Front Row (29 page)

“I’d had a good time with Beatrix, and I contributed regularly once a month for sixteen and a half years, so my career wasn’t being nipped in the bud. I just felt saddened that there was a lack of social grace in how she handled it.” (In 2002, a journalist who wrote a profile of Anna for the London
Times
asked her if she found it difficult firing a loyal family friend like Walker. “Well, I’m sure it was,” she responded briskly. “I’m afraid I don’t remember.”)

A few years after Anna was named editor in chief of American
Vogue
, Walker was in New York “full of himself,” as he notes, because he’d just been named critic of the year in the British annual press awards. He was walking along Madison Avenue and suddenly realized he was in front of the Condé Nast building and decided to go in and say hello to Anna, wish her well—he held no grudge against her.

The receptionist at the lobby desk called upstairs and Anna’s assistant answered. When he explained who he was, he was told she was very busy. After he said he just wanted to say hello, Anna got on the line, asked two quick questions—how he was and what he was doing in New York. As he started to explain, she cut him off, saying, “I hope you enjoy yourself. Give my regards to the people back home. Good-bye.” Click.

Once again, Walker notes, “I felt crushed, not in vanity but simply by the
fact that it would have been nice for her to say, ‘Oh, do come up. How nice to see you again.’ But—nothing. Anna always had her order of priorities. People like myself simply didn’t feature in them.”

Drusilla Beyfus Shulman knew it was only a matter of time before she faced Anna’s guillotine. She’d known Anna as a child and a teen, was a longtime friend and colleague of Charles Wintour’s, and liked and respected Nonie Wintour. But she viewed Anna as “a threat to all editors” at the magazine. “When Anna was appointed, her first statement was that she wanted to move the magazine up a generation or two. I worked for British
Vogue
for seven years, was close to Beatrix Miller, and knew Grace Mirabella. I belonged to the old guard, so I realized it was only a question of time.”

The firings and the general all-around shakeup at the venerable fashion monthly were watched closely by a gleeful and gloating British press. Anna’s firm and frosty Americanized management style and high-profile visibility became fodder for the pundits of Fleet Street. She was dubbed “nuclear Win-tour” by press and staff, and one scribe described what was going on at
Vogue
as “the Wintour of Our Discontent.” Even her retired father’s old paper,
The Evening Standard
, now under new management, noted Anna’s “habit of crashing through editorships as though they were brick walls, leaving behind a ragged hole and a whiff of Chanel.”

One of those covering fashion for
The New York Times
at the time was Michael Gross, who wrote a column called “Notes on Fashion.” He was able to schedule an interview with Anna while he was covering the collections, and it was then that he learned that she despised the adjectives the British press had been using to describe her. That became clearly evident the moment he walked into her office and the first words out of her mouth were, “You will
not
refer to me as ‘nuclear Wintour.’” She wasn’t kidding. If he wanted the interview, he had to pledge he would not use those words. Anna didn’t want Si Newhouse and Alex Liberman reading the
Times
and seeing what they thought of her in London, if they didn’t already know, or care.

Gross agreed to Anna’s condition. After the interview, he went back to his office and, having now spent some time with her and finding her “chilly and a little bit forbidding,” he described her in his story as “tightly coiled.” But the two words were edited out. When he complained, he was told by an editor,
“You can’t describe Anna Wintour as an asp,’ and I said, ‘It’s accurate. She’s tightly coiled. That’s what she is.’”

Anna was constantly reporting back to Liberman in New York. She was determined to keep him on her side, knowing he might be hearing some negative talk about the way she was handling things. She was concerned that the distance between London and New York might
not
make the heart grow fonder, so she kept him in the loop, at least for now.

“Anna was very possessive of Alex, of their relationship,” a colleague of both observes. “With Liberman you were always aware of his position and that he had the power of life and death over your career. He was a snake, a hypocrite, and you had to be to survive in that environment. That’s how
he
survived all those years. Anna had to be very political to really thrive and survive in that climate. Alex was the head of it, so everybody followed his lead. Alex established the corporate culture at
Vogue
, at Condé Nast. His thing was to divide and conquer. He also was the ultimate father figure. You
wanted
to please him.”

With all of that in mind, Anna sent him dummies of her layouts for his approval and phoned him often asking if he liked a particular cover. And she sometimes requested his help. “When she had problems with the front of the book,” he once stated, “she came to New York and we redesigned it for her.”

In London, Anna cracked down on photographers, demanding that they turn in
everything
they shot, giving them less creative freedom. When she was a fashion editor in the trenches in New York, she accepted their choice of the best of the best shots. Now, however, as boss woman, she wanted every single roll of film, every print, every Polaroid to be turned over to the fashion editor overseeing the shoot. Anna would have final approval. Where the photographer once was the key, if not lead, creative member of the team, the fashion editors at British
Vogue
now were given greater importance and power under Anna—that is, as long as they carried out her vision.

The New York fashion photographer Andrea Blanche, who had her innings with Anna in the past, was traveling through Europe when she got word that Anna had a couple of assignments for her. She was both delighted and apprehensive, having been burned by her before. Looking back, Blanche believes Anna’s decision to use her again “was definitely political because she
knew Liberman liked me. I’m a good photographer, so why not have me work for her.”

Blanche had shot for British
Vogue
when Bea Miller was editor, so she thought she knew the terrain. But that was then. Anna now wanted the photos to be “very up, joyful”—models smiling, jumping, and running.

Blanche, on the other hand, was more artsy, and her photos tended to be moody and sexual. While Anna gave Blanche no special instructions and didn’t say make it upbeat, the photographer was aware that Anna had done a one-eighty from the old days. “The things she was doing when she worked at
New York
magazine were much more aesthetic, but when she started working for British
Vogue
she was doing things that were more lively, more commercial.”

The assignments were simple enough for Blanche—one was shooting casual clothes in the studio, the other photographing a model in different cocktail dresses in various locations around London. Blanche shot thousands of frames for the latter, not atypical, and one of the pictures was of the model getting into a London taxi with her arms enthusiastically in the air, a big toothy smile on her perky face, a very natural moment, looking very buoyant. Working with a young
Vogue
fashion editor, Blanche went through her shots and decided to send all but the “natural moment” frame to Anna. When the editor protested, Blanche told her to forget it, she didn’t like the photo. After all, it was her eye, the photographer’s eye, that made such decisions. Or so she thought.

“We had three garbage bags filled with thirty-five-millimeter slides, and I sent only three or four shots from each situation to Anna, which is what I sent to
Vogue
all the time,” Blanche says.

A few days later Anna called and demanded to see
everything
Blanche had shot.

“I said, ‘No, I’m not going to do that. That’s all I send to American
Vogue
and that’s all I’m sending to you.’ And then Anna said, ‘I want to see that shot of the girl with her hands in the air. I want to see
that
shot!’”

While Anna could be furious on the inside, she rarely, if ever, showed anger on the outside, so controlled was she. But this time, sitting in her hotel room, Blanche felt Anna’s fury burning through the phone line.

“She got hysterical that she wasn’t going to get the film,” she says. “She became unglued. She wasn’t as calm and collected as I knew her to be. The pitch of her voice kept rising. I thought it was a bit amusing to hear her sound that way. I said, ‘No, I threw the picture away, I edited it out,’ or whatever, because I didn’t like it, didn’t think it was up to my standards.

“Whenever a question arose with Liberman, ninety-nine percent of the time he would give me my way. So I wasn’t used to somebody being that demanding. In all the time I knew Alex, maybe he once questioned how much film I sent him, and then when I talked to him about it, it was fine. I don’t remember ever having to send more film. It was just something that wasn’t done, and my judgment was never questioned.

“Anna wanted the power and the creative control. She got that if she saw all the film. Then it’s not my decision, the photographer’s decision, but her decision. It makes the photographer more dispassionate.”

Blanche heard nothing more about it. Because of the dispute over that one photo, she never worked for
Vogue
again. She says that when she later went into therapy, Anna, Liberman, and the insanity at
Vogue
constantly came up in sessions with her shrink.

Several months after Anna’s fit over the photo, the photographer was leafing through British
Vogue when
she came upon her cocktail dress layout. And there, right in the center, was the disputed picture Anna had demanded and that Blanche had refused to turn over.

“I was really surprised when I saw that picture, and I laughed, and I really felt sorry for that poor fashion editor,” says Blanche. “I can hear Anna saying, ‘Well, you’ve got to go back
and. find
that shot.’ And so there it was in the magazine. That editor had to go through every single slide—three garbage bags full, several thousand slides—to find that one shot. That’s a lot of work.

“But that incident shows how driven Anna is. And I have to say, I tip my hat to her. Who could be angry when somebody is so determined and perseveres like that. I thought that was quite something.”

B
y 1986, Anna’s former lover and longtime soul mate Jon Bradshaw, who had helped her so much over the years, was in the midst of a personal and professional midlife crisis, while she was skyrocketing to the top.

At forty-eight, he was especially despondent about the state of his career. His first serious book, a biography called
Dreams That Money Can Buy
, about the wild and tragic life of 1930s torch singer and playgirl Libby Holman, had been panned by critics.

Bradshaw had worked obsessively for five years on the book, enlisting talented author friends like A. Scott Berg to help in the rewriting, and had had big dreams of it becoming a bestseller and being made into a movie. He also had been involved in cowriting a screenplay about the “Lost Generation” in Paris, called
The Moderns
, and was working on a novel about a James Bond-
ish
character much like himself, called
Rafferty
, which he hoped would become a series.

But nothing seemed to be panning out. While he envisioned himself making it big in Hollywood, where his wife was a successful independent producer, and lolling tanned by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel flirting and drinking, he had little motivation and had to be constantly pushed and prodded by his friends.

Along with his career lows, he’d let himself go physically. After years of eating rich foods, smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day, drinking
heavily, and partaking in recreational drugs, he’d become overweight and was beginning to lose the roguish luster that had initially attracted Anna and other women and men to him.

Worse still, around the time of Anna’s thirty-seventh birthday in November 1986, as she was enthusiastically whipping British
Vogue
into shape, Brad-shaw, increasingly dispirited, was whipping himself about how life and success were passing him by.

Maudlin over drinks with friends, he began talking about his own death and the funeral he wanted for himself.

One of his confidants during this depressing period was Scott Berg, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Charles Lindbergh. The two had met at a Hollywood party in the late seventies—Bradshaw had conned a waiter into giving him a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, not just a drink, and the two split it. They had bonded around the time Bradshaw got married and Berg’s acclaimed biography of Max Perkins was published.

Like so many others in Bradshaw’s life, Berg became “obsessed” with Bradshaw. “It was love at first sight,” he emphasizes years later. “I just adored him. I thought he was an old-fashioned rogue, and he first, last, and always reminded me of a kind of toothless bulldog. He snarled and complained, but in fact he was really kind of a softy. Anna was absolutely still calling him, crying on his shoulder. I don’t know that Bradshaw ever lost a friend or a lover. People never let go of him. Anna’s name would come up every now and then. He’d reminisce about when he was with her, and he often talked about how beautiful and attractive she was.”

To their mutual Hollywood friends, Bradshaw and Berg became thought of as an odd couple, even though Bradshaw was married with an adopted daughter.

“I can’t tell you to how many dinners people would invite Bradshaw, and I would just sort of show up,” recounts Berg, who in 2003 had only one framed photo on his desk. It was of Bradshaw. “After a while, people learned to just set a place for me. I used to say I was his Margaret Dumont [a character actress in thirties and forties wacky films, including Marx Brothers comedies] and he was my Groucho. He would just sort of be outrageously Bradshaw, and I was the matronly old lady that he would offend.”

Women who knew Bradshaw over the years swore he wasn’t gay or bisexual,
though there were suggestions of a leaning in that direction in his manner and style. Marilyn Warnick, an American journalist who worked in London and adored Bradshaw, observes, “He was a man who loved women, who liked the way they looked, the way they smelled. He liked their problems, liked talking about their emotional situations. That was certainly the case with me when I was crying on his shoulder about this bastard I was dating at the time. Bradshaw was like a girlfriend, except he was virile and enormous fun. It’s true, though, that men liked him enormously.”

Sometime in October 1986, Berg was having dinner with Bradshaw at Adriano’s, a trendy restaurant at the top of Beverly Glen in Los Angeles. Bradshaw was drinking heavily, talking about how he hoped to see his adopted daughter, Shannon, grow up, and that led to his talk of dying and a list he bizarrely dictated to Berg of his fantasy memorial service.

In the predawn hours back at home, Berg wrote down the itinerary for Bradshaw’s future funeral service: who should speak, what they should speak about, and in what order they should speak. That’s the kind of obsessive detail Bradshaw had laid out for him.

“He wanted Nigel Dempster, his friend in London, to speak. I said, ‘Is he your
best
friend?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Scott, you’re like some little schoolgirl—“Who’s your best friend?” Nigel’s my mate!’”

Among other old pals he wanted present was the sixties British actress Fiona Lewis; the queen’s cousin, Patrick Lichfield; Jimmy Bradshaw, his brother, whom most didn’t even know existed; and his journalist pal A.J. Langguth. He didn’t mention Anna, though, probably for his future widow’s sake. He also wanted
three
memorial services: one at Morton’s in Los Angeles, a second at Elaine’s in Manhattan, and a third in London, not necessarily in that order.

Berg thought it was all so absurd that Bradshaw was being so mawkish that night. At the same time, he was aware that his friend “was almost a textbook case for how to get heart disease. He ate nothing but red meat. Butter was on everything [Anna had a similar propensity]. His favorite dessert was bananas Foster, which is just bananas, booze, and a lot of butter. It’s just like
drinking
butter. He was always under some professional pressure, the crunch of being a freelance writer. And once every month he would play a killer game of tennis, just going from zero to one hundred.”

About a month after that distressing dinner, just a couple of days before Thanksgiving, Berg got home and a call was waiting for him on his machine from another close friend of Bradshaw’s, Jean Vallely, who for years wrote for
Esquire
and had once been married to one of
Washington Post
owner Katharine Graham’s sons. She and Bradshaw had bonded and would spend weekends together with his little girl—Bradshaw’s wife often was away on business—and Vallely’s children; they were like two single moms.

Vallely’s message urgently instructed Berg to get to the UCLA Medical Center: Bradshaw had had a heart attack. He was in intensive care and had not regained consciousness. Berg was dumbstruck. He immediately thought of that dinner and how it now appeared to him that Bradshaw had foreseen his own demise. As it turned out, Bradshaw had collapsed on a tennis court while playing with two pals, Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais, both Brits, who were a successful screenwriting team in Hollywood.

“Dick put him in the car to drive him home, and by the time they pulled into the driveway he was unconscious, we called nine-one-one,” remembers Bradshaw’s widow, Carolyn Pfeiffer. “He never regained consciousness.”

Berg and other close friends, including Barbara Leary, the wife of psychedelic drug guru Timothy Leary, rushed to the ICU to see their larger-than-life hero on life support at such a young age. “We’re in intensive care and Barbara Leary looks around to see if any nurses are there and she lights up a cigarette,” recalls Vallely. “Barbara, whom Bradshaw adored, said, ‘Bradshaw wouldn’t have gone this long without a cigarette for any of us.”

On November 25, three days after he was stricken, Bradshaw died. It was decided that the plug be pulled because it didn’t appear he would ever regain consciousness.

The next day in the
Daily Mail
, Nigel Dempster noted his passing and pointed out that “for years Bradshaw lived with Anna Wintour, now editor of
Vogue
in London, but they split up in 1977 and he moved to California. . . . ”

Scott Berg had never seen a corpse before, “but somehow I just felt I had to see Bradshaw one last time, and I went to the morgue at UCLA.” He was accompanied by Vallely and Barbara Leary. “The three of us walk into where they keep the dead bodies,” recalls Vallely, “and it’s freezing cold, and there he is, and Barbara says, ‘Oh, my God, I just saw him yesterday, and now he
looks awful, just awful!’ And Scott turns to her and says, ‘That’s because he’s dead. Yesterday he wasn’t dead.’”

Says Berg, “I said good-bye to the Pied Piper, and he was a Pied Piper to many people who loved him.”

After his death, a story circulated that Bradshaw’s kidney had been donated to a powerful Hollywood studio head, and in exchange someone close to Bradshaw got a three-picture deal from the studio.

The obituary in the London
Times
, written by a close female journalist friend of Bradshaw’s, stated that his full name was Jon Wayne Bradshaw. The middle name was an inside joke about how macho he had acted.

After his death there was talk that his Libby Holman book would be made into a movie starring Debra Winger and that his novel
Rafferty
would be turned into a film, but nothing ever came of any of that. However, his cowritten screenplay
The Moderns
was produced, got decent reviews, and starred Keith Carradine and Linda Fiorentino.

As produced by Bradshaw, the three memorial services came off as planned, including the singing of an old Princeton school song at the service at Morton’s. Bradshaw had once accompanied Berg to an event where it was sung, and he became enamored of it. For Bradshaw, it was all image, even in death, since he had never gone to Princeton, or even graduated from college. But by having the song sung at his memorial service, people might think he was an Ivy Leaguer.

“He sort of wished he had gone to Princeton,” says Berg. “When he asked me at our last dinner together that the song be sung, I said, ‘Bradshaw, I have a moral problem with that since you didn’t go to Princeton.’ And he said, ‘Well, change the lyric to ‘In Praise of Old Bradshaw.’ And by God when I had the program printed up, I had the lyrics printed out. ‘In praise of old Bradshaw, my boys—hoorah, hoorah, hoorah.’ And everybody got up and sang it. People were just standing there sobbing. It was hilarious.”

In January, two months after his death, Bradshaw’s widow and their daughter took his ashes to the home they owned in his beloved Jamaica. He was given a formal funeral and his ashes were buried there.

In London, Anna, hidden behind her sunglasses, attended one of the three memorial services, also held in January, at trendy Church of England St.
Paul’s, in Knightsbridge, where debs got married and aristocrats were memorialized. “It was very formal, with a choir, trumpets, famous people—Brad-shaw would have absolutely loved it,” observes his widow Other mourners included Anna’s predecessor at
Vogue
, Beatrix Miller, who knew and liked Bradshaw and gave him some of his earliest magazine assignments in London. The London
Times
, which wrote about the service, listed all of the mourners. David Shaffer was not among them, and Anna was listed as “Miss Anna Wintour.” She sat with her mother. Many spoke about Bradshaw, including Anna’s father, who read the lesson; Patrick Lichfield, who gave the main address; and
Queen
founder Jocelyn Stevens, who read from Dylan Thomas.

Anna didn’t speak, but someone saw her wipe her eyes under her Ray-Bans.

“She was devastated—
devastated
—that Bradshaw was not in her life anymore,” says a colleague. “After the service, she went home and cried her eyes out.”

O
ne of the most important men in her life was gone. Now one of her closest female friendships was about to end.

It had been almost a decade since Anna and her best pal growing up, Vivi-enne Lasky, had seen each other. The last time had been that hellish weekend in Connecticut.

Over the intervening years, though, Lasky had kept up close ties with Anna’s brother Jim and with Nonie. It was while Anna was ruling British
Vogue
that the two onetime bosom buddies got together one last time.

Lasky, her husband, and their children, two-year-old Nicholas and three-year-old Amanda, had come to London twice in eighteen months to visit her father, who had suffered a heart attack. Lasky’s stepmother had designed to the nines a beautiful grandchildren’s apartment, two floors of a lovely house near Harrods, and she also provided a nanny when they visited. It was during their second stay that Nonie Wintour told Lasky that Anna “would love to see you and the children.”

Anna was quickly catching up to Lasky on the domestic front. Because of the odd way Anna had acted when Lasky got married, she had come to believe that Anna was jealous of her domesticity. Now Anna had a husband and
was only one child away from being even with Lasky in the motherhood sweepstakes.

In December 1986, around the time of Lasky’s visit, Anna became pregnant again during one of her weekend Concorde jaunts to New York to visit her husband.

Lasky naturally had qualms about seeing Anna after how badly their last visit turned out. But Nonie assured her that there was no ill will and that Anna really and truly wanted to have a reunion. A few days before the scheduled visit, Lasky’s husband broke his foot and couldn’t accompany her, but her two children and their nanny, Rosie, did. Knowing how upset Lasky had become the last time she saw Anna, Lasky’s husband instructed the nanny to “watch out for my wife.”

Lasky, her small brood, and Rosie, the newly proclaimed bodyguard, arrived around three for tea at the Wintours’ house and were greeted by David Shaffer, who came to London to be with his family as often as his work in New York permitted. It was the first time Lasky had met him. “I was like,
this
is who she picked? He had no charisma, just seemed old and tired. He wasn’t a handsome fellow and was balding. My thought was, ‘If this is one of the great child psychiatrists of the world, we’re all in trouble.’ Warm and fuzzy he wasn’t.”