Front Row (20 page)

“Young and kickin’ ” is the way Taylor remembers Anna from those days. She used to refer to him as “the Thin Man,” because she thought he resembled William Powell, and he wore snazzy pleated pants like the dashing private dick of thirties and forties films.

Because they had so much fun and hung out together, Anna’s interest in Taylor sparked some tensions for him and Sara, his future wife. Anna frequently tried to fix up Taylor with gorgeous women even though she knew he was living with Sara, who worked in theater.

“Dan really liked Anna. . . . He had a [friendly] relationship with her, and he’s an amazing talent and Anna knew that, and she surrounds herself with talented people,” notes Sara Taylor years later. “She introduced him to women who she thought would be more suitable for him, and this happened a lot. She introduced him to a lot of upper crusts—usually stylists and French and rather snotty. The possibilities were always there.”

Asked about Anna interfering in his relationship with his future wife, Dan Taylor says, “I’d rather not go there.”

From the moment Taylor met Anna, he thought of her as exquisite. In the office, she often leaned against his desk coquettishly in tight shorts and revealing T-shirts. “Oh, God, she was well put together,” he says, remembering those days. At the same time, he could see beyond her flirtation and knew she was determined, enterprising, and hustling for another job. While her long-term goal was
Vogue
, her sights were now set on one other high-profile magazine. “She told me she was shooting for
New York,”
Taylor recounts. “That was her goal at the time. She wanted to keep stepping up to get to
Vogue
. At
Viva
, she at least had a budget to work with.
Savvy
was just a blip. Everybody knew she was going somewhere.”

After Taylor arrived on staff, Anna worked closely with him, and he found her both “inspirational” and “a pain in the ass.”

“If she didn’t like something—a layout, the photos—it was always ‘just

A Savvy Decision
awful’
The operative word was
‘awful
. . . absolutely
awful,’
that was her key phrase during that time period. She was very demanding. She had a lot of drive, and she went through people like toilet paper.

“I was always fighting with her because she always wanted big spreads in the magazine to advertise herself. She wanted flashy pieces that made her look good. The better you made her look with the design and layout, the happier she was. Otherwise she was very, very
unhappy
. If it didn’t excite her, she quickly got bored. It took a lot to entertain her and keep her moving. She wanted you to do the best you could, and she’d reject it until you got there. That’s an incredible ability for someone.”

Like others who worked with her up to that point, Taylor agrees that Anna’s forte was finding creative talent to carry out her vision. “She had that ability to get great photographers working for us. She was able to get all these women to pose for her, and it was all off-the-cuff pretty much because we had no money at
Savvy
, we had nothing as a budget. Anna was the inspiration, the center point. She’d get the people fired up, let them run a little bit, but mostly hold them back until she got what she wanted, got them to try to do something for her within the realm of no budget.”

On one such no-budget shoot, though, the reputation of the magazine could have gone down, along with Anna’s career, because of the damage inflicted.

Like Anna, Taylor thought that Guy Le Baube, her fun-loving French shooter, was a trip, and they sometimes hung out together. Anna used Le Baube on a number of her stories at
Savvy
, and he always was spiritedly playful and would do “atrocious things with the models, or something obscene” to provoke her, to see her fume and sweat, because he knew how serious and driven and uptight she was about the job.

All of that was underscored by what became a legendary incident known among a tight circle of fashion insiders. It occurred in Southampton, at a very chichi home loaned to Anna for a day’s shoot, with an exotic cast that included Le Baube as the photographer and a flamboyant transvestite as Le Baube’s assistant and hairdresser. Because the assistant was Muslim, he didn’t drink or eat pork, though Le Baube tried to mischievously force them on him in the presence of Anna, who, he says, “enjoyed the cruelty of it.”

So they were a tight little group that arrived in the tony Hamptons sunshine
for the shoot. But Anna was her usually controlled self, and she extracted a pledge from of both of them that there would be no monkey business this time. They solemnly promised to act professionally.

“We said yes, we’ll be good boys,” chuckles Le Baube.

Anna should have known better, because even though she and Le Baube’s assistant usually got along, and she liked the way he cut her hair, he was known as a troublemaker.

“He liked to terrorize Anna and, in fact, Anna sometimes
liked to
be terrorized. So she hired us as two brutes—a nasty heterosexual French photographer and a really faggy, bitchy Muslim queen who was ferocious, who loved to get into the clothes of the models, to put on the high heels and walk around like a tramp,” says Le Baube. “He was my friend, but he disgusted me. Naturally, Anna was humorless because she’s very efficient, and efficient people don’t have time to waste. Because she was distressed, we decided to torture her as a joke.” But it was a joke that got out of control.

Anna had given the assistant and Le Baube strict instructions not to disturb anything in the house, and certainly not to damage or break anything, and if something was moved to put it back in the exact spot. The place was filled with valuable art and antiques, and the shoot was Anna’s responsibility, with her and the magazine’s name on the line.

Not long after Le Baube began to shoot, the assistant went into his schtick—he started to dance, bounce off the walls, and knock into things. Anna was in a state of shock as she watched him go bananas. Suddenly he fell against an
objet
and broke it, collapsing to the floor, clutching his chest, saying he thought he was having a heart attack, his face contorted in apparent pain. Then he slowly got to his feet, twisted and turned around the room, bumped into things, fell into a chair and knocked it over, scratching and damaging the rug and shattering a vase.

Le Baube asserts, “Anna was paralyzed,
astounded
that this was happening. She was freaking out and left the scene. We were laughing so hard we had pain in the stomach.”

The damage was taken care of, and Anna walked away with her reputation and job intact. The layout, with models at poolside, appeared under the headline “A Bigger Splash.”

• • •

A
nna had secured the house through the good graces of the new love in her life, a handsome, athletic, well-to-do man-about-town named Michael Stone, who also appeared in one of the photos, or at least part of him did. “I wanted just the ass of a man diving into the pool and had Michael diving and almost drowning as a prop in the background,” says Le Baube.

In fact, Stone appeared as a freebie model in a couple of Anna’s stories at
Savvy
. One, headlined “Off-White Weddings,” showed him dapper in bow tie and tux with his arm around the waist of a beauty. The caption read, “Starring Here with Screenwriter Michael Stone, Alexandra debuts in a silk plissé evening dress . . .” Though he modeled, he wasn’t square-jawed, blue-eyed, blond handsome. In Anna’s circle, he was jokingly nicknamed “Hosni Mubarak” because of his striking resemblance to the president of Egypt. “Michael was Jewish and had a swarthy sexiness to him,” says a friend of Anna’s. Stone’s nickname for Anna was “mouse,” because she was tiny compared to him.

Stone was a“playboy” and “socialite” who desperately wanted to make a name as a freelance journalist. Before he met Anna, he had owned an incredible whole-floor apartment in an opulent building on Fifth Avenue, where he threw fabulous parties.

The journalist Anthony Haden-Guest, a friend of Anna’s and Stone’s, quoted him in a book about Studio 54 that underscored his man-about-town flair. “All these Racquet Club guys, the people who used to go to El Morocco, the guys who ran things socially, suddenly they found themselves standing outside Studio 54 with their dicks in their hands.”

Like other men in her life, such as Bradshaw, Stone was thought of as “a paternal type with a hugely generous spirit,” notes Bradshaw’s pal Joanie McDonell. Stone bought Anna jewelry and clothing. One Christmas gift was said to be a twelve-hundred-dollar shearling jacket he purchased at the chic Madison Avenue boutique Dianne B., where Anna was friends with the owner, Dianne Benson, who supplied her with Japanese and French clothing for her stories beginning when she was at
Viva
.

Stone knew his way around, which Anna always found attractive in men.
He took her to the right restaurants to be seen; he was pals with the maître d’ at Le Cirque, for instance. At the same time, he was athletically attractive and played a mean game of tennis, Anna’s favorite sport. In a match he was considered aggressive, and a friend remembers him being severely reprimanded for spiking the ball too forcefully in a volleyball game.

Beyond that, for Anna’s career needs, he had access to fancy locations and other upscale accoutrements that could be used for
Savvy
shoots. He was for her the perfect Mr. Right of the moment.

Anna introduced him to Judith Daniels and, as Earle Mack says, “Anna launched Michael’s writing career.” Soon, he was not only modeling but also writing for
Savvy
. Like Anna, he was thrilled to have the magazine’s New York visibility.

One of his pieces, called “The Gambler,” was an intriguing profile of an obsessive female high roller. “Andrea plays backgammon for very high stakes. She plays against the best, she takes risks. But it’s not just for the money. It’s the life,” stated the headline.

In fact, the disguised “Andrea” was Stone’s own mother, a jet-setter of sorts who followed the action on the international backgammon circuit and “lost quite a lot of money,” according to Mack. Among the “best” she played against, and part of her circle, was, ironically, Claude Beer, though none of that was mentioned in the well-disguised story. After the piece ran, Stone revealed “Andrea’s” identity to Judith Daniels and also confirmed it to
Savvy
executive editor Susan Edmiston, whom he later dated after Anna dumped him. As Edmiston says, “Michael knew something about the milieu of rich women.”

When Stone and Anna became involved, he was divorced from a European model with whom he had a daughter. He was living in a loft on Broadway. Anna soon moved out of her Upper East Side apartment and into his place, and they quickly became known as a hot couple about town. As a well-placed observer notes, “Anna always had to have a man in her life, felt the need to live with someone. There always was that neediness.”

The loft was early eighties, very
New York
magazine trendy, Anna’s kind of place: sparse and clean, elegant and cool, with uncluttered contemporary tex-tural furniture and a genuine zebra rug on the floor. “It looked like a showroom
that nobody lived in,” says a frequent guest. The bathroom, once photographed for a
Savvy
piece on bath accessories, had a glass-block wall. Within were a whirlpool tub and a steam shower. The sleek look of the entire space was accentuated because everything but furniture was hidden in or behind almost invisible built-in closets and drawers, thus creating the illusion the loft was cavernous.

The highlight, though, for female guests, was Anna’s walk-in closet. In summer, for instance, all of her clothing was in white and shades of white, and each garment was hung separated by about an inch of space so nothing touched. She placed her shoes in racks, all in perfect formation, and the space could pass a drill sergeant’s inspection with flying colors.

The couple’s bedroom was the sparsest room of all: a king-size, low-to-the-floor platform bed with night tables on either side, each holding an alarm clock and tiny framed photo, one of Anna on one little table, one of Stone on the other. “I found it funny,” a lady friend recalls. “I always wondered whether it was her picture on his side, or her picture on her side.”

F
rom the time she started at
Savvy
, Anna had a fashion feature virtually every month in the magazine.

Among them was a shoot on location in Paris—Anna picked up the travel tab herself since she was taking the eight-thousand-dollar round-trip Concorde back and forth for weekend jaunts anyway; a piece from the City of Lights with her byline on it would make her look important to editors at other magazines.

One of the longest features, eleven pages, was a dramatic spread featuring her beautiful friend Tina Chow, co-owner of the trendy Mr. Chow’s restaurants in London, Los Angeles, and New York. Courtesy of her onetime London beau, John Pringle, who had been head of tourism in Jamaica, she was able to wangle an American Airlines round-trip flight and a stay at the luxurious Round Hill resort on the island, where she once again did a shoot with Le Baube and his transvestite assistant. “It was a disaster,” remembers Dan Taylor, who went along. “Guy lost some of his equipment,
Savvy
wouldn’t pay, and Anna was furious.”

While Anna pleased editor Judith Daniels’s bottom line with her low-budget,
dramatic-looking fashion layouts—many pulled off gratis because of her professional and social ties—the two strong-minded, assertive women, along with hands-on publisher Alan Bennett, began to butt heads.

As in her three previous magazine jobs, Anna always seemed to reach a point where she became a problem for management.

This time it had to do with the fact that the fashions she was choosing for her layouts were way too sexy for
Savvy’s
executive working woman readership, and some of the shots Anna selected were too artsy, with, in some instances, the models’ heads cut off.

“Judy was saying, ‘We not only have to see the clothes, we have to see the models’ faces,’ but Anna didn’t think that was very exciting,” notes art director Carol Carson. “Anna always wanted to put a spin on it, she wanted a theme. In one layout she wanted a twilight look. But Judith and Alan Bennett, who was our leader, wanted something a little more pedestrian for what they thought was our readers’ demographic.”