Front Row (22 page)

Anna was stunned and said nothing. Aware that Mullarkey could make life difficult for her, she knew when to back off.

“Anna had checked out Karen thoroughly and realized she was not a good enemy to have,” notes the source. “Anna’s too smart of a general, and she’s a believer in keeping your enemies closer than your friends, so she wasn’t about to go up against her. I think she was also intrigued by the fact that Karen wasn’t afraid of her.”

After almost a dozen years in the business, Anna still wasn’t considered a writer, so Quita McMath, an associate editor who had the reputation as a “clever writer,” was assigned to pen the fashion layouts in consultation with her. “She would sit down and
try
to tell me what point she was trying to make, or what was important about the clothes,” says McMath, whose Texas accent was in striking opposition to Anna’s British, which drove both of them crazy. “I once wrote something about hats and she kept wanting to say that they were ‘witty’ while I was trying to say it another way, using a pun or an American phrase that she wasn’t familiar with. All she could say was, ‘But they’re so
witty
. Can’t you see that, they’re
witty
hats.’ I always had the feeling that she felt I was beneath her social station because we had no personal connection, and I was a little bit intimidated by her.”

Anna got fed up with McMath and, during a week when the writer was on vacation, Nancy McKeon filled in for her. Anna went to Kosner and got the green light to have McKeon assigned as McMath’s permanent replacement, and McMath was relieved to go back to her other duties. But McKeon ran into some of the same problems every other writer who worked with Anna encountered. “She could not tell me
why
somebody was interesting or dressed well, or what she or he did was of significance,” states McKeon. “She’d say, ‘But they have such great
personal
style.’ All she kept saying was, ‘It’s
personal
style.’ Oh, my God, if I heard that one more time . . . And I’d think, okay, that’s three or four words, how does the rest go?”

McKeon, who later went on to become a powerhouse editor at
The Washington Post
, said she should have felt flattered that Anna had chosen her to do her writing. But instead her reaction was like that of others on staff. “We all felt taken over by Anna. . . . If ruthless means being totally faithful to one’s own vision and not bowing to anyone else’s, then yes, Anna’s ruthless. If you’re being told that what you’ve done is rubbish, one of Anna’s favorite words, and it’s a matter of your own taste, it’s hard not to feel hurt or slighted. And Anna doesn’t hesitate to tell you.”

A
New York
editor had always wondered what made Anna act the way she did, terrorizing and abusing others and making certain people feel bad. By the time Anna left
New York
, the editor had learned enough about her that she felt she had a good take on what she saw as a fascinating, very private, and enigmatic persona.

“Anna was
very
needy, and her ways of dealing with being needy were to always—
always
—be on the offensive, get them before they get you. She didn’t care about having good friends. She only wanted to be in control, to be in charge. That was paramount to her and was more important than people liking her. If she controlled everything, she felt safe. And people who have to be in that much control can be out of control. She had this insecurity, this lack of sense of self. She’s very studied—every detail was important, every aspect of her life was programmed. Her goals were very clear, and they weren’t about human relationships. The reason she never had any good friends was because she decided friends were not going to be the answer for her.”

A
nna’s imperious British manner quickly grated on some of her American colleagues at
New York
. They began to razz her, one by telling her, “Your father’s British, your mother’s American. Well, honey, it’s like Judaism, you’re the religion of your mother, so you’re an American.” Anna, who could dish it out, usually could take it, too, and kept a stiff upper lip. But on at least one occasion she was, to everyone’s surprise, brought to tears by an innocent and lighthearted prank.

The temperature in
New York’s
newsroom was either too hot or too cold, and on one particularly scorching summer afternoon Anna pulled her bob off of her forehead and neck and rubber-banded it into a topknot. One of the office clowns, noticing her new look, did the same to his hair, and soon everyone in the office joined in. Even Ed Kosner came out of his office, doffed his Dunhill jacket, and put his hair up.

Anna, who usually ignored everyone around her, had no idea what was going on. “But when she got up from her desk to take a walk through the office, she suddenly looked around and was stunned to see everybody with their hair up just like hers,” recalls Jordan Schaps, one of the few staffers with whom she had bonded. “She realized she was being made sport of, burst into tears, and left the office for the day. I guess her English sensibility didn’t like being the butt of that kind of humor. She didn’t laugh and get the joke.”

There were attempts to bring Anna into the
New York
family fold, such as
invitations to staff social gatherings, one of which was an old-fashioned New England–style clambake. When she got the invitation, Anna was stymied. “What is a clambake?” she asked a colleague. It’s really fun, she was told—lobster, clams, corn, beer, and everyone has a rollicking good time on the beach.

“Everyone was there in old jeans, shorts, and T-shirts, and Anna shows up draped in a complete Issye Miyake white, pleated three-piece outfit, with the stiletto shoes,” recalls a colleague, still laughing about the moment years later. “I said, ‘You know, Anna, we’re going to be sitting on the sand.’ But she didn’t have to. The men all jumped to attention and laid down blankets and jackets for her, and while everyone was eating with their hands, Anna was using utensils. She could always run the show, even at a clambake.”

One of the keys to Anna’s success was the way she managed to snag creative photographers to work for her—most of them men—and have them work hard to make her look good. “The thing she did so well was she never acted happy with their work,” notes a former
New York
editor, “so these guys were always jumping through hoops and doing backflips for her. And the way she kept them doing that was to let them know they hadn’t quite measured up.”

Anna was always on the lookout for creative shooters to add to her stable, so when she got a call from Andrea Blanche, who said she had a story idea, she instantly made an appointment to meet for drinks. Blanche hadn’t been aware of Anna until she saw a couple of her layouts in
New York
and thought they had a lot of style. An “idea person,” Blanche felt that her concept might fit well with the kind of work Anna was doing. “I found her very receptive to meet with me,” she says. “My reputation was established, she knew of me, and that’s why she took the call and agreed to get together.”

While Blanche was a female shooter, she was special to Anna because she shot for
Vogue
and was one of Alex Liberman’s favorites. Anna wouldn’t have taken the time for anyone less.

They met at a restaurant for about a half hour while Blanche pitched her “journalistic fashion idea” that she felt would fit in with what
New York
was doing. Anna sat and listened intently, leaning back in her chair, her hands resting on the table, not touching her wine and not taking any notes. Blanche, who’s outgoing, noticed that Anna showed no reaction, acted “reserved,” and
appeared “aloof.” When Blanche was finished, Anna gave her reaction. “She told me right then and there she didn’t like the idea and that it wasn’t something she could use or was good enough for the magazine.”

Naturally, Blanche was both “disappointed” and “surprised” because she usually had a good take on what editors liked. “I always try to fit the story to the editor, and I believed this fit with her.”

Blanche thanked Anna for her time, and the two parted company.

Not long after, Blanche was leafing through the latest issue of
New York
when she froze. Staring back at her was “exactly” the story idea she had pitched and Anna had rejected, shot by a male photographer.

Blanche was shocked, and the thoughts that raced through her mind about Anna at that moment were, as she recalls years later, “not very good things! I think you’re always surprised when you feel somebody has stolen something from you and has given your idea to somebody else. After all, my ideas are, to me, how I make a living, so it’s hard to take when you know someone’s lifted from you.” Blanche says the politics at
Vogue
in those days permitted such things to happen, and one had to adapt to it to stay in the game there. “But Anna was a new person,
New York a
. new venue, so I took her at her word. When I saw my story in the magazine, I was very upset and I probably shouted some profanities.”

Another prominent photographer with whom Anna had problems was Oliviero Toscani—but this time
she
took the brunt of the abuse. Anna was working on a piece with Jordan Schaps, who was shocked by the scene that played out. Toscani had arrived late from Paris and got to the magazine weary from the trip. But Anna, working on a tight deadline, needed to get started immediately.

“We were waiting for him like acolytes because he was a talented, brilliant man, but instead of him being gracious, he was devastatingly brutal to Anna,” says Schaps. “He didn’t like the clothes, didn’t like the girls, and was just a brute, a sarcastic brute. He strode around like an angry peacock and proceeded to criticize everything Anna had laid out, and he was so brutal that he reduced Anna to tears. I was shocked at his behavior and surprised at her vulnerability.”

In fact, Toscani admired Anna’s taste and creativity, but unlike other photographers
he refused to be intimidated by her. As a colleague of his notes, “If Anna tried to pull any of her crap with him, it wouldn’t work. He didn’t need her approval. She needed his. That’s why he could make her cry and is probably why he did it—just to remind her of that.”

Not everything with Anna was always so psychologically complex, especially when she was working with the likes of the fun-loving photographer Guy Le Baube, who caused the star of one of Anna’s first big fashion shoots for
New York
to have a panic attack. The story was called “Heat of the Night,” and featured a stunning young model from North Carolina named Andie MacDowell, who went on to become an actress and a cosmetics spokeswoman.

The setting was a narrow ledge after dark outside the midtown Manhattan penthouse office of Dianne B. Le Baube, mostly given a free hand by Anna because his work was worth it, had decided he wanted to have MacDowell in the foreground, with the Empire State Building in the background, but on a slant and not level with his camera.

This was in the days before something like that could be cheated in with computer software, so Le Baube decided to jerry-rig a platform with side rails and extend it out the window, some thirty stories above the street, and slant it. Anna had borrowed a classic chair from the Museum of Modern Art that would be placed on the platform, and MacDowell would be shot seated in the chair. It was a dangerous setup.

But the only aspect Anna argued against was Le Baube’s proposal to have a floor fan blowing up the pantyless MacDowell’s designer dress. He thought it would help keep her cool and also give the dress the effect of a billowing sail, with the Empire State Building resembling a sailboat leaning against the wind. But Anna felt it was dangerously windy enough at the altitude where they were working and that MacDowell “didn’t need a breeze between her legs.”

The actual shooting went well, and the photos turned out beautifully. But Andie MacDowell’s physical and emotional state was a different story at the end of the hour of picture taking.

“Andie has very beautiful eyes but very poor eyesight,” says Le Baube. “It wasn’t until we were done shooting that she realized she was two feet away from the edge on the thirtieth floor with absolutely no panties on—and she
suffers from vertigo. She suddenly got dizzy and scared and started to cry and began yelling she didn’t want to be there. What was funny was that Andie is half blind, and she never realized we put her in such a dangerous situation. When she realized it, she started to scream.

“The beauty of it was that Anna dealt with it very well. I always liked to experiment, and Anna let me do exactly what I wanted,” he says. “I could have had Andie MacDowell walking on a thread between two buildings and Anna wouldn’t have blinked an eye. She just wanted the photos.”

More aggressive, ambitious, and confident than ever, Anna saw an opportunity to widen her power base at
New York
from strictly fashion. She was in charge initially of the special spring and fall fashion issues, but she then moved into furniture design, personality pieces, and all forms of style. “She took over design and the food issues,” says a former editor. “She talked Kosner into giving her all of that. He was giving her everything she wanted.”

Anna saw that she could make such a territorial grab without stepping on many toes. Having closely studied the terrain and now seeing it in a fresh way, she realized there was a style vacuum at the magazine that only she was able to fill. She got Kosner’s ear and imposed direction, suggesting ideas no one else on staff had ever thought of, or produced, because her talent was all so visual. So she bulldozed forward, just like any enterprising, ambitious, and driven man who might have been in the same position, and with the same foresight.

“She branched out and made up for the failure of imagination of the rest of us,” says Nancy McKeon, who was writing all of Anna’s copy. “At the same time, she took herself seriously in a very frivolous profession because her real project and commodity was herself.

“She wanted to clean up
New York
magazine and bring in a touch of style, so she conceived this rotation—a page of home furnishings one week, a page of fashion the next, a page of girl-around-town celebrity something or other the following week—and this rotation brought a whole new level of photography and style thinking to
New York
that was very positive. But everything she did made
everyone
resentful.”

For Anna, it was a perfect time to be working as a fashion editor in New York, a period, as she later described it, “when artists, fashion designers, and interior decorators were in fierce competition with each other for celebrity
status.” She explained her sense of things to Kosner, who gave her carte blanche to take advantage of the situation—“to break away from the usual catalog formula of fashion journalism.” As it turned out, the decorators and artists were “delighted to be photographed next to gorgeous girls, and the approach seemed to go down well.”

But some of the pieces Anna proposed seemed to have absolutely no relevancy and left McKeon and other staffers baffled.

One girl-around-town story was about a minor British actress named Clio Goldsmith. Goldsmith had performed nude scenes in several French and Italian B movies in the early eighties that showed on late-night cable. It was during that time that Anna decided to feature her in
New York
for no other discernible reason than she was starring in another lame sex farce called
Le Cadeau
(The Gift) and was going to spend a bit of time in Manhattan.

Whatever the reason, Anna directed McKeon to write some text blocks to go with photos of Goldsmith. The wordsmith was, for once, stymied; she couldn’t figure out what to do because Anna gave her no other information or direction. Moreover, McKeon couldn’t discern why anything about this obscure actress should be published other than the fact that one Brit apparently was publicizing another, and so she went to Kosner and asked, “What the hell is this? Why are we doing this? What can I do here?”

Kosner’s lame response was, “Oh, it’s interesting. Do it for Anna.” And that was that.

According to McKeon and others, Kosner and his wife, Julie Baumgold, a contributing writer at
New York
at the time, had “social ambitions” and saw Anna as a shining star in their glitzy Manhattan firmament. “Kosner saw Anna turning part of
New York
into a fashion, trend-setting magazine, which I guess he figured would work well for him and Julie on the cocktail circuit,” notes a colleague.

At the same time, like so many other men, Kosner was captivated and enchanted by Anna, who knew how to work it and how to read him. “She figured here’s this guy who has this sort of vision of himself, who’s social, who always mentioned that he bought his suits at Paul Stuart,” maintains McKeon. “Anna was very sexy in a total, very all-girl kind of way. It was a Japanese moment, so she would wear these outfits loose and without a bra, and she had a succulent body—very slim, but not the anorexic thing she has
since done where she’s all head. She would always dab on perfume before she went in to see Ed. So she very much had a feeling about herself that she was a weapon, that she herself was a power.”

Another editor recalls how Anna would stride into Kosner’s office “in high heels, beautifully dressed, bat those big eyes and say to him, ‘I know you’ll agree with this . . .,’ and get whatever she wanted.”

Besides being mesmerized by her, Kosner was knocked out by Anna’s work, such as the time she commissioned a group of well-known artists to paint backdrops with models in the foreground. “It was a perfect piece for us and, at the time, a real first,” he said later. “It’s become such a standard now, but Anna was definitely the first.” Anna had developed many social contacts in the art world, such as glitzy New York gallery owner Mary Boone, who represented artists such as David Salle and Julian Schnabel, who participated in the model backdrop shoot. (Anna may have borrowed the concept from what set designers had done on Cathy McGowan’s
Ready, Steady, Go!
dance show when she was a teenager in London.)