Front Row (5 page)

Nevertheless, Brigitte Lasky felt that Anna bought the small sizes purposefully and maliciously to tease and taunt her daughter. Unlike Vivienne Lasky, who was a tad plump, Anna was skinny, but she was big-boned and usually had to buy larger sizes for herself and have them taken in. While Lasky thought Anna looked “great” in certain things, such as later in Chanel, she felt she looked “awful” in evening dresses then and now, “because her elbows, wrists, and knees are too big. She’s like Calista Flockhart and Lara Flynn Boyle. It can look
painful.”

Anna knew that juicy, thick lamb chops were her pal’s favorite. She even taught herself to cook them to Lasky’s taste, so she could gloat while she watched her clean her plate. “Anna would make my favorite food. Then she would just sit there and watch
me
eat. She wouldn’t eat, or she would just pick, and she’d point out that I was ‘pleasantly plump.’ I said, ‘Well, Anna, I don’t want to be a model,’ and she said, wagging her finger, ‘You know, Vivienne,
we
don’t want to get
too
pudgy’ My mother says I would always come home from those dinners feeling a lack of self-esteem. She said I didn’t come back confident and smiling.”

Anna hurt her friend’s feelings by making fun of her weight and putting her on the spot by demanding, “Why don’t you have more self-control?”
Lasky’s meek response was, “ ‘Life is too short . . . dieting all the time makes me crotchety.’ Well, that sends a message. I wasn’t so stupid. My mother always said, ‘Anna invites you to dinner, makes your favorite food, buys your favorite cheesecake, and she’s flitting about, but did she eat anything?’ I said, ‘Mom, you
know
she didn’t.’ My mother thought she was malicious. I’d say, ‘I don’t believe that of her. She loves me. She’s my best friend.’”

As one of Charles and Nonie Wintour’s favorites on the
Evening Standard’s
staff, Alex Walker often socialized with his editor. He was invited to their cocktail and dinner parties—Charles specialized in mixing a martini that left guests reeling—and was an overnight guest at their country place in West Farleigh, a village in Kent. And he got to know teenage Anna, who, he noted, was an “absolute monster” who “didn’t mind insisting on [her] own views on whatever anyone else said, particularly in that family.”

Walker thought Anna would do or say things just to be mean. He says he thought of her as a complex amalgam of such wicked film characters as
The Bad Seed’s
Rhoda Penmark,
Mildred Pierce’s
Vida Pierce, and
All About Eve’s
Eve Harrington. As a movie critic and a serious biographer of Hollywood greats, Walker enjoyed film analogies, even if possibly exaggerated.

“I’d stay with Charles and Nonie for the weekend,” he recalls. “I suppose Anna was fourteen, fifteen, and she had a horse. I’d hold the long harness while I delicately led her around, rather than galloping around, the paddock. When she was through riding, she’d say, ‘I think I’ve had quite enough of this, Mr. Walker. Now help me down.’ I was struck by the fact that she was very, very mature—far more mature than her age. The future editrix was in the blood there, that’s for certain.”

Anna was crazy about riding at that time, and she made a serious pitch to her father to quit his powerful job at the
Evening Standard and
. take over editorship of the local
Kent Messenger
so that she could enroll at the local stables with thoughts of becoming a chic, miniskirted veterinarian.

“Even as a child she had her father’s coldness,” continues Walker. “She was very much like her father. Anna had a self-possession that was beyond her years. She was in fact
more
than self-possessed. She was patrician. She was not a playful child. Her behavior manifested itself in quite small ways back then—simply in being stiffly polite but not taking very much notice of you. What she did, she did with purpose.”

But Anna had no tolerance for rude behavior that intruded upon her life and was especially upset with people who were tardy. “Anna could be very impatient,” Vivienne Lasky emphasizes. “She was actually a perfectionist. In that way she was sort of a Martha Stewart–ish person, always in control. To Anna, the thought of anyone being late was terribly rude, and she cut off people if they didn’t arrive at precisely the specified time—at least not anyone terribly important to her. ‘Well, we’re
not
going to meet them again, that’s that,’ she’d say with finality. ‘They’re not reliable. We’ll just go on our own. What’s the point of meeting people if they show up late.’”

A
round the time Anna turned fifteen, in 1964, the Wintours decided to move from their bland contemporary town house in St. Johns Wood. The uninteresting house no longer fit the regal image of the editor of a serious London newspaper.

Anna especially hated her tiny bedroom, though all of the rooms in the house were small. She felt hers was babyish-looking, and just prior to the family’s purchase of the new house she redid her room in an elegant green, faintly striped wallpaper.

In general, the house held bad memories because of the death of the Win-tours’ firstborn.

Vivienne Lasky had always found it odd that all of the windows in Anna’s room and those of her siblings had bars on them, which in those days was a rare addition in most British homes. One afternoon, sitting with Anna, she asked her about the guarded atmosphere, and Anna’s response surprised her. “My mother’s paranoid,” she stated, “that one of us is going to fall out.”

When Lasky asked her why, Anna revealed the sad story of her brother’s death and said that her mother still feared that the worst could happen to another of her children. “Anna said Nonie was edgy, nervous about the children’s safety, that one of them might stand on a footstool or a chair and fall out”—thus the prisonlike bars. “Anna never talked about him again, and I never heard anything about the dead brother from other members of the
family. But neither Anna nor any of the other children were permitted to ride or had bikes.”

The Wintours moved to an elegant late-nineteenth-century four-story white stucco home at 9 Phillimore Gardens, in fashionable Kensington, close to the area’s fancy department stores and antiques shops, a neighborhood “still stuffily grand at that point in time,” observes Valerie Grove. “Grandeur and wealth was the keynote.” It was a fine family house for entertaining, with a large garden, immediately adjacent to bucolic Holland Park. Compared to their previous home, the Wintours’ new house was enormous: nine bedrooms, four bathrooms (one en suite), three reception rooms, many fireplaces (the mantels of which were stolen during the renovation), a kitchen and breakfast room, and a cloakroom, all high-ceilinged with beautiful moldings. The facade had eight windows that faced the street, flooding the front rooms with light.

It was, as Grove notes, “an appropriate house for an editor of a newspaper in those days, and for an American heiress. The first thing anyone said about Nonie when one first arrived [on staff] at the
Evening Standard
was ‘Charles Wintour has a rich American wife.’ It was understood that, however well-heeled his army family was, it was Nonie’s money that had enabled them to buy the house in Kensington.”

Alex Walker believes that Beaverbrook may also have had a role in helping Wintour with the purchase, by giving him a loan, the kind of special perk he offered favored high-level employees. (Years later, Anna would also have a powerful and enamored media king for a boss, Condé Nast’s S.I. Newhouse Jr., who is said to have assisted her, too—one of his favorite editors—in buying a town house in Greenwich Village with an interest-free $1.64 million mortgage on the property from Condé Nast.)

Back then, though, teenage Anna didn’t care how her parents got their financing. She adored the fact that they now lived in a classier neighborhood, closer to the action, with powerful and well-to-do neighbors, and fancy shopping steps away. But most of all, she was enthralled with the lower level of the house, where there were servants’ quarters—a staff flat, consisting of a living room, kitchen, and bath, with a private entrance.

Anna believed she was old enough to have her own place, even though it was just a stairway away from the rest of the family. She asked, and her parents
readily agreed. The permissive Wintours viewed Anna as mature and responsible enough to live somewhat independently from the rest of the family and felt that she deserved her privacy They were ahead of their time—by the nineties homes would be built with separate teenager suites.

“So, at fifteen, Anna had her very own flat and total privacy to come and go as she wished,” says Vivienne Lasky. “Once she had her flat, she didn’t really participate upstairs at her house unless it was Sunday lunch, which was sort of sacrosanct in the Wintour household. She was very precocious, very adult, and was playing at being an adult.”

Discerning and opinionated about what she wanted, Anna furnished most of her flat at Habitat, the decor lifestyle store that brought designer Sir Terence Conran to prominence, a store that sparked a design revolution in the middle-class British home. To Anna, the shop was known as “Shabitat” because everything was relatively inexpensive—her parents footed the decorating costs, of course—but had a chic look. Habitat was the Ikea of its day, only classier.

Anna’s bedroom was all blue and white, but spare, and not very girly-girl. Against one wall was a fabric-covered kidney-shaped dressing table. The duvet on the queen-sized bed had matching fabric. (Conran asserted later that his introduction of the duvet had a positive impact on the supposedly boring British sex life because the cover made it so easy to make the bed and hide the evidence after a quick romp, and it also had a sexy, Swedish overtone.) Anna’s living room had floor-to-ceiling shelves, a wall filled with her parents’ books—she enjoyed Doris Lessing and Agatha Christie. In the bathroom she had a large framed purple poster promoting a New Year’s Eve party she had attended at a hotel discotheque in Zurmatt, Switzerland, during a ten-day Christmas vacation with Lasky and Anna’s younger brother, Patrick. The flat opened through French doors onto the pretty landscaped garden that included a little pond with a water-spouting frog. The garden backed on to the greenery and flowers of Holland Park. It was a suite fit for a princess.

But, surprisingly, the parents of the woman who one day would be noted for her sense of style and be appointed editor of the venerable
House & Garden
magazine had little if any taste of their own.

Aside from Anna’s room, the rest of the enormous Wintour house was, observers
maintain, horribly decorated in a glitzy contemporary American style. “Charles had very little visual sense of his surroundings,” notes Valerie Grove. “He was a cerebral person but was not into decorating a house in an appropriate style. I don’t think he particularly minded what backdrop he had as long as it was neat and tidy and businesslike. I never ever thought of Charles and Nonie as having a cozy or comfortable or warmly welcoming atmosphere.”

B
y her midteens, having her own flat and lots of independence, the world of dating and night-clubbing opened up for Anna.

Swinging sixties London was at her pretty feet, and men, young and old alike, were mesmerized by her appealing face, her ivory skin, her chic shiny bob that gave her an exotic with-it look, those skinny legs in the shortest of minis, and a Lolita-like come-hither shyness—an enigmatic quality that excited men all the more. All in all, Anna Wintour at fifteen was an alluring package and quite a catch. Another component of her aura was her father, a powerful figure in journalism and a lure for some of the up-and-coming scribes who pursued her. And Anna was immensely attracted to writers and journalists, and the older, the better. Over the years she would be drawn to father-figure types, surrogates, in a sense, for the absentee Charles Wintour, whose primary family was his newspaper.

As one armchair psychologist who worked on Fleet Street in those days, and who squired Anna briefly, notes, “I always felt she was chasing the daddy figure who was never around. She was like a needy, shy little girl, and I think that was all a bit of an act to get your full and undivided attention, which she never got from old Charles.”

The first in a relatively long queue of older men whom Anna dated was the future best-selling and critically acclaimed author Piers Paul Read, who at twenty-four was a year or two out of St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he had studied history. Fifteen-year-old Anna met Read, aptly enough, at a wedding—the nuptials of her first cousin on her father’s side, Oliver James, a future professor of geriatric medicine, and Roseanna Foster, one of Read’s closest childhood friends from his hometown of Yorkshire.

Among the conservative guests at the wedding party, Anna stood out, a chic and seductive vision to Read, who was instantly smitten with this sensual
teen in a pink miniskirt and heels, flirtatiously hiding behind the long bangs of her bob, giving her an air of mystery.

“Here was Anna, this sexy and pretty teenager, at fifteen, and I was this depraved twenty-four-year-old,” says Read, half jokingly “She was very young, very pretty, very sophisticated, very sort of culturally up-to-date, and just slightly timid.”

Though to Read she exuded extreme poise and confidence, model-thin Anna was unnecessarily consumed with, and obsessed about, her weight and didn’t think she was attractive, despite the way she lorded the poundage issue over Vivienne Lasky. “She hated the photographs that were taken of her at Oliver’s wedding,” recalls Lasky. “When she saw those pictures, she said, ‘God, do I look terrible.’ She thought she was chubby. She thought her legs looked awful. She thought she was not photogenic. She looked at the wedding pictures and said,
‘Good God!
Is that how people see me?’ I said, ‘You look fine.’ She said, ‘But just look at my knees! They’re
ugly.’
I mean, she was just a kid, but she was
so
involved with how she looked. She said, ‘Your knees don’t look like mine. Mine look
bigger,’
and she actually took out a ruler and measured her knees, and then measured my knees. Her knee bone was wider than mine. She was
so
upset.”

Anna was a firm believer in Mary Quant’s adage that “a woman is as young as her knees.”

The width of Anna’s knees notwithstanding, Read was hooked and so was Anna, though each had his or her own agenda. He appealed to her elitist tastes, was an intellectual of sorts, and already was being talked about as having a great future as a writer; therefore, she was fired up to go out with him, a trophy kind of guy, plus—and this was a big plus—he was older. Her interest in men of letters, as it were, was passed on to her by her father, who thrived on the excitement generated by being among journalists, of discovering new writing and editing talent, especially of gaining access to and being among celebrities, a taste Wintour had inherited from Beaverbrook and that he handed down to Anna, a taste she would cultivate throughout her life.

“Piers was very talented, very British,” observes Lasky. “He was older, sort of funny-looking. But his smile was devastating. For Anna, it wasn’t so much a man’s looks as [his] brain.”

Read was commuting between Yorkshire and London and working on his
first novel when he and Anna began dating—inexpensive dinners, the cinema, visits with the Wintours. He couldn’t afford much more, which wasn’t the way to win Anna’s heart. “If you were to take Anna out on a date,” recounts Lasky, “she expected it to be as fancy and well planned as any she would arrange for herself She had very high expectations.”

Nevertheless, Anna had a major crush on Read, which wasn’t quite reciprocated. Aside from her sexiness, Read states, “Anna wasn’t particularly interesting. She was a curiosity as much as a sexual desire.”

But through Anna, the ambitious Read hoped for access to a higher stratum of society, which was
his
main agenda. “I felt that I could sort of get to know London and the influential people in the big city,” he acknowledges, “by sort of chatting up the daughters, as it were.”

It was an eye-opening experience for this young man from the north of England who had never known a girl quite like Anna, especially such a young one, who had her own flat, free to come and go as she liked and to entertain friends there. Read also was surprised that the Wintours didn’t mind that Anna was dating a man nine years her senior, though he was certainly respectable.

“I was and am a Roman Catholic, so their kind of liberal take on things wasn’t quite mine,” he notes. “They had different values. They were fairly antireligious. And Anna’s parents had a very sort of liberal attitude towards sex. I was sort of horrified and fascinated at the same time by their sexual permissiveness. I’d been brought up with sort of rather straight, Catholic views. When I visited Phillimore Gardens it was with a combination of fascination and horror. I don’t want to give the impression that I was priggish or disapproving, but I was a Catholic country boy from Yorkshire, sort of an incredibly muddled young man at the time, and I had the feeling I was in Sodom and Gomorrah. But you know, it was the sexual revolution, so I didn’t mind cashing in on that.”

But he says he didn’t get past third base.

“Nothing irrevocable happened between us,” he claims. “I was quite young and inexperienced. We held hands, kissed occasionally. I don’t know for certain, but I don’t think Anna had lost her virginity when I went out with her. She certainly didn’t give me the impression that she’d been to bed with anyone, but I could be wrong.”

To Anna’s shock, horror, and dismay, Read suddenly and with finality ended the relationship—stopped seeing her, stopped calling her, disappeared off the scope, as it were, after telling her he didn’t think their relationship had much of a future.

As Lasky recalls, “Anna was more keen on him than he was on her. But she wasn’t ready to give him up.”

Anna had difficulty dealing with the young writer’s rejection and did not take kindly to having someone else decide what course her life would take. More appalled than confused that she’d been the one to get the heave-ho, Anna demanded answers. But rather than confront Read herself, Anna enlisted her best friend as her intermediary.

Anna told Lasky she didn’t want to meet with Read because “she was afraid she might become clingy” and believed her friend could be more objective in confronting him.

Anna Wintour clingy?

Indeed, Anna’s handling of the matter underscored a growing neediness involving men that would become even more apparent in later years—a shocker to female colleagues who viewed her as a strong and independent ice queen.