Front Row (36 page)

I
n the summer of 1991, a monster rumor began sweeping the fashion world. The hot buzz was that Liz Tilberis, who loathed Anna, and whom Anna detested, was on the short list to take over American
Harper’s Bazaar
.

This would mean all-out war between the two, the fashion magazine equivalent of Operation Desert Storm, which had been launched at the beginning of the year in the Persian Gulf If the rumor came to pass, Anna and Tilberis would be the opposing generals on the fashion battlefield.

Bazaar
—the first magazine to hire Anna when she arrived in New York and the first one to fire her—had fallen far behind
Vogue
and
Elle
in popularity over the years. The editor who was said to have canned Anna, Anthony Mazzola, was still in charge. The talk was that the wife of the head of the Hearst magazine empire was pushing for his replacement and that Tilberis seemed the best candidate.

Hearst wanted to get
Bazaar
back in the game and take on
Vogue
. There had always been an intense rivalry with Condé Nast, with each using every opportunity to steal talented personnel. Now Hearst felt that with Tilberis in charge of
Bazaar
, it might have a shot at playing catch-up with
Vogue
. Tilberis would be
Bazaars
Anna Wintour.

The chatter about Hearst’s plans for Tilberis and
Bazaar
had gotten so intense—bouncing back and forth across the Atlantic—that Si Newhouse’s
cousin, Jonathan Newhouse, who ran Condé Nast’s European operations, demanded a meeting with her. Over poached eggs and coffee at Claridge’s, he noted generously that she was due for a raise. He warned her she’d hate living in New York and added an ultimatum: If she took the job, she would “never work for Condé Nast again.”

But Tilberis had a number of trusted cheerleaders telling her to go for it when it was offered. Among them, surprisingly, was Anna’s own fashion director and top lieutenant at
Vogue
and Tilberis’s closest friend, Grace Coddington.

“Get your ass over here,” Tilberis was told by Coddington, who didn’t seem to have problems with the two of them being “friendly competitors.”

But Anna certainly would.

Coddington even helped Tilberis come up with alibis in case she was spotted in New York holding top secret meetings with Hearst brass: say she was on an anniversary trip or shopping. Coddington and Tilberis even had discussions about possibly joining forces again, becoming a team like they were in London when Anna came over and forced Coddington out. But they decided against it because Coddington had always been Tilberis’s superior and probably would have trouble working under her. Moreover, Coddington was now happy working with Anna. “We [Tilberis and Coddington] trusted our ancient friendship enough to figure out a comfortable compromise between our usual wont to dish and a more sensible policy of don’t ask, don’t tell,” Tilberis said.

Top fashion photographers, like Patrick Demarchelier, who could make
any
woman look stunning, told Tilberis that
Bazaar
was a great opportunity for her, and he would work for her if she was able to hire the controversial French art director Fabien Baron, who had been at Italian
Vogue
.

Tilberis was building a highly respected staff, and she hadn’t even gotten the offer yet.

But she was taking the advice of her friends and colleagues seriously. Since Anna left four years earlier, things had gotten worse at British
Vogue
. There had been management shifts at Condé Nast in London that did not sit well with Tilberis. And just like the stiff competition Anna’s
Vogue
was getting from
Elle
, Tilberis’s
Vogue
was fighting what appeared to be a losing battle for the hearts and minds of its readers with what she saw as the “slightly pornographic”
five-year-old British upstart
Marie Claire
. It now outsold
Vogue
by more than 10 percent with its mix of sexy articles and models.

During the Paris collections in October 1991, the forty-four-year-old Tilberis met for the first time with the president of Hearst magazines, D. Claeys Bahrenburg, and the two hit it off After subsequent meetings, she wrote a detailed series of demands: full editorial control, the best photographers, big editorial and promotional budgets. She also wanted to fire existing people and hire her own staff because she knew from watching Anna take over British
Vogue
“how difficult it was to inherit a recalcitrant, embittered staff.”

In short, if she were to take the job, Tilberis wanted carte blanche.

She then had a sit-down in New York with Si Newhouse. The meeting did not go well. She voiced some of her unhappiness with the way things were going in London, and he hardly responded. Later, Tilberis noted, “If I hadn’t had another job offer in the background, I would have left his office feeling thoroughly dejected.” Had she got a better response from him, she might have stayed.

Tilberis wasted no more time and cut a deal with Hearst. Tony Mazzola had already resigned but agreed to stay on to edit a 125th anniversary issue of the magazine.

On January 6, 1992, she was named editor in chief of
Harper’s Bazaar
, putting Brits at the helm of the most venerable fashion magazines in the United States.

Anna’s only immediate public response was not one of congratulations. To
The New York Times
she said merely, “The more British editors, the better.”

Spy
magazine, New York’s equivalent of
Private Eye
in London, was prompted to publish a humorous piece called “The New British Invasion: How American Publishing Has Been Taken over by People with Charming Accents and Bad Teeth.” An illustration by Al Hirschfeld showed a Beatles-style group called “The Brits,” with Anna and the
New Yorkers
Tina Brown on guitars and Liz Tilberis on drums. They were just several of dozens of British writers and editors—women and men—who had come to the United States, many working for Condé Nast.

In a similar piece in
The New York Times
, Edwin Diamond, media critic
for
New York
magazine, surveyed the phenomenon of fashion editors from the UK invading America. He concluded, “I don’t think there is any confirmed data that says that British women have better taste or sharper editing instincts than American women.”

Image, accent, and snob appeal were thought by observers to be the Brits main selling point to U.S. magazine publishers.

Anna didn’t offer a private salute to Tilberis, either. “I didn’t get any flowers of congratulations from her,” Tilberis said later. “No matter what either of us said [pleadingly and privately to reporters] to play down our personal rivalry, the press on both sides of the Atlantic were intent on setting up a cat-fight. Anna versus Liz,
Vogue
versus
Bazaar
, Condé Nast versus Hearst—it was far too juicy to resist.”

But it was true—the catfight, the rivalry, and the media circus.

In London, readers awoke to the headline, “Liz and Anna wage savage Frock War,” in the
Daily Express
. The story declared that Tilberis’s appointment “has set handbags flailing in the outwardly elegant, intrinsically vicious world of high fashion.” It went on to report that Anna “is certainly not laying out the welcome carpet. The Frock War between the Boadiceas of fashion is savage and fingernails are blood red.”

There was truth to what Fleet Street was reporting.

In Paris, at the couture previews, Anna sat stone-faced at a table just a few feet away from Tilberis and never said a word to her, refused even to acknowledge her presence. Ponytailed Karl Lagerfeld, a designer for Chanel, fluttered between the two of them in hopes of warming the chill, but to no avail.

Threatened with being banned from its pages,
Vogue
photographers and models were put on notice not to work for
Bazaar
. The other side made the same declarations. A
Vogue
editor at the time says, “Every time a photographer got an offer from them we upped the ante. If they beat us and got a photographer we wanted, it cost them huge money.”

Tilberis tried to convince photographers that they would have more freedom working for her than for Anna. “Anna Wintour’s style, as I knew from working with her,” Tilberis said, “is prescriptive. She tells people what she wants and they have to come back with it. If it’s not what she has in mind, she kills it. I kept repeating that
Bazaar
was going to be far more democratic.”

The battle for the photographer Peter Lindbergh, who shot Anna’s first
American
Vogue
cover, underscored the kind of hardball both sides were playing. When Tilberis got word that Lindbergh was ready to sign a contract with
Bazaar
, she booked the next flight to Paris to meet with him. But when she arrived at Kennedy Airport, she ran head-on into Si Newhouse, also Paris-bound and determined to have Lindbergh sign a
Vogue
contract for more money. Tilberis won; the creative freedom she promised did the trick. She also got Demarchelier to shoot exclusively for her. All of this Anna brushed off. Her philosophy, and that of Condé Nast, was that there are always others out there.

Tilberis’s salary along with perks was more than one million dollars. Anna was the highest-paid magazine editor in the world, earning close to two million, with built-in bonuses in her contract for circulation gains that could bring in seven more figures. She had a bottomless clothing budget and an enormous editorial budget, was surrounded by the most beautiful people in the world, had flower-filled suites when she traveled to the world’s most glamorous fashion capitals, had a Lincoln Town Car at her disposal, could catch a flight on the Concorde whenever, and was wafer thin (while Tilberis wore a size fourteen, about which the British press had a field day). Indeed, Anna had the kind of glamorous, glitzy Olivia Goldsmith–character life any woman worth her Manolos would covet.

Still, she was envious of what Tilberis was getting from Hearst.

In New York, a key
Vogue
editor under Anna at the time says, “She was fuming. She had no respect for Liz’s work, thought she was still way behind the times, and couldn’t believe she’d worked such an incredible deal for herself. Anna put out the word: Destroy
Harper’s Bazaar
at any cost. She wanted to see Liz Tilberis embarrassed out of her job. Anna’s all about beating the competition, keeping herself on top, pleasing Si Newhouse. I felt like we were on a war footing. We
were
on a war footing.”

Attempting to put a happy face on their very real and unpleasant feud, Anna described her relationship with Tilberis as “friendly” and said they even intended to have lunch “real soon.” The media “is just trying to make something out of nothing,” she maintained. “We had a conversation just the other day—about face-lifts.”

In fact, Anna wasn’t about to give a break to Tilberis or, for that matter, anyone who wanted to glorify her in any way.

Such was the case with the veteran British journalist Georgina Howell, who had interviewed Anna and her father for a candid London newspaper profile years earlier. Howell had won the
Vogue
Talent Contest at sixteen and later had served as fashion editor of the
Observer
, had worked for the
Sunday Times
, and had written a number of books, including
Vogue Women
and
In Vogue: Sultans of Style and Season
. Howell had also been Tina Brown’s deputy editor at the
Tatler
.

By the early nineties, with the feud between Anna and Brown bubbling, there was a bidding war for Howell’s services. Brown wanted her for
Vanity Fair
, and Anna for
Vogue
. “I had to decide between the two,” Howell says, “but Anna just offered me
so
much money that I had to accept it.” Howell also had an arrangement to write pieces that would appear only in Great Britain for the London
Telegraph
magazine, which at the time was edited by Anna’s friend Emma Soames.

One of Howell’s first assignments for Soames was to go to New York and write a profile of the newly appointed Tilberis, who was, Howell says, “the toast of the town. Everyone thought she was wonderful.” The article was only for British circulation for the
Telegraph
and would not appear in the United States.

“And so, as I always did when I went over to New York,” says Howell, “I dodged into Anna’s office and said hello, and she asked, ‘What are you doing here?’”

When Howell said she was interviewing Tilberis for a
Telegraph
profile, Anna went ballistic. “She said, ‘Do you not consider that a conflict of interest?’ I said, ‘Well, no, because it’s for England, not America, and it’s part of my London contract.’ And Anna yelled, ‘WELL, I DO!’ and that was the end of it. . . . My contract with American
Vogue
ran to its end and wasn’t renewed. I thought Anna and I had an excellent relationship. But Anna and Liz Tilberis were rivals in the marketplace.”

Looking back years later, Howell says she was “sorry to lose the money and sorry to have offended Anna, but as I reflected, and I’ve gone on reflecting over the years, I think perhaps Anna could have been
bigger
about it. But she does tend to demand total loyalty in a way that I reserve for private relations, not for business. I didn’t see it in my mind as being disloyal to Anna. It never occurred to me that it would be a problem for her.

“Liz [Tilberis] was a good friend of mine. She was a good friend of Emma
Soames, who was a great friend with Anna, and they were in constant touch, and I did think that Emma wouldn’t have asked me to do it if she’d seen any problem with Anna. Now I’ve concluded I
never
really had a personal relationship with Anna. I was surprised it turned out that way.”

The big question facing the magazine industry, still in a recession and with advertising revenue nose-diving and newsstand sales pale, was whether
Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Baazar
, and the newly minted
Mirabella
could be supported in such lean times. In 1991, for instance, ad pages had declined as much as 26 percent for
Bazaar
and almost 15 percent for
Vogue
compared with a year earlier. But Anna’s
Vogue
still received all of the kudos. One head of a major media buying and planning service described
Vogue
as “the gold standard of fashion for intelligent modern women.
Elle
doesn’t have the substance of
Vogue
and is more for the superficial external woman. I like
Mirabella
, which skews a tiny bit older. It’s a good threesome, and it’s possible to look at
Harper’s Bazaar
and say, ‘Who needs it?’”