Front Row (27 page)

The new girl was the Hon. Isabella Delves Broughton Blow—Issy (pronounced Izzy) to her friends. She was a busty, voluptuous, beet-red-lipped, microminiskirted eccentric Brit with a braying laugh who was sort of well connected back in Mother England. Her grandfather was the wealthy businessman Jock Delves Broughton, the central character in the nonfiction book and movie
White Mischief
. During World War II, in Kenya, the jealous Broughton had fatally shot a playboy named Lloyd Erroll, who was fooling around with his beautiful and much younger wife, Lady Diana Broughton (played by Greta Scacchi in the 1988 film). Lady Diana was Issy’s grandmother.

So into the
Vogue
wars came this fascinating new character as Anna’s aide de camp.

Blow saw an immediate bond with Anna. “She loved fashion with a passion like me. If you look at her, she surrounds herself with obsessive people like André Leon Talley, all absolutely obsessed with fashion.”

Blow says that most of her work for Anna consisted of simple errands like taking her shoes to the shoemaker to be reheeled—“really dull stuff.” She said she was “very frightened” by Anna’s “organization and steely determination. When someone rang up, Anna put the message in a folder.
Everything
would be filed,
every
conversation would be filed,
every
single piece of paper.”
To avoid being criticized by Anna for being sloppy, Blow began washing her own desk at the end of the day with Perrier.

She also saw during her nine-month stint how much Anna leaned on her husband for moral support. “David used to guide her,” she says. “I don’t think she could have done the job without him. David was a great strategist. He was so rational and precise. Because he was a psychiatrist, he thought more clearly. She spoke to him on the phone all the time. As a psychiatrist he would know how to deal with people.”

The bottom line, though, was that she found Anna to be “an inspiration. I idolized her.”

Anna liked Blow, Schechter says, “because she was a character. Issy was like a wacky, eccentric British bird. She would come to work in the miniest of skirts and fishnet hose that had rips, probably not because she meant it to be that way but because she tripped and ripped them, and her lipstick was always off the side of her mouth.”

Blow’s style began to impact the well-oiled functioning of the creative director’s office and a war within a war started. Schechter found herself working twice as hard to make sure Blow, who spent a lot of time talking on the phone to friends, was functioning. And other more serious issues arose, such as the time Blow “lost a photographer’s portfolio” and “he was threatening to sue for a hundred thousand dollars,” asserts Schechter. When Schechter first started working for Anna at
Vogue
, she lost about ten pounds because she’d run up and down thirteen flights of stairs to complete errands rather than waste time waiting for elevators. Now, with Blow on board, “I was near a nervous breakdown. Everyone adored her because she was Dizzy Issy—‘Isn’t she funny? Look at her torn stockings.’ But she was vitriolic toward me.”

After a time, she could take no more and complained to Anna. “I finally had to go to her because she was going to lose me—not so much because I was going to quit, but because I was going to fall over.”

As luck would have it, Blow had bonded with Anna’s protégé, André Leon Talley, who “adored” her and viewed her as an eccentric muse, and asked her to come to work as his assistant. “After three months,” says Schechter, “she and André weren’t talking,” and she left.

After she returned to England, Blow tried unsuccessfully to freelance stories
for
Vogue
but quickly learned that “Anna’s a great one for rejecting pieces. She’s famous for it, if it’s not right. She’s a perfectionist.”

By 2004, Blow had become famous in her own right in England. As a fashion stylist, she had worked for British
Vogue
and now was fashion director of the London Sunday
Times
and
Tatler
, where she kept a rack of her own clothing, aside from the forty-thousand-dollar custom-built closet she had at home. Over the years she has been credited with discovering such designers as Alexander McQueen and Philip Treacy.

“When I go to the shows, Anna always asks me to the American
Vogue
parties. She always says she was proud of me when I worked for her. They call her the ice maiden, but I don’t think she is an ice maiden at all. I think she’s like the Concorde, flying through the clouds.”

A
nna didn’t boast to friends and
Vogue
colleagues—the few with whom she communicated—that she was going to have a baby, and most couldn’t even tell she was pregnant, since she stayed thin and perfect-looking.

When one colleague finally found out she was with child, she asked Anna how she kept it so together. Anna’s response? “Willpower.”

Instead of wearing boring, unchic maternity clothes, she simply opened the back of her short, tight Chanel skirt a bit to make room for her tummy, and always wore the suit jacket when she was in the office, which helped to conceal her delicate condition. No comfortable shoes for her, either; she still clicked around in her stilettos. She was as energetic as ever. As her number one lady-in-waiting, Laurie Schechter, marveled, “It wasn’t like she was rushing out to go throw up. She sailed through it.”

One of the few who were in on her secret early on was her own father. The wife of a British journalist who had been mentored by Charles Wintour in the early days at the
Evening Standard
recalls running into him one day at the BBC, and he was beaming. “She asked him how he was doing and he was just beside himself with excitement. He said, ‘My daughter Anna’s going to have a baby, and if it’s a boy she’s going to call him Charlie after me.’ It was very thrilling for him.”

When Anna finally began to reveal to select female colleagues that she was
“up the duff,” as they say in England, a number of them were taken aback, mainly because they couldn’t imagine her taking any time from her career to raise a child, let alone envision the formidable ice queen holding a baby to her breast and being nurturing, warm, and loving. Anna Wintour, driven editor, yes; Anna Wintour, mother, no. To some, it seemed like an oxymoron.

“I thought it was kind of disconcerting to see her as a mother,” says the photographer Andrea Blanche. “I just never saw her that way. You know, warmth, those qualities that I attribute to motherhood. I just never envisioned Anna like that.” The photographer Jean Pagliuso happened to be on the elevator with Anna after a meeting at
Vogue
and “she just sort of dropped it as an aside,” Pagliuso recalls. “At that time she didn’t want anybody to know she was pregnant. She seemed happy, more than I would think for Anna.”

Along with a grandchild, “Chilly Charlie” Wintour was going to have his favorite offspring, a chip off the old block, back home in Britain, too.

Rumors had begun circulating in the British press in the summer of 1985 that Anna was the leading contender for Beatrix Miller’s job as editor in chief of British
Vogue
and that Anna had spent a week in London being wooed but had turned down the offer. She told Nigel Dempster at the
Daily Mail
she wasn’t taking the job because her husband had taken on a research project on teen suicide, his specialty, and couldn’t leave New York, and she wasn’t going without him. “I’d love to work in London and have a British baby, but he can’t leave,” she stated with a straight face.

Some weeks later, on September 18, 1985, Condé Nast managing director Bernard Leser confirmed the rumors. After top secret plotting and planning, and putting off the press, it had been decided that Anna would, in fact, become the new editor of British
Vogue
.

Unbenownst to most, Anna had been in on some of the clandestine talks and wasn’t exactly thrilled with the outcome. She had lobbied strenuously, and believed she deserved, to replace Grace Mirabella now rather than later. But Newhouse and Liberman convinced her that the time would come. She even played the motherhood card and complained that she’d wind up with a transatlantic marriage. But none of it held water with the suits. She had no choice but to play corporate ball.

In making the public announcement, though, Leser did a quick two-step when asked why the appointment had taken so long. “American
Vogue
did
not relish the idea of losing her,” he said, which was fine for press and public consumption.

But for those in the know who worked with her at American
Vogue
, the sooner Anna left, the better. There was no sense of loss, only glee. Her promotion was a dream come true and the end of a nightmare. Her many detractors, especially Mirabella, would finally be rid of her.

A brief mention about Anna’s new job appeared in
Women’s Wear Daily
, but the British press was breathless with anticipation over the change in command.
The Times
declared that Miller was “a hard act to follow” and speculated (oh, so wrongly) that Anna “can be expected to stay a decade and display the glamour and eccentricity that have marked out
Vogue
editors since 1916.”

That group included one who went on to run a fashion house and then spent the rest of her life in bed, another who always wore purple, and one who was a Communist.

The eccentricity of
Vogue’s
lineage would end with Anna’s reign. It now would be all business.

The
Guardian
, where Anna’s brother Patrick became a political correspondent, was on the mark, reporting, “In New York, they see her as wintry . . . Wintour is defined by her iron will, the cool single-mindedness, the success . . . the appearance of things.”

The London
Times
, quoting an unnamed Wintour colleague, described her as “elegance personified . . . Everything about her is the finest, simplest and most exquisite of its kind.” Calling Liberman the “grand panjandrum of the international
Vogues,”
the
Times
said he gave Anna “a little extra polish” when he appointed her creative director and “instructed her to ‘use her elbows.’ A minister without portfolio, she sized up the situation and rather quickly became the jewel in the Condé Nast crown.”

Five months pregnant, Anna acted as if she was thrilled, but
the
job—the flagship
Vogue
in New York—was still out of her reach. Schechter says Anna saw London as an opportunity to be an editor in chief of another
Vogue
, but she didn’t show great enthusiasm. “But you don’t
ever
see Anna get excited. She was never someone to jump up and down and be excited in some vocal way.”

If Anna wasn’t overjoyed with the appointment, Mirabella and her court were ecstatically dancing in the halls. Literally. “I was home sick the day they made the announcement,” recalls Jade Hobson. “My colleague Liz Tretter
called me to tell me, and I could literally hear hoots and hollers on the floor. It was pandemonium. A lot of people, including myself, were very pleased she was going.”

For Mirabella, the decision to ship Anna to London came as a relief. The editor in chief had had it with the creative director’s aggressive and insensitive attempts to push her out. Mirabella had been pummeled with rumors that she would be axed at any moment and replaced by Anna. The gossip had run rampant, from the lowliest clerk in the mailroom on up, since the day Anna arrived two years earlier. Outside of
Vogue
, the fashionistas who lunch speculated on nothing else—Grace was out, Anna was in, any day now. The rumors ricocheted from the elegant avenues of Madison, Park, and Fifth to the fashionable Avenue Montaigne in Paris and chic Via della Spiga in Milan. The fashion and general press had a field day speculating, too, chasing anonymous and sometimes well-placed insider tips that an announcement would be made any day that Anna would get
the
job.

But Mirabella taught herself to ignore the speculation, or otherwise she’d drive herself crazy.

Liberman, who loved to instigate, manipulate, and provoke, knew how Mirabella felt, and while he told his pride and joy, Anna, one thing, he told Mirabella another—comforting her and imploring her not to worry.

“Alex laughed off suggestions that anyone might be after my job,” she said. “And, very solicitously, he led me to believe that keeping Anna Wintour around was in my best interest.” He convinced her that if
Vogue
didn’t hold on to Anna, the competition, like
Harper’s Bazaar
, would snap her up.

Mirabella came to believe her nemesis was being groomed to be sent back whence she came to run that other
Vogue
and that would be the end of that. Later, she realized that by agreeing with Liberman Anna had “dug my grave with my blessing.”

But that was still several chess moves ahead.

For now, Mirabella had to sit back and watch Liberman’s adoration of his protégée.

“He loved her look, her glamour,” the incensed editor in chief noted later. “He loved the intrigue of her clicking around in her high heels, trusted by and trusting no one except him. He thought her work, which combined the glitz of the eighties with elements of street art and design, was brilliantly
‘modern.’ He’d often show up at my office and, with all the pride of a cat presenting a dead mouse to its owner, show me samples of art that Anna Wintour had brought in. ‘Isn’t this wonderful,’ he’d say breathlessly. ‘Look at what Anna has done.’”

And, indeed, Anna had made a visible contribution to the magazine’s look, despite Mirabella’s feelings. Before she was bumped out of the fashion coverage, Anna did a slick story on England’s new designers that was styled by a discovery of hers, a young designer by the name of Vera Wang. Working with the features editor, Anna saw ways to better illustrate front-of-the-book stories to make then “hipper, younger,” notes Schechter, who coordinated many of those stories. One such piece was about the gentrification of and the growing art and music scene in New York’s East Village. But, as Schechter points out, “it wasn’t like Anna was saying, ‘I think we should do a feature on this or that.’” Anna essentially was finding ways to improve the visual level of those stories. She read domestic and foreign fashion magazines constantly, looking for new ideas.

When the announcement was made that Anna was off to jolly old England to run
Vogue
and modernize “its dowdy, exclusive, and outdated-looking pages,” as Mirabella described it, she patted herself on the back, thinking she had been correct all along about Anna’s future, that it would be in London, not New York, and she’d finally be out of her well-coiffed hair.

Because Anna was pregnant, it was decided that she’d have the baby in New York and afterward cross the pond to take on her latest challenge. Anna was due in January 1986 and scheduled to be in her new office in London that April.

The only difficulty she faced in her final trimester was early contractions, which occurred around Thanksgiving. She was taken to the hospital for a day or two, watched over, and given some drugs. “I remember David joking and saying that the whole reason why she went into early contractions was because the baby wanted to come out and have a good meal,” says Schechter.

In December, friends in the business, those in her circle and hangers-on, started throwing rounds of lunches and dinners for her as time drew near—not for the the birth of the baby but rather for her coming ascension to the throne of British
Vogue
. On Fifty-seventh Street, at Mr. Chow’s, her pals Michael and Tina Chow feted her and fawned over her. It was one bash after another. As one observer noted, “It was a performance of staggering discipline.”

Right on schedule in January, Anna, at thirty-seven, became a mother for the first time, delivering a healthy boy As promised, she named him Charles in honor of her father.

There was talk that Anna had induced Charlie’s birth so that she could attend the couture collections, which she vehemently denied through her publicist when
The Times
of London repeated it—a whopping sixteen years later. Anna claimed she took off two months. The story came to prominence from fashion editor Liz Tilberis, who was one of Anna’s detractors when she arrived at British
Vogue
.

Within what seemed like days, whatever her claim, Anna was back in her office making final preparations for her transfer to London. She asked her trusted lieutenants to join her: Schechter, once again to be her assistant, and Paul Sinclaire, to be a fashion editor. She got neither.

Sinclaire, who had angered Anna by not coming to her wedding because he was out of town, agreed to take the job, but he later backed out and earned Anna’s wrath. “She had asked me to come to English
Vogue
—she didn’t offer me some
enormous
position—but I had accepted the job, and she was depending on me. I had already moved a lot and I just thought it’s too big of a drag, I didn’t feel like moving to London. I called her up and she was
enraged
. David even called me to say, ‘You
better
come.’ Anna was
really, really, really, really
angry. She was still mad at me for not coming to the wedding, but my not going to English
Vogue
put her over the top. Anna saw it as two betrayals.”

Schechter, too, had qualms about going to London. While she saw Anna’s invitation as “an amazing opportunity,” she still wanted to explore other possibilities. Anna gave her exactly one month to do so. “I’m sure she hoped that I wouldn’t find options here and that I would come with her, but I just wanted to see the lay of the land.”

As it turned out, the promised land was
Rolling Stone
, where the twenty-seven-year-old Schechter became the magazine’s first full-time fashion editor. Anna was seriously disappointed. Later she said she “intellectually understood” Schechter’s decision, “but emotionally it was very hard to take.”

Anna now desperately needed to find an assistant in London she could trust, someone as loyal, sharp, and hardworking as the one she had with her since
New York
magazine. Anna asked for recommendations. Schechter recalled having some luck with an ambitious young woman who worked for
Condé Nast in London named Gabe Doppelt who had done some research for her. She proposed her name—a recommendation she would come to regret. Anna and Schechter would work together again, but her star would fall and Doppelt’s would rise.

By mid-March 1986, Anna, two-month-old Charles, and a full-time nanny were ensconsed in a lovely Victorian town house rented for her by Condé Nast in picturesque and grand Edwardes Square—with its lovely private garden in the center—in chic Kensington. Her temporary home, befitting a
Vogue
editor, was within walking distance of the old Wintour family home in Phillimore Gardens, where Anna’s interest in fashion first burgeoned some two decades earlier.