Mirabella was furious, especially because Anna had instituted at British Vogue “everything she’d seemed to disdain about my Vogue” during her time as creative director. Mirabella was well aware that Anna was a shrewd operator and a savvy corporate politician and had completely won over Liberman and Si Newhouse with her brief reign in London.
As Mirabella acknowledged later, British Vogue “established Anna as a player on the editor-in-chief circuit.”
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Mirabella began telling confidants that she was thinking of leaving Vogue, but she wanted to do it on her own terms. At the same time, she still refused to admit to herself that she was swimming in dangerous waters and that Anna was circling in for the kill.
Meanwhile, Anna scoffed at suggestions that she had her eye on Mirabella’s job, declaring to The New York Times—nudge, nudge, wink, wink—that Vogue under the current editor was “fantastic” and that Mirabella was “doing a wonderful job.”
But Condé Nast veterans knew or suspected otherwise.
Just as fear gripped American Vogue and British Vogue when staffers knew she was coming, the same mood now existed at House & Garden. “Everyone was scared to death because she was known to be a terrible woman,” a veteran of more than a dozen years at the magazine recalls vividly.
Anna began pulling together her own creative team, which included André Leon Talley, who had been working as a style reporter at Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair. Talley would be, as Anna said at the time, “covering the waterfront in his own special way.”
Laurie Schechter’s new position was to oversee a newly minted style column that would encompass interior decorating, living, and fashion.
When Schechter arrived, Gabe Doppelt, the young woman she had recommended to Anna to be her assistant in London, was now listed as an editor, six names underneath Anna’s, while Schechter’s was eight names below Doppelt’s, an indication of things to come.
Doppelt was quickly earning a reputation as difficult and bossy like Anna, having been her right hand since London. “Gabe was wretched,” notes a female former House & Garden editor who had been waiting to have a meeting with Anna but was getting put off by Doppelt, who kept saying, “Anna’s getting ready for you . . . don’t worry, everything’s fine.” After being fired by Anna, the editor went into Doppelt’s office and declared, “ ‘You were very sweet when you were lying to me.’ When I left I certainly wished both of them ill.”
Anna had also brought in a Park Avenue and international mix she called “consulting editors” and put them on the masthead. This posh and glitzy group included diamond-studded socialite Brooke Astor; Anna’s restaurateur pal Michael Chow; her friend Oscar de la Renta; Dodie Kazanjian, who was about to cowrite an authorized (and some would say hagiographic) biography of Alex Liberman; and John Bowes-Lyon, who was related to the queen of England. Most were there mainly for their contacts and insights into the world of the rich and famous.
Gone were editors like Denise Otis, who was a top lieutenant to fired editor in chief Lou Gropp. “I’d been there a long time, but I didn’t stay very long after Anna took over,” says Otis. “The new management got bored with us, or annoyed with us, because we didn’t seem to move fast enough. But you can’t move beyond your readers. Anna’s approach was a fashion approach, and at that time Condé Nast was still a fashion company. They were used to the fashion pacing.”
Anna personally and viciously went after those leftovers from the old regime who had not already read the writing on the wall and resigned. Many needed jobs and stayed on as long as they could.
From behind her steely cold Buchsbaum desk and surrounded by tubs of pink peonies, Anna held personal meetings in her office with most staffers.
“Although she looked young, she looked like a person who was never a little girl and never played with dolls—unless she put pins in them,” recalls one female senior editor who was axed on the spot by Anna. “In that British accent of hers, she said, ‘Well, you won’t fit in.’ I said, ‘How do you know? I have this idea, and that idea,’ and I showed her a long list. We ended up standing up and yelling at each other, and I told her I hoped she fell on her face.”
About a half hour later the two ran into each other at the elevator. Anna looked through her and refused to acknowledge her presence.
In her first days at the magazine, Anna met with everybody “except people that she hated, those who were the age of her mother,” a senior staffer asserts.
Those who fit in that category felt age discrimination radiating from the bobbed, slender, and fashionable new editor in chief. “Young, young, young,” says one creative and talented older editor who soon left. “She didn’t want older people. She was mean to older staffers. My son is a lawyer, and as soon as I realized what she was up to I called him and said, ‘I think I’m going to need a lawyer.’ You don’t wait until the shit hits the fan. As soon as you see the fan, you hire a lawyer.”
The editor felt an age discrimination suit might be in order. Her son put her in touch with an attorney who specialized in such cases, and he advised her to make detailed notes about things Anna said, particularly if she ever used the word “youthful.” Luckily, for Anna’s sake, the editor never heard her utter it, though it’s certainly a part of Anna’s lexicon.
Other editors ran out to get new, hipper-looking wardrobes in the hopes of placating Anna and making her think they had a youthful image and attitude—and save their jobs, even if their hair was turning a bit gray “Everybody had to shorten their skirts,” recalls one editor.
A few who didn’t pass muster, but whom Condé Nast wanted to keep around because Liberman liked them, were sent to the fourteenth floor, known in the parlance of Condé Nast as “the elephant’s graveyard,” where they would serve out their time and retire, some with full pay and medical benefits.
Veteran staffers who weren’t fired were kept around because Anna didn’t know the shelter business like she knew the fashion business, and she needed experienced editors and writers who had covered that scene for years for House & Garden to take her to the showrooms and introduce her to the industry. They were treated shabbily before finally getting the boot.
Anna’s planned retooling was not the first time since the beginning of the eighties that Si Newhouse had shifted strategy at the magazine to try to make it into a winner.
In 1983, while Anna was still doing her dog and pony show at New York, Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast Publications Inc., had reduced House & Gardens circulation to make it an elite rather than a mass-market monthly. His hope was to put it in league with Architectural Digest. But House & Garden bombed, and a dark horse called Metropolitan Home raced into the lead of the shelter magazine pack. Soon more would come along, such as Elle Home. Eventually, Newhouse ended the competition with Architectural Digest by simply buying it.
Now Newhouse put his money on Anna to make House & Garden a success, if there was enough time before he canned Grace Mirabella and gave Anna her job. Anna was Newhouse’s favorite British editrix after Tina Brown at Vanity Fair.
The word was out that under Anna, the doddering eighty-six-year-old House & Garden was in for an extreme makeover. That included more than just larger pages, a new square format, lots of fashion coverage, and features on celebrities and socialites and nobility. Something far more drastic was in the works.
After almost nine decades, its name was changed—a corporate decision made by Newhouse, with Anna’s support. Her name first appeared on the masthead in the January 1988 issue, and the name on the March cover of the magazine became HG in three-inch-high letters. Nowhere in the magazine was there a mention that there had been a transition of editors or that the name had changed. Thinking it was a new magazine, many subscribers put it aside and continued to wait for their beloved House & Garden to arrive in the mailbox.
The first issue with Anna’s imprimatur got mixed reviews. Charles True-hart, who covered the magazine world for The Washington Post, observed that the new
HG looked more like it had been “shot up with amphetamines” rather than redesigned.
“There is no question of subtle transitions under Anna Wintour . . . The new HG is as different from the old as a remake can comfortably be. This one is born to be scanned: Its pages give the eye kiss after kiss of sumptuous color and snazzy scenes, little bites of information and dazzle, the glow of modern luxe.”
One major criticism of the first and early issues was that the graphics were distracting, especially to designers who saw their work cropped. One architect, after leafing through the first issue, said the layouts looked as if they’d gone through a Cuisinart.
Anna had also introduced Vanity Fair-style celebrity tabloid fare. That first issue included looks at the home life of Bette Midler, David Hockney (both of whom also appeared in Vanity Fair around the same time), Dennis Hopper, and some of the new Rothschilds. A column called “View” in Vogue was similar to one called “Talleysheet” in HG It all tended to make readers of both think they were seeing double, and it infuriated Tina Brown, who felt that Anna was intruding on her celebrity territory.
Anna assigned pieces to her pal Christopher Hitchens, who wrote about the George Bush White House as a place to live and advertising executive Jerry Della Femina’s “graphic” Manhattan penthouse.
A mixture of fashion, wealth, and elitism was in.
One photo underscoring the new look was of a guitar-playing Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis draped in S&M leathers while posed on Marie Antoinette’s bed in one of her palaces in Bavaria. One HG cover displayed a playwright’s rumpled bed with his pet pugs and books; there was a photo of Michael Chow standing on his head with an Eileen Grey pedestal nearby; and then there was the model lying spread-eagle on a needlepoint rug on a beach. Anna planned one issue around a Gauguin exhibit in Washington, D.C., which sparked anger from HG contributor John Richardson, a noted art historian. He was furious that she would use such art to hawk commercial design.
As she did at British Vogue, Anna turned HG inside out and upside down, fired and hired, raided other magazines for writers, including Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, with whom she was enmeshed in an ongoing rivalry.
Most shocking of all, she arrogantly tossed into the trash upward of two million dollars in story inventory (text and photos), so she could start from scratch and do things her way.
“In her dark glasses, she went through every piece of inventory,” recalls a senior editor. “Every editor had to come into the room, which had light boxes to view the Kodachromes around three sides of the room. Everyone came in with their inventory. The photographers had been paid, the writers and editors had been paid who had stayed in fancy hotels during those shoots; it was a very lush life. But Anna got rid of everything—everything—except for maybe seven or eight stories.”
Put off by the celebrity and fashion coverage, longtime readers canceled subscriptions—a special toll-free hotline was hurriedly established to deal with the onslaught of fuming subscribers. Designer advertisers who were hooked on the magazine’s reputation for spectacular layouts of elegant interiors—not cushy, nouveau riche celeb party pads—began to bail out, although the business side claimed that advertising had held its own. While some fashion advertisers gravitated to the magazine, most traditional House & Garden advertisers couldn’t make heads or tails out of what Anna was doing, and the same went for those in architecture and publishing.
Another problem for Anna was that former editor Lou Gropp was well liked in the home magazine industry and every month wrote a cozy “from the editor” column reminiscing about houses he had lived in. Under Anna, the once warm and fuzzy feeling of the magazine was replaced by a stark stainless-steel and granite coldness, representative of its editor.
“Anna was a bad fit,” observes Denise Otis. “The mood about her wasn’t very good. You got the feeling there were ‘in’ people and ‘out’ people, and that hadn’t been true of the magazine before.”
While Anna had dealt with interior design stories at New York magazine, running an entire magazine based not on fashion but on fanciful shelter quickly took its toll. When Anna began showing fashion along with interiors, the magazine earned the sobriquet House & Garment. When she introduced celebrities—including trendy artists, hip architects, and old- and new-money Brits and Euros—wags began calling her magazine Vanity Chair and Hot Gossip.
Where there were once “pristine, people-free rooms,” The New York Times noted, “there was now a zippy mix of fashionably dressed models in quirky environments . . . ‘society’ lady decorators in their designer duds” and a playwright petting his dogs in an unmade bed.
Despite the criticism, Anna felt as if she had revolutionized the home magazine genre. “Up until she changed things, the layouts were of very staid rooms that were perfectly attired and looked like nobody had touched them,” Laurie Schechter observes. “They were dust free, forever. Anna so dramatically changed the book. But it was very jolting to subscribers who were the older garden people, and to people in the interior design world. I don’t think they [Condé Nast] were prepared for that world to be so set in its ways. For those people who were so addicted to the old format, the new one was more irreverent and mixed things up more. You rarely see a total repositioning of a magazine. Ideally, you don’t want to alienate your readership but increase or broaden it.”
One of Newhouse’s goals in putting Anna in the editor’s chair was to play catch-up with Architectural Digest, but that would never happen during her watch. HG lagged far behind by some sixty thousand issues a month, though its circulation grew slightly. “Our instinct told us we needed to make House & Garden into more of a living magazine than a typical shelter magazine,” said Bernard Leser, Condé Nast Publication’s president. Liberman and others wanted to beat Architectual Digest at its own game by being distinctly different. That they got. But business reportedly went south; the publisher of Architectural Digest boasted that as many as twenty of HG’s advertisers had jumped ship and come aboard his publication because of the changes Anna and her team had wrought.
Anna’s blueprint for HG was to show, as she put it, “the connection between fashion and style and design and decorating.” But she denied at the height of the controversy over her remake that she had turned it into a fashion magazine, although by early summer 1988 four of its first five covers showed women in designer dresses. Inside, stories of the fashion genre abounded, such as one that had models in classic little black dresses standing on classic little black chairs. Despite her denials, Ralph Lauren’s fashions appeared on the cover, with Yves Saint Laurent’s inside; celebrity hairdressers Kenneth, Christaan, and Didier Malige were featured cutting topiary.
While so many were displeased with Anna’s product, Newhouse acted overjoyed. In fact, he acknowledged that he pampered it as if it were their baby. “I saw it before it was published,” he said. “I saw it when it was laid down with the photostats.”
Liberman also came to her defense. He said he saw every layout because “Anna wanted my approval. I personally questioned the introduction of fashion, but she was so innovative and daring about it, and Si loved what she was doing. We were both stimulated and excited by the idea of a total magazine of style.”
By early June 1988, rumors once again were rampant that Anna was set to replace Mirabella, all of which were denied by Condé Nast brass. After all, Mirabella had made Vogue a. great success, and Anna was just getting down to business at HG.
She told The Times of London, wearing what was described as the briefest white tweed skirt Karl Lagerfeld could devise, that the rumors “are ridiculous. We’ve only just started, it would be crazy to leave now.”
The reporter noted that Anna “even dissembles with style.”
But the question remained, Why make a change?
thirty-two
July Fourth Massacre
On August 20, 1985, an American version of a trendy French fashion magazine called Elle appeared on American newsstands. Overnight, it becam
e a publishing success story.
For Si Newhouse, it was the end of the world as he knew it. Well, almost. Vogue, he believed, faced its greatest threat and stiffest competition ever.
From that moment on, the message on high to Grace Mirabella was to make Vogue more like Elle, which had shrewdly picked up on the MTV generation’s short attention span, offering its quickly growing younger readership montages of flashy fashion layouts, crisper and spunkier headlines, shorter stories without jumps, and lots of exuberant hot models wearing youthful, sexy fashions.
Sister of the legendary thirty-year-old Parisian fashion magazine, American Elle was not designed to tell someone how to put style in her life, which Vogue subtly did—Mirabella’s philosophy was “give them what they never knew they needed.” Elle was aimed at fashionistas and wannabes who already had a thread of style, in everything from the clothes they wore to the food they ate to how they decorated their living spaces.
Newhouse must have been especially concerned when he read the May 5, 1986, issue of Forbes and noted that in just eight months Elle had “elbowed its way into the magazine racks alongside Vogue.” The director of print media for one of the world’s largest advertising agencies declared Elle “a fabulous success story.” And Elle’s publisher stated that the magazine’s readership was younger than Vogues and less didactic than other women’s magazines. Circulation, the business magazine noted, was way up and, better yet, ad rates were less expensive than Vogues.
A quiet panic had set in at the upper echelons. On a cover shoot, Alex Liberman was said to have called the studio every twenty minutes demanding to know, “Does it look like an Elle cover? Does it look like an Elle cover?” At one point he actually called back and ordered that the model’s hair be cut shorter “just like an Elle cover.”
Mirabella was told in “charming and not-so-charming terms” to give Vogue the feel of Elle. She couldn’t and she wouldn’t, which of course did not go over well with the big guy upstairs, who passed the word that she was out of touch with young people and with women in general.
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