Front Row (3 page)

Alexander Walker, who would become a noted film critic at the London
Evening Standard
, the paper Beaverbrook eventually gave Wintour to run, heard that he had actually telephoned Nonie after getting the urgent message about Gerald. “But Charles had decided to finish his work with Beaverbrook before returning home,” Walker says. “He told his proprietor what had happened to his son, and Beaverbrook was impressed at how bravely and businesslike Charles had taken the news, and that he was able to go on working. It made Charles’s reputation with Beaverbrook.”

Milton Shulman, who had started in journalism with Wintour immediately after the war and later worked under him as the
Evening Standard’s
esteemed theater critic, says years later, “There’s no question that the death of the child put Charles into the arms of Beaverbrook.”

Whichever way it happened, whether Wintour rushed to be with his distraught wife or stayed at his boss’s side, the death of their firstborn was devastating, and the events surrounding the tragedy left a permanent dark cloud over the Wintour family.

As Callan notes, “Charles’s behavior when the son was killed split the marriage.”

Walker, who was close to both Charles Wintour and especially Nonie, asserts, “The great tragedy of Charles’s life was he, like a lot of Beaverbrook’s editors, was a creature of his proprietor. The boy’s death
absolutely
destroyed the Wintour marriage, changed Charles forever, and he became a very chilly, withdrawn figure. It’s a terribly, terribly sad story.”

Furious with her husband, despondent over her son’s death, Nonie Win-tour gathered up little Anna and James and left England for Boston to be with her family, to be consoled. Some thought the marriage was over.

While his wife was gone, Wintour and Beaverbrook bonded. The two met frequently because at the time Beaverbrook needed bright, young editors for his newspaper chain. So he put Wintour to the test, inculcated him with his various conservative philosophies, had him write editorials to see if he was able to present them with Beaverbrook’s point of view, and promised to put him on the gravy train by giving him an editorship someday.

At the end of that terrible summer of 1951, Nonie Wintour returned to London with Anna and James. She and her husband had a chilly rapprochement, but their marriage never was the same.

It was in that horribly depressed and icy atmosphere that Anna grew up.

With hopes that a larger family might warm the frigid air, Nonie Wintour had two more children in quick succession in the wake of Gerald’s death. Less than a year after the tragedy, she became pregnant, and on February 3, 1953, Anna got a sister, Nora Hilary, with whom she’d never be close because they were so different: Anna would grow into a beauty and a fashionista, thought of as frivolous by the rest of the family, while Nora was plain looking like their mother, academically inclined, and a political activist.

A year later, Nonie got pregnant again, and two days before Anna’s fifth birthday, on November 1,1954, she gave birth to another son, Patrick Walter.

But it was Anna who replaced Gerald as the fair-haired child in Charles Wintour’s eye. Though he loved all his children, Anna became and would always be his favorite. And Anna was the one of the four surviving Wintour children who would turn out to be the most like him—driven, ambitious, creative, icy, with her eye always on the prize.

Anna would become the most famous of the Wintour brood, far surpassing
her father as a powerful editor. Of the other three, only Patrick became a journalist. Like their mother, James and Nora became societal do-gooders and lived rather quiet and stable lives. James worked in public housing in Scotland, and Nora married a Red Cross worker in Switzerland.

Besides the animosity Nonie felt toward Charles regarding his response, or lack thereof, to their firstborn’s death, she came to despise her husband for working for Beaverbrook, whose political and social views she vehemently disagreed with.

“Nonie was very left-wing,” says Milton Shulman, “and she always despised Charles’s compromises working for Beaverbrook, compromises which you have to make if you’re going to become editor of a right-wing newspaper.”

Like Beaverbrook, Shulman was a Canadian, so the publisher had a fondness for him beyond his being a bright young journalist. In the early fifties, Shulman says, he was asked by Beaverbrook to become deputy editor of the Manchester
Daily Express
, one of the papers in the Daily Express chain, where Beaverbrook tried out young editors for bigger jobs. But Shulman, who had been involved with the Socialist Party in Canada, turned down the job on the grounds that he didn’t share Beaverbrook’s political views. “I told him I would have to compromise either my work on the paper or my own political views. I didn’t want to do that. That was my one test to be editor, and he never asked me again.”

But when Beaverbrook asked Charles Wintour to take the job in Manchester, he accepted without reservation, but to his wife’s chagrin. “Nonie never moved up there with Charles,” says Shulman. “She stayed in London with the children.”

Shulman’s wife, the journalist Drusilla Beyfus Shulman, who socialized with the Wintours, observes that Nonie “was very disappointed in Charles’s loyalty to the Beaverbrook line, which was very much contrary to her own instincts and beliefs. She wasn’t sympathetic to Beaverbrook’s values and was quite naggy to Charles about them. Nonie and Charles weren’t particularly interested in each other’s views.”

Wintour impressed Beaverbrook, and in 1954, when Anna was five, her father was made deputy editor of the
Evening Standard
, and in 1959, at forty-two, he was appointed editor in chief. He turned the paper around with his extraordinary eye for spotting talented editors, writers, and columnists.
He also earned the sobriquet “Chilly Charlie” because of how stern, aloof, and demanding he was. As his power grew, he also became a womanizer, which added to the marital turmoil in the Wintour home, especially impacting young Anna.

During the 1950s, Nonie Wintour became a devoted, some say obsessively so, social worker; they attributed her intense involvement in the sad plight of others to her liberal Quaker background. Her first job involved dealing with people who were determined by the government to be mentally incompetent. Later, she worked with foster children and adoptive parents. For a time in the early fifties, the writer in her came out and she tried her hand at freelance film criticism for an intellectual and political British magazine called
Time and Tide
, whose contributors over the years had included Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Emma Goldman. She could be vicious. One film she called a “preposterous story,” another a “lachrymose tale of love,” and a third “an airy French trifle . . . a stale bit of sponge cake.” In the dozen or so reviews she wrote, she rarely gave two thumbs-up.

In a home filled with so much angst, Anna turned inward, became even more shy and withdrawn, and had no known close friends. At the North Bridge House School in Hampstead she was quiet as a church mouse, a loner who did not stand out from the crowd. It was clear she was horribly affected by her parents’ turmoil. Along with the curtain of gloom that had descended in the wake of her brother’s death, her father, whom she dearly loved, was rarely around, busy devoting his life to Beaverbrook and his success as an editor.

At the age of eleven, in September 1960, Anna was enrolled at London’s exclusive Queens College, which wasn’t a college at all but rather a fancy middle and high school that catered to such wealthy young heiresses as Christina Onassis, girls who arrived each morning in chauffeur-driven cars. It was a school that at the time, according to one of Anna’s classmates, “prepared women to be educated wives.”

Though Queens College had quite a lot of cachet and was very chichi, Anna despised it, hated putting up with the very intense discipline. Under the rules, students were not permitted to talk in certain parts of the building and were required to stand and stop speaking when a teacher entered the room. The school was kept so cold—warmth was considered bad for discipline—that a classmate developed a mild case of frostbite on her feet.

Anna also hated the school uniform—a pinafore with a long-sleeved white shirt, striped tie, and cardigan sweater, which she thought was ugly and dated.

With all of the discipline and regimentation, Anna was viewed as “willful, resentful, and very complex,” according to a classmate. “Anna didn’t seem to have a need for a lot of girlfriends. She didn’t have any really close friends, and if she did, she didn’t appear to keep any.”

Susan Summers, who went to Queens and later worked for the
Evening Standard
, was once told, “When you meet Charles Wintour, you’ll be put off by his rather glacial exterior, but when you get to know him better you realize it’s only the tip of the iceberg.” She says, “There’s clearly a lot in common between Anna and her father in that they’re both cold. . . . The difference is, he was actually loved by his staff, and she was
not a
. popular leader. She had a pretty screwed-up childhood, and she became a very icy woman.”

Anna remained at Queens College until July 1963, when the Wintours, tired of her complaints about how dreadful life was for her at the school, transferred her to another fancy all-girls’ school, the century-old North London Collegiate, where she was admitted on September 18, and where the students were known as “North London Clever Girls.”

A
t North London Collegiate, Anna bonded with another new student with whom she would have a seemingly loving and enduring friendship, albeit one marked by sporadic petty jealousy and Machiavellian cattiness. Anna’s relationship with Vivienne Lasky, her first and only true teenage soul mate, would eventually end years later, suddenly, sharply, and bizarrely, like a number of Anna’s subsequent adult female friendships and professional associations.

Anna never was, and never would be, a girls’ girl, would have few close female friends over the years, and didn’t appear to like or enjoy the company of other women—curious for someone who one day would control fashion magazines that catered to women’s styles and taste.

But back then, from the moment Anna and Lasky met in the dreary, frigid halls of North London Collegiate, about to turn fourteen, they became as close and dependent on each other as those four mop-heads called the Beatles who were about to launch the first British invasion of America. In the next decade, Anna would be among those at the forefront of a second—an encroachment upon the American shores of a brigade of British journalists, writers, and editors dubbed the “Briterati.”

“We were the two new girls at North London,” says Lasky. “Being the new girls was not easy. No one else would talk to us. We felt very left out. Anna would ask me, ‘Do you know where we’re meant to go?’ We arrived totally
unprepared and no one said, ‘Go here, go there.’ Nothing was made clear to us. It was not a warm and nurturing place. We used to have discussions, ‘How long are we going to be the new girls?’

“I liked her immediately. I could see she was smart, pretty, didn’t
seem
stuck up. We were just drawn together and became best friends. Anna was half American, and I was half American. We were both living in Britain, and our fathers were in journalism. We fit easily into each other’s lives. We were as close friends as girls could be. It was just the two of us.”

Like Charles Wintour, Vivienne Lasky’s father was a prominent journalist and editor. Melvin J. Lasky, a New Yorker, was cofounder and editor of
Encounter
, an influential intellectual monthly. During the 1950s and 1960s, the best and the brightest wrote for the journal: Bertrand Russell, Vladimir Nabokov, W. H. Auden, among other literary intelligentsia. Under Lasky,
Encounter
held what the British author and filmmaker Frances Stonor Saunders once called “a central position in postwar intellectual history. It could be as lively and bitchy as a literary cocktail party.” The magazine also became the center of a controversy when it was revealed that it received clandestine funding from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

There were other similarities between the two fathers. Like “Chilly Charlie,” Lasky had a reputation for being cold and tough. “Charles and my father, they were
very
critical,” Lasky states. “They edited in their own lives as well as in their work. If I said to Charles at Sunday lunch, ‘I’m reading a most marvelous book,’ he’d say, ‘What a bunch of slop!’”

Wintour and Lasky both were womanizers, and the Laskys’ marriage was also troubled. Both Anna and Vivienne shared the emotional upheavals ignited by their parents’ travails.

Lasky’s coeditor at
Encounter
was Sir Stephen Spender, the literary and art critic, journalist, and social commentator. Unlike Lasky, who had an eye for beautiful women, Spender was bisexual. His daughter, Lizzie Spender, had grown up with Vivienne Lasky and had attended North London Collegiate, where she got to know Anna. After a giddy and madcap life, the tall, elegant blonde, who was an actress and a friend of Prince Charles, settled down, and became the fourth wife of Barry Humphries, better known as the drag queen talk-show host and stage performer “Dame Edna Everage.”

Despite all of those intrigues, none of it seemed daunting or of concern to Anna. As she told Lasky, “We’re the daughters of celebrities. So be it.”

While the one subject at NLC that interested Anna was history, the most contemporary event taught was the Boer War, which Anna instantly dubbed “the Bore War.” Academic studies were of little interest to her. Anna loathed
everything
about school, especially the classroom couture. She thought the uniform “looked liked shit,” Lasky asserts. “It was the same color.”

In fall and winter, young Anna, who one day would rule the fashion world draped in Chanel, standing confidently in Manolos, was required to wear a brown felt blazer that had the feel of a horse blanket, the jacket worn over a stiff, scratchy tan poplin blouse, and a pleated brown skirt that was too large because the elderly spinster educators who ran the school wanted her to grow into it. Anna complained that it made her look pregnant. Moreover, the skirt was made of a synthetic fabric that once actually melted when Anna leaned against a classroom radiator to try to warm herself. The powers at North London Collegiate, like those at Queens College, kept the heat in the bitter and damp midwinter at a minimum, thinking it would inspire the students to work harder.

For a time, when she was at Queens, Anna had been a runner, the only extracurricular activity in which she is known to have participated during her school years. “When she was ten she was amazingly fleet of foot,” her father once observed. “Some sports instructor indicated that if she really worked at it she could probably become a sprinter of Olympic standard. That finished it. Anna said, ‘How frightful! What on earth will happen to my legs?’ and stopped running.”

By the time she got to North London, the teachers had to force her to run. “She hated that,” Lasky recalls. “She’d hide in the toilet.” Manolo Blahnik was years away from designing
Sex and the City
shoes, but somehow adolescent Anna foresaw that one day her legs would be a part of her signature look, so they needed to be slender and shapely, not thick and muscled.

Besides the impact she thought running would have on her legs, Anna avoided gym by either cutting the class or claiming she was ill because she was physically sickened by the suit she was required to wear—scratchy brown culottes with a culotte skirt studded with dozens of little buttons on each side that made getting in and out of the outfit a formidable task. All of this was
set off by a light blue preppyish polo shirt, brown and blue being the school colors.

Another reason she always tried to skip gym was that she had to participate in bare feet, a school rule based on some obscure turn-of-the-century health theory Anna feared picking up a skin irritation, such as the highly infectious virus called verrucae, a wart on the sole spread through athletic activity, which her friend had caught. “Actually, Anna thought it was terrific because I just got to sit on the bench,” Lasky recalls.

But more, Anna feared that the barefooted gymnastics might disfigure her slender feet.

Anna liked to show off her good legs and was at the forefront of the miniskirt revolution, the decade’s defining fashion statement then hitting London like a German V2 rocket during the Blitz.

While the school skirt’s length was set by the headmistress and was meant to cover the crease behind the knee, Anna rebelled by wearing a belt to hitch up the waist or by rolling up the hem, which got her into hot water. A number of times Miss Dobson, the scary math teacher, caught her shortening her skirt.

If “old Dobbie” caught Anna leaning out the window with her skirt rolled up and saw the back of her legs, she’d jab her hard with the chewed metal end of a pencil that once held the eraser and severely reprimand her. Other times, as Anna marched in line to morning prayers—the Church of England and Catholic girls prayed in the east gym, the Jewish girls in the west—she’d be spotted for shortening her skirt. The eagle-eyed teacher sneaked up behind Anna and pulled her sweater up over her head. Disoriented and frightened, Anna was yelled at and berated for breaking the rule. Anna was “scared shitless,” Lasky remembers, but believes she continually broke the rule in order to “get a rise out of them. The short skirt thing happened time and time again.”

Anna’s stubborn decision to wear minis, to defy the rules, would eventually lead to serious problems at school.

Most of the North London Collegiate teachers—all women—were unmarried, and some had lost husbands or fiancés in the First World War. Anna scoffed at them, whispered about them, joked that they were so doddering she was absolutely certain their men had been killed in the Boer War. Anna had already developed a thing about age and would later use it as both a creative tool and a weapon when she became a fashion editor.

North London’s uniform changed slightly in the spring, when students were required to wear long gingham dresses in various shades of the ubiquitous brown. “It was like a Donna Reed dress hanging on Anna Wintour,” recalls Lasky, giggling at the vision of her defiant, fashion-forward friend looking like the wholesome character on the golden-age TV sitcom
The Donna Reed Show
.

Outside of school, Anna was required to wear a brown beret and a knitted scarf that displayed the school colors. The beret was mandatory through all seasons, and North London girls wore it to and from school. However, at four o’clock, when classes ended, Anna and Lasky, on the way to the underground station, doffed their school covers and stuffed them into their book bags. Enough with uniforms! Enough with regimentation! All of which got Anna into more trouble on a number of occasions.

Riding home on the subway one late afternoon, Anna and Lasky were spotted sans berets by a proud alumna and reported. “Some woman called the school,” Lasky recalls, “and said, ‘I’ve just seen two North Londoners
not
wearing their berets!’ We were the only two girls who lived downtown, so they knew it was us. We got caught a few times. We got called in to the headmistress’s office and Anna would just sort of bullshit them. ‘You mean I can’t take my hat off?’ she asked innocently.”

A stern lecture, one of many she received during her school days, ensued. “Your uniform stands for something. It shows where you’re from,” the headmistress intoned. “You must
always
wear your beret
proudly
. You, Anna Win-tour, have to live up to your uniform!”

With wrist slapped, Anna left, stifling a giggle. She didn’t care about the school’s dress rules. “It’s a stupid hat. I hate it!” And she continued not to wear it if she thought she could get away with it.

Years later, after she became head of American
Vogue
, the beret was still on her “out” list. She called it that “awful brown beret” and suggested that the required school uniform might have been one of the reasons why she became interested in fashion in the first place.

Not until she was swathed in Chanel and standing on stilettos at the helm of the world’s fashion bible would Anna fully live up to her uniform.

Eating in public was another issue that school authorities seriously frowned upon. Unfortunately, Anna once again was a violator, caught gulping down an
occasional biscuit, hungry for a quick sugar rush because she rarely ate at all. Each time she got caught, her parents were called. “What do you mean she was eating biscuits?” demanded a furious Charles Wintour of the headmistress. “I would think my daughter was hungry!” Arguing in Anna’s defense, he swiftly and pointedly ended the discussion. “What,” he asked, “is this idiocy?”

At fourteen, stick-thin Anna watched her diet obsessively, mostly by not eating. Her school lunch usually consisted of a Granny Smith apple. Lasky’s mother, a former model, was worried about Anna’s health and thought she was too bony, though Anna felt she was fashionably emaciated like the premier model of the swinging sixties, Twiggy, whom Anna thought looked fab.

“Anna only ate if it was something special,” says Lasky. “She always has had
terrific
self-control.”

Anna was sickened even contemplating the school menu, which consisted of dishes such as “bubble and squeak,” so named because of the sounds that were emitted during cooking. It consisted of bland boiled potatoes and soggy green cabbage mashed together. Or a pudding with the saucy name “spotted dick,” which a British grocery chain wanted to change to “spotted richard,” because customers were too embarrassed to ask for it. At home, Nonie Wintour served a mousse called “housemaid’s knee,” which also disgusted Anna, who would bring leftovers to her friend, who ate it on the subway after school. Moreover, Anna didn’t feel that the atmosphere at school was conducive to a relaxed meal, what with one of the teachers seated primly at the end of the long table, carefully watching her deportment and manners.

“The place was so stiff-necked,” Lasky asserts. “There was no warmth.”

Only on special occasions did Anna gorge herself, such as when she and her friend cut into their formidable allowances and splurged on lunch at the posh four-star Caprice in Mayfair, which later became one of Princess Diana’s favorite Italian restaurants, or at the delectable Fortnum & Mason, just west of Piccadilly, for tea and a quick bite. Anna kept on top of restaurant, pub, and club ratings in trendy magazines and guides. “She always liked the best of everything,” Lasky says.

Bored with school, Anna and Lasky played hooky, forging their parents’ signatures on official-sounding notes they typed, asking to be excused from classes because of an urgent doctor’s appointment or a great-aunt’s funeral.

“We went to the ladies’ room in Trafalgar Square and changed into regular clothes. We’d go to museums. We’d go shopping. We’d go out to tea. We’d go to the movies. Anna loved the old romances, the black-and-white classics—
Rebecca
. We would walk miles to see them over and over again.”

Ferris Bueller had nothing on Anna Wintour.