Front Row (2 page)

B
orn on November 3, 1949, Anna was a healthy tot with a mop of straight, shiny dark brown hair and intelligent, dreamy grayish-green eyes set in a beautiful, tiny oval face. She was late to talk, and when she did, she spoke very little and was thought by her parents to be a shy and distant flower. Anna had come into the world at an ironic moment in time; only weeks before her birth, years of clothing rationing had ended in war-torn Britain—and clothing and fashion would become her passion.

As the first daughter in what was then a family of two sons whose father came from a line of military men and who had become a steely, ambitious newspaperman, the dainty girl would have much to live up to. She was the second of Charles Vere Wintour and Eleanor Trego Baker Wintour’s children who were born in London after the Nazi bombs and rockets had stopped raining death and destruction. The other postwar child was James Charles, a gentle, easy-to-handle tyke who was born two and a half years before Anna.

But the Wintours’ first, Gerald Jackson, born almost a decade before Anna, was the parents’ true pride and joy, the one the others would be compared to.

Charles Wintour felt certain that Gerald would follow in his footsteps as a journalist. For his eighth birthday, the father had given the fair-haired son a toy printing kit from Harrods, complete with various faces of little rubber type with wooden blocks to set them in, a messy black ink pad, and a sheaf
of blank newsprint. It was his favorite gift of all. On his own, Gerald produced a little newspaper, a diary about his small world, and proudly presented the first edition of the
Wintour Daily
to his father, a memento Charles Wintour would treasure his entire life.

Eleanor Baker, an American, who was nicknamed Nonie, met Wintour at Cambridge University in England in the fall of 1939. The petite, bright, bespectacled, and extremely plain-looking twenty-two-year-old Bostonian, who had a prettier sister named Jean, had gone to a fancy girls’ boarding school in Connecticut called Westover and was just out of Radcliffe.

She had initially tried to get to England as a correspondent for a small weekly newspaper,
The Daily Republican
, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, owned by close relatives, but when that failed, she enrolled at Newnham College, one of the two schools for women at Cambridge. “It was just something to do—Nonie had no particular ties to England,” notes an American cousin, Elizabeth Gilkyson Stewart Thorpe, known as “Neal,” who became a prominent women’s magazine editor in New York. Always known for her sharp tongue, critical manner, and liberal politics, Nonie Baker had dreams of becoming a writer or journalist. Instead, she would marry one and become a dedicated social worker.

Playing Cupid for Nonie and Charles was a mutual friend and Peterhouse College, Cambridge, classmate of Wintour’s, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who saw him as “a pleasant-looking young man with glasses, a somewhat saturnine expression, and an impressive air of professional efficiency.”

Nonie Baker and Schlesinger had known each other from his student days at Harvard, where her father, Ralph Baker, was a distinguished professor at the Harvard Law School and where Schlesinger’s father was a famous historian. During the war, Baker also was cocounsel for the U.S. office that confiscated alien property. Her parents, who had met at Swarthmore College, and “thee and thou’d” each other in a Quaker wedding ceremony, were well-to-do. Baker had made a bundle as a corporate attorney in Philadephia representing clients like the Pennsylvania Railroad before moving to Harvard to teach. His wife, Anna Gilkyson Baker, for whom Anna Wintour was named, was a charming, matronly, somewhat ditzy society girl from Philadelphia’s Main Line who was known to leave her children in the park and not realize it until she got home.

Like his father, Schlesinger would go on to become an eminent Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, author, and, moreover, a trusted adviser to Jack and Bobby Kennedy in the sixties, while his very best friend, Charles Wintour, would become one of Fleet Street’s most powerful, creative, respected, and feared newspaper editors.

Neal Thorpe maintains that in Boston, Schlesinger “was very much in love with Nonie” at one point “and wanted to marry her.” This is something that Schlesinger denies years later. “I was fond of her,” he acknowledges, “but she did not attract me physically.” Schlesinger remembers Nonie from those early days in Boston and London as “bright, witty, and critical. She had a sharp eye for the weaknesses of others; she took a generally critical stance toward the world.”

Looking back, he feels that Nonie was critical as a form of “self-protection because I think she was extremely vulnerable. But she also was great fun to be with so long as one wasn’t the target.”

While Charles Wintour initially appeared to Schlesinger to be “a quintessential Britisher,” he had actually spent the previous summer hitchhiking through the United States and was considered “an Americanophile.”

When they met, Wintour was editor of an undergraduate Cambridge weekly called
Granta
, which was a mix of the Harvard
Crimson
and the
Lampoon
. Schlesinger critiqued the magazine. Wintour accepted his comments with “brisk but somewhat enigmatic courtesy” and invited Schlesinger to write articles and attend editorial board meetings. The two later invented a false byline, A. G. Case—A. Glandular Case—that appeared every so often on stories that were critical of other campus publications.

Wintour was quite the operator and took Schlesinger under his wing, introducing him to everyone who counted. Schlesinger got to know “more campus big shots” because of his chum than he ever knew at Harvard. To Schlesinger, Wintour was “a man after my own heart—inquiring, skeptical, sensitive to relationships among people, and politically adept at influencing them, flexible, vigorous.”

Wintour, who had a sly and bad-boyish quality about him, took Schlesinger to meet his family in Dorset. While there, he gave his friend a tour of some of the more interesting local landmarks, such as the Cerne Abbas. Carved out of a hillside, it was the figure of a nude male with a twenty-six-foot erection,
which Wintour put on the itinerary because he enjoyed getting a rise out of his guests.

Schlesinger thoroughly enjoyed Wintour and repaid his friendship by introducing him to Nonie Baker, and the two “hit it off at once.”

Recalls Schlesinger, “They became a couple two or three months after they first met. Charles found Nonie very entertaining, certainly stylish, and she had a kind of patrician manner about her and seemed to represent a good, healthy American girl. Charles had great charm and wit, too, but also a sense of control. I wouldn’t say he was terribly handsome, though. He wasn’t a Ronald Coleman.” Schlesinger was no godsend in the looks department, either, so the two also had that in common.

At the same time Wintour and the Baker girl started dating, Schlesinger began seeing a friend of Wintour’s, Anne Mortimer Whyte, the daughter of a member of Parliament and private secretary to Winston Churchill. Wintour always made it his business to know all the right people.

The two couples—Charles and Nonie, and Schlesinger and Whyte—double-dated often. When Schlesinger directed a college production of Shakespeare’s
As You Like It
, he cast Wintour and Whyte in starring roles.

With war looming, the two couples enjoyed their last days at school, taking motor trips in Wintour’s convertible with the top down.

It was, as Schlesinger recalled, a “careless, glorious” time.

Charles and Nonie, madly in love, got married in the little parish church of St. Mary the Less near the university on March 13, 1940, a simple ceremony performed by a university chaplain. Wintour’s father, crisp and stern retired Major General Fitzgerald Wintour, a career military man, served as their witness. When the happy couple settled in a local hotel after they tied the knot, Gerald Jackson Wintour was conceived. It was a wartime love affair and marriage; Charles Wintour had already enlisted and was in uniform. There was no time to dilly-dally.

Little more than a month before she was due, the very independent Mrs. Wintour kissed her husband, a second lieutenant in the Royal Norfolk Regiment, good-bye and departed London for Boston, to be with her family and have the baby. With the war raging, the young parents-to-be felt it would be safer if the child was in America, out of harm’s way, as London was being blitzed by German rockets and bombs.

On November 20, eight months and a week after the Wintours’ nuptials, Nonie gave birth in New England Baptist Hospital to the healthy boy they named Gerald.

She took the baby back to her family’s apartment in the Barrington Court on fashionable Memorial Drive on the Charles River, where she breast-fed him.

Baby Gerald would grow into a sturdy, independent, rough-and-tumble boy, despite extremely difficult odds.

For the first four years of his life he didn’t know who his real parents were.

With London in flames, and with her groom in the middle of the Battle of Britain, Nonie Wintour decided to leave Gerald with her parents and return to England to be close to her husband and do whatever she could to help in the war effort over there—a real-life Mrs. Miniver.

“She left the baby because she was so much in love with Charles,” recalls Nonie’s first cousin, Patti Gilkyson Agnew, whose father was Anna Baker’s brother. “Aunt Anna and Uncle Ralph raised Gerald until he was something like four years old.”

In what Agnew and other American relatives felt was an emotionally difficult situation, the Bakers became Gerald Wintour’s surrogate parents for the duration. As often as she could, Nonie mailed home photographs of herself and her husband, which the Bakers would show to little Gerald, gently telling the toddler that those strangers in the shapshots were his real mommy and daddy so that he would recognize them when they came to retrieve him in the waning days of the war.

It was a highly emotional scene when that moment arrived, recalls Patti Agnew. “Ralph and Anna nearly died, were devastated, when Nonie and Charles came to claim Gerald. They felt as if he was
their
baby.” Her sister, Neal Thorpe, observes, “It was a real strain on everyone involved.”

Wintour survived the war, having spent most of his time in intelligence, and ending up at General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters in Paris. He saw little if any combat but was awarded the American Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre, usually pinned on men who had actually seen action. A longtime friend and newspaper colleague maintains that Wintour got the medals “for administrative work.” Years later, Schlesinger, who had also served in Europe and had even spent some time with his friend as fellow officers,
was surprised to learn that Wintour had received such high military honors. “He never told me.”

Back in London, with the war over, the Wintours bought a pleasant contemporary-style home on Cochrane Street in the upper-middle-class London area of St. Johns Wood.

Wintour had gotten a job in 1946 on London’s
Evening Standard
, starting as a secretary of sorts for one of the world’s most powerful, shrewd, domineering, and dictatorial press barons, Max Aitken, better known as Lord Beaverbrook. Wintour was a young journalist on the way up and would soon become one of Beaverbrook’s extremely loyal and creative fair-haired boys.

For the Wintours, the future looked exceedingly bright. In fairly quick succession, Charles and Nonie had James, and then Anna, the future editor in chief of
Vogue
.

But eighteen months after she was born, a tragedy struck the family that would have long-term emotional implications for Anna, her siblings, and particularly her parents.

Tuesday, July 3, 1951, was a pleasant day in London. With no rain expected, Nonie Wintour had allowed ten-year-old Gerald to ride his two-wheeler to the Hall School, a private preparatory school for boys in Hampstead, where he was a student. The boy had been riding a two-wheeler since he was five. His father had “complete confidence in his ability” and allowed him “to choose his own route” to and from school because “he was an extremely cautious driver.” Gerald left home with his book bag and wearing the school uniform, a pink blazer and cap. He never returned.

Pedaling home in the afternoon on Avenue Road, a wide street lined with trees and large homes, the boy was hit by a car. He was thrown into the air, landed on the hood with such impact that he smashed the windshield, and fell unconscious onto the asphalt. “I was not in a hurry, I did not see the boy until I was a few yards away,” testified the driver at the inquest. “I went to pass and did not blow my horn. I did not think he was going to turn. I did not see him put his arm out.” Witnesses said the boy didn’t know what hit him.

After getting the call, Nonie Wintour rushed to New End Hospital in nearby Hampstead, but she was too late. Gerald had died twenty minutes after he arrived in the emergency room of a fractured skull and other injuries. His death was later ruled accidental.

His mother was hysterical. She got on the pay phone and tried to reach her husband, who on that hellish day was meeting with Beaverbrook at Cherkley Court, his enormous, secluded nineteenth-century gray stone mansion with some thirty bedrooms, near the town of Leatherhead in Surrey, about two hours in those days from London.

What happened next, and there are a number of versions, became part of the whispered Fleet Street legend surrounding Charles Wintour’s life and was one of the reasons why he was thought of by many as an editor with ice water running through his veins.

Paul Callan, a respected veteran London journalist who had started his career working under Wintour, is one of the many who heard what he believes is a credible account of what happened that tragic day.

“At the time Charles was Lord Beaverbrook’s secretary, and he was taking dictation from him when the butler came in and asked to speak to Charles,” recounts Callan. “Charles went outside with the butler, who told him his little boy had been killed. Charles went back in, never said anything to Lord Beaverbrook, and resumed taking dictation. Nobody ever knew what made him do it. Charles wasn’t a monster, but he could be a bit coldblooded.”