With a reputation for discovering and nurturing new talent, Donovan liked what she saw in Anna and hired her as a junior editor. The fact that Anna had worked for Harpers & Queen also helped—the two magazines had Hearst corporate ties; Mazzola, in New York, was on the masthead of Harpers & Queen as editorial director, a position having to do with Bazaars editions in countries around the world.
Anna started on the bottom rung again as a twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year junior fashion editor. She appeared for the first time on the masthead in January 1976. She didn’t have an easy go. Her British frost and in-your-face ambition turned off her American colleagues and bosses, and her edgy concepts didn’t go over in what then was a conservative and tumultuous environment. But Anna had become part of Bazaars grand tradition, America’s first fashion magazine, a graphics leader that debuted in 1867 and over the decades had the world’s most famous fashion editors at the top—Vreeland, Carmel Snow—and brilliant photographers like Avedon and Man Ray.
But when Anna was hired, the magazine was having severe problems because management wanted to keep the outdated look. As a result, advertisers and subscribers were abandoning the old girl in droves. One of the reasons Donovan hired Anna was that Bazaar needed an infusion of new blood, a younger approach, something kicky and contemporary that would appeal to advertisers and readers.
Anna, one of four young fashion editors under Donovan, was assigned to a tiny office that she shared with another chic and engaging editor, Alida Morgan, who had previously worked under Vreeland and had been at Bazaar for little more than a year. Morgan, a society girl, was immediately impressed with the new hire’s demeanor—very dry, kind of deadpan—and her style. Unlike the other girls who came to work looking like “slobs,” surprising at a fashion magazine, Anna was usually wrapped in designer clothing and wore very little makeup, and every hair was perfectly in place, though she changed the length and direction of the fringe slightly from time to time.
Marilyn Kirschner, another glamorous and with-it fashion editor, who had been at the magazine for five years and whose name was above Anna’s on the masthead, believes the only thing that stood out about Anna was the Missoni and Kenzo that she wore and her upper-class British accent. “Otherwise, she was very aloof.”
Morgan was of interest to Anna. Besides being striking, she had a blue-ribbon pedigree—she was a granddaughter of Averell Harriman, a presidential adviser and multimillionaire, which appealed to Anna’s elitist side. Morgan perceived Anna as risqué and mischievous. “One night,” she recalls, “I was having dinner with my dad and Anna was in the same restaurant and she sent over a bottle of expensive champagne, and my father said, ‘Uh-oh, she’s trouble, schoolgirl trouble.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, she is.’”
It wasn’t long, though, before Morgan and others in the office saw through Anna’s schoolgirl guise, always a great come-on to men, and became aware of her enormous ambition and incredible discipline, her marvelous visual sense, and her intense interest in everything to do with fashion and style. And Morgan suddenly realized that Harper’s Bazaar was just a way station.
“Anna always wanted Vogue,” she states. “I knew that from the jump. Everybody knew it. She wanted to run Vogue, and the Vogue to run is American Vogue. That was the plan. She absolutely knew from the jump that that’s what she wanted, and that’s why she came to America. Her plan was to come here, get a better job, and start moving up.”
To prove it, staffers remember Anna’s unconscious doodling on Bazaar scratch pads—the word she kept writing over and over was “Vogue.”
Not long after Anna got down to business, the magazine promoted some of its chic and glamorous staff in a two-page spread in the March 1976 issue, headlined “Bazaars SINGLE WOMEN,” with the caption “The new young spirit of Harper’s Bazaar. Here are some of Bazaars single women who help keep that spirit going in every issue.” The layout was part of a special issue devoted to America’s bachelorettes. Photographed by Bill King, the double truck showed eleven coiffed and gorgeous staffers.
“Bill was making us all jump up and down to get into the spirit,” recalls Kirschner. “He wanted us to look very happy.”
In King’s shot, Anna is where she would always be in the fashion mag world—front row center. She’s wearing a modified bob, her fringe boyishly brushed to the side. The other staffers appear officious and career-girlish, smiling broadly, sporting long-sleeved black T-shirts emblazoned with the word “BAZAAR” in white.
Except, that is, for Anna.
While the others have their hands planted on their hips or behind their backs, Anna’s are crossed, blocking the word “BAZAAR,” and she’s the only one wearing something over the company T-shirt—a chic Kenzo vest.
Looking back years later, and knowing the heights to which Anna subsequently rose, Kirschner believes the photograph is telling. “Completely covering the Bazaar T-shirt with a Kenzo vest is so symbolic,” she observes, armchair analyst–like. “It was Anna clearly asserting herself.”
As another member of the fashion team, Zazel Loven, notes, “Anna was a little bit disdainful of the lack of sophistication in the American fashion magazine scene, and she didn’t fit in with Hearst corporate. That was her attitude. She certainly wasn’t staring down her nose at everyone—she was one of the players—but she just had a stronger vision, a stronger personality. She was very independent and had her own sense of taste, had her own way of doing things, and that didn’t jibe with Tony Mazzola’s way.”
Anna quickly butted heads with Mazzola, who colleagues assert had major problems with Anna’s independence, ego, ambition, and edgy fashion point of view. At the same time, Anna felt that he didn’t understand her creativity, particularly the very stylized photographs that were coming back from the shoots she was assigned. She was ordered by Mazzola on a number of occasions to go back to reshoot.
At a certain point, Anna adamantly refused to turn in all of the film as required, editing it with the photographers and turning in only the shots she thought should be used. Mazzola had never encountered such a stubborn and independent neophyte editor, so Anna quickly rose to the top of his shit list. (Years later, as head of Vogue, Anna would do a one-eighty and make life a living hell for staffers and photographers who didn’t turn in every single frame of a shoot.)
At the same time, Anna was hiring photographers like James Moore, who was considered more experimental, which also infuriated Mazzola. In fact, Moore’s highly sexual and erotic work was inspired by Bazaars legendary art director Alexei Brodovitch, who ran the magazine at its creative height, from the thirties to the end of the fifties with fashion editor Carmel Snow. Moore began shooting for Bazaar in the early sixties under Marvin Israel, Brodovitch’s remarkable successor. But after Mazzola came on board, Moore was being used less, until Anna, who loved his work and working with him, began giving him assignments.
“Mazzola made Anna reshoot with Jimmy four times on a couple of assignments,” recalls Morgan. “Anna would pick five shots and say, ‘This is it.’ She picked three and gave him two backups.”
Anna had begun handling beauty stories, along with fashion, with Moore. They worked so closely, and spent so much time together, that rumors began to fly at the magazine.
“Anna was a little naughty with the men,” observes Morgan. “She had a flirty quality about her. Bradshaw was the love of her life, but she was tempted by a lot of other things, and she was saying he was getting too possessive and too demanding. His life took him away a great deal, and her life was taking her away a great deal, on shooting trips, and that’s difficult. It was a tempting world out there, and Anna’s a very physical and passionate woman.”
Anna began asking girls in the office to cover for her. “She was always hysterical about that,” says Morgan. “She’d call up from wherever and say, ‘God, if Bradshaw calls, you’ve got to say . . . ’ She had that bad-girl component.”
Years later, nervously laughing when asked about the gossip, Moore says,
“I’m taking the Fifth,” refusing to confirm or deny an intimate relationship with Anna. “We had a working relationship, and we had a friendship,” he concedes. “It wasn’t love. We weren’t living with each other. Anna and I worked together very well. When people have romances, after the romance they’re out of each other’s life, but Anna and I worked together for a long while.”
But Morgan, Anna’s closest acquaintance at Bazaar, says, “If she had a flirtation, it was usually because of something like that extraordinary thing of having been stuck with Jimmy Moore in the studio for months. That was whom we lied to Bradshaw about. When she picked someone it would be on the side, very discreet, and it was passion—and it was usually a photographer in those days. Like with Jimmy, they spent so much time together in the studio. He’s very bright and their sensibilities locked so well. We covered for her like mad. We lied through our teeth to Bradshaw.
“Bradshaw, who was very macho and very jealous, was wildly suspicious. He was very obsessive and used to call all the time, which is why we all had to invent cover stories for her. But Anna invented them for us, too: ‘She’s working late at the studio,’ ‘They’re on location and can’t be reached,’ ‘We’re all going out to dinner.’ It would have been hard to explain to Bradshaw what happened when you’re in that creative setting—so intense, minds merging, senses merging. If you find each other at all attractive, it’s pretty difficult not to, at some point, let it happen. It’s almost a step in the creative process. They were so tightly put together, exposed together because there’s a lot of trust in a photo shoot. They [the magazine] kept Anna working with Jimmy, and then they got pissed off when the pictures started looking a little more erotic. Well, what did they expect?”
While Anna was seemingly playing the field, she and Bradshaw were living together in a small, lovely apartment in a brownstone on the Upper East Side in the seventies, according to Vivienne Lasky, who was working on another graduate degree, this time at Columbia University, and living in upper Manhattan with the man who would become her husband.
During this period, Anna and Lasky had pleasant lunches and shopped. During one of those excursions, as they breezed through Henri Bendel, Anna made a prediction about the future of the American woman that she firmly believed would materialize. “She felt that the ‘new woman’ was going to be so career oriented and busy that this leisurely shopping we were doing would become a thing of the past. Anna truly believed that these new career women, women like herself, would have personal shoppers working for them.”
Anna occasionally visited Lasky’s apartment for dinner, but always without Bradshaw, which Vivienne thought odd.
Lasky also visited Anna and Bradshaw’s flat, and what stood out most to her was their bedroom. “It was monastic, white and spare,” she says.
Lasky perceived that their relationship was on increasingly unsteady ground. “They stayed together amicably, long after things were over,” she says. “Anna should have moved out when she knew it was over, but she was comfortable. They stayed on decent terms, but they’d grown apart. There was a real difference from how they were in London, and even how they were when they first came to New York—but it went on and on and on. They were going in different directions. I could see it, did see it, and she admitted to me that they were growing apart. It didn’t make her feel good. It was a loss. But Anna was always philosophical and never whined.”
Besides her friendship with Moore, Anna had fallen for someone most unlikely: a dreadlocked, ganja-smoking, black Rastafarian, albeit a famous one—the first third world superstar.
As it turned out, it was Bradshaw who helped turn Anna on. One of his close friends, a member of his rat pack, was the creative record producer and multimillionaire businessman Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, who brought reggae into the mainstream in the midseventies with one of his major discoveries, Bob Marley & the Wailers. During Anna’s tenure at Bazaar, the Wailers had a big concert in New York, and through Blackwell, Bradshaw had arranged for a backstage pass for Anna at the Beacon Theater.
She virtually disappeared for a week.
As Alida Morgan succinctly put it, “Anna met God!”
Bob Marley took her off the scope during the Wailers Manhattan gig. “She went every night and stood backstage,” recounts Morgan, still dumbstruck years later at the memory of Anna at a reggae concert, let alone making the scene with the legendary Marley, who had a reputation as a womanizer.
“Anna was riveted, and she’d go out every night after the concerts with the band to have dinner, go on the town. When she came back we said, Anna, you look exhausted.’ She had these purple circles under her eyes. She says she didn’t have an affair, but she had this revelation and felt she had a mystical experience. I said, ‘How come I’m not being invited?’ But when Anna found something that good, she wanted to keep it to herself. I don’t think anything moved her as much as Bob Marley.”
Anna’s hard playing along with trying to stay on top of her game in a difficult work situation required enormous physical and emotional stamina. To handle this anxiety-filled load, she had a daily regimen that included the same high-protein lunch of scrambled eggs and bacon or basted eggs and shirred chicken livers at the tatty Women’s Exchange, where, with Morgan, she’d “invent cover stories for Bradshaw and complain about Tony Mazzola.”
Anna also took an hour a day for an expensive and tough physical training workout at Lotte Berk’s. Just as Philip Kingsley was Anna’s hair guru, Berk became her body’s Svengali. Berk was a ballet dancer, a free spirit who had escaped Hitler’s Germany and had become one of London’s swinging sixties icons who practically terrorized her clients into shape.
As corpulent Ms. Middle America worked out dancing to the oldies with perky Richard Simmons on VHS at home, stick-thin Anna—obsessed with keeping her trim body looking like a lean, mean, and sculpted fighting machine—did her exercises to pop music at Berk’s chic brownstone studio in Manhattan. The routines of the Lotte Berk Method had been given bizarre and sexually explicit names: “Fucking a Bidet,” “The Prostitute,” “The Peeing Dog,” “The Love-Making Position,” and “The French Lavatory.” Therefore, men were never permitted into her studio.
At Bazaar, Jimmy Moore viewed Anna as a phenomenal young editor who supported his work and didn’t try to control his ideas or creativity “She was gifted,” he declares. “She was growing, she was ambitious—not just to get ahead, but to do good work. She was one of the best editors I ever worked with. Anna had style, intelligence, and was a take-charge person. I could never see her as an assistant to anyone.”
Like others, Moore feels that Mazzola, and a shortsighted and conservative corporate mentality, was a hindrance to Anna’s creativity. “Tony,” he says, “had his own ideas.”
As Morgan points out, “We didn’t get any support from the ruling brass, so it was very difficult, and it was a cheap place that cut corners in every direction. The art department was impossible, putting type right over a model’s face.”
All of this incensed Anna. Even more maddening to her was the model situation. Mazzola, according to staffers, had a list of half a dozen or so approved cover-girl types that Anna and the other fashion editors were supposed to use.
“It was Cheryl Tiegs, Cheryl Tiegs, Cheryl Tiegs,” recalls Morgan. “We used to get letters asking, ‘Who’s in love with Cheryl Tiegs there?’” When Anna tried to use new girls, Mazzola balked. Not to be denied, Anna and others convinced Donovan, who supported change, to bring on a models editor responsible for recruiting new faces. Hired was Morgan’s close friend Wendy Goodman, sister of Tonne Goodman, who later became a top lieutenant of Anna’s at Vogue, her fashion director. “We had to fight every step of the way,” says Morgan, “and the fights Anna had were real knock-down, drag-out.”
Elsa Klensch, the fashion doyenne, was then a senior editor at Bazaar. She perceived Anna as “very conscientious. She had to learn her way around the city, learn her way around manufacturers, but she w
as so methodical and tried very hard to please. But Tony was a very difficult man who ran a tight ship and was a control freak who really didn’t want anybody’s ideas. So it was impossible for someone like Anna to succeed there. He was so insane about cutting costs that he used to sit in his office and go through all the messenger slips and then send memos saying, why was this sent? And Anna had her own vision of where she wanted to go.”
A perfectionist, Anna made it clear that she thought of Mazzola as “the Hearst button man” who watched every nickel—when Morgan asked for a small raise, Mazzola told her to “get married, or ask your family”—and was opposed to doing anything innovative.
Thus, Anna’s end came quickly.
She has maintained over the years that she was fired because the powers that be didn’t think she had a grasp of the U.S. fashion market. “They fired me after about a year and a half for being too European, I was screamed at all the time,” she told the London Guardian years later when she took over British Vogue. “They didn’t feel I understood the American woman—maybe they had a point.”
Actually, Anna had shaded the truth a bit about her time spent at the magazine. The fact is that she was axed after about nine months, not eighteen, or even a year as she states in some interviews. She last appeared on Bazaars masthead in September 1976. And no one who worked closely with her recalls her being screamed at; the fights were a two-way street.
The real reason Anna was given her walking papers was a dispute with Mazzola over a series of very moody Jimmy Moore black-and-white photographs taken of a sultry model during a lingerie shoot.
“Tony thought the photos were too sexual,” says Morgan. “They had this huge fight about it”—with Anna intensely defending her work on the shoot—“and he fired her. We all knew what was going on and we were really upset and angry. Anna was very upset, but she came into our office and said, ‘It’s okay. I’ll be fine.’ And she was.”
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