by Simon Doonan
No model she. Madame B. was a chunky Slavic version of Whoopi Goldberg’s character in the movie Ghost. Looks notwithstanding, she tapped into the Victorian obsession with death and all things ghostly and made a bang-up career for herself. Attendees to Madame Blavatsky’s séances and soirees were treated to the sight of a taxidermied baboon lurking in the entryway clutching a copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
La Blavatsky made a living scaring the crap out of people by pretending to bring their relatives back from the dead. She was a carny and a faker, who also popularized ideas about karma and positive thinking and—hello!—the model favorite: yoga!
So, yes. I was reminded of Blavatsky. What would she have made of this macabre abode? It’s hard to imagine that she would not have unearthed a few lingering souls, or at least pretended to.
Back to me and my Jonny.
The former tenant moved out, but we did not move in. Something mysterious and intangible was holding us back. Money. The place remained empty while me and my Jonny attempted to scrape together the requisite renovation shekels.
In the meantime, I had the brilliant idea of using it as a fashion shoot location. Budgets at Barneys were tight—we were in bankruptcy at the time—so why not shoot our seasonal fashion catalog in a no-cost, uniquely atmospheric location?
The day of the shooting arrived. I brushed my teeth and ran next door to see how things were progressing. The photographer was setting up his lights. Our model was sequestered in the upstairs powder room. I was anxious to introduce myself and hear anything oracular she had to say, or see if I could get her to buy me a cup of coffee, or just stare at her and admire her cheekbones.
I creaked up the rotting stairs and opened the door. Seated on the (closed) toilet and smoking a fag was a hard-faced Russian beauty. Let’s call her Svetlana.
Svet wore an anxious expression. Her eyes darted about as only a model’s eyes can. She spoke.
“Wha’s dis place?”
“It’s actually an empty apart—”
“Is haunted. Haunted bad. Very bad!”
“Well, we think with a little paint and—”
“Tell me! Somebody die here recently? Yes?”
“There was an old lady living here who—”
“I know it! I feel energy. Is violent death? Yes?”
“She is in a retire—”
“You hear her screams at night?”
“Actually she was a lovely per—”
“You need priest. I get you Russian Orthodox. The best.”
“We were rather hoping to move in next spr—”
“Don’t do it! If you sleep here, you wake up next morning a raving maniac with the snow white hair.”
“Okay. Well, I think we’re ready for the first shot.”
Over the next few days, Svetlana’s conviction that the previous tenant had died a horrible, unspecified, supernatural death only grew. Nothing I could do would get her to reconsider her position. Svet knew without a shadow of a doubt that our former neighbor had been raped and pillaged and obliterated by demons and that the whole place was now haunted. Exorcism was the only answer.
She lost no time in making everyone on the shoot aware that “an old lady, she perishing horrible, right HERE!” The fact that the lady in question was now happily ensconced in an old people’s home, enjoying a nice ambrosia salad every night, seemed of no interest to Svet. It was hard to escape the notion that she was channeling her fellow countrywoman Madame Blavatsky.
The shoot continued. Svetlana looked hauntingly lovely juxtaposed against the faded fusty grandeur of our apartment. Her spiritual anxieties lent a certain Edgar Allan Poe–like gravitas to her facial expressions and poses. The atmosphere during the shoot was quite funereal—in a good way.
Svetlana’s doom-laden rantings were infectious. When they arrived each day, the crew seemed surprised to find me still in the land of the living. Between shots, there was much crucifix fondling and hushed, respectful talk. You don’t raise your voice in what is essentially a killing field.
On the last day of the shoot, I stood on the threshold of what would soon be transformed into a groovy, swinging, happy, insanely colorful, Jonathan Adler–decorated home and bid farewell to the crew.
Svetlana looked at me with a sympathetic, heartfelt gaze. We embraced. She grabbed me and slammed her heavily rouged mouth up against my ear.
“Promise me you don’t move in till you SAGE THE SHIT OUT OF THIS PLACE!”
When a model tells you to do something, you just do it.
anna’s wondering why we haven’t started yet
LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I went to Anna Wintour again.
This is not so unusual. Like every other sick, twisted, neurotic, highly strung fashion person on earth, I regularly have Anna dreams. The bobbed and dark-spectacled Vogue editrix in chief haunts our collective unconscious on a near-nightly basis. Even as I write, some slumbering style slave somewhere in the world is tossing and turning, and mumbling, “Yes, Anna! No, Anna. Three Birkin bags full, Anna.”
Why is Ms. Wintour so enmeshed in our collective psyche? Why is she inhabiting our nocturnal dramas and deliriums? The reason is fairly obvious, non?
La Wintour is all-pervasive and all-powerful. She represents many mythological archetypes, so many, in fact, that it’s hard to keep track of them all: She is mother, soothsayer, monarch, deity, avatar, savior, teacher, redeemer, judge, kingmaker and executioner all rolled into one. So complex and powerful is her image that it is nothing short of a miracle that we ever dream about anyone else. How on earth do we ever find the psychic space to squeeze in a Gaga or a Madonna dream, to mention nothing of a Maya Angelou or a Margaret Thatcher one?
My Anna dreams are nothing if not consistent. Though the narratives and context may vary, the essential emotion is always the same: good old-fashioned shame. In my Anna dream I am invariably overwhelmed by the feeling that I have done something unforgivably unsavory and horrid.
Once, I was flitting through a crowded shopping mall wearing only a cropped Ed Hardy T-shirt. Yes, I was sans panties. Just at the moment of maximum public humiliation, Anna walked out of the nearest Chanel boutique looking flawlessly intimidating in shades and bouclé.
I woke up cringing. This feeling subsided only after I realized that I was, at least, wearing panties.
Cringing? Yes, we cringe and bow down before Anna because this is what you do in front of your queen. You worship and you curtsey, but you also cringe.
I am the same age as Anna. As baby boomers, we have a significant dollop of life experience under our belts. No longer in the first flush of youth, we are enriched by the machinations and tribulations of more than half a century. We have seen all kinds of things, both jarring and fabulous. We remember Kenneth Tynan saying the first “fuck” ever on live TV. We remember Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. We remember the Manson Girls, and Betty Ford’s drinking problem. We remember when heiress Patty Hearst got kidnapped, became Tania the revolutionary and started calling everyone “fascist insects.” We remember when David Bowie had a boy child and named him Zowie. We remember the Hillside Strangler. We remember Golda Meir. We remember when Alan Carr produced the Academy Awards with a Disney theme and all the pompous Hollywood actors got up and walked out because they felt it was so cheesy. We roamed the earth when women wore go-go boots and panty girdles and nylons. And we remember when men wore Hai Karate and had thick, butch tufts of hair on their various private areas. Some women too.
In other words, we have both been around the block.
Despite the shared history, Anna is different from moi and the others of our ge-ge-generation. (A reference to “My Generation,” a song by the Who circa 1965. I personally prefer early Who to late Who. “Substitute” might just be the tightest pop song in history. Just saying.) Simply put, we are sheep and Anna is the sheep dog. Over the years we f
ashionistas d’un certain âge have watched in awe as Anna stepped out front and became the leader of the pack, vrrrm vrrm! (Another song: “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-las circa 1964.)
While the rest of us stumbled and bungled through our various fashion careers, enjoying successes and failures, Anna grabbed the chariot reins of her fashion editorship and drove a steady ascending course toward deification. ’Ere long, we became less than the dust ’neath her chariot wheels. (Yes, another song reference. This time it’s a freaky Edwardian love lyric by Adela Florence Nicolson circa 1916: “Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheel, less than the weed which grows beside thy door.”)
Referring to Anna as a fashion editor is, therefore, a bit like calling the queen of England a civil servant. She is major. She is not only the most famous Vogue editor of all time, but she is also the ultimate figurehead of American fashion, nay, universal fashion.
During the last thirty years—Anna’s reign—fashion has exploded from minority elitism to international democratic spectator sport. Fashion is now a global cultural obsession. When Anna first came to New York, there were about twenty shows during any given Fashion Week. Now there are literally hundreds.
While I personally find it extremely hard to keep up, Anna, the fashion superdeity, seems to have no problem doing so. In fact, she not only keeps pace, she makes the pace. She has simultaneously weathered and orchestrated this massive period of change, enduring all that explosive growth while also helping to create it. If fashion is a worldwide smorgasboard, then Anna has played a significant role in making it thus.
She is mega. And just when you think she cannot get any more mega, she knocks it out of the park with some new level of accomplishment in fashion megastardom. Anna Wintour is an amazingly impressive broad. And that, dear reader, is why we cringe and curtsey. (Since I am no longer in the first flush of youth, my knees tend to make cracking sounds whenever I curtsey. I am toying with the notion of applying to Anna’s office for a no-curtsey-necessary dispensation.)
Having opened up my psyche—thereby hopefully shedding some light on fashion’s obsession with Anna Wintour—I now want to take a different perspective. Instead of holding up a mirror, let’s grab a telescope. Let’s try for a moment to get inside her head and to ask the question, “What’s it like to be Anna Wintour?”
How does it feel to have created this iconic role and now be obliged to inhabit it, to service it and to maintain it?
What’s it like to sally forth every day into this inferno of high expectations, expectations which you yourself have helped create?
What’s it like to listen to the cracking knee joints that accompany my curtseys? What’s it like to climb onto your throne every day, grab your scepter and orb, and look into the eyes of your subjects knowing that many of them, if not all, will have dreamed about you the night before?
If there are moments when AW wants to scream, “Oh, fuck it! I’m retiring to the Cotswolds to grow peonies!” you would never know it. If she has ever snapped her pearls, tossed her Chanel pocketbook down the lav, run home from the office and assumed the fetal position, then I am not aware of it.
She is unwavering in her leadership.
She is utterly consistent.
In addition to being consistent, Anna is also wildly magnanimous. I refer specifically to the fact that, back in 2006, she graciously showed up at the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada and did not punch Lauren Weisberger’s lights out, an action she might well be capable of, given how much tennis she plays.
Ms. Weisberger, for those of you who have been in a coma for the last ten years, was Ms. Wintour’s Eve Harrington: a toadying supplicant who successfully parlayed her former job as an assistant at Vogue, and its supposed mistreatments, into a putrid book and a naffer-than-naff movie.
I never saw the movie in question. So why, you may well ask, am I so sure that it’s so indescribably dreadful? I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m not in it.
Let’s go back. Way back.
2003. The Devil Wears Prada hits the bookstores. I tried reading it, but decided that having sex with a dead relative was preferable and hightailed it off to the local cemetery. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy trash as much as the next person. However, I like my trash to be quality trash, by which I mean Scruples trash or Valley of the Dolls trash. Nuanced trash.
I found TDWP singularly lacking in nuance. The multifaceted Anna was reduced to an imperious coat-flinging tyrant, and—this is the most horrid part—the groovy, idiosyncratic fashion people I know and love were entirely missing from the landscape conjured by the author. Where were all the freaks and funsters?
The world of fashion has always given a hearty willkommen bienvenue welcome to all the misfits, kooks and original thinkers of the world. Fashion has always been a safe space, a salon des refusés for people who might otherwise be unemployed, institutionalized, or forced into street theater or stripping, or even fluffing. La Weisberger replaced those quirky eccentrics with a bunch of overachieving, conventional careerist bimbos.
As far as I am concerned, this is nothing short of a crime against humanity. Replacing the Faridas and Alek Weks and Vivienne Westwoods and Marina Schianos and Loulous and Bettys and Piaggis and Emma Hopes and Pam Hoggs and Lori Goldsteins and Bethann Hardisons and Coddingtons and Pat McGraths and Roxanne Lowits and Lynn Yaegers and Carines and Anna Dello Russos with a bunch of annoying sorority girls was a horrid thing to do. Why replace the extraordinary with the ordinary?
If you think I am a little overly critical, keep in mind that Ms. Weisberger’s books have been so much more successful than mine. As a result, my comments may be tinged with freudenschade. (The opposite of schadenfreude, i.e., taking displeasure in the fortunes of others as opposed to the reverse.) I admit that I may, as a result, not be entirely objective. If you haven’t read TDWP, do not let me deter you. You might like it. Millions did.
A year or two after the unimaginably successful publication of the book, I got a call from a bubbly movie-production person. She was casting for the big-screen version of The Devil Wears Prada.
“Would you like to come in and read for the part of Nigel?” she asked.
Suddenly my disdain for the book melted like so much Velveeta. Please keep in mind that we fashion folk are not known for our consistency. In addition to which, I would ask you to remember what Gore Vidal said: “Never decline invitations to have sex or to be on TV.” I am quite sure the same applies to movies.
“Yes. Emphatically, yes,” I replied, and hung up the phone.
I then let out a little shriek of delight. I grabbed my dog, Liberace, and told him that together we were going to claw our way to the top. It was our moment!
In the days running up to my audition, I experienced a bouncy, breezy confidence. This whole movie thing was clearly meant to be. I have always been an attention-seeking show-off. The entertainment biz was a natural fit for my “talents.” I could not believe I had to wait this long! In addition to which, my inclusion in the movie would be a righting of wrongs. The book might have lacked nuanced, freaky fashion folk, but the movie would not, because . . . the movie would have moi!
Did I have any misgivings about being able to act?
Are you kidding?
I have always thought of movie acting as an absolute doddle. The notion that it’s hard to imitate the actions and mannerisms of others seems laughable to me. You just need to be a ham, a mimic. Child actors are great because they understand this. Sorry, Meryl and George and Angelina! Love you, but is it really that hard?
Stage acting? That’s a whole other story. Charging around a conventional theater stage in front of a live audience, trying to remember the part of King Lear, knowing that tomorrow night you have to play Othello, seems, indeed, like an impressive feat. But movie acting? Standing about on a set belching out your lines two or three at a time, take after take? Surely even I could manage
that. And in this particular case—I refer to the role of Nigel—it seemed as if all I would have to do is play a gay fashion dude . . . myself.
Let’s talk about Nigel. As those of you stoic souls who actually got through the book without committing suicide will recall, Nigel was the fey creative director of the fictitious Runway magazine. A consoling island in a sea of abuse, Nigel doled out sage advice to the beleaguered heroine.
Another cliché. The helpful homo.
Portraying a helpful homo would require a certain amount of research and some effort. Why? Because I do not really possess that helpful Queer Eye homo gene. Never have.
Not only am I not particularly helpful, I am actively unhelpful. I have discovered over the years that the advice that I give is, in fact, quite reckless and confusing.
When people ask me for pointers, especially style advice, I find it really hard to restrain myself from making anarchic suggestions. If an advice seeker confesses to me that she needs a new look, I might well respond as follows: “Buy yourself an electric blue silk-satin trench coat, dye your hair blue-black—or better yet, buy a blue stripper wig—and then go home and toss out all your other clothes. In cold weather, think snake-skin unitard. You have an okayish body. Why not?”
Advice seeker: “Are puffy jackets still in?”
Moi: “No! Do not even think of leaving the house this season unless you are wearing a Miss Marple cape. Start wearing dove gray spats . . . and a monocle.”
My advice, as you can see, is almost like a form of Tourette’s. If some innocent gal asks for a beauty tip, I am quite likely to say something like “Top and bottom lashes. Seven days a week.” Or: “Run home and plunge your breasts into ice-cold water.”
Inspirational? Possibly. Helpful? Never.
Back to Prada.
Putting aside these minor misgivings over my ability to imbue Nigel with the requisite helpfulness, I decided to go for it.
I unfurled the exciting news about this big Hollywood breakthrough in one of my weekly phone conversations with my eighty-year-old dad, Terry. Before flitting off to heaven, he resided in an English seaside old folks’ home in Brighton, England.