Front Row (41 page)

Asked for comment, David Shaffer stated, “I have no plans to get divorced, and I hope Anna has no plans to get divorced.”

In London, Anna’s father’s former newspaper,
The Evening Standard
, quoted an anonymous “close family friend” as saying, “I think for the first time in her life, she is madly in love with someone and she finds the whole experience totally overwhelming.”

When
Texas Monthly
did a small profile on Bryan in the wake of the breaking scandal, he confirmed that he and his wife had separated. But regarding Anna he stated, “There’s an old-fashioned view that your personal life should be kept private, and that’s my view.”

In her syndicated column in
Newsday
, Liz Smith called Bryan “the romantic fly in the sticky ointment of Anna Wintour’s marriage. . . . And let me add this, I have heard only the most unsettling things about Mr. Bryan, all about how ‘fascinating, naughty, thrilling, exciting, and bad-boyish’ he is said to be. Conversation about this tycoon makes him a cross between a movie star and Lord Byron. And I am told by everyone observing that the delectable Wintour is over the moon in love with him, more excited and happier than she has ever been in her formidable and controlled life. It isn’t just his money, either, although, of course, money is always in vogue.”

While Anna refused to talk to the press about the scandal, her and Shaffer’s high-powered New York lawyer and spokesman, Ed Hayes, put up a smoke screen. “I promise you that I’m not doing a divorce. They’re together, they love their children, and they’re going to stay together,” he said.

Every September, the world’s fashion press descends on New York for the annual rag trade bacchanal called Fashion Week, when the beautiful models strut their stuff, when fortunes and reputations of designers and manufacturers are won or lost, depending usually on how Anna reacts to what she sees and what
Vogue
subsequently features in its glossy pages.

But all the attention for the 1999 Fashion Week was on Anna herself, seated, as usual, front row center. Her marital scandal was on everyone’s glossy lips.

As the fashion reporter of London’s
Daily Telegraph
, pointed out, “the fashionistas loved it. After all, this is an industry that thrives on celebrity gossip at the best of times, and when the target is one of its own—indeed the widely feared queen of them all—you can virtually hear the shears being sharpened.”

That week, the September 20 issue of
New York
magazine, with every fashion person in the world in town, chose to make Anna its cover girl. The story was headlined “The Summer of Her Discontent,” and it went into gossipy detail about Anna’s extramarital relationship. The article called Bryan “a flashy extrovert . . . with a notoriously roving eye.”

On the outside, Anna was very British stiff upper lip, but on the inside, according to a close source, “She was embarrassed and devastated. For someone like Anna, who is so private and secretive, to have her dirty laundry strutted down the runway for the world to see, to have the biggest skeleton in her closet on display, it was the worst. She railed against the press, against her competitors at other magazines who were gloating. Anna’s never been much for introspection, but she suddenly was doing a whole lot of soul-searching. She felt guilty. She felt sick. She didn’t know which way to turn.”

And, indeed, there was great schadenfreude in the bitchy, wicked world of fashion.

Despite her disgust at all the horrendous gossip, the media-savvy, tight-lipped, ultraprivate Anna actually cooperated somewhat with
New York
magazine
as it was preparing its story and gathering photos. Surely she must have realized that the weekly was rubbing its hands together and was going to do a number on her. But she agreed to be interviewed, to a point. The article quoted her as saying just forty-two words regarding the scandal. Over lunch at her favorite table at the Four Seasons with the writer she said, “There are certain things that no one wants to read about in the tabloid press.” She added, “You know that your friends and your family have one vision, and if the outside world has another, then that’s just something that you don’t focus on.” She also acknowledged that there was nothing in any of the reports that she wanted to correct.

However, Anna’s involvement with the photographs that ran with the article was an entirely different story. While she agreed to the brief interview, she refused at first to pose for an exclusive photo and instead sent over to cover editor Jordan Schaps, her longtime friend at the magazine, a box containing pictures she was authorizing the magazine to use.

“One was in black and white taken by
[Vogue
fashion photographer] Mario Testino,” says Schaps, “and it had Anna with bangs down to her eyebrows, big sunglasses, and a fur coat pulled up so you barely saw her. It could have been Audrey Hepburn or Greta Garbo. She looked to be concealed, hiding, and very removed.”

Schaps went to the editor overseeing the story, told him he didn’t like the photo, and asked to be told when the interviewing was finished. He said he had a plan. When he got word that the editorial side had finished, he called Anna.

“I told her, ‘Look, we all know the story is not going to be a puff piece; it’s going to be tough. Why should you not look terrific, look courageous, look open on the cover? If the readers see a great cover they’ll think it’s a great story, no matter what. We’ll go into a studio and not come out until we’re all satisfied.’ ” It was the weekend. Anna said she was taking her children to see a tennis match, but she’d think about it.

A few days later she called Schaps and agreed to pose, but not with the photographer he had suggested, whom she did not know. She wanted the famed fashion and celebrity shooter Herb Ritz. Schaps agreed, and the shoot was scheduled for the next day at Chelsea Piers, a commercial and entertainment complex on the Hudson River.

Anna arrived in a tank top over a short skirt, and with her was André Leon Talley, who was there as her stylist, “fussing and mussing and making sure everything was fine,” Schaps says.

In the end,
New York
got an exclusive cover photo of Anna. It showed her unsmiling, looking determined, her bob streaked with blond, wearing a tight white wife-beater, her skinny but toned arms defiantly crossed. It was a hot shot, but she wasn’t thrilled with the story.

“I heard it had a very devastating effect on her,” Schaps says.

At
Vogue
, managing editor Laurie Jones contends that “Anna allowed them to profile her,” which was not actually the case. The magazine was going to do the story whether or not she cooperated, but Anna’s hope was that by offering some cooperation they might go easy on her.

Jones says she was “not surprised” that Anna agreed to participate to the extent that she did, and notes that she herself was offended by the article. “I told Anna I wanted to write a letter to the editor, which I did to complain, but she never would have asked me. She never feels she’s being picked on unfairly and never complains. She would never say anything, and there have been things in print which are totally inaccurate and unfair, but she wouldn’t complain. She just thinks these are things she has to deal with, and she deals with them by herself. She is a very strong woman.”

As for Anna’s affair, Jones says, “I was very surprised . . . it was something nobody really expected, but she seems very happy.”

N
ovember 1999, the cusp of the new millennium, was the cruelest month for Anna.

Even in the best of times—and those were the worst—she wasn’t looking forward to it.

For November marked a major milestone in her life: the big five-o.

Turning fifty, a difficult rite of passage for most, was even tougher for Anna, whose whole being and philosophy, both for herself and for
Vogue
, was based on looking young—model young, movie star beautiful young, miniskirt and Manolos sexy young.

But now she faced fifty embroiled in a horrid, very public extramarital affair and a hellish divorce. Moreover, she was concerned whether her relationship had legs, because in recent months her lover had been on and off her radar.

“Shelby was cooling his heels,” says an insider. “Katherine had caught Shelby before. He had apologized and said he’d never do it again if she took him back. Now he got caught again, this time with Anna, and he was profusely apologizing. At that point I don’t think he wanted to divorce his wife for Anna.”

Another knowledgeable source observes, “Shelby was not the epitome of the monogamous guy, and Katherine knew that. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Katherine knew very early on that Shelby had hooked up with Anna, but I don’t think Katherine ever thought it would come to much.”

For a time there was speculation that Anna and Bryan had ended it, and that Anna was trying for a reconciliation with an angry David Shaffer.

A woman writer friend of Jon Bradshaw’s, who also knew Anna, was shocked when she first saw Bryan and noticed his resemblance to Bradshaw and how similar they acted around women. “I met Shelby one night at my literary agent’s house and he was already with Anna, and flirted with me. I couldn’t believe it!”

On Wednesday, November 3, Anna celebrated her fiftieth birthday.

The very next day, she got an urgent call from her brother Patrick in London. Anna’s father,
the
most important influence in her life, whose icy manner and editorial style she inherited and emulated, had died in his home in Tisbury, Wiltshire. At his side was his second wife, Audrey. Wintour was eighty-two years old, and the cause of death was cerebroarteriosclerosis, or a hardening of the arteries in his brain.

Along with all the turbulence in her life, Anna was now struck with great sadness over her father’s passing.

“She was devastated, in a state of shock,” says a longtime family friend. “First of all, there was all of the horrible chatter over her affair, and then came her father’s death. It was too,
too
much, even for Anna, and she’s like the Rock of Gibralter. Charles really was the most influential man in Anna’s life. He was her teacher, her guide, her adviser. She was like him in many ways—tough, stern, icy, creative. It’s a cliché, but she really was Daddy’s girl.”

Now both of her parents were gone. Nonie had died three years earlier, on January 5, 1996, eight days before her seventy-ninth birthday. The passing of the divorced, lonely, and retired social worker came as she was being treated for pneumonia and a preleukemia blood cell disorder at London’s prestigious Royal Brompton and National Heart Hospital. Friends from when she was married, such as the film critic Alex Walker, weren’t even informed of her death. According to an American cousin, Anna telephoned to tell her of her mother’s death, one of their few contacts. In London, a small memorial service was held. Prior to Nonie Wintour’s hospitalization, she had been living in a flat in Chelsea where Patrick Wintour and his wife, Madeleine Bunting Wintour, also a
Guardian
journalist, lived, and they watched over her. The couple later divorced.

On word of her father’s death, Anna dropped everything and flew to London to deal with funeral arrangements (he was cremated) and a memorial service.

The
Guardian
said in its obituary, “If the test of a good editor is the ability to stamp a new sense of style and purpose on a newspaper, then Charles Wintour . . . was one of the greatest editors of the second half of the century He was one of the acknowledged masters of his trade . . . a courtly man with a sharp pen and a sharper private tongue. . . . Those who worked for him did not always love him, but he commanded universal respect for his shrewdness and speedy decisiveness. He was, with military precision, the general in every battle.”

When Anna’s sadness diminished, anger erupted when she discovered a shocking clause in her father’s will.

The document was dated August 23, 1993, when Anna and David Shaffer, always considered a “saint” by Charles Wintour, were still together. The clause stated: “I DO NOT leave a share of my residuary estate to my daughter Anna Wintour Shaffer as she is well provided for but I wish her to know that I am very proud of her great success and achievement and I am equally pleased that she has combined her career so happily with her family life.”

Anna’s happy family life was now a thing of the past.

And to Anna’s chagrin, her father’s estate, valued at upward of one million dollars in stocks, shares, and personal and real property, was left to his widow, whom Anna much resented; the widow’s two children from a previous marriage; and Anna’s three siblings.

Anna wasn’t as much upset about not being an heir as she was that her stepmother and her father’s stepchildren were beneficiaries.

With a memorial service for her father scheduled for December, Anna returned to New York, where she was met with yet another emotional blow.

On November 20, Alex Liberman, who first spotted Anna’s talents and was the dominant creative and political force in guiding her career through Condé Nast to the summit at
Vogue
, died at his retirement home in Miami. He was eighty-seven. For Anna, who owed her career to Liberman, his death, just two weeks after her father’s, came as a jolting shock.

In Anna’s rarefied world, November appeared to be a cursed month. Thirteen years earlier, almost to the day of Liberman’s death, Jon Bradshaw had
suddenly died. And it would have been the fifty-ninth birthday of her brother Gerald, whose death in that car-bike accident in 1951 left the Win-tours in emotional shambles.

On December 6, about a week before her father’s memorial service, Anna made an appearance at one of her treasured events, the Costume Institute Gala that she cochaired at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a very special occasion that year because the institute was opening a new exhibit of rock and roll fashions. The place was packed with boldface names—Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, Prince Pavlos and Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, Jerry Seinfeld, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Elizabeth Hurley, Debbie Harry, Kate Moss, Elle Macpherson, Donatella Versace, and Calvin Klein.

But there in the center ring was the spectacle of Anna, with all of the scandal buzz focused on her, crying in public with mascara running down her cheeks, her tear-filled swollen eyes covered by her sunglasses. Some thought she was upset because Shelby Bryan had to leave the party early on the night that was planned to be their most public appearance since they decided to divorce their spouses. One of the celebrities present, Whitney Houston, who had her own marital problems with her husband, Bobby Brown, was quoted as saying that Anna was so furious she would “fuck that boyfriend up!”

In fact, it was the death of her father and Alex Liberman, along with the roller-coaster ride of her affair, that had caused Anna to fall apart that glittery evening.

“Anna felt as if a dark cloud had descended over her and would not clear away,” says a friend who saw her in London when she returned for her father’s memorial service.

Hundreds of VIPs, celebrities, and journalists turned out for the celebration of Wintour’s life, held in the Vilar Floral Hall of London’s Royal Opera House on December 13. David Shaffer was not listed among them, but Shelby Bryan was.

Anna spoke lovingly about her father and also talked compassionately for the first time in anyone’s memory about how his second wife had made the last two decades of his life pleasant. There seemed to have been sort of a rapprochement, at least publicly. Anna’s speech was believed to have been written by her brother Patrick.

The journalist Paul Callan, who had started out in newspapers working for Charles Wintour, “was suddenly struck by how closely she reminded me of her father in voice and manner. When I closed my eyes, I thought it was Charles speaking.”

After the service, Anna posed with family members for a photograph. She was the only one smiling for the camera, as if she were on the red carpet at an awards dinner. Susan Summers, who had worked for Charles Wintour at the
Evening Standard
, went up to Anna, who was wrapped in mink, to offer her condolences and say a few nice words about her father. “I reached out, and she recoiled—actually recoiled! I don’t know if she was expecting me to throw paint on her mink or what, but it was an actual physical recoil. She’s sort of like the queen. You’re not supposed to talk to her.”

I
n the new millennium, Anna and her husband were divorced in New York, the papers sealed by the court. But, as a friend of the couple asserts, “Anna was very generous with David.” Anna’s brother Jim, however, told Vivienne Lasky, “Anna got to keep two houses.”

In New York, Katherine Bryan filed for divorce in Manhattan Supreme Court on March 10, 2000, charging “adultery” and “cruel and unusual treatment.” Five days later, Bryan sued her in Houston, three days after what would have been their eighteenth wedding anniversary. He felt it would be more financially beneficial for him to get the divorce in the Lone Star State, although he owned three homes in New York, because that’s where their prenuptial agreement was written and signed and was covered by the Texas community property law. Moreover, Texas had no-fault divorce, which meant details of his affair with Anna wouldn’t be made public. His Houston lawyer, Don Fullenweider, said his client was more a Texan than a New Yorker. “He’s a fifth-generation Texan,” the lawyer declared. He pointed out that besides New York, Bryan had property “everywhere,” operated an oil company in Houston and belonged to that city’s fancy River Oaks Country Club, and had a ranch in Brewster County. His wife’s lawyer, Bernard Clair, claimed that New York was the proper venue. The lawyers, clocking big-money hours, fought on.

As part of his divorce petition, Bryan asked the court to enforce the prenup. Under it, Katherine Bryan had agreed to seek no more than half of
the community property and not to seek any interest or share of his separate property The prenup also called for a couple of options. One was for him to pay her nine hundred thousand dollars. The other was to be an amount equal to 10 percent of his after-tax net worth in excess of ten million, payable in four equal yearly installments. A clause called for similar amounts for alimony, and fifty thousand dollars a year in child support until their children reached the age of eighteen.

At the time Bryan met Anna, he was said to be worth thirty million dollars. But in August 2000 he resigned from his lucrative position as chairman and chief executive officer of ICG Communications, operator of a nationwide voice and data network. Between the spring of 2000 and the day of his resignation, the company stock, of which Bryan owned 2.3 million shares, had dived from $39 a share, to $6.47, a loss, at least on paper, of $75 million. The New York
Daily News
observed, “It looks like some kind of karma just caught up with” Bryan. “Given the new circumstances, it will be interesting to see how long Bryan remains in vogue with Wintour.”

That summer, despite the financial mess, Anna reportedly vacationed with Bryan in the south of France, with her two children and his two sons.

Then, in November of 2000, high-flying ICG Communications filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Press reports said that the company was riddled with debt. Class action suits were filed alleging that Bryan and others misled investors, allegations that Bryan denied.

Nevertherless, he was still well off, and he and Katherine Bryan reached a settlement and were divorced. Their town house, where Bill Clinton was once entertained at a Democratic fund-raiser, reportedly sold for eleven million dollars, and the former Mrs. Bryan moved to Park Avenue.

Just as Audrey Slaughter had made Charles Wintour a happier and less icy man when she hooked up with him, Anna appeared more relaxed and less frosty with Bryan then she had with David Shaffer. She lightened and highlighted her signature bob and in public wore her sunglasses less. And there was talk that she even looked younger—a nip and tuck here and there wasn’t out of the question. At a New Yorkers for Children Fall Gala, Anna boogied with Bryan to the Village People’s disco gay anthem “YMCA,” and the boyish Bryan grabbed Gwyneth Paltrow and Oscar de la Renta, and he and Anna danced with them.

Anna’s divorce appeared to have little emotional impact on her children.
As a family observer notes, “Bee and Charlie live in a world of friends whose parents have affairs, whose names wind up in the gossip columns, who get divorced. They just felt it was a way of life.”

Anna has always had a close bond with her daughter—the child attended her first fashion show in her terrible twos with her mother—and some were later convinced that Bee Shaffer, as one fashion wag observes, “is Anna squared without the shades and the bob.”

By age ten the two didn’t see eye-to-eye regarding fashion. “She doesn’t listen to anything I say,” complained Anna. “She likes overalls and sweatpants, and she doesn’t like dresses. As long as she’s happy, that’s fine, but occasionally, I would love her to wear a dress.”

The child often confronted Anna when she was dressing to go out for the evening, critiquing that what she was wearing was “too revealing.” Declared Anna, “She’d like me to go out like a monk.”

All that changed when the youngster entered her teen years and became what one fashion journalist described as a “beautiful young fashion plate in her own right.” At an event on the arm of Olivier Theyskens, who designed for Rochas, she wore a “flattering, dreamy, frothy, pale strapless full skirted tulle gown.”