Front Row (33 page)

Anna’s takeover, therefore, raised an important question: Why would Condé Nast, as Liz Smith had asked, fix something that wasn’t broke?

While
Elle
was certainly making a name for itself,
Vogue
was still far ahead of its competitors in advertising revenue. In 1987,
Vogue
had $79.5 million in ad revenue, while
Elle
had $39 million and
Harper’s Bazaar
stood at $32.5 million. However, Elle’s paid circulation had catapulted to 851,000 by 1987, while
Vogue’s
had stayed around 1.2 million.
Vogue’s
newsstand sales had slipped and advertising pages were flat.

While speculation about Anna replacing Mirabella had been floating around ever since Anna first came to
Vogue
as creative director, her succession still shocked the fashion world, particularly in the shabby way it unfolded and how Mirabella learned about it.

“For Ms. Mirabella,”
The New York Times
noted later, “it was an undignified ending to a highly successful career.” And Mirabella told the
Times
that the manner of her removal was “very unstylish, for such a stylish place.” She also stated that she never spoke to Anna about the rumors, noting Anna was “not anybody I have long conversations with.”

The firing didn’t have as much impact on Mirabella, though, as it did on
Vogue
editor of yore Margaret Case. Case was so upset by the shabby way her own dismissal was handled, the eighty-year-old fashionista, ill with cancer, depressed, and alone, committed suicide by jumping out of her fourteenth-floor apartment window.

In Mirabella’s case, she’d bounce back in the fashion magazine ball game big-time soon enough.

Meanwhile,
HG
advertisers were left flabbergasted by Anna’s abandonment. “To have the person responsible for those changes get up and leave after a few
months is quite a surprise,” declared the director of advertising for a major furniture company. “You just don’t take a magazine the caliber of
House & Garden
, change it around, and walk away.”

At
HG
, Nancy Novogrod, a former book-publishing executive editor who had joined the magazine a few months earlier, succeeded Anna. Novogrod said she planned to “inch” the magazine “back to interior design,” the same place it was when Anna took it over.
HG
lasted a brief time before Newhouse closed it down but later reopened it.

Shortly after that memorable July Fourth weekend massacre, Anna was having lunch at the plush Four Seasons Grill Room. At another table was Grace Mirabella, who had just locked up the October issue and was ready to bid a final adieu to the magazine that had been her home for years.

The two editors never exchanged a glance.

Vogue
was now Anna’s baby.

As one wag observed at the time, “Condé Nast editors may all breathe a sigh of relief because Anna had landed the only job where she may safely be expected to stay.”

A
nna began her reign as editor in chief of
Vogue
even before Grace Mirabella had signed off on the final piece of text and the last photo for her curtain-closing October issue.

By late July, in her virtually empty
HG
office on the fifth floor of the Condé Nast building, she had started pulling her team together and making her power felt by interviewing shaken
Vogue
staffers every half hour or so. Members of the old regime would do what they had to do for Mirabella and then report directly to Anna, who often put them on the hot seat by asking them what they did, why they thought they should continue doing what they did for
her
, and who
they
felt should or shouldn’t stay. The do-you-still-beat-your-wife tactic sent a chill through the place.

With Anna about to take over, paranoia and fear ran rampant among those employees who saw their worlds crashing down under the new boss woman.

Mirabella remembered those last days as being “a strange and ugly time” with people walking around “whispering and looking over their shoulders to see who was listening.” She was especially peeved when she saw Si Newhouse actually walking the corridors of
Vogue
, where he was rarely seen, carrying baskets of jewelry and other things in and out of Anna’s office to preview for her first issue. It was, she felt, “like a slap in the face” to see him so involved.

Monday, August 1, 1988, Anna’s first full day as the head of
Vogue
, started
horrendously. Liz Smith had another scoop that was profoundly disturbing. The item alleged a romantic link between Anna and Newhouse, a rumor that had begun back when Anna was recruited by Alex Liberman and Newhouse from
New York
magazine, and one Anna was well aware of.

Nevertheless, the spanking-new editor in chief went ballistic. Not only did it cause problems for Anna and Newhouse, but the bitchy item would put what was described as a severe strain on Anna’s relationship with her husband, who is said to have gotten deeply involved behind the scenes in the imbroglio.

A catty item of this sort appearing on her debut at
Vogue
was almost guaranteed and shouldn’t have come as any great surprise. It had been open season on Anna ever since she had taken over British
Vogue
because so many people in the fashion magazine business and the rag trade had it in for her—either jealous of her success, or a victim of her imperiousness, or both.

But Smith felt the rumor had enough legs to warrant running with it.

Was it payback?

Despite the fact that Smith had run the item about Mirabella’s firing, she was known to be close friends with her. Mirabella later stated that Smith “was furious” with Condé Nast for giving someone the green light to “leak” the story before telling Mirabella.

Besides suggesting an intimate relationship, the item essentially repeated that old antifeminist saw that any successful woman who makes it to the top probably slept her way there. And while Anna was far from being a feminist, the assertion made her see red.

Rather than simply ignore the gossip, or laugh it off as the bitchiness of the fashion business, Anna was loaded for bear.

Within a week after the item ran, she called a mandatory morning meeting of her editorial staff and anyone else in the organization interested in hearing what she had to say.

“She was outraged—
outraged
—about the Liz Smith item and was not going to let it go by unanswered,” says a female former Condé Nast executive who had worked closely with Anna. “She was very upset that people thought this was still a world in which women couldn’t get ahead without sleeping with the boss.

“I thought David was completely behind the speech,” the former executive says. “There were certain things Anna said that I didn’t think she was capable of. I didn’t think that she could be the architect of such a speech. It was strong. It took the issue on where I wouldn’t think she would have taken it on. She sounded angry, but appropriately so.

“It was a difficult thing to do in light of the fact she’d just taken on this huge job, and the person she’s accused of sleeping with owns this huge company. Anna was very prepared and I could tell, knowing her, that this was something she had genuinely discussed with somebody very close to her, that this somebody was also very upset and had thought it through and addressed it. And that would have been David.

“Anna did it in a very dignified way, saying people still think this is the way women got ahead. Anna rarely ever held these kinds of meetings. It was one of very few such performances, and it was not a very English thing to do.”

Anna stood on stilettos throughout her remarks, which lasted less than twenty minutes in a meeting room on the twelfth floor where advertising and promotion was located. After finishing, she took no questions and told her people to go back to work and move forward.

If anyone applauded, no one can recall.

“It wasn’t like everyone was shocked,” says the former executive. “While unusual, it was probably a smart thing for Anna to do. Her comments didn’t sound like Bill Clinton’s ‘I didn’t sleep with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky’”

Afterward, staffers gathered in small groups to talk about the shocking events. “I, for one, thought she was telling the truth, and I always thought it was handy for people at
Vogue
to believe that she had a thing with Si because they didn’t want to see Anna validated,” says the former executive.

Newhouse eventually and genially commented to Smith that he was flattered by all the gossip but declared that he was “very much in love with my wife and my wife’s dog,” and stated firmly that there was no truth to what Smith had printed.

Around the same time as the Liz Smith item ran,
Newsday
did a major story about Anna’s takeover at
Vogue
and quoted an unnamed “fashion veteran,” who also asserted, “Si is in love with her. He loves the way she looks, he loves the way she flirts. . . . ”

Despite Anna’s sincere and forceful denial, talk of a cozy relationship between Anna and Newhouse continued.

“There were longtime and long-standing rumors that Anna and Si were romantically involved, and it was never anything but smoke,” says fashion writer Michael Gross. He said it was never the kind of gossipy story
The Times
would have ever chased and pointed out that “people in the fashion world are vicious, envious bitches—male and female.

“Anna’s rise caused a lot of envy and bitchiness. All you had to do was see Si Newhouse and Anna Wintour in a room together to realize that Si was
very
pleased to have Anna around him. Now, can you extrapolate sex from that? If you’re a fashion editor sitting in your three hundredth fashion show subsisting on cigarettes, coffee, and champagne in the nineteenth row looking down on Anna Wintour in the front row, sure, one could come up with that. But there was never enough there that I even chased it. Anna was already with David. She was breeding. Mothers don’t usually go off and have affairs.” (Down the road he’d be proved wrong about the latter, though the man in question wasn’t Si Newhouse.)

Laurie Schechter, who had come over to
Vogue
as style editor with Anna, also remembers her as being “highly disturbed and upset” about the Liz Smith item. “I don’t think Anna’s speech was a case of thou doth protest too much,” she maintains. “But she definitely has a way with men. They become enamored of her. She’s a striking woman and she has that mysterious allure, and her charms get turned on for men. But I didn’t think, personally, that the rumor was true. How pathetic that people couldn’t acknowledge she was at
Vogue
because she deserved to be there and not because she slept with Si Newhouse. Men can be carried a long way on the enamored quality of a woman like Anna. It doesn’t have to be physical.”

For Anna, her appointment seemed almost inauspicious. If there was a celebration of her coronation, no one was aware of it. So much venom was being spewed, so much anger and angst abounded. The Liz Smith story was like pouring gasoline on glowing embers.

Some fourteen years later, having been involved in a real, well-documented, and highly publicized extramarital affair that destroyed her marriage, Anna was still oddly vexed about that old and yellowed gossip item.
As a recipient of a 2002 Matrix Award for magazines, sponsored by New York Women in Communications, she brought up the gossip that most everyone had forgotten—the latest scandal, involving her and wealthy Texan Shelby Bryan, being much more current and scrumptious.

While the mood at the award luncheon was described as upbeat and gracious, Anna took a “defensive tone” in her acceptance speech. She recalled for the audience, including Walter Cronkite, who was on the dais, that on her first day as editor in chief of
Vogue
, “a nationally syndicated gossip writer said that an alleged affair with my boss had got me my job.” Anna emphasized that she believed “none of this would have happened if I had been a man.” A surprise and ironic speaker at the affair after Anna accepted her award and vented was an iconic figure who over the years had been embroiled in extramarital affairs—William Jefferson Clinton.

Besides Laurie Schechter, Anna brought with her to
Vogue a
. team that included André Leon Talley; Gabe Doppelt, who had bonded closely with Anna; Charles Gandee; Derek Ungless,
Vogue’s
new art director, who along with Anna was responsible for some of the controversial changes at
HG;
and a couple of other creative talents.

Among those who left were Jade Hobson, who went to Revlon for a time (but the other fashion creative director, Polly Mellen, stayed on); managing editor Lorraine Davis left but stayed within the Condé Nast organization; features editor Amy Gross accepted a position at
HG;
associate editor Kathleen Madden also resigned but stayed at Condé Nast; the two-person living department was killed off, and Anna’s once close friend and colleague Paul Sinclaire, who had been a fashion editor at
Vogue
where he also was a close associate of Mirabella’s, went to
HG
. In all, some thirty staffers either were pink-slipped or turned in their resignation within a month or two of Anna’s ascension.

With Anna gone from
HG
, new editor Nancy Novogrod added the old name
House & Garden
in small letters under the big
HG
initials, in hopes of winning back subscribers who had jumped the garden fence when Anna was in residence. The magazine didn’t have long to live, though, in its latest incarnation. In 1993, Si Newhouse killed off the more than nine-decades-old monthly because its comeback wasn’t fast enough. That same year he bought
its rival,
Architectural Digest
. Anna’s shoddy renovation of
HG
apparently couldn’t be repaired.

The biggest surprise addition to Anna’s team was one of the giants of British
Vogue
who had fled from Anna’s flogging—Grace Coddington. She had been working for Calvin Klein in New York for about eighteen months when Anna came into power. Coddington missed the fashion magazine world and she felt, after working in New York, that she had a better understanding of the American woman and her fashion needs. She telephoned Anna and said, “I’d like to come back,” and Anna responded, “I’m starting on Monday. Why don’t you start with me?” Anna gave her the title of fashion director and put her high on the masthead. There was talk within the industry that Coddington took a substantial salary cut and ate lots of crow to come work for Anna again.

“Anna’s very mercurial,” notes Schechter regarding Anna’s decision to hire Coddington. “She’s a lot like fashion—short skirts this season, long skirts next. She can be a bit like that with people, too. Even when she was pursuing André [Leon Talley, when he was a freelancer], she used to say to me, ‘Oh, I think his work is so over the top, don’t you?’ That’s the way she is. It didn’t surprise me that Grace went back. Working for a fashion designer like Calvin Klein is a very singular point of view and doesn’t allow the depth or range that working at a fashion magazine does, working with a lot of different designers’ clothes and points of view rather than just one.”

Anna, who despised the Brit mentality that ran
Vogue
in London, now did a complete one-eighty and acknowledged that when she took over American
Vogue
, “I took the British approach with me because it seemed what was needed was some sort of combination of the two.”

Anna’s immediate goal for
Vogue
was to “put a happier face on things,” says Schechter—models smiling and looking exuberant. “Even Anna’s first cover was a big departure because it wasn’t just a beautiful face, it was a smiling, beautiful face.”

That cover, dated November 1988, was far different from anything Grace Mirabella or Diana Vreeland or any of the others before Anna had ever dreamed or had nightmares about. It showed a pouty-lipped nineteen-year-old Israeli model named Michaela Bercu with mussed hair wearing tight,
faded fifty-dollar jeans—
jeans
, of all things, on the cover of glamorous
Vogue
, the old-line fashionistas gasped—and sporting a ten-thousand-dollar Christian Lacroix T-shirt designed with a bejeweled pattern in the shape of a cross.

“I wanted the covers to show gorgeous real girls looking the way they looked out on the street rather than the plastic kind of retouched look that had been the
Vogue
face for such a long time,” declared Anna. “I wanted to bring in new photographers and just liven the whole thing up a bit.”

Critics were astonished at what the new arbiter of American fashion had done with her first issue. As
The New York Times
pointed out, “It may well be the first time blue jeans have appeared on a
Vogue
cover—without a belt and with the model’s tummy showing, no less.”

“Weird” was the way a Neiman Marcus executive described the cover.

Anna’s view of mixing jeans with couture was to convey to the readers that a woman can “make an outfit her own by how she puts it together.” She called the issue “transitional” and pointed out that “
Vogue
girls have a kind of ‘don’t touch me’ look. I think we have a freer attitude toward fashion. When we looked at the couture this time, we tried to look at it in a more accessible way.”