Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Anna did a supreme job of hiding her fragile emotions from the staff, but every so often a few got a glimpse of what she was going through and were taken aback, because the general consensus was that she was “one tough bitch” and nothing or no one bothered her or got in her way.

  “Tell me, I can take it” was her macho response when she bluntly asked colleagues whether or not they liked one of her ideas.

  But then there were those other moments.

  Polly Mellen had an office next to Anna’s, which was several doors down from Mirabella’s, and was passing by when she heard a sound that stopped her in her tracks. “I went in and Anna was facing the window, and I realized she was sobbing, her shoulders were heaving, and she was trembling, and when she realized I was there she tried to get control for reasons of pride because she was a very strong young woman.” Mellen asked Anna what was wrong, and she said she had had a disagreement because an idea that she had proposed had been accepted by Mirabella and then killed by Mirabella. “This happened more than once, and Anna was totally frustrated,” maintains Mellen. “I realized she wanted to be involved in every part of the book, but she was being held back. She told me, ‘I can’t take it . . . I can’t go on.’ I said, ‘Don’t say that, please.’”

  Despite those scenarios, Anna claimed a couple of years later, when she took over British Vogue, that if there was resentment toward her, “I didn’t feel it,” though she acknowledged “it was very hard in the beginning.”

  Schechter also saw examples of Anna’s anxiety and stress. One afternoon she walked into her office and was surprised to find Anna teary-eyed and extremely upset. When Schechter asked what was wrong, Anna sobbed that she’d broken a tooth, which seemed an odd reason for the emotions she was showing. “I don’t know if it was true,” Schechter says years later. “I didn’t say, ‘Open your mouth and let me see.’”

  Stressed by the job, Anna, who was as organized as a Palm Pilot, began misplacing or losing important personal items, such as her Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. She’d go to lunch or to a meeting, and when she returned to her office she discovered they were missing, which drove her up the wall. She’d inadvertently left them in a cab or a restaurant and had to constantly order new ones that were customized for her by an optometrist in SoHo. Because her face is small and Wayfarers are oversize, she’d pay extra to have them constructed to fit her face.

  Stories have circulated over the years as to why she always wore sunglasses, inside and out, day or night: for image, was one; to hide behind, was another; a third was that her eyes were sensitive to the bright lights at fashion shows; still a fourth was to hide bags under her eyes.

  However, the main reason for the shades was the fact that Anna had very poor eyesight and a dread of losing her sight altogether. The trendy-looking glasses, therefore, weren’t just for show and image but were fitted with strong prescription lenses to help her see.

  Out of vanity, she chose to wear the stylish Wayfarers, which gave her a glamorous air of mystery, over regular prescription eyeglasses. The glasses are often mentioned by critics of Anna’s, such as one writer who noted tongue-in-cheek that there was “reason to believe” Anna was “Satan” and that the sunglasses “are very likely hiding glowing red eyeballs.”

  A colleague discovered otherwise. She had wandered into Anna’s office during her creative director stint and saw a pair of the trademark specs sitting on her desk. Since Anna was away, the staffer couldn’t resist trying them on, curious about how she’d look in them.

  “I almost fell over because they were such a strong prescription. I got dizzy,” she says. “It seemed like she was blind as a bat, and I thought to myself, ‘God, how many times have I stood across a room from her and she probably couldn’t see me if she wasn’t wearing her glasses. I was probably a blur.’ She has received so much attention and criticism over the years for wearing sunglasses, but if critics knew that she couldn’t see without them then they might have been more sympathetic.”

  Anna’s fear of losing her eyesight had some basis in fact. As her father aged, his eyesight became increasingly worse, and in his last years he’d gone almost completely blind. Friends and his second wife had to read to him, and he purchased from the United States a powerful magnifying frame that was attached to his television set on which books were projected in exceptionally large type, and he’d sit practically with his nose against the screen to read.

  “It really was terribly piteous to see this editor who had existed his entire life so keenly on reading newspapers and magazines and books go nearly blind,” says his longtime Evening Standard colleague Alex Walker. “I was told that there was a congenital illness in the Wintour side of the family that had resulted in this particular kind of blindness. This was an ailment that apparently was hereditary. If Anna, who constantly wore sunglasses, was aware of this, and no doubt she was, the use of those exceptionally dark glasses might not be affectation so much as protection.”

  After a number of emotional scenes involving Anna, most, if not all, out of public view, Liberman, a genius at Condé Nast corporate politics, took his protégée aside and told her that some battles were worth fighting and others were not winnable—and to forget about the latter.

  “Initially, it was hard for Anna,” says Schechter, who “adored her” and “felt blessed” to work with her. “Even though she had the title, a great salary, the car service, and the other perks Condé Nast offers, in some ways it was as if she was wearing golden handcuffs because she did not have the same freedom she had before. She had to battle to get people to do work for her, to like her, to want her to be there.

  “Anna’s not one to reveal herself. It wasn’t like suddenly she got a whole lot thinner or had huge horrible bags under her eyes. I know it affected her, but as a professional she would never reveal that. She wouldn’t come into the office and slam her door and throw a temper tantrum, or curse someone out behind their back. She didn’t work that way. She keeps a very steely exterior, but she’s a woman, and human inside. I felt for her because I recognized it was difficult for her, but I never, ever thought, ‘Oh, poor Anna,’ because I knew she was strong. And I knew how important David was to her as a sounding board, a support system, a sympathetic ear. He was another editor, so to speak.”

  During this stressful period, Schechter noticed some eccentricities in Anna’s behavior that struck her as odd—such as how she’d stand alone in her office and go through her purse picking out pennies and tossing them in the wastebasket, one by one. “I never asked. I just figured pennies were too small for her to consider keeping. She was someone who never had to count her pennies.” The other odd thing was Anna’s lunch. When she didn’t go out for lunch, she had Schechter pick up soup for her at a little place in the West Thirties. While there’s nothing strange about soup for lunch, Anna ate it in a curious manner. She’d put a big gob of butter on top, let it melt, and then eat only the butter and little of the soup. “I just saw the soup as a vehicle for the butter, a way to eat butter without seeming so obvious.”

  Meantime, Mirabella was freaking as Anna continued her assault, taking one hill after another in hopes of reaching the summit and toppling the leader. When Anna couldn’t do an end run around Mirabella’s veteran fashion editors, such as Polly Mellen and Jade Hobson (Hobson had been at Vogue since 1971, and Mellen since 1966), she’d “harass and criticize them,” the editor in chief claimed. She asserted that Anna demanded Polaroids of shoots over which she had no say, showed up at sittings that weren’t her responsibility, and in some cases, ordered that they be done over.

  “I was not a big fan of Anna’s,” says Hobson, shuddering at the memory of the early days of Anna’s tyrannical reign as creative director. “Anna didn’t seem to want to work with any of the existing staff. She wanted to bring in freelance people, and that didn’t sit so well with a number of us.”

  Anna’s desire, as it had been in her previous jobs, was working with her own team of freelance photographers and ov
erseeing the shoots herself. Single-handed power and control and the originality that emanated from it had always been her game, and that’s what had caught Liberman’s attention in the first place. However, Vogue was an entirely different kettle of fish. At Viva, at Savvy, at New York, the fashion coverage was a small part of the overall editorial content, so Anna, hidden in a corner with an assistant, was able to run things her way, be creative, and make herself and the fashion pages stand out. But Vogue had been doing that spectacularly with an army of people, all working together as a team, for decades.

  Under Mirabella, the job of overseeing and directing major fashion shoots was the longtime domain of the two talented editors, Hobson and Mellen. “We had absolute autonomy, and she started coming to the shoots, kind of excluding the editor, talking to the photographer, and she just made it very uncomfortable and it was rather disruptive,” declares Hobson.

  A shoot is a creative process—something Anna well knew. It involves a close working relationship with the editor, the photographer, the stylist, and other principals, and the shoot often doesn’t take shape until midway through the process, and often the original idea is scrapped or the direction changed because someone conceived a better idea. But Anna’s constant intervention virtually destroyed that very important process.

  “Her interference made it much more routine and not as creative,” asserts Hobson.

  Hobson, Mellen, and others felt that Anna was watching over their shoulder, “and not in a friendly way, and not in a supportive way,” says Hobson. “She was rather exclusionary of the editor. It wasn’t taken to very happily by the two of us.”

  Winter collections. Paris, spring 1984. Showdown time, big-time.

  Hobson and Mellen were overseeing a shoot in a studio when Anna appeared unexpectedly. “All of a sudden,” Hobson remembers vividly, “it was a cast of thousands, it seemed, watching and directing, and she destroyed the whole process.”

  The two editors were beside themselves, according to Mirabella. Furious, they returned to New York and declared “Never again!” in an emergency summit meeting with Liberman and Mirabella. Hobson remembers telling her bosses, “You’ve got to stop this. We can’t deal with it. It’s the magazine that’s losing out.” Mirabella said that the angry editors had actually threatened to strike if Anna didn’t get out of their hair. “ ‘We can’t stand her,’ they said, and they began, as much as they could, to shut her out of their work.”

  Years later, however, Mellen says she always thought Anna was the right person for the job and that fashion wasn’t Mirabella’s forte. “I saw Anna as someone who couldn’t be avoided, someone you could not turn your back on because that would be a mistake. But I had to be very careful because I was also very close to Grace.”

  To put a stop to the constant catfights, Liberman was forced to handcuff his protégée. With no other choice, and to avoid a mutiny, he essentially banned Anna from the fashion coverage—a “tough blow to her,” observes Schechter, because fashion was what Vogue was all about and why Anna always dreamed of being there. “Grace basically went to Liberman and Newhouse and said, ‘If she must be here, fine, but I don’t want her involved in the fashion.’”

  Liberman, who had been devoting his efforts to strengthening the magazine’s features section—books, entertaining, living, and style—now assigned Anna to work in that area with features editor Amy Gross, who had been recruited from Mademoiselle. Anna’s job, as described in a blatantly vague staff announcement, was to “enrich the looks of the pages and bring to the pages other aspects of women’s interests.”

  After that she reluctantly left editors like Hobson and Mellen alone.

  Anna wasn’t happy with her new assignment, but she brought in some new and talented photographers to work on features and was able to have some influence in that area.

  As Schechter points out, “Features was off Anna’s work agenda. However, she obviously had a good relationship with Mr. Liberman. I’m sure he fell in love with her, because she can be very charming, and I can’t define that charm because I’m not a man, and he recognized her talent. I felt instinctu-ally that features was certainly not going to be her resting place. I knew only too well that she was a focused, goal-oriented person and whatever she was looking to accomplish, she would accomplish it.”

  twenty-six

  Marriage Made in Heaven

  Anna and David Shaffer had a relatively quick courtship, and in short order he proposed, but she declined to give him an immediate answer. She held on to the expensive ring he gave her but didn’t wear it. It wasn’t until some months later, in early 1984, that he got the yes he was waiting for, but in the oddest way imaginable.

  Shaffer had accompanied Anna to the collections in Paris, the same trip that sparked the showdown with Jade Hobson and Polly Mellen. During their stay she met her father for drinks at the bar at the grand Ritz Hotel. Anna communicated very little with Charles Wintour at that point for a couple of reasons. Besides being totally immersed in her career in New York, she was still seething over his marriage to Audrey Slaughter and his shabby treatment of her mother.

  As father and daughter shared a rare intimate moment over drinks, Win-tour noticed a “very nice” diamond on the fourth finger of Anna’s left hand. When he asked her what was what, she revealed it was her engagement ring, and Shaffer was the lucky guy.

  Although he knew that Anna and Shaffer were deeply involved, and he thought of the shrink as “an absolute saint” because of how he looked after her professional and emotional interests, Wintour had no idea their relationship had reached the point of marriage. He was thrilled.

  As Wintour admired Anna’s ring, Shaffer suddenly arrived at the bar, and his future father-in-law offered him hearty congratulations. Shaffer “looked slightly stunned,” and had no idea what was going on. Then Anna slowly raised her hand, and Shaffer saw that she’d finally placed the sparkler on, which caught him as much by surprise as it had her father.

  As it turned out, Anna had told Shaffer when he first proposed that she’d put on the ring only when she was finally ready to marry him and not before. She chose that relatively unromantic moment at the Ritz bar with her father by her side to signal to Shaffer that she was now saying yes.

  Later, Charles Wintour said, “David always tells Anna that was the evening Iproposed to him.”

  The curious way Anna handled it all said something about the complexity of her relationship with the man who would become her husband, and which partner was ultimately in control in their relationship. As those who know her have stated, Anna’s “the ultimate control freak” in both her professional and private worlds. It also said something about her relationship with her father and how important his approval was to her at all times, despite her feelings about his remarriage. How many women let their father know they’ve accepted a proposal of marriage before letting the husband-to-be in on it? But her father’s acceptance of her future husband was of supreme importance to Anna. While many in her circle thought Shaffer was an odd choice, he was probably the first man in Anna’s life whom Charles Wintour genuinely approved of—and Anna always was a daddy’s girl who sought his approval.

  Back in New York, Anna dove back into the Vogue wars, and she and Shaffer, still not having set a wedding date, began overseeing the renovation of a four-story mid-nineteenth-century brownstone in Greenwich Village. The house, with its warren of small rooms, had been neglected for years and was a shambles, but Anna envisioned it becoming her dream house.

  She retained a friend, the high-tech New York architect and designer Alan Buchsbaum, to creatively preserve the original details of the house but also make it modernistic and different.

  Anna had met Buchsbaum while she was at New York magazine. She had chosen him along with some other well-known interior designers to do some rooms for a dramatic and idiosyncratic layout. Buchsbaum was an architect-designer to the stars who had done work for Christie Brinkley, Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, and Ellen Barkin, among others
. But he and Anna had a special relationship, and they often socialized, had dinner together, gossiped, and talked style. He was one of many gay men in her circle, mainly because of the fashion world in which she was immersed. Like Anna, Buchsbaum was reserved, but he lit up whenever he saw her. Sadly, he was one of the first American victims of AIDS in her life, at fifty-one, in 1987. After his death, the disease became one of Anna’s causes through a New York fund-raising fashion event called Seventh on Sale.

  According to Davis Sprinkle, who had been Buchsbaum’s business colleague, Anna ran the whole house renovation show. “She really had some very particular ideas about the feeling of the interior,” Sprinkle notes years later. “David was certainly less involved with the entire project. He definitely let her call the shots. She controlled most of the process. If she didn’t like something, she would certainly let me know.” Had she been difficult to work with? “With time,” he says, “we forget the bad stuff.”

  With a fetish for neatness and stark minimalism, Anna wanted lots of open space, so walls were torn down, and at least one room, the dining room, had a pair of columns rather than a door marking the entrance. “Working at a magazine is an endless feast for the eyes; you spend your days looking at things,” she once said in discussing the renovation. “Therefore, I prefer a more calm environment at home.”

  Along with his work on the house, Buchsbaum designed a high-tech and elegant power desk for Anna, which later was marketed by the French firm Ecart International as the “Wintour Table.” Its wooden frame and legs, set on the diagonal, were made of ebonized mahogany, and its top was a lacquered sheet of cold steel. Anna prized the desk more than anything she owned and had it shipped twice across the Atlantic—when she took over British Vogue and when she returned to become editor in chief of House & Garden and then American Vogue.

  Like her bob and sunglasses, the desk became an element of the Wintour signature, and she was still running things from behind it in 2004 in her second decade in charge of Vogue. She has described it as “very clean,” “a bit quirky,” and having “a sense of humor.” The desk has no drawers because she said she likes to have “everything out in the open,” and she loves its narrowness, because “I don’t want people to feel far away when they’re talking to me. . . . It’s not so corporate.” (Because Anna’s desk was a table, anyone could see through the bottom. “It was funny,” recalls Laurie Schechter, “because Anna sat behind her desk like a man, with her legs apart . . .”)