Front Row (42 page)

In the spring of 2003, when at Anna’s prodding Condé Nast saw fit to jump into the pop tart arena with a fashion and style magazine aimed at young girls called
Teen Vogue
, sixteen-year-old Bee Shaffer was named a contributing editor—nepotism, like wearing fur, had never been a problem for Anna. Anna felt that girls who could barely see over the edge of a catwalk were budding fashionistas. “They see media coverage . . . They are so much aware of what is going on in fashion than girls used to be. And that’s the magazine’s reason for being.”

Anna’s daughter became involved in the first issue, said the magazine’s editor, Amy Astley, a protégée of Anna’s. “I really love what Bee has to say. She’s obviously the ideal
Teen Vogue
reader. She and her friends are a ready-made focus group. They’re smart and really sophisticated and clearly know a lot about fashion, but they’re still normal girls.”

Every so often, Anna and her sleek, shiny-haired, and buxom daughter, who has been described as the
Vogue
editrix’s “mini-me,” sit together on the front row at the shows and occasionally attend cocktail parties together.

A Wintour family friend, the publicist Paul Wilmot, said Anna’s daughter,
considered poised, elegant, and regal, has “the DNA and, by osmosis, she’s got the exposure and experience. . . . Don’t be surprised if she winds up a young editor somewhere.”

Or America’s next hot model.

By mid-2004, there was talk that several agencies had interest in representing Bee, but she had her sights on going to college, something her mother hadn’t done.

With her divorce out of the way, Anna was on top of the world. As always,
Vogue
was number one and Anna was in total control. And she now had Bryan all to herself.

And then she got word that her longtime nemesis, Tina Brown, now running gossipy
Talk
magazine, was about to strike, having assigned a “grudge” profile of Bryan. Brown had left enemies behind when she jumped ship at Condé Nast to start
Talk
. Anna was at the top of the list.

“Tina has a very visceral hatred for Anna,” discloses a close observer of the two women. “It was not predicated on anything logical, or anything that Anna did to her, but was predicated once again on the innate rivalry that would arise between these two very driven and tough British editors.”

Brown focused on Bryan in particular, the insider asserts, because Brown’s husband, the editor Harry Evans, allegedly had affairs. “Tina was very bitter about that and was asking friends why nobody was concentrating on other editors who had bad marriages. There had always been stuff about Harry, blind items in the tabloids about him, so Tina was very bitter—not only about the negative press, but about her husband’s womanizing. So suddenly there’s Anna messing around with Shelby, and Tina couldn’t wait to do a story in
Talk
. From what I gather it was a grudge piece.”

Another element in Brown’s decision to go after Anna by publishing a piece about Bryan was the fact that an unauthorized biography about her marriage was in the works by
Vanity Fair
(Condé Nast) writer Judith Bachrach. Brown expected that the book about her life with Evans would be a hatchet job.

“Even though Bryan made for a legitimate news story, Anna was beside herself when she got wind of the
Talk
piece and made a slew of telephone calls to Brown pleading with her not to run the story,” says a publishing
insider. “Brown told her not to worry, but that she planned to continue pursuing the story. Anna contacted every power player she knew in media to try to get the piece killed. From what I hear, she pleaded with Graydon Carter [the editor of
Vanity Fair]
and went to Si [Newhouse] to see if he could help.”

The
Guardian
in London, where Patrick Wintour was a reporter, jumped on the war between the two British magazine queens and noted that Brown “has heartlessly ignored Anna’s pleas not to run an exposé of Anna’s arm-candy . . . The enmity between them runs deep.”

The unflattering piece was headlined “The Talented Mr. Bryan,” with a front-page text block that seemed to say it all: “Full of Texas charm, Shelby Bryan raised nearly $3 billion from investors as smart as John Malone, wooed
Vogue
editor Anna Wintour, and collected millions for the Democratic Party. Then his company went south. It has left the losers wondering whether he deliberately misled them—or whether love and ambition distracted him.”

There was a full-page photo of the onetime Golden Gloves boxer, hands on the hips of his pinstriped two-button business suit, looking ready to take on all comers.

The photo on the contents page showed a sunglassed Anna with a slinky off-the-shoulder dress next to a tuxedoed Bryan. The very first line of the story, which was supposed to be about Bryan’s business practices, began, “Last June, having just returned from a vacation in the south of France with his girlfriend,
Vogue
editor in chief Anna Wintour . . .”

The article touched on the affair and also quoted a number of women who made claims about Bryan’s “louche behavior.”

In her book, Bachrach notes wryly that “Tina was good enough to send Wintour a copy of the published article, with a ‘With Compliments’ card attached.”

Indeed, Brown had done what appeared to the media to be another number on Anna, and she was surely out for revenge.

Neither Bryan nor Anna took any legal action against Brown’s magazine for the article, but Bryan successfully pursued a libel claim against the London
Daily Telegraph
, which had picked up material from the
Talk
piece under a headline “English Queens of New York in Clash over Wintour’s Boyfriend.” Five months after its piece ran, the
Telegraph
apologized to Bryan,
who claimed that certain facts in the story—he was facing financial ruin, he had been accused of misleading another company about ICG’s business forecast, he had been forced out of ICG—were erroneous. The newspaper apologized to him in a published story and agreed to make a generous donation to a charity of Bryan’s choice and to pay his legal fees.

The fashion Web site Chic Happens, which broke the story of the affair, pointed out that “Britain’s more lenient libel laws” made a judgment in Bryan’s favor “more likely” and noted that “a victory in the UK—the home turf of both Wintour and Brown—would be that much sweeter.” The writers added, “If you’re reading this, Shelby, ‘WE DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY.’”

W
ith Bryan on her arm, Anna began to have another love affair—with the glitterati of Houston, her lover’s hometown, where the glamorous twosome began making stopovers and where Anna was treated like visiting royalty. Anna and Bryan also sparked whispers and gossip with their openly amorous ways. At a party for his brother at the exclusive Bayou Club, which includes high-powered members such as George W. Bush, Bryan and Anna acted like a pair of going-steady adolescents at a spin-the-bottle party.

“In front of the world, Shelby and Anna spent a good part of this party making out, tongues down each other’s throats, seated on a bench in a little foyer to the party room,” asserts a well-placed observer of the Houston social scene.

Anna became friends with a number of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful fashionistas, women who read
Vogue
as closely as they do a prenuptial agreement, fashion horses who spend at least tens of thousand of dollars a year to fill their closets with designer duds.

One with whom Anna eventually bonded was Becca Cason Thrash, a gorgeous fifty-something wife of one of the city’s gazillionaires who had to expand her closet by more than a thousand square feet to fit all of her elegant Chanel, Lacroix, Helmut Lang, Stella McCartney, Gianfranco Ferre, Sergio Rossi, Marc Bouwer, Jean Paul Gaultier, and La Perla. Name it, she had it. In Houston—and in New York and Paris—this daughter of a Harlington, Texas, TV sportscaster who married right was a boldface name, written about in the
Houston Chronicle, Women’s Wear Daily, Town and Country
, Tina
Brown’s
Talk
before it became defunct, and
Harper’s Bazaar
, in which the fashion diva was profiled as one of “Couture’s Big Spenders.” The magazine had followed Thrash and two others through fittings in Paris.

Thrash had once been dubbed “the high priestess of posh” and had earned the sobriquet “TriBecca,” because she usually changed her sexy, gorgeous outfits three times at the extravagant parties she threw in her twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion: indoor pool, two-thousand-square-foot kitchen, glass-floored second level. The place was once described as looking like a “cutting-edge art museum.”

“Anna just
loves
Texas, she
loves
it,” declares the exuberant Thrash, who had invited Anna to be the guest of honor at a party at her home for the Houston Stages Repertory Theater, an evening that included an abbreviated performance of
Full Gallop, a
. one-woman show about the life of
Vogue’s
onetime vaunted editor Diana Vreeland.

“We on the theater board were thinking about various ways to really make the evening interesting and we came up with the idea of inviting Anna,” Thrash says. She notes, though, “There’s no comparison between Anna and Diana Vreeland other than the fact that they both held the same job. Anna absolutely does not compare herself to Mrs. Vreeland.”

The arrangements for Anna’s royal visit were made by another Houston fashion powerhouse, Susan Criner, who was a close friend of Bryan and of his mother. “Susan and Gretchen were so close,” notes Thrash, “that when Gretchen died, a lot of her Chanel couture and a great number of her Chanel suits went to her. Susan owns and wears them to this day.”

Until the glittery night of the big party, Thrash says she felt “intimidated” by Anna. “I’m not easily intimidated, but there are no words to use to describe to what lengths Anna herself, her persona, intimidated me. When I would see her at couture at the fashion collection, I’d be intimidated. She’d come in with those signature sunglasses on and take the best seat on the front row, and I’d think, ‘God she’s a
very
imposing,
intimidating
character.’ You
know
who she is. The world
knows
who she is. Everyone
knows
that’s Anna Wintour,
the
most
influential
woman in fashion,
globally.”

It all was too much for Thrash to comprehend, so Anna became a scary figure to her.

Everyone who was anyone in Texas and the fashion world seemed represented
at Thrash’s party—politicians, celebrities, designers. Thrash had custom lighting installed to give the walls a red tint, and models were hired to move among the guests in dresses by the designers who were there: Mark Badgley, James Mischka, Diane von Furstenberg, among others. One woman was overheard complaining about her “jewelry elbow,” apparently all the bracelets and rocks she was sporting were too heavy.

Anna, wearing a silvery Chanel suit, minus the sunglasses, arrived fashionably late, holding hands with Bryan. All eyes were on her. The local press had reported little if anything about their extramarital relationship. Gossip like that just doesn’t see print in Houston. Lawyers threaten suit
before
items run. But everyone in Thrash’s wide circle knew all the dirt about Anna and dished about it incessantly. One of the guests noted that without her glasses Anna’s eyes blinked rapidly and that she did a double take looking at the bountiful new breasts of a Texas rose in a low-cut Ralph Lauren gown who introduced herself, practically bowing to the editrix from New York.

That night, the once intimidated Thrash bonded with her imperiousness when they shared the table of honor.

“It was just the eight of us”—Anna and Bryan, the Thrashes, the Criners, and Bryan’s brother and sister-in-law—“and we spent three or four hours at the same table and interacted, and I just thought Anna was great, and I was no longer intimidated,” emphasizes Thrash. “Anna was delightful, and she is completely one-hundred-percent misunderstood. It’s just that she’s a slow warm-up, really. I do think she is
very
British,
very
reserved, and for a Texan that can be misunderstood.

“At my parties, I never seat people next to each other who are sleeping together, so I put Anna between my husband and J.P. [Shelby’s brother], so my husband was her dinner partner, and he
adored
her, thought she was fabulous and
very
sexy—not in a blatant way, but in a subtle way.”

At a certain point during the evening, Thrash’s besotted mate got up to talk to another party guest, and Bryan, “who is so very effervescent and fun, dashed over and sat in his chair as fast as he could, and Anna and Shelby leaned over and kissed,” recalls Thrash fondly. “They’re like a young couple in love. And when all the speeches and presentations were done, Anna and Bryan were the first ones on the dance floor. My girlfriend was dancing next
to them and she told me, ‘God, they were kissing, and he was
all over
her.’ It was just like at a prom.”

The following Monday, once again all business, Anna, who never had a real prom, was at her huge desk in her enormous corner office with a wall of glass that gave her a spectacular view of Times Square from the new Condé Nast tower.

She was on top of the world, professionally and personally, ready to start work on another lushly beautiful, catalog-thick, very lucrative, style-setting, sexy-celebrity-on-the-cover issue of
Vogue
.

And as always, she was prepared to do battle with her competition and, as usual, come out the victor.

By the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, her relationship with Bryan was still golden. The two were seen together at fashion shows, cocktail parties, and cultural events in New York, holding hands. But when the photographers moved in to take pictures, Bryan usually evaporated into the background, leaving Anna in the spotlight. Their affair was no longer considered hot news and had long been out of the gossip columns.

But in May 2004, their life together once again became tabloid fodder. The
New York Post’s
Page Six ran a headline that blared: “Anna, Lover in ‘Illegal’ Sublet.” The story alleged that Bryan was illegally subletting an enormous $5,800-a-month penthouse loft from the internationally known hairdresser John Frieda. A woman whose family owned the loft building claimed that Frieda had moved out and was “replaced by Bryan and Win-tour.” When the woman, Beth Windsor, confronted them, “they froze. By this time Anna was getting her mail” from Frieda’s old mailbox, “which she promptly body-slammed shut and tried to disappear into the wall. She’s very small and almost got away with it. Shelby then said, ‘We’re only staying here for one or two days,’ in a phony British accent.” Then Anna and her man went out for a night on the town.