Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  Such was the case with highly respected fashion reporter Robin Givhan, who wrote for the lively Style section of The Washington Post.

  Anna, who knew Givhan and had been interviewed by her for fashion stories over the years, approached her to become an associate editor, a job that had just opened up. Givhan was very flattered and thought, If I’m ever going to write full-time on fashion for a magazine, it’s not going to get better than Vogue.

  Givhan had always been impressed with Anna, especially by her “incredible decisiveness.” She notes, “I would interview her, and there’s never any hesitancy, always a really clear opinion, thought out, always supported. I’d talk to her about putting someone like Hillary [Clinton] or Oprah on the cover. . . . She always had a vision about why those covers mattered . . . saw how those decisions would have a ripple effect within popular culture. She can talk about that in a way that moves beyond just talking about clothes.”

  Anna pursued Givhan, who agreed to join the team. “Anna’s very good at getting what she wants,” Givhan notes. “She can be very charming.”

  But within a matter of a few months, Givhan began to have doubts about the job and began questioning whether Anna was the boss she wanted to work for and Vogue the place.

  One reason had to do with the magazine’s objectivity, or lack thereof. Givhan quickly discovered that the focus of any article she wrote or considered had “to be changed to accommodate the Vogue point of view.” A newspaper like The Post, as Givhan well knew, chose people to be interviewed based on diversity, whereas at Vogue the rule of thumb was much narrower.

  “You’re looking for women who have a sophisticated point of view—not a suburban soccer mom but maybe a suburban charity worker. You’re always thinking about what these women look like. They’re going to be photographed so they need to project a Vogue sensibility.”

  In many ways, Givhan felt, writing for Vogue “was preaching to the choir, people interested in fashion, not women with an estranged relationship with fashion.”

  One story that intrigued Givhan and that she proposed to Anna never saw the light of day. It was about a designer who had a terrible reputation in the fashion industry, was disliked and self-destructive but continued to excel and draw public praise. “I thought it would make an interesting piece and give an insight to the goings-on behind the scenes.”

  But Anna didn’t buy it.

  “The point of Vogue is not to tear down the industry, but to celebrate it,” emphasizes Givhan. “My story wasn’t celebratory. Vogue takes the creativity of fashion seriously. It takes its readers’ love of clothes seriously. A woman who just adores shoes is very easily mocked, but the magazine doesn’t do that. They say, ‘You know what? You love shoes, we love shoes, and there’s nothing wrong with loving shoes.’”

  After four months, it had all become too much for Givhan. But when she mentioned to a friend that she was thinking of packing it in, she was advised, “Honey, buck up. There are people out there who would mow down a crowd for your job.”

  After six months, Givhan turned in her resignation, left on what she felt was good terms with Anna, and returned to her fashion beat at The Post.

  Anna had developed close ties with The Washington Post. She was friends with Katharine Graham, the owner, as was Anna’s father. And Anna had become pals with Nina Hyde, the longtime fashion editor, who died from breast cancer, a cause Anna felt strongly about. So she tended sometimes to focus, when she was hiring editors and writers, on Post people. Another was Stephanie Mansfield, who earned a reputation for her bitchy stories and profiles of politicians and celebrities in the Post’s Style section and was brought on as a contract writer by Anna. Their relationship didn’t last long, either.

  One of her assignments was a profile of the designer Donna Karan that was considered tough on her by Vogue standards—not negative, but realistic, dealing with her personal relationships, among other things.

  “Maybe Anna had not read the story before it went in,” says Nancy McKeon, who had worked with Anna at New York magazine and was a Washington Post colleague of Mansfield. “Anna took Stephanie out to lunch, and she was trying to kind of tell Stephanie, you know, we have to be careful with these people. And Stephanie’s remark to me was, ‘I don’t know what those girls think they’re doing up there, but it sure isn’t journalism.’”

  Then there were those who were so desperate to work for Vogue and were so fearful of Anna that they found themselves fibbing to her in order to be accepted for a job.

  One such example of fabrication-for-Anna’s-sake involves the blond, leggy, men-on-the-brain writer Candace Bushnell, who described the editor in chief as “one of the most frightening women in the world. I don’t care what anybody says.”

  Anna had offered Bushnell a job and the two went to lunch to seal the deal, when the white lie slipped out.

  “She’s eating a steak that’s like, bloody, like it was just killed in the street and brought in. I’m trying to eat a lamb chop. I’m, like, shaking,” recalled Bushnell. “She’s like, ‘Well, Candace, you are exactly our demographic. You live in an urban area and you’re thirty-two.’ I was, like, ‘Okay, I’m thirty-two.’

  “I was actually thirty-six. But I was so frightened [of her] that I didn’t want to say that I was thirty-six because I was convinced I would get fired before I even started to write this column. So then I started dating the publisher. So then I couldn’t tell him [her true age] because I’d already lied to Anna and he and Anna talk all the time so it would’ve come out.”

  Bushnell, who as a columnist for the New York Observer created what became HBO’s blockbuster Sex and the City, called her Anna experience “one of these horrendous situations you never ever think you’ll get in.” (A friend of hers tipped gossip columns and her real age eventually surfaced.)

  Anna also killed stories if the subject wasn’t attractive, thin, and beautiful. “She’s monstrous-looking, have you seen her?” an editor recalls Anna saying of one well-known star.

  Similarly, Anna is said to have killed an essay by a hugely successful author after she saw his photo that was to run with the piece and ruled he wasn’t good-looking enough to grace her pages. The editor of the piece is said to have argued to no avail with Anna that it was all about the writer’s words, not his looks.

  Anna could be arrogant to major figures in the fashion world, such as the red-carpet diva Cindy Crawford.

  Crawford, scheduled for the important September cover, was forced to attend three separate shooting sessions because Anna wasn’t satisfied with her look. In the end, Anna killed the Crawford cover. When the model’s people complained, they were told, “Cindy Crawford’s just another model. I’m Anna Wintour!”

  Under Anna, more celebrities and fewer known models made the cover. In 1998, for instance, Anna put on Vogue’s cover the likes of Liz Hurley, Sandra Bullock, Claire Danes, the Spice Girls, Renée Zellweger (whose fashion look Anna would control into the year 2004), Oprah Winfrey (Anna demanded she lose major poundage before appearing on the cover, and the queen of daytime TV obliged), and Hillary Clinton. As The Guardian in London pointed out, “Supermodel Carolyn Murphy, the August cover girl, actually seemed out of place in their company.”

  Anna would continue the trend, and by the time of the new millennium most Vogue covers were graced by celebrities.

  As a new managing editor, Anna had hired Laurie Jones, one of her great supporters at New York magazine, who had been at the weekly for two decades.

  It was Jones who had been so knocked out by Anna’s portfolio that she brought her to the attention of Ed Kosner, the editor, who hired her on the spot and gave her the visibility that caught Alex Liberman’s eye at Vogue. And it was Jones who, hoping to convince Anna to stay, told her, “ ‘You can’t leave New York; you’re the only one doing fashion. If you go to Vogue you will be lost.’ I knew it would be impossible to replace her.”

  Now Jones was working for Anna and was still Anna’s trusted lieutenant in 2004
, a dozen years later.

  Jones started at Vogue the day after the 1992 presidential election and remembers how enthused Anna was to see Bill and Hillary Clinton replace George Bush. “Anna’d been out at various parties,” Jones recalls, “and she was very excited he’d won.”

  Anna was smitten with Clinton’s charisma and sexiness, and could perceive the bad boy in him that was always so attractive to her in men. Having gone through the Gennifer Flowers scandal and survived to get elected, Bill and Hillary were celebrities, along with being shrewd politicians, Anna felt. “Anna told me the Clintons were the new Kennedys and the royal family wrapped into one,” a Vogue editor at the time observes.

  As the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal unfolded, the first lady was troubled about her look. She was never a fashionista. As a Beltway wonk, she favored navy blue pantsuits and low heels to hide her heavy legs, her hair was a disaster, and she had those fearsome eyebrows. The president’s spouse realized that she required a mega-makeover. She started meeting with celebrity hairstylist Cristophe, and she conferred with haute-couture king Oscar de la Renta, who placed her in Anna’s able hands. The two struck up a friendship.

  Under Anna’s tutelage—and Anna had an agenda going in—Hillary’s wardrobe became more fashionable, even glamorous. She began wearing neutral-colored suits with long jackets that hid her wide hips, her hair became blonder and straighter, and she began wearing softer matte makeup. Anna scoffed at the look of some of the other female players in the Clinton drama, such as Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. “If you’re going to make accusations about the president,” she intoned, “you had better have a good hairdresser.”

  Anna’s savvy bonding with the first lady and future New York senator resulted in a huge scoop for Vogue.

  During the politically charged Ken Starr versus Bill Clinton year of 1998, Anna put a glamorous new Hillary Clinton on the cover of the December issue, the first time a first lady had ever struck a pose there. There she was, the stand-by-your-man wife of the embattled president looking poised and self-assured in a velvet dress, and beautifully coiffed.

  Hillary Clinton’s sitting ignited worldwide press so immense that the publicity department at Vogue sent the thick set of tear sheets out in a binder book. The issue sold more than a million copies on newsstands alone.

  “The press hit way before the issue was out,” Anna told The New York Times. “People have seen it as a vindication for [Hillary Clinton], that being on the cover of Vogue is beyond power and politics. It proves in a way that she is a woman of stature and an icon of American women.”

  Anna was extremely proud of her friendship with one of the most fascinating first ladies of the land since Jackie. So proud, in fact, that, after one of her visits to the Clinton White House she returned to New York with a stack of souvenir White House stationery. During a subsequent visit to London she gave some of the letterheads and envelopes to her brother Patrick, a political reporter at The Guardian, in London, who found her idolization of the first family rather amusing. “Patrick makes fun of Anna,” says cousin Patti Gilkyson Agnew. “He wrote me a letter on the White House stationery and said, ‘This is from Anna, and Anna’s love of Hillary Clinton.’ He said Anna brought the stationery over and left it, ‘so don’t think I’m writing you from the White House.’”

  At Allure, Linda Wells jumped into the Clinton competition with an issue featuring a makeover given another of the commander in chief’s women, the Minnie Mouse–like, big-haired Paula Jones. Tina Brown, not to be outdone, put “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky” on the cover of Vanity Fair, and a year later, Brown had Hillary Clinton discussing her hubby’s infidelities in the premier issue of her new magazine, Talk.

  But it was Anna who first saw star quality in the Clintons and scooped her Condé Nast competition.

  Laurie Jones paints Anna as a superwoman of sorts. “She’s very stoic, very strong,” she declares. “She’s fearless. Everything is done very quickly. There are a lot of meetings, but nothing goes for any length of time. Anna handles it all very efficiently. She approves all the story ideas. She does the run-through where all the clothes are brought in on the rack. When the pictures come in, she picks the pictures.”

  Anna’s schedule was rigorous. Up at six A.M., she usually played a mean game of tennis before having her hair and face done professionally. In the office around eight A.M., she had rounds of meetings and made dozens of quick editorial decisions before going out for a high-protein lunch of a lamb chop or a hamburger, with hopes she didn’t run into the animal rights activists who have constantly gone after her, once even throwing a dead raccoon in her plate, which Anna nonchalantly pushed aside and continued seemingly un-fazed with her chopped steak. She usually left her office around six, and her evenings were as filled as her days. There were charity events that she had to attend—Anna has graciously given her time as a power in the fashion world to AIDS awareness and breast cancer. There were parties where she had to make an appearance.

  At glittery events, she went from ice queen to glamour queen at the sight of the cameras aimed at her, preening and posing and smiling. There are literally thousands of photos of her doing it up for the lenses and modeling every kind of expensive outfit imaginable, many of them freebies from friendly designers.

  Every night during an issue closing cycle she had to go through and approve stories and photos in the “book”—a sacred, thick, bound volume that is delivered to her home by an assistant. The layouts are in the order of their appearance in the magazine. The book, considered Anna’s bible, is returned to the art department the next morning.

  “Anna has gone over every layout, every page, and after she’s reviewed it, the pages are filled with her Post-it notes,” says Jones. “There could be a collage of different photographs, and something the size of a postage stamp, and Anna may say she doesn’t like that dress, that whoever’s wearing it wore it to such and such party on such and such date. Her attention to detail is phenomenal to me.”

  Jones emphasizes that Anna takes home manuscripts every night and “reads everything that comes into the magazine.”

  Well, almost everything.

  In 1997, after a decade of research, author Patricia Bosworth’s biography of her father, Bartley Crum, was published. Bosworth had written about her father’s colorful career as a high-powered lawyer, his work as an adviser to Harry Truman, his crusade against the Hollywood blacklist, and his suicide in 1959 at age fifty-nine.

  Acclaimed for her biographies of the dark lives of Montgomery Clift and Diane Arbus, Anything Your Little Heart Desires also was well received and got a full-page review by Mary Cantwell in the book section of Vogue’s April 1997 issue.

  “ Vogue reviewed my book wonderfully, which, of course, was enormously helpful,” says Bosworth.

  Bosworth’s book wasn’t a best seller, but the author did win a Survivor of the Year Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a group in which David Shaffer was involved because of his expertise in the area of teen suicides.

  The organization’s annual awards dinner was held at a New York hotel several months after the review appeared. “Judy Collins sang to me, and it was all very emotional,” says Bosworth, who was seated at a table with Anna and her husband, and couldn’t help but notice that they had “no interaction” and “didn’t talk to one another.”

  “Because Vogue had given me a huge spread, I leaned over and I naturally thanked Anna. But she had no idea what I was talking about. To my surprise, she told me she hadn’t read my book and didn’t even know the review was in her magazine,” says Bosworth. “I just assumed she had read it, but she didn’t know anything about it, and I was surprised since she’s the editor in chief. I was struck by that, and I’m not an egomaniac.”

  A couple of months after the event, Bosworth ran into Richard David Storey, the features editor at Vogue who had overseen the review of her book, and told him what had transpired.

  “I just said, ‘I can’t believe this. My God, she
didn’t read it.’ It was then I found out that wasn’t an isolated incident. He told me, ‘Oh, no, it’s par for the course. She never reads, or very rarely reads the copy for the books and movies—the arts coverage.’ I found that absolutely staggering.”

  Along with all of her editorial duties, Anna gave Laurie Jones the responsibility of interviewing potential assistants.

  Few were ever as hardworking, dutiful, and ambitious as Laurie Schechter or Gabe Doppelt, so Anna went through a number of them. But some were well liked by Anna. “She takes good care of her assistants,” emphasizes Jones with pride. “Anna’s very devoted to them. One moved on to be the assistant to the sittings editor.”

  But one especially turned out to be big trouble for Anna.

  She was a tall, cute, preppy blonde just out of college who wanted to be a writer—a perfect Vogue specimen, or so she seemed. Her name was Lauren Weisberger.

  “I was the one who hired Lauren Weisberger,” acknowledges Jones.

  It was a gutsy admission for Jones to make, because Weisberger’s name, if whispered and overheard by Anna in the hallowed halls of Vogue, could lead to a career beheading.

  Weisberger spent less than a year as Anna’s assistant. After she left, she wrote a roman à clef called The Devil Wears Prada about life as an assistant to the barely fictional Miranda Priestly, described as the most revered—and hated—woman in fashion, the editor in chief of a fashion magazine called Runway.

  Even though Weisberger repeatedly denied it, everyone in that rarefied world of fashion knew that Miranda and Anna were one in the same, only the names were changed to protect the guilty, and the author from possible legal action.

  The book, part of a genre called chick lit, written and read by young women, became a bestseller in 2003 and followed in the wake of The Nanny Diaries, a fictionalized tell-all written by two former short-time nannies who worked for rich East Side Manhattan mothers. Both were the precursor to a 2004 best seller about beautiful Manhattan man-hunters called The Bergdorf Blondes, penned by a former Vogue writer and British pal of Anna’s. The books appealed to the same demographic of twenty- and thirty-somethings who watched Melrose Place, Friends, and Sex and the City, and fantasized about having glamorous lives and studly lovers.