“Anna did it in a very dignified way, saying people still think this is the way women got ahead. Anna rarely ever held these kinds of meetings. It was one of very few such performances, and it was not a very English thing to do.”
Anna stood on stilettos throughout her remarks, which lasted less than twenty minutes in a meeting room on the twelfth floor where advertising and promotion was located. After finishing, she took no questions and told her people to go back to work and move forward.
If anyone applauded, no one can recall.
“It wasn’t like everyone was shocked,” says the former executive. “While unusual, it was probably a smart thing for Anna to do. Her comments didn’t sound like Bill Clinton’s ‘I didn’t sleep with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky’”
Afterward, staffers gathered in small groups to talk about the shocking events. “I, for one, thought she was telling the truth, and I always thought it was handy for people at Vogue to believe that she had a thing with Si because they didn’t want to see Anna validated,” says the former executive.
Newhouse eventually and genially commented to Smith that he was flattered by all the gossip but declared that he was “very much in love with my wife and my wife’s dog,” and stated firmly that there was no truth to what Smith had printed.
Around the same time as the Liz Smith item ran, Newsday did a major story about Anna’s takeover at Vogue and quoted an unnamed “fashion veteran,” who also asserted, “Si is in love with her. He loves the way she looks, he loves the way she flirts. . . . ”
Despite Anna’s sincere and forceful denial, talk of a cozy relationship between Anna and Newhouse continued.
“There were longtime and long-standing rumors that Anna and Si were romantically involved, and it was never anything but smoke,” says fashion writer Michael Gross. He said it was never the kind of gossipy story The Times would have ever chased and pointed out that “people in the fashion world are vicious, envious bitches—male and female.
“Anna’s rise caused a lot of envy and bitchiness. All you had to do was see Si Newhouse and Anna Wintour in a room together to realize that Si was very pleased to have Anna around him. Now, can you extrapolate sex from that? If you’re a fashion editor sitting in your three hundredth fashion show subsisting on cigarettes, coffee, and champagne in the nineteenth row looking down on Anna Wintour in the front row, sure, one could come up with that. But there was never enough there that I even chased it. Anna was already with David. She was breeding. Mothers don’t usually go off and have affairs.” (Down the road he’d be proved wrong about the latter, though the man in question wasn’t Si Newhouse.)
Laurie Schechter, who had come over to Vogue as style editor with Anna, also remembers her as being “highly disturbed and upset” about the Liz Smith item. “I don’t think Anna’s speech was a case of thou doth protest too much,” she maintains. “But she definitely has a way with men. They become enamored of her. She’s a striking woman and she has that mysterious allure, and her charms get turned on for men. But I didn’t think, personally, that the rumor was true. How pathetic that people couldn’t acknowledge she was at Vogue because she deserved to be there and not because she slept with Si Newhouse. Men can be carried a long way on the enamored quality of a woman like Anna. It doesn’t have to be physical.”
For Anna, her appointment seemed almost inauspicious. If there was a celebration of her coronation, no one was aware of it. So much venom was being spewed, so much anger and angst abounded. The Liz Smith story was like pouring gasoline on glowing embers.
Some fourteen years later, having been involved in a real, well-documented, and highly publicized extramarital affair that destroyed her marriage, Anna was still oddly vexed about that old and yellowed gossip item. As a recipient of a 2002 Matrix Award for magazines, sponsored by New York Women in Communications, she brought up the gossip that most everyone had forgotten—the latest scandal, involving her and wealthy Texan Shelby Bryan, being much more current and scrumptious.
While the mood at the award luncheon was described as upbeat and gracious, Anna took a “defensive tone” in her acceptance speech. She recalled for the audience, including Walter Cronkite, who was on the dais, that on her first day as editor in chief of Vogue, “a nationally syndicated gossip writer said that an alleged affair with my boss had got me my job.” Anna emphasized that she believed “none of this would have happened if I had been a man.” A surprise and ironic speaker at the affair after Anna accepted her award and vented was an iconic figure who over the years had been embroiled in extramarital affairs—William Jefferson Clinton.
Besides Laurie Schechter, Anna brought with her to Vogue a. team that included André Leon Talley; Gabe Doppelt, who had bonded closely with Anna; Charles Gandee; Derek Ungless, Vogue’s new art director, who along with Anna was responsible for some of the controversial changes at HG; and a couple of other creative talents.
Among those who left were Jade Hobson, who went to Revlon for a time (but the other fashion creative director, Polly Mellen, stayed on); managing editor Lorraine Davis left but stayed within the Condé Nast organization; features editor Amy Gross accepted a position at HG; associate editor Kathleen Madden also resigned but stayed at Condé Nast; the two-person living department was killed off, and Anna’s once close friend and colleague Paul Sinclaire, who had been a fashion editor at Vogue where he also was a close associate of Mirabella’s, went to HG. In all, some thirty staffers either were pink-slipped or turned in their resignation within a month or two of Anna’s ascension.
With Anna gone from HG, new editor Nancy Novogrod added the old name House & Garden in small letters under the big HG initials, in hopes of winning back subscribers who had jumped the garden fence when Anna was in residence. The magazine didn’t have long to live, though, in its latest incarnation. In 1993, Si Newhouse killed off the more than nine-decades-old monthly because its comeback wasn’t fast enough. That same year he bought its rival, Architectural Digest. Anna’s shoddy renovation of HG apparently couldn’t be repaired.
The biggest surprise addition to Anna’s team was one of the giants of British Vogue who had fled from Anna’s flogging—Grace Coddington. She had been working for Calvin Klein in New York for about eighteen months when Anna came into power. Coddington missed the fashion magazine world and she felt, after working in New York, that she had a better understanding of the American woman and her fashion needs. She telephoned Anna and said, “I’d like to come back,” and Anna responded, “I’m starting on Monday. Why don’t you start with me?” Anna gave her the title of fashion director and put her high on the masthead. There was talk within the industry that Coddington took a substantial salary cut and ate lots of crow to come work for Anna again.
“Anna’s very mercurial,” notes Schechter regarding Anna’s decision to hire Coddington. “She’s a lot like fashion—short skirts this season, long skirts next. She can be a bit like that with people, too. Even when she was pursuing André [Leon Talley, when he was a freelancer], she used to say to me, ‘Oh, I think his work is so over the top, don’t you?’ That’s the way she is. It didn’t surprise me that Grace went back. Working for a fashion designer like Calvin Klein is a very singular point of view and doesn’t allow the depth or range that working at a fashion magazine does, working with a lot of different designers’ clothes and points of view rather than just one.”
Anna, who despised the Brit mentality that ran Vogue in London, now did a complete one-eighty and acknowledged that when she took over American Vogue, “I took the British approach with me because it seemed what was needed was some sort of combination of the two.”
Anna’s immediate goal for Vogue was to “put a happier face on things,” says Schechter—models smiling and looking exuberant. “Even Anna’s first cover was a big departure because it wasn’t just a beautiful face, it was a smiling, beautiful face.”
That cover, dated November 1988, was far different from anything Grace Mirabella or Diana Vreeland or any of the othe
rs before Anna had ever dreamed or had nightmares about. It showed a pouty-lipped nineteen-year-old Israeli model named Michaela Bercu with mussed hair wearing tight, faded fifty-dollar jeans—jeans, of all things, on the cover of glamorous Vogue, the old-line fashionistas gasped—and sporting a ten-thousand-dollar Christian Lacroix T-shirt designed with a bejeweled pattern in the shape of a cross.
“I wanted the covers to show gorgeous real girls looking the way they looked out on the street rather than the plastic kind of retouched look that had been the Vogue face for such a long time,” declared Anna. “I wanted to bring in new photographers and just liven the whole thing up a bit.”
Critics were astonished at what the new arbiter of American fashion had done with her first issue. As The New York Times pointed out, “It may well be the first time blue jeans have appeared on a Vogue cover—without a belt and with the model’s tummy showing, no less.”
“Weird” was the way a Neiman Marcus executive described the cover.
Anna’s view of mixing jeans with couture was to convey to the readers that a woman can “make an outfit her own by how she puts it together.” She called the issue “transitional” and pointed out that “ Vogue girls have a kind of ‘don’t touch me’ look. I think we have a freer attitude toward fashion. When we looked at the couture this time, we tried to look at it in a more accessible way.”
Besides the startling cover, the models inside had a more informal look.
It was what Si and Alex had been demanding of Mirabella but never got. It was Elle. Vogue called the look “haute but not haughty.” As Schechter notes, “The Vogue under Anna didn’t look or feel like the Vogue under Grace. Anna obviously had a different approach. Even the content that Grace railed against for whatever reason when Anna was creative director—all of it was very palatable commercially. Anna’s smart. She’s not going to do something that’s going to put her outside the corporate popularity.”
Much later, Mirabella felt certain she would never have been fired if she had only followed Newhouse’s wishes and made Vogue look just a little bit more like Elle.
Anna had followed Newhouse’s mandate to the letter, nudging Vogue ever closer to the look and feel of Elle. One of her first acts after unseating Mirabella was to lure to Vogue a. glamorous, high-ranking Elle editor who had the Elle spirit of being fun, mixing things up. She was an important addition to the staff in those early days.
thirty-four
Madonna, Di, and Tina
Anna’s first full year at the top of Vogue was not a pleasant time for the fashion industry. A deep recession had taken hold.
The U.S. dollar had fallen like a rock, by as much as 50 percent against the British pound. Everyone from the rag trade to couture was feeling the pinch. As a result, Anna and other power brokers in the U.S. fashion scene went so far as to ignore Fashion Week in London in spring 1989. Everyone was in the doldrums.
Anna, meanwhile, devoted as much as twelve hours a day to performing cosmetic surgery on what she and Newhouse perceived as the wrinkly face of Vogue—tightening it here, nipping it there, tucking it everywhere—always working toward making it look younger, getting it closer to that kicky Elle look that had intrigued Newhouse so much that he canned Grace Mirabella because she didn’t get it.
What Anna didn’t do was a complete makeover as she had done at HG. She’d learned her lesson about proceeding with extreme surgery without a real plan or a true feel for the marketplace.
Those first year of Vogue covers under Anna ranged from a young model in a tank top sporting a Byblos hat costing less than a hundred dollars to a formal photograph taken by the famous Irving Penn. It was all part of her loosening-up process, without going off the chart.
That included putting hot young celebrities on the cover—and none was hotter, sexier, or more erotic at the time than a singer and entertainer formerly known as Madonna Louise Ciccone.
André Leon Talley went forth to Los Angeles to check her out for Anna, met with her, was psyched, and thus the May 1989 issue of Vogue had the Material Girl on its cover, with a ten-page spread of her house inside, HG-like.
“We put Madonna on the cover,” Anna intoned, “because we want to show the range where fashion comes from.”
In fact, Anna actually put Madonna on the cover for “S&tS—sales and Si,” asserts a well-placed Vogue source. “Madonna in those days would have sold a roll of toilet paper if she was on the packaging. Anna was all about celebrity, putting a supercelebrity on the cover sold big-time, and Si was walking on air. She was doing what Grace didn’t do, and what Si wanted.”
The New York Times, though, noted that Madonna was “hardly the elegant, carefully coiffed woman of whom Vogue was enamored” in the past.
But Anna’s youth orientation didn’t show an upward spike in newsstand sales, which represented some 65 percent of Vogue’s circulation. That number remained much the same as when Mirabella was running the show. However, advertising pages increased somewhat, by about forty-seven pages compared to Mirabella’s final year.
As The Times observed, “The jury is still out on how effective Ms. Wintour is doing.”
Meanwhile, Elle was right on Vogue’s tail, having replaced Harper’s Bazaar in both circulation and advertising. Some in the industry had begun looking at Anna’s baby as a “me-too” magazine, meaning Anna was copying the Elle look and feel, which to a great extent she was.
Aware of the criticism, she declared that Vogue had the responsibility to “report which way fashion is going.” She added, “It is an attitude, not an age. The magazine is younger looking because that is more contemporary, but age is not the issue. We have to tread a narrow path . . . be on the cutting edge” or “lose the buzz.”
Anna had Newhouse’s full backing. His plan was to raise by 10 percent the circulation that the magazine guarantees its advertisers, what’s known in the industry as the rate base. A step like that was seen as a calculated risk and hadn’t happened since the late 1970s.
Anna was now moving on all fronts—from fashion to features—and seeking less and less input from the one man who had guided her to the pinnacle, Alex Liberman. She essentially demanded that her mentor keep his nose out of what she was doing. “Anna told Si she didn’t want Alex meddling, that she wanted total control over what went into each issue,” a Vogue insider maintains. “When the word got around that Anna was dissing Alex, she claimed it was all nasty gossip, ‘rubbish.’”
But Alex felt out of the loop he had controlled forever. The man who had helped get her to Vogue in the first place came to the realization that he was no longer of any use to her. “He had done for Anna what she required, and now she felt it was time to break the cord,” notes the insider. “Alex complained and Si finally had to put Anna on notice to keep Alex involved.”
Later, Anna acknowledged that she “probably forgot how much [Liberman] had been involved before,” which is difficult to imagine since she was at his side from the moment she first came to Vogue as creative director and relied on him to consult on and approve her pages when she was at British Vogue.
“I guess,” said Anna later, “I was trying too hard to prove that I was not going to be like Grace Mirabella.”
She said that when she took over from Mirabella she had meetings with Liberman, who appeared concerned about his future role. He kept asking her, “ ‘What will it be like?’ and ‘How will we get along?’ I was probably too pushy, and all the people who had been with me at HG were used to reporting to me. But Alex and I talked . . . and gradually things got worked out.”
Under orders from Newhouse, Anna brought Liberman back in the ball game—somewhat—by running layouts by him and by showing him potential covers but doing what she wanted to do anyway. She placated him and he felt relieved that he wasn’t being discarded.
He saw Anna as bold and audacious in how she handled the magazine and its personnel. While he thought Diana Vreeland when she took over Vogue was “daring” in an “artificial” way, that sh
e was all “flamboyance,” Anna, he determined, if he hadn’t long ago, was “closer to pure femininity” and felt “her great genius is feminine seduction. Maybe this is what it takes to make Vogue exciting . . . I may have made Vogue handsome . . . but I don’t think I made its fashion pages exciting.”
Besides Elle, a. new magazine had joined the fashion follies.
It was called Mirabella.
Anna simmered. She thought Mirabella was out of her hair forever. Now she was back.
About a week after Anna was named editor, Mirabella received a telephone call from Ed Kosner, Anna’s former editor at New York magazine, who told her that his boss, the media baron Rupert Murdoch, wanted to have lunch with her. Mirabella wondered why a publisher known mostly for his gossipy tabloids (but also 50 percent of Elle) wanted to meet, but she went along for the ride. No one turns down an audience with Murdoch.
At the fancy French restaurant La Côte Basque, he talked to her in detail about women’s magazines, asking lots of questions, especially about what was lacking in them and which audience of women was being ignored. They parted company with Murdoch saying the magic words, “Let me go over the figures,” which meant the man had a plan.
Mirabella heard nothing more. Murdoch was busy that summer buying TV Guide, the Daily Racing Form, and Seventeen. Then, when she thought he was off to other things, he called and they had another lunch. It went well. A few days later, she sat with one of his colleagues in a private room at another restaurant and was told she was going to be given a new magazine. She was floored when she heard it would be called Mirabella. Murdoch’s philosophy was “a magazine has to have a name,” and Mirabella’s was as good as any.
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