Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Playing Cupid for Nonie and Charles was a mutual friend and Peterhouse College, Cambridge, classmate of Wintour’s, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who saw him as “a pleasant-looking young man with glasses, a somewhat saturnine expression, and an impressive air of professional efficiency.”

  Nonie Baker and Schlesinger had known each other from his student days at Harvard, where her father, Ralph Baker, was a distinguished professor at the Harvard Law School and where Schlesinger’s father was a famous historian. During the war, Baker also was cocounsel for the U.S. office that confiscated alien property. Her parents, who had met at Swarthmore College, and “thee and thou’d” each other in a Quaker wedding ceremony, were well-to-do. Baker had made a bundle as a corporate attorney in Philadephia representing clients like the Pennsylvania Railroad before moving to Harvard to teach. His wife, Anna Gilkyson Baker, for whom Anna Wintour was named, was a charming, matronly, somewhat ditzy society girl from Philadelphia’s Main Line who was known to leave her children in the park and not realize it until she got home.

  Like his father, Schlesinger would go on to become an eminent Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, author, and, moreover, a trusted adviser to Jack and Bobby Kennedy in the sixties, while his very best friend, Charles Wintour, would become one of Fleet Street’s most powerful, creative, respected, and feared newspaper editors.

  Neal Thorpe maintains that in Boston, Schlesinger “was very much in love with Nonie” at one point “and wanted to marry her.” This is something that Schlesinger denies years later. “I was fond of her,” he acknowledges, “but she did not attract me physically.” Schlesinger remembers Nonie from those early days in Boston and London as “bright, witty, and critical. She had a sharp eye for the weaknesses of others; she took a generally critical stance toward the world.”

  Looking back, he feels that Nonie was critical as a form of “self-protection because I think she was extremely vulnerable. But she also was great fun to be with so long as one wasn’t the target.”

  While Charles Wintour initially appeared to Schlesinger to be “a quintessential Britisher,” he had actually spent the previous summer hitchhiking through the United States and was considered “an Americanophile.”

  When they met, Wintour was editor of an undergraduate Cambridge weekly called Granta, which was a mix of the Harvard Crimson and the Lampoon. Schlesinger critiqued the magazine. Wintour accepted his comments with “brisk but somewhat enigmatic courtesy” and invited Schlesinger to write articles and attend editorial board meetings. The two later invented a false byline, A. G. Case—A. Glandular Case—that appeared every so often on stories that were critical of other campus publications.

  Wintour was quite the operator and took Schlesinger under his wing, introducing him to everyone who counted. Schlesinger got to know “more campus big shots” because of his chum than he ever knew at Harvard. To Schlesinger, Wintour was “a man after my own heart—inquiring, skeptical, sensitive to relationships among people, and politically adept at influencing them, flexible, vigorous.”

  Wintour, who had a sly and bad-boyish quality about him, took Schlesinger to meet his family in Dorset. While there, he gave his friend a tour of some of the more interesting local landmarks, such as the Cerne Abbas. Carved out of a hillside, it was the figure of a nude male with a twenty-six-foot erection, which Wintour put on the itinerary because he enjoyed getting a rise out of his guests.

  Schlesinger thoroughly enjoyed Wintour and repaid his friendship by introducing him to Nonie Baker, and the two “hit it off at once.”

  Recalls Schlesinger, “They became a couple two or three months after they first met. Charles found Nonie very entertaining, certainly stylish, and she had a kind of patrician manner about her and seemed to represent a good, healthy American girl. Charles had great charm and wit, too, but also a sense of control. I wouldn’t say he was terribly handsome, though. He wasn’t a Ronald Coleman.” Schlesinger was no godsend in the looks department, either, so the two also had that in common.

  At the same time Wintour and the Baker girl started dating, Schlesinger began seeing a friend of Wintour’s, Anne Mortimer Whyte, the daughter of a member of Parliament and private secretary to Winston Churchill. Wintour always made it his business to know all the right people.

  The two couples—Charles and Nonie, and Schlesinger and Whyte—double-dated often. When Schlesinger directed a college production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, he cast Wintour and Whyte in starring roles.

  With war looming, the two couples enjoyed their last days at school, taking motor trips in Wintour’s convertible with the top down.

  It was, as Schlesinger recalled, a “careless, glorious” time.

  Charles and Nonie, madly in love, got married in the little parish church of St. Mary the Less near the university on March 13, 1940, a simple ceremony performed by a university chaplain. Wintour’s father, crisp and stern retired Major General Fitzgerald Wintour, a career military man, served as their witness. When the happy couple settled in a local hotel after they tied the knot, Gerald Jackson Wintour was conceived. It was a wartime love affair and marriage; Charles Wintour had already enlisted and was in uniform. There was no time to dilly-dally.

  Little more than a month before she was due, the very independent Mrs. Wintour kissed her husband, a second lieutenant in the Royal Norfolk Regiment, good-bye and departed London for Boston, to be with her family and have the baby. With the war raging, the young parents-to-be felt it would be safer if the child was in America, out of harm’s way, as London was being blitzed by German rockets and bombs.

  On November 20, eight months and a week after the Wintours’ nuptials, Nonie gave birth in New England Baptist Hospital to the healthy boy they named Gerald.

  She took the baby back to her family’s apartment in the Barrington Court on fashionable Memorial Drive on the Charles River, where she breast-fed him.

  Baby Gerald would grow into a sturdy, independent, rough-and-tumble boy, despite extremely difficult odds.

  For the first four years of his life he didn’t know who his real parents were.

  With London in flames, and with her groom in the middle of the Battle of Britain, Nonie Wintour decided to leave Gerald with her parents and return to England to be close to her husband and do whatever she could to help in the war effort over there—a real-life Mrs. Miniver.

  “She left the baby because she was so much in love with Charles,” recalls Nonie’s first cousin, Patti Gilkyson Agnew, whose father was Anna Baker’s brother. “Aunt Anna and Uncle Ralph raised Gerald until he was something like four years old.”

  In what Agnew and other American relatives felt was an emotionally difficult situation, the Bakers became Gerald Wintour’s surrogate parents for the duration. As often as she could, Nonie mailed home photographs of herself and her husband, which the Bakers would show to little Gerald, gently telling the toddler that those strangers in the shapshots were his real mommy and daddy so that he would recognize them when they came to retrieve him in the waning days of the war.

  It was a highly emotional scene when that moment arrived, recalls Patti Agnew. “Ralph and Anna nearly died, were devastated, when Nonie and Charles came to claim Gerald. They felt as if he was their baby.” Her sister, Neal Thorpe, observes, “It was a real strain on everyone involved.”

  Wintour survived the war, having spent most of his time in intelligence, and ending up at General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters in Paris. He saw little if any combat but was awarded the American Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre, usually pinned on men who had actually seen action. A longtime friend and newspaper colleague maintains that Wintour got the medals “for administrative work.” Years later, Schlesinger, who had also served in Europe and had even spent some time with his friend as fellow officers, was surprised to learn that Wintour had received such high military honors. “He never told me.”

  Back in London, with the war over, the Wintours bought a pleasant contemporary-style home on Cochr
ane Street in the upper-middle-class London area of St. Johns Wood.

  Wintour had gotten a job in 1946 on London’s Evening Standard, starting as a secretary of sorts for one of the world’s most powerful, shrewd, domineering, and dictatorial press barons, Max Aitken, better known as Lord Beaverbrook. Wintour was a young journalist on the way up and would soon become one of Beaverbrook’s extremely loyal and creative fair-haired boys.

  For the Wintours, the future looked exceedingly bright. In fairly quick succession, Charles and Nonie had James, and then Anna, the future editor in chief of Vogue.

  But eighteen months after she was born, a tragedy struck the family that would have long-term emotional implications for Anna, her siblings, and particularly her parents.

  Tuesday, July 3, 1951, was a pleasant day in London. With no rain expected, Nonie Wintour had allowed ten-year-old Gerald to ride his two-wheeler to the Hall School, a private preparatory school for boys in Hampstead, where he was a student. The boy had been riding a two-wheeler since he was five. His father had “complete confidence in his ability” and allowed him “to choose his own route” to and from school because “he was an extremely cautious driver.” Gerald left home with his book bag and wearing the school uniform, a pink blazer and cap. He never returned.

  Pedaling home in the afternoon on Avenue Road, a wide street lined with trees and large homes, the boy was hit by a car. He was thrown into the air, landed on the hood with such impact that he smashed the windshield, and fell unconscious onto the asphalt. “I was not in a hurry, I did not see the boy until I was a few yards away,” testified the driver at the inquest. “I went to pass and did not blow my horn. I did not think he was going to turn. I did not see him put his arm out.” Witnesses said the boy didn’t know what hit him.

  After getting the call, Nonie Wintour rushed to New End Hospital in nearby Hampstead, but she was too late. Gerald had died twenty minutes after he arrived in the emergency room of a fractured skull and other injuries. His death was later ruled accidental.

  His mother was hysterical. She got on the pay phone and tried to reach her husband, who on that hellish day was meeting with Beaverbrook at Cherkley Court, his enormous, secluded nineteenth-century gray stone mansion with some thirty bedrooms, near the town of Leatherhead in Surrey, about two hours in those days from London.

  What happened next, and there are a number of versions, became part of the whispered Fleet Street legend surrounding Charles Wintour’s life and was one of the reasons why he was thought of by many as an editor with ice water running through his veins.

  Paul Callan, a respected veteran London journalist who had started his career working under Wintour, is one of the many who heard what he believes is a credible account of what happened that tragic day.

  “At the time Charles was Lord Beaverbrook’s secretary, and he was taking dictation from him when the butler came in and asked to speak to Charles,” recounts Callan. “Charles went outside with the butler, who told him his little boy had been killed. Charles went back in, never said anything to Lord Beaverbrook, and resumed taking dictation. Nobody ever knew what made him do it. Charles wasn’t a monster, but he could be a bit coldblooded.”

  Alexander Walker, who would become a noted film critic at the London Evening Standard, the paper Beaverbrook eventually gave Wintour to run, heard that he had actually telephoned Nonie after getting the urgent message about Gerald. “But Charles had decided to finish his work with Beaverbrook before returning home,” Walker says. “He told his proprietor what had happened to his son, and Beaverbrook was impressed at how bravely and businesslike Charles had taken the news, and that he was able to go on working. It made Charles’s reputation with Beaverbrook.”

  Milton Shulman, who had started in journalism with Wintour immediately after the war and later worked under him as the Evening Standard’s esteemed theater critic, says years later, “There’s no question that the death of the child put Charles into the arms of Beaverbrook.”

  Whichever way it happened, whether Wintour rushed to be with his distraught wife or stayed at his boss’s side, the death of their firstborn was devastating, and the events surrounding the tragedy left a permanent dark cloud over the Wintour family.

  As Callan notes, “Charles’s behavior when the son was killed split the marriage.”

  Walker, who was close to both Charles Wintour and especially Nonie, asserts, “The great tragedy of Charles’s life was he, like a lot of Beaverbrook’s editors, was a creature of his proprietor. The boy’s death absolutely destroyed the Wintour marriage, changed Charles forever, and he became a very chilly, withdrawn figure. It’s a terribly, terribly sad story.”

  Furious with her husband, despondent over her son’s death, Nonie Win-tour gathered up little Anna and James and left England for Boston to be with her family, to be consoled. Some thought the marriage was over.

  While his wife was gone, Wintour and Beaverbrook bonded. The two met frequently because at the time Beaverbrook needed bright, young editors for his newspaper chain. So he put Wintour to the test, inculcated him with his various conservative philosophies, had him write editorials to see if he was able to present them with Beaverbrook’s point of view, and promised to put him on the gravy train by giving him an editorship someday.

  At the end of that terrible summer of 1951, Nonie Wintour returned to London with Anna and James. She and her husband had a chilly rapprochement, but their marriage never was the same.

  It was in that horribly depressed and icy atmosphere that Anna grew up.

  With hopes that a larger family might warm the frigid air, Nonie Wintour had two more children in quick succession in the wake of Gerald’s death. Less than a year after the tragedy, she became pregnant, and on February 3, 1953, Anna got a sister, Nora Hilary, with whom she’d never be close because they were so different: Anna would grow into a beauty and a fashionista, thought of as frivolous by the rest of the family, while Nora was plain looking like their mother, academically inclined, and a political activist.

  A year later, Nonie got pregnant again, and two days before Anna’s fifth birthday, on November 1,1954, she gave birth to another son, Patrick Walter.

  But it was Anna who replaced Gerald as the fair-haired child in Charles Wintour’s eye. Though he loved all his children, Anna became and would always be his favorite. And Anna was the one of the four surviving Wintour children who would turn out to be the most like him—driven, ambitious, creative, icy, with her eye always on the prize.

  Anna would become the most famous of the Wintour brood, far surpassing her father as a powerful editor. Of the other three, only Patrick became a journalist. Like their mother, James and Nora became societal do-gooders and lived rather quiet and stable lives. James worked in public housing in Scotland, and Nora married a Red Cross worker in Switzerland.

  Besides the animosity Nonie felt toward Charles regarding his response, or lack thereof, to their firstborn’s death, she came to despise her husband for working for Beaverbrook, whose political and social views she vehemently disagreed with.

  “Nonie was very left-wing,” says Milton Shulman, “and she always despised Charles’s compromises working for Beaverbrook, compromises which you have to make if you’re going to become editor of a right-wing newspaper.”

  Like Beaverbrook, Shulman was a Canadian, so the publisher had a fondness for him beyond his being a bright young journalist. In the early fifties, Shulman says, he was asked by Beaverbrook to become deputy editor of the Manchester Daily Express, one of the papers in the Daily Express chain, where Beaverbrook tried out young editors for bigger jobs. But Shulman, who had been involved with the Socialist Party in Canada, turned down the job on the grounds that he didn’t share Beaverbrook’s political views. “I told him I would have to compromise either my work on the paper or my own political views. I didn’t want to do that. That was my one test to be editor, and he never asked me again.”

  But when Beaverbrook asked Charles Wintour to take the job in Manchest
er, he accepted without reservation, but to his wife’s chagrin. “Nonie never moved up there with Charles,” says Shulman. “She stayed in London with the children.”

  Shulman’s wife, the journalist Drusilla Beyfus Shulman, who socialized with the Wintours, observes that Nonie “was very disappointed in Charles’s loyalty to the Beaverbrook line, which was very much contrary to her own instincts and beliefs. She wasn’t sympathetic to Beaverbrook’s values and was quite naggy to Charles about them. Nonie and Charles weren’t particularly interested in each other’s views.”

  Wintour impressed Beaverbrook, and in 1954, when Anna was five, her father was made deputy editor of the Evening Standard, and in 1959, at forty-two, he was appointed editor in chief. He turned the paper around with his extraordinary eye for spotting talented editors, writers, and columnists.He also earned the sobriquet “Chilly Charlie” because of how stern, aloof, and demanding he was. As his power grew, he also became a womanizer, which added to the marital turmoil in the Wintour home, especially impacting young Anna.

  During the 1950s, Nonie Wintour became a devoted, some say obsessively so, social worker; they attributed her intense involvement in the sad plight of others to her liberal Quaker background. Her first job involved dealing with people who were determined by the government to be mentally incompetent. Later, she worked with foster children and adoptive parents. For a time in the early fifties, the writer in her came out and she tried her hand at freelance film criticism for an intellectual and political British magazine called Time and Tide, whose contributors over the years had included Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Emma Goldman. She could be vicious. One film she called a “preposterous story,” another a “lachrymose tale of love,” and a third “an airy French trifle . . . a stale bit of sponge cake.” In the dozen or so reviews she wrote, she rarely gave two thumbs-up.