Front Row (15 page)

“There was something about the way Anna worked—her
single-mindedness,”
continues Duff. “You couldn’t imagine she had any life outside of being a fashion editor. One never had any intimation she had a friend or a family.

“It appeared to me she never thought of anything
except
fashion, and doing those shoots, and getting those photographers together with those designers, and dreaming of layouts. It was almost her whole being. The rest of us were sort of having a good time—we traveled a lot, were well paid, and had long martini lunches—but she was a workaholic on a mission, which was kind of a mystery until you got to see that what she was about was discovering designers and putting together the most fabulous photographers available. No one was doing stuff like that back then.

“But in doing it she intimidated everyone. It wasn’t just Georgia, but
anyone
who got in her way. You could hear her screaming on the phone to whomever—someone not doing what she wanted them to do. Anna was
so
intense. She couldn’t tolerate any mistakes or incompetence. To her, all of this was life-and-death stuff, which is probably common among people who do just one thing and it’s all they ever think about and it’s got to be done their way.”

Anna quickly gained a reputation at
Viva
as the editor from hell, a reputation that would stick and come to haunt her as she moved up in the fashion
magazine business. Years later, people who had worked with her compared her to another imperious diva, the convicted felon and queen of domesticity, Martha Stewart.

There were times, though, when Anna was happy with Gunn’s work. She was given the title of accessories editor, and on rare instances, Anna would join Gunn and Duff for drinks—rare because Anna had made few if any friends at the magazine and didn’t appear to care. On one of those nice Anna moments, when she was in a good mood and getting along, Duff asked her for some fashion tips, what to wear, how to make what she had in her closet look great. Anna glared hard at her for a long moment, looked her up and down, and then flippantly replied, “You’d have to throw out
everything
you own.” Anna wasn’t being cute with her criticism; she was being harshly honest, which was her style.

“You couldn’t enter her realm,” observes Duff. “She was alone in that, and that didn’t bother her either, as far I could tell. She felt superior to everyone in kind of a class way.”

While virtually everyone at the magazine respected Anna’s fashion sense and her eye for what was new and hot, it was widely known and joked about that she couldn’t put any of her styling talent into words on paper—a criticism she had faced back in her
Harpers & Queen
days.

“Anna was known for not having any particular verbal or writing skills,” notes Stephanie Brush, one of the few on staff whom Anna took a liking to. “She wasn’t articulate like a Tina Brown. Anna wasn’t someone who would sit and talk about complicated ideas. She would just say, ‘Oh, that’s
fabulous’
She didn’t seem to have a lot of complicated ideas in her head. Maybe that’s why she liked me, because I was a writer. She liked people who were good with words, and I was known on the grapevine as this up-and-coming writer, so that didn’t escape her notice.”

After Anna settled in, Duff was assigned to write all of her fashion copy. “She never had anything to do with any kind of description of what she was doing,” says Duff. “I would get these layouts from her with these absolutely wild Helmut Newton photographs and I would just write fiction. I would write a little short story. Sometimes I’d create the story after I went to the shoots and interviewed the models and the photographer. Even at the
shoots, I’d have very little interaction with her. Anna had no input on the copy and wasn’t interested in having any I always thought of her as an exalted stylist because she never had anything to do with any of the written description.”

Anna’s failure to communicate in words what she had her stable of high-priced and big-name photographers communicate in pictures infuriated Rowan Johnson,
Viva’s
very talented and off-the-wall South African art director. To punish her, he often put the gorgeous layouts that she had obsessively conceived and developed into the magazine without giving her credit in the form of a byline. Instead, the story would say, photographs by Helmut Newton, text by Susan Duff, even though the text was usually modest compared to Anna’s electric spreads. All of which infuriated Anna and was embarrassing to Duff, because she knew how hard Anna had worked.

Though their work relationship was stormy at times, Anna and Johnson “adored each other, although Anna was rather eclipsed by Rowan,” says then-
Penthouse
art director Joe Brooks, one of Johnson’s close friends. In fact, there was considerable gossip that Johnson hoped for more with Anna. “There was talk,” acknowledges
Penthouse
editor Peter Bloch. “But in those days there was talk about everyone [at the two magazines].”

Beverly Wardale got a call one night from Johnson who was on a shoot with Anna in Montauk, in the Hamptons. “I’ll never forget that call. He asked me, ‘Do you think I should jump Anna tonight?’ He would try anything if he got scotch in him. He would have quite fancied being involved with Anna. He was Peck’s Bad Boy, extremely creative and terribly attractive.”

Like Bradshaw, Claude Beer, and some of the other rogues Anna had known, Rowan Johnson fit the profile—an intriguing bad boy, the son of a judge and the brother of a Rhodes scholar. When the film
Arthur
, starring Dudley Moore as a ne’er-do-well lush, was released, everyone who knew Johnson said he was Arthur Bach. “Everything in that movie, Rowan had done, from the drinking to the Rolls-Royce to the hookers,” says Brooks. “We all phoned each other and said, ‘Jesus Christ, they’ve made a movie about him.’”

The other thing about Johnson was that he was a user of hard drugs. When the door to Johnson’s office was shut, everyone figured he was shooting up. “He basically took every drug in the world,” says Brooks. “The drugs and the
drinking made him difficult to take.” One night, at Brooks’s apartment, Johnson crawled out onto the ledge fifteen stories above Fifty-fifth Street. “As much as you loved him, he became tremendously hard to tolerate, so I shut the window on him, sort of left him out there, high above the street, screeching. I said, ‘Make up your mind, in or out.’ Eventually, I let him back in.”

Johnson’s drug habit became so severe at one point that Guccione and Keeton sent him to an expensive rehab clinic and picked up the tab.

Johnson’s favorite watering hole was P.J. Clarke’s, the
Penthouse-Viva
hangout, across from the office on Third Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street. He was sometimes spotted with Anna cozying at his side, though she was probably there more for political reasons, because Clarke’s wasn’t her kind of place. “She’d be there wearing her dark glasses with Rowan, who considered himself the Mozart of art directors,” recalls Peter Bloch. “I can see him and Anna sitting over in Clarke’s endlessly, as we all did in those days. I was awestruck by Anna being in Clarke’s with her dark glasses on because the place was dark as a cave. I don’t know how she even managed to find her table with those glasses on.”

J
ohnson and Duff weren’t the only staffers who had difficulty getting information out of Anna for scheduled stories. Photographers such as Pat Hill, a female and the only shooter and photo editor on staff, faced a similar dilemma.

Hill straddled the very different worlds of
Viva
and
Penthouse
, snapping
Penthouse
Pet pictorials for Guccione and artsy portraiture for Keeton. When Anna came aboard, Hill kept a close eye on her work, which was always shot by her stable of mostly male freelance photographers, and was duly impressed. “She produced some wonderful pages,” she says. But when they passed in the hall, Anna looked down her sunglasses at her. “It was like I was not important enough to talk to because I was a staff photographer,” notes Hill. “I’m a pretty friendly person. I would say hi to everybody, but I don’t go out of my way to get smacked down. She was just very icy from the start. I really kind of kept away from her because I got such negative vibes.”

On one occasion, though, Hill was assigned by Johnson to work with Anna. He probably foresaw what would happen if the two collaborated and
wanted a vicarious high when their claws were bared. He was on the mark—the assignment quickly deteriorated into a catfight. The only information Hill was given by Johnson was that the feature involved a dancer from the American Ballet Theatre. “I never had a clue what was really going on,” she says years later.

An intense and creative photographer who took all of her assignments seriously, Hill immediately put in a call to Anna to find out what she needed. And Hill called and called and called. “I must have called her at least three or four times a day for three weeks, or whatever the lead time was. She was always unavailable. I’d call her, and if I caught her, which was rare, she’d say, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and never did. I’d call Georgia, and she’d say, ‘She’ll get back to you, she hasn’t gone over that yet.’ But she never did call back. The day before the shoot I called Anna’s office and said, ‘I’m shooting, starting at eight o’clock.’”

One of the reasons Hill had a hard time reaching Anna was that Anna made her own hours, unlike the other editors. Anna didn’t tie herself to her desk and was often off doing other things—no one knew what—so she was hard to pin down.

“Anna pretty much showed up when she felt like,” recalls Stephanie Brush, who had been promoted from editorial assistant to an associate editor spot after one of Kathy Keeton’s many editorial shakeups. “There wasn’t any nine-to-five for her. It was just understood she showed up when she wanted to show up. I never got the sense of her working for anybody. She sort of had her own little fiefdom. Anna popped in, made phone calls, and left. I don’t think she ever really moved into her office. It was kind of a place where she kept a phone, tacked up some photos that she liked, and had some clothes she liked sort of lying around, which are what fashion editor offices look like. She didn’t turn her office into a little home away from home, because she didn’t really have a homey kind of personality.”

Every so often Anna would breeze in and out of an editorial meeting when the peons were deciding what to put in the magazine. Stopping for a moment during one such brainstorming session, Anna volunteered her magic formula. “A magazine,” she proclaimed, “should be like a perfect dinner party. The two essentials are a politician and a pretty girl.” As she scooted out, jaws
dropped. And if by chance she sat in on a meeting, she usually remained mute. “She kept her opinions to herself, and not to say anything at all, or contribute vaguely, seemed almost insolent,” recalls an editor.

Not to be stymied by Anna’s failure to return her calls, Pat Hill went ahead and prepared for the shoot with the vague information she was given. She rented Merce Cunningham’s downtown dance studio for the day, determined her lighting needs, and stayed up late for several nights dyeing bolts of fabric in various shades of plums and pinks and reds, which she thought might be used as backdrops to match ballet skirts, after doing research on Degas’s paintings of ballet dancers.

“On the day of the shoot, I got there at the crack of dawn and set up and everything all fell in line, and then in trails Anna with her hair and makeup people, looks around at the setup and says, ‘Just what do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know this is just a service feature. It’s just dance positions one, two, and three.’”

Hill couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I said, ‘Well, I couldn’t get a hold of you and I’ve taken all this trouble and I’m just going to have to shoot it like this with the background.’ And she just gave me that Anna look. She was not nice about it. She was a bitch. She said, ‘Well, shoot it the way you want, but then you’re just going to have to reshoot it, aren’t you, because I’m telling you to.’ I was going to shoot it my way at that point because I never could get any answer out of her. It was a really horrible, ugly scene.”

As Hill learned at that moment, the shoot was tied to a new 1977 film about the ballet world called
The Turning Point
, starring Shirley MacLaine, Anne Bancroft, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The dancer Hill was assigned to photograph was Leslie Browne, a star with the American Ballet Theatre, who played Baryshnikov’s love interest.

Meanwhile, at the dance studio, battle lines had been drawn. “Anna stayed on one side of the studio, and I was on the other side,” Hill says. “They would dress the dancer and put her makeup on, and then send her over to my side and I would do what I needed to do. Anna was never next to me the entire day.”

Around noon, Hill, trying to restore some semblance of propriety, asked her assistant to take lunch orders, this still being the days before such assignments became Hollywood-style catered affairs. The lunch break brought the
morning’s work to a halt. Everyone placed his or her order, including Anna, and then she sat around looking sullen as everyone waited for the assistant to return with the grub. An hour passed, then two. All the while Hill was running out of natural light. When the assistant finally returned with brown bags, Hill was livid.

“I said, ‘You took so long. What did everybody order?’

“He said, ‘Well, Anna wanted quiche, caviar, and champagne.’

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. First of all, we didn’t have the budget for that, and the location was in a dead zone. He had to run blocks and blocks but couldn’t find what she wanted, so he made a decision. He got her a tuna fish on rye. I was like, ‘Good for you!’ You can’t get away with not giving me the information I needed for the shoot and then come in and act like a queen.”

After the shoot, Hill went to Johnson and demanded, “ ‘What the hell’s going on with her?’ He just said, ‘Pat, it’s Anna’s baby. But I’m going to give you an opening spread so that we don’t have to waste those photos.’ He wasn’t going to confront her but was making amends to me for all that aggravation from Anna. But that was it between me and Anna. We never worked together again. I really kept away from her; there was just this sense of negativity, and life’s too short to deal with it.”