Front Row (9 page)

“She used to have a really amazing figure, really great boobs and quite a tiny waist, and we were sort of the same size and about the same height, about five foot five, a classic size eight to ten, with a very slight-looking frame,” continues Walker, who had an eye for such detail, going on to become executive fashion and beauty editor at British
Marie Claire
. “Anna would pass on her clothes, but she’d do it in a really charming way, not in the I-am-the-rich-girl-giving-my-clothes-to-you. She would choose things she thought you might like, or would suit you. It was really done in a very gracious way.”

Giving away her castoffs became part of Anna’s modus operandi, something she’d do throughout her life. Some, with a cynical point of view, thought it was her way of securing loyalty or buying friendship from the beneficiaries of her generosity. Whatever the motive, it was also a quick and easy way to make room in her closets for the new lines.

“None of us were paid much, but Anna had her own money, family money,” notes Hocking. “We used to go to the shows in Italy, and Anna would be the only one of us who would then actually buy clothes from the designers. Here’s this young girl going to Milan and Paris, and that could be a bit of a shock for anyone else—but not to Anna. Nothing fazed her because she was used to going to the best places and meeting top people in her personal life. Nothing would impress, unless it was
really
good, but I don’t remember ever seeing her
really
impressed. She wasn’t the sort of person who would say, ‘Gosh, that’s amazing!’ She was always on one level, but taking everything in.”

Despite Anna’s contention that she had no master plan for herself in the fashion mag game, she expressed a major goal less than two years after she joined
Harpers & Queen
. In the fall of 1971, the staff began planning features for the Christmas issue. “All of us, Anna, myself, and Jennifer, had to do a page—our ideal Christmas present,” recalls Murphy. “Mine was a trip to a desert island. But Anna’s goal was to be appointed editor of
Vogue
. That’s what
her
dream was.”

Since
Vogue was
a competitor, Landels didn’t see fit to mention Anna’s fantasy in his magazine. Instead, she appeared in the late November issue of
Harpers & Queen
—a bimonthly at the time—with five of her colleagues under a headline that read, “6
H&Q
employees describe their ideal Christmas presents, illustrated by models’ photos.”

And there she was, smashing, in her third modeling assignment. The copy read: “Anna Wintour, fashion assistant, 21, would like to taste St. Moritz living next year and hopes to escape from the Underground (quilt-trousered Japanese work woman division) wearing this ankle-length white fox coat, £1,950 from Harrods, SW1, and diamond feather brooch from Colling-wood,
46
Conduit St. W1 (also the diamond band ring), and leading this large Pyrenean mountain dog from Harrods. The cane chair is £29 from Biba, 124 Kensington High St. W8. Hair by Herts at Vidal Sassoon.”

Back then, being a fashion editor involved very little writing, just a simple intro to a layout now and then, if that. “The problem was, Anna couldn’t write,” asserts Landels, which he thought was odd for the daughter of a newspaper editor. But neither could Jennifer Hocking write, which would eventually result in her dismissal by Landels and a bitchy battle for her job involving
Anna. But that was still down the road. “We never wrote words,” acknowledges Hocking. “We weren’t asked to write. We’d write down the facts—‘blue shoes.’ We were fashion editors. We selected clothes. We didn’t write about them.”

Moreover, Anna had problems getting across what
needed
to be written. “Anna couldn’t express her thoughts about fashion,” adds Landels. “We had a subeditor who said to me, ‘That fucking Anna Wintour! She’s given me this folder and I don’t know what to write because she doesn’t tell me anything.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be unkind about Anna. One day she will be our boss.’”

During Anna’s tenure, most of her writing was done by Laura Pank, who had to devise kicky sentences for “the ridiculous fashion sets” and headlines “for these weird things that Anna told me were ‘wonderful,’ so I just believed it, really, and wrote it that way.” Anna briefed Pank in a voice that still echoed in her ears years later. “She sounded like sandpaper, really grating, like a door that needs oiling, a floorboard, something really painful. Otherwise, she tried to be mysterious behind the glasses, honing her persona.” Of all of the people working on fashion news, Anna “certainly dressed as she shot,” notes Pank. “She actually lived fashion, wore her dark glasses all the time, in and out, was immensely stylish, and pin-thin. I think she existed on lettuce leaves.”

Pank was convinced, and people gossiped, that Anna was restricting her diet. “That’s her personality,” she asserts. “She’s a control freak, always had to be in control of herself and everyone else.”

The most difficult aspect of the job, whether one was a junior like Anna or a senior like Hocking, was learning to work smoothly with prima donna photographers who wanted only one thing—their creative freedom. The fashion editor’s job was to keep control of the shoot.

Anna seemed to have a preternatural ability. She worked well with some of the best of them back then—Alex Chatelaine, in Paris, and talented neophyte James Wedge in London, whom Anna knew, so no problem there. He was part of the group of cool older men in her social sphere, a player in the London boutique scene where Anna had first met him.

Wedge had just started shooting professionally when Anna began giving him assignments. Before long, they became romantically involved. She was in
good company. Among his girlfriends was the model Pat Booth, who became a popular novelist, and after Anna the actress Helen Mirren, with whom he had a long, tempestuous relationship.

“Anna hired me as a photographer, and that’s how we met, and then we became lovers,” acknowledges Wedge, who says he succeeded Richard Neville. “When I met her she was still with Richard and they were sort of splitting up.”

Anna and Wedge, a decade older, were together for about eighteen months. Since Wedge considered himself “a loner” and Anna had few female friends, he described their relationship as a “very private affair.” When he first met Anna, he thought of her as a
Vogue
type. “Though she was working for
Harpers,”
he observes, “she had that
Vogue
attitude—very snooty about fashion, seemed to know it all.”

In fact, much of their relationship revolved around fashion, as had her involvement with Stephen Bobroff “We were lovers, we went out together, and we worked together at the same time,” says Wedge, “and most of our time together was spent talking about fashion and never seemed to depart from that. It was always—
always
—the same subject.” Wedge knew Bobroff professionally. Unlike Bobroff, though, Wedge and Anna didn’t set up housekeeping together. He had an enchanting cottage in a forest in the Gloucester countryside where they spent weekends together, and Anna had an elegant apartment near Earl’s Court, in the city.

“Anna was very determined, ambitious—it was pretty obvious in the way she acted—and she had very strong views on fashion and the work we were doing together,” he says. “Often you can be employed by a fashion editor because they like your work and leave all the decisions up to you, but she had a lot to say on how my work—the photos—was to be achieved. But I was quite a young photographer in the sense that I hadn’t been working very long, so it was nice to work with someone like Anna who was
so
strong-minded.”

Anna took Wedge to Phillimore Gardens and introduced her new beau to her father, who he found “very frosty.” After several visits, Wedge came away thinking, “It runs through the family.”

Even though Wedge fancied Anna, there were aspects of her personality that he found irritating or just plain odd. The first had to do with her eating
habits: “She’d order coffee,” he remembers clearly, “and have cream put on the top and then she would just eat the cream off with a spoon and never touch the coffee. And when the food came, she’d just pick at it, never eat it.”

The other issue that he found odd had to do with Anna’s relationship with her colleagues at the magazine, which was underscored for Wedge during a weeklong shoot in Greece. “Normally on those sort of occasions the crew gets up early, has breakfast together, do the day’s shoot, and then you all meet up for dinner in the evening. But with Anna, it was different. She
never
had dinner with us, had her meals sent to her room and ate alone. It always struck me how aloof she was. It’s sort of a sign, not to eat with everyone in the evenings. It’s unusual.”

Like all couples, they had tiffs. It might have been over something Wedge had said that ticked off Anna, but when she got angry, she didn’t explode. “She went the opposite way. She became cold, did
not
speak.” Their relationship eventually bottomed out. “We just went our separate ways,” he says. “Nothing special happened to end it. It was the seventies, you know—if you remember [what happened], you weren’t really there.”

Wedge left London, moved to the country, and began painting. Sometime in the early to midnineties, Anna showed up unexpectedly at his London studio during the Christmas holiday to say hello, looking “slightly older, but her style was the same—the bob, still very slim, but a little bit more aloof, a little crisper.” They hadn’t spoken for many years, and he was pleasantly surprised to see her. But it wasn’t until long after she left that he discovered she had gotten married and had children, none of which she told him during her visit, which didn’t surprise Wedge, who always felt she was secretive.

“Despite spending quite some time with her as her boyfriend, I knew very little about her,” he notes. “It’s amazing. With Anna you look back and think how little you know of her.”

Jennifer Hocking recalls that Wedge was “very keen” on Anna, and she knows of at least one other photographer, a Frenchman, with whom Anna was involved while working at
Harpers & Queen
. “When we used to go to Paris she would see him. She had a busy life, but on the surface she never came in looking as if she’d spent a night out, but always looked calm, collected. You couldn’t read her life by talking to her. She certainly attracted interesting
guys, intelligent ones, but she did it quietly, didn’t boast, didn’t say I’m doing this or that. A lot of the shoots Anna did, she did with James Wedge. She used to get things out of photographers nobody else could, so maybe she had her own methods—I don’t know. Men obviously liked her . . . and that is why she always got these amazing photos.”

Manipulating men has always been one of Anna’s great strengths. With the photographers, she flirted, complimented, ego-stroked, and slyly directed in order to get the best out of them. Moreover, as she became more experienced as an editor, she was savvy enough to take
their
advice, to use the shots
they
recommended, the photos
they
determined were their best from a particular shoot, rather than making her own personal choice. That way, in most instances, she could do no wrong.

Hocking, who knew a thing or two about handling men, was amazed that such a young thing like Anna could do it as she did and make it appear so easy. A valise, as it turns out, underscored it all for her. “We’d go to the shows and she’d always be able to get men to carry her suitcase,” she said, remembering those moments years later. “I’m tall and no one would ever carry my suitcase. I used to say, ‘My God, in my next life I’m going to look like Anna Wintour.’ She looked frail, she looked fragile, and obviously that appeals to a lot of men. Men loved her. Anna would stand there with the fringe hanging down over her eyes, looking very sort of helpless, a waiflike look, but far from being a waif, and the men would line up.”

From the beginning of her career, Anna had an eye for interesting locations. One memorable and magical shoot for
Harpers & Queen
that she oversaw was for a collection of clothing by Japanese designers, a favorite of Anna’s through the seventies and eighties. The magazine wouldn’t spring for an expensive and time-consuming location shoot in Asia, so Anna, working with Wedge, found a farm that grew watercress in the English countryside that had from a distance the look of a rice paddy, and that’s where she posed the models, wearing peasant hats and Japanese fashions. “It was fantastic,” recalls Hocking. “She could organize, she would make sure people sent in the props and clothing she wanted, and she got very good work out of the photographers. Her mind was always sharp and crystal clear. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as clever as her.”

Years later, Anna looked back on her work at
Harpers & Queen
and noted
that she considered the fashion shoots to be “amateurish affairs.” She recalled being sent to India for a weeklong assignment with nothing more than twenty pounds, which in those days was less than fifty dollars. “When I asked my editor, ‘How am I supposed to pay for everything?’ He said, ‘Oh, just find a ma-harajah with a palace.’ And I think I did.”

F
rom the age of fifteen, Anna had begun hearing well-founded rumors that her father was a womanizer. Later, gossip items alluding to his extracurricular affairs began appearing in the “Grovel” gossip column of London’s bitchy satirical magazine
Private Eye
.

The column linked him to a married woman and made light by calling him “Sir Charles” because he never received knighthood, which he felt he deserved.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had been introduced to the woman by Win-tour, says, “It was evident to an old friend his interest in her had a certain sexual tinge. She was very vivacious, sexy, and bright, and Charles was a powerful editor by this time. Womanizing was not the central theme of his life, but he liked intelligent, pretty women, and I suppose went to bed with them. Charles had a British reserve about things and was not given to con-fessionalism.”

Wintour once showed up with the beauty at the
Evening Standard’s
Washington, D.C., bureau, staying with her at the Madison Hotel, according to the paper’s then-correspondent in the nation’s capital, Jeremy Campbell, who had long heard the stories about his boss’s affairs. But Wintour attempted to dispel the rumors. “Charles said to me, ‘Whatever you hear, she’s my traveling companion, and nothing more.’ ”

Campbell’s reaction? “I suspended belief.”

Alex Walker, who had become close to Nonie Wintour before, during, and after her marriage, believes that the tensions that had long existed between her and her husband had reached their zenith in the late sixties and early seventies. “The children were growing up. Nonie was deeply involved in her social work. Charles consequently became more involved in the feminine comforts that a number of women offered him.

“Charles would have absolutely never talked about any of this. He would have thought that that would have been a breach of faith in marriage. If he had any real confidantes, they were probably the other women that he was with. He became the kind of husband who relaxes with a mistress to get rid of the tensions of home life.”

Besides the boldface names with whom he had liaisons, Wintour “riffled through secretaries at the paper, one after another, and poor old Nonie was at home,” recounts a female former
Evening Standard
reporter. “He was very frigid and horrible to her. They gave wonderful cocktail parties, but they were very unhappy together.”

Anna knew of her father’s wanderings from what she saw and heard firsthand at home, from
Private Eye
, and from the whispering in the circle in which she ran. Always very private, she never talked about the gossip items.

“She was very reserved that way,” notes Jennifer Hocking. “She wouldn’t have discussed it, and Anna was not a gossipy person who you could sit around and have a good dish with.”

Her father’s philandering was difficult for her to deal with, or to comprehend intelligently, says Vivienne Lasky. “Anna thought that some of the women reporters who worked at the
Standard
weren’t just protégées. Anna sensed something. One was invited along to the country, was included in a lot of things even with Nonie there, and often he would take her to parties if Nonie didn’t want to go.

“Anna couldn’t go to her mother, or her father, and say, ‘What’s this all about?’ She’s so terribly British,” observes Lasky. “We had many conversations about our fathers being womanizers. She knew of his infidelities, was aware he had protégées, and she forgave him everything. Early on, when
Private Eye
first started reporting the gossip, she tended to side privately with her
father. It was tough, but we both loved and idolized our fathers and didn’t quite know what to do with our feelings. I don’t even know if it was anger. It was just sort of like, what does this all mean?”

In a childish and naive way, Anna seemed to understand her father’s philandering more than she could Melvin Lasky’s, mainly because Brigitte Lasky was chic and beautiful as opposed to her own frumpy mother. “I remember Anna wondering, ‘Why would your father go any further than
your
mother? Why would he, if he’s got
the
most beautiful woman?’”

Anna seemed to have the mind-set of a
Cosmo
Girl—that it all had to do with a sexy look and sex, with little understanding that relationships were far more complex.

“I adored Charles, he was charismatic and flirtatious,” Lasky says. “And I knew his flaws. I don’t want to put any blame on Nonie—she didn’t deserve that kind of treatment—but once in a while she could have gone out with her husband. Nonie never went anywhere with him. Charles would buy Nonie jewelry for her birthday, but she’d say she didn’t want it. It’s as if he didn’t really know her.”

O
n September 4, 1970, nine months after Anna had joined
Harpers & Queen
, Nonie received an urgent transatlantic call from her sister Jean in New York. Their mother, Anna Gilkyson Baker, had died at the age of eighty-one. The matriarch had been widowed for almost four years, ever since pneumonia claimed the life of her renowned Harvard corporate law professor husband, Ralph Jackson Baker, at seventy-eight. Hospitalized for a week, Baker died on November 5, 1966, two days after his granddaughter Anna’s seventeenth birthday.

Anna’s grandmother had been found dead in the Bakers’ Boston apartment where Nonie had spent her formative years. The cause of her mother’s death, though, was kept secret from other family members on the American side.

Unlike Ralph Baker, who had long suffered from heart disease and chronic bronchitis, which were the cause of his death, Anna Baker did not die a natural death or from illness. Apparently long depressed, Anna’s grandmother committed suicide, taking an overdose of the barbiturate Nembutal.

Anna’s maternal grandfather had invested his money wisely and left an
impressive estate of $2,279,578.62 (in 1966 dollars), of which Anna was a beneficiary. Her grandmother when she died had a personal worth—excluding her husband’s sizable trust for her—of $204,162.93, of which Anna also was an heir.

On November 3, 1970, two months after her grandmother’s death, Anna celebrated her twenty-first birthday at a party thrown by her parents at the posh Savoy Hotel. She now had substantial income at her disposal from the family trusts, the kind of money that would allow her to take low-paying fashion magazine jobs, such as the one at
Harpers & Queen
, and still live the high life: have chic apartments, wear beautiful clothes, drive a trendy car, spend nights on the town, and date outrageous men.