Front Row (28 page)

Anna complained that the logistics of the move and the transatlantic marriage were “terrible” and claimed at the time she woke up at night in “a cold sweat . . . parts of me think, ‘I’m crazy. I should stay home, look after my baby, have a nice quiet life.’ But I didn’t think I wanted to have a kid in New York. I’ve worked so hard for fifteen years [in New York]. . . . British
Vogue
was always the magazine I wanted to edit. Will it work? Ask me in six months.” Meanwhile, her husband stayed in New York, and both commuted via the Concorde to see each other. Anna’s personal frustration was, in part, taken out on her new colleagues.

The Wintour of British
Vogue’s
discontent was about to begin.

T
he January 1986 issue of British and American
Vogue
had the same - model on the cover. In the UK edition, her hair was a bit tousled and the freckles on her face stood out. In the edition produced in New York, she had a more glitzy, glamorous look—a Madison Avenue Madonna, a Barney’s Brat.

Anna, who had arrived in London with a corporate mandate essentially to Americanize British
Vogue
, compared the two issues and concluded that there weren’t very many women she knew in New York who walked down the street dressed like the models in the out-of-touch
Vogue
she was taking over. Beatrix Miller used to call her seventy-year-old magazine
Brogue
to distinguish it from American
Vogue
, but Anna would trash that concept soon enough. There would be
no
difference between the two, if she had her way. The fantasy, fancy, and eccentricity that had been
Brogue’s
signature was about to be pummeled to the ground and, some would later believe, robbed of its singular personality.

A couple of weeks before she started the overhaul and the bloodletting—and blood would flow as she swung her ax—she gave some hints of what was to come to one of the many London fashion scribes lining up at her majesty’s doorstep for interviews. “I enjoy my work, and I work very hard,” Anna declared. “In New York I used to get in at eight and the office was full. When I first started work in London [at
Harpers & Queen]
we used to droop in
around ten.” And then she emphasized (or threatened), “I do think New York brought out my competitive streak.”

Just like the fear that permeated Madison Avenue
Vogue
for the two years before Anna made her exit, a feeling of dread hovered over the offices of Vogue House on Hanover Square upon her arrival.

Before formally making her entrance, Anna began holding high-level private meetings in her home with the editors who were Beatrix Miller’s top lieutenants: fashion director Grace Coddington, the most senior, and Liz Tilberis, second in command, both of whom would have major battles with Anna. Both knew her from her days in London, were aware of her reputation in New York, and shared mutual friends—and so they didn’t trust her for a second. Moreover, their backgrounds were so very different from Anna’s.

While working as a waitress in the late fifties, Coddington had started to model, often for
Vogue
, just as the fashion boom of the swinging sixties was kicking off. She was the epitome of the era’s look—tall, skinny, and leggy—and could look haughty or decadent. One of her last photo shoots was conducted by Helmut Newton, who posed her in a tiny black bikini at night, in a swimming pool, wearing red nail polish and sunglasses.

By 1968, her modeling days were numbered and she was hired by
Vogue
as a fashion editor, where she could be icy, dismissive, and terrifying if she had it in for someone. She was a fashionista big-time, who would go from flaming red hair to dyed punk color at a blink of a perfect eyelash. At the time she joined
Vogue
, she was married to Anna’s friend, the restaurateur Michael Chow, and cruised around London in a flashy beige convertible Rolls-Royce, an amazing change in lifestyle for a poor girl who grew up eating ham sandwiches for dinner every night.

Liz Tilberis, who long ago had closely bonded with Coddington, was two years older than Anna, the daughter of an arch-conservative ophthalmologist. Her mother came from a wealthy Scottish family that made a fortune in the fabric-dyeing industry. Tilberis was sent to a fancy boarding school, after graduation took a secretarial course, and then went to one of Britain’s finest art schools, where she studied fashion design—around the same time Anna was dropping out of North London Collegiate. Over the years her family’s money disappeared, and by the time Tilberis joined
Vogue
in the sixties as a lowly intern, she had to earn her keep; there was no private income such as
that enjoyed by Anna and by many of the
Voguettes
with proper backgrounds who worked there in those days—a virtual finishing school populated with socially connected young women who gossiped about who among them was seeing Prince Charles or one of the Beatles.

Tilberis had covered the lingerie market with Anna in the early seventies, when Anna was a junior at
Harpers & Queen
and Tilberis was just getting her feet wet at
Vogue
.

While glamorous, these were not high-paying jobs. A story that has made the rounds over the years, apocryphal but on the mark, is of a pretty society girl editorial assistant who complained. “I have to get a real job. Daddy can’t afford to send me to
Vogue
anymore.”

Coddington wasn’t very interested in the editor in chief’s job when Miller stepped down because of the politics and other obligations involved—she cared only about fashion. The more competitive Tilberis, on the other hand, made her interest known, though she felt she didn’t have much of a chance because of her lack of experience in production and features. She was married to an artist and had two adopted sons. Neither Coddington nor Tilberis knew that Anna was already the chosen heir to the throne.

Miller was disappointed when she heard that Anna got the crown. “Beatrix is not a great admirer of Anna,” says onetime
Vogue
staffer Drusilla Beyfus Shulman, a friend of Miller’s and of the Wintour family. “She didn’t like Anna’s values. She felt Anna was all about shopping, sex, slickness. Beatrix always tried to imbue
Vogue
with a kind of higher quality of culture and intellect. That was her aim at
Vogue
”

When Anna arrived in London, one of the first things on her to-do list was to call Tilberis, offer a perfunctory hello, and demand to know where she could put her fur coats in storage. “No one I knew in London wore furs,” Tilberis stated later, “and Icertainly couldn’t afford them.” Anna also began using Tilberis’s hair salon, swanky MichaelJohn in Mayfair, where celebrity clients have ranged over the years from Tony Blair to Nigella Lawson. Anna used the same cutter, too—an eccentric named Charlie Chan who liked to chatter about his New Age interests while cutting her hair. Anna is said to have told him to put a sock in it.

Anna’s ascension was a gold mine for
Private Eye
, which published many gossip items about her. It noted that her arrival at
Vogue
was “the occasion for
tears and near hysteria” among the magazine’s fashion writers, who “have long been able to indulge their favourite designers as well as photographers. . . . La Wintour has said she wants ‘total control’ of the content.”
Private Eye
was getting constant leaks from
Vogue
insiders. One report had it that Anna had called
Vogue’s
longtime managing editor, Georgina Boosey, asking if “she knew of a gym that opened at 6
A.M.
A little shaken, Boosey said no. ‘Well where do you all go?’ demanded La Wintour incredulously. There has been a sudden rush, I understand, to purchase items of designer sportswear among the tremulous staff.”

Private Eye
also broke the story that Anna had negotiated a whopping $160,000 salary for herself, the rent on her house, a car with a full-time chauffeur, and a nanny—“thus lightening the burden of motherhood for her. To maintain social contacts in the states,” the report continued, “the workaholic harpy will be provided with 2 return airfares each month, via Concorde, of course.”

“She was
incredibly
focused and organized when she got to London,” notes Shulman, a veteran
Vogue
features editor who would be fired by Anna soon after she took over the magazine. “She just had the baby and immediately went to work straight off the obstetric table.

“Wonderful David Shaffer started to commute by Concorde in order to see her. Charles [Wintour] always referred to him as a saint, and he was. Never be saintly to a wife that’s so ambitious. But David admired her. She was just all so terrific within that narrow compass of fashion. One might ask, is it worth feeling like that about a fashion magazine? And who cares, since it’s just selling advertising, really.” (Some time after Anna’s reign ended at British
Vogue
, Shulman’s daughter, Alexandra, became its editor in chief. Beatrix Miller is her quasi godmother.)

In her meetings with Tilberis and Coddington, Anna was “civilized,” “polite,” “reassuring.” But Tilberis saw her as having an American outlook on fashion and foresaw herself and others at the magazine “heading for a direct culture clash.”

The British press, such as the
Daily Telegraph
, noted that Anna was about to do a “major shakeup on one of Britain’s greatest and grandest institutions.” She told the paper, “I want
Vogue
to be pacy, sharp and sexy. I’m not interested in the super-rich or infinitely leisured (which, of course, she was, as
time would tell). I want our readers to be energetic, executive women, with money of their own and a wide range of interests.” Interestingly, that was the same concept Anna had adapted to and carried out a few years back when she was at
Savvy
. In fact, there was nothing new in the philosophy she was now espousing—but it was new to London.

Anna’s meetings and blunt memos said it all. She was going to turn British
Vogue
upside down and inside out, and shake out the cobwebs. As Tilberis noted sourly, she was planning to make the magazine “faster and busier, directly addressing the concept of the modern working woman, and it scared the hell out of us. She hated anything . . . too archly British.”

On Anna’s first day on the job, Tilberis had handed to her some black-and-white photos of a model whose head was swathed in bandages—the kind of offbeat layouts she liked to do and that had long been a staple of the magazine. To Anna, Tilberis proudly exclaimed, “This is very new!” Anna, looking as if she’d been handed a bag of soggy fish and chips, replied, “Oh, my God, I’m back in England.”

It would only get worse.

The more traditional stories, the fashion shoots at country castles, were scratched, replaced by models toting briefcases at Lloyd’s of London.

“She wanted smiling, happy, athletic, professional pictures,” declared Tilberis. “She wanted saneness and sameness. It was the end of life as we knew it.”

Anna ordered the complete renovation of Beatrix Miller’s office, which was expedited over one weekend. One wall was knocked down to make a new entrance, all walls were painted linen white, Anna’s Buchsbaum desk and a Biedermeier sofa were delivered, bookshelves for bound volumes of the magazine with a large
NO SMOKING
sign on one shelf were installed, and the carpets were torn up and the floors finished to a gleam. Now she was ready to get down to the business of chopping heads.

Anna’s debut issue, with a circulation of around 170,000 (big for Britain, minuscule for the United States) appeared on the newsstands in August 1986. The size of the type was larger, the graphics had a sleeker look, and sections like travel and “Men in Vogue” were moved from the back to the body of the magazine. Anna had plans for additional arts coverage, more health and fitness
stories, celebrity profiles, and even a horoscope—all in all, as American as a women’s magazine can get.

Excised from the masthead were two fashion editors, the living editor, the restaurant critic, the associate editor for features, the nutrition editor, and some others. Anna added another high-ranking fashion editor, her friend Michael Roberts, to work with Coddington, who was one name above his on the masthead; she remained fashion editor but he was given the fancier title of fashion director. Tilberis got a raise and was promoted from fashion editor to executive fashion editor. (The raise was unexpected, and when Tilberis said to Anna, “I don’t know what to say,” her boss’s response was a chilly “You could say thank you.”)

Anna kept Georgina Boosey as managing editor. She’d been at
Vogue
since the midfifties and knew everything there was to know about production, printing, and budgets—important information Anna needed. Anna brought in a new arts editor, a beauty editor, a senior fashion editor, and two lower-level fashion editors. Her friend Emma Soames, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, was brought back to
Vogue
as features editor, and four fashion assistants were added to the staff list, all with perfect
Vogue
first names—Phillipa, Arabella, Annabelle, and Venetia. Gabe Doppelt was listed as Anna’s assistant, the job Laurie Schechter had passed on.

Among the first to be fired, curiously, were close Wintour family friends and longtime colleagues of her father, among them Alex Walker, the august film critic of the
Evening Standard
who played with Anna as a child and for more than sixteen years wrote a monthly show business column for
Vogue
. Another was Milton Shulman, the
Evening Standard’s
drama critic who began his newspaper career with Charles Wintour and had a similar deal with
Vogue
to write a cinema column.

Milton Shulman was the first to get the pink slip. After it happened, he called Walker and said, “ ‘You’re next.’ And I said, ‘No, don’t be silly’ And then, of course, when I did get sacked, Milton rang up and said, ‘I told you so.’”

Almost two decades after he was pink-slipped, Walker was still upset and saddened by Anna’s rude and frigid handling of him. “I’m a well-brought-up child, and I would have thought it would have been perfectly easy for someone
in Anna’s position to call me up, particularly because she knew me personally, and say, ‘Alex, I’m making a lot of changes. I want it to be a different magazine from Beatrix’s. I know you’ve been here a very long time and I hope you don’t mind if I thank you very much, and say well done, and hope you’ll be able to contribute occasionally’

“There was none of that. The work that I’d written in advance simply didn’t appear in the magazine. I was paid for three months, and that was the end of it—never a letter, nothing, absolutely nothing. I thought it was an absence of politeness, not an absence of gratitude, because there was no reason why she should be grateful. For her, it was easier to exert power through the negative aspect of dropping someone rather than dropping a line and saying, ‘I’m sorry’ Charles would never have handled it in such a backhanded way. He would have said, ‘I don’t think things are working out. Have you anywhere else you’d like to go?’