Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  “We often joked with Anna about the flame-haired temptress because it’s one of those phrases that rolls off the tongue,” recalls Richard Neville, who was in and out of Anna’s life during the time of her parents’ separation and divorce. “Anna accepted that there was an air of jocularity about it. But she hated Audrey Slaughter. Anna was concerned about how her mother was reacting. But it was something that you felt you could mention because it was so out there.”

  Besides his record company, Michel Esteban owned a shop in the working-class Les Halles section of central Paris called Harry Cover that specialized in imported rock and roll and merchandise like T-shirts—“nothing close to Anna’s world,” he notes. Since he was busy developing ZE in New York, Esteban needed someone to manage the shop, and Anna recommended Brian McNally’s brother, Keith, who was then the maître d’ at One Fifth. Esteban invited McNally to Paris with his future wife for a two-week stay, to see if he was interested in taking the job.

  “I introduced them to all the great restaurants. We had a great time, and at the end of their trip they decided to go back to New York and open a restaurant of their own.”

  McNally subsequently opened a chic downtown place called Odeon, and then others, and became quite successful. But he has shaded the story of that visit to Paris a bit. Interviewed in 2002 for a film documentary about the New York restaurant scene, he said, “I’d been offered a job in Paris, oddly enough, by the woman who is now the editor of Vogue, Anna Wintour. She’d offered me a job working in a boutique in Paris with her then boyfriend . . . and in order to try to seduce me into managing the boutique she took me to all these great bistros and I thought I’d rather be working in this kind of environment.” His shop, Esteban notes, was not a boutique.

  After three years, Anna and Esteban’s relationship ended. “Anna was always with older men and, like a lot of women, I think she was looking for a ‘father’ figure, and I was not that type,” Esteban observes. “I guess three years is a good period. We had the best time.”

  That “best time” was underscored by the new clothing in Anna’s closet in the Upper East Side apartment she rented after the affair with Esteban ended. Recalls Paul Sinclaire, “I opened her closet and it was extraordinary—there was one Saint Laurent suit from ready-to-wear after another that she’d bought in Paris, all perfectly hung with the shoes above them, always very high heels. That was our slogan: ‘The higher the heels, the better she feels.’”

  During the Esteban period, Anna had had bitchy skirmishes with her friend Michael Zilkha’s wife, Cristina. As Cristina Zilkha maintains years later, “I wasn’t very kindly disposed toward Anna. She’s not a girl’s girl—she hated me.”

  One of the reasons for Anna’s disfavor, according to Zilkha, is that she once had a romantic interlude with the hard-drinking, backgammon-hustling roué Claude Beer. Zilkha maintains Anna was jealous. Another reason is that Michael Zilkha was “like a little brother” to Anna, and she “considered him her property,” so she also was jealous of his involvement with the Harvard-educated Cristina, who was an up-and-coming writer said to have an IQ of 165. As a result, Anna “was vicious to me from the first day we met,” Cristina Zilkha asserts. “She did gratuitously spiteful things.”

  In one instance, Zilkha had taken off a year from Harvard and was visiting England when she received a call from Anna promising her a summer job at Viva that Anna said wouldn’t wait. “When I got to New York, she told me she’d given the job to someone else and, in front of her assistant, told me how essentially unemployable I was. Then Anna would tell Michael there were no hard feelings and that she’d still owe me this favor. It was like a mineshaft to fall into again.”

  Another example she cites of Anna’s cattiness was the lunch at the Plaza when Anna first met Esteban. Zilkha believes that Anna purposely arranged the date in the hope that Michael would fall for Georgia Gunn and break off with her. “She was always being incredibly bitchy and hostile. But Michael would always say, ‘It’s all in your head.’ ” The two women constantly squabbled. Zilkha would hurl zingers about Anna—“Even her shit’s chic.” And Zilkha remembers Bradshaw saying, “Anna used to wear tidy shoes,” and Anna would say, “Ha! Not that tidy.”

  The feud between the two never cooled over the years. To celebrate the Zilkhas’ second wedding anniversary and their tenth year together, Zilkha asked Anna, who by then was creative director at Vogue, to get a Chanel suit that he could give to his wife as a present. By that point, Anna was wearing nothing but elegant, very discreet Chanel as her Condé Nast work uniform.

  “Michael said to me, ‘You know, you’ve never had a Chanel suit, so I told Anna that when she sees [Karl] Lagerfeld to get you something from the autumn collections because she gets fifty percent off,’ ” recalls Cristina Zilkha. “I said, ‘I can’t believe you gave that woman an opportunity like this. God knows what she’ll do!’”

  The beautifully gift-wrapped present arrived a few weeks later. Zilkha opened it and exclaimed, “I knew it! I knew it!

  “It was not a suit, and it was not a jacket,” she says, the design imprinted indelibly on her memory. “It was half a suit of a really nasty pale yellow with a puce undertone—a Mr.-Livingstone-I-presume double-breasted safari jacket with thick, huge gold metal buttons, each of which had a huge ‘CC.’ It was the kind of thing they make for the Jewish-Kuwaiti-Japanese nouveau riche tourist trade who want the signature. It was vulgarity one couldn’t believe and something Anna would not have been caught dead in. I said to Michael, ‘Look at this horror! I knew she’d pull something like this.’ And Michael says, Anna said you’d make trouble. She said you’d be impossible. She said there weren’t any nice suits and this was her and Karl’s favorite piece in the whole collection and there was only one size thirty-four.’

  “It was just the kind of manipulative, devious thing she would have done, to get me something hideously vulgar, unbelievably unflattering, and fundamentally unwearable, and she realized that Michael wouldn’t understand the malice of it. So at that point I took the kitchen scissors and cut this thing in half and said to Michael, ‘Convey this to Ms. Wintour with my compliments.’”

  Zilkha then “dined out on the story gleefully all over town,” telling gloating fashionista friends of Anna’s like the eccentric Isabella Blow and Condé Nast’s Gully Wells. “Everybody thought it was an uproariously funny story. And Anna in turn said of me, ‘That impossible, dreadful girl.’”

  twenty

  A Savvy Decision

  Judith Daniels had a terrible dilemma. She wanted to fire Anna, but Anna refused to be fired.

  It hadn’t always been that way between them, and the attempted axing wouldn’t happen for some months to come. In fact, the two had started off beautifully when Daniels first retained Anna in the spring of 1980 as a freelance fashion editor for a slick and sophisticated new magazine called Savvy, targeted at the executive working woman.

  After her relationship with Michel Esteban ended, Anna had jumped back onto her career track, this time determined not to allow anyone or anything to stand in her way. But there was bad news and good news. The job market was poor. She made the rounds of the better magazines, but there was little or no interest in her, or no openings.

  Once again she turned for help to Jon Bradshaw, who was spending most of his time in California now with his future wife, Carolyn Pfeiffer.

  He did some snooping among his media friends and learned about Savvy, a recent start-up. This new breed of magazine was targeting a seemingly untapped and lucrative market: ambitious Reagan-era women armed with MBAs who were entering the worlds of business, finance, and government, and needed straight talk on everything from buying the best spreadsheet software to choosing the most appropriate wide-shouldered pinstripe pantsuit, then in fashion, to wear to an important meeting.

  Better still, Bradshaw had known the entrepreneurial Daniels when she was an editor at New York and The Village Voice, and Anna had met Daniels socially with Bradshaw at parties
around town. Daniels had taken note of her and her brio. “I liked her,” Daniels states. “She was smart, well read, knew about art, was good company, and was gorgeous and slender.” In the late seventies, Daniels, a sharp operator with a low-key style, had been able to preview Savvy in New York, which was wonderful publicity, because of her close ties to the magazine’s editor, Clay Felker. Then it took her a couple of years to raise the necessary financing and gain backers. Now she’d finally launched her baby. The premier issue of Savvy hit the stands in November 1979 but was dated January 1980.

  Luckily for Anna, Daniels had just started looking for a fashion editor to succeed the first one, the respected fashion maven and journalist Elsa Klensch, who is said not to have worked out. When Bradshaw telephoned, recalls Daniels, he said, “ ‘What about Anna?’ And I like to think I was smart enough to say, ‘Oh, of course, why didn’t I think of her myself At the time I didn’t know what Anna was interested in, or doing, so we talked.”

  All Daniels knew was that Anna had last worked at Viva, and she liked what she had seen her do there. At their first meeting, Daniels offered Anna the job of fashion editor, but the position was part-time, offered neither perks nor benefits, and paid very little money—much less, in fact, than Anna was making when she got her short-lived raise at Viva. Anna had no other options at the moment, so she gave Daniels an immediate yes. Once again, money was not an issue, but visibility was. Anna needed another forum in New York to attract a truly glamorous fashion magazine job, her hope still being that someone at Vogue would see her work and reel her into the place where she felt she really belonged.

  Like her position at Viva, Anna was given virtually complete freedom at Savvy by Daniels, at least at first, during their honeymoon period.

  “She was not supposed to be in the office every single day,” says Daniels. “Everything Anna did, she did on her own. She was brought in on a freelance basis. We paid her a shockingly small amount each month—it’s embarrassing, about three thousand dollars—out of which she was supposed to pay photographers and herself. I didn’t even want to know. It was appalling.

  “But she just loved the business so much, and fashion so much, and she was so good at it, that she was willing to do it for practically nothing. [In fact, according to another editor, Anna was taking only a thousand dollars a month for herself out of the monthly fashion stipend.] I had met a lot of women with drive and ambition. What I was just very grateful about was that someone with Anna’s drive and ambition was prepared to focus it for me. She was extremely generous.

  “I was impressed at how hard she worked, how professional and knowledgeable she was, and how much people would do for her. She had her incredible network, even then, of first-rate photographers. I totally trusted her and her judgment in this case, and she delivered, and did it on time. She had no staff (Anna did bring Georgia Gunn along with her) and no support system, but she just knew the job and did it on her own. I don’t know how she got the clothes, where she went, how she wheeled and dealed, and who she had to wheel and deal with. Savvy was new. Had no budget. It wasn’t like she could drop the name of New York magazine.”

  Anna’s first layout appeared in the June 1980 issue. The cover carried a head shot of Alice Daniel, a conservative-looking woman with close-cropped hair, wearing a buttoned-to-the-throat simple blue blouse. The profile was about an “ardent civil libertarian” running the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Division. The cover lines included “HOW TO GET THE TITLE YOU DESERVE,” “FALSE GRIT. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MACHO TO GET AHEAD,” and, in red type, the very ironic “TELLTALE SIGNS OF THE DEAD-END JOB.”

  Anna had come full circle, from the eroticism of Viva to big-time magazine Puritanism, or so it seemed from Savvy’s cover stories and art. Inside, on page 65, squeezed between an article about the literary quality of notes women place on refrigerator doors and one about various types of scales, tape measures, and timers readers could buy, was Anna’s first contribution—the only relatively sexy feature in the whole eighty-page issue. It was called “Stripes,” four pages of uncomplicated photographs of models with striped belts, striped one-piece bathing suits, and striped blouses. Anna shared the byline with Georgia Gunn and the photographer Jean Pagliuso, who was now part of her core group that also included exceptional shooters like Jimmy Moore, whom she had been working with since her hiring and firing at Harper’s Bazaar; Guy Le Baube, who started with her at Viva; and Tohru Nakamura.

  Once again, to the rest of the Savvy female staff, most if not all of whom were staunch feminists, Anna appeared like an alien or, as consulting editor Kathleen Fury describes her, “pixie dust sprinkled in among the group, who were very bright, funny, hardworking, young, talented journalists. She was one of us, but she was not one of us. Anna floated in and out, weighed about two ounces—and she was like from another planet. You knew that you wouldn’t ever get too close to her.”

  Fury, who had worked for Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal, says she always had the odd sensation that Anna was watching her and the others as they worked, as if observing some other life-form, just as they looked at her as being from Venus.

  “She seemed interested and amused,” Fury observes. “We were not fashion people, and she may have been admiring us for our abilities to use the language and our ability to use style. You could actually see her watching us—very quiet, but observant, and it was almost as if she was standing outside of a circle of people who were having a lot of fun, and she was enjoying, but not taking part in, their fun. There was a sense of remoteness about her that said don’t get too close.”

  Another editor, Patricia O’Toole, who came to Savvy with a good amount of business reporting and writing experience, and in the early eighties would freelance for Vogue, never forgot her first introduction to Anna. “I said, ‘How do you do?’ And she didn’t say anything. She just stared right through me. I took this to be a bad review of whatever I was wearing. Mine is a wardrobe that does not fit even the most elastic definition of chic. But years later when I read that some people called her ‘nuclear Wintour,’ I thought, Well, that’s perfect—that squared with my experience.”

  Just as she acted at Viva, Anna rarely if ever participated in editorial meetings but would breeze into the downtown Manhattan offices of Savvy wearing tight white T-shirts and tight designer jeans, or shorts and stylish flats, and discuss privately with Daniels what she intended to do. When the photos were delivered, Daniels, never Anna, usually wrote the copy, and that was always at the last minute because of Anna’s continued difficulty in communicating the details of the story. Anna came up with the general scheme but expected someone else to handle the nuts and bolts.

  Seeing how Anna worked, Daniels was forced, with all of her other responsibilities, to assign a writer, Carol Wheeler, to write all of the fashion copy for the features produced by Anna. Wheeler says that Anna’s role was minimal. “She brought the clothes in, and at some point I would hear that the story was going to be about clothes to wear in the summer in New York, and then I would think about what to write. Anna didn’t even tell me what the concept was. I would first hear from Judy, and then later Anna would show me the clothes. Later, I would see the pictures, which were interesting and glamorous, and write from those. Anna was certainly not terribly communicative, not word oriented, and I never saw her even try to write anything.”

  Wheeler recalls learning two new things from Anna. One was how properly to apply mascara. The other was the importance of the British artist David Hockney and his critically acclaimed Southern California swimming pool paintings. Anna brought up Hockney to Wheeler because she was using pools at borrowed homes as backgrounds in some location shoots.

  Like most others at Savvy, Wheeler thought of Anna as “an exotic flower in our midst.” Her presence titillated the staff, but they were by no means in awe of her. Like Wheeler, most found her to be “rather chilly, very British, and very upper class.” Wheeler was especially put off by Anna’s treatment of Georgia Gunn, whom
she saw as her boss’s whipping girl. “That’s certainly the sense that I had of her,” Wheeler asserts. “Anna simply ordered her around, and Georgia did what she was told. She did the heavy lifting, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, because there were all these clothes that had to be moved around.” Wheeler acknowledges that if there was a mule and mule driver, Anna was most definitely the latter.

  A few years after both Anna and Wheeler had left Savvy, they practically tripped over one another while walking on Fifty-seventh Street between Fifth and Madison. “I said, Hello, Anna,’ but she just looked through me and cut me dead, just pretending she didn’t know me. It was incredible.” (In the summer of 2003, many years after Anna had become Vogues editor in chief, "Wheeler mentioned the incident to one of Anna’s young features editors at the magazine. She wasn’t surprised. “That happens to people she’s working with right now, all the time,” she volunteered.)

  Of the six or seven full-time staffers, Carol Devine Carson, Savvy’s very talented art director, worked more closely with Anna, particularly in the selection and layout of photos. While she respected Anna’s fashion judgment, she noticed flaws and eccentricities.

  “She was always gushing about the clothes,” says Carson, who later became art director at Knopf, the publishing house. “We did one whole series of stuff with polka dots, and to Anna it was all ‘staggering . . . absolutely staggering . . . these girls are staggering.’ There was always a little bit of the old self-promotion in her speech when she’d present her stuff. It was never what we thought but how she thought about it—‘Isn’t it fabulous . . . isn’t she staggering . . . aren’t these incredible photographs.’ Everything was always a bit hyped. A lot of people do that and I understand that, but it was constant with her.”

  As time went on, Carson came to believe that some if not all of Anna’s passion about the fashion pages she produced was more an intense neediness to receive praise. “She’d tell me, ‘You have to make this photo spread look great. They’ve got to like it. They’ve got to love it.’ ” Carson says Anna was referring to Daniels, as well as Savvy’s hard-nosed publisher, Alan Bennett, who held equity in the magazine, took an active role in its look and feel, and was disliked by most of the staff, including Daniels.