Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Anna was in her element, the queen of the ball, dressed in an elegant long cream Geoffrey Beene beaded dress. “We wanted to turn the music up really loud so that all the old people would leave, including me,” she joked. Only because her longtime friend, The New York Times’s street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who had been shooting Anna since the early seventies, asked her to, she posed with one of her guests, Liz Tilberis, who was wearing a Chanel dinner suit. Both also wore boilerplate smiles and played nice, offering no hint of the animosity that existed between them. But, of course, everyone present knew otherwise.

  Still, despite the contempt in the air, it was one of New York’s memorable parties.

  As Anna’s friend the designer Anna Sui declared of the fabulous evening, “Anyone you can think of is here.”

  Meanwhile, a mile uptown, the average Joes of New York and tourists from the Midwest peered into the windows of Bloomingdale’s flagship store on Lexington Avenue trying to figure out what was what. The show windows were lined with Anna clones—many, many mannequins with bobs, sporting sunglasses, and perched on gold chairs with pencil-thin legs crossed as if they were in the front row at a fashion show. The dummies wore either Isaac Mizrahi slip dresses or Chanel jackets with skintight white jeans, which had become Anna’s latest look when not dressing for success.

  With all of the pressures of the job, the battles and feuds and personality conflicts, Anna needed to get away from the Vogue hot seat. In the midnineties she kicked off her Manolo slingbacks in favor of chic little flats, shed her Chanel for fashionable black slacks and tight Ts, and took what became known as “the vacation from hell.”

  The location was the CM Ranch, situated in a bucolic, secluded valley in Dubois, Wyoming. The spread had been a longtime summer vacation spot for the American side of her family. Though charming, it was a funky, rustic old dude ranch that featured events like square dancing and horseshoe tossing, and was one of the last places in the world that one would expect to find the queen of glam chilling. Anna’s thing was urban luxury.

  Her party included the flamboyant Donatella Versace and her two children, Allegra, the ten-year-old heiress to the Versace fortune, and her brother, Daniel; Donatella’s husband, former model Paul Beck, described in the press as “his hunkyness,” who was head of menswear operations for Versace; Donatella’s handsome bodyguard, Albert Orlangi, called “a gorgeous stud” by ranch help; Anna’s husband, David Shaffer, and their two children, Bee and Charlie; Anna’s stepson, Sam Shaffer; Manhattan restaurateur Brian McNally, who spent the week with a cell phone epoxied to his ear, shouting “buy this, sell that,” and his chic wife, Anne McNally, a fashion editor at Vanity Fair; Gabe Doppelt; a nanny or two; and a couple of other children.

  In the weeks preceding Anna and her posse’s arrival—all bills sent to Condé Nast, of course—there were daily calls from her harried assistant at Vogue to ranch bosses Lisa Petersen and Barbara Shoemaker. Petersen says she tried to make Anna’s assistant understand that the old CM was not a fancy spa but a classic dude ranch with 1920s log cabins heated by woodstoves, with showers but no baths, with Indian rugs on wood plank floors, and down-home front porches. There were several fancier houses, but all but one had been booked far in advance. Anna graciously—and shrewdly—gave the vacant one to Versace, a major Vogue advertiser. “Her assistant said, Anna wants the real experience,’” recalls Petersen. “I said, ‘Well, I hope this is going to work.’ I was definitely a little suspicious.”

  Shoemaker says the assistant called every day. “Anna wanted this, Anna wanted that. I told her to tell Anna to lighten up a little, and the assistant said, Ain’t it the truth.’ I can’t think of a worse job in the entire world than what that poor girl had. I’ll bet when deadlines come and things get tense, it’s like handling explosives. Me? I’d kill her about the first week and that’d take care of that.”

  Petersen and Shoemaker were correct to have qualms. On arrival—by helicopter—Anna, wearing her sunglasses, which she never removed in public, even at night, during the weeklong stay, demanded an in-house hairdresser and an in-house masseuse to cater to her and her friends’ sybaritic needs, which the ranch couldn’t supply. So Anna immediately chartered a plane to shuttle back and forth daily to the tony little town of Jackson for shopping, shampoos, comb-outs, and body rubs. She also had a chauffeur at her disposal to take her and her friends by limo to the stables, which were within walking distance, when one of them got a hankering to ride.

  Anna was one of the most difficult and demanding guests the ranch had ever seen. “We didn’t forget that one real easy,” notes Shoemaker.

  By coincidence, one of the young people working as a cabin girl and waitress was a young American relative of Anna’s, Delia Gilkyson, the teenage daughter of Anna’s cousin Eliza, whom she hadn’t seen or spoken to since that family reunion back in the sixties.

  “It was one of my daughter’s first jobs,” says Eliza Gilkyson, “and Anna knew that a relative was working there, but Anna never even spoke to her, gave her the cold shoulder. Anna knows about us, the Gilkysons, and couldn’t care less. She’s a snob!”

  Word of Anna’s snub soon spread to other Gilkysons, including Patti Gilkyson Agnew, who felt Anna hadn’t changed much since her chilly visit in New York as a teenager years earlier with Agnew’s sister, Neal Thorpe. “I heard Anna was very cold to Eliza’s daughter,” says Agnew. “She didn’t pay much attention to Delia.”

  The first evening, the glitzy Wintour party showed up at the ranch’s homey family-style dinner. Anna clearly wasn’t a happy camper. Summoning Petersen with a patrician wave of her hand, she said, “You understand. You’re from New York. This is not acceptable! We need the other two houses.”

  Petersen told her she was sorry, but the houses were already occupied.

  “Well, move them out!” Anna snapped.

  Petersen was startled, said she would do no such thing, and advised Anna “to sit back and observe and start to enjoy the place, or we can pack you up . . . that’s your choice. That kind of snuffed her a little bit. I think she was stunned to find herself where she was. I guess she didn’t read the brochure her assistant gave her.”

  From that point on, Anna avoided the ranch as if it were an outlet mall. Almost daily, she had her driver whisk her to the one-horse airport in Dubois, ten minutes away, where she boarded her chartered plane for the half-hour hop to Jackson, where she spent the day.

  When she was at the ranch, she acted like a spoiled child who couldn’t get her way and was having a 24/7 hissy fit.

  “She didn’t speak to anyone,” recalls Shoemaker. “She was totally antisocial, totally disagreeable, didn’t blend in with the other guests at all—intentionally. She went riding once, maybe twice, no more, and always rode way behind everybody She just wouldn’t socialize or do anything that was friendly”

  Versace, accompanied by her bodyguard, strolled up and down in front of the dining room and office where the other guests could see her, wearing low-slung, skintight, black spandex shorts that, according to bug-eyed eyewitnesses, “just barely covered the essentials,” and was always puffing a cigarette. At home, she moisturizes her toes with $150-a-bottle Crème de la Mer and rarely goes out without being draped in jewelry worth a small fortune. So the CM was big-time culture shock as much for her as it was for Anna.

  “Everybody staying at the ranch was very aware of Wintour’s iciness,” maintains Shoemaker. “They laughed about it all week. Anybody sitting in the dining room at night wearing sunglasses is something of a novelty,” says Petersen.

  thirty-seven

  The Party’s Over

  From ejecting veteran staffers to igniting in-house competition for stories to establishing dress codes and odd rules of behavior, Anna turned Vogue into her vision of what a great fashion magazine should be.

  Some longtime staffers fled in terror or disgust at the changes or their treatment—like Grace Coddington had done in London before she came back into the fold
. Others left because their departments were abandoned, or they were axed, or they retired.

  “Anna had a very interesting way of establishing herself,” recalls Elizabeth Tretter, who was a seventeen-year veteran of Vogue, a. honcho in the fabric department, which Anna dismantled to streamline the operation. “She took a look at the staff as it was and scheduled lunches with the ones she wanted to keep, and if you didn’t have lunch with her, you knew what was up.”

  Luckily, Tretter got an invitation, and Anna took her to Tretter’s favorite restaurant, the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. They had a pleasant chat, but soon Tretter was gone.

  “Age,” she says, “could have been a factor.” She was a decade older than Anna, and “Anna’s mandate was young, spirited, enthusiastic. Hip-hop editors like Gabe Doppelt came in. I was not hip-hop.”

  Tretter’s department was closed, and she was assigned to the tedious job of shooting pattern pages, something everyone abhorred.

  Tretter had mentioned to a younger friend all of Anna’s talk about wanting everything youthful, and the friend thought “that is actionable” and suggested that an age-discrimination suit might be in order, a repeat of what had happened at HG. “But that’s as far as it went,” she says. “So was I pushed out? Possibly, by the trend of things, the way it was going.”

  Over the years at Vogue, Tretter had made many contacts in the fabric business, so when things started to look very bleak she had opportunities out of Vogue. “I said to my husband, ‘I think the party is over.’ I went to speak with Anna and I said I thought I had to go someplace else. She didn’t say, ‘No, you can’t leave.’”

  Another older, longtime editor, who left six months into Anna’s reign but stayed within Condé Nast, also thought age figured in Anna’s personnel decisions. “There was that whole thing about young, young, young,” she asserts. “Anna was kind of peeling out everyone who was older. Anna was just adamant that everyone be young. And the thing is, she inherited Polly Mellen, who one wouldn’t call young. But Polly transcended the age issue because she was such a character and tried so hard.”

  Mellen, who had been at Vogue almost three decades, had been Anna’s biggest cheerleader during Grace Mirabella’s reign and was the one who set up that ill-fated meeting in which Anna told Mirabella she wanted her job. Anna was aware of Mellen’s support, and Mellen was the first one she told that Grace Codding-ton was coming on board. “I got a phone call from Anna saying, ‘I want you to be the first to know,’ She told me Grace was going to be creative director, and she said, ‘Do you like her? Do you get along?’ And I told her, ‘I love her.’”

  Coddington and Mellen were supposed to work closely. But after a time, less and less of Mellen’s sittings and ideas were getting into the magazine, and finally none were.

  “It was sad, in a way,” recalls a colleague. “Polly was sitting there with her thumb up her you-know-what. Nothing of her work was getting into the book. Anna and Grace were sending her a message.”

  Mellen says she was aware that Anna’s mission was to have everyone “young and beautiful,” but Mellen believed that “performance was still number one.” She also reached the cold realization that “two strong editors,” like her and Coddington, working together “does not work.”

  Mellen held out as long as she could, hoping things would get better, but she finally saw the writing on the wall: “I began to feel like I’m not really doing shoots, maybe I’m not really young enough for Anna. The time comes when you can sense it, and I’m pretty good at that. I had to do some real soul-searching and say, ‘Come on, you’ve had a wonderful life. You’re the spoiled brat of the fashion world.’”

  Anna had decided she’d given Mellen enough rope and it was now time delicately to drop the trapdoor.

  Si Newhouse handled the job for her. He called Mellen to his office and asked her what her dream job was. “I said, if you can believe it at my extreme age, I’d like my own magazine.”

  He didn’t have that to offer, but he told Mellen that Linda Wells at Allure needed a creative director, post–Laurie Schechter.

  Unlike many of the others who fell by the wayside, Mellen made the move and carved a niche for herself there. And she gives all the credit to Anna, who, she says, had “guts, passion, daring, caring, a point of view, and, number one, total focus. She’s the biggest influence in fashion in the world in the twentieth century. I put her right up there with Coco Chanel. People will argue with me, but I’m a fan.”

  Under Anna, everything changed.

  When Mirabella ran the show there were endless lengthy meetings. Recalls one editor, who was close to Mirabella and disliked Anna, “I remember sitting in a Grace run-through and it was like, ‘Oh, my God, tell us what you want for heaven’s sake. It’s not brain surgery’ And then with Anna you were going, Hmmmm . . . this is too damn easy’ because the meetings were over in a flash. It was one extreme to another. With Anna there was no waiting, she was always prompt. In the past you sometimes hung around forever.”

  Michael Roberts, a longtime British friend of Anna’s who became The New Yorkers fashion editor in the midnineties under Tina Brown, had observed Anna closely over the years and came to the conclusion that she “simply likes to keep things brusque, abbreviated, and to the point.”

  Anna’s imperious manner manifested itself even in the elevators and hallways of Vogue.

  Toby Young, a British journalist who became a contributing editor to Vanity Fair in the midnineties, claimed there was an “unwritten rule” that Anna didn’t permit anyone to ride on the elevators with her and that staffers “were expected to let her go first and take the next one.”

  He recalled how a jokester who worked as a researcher at Vanity Fair had talked about hiding behind a pillar in the lobby, waiting with a bunch of friends for Anna to appear, and when she got on the elevator would “pile in with her.” His stunt would be carried out after having consumed lots of beans and beer the night before.

  There was even a rule imposed about how Anna was to be addressed and when and where one might speak to her.

  The teenage daughter of a Vogue department head had gotten a job as a summer intern and was warned by her mother never ever to speak to “Ms. Wintour.” One day the girl was walking down the corridor when she saw Anna heading her way. Frightened of a confrontation with the boss woman, according to Young’s account, she walked quickly and looked straight ahead, hoping they would pass safely like two ships in the night. But just as they got virtually face-to-face, one of Anna’s high heels broke and she fell to the floor, sprawling at the girl’s feet. Remembering what her mother had told her, she “gingerly stepped over Anna’s prostrate form” and hurried to her mother’s office, where the child was told she’d done “the right thing.”

  As Young saw Anna, “Here, at last, was Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous in the flesh.”

  Under Mirabella, everything was a team effort, decisions were made by committee, long and drawn out. People who came up with an idea were assigned that idea. All that changed drastically under Anna.

  “Everyone was sort of an Indian, out doing their own stories, with a smallish story pot to pick from,” says one editor who quit in less than a year, refusing to contend with Anna’s demands and warp-speed drive.

  “There would be a list of designers, and each one of the editors would want, of course, the same thing,” she recounts. “So you would be crying, ‘Me, me, me! Please, please, please.’ It was funny and pathetic. We were like children. People were fighting. You’d bring in an accessory to use and hide it in a closet from everyone else. . . . You had to start wearing body armor because everyone was fighting for their piece of the turf. Anna really allowed powerful personalities in there to do their thing. It was like the end of the dinosaur era.”

  Anna brought in new writers. Some lasted, some didn’t. One in the latter category was the magazine writer and novelist Julie Baumgold, Ed Kosner’s wife, who had played an unsuccessful role in trying to keep Anna at Ne
w York when she was being wooed by Alex Liberman.

  Anna viewed Baumgold as someone who could handle the kinds of celebrity stories she was now jamming into the magazine—some worthy, some puzzling, like the makeover layouts featuring tabloid faces such as Lisa Marie Presley and Ivana Trump.

  In the late nineties, Baumgold’s first assignment was a profile of Brad Pitt. “I never met Brad Pitt, and I wrote a quick piece on Brad Pitt because they had some wonderful Brad Pitt pictures—and nobody changed a word,” says Baumgold. “It was sort of male beauty and I mentioned that Marilyn Monroe and Elvis had their noses fixed and that Brad Pitt had a little scar on his cheek.”

  That kind of piece was Anna’s speed. She was thrilled and invited Baumgold to lunch.

  “She asked me to become a contributing editor, and remembering that experience [writing about Brad Pitt], I said yes.”

  That was the last good experience Baumgold had working for Anna at Vogue.

  She says her dealings with the editor in chief after that “were never direct. It always came filtered through other people, which was a mistake. It was always, ‘This is what Anna wants . . .’ And that wasn’t the best way to have things filtered. It wasn’t direct and then I never quite got it because it changed all the time.”

  On a piece Baumgold did on femmes fatales, she was told “Anna wants you to include Kate Beckinsale, Anna wants this, Anna wants that . . .”

  Eventually, after several more pieces, it all became too much for Baumgold to deal with. “I worked for Anna for six months and couldn’t stand it and quit,” she says, laughing at the memory. “I can say that was the last time I enjoyed working in journalism. I left. That was it for me. This was a weak point in my magazine career.”

  While Baumgold made the cut with Anna but couldn’t take dealing with her indirect demands, others felt that the corporate culture and journalistic direction of the magazine wasn’t a perfect fit and fled.