Tina Brown and a Party of Renown : Benefit: After Mrs. Reagan just said no to Phoenix House, Vanity Fair’s editor said yes.

It’s the do-good decade, proclaims Vanity Fair magazine. And few are better placed to do it than Vanity Fair Editor in Chief Tina Brown. After six years at the helm, she is New York’s priestess of glossy publishing, the turnaround artist who molded a tottering, year-old magazine into an upscale, high-profile monthly. (Circulation was 220,000 when she took over; it was 760,000 at last count, and advertising has tripled, too.)

Like her magazine, which offers in-depth stories on pop stars and global politics in the same issue, Brown has a glittery, fun-loving facade buttressed by intellect.

Also like her magazine, which features coverage of night life on the back pages every month, Brown enjoys nothing more than a good party. Make that a “brilliant” party.

That is why the British-born editor, 36, flew to Los Angeles recently with what she calls her “inner circle” of “brilliant party minds” to plan Thursday’s gala at Culver Studios, advertised as the “first great Hollywood benefit” of the 1990s.

It is a fund-raiser for Phoenix House, the New York-based, nonprofit drug rehabilitation program that has four facilities in California and was about to build a fifth, in Lake View Terrace, until Nancy Reagan withdrew her support last September.

She pulled out after residents near the proposed San Fernando Valley site said they did not want a rehab center in their neighborhood and threatened to picket her Bel-Air home.

The party invitations read “Just Say Yes,” and about 500 people have said it, at $250 per ticket. Understandably, Mrs. Reagan is not one of them.

Mrs. Reagan’s withdrawal in midstream left Phoenix House founder Dr. Mitch Rosenthal with $2.8 million worth of donations already collected, much of it from Reagan friends, and another $2.4 million pledged but never received.

Rosenthal, who flew to Los Angeles with Brown, says some donors asked for their money back when Mrs. Reagan withdrew her support. He told them it would be “legally incorrect,” and they did not pursue the matter.

He also says he might have proceeded at the site even without Mrs. Reagan’s support if all the pledged donations had come through. Despite residents’ protests, he explains, the Los Angeles City Council was favorable to the project, and he believes neighbors eventually would have come around, as they have at other Phoenix House locations.

But back to the party, which may raise enough money for Rosenthal to buy and build on a new L.A. site.

Brown promises it will be “riveting,” with “extraordinary visuals” and a “wonderful mix of people.”

“It will not be suit meets suit and talks about deal,” she explains, perched at sofa’s edge in the Four Seasons hotel lobby. “Suit is going to meet exciting, new wonderful person. Suit is going to meet other suits, but he’ll also meet creative people, fun people, pretty people. It will be an electric mixture of people,” she says breathlessly in her soft, British accent. Parties obviously excite her.

In fact, one of the two books she wrote while in her 20s is titled “Life as a Party.” It is a collection of profiles first printed in The Tatler, England’s oldest magazine, where she was editor from 1979 to 1983, and where she increased circulation by 300% during her tenure.

Before that, she was named England’s Young Journalist of the Year (1978) for her columns in Punch Magazine. Her contributions to the New Statesman magazine earned her the Most Promising Female Journalist award in 1975.

For Thursday’s festivities, Brown has persuaded Broadway producer David Brown to close the Booth Theatre in Manhattan for one night so “Tru” star Robert Morse can fly to Los Angeles and perform an excerpt from the play about Truman Capote at the benefit. Kid Creole and The Coconuts will provide musical entertainment. Gianni Versace has donated $50,000 to help underwrite party costs; the Gap also has contributed money. A donor who wishes to remain anonymous pledged $200,000 for Phoenix House even before the party, and more contributions are predicted after what Brown expects will be an “extraordinary” evening.

It will be her first time ever to direct a benefit, she says with a laugh, calling herself a “sort of virgin chairwoman.” But she has given many parties for the magazine, she says, recalling last year’s fifth anniversary bash: “It was a very stellar night. The late Steve Rubell of Studio 54 and his partner Ian Schrager lent us the basement of the Century Paramount Hotel (in Manhattan), which was the former Diamond Jim’s Horseshoe. We turned it into an incredible ‘30s supper club . . . with gold palm trees, an all-girl saxophone band. It was wonderful . . . not just for the visuals, which were very exciting, but also because of the mix of people. You had a Henry Kissinger side by side with a rock star with a rich person. There were hip young people gyrating next to heavy money. . . .” Her voice trails off, and her ice-blue eyes melt just a little.

Brown first heard about Phoenix House, which treats adolescents and adults, from a friend whose drug-addicted stepson was “completely redeemed” there. She decided to run a profile of “Dr. Mitch” in Vanity Fair, she recalls, and asked writer Leslie Bennetts to do it. While researching the story, Bennetts learned Mrs. Reagan had abandoned the project and the tale became more titillating and complex.

After the story was published, Brown visited Phoenix House in Manhattan and was so moved by what she saw there that she decided to give this benefit to try and “get the money back that had been lost” by Mrs. Reagan’s pull-out.

Brown says “the driving forces” behind the party are Vanity Fair’s writers and contributing editors, whom she labels “stars in their own right.” Most will attend, including Dominick Dunne whose new novel, “An Inconvenient Woman,” features film industry folk who will be at the benefit and “who will recognize themselves” in Dunne’s book. Brown laughs delightedly, as if every little piece of her party puzzle was falling in its proper place.