Front Row (30 page)

Neither was Anna, who barely greeted Lasky and accepted her gift for baby Charles—pants with a corduroy British riding jacket—by responding, “ ‘Oh, how
very
Ralph Lauren.’ She gave me a look like it was acceptable as a gift.” Anna noted how adorable Lasky’s children were. And that was that.

As Anna’s and Lasky’s nannies disappeared to the kitchen to get cookies for the children, Anna turned to another woman in the room, whom Lasky hadn’t noticed at first, and proceeded to chat with her, ignoring Lasky completely and never introducing her.

“Her husband never once went over to whisper in Anna’s ear, ‘You’re ignoring your friend, darling.’ My husband was very protective, very proper, the kind of person who would have gone over and said, ‘What’s going on here?’”

Lasky sat on a couch, as if she didn’t exist, about to burst into tears. Anna and the other woman—lots of makeup, red streaks in her hair, most likely
someone from
Vogue
—sat facing away from her “like I was chopped liver. I thought, ‘Well, I put myself in this situation,’ but Nonie had said, ‘Anna really wants to see you.’ If my husband had been there, he would have said, ‘We’re leaving now.’”

As she looked around the house, Lasky was surprised at how badly furnished it was. “It came furnished and it was hideous,” she remembers. “I wondered how Anna could bear this ugly furniture because she cared so much about that kind of thing and was such a snob about it.”

The fact that Anna
hadn ’t
redone the place to her very precise tastes was a strong clue that she knew her stay at British
Vogue
was temporary and that she’d soon take over Grace Mirabella’s office in New York.

Thankfully for the upset and embarrassed Lasky, Anna’s mother and brother arrived earlier than expected.

“Nonie said, Anna, why haven’t you served anything yet? I thought this was a tea party. Vivienne’s come all the way from America. Where are the things you ordered? Where’s the tea?’”

Anna rolled her eyes and instructed Shaffer to get the housekeeper to bring up the tea and food from the kitchen.

Watching husband and wife interact for the first time, Lasky didn’t see a match made in heaven. “I didn’t see the rapport. I saw no chemistry whatsoever,” she recalls. “What I’d seen with Bradshaw and her, here I saw
nothing.”

Mainly, Lasky couldn’t believe that this visit with Anna was a repeat of the last horrific one. “It was god-awful, a really awkward, bad afternoon,” she says. “I asked her husband to call for a taxi for my nanny to take the children home. My nanny said, ‘If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed how rude and unfeeling she was, and this was your best friend.’ We left Anna with her friend in the living room to get away from that situation, and I said to Jim and Nonie, ‘Do we have to stay any longer? Once I get my children off to their destination, let’s go,’ and they said, ‘That’s a good idea, we’ll have more time together,’ and they whisked me away. We had a lovely evening together. What happened was not discussed. Not one word was said about Anna’s rude behavior. My mother might have apologized for my poor behavior. Nonie said nothing.”

And that was that. Lasky had had it with Anna. After a close bond that
was cemented more than two decades earlier, they never spoke to or saw one another again.

In 2003, Lasky, her voice choking with emotion after having looked back on all those years as Anna’s friend, had no answer as to why she treated her the way she did. Yet, she notes, “Anna’s still part of my life, like an unfinished sentence.”

O
n her visit to London, Lasky was surprised to see how drastically Nonie Wintour’s circumstances had changed since the divorce. She had moved into a simple, tiny town house in a rather drab area far from the vibrant center of London where all of her friends were, many with whom she had lost touch or simply severed contact. “She seemed sadder,” notes Lasky.

After the divorce from Charles, Nonie had seemingly disappeared from the scene altogether, and some thought she might have returned to the United States to live with her sister, Jean. In fact, she had decided to live alone in the working-class suburb of Balham and to drown herself in her social work. Blue-collar Balham, a part of which was known for street prostitution through the seventies and eighties, also was a target for comics like Peter Sellers who poked fun at the place in a popular British sketch called, “Balham, Gateway to the South.”

The one
Evening Standard
staffer who always was a favorite of Nonie’s from the early days was Alex Walker, who was shocked by Nonie’s new lifestyle. “Balham’s not the part of London where I
ever
would have imagined Nonie living,” he says. “It’s not where Nonie would find her kind of intellectual, with-it, stimulating company.”

Walker had visited Nonie once there but found it all too depressing. “It was a small place she lived in, and everything was a bit cramped, perfectly comfortable but not Nonie’s style,” he recalls. “There was a wariness about mentioning Charles. One didn’t do it. It was as if Charles didn’t exist.

“It struck me that she was filling her time with social work. There were all kinds of files in her place, case histories and so on that she brought home from her office. Nonie was probably doing very good work with unfortunate children, and I would guess many of them were in the Balham area. She had resigned herself to that life.

“Nonie had made her choice, and her choice did not lie with the friends she had known when she was married to Charles. It lay in the work that she had accustomed herself to doing and felt compelled to do.

“Both Nonie and Charles believed in suffering in silence,” Walker observes. “Nonie was a Boston Brahmin character who believed life was hard. And Charles was an English county man who thought that any expression of emotion was a bit vulgar.”

After that one dismaying visit to Balham, Walker invited her to dinner at a fine restaurant in London to cheer her up, to talk about books and films, their favorite mutual passions. But then he lost track of her. She’d moved and no one knew where or how to contact her.

After years of her husband’s womanizing along with their other problems, she had come to despise marriage. Anna, though, had a different, more positive view of the state of matrimony, at least one that she had begun expressing to colleagues in London during her editorship at British
Vogue
—a time when she and her husband talked daily by phone but were lucky if they saw each other and spent time together with the baby once or twice a month.

“Anna was going on and on like she was on a soapbox about marriage and how she felt it identifies you,” recalls one of her colleagues. “She said she thought marriage was a very important thing. She said, ‘Marriage says who you are.’ She said people should be committed enough to
say
who they are. Of course, she never used her married name. I got the feeling she felt it was more bold to be married than not married. But I thought it sounded more like a shrink talking than her talking. I thought it was David talking through her.

“I asked her about her marriage. I said, ‘He’s so much older than you, don’t you think about that?’ And she said, ‘Oh, he has the most energy of anybody I know. I talk to him many times a day and I miss him.’

“And then she said, ‘Right now, I think he’s wonderful.’ She left it kind of like it might not be forever.”

L
iz Tilberis and Grace Coddington felt that their days were numbered, that Anna was out to get them.

Ratcheting up the pressure, Anna constantly demanded reshoots. Cod-dington’s first had to be done three times until Anna finally signed off. When Coddington was on location, Anna commanded that she shoot a Polaroid of the setup (before the actual shooting started) and have a courier rush it back to the office. Anna would then scrutinize it and telephone Coddington, declaring, “Like it” or “Don’t like it.” If she didn’t, which was often, Coddington would have to start all over, wasting time and costing the company money.

“It was pure harassment and bullying on Anna’s part,” an editor maintains.

Used to the rules of the old regime, Coddington tended to be late—to work in the morning, back from lunch in the afternoon—which infuriated Anna, who once tracked her down to a restaurant and demanded that the former model who had controlled what went onto
Vogue’s
fashion pages for two decades return to the office posthaste, as if she were a lowly intern.

Tilberis was equally harassed. On the morning of her father-in-law’s funeral, she received a hand-slapping call from Anna, lecturing her that she was over her budget and ordering her not to take her assistant on a scheduled trip to New York. Tilberis was “horrified” and felt she was being “reprimanded like a willful child.”

Anna had a negative attitude about everything Coddington and Tilberis thought or did in regard to fashion. At the “horribly tense” editorial meetings to decide what would go into the magazine, the imperious and dictatorial editor in chief positioned herself on a hard-back chair, and if she didn’t like an idea she’d loudly tap her pencil on the desk, sending a chill through everyone present.

As one staffer who quit in disgust says, “She’s the first female bully I ever met. She treated everyone, except for her own little coterie, like trash. You could tell she got off on it. A real little bully of a woman, and for what? Power for her was what it was all about. Power’s Anna’s aphrodisiac. I mean,
Vogue’s
just a fashion magazine, a catalog to sell clothes, for God’s sake. And people had to be tormented so she could get a pat on the bum from Liberman and Newhouse, and get Grace Mirabella’s job.”

Anna and the veteran editors were on opposite sides and on a disastrous collision course. “She was horrified at the sort of work I was doing, the iconoclastic images that differentiated British fashion coverage from anything in American magazines,” Tilberis has stated. “I began to wonder how long I’d last and whether it was worth the angst.”

Anna trusted only a few, such as André Leon Talley, whose presence came as a shock to her subordinates because of his flamboyant manner and dress: patent leather pumps, striped stretch pants, red snakeskin backpacks, faux-fur muffs all superimposed on this gentle black giant who, in another world, could have been playing for the New York Knicks with his six-foot-seven frame. But here he was at British
Vogue
, advising her—the two of them and a few others against all the rest.

Most all the old guard’s layouts, concepts, and story ideas Anna declared she hated. Staffers wanted highbrow features, Anna demanded middle-of-the-road. “There is still a place for those wonderful, creative mood pictures for which British
Vogue
is famous,” Anna told a fashion reporter for the
Sunday Telegraph
, “but I also would like to see a balanced, modern approach to fashion—less drifting-through-the-woods and more realism.”

Anna especially detested a photo Tilberis had David Bailey shoot of future supermodel Christy Turlington wearing an almost open man’s shirt. She spiked it.

“Peremptory,” “rather tactless,” “unconcerned with ‘the little people,’” “quickly bored,” “didn’t let anything so mundane as courtesy get in her way,” is the way Tilberis saw her. She viewed Anna’s appointment as the start of a “reign of mediocrity.”

A major confrontation involving Anna, Tilberis, and Coddington took place at the collections in New York. The three were unhappily ensconced in a suite at the Algonquin Hotel trying to decide which clothes should be photographed when a firefight erupted over a Ralph Lauren double-layered coat.

Coddington loved it and demanded that it be shot. “It’s fabulous,” she said. Anna hated it. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s the look,” Tilberis said. The battle went on, Coddington fighting for “the look” and Anna always thinking ahead to what the reader’s (and Liberman’s) reaction would be. It got so bad that Tilberis suddenly felt panicky, began gasping for air, and excused herself and ran out of the room. Later she claimed the stress and anxiety of the situation had caused an attack of asthma, from which she would suffer for years.

“She was quite a whirlwind,” observes former fashion editor Sophie Hicks, who fled
Vogue
about six months after Anna’s reign of terror began. “When Anna took over, people were quite shocked because she was very dynamic and fast and took the job at great speed, and that was quite unusual. She was a
blast
—not a breath—of fresh air, worked much longer hours than any previous professional with a capital ‘P.’ Things were professional before Anna but much more relaxed. She hit the ground running and wanted to redo the magazine in her own image, worked extremely hard at it and expected others to work extremely hard—and they did mind that.”

Hicks saw an immediate change in the look and feel of the magazine under Anna’s watch. The issues were “more coherent . . . there were isolated things of more interest. It became less quirky, less individualistic. Some of the fashion before was better than after Anna came. But over all, if one adds it all together, the worst of
Vogue
was better, but the best was
not
better.”

Anna was bothered by certain British attitudes, one of them that English women, as she saw them, “are embarrassed to spend money on themselves, which is a shame.” Through
Vogue
Anna hoped to change all that. “If you earn the money,” she intoned, “it is yours and if you have a certain self-respect, it is terrific to go out and spend it on yourself.” Geraldine Ranson,
who wrote the piece for the
Sunday Telegraph
, pointed out that Anna earned an enormous salary, so “it may take her a while to come to grips with the reality of most of her readers’ domestic finances.”

Coddington felt as if the roof had caved in on her. In control for so many years at the magazine, she now was being treated horribly. To make matters worse, she was one of those who early on had supported Anna for the job.

“Anna turned out to be beastly to her,” states Winston Stona, a Jamaican businessman who was a friend of Coddington’s and had been a close pal of Jon Bradshaw’s. “Anna was terribly unkind to the point that I remember going to England and seeing Grace, and I said to her, ‘Listen, leave the bloody place.’ She was devastated at how Anna treated her.”

Coddington heeded his advice. Eight months after Anna took power, Coddington quit. She’d had it. “You don’t need a fashion director, because you’re it,” she said when she gave notice to become design director for Calvin Klein in New York.

Although Tilberis despised Anna, she lobbied with her for Coddington’s position. Anna put the job on hold and told Tilberis that if she wanted to keep her current position—let alone get a promotion—she had better shape up, do what she wanted her to do, stop complaining, and support her decisions and demands.

Tilberis, power hungry in her own right, played ball, and a month after Coddington quit, she got her job.

“I never became a convert to Anna’s themes,” Tilberis claimed later, “but I decided right then to be a dutiful number two. . . . I carried out Anna’s bidding directly.”

Things got slightly better between them, but skirmishes continued to rage at the magazine.

Anna was the attacker at
Vogue
but played the victim of the British press. She had come to hate the media. She considered herself a journalist, she was the daughter of a noted one, and she had been involved romantically in the past with many—yet in private and later in public she attacked Fleet Street. “The British press are worst,” she declared in 2002 while discussing its treatment of her when she was at British
Vogue
.

Everything about her became a target for criticism. Her father’s old paper, the
Evening Standard
, sent a reporter to interview her, and the story noted that Anna had offered the scribe a “Valium . . . to calm my nerves,” that
Anna’s smile “seems brief and insincere,” that after a decade in New York Anna was “not quite British,” and that her only enthusiasm was for articles on “career women, business suits and working out. . . . ‘There is a new kind of woman out there. She’s interested in business and money. She doesn’t have time to shop any more. She wants to know what and why and where and how,’ Anna declared. ‘So I feel the fashion pages, as well as looking wonderful, should give information.’”

The
Evening Standard
piece asked, “Is there anything nice to be said about Anna? Well, friends say she is a pushover—a mug for men, able to take a joke . . .”

The British press weren’t the only media doing unkind reporting about her.
The New York Times
noted that Anna “is a thorn in the side of London’s trendy set, who say the magazine has become too bland.” Anna’s response? “Any reaction is better than none.” She added, “A new editor is going to change a magazine. People resist change. British fashion was a little insular. One had to open it up.”

Around the same time the press was going after her, someone had designed a button meant to criticize Anna’s drastic makeover of the magazine. Thom O’Dwyer, the style editor of London’s
Fashion Weekly
, was spotted wearing one at a fashionable London restaurant. It read: “Vogue. Vague. Vomit.”

Anna had bigger problems, though. Her second in command, Tilberis, had become the subject of a spirited headhunt between Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, who both wanted her to come to New York and take big jobs with them in the wake of Coddington’s defection. Lauren had been the first to call, but when Tilberis swore Coddington to secrecy and told her of the $250,000 offer from Lauren, Coddington went directly to her boss, and the next thing Tilberis knew Klein was also courting her.

When Tilberis went to Anna’s office to offer her resignation in June 1987, Anna was shocked that she was leaving and then proceeded to denigrate Seventh Avenue and people like Lauren and Klein, who were its royalty. But Tilberis had already accepted Lauren’s offer, the press had announced she was following Coddington to America, and friends were planning going-away parties. Her family, she told Anna, was packed and ready to go, their house sold.

Anna called Newhouse and Liberman.

A couple of days later Tilberis (and soon the fashion world) got the shock
of her life. In a secret meeting, Anna disclosed in confidence that she was actually the one leaving British
Vogue
and she offered Tilberis her job, which she accepted right then and there.

Rumors about Anna’s possible departure from
Vogue
and her future in the United States had been swirling since earlier in 1987, around the same time reports appeared in the press that she was pregnant again.

One story in
The New York Times
about the speculation caused problems in the Condé Nast executive suite on Madison Avenue. Fashion reporter Michael Gross had concluded a column by quoting Liberman as saying, “It is possible that Anna Wintour will come to the U.S., within a certain period of time.” Gross ended by noting, “That should keep the rumors roiling.”

When he arrived at his desk the next morning, a series of urgent phone messages awaited him from Liberman. The reporter called instantly, and the first words out of Liberman’s mouth were, “Dear friend, it seems that
we
have gotten
me
in some trouble. What are
we
going to do to get
me
out of it?” According to Gross, Liberman gave the strong impression that he had been chastised for his comment—probably by Newhouse—and he was now demanding a correction.

“Obviously he had been read the riot act that morning,” says Gross, “and it took me forty-five minutes to talk him out of the correction, which I did by explaining to him that by the end of the day his parakeet will be shitting on the story, and if there’s a correction, all you’re going to do is keep this alive. It’s much better to let it pass.”

Anna’s second child was due to arrive on July 30, and she intended to work right up until July 29. “It’s not an illness,” she firmly explained to the
Daily Mail
. Anna had a scan done and knew it was a girl.

The talk about Anna leaving
Vogue
started just after Si Newhouse, who was aware of her growing discontent, had flown to London for a breakfast meeting with her. He wanted to placate her, buck her up, tell her that her time was coming, and offer her a new job back in New York.

Anna thought this was the big moment for which she’d been waiting, that Newhouse was going to hand her the editorship of American
Vogue
.

In mid-August, the gossip that something big was going to happen to Anna was confirmed.

She was returning to New York—not to
Vogue
to unseat Grace Mirabella
but rather as the new editor in chief of Condé Nast’s revered shelter magazine,
House & Garden
. That magazine’s longtime editor in chief, Lou Gropp, learned he had been canned three days after Anna’s appointment had been announced. “Lou was very brutishly fired,” says a former high-ranking editor at
House & Garden
. “He was on vacation in California, and he phoned the office every day, and one day he phoned from a public phone in a parking lot and Si told him he was history”

Anna was, as she stated later, “totally stunned” by Newhouse’s offer, and not happily stunned, because she could practically taste American
Vogue
.

“I went right back to the office and called Alex, and he said, Absolutely, you have to come.’ It was apparently Alex who pushed for me to go to
House & Garden
”