Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  “Bradshaw, of course, knew about Anna and Claude, and that was why it was so exciting for Anna, because she was hiding and rushing in and out—two-timing a bit. Bradshaw was a bit vulnerable there. He was just about able to cope because Anna wasn’t being too naughty. But Bradshaw played it quite well, let her go as long as necessary. He knew Anna was a different caliber of woman—you had to be jealous of her.”

  Bradshaw’s ego had been badly bruised and his macho image tarnished. Word of the Anna-Beer romance had spread quickly around Bradshaw’s wide circle of fellow ladies’ men in London. And he himself carried the tale to New York, where he bemoaned what had happened to a friend, the up-and-coming novelist and poetry editor Joanie McDonell, whom he had met in the early seventies when she was working as assistant to another Bradshaw pal, Lewis Lapham, then the managing editor of Harper’s magazine. “One day this guy with a big cape blew into the office, handsome as possibly could be, larger than life, looking for work,” she recalls, “and within five minutes three people were saying, ‘Bradshaw, you owe me money’”

  Bradshaw quickly became one of McDonell’s “most dearest and intimate friends.” And so she listened with utter horror and overwhelming sympathy when he described how crushed he was by Anna’s actions.

  Bradshaw, however, was the only source from whom she ever heard the story. And she was aware that Bradshaw was something of a hype artist, and that he hadn’t always been faithful to Anna. “He was a bit of a rake,” she acknowledges. Nevertheless, she bought his story of how Anna’s behavior on the high seas had devastated him. He told her that there was no problem in their relationship prior to the shipboard event. And he admitted to her that when Anna left him for Beer, he got drunk and stayed drunk rather than confront his adversary.

  “Bradshaw was humiliated and horrified and devastated,” she says, still angry and emotional about it years later. “It was a hideous thing for Anna to do.”

  From the way Bradshaw described what had happened, his feelings, and the aftermath, McDonell saw “the boat incident,” as she refers to it, as “a pivotal moment” in their relationship, and she was one of those convinced that things “were never the same” for them.

  McDonell, who got to know Bradshaw and Anna as a couple in New York, points out, “He took her back because he loved her—and she did love him—but it hurt. The truth is that Anna was the love of his life. That was clear. But it was the end of the relationship as a romantic relationship. In terms of love, as I saw it, it was over.”

  A year after the QE2 incident Bradshaw’s first book was published. Fast Company profiled professional gamblers. The dedication page reads: “For Anna.”

  The two would have an all-consuming and tumultuous relationship, one that spanned two continents and simmered and boiled, on and off into the eighties.

  thirteen

  Playing Hardball

  Things were changing in the British fashion magazine world by the mid-. seventies. Top editors wanted fashion people who could actually write, not just pick clothes. In 1974, Willie Landels decided that Jennifer Hocking would have to be replaced with someone who had genuine journalism experience, someone who could write and edit and express on paper her thoughts about fashion. It was a difficult decision for him to make because they were close friends. He’d known Hocking for ages, since she was a young model, and he wanted to be fair and square with her, so he decided to ease her out.

  Somehow word leaked—magazines, especially fashion magazines, being gossipy, competitive, and bitchy places—that Hocking was going to be replaced and that Landels had begun a search for a new fashion editor.

  That’s when Anna, twenty-four, with no proper university schooling, with no writing ability, and with only four years of experience under her Gucci belt, let it be known through the two most important men in her life—Jon Bradshaw and Charles Wintour—that she was the brightest, the most creative, the most ambitious fashion person on staff and therefore deserved and should be handed on a Tiffany platter the most powerful fashion position on the staff of one of the hippest established magazines in all of Great Britain.

  Landels wasn’t shocked that Anna wanted the top job. He always knew how hungry she was for power and was aware of her dream to become editor of Vogue. But he was surprised by how she went about it. She never discussed the job with him directly. Anna’s campaign began in an elegant private club in Mayfair over a fine meal.

  “She was determined to be made the fashion editor, so she and Bradshaw took me to lunch, a very fancy place, and he did all the talking,” Landels recalls vividly. “ ‘Willie, Jennifer’s leaving,’ Bradshaw said. ‘I think you should make Anna the fashion editor.’

  “I said, ‘Bradshaw, I don’t tell you how to write, so don’t tell me how to run my magazine.’ It was perfectly amicable, but I could see Anna wasn’t happy. Anna just sat there behind her fringe, poker-faced. She had a way, when she wasn’t happy about something, to look rather sulky.”

  When the luncheon ploy failed, Anna brought out her other big gun: her famous and powerful father. It was either a letter or a telephone call or both, from him, recalls Landels. Charles Wintour had made a case for his favorite daughter’s promotion, but without success.

  Though Landels certainly had come to know over the past several years that Anna was clever and creative, he felt she was too young, too inexperienced, too lacking in writing skills, and too unpopular with other staffers because of her icy, unfriendly demeanor to be promoted to the magazine’s top fashion job.

  Instead, he hired Min Hogg, who for a time had worked for Queen and for the Sunday Times, had been a photographer’s representative, and was doing freelance writing.

  From the start, Anna resented Min Hogg with a passion. Not only was she seething that she didn’t get the top fashion job, she also felt Hogg didn’t know fashion and wasn’t cutting edge. “Anna considered that Min wasn’t a fashionista,” says Landels. “But Min was very intelligent and very articulate, and I was delighted to talk to a fashion editor who could actually speak and write.”

  It didn’t take long for Min Hogg to feel the resentment emanating from Anna. “We didn’t get on, she didn’t approve of me getting the job. She wanted it herself and was absolutely furious when she didn’t get it,” says Hogg years later, not enjoying dredging up the bad memories of that time. “She had a degree of ambition that must eat away at her heart all the time. Fashion was her absolute world, and she did know more about it than me, so she just didn’t know how to deal with having someone like me over her. Fashion, that’s all she thought about, and she didn’t like anyone who didn’t—in other words, me. She didn’t respect me for my work as a fashion editor at all, at all, at all, and despised my professional standing.”

  Anna’s contempt for her new boss exploded openly in Paris at the winter collections shortly after Hogg’s arrival at the magazine. Hoping to bond with her deputy, Hogg took Anna along but quickly discovered that she was trying to undermine her. From day one, Anna let her contempt be known. “I got a seat on the front row and she didn’t,” Hogg recalls. “She loathed that. She didn’t need to say anything. It was perfectly obvious.”

  Anna’s behavior became so intolerable that Hogg was forced to make an emergency phone call to Willie Landels, who was enjoying a vacation in Italy. She told him that Anna was essentially sabotaging the important assignment. “If she can,” says Hogg, recalling that time, “she will ride over anyone.”

  Says Landels, “I was on holiday and I had to leave to go to Paris to sort things out. Min called and said, Anna’s making things rather difficult for me—you’d better come to Paris. She’s making trouble. She’s telling people not to listen to me.’ Anna was absolutely trying to undermine Min. It was like two mad dogs. It was all a bit naughty of Anna. I had to stay there the whole week like a policeman.”

  During the shows in Paris, Hogg also saw the seductive side of Anna’s persona. “She puts on a sort of femininity, pushes her hair about a bit, and men do go
for her on sight,” Hogg observes. “There was an American journalist at the collections who never stopped photographing Anna: Anna coming in, Anna sitting down, just nonstop. If she was there he couldn’t take his eyes off her, and she knew it. It was a complicit thing.” The photographer, who has shot literally hundreds of photos of Anna over the years, was Bill Cunningham, who later shot brilliant street fashions for The New York Times.

  After Paris, the chill emanating from Anna toward Hogg was palpable throughout the office. “Anna and I talked about it,” recalls Vivienne Lasky. “There was a feeling at the magazine that Anna was sort of a ballbuster, and she definitely knew that. She was [a ballbuster], but she felt if she were a man, it would be admired. It wasn’t the first time Anna felt her career had been derailed over the years by controlling people.”

  Not long after the Paris shows, Anna quit, while Min Hogg stayed on until 1979.

  All Anna has ever said about her tenure at Harpers & Queen was that her rise by gradual degrees from fashion assistant to Min Hogg’s number two was not meteoric—a tidbit of irony she gloatingly tossed to a journalist when she was appointed editor in chief of British Vogue in the mideighties.

  “During that time [at Harpers & Queen], my father would pick me up for lunch and we would each talk about our problems and I guess I got a feeling of what it was like to be an editor,” she observed. “Then they fired the fashion editor and appointed another one over my head.” No mention of what happened in Paris, ever. “I got straight on a plane for New York. At the time it seemed the place with the most pull—partly because I had a boyfriend [Brad-shaw] there, partly because I love American society. You’re not placed by your surname and accent as you are in London.”

  Anna left the magazine in March 1975, though her name last appeared on the masthead in the May issue.

  As Anna was abandoning London to begin a new life in New York, and with her relationship with Bradshaw on rocky ground, her parents’ marriage of more than three decades was on its last legs.

  Friends of the Wintours, like Drusilla Beyfus Shulman, think the reasons for the breakup were obvious. “For years, Charles was hardly ever at home. He had an intense family life that was entirely the responsibility of Nonie. She didn’t sympathize with what he was doing on the paper and despised Beaverbrook. He was flirtatious with other women. And, of course, their adored son had died. She’d have had to have been a saint.”

  There had been several attempts to salvage the marriage, one of which was a vacation, because both enjoyed traveling. “They took a trip by automobile through Afghanistan, and I always interpreted that in view of what happened later as an attempt to save the marriage,” says Arthur Schlesinger. “I doubt, though, whether either of them said to me it was a last-ditch effort, but that’s a fair appraisal.”

  Charles Wintour had all but left his wife for the talented woman’s magazine editor Audrey Slaughter, otherwise known as the “flame-haired temptress,” who was about a decade his junior. Their affair had become public, thanks to Private Eye, which published the juicy details through the mid- to late seventies. “I wasn’t even very red-haired,” Slaughter protested feebly years later, “and I always wanted to be dark and mysterious.”

  Wintour had been introduced to Slaughter at a dinner party by her friend Shirley Conran, a journalist, onetime wife of the designer Terence Conran, and later author of a string of best sellers. Unlike some of Wintour’s other female companions, Slaughter was not glamorous and didn’t have anything like Nonie’s Boston society background or Ivy League education. But Slaughter captivated Anna’s father. “Audrey’s a very brilliant editor, very finger-on-the-pulse, an energetic businesswoman always launching new magazines, and that’s what attracted Charles,” says Valerie Grove, who had known Slaughter since the late sixties. “They had something in common, which he didn’t have anymore with Nonie. Audrey was a great contrast to Nonie—much warmer, amusing, self-deprecating, clearly happy to be on Charles’s arm. Charles was captivated by her.”

  And Wintour adored being idolized, something he hadn’t gotten from Nonie in years. “Charles missed the sort of adoration that Audrey brought,” notes Drusilla Beyfus Shulman. “She worshipped Charles, and he could do no wrong. She didn’t have any of the kind of intellectual judgments about him that Nonie had. She just really adored him.”

  With their marriage in tatters, the Wintours had sold off their wonderful house in Phillimore Gardens, where Anna had spent her swinging sixties teenage years, and moved into what Grove describes as a “ghastly, soulless apartment” on Southampton Row, steps from a subway station and a blue-collar tourist hotel.

  Attempts at putting on a good front for friends were disastrous, such as the time Wintour tossed a Sunday brunch at the new apartment, inviting some of his favorite Evening Standard staffers. Nonie had taken to her bed, claiming she was sick, and everyone brought flowers to try to cheer her up after being warned by Charles.

  “I think actually she’d said, ‘Oh, to hell with your staff. . . . I’m going to bed. I’m not feeling well,’ and she was ill,” recalls Grove, one of the guests. “We went into the bedroom where she was sitting up in bed feeling just grumpy, gave her flowers, and then went on with our lunch.”

  Grove felt the Wintour apartment “had the aura of a marriage falling apart.”

  A string of sometimes hilarious gossip items about the Wintours’ marital travails and his affair with Slaughter appeared in the “Grovel” column of Private Eye. The source of most, if not all, of it most likely was Nigel Dempster, who some believe was still angry that Wintour thought he wasn’t good enough for his daughter or for his newspaper.

  In a profile of Dempster that was published in Harpers & Queen in 1974 under the headline “The Scum Also Rises,” Jon Bradshaw wrote that Dempster had made a deal in 1973 with his employer, the Daily Mail, to secretly write the “Grovel” column as long as he didn’t include any Daily Mail dirty laundry. According to Bradshaw, this allowed Dempster “to attack his targets with greater impunity. . . . As a result of his rude assaults, Dempster has been banned from various London clubs . . . he has made powerful enemies within his own profession and more than a few of his victims have seriously considered sending heavies round.”

  Meanwhile, Anna would hold Audrey Slaughter in utter contempt for years, blaming her for destroying her parents’ marriage, her animosity intensifying after her father married Slaughter. It would take almost two decades, until her father’s death, for Anna to have a semblance of a rapprochement with Slaughter.

  fourteen

  Axed American Style

  Twenty-five-year-old Anna landed in New York City in the long, hot summer of 1975, just in time for the Big Apple’s era of decadence.

  Anna’s world was Manhattan’s high life and nightlife: the trendy Upper East Side, where she again established a shaky live-in relationship with Bradshaw, whom she had followed to New York; the chic Saturday Night Fever scene at Studio 54, with its Andy Warhol–beautiful people set; the downtown scene where other recent British expatriates—journalists and fashion people—lived in funky artists’ lofts, ran trendy new boutiques, and opened exclusive boîtes. Though the city was almost bankrupt, there was nowhere in the world more hip and open than New York in the mid- to late seventies. It was a freewheeling era of artistic creativity.

  Anna’s arrival in the far-out seventies, however, was greeted by a fashion scene that wasn’t very far-out, and fashion magazines of the day had little of her kind of pizzazz, which may have been part of her master plan for coming to America—even though she denied having one—or merely a stroke of luck.

  Women’s wear was nowhere, with more focus on the personality of who was wearing the clothes than the clothes themselves. Men wore polyester leisure suits and loud shirts with big collars and gold chains around their necks à la Tony Manero. Women’s fashion was very laid back, relaxed, and chic because of its simplicity—spurred by designs from Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, Diane von Furstenberg, and Ralph La
uren. Sparked by the feminist movement and sexual freedom, women were declaring their individuality.

  The miniskirt and bell-bottoms from the sixties remained in vogue, but seventies skirts were in two other lengths, midi and maxi. Jeans paired with tight white T-shirts, which became a favorite of Anna’s—who also wore hot pants—was a chic and popular look. On the high end of the fashion food chain were designs by Givenchy, Norell, and Oscar de la Renta. And then came Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Diane Keaton’s la-di-da look—a tie, a waistcoat, a man’s shirt, thirties-style wide pants, designed and styled by Ralph Lauren—became de rigueur overnight.

  Anna felt that fashion, and especially fashion magazines, in midseventies America needed a major fix of direction and focus, and a creative eye—something she was confident she had plenty of, so she began job hunting. As she once stated, “It wasn’t until I came to the United States that I became more disciplined and more focused.”

  By late 1975 she had caught the eye of Carrie Donovan, the flamboyant and eccentric fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, which was going through some rough times under editor in chief Tony Mazzola. Creative and managerial turmoil had become a way of life at the magazine. Donovan, a good two decades older than Anna, had come to Bazaar from Vogue, where her mentor, Diana Vreeland, once told her that in fashion she had “the common touch,” which was a compliment.

  Donovan and Anna had much in common. Both had bobs and both had become fashionistas at a young age: When Donovan was ten, she sent Jane Wyman sketches for a wardrobe and received a treasured thank-you note. And like Anna, Donovan had her first taste of fashion in a low-level spot in a department store, Anna at Harrods, Donovan in the hat department at Saks Fifth Avenue under the wife of Vogue’s Alexander Liberman. Donovan, though, had a formal education, having graduated from the Parsons School of Design.