Manipulating men has always been one of Anna’s great strengths. With the photographers, she flirted, complimented, ego-stroked, and slyly directed in order to get the best out of them. Moreover, as she became more experienced as an editor, she was savvy enough to take their advice, to use the shots they recommended, the photos they determined were their best from a particular shoot, rather than making her own personal choice. That way, in most instances, she could do no wrong.
Hocking, who knew a thing or two about handling men, was amazed that such a young thing like Anna could do it as she did and make it appear so easy. A valise, as it turns out, underscored it all for her. “We’d go to the shows and she’d always be able to get men to carry her suitcase,” she said, remembering those moments years later. “I’m tall and no one would ever carry my suitcase. I used to say, ‘My God, in my next life I’m going to look like Anna Wintour.’ She looked frail, she looked fragile, and obviously that appeals to a lot of men. Men loved her. Anna would stand there with the fringe hanging down over her eyes, looking very sort of helpless, a waiflike look, but far from being a waif, and the men would line up.”
From the beginning of her career, Anna had an eye for interesting locations. One memorable and magical shoot for Harpers & Queen that she oversaw was for a collection of clothing by Japanese designers, a favorite of Anna’s through the seventies and eighties. The magazine wouldn’t spring for an expensive and time-consuming location shoot in Asia, so Anna, working with Wedge, found a farm that grew watercress in the English countryside that had from a distance the look of a rice paddy, and that’s where she posed the models, wearing peasant hats and Japanese fashions. “It was fantastic,” recalls Hocking. “She could organize, she would make sure people sent in the props and clothing she wanted, and she got very good work out of the photographers. Her mind was always sharp and crystal clear. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as clever as her.”
Years later, Anna looked back on her work at Harpers & Queen and noted that she considered the fashion shoots to be “amateurish affairs.” She recalled being sent to India for a weeklong assignment with nothing more than twenty pounds, which in those days was less than fifty dollars. “When I asked my editor, ‘How am I supposed to pay for everything?’ He said, ‘Oh, just find a ma-harajah with a palace.’ And I think I did.”
ten
Family Affairs
From the age of fifteen, Anna had begun hearing well-founded rumors that her father was a womanizer. Later, gossip items alluding to his extracurricular affairs began appearing in the “Grovel” gossip column of London’s bitchy satirical magazine Private Eye.
The column linked him to a married woman and made light by calling him “Sir Charles” because he never received knighthood, which he felt he deserved.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had been introduced to the woman by Win-tour, says, “It was evident to an old friend his interest in her had a certain sexual tinge. She was very vivacious, sexy, and bright, and Charles was a powerful editor by this time. Womanizing was not the central theme of his life, but he liked intelligent, pretty women, and I suppose went to bed with them. Charles had a British reserve about things and was not given to con-fessionalism.”
Wintour once showed up with the beauty at the Evening Standard’s Washington, D.C., bureau, staying with her at the Madison Hotel, according to the paper’s then-correspondent in the nation’s capital, Jeremy Campbell, who had long heard the stories about his boss’s affairs. But Wintour attempted to dispel the rumors. “Charles said to me, ‘Whatever you hear, she’s my traveling companion, and nothing more.’ ”
Campbell’s reaction? “I suspended belief.”
Alex Walker, who had become close to Nonie Wintour before, during, and after her marriage, believes that the tensions that had long existed between her and her husband had reached their zenith in the late sixties and early seventies. “The children were growing up. Nonie was deeply involved in her social work. Charles consequently became more involved in the feminine comforts that a number of women offered him.
“Charles would have absolutely never talked about any of this. He would have thought that that would have been a breach of faith in marriage. If he had any real confidantes, they were probably the other women that he was with. He became the kind of husband who relaxes with a mistress to get rid of the tensions of home life.”
Besides the boldface names with whom he had liaisons, Wintour “riffled through secretaries at the paper, one after another, and poor old Nonie was at home,” recounts a female former Evening Standard reporter. “He was very frigid and horrible to her. They gave wonderful cocktail parties, but they were very unhappy together.”
Anna knew of her father’s wanderings from what she saw and heard firsthand at home, from Private Eye, and from the whispering in the circle in which she ran. Always very private, she never talked about the gossip items.
“She was very reserved that way,” notes Jennifer Hocking. “She wouldn’t have discussed it, and Anna was not a gossipy person who you could sit around and have a good dish with.”
Her father’s philandering was difficult for her to deal with, or to comprehend intelligently, says Vivienne Lasky. “Anna thought that some of the women reporters who worked at the Standard weren’t just protégées. Anna sensed something. One was invited along to the country, was included in a lot of things even with Nonie there, and often he would take her to parties if Nonie didn’t want to go.
“Anna couldn’t go to her mother, or her father, and say, ‘What’s this all about?’ She’s so terribly British,” observes Lasky. “We had many conversations about our fathers being womanizers. She knew of his infidelities, was aware he had protégées, and she forgave him everything. Early on, when Private Eye first started reporting the gossip, she tended to side privately with her father. It was tough, but we both loved and idolized our fathers and didn’t quite know what to do with our feelings. I don’t even know if it was anger. It was just sort of like, what does this all mean?”
In a childish and naive way, Anna seemed to understand her father’s philandering more than she could Melvin Lasky’s, mainly because Brigitte Lasky was chic and beautiful as opposed to her own frumpy mother. “I remember Anna wondering, ‘Why would your father go any further than your mother? Why would he, if he’s got the most beautiful woman?’”
Anna seemed to have the mind-set of a Cosmo Girl—that it all had to do with a sexy look and sex, with little understanding that relationships were far more complex.
“I adored Charles, he was charismatic and flirtatious,” Lasky says. “And I knew his flaws. I don’t want to put any blame on Nonie—she didn’t deserve that kind of treatment—but once in a while she could have gone out with her husband. Nonie never went anywhere with him. Charles would buy Nonie jewelry for her birthday, but she’d say she didn’t want it. It’s as if he didn’t really know her.”
On September 4, 1970, nine months after Anna had joined Harpers & Queen, Nonie received an urgent transatlantic call from her sister Jean in New York. Their mother, Anna Gilkyson Baker, had died at the age of eighty-one. The matriarch had been widowed for almost four years, ever since pneumonia claimed the life of her renowned Harvard corporate law professor husband, Ralph Jackson Baker, at seventy-eight. Hospitalized for a week, Baker died on November 5, 1966, two days after his granddaughter Anna’s seventeenth birthday.
Anna’s grandmother had been found dead in the Bakers’ Boston apartment where Nonie had spent her formative years. The cause of her mother’s death, though, was kept secret from other family members on the American side.
Unlike Ralph Baker, who had long suffered from heart disease and chronic bronchitis, which were the cause of his death, Anna Baker did not die a natural death or from illness. Apparently long depressed, Anna’s grandmother committed suicide, taking an overdose of the barbiturate Nembutal.
Anna’s maternal grandfather had invested his money wisely and left an impressive estate of $2,279,578.62
(in 1966 dollars), of which Anna was a beneficiary. Her grandmother when she died had a personal worth—excluding her husband’s sizable trust for her—of $204,162.93, of which Anna also was an heir.
On November 3, 1970, two months after her grandmother’s death, Anna celebrated her twenty-first birthday at a party thrown by her parents at the posh Savoy Hotel. She now had substantial income at her disposal from the family trusts, the kind of money that would allow her to take low-paying fashion magazine jobs, such as the one at Harpers & Queen, and still live the high life: have chic apartments, wear beautiful clothes, drive a trendy car, spend nights on the town, and date outrageous men.
eleven
Creative Energy
Anna’s first discovery of a new face and potential cover girl at Harpers & Queen was a debutante on the London social scene named Annabel Hodin, who had been a year behind Anna at North London Collegiate. They rode the same underground line, passed in the hall on the way to classes in their drab brown uniforms, nodded at one another, but didn’t mix because of the slight age difference. But both were intrigued.
“I knew of Anna because I liked pretty people, and she was pretty,” says Hodin. By the time Anna was promoted to assistant fashion editor in late 1971 under Jennifer Hocking, Hodin was just breaking into the modeling game. She had quite a timely look—her bright orange bob was cut by Sassoon and she wore microminiskirts. She was the real deal. Anna was hooked. “Like attracts like,” Hodin observes. “She discovered me as a model, liked my look, took me under her wing, and gave me my first job.”
Anna had created a story called “London Originals” and had booked Hodin for the layout with hopes of getting her on the cover against stiff competition—the stunner Charlotte Rampling, of television’s The Avengers fame. Rampling made the cover of the February 1973 issue, but Hodin was one of the featured London beauties, and from there her career took off.
Anna had pulled together quite a team for the shoot, including the South African photographer Barry McKinley, who was hot at the time, and the innovative Barbara Daly, who handled the extraordinary makeup for Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 terrifying sci-fi classic A Clockwork Orange and his 1975 Barry Lyndon. The period photos of the models with crimped hair and marcelled waves were shot in the dramatic art nouveau–style apartment of the renowned Chinese art director and designer Barney Wan, whom Anna knew.
She was quickly building a reputation of being able to round up the best people and locations, mainly because of her connections through her father, pals like Nigel Dempster, and other well-placed types with whom she networked socially.
“Her shoots were always very high style, very classy,” notes Hodin. “Anna would have the best of the new designers, top makeup. She had the most immaculate eye. She never chose mediocrity in any form, and when you get a good team, you get a great shot.”
After “London Originals,” Anna booked Hodin for a shoot in Corsica, with her lover James Wedge as the photographer, with fashions by Missoni and jewelry from the posh London shop Emeline—everything in coral, ebony, and ivory. Such location shoots usually took about a week. “Afterwards, the jeweler gave everyone marvelous bracelets,” recalls Hodin, “and then we’d go off to San Lorenzo [an expensive celebrity restaurant in Knightsbridge] where we’d all have lunch.”
Rigid in so many ways, such as with her bob, which she kept for a lifetime, and her signature sunglasses, Anna also never digressed from her luncheon regimen. “It was so odd, because she had the same meal every day at a little Italian restaurant around the corner from the magazine,” says Liz Walker. “It was smoked salmon and scrambled eggs—every single day. She would eat nothing else. She was practicing the high-protein thing even then. We all had at least a glass of wine, but if she did, she drank the tiniest amount.”
Besides kick-starting the careers of models like Hodin, Anna launched up-and-coming photographers in her early days at Harpers & Queen. One was Eric Boman, whom Landels describes as a “very beautiful, wonderfully blond, and charming” college boy who had done some “very lovely” drawings that had caught his keen art director’s eye. Anna had planned to do a feature on lingerie, and Landels, looking for a different slant on what he thought was a boring and cliché subject, asked her to get Boman to sketch the models.
A few days later, the pair appeared at Landels’s desk with spectacular photographs of a beautiful girl in underwear, sitting at a dressing table in a luxurious room at the Savoy. “Anna took a room and they went there and those photos were shot,” says Landels. “So Anna made Eric, an artist, into a photographer. I thought, ‘What vision on her.’ It was very perceptive of her to know he would be good. I adored the photographs. Maybe Eric said, ‘Let me shoot pictures.’ But the fact that she let him, and took the risk of me saying, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ said something about her.”
As much as any woman could bond with Anna in those days, Annabel Hodin did. It was a time of constant partying, with many champagne-filled evenings spent at the Clermont, a posh gambling club on Berkeley Square, or at Annabel’s, or at any of the other chic nightspots where rich and powerful men and beautiful young women on the make gathered in the glitzy, disco seventies. Very briefly during this period, Anna dated, among others, Tony Elliott, who, just out of college in 1968, had founded the very successful weekly events listing magazine Time Out, and impresario Michael White, who produced the first London stage performance of The Rocky Horror Show.
“Everybody wanted to go out with Anna,” says Hodin. “She was very beautiful, and any powerful man with any aspirations would want to be with her.”
There was an endless line of high rollers who adored Anna and competed for her affections. Two among them were friends, part of a hard-drinking, playboy rat pack of sorts. One was a powerful British advertising executive twice her age, the other a freelance American journalist a dozen years her senior.
“Anna was attracted to older men, and thank God for that! Otherwise I wouldn’t have had a hope,” states dashing John Pringle, who at the time was nearly fifty and had been the chairman of the European branch of the powerful American advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. “Oh, God, Anna was much younger, but that never hindered me. I always rather fancied a young woman.”
By the time Anna met Pringle, the ad business was in a recession, DDB had lost some big clients, and he had been appointed director of tourism for Jamaica, based in London, with offices worldwide. He was quite successful in putting the island on the map, vacationwise. He had big-time family connections there. An ancestor, Sir John Pringle, had arrived in Jamaica, then still part of the British Empire, in the early 1900s as supervisor of the lunatic asylum in Kingston. He later made a killing by buying up abandoned sugar plantations and planting bananas.
Pringle fit Anna’s profile. “Anna only liked men who were stimulating and exciting, and she would fall in love with that,” notes Hodin. “Anything else would be just a sex thing.”
The moneyed Pringle had just ended a long marriage and was playing the field when he was introduced to Anna by a mutual pal at one of the clubs. “Because of the divorce I was terribly unhappy,” he says. “I’d been married for a number of years and did all sorts of stupid things. Anna came into my life during that period, and she was very exciting.”
A charming raconteur and good-looking man-about-town—the type who calls both male and female friends “dahling”—Pringle was utterly smitten with the chic young assistant fashion editor. “I found her extremely attractive, she flirted with me, and I had a big crush on her,” he acknowledges. “I saw quite a lot of Anna, took her to Annabel’s, the usual places. She was just so sexy and funny and amusing and attractive, but at the same time she was a tough little bird.”
As he got to know her, he found downsides to what he considered to be Anna’s intriguing persona. For one, he came to the conclusion, after numerous attempts to seduce her, that she was a tease. “Anna was cold in a very sexy sort of way, if one can cope with that sort of strange stateme
nt. She flirted. I stuck my tongue in her mouth, and she rather liked that. But I never got to bed with her.”
He also was put off a bit by her vanity and imperiousness. “She always struck me as being incredibly spoiled, very flirtatious and slightly naughty, and enormously secretive. She isn’t one of those people who disclose their innards to anyone. She never told you anything about her feelings, about what she was going to do or not going to do. She just did it.”
And one of the things Anna did was to fall in love with Pringle’s best friend, an American freelance writer named Jon Bradshaw. “I was very fond of Bradshaw, I loved Bradshaw. He was a complete rascal, and he was magic to women, who fell in love with him all over the place. And Bradshaw came along and had a crush on Anna, and I had a crush on her, but Bradshaw started fucking her.”
twelve
Meeting Mr. Wrong
Anna and Jon Bradshaw—everyone called him Bradshaw, never Jon—were introduced in 1972 by their mutual friend Nigel Dempster, who had known Bradshaw since his arrival in London from New York City in the early sixties when he went to work as a freelance for Queen magazine.
Giving a gossip item ring to how he played Cupid, Dempster says, “I introduced them, and Bradshaw said to me, ‘Anna’s a wonderful girl,’ and went off with her to Tramp,” the hot, celebrity-studded nightclub in posh Mayfair. “Afterwards, he told me, Anna’s the girl for me.’” Bradshaw’s attraction was that he “was a discoverer, an interesting character who came to our city and showed us things we’d never seen before,” says Dempster, extolling his friend’s virtues.
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