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Front Row

Page 15

by Jerry Oppenheimer


  Not long after Anna came aboard she hired a young woman in her early twenties as an assistant, the first in a long line over the years. As her first foray into the fashion and magazine world, she initially viewed Anna as “very creative.” Hoping to learn from her, the assistant watched her boss closely but soon was shocked to discover that “most of her work was looking for ideas in foreign fashion magazines.”

  She says that one of her most important roles was making excuses to Anna’s many suitors when she was off with someone else. “She was having affairs left and right. . . . She was dating married men and she had no qualms,” the woman maintains. “She’d enlist me to cover for her, which put me in a very awkward position. If the person she was involved with called up and I knew where Anna was, I couldn’t let on. I’d just have to keep it vague. Anna knew I knew who she was involved with, but we wouldn’t talk about it. She was involved with two and three persons at the same time sometimes, and not all were photographers. Some were very prominent men.”

  Anna often borrowed clothes from designers or retailers. That’s how the job of fashion editor gets done. Anna got credit for the spread and the fashion trade people got their names in print. It was one happy, productive, and close relationship for all.

  However, the assistant soon came to realize that Anna was wearing some of the clothes she borrowed. “She would take clothes home and wear them, bring them back to the office, and have me return them for her,” she claims.

  The relationship between Anna and the assistant deteriorated and she was gone in less than a year. Looking back on the experience, she says, “Anna has to have it her way. She’s extremely manipulative of assistants and of everyone. Anna Wintour is definitely a trip.”

  Another assistant was described as “a sharp cookie,” but they apparently didn’t get along. She lasted just a few months before being given the hatchet.

  Anna’s next assistant was a whole different story, and they would become involved in a long-running love-hate relationship.

  Paul Sinclaire, a fashionista friend of Anna’s, walked into Yves St. Laurent in Manhattan one afternoon to browse—he and Anna often shopped there together—and spotted an interesting-looking young woman. With her wild hair and red, red lips she reminded him not of a saleswoman but rather Louise Brooks’s Lulu character—glamorous and eccentric and right out of fiction. “I thought, ‘Wow!’” As it turned out, Sinclaire and the young woman, a Brit named Georgia Gunn, had a mutual friend. They became pals, and Sinclaire introduced her to Anna, who “absolutely adored Georgia.”

  But when Sinclaire, who was affiliated with the chic Manhattan boutique Dianne B., tried to hire Gunn, Anna freaked out. She stepped in and hired her as her own girl Friday and, as many saw it, her whipping girl. Most of the stories over the years about Anna’s shoddy treatment of assistants started at Viva with talk about her behavior toward Georgia Gunn.

  “Anna didn’t get along with her,” Alma Moore recalls. “They traveled together on everything, and Anna treated her badly. She blamed her for a fiasco of a sitting, which cost a lot of money because it was shot on some exotic island, and poor Georgia took all the heat.”

  Colleagues remember Anna acting like a wild-eyed diva, verbally flagellating Gunn if anything, even the most minor detail, didn’t go according to Anna’s perfectionist plan. “As cool and aloof and in control as Anna was,” recalls Viva and Penthouse female staff photographer Pat Hill, “Georgia seemed to be kind of a bumbler—but she wasn’t. It was a strange balance between them and very interesting to watch.”

  Stephanie Brush, a twenty-two-year-old Northwestern University Drama School dropout but a talented writer who joined the staff around the same time as Anna, saw Anna as glacial and Georgia as down-to-earth. “If you were to cast them in a film, Anna would play Princess Diana because Di and Anna both managed to cultivate a mystique, and Georgia would have been the Fergie character. Georgia got the brunt of whatever pressure there was to do the fashion job right,” maintains Brush. “Anna would have the ideas and think, ‘Oh, it would be great if we did such and such.’ But Georgia was the one who did all the work—and took all of Anna’s BS that she was spewing out that particular week. I know Georgia got frustrated, and Anna was a fairly frustrating person to work for because she had pretty strong ideas about things and was not known for her tact. It would not occur to Anna to sort of soften the blow. She didn’t have the time or energy or inclination. She had the attitude without the power. Eventually, she got both.”

  Coworkers winced years later when they thought of Anna and Gunn’s stormy relationship, described as one of master and slave. Beverly Wardale, who thought Gunn was terrific, recalls Anna having her ironing clothes and sending her to the other side of Manhattan to pick up a pair of gloves because she decided at the last minute that the ones Gunn had originally chosen just weren’t quite right—and Anna wanted the new ones ASAP.

  “There were explosions with Anna, who had terrible temper tantrums, and you could hear her screaming at Georgia,” asserts Susan Duff, who had come on staff as beauty editor shortly after Anna and worked very closely with her. “It was very unpleasant for Georgia—and for everyone. We were all sort of creeping around and walking on eggshells trying to stay out of Anna’s way because she could get really mean and didn’t care about people’s feelings. She was one of those perfectionists who couldn’t tolerate mere mortals.

  “There was something about the way Anna worked—her single-mindedness,” continues Duff. “You couldn’t imagine she had any life outside of being a fashion editor. One never had any intimation she had a friend or a family.

  “It appeared to me she never thought of anything except fashion, and doing those shoots, and getting those photographers together with those designers, and dreaming of layouts. It was almost her whole being. The rest of us were sort of having a good time—we traveled a lot, were well paid, and had long martini lunches—but she was a workaholic on a mission, which was kind of a mystery until you got to see that what she was about was discovering designers and putting together the most fabulous photographers available. No one was doing stuff like that back then.

  “But in doing it she intimidated everyone. It wasn’t just Georgia, but anyone who got in her way. You could hear her screaming on the phone to whomever—someone not doing what she wanted them to do. Anna was so intense. She couldn’t tolerate any mistakes or incompetence. To her, all of this was life-and-death stuff, which is probably common among people who do just one thing and it’s all they ever think about and it’s got to be done their way.”

  Anna quickly gained a reputation at Viva as the editor from hell, a reputation that would stick and come to haunt her as she moved up in the fashion magazine business. Years later, people who had worked with her compared her to another imperious diva, the convicted felon and queen of domesticity, Martha Stewart.

  There were times, though, when Anna was happy with Gunn’s work. She was given the title of accessories editor, and on rare instances, Anna would join Gunn and Duff for drinks—rare because Anna had made few if any friends at the magazine and didn’t appear to care. On one of those nice Anna moments, when she was in a good mood and getting along, Duff asked her for some fashion tips, what to wear, how to make what she had in her closet look great. Anna glared hard at her for a long moment, looked her up and down, and then flippantly replied, “You’d have to throw out everything you own.” Anna wasn’t being cute with her criticism; she was being harshly honest, which was her style.

  “You couldn’t enter her realm,” observes Duff. “She was alone in that, and that didn’t bother her either, as far I could tell. She felt superior to everyone in kind of a class way.”

  While virtually everyone at the magazine respected Anna’s fashion sense and her eye for what was new and hot, it was widely known and joked about that she couldn’t put any of her styling talent into words on paper—a criticism she had faced back in her Harpers & Queen days.

  “Anna was known for not h
aving any particular verbal or writing skills,” notes Stephanie Brush, one of the few on staff whom Anna took a liking to. “She wasn’t articulate like a Tina Brown. Anna wasn’t someone who would sit and talk about complicated ideas. She would just say, ‘Oh, that’s fabulous’ She didn’t seem to have a lot of complicated ideas in her head. Maybe that’s why she liked me, because I was a writer. She liked people who were good with words, and I was known on the grapevine as this up-and-coming writer, so that didn’t escape her notice.”

  After Anna settled in, Duff was assigned to write all of her fashion copy. “She never had anything to do with any kind of description of what she was doing,” says Duff. “I would get these layouts from her with these absolutely wild Helmut Newton photographs and I would just write fiction. I would write a little short story. Sometimes I’d create the story after I went to the shoots and interviewed the models and the photographer. Even at the shoots, I’d have very little interaction with her. Anna had no input on the copy and wasn’t interested in having any I always thought of her as an exalted stylist because she never had anything to do with any of the written description.”

  Anna’s failure to communicate in words what she had her stable of high-priced and big-name photographers communicate in pictures infuriated Rowan Johnson, Viva’s very talented and off-the-wall South African art director. To punish her, he often put the gorgeous layouts that she had obsessively conceived and developed into the magazine without giving her credit in the form of a byline. Instead, the story would say, photographs by Helmut Newton, text by Susan Duff, even though the text was usually modest compared to Anna’s electric spreads. All of which infuriated Anna and was embarrassing to Duff, because she knew how hard Anna had worked.

  Though their work relationship was stormy at times, Anna and Johnson “adored each other, although Anna was rather eclipsed by Rowan,” says then-Penthouse art director Joe Brooks, one of Johnson’s close friends. In fact, there was considerable gossip that Johnson hoped for more with Anna. “There was talk,” acknowledges Penthouse editor Peter Bloch. “But in those days there was talk about everyone [at the two magazines].”

  Beverly Wardale got a call one night from Johnson who was on a shoot with Anna in Montauk, in the Hamptons. “I’ll never forget that call. He asked me, ‘Do you think I should jump Anna tonight?’ He would try anything if he got scotch in him. He would have quite fancied being involved with Anna. He was Peck’s Bad Boy, extremely creative and terribly attractive.”

  Like Bradshaw, Claude Beer, and some of the other rogues Anna had known, Rowan Johnson fit the profile—an intriguing bad boy, the son of a judge and the brother of a Rhodes scholar. When the film Arthur, starring Dudley Moore as a ne’er-do-well lush, was released, everyone who knew Johnson said he was Arthur Bach. “Everything in that movie, Rowan had done, from the drinking to the Rolls-Royce to the hookers,” says Brooks. “We all phoned each other and said, ‘Jesus Christ, they’ve made a movie about him.’”

  The other thing about Johnson was that he was a user of hard drugs. When the door to Johnson’s office was shut, everyone figured he was shooting up. “He basically took every drug in the world,” says Brooks. “The drugs and the drinking made him difficult to take.” One night, at Brooks’s apartment, Johnson crawled out onto the ledge fifteen stories above Fifty-fifth Street. “As much as you loved him, he became tremendously hard to tolerate, so I shut the window on him, sort of left him out there, high above the street, screeching. I said, ‘Make up your mind, in or out.’ Eventually, I let him back in.”

  Johnson’s drug habit became so severe at one point that Guccione and Keeton sent him to an expensive rehab clinic and picked up the tab.

  Johnson’s favorite watering hole was P.J. Clarke’s, the Penthouse-Viva hangout, across from the office on Third Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street. He was sometimes spotted with Anna cozying at his side, though she was probably there more for political reasons, because Clarke’s wasn’t her kind of place. “She’d be there wearing her dark glasses with Rowan, who considered himself the Mozart of art directors,” recalls Peter Bloch. “I can see him and Anna sitting over in Clarke’s endlessly, as we all did in those days. I was awestruck by Anna being in Clarke’s with her dark glasses on because the place was dark as a cave. I don’t know how she even managed to find her table with those glasses on.”

  Johnson and Duff weren’t the only staffers who had difficulty getting information out of Anna for scheduled stories. Photographers such as Pat Hill, a female and the only shooter and photo editor on staff, faced a similar dilemma.

  Hill straddled the very different worlds of Viva and Penthouse, snapping Penthouse Pet pictorials for Guccione and artsy portraiture for Keeton. When Anna came aboard, Hill kept a close eye on her work, which was always shot by her stable of mostly male freelance photographers, and was duly impressed. “She produced some wonderful pages,” she says. But when they passed in the hall, Anna looked down her sunglasses at her. “It was like I was not important enough to talk to because I was a staff photographer,” notes Hill. “I’m a pretty friendly person. I would say hi to everybody, but I don’t go out of my way to get smacked down. She was just very icy from the start. I really kind of kept away from her because I got such negative vibes.”

  On one occasion, though, Hill was assigned by Johnson to work with Anna. He probably foresaw what would happen if the two collaborated and wanted a vicarious high when their claws were bared. He was on the mark—the assignment quickly deteriorated into a catfight. The only information Hill was given by Johnson was that the feature involved a dancer from the American Ballet Theatre. “I never had a clue what was really going on,” she says years later.

  An intense and creative photographer who took all of her assignments seriously, Hill immediately put in a call to Anna to find out what she needed. And Hill called and called and called. “I must have called her at least three or four times a day for three weeks, or whatever the lead time was. She was always unavailable. I’d call her, and if I caught her, which was rare, she’d say, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and never did. I’d call Georgia, and she’d say, ‘She’ll get back to you, she hasn’t gone over that yet.’ But she never did call back. The day before the shoot I called Anna’s office and said, ‘I’m shooting, starting at eight o’clock.’”

  One of the reasons Hill had a hard time reaching Anna was that Anna made her own hours, unlike the other editors. Anna didn’t tie herself to her desk and was often off doing other things—no one knew what—so she was hard to pin down.

  “Anna pretty much showed up when she felt like,” recalls Stephanie Brush, who had been promoted from editorial assistant to an associate editor spot after one of Kathy Keeton’s many editorial shakeups. “There wasn’t any nine-to-five for her. It was just understood she showed up when she wanted to show up. I never got the sense of her working for anybody. She sort of had her own little fiefdom. Anna popped in, made phone calls, and left. I don’t think she ever really moved into her office. It was kind of a place where she kept a phone, tacked up some photos that she liked, and had some clothes she liked sort of lying around, which are what fashion editor offices look like. She didn’t turn her office into a little home away from home, because she didn’t really have a homey kind of personality.”

  Every so often Anna would breeze in and out of an editorial meeting when the peons were deciding what to put in the magazine. Stopping for a moment during one such brainstorming session, Anna volunteered her magic formula. “A magazine,” she proclaimed, “should be like a perfect dinner party. The two essentials are a politician and a pretty girl.” As she scooted out, jaws dropped. And if by chance she sat in on a meeting, she usually remained mute. “She kept her opinions to herself, and not to say anything at all, or contribute vaguely, seemed almost insolent,” recalls an editor.

  Not to be stymied by Anna’s failure to return her calls, Pat Hill went ahead and prepared for the shoot with the vague information she was given. She rented Merce Cunning
ham’s downtown dance studio for the day, determined her lighting needs, and stayed up late for several nights dyeing bolts of fabric in various shades of plums and pinks and reds, which she thought might be used as backdrops to match ballet skirts, after doing research on Degas’s paintings of ballet dancers.

  “On the day of the shoot, I got there at the crack of dawn and set up and everything all fell in line, and then in trails Anna with her hair and makeup people, looks around at the setup and says, ‘Just what do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know this is just a service feature. It’s just dance positions one, two, and three.’”

  Hill couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I said, ‘Well, I couldn’t get a hold of you and I’ve taken all this trouble and I’m just going to have to shoot it like this with the background.’ And she just gave me that Anna look. She was not nice about it. She was a bitch. She said, ‘Well, shoot it the way you want, but then you’re just going to have to reshoot it, aren’t you, because I’m telling you to.’ I was going to shoot it my way at that point because I never could get any answer out of her. It was a really horrible, ugly scene.”

  As Hill learned at that moment, the shoot was tied to a new 1977 film about the ballet world called The Turning Point, starring Shirley MacLaine, Anne Bancroft, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The dancer Hill was assigned to photograph was Leslie Browne, a star with the American Ballet Theatre, who played Baryshnikov’s love interest.

  Meanwhile, at the dance studio, battle lines had been drawn. “Anna stayed on one side of the studio, and I was on the other side,” Hill says. “They would dress the dancer and put her makeup on, and then send her over to my side and I would do what I needed to do. Anna was never next to me the entire day.”

 

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