Front Row (14 page)

A
nna’s firing from
Harper’s Bazaar
had come so swiftly and so unexpectedly that she was in a state of shock. Out of work for several months, with nothing lined up, she was getting desperate. Money wasn’t the issue, but getting back on her career track was. Her primary concern was her climb to the summit, to get to the Holy Grail,
Vogue
. That’s when she turned to Jon Bradshaw, who would always be there for her no matter how troubled the state of their relationship.

As Bradshaw’s writer friend Nik Cohn notes, “He was very protective of Anna. There was a very fatherly way about him toward her.”

Bradshaw had media connections all over Manhattan, and one of them was Beverly Wardale, an advertising executive at Bob Guccione’s
Penthouse
magazine. Wardale, a Brit, was married to Bradshaw and Nigel Dempster’s chum Brian Vine, the New York bureau chief of London’s
Daily Express
. Bradshaw and Anna had met Wardale and Vine for drinks at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel, and Bradshaw mentioned that Anna was looking for a job in fashion. Wardale said she’d see what she could do, thinking there might be an opening at
Penthouse’s
sister publication,
Viva
.

Acting on the tip, Bradshaw put in a call to another acquaintance, Peter Bloch, an articles editor at
Penthouse
, then
Playboys
major competitor in the mainstream girlie magazine field. “He said he had a girlfriend who was looking for a fashion gig in New York and that she had lots of experience in London,
and was there any chance
Viva
would be interested in talking with her. There was no mention of her recent firing.”

Both Wardale and Bloch mentioned Anna’s availability. As luck would have it, Alma Moore, the editor of
Viva
, was looking for a new fashion editor.

The last fashionista had just been axed in another Friday night massacre—the place was a revolving door—by Guccione’s significant other, Kathy Keeton.

A thirty-something ballerina turned exotic dancer who had polio as a child, Keeton had conceived and launched
Viva
—the “International Magazine for Women”—with Guccione’s money in October 1973, with pieces by Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wicker. She ran the monthly with a halter top, tight pants, fuck-me heels, and an iron hand in a velvet glove from an enormous office filled with white wicker furniture and a desk guarded by two ferocious-looking Rhodesian ridgebacks. But Keeton, a South African whom Guccione had met in London, only dressed like a bimbo. She was bright and ambitious and was now hoping to have
Viva
, which was her baby, compete for readers against such higher-end magazines as
Vogue, Cosmopolitan
, and
Glamour
.

Viva
attracted strong, literate, creative women’s lib editors such as Patricia Bosworth, who, like Anna, had worked for
Harper’s Bazaar
, and later went on to write well-received biographies. There was Dawn Steel, who had worked as a secretary and in promotions developing X-rated products for
Penthouse
, who became a powerhouse in Hollywood as head of Columbia Pictures. André Leon Talley, the flamboyant black fashionista who would become Anna’s creative sidekick years later, did some time there. Keeton recruited top-notch editors from magazines like
Esquire
and Gloria Steinem’s
Ms
.

Ironically, all of this high-toned editorial activity was happening just across a divider from where
Penthouse’s
shaved and pink gynecological-like shots were being laid out and where the world-famous raunchy “Dear Penthouse” letters were penned.

Based on Wardale and Bloch’s suggestion, Alma Moore interviewed Anna and was impressed. “I explained what I wanted to do, and she knew what she wanted to do, and we were in agreement. One knew she had ambitions.”

In late 1976, twenty-seven-year-old Anna was brought on as the editor in charge of
Viva’s
fashion department, which consisted at that moment of
Anna. It was the most powerful position she had held up to that point. The month she started, the magazine featured an article called “How to throw fabulous parties, create new faces, wear silk stockings, have sexy fantasies and perfect orgasms.”

Word of her hiring was instantly communicated to London—probably by Bradshaw or one of her British compatriots in New York—where
Private Eye
duly reported that the “pulchritudinous daughter of Sir Charles . . . is working on a porn magazine.”

The Wintours, about to get a permanent separation and soon a divorce, did have one thing in common: mortification about where their daughter was working.

The cloud that had always hung over
Viva
—mainly because of its X-rated sister publication—was, indeed, an embarrassment to Anna. The reminders were always there. To get to her office, she had to walk down a hall lined with photos of shapely female legs and other body parts, and pass offices where former
Penthouse
Pets worked and were on display—young, shapely babes with “big hair, lots of makeup, and enormous boobs,” as one former
Viva
staffer recalls. While there was no mixing of staff,
Viva
and
Penthouse
did share the art department and copyediting.

Over the years, Anna has ignored, downplayed, and even blatantly fibbed about the time she spent at
Viva
, and was known to take circuitous routes later to avoid people who worked with her there, apparently not wanting to be reminded.

In March 1998, in a profile in the
London Daily Telegraph
, for instance, she tweaked the truth to suit her
Vogue
image. She was quoted as saying, “Once I got over being fired [at
Harper’s Bazaar]
I did a little freelance again before getting a job on
New York
magazine.”

The truth of the matter is that Anna spent two aggressive years on the staff of
Viva
and had three years of other personal and professional adventures before
New York
agreed to hire her. It was, in fact, quite a chunk of résumé time that she had brushed off as “a little freelance.”

Moore felt that Anna’s aloofness in the office, which surfaced on her first day on the job, and the fact that at
Viva
she always hid behind what became her trademark sunglasses, had to do with her discomfiture. “There was embarrassment
on her part, and maybe her family said, ‘Are you sure you want to be working at a place like that?’”

Still in touch with Anna, Vivienne Lasky was horrified. “She told me she was working for that awful Bob Guccione. I said, ‘I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.’ But she said, ‘Well, one needs a job. Work is work.’ Anna said she had complete editorial control, that she was being given carte blanche. I said, ‘Good for you, but is it two pages of fashion, or five?’ And I remember her giving me this look like, you’re giving me the third degree just like your father used to give me. I know she felt awkward there.”

As it turned out, Anna had an incredibly good situation for someone who had just been pink-slipped from one of the world’s leading fashion magazines. Her department was hidden away in a corner of the
Viva
office where she was left on her own, reporting only to Moore and Keeton, with whom she pitched story ideas. “I gave her pretty much control, and that’s very unusual,” acknowledges Moore. “She was very sure of herself, decisive, a young woman to be reckoned with. We both saw fashion and beauty the same way and agreed that what
Viva
did had to be distinctive, had to stand out from other magazines, and she managed to do that. She realized she could call the shots and could go far.”

Unlike the plain-Jane feminist story and copy editors at
Viva
who wore jeans or conservative business suits, or the
Penthouse
secretaries in stilettos, tight skirts, and lots of cleavage à la Kathy Keeton, Anna showed up for work in dramatic style. For a time, her outfit of choice was jodhpurs worn with riding boots, missing only the crop. “She looked smashing,” recalls Moore. “I used to tease her. Anna, when you become fashion editor at
Vogue
you’ll end up wearing Chanel suits.’ And she scoffed and said, ‘I will always dress the way Iwant to dress.’”

Anna also sported another glamorous look—a chic and expensive outfit consisting of tight white T-shirts over Yves St. Laurent peasant skirts and leather boots, all of which made her look like a skinny Cossack. In spring and summer she sported Alice in Wonderland straw hats over her bob, and in winter she kept it warm with a fur hat with the furry tails of little animals hanging from it, a gift from Bradshaw One colleague remembers thinking,
“That is the mother of all hats, and if you aren’t Anna Wintour, don’t try this at home.”

Not long after Anna came aboard she hired a young woman in her early twenties as an assistant, the first in a long line over the years. As her first foray into the fashion and magazine world, she initially viewed Anna as “very creative.” Hoping to learn from her, the assistant watched her boss closely but soon was shocked to discover that “most of her work was looking for ideas in foreign fashion magazines.”

She says that one of her most important roles was making excuses to Anna’s many suitors when she was off with someone else. “She was having affairs left and right. . . . She was dating married men and she had no qualms,” the woman maintains. “She’d enlist me to cover for her, which put me in a very awkward position. If the person she was involved with called up and I knew where Anna was, I couldn’t let on. I’d just have to keep it vague. Anna knew I knew who she was involved with, but we wouldn’t talk about it. She was involved with two and three persons at the same time sometimes, and not all were photographers. Some were very prominent men.”

Anna often borrowed clothes from designers or retailers. That’s how the job of fashion editor gets done. Anna got credit for the spread and the fashion trade people got their names in print. It was one happy, productive, and close relationship for all.

However, the assistant soon came to realize that Anna was wearing some of the clothes she borrowed. “She would take clothes home and wear them, bring them back to the office, and have me return them for her,” she claims.

The relationship between Anna and the assistant deteriorated and she was gone in less than a year. Looking back on the experience, she says, “Anna has to have it her way. She’s extremely manipulative of assistants and of everyone. Anna Wintour is definitely a trip.”

Another assistant was described as “a sharp cookie,” but they apparently didn’t get along. She lasted just a few months before being given the hatchet.

Anna’s next assistant was a whole different story, and they would become involved in a long-running love-hate relationship.

Paul Sinclaire, a fashionista friend of Anna’s, walked into Yves St. Laurent in Manhattan one afternoon to browse—he and Anna often shopped there together—and spotted an interesting-looking young woman. With
her wild hair and red, red lips she reminded him not of a saleswoman but rather Louise Brooks’s Lulu character—glamorous and eccentric and right out of fiction. “I thought, ‘Wow!’” As it turned out, Sinclaire and the young woman, a Brit named Georgia Gunn, had a mutual friend. They became pals, and Sinclaire introduced her to Anna, who “absolutely adored Georgia.”

But when Sinclaire, who was affiliated with the chic Manhattan boutique Dianne B., tried to hire Gunn, Anna freaked out. She stepped in and hired her as her own girl Friday and, as many saw it, her whipping girl. Most of the stories over the years about Anna’s shoddy treatment of assistants started at
Viva
with talk about her behavior toward Georgia Gunn.

“Anna didn’t get along with her,” Alma Moore recalls. “They traveled together on everything, and Anna treated her badly. She blamed her for a fiasco of a sitting, which cost a lot of money because it was shot on some exotic island, and poor Georgia took all the heat.”

Colleagues remember Anna acting like a wild-eyed diva, verbally flagellating Gunn if anything, even the most minor detail, didn’t go according to Anna’s perfectionist plan. “As cool and aloof and in control as Anna was,” recalls
Viva
and
Penthouse
female staff photographer Pat Hill, “Georgia seemed to be kind of a bumbler—but she wasn’t. It was a strange balance between them and very interesting to watch.”

Stephanie Brush, a twenty-two-year-old Northwestern University Drama School dropout but a talented writer who joined the staff around the same time as Anna, saw Anna as glacial and Georgia as down-to-earth. “If you were to cast them in a film, Anna would play Princess Diana because Di and Anna both managed to cultivate a mystique, and Georgia would have been the Fergie character. Georgia got the brunt of whatever pressure there was to do the fashion job right,” maintains Brush. “Anna would have the ideas and think, ‘Oh, it would be great if we did such and such.’ But Georgia was the one who did all the work—and took all of Anna’s BS that she was spewing out that particular week. I know Georgia got frustrated, and Anna was a fairly frustrating person to work for because she had pretty strong ideas about things and was not known for her tact. It would not occur to Anna to sort of soften the blow. She didn’t have the time or energy or inclination. She had the attitude without the power. Eventually, she got both.”

Coworkers winced years later when they thought of Anna and Gunn’s stormy relationship, described as one of master and slave. Beverly Wardale, who thought Gunn was terrific, recalls Anna having her ironing clothes and sending her to the other side of Manhattan to pick up a pair of gloves because she decided at the last minute that the ones Gunn had originally chosen just weren’t quite right—and Anna wanted the new ones ASAP.

“There were explosions with Anna, who had terrible temper tantrums, and you could hear her
screaming
at Georgia,” asserts Susan Duff, who had come on staff as beauty editor shortly after Anna and worked very closely with her. “It was very unpleasant for Georgia—and for everyone. We were all sort of creeping around and walking on eggshells trying to stay out of Anna’s way because she could get really mean and didn’t care about people’s feelings. She was one of those perfectionists who couldn’t tolerate mere mortals.