Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  “Anna’s coming to Bazaar was a nonevent,” recalls Marilyn Kirschner, “and her leaving was a nonevent. It was less than a year, just a drop in the bucket. When one reads her profiles, Anna kind of slides over it. She certainly didn’t leave her mark on the magazine, and I don’t think she was really allowed to or given a chance to develop.”

  After the firing, Zazel Loven came to the conclusion that Anna might have appeared upset but really didn’t care. “She’s always had a strong sense of self and felt that getting fired was their problem, not hers, that she’d just take her vision elsewhere and refine it.”

  Years later, Mazzola denies firing Anna and claims it was Carrie Donovan who wielded the ax. He asserts that he ran a creative fashion magazine. “Carrie, who was the huge star who came from Vogue, was the one who constructed the department and was responsible for who came in and who left,” he says. “Carrie Donovan decided she wanted to make a change, and that’s what she did. It was her right to say, ‘I think we need to make a change.’ People can think what they like, but I didn’t fire Anna Wintour.

  “I remember one sitting with Anna. I happened to be in Paris for the collections, and she was the editor in charge. Anna was very professional, and I remember she did a great job with those pages. We published everything she worked on. If anything, I tried to encourage the editors to do unusual, interesting things.”

  Anna also remembered that shoot in Paris. “It was for the couture,” she said, “and the editor in chief had a breakdown because I had used models with dreadlocks. You know, it just wasn’t a blonde American look.”

  fifteen

  A Curious Betrayal

  Just as Anna and Bradshaw were growing apart, it was clear to Vivienne,j Lasky that Anna was severing their bond of many years—the closest female friendship Anna ever had up until then.

  Their fun shopping expeditions and the lunches and dinners in Anna’s favorite hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants were becoming few and far between. The girly chats about fashion and Anna’s sporadic gossip about her love life while still with Bradshaw were winding down.

  When, in November 1975, Lasky had a fancy engagement party in Boston, Anna ignored the invitation and was a no-show, which hurt Lasky terribly.

  Looking back years later, she came to the conclusion that Anna—focused solely on success—was actually envious, if not altogether jealous, that Lasky was in love and about to get married and start a family. Anna had even made snide and catty remarks about the “conventional route” Lasky’s life was taking—graduating from Columbia on May 12, 1976, and getting hitched on May 16.

  “She was surprised that I was actually going to be married,” says Lasky.

  And when Lasky told her that she and her fiancé were planning to leave New York to begin their careers and raise children in a sedate New England city, Anna smirked, making it clear that she felt that Lasky’s life was boring and mundane.

  Although Anna had missed Lasky’s engagement bash, she did show up, alone, at her wedding at New York’s Central Synagogue, looking smashing in a black-and-white Dior suit. Lasky was happy that Anna had honored her nuptials with her presence, though she barely spoke a word to the bride.

  Some weeks before the wedding, Anna had asked Lasky out of the blue what her fiancé’s middle name was. She didn’t explain why, just acted secretive, and Lasky assumed that Anna was going to have something engraved or monogrammed.

  Weeks after the nuptials, Anna made a surprise visit to the newlyweds in their Manhattan apartment, bearing her wedding gift, albeit a curious one. “It was bizarre beyond belief,” says Lasky. “It was simple engraved stationery. It was brown”—like their despised uniforms at North London Collegiate. “It was ugly, but it was from Bendel’s, which sort of linked us back to a time twelve years earlier.”

  During a visit to the States in the midsixties, Lasky had picked up a little gift for Anna at Bendel’s, a stack of cool notepads in different colors, which Anna adored because there was nothing like them available in London.

  Lasky viewed Anna’s offering as bizarre for a couple of reasons. For one, Lasky expected something a bit classier from someone like Anna, with whom she had been so close for so many years and who certainly could afford better. “She was raised better than that,” Lasky points out. What would it have taken for Anna to have gone to Cartier or Tiffany, for a present more appropriate for her best friend and her groom? For another, Lasky had made it absolutely clear to Anna that she wasn’t going to use her married name—after all, this was the midseventies, the era of the feminist. Lasky felt as independent as Anna, marriage notwithstanding. Moreover, she and her brother were the last of the Laskys, and she was proud of her family name, all of which Anna knew.

  And all of which Anna ignored.

  The stationery she gave Lasky was engraved “Vivienne Lasky Elliot Freeman.” Besides everything else, Anna had gotten Lasky’s husband’s name wrong. “His name was Robert Elliot Freeman, so I had gobs of stupid-looking stationery and had to cut off the Elliot Freeman part. It was idiotic, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her. She knew his name and she had specifically asked me what his middle name was. It was the goofiest thing.”

  To Lasky, it was clear that Anna had given the off-the-wall and inappropriate gift spitefully and on purpose, a bitchy message that she didn’t like the idea that she had gotten married, either first or at all. “Anna’s competitive,” notes Lasky “My husband, who liked Anna, used to say to me, ‘Well, you got married first. I see a competition you’re not engaging in.’ He said, ‘You’re just oblivious to these things.’”

  After Anna bestowed the stationery, she told Lasky she had another gift, just for her, but it wasn’t ready yet. “I said, ‘That’s sweet. It isn’t necessary’ And I thought, ‘Oh, God, what now?’”

  A couple of months later, Anna called and asked Lasky to stop by the Harper’s Bazaar office to catch up because they were seeing less and less of each other and to pick up the gift she’d promised. But when Lasky arrived at the hour designated by Anna, she found she’d been stood up. “Someone in the office said, ‘Oh, you must be Vivienne. Anna’s left a parcel for you.’ It was like I was a messenger. She could have left a message for me, but there was nothing.”

  Lasky took the package outside, sat on a bench, and unwrapped the white tissue paper, thinking, “What the hell is this?” Inside, she found a wool Mis-soni shawl in muted colors of gray, red, and orange—possibly one used in a recent Bazaar shoot, freebies being one of the perks of fashion magazine editors.

  Neither Lasky nor Anna ever made mention of the gift.

  Lasky clung to what remained of their friendship, but the stage was set for what would be the very strange and emotional penultimate act of Anna and Lasky’s intense relationship.

  The bucolic setting was the Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, country home of Anna’s aunt Jean, the book editor, and her American Cancer Society executive husband, Cliff Read. It was a lovely place in the Litchfield Hills, filled with elegant furnishings, rugs draped on beams, books, and art, including a valuable de Kooning.

  Anna’s brother Jim, who remained close to Lasky, was visiting from England and had asked his aunt to invite Anna and Lasky and her husband to spend what he hoped would be a pleasant summer weekend. Lasky had been there many times, hiking on the nearby Appalachian Trail and helping Jean Read tend her lovely garden. “Jim said, ‘Please, will you come down, it’ll be so much fun,’ ” recalls Lasky, who readily agreed, eager to see Anna, who had not kept in touch after Lasky’s marriage. But when Anna heard that Lasky was going to be there, she made an excuse to come on another weekend. Jim and his aunt pleaded with her, and she eventually relented. Lasky had brought a present for Anna, but the way things turned out, she never gave it to her.

  “Anna was thinner than I’d ever seen her, and she was all in black leather,” says Lasky, who was dressed New England preppy–style and was taken aback by Anna’s gaunt, avant-garde look and manner. “She’d been deli
vered in a limo and she behaved like a twelve-year-old. She didn’t say hello to me. It was like I was invisible. She refused to come to lunch, refused to help out, and sat in a chair sulking. I heard Jean, who was furious, saying to her, ‘You’re so unbelievably rude. What’s the matter with you?’ She refused to interact with anyone. She seemed to be ticked off that they had guilt-tripped her into coming because it was the correct thing to do so we could all be together. She just didn’t want to be there. She wasn’t happy to see me, and she didn’t talk to me about anything. I’d never seen her like that in my life. You could cut the tension with a knife.”

  At one point during the hellish weekend, Anna made a call to New York. A couple of hours later a limousine arrived with a mysterious-looking fellow also in leather. Anna and the man huddled for a time, and then he left. He was never properly introduced. It was all very awkward for everyone. (He was a French record producer by the name of Michel Esteban, with whom Anna was starting a relationship.)

  “I was very hurt,” says Lasky. “I said to my husband, ‘I want to go home.’ But he said, No, we have to stay. We don’t have to go down to her level. Just ignore her.’ Jim took over and asked me to go for a walk with him, and we walked for several hours. I told him I was very uncomfortable, and he said, ‘I don’t know why she’s being so bloody rude. I don’t know what’s gotten in to her. She’s like a child. Don’t take it personally’”

  That night, Lasky cried herself to sleep.

  The next day, Sunday, was sunny and glorious, and everyone sat in the Reads’ wild garden, an idyllic spot. Anna opened up a bit to Lasky, telling her that she planned to move to a new apartment; her long relationship with Bradshaw was nearing its demise. “She said she would give me her address and I turned to her and said, ‘There’s not much point to that, is there?’ I’ve never done that before, and she looked shocked. That weekend I knew Anna and I had lost something. We had been so much a part of each other’s lives, our families so intertwined, so much love and affection. I’ve never understood what happened.”

  sixteen

  An Embarrassing Position

  Anna’s firing from Harper’s Bazaar had come so swiftly and so unexpectedly that she was in a state of shock. Out of work for several months, with nothing lined up, she was getting desperate. Money wasn’t the issue, but getting back on her career track was. Her primary concern was her climb to the summit, to get to the Holy Grail, Vogue. That’s when she turned to Jon Bradshaw, who would always be there for her no matter how troubled the state of their relationship.

  As Bradshaw’s writer friend Nik Cohn notes, “He was very protective of Anna. There was a very fatherly way about him toward her.”

  Bradshaw had media connections all over Manhattan, and one of them was Beverly Wardale, an advertising executive at Bob Guccione’s Penthouse magazine. Wardale, a Brit, was married to Bradshaw and Nigel Dempster’s chum Brian Vine, the New York bureau chief of London’s Daily Express. Bradshaw and Anna had met Wardale and Vine for drinks at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel, and Bradshaw mentioned that Anna was looking for a job in fashion. Wardale said she’d see what she could do, thinking there might be an opening at Penthouse’s sister publication, Viva.

  Acting on the tip, Bradshaw put in a call to another acquaintance, Peter Bloch, an articles editor at Penthouse, then Playboys major competitor in the mainstream girlie magazine field. “He said he had a girlfriend who was looking for a fashion gig in New York and that she had lots of experience in London, and was there any chance Viva would be interested in talking with her. There was no mention of her recent firing.”

  Both Wardale and Bloch mentioned Anna’s availability. As luck would have it, Alma Moore, the editor of Viva, was looking for a new fashion editor.

  The last fashionista had just been axed in another Friday night massacre—the place was a revolving door—by Guccione’s significant other, Kathy Keeton.

  A thirty-something ballerina turned exotic dancer who had polio as a child, Keeton had conceived and launched Viva—the “International Magazine for Women”—with Guccione’s money in October 1973, with pieces by Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wicker. She ran the monthly with a halter top, tight pants, fuck-me heels, and an iron hand in a velvet glove from an enormous office filled with white wicker furniture and a desk guarded by two ferocious-looking Rhodesian ridgebacks. But Keeton, a South African whom Guccione had met in London, only dressed like a bimbo. She was bright and ambitious and was now hoping to have Viva, which was her baby, compete for readers against such higher-end magazines as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour.

  Viva attracted strong, literate, creative women’s lib editors such as Patricia Bosworth, who, like Anna, had worked for Harper’s Bazaar, and later went on to write well-received biographies. There was Dawn Steel, who had worked as a secretary and in promotions developing X-rated products for Penthouse, who became a powerhouse in Hollywood as head of Columbia Pictures. André Leon Talley, the flamboyant black fashionista who would become Anna’s creative sidekick years later, did some time there. Keeton recruited top-notch editors from magazines like Esquire and Gloria Steinem’s Ms.

  Ironically, all of this high-toned editorial activity was happening just across a divider from where Penthouse’s shaved and pink gynecological-like shots were being laid out and where the world-famous raunchy “Dear Penthouse” letters were penned.

  Based on Wardale and Bloch’s suggestion, Alma Moore interviewed Anna and was impressed. “I explained what I wanted to do, and she knew what she wanted to do, and we were in agreement. One knew she had ambitions.”

  In late 1976, twenty-seven-year-old Anna was brought on as the editor in charge of Viva’s fashion department, which consisted at that moment of Anna. It was the most powerful position she had held up to that point. The month she started, the magazine featured an article called “How to throw fabulous parties, create new faces, wear silk stockings, have sexy fantasies and perfect orgasms.”

  Word of her hiring was instantly communicated to London—probably by Bradshaw or one of her British compatriots in New York—where Private Eye duly reported that the “pulchritudinous daughter of Sir Charles . . . is working on a porn magazine.”

  The Wintours, about to get a permanent separation and soon a divorce, did have one thing in common: mortification about where their daughter was working.

  The cloud that had always hung over Viva—mainly because of its X-rated sister publication—was, indeed, an embarrassment to Anna. The reminders were always there. To get to her office, she had to walk down a hall lined with photos of shapely female legs and other body parts, and pass offices where former Penthouse Pets worked and were on display—young, shapely babes with “big hair, lots of makeup, and enormous boobs,” as one former Viva staffer recalls. While there was no mixing of staff, Viva and Penthouse did share the art department and copyediting.

  Over the years, Anna has ignored, downplayed, and even blatantly fibbed about the time she spent at Viva, and was known to take circuitous routes later to avoid people who worked with her there, apparently not wanting to be reminded.

  In March 1998, in a profile in the London Daily Telegraph, for instance, she tweaked the truth to suit her Vogue image. She was quoted as saying, “Once I got over being fired [at Harper’s Bazaar] I did a little freelance again before getting a job on New York magazine.”

  The truth of the matter is that Anna spent two aggressive years on the staff of Viva and had three years of other personal and professional adventures before New York agreed to hire her. It was, in fact, quite a chunk of résumé time that she had brushed off as “a little freelance.”

  Moore felt that Anna’s aloofness in the office, which surfaced on her first day on the job, and the fact that at Viva she always hid behind what became her trademark sunglasses, had to do with her discomfiture. “There was embarrassment on her part, and maybe her family said, ‘Are you sure you want to be working at a place like that?’”

  Stil
l in touch with Anna, Vivienne Lasky was horrified. “She told me she was working for that awful Bob Guccione. I said, ‘I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.’ But she said, ‘Well, one needs a job. Work is work.’ Anna said she had complete editorial control, that she was being given carte blanche. I said, ‘Good for you, but is it two pages of fashion, or five?’ And I remember her giving me this look like, you’re giving me the third degree just like your father used to give me. I know she felt awkward there.”

  As it turned out, Anna had an incredibly good situation for someone who had just been pink-slipped from one of the world’s leading fashion magazines. Her department was hidden away in a corner of the Viva office where she was left on her own, reporting only to Moore and Keeton, with whom she pitched story ideas. “I gave her pretty much control, and that’s very unusual,” acknowledges Moore. “She was very sure of herself, decisive, a young woman to be reckoned with. We both saw fashion and beauty the same way and agreed that what Viva did had to be distinctive, had to stand out from other magazines, and she managed to do that. She realized she could call the shots and could go far.”

  Unlike the plain-Jane feminist story and copy editors at Viva who wore jeans or conservative business suits, or the Penthouse secretaries in stilettos, tight skirts, and lots of cleavage à la Kathy Keeton, Anna showed up for work in dramatic style. For a time, her outfit of choice was jodhpurs worn with riding boots, missing only the crop. “She looked smashing,” recalls Moore. “I used to tease her. Anna, when you become fashion editor at Vogue you’ll end up wearing Chanel suits.’ And she scoffed and said, ‘I will always dress the way Iwant to dress.’”

  Anna also sported another glamorous look—a chic and expensive outfit consisting of tight white T-shirts over Yves St. Laurent peasant skirts and leather boots, all of which made her look like a skinny Cossack. In spring and summer she sported Alice in Wonderland straw hats over her bob, and in winter she kept it warm with a fur hat with the furry tails of little animals hanging from it, a gift from Bradshaw One colleague remembers thinking, “That is the mother of all hats, and if you aren’t Anna Wintour, don’t try this at home.”