Front Row (39 page)

But one especially turned out to be big trouble for Anna.

She was a tall, cute, preppy blonde just out of college who wanted to be a writer—a perfect
Vogue
specimen, or so she seemed. Her name was Lauren Weisberger.

“I was the one who hired Lauren Weisberger,” acknowledges Jones.

It was a gutsy admission for Jones to make, because Weisberger’s name, if whispered and overheard by Anna in the hallowed halls of
Vogue
, could lead to a career beheading.

Weisberger spent less than a year as Anna’s assistant. After she left, she wrote a roman à clef called
The Devil Wears Prada
about life as an assistant to the barely fictional Miranda Priestly, described as the most revered—and hated—woman in fashion, the editor in chief of a fashion magazine called
Runway
.

Even though Weisberger repeatedly denied it, everyone in that rarefied world of fashion knew that Miranda and Anna were one in the same, only the names were changed to protect the guilty, and the author from possible legal action.

The book, part of a genre called chick lit, written and read by young women, became a bestseller in 2003 and followed in the wake of
The Nanny Diaries
, a fictionalized tell-all written by two former short-time nannies who worked for rich East Side Manhattan mothers. Both were the precursor to a 2004 best seller about beautiful Manhattan man-hunters called
The Bergdorf Blondes
, penned by a former
Vogue
writer and British pal of Anna’s. The books appealed to the same demographic of twenty- and thirty-somethings who watched
Melrose Place, Friends
, and
Sex and the City
, and fantasized about having glamorous lives and studly lovers.

Publishers Weekly
, the publishing industry trade magazine, gave
The Devil Wears Prada
a rave review: “As the ‘lowest-paid-but-most-highly-perked assistant in the free world,’ [Andrea Sachs, the protagonist] soon learns her Nine West loafers won’t cut it—
everyone
wears Jimmy Choos or Manolos—and that the four years she spent memorizing poems and examining prose will not help her in her new role of ‘finding, fetching, or faxing,’ whatever the diabolical Miranda wants, immediately. . . . Weisberger has penned a comic novel that manages to rise to the upper echelons of the chick-lit genre.”

In London,
The Daily Telegraph
dubbed the genre “Boss Betrayal” and noted that Miranda Priestly “is a stick-thin, British, steak-eating, tennis-playing, fur-and-Prada-wearing editrix with two children, who resembles Wintour in every observable way except that she invariably sports a white Hermès scarf while Wintour is know for her sunglasses.”

The article pointed out that, in the interest of avoiding a lawsuit, no doubt, Weisberger “gives the real Anna Wintour a walk-on part.”

Many of the reviews and articles about the bitchy novel actually turned sympathetic toward Anna. Some journalists felt the book was unfair. As
The Telegraph
article pointed out, and it seemed to represent the views of many others on both sides of the Atlantic, “Wintour is tough in her position, you have to be. You also have to be dedicated, hard-working, passionate about fashion, and self-disciplined.”

The story quoted the newspaper’s own fashion editor, Hilary Alexander, as saying, “I’m sure she [Anna] is probably quite tough to work for, but she has to be. She probably does make life impossible for her assistants sometimes because she has an iron will. It’s the nature of this business. Fashion is full of workaholics for whom it is their whole lives because they love it.”

With all the publicity, Anna had to say something, so she told
The New York Times
, “I am looking forward to reading the book.” Hamish Bowles, her European editor at large, said the book should be laughed off as “very inventive fiction.”

Privately, Anna fumed. “She was spitting fire,” maintains a
Vogue
editor. “Anna felt she had been used and abused by Weisberger.”

What the book did do, besides giving Weisberger her fifteen minutes, was to place Anna squarely in the mainstream celebrity pantheon. Besides the gilded venues of New York, London, Paris, and Milan, Anna was now known and talked about over Big Macs and fries under the Golden Arches by young fashionistas in Wal-Mart denim in Davenport and Dubuque.

Laurie Jones, who claims she never read the book, says Weisberger “wasn’t here very long. When Richard Storey left”—the editor who revealed to Patricia Bosworth that Anna didn’t read everything in her magazine—“she went with him. She wanted to be in features and there aren’t many positions that open up there, so she asked to go with Richard as his assistant. While she was here she seemed to be a perfectly happy, lovely woman.”

When Jones had to fill the position vacated by a more recent assistant of Anna’s who was promoted, she had to do a lot of interviewing. “All those people had read the book,” she says. “One of them asked me, would she have to walk Anna’s dog. I said, no. I guess that’s in the book.

“Anna doesn’t share a lot of details about her personal life,” acknowledges Jones. “She is slightly enigmatic, doesn’t pour out her heart to people. There
are
questions, things people wonder about her—‘nuclear Wintour’ and all that. We go our separate ways, but we’ve always been able to talk about things.”

I
t was a banner year for Anna, 1998.
Vogue
revenues were booming. In the previous twelve months it had posted its richest period since 1892, when
Vogue
was founded, and forecasts were even more optimistic. Along with being the world’s diva of fashion, Anna also possessed the Midas touch. Her praises were being sung by the royalty of the magazine and fashion kingdoms.

Sir
Si-ness
, Si Newhouse, called Anna “the greatest
Vogue
editor of them all.”

King of designers Oscar de la Renta raved, “She has the star quality—she
is a
. star. There has never been a
Vogue
as important as
Vogue
is now.”

Arie Kopelman, head of Chanel—designer of Anna’s
Vogue
uniform—declared, “She has become a persona.”

Her longtime colleague and court jester, André Leon Talley, noted, “The Red Sea parts when she walks through the room.”

The designer Marc Jacobs was ecstatic. “If I design a grey thermal cashmere sweater, and Anna’s wearing it, and it’s also on Stella Tennant on the cover of American
Vogue
, the effect on sales is phenomenal. There’s definitely a flock who follow what Anna does . . . she’s a celebrity icon.” Jacobs wasn’t exaggerating. Anna did wear his gray thermal sweater, Tennant was on the cover sporting it, and it sold like Manolos at a fire sale.

The designer John Galiano described Anna as “my fairy godmother. Anna’s influence cannot be underestimated.”

Despite headline-making protests by animal-rights groups like PETA, the fur industry had come to worship Anna. The Fur Information Council of America, the fur trade group, observed, “Anna has had a huge impact on the amount of fur being used in fashion. The point about Anna is she influences the influencers.”

Along with fur, Anna also was far ahead of the competition when it came to athletic wear for nonathletic activities. Bloomingdale’s fashion director Kal Ruttenstein, always a big fan of Anna’s, said his chain “rushed to the market to look for these kinds of clothes” after
Vogue
presented them to readers. And he declared, “Where Anna leads, it seems, the rest of the world follows.”

“Simply put,” observed James Truman, the British editorial director of Condé Nast who had succeeded an aging Alex Liberman, “Anna is running the industry, far beyond her influence as a tastemaker. All designers check in with Anna about what she thinks is modern, what she thinks is hip. She gives them the broad trend ideas about what the public is ready for.”

October 1998 had the greatest significance for Anna. It was a landmark for her, her tenth anniversary as editor in chief. For a decade she had run the most powerful fashion magazine in the world, turned it around, and made it soar with a more contemporary mix of celebrity profiles, trendy features on food and style, and fashions more accessable to mainstream women.

None of her competitors was ever able to knock her out of the box. Not Liz Tilberis at
Harper’s Bazaar
, who, dying of ovarian cancer, published a memoir in 1998, the year before her death, that was highly critical of Anna. Not Grace Mirabella, whose
Mirabella
, called by the media “the magazine born with a silver spoon in its mouth” because of Rupert Murdoch’s backing, couldn’t really compete and officially ceased publication with its May 1995 issue. It got a brief reprieve when another publisher, Hachette, picked it up with plans to publish six times a year, but it didn’t survive. Not
Elle
, which continued to pursue
Vogue
vigorously but never could jump into the lead. And there was no horse race with other fashion monthlies that popped in and out.

Vogue
was Anna, and Anna was
Vogue
—an unbeatable combination.

“She’s far more than just another well-paid hack,” pronounced
The Guardian
in London in a piece celebrating her decade at the helm. “She’s the most influential person in fashion today. . . . Wintour is either the fashion world’s fairy godmother, championing new talent and keeping the industry
hip and modern; or she’s its answer to
The Godfather
, single-handedly controlling a $160 billion global industry.”

In a major story in
The Washington Post
headlined “Anna’s World: In Industry of Glamour, Editor of Vogue Turns a Lot of Heads,” it was noted that Anna “has been both deified and demonized” over the past decade of her reign. But the article pointed out that however people felt about her, “just about all agree she has taken
Vogue
to a whole new blockbuster level as the bible of fashion—and that she has become an icon in the process.”

Not bad at all for an obsessive fashionista who had reached the pinnacle of the fashion magazine world without even a high school diploma, with no journalistic writing or communications skills in the pre-
Vogue
years of her career, and with a wild side.

Anna’s philosophy at
Vogue
was to determine and define fashion—and to help fashionistas choose what was and wasn’t fashionable. She believed that because there was so much clothing in the marketplace, most women required guidance and direction. Thus,
Vogue
under her started and shaped fashion trends by focusing on the work of favored designers, many of them Anna’s discoveries and pals.

Through the years, a good deal of the magazine’s content has been a reflection of her personal taste, though she has asserted that her editors were sometimes “much better at spotting trends” than she was. “I know they wouldn’t be working for me if they didn’t feel the magazine did justice to their eye as well as mine,” she once said.

Nevertheless, it was she who ran the industry, she who designers touched base with about what she thought was “in” and “hip.” Like a guru, she sent down the message from on high about what she thought the public wanted.

Early on Anna was
the
poster girl for Chanel, was a strong supporter of Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Azzedine Alaia, Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene, Helmut Lang, Narciso Rodriguez, and Gianni Versace; of the Japanese such as Issey Miyake and Kenzo whose sensibilities were mixed with European elegance. She wore them, and promoted them. Anna was one of the earliest champions of Vera Wang and her beautiful bridal dresses. The furs of Adolfo, Ben Kahn, Marco Gianoti, and Dennis Basso—much to the consternation of animal-rights advocates—have been favorites of hers, and have been
Vogue
advertisers.

Marc Jacobs, whom she has championed, said his design work is often influenced by what Anna tells him in broad strokes. “She’d never say, ‘Oh, don’t do this or that,’ ” he has said. “I don’t fax her designs—I usually tell her what I’m thinking about.” But designers do send her their ideas for her approval. “I’ll call them before the couture or the collections and say, ‘What are you thinking?’ and sometimes they’ll send me sketches.”

As Condé Nast’s editorial director James Truman has noted, “Anna is not a newspaper editor, spending weekends with Tony Blair.
Vogue
has always been half in and half out of the industry, and Anna fully comprehends both aspects of it. Anna is a strategist. It is through her relationship with designers that
Vogue
has become the bible of fashion. It pays dividends in ads and how esteemed the magazine is. I can’t say which comes first.”

And that’s why she’s
the
fashion world’s most powerful figure, one who can make or save a designer’s career. One whom she saved was another favorite, John Galiano. When his business was struggling financially,
Vogue
, unlike other fashion magazines, continued to prominently feature his designs. Anna had also come to his rescue by footing his costs for a trip to New York and a salon show, and helping him to find an investor. He called what she did for him “an act of loyalty unheard of in the industry.”

In the new millennium, Anna would champion the careers of young designers like Tom Ford, Stella McCartney, and Zac Posen. An Iranian-born designer, Behnaz Sarafpour, had started working for Anne Klein and Isaac Mizrahi, but then Anna issued an edict that Sarafpour was about to be the next fashion star, and the world of fashionistas took notice of her independent sexy line.

Twenty-something Lazaro Hernandez, an aspiring designer, ran into Anna at the airport in Miami, gave her a note telling how much he idolized her and fashion. A few weeks later, Michael Kors—another acolyte of Anna’s—sent him a note saying, “Anna Wintour says you should work here.” Several years later Hernandez and his design partner, Jack McCollough, won the Perry Ellis Award for new talent. They are the two behind the label Proenza Schouler.

Anna also became a huge supporter of the work of young Swedish designer Lars Nilsson, whose background was in French haute couture and the tailoring of men’s clothing. He became the head designer of Bill Blass. Anna helped his rep by wearing one of his shirts to the VH1/
Vogue
fashion awards.

There’s always reversible sides to every story, to wit: Anna has had her battles and feuds with designers, such as Geoffrey Beene, Alexander McQueen, and Georgio Armani.

“Wintour is a woman of simmering discontent, a boss lady in four-wheel drive who ignores or abandons those who do not fuel her tank. As an editor, she has turned class into mass, taste into waste. Is she not a trend herself?”

So declared Beene in the midnineties after Anna stopped covering him, and he refrained from inviting her to his shows.

When McQueen failed to make a showing at one of Anna’s favored events—the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute gala—she was said to have gone ballistic, threatening to boycott his future shows. They reportedly had a rapprochement.

In the early nineties, in the middle of New York Fashion Week, Armani decided to throw a party at the Museum of Modern Art. It was not the best of times to expect a joyous turnout because Anna and the rest of the fashion crowd had just returned exhausted from the shows in London, Paris, and Milan, and it was raining that night.

Furious, Anna did make a showing at the party and also a fashion statement underscoring her anger. She wore a bright yellow sequined scuba jacket designed by Karl Lagerfeld for his Chanel collection.

“It was a blatant signature piece of a collection that was the diametric opposite of Armani’s look,” recalls fashion writer Michael Gross, who was there that night. “Anna was a walking fuck-you. She absolutely wore it to send him a message. It was her way of saying, you know what, buddy, making me come out tonight to see a Milanese designer in the middle of New York Fashion Week is simply not right, so I’m going to wear this glaringly insulting outfit.

“It’s bad enough to wear another designer, but to wear the bright yellow runway piece to the command performance gala of the designer who epitomized imperiousness said to me that I had underestimated this woman.

“Fashion is a power game, and Anna has come to epitomize fashion as a power game. She clearly had this will to power and that was the first night that I saw that there was more to her than the imperious fashion editor hiding behind glasses with her legs twisted around like a corkscrew and her arms crossed in front of her, always seemingly cagey and hiding. I always thought
it was a cover for some vast insecurity, but that night I admired the shit out of this woman.”

D
espite her enormous success and power professionally, Anna’s personal life was in a dreadful state by the late nineties. Her seemingly happy marriage to her guru, David Shaffer, was on shaky grounds. Just as 1998 was an extraordinarily wonderful and joyous year for Anna, 1999 would turn out to be one of the ugliest periods in her otherwise glam life—a year filled with carnal scandal, tear-jerking heartbreak, and stranger-than-fiction irony.

Though Anna and Shaffer tried to keep their private life very private, there were signs of growing discord and discontent.

The two were seen together at public events less and less and, when they were, the psychiatrist looked glum while the editrix-wife switched on her brilliant, albeit enigmatic, smile for the photographers. The couple barely communicated. During a vacation in tony St. Barth’s in their fourteenth year of marriage, Anna and Shaffer sat together on the beach but never spoke a word and were described by an observer as sad and bored looking.

A high-profile journalist who covered the fashion world recalls how Anna and Shaffer had angry dinners together in an Italian restaurant near their Greenwich Village home. “They would fight so bitterly at the table that often one or the other of them would get up and walk out, and the other would sit there alone finishing their meal. They were the kind of public rows that one would think that a stylish, image-conscious person like Anna would not engage in. Other times she’d eat alone if they weren’t talking. She would walk into certain restaurants in her neighborhood and demand a certain table. If it wasn’t ready she would blow her top. There was tremendous anger there.”

This source says he “never understood” the marriage. “David is certainly no Adonis and he’s such a mild-mannered guy, though he was her Svengali. It was amusing that he married Anna and that he specialized in disturbed teenagers—somehow that always rang true to me.”

Despite all of Shaffer’s love and support over the years, Anna is said to have gotten bored with the marriage, just as she got bored with the length of skirts, or photographers who had served their purpose, or assistants who didn’t act slavish, or designers who no longer turned on her fashion juices.

“She was numb, tired of their routine—playing Scrabble was one of their
pastimes—and she wanted more excitement in her life,” says one close observer of the marriage. “David was so different from all those men she’d been involved with in the past. Not to sound mean or cynical, but I think David, who is really brilliant and very charming, had served Anna’s purposes. He gave her two lovely children, was a great father, was her guiding light through the most important years of her career. But I think after all of her success Anna felt omnipotent, felt she could handle it all on her own. She needed a new beginning—and then Shelby came along.”