“It was pure harassment and bullying on Anna’s part,” an editor maintains.
Used to the rules of the old regime, Coddington tended to be late—to work in the morning, back from lunch in the afternoon—which infuriated Anna, who once tracked her down to a restaurant and demanded that the former model who had controlled what went onto Vogue’s fashion pages for two decades return to the office posthaste, as if she were a lowly intern.
Tilberis was equally harassed. On the morning of her father-in-law’s funeral, she received a hand-slapping call from Anna, lecturing her that she was over her budget and ordering her not to take her assistant on a scheduled trip to New York. Tilberis was “horrified” and felt she was being “reprimanded like a willful child.”
Anna had a negative attitude about everything Coddington and Tilberis thought or did in regard to fashion. At the “horribly tense” editorial meetings to decide what would go into the magazine, the imperious and dictatorial editor in chief positioned herself on a hard-back chair, and if she didn’t like an idea she’d loudly tap her pencil on the desk, sending a chill through everyone present.
As one staffer who quit in disgust says, “She’s the first female bully I ever met. She treated everyone, except for her own little coterie, like trash. You could tell she got off on it. A real little bully of a woman, and for what? Power for her was what it was all about. Power’s Anna’s aphrodisiac. I mean, Vogue’s just a fashion magazine, a catalog to sell clothes, for God’s sake. And people had to be tormented so she could get a pat on the bum from Liberman and Newhouse, and get Grace Mirabella’s job.”
Anna and the veteran editors were on opposite sides and on a disastrous collision course. “She was horrified at the sort of work I was doing, the iconoclastic images that differentiated British fashion coverage from anything in American magazines,” Tilberis has stated. “I began to wonder how long I’d last and whether it was worth the angst.”
Anna trusted only a few, such as André Leon Talley, whose presence came as a shock to her subordinates because of his flamboyant manner and dress: patent leather pumps, striped stretch pants, red snakeskin backpacks, faux-fur muffs all superimposed on this gentle black giant who, in another world, could have been playing for the New York Knicks with his six-foot-seven frame. But here he was at British Vogue, advising her—the two of them and a few others against all the rest.
Most all the old guard’s layouts, concepts, and story ideas Anna declared she hated. Staffers wanted highbrow features, Anna demanded middle-of-the-road. “There is still a place for those wonderful, creative mood pictures for which British Vogue is famous,” Anna told a fashion reporter for the Sunday Telegraph, “but I also would like to see a balanced, modern approach to fashion—less drifting-through-the-woods and more realism.”
Anna especially detested a photo Tilberis had David Bailey shoot of future supermodel Christy Turlington wearing an almost open man’s shirt. She spiked it.
“Peremptory,” “rather tactless,” “unconcerned with ‘the little people,’” “quickly bored,” “didn’t let anything so mundane as courtesy get in her way,” is the way Tilberis saw her. She viewed Anna’s appointment as the start of a “reign of mediocrity.”
A major confrontation involving Anna, Tilberis, and Coddington took place at the collections in New York. The three were unhappily ensconced in a suite at the Algonquin Hotel trying to decide which clothes should be photographed when a firefight erupted over a Ralph Lauren double-layered coat.
Coddington loved it and demanded that it be shot. “It’s fabulous,” she said. Anna hated it. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s the look,” Tilberis said. The battle went on, Coddington fighting for “the look” and Anna always thinking ahead to what the reader’s (and Liberman’s) reaction would be. It got so bad that Tilberis suddenly felt panicky, began gasping for air, and excused herself and ran out of the room. Later she claimed the stress and anxiety of the situation had caused an attack of asthma, from which she would suffer for years.
“She was quite a whirlwind,” observes former fashion editor Sophie Hicks, who fled Vogue about six months after Anna’s reign of terror began. “When Anna took over, people were quite shocked because she was very dynamic and fast and took the job at great speed, and that was quite unusual. She was a blast—not a breath—of fresh air, worked much longer hours than any previous professional with a capital ‘P.’ Things were professional before Anna but much more relaxed. She hit the ground running and wanted to redo the magazine in her own image, worked extremely hard at it and expected others to work extremely hard—and they did mind that.”
Hicks saw an immediate change in the look and feel of the magazine under Anna’s watch. The issues were “more coherent . . . there were isolated things of more interest. It became less quirky, less individualistic. Some of the fashion before was better than after Anna came. But over all, if one adds it all together, the worst of Vogue was better, but the best was not better.”
Anna was bothered by certain British attitudes, one of them that English women, as she saw them, “are embarrassed to spend money on themselves, which is a shame.” Through Vogue Anna hoped to change all that. “If you earn the money,” she intoned, “it is yours and if you have a certain self-respect, it is terrific to go out and spend it on yourself.” Geraldine Ranson, who wrote the piece for the Sunday Telegraph, pointed out that Anna earned an enormous salary, so “it may take her a while to come to grips with the reality of most of her readers’ domestic finances.”
Coddington felt as if the roof had caved in on her. In control for so many years at the magazine, she now was being treated horribly. To make matters worse, she was one of those who early on had supported Anna for the job.
“Anna turned out to be beastly to her,” states Winston Stona, a Jamaican businessman who was a friend of Coddington’s and had been a close pal of Jon Bradshaw’s. “Anna was terribly unkind to the point that I remember going to England and seeing Grace, and I said to her, ‘Listen, leave the bloody place.’ She was devastated at how Anna treated her.”
Coddington heeded his advice. Eight months after Anna took power, Coddington quit. She’d had it. “You don’t need a fashion director, because you’re it,” she said when she gave notice to become design director for Calvin Klein in New York.
Although Tilberis despised Anna, she lobbied with her for Coddington’s position. Anna put the job on hold and told Tilberis that if she wanted to keep her current position—let alone get a promotion—she had better shape up, do what she wanted her to do, stop complaining, and support her decisions and demands.
Tilberis, power hungry in her own right, played ball, and a month after Coddington quit, she got her job.
“I never became a convert to Anna’s themes,” Tilberis claimed later, “but I decided right then to be a dutiful number two. . . . I carried out Anna’s bidding directly.”
Things got slightly better between them, but skirmishes continued to rage at the magazine.
Anna was the attacker at Vogue but played the victim of the British press. She had come to hate the media. She considered herself a journalist, she was the daughter of a noted one, and she had been involved romantically in the past with many—yet in private and later in public she attacked Fleet Street. “The British press are worst,” she declared in 2002 while discussing its treatment of her when she was at British Vogue.
Everything about her became a target for criticism. Her father’s old paper, the Evening Standard, sent a reporter to interview her, and the story noted that Anna had offered the scribe a “Valium . . . to calm my nerves,” that Anna’s smile “seems brief and insincere,” that after a decade in New York Anna was “not quite British,” and that her only enthusiasm was for articles on “career women, business suits and working out. . . . ‘There is a new kind of woman out there. She’s interested in business and money. She doesn’t have time to shop any more. She wants to know what and why and where and how,’ Anna declared. ‘So
I feel the fashion pages, as well as looking wonderful, should give information.’”
The Evening Standard piece asked, “Is there anything nice to be said about Anna? Well, friends say she is a pushover—a mug for men, able to take a joke . . .”
The British press weren’t the only media doing unkind reporting about her. The New York Times noted that Anna “is a thorn in the side of London’s trendy set, who say the magazine has become too bland.” Anna’s response? “Any reaction is better than none.” She added, “A new editor is going to change a magazine. People resist change. British fashion was a little insular. One had to open it up.”
Around the same time the press was going after her, someone had designed a button meant to criticize Anna’s drastic makeover of the magazine. Thom O’Dwyer, the style editor of London’s Fashion Weekly, was spotted wearing one at a fashionable London restaurant. It read: “Vogue. Vague. Vomit.”
Anna had bigger problems, though. Her second in command, Tilberis, had become the subject of a spirited headhunt between Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, who both wanted her to come to New York and take big jobs with them in the wake of Coddington’s defection. Lauren had been the first to call, but when Tilberis swore Coddington to secrecy and told her of the $250,000 offer from Lauren, Coddington went directly to her boss, and the next thing Tilberis knew Klein was also courting her.
When Tilberis went to Anna’s office to offer her resignation in June 1987, Anna was shocked that she was leaving and then proceeded to denigrate Seventh Avenue and people like Lauren and Klein, who were its royalty. But Tilberis had already accepted Lauren’s offer, the press had announced she was following Coddington to America, and friends were planning going-away parties. Her family, she told Anna, was packed and ready to go, their house sold.
Anna called Newhouse and Liberman.
A couple of days later Tilberis (and soon the fashion world) got the shock of her life. In a secret meeting, Anna disclosed in confidence that she was actually the one leaving British Vogue and she offered Tilberis her job, which she accepted right then and there.
Rumors about Anna’s possible departure from Vogue and her future in the United States had been swirling since earlier in 1987, around the same time reports appeared in the press that she was pregnant again.
One story in The New York Times about the speculation caused problems in the Condé Nast executive suite on Madison Avenue. Fashion reporter Michael Gross had concluded a column by quoting Liberman as saying, “It is possible that Anna Wintour will come to the U.S., within a certain period of time.” Gross ended by noting, “That should keep the rumors roiling.”
When he arrived at his desk the next morning, a series of urgent phone messages awaited him from Liberman. The reporter called instantly, and the first words out of Liberman’s mouth were, “Dear friend, it seems that we have gotten me in some trouble. What are we going to do to get me out of it?” According to Gross, Liberman gave the strong impression that he had been chastised for his comment—probably by Newhouse—and he was now demanding a correction.
“Obviously he had been read the riot act that morning,” says Gross, “and it took me forty-five minutes to talk him out of the correction, which I did by explaining to him that by the end of the day his parakeet will be shitting on the story, and if there’s a correction, all you’re going to do is keep this alive. It’s much better to let it pass.”
Anna’s second child was due to arrive on July 30, and she intended to work right up until July 29. “It’s not an illness,” she firmly explained to the Daily Mail. Anna had a scan done and knew it was a girl.
The talk about Anna leaving Vogue started just after Si Newhouse, who was aware of her growing discontent, had flown to London for a breakfast meeting with her. He wanted to placate her, buck her up, tell her that her time was coming, and offer her a new job back in New York.
Anna thought this was the big moment for which she’d been waiting, that Newhouse was going to hand her the editorship of American Vogue.
In mid-August, the gossip that something big was going to happen to Anna was confirmed.
She was returning to New York—not to Vogue to unseat Grace Mirabella but rather as the new editor in chief of Condé Nast’s revered shelter magazine, House & Garden. That magazine’s longtime editor in chief, Lou Gropp, learned he had been canned three days after Anna’s appointment had been announced. “Lou was very brutishly fired,” says a former high-ranking editor at House & Garden. “He was on vacation in California, and he phoned the office every day, and one day he phoned from a public phone in a parking lot and Si told him he was history”
Anna was, as she stated later, “totally stunned” by Newhouse’s offer, and not happily stunned, because she could practically taste American Vogue.
“I went right back to the office and called Alex, and he said, Absolutely, you have to come.’ It was apparently Alex who pushed for me to go to House & Garden”
To The New York Times, though, she put up a cheery front, saying nothing of substance and talking only on the condition that she not be asked about her plans for her new magazine—mainly because she had none. “I’ve missed New York terribly,” she said. “I’m enormously looking forward to coming back.” Speaking of her tenure in London, she said only that “Some people did not like what I did.”
By the time of Anna’s new appointment, British Vogue had gone through the most traumatic time in its seven decades: More than two-thirds of the staff had been replaced, she banned lunchtime drinking, she made sure her top editors were there at eight in the morning by sending cars to pick them up, most arriving rather bleary. It wasn’t quite the Blitz, but to those who worked in the trenches at Vogue it felt like it. While the look and feel had changed during Anna’s brief, controversial watch, circulation and advertising had stayed about the same.
As Drusilla Beyfus Shulman notes, “Everyone was delighted when she got the editorship of House & Garden because every editor at British Vogue could breathe safely.”
Anna rationalized, defended, and denied some of the changes she made during her tenure in London. She said she felt that everyone at Vogue “thought I was some sort of American control freak,” charged that the press had portrayed her as “a wicked woman of steel,” and claimed, “I only remember letting only two or three people go. But, no doubt fearing my awful reputation, a number left of their own accords.”
She said she was attacked because she decided to “infuse the magazine with a bit of American worldliness, even toughness.” She asserted that the “cozy but mildly eccentric atmosphere” at the magazine struck her “as out of date” and “out of step,” and “not responsive to intelligent women’s changing lives.”
In early August 1987, as scheduled, Anna had a baby girl whom the Shaffers named Kate but who would be nicknamed Bee, mainly because when she first started talking, the toddler had a difficult time saying her actual name, uttering something like “bah-bee.” So Bee it became. Fleet Street reported that Anna, after giving birth, was back in the office three days later. But Anna’s brother James told Vivienne Lasky that there was some concern about the baby’s health, enough that Nonie flew over from England to be at her side. But the emergency soon passed.
Some six weeks later, on September 9, Anna started the overhaul of her new magazine. Already speculation was rampant that she would be at House & Garden temporarily, a short respite before pulling out the rug from under Grace Mirabella.
The first day Anna was out of her hair, Liz Tilberis, the new editor in chief of British Vogue, resurrected that photo Anna had killed of Christy Turlington and made it her debut cover. She and her family celebrated Anna’s long-awaited departure with a real English-style dinner of takeout fish and chips washed down with expensive champagne.
thirty-one
The Parking Lot
No one would ever think of referring to elegant House & Garden as a parking lot. But in fact that’s how it was described ironically and in private by high-ranki
ng editors at the magazine and top executives at Condé Nast. They called it that because Anna had been placed there temporarily until the time was ripe to give her Grace Mirabella’s job at Vogue.
“Anna was just being parked for a short time at House & Garden,” a tuned-in magazine executive says. “She threatened Si that she was going to go to another magazine, so he gave her House & Garden and parked her there while he worked out his Machiavellian scheme to get rid of Grace. None of what he did made any sense because he could have just gotten rid of Mirabella and stuck Anna at Vogue, and House & Garden could have remained a lovely magazine. Anna came in and destroyed it.”
Laurie Schechter, whom Anna hired away from Rolling Stone to work with her at House & Garden as a decorating editor, says, “She told me that she couldn’t stand being in England and told them [Newhouse and Liberman] that she didn’t care what they had to do, but that they had to bring her back. And so they gave her House & Garden”
At Vogue, Anna’s cheerleader, the fashion editor Polly Mellen, watched the move and suspected what was going on. “Anna did an oblique, and I thought, wait, what’s going on here? I had a very strong feeling, a hopeful feeling she was on her way to Vogue”
Just when Mirabella thought she was finally safe from that skinny shark draped in Chanel, she started hearing the Jaws theme song ringing in her ears again. With Anna back in New York to run House & Garden, Mirabella’s job was in even greater jeopardy than when Anna was at Vogue as creative director—for a couple of reasons.
Not only had Mirabella’s relationship with Alex Liberman deteriorated after Anna decamped to British Vogue, but now Anna had returned to the Condé Nast headquarters a conquering hero who had seemingly turned the magazine around in less than two years. At least that was the perception that she and her guardian angel Liberman promulgated.
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