Doppelt replaced forty-five-year-old Amy Gross Cooper, editor since 1980. Her “promotion” to editor at large for all Condé Nast publications was reported to have been a “complete sham . . . the standard move when a veteran employee isn’t wanted at a certain position anymore.”
A native South African whose family moved to London when she was in her midteens, the brash and aggressive Doppelt was the invention of the two most powerful women in the business: Anna and Tina Brown. Doppelt had been a loyal assistant to both, starting by answering phones at eighteen for Brown when she was the editor in chief of Britain’s Tatler, then moving on to Anna, beginning at British Vogue, from where Doppelt rose to editorships under her at HG and American Vogue.
On taking on her powerful new job at Mademoiselle, Doppelt declared, “We live and breathe frocks, but we also want to make the magazine face issues in a modern, amusing manner.”
In less than a year, she failed miserably.
Her first issue appeared on newsstands in March 1993. It included a recipe for peanut butter pie and Cool Whip from the Junior League Cookbook and an advice column on spotting and removing one’s own nasal detritus. The covers were even more over the edge—druggy-looking, grungy girls, with cover lines that read “Cool Clothes from Kmart.”
Six months later, on September 29, 1993, she was out, though the Condé Nast press release, with Si Newhouse’s name on it, diplomatically stated that she had resigned. “I had one vision of the magazine,” she said. “They had another.” Newhouse said that there were “conceptual differences that we have been unable to resolve.”
If Anna feared possible competition from Schechter, whose ideas were mainstream and commercial, she had little to fear from Doppelt, whose ideas were off-the-wall—and that’s most likely why she backed Doppelt for the Mademoiselle job.
A day after Doppelt cleaned out her desk, Elizabeth Crow, a forty-seven-year-old magazine and publishing veteran, was named as the new editor. Just as Newhouse wanted Vogue to be more like Elle, he mandated that Crow give Mademoiselle “an Allure feel.” It went through a few more iterations but was finally laid to rest by Si Newhouse on October 1, 2001. At the time of its demise, it was being edited by another Brit, Mandi Norwood.
Looking back more than a decade later, now running her own successful fashion-styling business, Schechter says, “I don’t know if Anna betrayed me. But a couple of my story ideas that I had in my proposal for Mademoiselle turned up in Vogue. Anna’s a good editor, and a good editor is good at appropriating. She’s a very competitive person, and I don’t think she could be where she is today without being . . . very aware of what her competition is doing and who her possible competition might be.”
thirty-six
Fashion Battlefield
In the summer of 1991, a monster rumor began sweeping the fashion world. The hot buzz was that Liz Tilberis, who loathed Anna, and whom Anna detested, was on the short list to take over American Harper’s Bazaar.
This would mean all-out war between the two, the fashion magazine equivalent of Operation Desert Storm, which had been launched at the beginning of the year in the Persian Gulf If the rumor came to pass, Anna and Tilberis would be the opposing generals on the fashion battlefield.
Bazaar—the first magazine to hire Anna when she arrived in New York and the first one to fire her—had fallen far behind Vogue and Elle in popularity over the years. The editor who was said to have canned Anna, Anthony Mazzola, was still in charge. The talk was that the wife of the head of the Hearst magazine empire was pushing for his replacement and that Tilberis seemed the best candidate.
Hearst wanted to get Bazaar back in the game and take on Vogue. There had always been an intense rivalry with Condé Nast, with each using every opportunity to steal talented personnel. Now Hearst felt that with Tilberis in charge of Bazaar, it might have a shot at playing catch-up with Vogue. Tilberis would be Bazaars Anna Wintour.
The chatter about Hearst’s plans for Tilberis and Bazaar had gotten so intense—bouncing back and forth across the Atlantic—that Si Newhouse’s cousin, Jonathan Newhouse, who ran Condé Nast’s European operations, demanded a meeting with her. Over poached eggs and coffee at Claridge’s, he noted generously that she was due for a raise. He warned her she’d hate living in New York and added an ultimatum: If she took the job, she would “never work for Condé Nast again.”
But Tilberis had a number of trusted cheerleaders telling her to go for it when it was offered. Among them, surprisingly, was Anna’s own fashion director and top lieutenant at Vogue and Tilberis’s closest friend, Grace Coddington.
“Get your ass over here,” Tilberis was told by Coddington, who didn’t seem to have problems with the two of them being “friendly competitors.”
But Anna certainly would.
Coddington even helped Tilberis come up with alibis in case she was spotted in New York holding top secret meetings with Hearst brass: say she was on an anniversary trip or shopping. Coddington and Tilberis even had discussions about possibly joining forces again, becoming a team like they were in London when Anna came over and forced Coddington out. But they decided against it because Coddington had always been Tilberis’s superior and probably would have trouble working under her. Moreover, Coddington was now happy working with Anna. “We [Tilberis and Coddington] trusted our ancient friendship enough to figure out a comfortable compromise between our usual wont to dish and a more sensible policy of don’t ask, don’t tell,” Tilberis said.
Top fashion photographers, like Patrick Demarchelier, who could make any woman look stunning, told Tilberis that Bazaar was a great opportunity for her, and he would work for her if she was able to hire the controversial French art director Fabien Baron, who had been at Italian Vogue.
Tilberis was building a highly respected staff, and she hadn’t even gotten the offer yet.
But she was taking the advice of her friends and colleagues seriously. Since Anna left four years earlier, things had gotten worse at British Vogue. There had been management shifts at Condé Nast in London that did not sit well with Tilberis. And just like the stiff competition Anna’s Vogue was getting from Elle, Tilberis’s Vogue was fighting what appeared to be a losing battle for the hearts and minds of its readers with what she saw as the “slightly pornographic” five-year-old British upstart Marie Claire. It now outsold Vogue by more than 10 percent with its mix of sexy articles and models.
During the Paris collections in October 1991, the forty-four-year-old Tilberis met for the first time with the president of Hearst magazines, D. Claeys Bahrenburg, and the two hit it off After subsequent meetings, she wrote a detailed series of demands: full editorial control, the best photographers, big editorial and promotional budgets. She also wanted to fire existing people and hire her own staff because she knew from watching Anna take over British Vogue “how difficult it was to inherit a recalcitrant, embittered staff.”
In short, if she were to take the job, Tilberis wanted carte blanche.
She then had a sit-down in New York with Si Newhouse. The meeting did not go well. She voiced some of her unhappiness with the way things were going in London, and he hardly responded. Later, Tilberis noted, “If I hadn’t had another job offer in the background, I would have left his office feeling thoroughly dejected.” Had she got a better response from him, she might have stayed.
Tilberis wasted no more time and cut a deal with Hearst. Tony Mazzola had already resigned but agreed to stay on to edit a 125th anniversary issue of the magazine.
On January 6, 1992, she was named editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar, putting Brits at the helm of the most venerable fashion magazines in the United States.
Anna’s only immediate public response was not one of congratulations. To The New York Times she said merely, “The more British editors, the better.”
Spy magazine, New York’s equivalent of Private Eye in London, was prompted to publish a humorous piece called “The New British Invasion: How American Publishing Has Been Taken
over by People with Charming Accents and Bad Teeth.” An illustration by Al Hirschfeld showed a Beatles-style group called “The Brits,” with Anna and the New Yorkers Tina Brown on guitars and Liz Tilberis on drums. They were just several of dozens of British writers and editors—women and men—who had come to the United States, many working for Condé Nast.
In a similar piece in The New York Times, Edwin Diamond, media critic for New York magazine, surveyed the phenomenon of fashion editors from the UK invading America. He concluded, “I don’t think there is any confirmed data that says that British women have better taste or sharper editing instincts than American women.”
Image, accent, and snob appeal were thought by observers to be the Brits main selling point to U.S. magazine publishers.
Anna didn’t offer a private salute to Tilberis, either. “I didn’t get any flowers of congratulations from her,” Tilberis said later. “No matter what either of us said [pleadingly and privately to reporters] to play down our personal rivalry, the press on both sides of the Atlantic were intent on setting up a cat-fight. Anna versus Liz, Vogue versus Bazaar, Condé Nast versus Hearst—it was far too juicy to resist.”
But it was true—the catfight, the rivalry, and the media circus.
In London, readers awoke to the headline, “Liz and Anna wage savage Frock War,” in the Daily Express. The story declared that Tilberis’s appointment “has set handbags flailing in the outwardly elegant, intrinsically vicious world of high fashion.” It went on to report that Anna “is certainly not laying out the welcome carpet. The Frock War between the Boadiceas of fashion is savage and fingernails are blood red.”
There was truth to what Fleet Street was reporting.
In Paris, at the couture previews, Anna sat stone-faced at a table just a few feet away from Tilberis and never said a word to her, refused even to acknowledge her presence. Ponytailed Karl Lagerfeld, a designer for Chanel, fluttered between the two of them in hopes of warming the chill, but to no avail.
Threatened with being banned from its pages, Vogue photographers and models were put on notice not to work for Bazaar. The other side made the same declarations. A Vogue editor at the time says, “Every time a photographer got an offer from them we upped the ante. If they beat us and got a photographer we wanted, it cost them huge money.”
Tilberis tried to convince photographers that they would have more freedom working for her than for Anna. “Anna Wintour’s style, as I knew from working with her,” Tilberis said, “is prescriptive. She tells people what she wants and they have to come back with it. If it’s not what she has in mind, she kills it. I kept repeating that Bazaar was going to be far more democratic.”
The battle for the photographer Peter Lindbergh, who shot Anna’s first American Vogue cover, underscored the kind of hardball both sides were playing. When Tilberis got word that Lindbergh was ready to sign a contract with Bazaar, she booked the next flight to Paris to meet with him. But when she arrived at Kennedy Airport, she ran head-on into Si Newhouse, also Paris-bound and determined to have Lindbergh sign a Vogue contract for more money. Tilberis won; the creative freedom she promised did the trick. She also got Demarchelier to shoot exclusively for her. All of this Anna brushed off. Her philosophy, and that of Condé Nast, was that there are always others out there.
Tilberis’s salary along with perks was more than one million dollars. Anna was the highest-paid magazine editor in the world, earning close to two million, with built-in bonuses in her contract for circulation gains that could bring in seven more figures. She had a bottomless clothing budget and an enormous editorial budget, was surrounded by the most beautiful people in the world, had flower-filled suites when she traveled to the world’s most glamorous fashion capitals, had a Lincoln Town Car at her disposal, could catch a flight on the Concorde whenever, and was wafer thin (while Tilberis wore a size fourteen, about which the British press had a field day). Indeed, Anna had the kind of glamorous, glitzy Olivia Goldsmith–character life any woman worth her Manolos would covet.
Still, she was envious of what Tilberis was getting from Hearst.
In New York, a key Vogue editor under Anna at the time says, “She was fuming. She had no respect for Liz’s work, thought she was still way behind the times, and couldn’t believe she’d worked such an incredible deal for herself. Anna put out the word: Destroy Harper’s Bazaar at any cost. She wanted to see Liz Tilberis embarrassed out of her job. Anna’s all about beating the competition, keeping herself on top, pleasing Si Newhouse. I felt like we were on a war footing. We were on a war footing.”
Attempting to put a happy face on their very real and unpleasant feud, Anna described her relationship with Tilberis as “friendly” and said they even intended to have lunch “real soon.” The media “is just trying to make something out of nothing,” she maintained. “We had a conversation just the other day—about face-lifts.”
In fact, Anna wasn’t about to give a break to Tilberis or, for that matter, anyone who wanted to glorify her in any way.
Such was the case with the veteran British journalist Georgina Howell, who had interviewed Anna and her father for a candid London newspaper profile years earlier. Howell had won the Vogue Talent Contest at sixteen and later had served as fashion editor of the Observer, had worked for the Sunday Times, and had written a number of books, including Vogue Women and In Vogue: Sultans of Style and Season. Howell had also been Tina Brown’s deputy editor at the Tatler.
By the early nineties, with the feud between Anna and Brown bubbling, there was a bidding war for Howell’s services. Brown wanted her for Vanity Fair, and Anna for Vogue. “I had to decide between the two,” Howell says, “but Anna just offered me so much money that I had to accept it.” Howell also had an arrangement to write pieces that would appear only in Great Britain for the London Telegraph magazine, which at the time was edited by Anna’s friend Emma Soames.
One of Howell’s first assignments for Soames was to go to New York and write a profile of the newly appointed Tilberis, who was, Howell says, “the toast of the town. Everyone thought she was wonderful.” The article was only for British circulation for the Telegraph and would not appear in the United States.
“And so, as I always did when I went over to New York,” says Howell, “I dodged into Anna’s office and said hello, and she asked, ‘What are you doing here?’”
When Howell said she was interviewing Tilberis for a Telegraph profile, Anna went ballistic. “She said, ‘Do you not consider that a conflict of interest?’ I said, ‘Well, no, because it’s for England, not America, and it’s part of my London contract.’ And Anna yelled, ‘WELL, I DO!’ and that was the end of it. . . . My contract with American Vogue ran to its end and wasn’t renewed. I thought Anna and I had an excellent relationship. But Anna and Liz Tilberis were rivals in the marketplace.”
Looking back years later, Howell says she was “sorry to lose the money and sorry to have offended Anna, but as I reflected, and I’ve gone on reflecting over the years, I think perhaps Anna could have been bigger about it. But she does tend to demand total loyalty in a way that I reserve for private relations, not for business. I didn’t see it in my mind as being disloyal to Anna. It never occurred to me that it would be a problem for her.
“Liz [Tilberis] was a good friend of mine. She was a good friend of Emma Soames, who was a great friend with Anna, and they were in constant touch, and I did think that Emma wouldn’t have asked me to do it if she’d seen any problem with Anna. Now I’ve concluded I never really had a personal relationship with Anna. I was surprised it turned out that way.”
The big question facing the magazine industry, still in a recession and with advertising revenue nose-diving and newsstand sales pale, was whether Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Baazar, and the newly minted Mirabella could be supported in such lean times. In 1991, for instance, ad pages had declined as much as 26 percent for Bazaar and almost 15 percent for Vogue compared with a year earlier. But Anna’s Vogue still received all of the kudo
s. One head of a major media buying and planning service described Vogue as “the gold standard of fashion for intelligent modern women. Elle doesn’t have the substance of Vogue and is more for the superficial external woman. I like Mirabella, which skews a tiny bit older. It’s a good threesome, and it’s possible to look at Harper’s Bazaar and say, ‘Who needs it?’”
And that’s precisely why Tilberis was brought in to do battle.
“With Liz there, it will be stronger,” Anna conceded. “I think she will do a good job, but I am not going to edit this magazine any differently because she is over there. We know we can have an impact if we have strong features and a point of view. Do women still want fashion? Of course they want fashion. They’ll always want fashion.”
Even with the new competition, the horrible recession, and staying on top of her game, Anna was deeply involved in putting together the hundredth anniversary celebration of Vogue in April 1992. To honor the occasion, a huge black-tie bash was held in the vaulted lobby of the New York Public Library, along with a century retrospective of Vogue photographs chosen by Anna and Alex Liberman.
The anniversary party—Anna oversaw the guest list—was like the Academy Awards and the Emmys and every contemporary Paris, Milan, London, and New York fashion show all wrapped in one big glittery ball. Movie stars, socialites, supermodels, titans of industry, media moguls, the world’s top designers—Lacroix, Lagerfeld, Gaultier, Versace, Blass, Beene, Karan, Klein, Lauren, de la Renta, Jacobs, and Mizrahi—were there, plus all of the A-list fashion photographers. The designers and the photographers were fantasy makers, and fantasy was what the fashion industry was all about, and Vogue transmitted the message to the masses. All the beautiful fashionistas ate, drank, and danced to Tito Puente and C&C Music factory.
Front Row Page 36