Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  “It was never a question of if she’d stay at New York; it was always how long it would take for her to get Alex and Si’s attention,” says a New York insider in whom Anna had confided. “Anna told me she heard from Liberman and she asked me, ‘How do I play it?’ I said, ‘Look, sweetie, Vogue is where you belong. That’s always been your goal.’ I said, ‘You need to let Ed [Kosner] know in a gentle way, so he will rebound and do everything he can to keep you, which of course will make Liberman want you even more.’ Anna played it beautifully. She’d go in and have a private meeting with Ed, and then she’d come out and look at me and smile, and she’d say, ‘Now I’m going to have lunch with Liberman.’ Then she’d go to Liberman and say that Ed had told her she could have more pages in the magazine and get more money.”

  At one point, Kosner, who had enlisted his wife, Julie Baumgold, to get involved in the effort to keep Anna from going to Vogue, actually thought he had her. Anna did feel an allegiance to the magazine that gave her such great visibility, permitting her to become a big fish in a relatively small pond.

  Nancy McKeon says, “It was a little messy. Anna was talking to Ed, she was talking to [managing editor] Laurie Jones, and she seemed not sure what she wanted to do because Grace Mirabella was still at Vogue. At one point she decided to stay at New York. But then Liberman called again, and she decided to leave. It was a matter of a couple of weeks.”

  Word of Anna’s negotiations got out, and talk flew around the New York newsroom that she had sealed the deal by spending a seductive weekend with the Libermans; that Liberman, in his seventies, was chasing her around the swimming pool, and that Anna was coquettishly trying to avoid his advances, all of which was most likely unfounded but made for great watercooler chatter among those who were envious of her success.

  One of the biggest sticking points in Anna’s discussions with Liberman wasn’t over money but rather over title. They didn’t want to give her one at first, but Anna (and Shaffer) insisted, according to a Vogue insider. They finally settled on a new title that had never been used. It was rather nebulous but had panache and a powerful ring to it. Anna was, in the end, satisfied that the masthead would list her as Vogue’s creative director. And while salary

  In Vogue wasn’t a big issue, Anna managed almost to double what she was making at New York, with a starting salary of $125,000 annually and many perks, including a clothing allowance, all expenses, and a car and driver, among others, which was typical of the lures Condé Nast used to recruit major talent.

  After Anna sealed the deal with Liberman, she immediately telephoned her father in London from her desk at New York to proudly announce the news. A staffer who overheard the conversation claims there was a long pause as Anna listened intently to the most influential man in her life. The busybody took the long silence on Anna’s end to mean that Charles Wintour was questioning his faith in his daughter’s abilities to perform at Vogue, because Anna’s response, almost childlike, was, “Well, Daddy, they think I can do the job.”

  Anna’s first order of business after she was hired, but just before she started at Vogue in mid-October 1983—a couple of weeks before her thirty-fourth birthday—was to buy herself an expensive new wardrobe, consisting mainly of chic and sexy business suits that would fit in with the Condé Nast corporate culture.

  That dress-for-success advice came from her friend Paul Sinclaire, whose fashion judgment she trusted implicitly. He told her, “Ahna, only Chanel will do.” Sinclaire accompanied Anna to a chic shop in Millburn, New Jersey, of all places, where she bought “a bunch” of Chanel suits with tight, short skirts.

  Soon after Sinclaire started working with Anna at Vogue, the magazine’s newly appointed features editor, Amy Gross, with whom Anna would work closely, pulled Sinclaire aside and said, “You know, Paul, she’s not a. Russian princess. What’s with the ‘Ahna’ ?”

  For the first time since she got into the fashion magazine game, Anna demanded and was given an office, a two-room suite, actually, by her new mentor, Alex Liberman.

  It was a sun-filled affair with a view of Manhattan’s towers of commerce. She had her name and title placed on the door. And as she did at New York, Anna brought in her own desk and furnishings, which were surrounded by glamorous accoutrements supplied by Condé Nast. She also brought along her loyal and hardworking assistant, Laurie Schechter, who had her own little outer office and became the new creative director’s gatekeeper.

  One wall of Anna’s domain was covered with a single-patterned repeating image that had no borders, and each pattern blurred into the next in some curious psychological-like fashion, inspiring some to wonder whether Dr. David Shaffer himself had decorated the office.

  Grace Mirabella was beside herself As she put it, “Anna created an office within the office . . . and against me . . . to undermine my thinking and my authority.”

  She was furious about Anna’s hiring. She was incredulous that Anna would be given the new executive title of creative director, which she saw as a position that Liberman had handed to Anna on a silver platter because he was so infatuated with her. Mirabella knew the score, she’d heard it from Anna’s own lips, so she knew she was in for a battle. As Polly Mellen, one of Mirabella’s key lieutenants, put it years later, “Anna loves men and had a special appeal to men. It’s not an appeal that every man would dig, but for the ones that dug it, her appeal was special. She’s an incredible flirt and it hit certain men hard. That’s what happened to Alex Liberman and to Si Newhouse—they were smitten, totally. Not only did she have the brains, but she had the come-hither. She knows how to do it.”

  Mirabella saw Anna as the enemy or, as she venomously put it later, “a vision of skinniness in black sunglasses and Chanel suits . . . cold [and] suspicious of everyone loyal to me, and autocratic in her working style.”

  Mirabella had come to the realization that Liberman, whom she always thought was her mentor and supporter, had become a turncoat and fallen “so in love” with Anna that he gave her “the power” to do whatever she wanted at Vogue.

  Notes Laurie Schechter, “It was obviously a painful experience for Grace. . . . Anna was obviously a threat, and Grace was right in thinking so.”

  Now that Anna had been hired at the world’s fashion bible with a high-sounding title, she was, for the first time, on the news media’s radar. In her previous jobs in the United States and in England, she was essentially smalltime, not worthy of big-time coverage, except for the nasty bits that appeared in the British gossip columns and in Private Eye, therefore, the extremely private Anna had been able to keep her personal life well hidden.

  But coming to Vogue put her in the big leagues and would change all of that. From 1983 on, her every move, her every promotion, her every appear-

  In Vogue ance at an event, the women she lunched with and the men she was seen with, became fodder for the news and gossip machine. Anna’s movements and decisions were dissected and speculated upon by the press, both fashion and general. Anna’s past was virtually unknown to the media and the public, but her present and future lives would be placed under a journalistic microscope as if she were a newly discovered life-form.

  One of the first articles appeared in the trade magazine Adweek under the glowing headline “The Up-and-Comers: Wintour Displays Knack for the New.”

  Mirabella and her loyalists read the puff piece and shuddered. Anna, with amazing chutzpah, boasted that she was “working on every aspect of the magazine, from the choice of photographers to the overall design.” Taking a direct shot at Mirabella, Anna claimed, “There hasn’t been someone who can stand back a bit and say, ‘What can we do with this fashion sitting to make it different? Maybe there’s a new photographer we should try. Maybe we can mix painting and illustration to add dimension to the pages.’ . . . One of my concerns at Vogue is to bring in other aspects, to mix fashion with anything that’s cultural. That’s the direction I think things are going.”

  Interestingly, in discussing her early years, Anna
mentioned nothing about her schooling, or lack thereof, but made claims such as having “studied the classics with an emphasis on English literature” and possessing “a fondness for Jane Austen.” The article stated erroneously that Anna moved to the United States and “spent several years working for Carrie Donovan at Harper’s Bazaar,” when in fact she worked there less than a year and was fired. There was absolutely no mention of her tenure at the cursed Viva, let alone Savvy, or of her Paris fling.

  She turned on the charm and the author of the article gave her four stars, declaring that Anna “has been expanding the traditional boundaries of fashion coverage,” that her “influence has begun filtering through the pages” of Vogue, and that her articles “made for provocative reading.” While the Adweek piece states that “colleagues praise her knack for discovering new talents and producing new talents and producing inspired fashion and interior design features,” none was quoted, an indication of the fear that now permeated Vogue. Anna defenders were worried about repercussions from Mirabella, and Mirabella advocates were afraid of what would happen to them if Anna took power. The only person who was quoted by name didn’t even work at Vogue: Her old boss and acolyte, Ed Kosner from New York magazine, called her “a real star.”

  What Anna hadn’t told the reporter from Adweek, and what no one leaked to the press because of fear of reprisal, was that she had started arrogantly showing up at meetings of the editorial board, “shaking her head, obviously disagreeing” with everything Mirabella said or did.

  Mirabella soon discovered that Anna, on the sly, was redoing layouts without the editor in chief’s permission, was contracting for new photos that Mirabella and her fashion editors weren’t aware of, and was beginning to oversee fashion sittings that weren’t in her domain.

  Anna was carving up the magazine as if it were her own and reporting only to Liberman. Looking back on that time, Mirabella stated that Anna was so optimistic that she’d be named to the top job that she considered her more “a momentary inconvenience than a person she might have to answer to or contend with.”

  All hell was breaking loose at America’s most elegant and ladylike fashion magazine, and Anna, anxious to take over, was the wily provocateur.

  twenty-five

  Golden Handcuffs

  While Grace Mirabella and her capos were blindsided by Anna’s blatant efforts to sabotage the old regime, the new creative director also worked in more subtle ways to infuriate her editor in chief

  One instance of her cattiness once again involved Andrea Blanche, the photographer whose story idea she had stolen and used in her early days at New York magazine. Long associated with Vogue, Blanche had learned that Anna had been hired before many others knew. “I remember getting this pain in my stomach when I heard. At that moment I had a premonition that things were not going to be easy for me at Vogue. What happened when she stole my idea had always stayed with me.”

  But Anna’s shabby treatment of Blanche at New York was then, and this was now, and Anna realized she had to play nice because she knew that Blanche was special to Alex Liberman.

  As with Anna, Liberman had first seen Blanche’s photos in New York magazine long before Anna had come to work there.

  “I had these pages that were very successful, and Liberman called me to his office and said, ‘Why do I see these in New York and I don’t see them in Vogue? And that’s the same reason he hired Anna—because her work was getting so much attention. Plus, she’s very beguiling and attractive, so I could see where he could fall for her. He was a big flirt, Liberman.

  “I worked very closely with Alex and he had sort of taken me under his wing, and he wanted Anna and me to get along, to try to get along, and he kind of put us together, so she had to deal with me,” says Blanche. “Anna was on a turf that I had been working on since 1979, and I had to protect myself, but I wanted to create a situation where we could work together.”

  The two went to lunch. Blanche was naturally wary and this time didn’t toss out any story ideas but knew she would have to pitch Anna and sell herself to her once again. And she was quite aware that the only reason Anna was acting as if nothing bad had ever happened between them was that she knew Liberman adored Blanche.

  But it still came as a shock to Blanche when she received a call out of the blue from Anna inviting her to a social event at a new Manhattan discotheque called Palladium. “I almost dropped my pants!” she remembers. “It was right out of left field.”

  As Blanche would soon realize, Anna may have had subtle ulterior motives for asking Blanche to join her and David Shaffer and her cousin Oliver James, who was visiting from England, for an evening of what was supposed to be fun.

  Their party eventually grew to include a business entrepreneur and acquaintance of Anna’s named Sam Waksal, who would gain notoriety and go to prison years later in the ImClone trading case that also indirectly caused Martha Stewart’s downfall. At the time of the Palladium event, though, Blanche and the high-riding Waksal were “kind of in and out of a relationship.” And Waksal had started seeing Anna’s friend and Vogue contributing writer Joan Juliet Buck, who also showed up that night. So it wasn’t very pleasant for Blanche and caused her to wonder, “What’s going on here? Why was I invited? Is this a bad dream?”

  The next morning the apparent reason for the curious machinations of the previous night appeared to come into the photographer’s focus.

  Blanche arrived at a scheduled meeting at Vogue to discuss an assignment with Liberman and Mirabella. Anna also showed up, at Liberman’s side, where she always seemed to position herself as if they were epoxied together.

  But before they got a chance to discuss the proposed shoot, Anna enthusiastically jumped in and raved to Mirabella about the absolutely marvelous time she had had the night before with Andrea Blanche, whom she made to seem like her new best friend.

  “This, of course, made Grace crazy,” notes Blanche, who began to speculate that Anna had invited her to the disco party for the sole purpose of being able to boast to Mirabella about it, make it seem as if Blanche was in Anna’s corner and “totally piss off Grace and put me in a really awkward position. I felt I was brought into something very messy, with mind games going on. I thought it was very Byzantine and Machiavellian.”

  Soon Blanche found herself getting less rather than more work from Vogue. In one instance, Anna had Blanche shoot a portrait of her but afterward said she didn’t like it. “Anna’s relationship with me was frosty,” she observes. “I don’t think she ever really liked the fact that I was Liberman’s ‘baby,’ so to speak, and that she had to deal with me. I was not her find, so she just never really embraced the situation or me.”

  Down the road, when Anna was named editor in chief of British Vogue at Liberman’s behest and returned to London for a time, Blanche would find herself in an even more distasteful situation.

  The fear of Anna that gripped Vogue—the palpable dread of what she would or wouldn’t do to the venerable magazine, and who would or wouldn’t be demoted, axed, or sent off to the North Pole to cover deep-freeze couture—was so widespread it also devolved onto her assistant, Laurie Schechter.

  At her job interview with a Condé Nast human resources woman, she was sternly informed, “Even though you’re working for Anna Wintour, you’re not going to have any power.”

  Schechter was dumbfounded. “To me what she was saying was, ‘We are all so scared here of [Anna’s] coming.’ It revealed the fears at Condé Nast even about someone who was going to work for Anna as an assistant. But obviously Anna’s demeanor was forbidding and foreboding. Everybody was quaking in their boots. It’s that sink-or-swim attitude at Condé Nast—if they drown, we’ll just get new ones.” But Schechter had learned one big lesson from Anna that helped her move forward: In order to get ahead she had to “charm it and work it, do whatever you needed to do, and not be afraid.”

  Though she had the total support of Liberman, Anna was lost in her early days as creative director, mainly be
cause everyone was afraid and didn’t want to get too close. She got little cooperation from the old guard. Just as Anna was showing her claws and pushing herself into every area of the magazine, Grace Mirabella was defending her long-held domain with equal ferocity.

  “It was a tough transition for Anna,” observes Schechter. “She had no friends at Vogue per se. Anna can live without friends, but she didn’t have any. She didn’t have any supporters there, quite honestly.”

  Besides Liberman and Si Newhouse, her greatest cheerleader was David Shaffer, who continued to send her a daily bouquet of flowers to show his love and keep up her morale. Anna had a virtual hotline to him, was on the phone with him constantly seeking advice and guidance.

  “He was supportive as a partner, and his professional knowledge and experience was important to her,” says Schechter. “How much better could it be to have your shrink at home. They had a very strong relationship. They communicated a lot. I’m sure if . . . she was at a point of being broken to some extent, then he would be a great help.” But Schechter doesn’t feel Anna was “broken,” but rather faced “culture shock of sorts in the sense that she tried to contribute and do things she may have been mandated to do corporately.”

  Next to Liberman, Schechter worked more closely with Anna than anyone else did during her creative director period, and she saw the toll the job was taking on her. “She had a hard time at first because prior to that she was a fairly big fish in a good-size pond. Now she was a big fish in a pond of barracudas, and that can take you off your center, and it did to some extent. It wasn’t like people were nasty to her, but people just didn’t necessarily go out of their way. They did their job and protected their territory.”

  Schechter, who watched Anna closely, states she suffered “a bit” emotionally during that time. “And that’s where David came in. Thank God he was a psychiatrist!” To help Anna, he even chatted up difficult staffers, making them wary of him.