Front Row (32 page)

Another problem for Anna was that former editor Lou Gropp was well liked in the home magazine industry and every month wrote a cozy “from the editor” column reminiscing about houses he had lived in. Under Anna, the once warm and fuzzy feeling of the magazine was replaced by a stark stainless-steel and granite coldness, representative of its editor.

“Anna was a bad fit,” observes Denise Otis. “The mood about her wasn’t very good. You got the feeling there were ‘in’ people and ‘out’ people, and that hadn’t been true of the magazine before.”

While Anna had dealt with interior design stories at
New York
magazine, running an entire magazine based not on fashion but on fanciful shelter quickly took its toll. When Anna began showing fashion along with interiors, the magazine earned the sobriquet
House & Garment
. When she introduced celebrities—including trendy artists, hip architects, and old- and new-money Brits and Euros—wags began calling her magazine
Vanity Chair
and
Hot Gossip
.

Where there were once “pristine, people-free rooms,”
The New York Times
noted, “there was now a zippy mix of fashionably dressed models in quirky environments . . . ‘society’ lady decorators in their designer duds” and a playwright petting his dogs in an unmade bed.

Despite the criticism, Anna felt as if she had revolutionized the home magazine genre. “Up until she changed things, the layouts were of very staid rooms that were perfectly attired and looked like nobody had touched them,” Laurie Schechter observes. “They were dust free, forever. Anna so dramatically changed the book. But it was very jolting to subscribers who were the older garden people, and to people in the interior design world. I don’t think they [Condé Nast] were prepared for that world to be
so
set in its ways. For those people who were so addicted to the old format, the new one was more irreverent and mixed things up more. You rarely see a total repositioning of a magazine. Ideally, you don’t want to alienate your readership but increase or broaden it.”

One of Newhouse’s goals in putting Anna in the editor’s chair was to play catch-up with
Architectural Digest
, but that would never happen during her watch.
HG
lagged far behind by some sixty thousand issues a month, though its circulation grew slightly. “Our instinct told us we needed to make
House & Garden
into more of a living magazine than a typical shelter magazine,” said Bernard Leser, Condé Nast Publication’s president. Liberman and others wanted to beat
Architectual Digest
at its own game by being distinctly different. That they got. But business reportedly went south; the publisher of
Architectural Digest
boasted that as many as twenty of
HG’s
advertisers had jumped ship and come aboard his publication because of the changes Anna and her team had wrought.

Anna’s blueprint for
HG
was to show, as she put it, “the connection between fashion and style and design and decorating.” But she denied at the height of the controversy over her remake that she had turned it into a fashion magazine, although by early summer 1988 four of its first five covers showed women in designer dresses. Inside, stories of the fashion genre abounded, such as one that had models in classic little black dresses standing on classic little black chairs. Despite her denials, Ralph Lauren’s fashions appeared on the cover, with Yves Saint Laurent’s inside; celebrity hairdressers Kenneth, Christaan, and Didier Malige were featured cutting topiary.

While so many were displeased with Anna’s product, Newhouse acted overjoyed. In fact, he acknowledged that he pampered it as if it were their baby. “I saw it before it was published,” he said. “I saw it when it was laid down with the photostats.”

Liberman also came to her defense. He said he saw every layout because “Anna wanted my approval. I personally questioned the introduction of fashion, but she was so innovative and daring about it, and Si loved what she was doing. We were both stimulated and excited by the idea of a total magazine of style.”

By early June 1988, rumors once again were rampant that Anna was set to replace Mirabella, all of which were denied by Condé Nast brass. After all, Mirabella had made
Vogue a
. great success, and Anna was just getting down to business at
HG
.

She told
The Times
of London, wearing what was described as the briefest white tweed skirt Karl Lagerfeld could devise, that the rumors “are ridiculous. We’ve only just started, it would be crazy to leave now.”

The reporter noted that Anna “even dissembles with style.”

But the question remained, Why make a change?

O
n August 20, 1985, an American version of a trendy French fashion magazine called
Elle
appeared on American newsstands. Overnight, it became a publishing success story.

For Si Newhouse, it was the end of the world as he knew it. Well, almost.
Vogue
, he believed, faced its greatest threat and stiffest competition ever.

From that moment on, the message on high to Grace Mirabella was to make
Vogue
more like
Elle
, which had shrewdly picked up on the MTV generation’s short attention span, offering its quickly growing younger readership montages of flashy fashion layouts, crisper and spunkier headlines, shorter stories without jumps, and lots of exuberant hot models wearing youthful, sexy fashions.

Sister of the legendary thirty-year-old Parisian fashion magazine, American
Elle
was not designed to tell someone how to put style in her life, which
Vogue
subtly did—Mirabella’s philosophy was “give them what they never knew they needed.”
Elle
was aimed at fashionistas and wannabes who already had a thread of style, in everything from the clothes they wore to the food they ate to how they decorated their living spaces.

Newhouse must have been especially concerned when he read the May 5, 1986, issue of
Forbes
and noted that in just eight months
Elle
had “elbowed its way into the magazine racks alongside
Vogue.”
The director of print media for one of the world’s largest advertising agencies declared
Elle
“a fabulous
success story.” And
Elle’s
publisher stated that the magazine’s readership was younger than
Vogues
and less didactic than other women’s magazines. Circulation, the business magazine noted, was way up and, better yet, ad rates were less expensive than
Vogues
.

A quiet panic had set in at the upper echelons. On a cover shoot, Alex Liberman was said to have called the studio every twenty minutes demanding to know, “Does it look like an
Elle
cover? Does it look like an
Elle
cover?” At one point he actually called back and ordered that the model’s hair be cut shorter “just like an
Elle
cover.”

Mirabella was told in “charming and not-so-charming terms” to give
Vogue
the feel of
Elle
. She couldn’t and she wouldn’t, which of course did not go over well with the big guy upstairs, who passed the word that she was out of touch with young people and with women in general.

That message was usually funneled to Mirabella by Liberman, through whom she communicated with Newhouse, an odd setup and not a great career enhancer. Not talking directly with the head of the whole company because she disliked him intensely and never took him seriously was Mirabella’s curious style—and against Liberman’s advice.

Many times he had told her to get to know him. But she refused. Later, she pondered the possibility that some key two-way information regarding her views about
Elle
and other issues never made it to the intended party. “Alex,” she pointed out, “controlled the flow of information as it suited his purposes.”

But her biggest career faux pas was not following
Elle’s
lead, which is what Newhouse wanted. She firmly believed that
Vogue
was still the magazine some 1.2 million women a month turned to for their fashion fix, and that
Elle
“offered very little. . . . ”

Bad decision, as she would later acknowledge.

Through the month of May 1988, top secret meetings took place in the executive suite at Condé Nast with Si Newhouse, Alex Liberman, and Bernard Lesser. Planning was under way for Mirabella’s dismissal and Anna’s ascension, the job she could taste practically since the first time she shopped at Biba in the midsixties. According to Liberman later, it was Newhouse who wanted Mirabella out and Anna in. “I didn’t push for Anna Wintour,” he maintained. “She was a demand of Si’s.”

Whoever made the decision—and most find Liberman’s assertion hard to
swallow, since he was Anna’s biggest booster—she was elated. Her time had finally come.

“There were endless meetings with Si and Alex at which we talked mostly about dates and timing, because Alex was so undecided” about the timing, she stated later. “Sometimes it was going to be September, and sometimes the following January. The whole thing was unfair to Grace, who had not been told, and unfair to me, because I had to come back from the meetings and try to do a magazine that I knew I wasn’t going to be at for very long, and lie to all the people. It was awful, really awful.”

Anna and Mirabella had two things in common: their passion for fashion and the fact that both had taken doctors for husbands. Mirabella’s, Dr. William Cahan, was a cancer surgeon affiliated with the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York.

On June 28, 1988, upscale New Yorkers who didn’t have to punch a clock were already escaping the city for the long Fourth of July weekend, heading for beach houses on Long Island or country places in Connecticut, both especially popular with the fashion, style, and design crowd.

Mirabella was still at her office, but Cahan was at home relaxing after a stressful day in the operating room when the telephone rang. A family friend was urgently calling to tell him to turn on Channel 4. A promo said that the syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith, who had a segment on “Live at Five,” was about to dish some major gossip about Grace.

He switched on the TV just in time to hear Smith in her annoyingly creaky Texas voice tell viewers that his wife, at age fifty-eight, the editor in chief of
Vogue
for seventeen years, was about to be axed, and that Anna, who had a tempestuous history in the fashion magazine business and wasn’t liked by many, would be her successor four months before her thirty-ninth birthday.

“The hot publishing story is that this will probably happen on September first,” Smith stated. “Don’t ask me why Condé Nast would want to replace Grace Mirabella.
Vogue
is one of the healthiest, heftiest magazines in the Condé Nast chain. You know, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but they’re going to anyway.”

One of Smith’s greatest assets as a highly paid gossip is her ability to have it both ways—to stick in the knife while still appearing sympathetic to the victim. Someone at the top at Condé Nast had dropped a dime and she ran with it, even though Mirabella considered her a friend.

With the holiday weekend near and rumors about her demise flying, Mirabella should have expected something like this. Newhouse had a tendency to fire top editors before or during a holiday or vacation. He had notches on his belt to prove it. The most recent victim had been
House & Gardens
Lou Gropp. Now Anna was going to replace another Condé Nast veteran, just ten months after she took over
HG
. “What was a constant in all of Si Newhouse’s seemingly erratic behavior,” Mirabella would later observe, “was a kind of extreme insensitivity to the feelings of his editors.”

There was still another clue that something bad might befall Mirabella’s career. In early June, instead of attending an important furniture trade show in Chicago where the editor of
HG
was expected, Anna was in Paris front row center at a fashion show, which didn’t escape the keen eyes of both the furniture and the fashion people, and the drums started beating.

The Tuesday when the story broke Anna had left the office early in the afternoon, which was curious to her
HG
team because she had been spending long hours there molding the magazine in her image. But on that particular day, as if she knew that a dirty bomb was about to explode, she had oddly disappeared. Many later wondered whether she knew the leak was coming and didn’t want to be around to answer to anyone. The other question was whether she herself had leaked the story, either directly or indirectly. No one would put it past her, but no one ever knew for sure.

Refusing to believe what he was hearing, Mirabella’s husband immediately telephoned his wife, who had been told nothing about being replaced—she was innocently going about the business of locking up the next issue. Now they both were in shock.

In response to his question “What’s going on?,” all she could mumble was “I have no idea . . . I have no idea.”

“It had all the makings of a soap opera,”
Newsday
reported a few days later. “The formidable yet fallible editor of the world’s most vaunted fashion magazine is ousted. The hauntingly beautiful upstart ascends to the helm . . . with reports of plots and coups and tales of behind-the-scenes sniping.”

Mirabella headed upstairs to the office of her mentor to find out if there was any truth to the broadcast gossip.

“Grace, I’m afraid it’s true,” Liberman told her,

When she demanded an explanation, he claimed the axing wasn’t his idea and advised her to talk to Newhouse. “I had nothing to do with it,” he maintained.

She told him, “You’re going to regret this,” because of how it was handled.

Later, Liberman raised more questions than he answered when he described the succession as “a series of misunderstandings and mix-ups” and asserted that “the way it came out was unfortunate.”

Anna was jubilant that late afternoon. Her dream had finally come true. She’d been crowned editor in chief of
Vogue
, the world’s fashion bible and the jewel of the Condé Nast publishing empire. She had become the fifth editor of the nearly nine-decades-old magazine. But she was in hiding, no one knew where. She’d known for more than a month she had the job but had covered up and lied to everyone she knew, except for her husband.

Mirabella, meanwhile, was numb and in the spotlight.

She couldn’t believe that Newhouse had replaced her with an editor who many felt made a “fiasco” out of
House & Garden
, where ad pages were down and subscribers had disappeared. Newhouse, on the other hand, put forth that Anna had turned
HG
into a magazine of “wit, excitement and controversy.” And he was seemingly unbothered by the mess she’d left in her wake at British
Vogue
, so adoring he was of her.

To Mirabella, her dismissal and replacement by Anna was unconscionable and insane.

But Anna was the ultimate company girl, and Mirabella wasn’t. She’d thumbed her nose at Newhouse for too many years, and now she’d gotten her due, as he saw it. And so had Anna.

As one keen but cynical Condé Nast observer notes years later, “Anna was so far up Si’s you know what, she could see his fillings.”

A few hours after her brief meeting with Liberman, Mirabella reached Newhouse by telephone at home. Yes, he confirmed, he’d sacked her, and he told her to meet with him in his office the next morning to make arrangements for her departure and a financial settlement.

Early Wednesday, June 29, she found him at his desk in his stocking feet. It was just nine
A.M.,
but he’d been working since five, so he was relaxing.

“Well, it’s been a long time,” he said as he dropped the curtain on her career.

He asked her to stay on until mid-July to oversee the completion of the October issue and then sent her off to meet the corporate secretary to work out a severance package. Mirabella thought the offer was low and telephoned her friend the attorney and literary agent Mort Janklow. He came up with an alternative plan that his friend Newhouse accepted immediately.

That afternoon, this real-life melodrama continued to play out when Mirabella called a meeting of her staff to formally announce that she was leaving. “Unfortunately, management has seen fit to have me go earlier,” she said. Then she added, “Anna Wintour will be the new editor of
Vogue.”

Some, who hadn’t heard about the TV report, were shocked. Others, who watched the Liz Smith spectacle, had tears in their eyes.

Co–fashion creative director Polly Mellen performed her and-now-Mr.-DeMille-I’m-ready-for-my-close-up routine. As Mirabella later described the scene, “Grabbing her breast, she threw herself against the cabinet that held our TV and VCR and shouted, ‘My God, Grace! My God! How could this happen?’”

Only moments before, though, Mellen, long a champion of Anna, had told a colleague that she supported Mirabella’s firing, which Mirabella was aware of when Mellen gave her Oscar-worthy performance.

Later, Mirabella said, “I thought of Diana Vreeland’s line: ‘The stage lost its greatest actress when Polly Mellen joined
Vogue.’
”

Another editor bitchily pointed out to Mirabella, “Well, you don’t need the money” and mentioned something about the magazine needing “new blood.”

The other fashion creative director, Jade Hobson, immediately let it be known she was resigning. Hobson destested Anna and never forgot how Anna had treated her and others during her tenure as creative director.

Another veteran editor, astonished by what had transpired, stood by Mirabella’s desk and observed sadly, “This is a tough place. Very tough. I had no idea.”

While everyone knew she had been fired, Newhouse issued a memo to the staff that afternoon announcing that Mirabella had retired. Later, Mirabella would claim that she intended to leave the magazine of her own accord later that year or the next, which might have been her rationale to lessen the blow.

The next day
The New York Times
, in announcing the dramatic change in editors at the world’s most powerful fashion magazine, noted that the appointment of Anna “comes as
Vogue
is thought to be losing ground to
El
le” and quoted a top national media director as saying, “The scuttlebutt in the fashion industry is that
Elle
could be the new standard for the fashion industry, and that’s got to be disconcerting to
Vogue.”

Newhouse later told the
Times
that he long felt it was time to “reposition
Vogue
for the 90’s.” This despite the fact that under Mirabella, circulation had tripled.