That message was usually funneled to Mirabella by Liberman, through whom she communicated with Newhouse, an odd setup and not a great career enhancer. Not talking directly with the head of the whole company because she disliked him intensely and never took him seriously was Mirabella’s curious style—and against Liberman’s advice.
Many times he had told her to get to know him. But she refused. Later, she pondered the possibility that some key two-way information regarding her views about Elle and other issues never made it to the intended party. “Alex,” she pointed out, “controlled the flow of information as it suited his purposes.”
But her biggest career faux pas was not following Elle’s lead, which is what Newhouse wanted. She firmly believed that Vogue was still the magazine some 1.2 million women a month turned to for their fashion fix, and that Elle “offered very little. . . . ”
Bad decision, as she would later acknowledge.
Through the month of May 1988, top secret meetings took place in the executive suite at Condé Nast with Si Newhouse, Alex Liberman, and Bernard Lesser. Planning was under way for Mirabella’s dismissal and Anna’s ascension, the job she could taste practically since the first time she shopped at Biba in the midsixties. According to Liberman later, it was Newhouse who wanted Mirabella out and Anna in. “I didn’t push for Anna Wintour,” he maintained. “She was a demand of Si’s.”
Whoever made the decision—and most find Liberman’s assertion hard to swallow, since he was Anna’s biggest booster—she was elated. Her time had finally come.
“There were endless meetings with Si and Alex at which we talked mostly about dates and timing, because Alex was so undecided” about the timing, she stated later. “Sometimes it was going to be September, and sometimes the following January. The whole thing was unfair to Grace, who had not been told, and unfair to me, because I had to come back from the meetings and try to do a magazine that I knew I wasn’t going to be at for very long, and lie to all the people. It was awful, really awful.”
Anna and Mirabella had two things in common: their passion for fashion and the fact that both had taken doctors for husbands. Mirabella’s, Dr. William Cahan, was a cancer surgeon affiliated with the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York.
On June 28, 1988, upscale New Yorkers who didn’t have to punch a clock were already escaping the city for the long Fourth of July weekend, heading for beach houses on Long Island or country places in Connecticut, both especially popular with the fashion, style, and design crowd.
Mirabella was still at her office, but Cahan was at home relaxing after a stressful day in the operating room when the telephone rang. A family friend was urgently calling to tell him to turn on Channel 4. A promo said that the syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith, who had a segment on “Live at Five,” was about to dish some major gossip about Grace.
He switched on the TV just in time to hear Smith in her annoyingly creaky Texas voice tell viewers that his wife, at age fifty-eight, the editor in chief of Vogue for seventeen years, was about to be axed, and that Anna, who had a tempestuous history in the fashion magazine business and wasn’t liked by many, would be her successor four months before her thirty-ninth birthday.
“The hot publishing story is that this will probably happen on September first,” Smith stated. “Don’t ask me why Condé Nast would want to replace Grace Mirabella. Vogue is one of the healthiest, heftiest magazines in the Condé Nast chain. You know, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but they’re going to anyway.”
One of Smith’s greatest assets as a highly paid gossip is her ability to have it both ways—to stick in the knife while still appearing sympathetic to the victim. Someone at the top at Condé Nast had dropped a dime and she ran with it, even though Mirabella considered her a friend.
With the holiday weekend near and rumors about her demise flying, Mirabella should have expected something like this. Newhouse had a tendency to fire top editors before or during a holiday or vacation. He had notches on his belt to prove it. The most recent victim had been House & Gardens Lou Gropp. Now Anna was going to replace another Condé Nast veteran, just ten months after she took over HG. “What was a constant in all of Si Newhouse’s seemingly erratic behavior,” Mirabella would later observe, “was a kind of extreme insensitivity to the feelings of his editors.”
There was still another clue that something bad might befall Mirabella’s career. In early June, instead of attending an important furniture trade show in Chicago where the editor of HG was expected, Anna was in Paris front row center at a fashion show, which didn’t escape the keen eyes of both the furniture and the fashion people, and the drums started beating.
The Tuesday when the story broke Anna had left the office early in the afternoon, which was curious to her HG team because she had been spending long hours there molding the magazine in her image. But on that particular day, as if she knew that a dirty bomb was about to explode, she had oddly disappeared. Many later wondered whether she knew the leak was coming and didn’t want to be around to answer to anyone. The other question was whether she herself had leaked the story, either directly or indirectly. No one would put it past her, but no one ever knew for sure.
Refusing to believe what he was hearing, Mirabella’s husband immediately telephoned his wife, who had been told nothing about being replaced—she was innocently going about the business of locking up the next issue. Now they both were in shock.
In response to his question “What’s going on?,” all she could mumble was “I have no idea . . . I have no idea.”
“It had all the makings of a soap opera,” Newsday reported a few days later. “The formidable yet fallible editor of the world’s most vaunted fashion magazine is ousted. The hauntingly beautiful upstart ascends to the helm . . . with reports of plots and coups and tales of behind-the-scenes sniping.”
Mirabella headed upstairs to the office of her mentor to find out if there was any truth to the broadcast gossip.
“Grace, I’m afraid it’s true,” Liberman told her,
When she demanded an explanation, he claimed the axing wasn’t his idea and advised her to talk to Newhouse. “I had nothing to do with it,” he maintained.
She told him, “You’re going to regret this,” because of how it was handled.
Later, Liberman raised more questions than he answered when he described the succession as “a series of misunderstandings and mix-ups” and asserted that “the way it came out was unfortunate.”
Anna was jubilant that late afternoon. Her dream had finally come true. She’d been crowned editor in chief of Vogue, the world’s fashion bible and the jewel of the Condé Nast publishing empire. She had become the fifth editor of the nearly nine-decades-old magazine. But she was in hiding, no one knew where. She’d known for more than a month she had the job but had covered up and lied to everyone she knew, except for her husband.
Mirabella, meanwhile, was numb and in the spotlight.
She couldn’t believe that Newhouse had replaced her with an editor who many felt made a “fiasco” out of House & Garden, where ad pages were down and subscribers had disappeared. Newhouse, on the other hand, put forth that Anna had turned HG into a magazine of “wit, excitement and controversy.” And he was seemingly unbothered by the mess she’d left in her wake at British Vogue, so adoring he was of her.
To Mirabella, her dismissal and replacement by Anna was unconscionable and insane.
But Anna was the ultimate company girl, and Mirabella wasn’t. She’d thumbed her nose at Newhouse for too many years, and now she’d gotten her due, as he saw it. And so had Anna.
As one keen but cynical Condé Nast observer notes years later, “Anna was so far up Si’s you know what, she could see his fillings.”
A few hours after her brief meeting with Liberman, Mirabella reached Newhouse by telephone at home. Yes, he confirmed, he’d sacked her, and he told her to meet with him in his office the next morning to make arrangements for her departure and a
financial settlement.
Early Wednesday, June 29, she found him at his desk in his stocking feet. It was just nine A.M., but he’d been working since five, so he was relaxing.
“Well, it’s been a long time,” he said as he dropped the curtain on her career.
He asked her to stay on until mid-July to oversee the completion of the October issue and then sent her off to meet the corporate secretary to work out a severance package. Mirabella thought the offer was low and telephoned her friend the attorney and literary agent Mort Janklow. He came up with an alternative plan that his friend Newhouse accepted immediately.
That afternoon, this real-life melodrama continued to play out when Mirabella called a meeting of her staff to formally announce that she was leaving. “Unfortunately, management has seen fit to have me go earlier,” she said. Then she added, “Anna Wintour will be the new editor of Vogue.”
Some, who hadn’t heard about the TV report, were shocked. Others, who watched the Liz Smith spectacle, had tears in their eyes.
Co–fashion creative director Polly Mellen performed her and-now-Mr.-DeMille-I’m-ready-for-my-close-up routine. As Mirabella later described the scene, “Grabbing her breast, she threw herself against the cabinet that held our TV and VCR and shouted, ‘My God, Grace! My God! How could this happen?’”
Only moments before, though, Mellen, long a champion of Anna, had told a colleague that she supported Mirabella’s firing, which Mirabella was aware of when Mellen gave her Oscar-worthy performance.
Later, Mirabella said, “I thought of Diana Vreeland’s line: ‘The stage lost its greatest actress when Polly Mellen joined Vogue.’”
Another editor bitchily pointed out to Mirabella, “Well, you don’t need the money” and mentioned something about the magazine needing “new blood.”
The other fashion creative director, Jade Hobson, immediately let it be known she was resigning. Hobson destested Anna and never forgot how Anna had treated her and others during her tenure as creative director.
Another veteran editor, astonished by what had transpired, stood by Mirabella’s desk and observed sadly, “This is a tough place. Very tough. I had no idea.”
While everyone knew she had been fired, Newhouse issued a memo to the staff that afternoon announcing that Mirabella had retired. Later, Mirabella would claim that she intended to leave the magazine of her own accord later that year or the next, which might have been her rationale to lessen the blow.
The next day The New York Times, in announcing the dramatic change in editors at the world’s most powerful fashion magazine, noted that the appointment of Anna “comes as Vogue is thought to be losing ground to Elle” and quoted a top national media director as saying, “The scuttlebutt in the fashion industry is that Elle could be the new standard for the fashion industry, and that’s got to be disconcerting to Vogue.”
Newhouse later told the Times that he long felt it was time to “reposition Vogue for the 90’s.” This despite the fact that under Mirabella, circulation had tripled.
Anna’s takeover, therefore, raised an important question: Why would Condé Nast, as Liz Smith had asked, fix something that wasn’t broke?
While Elle was certainly making a name for itself, Vogue was still far ahead of its competitors in advertising revenue. In 1987, Vogue had $79.5 million in ad revenue, while Elle had $39 million and Harper’s Bazaar stood at $32.5 million. However, Elle’s paid circulation had catapulted to 851,000 by 1987, while Vogue’s had stayed around 1.2 million. Vogue’s newsstand sales had slipped and advertising pages were flat.
While speculation about Anna replacing Mirabella had been floating around ever since Anna first came to Vogue as creative director, her succession still shocked the fashion world, particularly in the shabby way it unfolded and how Mirabella learned about it.
“For Ms. Mirabella,” The New York Times noted later, “it was an undignified ending to a highly successful career.” And Mirabella told the Times that the manner of her removal was “very unstylish, for such a stylish place.” She also stated that she never spoke to Anna about the rumors, noting Anna was “not anybody I have long conversations with.”
The firing didn’t have as much impact on Mirabella, though, as it did on Vogue editor of yore Margaret Case. Case was so upset by the shabby way her own dismissal was handled, the eighty-year-old fashionista, ill with cancer, depressed, and alone, committed suicide by jumping out of her fourteenth-floor apartment window.
In Mirabella’s case, she’d bounce back in the fashion magazine ball game big-time soon enough.
Meanwhile, HG advertisers were left flabbergasted by Anna’s abandonment. “To have the person responsible for those changes get up and leave after a few months is quite a surprise,” declared the director of advertising for a major furniture company. “You just don’t take a magazine the caliber of House & Garden, change it around, and walk away.”
At HG, Nancy Novogrod, a former book-publishing executive editor who had joined the magazine a few months earlier, succeeded Anna. Novogrod said she planned to “inch” the magazine “back to interior design,” the same place it was when Anna took it over. HG lasted a brief time before Newhouse closed it down but later reopened it.
Shortly after that memorable July Fourth weekend massacre, Anna was having lunch at the plush Four Seasons Grill Room. At another table was Grace Mirabella, who had just locked up the October issue and was ready to bid a final adieu to the magazine that had been her home for years.
The two editors never exchanged a glance.
Vogue was now Anna’s baby.
As one wag observed at the time, “Condé Nast editors may all breathe a sigh of relief because Anna had landed the only job where she may safely be expected to stay.”
thirty-three
Anna and the Boss
Anna began her reign as editor in chief of Vogue even before Grace Mirabella had signed off on the final piece of text and the last photo for her curtain-closing October issue.
By late July, in her virtually empty HG office on the fifth floor of the Condé Nast building, she had started pulling her team together and making her power felt by interviewing shaken Vogue staffers every half hour or so. Members of the old regime would do what they had to do for Mirabella and then report directly to Anna, who often put them on the hot seat by asking them what they did, why they thought they should continue doing what they did for her, and who they felt should or shouldn’t stay. The do-you-still-beat-your-wife tactic sent a chill through the place.
With Anna about to take over, paranoia and fear ran rampant among those employees who saw their worlds crashing down under the new boss woman.
Mirabella remembered those last days as being “a strange and ugly time” with people walking around “whispering and looking over their shoulders to see who was listening.” She was especially peeved when she saw Si Newhouse actually walking the corridors of Vogue, where he was rarely seen, carrying baskets of jewelry and other things in and out of Anna’s office to preview for her first issue. It was, she felt, “like a slap in the face” to see him so involved.
Monday, August 1, 1988, Anna’s first full day as the head of Vogue, started horrendously. Liz Smith had another scoop that was profoundly disturbing. The item alleged a romantic link between Anna and Newhouse, a rumor that had begun back when Anna was recruited by Alex Liberman and Newhouse from New York magazine, and one Anna was well aware of.
Nevertheless, the spanking-new editor in chief went ballistic. Not only did it cause problems for Anna and Newhouse, but the bitchy item would put what was described as a severe strain on Anna’s relationship with her husband, who is said to have gotten deeply involved behind the scenes in the imbroglio.
A catty item of this sort appearing on her debut at Vogue was almost guaranteed and shouldn’t have come as any great surprise. It had been open season on Anna ever since she had taken over British Vogue because so many people in the fashion magazine business and the rag trade had it in for he
r—either jealous of her success, or a victim of her imperiousness, or both.
But Smith felt the rumor had enough legs to warrant running with it.
Was it payback?
Despite the fact that Smith had run the item about Mirabella’s firing, she was known to be close friends with her. Mirabella later stated that Smith “was furious” with Condé Nast for giving someone the green light to “leak” the story before telling Mirabella.
Besides suggesting an intimate relationship, the item essentially repeated that old antifeminist saw that any successful woman who makes it to the top probably slept her way there. And while Anna was far from being a feminist, the assertion made her see red.
Rather than simply ignore the gossip, or laugh it off as the bitchiness of the fashion business, Anna was loaded for bear.
Within a week after the item ran, she called a mandatory morning meeting of her editorial staff and anyone else in the organization interested in hearing what she had to say.
“She was outraged—outraged—about the Liz Smith item and was not going to let it go by unanswered,” says a female former Condé Nast executive who had worked closely with Anna. “She was very upset that people thought this was still a world in which women couldn’t get ahead without sleeping with the boss.
“I thought David was completely behind the speech,” the former executive says. “There were certain things Anna said that I didn’t think she was capable of. I didn’t think that she could be the architect of such a speech. It was strong. It took the issue on where I wouldn’t think she would have taken it on. She sounded angry, but appropriately so.
“It was a difficult thing to do in light of the fact she’d just taken on this huge job, and the person she’s accused of sleeping with owns this huge company. Anna was very prepared and I could tell, knowing her, that this was something she had genuinely discussed with somebody very close to her, that this somebody was also very upset and had thought it through and addressed it. And that would have been David.
Front Row Page 33