Front Row (23 page)

As Kosner gave Anna free rein to do whatever she wanted within her expanding domain, a territorial fear gripped some of the women staffers, among them “Best Bets” Corky Pollan, who cowrote blurbs with McKeon about things to buy, see, and do in the city. Pollan feared the worst about Anna and became like a modern-day Paul Revere out to warn the villagers about an imminent British attack. And her fear was warranted. Anna despised “Best Bets.” She saw it as a mélange of boring pictures, with uninteresting tips, so she got Kosner’s ear and started dummying up well-orchestrated still lifes, such as a layout with everything white. “The woman’s ego knew no bounds,” McKeon says. Realizing that a revolution was afoot in the newsroom, Pollan kept the enemy under tight surveillance from her “Best Bets” desk, which was in close range of Anna’s white Formica command post.

“Corky came to me one day,” recalls McKeon, “and said, ‘We’d better watch our backs.’ I asked her what she meant, and she said, ‘Well, if we don’t watch out, this woman’s going to take over
everything
. She’s going to take all our jobs.’ And two weeks later Anna’s profiles, those one-page fashion, home furnishings, celebrity things, started appearing. But ‘Best Bets’ remained.”

One of those shoots involved a piece shot in a house Anna had rented in the Hamptons. The cover photograph Anna was going for was of a model
with an extremely expensive piece of cowhide draped over her in a stylish way Working on the shoot with her was Jordan Schaps, who had certain qualms about Anna’s concept and finally felt compelled to express his view. “So you really think,” he asked Anna, “that the
New York
magazine woman is going to go out and spend five thousand dollars on a leather hide to throw around?” Anna stared hard at him for a few seconds and then declared, “ ‘My dear, I don’t care if they go to Woolworth’s and buy a lump of fabric. It’s not about fashion, it’s about style.’ And I was very impressed by what she said, and
loved
the attitude.”

There were three cardinal sins at
New York
under Kosner that could result in an employee’s dismissal: lying on an expense report, leaking internal information about a story, and giving copy or photo approval to a subject. Anna committed the third. Anyone else would have been fired on the spot, but because the violator was Anna, Kosner bent the rules.

After completing a summer fashions shoot with the sultry new actress Rachel Ward, Anna approached another editor who worked on the story and requested the final layout photos, saying she wanted to send them to Ward for her approval—an absolute no-no, which Anna knew.

The editor was in for an even greater surprise while examining the model release form. In writing, Anna had actually given Ward, who wasn’t a major star at the time, approval over the photos. Bottom line: If the Australian-born actress didn’t like the pictures and refused to approve them, the story might have to be killed. “Maybe Anna didn’t expect Ward would hold us to it. Maybe Anna thought she could get away with it,” speculates the associate years later.

Even back then, long before celebrities became a staple of every form of magazine from sports to fashion, Anna foresaw that sexy stars like Ward on the cover sold copies, and she was desperate to reel one in, at whatever cost.

The editor explained the dire situation to Kosner, who summoned Anna for a private meeting. “Ed was not pleased,” the staffer recalls, and the next morning Anna was aboard a flight to la-la land—on her own dime—with the photos in hand, in hopes of getting the subject’s approval. Kosner had apparently given Anna permission to ignore the no-show rule in order to salvage the story.

As it turned out, Ward gave her okay for the inside photos but refused to approve the shot of her in a bathing suit destined for
New York’s
cover. A last-ditch attempt was made from New York to get her cooperation, but then she broke into tears on the phone. “She was crying and saying, ‘I look so fat! Please don’t use it,’ ” a staffer says, and Ward was told, “ ‘ . . . if that’s the way you feel, honey, we won’t do it.’”

In the end, the story ran, but with a noncelebrity model on the cover, considerably weakening its impact.

Anna acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, never looked back, and plowed forward determined to reach her goal.

And that goal seemed closer than ever because of a fashionista of the first order, a veteran
Vogue
editor by the name of Polly Mellen. Like Anna, Mellen had a reputation as a perfectionist, was difficult to work for, lived for fashion, and possessed a keen eye and astute taste.

Mellen had first spotted Anna back in the seventies when Anna first started covering the collections as a young editor for
Harpers & Queen
. Mellen was intrigued. “Who is
that
beautiful little girl, how fascinating she is, how she dresses, how she mixes,” Mellen recalls thinking. “I noticed her intensity and how she
never
took many notes, and I’m always fascinated with people who don’t take notes . . . they want to remember what interests
them
the most.”

Over the years, when they ran into each other, they’d chat about everything—from clothes to men, especially men, “because Anna liked men in a very interesting way, and she was a flirt.”

In 1982, Anna’s second year at
New York
, they bumped into each other at a hotel restaurant and Anna used the opportunity to pitch herself to Mellen.

“I sat next to her, we talked, and at the end I told her, ‘I wish you were at
Vogue,’
” Mellen recalls.

“So do I,” responded Anna, who surely was walking on air by the time she got back to her desk at
New York
.

Meanwhile, back at
Vogue
, Mellen gushed about Anna to editor in chief Grace Mirabella, a Jersey girl who had worked her way up through the ranks under Diana Vreeland. “I said to Grace, ‘Grace, you have to meet this incredible young woman at
New York
magazine. She’s
so
with it. Her eye is fantastic. She doesn’t just dig fashion, she loves houses, she loves art, she loves
everything.’
And it was really what Grace and I had been talking about for some time, which is fashion is not
just
fashion—it’s
lifestyle
. I said to Grace, ‘I wish you could meet her.’”

Mirabella agreed to a meeting, which Mellen zealously arranged. Anna, of course, had to do it on the sly so no one at
New York
would find out she was starting to job-hunt.

“Anna arrived, and I met her at the elevator and brought her into Grace’s office, and I left so they could talk together,” says Mellen.

The meeting didn’t last long, possibly ten minutes max, before Mirabella’s secretary summoned Mellen to come and pick up her visitor.

“I took Anna to the elevator, and I asked, ‘How did it go? I so hope it went well!’ And she said briskly, ‘I’m not sure, but anyway, thank you, and good-bye.’”

The elevator door closed and she was gone.

By the time Mellen got back to her office there was a message waiting for her from Mirabella to come to the inner sanctum forthwith. Such a summons from the usually easygoing editor in chief was a bad sign. The thought that raced through Mellen’s mind was, “Oh, my God, not good. What could have happened?” When Mellen arrived, Grace recapped the brief interview, an event the very dramatic Mellen says she’s never forgotten.

“At the end, Grace said to Anna, ‘If you came to
Vogue
, what job would you like?’ And Anna said, ‘Well, actually, the job I would like is
your
job.’” Mirabella instantly terminated the discussion and had Anna ushered out. Mellen listened in stunned silence and then managed to utter a few words: “ ‘Oh, dear. Oh, God!’ Grace was very displeased. Anna didn’t have a chance with her.”

Anna didn’t get the gold ring this time, but it wouldn’t be long before Mirabella’s world would be turned upside down by the arrogant young woman she had quickly dispatched.

A
new man had come into Anna’s life, one who would have an immense impact on her emotional and professional life.

The first indication that Anna and Michael Stone’s relationship was on the rocks was heralded by bouquets of flowers from the other man that began arriving for her at the desk of Laurie Schechter, Anna’s second personal assistant in little more than a year. Anna’s world was her work, she had few close friends, so it was usually her office colleagues who first got wind of changes in her personal life. Schechter’s radar caught the first blip.

With enough things on her plate working for a driven boss, Schechter now had to discreetly juggle two bouquets arriving daily—one from Stone, who had always sent a bouquet a day to Anna, and one from the new man. To Schechter, Anna was a “very powerful presence” with “a sexual power . . . an attraction, an appeal” to men.

Schechter was an intense, hard worker whom Anna hired away from the Dianne B. boutique in October 1982. At twenty-four, she was loyal and well liked by Anna, who would become her mentor and help her in the fashion world, where she later became a top stylist and editor in her own right. The two had first met when Anna came to Dianne B. to shop or pull clothing for fashion shoots when she was at
Savvy
, and Anna saw what a detail-oriented, compulsive worker Schechter was—a virtual Anna clone in terms of dedication and devotion to her job.

A graduate of Wesleyan University, where she had been an art history major, Schechter was intrigued by Anna, too. “She was this kind of mystery,” she says, “enveloped in the Wayfarer sunglasses, the Comme des Garçons, or layers of Issye Miyake, the bob in her face.” Unlike other personal assistants who would toil for Anna over the years and eventually leave or be fired, Schechter had incredible staying power, a strong personality, and “a passion for fashion.” Most important, she was a no-nonsense workaholic with unquestioned devotion to do whatever Anna needed, around the clock if necessary.

“There was no basic training,” Schechter notes. “Anna’s not someone who takes you in hand. It’s more she throws you in the water and you’ll either sink or swim. If you swim well, you’ll do well, and if you don’t, you’re not long for the position or the association.”

The first day the twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year Schechter showed up for work, Anna seemed surprised to see her and immediately sent her out for coffee. Schechter was convinced that Anna had “forgotten I was starting” and “wasn’t quite prepared” to deal with her.

By the time she returned, though, Anna began tossing out orders for things she required for a scheduled weekend shoot. “I need a van . . . call Brian Bantry . . . I need Sam McKnight for hair . . .” The list went on and on. Schechter had no idea what was what and who was who, and Anna wasn’t telling her. She could see she’d quickly have to figure it all out for herself—“sink or swim.” That was life working for Anna. When Bantry hung up on Schechter, saying McKnight wasn’t available, Anna’s response, “clipped and British,” was, “Well, convince him!”

From the Hamptons a day or so later, Anna called to let Schechter know in no uncertain terms that they’d almost been killed in a rainstorm because the van the assistant had rented for her had bald tires and a terrible driver. “I knew by the tone of her voice she was not pleased,” recalls Schechter years later, laughing at the moment. “She said they almost died. I was mortified. I called the rental agency and conveyed to them that I was in a new job and unless they got a new van out there they were about to get me fired because I almost killed my new boss.”

In her first two weeks working for Anna, the five-foot-two-inch Schechter lost eight pounds and had started drinking cup after cup of strong coffee to
keep herself going because of Anna’s many demands; Schechter quickly dubbed her “laser brain.” At one point another staffer who sat nearby was concerned and asked, “Are you okay?” Looking back to that time, she says, “I didn’t stop moving in those first two weeks. Ten cups of coffee a day didn’t help.” Schechter realized that things had finally started to go well when Anna came in one morning and gave her a gift of clothing, something Anna had started doing as a teen with Vivienne Lasky. In Schechter’s case, it was an Agnès B. white cotton skirt. “When Anna’s pleased she’ll do a gesture like that. She has a very maternal side to her, which she doesn’t show a lot, but it’s there for people she cares about.”

By the time the competing bouquets of flowers started arriving for Anna from her two men of the moment—“the flowers wars,” as Schechter refers to it—she had the PA job under control and Anna’s many needs and wants down to a near science. Most important, she was discreet and had Anna’s total trust. The word in the newsroom was that Anna had told Schechter “not to get too friendly with the other people.” And she didn’t. While she doesn’t recall Anna ever giving her such a directive, she notes, “I didn’t talk to people anyway. I’m not a watercooler person.”

An assistant with that kind of prudence was necessary for a woman boss who had started having an affair.

After the flowers from the new man started arriving at the office—they were always from a chic florist, and Anna’s favorite was a mixed arrangement with fragrant Easter lilies—Schechter began fielding calls from him, usually in late morning. And then Anna would give a breezy “I’m off to lunch.” The curious thing was that when she returned from lunch, she’d declare, “I’m
starving
. I have to have something to eat!” So Schechter would have to run out and get her the lunch that Anna supposedly just had.

“I’d be like, okay, I guess it wasn’t
a. food lunch.”

And soon the new man, a serious-looking and ponderous-sounding South African–born psychiatrist by the name of David Shaffer, began arriving to collect Anna at the end of the day.

She was thirty-two and he was forty-five.

And then Stone would telephone looking for her, and Schechter would tell him, “She left already.”

“She played Michael on a short leash,” says another associate of Anna’s at
New York
. “She was very good at orchestration and knew how to drive him crazy Michael was jealous.”

Anna began her relationship with Shaffer before ending with Stone, according to friends such as Paul Sinclaire, a close member of Anna’s circle at the time. Anna was following the same pattern as when she was stepping out on Jon Bradshaw during her time at
Harper’s Bazaar
. However, this time she didn’t confide in anyone early on, including her trusted assistant, nor did she ask her to make up excuses about where she was when Stone called asking her whereabouts.

“It was not discussed,” says Schechter. “Anna’s obviously the woman of the unspoken word, so she didn’t have to tell me. And I don’t think you needed to be a rocket scientist to know what was going on. Maybe at some point she told me ‘I have a new address,’ and that was kind of the extent of it.”

Acquaintances and colleagues of Anna’s in and out of
New York
magazine who knew her and Stone had mixed views of them as a couple as their relationship matured.

“Anna loved having great moments in her life, but she was bored out of her mind with Michael,” maintains Sinclaire. “I must have been to dinner at the loft at least twenty times, and she would get up and go to bed.”

Earle Mack asserts, “Anna was never particularly happy with Michael and certainly not toward the end. She would have left Michael even if David Shaffer hadn’t come into the picture.”

New York’s
Nancy McKeon knew that Anna and Stone had been living together, and she had helped Stone edit some of his pieces when he had started writing for the magazine. She didn’t think much of him and couldn’t understand what Anna saw in him, other than his money. “At one point Anna said to me that she was in love with somebody else, and I asked was he English or American, and she said, ‘Ah, English of course,’ like it was the accent that got her, and that was David.”

Many in the circle knew that Anna had “dumped” Stone, who is said to have been “devastated,” although he later claimed that he and Anna had remained friends. In fact, Anna tended to remain on good terms with most of the many men in her life, and they remained loyal to her. “She was always a good friend to men,” observes Annabel Hodin, Anna’s pal from her
Harpers
& Queen
days. “Being an intelligent woman, she didn’t lose them when the romance was over.” Stone indicated to former
Savvy
executive editor Susan Edmiston, whom he started seeing when he tried to sell articles to her after she moved to
Redbook
, that he felt the relationship with Anna ended because her career was more important to her than he was. “He once said something along the lines of ‘I wasn’t as ambitious or as hardworking as Anna,’ and he told me that she worked ‘eighteen hours a day,’ that she was ‘very focused,’ and that ‘the relationship just never worked.’”

Meanwhile, some in Anna’s small circle at
New York
were surprised that she would fall for someone like Shaffer, who was so different from the bad-boy types to whom Anna always was attracted.

“I didn’t care for the way Michael treated Anna,” says Jordan Schaps, who had also worked with Stone on artwork for stories he did at
New York
. “He was supermacho, and kind of like a Sylvester Stallone Jewish version, out to prove to you what a tough guy he was, and felt he needed to express that with her. Maybe he was jealous of her . . . one of those guys who dealt differently with women than men. I thought he was game playing, the way a guy can do with important, strong, elegant women. I don’t know if it was rivalry, but I tend to think she was perceived to be more important than he was, and I’m sure he didn’t care for that.

“Anna was more professionally assured of herself than she was personally assured of herself, and I think women like that unfortunately are vulnerable to brutes. At a certain point, for whatever reason, she decided she’d had enough.

“David was totally different, though I never found him attractive and always thought it was interesting she’d get involved with someone so quite different from Michael. David was much more refined, subdued, and extremely intelligent. David just appeared one day as a presence in Anna’s life, then started picking her up at the office, and then started appearing with her at functions. I liked David and felt he was complex. But I was just surprised that someone as glamorous and elegant as Anna would be with someone like David, who I found rather drab.”

News of Anna’s new man leaped across the pond, and an item appeared in the gossip column of London’s
Mail On Sunday
, presumably written by Nigel Dempster. The blurb said that she was involved with an “ageing divorcé” and noted, “For some reason Shaffer is known to his friends as ‘ET.’
Why, I wonder?” The snarky comment was in reference to the extraterrestrial of movie fame, who some apparently thought the distinguished psychatrist resembled because of his large bald pate and big eyes.

The scion of a well-to-do South African family, Shaffer was born on April 20, 1936, and spent his early childhood in a splendorous Johannesburg home where his father, Isaac, was the chairman of New Union Goldfields, which also had offices in London. “His father made a fortune,” a Shaffer friend says. Young Shaffer was then sent off to boarding school at the acclaimed L’École Internationale de Genève, which was founded in 1924 by the eminent sociologist Adolphe Ferrière and a German scholar named Elisabeth Rotten, both of Geneva’s Rousseau Institute, to cater to the wealthy children of League of Nations officials, businessmen, and financiers.

After he completed high school, he went to London and got his MB and BS degrees at the University of London, was a member of the Royal College of Physicians, and received his academic diploma in psychological medicine at the University of London. While he was a student, the whole swinging sixties London thing was happening, and Shaffer, who had his own fun-loving streak, savored the excitement of the era. The bright and affluent young bachelor, who enjoyed fine food and wine, traveled through some of the same in-clubs as Anna, ate in the best restaurants, and, like Anna, had his own posh crowd—a hip posse that reportedly included Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, then starring in the biting social and political satire
Beyond the Fringe
.

Shaffer also had a taste for beautiful women, the younger the better, it seemed. One who caught the eye of the trendy twenty-four-year-old doctor who had decided to specialize in the problems of teenagers was a sixteen-year-old exotic named Serena who favored bright red lipstick and dressed at Biba and Mary Quant. Like other teenagers who were descending on London from the hinterlands to join the party, she wanted more excitement. She’d left her stepmother’s home in seaside Brighton, having tired of meals of pigs’ feet and headcheese, and was hanging out on the Brighton Pier with the local mods and rockers. One of several gorgeous sisters, Serena wanted something more sophisticated for herself. She found it with Shaffer, and the two fell in love.

In the late sixties, Shaffer was a clinical and research fellow in pediatric
neurology and child development at Yale University Medical School. It was during that time in America that he became friends, by odd coincidence, with Anna’s first serious teenage love, the writer Piers Paul Read. “He was very good company in a very sort of quiet way,” recalls Read. “He was very fascinated with what was going on, very interested in people.” One such person, the one who introduced Shaffer to Read, was a wild-looking Australian surreal artist and druggie by the name of Brett Whiteley. Like Read at Columbia University, Whiteley was studying on a Harkness Foundation Scholarship. Shaffer had become close chums with Whiteley at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, once described as a “Tower of Babel of creativity and bad behavior,” where the two young men had rooms while pursuing their studies. An alcoholic and a drug addict, Whiteley later died of a heroin overdose.

After completing his fellowship, Shaffer returned to London, where he held positions at Maudsley Hospital and continued his relationship with Serena. When she turned eighteen, he took her to meet his family in Johannesburg. Serena was astounded by their opulent lifestyle: Shaffer’s mother had her beautiful dining table set with the great Danish silversmith Georg Jensen’s Pyramide silverware that was worth a small fortune—the same forks and knives used by royalty. They married when she was twenty and he was thirty in 1966, around the same time Anna was quitting North London Collegiate at sixteen because of the miniskirt imbroglio.