As Anna was working to get her first spring 1989 issue locked up, Mirabella was preparing for her first issue, which she proudly described to the media as “an upscale fashion book for women who know who they are. It’s for women who are more than fashion groups. It’s not about bubble gum and hula hoops.”
A top executive of Murdoch Magazines, though, was more specific about the target audience: “It’s aimed at the reader Vogue abandoned ten years ago. She’s interested in substance, not glitter.”
Once Mirabella began readying its launch, Vogue would fight tooth and nail to keep anyone from even thinking of defecting. Those who did, or were known to be negotiating with the enemy, were threatened with blacklisting from Vogue. That went for models, photographers, writers, and editors. It became nasty. Some key players were forced to sign contracts giving Vogue exclusivity, causing them to lose their other markets.
That was an outside feud, one of many Anna would have with editors of competing fashion magazines.
Within the Condé Nast organization, Anna’s main competitor was seen as “that other Brit”—Vanity Fair and later New Yorker editor in chief Tina Brown. The media loved to play up a good catfight, and magazine industry wags were constantly weaving bitchy scenarios about the two.
Anna versus Tina made for hot copy. They had become symbols of the glittery Condé Nast universe: glamorous icons presented like movie stars playing at being editors. They both ran glitzy journals in tight skirts and high heels, lived glamorous public lives, were celebrities in the gossip columns. Everything about their high-flying worlds became grist. They were the dons of Condé Nast’s British Mafia.
The feud between Anna and Brown wasn’t totally imagined.
Rancor between the two dated back to their younger days in London. Brown’s father, George Hambley Brown, a British B-movie producer, despised Charles Wintour because the Evening Standard had panned some of his films. “Charles thought Brown was a hack filmmaker,” says Alex Walker. “I didn’t think much of him, either, and my reviews reflected both of our thinking.”
The resentment carried over to their daughters once they were together in the same arena.
Embarrassed by her lack of a formal education, Anna was envious of Brown’s, who had been a proper and serious student, and graduated from Oxford’s St. Anne’s College. Unlike Anna, Brown had no problem with writing and, as was said later, took to magazine editing “like a deb to a canapé.” But while Brown was blond, tiny, buxom, and five years younger, she was no seductive glamour puss like Anna, and that caused her to be jealous.
“Here were two women who could not have been more different,” observes a female former Condé Nast executive who worked closely with both of them. “Tina is so smart, so good at what she does, and Anna is beautiful and icy and knows how to play the game.
“Their relationship with Si had many elements of a classic family structure—a classic dysfunctional family structure—with Si as the father figure and Anna and Tina vying to be the favored daughter. Si appreciated them each. Tina’s perception was that Anna was the prettier sister, more girly-girl, more popular. But Tina was brilliantly finding this magazine niche that had never existed and was getting all that media attention, and that made Anna jealous. Both used their charms on Si.”
What the two did have in common was unvarnished ambition, undistilled drive, Olympian competitiveness, and an incredible need for success—all worthy traits in the bitchy magazine world.
They also had a friend in common, the London gossip columnist Nigel Dempster.
In November 1989, Anna and Brown put aside their differences for a few hours and cohosted a party for Dempster in New York to honor the publication of a book he had written about the tragic life of billionaire playgirl Christina Onassis. The event took place in a trendy downtown café owned by Anna’s pal Brian McNally.
The guest list consisted of some two hundred so-called classic-A talents and literary masters of the universe, a nice way of describing the usual suspects who show up to get free books, free food, free drinks, and a free boldface mention in Liz Smith’s mostly hagiographic column. At one point during the party, both Anna and Brown showed their wicked side, laughing hysterically when Dempster, probably soused, accused one of the guests of murdering Onassis a year earlier.
When Anna was editing HG and had started including celebrity coverage, Brown was livid. She couldn’t believe that Newhouse would permit her to trespass on her glitzy domain since Vanity Fair was all about the idolization of celebrities.
“Can you believe Si did that!” Brown once complained to a friend. “He’s humiliating my father. He knows Anna’s father and my father are mortal enemies! He knows!”
A knowledgeable observer, however, says, “I always thought Tina used the feud between the fathers as an excuse. Tina just saw Anna as being far more beautiful and had far greater ease, and that Si found her sexier. They were like teenagers vying for his eye.”
Anna’s pal, André Leon Talley, who once worked for Brown at Vanity Fair, is said to have thought of her as “tacky-tacky-tacky, dowdy-dowdy-dowdy” and accused her of wearing “borrowed designer dresses.” Talley reportedly presented his views to Brown in a snarky note when he left Vanity Fair at one point to work for Anna.
Their resentment toward each other grew more intense in the 1990s.
In June 1992, Brown was named editor of America’s most esteemed but money-losing weekly, The New Yorker. The move caused quite a stir in the literary and media worlds, but for Anna, Newhouse’s decision to place Brown there came as welcome news. Rumors had been circulating that Brown was being considered by Newhouse as Liberman’s replacement as editorial director of all Condé Nast magazines. Anna lobbied strenuously against it, telling friends privately that she’d quit before having to report to Brown. It would have been a battle royale.
By June 1997, Brown had turned The New Yorker around, Anna was near-ing her eighth successful year running Vogue and, while there would never be a peace treaty between the two, things appeared copacetic. In fact, Anna had arranged for a very private lunch with one of the world’s most famous women, Diana, Princess of Wales, at the Four Seasons in New York, and had graciously invited Brown to join them.
Since The New Yorker for the most part wasn’t into celebrity and fashion reportage, Anna’s fear of competition from Brown had faded somewhat. But Anna’s invitation to Brown was Machiavellian, mainly because of a nasty piece Brown had written for Vanity Fair in the mid-1980s before she became its editor, a piece of journalism that Di would never have forgotten.
That story, which received international attention, painted the prince and princess as a highly dysfunctional couple. Called “The Mouse That Roared,” Brown described an emotionally unstable Di who spent hours isolated, listening to her Sony Walkman, dancing alone, and studying her press clippings. And she described Charles as “pussy-whipped from here to eternity.”
By the time of the lunch, though, Diana seemed to hold no grievance against Brown and opened up to the two editors, confiding her negative thoughts about Prince Charles as the future king of England. It was strictly a social lunch and everything discussed was off the record, supposedly.
Cut to September 1997 and the horrible car crash that took Diana’s life in Paris. Brown rushed out a special New Yorker commemorative issue and there, as part of the package, was a blow-by-blow account of that lunch with Di, which became a journalistic cause célèbre. While New Yorker newsstand sales rocketed, critics like Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post lambasted Brown for breaking Di’s confidentiality, calling the piece “an exercise in self-display, so odious as to shame everyone in journalism.”
Odious, shmodious, Anna was livid and complained vociferously to New-house and others in the media who she hoped would go after Brown for breaking the confidence. Mainly, she was upset because she’d been scooped by her archrival.
“Tina never so much as inquired whether Anna was okay with her using the entire off-the-record conv
ersation,” says a Vanity Fair editor and writer who had a ringside seat at the imbroglio. “There was no courtesy call by Tina to Anna, which there usually is from one editor to another in the same organization under such circumstances. All’s fair in journalism, but Anna was fit to be tied. She was the one who had arranged the lunch and she was embarrassed—mainly because it was Tina and not her who had run with the story.”
But the brouhaha over the Di story paled in comparison to the controversy still to come over how Brown would use the pages of her next magazine, Talk, to go after Anna and her lover after the scandal about their extramarital affair became tabloid news.
As one highly placed Condé Nast executive observes, “When it involves Anna, it’s a bitch-eat-bitch world.”
thirty-five
The Assistant
Anna had brought Laurie Schechter a long way since she first hired her as her personal gofer at New York magazine. With Anna as her mentor, Schechter had earned the kind of respect and hash marks that got her the first fashion editor’s job at Rolling Stone and was brought back by Anna as a ranking editor at HG and now at Vogue.
Schechter’s name had become known in the fashion business and the media, and she was viewed as a contender. When Anna was running British Vogue, she had even recommended Schechter to Carrie Donovan at The New York Times for a prime spot on the Sunday Magazine style section staff and had made that generous gesture despite the fact that Schechter had disappointed her by not following her to London.
Anna clearly saw in Schechter the same kind of ambition and drive that had taken her to the top of the fashion magazine field. She liked and respected her spunk and hard work, or at least that was the feeling Schechter had, and there was never a reason to feel otherwise.
Anna even felt maternal toward Schechter. That was amply and graciously demonstrated when Schechter eloped and Anna, overwhelmed with launching her Vogue, actually took time from her hectic pace to plan and toss an elaborate dinner for her.
It was quite an affair, held in Anna’s town house with celebrity florist Robert Isabell handling the flower arrangements and celebrity caterer Glorious Foods preparing the supper. While Anna offered Schechter the option to choose from the menu, she strongly suggested lamb, so that’s what Schechter chose. Do as the boss does.
Most of the organization for the party was handled by Anna’s new favorite lady-in-waiting, Gabe Doppelt, who had taken the job of Anna’s assistant in London when Schechter declined to make the move. And Condé Nast picked up the tab. After all, this was a bash Anna was tossing, Schechter was a respected employee, and a lot of big names in the fashion world were invited—Marc Jacobs, Simon Doonan, among others. Anna’s philosophy was always to combine pleasure with business. And her world was the job.
“She was charming about throwing the party for me and I thought it was all very wonderful to have a close relationship with her,” says Schechter.
By 1990, though, Schechter was getting antsy for a couple of reasons. She hadn’t moved up the ladder under Anna as she thought she would, and she could see that Gabe Doppelt had gotten closer to Anna in Vogue’s inner circle. Schechter had kept her eye out for other opportunities, and one suddenly came along. Interview magazine, which had once rejected Anna for a job, had approached Schechter with “an appealing offer” to oversee fashions and style.
She went to Anna and told her, and was shocked by her reply.
“She said, ‘I’m not supposed to tell you, but there’s something they’ve been talking about for you at Condé Nast, and in light of this situation, it’s something you should know about. Go back to your office and I’ll call you.”
Within the hour, Anna called and told Schechter, “Go see Si Newhouse.”
Schechter couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Newhouse was telling her that she was being seriously considered for the top job at Mademoiselle. “He said it wasn’t a move they were going to make right away, but that they were considering it,” says Schechter, who saw the possibility “as my dream job. I was thrilled.” The only hitch was that the editor, Amy Gross Cooper, was married to GQ editor Art Cooper, and they had a complex clause in their Condé Nast contracts that if one was fired, both would have to receive severance. “It was a sticky deal, and they were still kind of muddling through the idea,” says Schechter. “Art Cooper made a fuss, but in the meantime, Mr. Newhouse told Anna that he wanted her to train me for the job.”
The training, for the most part, involved following Anna in and out of meetings and watching her operate, though Anna wasn’t big on editorial meetings and was usually in and out in minutes as opposed to the hours Grace Mirabella was said to have labored over decisions. Anna got bored quickly and left it to her subordinates, for the most part, to handle the details.
Anna also strongly urged Schechter to put together a detailed plan for what she’d do with Mademoiselle—once described by the snarky New York Observer as the “Jan Brady of Condé Nast”—when and if she took it over. “If I were you,” Schechter recalls Anna saying, “I would write one.” Schechter got on it immediately. She gave a copy to Anna and one to Newhouse, but the reaction in the executive suite was not positive. “They [Newhouse, Liberman et al.] weren’t ready for a rehaul,” Schechter says.
After a few months, having watched the Interview job grow wings and fly away—a great career opportunity lost by heeding Anna’s advice—Schechter was told that the editorship of Mademoiselle was on hold indefinitely. By shrewdly holding out the carrot of a major editor in chief’s job, Anna, New-house, and Liberman had kept the talented Schechter from going to the competition.
And now they had another so-called opportunity for her. They said she was needed to help launch a new beauty magazine called Allure. The prototype, she says, was a disaster and “they had to throw it in the garbage. They needed me to come from Vogue to get it off the ground, format the whole thing and put it in order.”
The problem was that Allure had an editor in chief, thirty-two-year-old Linda Wells, who did not take kindly to what she viewed as Schechter’s interference, coming over with the title of creative director—the same one Anna had when she first wreaked havoc at Vogue under Grace Mirabella. At the same time, Schechter thought Wells was a lightweight who didn’t have her kind of magazine experience. Wells did have journalistic cachet, though; she’d been the food and beauty editor at The New York Times Magazine for five years. Schechter, though, felt that Wells got the job through family connections.
“But I was encouraged to go to Allure by Alex Liberman, and I had a message that Mr. Newhouse strongly urged me to take the position. I was sort of between a rock and a hard place because I had to go to Allure whether I wanted to or not. It would have been career suicide to tell them to go jump in the lake.”
The petite Jewish Schechter and the taller, blond, and WASPy Wells—both of whom had worked at Vogue at the same time as assistants—were like oil and water, like Wintour and Mirabella. The two didn’t mix.
Anna could have stepped in to help Schechter—she certainly wielded enough influence with Newhouse and Liberman. But to Schechter’s surprise and dismay, Anna quietly removed herself from participation in the matter. Years later, Schechter looks back on that time and observes, “Maybe she didn’t want to go up against them. Anna is the kind of person who will give you the rope. If you’re going to hang yourself, then that’s what you’re going to do. She’s not going to necessarily help you either way. If Anna really didn’t want me to go, she could have taken a stand, but she didn’t because Si and Alex wanted me there. Politically, Anna wouldn’t have taken a stand against them.”
Was the very Machiavellian editor in chief out to “get” Schechter in some way? “Maybe.” Schechter says plaintively.
She notes that Anna “knew about my capabilities, and if you’re a potential threat to her, competition to her, she’s not going to help you do a better job at competing with her. Anna’s smart. I was a Vogue editor at Allure and that’s obviously a problem, that havi
ng a Vogue editor at another publication is going to be viewed by her as a possible threat. When I was fashion editor at Rolling Stone, I wasn’t a threat to what she was doing, as I was when I was at Allure. Not to say that Anna didn’t want me to do well, but I knew that to some extent I would appear as a threat to her.”
While Allure was mainly a beauty magazine, it did get involved with fashion, an arena that competed head-on with Vogue, and Schechter believes that concerned Anna because she would have started getting good word of mouth because of “my influence, my story ideas.”
Although Anna knew of the problems that existed between Schechter and Wells, she didn’t intercede or try to help Schechter. In fact, Schechter believes that Anna was “more helpful” to Wells.
While all this was going on, Newhouse had decided for a number of reasons, ranging from the economic climate to the resources required to get Allure launched, that this wasn’t the best time to change editors at Mademoiselle after all, so that possibility became a dead issue for Schechter.
She began to feel that she was in the middle of a horrific nightmare that wouldn’t end. “It was kind of a no-win situation at Allure,” she states.
As creative director, she was supposed to work on all aspects of Allure. “With Linda, what happened was she wouldn’t let me do anything, basically.” It was the same situation Anna had faced as creative director under Mirabella.
Schechter stayed at Allure for about six months during the late fall and winter of 1990, then resigned in spring 1991.
About eighteen months after Schechter left Condé Nast, her rival, thirty-two-year-old Gabe Doppelt, with Anna’s full support, was named editor in chief of the 1.5-million-circulation Mademoiselle, the job Schechter originally had been promised. “It was my finding and recommending Gabe to Anna,” she says, “that started Anna’s relationship with her, and they became close friends.”
Schechter wasn’t at all surprised that Doppelt got the job that she had coveted. “Gaby’s clever, knows how to play her cards right, has contacts, knows a lot of people, she’s very British, and she’s very private—and in that way she’s very much like Anna. Anna was a great supporter of hers and has done great things for her.”
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