Front Row

by Jerry Oppenheimer

  And then she got word that her longtime nemesis, Tina Brown, now running gossipy Talk magazine, was about to strike, having assigned a “grudge” profile of Bryan. Brown had left enemies behind when she jumped ship at Condé Nast to start Talk. Anna was at the top of the list.

  “Tina has a very visceral hatred for Anna,” discloses a close observer of the two women. “It was not predicated on anything logical, or anything that Anna did to her, but was predicated once again on the innate rivalry that would arise between these two very driven and tough British editors.”

  Brown focused on Bryan in particular, the insider asserts, because Brown’s husband, the editor Harry Evans, allegedly had affairs. “Tina was very bitter about that and was asking friends why nobody was concentrating on other editors who had bad marriages. There had always been stuff about Harry, blind items in the tabloids about him, so Tina was very bitter—not only about the negative press, but about her husband’s womanizing. So suddenly there’s Anna messing around with Shelby, and Tina couldn’t wait to do a story in Talk. From what I gather it was a grudge piece.”

  Another element in Brown’s decision to go after Anna by publishing a piece about Bryan was the fact that an unauthorized biography about her marriage was in the works by Vanity Fair (Condé Nast) writer Judith Bachrach. Brown expected that the book about her life with Evans would be a hatchet job.

  “Even though Bryan made for a legitimate news story, Anna was beside herself when she got wind of the Talk piece and made a slew of telephone calls to Brown pleading with her not to run the story,” says a publishing insider. “Brown told her not to worry, but that she planned to continue pursuing the story. Anna contacted every power player she knew in media to try to get the piece killed. From what I hear, she pleaded with Graydon Carter [the editor of Vanity Fair] and went to Si [Newhouse] to see if he could help.”

  The Guardian in London, where Patrick Wintour was a reporter, jumped on the war between the two British magazine queens and noted that Brown “has heartlessly ignored Anna’s pleas not to run an exposé of Anna’s arm-candy . . . The enmity between them runs deep.”

  The unflattering piece was headlined “The Talented Mr. Bryan,” with a front-page text block that seemed to say it all: “Full of Texas charm, Shelby Bryan raised nearly $3 billion from investors as smart as John Malone, wooed Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and collected millions for the Democratic Party. Then his company went south. It has left the losers wondering whether he deliberately misled them—or whether love and ambition distracted him.”

  There was a full-page photo of the onetime Golden Gloves boxer, hands on the hips of his pinstriped two-button business suit, looking ready to take on all comers.

  The photo on the contents page showed a sunglassed Anna with a slinky off-the-shoulder dress next to a tuxedoed Bryan. The very first line of the story, which was supposed to be about Bryan’s business practices, began, “Last June, having just returned from a vacation in the south of France with his girlfriend, Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour . . .”

  The article touched on the affair and also quoted a number of women who made claims about Bryan’s “louche behavior.”

  In her book, Bachrach notes wryly that “Tina was good enough to send Wintour a copy of the published article, with a ‘With Compliments’ card attached.”

  Indeed, Brown had done what appeared to the media to be another number on Anna, and she was surely out for revenge.

  Neither Bryan nor Anna took any legal action against Brown’s magazine for the article, but Bryan successfully pursued a libel claim against the London Daily Telegraph, which had picked up material from the Talk piece under a headline “English Queens of New York in Clash over Wintour’s Boyfriend.” Five months after its piece ran, the Telegraph apologized to Bryan, who claimed that certain facts in the story—he was facing financial ruin, he had been accused of misleading another company about ICG’s business forecast, he had been forced out of ICG—were erroneous. The newspaper apologized to him in a published story and agreed to make a generous donation to a charity of Bryan’s choice and to pay his legal fees.

  The fashion Web site Chic Happens, which broke the story of the affair, pointed out that “Britain’s more lenient libel laws” made a judgment in Bryan’s favor “more likely” and noted that “a victory in the UK—the home turf of both Wintour and Brown—would be that much sweeter.” The writers added, “If you’re reading this, Shelby, ‘WE DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY.’”

  With Bryan on her arm, Anna began to have another love affair—with the glitterati of Houston, her lover’s hometown, where the glamorous twosome began making stopovers and where Anna was treated like visiting royalty. Anna and Bryan also sparked whispers and gossip with their openly amorous ways. At a party for his brother at the exclusive Bayou Club, which includes high-powered members such as George W. Bush, Bryan and Anna acted like a pair of going-steady adolescents at a spin-the-bottle party.

  “In front of the world, Shelby and Anna spent a good part of this party making out, tongues down each other’s throats, seated on a bench in a little foyer to the party room,” asserts a well-placed observer of the Houston social scene.

  Anna became friends with a number of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful fashionistas, women who read Vogue as closely as they do a prenuptial agreement, fashion horses who spend at least tens of thousand of dollars a year to fill their closets with designer duds.

  One with whom Anna eventually bonded was Becca Cason Thrash, a gorgeous fifty-something wife of one of the city’s gazillionaires who had to expand her closet by more than a thousand square feet to fit all of her elegant Chanel, Lacroix, Helmut Lang, Stella McCartney, Gianfranco Ferre, Sergio Rossi, Marc Bouwer, Jean Paul Gaultier, and La Perla. Name it, she had it. In Houston—and in New York and Paris—this daughter of a Harlington, Texas, TV sportscaster who married right was a boldface name, written about in the Houston Chronicle, Women’s Wear Daily, Town and Country, Tina Brown’s Talk before it became defunct, and Harper’s Bazaar, in which the fashion diva was profiled as one of “Couture’s Big Spenders.” The magazine had followed Thrash and two others through fittings in Paris.

  Thrash had once been dubbed “the high priestess of posh” and had earned the sobriquet “TriBecca,” because she usually changed her sexy, gorgeous outfits three times at the extravagant parties she threw in her twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion: indoor pool, two-thousand-square-foot kitchen, glass-floored second level. The place was once described as looking like a “cutting-edge art museum.”

  “Anna just loves Texas, she loves it,” declares the exuberant Thrash, who had invited Anna to be the guest of honor at a party at her home for the Houston Stages Repertory Theater, an evening that included an abbreviated performance of Full Gallop, a. one-woman show about the life of Vogue’s onetime vaunted editor Diana Vreeland.

  “We on the theater board were thinking about various ways to really make the evening interesting and we came up with the idea of inviting Anna,” Thrash says. She notes, though, “There’s no comparison between Anna and Diana Vreeland other than the fact that they both held the same job. Anna absolutely does not compare herself to Mrs. Vreeland.”

  The arrangements for Anna’s royal visit were made by another Houston fashion powerhouse, Susan Criner, who was a close friend of Bryan and of his mother. “Susan and Gretchen were so close,” notes Thrash, “that when Gretchen died, a lot of her Chanel couture and a great number of her Chanel suits went to her. Susan owns and wears them to this day.”

  Until the glittery night of the big party, Thrash says she felt “intimidated” by Anna. “I’m not easily intimidated, but there are no words to use to describe to what lengths Anna herself, her persona, intimidated me. When I would see her at couture at the fashion collection, I’d be intimidated. She’d come in with those signature sunglasses on and take the best seat on the front row, and I’d think, ‘God she’s a very imposing, intimidating character.’ You know who she is. The world
knows who she is. Everyone knows that’s Anna Wintour, the most influential woman in fashion, globally.”

  It all was too much for Thrash to comprehend, so Anna became a scary figure to her.

  Everyone who was anyone in Texas and the fashion world seemed represented at Thrash’s party—politicians, celebrities, designers. Thrash had custom lighting installed to give the walls a red tint, and models were hired to move among the guests in dresses by the designers who were there: Mark Badgley, James Mischka, Diane von Furstenberg, among others. One woman was overheard complaining about her “jewelry elbow,” apparently all the bracelets and rocks she was sporting were too heavy.

  Anna, wearing a silvery Chanel suit, minus the sunglasses, arrived fashionably late, holding hands with Bryan. All eyes were on her. The local press had reported little if anything about their extramarital relationship. Gossip like that just doesn’t see print in Houston. Lawyers threaten suit before items run. But everyone in Thrash’s wide circle knew all the dirt about Anna and dished about it incessantly. One of the guests noted that without her glasses Anna’s eyes blinked rapidly and that she did a double take looking at the bountiful new breasts of a Texas rose in a low-cut Ralph Lauren gown who introduced herself, practically bowing to the editrix from New York.

  That night, the once intimidated Thrash bonded with her imperiousness when they shared the table of honor.

  “It was just the eight of us”—Anna and Bryan, the Thrashes, the Criners, and Bryan’s brother and sister-in-law—“and we spent three or four hours at the same table and interacted, and I just thought Anna was great, and I was no longer intimidated,” emphasizes Thrash. “Anna was delightful, and she is completely one-hundred-percent misunderstood. It’s just that she’s a slow warm-up, really. I do think she is very British, very reserved, and for a Texan that can be misunderstood.

  “At my parties, I never seat people next to each other who are sleeping together, so I put Anna between my husband and J.P. [Shelby’s brother], so my husband was her dinner partner, and he adored her, thought she was fabulous and very sexy—not in a blatant way, but in a subtle way.”

  At a certain point during the evening, Thrash’s besotted mate got up to talk to another party guest, and Bryan, “who is so very effervescent and fun, dashed over and sat in his chair as fast as he could, and Anna and Shelby leaned over and kissed,” recalls Thrash fondly. “They’re like a young couple in love. And when all the speeches and presentations were done, Anna and Bryan were the first ones on the dance floor. My girlfriend was dancing next to them and she told me, ‘God, they were kissing, and he was all over her.’ It was just like at a prom.”

  The following Monday, once again all business, Anna, who never had a real prom, was at her huge desk in her enormous corner office with a wall of glass that gave her a spectacular view of Times Square from the new Condé Nast tower.

  She was on top of the world, professionally and personally, ready to start work on another lushly beautiful, catalog-thick, very lucrative, style-setting, sexy-celebrity-on-the-cover issue of Vogue.

  And as always, she was prepared to do battle with her competition and, as usual, come out the victor.

  By the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, her relationship with Bryan was still golden. The two were seen together at fashion shows, cocktail parties, and cultural events in New York, holding hands. But when the photographers moved in to take pictures, Bryan usually evaporated into the background, leaving Anna in the spotlight. Their affair was no longer considered hot news and had long been out of the gossip columns.

  But in May 2004, their life together once again became tabloid fodder. The New York Post’s Page Six ran a headline that blared: “Anna, Lover in ‘Illegal’ Sublet.” The story alleged that Bryan was illegally subletting an enormous $5,800-a-month penthouse loft from the internationally known hairdresser John Frieda. A woman whose family owned the loft building claimed that Frieda had moved out and was “replaced by Bryan and Win-tour.” When the woman, Beth Windsor, confronted them, “they froze. By this time Anna was getting her mail” from Frieda’s old mailbox, “which she promptly body-slammed shut and tried to disappear into the wall. She’s very small and almost got away with it. Shelby then said, ‘We’re only staying here for one or two days,’ in a phony British accent.” Then Anna and her man went out for a night on the town.

  At Vogue, Anna had the best people working for her, the prize photographers, among them the incomparable Helmut Newton, whose erotically charged, compelling, and glamorous fashion shots had long been an asset of the magazine. He was thought of as the creator of “porno chic.”

  At eighty-three, Newton was still under contract and had been faxing ideas to Anna in 2003 from his home in Monte Carlo for a layout he planned to do for her in Los Angeles.

  The two had a close working relationship, dating back to the late seventies when Anna was fashion editor at Viva.

  “Over the years, we had our moments. Anna and I had many moments,” says Newton, recalling how “tough and demanding and stubborn Anna can be. But she always knew what she was doing. She knew when to listen. It wasn’t just charm that got her where she is today.

  “We were at odds many, many times about her choice of my pictures. She could be very tough, but I’ve always respected Anna. Vogues her magazine, and she knows so much about the job. Mostly she does me very proud. No one can top her. She’ll be in charge of deciding what’s in and out of fashion long after I’m gone.”

  Not long after Newton, who earned the sobriquet “King of Kink” because of his sexy portraits, arrived in the City of Angels, tragedy struck. As he was driving out of the garage of the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard on January 23, 2004, he suffered an apparent heart attack, lost control, and crashed into a wall. He died in the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. His wife and muse, June, also a photographer, shot pictures of her fatally injured husband of many years. On June 2 his ashes were laid to rest in Berlin, his birthplace.

  In July, Anna was among the world’s most famous fashionistas who paid homage to the great man at a memorial service held in the splendorous and baroque Theatre du Palais Royale, in Paris. Wearing a black-and-white Carolina Herrera dress, Anna spoke eloquently of her years working with Newton. “Plenty of shocking things happen at Vogue, but there has never been anyone so consistently scandalous as Helmut,” she confided. She called him a “visionary photographer” who possessed the magic touch to turn the most boring shoot into an erotic happening. The photos he turned in to her, she said, had left her over the years “aghast, awestruck and always amazed.”

  Then she surprised the gathering that included Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Jean Paul Gaultier, Stella McCartney, and Anna’s daughter, Bee, who wore one of her mother’s black Prada dresses—she served as an usher at the service—by disclosing her one regret in an otherwise glamorous and very successful life. She revealed that as a young fashion editor at Harpers & Queen, Helmut Newton had offered to photograph her, but the shoot had never come off.

  Declared Anna: “I would have loved to have been one of Helmut’s women. I can’t think of a greater compliment than to have been deemed worthy of Helmut’s lens.”

  The sadness of the event for Anna, though, gave way to a feeling of elation because of wonderful news from America.

  Si Newhouse informed her that the September 2004 issue would be the largest Vogue ever, and the biggest monthly magazine in publishing history—a whopping 832 pages. It was clear that as Anna Wintour headed toward a quarter-century as editor in chief, she had truly turned Vogue into the most important and successful fashion arbiter and glamour page-turner in the world.

  Selected Bibliography

  Bachrach, Judy. Tina and Harry Come to America. New York: Free Press, 2001.

  Bradshaw, Jon. Fast Company. London: High Stakes Publishing, 2003.

  Chisholm, Anne, and Michael Davie. Lord Beaverbrook. New York: Knopf, 1993.

  Felsenthal, Carol. Citizen Newhouse. New York: Seven S
tories Press, 1998.

  Gross, Michael. Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

  Hackett, Pat, ed. The Andy Warhol Diaries. New York: Warner Books, 1989.

  Haden-Guest, Anthony. The Last Party. New York: William Morrow, 1997.

  Kazanjian, Dodie, and Calvin Tomkins. Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman. New York: Knopf, 1993.

  Levy, Shawn. Ready, Steady, Go! New York: Doubleday, 2002.

  Mirabella, Grace. In and Out of Vogue: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

  Neville, Richard. Hippie Hippie Shake. London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

  Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. A Life in the Twentieth Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

  Tilberis, Liz. No Time to Die. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.

  Vreeland, Diana, D.V. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

  Wintour, Charles. Pressures on the Press. London: Andre Deutsch, 1972.

  Young, Toby. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. New York: Da Capo, 2002.

  Author’s Note on Sources

  Since Front Row is the first biography of Anna Wintour, I was faced with the enormous task of tracking down scores of knowledgeable, creditable sources—her schoolmates, friends, family members, colleagues, employees, lovers—because little was known about Anna’s pre- Vogue life, private and professional.

  Her years growing up in England, her schooling there, her first jobs in London and New York, and the Wintour family’s tragedies, triumphs, and scandals were essentially unknown to the public and the media, especially in America.

  It wasn’t until the mideighties—a decade after Anna settled in Manhattan—that she became a subject of major news media attention and scrutiny with her appointment as creative director of Vogue, her first step toward being named editor in chief. News accounts beginning in that period, therefore, also were valuable sources, along with the author’s first-person interviews, in the telling of Anna’s story.