Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power; Judy Bachrach (2012)

You'd think they were Hillary and Bill Clinton, the way Judy Bachrach jeers at her subjects in Tina and Harry Come to America. The subtitle of Bachrach's bilious, gossipy takedown is Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, and you'd think from the author's unpleasant chuffing and huffing that the pale pair of Brits currently living in New York City use their joint powers of party-throwing in service to the dark side of the Force.

Yet even their bitchiest tattlers can't come up with much of substance to indict Tina and Harry (fans and detractors from Manhattan to Missoula are encouraged to call them Tina and Harry). The couple's biggest crime appears to be that they symbolize the best and worst of media glamour as it glittered, about as valuable as rhinestones, in the 1980s and '90s -- a topic of interest to, oh, hundreds of Americans who talk amongst themselves about such stuff.

A small, blond British interloper with uncertain personal style but a striking instinct for the zeitgeist, Tina first developed her ''ability to inspire in both friends and rivals a feeling of deficiency, as though no one was quite worthy of her'' at Oxford University. The ''shy virago'' was just 30 years old when she arrived in New York in 1984 as editor of the foundering Conde Nast publication Vanity Fair. (Her 55-year-old husband, Harry Evans, was at the time the more famous of the two -- the highly respected editor of The Sunday Times and The Times of London, who had recently been fired by the papers' new owner, Rupert Murdoch.)

American media chatterers expected Tina to fail, but she didn't: She turned VF into the leading national chronicle of celebrity, money, and cocktail talking points in the 1980s -- a ''state of ethical confusion [that] wasn't amply scrutinized by the press.'' (Harry, meanwhile, shadow-edited U.S. News & World Report, owned by his friend Mort Zuckerman, then edited sister magazine Conde Nast Traveler.)

Those same chatterers next waited for Tina to fail when she became editor of The New Yorker in 1992, but she didn't: She offended historic preservationists by altering the architecture of that idiosyncratic magazine, but she also replaced rotting beams of prose and renovated the franchise. (Harry, meanwhile, who ''had been so long in the wings,'' was made editor of Random House -- which, like Conde Nast, is owned by S.I. Newhouse. But his tenure was rocky. He left to work at the New York Daily News, also owned by Zuckerman. And when that didn't work out, he left to work on various editorial projects.)

Is Tina at long last failing now that she's editor of the unremarkable Talk magazine and, as a mother of two in her late 40s, no longer the go-getter mod bird she once was? Is Harry now just an old duffer? Is that why the burned, the gloating, and the opportunistic choose to participate in this nasty book now, when ''the reign of the couple, alternately brilliant and hapless, [is]over''? While media junkies scan the index for specific dish (on Princess Diana, Harvey Weinstein, Anna Wintour), the nonaddicts who read Tina and Harry Come to America shouldn't expect any intelligence about why one British couple managed to influence American media so strikingly for two decades, or, indeed, how styles of journalism rise and fall. The best to be revealed, amid the cattiness and petty tattle, is that young Tina Brown left a trail of interesting beaux including Martin Amis, Dudley Moore, and Evelyn Waugh's son, Auberon; that she fell in love with Harry Evans, an older man with a previous wife and children, who married her; and that the two enhanced each other's careers, as couples do all the time.

And the worst to be revealed is the sourness of Bachrach herself, a contributing editor at the faded-copy Vanity Fair now edited by Tina antagonist Graydon Carter, matched only by the juvenile aggression of the many who were happy to join the wilding. Thinking she is enlisting a journalistic ally, the author quotes something New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote criticizing Tina during her New Yorker years: ''We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty.'' Had she not been so gassed up with schadenfreude, Bachrach might have recognized herself among the indicted.