Front Row (13 page)

Anna occasionally visited Lasky’s apartment for dinner, but always without Bradshaw, which Vivienne thought odd.

Lasky also visited Anna and Bradshaw’s flat, and what stood out most to her was their bedroom. “It was monastic, white and spare,” she says.

Lasky perceived that their relationship was on increasingly unsteady ground. “They stayed together amicably, long after things were over,” she says. “Anna should have moved out when she knew it was over, but she was comfortable. They stayed on decent terms, but they’d grown apart. There was a real difference from how they were in London, and even how they were when they first came to New York—but it went on and on and on. They were going in different directions. I could see it, did see it, and she admitted to me that they were growing apart. It didn’t make her feel good. It was a loss. But Anna was always philosophical and never whined.”

Besides her friendship with Moore, Anna had fallen for someone most unlikely: a dreadlocked, ganja-smoking, black Rastafarian, albeit a famous one—the first third world superstar.

As it turned out, it was Bradshaw who helped turn Anna on. One of his close friends, a member of his rat pack, was the creative record producer and multimillionaire businessman Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, who brought reggae into the mainstream in the midseventies with one of his
major discoveries, Bob Marley & the Wailers. During Anna’s tenure at
Bazaar
, the Wailers had a big concert in New York, and through Blackwell, Bradshaw had arranged for a backstage pass for Anna at the Beacon Theater.

She virtually disappeared for a week.

As Alida Morgan succinctly put it, “Anna met God!”

Bob Marley took her off the scope during the Wailers Manhattan gig. “She went every night and stood backstage,” recounts Morgan, still dumbstruck years later at the memory of Anna at a reggae concert, let alone making the scene with the legendary Marley, who had a reputation as a womanizer.

“Anna was riveted, and she’d go out every night after the concerts with the band to have dinner, go on the town. When she came back we said, Anna, you look exhausted.’ She had these purple circles under her eyes. She says she didn’t have an affair, but she had this revelation and felt she had a mystical experience. I said, ‘How come I’m not being invited?’ But when Anna found something
that
good, she wanted to keep it to herself. I don’t think anything moved her as much as Bob Marley.”

Anna’s hard playing along with trying to stay on top of her game in a difficult work situation required enormous physical and emotional stamina. To handle this anxiety-filled load, she had a daily regimen that included the same high-protein lunch of scrambled eggs and bacon or basted eggs and shirred chicken livers at the tatty Women’s Exchange, where, with Morgan, she’d “invent cover stories for Bradshaw and complain about Tony Mazzola.”

Anna also took an hour a day for an expensive and tough physical training workout at Lotte Berk’s. Just as Philip Kingsley was Anna’s hair guru, Berk became her body’s Svengali. Berk was a ballet dancer, a free spirit who had escaped Hitler’s Germany and had become one of London’s swinging sixties icons who practically terrorized her clients into shape.

As corpulent Ms. Middle America worked out dancing to the oldies with perky Richard Simmons on VHS at home, stick-thin Anna—obsessed with keeping her trim body looking like a lean, mean, and sculpted fighting machine—did her exercises to pop music at Berk’s chic brownstone studio in Manhattan. The routines of the Lotte Berk Method had been given bizarre and sexually explicit names: “Fucking a Bidet,” “The Prostitute,” “The Peeing Dog,” “The Love-Making Position,” and “The French Lavatory.” Therefore, men were never permitted into her studio.

At
Bazaar
, Jimmy Moore viewed Anna as a phenomenal young editor who supported his work and didn’t try to control his ideas or creativity “She was gifted,” he declares. “She was growing, she was ambitious—not just to get ahead, but to do good work. She was one of the best editors I ever worked with. Anna had style, intelligence, and was a take-charge person. I could never see her as an assistant to anyone.”

Like others, Moore feels that Mazzola, and a shortsighted and conservative corporate mentality, was a hindrance to Anna’s creativity. “Tony,” he says, “had his own ideas.”

As Morgan points out, “We didn’t get any support from the ruling brass, so it was very difficult, and it was a cheap place that cut corners in every direction. The art department was impossible, putting type right over a model’s face.”

All of this incensed Anna. Even more maddening to her was the model situation. Mazzola, according to staffers, had a list of half a dozen or so approved cover-girl types that Anna and the other fashion editors were supposed to use.

“It was Cheryl Tiegs, Cheryl Tiegs, Cheryl Tiegs,” recalls Morgan. “We used to get letters asking, ‘Who’s in love with Cheryl Tiegs there?’” When Anna tried to use new girls, Mazzola balked. Not to be denied, Anna and others convinced Donovan, who supported change, to bring on a models editor responsible for recruiting new faces. Hired was Morgan’s close friend Wendy Goodman, sister of Tonne Goodman, who later became a top lieutenant of Anna’s at
Vogue
, her fashion director. “We had to fight every step of the way,” says Morgan, “and the fights Anna had were real knock-down, drag-out.”

Elsa Klensch, the fashion doyenne, was then a senior editor at
Bazaar
. She perceived Anna as “very conscientious. She had to learn her way around the city, learn her way around manufacturers, but she was so methodical and tried very hard to please. But Tony was a very difficult man who ran a tight ship and was a control freak who really didn’t want anybody’s ideas. So it was impossible for someone like Anna to succeed there. He was so insane about cutting costs that he used to sit in his office and go through all the messenger slips and then send memos saying, why was this sent? And Anna had her own vision of where she wanted to go.”

A perfectionist, Anna made it clear that she thought of Mazzola as “the Hearst button man” who watched every nickel—when Morgan asked for a
small raise, Mazzola told her to “get married, or ask your family”—and was opposed to doing anything innovative.

Thus, Anna’s end came quickly.

She has maintained over the years that she was fired because the powers that be didn’t think she had a grasp of the U.S. fashion market. “They fired me after about a year and a half for being too European, I was screamed at all the time,” she told the London
Guardian
years later when she took over British
Vogue
. “They didn’t feel I understood the American woman—maybe they had a point.”

Actually, Anna had shaded the truth a bit about her time spent at the magazine. The fact is that she was axed after about nine months, not eighteen, or even a year as she states in some interviews. She last appeared on
Bazaars
masthead in September 1976. And no one who worked closely with her recalls her being screamed at; the fights were a two-way street.

The real reason Anna was given her walking papers was a dispute with Mazzola over a series of very moody Jimmy Moore black-and-white photographs taken of a sultry model during a lingerie shoot.

“Tony thought the photos were too sexual,” says Morgan. “They had this huge fight about it”—with Anna intensely defending
her
work on the shoot—“and he fired her. We all knew what was going on and we were really upset and angry. Anna was very upset, but she came into our office and said, ‘It’s okay. I’ll be fine.’ And she was.”

“Anna’s coming to
Bazaar
was a nonevent,” recalls Marilyn Kirschner, “and her leaving was a nonevent. It was less than a year, just a drop in the bucket. When one reads her profiles, Anna kind of slides over it. She certainly didn’t leave her mark on the magazine, and I don’t think she was really allowed to or given a chance to develop.”

After the firing, Zazel Loven came to the conclusion that Anna might have appeared upset but really didn’t care. “She’s always had a strong sense of self and felt that getting fired was their problem, not hers, that she’d just take her vision elsewhere and refine it.”

Years later, Mazzola denies firing Anna and claims it was Carrie Donovan who wielded the ax. He asserts that he ran a creative fashion magazine. “Carrie, who was the huge star who came from
Vogue
, was the one who constructed
the department and was responsible for who came in and who left,” he says. “Carrie Donovan decided she wanted to make a change, and that’s what she did. It was her right to say, ‘I think we need to make a change.’ People can think what they like, but I didn’t fire Anna Wintour.

“I remember one sitting with Anna. I happened to be in Paris for the collections, and she was the editor in charge. Anna was very professional, and I remember she did a great job with those pages. We published everything she worked on. If anything, I tried to encourage the editors to do unusual, interesting things.”

Anna also remembered that shoot in Paris. “It was for the couture,” she said, “and the editor in chief had a breakdown because I had used models with dreadlocks. You know, it just wasn’t a blonde American look.”

J
ust as Anna and Bradshaw were growing apart, it was clear to Vivienne,
j
Lasky that Anna was severing their bond of many years—the closest female friendship Anna ever had up until then.

Their fun shopping expeditions and the lunches and dinners in Anna’s favorite hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants were becoming few and far between. The girly chats about fashion and Anna’s sporadic gossip about her love life while still with Bradshaw were winding down.

When, in November 1975, Lasky had a fancy engagement party in Boston, Anna ignored the invitation and was a no-show, which hurt Lasky terribly.

Looking back years later, she came to the conclusion that Anna—focused solely on success—was actually envious, if not altogether jealous, that Lasky was in love and about to get married and start a family. Anna had even made snide and catty remarks about the “conventional route” Lasky’s life was taking—graduating from Columbia on May 12, 1976, and getting hitched on May 16.

“She was surprised that I was actually going to be married,” says Lasky.

And when Lasky told her that she and her fiancé were planning to leave New York to begin their careers and raise children in a sedate New England city, Anna smirked, making it clear that she felt that Lasky’s life was boring and mundane.

Although Anna had missed Lasky’s engagement bash, she did show up, alone, at her wedding at New York’s Central Synagogue, looking smashing in a black-and-white Dior suit. Lasky was happy that Anna had honored her nuptials with her presence, though she barely spoke a word to the bride.

Some weeks before the wedding, Anna had asked Lasky out of the blue what her fiancé’s middle name was. She didn’t explain why, just acted secretive, and Lasky assumed that Anna was going to have something engraved or monogrammed.

Weeks after the nuptials, Anna made a surprise visit to the newlyweds in their Manhattan apartment, bearing her wedding gift, albeit a curious one. “It was bizarre beyond belief,” says Lasky. “It was simple engraved stationery. It was brown”—like their despised uniforms at North London Collegiate. “It was ugly, but it was from Bendel’s, which sort of linked us back to a time twelve years earlier.”

During a visit to the States in the midsixties, Lasky had picked up a little gift for Anna at Bendel’s, a stack of cool notepads in different colors, which Anna adored because there was nothing like them available in London.

Lasky viewed Anna’s offering as bizarre for a couple of reasons. For one, Lasky expected something a bit classier from someone like Anna, with whom she had been so close for so many years and who certainly could afford better. “She was raised better than that,” Lasky points out. What would it have taken for Anna to have gone to Cartier or Tiffany, for a present more appropriate for her best friend and her groom? For another, Lasky had made it absolutely clear to Anna that she wasn’t going to use her married name—after all, this was the midseventies, the era of the feminist. Lasky felt as independent as Anna, marriage notwithstanding. Moreover, she and her brother were the last of the Laskys, and she was proud of her family name, all of which Anna knew.

And all of which Anna ignored.

The stationery she gave Lasky was engraved “Vivienne Lasky Elliot Freeman.” Besides everything else, Anna had gotten Lasky’s husband’s name wrong. “His name was Robert Elliot Freeman, so I had gobs of stupid-looking stationery and had to cut off the Elliot Freeman part. It was idiotic, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her. She knew his name and she had specifically asked me what his middle name was. It was the goofiest thing.”

To Lasky, it was clear that Anna had given the off-the-wall and inappropriate gift spitefully and on purpose, a bitchy message that she didn’t like the idea that she had gotten married, either first or at all. “Anna’s competitive,” notes Lasky “My husband, who liked Anna, used to say to me, ‘Well, you got married first. I see a competition you’re not engaging in.’ He said, ‘You’re just oblivious to these things.’”

After Anna bestowed the stationery, she told Lasky she had another gift, just for her, but it wasn’t ready yet. “I said, ‘That’s sweet. It isn’t necessary’ And I thought, ‘Oh, God, what now?’”

A couple of months later, Anna called and asked Lasky to stop by the
Harper’s Bazaar
office to catch up because they were seeing less and less of each other and to pick up the gift she’d promised. But when Lasky arrived at the hour designated by Anna, she found she’d been stood up. “Someone in the office said, ‘Oh, you must be Vivienne. Anna’s left a parcel for you.’ It was like I was a messenger. She could have left a message for me, but there was nothing.”

Lasky took the package outside, sat on a bench, and unwrapped the white tissue paper, thinking, “What the hell is this?” Inside, she found a wool Mis-soni shawl in muted colors of gray, red, and orange—possibly one used in a recent
Bazaar
shoot, freebies being one of the perks of fashion magazine editors.

Neither Lasky nor Anna ever made mention of the gift.

Lasky clung to what remained of their friendship, but the stage was set for what would be the very strange and emotional penultimate act of Anna and Lasky’s intense relationship.

The bucolic setting was the Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, country home of Anna’s aunt Jean, the book editor, and her American Cancer Society executive husband, Cliff Read. It was a lovely place in the Litchfield Hills, filled with elegant furnishings, rugs draped on beams, books, and art, including a valuable de Kooning.

Anna’s brother Jim, who remained close to Lasky, was visiting from England and had asked his aunt to invite Anna and Lasky and her husband to spend what he hoped would be a pleasant summer weekend. Lasky had been there many times, hiking on the nearby Appalachian Trail and helping Jean Read tend her lovely garden. “Jim said, ‘Please, will you come down, it’ll be
so much fun,’ ” recalls Lasky, who readily agreed, eager to see Anna, who had not kept in touch after Lasky’s marriage. But when Anna heard that Lasky was going to be there, she made an excuse to come on another weekend. Jim and his aunt pleaded with her, and she eventually relented. Lasky had brought a present for Anna, but the way things turned out, she never gave it to her.

“Anna was thinner than I’d ever seen her, and she was all in black leather,” says Lasky, who was dressed New England preppy–style and was taken aback by Anna’s gaunt, avant-garde look and manner. “She’d been delivered in a limo and she behaved like a twelve-year-old. She didn’t say hello to me. It was like I was invisible. She refused to come to lunch, refused to help out, and sat in a chair sulking. I heard Jean, who was furious, saying to her, ‘You’re so unbelievably rude. What’s the matter with you?’ She refused to interact with anyone. She seemed to be ticked off that they had guilt-tripped her into coming because it was the correct thing to do so we could all be together. She just didn’t want to be there. She wasn’t happy to see me, and she didn’t talk to me about anything. I’d never seen her like that in my life. You could cut the tension with a knife.”

At one point during the hellish weekend, Anna made a call to New York. A couple of hours later a limousine arrived with a mysterious-looking fellow also in leather. Anna and the man huddled for a time, and then he left. He was never properly introduced. It was all very awkward for everyone. (He was a French record producer by the name of Michel Esteban, with whom Anna was starting a relationship.)

“I was very hurt,” says Lasky. “I said to my husband, ‘I want to go home.’ But he said, No, we have to stay. We don’t have to go down to her level. Just ignore her.’ Jim took over and asked me to go for a walk with him, and we walked for several hours. I told him I was very uncomfortable, and he said, ‘I don’t know why she’s being so bloody rude. I don’t know what’s gotten in to her. She’s like a child. Don’t take it personally’”

That night, Lasky cried herself to sleep.

The next day, Sunday, was sunny and glorious, and everyone sat in the Reads’ wild garden, an idyllic spot. Anna opened up a bit to Lasky, telling her that she planned to move to a new apartment; her long relationship with Bradshaw was nearing its demise. “She said she would give me her address
and I turned to her and said, ‘There’s not much point to that, is there?’ I’ve never done that before, and she looked shocked. That weekend I knew Anna and I had lost something. We had been so much a part of each other’s lives, our families so intertwined, so much love and affection. I’ve never understood what happened.”