Former Vanity Fair Celebrity Journalist Looks for a Comeback
SAN FRANCISCO — For a time, in the 1990s, there were few celebrity journalists who lived quite as large as Vanity Fair’s Kevin Sessums. He smoked a joint with Heath Ledger in Prague. He interviewed Courtney Love while she soaked in a tub. He crawled into a bed with Cher.
During
those heady years of ascendant glossy magazines — before fame was
devalued by reality stars and the selfie overshadowed the glamour photo
shoot — Mr. Sessums offered the public and movie stars what they wanted:
each other. He was one of a coterie of Hollywood writers who used
charm, moxie and an impressive Rolodex to not only write about celebrity
culture, but to inhabit it.
He
was treated like an insider, too. Barry Diller and Diane von
Furstenberg held a book party for Mr. Sessums at Indochine when he
published his 2007 memoir, “Mississippi Sissy.” And he traveled well: a
yachting trip to French Polynesia with David Geffen, whose house on Fire
Island Mr. Sessums said he visited during summers.
Writers at Vanity Fair had a cushy life under the editorships of Tina Brown
and, later, Graydon Carter. Ms. Brown routinely doled out six-figure
contracts to those she considered star writers, including Mr. Sessums.
When he wasn’t in residence at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood,
Mr. Sessums lived in a rented 2,000-square-foot TriBeCa loft. It was a
nice setup for a writer. But as celebrities entrusted publicists, social
media and reality TV to build their public personas, Mr. Sessums, 58,
found it hard to adjust.
And
then it all came apart: a falling-out with Ms. Brown, a long descent
into substance abuse, followed by unemployment and a time on food
stamps.
These
days, Mr. Sessums is trying to mount something of a comeback. Now
sober, he took a job last year as the editor in chief of FourTwoNine, a
new glossy magazine published in San Francisco by the gay and lesbian
professional social network, dot429.com. Executives there say the
magazine is a way to raise online advertising and help build an audience
for the website.
For
Mr. Sessums, it is an opportunity to capitalize on a 30-year career.
For his first issue, he put his old Hollywood pals Sarah Jessica Parker
and Bravo’s Andy Cohen on the cover. He tapped Courtney Love for a
coming issue. She will be naked again.
Mr.
Sessums described FourTwoNine as “the queer child that resulted from
the assignation between Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and The New
Yorker.” But Mr. Sessums’s future in magazine publishing relies on the
success of a lean start-up, a far cry from the luxurious world he once
inhabited. “I look on the start-up culture the way I look on sobriety,”
said Mr. Sessums, staring out the window of his small apartment on
Telegraph Hill. “It’s one day at a time.”
Like so many of the best Hollywood stories, this one begins with a breakup.
For
nearly 15 years as a contributing editor, Mr. Sessums wrote 27 cover
profiles for Vanity Fair, before he split in 2004 with the magazine that
defined him as a writer. “If you are at a place like Vanity Fair, you
become identified with it,” he said. Afterward, “you are sort of
heartbroken and you have to find an identity that is not based on a
job.”
Everywhere
in Mr. Sessums’s apartment there are reminders of his previous life. On
one wall is a print of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, a nod to his stint
as executive editor of Interview in the mid-1980s. And tucked away in
the kitchen is a water-stained copy of the first feature he edited for
Ms. Brown in 1990.
She
had plucked him from Interview to edit the Fanfair section and write
profiles. “I spotted him early on and I never regretted it,” she said in
an interview last week. His stories were as much about him as his
subjects, a style she encouraged. “I looked at it, like, if they were
going to slap your name on the cover of a magazine and build you up, you
might as well put yourself in the story, too,” Mr. Sessums said.
In
1992, Ms. Brown left to become the editor of The New Yorker. Few of the
stars she nurtured were invited to join her. “Vanity Fair was perceived
as a gossipy magazine even though they do great pieces,” said George
Hodgman, a magazine and book editor who worked with Mr. Sessums and,
later, Ms. Brown, whom, Mr. Hodgman said, “didn’t want that many writers
with a Vanity Fair imprimatur.”
Ms. Brown concurred: she said she didn’t want to create Vanity Fair 2.
There
was tension. In 1994, two years after Ms. Brown left, Vanity Fair
caused a kerfuffle when it photographed Roseanne Barr for the February
cover wearing a black bustier and thigh highs, her legs spread. Mr.
Sessums wrote the article. He told a friend at the time, “It is our
first scratch-and-sniff cover.” He recalled being seated at a booth at
the Royalton Hotel soon after when Ms. Brown stopped by. “‘I heard what
you said about that cover!” Mr. Sessums said she told him. “ ‘Oh! You
are the Oscar Wilde of New York!’ ” Mr. Sessums nodded at her. “That is
her way of complimenting me and denigrating me at the same time,” he
said. “She was really good at that.”
Ms. Brown was baffled at Mr. Sessums’s interpretation, saying, “Kevin could be self-indulgent.”
For
a while, Mr. Sessums continued to ride high at Vanity Fair. But he and
Mr. Carter, who succeeded Ms. Brown, had stylistic differences. “Kevin
produced a personal type of story,” Mr. Carter said. “It’s not my
style.”
Over
time, he got fewer assignments. Mr. Carter described the parting as a
“slow drift.” “He never fully dropped out,” he said. “He’d come to the
Vanity Fair Oscar party.”
But Mr. Sessums said he was hurt. “It was a huge part of my life and I loved it there,” he said.
Around
the same time, Mr. Sessums said he learned he was H.I.V. positive, a
result of casual sex and drug use. He decided to author a memoir about
his troubled childhood in Mississippi, while continuing to write for
magazines. But celebrity journalism had matured. Hollywood publicists
wielded enormous power by restricting access. Celebrity gossip was
becoming a commodity.
Mr.
Sessums, used to spending days with a subject, resisted the change to
shorter interviews. “They gave you an hour in between a bowel movement
and a Botox injection,” he said.
In
2008, Ms. Brown re-entered his professional life. She had partnered
with Barry Diller, the chairman of the media and Internet company
IAC/InterActiveCorp, to found The Daily Beast. Soon, Mr. Sessums was
freelancing for his old boss, writing celebrity Q. and A. columns, which
took less time, but paid less, too.
But
the change in celebrity journalism was not the only obstacle. As Mr.
Sessums later acknowledged, drugs were increasingly an issue. He
recalled interviewing Daniel Radcliffe
in 2009, when the “Harry Potter” star was finishing a Broadway run in
“Equus,” saying he showed up for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel exhausted
after a night of casual sex and smoking crystal meth. He apologized for
his rumpled appearance and blamed it on a stomach bug. The Daily Beast
published the Q. and A. a week later. (Ms. Brown said she saw no
evidence of his drug use.)
In
2010, Ms. Brown became editor in chief of Newsweek after it merged its
operations with IAC. Mr. Sessums hoped for a full-time position in Los
Angeles at the newly named The Newsweek Daily Beast. But a job never
came, said people with knowledge of those talks, because Mr. Sessums was
asking for a car, moving expenses and increased salary.
Ms. Brown said she told Mr. Sessums, “Those days are gone, Kevin.”
Mr. Sessums called it a “misunderstanding.”
By
2011, Mr. Sessums said he had begun using crystal meth intravenously.
“I still have a scar here,” he said, lifting his left shirt sleeve to
reveal a two-inch stripe. (On his arms are also two quotes, one from Emily Dickinson,
which he got after being 90 days sober, the other from John Keats.) By
the end of the year, he left New York and temporarily moved to a rooming
house in Provincetown, Mass., where he attended 12-step meetings and
volunteered in a soup kitchen. (He said he has not spent time in
rehabilitation.)
Friends told him to sell his artwork. He resisted. “It would be a sign of giving up,” he said. He put everything in storage.
Six
later months later, Mr. Sessums relapsed and was kicked out of a
friend’s home, he said. He was forced to drop off his two dogs, Archie
and Teddy, at a foster home near Boston. As Mr. Sessums drove away, he
watched Archie barking wildly, scratching at a sliding-glass door. “I
totally lost it,” he said. “And I began to sob. My friend reached out to
me and said, ‘This is what sobriety feels like.’ ”
In
telling this story, Mr. Sessums choked back tears. “In that moment of
so much pain, my life began again,” he said. “I grieved for lots of
stuff. I grieved for the person I’d lost, my past. For the drug addict.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I just let it all go,” he
said.
With
no place to live, Mr. Sessums went back to New York, and another friend
took him in. He returned to Provincetown in October 2012 and, six
months later, was beginning to get his life back together. He finished a
first draft of his new memoir, “I Left It on the Mountain” (to be
released in February by St. Martin’s Press), got his dogs out of foster
care and scanned mediabistro.com for jobs.
One
piqued his interest: editor in chief of a new magazine based in San
Francisco. The magazine, FourTwoNine (the numbers spell out “gay” on a
cellphone keypad), was the brainchild of Richard Klein, an entrepreneur
who had started Surface magazine in 1993.
Mr.
Klein saw Mr. Sessums’s posts on Facebook, where the writer has a
supportive following. He invited Mr. Sessums to lunch at the Fairmont
Copley Plaza in Boston. FourTwoNine needed someone with Mr. Sessums’s
contacts. “And he needed this opportunity as much as we needed him,” Mr.
Klein said. He offered him a job.
“My life changed at that moment, at that lunch,” Mr. Sessums said.
About
a year ago, Mr. Sessums moved to San Francisco, and the first issue
made its debut last October with 85,000 copies printed, costing $12.99
an issue. It is getting promising reviews, including from an old boss.
“It’s very assured so young in its life,” Mr. Carter said.
Mr.
Sessums said he is working harder than ever. He keeps his two-year
sobriety chip and a small figure of the Hindu deity Ganesha, commonly
called the lord of obstacles, in his pocket.
He said: “I feel blessed that someone is giving me a second chance.”
