Front Row (8 page)

T
he education of Anna Wintour as fashion magazine editor began with the dawn of the glitter, glam, and disco seventies at
Harper’s Bazaar
, once Britain’s premier couture monthly. It was in the process of becoming hipper by merging with a magazine called
Queen
, which had become
the
irreverent, witty, and trendy fashion must-read of swinging London.

With the deal in the works, the word had gone out: The combined magazine was looking for new hires, especially a fashion assistant, the lowest-paid job in the business. But Anna didn’t need or care about the paycheck. She was far more intrigued with being around hot fashion, cool people, and a hip environment.

In early January 1970, she arrived at the magazine’s offices for an interview with the editor, Jennifer Hocking, a former model who was a bit in the dark about the identity of this fabulous-looking fashionista, sporting Missoni, with the fringe over her eyes.

“When I took her on I had no idea who she was,” recalls Hocking, who, because Anna looked so young, thought she was about seventeen. “She said something about her father being a journalist, and as I can never remember anybody’s name, it didn’t connect with me that he was
the
Charles Wintour.” Hocking also wasn’t aware that it was Wintour, working behind the scenes, who got Anna in the door.

But she was satisfied that this new girl could work out. Anna struck her as quite reserved, had an extraordinary look, and, unlike other girls she’d recently interviewed, had neither asked nor cared about company benefits. She didn’t know at the time that Anna—unlike Hocking herself, who made most of her own clothes—had family money.

“We weren’t looking for anyone sensational,” Hocking continues, “just someone who would work well with other people and get on with it.”

Besides, the fashion department was a very small part of the magazine, which was more generalized in those days. The department took up a very small area at the end of the office, with a closet for clothing and other accoutrements. As Laura Pank, one of the editors, notes, “Fashion was kind of a bit that we had to tolerate. The editorial was much more important.”

And so Hocking hired Anna, who had even beaten out an applicant with more experience from British
Vogue
.

Years later, Anna said her start in the fashion world was virtually predestined. “I think being Charles Wintour’s daughter probably got me my first interview and my first job.” She also boasted that she had bluffed her way through the interview—something Hocking hadn’t caught—by claiming she could handle fashion shoots, though she had no prior fashion magazine experience. Well, she did have a little. Having lived with Stephen Bobroff, who had shot for
Queen
, and having modeled twice before, and having posed as a trendy bird in London’s hottest clubs since she was a teen as part of her nightlife world, Anna probably knew a bit more about what was required in a shoot than the next girl in line.

Modestly, she later asserted that she didn’t see a future for herself in the world of
Harpers & Queen
. “I just sort of fell into magazines,” she maintained. “So much of what happened to me has happened by chance. There was no master plan. . . . This was a time when the fashion magazines were widely regarded by one’s mothers as finishing schools for girls of a certain background and a certain name. One had fun there, but one dabbled in the business in anticipation of marriage and, all being well, a large house somewhere in the English countryside.”

But that’s not the way Jennifer Hocking viewed what she quickly saw as her “very clever, incredibly organized, so together, quietly driven, sometimes terrifying” new hire.

Anna’s name first appeared far down on the masthead as one of three fashion assistants in the March 1970 issue, whose cover featured “The Anne Bo-leyn face, a summer tanned image of Elizabethan beauty.”

She had landed on her feet her very first day on the job and never stopped running and never looked back to see whom she left in her dust.

The Wintour girl didn’t strike Hocking as a dilettante, as were some of the others on staff. From the beginning, she saw someone “driven, determined, and ambitious.” Anna’s coworkers endured her—some with awe, others with contempt, and still others with fear and alarm.

“She had this incredible brain, and I used to think it would be amazing to meet her when she was thirty-five, because she was too mature for her age,” observes Hocking. “She was
so
organized. She would make business appointments for lunch when the rest of us were sort of sitting around twiddling our thumbs. She was just
so
together. With most young people, it’s, ‘Oh, I forgot this, I forgot that.’ There was none of that nonsense. She was very quick at picking up things. If you said something to her, you knew she’d taken it in because next time she was talking about something, she’d say, oh, such and so, and I’d remember, I
told you
that. Just extraordinary.”

Willie Landels, a creative, perceptive, and gentle man who had been promoted to editor but handled the duties of art director at the same time, felt from the first day he was introduced to Anna that her ambition was obvious, that she was very determined to succeed. “There were other girls,” he notes, “who were more talented, who had amazing taste and were chic, but didn’t have that
incredible
drive that Anna had—like a businessman who is really successful, who only looks in one direction and goes for it. Anna had that—this
total
conviction that she was aiming for the top job.”

But Landels had his qualms about her, too. “She had very precise ideas about clothes, a very good sense of quality, but nothing adventurous, always rather conventional. I didn’t see her as being very original, but was very much in the mainstream, which made her right later for
Vogue
, which was hardly revolutionary. Her intelligence? Well, obviously she’s no fool. People like Anna who are so beamed at something have an intelligence that is highly developed in one direction. The whole energy goes into one thing. In her case it was succeeding.”

At the same time, the editor found her to be a poor communicator in a
business where communication is key. “It was very difficult when she did a feature story to get out of her
why
she did it,
why
she would do one story over another, because she was
not very
articulate.”

He also was concerned about her being a team player, because “she was rather cool, didn’t smile, wasn’t very open, wasn’t very friendly.”

Nevertheless, it was not long before Anna began to accompany Hocking on photo shoots and to the collections, where the fashion editor privately began calling her young assistant the “bacon slicer” because of her cutting and critical manner.

“I sat next to her at some of the shows in Italy, in Paris, and the terrible things she used to say about people—nasty things—and no expression would alter her face. She wouldn’t sort of indicate she was saying these extraordinarily cutting and caustic things. She was just
so
pin sharp and
so
cruel.”

On one occasion Anna, to Hocking, quietly lit into Ernestine Carter, a doyenne of fashion journalism in Britain who had worked for
Harper’s Bazaar
and had written several books on high fashion with introductions by Diana Vreeland, the legendary and influential American fashion editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
and later editor in chief of what would become Anna’s
Vogue
.

“Ernestine was at one of the shows with some famous American journalist, and they were both very tiny women whose feet never touched the ground, and Anna made very cutting comments about them,” Hocking says. “I had never come across anyone, and I don’t think I’ve met anyone since, who was so bitchy and sharply critical.”

Anna’s attitude also caused problems for the magazine with more than one design house. Still a neophyte, but a neophyte with fangs, she’d flounce into some of the lesser-known houses looking for clothing to feature, flip through the racks, and then declare, “There’s
nothinghere.”
Her caustic visits sparked irate calls to Hocking from vociferously complaining designers with deflated and bruised egos.

“Somebody might have been brave enough to tell her to be a little more politic,” says Hocking, who was afraid to confront Anna, fearful of her wrath. “I was the fashion editor and this was something I wouldn’t do, even if I hated the clothes. You sort of say, ‘Oh, we’re not doing blue this year.’”

Later, Anna would toss out one very devastating word—“rubbish”—to
describe something she didn’t like, and strong men and thick-skinned women would fall like lumps of clay. “She was very much to the point,” notes Hocking, “and very clear thinking. I’m sure she didn’t then, and doesn’t care now [what people think of her], because she would not have been able to do what she managed to do with her career. She’s so single-minded, and basically she’s probably right all the time as well.”

Anna was part of a team of several fashion assistants, one of whom she regarded with seemingly irrational and utter contempt. The young woman was the daughter of a well-placed London publicist and a friend of Jennifer Hocking’s. “Anna certainly, basically, destroyed this girl, who felt very inefficient by comparison,” declares Hocking. “Anna was being Anna, just being cleverer than anyone else, and defeated this one girl. I think somehow she puts the evil spell on people.”

Another of the fashion assistants on the team, Jillie Murphy, who had come to
Harper’s Bazaar
before Anna with some experience as a stylist for photographers like Richard Avedon, remembers clearly how Anna made the other girl’s life “a living hell.” “It was a conflict of personalities,” explains Murphy, who had been assigned by Hocking early on to take Anna under her wing and show her the ropes. “Anna found the other girl to be a weaker personality, and I wouldn’t have thought Anna liked that. Occasionally someone comes into your party that you don’t get on with, and that obviously happened with Anna and [the other girl]. From day one, they didn’t get on.”

Anna made nasty comments to the girl, put her down in front of her colleagues, and claimed she was incompetent. Anna made the poor young woman’s life miserable—and for no apparent reason except she enjoyed bullying those who couldn’t fight back.

Because of the infighting, Hocking had to take out time from her relevant duties to trim Anna’s sharp claws.

“Jennifer would have to take Anna for lunch to have a talk, and then she would have to take [the other girl] and her mother to lunch, to kind of make things sweeter, to make the relationship work, because we were a team,” declares Murphy. “I liked Anna. I liked her firmness. But some people were terrified of her. She was quite cutting. But she wasn’t as tough as what she grew into, as what she became later.”

Landels says the other girl was “sweet,” but that Anna “absolutely” beat her down and literally drove her out of the magazine. Anna didn’t fear competition from her but rather was disgusted by her weakness, which brought out the bully in her.

Unlike the defeated and victimized girl, Murphy was a fighter who stood up for herself and therefore wasn’t going to let Anna get to her. “It made Jil-lie basically investigate the enemy,” notes Hocking. “She wanted to know what made Anna tick. She even managed to get Anna to invite her to stay overnight at her house. She got in under the radar, and I’ve always been absolutely amazed by that, because no way would I have been brave enough to do that with Anna. There was no way Jillie was going to be destroyed like the other girl.”

While there were enormous differences in their lifestyles, Anna and Murphy bonded, or at least Murphy thought they had, though Anna never let her hair down. But she acted friendly. When Murphy was hospitalized for a brief time, Anna trekked to the blue-collar London suburbs to visit her. Afterwards, Murphy wondered about Anna’s motives.

Because she couldn’t afford private care, Murphy was treated in one of Britain’s National Health hospitals, the kind of public institution someone of Anna’s social standing would never have seen the inside of. “She was curious, not only to see how I was, but to see what a National Health hospital was like,” says Murphy. “I’ll never forget. She said, ‘It’s like
real
life.’ I didn’t think she had that human element.”

On another occasion, Murphy had a chum whose boyfriend was in prison. She made mention of it in passing to Anna, whose eyes lit up. “She was interested to know what the inside of a prison looked like, so she actually went to visit him. I didn’t even go. But that’s what her curiosity was like.”

As she got to know Anna, Murphy was surprised to find that she had very few close women friends. “And as her career took off,” she adds, “her circle of friends took off as well.” Back then, Anna’s posse consisted of Murphy and another very ambitious young woman named Joan Juliet Buck, who years later became editor of French
Vogue
and a contributing writer to American
Vogue
, under Anna, where the two had an up-and-down relationship. “We were like the Three Musketeers,” Murphy recalls fondly. “Joan’s an American
and I met her through Anna, and then we just all hung out together, liked the same hip things, looking for things that were new.”

Still, Vivienne Lasky remained Anna’s closest friend, but she was in the United States pursuing her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe while Anna was getting her real-life degree on the job.

Murphy didn’t come from money, was kind of a free spirit, and was a couple of years older than Anna. Like Anna, though, she had not gone to college, and they were both size eight. If they were going to a party, Anna often lent Murphy some of the expensive designer clothing from her vast and always updated wardrobe. “Anna used to have all the Missonis, all the designer things, so I got all the leftovers. If she got fed up with something, as she often did, she’d give it to me.”

Another beneficiary of Anna’s largesse was Liz Walker, Willie Landels’s young deputy art director, who thought of Anna as a fairy godmother. Though she saw her as “distant, frozen-faced, private, and rather determined,” she also felt that Anna was “incredibly generous in a quiet sort of way” by giving away outdated pieces—usually no more than six months old—from her wardrobe. “We were all paid virtually nothing,” Walker says, “and Anna was probably the only person on our block who had a private income. And every season she would get rid of her clothes, and she’d have worn some of these things maybe once.