Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Women who knew Bradshaw over the years swore he wasn’t gay or bisexual, though there were suggestions of a leaning in that direction in his manner and style. Marilyn Warnick, an American journalist who worked in London and adored Bradshaw, observes, “He was a man who loved women, who liked the way they looked, the way they smelled. He liked their problems, liked talking about their emotional situations. That was certainly the case with me when I was crying on his shoulder about this bastard I was dating at the time. Bradshaw was like a girlfriend, except he was virile and enormous fun. It’s true, though, that men liked him enormously.”

  Sometime in October 1986, Berg was having dinner with Bradshaw at Adriano’s, a trendy restaurant at the top of Beverly Glen in Los Angeles. Bradshaw was drinking heavily, talking about how he hoped to see his adopted daughter, Shannon, grow up, and that led to his talk of dying and a list he bizarrely dictated to Berg of his fantasy memorial service.

  In the predawn hours back at home, Berg wrote down the itinerary for Bradshaw’s future funeral service: who should speak, what they should speak about, and in what order they should speak. That’s the kind of obsessive detail Bradshaw had laid out for him.

  “He wanted Nigel Dempster, his friend in London, to speak. I said, ‘Is he your best friend?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Scott, you’re like some little schoolgirl—“Who’s your best friend?” Nigel’s my mate!’”

  Among other old pals he wanted present was the sixties British actress Fiona Lewis; the queen’s cousin, Patrick Lichfield; Jimmy Bradshaw, his brother, whom most didn’t even know existed; and his journalist pal A.J. Langguth. He didn’t mention Anna, though, probably for his future widow’s sake. He also wanted three memorial services: one at Morton’s in Los Angeles, a second at Elaine’s in Manhattan, and a third in London, not necessarily in that order.

  Berg thought it was all so absurd that Bradshaw was being so mawkish that night. At the same time, he was aware that his friend “was almost a textbook case for how to get heart disease. He ate nothing but red meat. Butter was on everything [Anna had a similar propensity]. His favorite dessert was bananas Foster, which is just bananas, booze, and a lot of butter. It’s just like drinking butter. He was always under some professional pressure, the crunch of being a freelance writer. And once every month he would play a killer game of tennis, just going from zero to one hundred.”

  About a month after that distressing dinner, just a couple of days before Thanksgiving, Berg got home and a call was waiting for him on his machine from another close friend of Bradshaw’s, Jean Vallely, who for years wrote for Esquire and had once been married to one of Washington Post owner Katharine Graham’s sons. She and Bradshaw had bonded and would spend weekends together with his little girl—Bradshaw’s wife often was away on business—and Vallely’s children; they were like two single moms.

  Vallely’s message urgently instructed Berg to get to the UCLA Medical Center: Bradshaw had had a heart attack. He was in intensive care and had not regained consciousness. Berg was dumbstruck. He immediately thought of that dinner and how it now appeared to him that Bradshaw had foreseen his own demise. As it turned out, Bradshaw had collapsed on a tennis court while playing with two pals, Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais, both Brits, who were a successful screenwriting team in Hollywood.

  “Dick put him in the car to drive him home, and by the time they pulled into the driveway he was unconscious, we called nine-one-one,” remembers Bradshaw’s widow, Carolyn Pfeiffer. “He never regained consciousness.”

  Berg and other close friends, including Barbara Leary, the wife of psychedelic drug guru Timothy Leary, rushed to the ICU to see their larger-than-life hero on life support at such a young age. “We’re in intensive care and Barbara Leary looks around to see if any nurses are there and she lights up a cigarette,” recalls Vallely. “Barbara, whom Bradshaw adored, said, ‘Bradshaw wouldn’t have gone this long without a cigarette for any of us.”

  On November 25, three days after he was stricken, Bradshaw died. It was decided that the plug be pulled because it didn’t appear he would ever regain consciousness.

  The next day in the Daily Mail, Nigel Dempster noted his passing and pointed out that “for years Bradshaw lived with Anna Wintour, now editor of Vogue in London, but they split up in 1977 and he moved to California. . . . ”

  Scott Berg had never seen a corpse before, “but somehow I just felt I had to see Bradshaw one last time, and I went to the morgue at UCLA.” He was accompanied by Vallely and Barbara Leary. “The three of us walk into where they keep the dead bodies,” recalls Vallely, “and it’s freezing cold, and there he is, and Barbara says, ‘Oh, my God, I just saw him yesterday, and now he looks awful, just awful!’ And Scott turns to her and says, ‘That’s because he’s dead. Yesterday he wasn’t dead.’”

  Says Berg, “I said good-bye to the Pied Piper, and he was a Pied Piper to many people who loved him.”

  After his death, a story circulated that Bradshaw’s kidney had been donated to a powerful Hollywood studio head, and in exchange someone close to Bradshaw got a three-picture deal from the studio.

  The obituary in the London Times, written by a close female journalist friend of Bradshaw’s, stated that his full name was Jon Wayne Bradshaw. The middle name was an inside joke about how macho he had acted.

  After his death there was talk that his Libby Holman book would be made into a movie starring Debra Winger and that his novel Rafferty would be turned into a film, but nothing ever came of any of that. However, his cowritten screenplay The Moderns was produced, got decent reviews, and starred Keith Carradine and Linda Fiorentino.

  As produced by Bradshaw, the three memorial services came off as planned, including the singing of an old Princeton school song at the service at Morton’s. Bradshaw had once accompanied Berg to an event where it was sung, and he became enamored of it. For Bradshaw, it was all image, even in death, since he had never gone to Princeton, or even graduated from college. But by having the song sung at his memorial service, people might think he was an Ivy Leaguer.

  “He sort of wished he had gone to Princeton,” says Berg. “When he asked me at our last dinner together that the song be sung, I said, ‘Bradshaw, I have a moral problem with that since you didn’t go to Princeton.’ And he said, ‘Well, change the lyric to ‘In Praise of Old Bradshaw.’ And by God when I had the program printed up, I had the lyrics printed out. ‘In praise of old Bradshaw, my boys—hoorah, hoorah, hoorah.’ And everybody got up and sang it. People were just standing there sobbing. It was hilarious.”

  In January, two months after his death, Bradshaw’s widow and their daughter took his ashes to the home they owned in his beloved Jamaica. He was given a formal funeral and his ashes were buried there.

  In London, Anna, hidden behind her sunglasses, attended one of the three memorial services, also held in January, at trendy Church of England St. Paul’s, in Knightsbridge, where debs got married and aristocrats were memorialized. “It was very formal, with a choir, trumpets, famous people—Brad-shaw would have absolutely loved it,” observes his widow Other mourners included Anna’s predecessor at Vogue, Beatrix Miller, who knew and liked Bradshaw and gave him some of his earliest magazine assignments in London. The London Times, which wrote about the service, listed all of the mourners. David Shaffer was not among them, and Anna was listed as “Miss Anna Wintour.” She sat with her mother. Many spoke about Bradshaw, including Anna’s father, who read the lesson; Patrick Lichfield, who gave the main address; and Queen founder Jocelyn Stevens, who read from Dylan Thomas.

  Anna didn’t speak, but someone saw her wipe her eyes under her Ray-Bans.

  “She was devastated—devastated—that Bradshaw was not in her life anymore,” says a colleague. “After the service, she went home and cried her eyes out.”

  One of the most important men in her life was gone. Now one of her closest female friendships was about to end.

  It had been almost a decade since Anna and her best pal growing up, Vivi-enn
e Lasky, had seen each other. The last time had been that hellish weekend in Connecticut.

  Over the intervening years, though, Lasky had kept up close ties with Anna’s brother Jim and with Nonie. It was while Anna was ruling British Vogue that the two onetime bosom buddies got together one last time.

  Lasky, her husband, and their children, two-year-old Nicholas and three-year-old Amanda, had come to London twice in eighteen months to visit her father, who had suffered a heart attack. Lasky’s stepmother had designed to the nines a beautiful grandchildren’s apartment, two floors of a lovely house near Harrods, and she also provided a nanny when they visited. It was during their second stay that Nonie Wintour told Lasky that Anna “would love to see you and the children.”

  Anna was quickly catching up to Lasky on the domestic front. Because of the odd way Anna had acted when Lasky got married, she had come to believe that Anna was jealous of her domesticity. Now Anna had a husband and was only one child away from being even with Lasky in the motherhood sweepstakes.

  In December 1986, around the time of Lasky’s visit, Anna became pregnant again during one of her weekend Concorde jaunts to New York to visit her husband.

  Lasky naturally had qualms about seeing Anna after how badly their last visit turned out. But Nonie assured her that there was no ill will and that Anna really and truly wanted to have a reunion. A few days before the scheduled visit, Lasky’s husband broke his foot and couldn’t accompany her, but her two children and their nanny, Rosie, did. Knowing how upset Lasky had become the last time she saw Anna, Lasky’s husband instructed the nanny to “watch out for my wife.”

  Lasky, her small brood, and Rosie, the newly proclaimed bodyguard, arrived around three for tea at the Wintours’ house and were greeted by David Shaffer, who came to London to be with his family as often as his work in New York permitted. It was the first time Lasky had met him. “I was like, this is who she picked? He had no charisma, just seemed old and tired. He wasn’t a handsome fellow and was balding. My thought was, ‘If this is one of the great child psychiatrists of the world, we’re all in trouble.’ Warm and fuzzy he wasn’t.”

  Neither was Anna, who barely greeted Lasky and accepted her gift for baby Charles—pants with a corduroy British riding jacket—by responding, “ ‘Oh, how very Ralph Lauren.’ She gave me a look like it was acceptable as a gift.” Anna noted how adorable Lasky’s children were. And that was that.

  As Anna’s and Lasky’s nannies disappeared to the kitchen to get cookies for the children, Anna turned to another woman in the room, whom Lasky hadn’t noticed at first, and proceeded to chat with her, ignoring Lasky completely and never introducing her.

  “Her husband never once went over to whisper in Anna’s ear, ‘You’re ignoring your friend, darling.’ My husband was very protective, very proper, the kind of person who would have gone over and said, ‘What’s going on here?’”

  Lasky sat on a couch, as if she didn’t exist, about to burst into tears. Anna and the other woman—lots of makeup, red streaks in her hair, most likely someone from Vogue—sat facing away from her “like I was chopped liver. I thought, ‘Well, I put myself in this situation,’ but Nonie had said, ‘Anna really wants to see you.’ If my husband had been there, he would have said, ‘We’re leaving now.’”

  As she looked around the house, Lasky was surprised at how badly furnished it was. “It came furnished and it was hideous,” she remembers. “I wondered how Anna could bear this ugly furniture because she cared so much about that kind of thing and was such a snob about it.”

  The fact that Anna hadn ’t redone the place to her very precise tastes was a strong clue that she knew her stay at British Vogue was temporary and that she’d soon take over Grace Mirabella’s office in New York.

  Thankfully for the upset and embarrassed Lasky, Anna’s mother and brother arrived earlier than expected.

  “Nonie said, Anna, why haven’t you served anything yet? I thought this was a tea party. Vivienne’s come all the way from America. Where are the things you ordered? Where’s the tea?’”

  Anna rolled her eyes and instructed Shaffer to get the housekeeper to bring up the tea and food from the kitchen.

  Watching husband and wife interact for the first time, Lasky didn’t see a match made in heaven. “I didn’t see the rapport. I saw no chemistry whatsoever,” she recalls. “What I’d seen with Bradshaw and her, here I saw nothing.”

  Mainly, Lasky couldn’t believe that this visit with Anna was a repeat of the last horrific one. “It was god-awful, a really awkward, bad afternoon,” she says. “I asked her husband to call for a taxi for my nanny to take the children home. My nanny said, ‘If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed how rude and unfeeling she was, and this was your best friend.’ We left Anna with her friend in the living room to get away from that situation, and I said to Jim and Nonie, ‘Do we have to stay any longer? Once I get my children off to their destination, let’s go,’ and they said, ‘That’s a good idea, we’ll have more time together,’ and they whisked me away. We had a lovely evening together. What happened was not discussed. Not one word was said about Anna’s rude behavior. My mother might have apologized for my poor behavior. Nonie said nothing.”

  And that was that. Lasky had had it with Anna. After a close bond that was cemented more than two decades earlier, they never spoke to or saw one another again.

  In 2003, Lasky, her voice choking with emotion after having looked back on all those years as Anna’s friend, had no answer as to why she treated her the way she did. Yet, she notes, “Anna’s still part of my life, like an unfinished sentence.”

  On her visit to London, Lasky was surprised to see how drastically Nonie Wintour’s circumstances had changed since the divorce. She had moved into a simple, tiny town house in a rather drab area far from the vibrant center of London where all of her friends were, many with whom she had lost touch or simply severed contact. “She seemed sadder,” notes Lasky.

  After the divorce from Charles, Nonie had seemingly disappeared from the scene altogether, and some thought she might have returned to the United States to live with her sister, Jean. In fact, she had decided to live alone in the working-class suburb of Balham and to drown herself in her social work. Blue-collar Balham, a part of which was known for street prostitution through the seventies and eighties, also was a target for comics like Peter Sellers who poked fun at the place in a popular British sketch called, “Balham, Gateway to the South.”

  The one Evening Standard staffer who always was a favorite of Nonie’s from the early days was Alex Walker, who was shocked by Nonie’s new lifestyle. “Balham’s not the part of London where I ever would have imagined Nonie living,” he says. “It’s not where Nonie would find her kind of intellectual, with-it, stimulating company.”

  Walker had visited Nonie once there but found it all too depressing. “It was a small place she lived in, and everything was a bit cramped, perfectly comfortable but not Nonie’s style,” he recalls. “There was a wariness about mentioning Charles. One didn’t do it. It was as if Charles didn’t exist.

  “It struck me that she was filling her time with social work. There were all kinds of files in her place, case histories and so on that she brought home from her office. Nonie was probably doing very good work with unfortunate children, and I would guess many of them were in the Balham area. She had resigned herself to that life.

  “Nonie had made her choice, and her choice did not lie with the friends she had known when she was married to Charles. It lay in the work that she had accustomed herself to doing and felt compelled to do.

  “Both Nonie and Charles believed in suffering in silence,” Walker observes. “Nonie was a Boston Brahmin character who believed life was hard. And Charles was an English county man who thought that any expression of emotion was a bit vulgar.”

  After that one dismaying visit to Balham, Walker invited her to dinner at a fine restaurant in London to cheer her up, to talk about books and films, their favor
ite mutual passions. But then he lost track of her. She’d moved and no one knew where or how to contact her.

  After years of her husband’s womanizing along with their other problems, she had come to despise marriage. Anna, though, had a different, more positive view of the state of matrimony, at least one that she had begun expressing to colleagues in London during her editorship at British Vogue—a time when she and her husband talked daily by phone but were lucky if they saw each other and spent time together with the baby once or twice a month.

  “Anna was going on and on like she was on a soapbox about marriage and how she felt it identifies you,” recalls one of her colleagues. “She said she thought marriage was a very important thing. She said, ‘Marriage says who you are.’ She said people should be committed enough to say who they are. Of course, she never used her married name. I got the feeling she felt it was more bold to be married than not married. But I thought it sounded more like a shrink talking than her talking. I thought it was David talking through her.

  “I asked her about her marriage. I said, ‘He’s so much older than you, don’t you think about that?’ And she said, ‘Oh, he has the most energy of anybody I know. I talk to him many times a day and I miss him.’

  “And then she said, ‘Right now, I think he’s wonderful.’ She left it kind of like it might not be forever.”

  thirty

  Beginning of the End

  Liz Tilberis and Grace Coddington felt that their days were numbered, that Anna was out to get them.

  Ratcheting up the pressure, Anna constantly demanded reshoots. Cod-dington’s first had to be done three times until Anna finally signed off. When Coddington was on location, Anna commanded that she shoot a Polaroid of the setup (before the actual shooting started) and have a courier rush it back to the office. Anna would then scrutinize it and telephone Coddington, declaring, “Like it” or “Don’t like it.” If she didn’t, which was often, Coddington would have to start all over, wasting time and costing the company money.