Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  After completing his fellowship, Shaffer returned to London, where he held positions at Maudsley Hospital and continued his relationship with Serena. When she turned eighteen, he took her to meet his family in Johannesburg. Serena was astounded by their opulent lifestyle: Shaffer’s mother had her beautiful dining table set with the great Danish silversmith Georg Jensen’s Pyramide silverware that was worth a small fortune—the same forks and knives used by royalty. They married when she was twenty and he was thirty in 1966, around the same time Anna was quitting North London Collegiate at sixteen because of the miniskirt imbroglio.

  The Shaffers lived a voguish life on Priory Walk in west London, and Serena—like Anna, who was at Harpers & Queen at the time—was deeply involved in the London fashion scene as a designer; it’s possible the two had even met. As part of the fashion world, she acted as a liaison in London for the designer Ralph Lauren, and when he visited she would show him around and look for British goods that he could remake and put under his label. In return she got a 5 percent commission on anything he ordered. The Shaffers had an interesting social set that is said to have included fashionistas Michael Roberts and André Leon Talley, who later became protégés of Anna’s, and lots of artists and writers, like Piers Read, who thought of Serena as “very sweet, very plucky. We [he and Shaffer] were tired of grown-up women. I was, certainly.”

  Another “very old friend” of David and Serena Shaffer from the early seventies in London was the American upscale fashion retailer Dianne Benson. “Serena was just a baby when she and David were married, and he was sort of like a father figure and introduced her to the world of London,” she says. “She was much, much younger and very funky. She was a designer and used to have a little fashion company called Electric Circus or something, and I knew her because I bought her clothing when I was a hot buyer for Henri Bendel in New York before I opened Dianne B.

  “Serena had a collection that she designed and sold out of the downstairs of their house, a funky collection she practically handmade herself—checks and big buttons. David and Serena were very social. They entertained constantly and had big dinners in one of those big dining room–kitchen combinations. I have a very fond spot in my heart for the Shaffers because I met one of the great loves of my life at their kitchen table on Priory Walk.”

  David and Serena Shaffer had two sons in the late sixties, Joseph Jacob and Samuel. The young Mrs. Shaffer liked to dabble in the kitchen, where she started cooking fancy meals, which would pay off down the road, egged on by the British food writer Elizabeth David, who had a trendy grocery around the corner.

  In 1977, just as Anna was starting at Viva, the Shaffer family moved to New York and set up temporary housekeeping in David Shaffer’s favorite bo-hemian haunt, the Chelsea Hotel, while they were renovating a town house in Greenwich Village. Shaffer took a position as clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. While staying at the Chelsea, his wife became enthralled with the interesting artists and writers who crashed there.

  Once settled in their house, “We entertained everybody—my husband was very taken with it all,” Serena once said. Their entertaining was enhanced with some twenty place settings of that elegant Jensen silverware that Shaffer had inherited when his mother died. Serena Shaffer viewed the family heirloom as a “symbol of stability, a symbol of luxury, of civility.”

  In 1982, five years after the Shaffers moved to New York, their marriage fell apart—so much for stability—and Anna and David Shaffer soon became an item.

  “We were bitterly not talking to each other,” the former Mrs. Shaffer has said. So angry at her husband was she that she tossed the beloved Shaffer family silverware into a suitcase, carted it off to Shaffer’s town house, and left it on the floor, but snitched a few pieces before she left because “there was so much of it, I thought he’d never miss it.” She left without locking the door, she has said, and someone broke in and walked off with the valuable booty. Looking back on the incident, she said, “I could have had the whole thing.”

  There are a number of accounts of what happened to the Shaffers’ marriage.

  Serena once revealed to a friend that the breakup was all her fault. “She said she fell in love with an artist,” the friend, who also happened to be a pal of Anna’s, says. “Serena told me the artist dumped her pretty quickly, and Serena said she was contrite, was sorry she did it, and felt she had made a terrible mistake. She said she was young and impetuous and did a stupid thing, lost her head and made a horrible mistake. I felt this was coming from the inside, an honest revelation, not the sort of thing you’d get up and tell everybody, and she said it ruefully. It certainly makes for an interesting story, and it made me think of Serena as this hot bohemian—and maybe that’s what she wanted me to think.”

  Dianne Benson said it was her understanding, too, that Serena left her husband for another man. “It was pretty devastating for David,” she says. “From what I could see he was a very devoted husband. Serena and the new man had a house in upstate New York, some idyllic life, and she seemed very complacent for a while before she fired herself up again. That relationship fell apart. And then all of a sudden David turned up with Anna. I think Serena and everybody else was quite shocked. One would not have expected that from David Shaffer, at least I would not have. He was something of an intellectual, but he certainly was not a dashing prince.”

  Serena remarried, to a man named Curt Bass, from a wealthy New York Jewish family in the knitwear business. The couple lived in the New York suburbs and were considering settling in the Virgin Islands, where they were building an expensive home. But the Basses had their differences, and the marriage became increasingly rocky and ended in divorce. Serena Bass went on to build a successful catering business in New York with a celebrity and fashion industry clientele, including Vogue. In partnership with her son, Sam, she also opened a trendy little red-and-black bar and lounge with tin palm trees and Moroccan lamps called Serena in the basement of her old haunt, the Chelsea Hotel, and became a New York celebrity of sorts, a publicity hound whose name often appeared in the city’s tabloid gossip columns.

  Sometime while the Shaffers were splitting up, Anna and David Shaffer met. Some say they were introduced at a dinner party by Eric Boman, the artist-turned-photographer whom Anna had known and worked with since her days at Harpers & Queen. Others say Cupid was played by Paul Sinclaire, who had had what he calls “a very special and very private relationship with Anna over many, many years”—the two often shopped together and even traded clothes.

  Sinclaire became a trusted adviser to Anna. “We’d speak on the phone three times a day,” he says. There were quirks about Anna, though, that annoyed him, such as at times acting as if she didn’t know him. “I’d see her in the front row of a show and rush over and say hi, and she’d briskly go, ‘Hello, darling,’ as if she knew me for two minutes. And then we’d have dinner later that night and I’d say, ‘What was that all about?’ and she’d brush it off and say, ‘Well, you know I can’t see very well.’ She was wonderful at kind of working a mystique.”

  Sinclaire also knew and was friendly with Shaffer separately. “He was kind of great and kind of very offbeat,” he observes. Sinclaire first met him when David and Serena Shaffer stayed with Dianne Benson and her husband, Irving, who were renting a home in Quogue, in the Hamptons, from model agency head Eileen Ford.

  Sinclaire, very well connected in the art world, claims credit for bringing Anna and Shaffer together. “I was at a dinner party for [the artist] Lee Kras-ner, and David was there and I said, ‘David, I’m having a small birthday party at my apartment. Why don’t you come?’ David had separated from Serena, and they were in the middle of a not-wonderful divorce. He was so depressed. I’d also invited Anna, and she arrived with Michael Stone. Anna and David met at the party and he fell in love, he truly fell in love. The next thing I know he’s ringing me up at eleven o’clock at night to bring me a perfectly dreadful Carlos F
alci handbag he’d bought for Anna to see if I thought she’d like it.”

  Dianne Benson recalls, too, how Shaffer “used to haunt” her shops on Madison Avenue and in SoHo, “looking for presents for Anna.”

  Talk about the new man in Anna’s life spread when the two were spotted by a friend walking romantically arm in arm on a Manhattan street.

  Shaffer and Anna began a serious relationship that would climax in a long marriage, two children, and a scandalous divorce that would hit the tabloids and send shockwaves through the fashion capitals of the world. All of that, though, was far in the future.

  A highly emotional event occurred for Anna around the time she was dropping Stone and hooking up with Shaffer. On December 5, 1982, on his beloved island of Jamaica, the man considered the one true love of Anna’s life, Jon Bradshaw, married the movie producer Carolyn Pfeiffer—eleven years older than Anna—with whom he had been living for some five years.

  “Even though they hadn’t been romantically involved for some time,” says a member of Anna’s and Bradshaw’s circle, “Anna was absolutely devastated. It’s clear she still loved him in her heart of hearts, still felt possessive of him, still wanted his advice and guidance, and was absolutely jealous he’d gotten married. Not to play armchair psychiatrist, but I’ve always felt Anna got involved with her shrink [Shaffer] as part of some sort of subconscious competition with Bradshaw, one-upsmanship, if you will. Bradshaw got married, so I’ll find someone worthy to marry myself.”

  Despite Bradshaw’s marriage and the couple’s subsequent adoption of a baby girl, Anna never cut the connection.

  “Even after they broke up, even after Carolyn and Bradshaw were married, Anna continued calling him, seeking his advice,” says a confidante of Pfeif-fer’s, who retained her name after the marriage. “When Anna would call and Carolyn answered, Anna was icy and just barely civil. Anna never tried to chat her up. She’d just say, ‘Is Bradshaw there?’ Anna was still very needy of Bradshaw, and this was very flattering to him. She used to cry all the time with him on the phone—she was constantly crying—and Carolyn felt that was how she manipulated Bradshaw, how she pushed his buttons. There was a sort of whole neediness that Anna had.

  “She would talk to him about every decision in her life and what did he think. Anna wasn’t terribly open with a lot of people. she’s a very guarded woman, but she was very open with him. She played like a little girl with him—it was part of her way. She would seek advice from him about her relationship with Michael Stone and other boyfriends. It was a father-daughter thing. Even after Anna married David she would still call Bradshaw. Carolyn wasn’t very happy about it because she knew Bradshaw still totally adored Anna.”

  Carolyn Pfeiffer was more than unhappy, according to the writer Joanie McDonell, who was part of their circle. “Carolyn hated Anna.,” McDonell asserts. “Carolyn absolutely forbid Bradshaw from having anything to do with Anna; she wouldn’t even want to hear Anna’s name. Carolyn and Bradshaw stayed with me sometimes when they came to New York, and she’d say to Bradshaw, Anna’s so ungrateful, that bitch! Do you think she’d ever tell anyone everything you did for her! She would never tell anyone!’ And Bradshaw would just laugh—I can see him laughing—and say, ‘Oh, who cares, who cares, Carolyn. What difference does it make?’”

  twenty-four

  In Vogue

  By 1983, Anna had become a powerhouse at New York. She had been promoted to senior editor and was giving the mostly newsy and service-oriented weekly a reputation as a style arbiter with her splashy and creative layouts that encompassed everything from chic fashion to trendy interior design and glamorous home entertaining.

  Anna had hit on the right mix at the right time. The era of the young urban professional, the yuppie, the defining figure of the Reagan eighties, was in full swing. With lots of disposable income and sophisticated taste, real or wannabe, this self-indulgent army of cash-rich, plastic-wielding consumers—many of them double income, no-kids-yet couples—were buying like crazy, seeking out clothing, household goods, and home furnishings, and they wanted advice on what to buy and where to buy it. Anna had her finger on their pulse. As a result, her features lured new advertisers—boutiques, restaurants, furniture stores—which gave her even greater cachet.

  Around the same time, another creative, driven, and ambitious woman, the onetime stockbroker and caterer Martha Stewart, had earned the sobriquet “Diva of Domesticity” with the publication of her groundbreaking best seller Entertaining, which covered some of the same territory that Anna was now marking, which was simply called lifestyle. Stewart’s book—and success—had not gone unnoticed by Anna, who was now thought of as New York’s “Diva of Fashion and Style.” Both Anna and Martha were catering to the affluent younger generation and promoting the high life.

  Anna’s byline and features were finally noticed by the sharp and creative eye of Alex Liberman at Vogue, just as she had hoped. Moreover, Polly Mellen, long a supporter, had also gotten his ear about Anna after Grace Mirabella had booted her out of her office.

  In the spring of 1983, the great man summoned Anna to a meeting at Condé Nast’s headquarters, then at 350 Madison Avenue, where Anna had had that embarrassing ten-minute session with Mirabella some months earlier. Mirabella had never mentioned anything to Liberman about the young woman who arrogantly proclaimed she wanted her job. And Liberman never told Mirabella that he had an intense interest in Anna—who also told him at their meeting that she wanted to be Vogues new editor in chief. Liberman, who had developed qualms about Mirabella’s abilities, was quite taken with Anna and had something big in mind for her.

  He was impressed mostly by a piece she had recently done in which she asked a few trendy Manhattan artists such as Francesco Clemente and David Salle to interpret the New York collections.

  It took her over the top.

  Liberman and his boss, Si Newhouse, were Anglophiles and had a thing for young, bright, ambitious—and pretty—Brits. In the same time frame that Liberman began to focus on Anna at New York, he and Newhouse had just brought a savvy blond, blue-eyed, buxom sharpie named Tina Brown over from London, where as editor of the venerable Tatler she had tripled circulation. They made her first a consultant to the circulation-challenged Vanity Fair and soon after appointed her its editor in chief. She turned the magazine around with a gossipy and glitzy mix of well-written and -reported stories about the high and low life of society, with major emphasis on celebrities.

  The elegant, sophisticated, and artistic Liberman adored the glamour of Hollywood and often tacked up on his office walls, to the shock and consternation of his chic subordinates, the garish front pages of the celebrity-driven supermarket tabloids, telling his editors they should be doing something similar only more upscale. One Condé Nast editor in chief, Linda Wells of Allure, once said, “There is a tension that you get from the juxtaposition of the high and the low that [Liberman] was fascinated with. A lot of delicious

  In Vogue naughtiness can be had using tabloid devices.” Tina Brown knew the score and made Vanity Fair into what some thought was a slicker literate version of the National Enquirer.

  A few weeks after Anna’s first meeting with Liberman, a second session was arranged, this time with more secrecy. Because Liberman was concerned that Mirabella might spot her, the meeting was held at the country house and sculpture studio that Liberman and his wife, Tatiana, owned in Warren, Connecticut, a short distance from Anna’s aunt Jean Read’s place.

  For advice and counsel, and for his take on the talks, Anna brought along her beau, David Shaffer, who had fast become her “in-house shrink, personal adviser, guru, and Svengali regarding her career and her life in general,” as one close observer notes. Another says, “David took care of her. She always needed taking care of. With David, she was looking for security. It was a turbulent time. She had a goal—Vogue—and David was responsible, secure, and bright. He could guide her.” Paul Sinclaire put it this way: “David was very supportive helping her to a
chieve keeping it together and getting what she wanted. David was so ambitious for her.”

  The meeting was on a weekday, and Shaffer picked up Anna at New York for the ninety-minute drive to Litchfield County. En route they stopped at a motel so Anna could change out of her office outfit into something a bit more alluring, a miniskirt of micro proportions. Later, Liberman would say of Anna, “I was absolutely enchanted with her,” though Mrs. Liberman, a sexy woman in her day, was put off by the tiny skirt and the fact that Anna had chosen to bring zinnias as an offering rather than roses or a plant. As usual, Anna had seduced the man and put off the woman.

  In any case, Liberman laid an offer on the table—but not the editorship of Vogue as Anna had hoped. It was a new position with undefined duties. Essentially, he wanted to get her in place and move her up or around when the need suited him, and mainly get her away from the competition. Nevertheless, Anna was thrilled. All of her hard work, her enormous creativity, her toughness on the way up, her manipulations and machinations had finally paid off. Getting into Vogue had always been her goal, and it was about to become a reality.

  Back at New York, Anna let a few people know that Vogue had called with a job offer she knew she couldn’t refuse. And so she began pitting her editor, Ed Kosner, against Alex Liberman and vice versa, hoping to get the best deal possible.