• February 04, 1980
• Vol. 13
• No. 5

Lookout

Tina Brown, 26, is the new editor of Britain's society monthly Tatler. She appeared in both the serious New Statesman and the satirical Punch often enough to publish a collection of pieces shortly after taking over at the 271-year-old Tatler. Brown vows to replace the magazine's fusty traditionalism with "wicked elegance. I want to smarten it up," she explains, "and make it more provocative intellectually." Which doesn't mean the end of, well, tattling. "Prince Charles," reports one recent article, "has a romantic record that would make Casanova blush." Sales for the very first issue of the Brown regime doubled (to 22,000). The daughter of London movie producer George Brown, Tina grew up with "a funny mixture of actors and horse-riding debs" and soon manifested "a flamboyant streak: I didn't share the English reticence about ambition." At 11, she started keeping a diary: "I always had a beady eye and was grooming myself to be a writer." Eventually Oxford alum Brown wants to concentrate on books and plays (of which she's already written three). Brown, who has lived for the past two years with Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, 51, demurs at the notion of evolving into her generation's Lady Antonia Fraser, but concedes, "There are a lot of worse people to be like."

Billy "The Kid" Mayfair of Phoenix shoots sub-par golf and regularly whacks the ball 215 yards off the tee. His other stats: age 13, 5 feet and 109 pounds. Small wonder that the stocky blond Jack Nicklaus lookalike won the Junior World Golf Championship in his age group both in 1976 and again last July. The strongest part of his game is putting, and he's impatient for further growth ("My hands are too small to really grip the club") and more heft behind his swing. "When I get a little bigger," he figures, "I'll really start scoring." So Billy is heavily into pasta and Mexican cuisine, though he has a nervous stomach and once barfed three times in the men's locker room before going out and winning a tournament. Billy began to develop his different strokes at 20 months with a set of toy clubs. By 4 he had a scaled-down wood and iron and would join his father, Dick, a Cadillac salesman, on the links. "You can't imagine those shots are coming from a kid who wears braces on his teeth," says local pro Bill Farkas. Billy the Kid practices at least four hours seven days a week and won't long be content with his nearly 100 amateur trophies. "They measure you by the money you win," he grins, "and I want to be the best."