If Anna wasn’t overjoyed with the appointment, Mirabella and her court were ecstatically dancing in the halls. Literally. “I was home sick the day they made the announcement,” recalls Jade Hobson. “My colleague Liz Tretter called me to tell me, and I could literally hear hoots and hollers on the floor. It was pandemonium. A lot of people, including myself, were very pleased she was going.”
For Mirabella, the decision to ship Anna to London came as a relief. The editor in chief had had it with the creative director’s aggressive and insensitive attempts to push her out. Mirabella had been pummeled with rumors that she would be axed at any moment and replaced by Anna. The gossip had run rampant, from the lowliest clerk in the mailroom on up, since the day Anna arrived two years earlier. Outside of Vogue, the fashionistas who lunch speculated on nothing else—Grace was out, Anna was in, any day now. The rumors ricocheted from the elegant avenues of Madison, Park, and Fifth to the fashionable Avenue Montaigne in Paris and chic Via della Spiga in Milan. The fashion and general press had a field day speculating, too, chasing anonymous and sometimes well-placed insider tips that an announcement would be made any day that Anna would get the job.
But Mirabella taught herself to ignore the speculation, or otherwise she’d drive herself crazy.
Liberman, who loved to instigate, manipulate, and provoke, knew how Mirabella felt, and while he told his pride and joy, Anna, one thing, he told Mirabella another—comforting her and imploring her not to worry.
“Alex laughed off suggestions that anyone might be after my job,” she said. “And, very solicitously, he led me to believe that keeping Anna Wintour around was in my best interest.” He convinced her that if Vogue didn’t hold on to Anna, the competition, like Harper’s Bazaar, would snap her up.
Mirabella came to believe her nemesis was being groomed to be sent back whence she came to run that other Vogue and that would be the end of that. Later, she realized that by agreeing with Liberman Anna had “dug my grave with my blessing.”
But that was still several chess moves ahead.
For now, Mirabella had to sit back and watch Liberman’s adoration of his protégée.
“He loved her look, her glamour,” the incensed editor in chief noted later. “He loved the intrigue of her clicking around in her high heels, trusted by and trusting no one except him. He thought her work, which combined the glitz of the eighties with elements of street art and design, was brilliantly ‘modern.’ He’d often show up at my office and, with all the pride of a cat presenting a dead mouse to its owner, show me samples of art that Anna Wintour had brought in. ‘Isn’t this wonderful,’ he’d say breathlessly. ‘Look at what Anna has done.’”
And, indeed, Anna had made a visible contribution to the magazine’s look, despite Mirabella’s feelings. Before she was bumped out of the fashion coverage, Anna did a slick story on England’s new designers that was styled by a discovery of hers, a young designer by the name of Vera Wang. Working with the features editor, Anna saw ways to better illustrate front-of-the-book stories to make then “hipper, younger,” notes Schechter, who coordinated many of those stories. One such piece was about the gentrification of and the growing art and music scene in New York’s East Village. But, as Schechter points out, “it wasn’t like Anna was saying, ‘I think we should do a feature on this or that.’” Anna essentially was finding ways to improve the visual level of those stories. She read domestic and foreign fashion magazines constantly, looking for new ideas.
When the announcement was made that Anna was off to jolly old England to run Vogue and modernize “its dowdy, exclusive, and outdated-looking pages,” as Mirabella described it, she patted herself on the back, thinking she had been correct all along about Anna’s future, that it would be in London, not New York, and she’d finally be out of her well-coiffed hair.
Because Anna was pregnant, it was decided that she’d have the baby in New York and afterward cross the pond to take on her latest challenge. Anna was due in January 1986 and scheduled to be in her new office in London that April.
The only difficulty she faced in her final trimester was early contractions, which occurred around Thanksgiving. She was taken to the hospital for a day or two, watched over, and given some drugs. “I remember David joking and saying that the whole reason why she went into early contractions was because the baby wanted to come out and have a good meal,” says Schechter.
In December, friends in the business, those in her circle and hangers-on, started throwing rounds of lunches and dinners for her as time drew near—not for the the birth of the baby but rather for her coming ascension to the throne of British Vogue. On Fifty-seventh Street, at Mr. Chow’s, her pals Michael and Tina Chow feted her and fawned over her. It was one bash after another. As one observer noted, “It was a performance of staggering discipline.”
Right on schedule in January, Anna, at thirty-seven, became a mother for the first time, delivering a healthy boy As promised, she named him Charles in honor of her father.
There was talk that Anna had induced Charlie’s birth so that she could attend the couture collections, which she vehemently denied through her publicist when The Times of London repeated it—a whopping sixteen years later. Anna claimed she took off two months. The story came to prominence from fashion editor Liz Tilberis, who was one of Anna’s detractors when she arrived at British Vogue.
Within what seemed like days, whatever her claim, Anna was back in her office making final preparations for her transfer to London. She asked her trusted lieutenants to join her: Schechter, once again to be her assistant, and Paul Sinclaire, to be a fashion editor. She got neither.
Sinclaire, who had angered Anna by not coming to her wedding because he was out of town, agreed to take the job, but he later backed out and earned Anna’s wrath. “She had asked me to come to English Vogue—she didn’t offer me some enormous position—but I had accepted the job, and she was depending on me. I had already moved a lot and I just thought it’s too big of a drag, I didn’t feel like moving to London. I called her up and she was enraged. David even called me to say, ‘You better come.’ Anna was really, really, really, really angry. She was still mad at me for not coming to the wedding, but my not going to English Vogue put her over the top. Anna saw it as two betrayals.”
Schechter, too, had qualms about going to London. While she saw Anna’s invitation as “an amazing opportunity,” she still wanted to explore other possibilities. Anna gave her exactly one month to do so. “I’m sure she hoped that I wouldn’t find options here and that I would come with her, but I just wanted to see the lay of the land.”
As it turned out, the promised land was Rolling Stone, where the twenty-seven-year-old Schechter became the magazine’s first full-time fashion editor. Anna was seriously disappointed. Later she said she “intellectually understood” Schechter’s decision, “but emotionally it was very hard to take.”
Anna now desperately needed to find an assistant in London she could trust, someone as loyal, sharp, and hardworking as the one she had with her since New York magazine. Anna asked for recommendations. Schechter recalled having some luck with an ambitious young woman who worked for Condé Nast in London named Gabe Doppelt who had done some research for her. She proposed her name—a recommendation she would come to regret. Anna and Schechter would work together again, but her star would fall and Doppelt’s would rise.
By mid-March 1986, Anna, two-month-old Charles, and a full-time nanny were ensconsed in a lovely Victorian town house rented for her by Condé Nast in picturesque and grand Edwardes Square—with its lovely private garden in the center—in chic Kensington. Her temporary home, befitting a Vogue editor, was within walking distance of the old Wintour family home in Phillimore Gardens, where Anna’s interest in fashion first burgeoned some two decades earlier.
Anna complained that the logistics of the move and the transatlantic marriage were “terrible” and claimed at the time she woke up at night in “a cold sweat . . . parts of me think, ‘I’m cr
azy. I should stay home, look after my baby, have a nice quiet life.’ But I didn’t think I wanted to have a kid in New York. I’ve worked so hard for fifteen years [in New York]. . . . British Vogue was always the magazine I wanted to edit. Will it work? Ask me in six months.” Meanwhile, her husband stayed in New York, and both commuted via the Concorde to see each other. Anna’s personal frustration was, in part, taken out on her new colleagues.
The Wintour of British Vogue’s discontent was about to begin.
twenty-eight
Anna s Guillotine
The January 1986 issue of British and American Vogue had the same - model on the cover. In the UK edition, her hair was a bit tousled and the freckles on her face stood out. In the edition produced in New York, she had a more glitzy, glamorous look—a Madison Avenue Madonna, a Barney’s Brat.
Anna, who had arrived in London with a corporate mandate essentially to Americanize British Vogue, compared the two issues and concluded that there weren’t very many women she knew in New York who walked down the street dressed like the models in the out-of-touch Vogue she was taking over. Beatrix Miller used to call her seventy-year-old magazine Brogue to distinguish it from American Vogue, but Anna would trash that concept soon enough. There would be no difference between the two, if she had her way. The fantasy, fancy, and eccentricity that had been Brogue’s signature was about to be pummeled to the ground and, some would later believe, robbed of its singular personality.
A couple of weeks before she started the overhaul and the bloodletting—and blood would flow as she swung her ax—she gave some hints of what was to come to one of the many London fashion scribes lining up at her majesty’s doorstep for interviews. “I enjoy my work, and I work very hard,” Anna declared. “In New York I used to get in at eight and the office was full. When I first started work in London [at Harpers & Queen] we used to droop in around ten.” And then she emphasized (or threatened), “I do think New York brought out my competitive streak.”
Just like the fear that permeated Madison Avenue Vogue for the two years before Anna made her exit, a feeling of dread hovered over the offices of Vogue House on Hanover Square upon her arrival.
Before formally making her entrance, Anna began holding high-level private meetings in her home with the editors who were Beatrix Miller’s top lieutenants: fashion director Grace Coddington, the most senior, and Liz Tilberis, second in command, both of whom would have major battles with Anna. Both knew her from her days in London, were aware of her reputation in New York, and shared mutual friends—and so they didn’t trust her for a second. Moreover, their backgrounds were so very different from Anna’s.
While working as a waitress in the late fifties, Coddington had started to model, often for Vogue, just as the fashion boom of the swinging sixties was kicking off. She was the epitome of the era’s look—tall, skinny, and leggy—and could look haughty or decadent. One of her last photo shoots was conducted by Helmut Newton, who posed her in a tiny black bikini at night, in a swimming pool, wearing red nail polish and sunglasses.
By 1968, her modeling days were numbered and she was hired by Vogue as a fashion editor, where she could be icy, dismissive, and terrifying if she had it in for someone. She was a fashionista big-time, who would go from flaming red hair to dyed punk color at a blink of a perfect eyelash. At the time she joined Vogue, she was married to Anna’s friend, the restaurateur Michael Chow, and cruised around London in a flashy beige convertible Rolls-Royce, an amazing change in lifestyle for a poor girl who grew up eating ham sandwiches for dinner every night.
Liz Tilberis, who long ago had closely bonded with Coddington, was two years older than Anna, the daughter of an arch-conservative ophthalmologist. Her mother came from a wealthy Scottish family that made a fortune in the fabric-dyeing industry. Tilberis was sent to a fancy boarding school, after graduation took a secretarial course, and then went to one of Britain’s finest art schools, where she studied fashion design—around the same time Anna was dropping out of North London Collegiate. Over the years her family’s money disappeared, and by the time Tilberis joined Vogue in the sixties as a lowly intern, she had to earn her keep; there was no private income such as that enjoyed by Anna and by many of the Voguettes with proper backgrounds who worked there in those days—a virtual finishing school populated with socially connected young women who gossiped about who among them was seeing Prince Charles or one of the Beatles.
Tilberis had covered the lingerie market with Anna in the early seventies, when Anna was a junior at Harpers & Queen and Tilberis was just getting her feet wet at Vogue.
While glamorous, these were not high-paying jobs. A story that has made the rounds over the years, apocryphal but on the mark, is of a pretty society girl editorial assistant who complained. “I have to get a real job. Daddy can’t afford to send me to Vogue anymore.”
Coddington wasn’t very interested in the editor in chief’s job when Miller stepped down because of the politics and other obligations involved—she cared only about fashion. The more competitive Tilberis, on the other hand, made her interest known, though she felt she didn’t have much of a chance because of her lack of experience in production and features. She was married to an artist and had two adopted sons. Neither Coddington nor Tilberis knew that Anna was already the chosen heir to the throne.
Miller was disappointed when she heard that Anna got the crown. “Beatrix is not a great admirer of Anna,” says onetime Vogue staffer Drusilla Beyfus Shulman, a friend of Miller’s and of the Wintour family. “She didn’t like Anna’s values. She felt Anna was all about shopping, sex, slickness. Beatrix always tried to imbue Vogue with a kind of higher quality of culture and intellect. That was her aim at Vogue”
When Anna arrived in London, one of the first things on her to-do list was to call Tilberis, offer a perfunctory hello, and demand to know where she could put her fur coats in storage. “No one I knew in London wore furs,” Tilberis stated later, “and Icertainly couldn’t afford them.” Anna also began using Tilberis’s hair salon, swanky MichaelJohn in Mayfair, where celebrity clients have ranged over the years from Tony Blair to Nigella Lawson. Anna used the same cutter, too—an eccentric named Charlie Chan who liked to chatter about his New Age interests while cutting her hair. Anna is said to have told him to put a sock in it.
Anna’s ascension was a gold mine for Private Eye, which published many gossip items about her. It noted that her arrival at Vogue was “the occasion for tears and near hysteria” among the magazine’s fashion writers, who “have long been able to indulge their favourite designers as well as photographers. . . . La Wintour has said she wants ‘total control’ of the content.” Private Eye was getting constant leaks from Vogue insiders. One report had it that Anna had called Vogue’s longtime managing editor, Georgina Boosey, asking if “she knew of a gym that opened at 6 A.M. A little shaken, Boosey said no. ‘Well where do you all go?’ demanded La Wintour incredulously. There has been a sudden rush, I understand, to purchase items of designer sportswear among the tremulous staff.”
Private Eye also broke the story that Anna had negotiated a whopping $160,000 salary for herself, the rent on her house, a car with a full-time chauffeur, and a nanny—“thus lightening the burden of motherhood for her. To maintain social contacts in the states,” the report continued, “the workaholic harpy will be provided with 2 return airfares each month, via Concorde, of course.”
“She was incredibly focused and organized when she got to London,” notes Shulman, a veteran Vogue features editor who would be fired by Anna soon after she took over the magazine. “She just had the baby and immediately went to work straight off the obstetric table.
“Wonderful David Shaffer started to commute by Concorde in order to see her. Charles [Wintour] always referred to him as a saint, and he was. Never be saintly to a wife that’s so ambitious. But David admired her. She was just all so terrific within that narrow compass of fashion. One might ask, is it worth feeling like that about a fashion magazine? A
nd who cares, since it’s just selling advertising, really.” (Some time after Anna’s reign ended at British Vogue, Shulman’s daughter, Alexandra, became its editor in chief. Beatrix Miller is her quasi godmother.)
In her meetings with Tilberis and Coddington, Anna was “civilized,” “polite,” “reassuring.” But Tilberis saw her as having an American outlook on fashion and foresaw herself and others at the magazine “heading for a direct culture clash.”
The British press, such as the Daily Telegraph, noted that Anna was about to do a “major shakeup on one of Britain’s greatest and grandest institutions.” She told the paper, “I want Vogue to be pacy, sharp and sexy. I’m not interested in the super-rich or infinitely leisured (which, of course, she was, as time would tell). I want our readers to be energetic, executive women, with money of their own and a wide range of interests.” Interestingly, that was the same concept Anna had adapted to and carried out a few years back when she was at Savvy. In fact, there was nothing new in the philosophy she was now espousing—but it was new to London.
Anna’s meetings and blunt memos said it all. She was going to turn British Vogue upside down and inside out, and shake out the cobwebs. As Tilberis noted sourly, she was planning to make the magazine “faster and busier, directly addressing the concept of the modern working woman, and it scared the hell out of us. She hated anything . . . too archly British.”
On Anna’s first day on the job, Tilberis had handed to her some black-and-white photos of a model whose head was swathed in bandages—the kind of offbeat layouts she liked to do and that had long been a staple of the magazine. To Anna, Tilberis proudly exclaimed, “This is very new!” Anna, looking as if she’d been handed a bag of soggy fish and chips, replied, “Oh, my God, I’m back in England.”
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