Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  At the same time, the editor found her to be a poor communicator in a business where communication is key. “It was very difficult when she did a feature story to get out of her why she did it, why she would do one story over another, because she was not very articulate.”

  He also was concerned about her being a team player, because “she was rather cool, didn’t smile, wasn’t very open, wasn’t very friendly.”

  Nevertheless, it was not long before Anna began to accompany Hocking on photo shoots and to the collections, where the fashion editor privately began calling her young assistant the “bacon slicer” because of her cutting and critical manner.

  “I sat next to her at some of the shows in Italy, in Paris, and the terrible things she used to say about people—nasty things—and no expression would alter her face. She wouldn’t sort of indicate she was saying these extraordinarily cutting and caustic things. She was just so pin sharp and so cruel.”

  On one occasion Anna, to Hocking, quietly lit into Ernestine Carter, a doyenne of fashion journalism in Britain who had worked for Harper’s Bazaar and had written several books on high fashion with introductions by Diana Vreeland, the legendary and influential American fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and later editor in chief of what would become Anna’s Vogue.

  “Ernestine was at one of the shows with some famous American journalist, and they were both very tiny women whose feet never touched the ground, and Anna made very cutting comments about them,” Hocking says. “I had never come across anyone, and I don’t think I’ve met anyone since, who was so bitchy and sharply critical.”

  Anna’s attitude also caused problems for the magazine with more than one design house. Still a neophyte, but a neophyte with fangs, she’d flounce into some of the lesser-known houses looking for clothing to feature, flip through the racks, and then declare, “There’s nothinghere.” Her caustic visits sparked irate calls to Hocking from vociferously complaining designers with deflated and bruised egos.

  “Somebody might have been brave enough to tell her to be a little more politic,” says Hocking, who was afraid to confront Anna, fearful of her wrath. “I was the fashion editor and this was something I wouldn’t do, even if I hated the clothes. You sort of say, ‘Oh, we’re not doing blue this year.’”

  Later, Anna would toss out one very devastating word—“rubbish”—to describe something she didn’t like, and strong men and thick-skinned women would fall like lumps of clay. “She was very much to the point,” notes Hocking, “and very clear thinking. I’m sure she didn’t then, and doesn’t care now [what people think of her], because she would not have been able to do what she managed to do with her career. She’s so single-minded, and basically she’s probably right all the time as well.”

  Anna was part of a team of several fashion assistants, one of whom she regarded with seemingly irrational and utter contempt. The young woman was the daughter of a well-placed London publicist and a friend of Jennifer Hocking’s. “Anna certainly, basically, destroyed this girl, who felt very inefficient by comparison,” declares Hocking. “Anna was being Anna, just being cleverer than anyone else, and defeated this one girl. I think somehow she puts the evil spell on people.”

  Another of the fashion assistants on the team, Jillie Murphy, who had come to Harper’s Bazaar before Anna with some experience as a stylist for photographers like Richard Avedon, remembers clearly how Anna made the other girl’s life “a living hell.” “It was a conflict of personalities,” explains Murphy, who had been assigned by Hocking early on to take Anna under her wing and show her the ropes. “Anna found the other girl to be a weaker personality, and I wouldn’t have thought Anna liked that. Occasionally someone comes into your party that you don’t get on with, and that obviously happened with Anna and [the other girl]. From day one, they didn’t get on.”

  Anna made nasty comments to the girl, put her down in front of her colleagues, and claimed she was incompetent. Anna made the poor young woman’s life miserable—and for no apparent reason except she enjoyed bullying those who couldn’t fight back.

  Because of the infighting, Hocking had to take out time from her relevant duties to trim Anna’s sharp claws.

  “Jennifer would have to take Anna for lunch to have a talk, and then she would have to take [the other girl] and her mother to lunch, to kind of make things sweeter, to make the relationship work, because we were a team,” declares Murphy. “I liked Anna. I liked her firmness. But some people were terrified of her. She was quite cutting. But she wasn’t as tough as what she grew into, as what she became later.”

  Landels says the other girl was “sweet,” but that Anna “absolutely” beat her down and literally drove her out of the magazine. Anna didn’t fear competition from her but rather was disgusted by her weakness, which brought out the bully in her.

  Unlike the defeated and victimized girl, Murphy was a fighter who stood up for herself and therefore wasn’t going to let Anna get to her. “It made Jil-lie basically investigate the enemy,” notes Hocking. “She wanted to know what made Anna tick. She even managed to get Anna to invite her to stay overnight at her house. She got in under the radar, and I’ve always been absolutely amazed by that, because no way would I have been brave enough to do that with Anna. There was no way Jillie was going to be destroyed like the other girl.”

  While there were enormous differences in their lifestyles, Anna and Murphy bonded, or at least Murphy thought they had, though Anna never let her hair down. But she acted friendly. When Murphy was hospitalized for a brief time, Anna trekked to the blue-collar London suburbs to visit her. Afterwards, Murphy wondered about Anna’s motives.

  Because she couldn’t afford private care, Murphy was treated in one of Britain’s National Health hospitals, the kind of public institution someone of Anna’s social standing would never have seen the inside of. “She was curious, not only to see how I was, but to see what a National Health hospital was like,” says Murphy. “I’ll never forget. She said, ‘It’s like real life.’ I didn’t think she had that human element.”

  On another occasion, Murphy had a chum whose boyfriend was in prison. She made mention of it in passing to Anna, whose eyes lit up. “She was interested to know what the inside of a prison looked like, so she actually went to visit him. I didn’t even go. But that’s what her curiosity was like.”

  As she got to know Anna, Murphy was surprised to find that she had very few close women friends. “And as her career took off,” she adds, “her circle of friends took off as well.” Back then, Anna’s posse consisted of Murphy and another very ambitious young woman named Joan Juliet Buck, who years later became editor of French Vogue and a contributing writer to American Vogue, under Anna, where the two had an up-and-down relationship. “We were like the Three Musketeers,” Murphy recalls fondly. “Joan’s an American and I met her through Anna, and then we just all hung out together, liked the same hip things, looking for things that were new.”

  Still, Vivienne Lasky remained Anna’s closest friend, but she was in the United States pursuing her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe while Anna was getting her real-life degree on the job.

  Murphy didn’t come from money, was kind of a free spirit, and was a couple of years older than Anna. Like Anna, though, she had not gone to college, and they were both size eight. If they were going to a party, Anna often lent Murphy some of the expensive designer clothing from her vast and always updated wardrobe. “Anna used to have all the Missonis, all the designer things, so I got all the leftovers. If she got fed up with something, as she often did, she’d give it to me.”

  Another beneficiary of Anna’s largesse was Liz Walker, Willie Landels’s young deputy art director, who thought of Anna as a fairy godmother. Though she saw her as “distant, frozen-faced, private, and rather determined,” she also felt that Anna was “incredibly generous in a quiet sort of way” by giving away outdated pieces—usually no more than six months old—from her wardrobe. “We were all paid virtually nothing,”
Walker says, “and Anna was probably the only person on our block who had a private income. And every season she would get rid of her clothes, and she’d have worn some of these things maybe once.

  “She used to have a really amazing figure, really great boobs and quite a tiny waist, and we were sort of the same size and about the same height, about five foot five, a classic size eight to ten, with a very slight-looking frame,” continues Walker, who had an eye for such detail, going on to become executive fashion and beauty editor at British Marie Claire. “Anna would pass on her clothes, but she’d do it in a really charming way, not in the I-am-the-rich-girl-giving-my-clothes-to-you. She would choose things she thought you might like, or would suit you. It was really done in a very gracious way.”

  Giving away her castoffs became part of Anna’s modus operandi, something she’d do throughout her life. Some, with a cynical point of view, thought it was her way of securing loyalty or buying friendship from the beneficiaries of her generosity. Whatever the motive, it was also a quick and easy way to make room in her closets for the new lines.

  “None of us were paid much, but Anna had her own money, family money,” notes Hocking. “We used to go to the shows in Italy, and Anna would be the only one of us who would then actually buy clothes from the designers. Here’s this young girl going to Milan and Paris, and that could be a bit of a shock for anyone else—but not to Anna. Nothing fazed her because she was used to going to the best places and meeting top people in her personal life. Nothing would impress, unless it was really good, but I don’t remember ever seeing her really impressed. She wasn’t the sort of person who would say, ‘Gosh, that’s amazing!’ She was always on one level, but taking everything in.”

  Despite Anna’s contention that she had no master plan for herself in the fashion mag game, she expressed a major goal less than two years after she joined Harpers & Queen. In the fall of 1971, the staff began planning features for the Christmas issue. “All of us, Anna, myself, and Jennifer, had to do a page—our ideal Christmas present,” recalls Murphy. “Mine was a trip to a desert island. But Anna’s goal was to be appointed editor of Vogue. That’s what her dream was.”

  Since Vogue was a competitor, Landels didn’t see fit to mention Anna’s fantasy in his magazine. Instead, she appeared in the late November issue of Harpers & Queen—a bimonthly at the time—with five of her colleagues under a headline that read, “6 H&Q employees describe their ideal Christmas presents, illustrated by models’ photos.”

  And there she was, smashing, in her third modeling assignment. The copy read: “Anna Wintour, fashion assistant, 21, would like to taste St. Moritz living next year and hopes to escape from the Underground (quilt-trousered Japanese work woman division) wearing this ankle-length white fox coat, £1,950 from Harrods, SW1, and diamond feather brooch from Colling-wood, 46 Conduit St. W1 (also the diamond band ring), and leading this large Pyrenean mountain dog from Harrods. The cane chair is £29 from Biba, 124 Kensington High St. W8. Hair by Herts at Vidal Sassoon.”

  Back then, being a fashion editor involved very little writing, just a simple intro to a layout now and then, if that. “The problem was, Anna couldn’t write,” asserts Landels, which he thought was odd for the daughter of a newspaper editor. But neither could Jennifer Hocking write, which would eventually result in her dismissal by Landels and a bitchy battle for her job involving Anna. But that was still down the road. “We never wrote words,” acknowledges Hocking. “We weren’t asked to write. We’d write down the facts—‘blue shoes.’ We were fashion editors. We selected clothes. We didn’t write about them.”

  Moreover, Anna had problems getting across what needed to be written. “Anna couldn’t express her thoughts about fashion,” adds Landels. “We had a subeditor who said to me, ‘That fucking Anna Wintour! She’s given me this folder and I don’t know what to write because she doesn’t tell me anything.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be unkind about Anna. One day she will be our boss.’”

  During Anna’s tenure, most of her writing was done by Laura Pank, who had to devise kicky sentences for “the ridiculous fashion sets” and headlines “for these weird things that Anna told me were ‘wonderful,’ so I just believed it, really, and wrote it that way.” Anna briefed Pank in a voice that still echoed in her ears years later. “She sounded like sandpaper, really grating, like a door that needs oiling, a floorboard, something really painful. Otherwise, she tried to be mysterious behind the glasses, honing her persona.” Of all of the people working on fashion news, Anna “certainly dressed as she shot,” notes Pank. “She actually lived fashion, wore her dark glasses all the time, in and out, was immensely stylish, and pin-thin. I think she existed on lettuce leaves.”

  Pank was convinced, and people gossiped, that Anna was restricting her diet. “That’s her personality,” she asserts. “She’s a control freak, always had to be in control of herself and everyone else.”

  The most difficult aspect of the job, whether one was a junior like Anna or a senior like Hocking, was learning to work smoothly with prima donna photographers who wanted only one thing—their creative freedom. The fashion editor’s job was to keep control of the shoot.

  Anna seemed to have a preternatural ability. She worked well with some of the best of them back then—Alex Chatelaine, in Paris, and talented neophyte James Wedge in London, whom Anna knew, so no problem there. He was part of the group of cool older men in her social sphere, a player in the London boutique scene where Anna had first met him.

  Wedge had just started shooting professionally when Anna began giving him assignments. Before long, they became romantically involved. She was in good company. Among his girlfriends was the model Pat Booth, who became a popular novelist, and after Anna the actress Helen Mirren, with whom he had a long, tempestuous relationship.

  “Anna hired me as a photographer, and that’s how we met, and then we became lovers,” acknowledges Wedge, who says he succeeded Richard Neville. “When I met her she was still with Richard and they were sort of splitting up.”

  Anna and Wedge, a decade older, were together for about eighteen months. Since Wedge considered himself “a loner” and Anna had few female friends, he described their relationship as a “very private affair.” When he first met Anna, he thought of her as a Vogue type. “Though she was working for Harpers,” he observes, “she had that Vogue attitude—very snooty about fashion, seemed to know it all.”

  In fact, much of their relationship revolved around fashion, as had her involvement with Stephen Bobroff “We were lovers, we went out together, and we worked together at the same time,” says Wedge, “and most of our time together was spent talking about fashion and never seemed to depart from that. It was always—always—the same subject.” Wedge knew Bobroff professionally. Unlike Bobroff, though, Wedge and Anna didn’t set up housekeeping together. He had an enchanting cottage in a forest in the Gloucester countryside where they spent weekends together, and Anna had an elegant apartment near Earl’s Court, in the city.

  “Anna was very determined, ambitious—it was pretty obvious in the way she acted—and she had very strong views on fashion and the work we were doing together,” he says. “Often you can be employed by a fashion editor because they like your work and leave all the decisions up to you, but she had a lot to say on how my work—the photos—was to be achieved. But I was quite a young photographer in the sense that I hadn’t been working very long, so it was nice to work with someone like Anna who was so strong-minded.”

  Anna took Wedge to Phillimore Gardens and introduced her new beau to her father, who he found “very frosty.” After several visits, Wedge came away thinking, “It runs through the family.”

  Even though Wedge fancied Anna, there were aspects of her personality that he found irritating or just plain odd. The first had to do with her eating habits: “She’d order coffee,” he remembers clearly, “and have cream put on the top and then she would just eat the cream off with a spoon and never touch the coffee. And when the food came, s
he’d just pick at it, never eat it.”

  The other issue that he found odd had to do with Anna’s relationship with her colleagues at the magazine, which was underscored for Wedge during a weeklong shoot in Greece. “Normally on those sort of occasions the crew gets up early, has breakfast together, do the day’s shoot, and then you all meet up for dinner in the evening. But with Anna, it was different. She never had dinner with us, had her meals sent to her room and ate alone. It always struck me how aloof she was. It’s sort of a sign, not to eat with everyone in the evenings. It’s unusual.”

  Like all couples, they had tiffs. It might have been over something Wedge had said that ticked off Anna, but when she got angry, she didn’t explode. “She went the opposite way. She became cold, did not speak.” Their relationship eventually bottomed out. “We just went our separate ways,” he says. “Nothing special happened to end it. It was the seventies, you know—if you remember [what happened], you weren’t really there.”

  Wedge left London, moved to the country, and began painting. Sometime in the early to midnineties, Anna showed up unexpectedly at his London studio during the Christmas holiday to say hello, looking “slightly older, but her style was the same—the bob, still very slim, but a little bit more aloof, a little crisper.” They hadn’t spoken for many years, and he was pleasantly surprised to see her. But it wasn’t until long after she left that he discovered she had gotten married and had children, none of which she told him during her visit, which didn’t surprise Wedge, who always felt she was secretive.

  “Despite spending quite some time with her as her boyfriend, I knew very little about her,” he notes. “It’s amazing. With Anna you look back and think how little you know of her.”

  Jennifer Hocking recalls that Wedge was “very keen” on Anna, and she knows of at least one other photographer, a Frenchman, with whom Anna was involved while working at Harpers & Queen. “When we used to go to Paris she would see him. She had a busy life, but on the surface she never came in looking as if she’d spent a night out, but always looked calm, collected. You couldn’t read her life by talking to her. She certainly attracted interesting guys, intelligent ones, but she did it quietly, didn’t boast, didn’t say I’m doing this or that. A lot of the shoots Anna did, she did with James Wedge. She used to get things out of photographers nobody else could, so maybe she had her own methods—I don’t know. Men obviously liked her . . . and that is why she always got these amazing photos.”