A dozen years Anna’s senior and recently divorced from a wealthy Englishwoman after less than a year’s marriage—the two actually had a well-publicized London divorce party—Bradshaw was a devilish rogue with enormous appetites: of liquor, Johnny Walker Black being his favorite, but anything would do as long as someone else was picking up the tab; of recreational highs—a toke here, a snort there; of nicotine—at least three packs of unfiltered British Rothmans a day; and of rich foods. He also was a gambler who played high-stakes backgammon and wrote a book about it called The Cruelest Game during the halcyon days of the backgammon boom in the seventies.
The writer Nik Cohn, a close friend of Bradshaw’s who penned the New York magazine story that became Saturday Night Fever starring John Travolta, had an apt description of the man for whom Anna fell hard: “His calling cards were wit and charm, a world-class talent for gossip, and good looks of an almost Hollywood order. A louche, more dissolute version of James Garner, he carried himself with conscious roguery, a Rothman’s perpetually dangling from one corner of his mouth and that lopsided shark’s grin plastering the other. He sported Turnbull and Asser silk shirts and Gucci loafers, flashed gold lighters and a Piaget watch; slathered himself with Vetiver cologne; tended to speak in mock-abusive italics: ‘the awful Mailer, the dreadfulElaine, the unspeakable Timothy Leary.’ The insults were his style of showing admiration. Awfulness, if married to flair, was golden. . . . His devouring passion was for action.”
Men, straight and gay, as well as women loved and fawned over him. In the new millennium he’d be typed a “metrosexual.”
Anna found everything about Bradshaw incredibly fascinating and attractive, especially his family background.
In New York, Bradshaw’s mother, Annis Murphy, a drinker, a smoker, “strong and domineering,” had been a copy editor at Vogue and was a close friend of Beatrix Miller, the longtime editor of British Vogue whom Anna would replace in the mideighties. She also was a chum of Anne Trehearne, the clever, longtime fashion editor at Queen with whom Bradshaw stayed when he first hit London and who was his entrée to start freelancing for the magazine. Bradshaw’s father had abandoned the family early on, so besides his mother, he was raised by an uncle, an executive at the Vanguard Press in New York who helped oversee publication of the 1954 best-selling novel The Bridge on the River Kwai. Bradshaw grew up in a book-filled apartment in a genteel building overlooking the East River at Seventy-second Street, where family friends included the writer and Renaissance man George Plimpton and the famed Tiffany’s window dresser Gene Moore. Bradshaw had gone to a prep school in Pennsylvania and later attended writing classes at Columbia University, and tried to sell pieces to the New York Herald Tribune before splitting for London.
Despite Dempster’s assertion of having brought Anna and Bradshaw together as lovers in 1972, there are some who believe they had actually gotten to know each other much earlier—when Anna was in her club-hopping mid-teens.
A journalist who had worked for the Evening Standard in the early sixties and later had an “on-and-off romance with Bradshaw” recalls seeing him in Charles Wintour’s newsroom—“sprawled all over the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ desk, making personal transatlantic calls to New York”—as early as 1963, when Anna was just fourteen. Moreover, she recalls seeing him around that same time at the Wintour house.
“I just have this picture in my mind’s eye of being in the house in Phillimore Gardens and seeing Bradshaw and Anna going downstairs to her flat and somebody saying to me, Are they living together down there?’ It was extraordinary because her father was a stern father figure to everybody at the Evening Standard. He was quite possessive, so why he would allow his favorite daughter to be with this charming guy who never earned a penny is a mystery. Bradshaw might have just been bumming a bed off her down there then because he never seemed to have a place of his own.”
Since Dempster was already a friend of Bradshaw’s, and Dempster was seeing Anna when she was in her mid- to late teens, it’s likely Anna had met Bradshaw in Dempster’s circle, which included the likes of John Pringle long before they became romantically involved publicly.
How and when they met, and whether Charles Wintour took kindly to his daughter’s latest suitor, became a moot point because Anna and Bradshaw quickly became an item and moved in together, renting a partly furnished quaint town house in trendy Chelsea.
“Anna had done a lot of decorating, with all very warm touches,” recalls Vivienne Lasky. “She had such style. What were hers I could pick out—the books, and the way they were stacked, the Provençal fabrics, and Bradshaw had a lot of his very tasteful memorabilia on display.”
Anna’s lover’s possessions included a series of stamps that he and his buddy, the photographer Patrick Lichfield, the queen’s first cousin once removed, had produced as a publicity stunt. On a lark, the pair had started a private postal service—Rickshaw Limited—using six couriers on Honda motor scooters in January 1971, during a postal strike in central London. “Back comes royal mail—posted by the Queen’s cousin,” declared a headline in the Daily Express. The story was illustrated with two photos, one of Lichfield, looking amazingly like a Las Vegas Elvis impersonator, with coiffed hair and sunglasses, and one of “Lord Lichfield’s postman Jon Bradshaw,” straddling a Honda, wearing a hippie-style leather-brimmed hat, loafers, and velvet slacks. He was shown handing over mail to a long-legged and slender beauty in a microminiskirt and boots at her shop in Chelsea, who was described as “one of their satisfied customers.”
Lasky first saw Anna and Bradshaw as a couple when she returned to England in June 1972 to attend graduate school at Cambridge’s New Hall College. She found him handsome and charming.
“Anna wanted to pick up where we left off when I went away to Radcliffe. She would say, ‘Oh, come to dinner. We’re all going. I want you to come and meet my friends. They’re all interesting. You haven’t got anything else to do.’ Anna was forceful. She was always with a group of men, never other women.”
Besides Bradshaw, Anna’s posse consisted of Anthony Haden-Guest, whom Vivienne found “amusing and effete;” Dempster, who she describes as “weaselly;” and Lichfield, whom she thought of as bright, good-looking, and well-bred.
“Maybe Anna wanted another girl there because it was all sort of guy camaraderie. If they talked about sports, we would talk in the corner. She would say, ‘We can talk while we eat and at least we’ll get to be together.’”
Lasky looked and felt like a college kid compared to her glamorous assistant fashion editor best friend who, during London’s cold and rainy months, went about town wearing a dramatic floor-length coat made of the fur of a white wolf.
Of all of the men in Anna’s circle, Lasky adored Bradshaw. “He had a teddy bearish quality to him. He was genuine, the only one who would say hi and give me a hug, the only one who had an ounce of warmth, and I thought she needed a warm person in her life. I knew Bradshaw was older, but it wasn’t a Pygmalion relationship. He wasn’t trying to make her over into someone else. Anna was very well versed, lovely looking, well-spoken, had read everything, seen everything, and traveled a lot. What man wouldn’t want to spend time with her?”
In fact, it was Anna who apparently tried to change Bradshaw, or at least encourage him, cheer him on in terms of his writing. She knew he had aspirations to write the great American novel, or screenplay, but was too much of a layabout ever to succeed. He needed, she believed, her guidance. Her goal became apparent in intimate letters she wrote to him, which Bradshaw saw fit to share with his friend A. J. “Jack” Langguth, a Vietnam war correspondent for The New York Times, author, and much later a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications.
Langguth, who had had many uproarious adventures with Bradshaw over the years and loved him dearly, was surprised that his friend revealed the intimate and private correspondence to him. “He would read them not with a malicious attitude,” emphasizes Langgu
th, “but to let me know that Anna was crazy about him. Anna was seeing herself as Bradshaw’s muse who would inspire him to new heights, cheering him on as a young lady would write to Lord Byron, somehow influencing his life and production. And I knew Bradshaw would play the wounded artiste to the hilt. I’d say, ‘Come on, Bradshaw, this young woman really has been taken in by this.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, Langguth, I’m a very sensitive person. You don’t give me credit for that.’”
From the letters, Langguth came to the conclusion that Anna was sincere, “a nice young woman” who he thought “was too good” for Bradshaw.
But Anna and Bradshaw’s relationship was far more complex than Langguth had perceived from letters. Others in closer proximity saw Bradshaw as a father figure to Anna, both emotionally and professionally. They felt she played a needy little girl role with him, and Bradshaw was always a sucker for people in need. Because of his many connections, he would be able to help her get in the door for jobs and meet the right people after she arrived in New York.
As John Pringle notes, “Bradshaw was a terribly generous man, and if he liked you—and he loved Anna—he would do anything to help her.”
Anna, friends of the couple observe, would come to be the dominant figure in their tumultuous relationship.
It was a wild and crazy time, those early to midseventies years of the Wintour-Bradshaw romance.
But Annabel Hodin, who was a part of the scene, observes that despite all of the partying, Anna was “quite solitary. You’d always think of Anna being apart in the group—not needing to be liked, very self-contained.”
Besides wild nights in the trendy London clubs, Anna and Bradshaw were frequent hangers-on at Shugborough Hall, Patrick Lichfield’s magnificent two-hundred-acre, seventeenth-century ancestral home in Staffordshire. For Bradshaw, it was a platinum card freeload—lots of marvelous food, drink, fascinating men, beautiful women, and servants at his beck and call.
For Anna, it was a wonderful environment in which to network. Lichfield, who had snapped his first photo when he was six, was an influential friend to have if, like Anna, you were trying to make it in the fashion magazine world. He hung out with the new breed of fashion photographers, such as David Bailey, whom he once described as “strongly hetero East End kids,” as opposed to what had been a mostly gay elite of shooters.
But of greater interest to Anna was the fact that Lichfield had developed a close relationship with Diana Vreeland, the doyenne of fashion editors, and had shot fashion for five years under her at American Vogue. His fellow photographers included the greats like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, who also shot for Vogue. He was close to designers like Oscar de la Renta, with whom Anna later became friends. Most important, Lichfield was a respected friend of Alex Liberman, the all-powerful editorial director of Condé Nast who ran the show at Vogue and down the road would become Anna’s guru, mentor, and Svengali.
Long before she came to America, Anna’s name was known to many of the key players in the upper echelons of the fashion magazine world because of the contacts she made for herself during those fun weekends at Shugborough Hall.
For her, working at Harpers & Queen was like a power pitcher working his way up through the minors, but with George Steinbrenner keeping a keen eye on his record.
Sometimes Anna and Bradshaw went to Lichfield’s with Annabel Hodin and her boyfriend, Robert Wade, who managed the British rock group The Kinks. Ironically, the group had put down as obnoxious and pretentious the whole London fashion scene, including fashionistas like Anna, in a rant of a single called “Dedicated Follower of Fashion.”
“We did lovely things,” reminisces Hodin of the weekends spent with Anna and Bradshaw at Lichfield’s country estate. “Chauffeurs would take us to the woods and we’d all be given a gun so we could shoot at helium balloons. Then the butlers would lay out the picnic. There’d be movie shows in the evening. We’d stay all night, and in the morning the women would have their breakfast on silver trays, and then the men would go to the breakfast room where you pulled the doors back and the scrambled eggs and sausage and everything were. And then the men would read their newspapers. It sounds all very Gosford Park, but Gosford Park was about an industrialist, and Patrick was an aristocrat. It’s very different. Then we’d all play tennis and run around on the lawns. He had funny cars for us to ride in and motorbikes. We could do anything we wanted.”
But sometimes it all became too much for the lord of the manor, especially if someone like Bradshaw took advantage of the good life the earl offered to his friends and hangers-on.
John Pringle remembers one particular weekend when “that shit Lichfield was in one of his peevish, bitchy moods, and Bradshaw had tummy problems. He was not feeling well and he’d been staying at that rather grand house for what seemed like weeks and he knew all the servants. I was sitting at the table, and he said to one of the butlers, ‘I can’t eat very much. Can you make me a bowl of soup?’ And Lichfield, at the other end of the table—and there were eighteen people at the table—said, ‘Bradshaw, this is not a. fucking hotel!’ I got up and left the table and left the house that very afternoon because he was so rude to Bradshaw.”
Bradshaw never forgot the embarrassing incident. After a very raunchy bachelor party thrown for Lichfield just prior to his marriage to Lady Leonora Grosvenor, daughter of the fifth Duke of Westminster, Bradshaw got his revenge. “There were a few girls here and there,” says Bradshaw’s Jamaican artist pal Willie Fielding, one of the revelers. “Bradshaw went and wrote about the whole thing in Private Eye, which came out the day before the wedding. He shat on Patrick, and none of us really wanted to talk to him for a while.”
By 1974, Anna and Bradshaw had been together for some two years. Friends thought they seemed happy, despite the kind of lives they led.
“He was always very tender with her,” observes the writer Glenys Roberts, a onetime Evening Standard reporter whom Bradshaw was seeing along with other women on the side. “It was almost a sort of paternal relationship with Anna, perhaps because her father was very cold and Bradshaw very warm. It might have been as simple as that.”
Anna was proving herself at Harpers & Queen, where colleagues saw her as becoming increasingly driven and restless for more power. Bradshaw was often on the road, supposedly working on stories and book ideas, but was mainly living the high life with his pals and bedding down with other women.
“I had sort of an on-and-off platonic romance with Bradshaw, and he would pass out on my couch regularly,” discloses Roberts, who had once been the girlfriend of Monty Pythons Terry Gilliam and later was married to a well-to-do London tailor. “I knew Bradshaw was supposed to be living with Anna, but he never rang her up and said, ‘I won’t be home tonight, darling.’ He’d collapse on everybody’s floor, so I don’t think he was a very good bet for any woman, really. The one thing Bradshaw could do for Anna would be to introduce her to people, because he knew everybody.”
Anna may have caught on to Bradshaw’s womanizing, or been stung by it, or just come to the conclusion that they had an open relationship, because in 1974 she had an affair with one of his compatriots.
It all transpired like a scene out of a Jackie Collins novel.
Anna and Bradshaw had set sail on the Queen Elizabeth 2, Anna said to be working on a fashion assignment for Harpers & Queen, Bradshaw hustling money by participating in a shipboard backgammon tournament sponsored by Dunhill. Also taking part was a pal of Bradshaw’s, a tough competitor by the name of Claude Beer, the 1974 world backgammon champion.
Like Bradshaw, Beer was a rascal and a rogue, a darkly handsome Paris-born playboy and gambler who had been spoiled by his mother who mostly supported him with her second husband’s American oil money. “Claude was more fun than anyone could ever imagine,” exclaims a female Palm Beach pal. Especially when he drank, and Beer loved the bubbly. He and his buddy Nigel Dempster had once gotten into a fight at Castel’s, the fancy Paris nightspot, over a bottle of champagne. Beer won—th
en promptly passed out.
Beer also was a womanizer who had “a million girlfriends—a million” says his Florida chum. On that QE2 cruise he romanced Anna, who was a dozen years his junior.
Dempster noted the shipboard romance in his Daily Mail gossip column—not once, but twice—a number of years after it happened. On November 29, 2000, in an item about Anna and Shelby Bryan, the multimillionaire for whom Anna left her husband and the father of their two children in the late nineties, Dempster dredged up the quarter-century-old affair: “During Anna’s romance with Bradshaw, she ran off on the QE2 with noted Palm Beach drunk and backgammon gambler Claude Beer . . .” In a second column, dated September 16, 2001, mourning the death of “my old friend” Beer, who had died of alcohol-related illnesses at the age of sixty-three in Palm Beach on the same day as the terrorist attacks in the United States, Dempster reminded his readers, “Back in 1974 on a Dunhill QE2 backgammon jolly, he fell in love with American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, but that’s another story”
After the ship reached port, Anna continued to see Beer. According to friends, Bradshaw was furious and, as he made it seem, broken hearted. They didn’t immediately resume cohabitating. It was only after a while that he took her back, but things were never the same.
“Claude was hot, very exciting, and naughty,” says Hodin, who knew him when he was with Anna. “He was around with her for a while. She would never be in love with someone like Claude. I don’t know exactly what happened between them because Anna was very private like that. We’d talk about boyfriends but never go into detail. It was always, ‘Oh, we had great fun.’ Nothing more.
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