Front Row (16 page)

Hill was convinced that Anna’s lack of communication from the start was “intentional” because Anna wanted Hill to look bad and not get another assignment at
Viva
. Anna’s motivation, Hill firmly believes, was paranoia that all photography might be turned in-house and away from Anna’s freelance photographers, which would diminish her power.

Years later, the memory of the incident still riles Hill, who says, “It’s probably the ugliest experience I’ve ever had in dealing with an editor, and it affected me for a long time.”

Jean Pagliuso, another female fashion photographer, who started shooting for Anna at
Viva
and became a member of her “little family of photographers” that worked with her over the years, saw Anna as very methodical, very determined, very demanding and self-possessed.

“She brought the fear of God into everybody, and I felt it on
every
shoot,” Pagliuso says. “Nobody seemed to ever tell her what to do because she really was quite good, and her choices of designers and photographers were made
intellectually. She had it all together, and it was always top of the line. She had a gift.”

After working with her for a time, Pagliuso perceived that Anna had a number of eccentricities, one of which was to tune out while overseeing a shoot. “Anna had a very low boredom threshold, and once the shot was set up, and once Anna liked it, she was not there anymore in her head,” the photographer says. “It’s very hard to shoot when you know somebody’s doing that, when you know they’ve tuned out, because you’re both supposed to be working toward something. But she’d be standing next to me, and suddenly she wasn’t there anymore. That’s not giving me creative freedom. That’s like saying, ‘I’m no longer interested,’ that I was boring her. Other fashion editors stay with it. Not Anna.”

After a time, Pagliuso became part of Anna’s social circle, but then was suddenly and inexplicably dumped for no discernible reason. “It was over,” she says. “That was it.”

As others have noted, women aren’t Anna’s cup of tea, and she therefore preferred working with male photographers and gave them more freedom and less attitude. The ones she chose to be part of her stable were imaginative, creative, and good-looking types like the Frenchman Guy Le Baube. As a young photographer, Le Baube, at the recommendation of Helmut Newton, was the first to put a new model named Jerry Hall in the camera’s lens for a L’Oréal calendar, and his pictures caught the eye of
Vogue’s
Alex Liberman, who hired him and gave him his start in America in 1976.

At
Viva
, Anna began using Le Baube. But even though they had some wild and fun times on location together, he says, she was not very pleasant to work with. “Anna was
very
straightforward. She didn’t go for the phony, nicey-nicey fashion bullshit, and the relationship could be rough, and sometimes we wrestled. She’d say, ‘I don’t agree with you . . . it should be done this way . . .
my
way . . . this is
rubbish
. . . this is
ghastly,’
with a very British manner. I’m French, and naturally the British and the French have this enmity. With Americans it’s always, ‘Ah, you’re
so
French.’ But with the British it’s just, ‘Fuck you!’ We don’t play together.”

Like others who were loyal members of her crew, he eventually got dropped when she got the big job at
Vogue
.

“Anna picked people to work with who were on the top at the time in the
marketplace,” he explains. “She chose people who were up and in, and she didn’t take much risk. She wasn’t experimenting.”

He also notes that that once he completed a shoot with her, Anna would permit him to pick the best five or six photos, and then she would decide which ones would make it into the magazine, the kind of freedom she didn’t usually offer to female photographers. For Le Baube, and any photographer, that was a wonderful situation, because it gave him a great deal of creative control.

“She was quite loose about letting you be free to shoot your way,” he maintains. “She gave you an immense space of freedom, and she was very trusting,” he notes, compared to Grace Mirabella, then editor of
Vogue
, or top
Vogue
fashion editors like Jade Hobson and Polly Mellen, with whom he often worked. “I would end up having the shittiest photograph of the series being picked and published by them, and I would have no say about it. With Anna, she gave you the say. The result was what counted with her.”

He felt that her style of giving the photographer freedom was more “old Europe” than the American fashion editors with whom he worked who demanded more control. Later, all of that would change with Anna, but for now she thought it in her best interest to allow the pros to judge which photos were the best. Their trained eye and experience would make her look good in the end, and she could take much of the credit.

Despite their little battles, Le Baube did find Anna desirable. “She’s very attractive and extremely discreet.” He maintains that nothing ever happened between them, “though I do believe it would have been possible if it was pushed. I think she needed to be attractive to a man. She was more attracted to me than I was to her . . . there was a lot of frustration.

“I felt it was no good to have a sexual relationship, or a sentimental one, or both with someone like Anna, who I wrestled with professionally. We had some tête-à-tête dinners and lunches, but she was not very compassionate and extremely selfish. To have lunch or dinner with Anna, you don’t do ha-ha.”

Because Guccione and Keeton were willing to spend money, Anna was able to travel the world on location shoots—from islands in the Caribbean to Japan. She hired cutting-edge photographers like Helmut Newton, Deborah Turbeville, Patrick Demarchelier, André Carrara, and Shig Ikida. And
she discovered and presented to readers new and edgy designers like Issey Miyake.

At
Viva
, savvy staffers glimpsed Anna as a demanding and creative editor, a take-no-prisoners executive, and a Fashionista with a capital F—gifts that would eventually catapult her to the top of the fashion magazine world and make her a legend in her own time.

Along with being possessed of a rare and unerring creative eye, she was a singular wizard at delegating work to highly creative people, which many consider one of her greatest attributes. Like her father, she hired the best and the brightest, demanded absolute loyalty, and gave them a free hand—to a point.

“A lot of Anna’s success at
Viva
was because of Rowan Johnson, who had a wonderful sense of design and was very creative,” observes Stephanie Brush, who after leaving
Viva
went on to write a best-selling humor book and had a syndicated newspaper column. “Someone once said that Anna doesn’t really know what she likes, but if it’s the right designer, she’ll like it. If she hears the name of the designer, she’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ It was fashion if Anna said it was fashion. She had that kind of definitiveness about her. She was this strange and exotic and distant creature who looked cutting edge, was
out
there, with a mysterious way about her, this aura. And she obviously knew it.”

O
utside of the office, the domina of
Viva’s
fashion pages exhibited an entirely different persona. In the office, Anna was the aloof ice queen whom everyone found a bit scary and gave a wide berth. But in the company of Bradshaw socially, she played her long-running little girl role to the hilt.

Friends of Bradshaw’s, such as Byron Dobell, found her game intriguing if not totally off-the-wall. He was never really quite sure what was what with her. A perceptive editor at
Esquire
and at
New York
, where he gave Bradshaw plum assignments, Dobell, and his equally astute
Redbook
editor wife, Elizabeth Rodger, were dumbstruck and mystified by Anna’s manner when they socialized with her in their East Sixty-ninth Street apartment.

“She would sit totally silent, her legs tucked under her in a catlike position, wearing these beautifully pleated wool skirts, and she would practically put her thumb in her mouth,” Dobell recalls vividly. “I will not swear that she put her thumb in her mouth, but my impression was she was about to. She was like a baby doll. She was very childlike, incredibly passive, and I didn’t know what was going on. I had no strong sense that she had
any
career. That’s why it always amazed me that she blossomed into this successful editor.”

Elizabeth Rodger, a beauty who had a reputation as an insightful and sharp editor, watched Anna closely and came to the conclusion that “she was a zed, just a blank,” says Dobell. “Her assessment was, Anna was a passive being. That’s how she saw her, and how we saw her. Now whether she was willingly
passive, or whether Bradshaw did something that intimidated or overwhelmed her so that she didn’t speak up around him, I had no way of knowing because I never met her alone. All I can say is that in the presence of Bradshaw, she was quiet as a mouse.”

The other aspect of the relationship that stuck out was Bradshaw’s attitude toward Anna, which was extreme impatience, or at least that’s the way it struck Dobell. He remembers Bradshaw describing Anna as “childish, too clinging, too dependent, and annoying. Anna was obviously very attractive and they obviously had something going,” he says. “But he did express to me his annoyances with her. Now, whether he was covering up for her becoming annoyed with him, who knows.”

The seemingly passive Lolita-like character that the Dobells saw, and the shrew many of the
Viva
people witnessed, had still another face. With men in her life, past and present, Anna played curious head games.

In one, she appeared to pit her onetime London hippie boyfriend, Richard Neville, against her current live-in, Bradshaw.

By the midseventies, Neville, the once-controversial
Oz
editor, had moved to New York City like so many other Brits and Australians to get a toehold on American journalism.

Neville, trying to freelance, was then living in a loft on the Lower East Side with his future wife, a beauty named Julie Clarke, who was the U.S. correspondent for the high-circulation magazine
Australian Women’s Weekly
, with an office in the
Newsweek
building on Madison Avenue.

Neville contacted Anna at
Viva
, and the two renewed their friendship. “My God, I thought, here’s that quiet little girl, Anna Wintour, who I remember in London was not even sure of what she was doing, and here she is now, in New York, working for Bob Guccione,” he notes. “This was the
new
Anna.” Anna also became friendly with Julie Clarke, who was young and kicky and covered fashion and style and recognized in Anna, as Neville puts it, “a person of great aesthetic confidence.”

Right after Neville called, Anna arranged to have lunch with him at the fashionable Russian Tea Room to catch up on old times, but he was surprised when she arrived with Bradshaw, whom Neville had never met but had heard about. Did Anna hope to see a duel over her? To see her guys duke it out? Winner take all? It seemed all so sophisticated and bitchy, like something
Samantha might have dreamed up years later on
Sex and the City
. If Anna’s reason for bringing them together was simply to put them on the hot seat and see what would happen, she was relatively successful. Neville felt extremely uncomfortable, while Bradshaw eyed Anna’s ex-lover with icy suspicion.

“I found it very strange that Anna had lunch with the both of us. My guess was that she was pitting us and we were both supposed to dislike each other,” Neville clearly recalls. “It was all rather odd.”

But as it happened, Anna’s mind game backfired. “Bradshaw and I got on much better than he with Anna, or me with Anna. Instead of disliking each other, Bradshaw and I eventually became friends. I was so enchanted. He occupied a world with which I was not familiar,” says Neville.

From their initial lunchtime chatter and subsequent mano a mano conversations, Neville got the distinct impression that Bradshaw could well have preceded him as Anna’s boyfriend in London, as others have suggested, which would have put Bradshaw with Anna when she was in her midteens.

While Bradshaw had complained to Byron Dobell about Anna’s neediness and childlike behavior, Neville says Bradshaw teased her about her “facileness and her superficiality. We both used to joke about Anna. Bradshaw was very mocking of her—not in a cruel way, but in an amusing way. With jocular comments, he teased and made fun of her opinions and attitudes. He was older than her, and more worldly, and there was that daddy complex going on between them, and his criticism struck me as slightly paternal, although some might call it condescending. I thought it was, in a way, affectionate. And I don’t think she minded being teased; she seemed to rather enjoy it. I saw them as an odd couple. He was this tall George Raftian guy with a great love of words who’d been to Vietnam, and she [was] the ingenue on the lower end of journalism. The irony is that little was he to know that she would become a superstar.”

A
nna’s relationship with Kathy Keeton, the associate publisher and editor of
Viva
, was a veritable roller-coaster ride.

In many ways the two were perfectly matched—imperious, ambitious, driven. “Like Anna, Kathy was another haughty, princesslike figure, and Anna was very pretty, wore gorgeous clothes, and acted and looked like she
was not of us, that she was of a much higher order than we were,” notes Carol Mithers, then a young
Viva
editor.

But others, like Stephanie Brush, couldn’t imagine a bond between them, professionally or personally “Kathy showed up at work with these halter tops, totally bare in the back,” she says. “She was a real trash queen extraordinaire—big hair, the whole deal. What would these two women have to talk about? Kathy was South African, an ex-stripper; Anna was British, wore Yves St. Laurent, and acted like royalty. I can’t imagine they had any common ground.”

Beverly Wardale watched the dynamic between the two and came to believe that Anna only “tolerated” Kathy and felt she was “in the second division” by working for the Guccione organization.

“Anna thought the whole company was
tainted,”
asserts Wardale. “She didn’t find anybody who was a kindred spirit. If it had been Condé Nast, and we’d had fashion editors who went to Paris every five minutes, she would have thought it was a wonderful place. But there wasn’t anyone there on her real wavelength. There weren’t that many people at
Viva
who were interested in fashion, who were that driven about fashion, that artistic. Certainly she didn’t think Bob and Kathy were—they were coming from one direction, she from another.”

Susan Duff, on the other hand, feels that Kathy “loved” Anna and believes Kathy was interested in Anna’s ideas. “When the two of them were together, it didn’t even seem like Kathy was the boss.” At the same time, though, Duff concedes that Anna “definitely felt superior in kind of a class way—to her surroundings [the magazine], toward Kathy and Bob.”

On one occasion, after an editorial meeting, Keeton had praised Duff for some work she had done and Duff had mentioned it to Anna, who never complimented her for her efforts as her writer, which was Anna’s style. On hearing Duff going on about Keeton’s kudo and how she felt the boss liked her, Anna remarked tersely, “ ‘Kathy would fire you for sneezing.’ In other words,” observes Duff, “Anna was saying don’t feel good about yourself. But she also may have been expressing her own insecurities and vulnerability regarding Kathy.”

Nevertheless, Keeton liked Anna well enough to invite her for a girls’ night at the Guccione house, a bizarre evening of drinks, dinner, and girl talk. The
house was a thirty-room, seven-story pleasure palace filled with art by Van Gogh and Picasso, and featuring an indoor pool and a ballroom. Once a struggling artist working in London, Brooklyn-born Guccione had started
Penthouse
on a shoestring in 1965, essentially copying the
Playboy
format. His golden philosophy was if there’s room for one, there’s room for two. A decade, two wives, and two sons later, with a net worth of more than $100 million, he bought the house at 12 East Sixty-seventh Street, the largest privately owned town house in Manhattan. The Guccione place eclipsed Hugh Hefner’s pad for sheer elegance and kitsch: A piano that once belonged to Judy Garland, a statue of a female saint, and two lead sphinxes with the head of Marie Antoinette were just part of the bizarre picture.

Guccione was out of town on business the night Anna, dragging Duff along, visited the mansion to spend the evening with Keeton, who presumably had little better to do. Like Anna, Keeton had few close female friends, was lonely at the top, and wanted some company, so when the boss calls, the help comes running. Anna and Duff sat dutifully on either side of Keeton, who perched herself at the head of a dining table that looked like the flight deck of the USS
Forrestal
.

“The mansion was a weird, strange, creepy place. The whole scene was very Gothic,” recalls Duff. “Kathy was going on about how wonderful it was when the man’s away and you can get your facial and pedicure and just hang out and have girl talk. She had this maid who I think was drunk or something and was falling all over Kathy, slobbering on her neck. I looked over and Anna was just sitting there rolling her eyes.”

It was probably the one and only time Anna visited the mansion. She absolutely never made an appearance with some of the other women editors who were asked to fill in the ranks with
Penthouse
Pets, who were supposed to look like normal guests, when Guccione was entertaining advertisers at the house, and it wound up being four women for every man.

Relations between Keeton and Anna often became strained, especially over expenditures. While Guccione poured money into
Viva
, which always lost it—some savvy staffers saw the place as a glorified tax write-off—Keeton kept a sharp eye on costs; she may have been a scantily clad dancer when Guccione first set eyes on her in the Pigalle club, in London’s Soho district when she was twenty-six, but she was a scantily clad dancer who read the
Financial
Times
and played the market. Anna, on the other hand, acted as if Guccione had handed her a blank check at
Viva
, which sometimes turned Keeton into a veritable Shylock over the most trivial expenses.

The longer Anna was there, and she’d been at
Viva
about a year by the close of 1977, the more she and Keeton seemed to go at it, money being just one issue.

“One of the things that went wrong was, Anna had a head-to-head with Kathy,” recalls Joe Brooks. “Kathy was of the opinion that anybody who wanted their clothes in
Viva
should pay for the shipping to and from the shoot, which is evidently not the way it goes in the trade.”

While it was peanuts, Keeton thought it was an unnecessary expense and felt strongly that the magazine wasn’t going to foot the bill. Moreover, she was out to rattle Anna. And it worked. Anna was seething because she was on the magazine’s fashion front lines and would have to explain the situation to her friends in the business. At this point, whatever Anna wanted to do, Keeton put her two cents in, and whatever Kathy wanted to do “wrinkled Anna’s nose somehow,” states Brooks. “It was
not a
. match made in heaven.”

Beverly Wardale believes that Keeton “initially had been somewhat in awe” of Anna, “but toward the end she and Bob thought Anna was expensive. She only knew about photographers of the caliber of Helmut Newton. She wasn’t going to use someone with a box Brownie. That was her trademark. She was costing the company money. Anna never did anything on the cheap. She’d never say, ‘I have this up-and-coming
inexpensive
photographer, or this young up-and-coming
inexpensive
model.’ If it wasn’t someone or something that could be in
Vogue
, it didn’t exist for Anna. It always had to be the best, the most expensive, the chicest. That’s Anna, and it got to Bob and Kathy.”

There also were increasing arguments between Keeton and Anna over the fashions being used in her flashy layouts, with Keeton complaining that the clothing was pure fantasy, and that women readers in Des Moines wouldn’t get it. “But Anna didn’t care,” says Wardale. “She cared for the total look, which was an extension of herself. She didn’t care what people who live in trailer parks thought. She was selling Anna Wintour, the package. And the package was being able to pick out a fashion or a trend before it happens. That’s what she’s all about, and that’s why she eventually got to where she is.”

Outside the office Anna began complaining about Keeton to friends. To
Vivienne Lasky she made it clear in several telephone calls that she wasn’t happy with the way the job was going, that she felt she was being edged out by a “bimbo.”

What Anna and most other staffers didn’t know was that Guccione had new, costly ventures in mind—gambling casinos in Atlantic City, books, records, television—and another new magazine, a slick futuristic monthly called
Omni
. He also had sunk a reported $17 million of his own money in the X-rated film
Caligula
, based on a script by Gore Vidal and containing a scene with six hundred extras having an orgy As a result, unnecessary expenses, such as those racked up by Anna, were being slashed, and there were secret discussions at the mansion about killing the money-draining
Viva
altogether. Keeton’s seemingly petty cost-cutting dispute with Anna was just the tip of the iceberg. And the beginning of the end.