Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  It would only get worse.

  The more traditional stories, the fashion shoots at country castles, were scratched, replaced by models toting briefcases at Lloyd’s of London.

  “She wanted smiling, happy, athletic, professional pictures,” declared Tilberis. “She wanted saneness and sameness. It was the end of life as we knew it.”

  Anna ordered the complete renovation of Beatrix Miller’s office, which was expedited over one weekend. One wall was knocked down to make a new entrance, all walls were painted linen white, Anna’s Buchsbaum desk and a Biedermeier sofa were delivered, bookshelves for bound volumes of the magazine with a large NO SMOKING sign on one shelf were installed, and the carpets were torn up and the floors finished to a gleam. Now she was ready to get down to the business of chopping heads.

  Anna’s debut issue, with a circulation of around 170,000 (big for Britain, minuscule for the United States) appeared on the newsstands in August 1986. The size of the type was larger, the graphics had a sleeker look, and sections like travel and “Men in Vogue” were moved from the back to the body of the magazine. Anna had plans for additional arts coverage, more health and fitness stories, celebrity profiles, and even a horoscope—all in all, as American as a women’s magazine can get.

  Excised from the masthead were two fashion editors, the living editor, the restaurant critic, the associate editor for features, the nutrition editor, and some others. Anna added another high-ranking fashion editor, her friend Michael Roberts, to work with Coddington, who was one name above his on the masthead; she remained fashion editor but he was given the fancier title of fashion director. Tilberis got a raise and was promoted from fashion editor to executive fashion editor. (The raise was unexpected, and when Tilberis said to Anna, “I don’t know what to say,” her boss’s response was a chilly “You could say thank you.”)

  Anna kept Georgina Boosey as managing editor. She’d been at Vogue since the midfifties and knew everything there was to know about production, printing, and budgets—important information Anna needed. Anna brought in a new arts editor, a beauty editor, a senior fashion editor, and two lower-level fashion editors. Her friend Emma Soames, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, was brought back to Vogue as features editor, and four fashion assistants were added to the staff list, all with perfect Vogue first names—Phillipa, Arabella, Annabelle, and Venetia. Gabe Doppelt was listed as Anna’s assistant, the job Laurie Schechter had passed on.

  Among the first to be fired, curiously, were close Wintour family friends and longtime colleagues of her father, among them Alex Walker, the august film critic of the Evening Standard who played with Anna as a child and for more than sixteen years wrote a monthly show business column for Vogue. Another was Milton Shulman, the Evening Standard’s drama critic who began his newspaper career with Charles Wintour and had a similar deal with Vogue to write a cinema column.

  Milton Shulman was the first to get the pink slip. After it happened, he called Walker and said, “ ‘You’re next.’ And I said, ‘No, don’t be silly’ And then, of course, when I did get sacked, Milton rang up and said, ‘I told you so.’”

  Almost two decades after he was pink-slipped, Walker was still upset and saddened by Anna’s rude and frigid handling of him. “I’m a well-brought-up child, and I would have thought it would have been perfectly easy for someone in Anna’s position to call me up, particularly because she knew me personally, and say, ‘Alex, I’m making a lot of changes. I want it to be a different magazine from Beatrix’s. I know you’ve been here a very long time and I hope you don’t mind if I thank you very much, and say well done, and hope you’ll be able to contribute occasionally’

  “There was none of that. The work that I’d written in advance simply didn’t appear in the magazine. I was paid for three months, and that was the end of it—never a letter, nothing, absolutely nothing. I thought it was an absence of politeness, not an absence of gratitude, because there was no reason why she should be grateful. For her, it was easier to exert power through the negative aspect of dropping someone rather than dropping a line and saying, ‘I’m sorry’ Charles would never have handled it in such a backhanded way. He would have said, ‘I don’t think things are working out. Have you anywhere else you’d like to go?’

  “I’d had a good time with Beatrix, and I contributed regularly once a month for sixteen and a half years, so my career wasn’t being nipped in the bud. I just felt saddened that there was a lack of social grace in how she handled it.” (In 2002, a journalist who wrote a profile of Anna for the London Times asked her if she found it difficult firing a loyal family friend like Walker. “Well, I’m sure it was,” she responded briskly. “I’m afraid I don’t remember.”)

  A few years after Anna was named editor in chief of American Vogue, Walker was in New York “full of himself,” as he notes, because he’d just been named critic of the year in the British annual press awards. He was walking along Madison Avenue and suddenly realized he was in front of the Condé Nast building and decided to go in and say hello to Anna, wish her well—he held no grudge against her.

  The receptionist at the lobby desk called upstairs and Anna’s assistant answered. When he explained who he was, he was told she was very busy. After he said he just wanted to say hello, Anna got on the line, asked two quick questions—how he was and what he was doing in New York. As he started to explain, she cut him off, saying, “I hope you enjoy yourself. Give my regards to the people back home. Good-bye.” Click.

  Once again, Walker notes, “I felt crushed, not in vanity but simply by the fact that it would have been nice for her to say, ‘Oh, do come up. How nice to see you again.’ But—nothing. Anna always had her order of priorities. People like myself simply didn’t feature in them.”

  Drusilla Beyfus Shulman knew it was only a matter of time before she faced Anna’s guillotine. She’d known Anna as a child and a teen, was a longtime friend and colleague of Charles Wintour’s, and liked and respected Nonie Wintour. But she viewed Anna as “a threat to all editors” at the magazine. “When Anna was appointed, her first statement was that she wanted to move the magazine up a generation or two. I worked for British Vogue for seven years, was close to Beatrix Miller, and knew Grace Mirabella. I belonged to the old guard, so I realized it was only a question of time.”

  The firings and the general all-around shakeup at the venerable fashion monthly were watched closely by a gleeful and gloating British press. Anna’s firm and frosty Americanized management style and high-profile visibility became fodder for the pundits of Fleet Street. She was dubbed “nuclear Win-tour” by press and staff, and one scribe described what was going on at Vogue as “the Wintour of Our Discontent.” Even her retired father’s old paper, The Evening Standard, now under new management, noted Anna’s “habit of crashing through editorships as though they were brick walls, leaving behind a ragged hole and a whiff of Chanel.”

  One of those covering fashion for The New York Times at the time was Michael Gross, who wrote a column called “Notes on Fashion.” He was able to schedule an interview with Anna while he was covering the collections, and it was then that he learned that she despised the adjectives the British press had been using to describe her. That became clearly evident the moment he walked into her office and the first words out of her mouth were, “You will not refer to me as ‘nuclear Wintour.’” She wasn’t kidding. If he wanted the interview, he had to pledge he would not use those words. Anna didn’t want Si Newhouse and Alex Liberman reading the Times and seeing what they thought of her in London, if they didn’t already know, or care.

  Gross agreed to Anna’s condition. After the interview, he went back to his office and, having now spent some time with her and finding her “chilly and a little bit forbidding,” he described her in his story as “tightly coiled.” But the two words were edited out. When he complained, he was told by an editor, “You can’t describe Anna Wintour as an asp,’ and I said, ‘It’s accurate. She’s tightly coiled. That’s what she is.�
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  Anna was constantly reporting back to Liberman in New York. She was determined to keep him on her side, knowing he might be hearing some negative talk about the way she was handling things. She was concerned that the distance between London and New York might not make the heart grow fonder, so she kept him in the loop, at least for now.

  “Anna was very possessive of Alex, of their relationship,” a colleague of both observes. “With Liberman you were always aware of his position and that he had the power of life and death over your career. He was a snake, a hypocrite, and you had to be to survive in that environment. That’s how he survived all those years. Anna had to be very political to really thrive and survive in that climate. Alex was the head of it, so everybody followed his lead. Alex established the corporate culture at Vogue, at Condé Nast. His thing was to divide and conquer. He also was the ultimate father figure. You wanted to please him.”

  With all of that in mind, Anna sent him dummies of her layouts for his approval and phoned him often asking if he liked a particular cover. And she sometimes requested his help. “When she had problems with the front of the book,” he once stated, “she came to New York and we redesigned it for her.”

  In London, Anna cracked down on photographers, demanding that they turn in everything they shot, giving them less creative freedom. When she was a fashion editor in the trenches in New York, she accepted their choice of the best of the best shots. Now, however, as boss woman, she wanted every single roll of film, every print, every Polaroid to be turned over to the fashion editor overseeing the shoot. Anna would have final approval. Where the photographer once was the key, if not lead, creative member of the team, the fashion editors at British Vogue now were given greater importance and power under Anna—that is, as long as they carried out her vision.

  The New York fashion photographer Andrea Blanche, who had her innings with Anna in the past, was traveling through Europe when she got word that Anna had a couple of assignments for her. She was both delighted and apprehensive, having been burned by her before. Looking back, Blanche believes Anna’s decision to use her again “was definitely political because she knew Liberman liked me. I’m a good photographer, so why not have me work for her.”

  Blanche had shot for British Vogue when Bea Miller was editor, so she thought she knew the terrain. But that was then. Anna now wanted the photos to be “very up, joyful”—models smiling, jumping, and running.

  Blanche, on the other hand, was more artsy, and her photos tended to be moody and sexual. While Anna gave Blanche no special instructions and didn’t say make it upbeat, the photographer was aware that Anna had done a one-eighty from the old days. “The things she was doing when she worked at New York magazine were much more aesthetic, but when she started working for British Vogue she was doing things that were more lively, more commercial.”

  The assignments were simple enough for Blanche—one was shooting casual clothes in the studio, the other photographing a model in different cocktail dresses in various locations around London. Blanche shot thousands of frames for the latter, not atypical, and one of the pictures was of the model getting into a London taxi with her arms enthusiastically in the air, a big toothy smile on her perky face, a very natural moment, looking very buoyant. Working with a young Vogue fashion editor, Blanche went through her shots and decided to send all but the “natural moment” frame to Anna. When the editor protested, Blanche told her to forget it, she didn’t like the photo. After all, it was her eye, the photographer’s eye, that made such decisions. Or so she thought.

  “We had three garbage bags filled with thirty-five-millimeter slides, and I sent only three or four shots from each situation to Anna, which is what I sent to Vogue all the time,” Blanche says.

  A few days later Anna called and demanded to see everything Blanche had shot.

  “I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that. That’s all I send to American Vogue and that’s all I’m sending to you.’ And then Anna said, ‘I want to see that shot of the girl with her hands in the air. I want to see that shot!’”

  While Anna could be furious on the inside, she rarely, if ever, showed anger on the outside, so controlled was she. But this time, sitting in her hotel room, Blanche felt Anna’s fury burning through the phone line.

  “She got hysterical that she wasn’t going to get the film,” she says. “She became unglued. She wasn’t as calm and collected as I knew her to be. The pitch of her voice kept rising. I thought it was a bit amusing to hear her sound that way. I said, ‘No, I threw the picture away, I edited it out,’ or whatever, because I didn’t like it, didn’t think it was up to my standards.

  “Whenever a question arose with Liberman, ninety-nine percent of the time he would give me my way. So I wasn’t used to somebody being that demanding. In all the time I knew Alex, maybe he once questioned how much film I sent him, and then when I talked to him about it, it was fine. I don’t remember ever having to send more film. It was just something that wasn’t done, and my judgment was never questioned.

  “Anna wanted the power and the creative control. She got that if she saw all the film. Then it’s not my decision, the photographer’s decision, but her decision. It makes the photographer more dispassionate.”

  Blanche heard nothing more about it. Because of the dispute over that one photo, she never worked for Vogue again. She says that when she later went into therapy, Anna, Liberman, and the insanity at Vogue constantly came up in sessions with her shrink.

  Several months after Anna’s fit over the photo, the photographer was leafing through British Vogue when she came upon her cocktail dress layout. And there, right in the center, was the disputed picture Anna had demanded and that Blanche had refused to turn over.

  “I was really surprised when I saw that picture, and I laughed, and I really felt sorry for that poor fashion editor,” says Blanche. “I can hear Anna saying, ‘Well, you’ve got to go back and. find that shot.’ And so there it was in the magazine. That editor had to go through every single slide—three garbage bags full, several thousand slides—to find that one shot. That’s a lot of work.

  “But that incident shows how driven Anna is. And I have to say, I tip my hat to her. Who could be angry when somebody is so determined and perseveres like that. I thought that was quite something.”

  twenty-nine

  Lover, Friend, Mother

  By 1986, Anna’s former lover and longtime soul mate Jon Bradshaw, who had helped her so much over the years, was in the midst of a personal and professional midlife crisis, while she was skyrocketing to the top.

  At forty-eight, he was especially despondent about the state of his career. His first serious book, a biography called Dreams That Money Can Buy, about the wild and tragic life of 1930s torch singer and playgirl Libby Holman, had been panned by critics.

  Bradshaw had worked obsessively for five years on the book, enlisting talented author friends like A. Scott Berg to help in the rewriting, and had had big dreams of it becoming a bestseller and being made into a movie. He also had been involved in cowriting a screenplay about the “Lost Generation” in Paris, called The Moderns, and was working on a novel about a James Bond-ish character much like himself, called Rafferty, which he hoped would become a series.

  But nothing seemed to be panning out. While he envisioned himself making it big in Hollywood, where his wife was a successful independent producer, and lolling tanned by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel flirting and drinking, he had little motivation and had to be constantly pushed and prodded by his friends.

  Along with his career lows, he’d let himself go physically. After years of eating rich foods, smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day, drinking heavily, and partaking in recreational drugs, he’d become overweight and was beginning to lose the roguish luster that had initially attracted Anna and other women and men to him.

  Worse still, around the time of Anna’s thirty-seventh birthday in November 1986, as she was enthusiastically whipping British Vog
ue into shape, Brad-shaw, increasingly dispirited, was whipping himself about how life and success were passing him by.

  Maudlin over drinks with friends, he began talking about his own death and the funeral he wanted for himself.

  One of his confidants during this depressing period was Scott Berg, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Charles Lindbergh. The two had met at a Hollywood party in the late seventies—Bradshaw had conned a waiter into giving him a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, not just a drink, and the two split it. They had bonded around the time Bradshaw got married and Berg’s acclaimed biography of Max Perkins was published.

  Like so many others in Bradshaw’s life, Berg became “obsessed” with Bradshaw. “It was love at first sight,” he emphasizes years later. “I just adored him. I thought he was an old-fashioned rogue, and he first, last, and always reminded me of a kind of toothless bulldog. He snarled and complained, but in fact he was really kind of a softy. Anna was absolutely still calling him, crying on his shoulder. I don’t know that Bradshaw ever lost a friend or a lover. People never let go of him. Anna’s name would come up every now and then. He’d reminisce about when he was with her, and he often talked about how beautiful and attractive she was.”

  To their mutual Hollywood friends, Bradshaw and Berg became thought of as an odd couple, even though Bradshaw was married with an adopted daughter.

  “I can’t tell you to how many dinners people would invite Bradshaw, and I would just sort of show up,” recounts Berg, who in 2003 had only one framed photo on his desk. It was of Bradshaw. “After a while, people learned to just set a place for me. I used to say I was his Margaret Dumont [a character actress in thirties and forties wacky films, including Marx Brothers comedies] and he was my Groucho. He would just sort of be outrageously Bradshaw, and I was the matronly old lady that he would offend.”