With the renovation at the house ongoing, Anna and Shaffer rented a loft with Hudson River views in what was then the far West Village, near the West Side Highway. The apartment, which permitted Anna to see the QE2 arrive and depart, was in a forbidding building that had once been a penitentiary. The owner of the loft was a British woman named Charlotte Noel, who had been part of Anna’s small circle when she first arrived in New York a decade earlier. Noel was escaping the area and moving uptown, and Anna and Shaffer decided to lease her place because it was close to their town house renovation and friends in the area.
“It was an ordinary loft with very little furniture and not very comfy, and the area was very grim, pretty ugly, quite bleak when they rented from me,” she says. “Dead bodies were being fished out of the river, the Mafia controlled all the garbage trucks, and there were all those gay S&M clubs. It was really rough.” But Anna and Shaffer didn’t mind, thought it was a cool milieu, and took the place after a brief negotiation over the rent.
“Anna was really very brusque, very businesslike, and David was rather sort of pathetic, asking things like, ‘Could I go and get the sofas covered?’” recalls Noel. “What I’m saying is, Anna did nothing, and so he was left to do a lot of what you would think of as sort of womanly tasks. It was an odd relationship, and I always thought it was an odd coupling. They didn’t seem to match physically or mentally.”
Still others had an opposing view—that the editor and the psychiatrist were in love and were good for each other. Shaffer had intellect, was a solid father figure, and Anna was cool and sexy and younger, someone who was good for the shrink’s ego and gave him panache. “Anna wanted children. She wanted stability,” a friend notes.
On Friday September 7, 1984, in their town house on MacDougal Street, Anna and Shaffer, then chief of the child psychiatry department of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, were married in a ceremony conducted by New York Civil Court Judge Elliott Wilk. In two months, Anna would turn thirty-five. Shaffer was forty-eight. The brief notice in the next day’s New York Times, probably the first time Anna had ever received a mention in the paper, noted that she would retain her last name. Of her previous work history, only Harpers & Queen and New York magazine were mentioned, presumably based on information she had submitted.
Other than the engraved invitations that had gone out, there was nothing fancy about what one guest describes as “a very beautiful, very simple, very quiet intimate family wedding—very civil, not splashy”
After the ceremony, all of the guests, about twenty, including Anna’s divorced parents, her father’s new wife, Anna’s siblings, and work friends of Anna’s, such as Ed Kosner, Jean Pagliuso and her husband, Laurie Schechter, and Georgia Gunn, adjourned to the living-room area, where a long table was set up for a celebratory supper.
At the table, Charles Wintour stood and offered a toast to his favorite child and her groom. He told the gathering that Anna was finally fulfilling a dream, to be an editor at Vogue. Years later Anna recalled that day: “My father is enormously kind in a subtle kind of way. At my wedding, when he made his speech, he mentioned each of David’s two children at length to show them they were an important part of the family.” (The two teenage boys from Shaffer’s first marriage would live with the newlyweds.)
“It was a lovely wedding,” says Schechter. “They had written their own vows. To me it seemed like a good match.”
Others, like Anna’s colleague and friend Paul Sinclaire, felt differently and were surprised that they had tied the knot. “I would have bet that the wedding would not have happened, and if it did their marriage would have lasted a year and a half, let alone having two kids,” he says, looking back years later, after the affair that ended the marriage. “I think she married David because he was so smart. A beauty he never was.”
Some seven months after the nuptials, around April 1985, Anna became pregnant.
That same month, in London, an event occurred that also would have great implications for her future. After twenty-one years at the helm of British Vogue, fashion doyenne Beatrix Miller announced her departure, saying she was leaving to write books. Like Anna, Miller was a tough cookie and a taskmaster. To a potential employee, she would proclaim gruffly, “You have exactly two minutes. Tell me about yourself.” She once called some four dozen staffers into her office and told them, “I want you all to know that, as far as I’m concerned, the July issue is a write-off There is a mistake on page 136.” But she was beloved. Now the staff pondered their future as rumors began to float across the pond that a nuclear blast in the skinny form of Anna Wintour was coming their way. But top management at Condé Nast—Si Newhouse and Alex Liberman—remained mum as to who Miller’s replacement would be.
Meanwhile, the pregnant Anna was busy pushing her way around the front of the book at Vogue and becoming stepmother to Shaffer’s sons.
Mutual friends of Shaffer’s ex-wife and of Anna and David Shaffer observe that the psychiatrist “must have applied his own brand of psychology to the kids” because they turned out so well. “The boys were always extraordinary and precocious in the best way, and always seemed close to their parents,” says Dianne Benson.
Shaffer’s sons occupied the ground floor of the couple’s beautiful town house, starkly furnished with simple but elegant English and American antique pieces—a Federal sofa, a Queen Anne tallboy, Empire chairs, lots of books, bare wood floors, area rugs. Anna lived the life Vogue represented, and that was a gold bullion asset, which had made her even more of an attraction to Alex Liberman and ultimately to Si Newhouse.
The top floor of the house had been gutted from four small rooms into the couple’s large master bedroom suite, minimally furnished with a bed covered with a simple white down comforter, two Victorian slipper chairs, a Queen Anne bureau, an English oak chest, and Anna’s collection of small pieces made of ivory. The bathroom was large—British-style, the kind Anna was used to—and had a fireplace, an old porcelain tub, a marble sink, a large wood-framed mirror from England, and a nineteenth-century wicker chair.
Anna had decided that every room had to be airy, open, uncluttered; she didn’t want a Victorian mélange, which she believed “can look ridiculous when it’s re-created in New York apartments. . . . When it’s genuine nobody does it better than the English,” she boasted in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, which in 1986 deemed the elegant house and its powerful Vogue creative director now worthy of her first big spread.
Regarding Americans and their level of taste, Anna said they were too brand-name and designer driven, which was a curious statement from an editor at a magazine that promoted and derived its power and revenue from designer and brand names. Nevertheless, she thought the Yanks (wealthy ones, presumably) were overly obsessed “with owning Biedermeier this or Josef Hoffman that,” and that “designer homes” bored her to death. She noted that some of her neighbors didn’t “get” the redo of her house. When invited to tour her domicile, she said they “looked around quite perplexed and said, ‘I guess this is what you call a loft house.’”
Back at the office, Anna had given Laurie Schechter more responsibility—of coordinating photographers, locations, and such for the nonfashion front of the book, which Anna now loathingly had to handle at Liberman’s directive alongside Amy Gross. With the Schechter promotion, Anna announced that she would hire a secretary/editorial assistant to take over the day-to-day routine work. Schechter was relieved—for about a minute.
The new girl was the Hon. Isabella Delves Broughton Blow—Issy (pronounced Izzy) to her friends. She was a busty, voluptuous, beet-red-lipped, microminiskirted eccentric Brit with a braying laugh who was sort of well connected back in Mother England. Her grandfather was the wealthy businessman Jock Delves Broughton, the central character in the nonfiction book and movie White Mischief. During World War II, in Kenya, the jealous Broughton had fatally shot a playboy named Lloyd Erroll, who was fooling around with his beautiful
and much younger wife, Lady Diana Broughton (played by Greta Scacchi in the 1988 film). Lady Diana was Issy’s grandmother.
So into the Vogue wars came this fascinating new character as Anna’s aide de camp.
Blow saw an immediate bond with Anna. “She loved fashion with a passion like me. If you look at her, she surrounds herself with obsessive people like André Leon Talley, all absolutely obsessed with fashion.”
Blow says that most of her work for Anna consisted of simple errands like taking her shoes to the shoemaker to be reheeled—“really dull stuff.” She said she was “very frightened” by Anna’s “organization and steely determination. When someone rang up, Anna put the message in a folder. Everything would be filed, every conversation would be filed, every single piece of paper.” To avoid being criticized by Anna for being sloppy, Blow began washing her own desk at the end of the day with Perrier.
She also saw during her nine-month stint how much Anna leaned on her husband for moral support. “David used to guide her,” she says. “I don’t think she could have done the job without him. David was a great strategist. He was so rational and precise. Because he was a psychiatrist, he thought more clearly. She spoke to him on the phone all the time. As a psychiatrist he would know how to deal with people.”
The bottom line, though, was that she found Anna to be “an inspiration. I idolized her.”
Anna liked Blow, Schechter says, “because she was a character. Issy was like a wacky, eccentric British bird. She would come to work in the miniest of skirts and fishnet hose that had rips, probably not because she meant it to be that way but because she tripped and ripped them, and her lipstick was always off the side of her mouth.”
Blow’s style began to impact the well-oiled functioning of the creative director’s office and a war within a war started. Schechter found herself working twice as hard to make sure Blow, who spent a lot of time talking on the phone to friends, was functioning. And other more serious issues arose, such as the time Blow “lost a photographer’s portfolio” and “he was threatening to sue for a hundred thousand dollars,” asserts Schechter. When Schechter first started working for Anna at Vogue, she lost about ten pounds because she’d run up and down thirteen flights of stairs to complete errands rather than waste time waiting for elevators. Now, with Blow on board, “I was near a nervous breakdown. Everyone adored her because she was Dizzy Issy—‘Isn’t she funny? Look at her torn stockings.’ But she was vitriolic toward me.”
After a time, she could take no more and complained to Anna. “I finally had to go to her because she was going to lose me—not so much because I was going to quit, but because I was going to fall over.”
As luck would have it, Blow had bonded with Anna’s protégé, André Leon Talley, who “adored” her and viewed her as an eccentric muse, and asked her to come to work as his assistant. “After three months,” says Schechter, “she and André weren’t talking,” and she left.
After she returned to England, Blow tried unsuccessfully to freelance stories for Vogue but quickly learned that “Anna’s a great one for rejecting pieces. She’s famous for it, if it’s not right. She’s a perfectionist.”
By 2004, Blow had become famous in her own right in England. As a fashion stylist, she had worked for British Vogue and now was fashion director of the London Sunday Times and Tatler, where she kept a rack of her own clothing, aside from the forty-thousand-dollar custom-built closet she had at home. Over the years she has been credited with discovering such designers as Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy.
“When I go to the shows, Anna always asks me to the American Vogue parties. She always says she was proud of me when I worked for her. They call her the ice maiden, but I don’t think she is an ice maiden at all. I think she’s like the Concorde, flying through the clouds.”
twenty-seven
Baby Makes Three
Anna didn’t boast to friends and Vogue colleagues—the few with whom she communicated—that she was going to have a baby, and most couldn’t even tell she was pregnant, since she stayed thin and perfect-looking.
When one colleague finally found out she was with child, she asked Anna how she kept it so together. Anna’s response? “Willpower.”
Instead of wearing boring, unchic maternity clothes, she simply opened the back of her short, tight Chanel skirt a bit to make room for her tummy, and always wore the suit jacket when she was in the office, which helped to conceal her delicate condition. No comfortable shoes for her, either; she still clicked around in her stilettos. She was as energetic as ever. As her number one lady-in-waiting, Laurie Schechter, marveled, “It wasn’t like she was rushing out to go throw up. She sailed through it.”
One of the few who were in on her secret early on was her own father. The wife of a British journalist who had been mentored by Charles Wintour in the early days at the Evening Standard recalls running into him one day at the BBC, and he was beaming. “She asked him how he was doing and he was just beside himself with excitement. He said, ‘My daughter Anna’s going to have a baby, and if it’s a boy she’s going to call him Charlie after me.’ It was very thrilling for him.”
When Anna finally began to reveal to select female colleagues that she was “up the duff,” as they say in England, a number of them were taken aback, mainly because they couldn’t imagine her taking any time from her career to raise a child, let alone envision the formidable ice queen holding a baby to her breast and being nurturing, warm, and loving. Anna Wintour, driven editor, yes; Anna Wintour, mother, no. To some, it seemed like an oxymoron.
“I thought it was kind of disconcerting to see her as a mother,” says the photographer Andrea Blanche. “I just never saw her that way. You know, warmth, those qualities that I attribute to motherhood. I just never envisioned Anna like that.” The photographer Jean Pagliuso happened to be on the elevator with Anna after a meeting at Vogue and “she just sort of dropped it as an aside,” Pagliuso recalls. “At that time she didn’t want anybody to know she was pregnant. She seemed happy, more than I would think for Anna.”
Along with a grandchild, “Chilly Charlie” Wintour was going to have his favorite offspring, a chip off the old block, back home in Britain, too.
Rumors had begun circulating in the British press in the summer of 1985 that Anna was the leading contender for Beatrix Miller’s job as editor in chief of British Vogue and that Anna had spent a week in London being wooed but had turned down the offer. She told Nigel Dempster at the Daily Mail she wasn’t taking the job because her husband had taken on a research project on teen suicide, his specialty, and couldn’t leave New York, and she wasn’t going without him. “I’d love to work in London and have a British baby, but he can’t leave,” she stated with a straight face.
Some weeks later, on September 18, 1985, Condé Nast managing director Bernard Leser confirmed the rumors. After top secret plotting and planning, and putting off the press, it had been decided that Anna would, in fact, become the new editor of British Vogue.
Unbenownst to most, Anna had been in on some of the clandestine talks and wasn’t exactly thrilled with the outcome. She had lobbied strenuously, and believed she deserved, to replace Grace Mirabella now rather than later. But Newhouse and Liberman convinced her that the time would come. She even played the motherhood card and complained that she’d wind up with a transatlantic marriage. But none of it held water with the suits. She had no choice but to play corporate ball.
In making the public announcement, though, Leser did a quick two-step when asked why the appointment had taken so long. “American Vogue did not relish the idea of losing her,” he said, which was fine for press and public consumption.
But for those in the know who worked with her at American Vogue, the sooner Anna left, the better. There was no sense of loss, only glee. Her promotion was a dream come true and the end of a nightmare. Her many detractors, especially Mirabella, would finally be rid of her.
A brief mention about Anna’s new job appeared in Women
’s Wear Daily, but the British press was breathless with anticipation over the change in command. The Times declared that Miller was “a hard act to follow” and speculated (oh, so wrongly) that Anna “can be expected to stay a decade and display the glamour and eccentricity that have marked out Vogue editors since 1916.”
That group included one who went on to run a fashion house and then spent the rest of her life in bed, another who always wore purple, and one who was a Communist.
The eccentricity of Vogue’s lineage would end with Anna’s reign. It now would be all business.
The Guardian, where Anna’s brother Patrick became a political correspondent, was on the mark, reporting, “In New York, they see her as wintry . . . Wintour is defined by her iron will, the cool single-mindedness, the success . . . the appearance of things.”
The London Times, quoting an unnamed Wintour colleague, described her as “elegance personified . . . Everything about her is the finest, simplest and most exquisite of its kind.” Calling Liberman the “grand panjandrum of the international Vogues,” the Times said he gave Anna “a little extra polish” when he appointed her creative director and “instructed her to ‘use her elbows.’ A minister without portfolio, she sized up the situation and rather quickly became the jewel in the Condé Nast crown.”
Five months pregnant, Anna acted as if she was thrilled, but the job—the flagship Vogue in New York—was still out of her reach. Schechter says Anna saw London as an opportunity to be an editor in chief of another Vogue, but she didn’t show great enthusiasm. “But you don’t ever see Anna get excited. She was never someone to jump up and down and be excited in some vocal way.”
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