Front Row (26 page)

During this stressful period, Schechter noticed some eccentricities in Anna’s behavior that struck her as odd—such as how she’d stand alone in her office and go through her purse picking out pennies and tossing them in the wastebasket, one by one. “I never asked. I just figured pennies were too small for her to consider keeping. She was someone who never had to count her pennies.” The other odd thing was Anna’s lunch. When she didn’t go out for lunch, she had Schechter pick up soup for her at a little place in the West Thirties. While there’s nothing strange about soup for lunch, Anna ate it in a curious manner. She’d put a big gob of butter on top, let it melt, and then eat only the butter and little of the soup. “I just saw the soup as a vehicle for the butter, a way to eat butter without seeming so obvious.”

Meantime, Mirabella was freaking as Anna continued her assault, taking one hill after another in hopes of reaching the summit and toppling the leader. When Anna couldn’t do an end run around Mirabella’s veteran fashion editors, such as Polly Mellen and Jade Hobson (Hobson had been at
Vogue
since 1971, and Mellen since 1966), she’d “harass and criticize them,” the editor in chief claimed. She asserted that Anna demanded Polaroids of shoots over which she had no say, showed up at sittings that weren’t her responsibility, and in some cases, ordered that they be done over.

“I was not a big fan of Anna’s,” says Hobson, shuddering at the memory of the early days of Anna’s tyrannical reign as creative director. “Anna didn’t
seem to want to work with
any
of the existing staff. She wanted to bring in freelance people, and that didn’t sit so well with a number of us.”

Anna’s desire, as it had been in her previous jobs, was working with her own team of freelance photographers and overseeing the shoots herself. Single-handed power and control and the originality that emanated from it had always been her game, and that’s what had caught Liberman’s attention in the first place. However,
Vogue
was an entirely different kettle of fish. At
Viva
, at
Savvy
, at
New York
, the fashion coverage was a small part of the overall editorial content, so Anna, hidden in a corner with an assistant, was able to run things her way, be creative, and make herself and the fashion pages stand out. But
Vogue
had been doing that spectacularly with an army of people, all working together as a team, for decades.

Under Mirabella, the job of overseeing and directing major fashion shoots was the longtime domain of the two talented editors, Hobson and Mellen. “We had absolute autonomy, and she started coming to the shoots, kind of excluding the editor, talking to the photographer, and she just made it
very
uncomfortable and it was rather disruptive,” declares Hobson.

A shoot is a creative process—something Anna well knew. It involves a close working relationship with the editor, the photographer, the stylist, and other principals, and the shoot often doesn’t take shape until midway through the process, and often the original idea is scrapped or the direction changed because someone conceived a better idea. But Anna’s constant intervention virtually destroyed that very important process.

“Her interference made it much more routine and not as creative,” asserts Hobson.

Hobson, Mellen, and others felt that Anna was watching over their shoulder, “and
not
in a friendly way, and
not
in a supportive way,” says Hobson. “She was rather exclusionary of the editor. It wasn’t taken to very happily by the two of us.”

Winter collections. Paris, spring 1984. Showdown time, big-time.

Hobson and Mellen were overseeing a shoot in a studio when Anna appeared unexpectedly. “All of a sudden,” Hobson remembers vividly, “it was a cast of thousands, it seemed, watching and directing, and she destroyed the whole process.”

The two editors were beside themselves, according to Mirabella. Furious,
they returned to New York and declared “Never again!” in an emergency summit meeting with Liberman and Mirabella. Hobson remembers telling her bosses, “You’ve got to stop this. We can’t deal with it. It’s the magazine that’s losing out.” Mirabella said that the angry editors had actually threatened to strike if Anna didn’t get out of their hair. “ ‘We can’t stand her,’ they said, and they began, as much as they could, to shut her out of their work.”

Years later, however, Mellen says she
always
thought Anna was the right person for the job and that fashion wasn’t Mirabella’s forte. “I saw Anna as someone who couldn’t be avoided, someone you could not turn your back on because that would be a mistake. But I had to be very careful because I was also very close to Grace.”

To put a stop to the constant catfights, Liberman was forced to handcuff his protégée. With no other choice, and to avoid a mutiny, he essentially banned Anna from the fashion coverage—a “tough blow to her,” observes Schechter, because fashion was what
Vogue
was all about and why Anna always dreamed of being there. “Grace basically went to Liberman and Newhouse and said, ‘If she must be here, fine, but I don’t want her involved in the fashion.’”

Liberman, who had been devoting his efforts to strengthening the magazine’s features section—books, entertaining, living, and style—now assigned Anna to work in that area with features editor Amy Gross, who had been recruited from
Mademoiselle
. Anna’s job, as described in a blatantly vague staff announcement, was to “enrich the looks of the pages and bring to the pages other aspects of women’s interests.”

After that she reluctantly left editors like Hobson and Mellen alone.

Anna wasn’t happy with her new assignment, but she brought in some new and talented photographers to work on features and was able to have some influence in that area.

As Schechter points out, “Features was off Anna’s work agenda. However, she obviously had a good relationship with Mr. Liberman. I’m sure he fell in love with her, because she can be
very
charming, and I can’t define that charm because I’m not a man, and he recognized her talent. I felt instinctu-ally that features was certainly not going to be her resting place. I knew only too well that she was a focused, goal-oriented person and whatever she was looking to accomplish, she would accomplish it.”

A
nna and David Shaffer had a relatively quick courtship, and in short order he proposed, but she declined to give him an immediate answer. She held on to the expensive ring he gave her but didn’t wear it. It wasn’t until some months later, in early 1984, that he got the yes he was waiting for, but in the oddest way imaginable.

Shaffer had accompanied Anna to the collections in Paris, the same trip that sparked the showdown with Jade Hobson and Polly Mellen. During their stay she met her father for drinks at the bar at the grand Ritz Hotel. Anna communicated very little with Charles Wintour at that point for a couple of reasons. Besides being totally immersed in her career in New York, she was still seething over his marriage to Audrey Slaughter and his shabby treatment of her mother.

As father and daughter shared a rare intimate moment over drinks, Win-tour noticed a “very nice” diamond on the fourth finger of Anna’s left hand. When he asked her what was what, she revealed it was her engagement ring, and Shaffer was the lucky guy.

Although he knew that Anna and Shaffer were deeply involved, and he thought of the shrink as “an absolute saint” because of how he looked after her professional and emotional interests, Wintour had no idea their relationship had reached the point of marriage. He was thrilled.

As Wintour admired Anna’s ring, Shaffer suddenly arrived at the bar, and
his future father-in-law offered him hearty congratulations. Shaffer “looked slightly stunned,” and had no idea what was going on. Then Anna slowly raised her hand, and Shaffer saw that she’d finally placed the sparkler on, which caught him as much by surprise as it had her father.

As it turned out, Anna had told Shaffer when he first proposed that she’d put on the ring only when
she
was finally ready to marry him and not before. She chose that relatively unromantic moment at the Ritz bar with her father by her side to signal to Shaffer that she was now saying yes.

Later, Charles Wintour said, “David always tells Anna that was the evening Iproposed to
him.”

The curious way Anna handled it all said something about the complexity of her relationship with the man who would become her husband, and which partner was ultimately in control in their relationship. As those who know her have stated, Anna’s “the
ultimate
control freak” in both her professional and private worlds. It also said something about her relationship with her father and how important his approval was to her at all times, despite her feelings about his remarriage. How many women let their father know they’ve accepted a proposal of marriage before letting the husband-to-be in on it? But her father’s acceptance of her future husband was of supreme importance to Anna. While many in her circle thought Shaffer was an odd choice, he was probably the first man in Anna’s life whom Charles Wintour genuinely approved of—and Anna always was a daddy’s girl who sought his approval.

Back in New York, Anna dove back into the
Vogue
wars, and she and Shaffer, still not having set a wedding date, began overseeing the renovation of a four-story mid-nineteenth-century brownstone in Greenwich Village. The house, with its warren of small rooms, had been neglected for years and was a shambles, but Anna envisioned it becoming her dream house.

She retained a friend, the high-tech New York architect and designer Alan Buchsbaum, to creatively preserve the original details of the house but also make it modernistic and different.

Anna had met Buchsbaum while she was at
New York
magazine. She had chosen him along with some other well-known interior designers to do some rooms for a dramatic and idiosyncratic layout. Buchsbaum was an architect-designer to the stars who had done work for Christie Brinkley, Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, and Ellen Barkin, among others. But he and Anna had a special
relationship, and they often socialized, had dinner together, gossiped, and talked style. He was one of many gay men in her circle, mainly because of the fashion world in which she was immersed. Like Anna, Buchsbaum was reserved, but he lit up whenever he saw her. Sadly, he was one of the first American victims of AIDS in her life, at fifty-one, in 1987. After his death, the disease became one of Anna’s causes through a New York fund-raising fashion event called Seventh on Sale.

According to Davis Sprinkle, who had been Buchsbaum’s business colleague, Anna ran the whole house renovation show. “She really had some very particular ideas about the feeling of the interior,” Sprinkle notes years later. “David was certainly less involved with the entire project. He definitely let her call the shots. She controlled most of the process. If she didn’t like something, she would certainly let me know.” Had she been difficult to work with? “With time,” he says, “we forget the bad stuff.”

With a fetish for neatness and stark minimalism, Anna wanted lots of open space, so walls were torn down, and at least one room, the dining room, had a pair of columns rather than a door marking the entrance. “Working at a magazine is an endless feast for the eyes; you spend your days looking at things,” she once said in discussing the renovation. “Therefore, I prefer a more calm environment at home.”

Along with his work on the house, Buchsbaum designed a high-tech and elegant power desk for Anna, which later was marketed by the French firm Ecart International as the “Wintour Table.” Its wooden frame and legs, set on the diagonal, were made of ebonized mahogany, and its top was a lacquered sheet of cold steel. Anna prized the desk more than anything she owned and had it shipped twice across the Atlantic—when she took over British
Vogue
and when she returned to become editor in chief of
House & Garden
and then American
Vogue
.

Like her bob and sunglasses, the desk became an element of the Wintour signature, and she was still running things from behind it in 2004 in her second decade in charge of
Vogue
. She has described it as “very clean,” “a bit quirky,” and having “a sense of humor.” The desk has no drawers because she said she likes to have “everything out in the open,” and she loves its narrowness, because “I don’t want people to feel far away when they’re talking to
me. . . . It’s not so corporate.” (Because Anna’s desk was a table, anyone could see through the bottom. “It was funny,” recalls Laurie Schechter, “because Anna sat behind her desk like a man, with her legs apart . . .”)

With the renovation at the house ongoing, Anna and Shaffer rented a loft with Hudson River views in what was then the far West Village, near the West Side Highway. The apartment, which permitted Anna to see the
QE2
arrive and depart, was in a forbidding building that had once been a penitentiary. The owner of the loft was a British woman named Charlotte Noel, who had been part of Anna’s small circle when she first arrived in New York a decade earlier. Noel was escaping the area and moving uptown, and Anna and Shaffer decided to lease her place because it was close to their town house renovation and friends in the area.

“It was an ordinary loft with very little furniture and not very comfy, and the area was very grim, pretty ugly, quite bleak when they rented from me,” she says. “Dead bodies were being fished out of the river, the Mafia controlled all the garbage trucks, and there were all those gay S&M clubs. It was really rough.” But Anna and Shaffer didn’t mind, thought it was a cool milieu, and took the place after a brief negotiation over the rent.

“Anna was really very brusque, very businesslike, and David was rather sort of pathetic, asking things like, ‘Could I go and get the sofas covered?’” recalls Noel. “What I’m saying is, Anna did nothing, and so he was left to do a lot of what you would think of as sort of womanly tasks. It was an odd relationship, and I always thought it was an odd coupling. They didn’t seem to match physically or mentally.”

Still others had an opposing view—that the editor and the psychiatrist were in love and were good for each other. Shaffer had intellect, was a solid father figure, and Anna was cool and sexy and younger, someone who was good for the shrink’s ego and gave him panache. “Anna wanted children. She wanted stability,” a friend notes.

On Friday September 7, 1984, in their town house on MacDougal Street, Anna and Shaffer, then chief of the child psychiatry department of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, were married in a ceremony conducted by New York Civil Court Judge Elliott Wilk. In two months, Anna would turn thirty-five. Shaffer was forty-eight. The
brief notice in the next day’s
New York Times
, probably the first time Anna had ever received a mention in the paper, noted that she would retain her last name. Of her previous work history, only
Harpers & Queen
and
New York
magazine were mentioned, presumably based on information she had submitted.

Other than the engraved invitations that had gone out, there was nothing fancy about what one guest describes as “a very beautiful, very simple, very quiet intimate family wedding—very civil, not splashy”

After the ceremony, all of the guests, about twenty, including Anna’s divorced parents, her father’s new wife, Anna’s siblings, and work friends of Anna’s, such as Ed Kosner, Jean Pagliuso and her husband, Laurie Schechter, and Georgia Gunn, adjourned to the living-room area, where a long table was set up for a celebratory supper.

At the table, Charles Wintour stood and offered a toast to his favorite child and her groom. He told the gathering that Anna was finally fulfilling a dream, to be an editor at
Vogue
. Years later Anna recalled that day: “My father is enormously kind in a subtle kind of way. At my wedding, when he made his speech, he mentioned each of David’s two children at length to show them they were an important part of the family.” (The two teenage boys from Shaffer’s first marriage would live with the newlyweds.)

“It was a lovely wedding,” says Schechter. “They had written their own vows. To me it seemed like a good match.”

Others, like Anna’s colleague and friend Paul Sinclaire, felt differently and were surprised that they had tied the knot. “I would have bet that the wedding would not have happened, and if it did their marriage would have lasted a year and a half, let alone having two kids,” he says, looking back years later, after the affair that ended the marriage. “I think she married David because he was so smart. A beauty he never was.”

Some seven months after the nuptials, around April 1985, Anna became pregnant.

That same month, in London, an event occurred that also would have great implications for her future. After twenty-one years at the helm of British
Vogue
, fashion doyenne Beatrix Miller announced her departure, saying she was leaving to write books. Like Anna, Miller was a tough cookie and a taskmaster. To a potential employee, she would proclaim gruffly, “You have exactly two minutes. Tell me about yourself.” She once called some four
dozen staffers into her office and told them, “I want you all to know that, as far as I’m concerned, the July issue is a write-off There is a mistake on page 136.” But she was beloved. Now the staff pondered their future as rumors began to float across the pond that a nuclear blast in the skinny form of Anna Wintour was coming their way. But top management at Condé Nast—Si Newhouse and Alex Liberman—remained mum as to who Miller’s replacement would be.

Meanwhile, the pregnant Anna was busy pushing her way around the front of the book at
Vogue
and becoming stepmother to Shaffer’s sons.

Mutual friends of Shaffer’s ex-wife and of Anna and David Shaffer observe that the psychiatrist “must have applied his own brand of psychology to the kids” because they turned out so well. “The boys were always extraordinary and precocious in the best way, and always seemed close to their parents,” says Dianne Benson.

Shaffer’s sons occupied the ground floor of the couple’s beautiful town house, starkly furnished with simple but elegant English and American antique pieces—a Federal sofa, a Queen Anne tallboy, Empire chairs, lots of books, bare wood floors, area rugs. Anna lived the life
Vogue
represented, and that was a gold bullion asset, which had made her even more of an attraction to Alex Liberman and ultimately to Si Newhouse.

The top floor of the house had been gutted from four small rooms into the couple’s large master bedroom suite, minimally furnished with a bed covered with a simple white down comforter, two Victorian slipper chairs, a Queen Anne bureau, an English oak chest, and Anna’s collection of small pieces made of ivory. The bathroom was large—British-style, the kind Anna was used to—and had a fireplace, an old porcelain tub, a marble sink, a large wood-framed mirror from England, and a nineteenth-century wicker chair.

Anna had decided that every room had to be airy, open, uncluttered; she didn’t want a Victorian mélange, which she believed “can look ridiculous when it’s re-created in New York apartments. . . . When it’s genuine nobody does it better than the English,” she boasted in
The New York Times
Sunday
Magazine
, which in 1986 deemed the elegant house and its powerful
Vogue
creative director now worthy of her first big spread.

Regarding Americans and their level of taste, Anna said they were too brand-name and designer driven, which was a curious statement from an editor
at a magazine that promoted and derived its power and revenue from designer and brand names. Nevertheless, she thought the Yanks (wealthy ones, presumably) were overly obsessed “with owning Biedermeier this or Josef Hoffman that,” and that “designer homes” bored her to death. She noted that some of her neighbors didn’t “get” the redo of her house. When invited to tour her domicile, she said they “looked around quite perplexed and said, ‘I guess this is what you call a loft house.’”

B
ack at the office, Anna had given Laurie Schechter more responsibility—of coordinating photographers, locations, and such for the nonfashion front of the book, which Anna now loathingly had to handle at Liberman’s directive alongside Amy Gross. With the Schechter promotion, Anna announced that she would hire a secretary/editorial assistant to take over the day-to-day routine work. Schechter was relieved—for about a minute.