Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Years later, Daniels, who left Savvy in 1984 to go to Time Inc. and later became a magazine consultant, diplomatically maintains that she never tried to fire Anna. “I never said that . . . that’s not ringing any bells at all. Everybody gets annoyed at somebody at some point. I’m sure there are times when everybody thinks of firing someone. I certainly appreciated her. I certainly never had anybody else lined up [as fashion editor]. I never looked for anybody.”

  The former Esquire and New York magazine editor Byron Dobell, a friend of Daniels, says he heard “two diametrically opposed” stories at the time about Anna’s deteriorating relationship with Daniels. One came from Jon Bradshaw, who helped Anna get the job at Savvy and on whose shoulder Anna always cried. “He told me very indignantly that Judy was dropping Anna because Anna was too high couture for Judy’s magazine. He said Judy didn’t appreciate how wonderful Anna was,” recalls Dobell. “But Judy, on the other hand, speaks with great praise of Anna. My feeling is that Judy never realized Anna was ever going to become this grande dame of the fashion industry.”

  Whatever happened between the two, Anna, now thirty-one, quietly began seriously looking for another job in early 1981 after having been at Savvy for just nine months.

  One of her first stops was Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which turned into an embarrassing disaster. For three months, Anna had been working in secret, while still receiving her monthly stipend from Savvy, on an idea for a fashion insert that she thought would be perfect for the edgy downtown monthly In mid-March 1981, Anna confidently and proudly showed her layout to Bob Colacello, Warhol’s trusted lieutenant and bosom buddy at the magazine, expecting him to be excited and welcome her with open arms into the underground fold. Her hopes were that she’d be hired on the spot.

  Just the opposite happened, and it knocked Anna for a loop, at least the way Warhol told it. Colacello “just looked at it for one second and said it was trash and she started crying,” Warhol maintained. “And she’s a tough cookie that I could never even imagine her crying, but I guess it was her femininity coming out.”

  In a way, the rejection was a stroke of luck, because the next magazine she visited seeking work, with the same portfolio in hand, viewed her like a messiah.

  Anna would finally get the visibility that would catch the attention of Vogue.

  twenty-one

  New York by Storm

  All of the doors were opened for Anna’s first four jobs—from Harpers & Queen to Savvy—by men in her life. The role she would always play as the ultimate man’s woman paid off well and would continue to earn her big dividends.

  Her position as fashion editor at trendy New York magazine, which she won in the spring of 1981, was no exception.

  Once again, another guy pal in her circle laid the groundwork for her to get the job that would give her the most credibility and visibility since she entered the fashion magazine world a decade earlier, a position that would catapult her to Vogue through her own creativity, ambition, and shrewd manipulation.

  A colleague at New York magazine maintains that “Anna came to New York with one goal, and that was to get the attention of [Condé Nast owner] Si Newhouse, and [Vogue editorial director] Alex Liberman. She was auditioning for them. We talked about it. She knew what she was doing. She’s very smart and calculating, and she knew how to play everyone, especially Ed [Kosner, the editor at New York], in order to get to Vogue. The goal was Vogue, always Vogue, and Anna told me that.”

  Anna’s buddy Anthony Haden-Guest, who contributed a number of stories about the modeling business to New York, got the gold ring this time around for helping her get the fashion editor’s position at the slick Big Apple weekly.

  The way Anna told it to a British journalist writing a 1998 profile of her, she got her in through a “fortunate phone call” from Haden-Guest, who rang her up one day “to ask if I was busy for lunch, and out of that came” the job offer. She insists that “no master plan” on her part was involved.

  In that profile, as well as others, she never mentioned her stints at Viva and Savvy or her jet-setting hiatus with Michel Esteban before New York hired her.

  It’s as if Anna had taken half of her résumé and dropped it into a shredder and then pieced together the parts that best served her image.

  She also never revealed to the profile writer, Nigel Farndale of London’s Daily Telegraph, that she was desperately seeking a new job when Haden-Guest called. Nor did she disclose that she had made Haden-Guest very aware of her intense desire to work at New York, where he had access to the top brass and could drop her name.

  Anna made her hiring at New York sound serendipitous.

  In any event, Haden-Guest, whom she’d known since her nightclubbing days in London, had put in good words for her and gotten her an appointment with the magazine’s managing editor, Laurie Jones.

  As it turned out, much of the same material that Bob Colacello at Interview thought was “trash” not long before, Jones found exciting and compelling. Anna and Jones also took an immediate liking to each other, even though in some ways they were different types.

  A native of the small Texas town of Kerrville, a onetime cheerleader, superb athlete, former Miss Kerr County, and member of an exclusive WASP college sorority, Jones was stylish and immaculate, and would marry into a blue-blooded family. She was a perfect fit for the sophisticated ambiance of New York and a match for someone like Anna who knew, a colleague notes, that “she was dealing with someone with credentials, a pedigree, money, and style.” Jones also was hardworking, earnest, and highly respected by the troops at New York—star writers such as Pete Hamill, Nicholas Pileggi, Lally Weymouth, and John Simon—and was number two on the masthead under Kosner, a veteran journalist. Their boss at the time was the conservative Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose News Group owned New York.

  Jones’s “vivid recollection” of their first meeting is that Anna told her she was “between jobs” and “wasn’t working for Savvy.” In fact, Anna was still connected to Savvy when she met with Jones, and her last feature, presciently headlined “Dressing for Success,” didn’t run in that magazine until August 1981, some four months after she was hired at New York.

  Despite the inconsistencies in the timeline, Jones says Anna knocked her socks off with her presentation. “She had brought in story ideas. . . . It was all Polaroided, sort of a map [with photos] of what she’d do with different ideas. Sometimes people come in with ideas to discuss, but she had Polaroids. She had the whole storyboard worked out, I never encountered anything like that.”

  After their meeting, the ex-cheerleader went into Kosner’s office and raved, “This woman is unbelievable. We’ll all be working for her someday.” (Jones’s prediction was on the mark, at least concerning herself. After Anna became editor in chief of Vogue, she grabbed Jones from New York and appointed her to the powerful post of managing editor, where she remained Anna’s trusted lieutenant.) Jones explained to Kosner that she envisioned Anna as a “one-woman show” (with an assistant) and that she would be responsible for generating fashion and style story ideas, overseeing shoots, and attending the collections.

  If Jones was unabashedly impressed with Anna, the married Ed Kosner was enthralled, if not infatuated, from the moment he laid eyes on her, and he gave Jones the green light to hire her at a salary that was said to be in the fifty-thousand-dollar range, the most Anna had ever made.

  “Ed had shiksa love, we’re talking major shiksa love, full breakdown time,” says a former high-ranking New York editor, laughing at the memory. “Anna would go into his office and bat her eyes and get anything she wanted.”

  Everyone in the office knew it from day one and whispered and joked about it. As Corky Pollan, an assistant editor at the time who worked on the popular “Best Bets” column, notes, “Ed was quite enamored of Anna. She seems to have quite an effect on men.”

  Years later, from her high perch at Vogue, Jones remembers only the fine work Anna produced. “Anna j
ust did fabulous pieces and portfolios—so innovative—and eventually, obviously, it caught Alex Liberman’s eye at Vogue.”

  But all of that was still to come.

  With Michael Stone, Anna celebrated her hiring at the expensive downtown Italian restaurant Da Silvano on Sunday, April 26, 1981, where she ran into Andy Warhol, who “couldn’t remember her name at first” and didn’t think much of her. “She was just hired by New York magazine to be their fashion editor,” he said in his published diary, adding bitchily, “She wanted to work for Interview but we didn’t hire her. Maybe we should have . . . but I don’t think she knows how to dress, she’s actually a terrible dresser.”

  When Anna came aboard, New York wasn’t what it had been back in the late sixties and seventies when it was edited by its founder, Clay Felker, the father of the so-called new journalism, who gave legs to iconic writers like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. Back then it was a must-read, one of the first city magazines with the best reporting and writing in the country.

  Even by the early eighties, New York was still the place to be seen and heard in the communications capital of the world, where it covered everything from brownstone living in trendy Brooklyn Heights, to the best Upper East Side private schools, to dramatic city crimes, to Manhattan celebrities and power brokers. Before Anna, the most creative fashion and style editor there was the witty, sharp-eyed John Duka, who left to become a style reporter at The New York Times and later worked for Anna’s HG and Vogue. He later developed AIDS and died after a surgical procedure.

  New York magazine was Anna’s big chance. She knew it, and she made the most of it.

  The first day on the job she marked her territory and established her stature by refurnishing her alcove off what was called the bull pen, the main newsroom, where the other editors and writers worked. When Felker, an ex-newspaperman, ran the magazine, he had moved it into a relatively new mid-town building but furnished the editorial floor like a city room out of The Front Page, with secondhand clunky wooden desks and chairs from a defunct insurance company, which was ironic for a magazine that promoted upscale lifestyle. The ambiance, or lack thereof, didn’t suit Anna one bit.

  “She looked around at the space we’d allocated for her,” recalls Jones, “and she said, ‘I won’t work at a desk like that.’”

  The next day, to the amazement of other staffers, Anna marched into the office and had the old desk removed and replaced with a sleek, contemporary Formica-topped affair on two metal sawhorses as legs that she’d brought from Michael Stone’s loft, along with a high-tech chrome-framed chair with a seat and back made of bungee cords. It sent a message to everyone around her: Her majesty has arrived. “No one had even thought to do that, to have a new desk delivered,” notes Jones, still seemingly astonished more than two decades later.

  That first day Anna’s image as a diva was cemented, just as if she were a star who had placed her prints in Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

  And an incident involving her sleek white desk underscored to a number of her fellow staffers that she was a temperamental prima donna.

  Anna was given the go-ahead to hire an assistant. In her early twenties, creative, quirky, and artistic, the new hire answered Anna’s phones, scheduled her appointments, ran her errands, picked up her lunch, and, in general, did her scut work. At the end of each day, Anna demanded that the girl clear everything off of her prize desk—everything—and wipe it down with Windex so the Formica glistened. The next time Anna was in the office, she wanted to be able to sit at a spartan, shiny work surface with absolutely nothing on it, which is the way her desk usually appeared to the astonishment of those whose desks were piled high with old newspapers, magazines, press releases, and cardboard coffee cups like real working journalists.

  One of the veteran New York staffers was Ruth Gilbert, a tough old bird—she finally retired when she turned eighty—who wrote the column “In and Around Town” about things to do in the city. One of her favorite places to visit was Haiti, and she frequently brought back wooden dolls, supposedly good-luck charms, and gave them to special people. As a present, she left one of those tokens on Anna’s desk.

  The next morning, Anna came in and “freaked” when she saw the curio, possibly thinking it was a voodoo doll that was left there by one of the many staffers whom she sensed disliked her. At the same time, she was furious that someone had, as one eyewitness recalls, “sullied this pristine surface of her desk by leaving her a little gift.” Anna is said to have reprimanded her innocent assistant, who soon quit, for permitting the trespass to occur. She was the first in a long line of young female assistants who “came and went like butterflies in the night.” The Anna desk incident became the talk of the office.

  Compulsive and obsessive was the way a number of her colleagues viewed her after it happened.

  When Gilbert heard about Anna’s reaction, she, too, was spitting fire. As a colleague notes of the late and lamented editor, “She was the kind of woman who if somebody said something wrong or she heard something unfair would say, ‘Fuck that shit!’ ” And that’s what she said about Anna’s hissy fit.

  Anna felt a lot of animosity from other staffers because of her behavior and attitude, which caused her some insecurity At one point early on, she let her hair down a bit and plaintively asked a colleague, Nancy McKeon, “I don’t really belong here, do I?”

  Trailing behind Anna to the new job was her trusted and loyal stylist-helper, Georgia Gunn. In the years since they started working together, nothing seemed to have changed in what appeared to be their master-slave relationship. By the time Gunn got to New York, she still worked like a “fucking fiend” for Anna, who “abused her dreadfully,” says the New York colleague. “Anna’s a classic bully and does it around people with whom she can get away with it. People were just afraid of her. Look how Martha Stewart got away with treating people badly all those years. They have the same mentality, a huge amount of hubris. Anna has an incredible force of will.”

  Jordan Schaps, New York’s cover editor, had a somewhat different view. He feels the two had a “love-hate relationship,” that there were good and bad feelings between them, and an indecipherable bond that kept them working together. But the source maintains, “Georgia was a slave and she was treated as such. Anybody who worked directly for Anna was treated abominably. But if Anna had to work one-on-one with you, or she needed something from you, she behaved differently. She played nice.”

  One confrontation occurred early on with some people in the photo and art departments, with which Anna worked closely. Those departments handled her fashion shots and were responsible for making her layouts look good, but the staff could sabotage her work if they felt they were being treated shabbily, which is how they felt from day one.

  “She threw fits, she showed no respect, she acted completely inappropriately,” asserts the source, who witnessed Anna’s behavior.

  Complaints were made to photo editor Karen Mullarkey, a six-foot-tall cowgirl type who possessed major clout and had a great reputation in the photography world; she was a protégée of the noted photographer Oliviero Toscani. She’d also worked at Life, Rolling Stone, and Newsweek. Unlike others, Mullarkey wasn’t afraid to confront Anna, and she did. In front of an eyewitness in the newsroom, Mullarkey pulled Anna aside and, towering over her, read her the riot act.

  “You don’t have the right to behave that way to these people,” she said firmly “They don’t work for you like Georgia does. You can treat her like a dog, but not the people who work for me, because if you do it to people who work for me, I’ll assume you did it to me, and I’ll get ugly. Don’t go there. I fight for keeps.”

  Anna was stunned and said nothing. Aware that Mullarkey could make life difficult for her, she knew when to back off.

  “Anna had checked out Karen thoroughly and realized she was not a good enemy to have,” notes the source. “Anna’s too smart of a general, and she’s a believer in keeping your enemies closer than your friends, so she wasn
’t about to go up against her. I think she was also intrigued by the fact that Karen wasn’t afraid of her.”

  After almost a dozen years in the business, Anna still wasn’t considered a writer, so Quita McMath, an associate editor who had the reputation as a “clever writer,” was assigned to pen the fashion layouts in consultation with her. “She would sit down and try to tell me what point she was trying to make, or what was important about the clothes,” says McMath, whose Texas accent was in striking opposition to Anna’s British, which drove both of them crazy. “I once wrote something about hats and she kept wanting to say that they were ‘witty’ while I was trying to say it another way, using a pun or an American phrase that she wasn’t familiar with. All she could say was, ‘But they’re so witty. Can’t you see that, they’re witty hats.’ I always had the feeling that she felt I was beneath her social station because we had no personal connection, and I was a little bit intimidated by her.”

  Anna got fed up with McMath and, during a week when the writer was on vacation, Nancy McKeon filled in for her. Anna went to Kosner and got the green light to have McKeon assigned as McMath’s permanent replacement, and McMath was relieved to go back to her other duties. But McKeon ran into some of the same problems every other writer who worked with Anna encountered. “She could not tell me why somebody was interesting or dressed well, or what she or he did was of significance,” states McKeon. “She’d say, ‘But they have such great personal style.’ All she kept saying was, ‘It’s personal style.’ Oh, my God, if I heard that one more time . . . And I’d think, okay, that’s three or four words, how does the rest go?”

  McKeon, who later went on to become a powerhouse editor at The Washington Post, said she should have felt flattered that Anna had chosen her to do her writing. But instead her reaction was like that of others on staff. “We all felt taken over by Anna. . . . If ruthless means being totally faithful to one’s own vision and not bowing to anyone else’s, then yes, Anna’s ruthless. If you’re being told that what you’ve done is rubbish, one of Anna’s favorite words, and it’s a matter of your own taste, it’s hard not to feel hurt or slighted. And Anna doesn’t hesitate to tell you.”