Front Row (25 page)

One of the first articles appeared in the trade magazine
Adweek
under the glowing headline “The Up-and-Comers: Wintour Displays Knack for the New.”

Mirabella and her loyalists read the puff piece and shuddered. Anna, with amazing chutzpah, boasted that she was “working on every aspect of the magazine, from the choice of photographers to the overall design.” Taking a direct shot at Mirabella, Anna claimed, “There hasn’t been someone who can stand back a bit and say, ‘What can we do with this fashion sitting to make it different? Maybe there’s a new photographer we should try. Maybe we can mix painting and illustration to add dimension to the pages.’ . . . One of my concerns at
Vogue
is to bring in other aspects, to mix fashion with anything that’s cultural. That’s the direction I think things are going.”

Interestingly, in discussing her early years, Anna mentioned nothing about her schooling, or lack thereof, but made claims such as having “studied the classics with an emphasis on English literature” and possessing “a fondness for Jane Austen.” The article stated erroneously that Anna moved to the United States and “spent several years working for Carrie Donovan at
Harper’s Bazaar,”
when in fact she worked there less than a year and was fired. There was absolutely no mention of her tenure at the cursed
Viva
, let alone
Savvy
, or of her Paris fling.

She turned on the charm and the author of the article gave her four stars, declaring that Anna “has been expanding the traditional boundaries of fashion coverage,” that her “influence has begun filtering through the pages” of
Vogue
, and that her articles “made for provocative reading.” While the
Adweek
piece states that “colleagues praise her knack for discovering new talents and producing new talents and producing inspired fashion and interior design features,” none was quoted, an indication of the fear that now permeated
Vogue
. Anna defenders were worried about repercussions from Mirabella, and Mirabella advocates were afraid of what would happen to them if Anna took
power. The only person who was quoted by name didn’t even work at
Vogue:
Her old boss and acolyte, Ed Kosner from
New York
magazine, called her “a real star.”

What Anna hadn’t told the reporter from
Adweek
, and what no one leaked to the press because of fear of reprisal, was that she had started arrogantly showing up at meetings of the editorial board, “shaking her head, obviously disagreeing” with everything Mirabella said or did.

Mirabella soon discovered that Anna, on the sly, was redoing layouts without the editor in chief’s permission, was contracting for new photos that Mirabella and her fashion editors weren’t aware of, and was beginning to oversee fashion sittings that weren’t in her domain.

Anna was carving up the magazine as if it were her own and reporting only to Liberman. Looking back on that time, Mirabella stated that Anna was so optimistic that she’d be named to the top job that she considered her more “a momentary inconvenience than a person she might have to answer to or contend with.”

All hell was breaking loose at America’s most elegant and ladylike fashion magazine, and Anna, anxious to take over, was the wily provocateur.

W
hile Grace Mirabella and her capos were blindsided by Anna’s blatant efforts to sabotage the old regime, the new creative director also worked in more subtle ways to infuriate her editor in chief

One instance of her cattiness once again involved Andrea Blanche, the photographer whose story idea she had stolen and used in her early days at
New York
magazine. Long associated with
Vogue
, Blanche had learned that Anna had been hired before many others knew. “I remember getting this pain in my stomach when I heard. At that moment I had a premonition that things were not going to be easy for me at
Vogue
. What happened when she stole my idea had always stayed with me.”

But Anna’s shabby treatment of Blanche at
New York
was then, and this was now, and Anna realized she had to play nice because she knew that Blanche was special to Alex Liberman.

As with Anna, Liberman had first seen Blanche’s photos in
New York
magazine long before Anna had come to work there.

“I had these pages that were very successful, and Liberman called me to his office and said, ‘Why do I see these in
New York
and I don’t see them in
Vogue?
And that’s the same reason he hired Anna—because her work was getting so much attention. Plus, she’s very beguiling and attractive, so I could see where he could fall for her. He was a big flirt, Liberman.

“I worked very closely with Alex and he had sort of taken me under his wing, and he wanted Anna and me to get along, to
try
to get along, and he kind of put us together, so she had to deal with me,” says Blanche. “Anna was on a turf that I had been working on since 1979, and I had to protect myself, but I wanted to create a situation where we could work together.”

The two went to lunch. Blanche was naturally wary and this time didn’t toss out any story ideas but knew she would have to pitch Anna and sell herself to her once again. And she was quite aware that the only reason Anna was acting as if nothing bad had ever happened between them was that she knew Liberman adored Blanche.

But it still came as a shock to Blanche when she received a call out of the blue from Anna inviting her to a social event at a new Manhattan discotheque called Palladium. “I almost dropped my pants!” she remembers. “It was right out of left field.”

As Blanche would soon realize, Anna may have had subtle ulterior motives for asking Blanche to join her and David Shaffer and her cousin Oliver James, who was visiting from England, for an evening of what was supposed to be fun.

Their party eventually grew to include a business entrepreneur and acquaintance of Anna’s named Sam Waksal, who would gain notoriety and go to prison years later in the ImClone trading case that also indirectly caused Martha Stewart’s downfall. At the time of the Palladium event, though, Blanche and the high-riding Waksal were “kind of in and out of a relationship.” And Waksal had started seeing Anna’s friend and
Vogue
contributing writer Joan Juliet Buck, who also showed up that night. So it wasn’t very pleasant for Blanche and caused her to wonder, “What’s going on here? Why was I invited? Is this a bad dream?”

The next morning the apparent reason for the curious machinations of the previous night appeared to come into the photographer’s focus.

Blanche arrived at a scheduled meeting at
Vogue
to discuss an assignment with Liberman and Mirabella. Anna also showed up, at Liberman’s side, where she always seemed to position herself as if they were epoxied together.

But before they got a chance to discuss the proposed shoot, Anna enthusiastically jumped in and raved to Mirabella about the absolutely marvelous time she had had the night before with Andrea Blanche, whom she made to seem like her new best friend.

“This, of course, made Grace
crazy,”
notes Blanche, who began to speculate
that Anna had invited her to the disco party for the sole purpose of being able to boast to Mirabella about it, make it seem as if Blanche was in Anna’s corner and “totally piss off Grace and put me in a really awkward position. I felt I was brought into something very messy, with mind games going on. I thought it was very Byzantine
and
Machiavellian.”

Soon Blanche found herself getting less rather than more work from
Vogue
. In one instance, Anna had Blanche shoot a portrait of her but afterward said she didn’t like it. “Anna’s relationship with me was frosty,” she observes. “I don’t think she ever really liked the fact that I was Liberman’s ‘baby,’ so to speak, and that she had to deal with me. I was not
her
find, so she just never really embraced the situation or me.”

Down the road, when Anna was named editor in chief of British
Vogue
at Liberman’s behest and returned to London for a time, Blanche would find herself in an even more distasteful situation.

The fear of Anna that gripped
Vogue
—the palpable dread of what she would or wouldn’t do to the venerable magazine, and who would or wouldn’t be demoted, axed, or sent off to the North Pole to cover deep-freeze couture—was so widespread it also devolved onto her assistant, Laurie Schechter.

At her job interview with a Condé Nast human resources woman, she was sternly informed, “Even though you’re working for Anna Wintour, you’re
not
going to have any power.”

Schechter was dumbfounded. “To me what she was saying was, ‘We are all so scared here of [Anna’s] coming.’ It revealed the fears at Condé Nast even about someone who was going to work for Anna as an assistant. But obviously Anna’s demeanor was forbidding and foreboding. Everybody was quaking in their boots. It’s that sink-or-swim attitude at Condé Nast—if they drown, we’ll just get new ones.” But Schechter had learned one big lesson from Anna that helped her move forward: In order to get ahead she had to “charm it and work it, do whatever you needed to do, and not be afraid.”

Though she had the total support of Liberman, Anna was lost in her early days as creative director, mainly because everyone was afraid and didn’t want to get too close. She got little cooperation from the old guard. Just as Anna was showing her claws and pushing herself into every area of the magazine, Grace Mirabella was defending her long-held domain with equal ferocity.

“It was a tough transition for Anna,” observes Schechter. “She had no
friends at
Vogue
per se. Anna can live without friends, but she didn’t have
any
. She didn’t have any supporters there, quite honestly.”

Besides Liberman and Si Newhouse, her greatest cheerleader was David Shaffer, who continued to send her a daily bouquet of flowers to show his love and keep up her morale. Anna had a virtual hotline to him, was on the phone with him constantly seeking advice and guidance.

“He was supportive as a partner, and his professional knowledge and experience was important to her,” says Schechter. “How much better could it be to have your shrink at home. They had a very strong relationship. They communicated a lot. I’m sure if . . . she was at a point of being broken to some extent, then he would be a great help.” But Schechter doesn’t feel Anna was “broken,” but rather faced “culture shock of sorts in the sense that she tried to contribute and do things she may have been mandated to do corporately.”

Next to Liberman, Schechter worked more closely with Anna than anyone else did during her creative director period, and she saw the toll the job was taking on her. “She had a hard time at first because prior to that she was a fairly big fish in a good-size pond. Now she was a big fish in a pond of barracudas, and that can take you off your center, and it did to some extent. It wasn’t like people were nasty to her, but people just didn’t necessarily go out of their way. They did their job and protected their territory.”

Schechter, who watched Anna closely, states she suffered “a bit” emotionally during that time. “And that’s where David came in. Thank God he was a psychiatrist!” To help Anna, he even chatted up difficult staffers, making them wary of him.

Anna did a supreme job of hiding her fragile emotions from the staff, but every so often a few got a glimpse of what she was going through and were taken aback, because the general consensus was that she was “one tough bitch” and nothing or no one bothered her or got in her way.

“Tell me, I can take it” was her macho response when she bluntly asked colleagues whether or not they liked one of her ideas.

But then there were those other moments.

Polly Mellen had an office next to Anna’s, which was several doors down from Mirabella’s, and was passing by when she heard a sound that stopped her in her tracks. “I went in and Anna was facing the window, and I realized she was sobbing, her shoulders were heaving, and she was trembling, and when she
realized I was there she tried to get control for reasons of pride because she was a very strong young woman.” Mellen asked Anna what was wrong, and she said she had had a disagreement because an idea that she had proposed had been accepted by Mirabella and then killed by Mirabella. “This happened more than once, and Anna was totally frustrated,” maintains Mellen. “I realized she wanted to be involved in
every
part of the book, but she was being held back. She told me, ‘I can’t take it . . . I can’t go on.’ I said, ‘Don’t say that, please.’”

Despite those scenarios, Anna claimed a couple of years later, when she took over British
Vogue
, that if there was resentment toward her, “I didn’t feel it,” though she acknowledged “it was very hard in the beginning.”

Schechter also saw examples of Anna’s anxiety and stress. One afternoon she walked into her office and was surprised to find Anna teary-eyed and extremely upset. When Schechter asked what was wrong, Anna sobbed that she’d broken a tooth, which seemed an odd reason for the emotions she was showing. “I don’t know if it was true,” Schechter says years later. “I didn’t say, ‘Open your mouth and let me see.’”

Stressed by the job, Anna, who was as organized as a Palm Pilot, began misplacing or losing important personal items, such as her Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. She’d go to lunch or to a meeting, and when she returned to her office she discovered they were missing, which drove her up the wall. She’d inadvertently left them in a cab or a restaurant and had to constantly order new ones that were customized for her by an optometrist in SoHo. Because her face is small and Wayfarers are oversize, she’d pay extra to have them constructed to fit her face.

Stories have circulated over the years as to why she always wore sunglasses, inside and out, day or night: for image, was one; to hide behind, was another; a third was that her eyes were sensitive to the bright lights at fashion shows; still a fourth was to hide bags under her eyes.

However, the main reason for the shades was the fact that Anna had very poor eyesight and a dread of losing her sight altogether. The trendy-looking glasses, therefore, weren’t just for show and image but were fitted with strong prescription lenses to help her see.

Out of vanity, she chose to wear the stylish Wayfarers, which gave her a glamorous air of mystery, over regular prescription eyeglasses. The glasses are often mentioned by critics of Anna’s, such as one writer who noted tongue-in-cheek
that there was “reason to believe” Anna was “Satan” and that the sunglasses “are very likely hiding glowing red eyeballs.”

A colleague discovered otherwise. She had wandered into Anna’s office during her creative director stint and saw a pair of the trademark specs sitting on her desk. Since Anna was away, the staffer couldn’t resist trying them on, curious about how she’d look in them.

“I almost fell over because they were such a strong prescription. I got dizzy,” she says. “It seemed like she was blind as a bat, and I thought to myself, ‘God, how many times have I stood across a room from her and she probably couldn’t see me if she wasn’t wearing her glasses. I was probably a blur.’ She has received so much attention and criticism over the years for wearing sunglasses, but if critics knew that she couldn’t see without them then they might have been more sympathetic.”

Anna’s fear of losing her eyesight had some basis in fact. As her father aged, his eyesight became increasingly worse, and in his last years he’d gone almost completely blind. Friends and his second wife had to read to him, and he purchased from the United States a powerful magnifying frame that was attached to his television set on which books were projected in exceptionally large type, and he’d sit practically with his nose against the screen to read.

“It really was terribly piteous to see this editor who had existed his entire life so keenly on reading newspapers and magazines and books go nearly blind,” says his longtime
Evening Standard
colleague Alex Walker. “I was told that there was a congenital illness in the Wintour side of the family that had resulted in this particular kind of blindness. This was an ailment that apparently was hereditary. If Anna, who constantly wore sunglasses, was aware of this, and no doubt she was, the use of those exceptionally dark glasses might not be affectation so much as protection.”

A
fter a number of emotional scenes involving Anna, most, if not all, out of public view, Liberman, a genius at Condé Nast corporate politics, took his protégée aside and told her that some battles were worth fighting and others were not winnable—and to forget about the latter.

“Initially, it was hard for Anna,” says Schechter, who “adored her” and “felt blessed” to work with her. “Even though she had the title, a great salary, the
car service, and the other perks Condé Nast offers, in some ways it was as if she was wearing golden handcuffs because she did not have the same freedom she had before. She had to battle to get people to do work for her, to like her, to want her to be there.

“Anna’s not one to reveal herself. It wasn’t like suddenly she got a whole lot thinner or had huge horrible bags under her eyes. I know it affected her, but as a professional she would never reveal that. She wouldn’t come into the office and slam her door and throw a temper tantrum, or curse someone out behind their back. She didn’t work that way. She keeps a very steely exterior, but she’s a woman, and human inside. I felt for her because I recognized it was difficult for her, but I never, ever thought, ‘Oh, poor Anna,’ because I knew she was strong. And I knew how important David was to her as a sounding board, a support system, a sympathetic ear. He was another editor, so to speak.”