Front Row (17 page)

A
s Anna’s relationship with
Viva
was deteriorating, her personal life was in utter chaos.

By 1978, she and Bradshaw had reached the breaking point. The romance was long over, and the live-in aspect had become antagonistic and sporadic, with Bradshaw mostly crashing on the couches of friends, male and female, in New York, Los Angeles, and London.

Possibly with an eye to replacing Bradshaw, Anna decided to do a
Viva
fashion spread using interesting and sexy men as models, among them Bradshaw and Jean-Paul Goude, an artist who later married disco vamp Grace Jones and helped create the amazonian beauty and former model’s androgynous look and persona. Carol Mithers, who had been hired as a twenty-three-year-old editorial assistant but was quickly promoted to associate editor during one of the staff purges, was assigned by Anna to interview the “models” and write blurbs about them.

Mithers, who thought of Anna as “not a nice person—cold, arrogant, and haughty in a magazine with an otherwise nice sisterly feeling, but who did unbelievable, absolutely gorgeous spreads,” was taking notes from Bradshaw in the photo studio when he began talking about one particular woman in his life. “I remember him saying, ‘My last girlfriend said I was a wonderful affair, but would make a bad husband.’ He either told me, or I later figured out, that he was talking about Anna.”

In the same time frame as the shoot, there was great excitement—and a bit of schadenfreude—in the
Viva
office when Anna had what was described as a crying fit over the split. She was said to have holed up in her office and, according to the photographer Pat Hill, “was hysterical and crying her eyes out.” Mostly, though, everyone in the office was intrigued that the ice maiden could actually shed real tears.

Though she appeared heartbroken, a number of friends of both Anna and Bradshaw say it was she who broke it off.

“Anna ended that relationship, not Bradshaw,” maintains Earle Mack, a close friend of both, whose fancy Park Avenue digs Bradshaw commandeered at times before, during, and after the breakup. A genial and charismatic businessman, political adviser, and culture maven who would later serve as chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts, Mack had first met Bradshaw in swinging London and through him became friends with Anna after she landed in New York. “It ended,” Mack asserts, “because she was fed up with Bradshaw’s wild ways—his drinking, his gambling. She just didn’t think that he was responsible enough for her. When you’re trying to look seriously at someone for the future you want them to be responsible. Anna was a strong woman. She knew what she was about. She knew what she wanted to do. She was very much in love with Bradshaw, and he was everything wonderful to Anna—but she needed someone with more stability in her life.”

Nik Cohn, who opened his Upper West Side apartment to Bradshaw, says, “Obviously, there were problems and rocky times, ups and downs, and storms between Anna and Bradshaw. But Bradshaw’s thing with Anna didn’t just one day end. They were on and off. She certainly loved him very much, and even when he was going through considerable pain [after the breakup], I never heard Bradshaw say anything negative about her personal life or her professional life. He was more like her cheerleader: Anna’s up to this, Anna’s doing that.’ The way I saw it, he thought the world of her, [but] they were two exceptionally complex and deeply contradictory personalities.”

Through Bradshaw, Cohn had gotten to know and like Anna, and he saw her, as most men did, in a far different light from those who worked with her, especially other women. Cohn compares her back then to a little doe lost in the woods, while those at
Viva
saw her as Godzilla.

“Anna was very vulnerable and spent a lot of time biting the ends of her
hair,” he remembers. “There was a Bambi-caught-in-the-headlights quality about her. She was highly emotional and high-strung. Her energies were diffused, and she changed her mind at enormous speed about what she wanted.”

At twenty-nine, ambitious and determined to climb to the top of the fashion magazine business, Anna had made the decision to break free of her Bradshaw dependency. He no longer fit into her blueprint for success, despite the fact that she did then, and always would, love him. In the wake of the split, Bradshaw had what Cohn describes as “wide mood swings.” But he still found time to hang out at some of his favorite New York haunts—Elaine’s and Mortimer’s. To raise pocket money, he hustled backgammon games in the back room of Othello, a black disco on Eighth Avenue.

Bradshaw also spent considerable time on the road working on freelance pieces as a way, in part, to drown his sorrow over Anna’s defection. On a trip to Hollywood, he reconnected with Carolyn Pfeiffer, an American film publicist whom he had met in London in the early sixties. By the seventies, Pfeiffer had become a relatively successful independent film producer. The two suddenly fell in love, as Pfeiffer tells it, and Bradshaw moved into her Hollywood Hills home, though he continued to see other women, drink, and gamble. On assignment in London in 1978, for instance, he stayed with a friend of Anna’s and seduced an American woman journalist pal of hers, without telling her of his involvement with Pfeiffer.

Anna wasted no time after the final split with Bradshaw. One of the next men in her life was said to be Eric Idle, a member of
Monty Python
. When Idle once purportedly broke a date with her, a
Viva
colleague says, Anna was furious. “We all could hear this ridiculous conversation she was having with him on the phone. She kept repeating, ‘I think that’s
very
naughty of you. . . . It’s
terribly
naughty of you. . . . It’s
horribly
naughty of you.’ She wasn’t letting him off easy for canceling out on her. She wasn’t taking any excuses.”

Anna also raised eyebrows at the
Viva
office around this time by appearing rumpled, if not disheveled, at times, with circles under her eyes, and looking like a lost soul, which ignited watercooler gossip. “She was coming to work wearing the same outfit maybe five days in a row, on several occasions,” recalls a coworker, one of the few who liked her. “Here she was, this fashion plate, and she was wearing the same dress every day. People were saying she didn’t
even have a permanent address at that point, that she didn’t have any place to go home to. It was all very, very strange.”

With Bradshaw out of the picture, Anna asked
Viva
associate editor Stephanie Brush, who was five years younger and no fashionista—she bought her clothes at Alexander’s, a low-budget New York department store—to join her in a
Three’s Company-
style roommate arrangement. The other roomie was a younger man, a friend of Anna’s, who was not a romantic interest.

Anna was unusually fond of Brush. When she learned that Brush was planning a trip to London to visit a boyfriend, for instance, she offered her a list of people to call, among them the novelist Martin Amis. And on a number of occasions Anna invited Brush for drinks or dinner at a couple of her favorite haunts, such as One Fifth, at One Fifth Avenue, a chic and hip restaurant with a nautical theme that was owned by Anna’s friend George Schwartz, a radiologist, who always gave her the best table in the house. According to Paul Sinclaire, Anna dated Schwartz for a time, and he gave her a gift of bracelets. Anna’s British ex-pat friend Brian McNally, who went on with his brother Keith to open trendy Manhattan restaurants, worked there at the time. One Fifth was a hip spot. A scene from the film
An Unmarried Woman
was shot there while Anna was at
Viva
, and celebrities like Richard Gere, Nick Nolte, and Bette Midler were customers.

Brush never really understood Anna’s interest in her. “She was so cool, and I was such a dork, but I think I amused her on some level,” she says.

So she was pleasantly taken aback when Anna asked her out of the blue to share an apartment. It was a triplex in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan, and each roommate would have one level. Brush was interested, so Anna took her to visit the place, and then they went to lunch at One Fifth to discuss arrangements. But that was the last Brush heard of the offer.

“She never said anything more about it, and for all I know she never ended up getting that place,” Brush says. “I never did know what happened. But it’s always been in the back of my mind that I just wore the wrong outfit that day—a rodeo skirt with a little ruffle at the bottom and cowboy boots, a little cowgirl theme—and that probably turned her off.”

Anna seemed desperate for a new roof over her bob and was willing to settle for something as bizarre as a cockroach-infested walkup loft two flights
above iffy East Broadway on the Lower East Side in Chinatown, practically under the Manhattan Bridge—the kind of situation no one could have imagined the high-style priestess living in if she was thinking straight. But the break with Bradshaw, and her increasingly precarious situation at
Viva
, was seemingly taking an emotional toll. The loft, with pitted wood floors painted in dark blue enamel, and a couple of partition walls that did not reach the ceiling, belonged to Richard Neville.

On a few occasions, Anna had attended candlelit bohemian dinner parties there—lots of insider gossip from a diverse group of underground journalists and writers—and the place looked interestingly funky and romantic to her, at least in the semidarkness. Besides Neville, the loft’s former occupants had included a reporter for the hip
SoHo News
and an up-and-coming young architect, so the joint had some cachet. But in the glare of the harsh morning light the reality was far different.

The drab space included a tiny bathroom, accessorized with a grungy shower, a toilet, and a mirror nailed to the wall. Across a wallboard partition was the minuscule kitchen—both rooms shared one set of plumbing risers—with a cheap fridge, an inexpensive four-burner stove, and a couple of feet of counterspace, though a small expanse of brick wall was trendily exposed. In the main part of the space, some long-ago tenant had left a Ping-Pong table. The ground floor of the building housed a storeroom for groceries; the floor above the loft was a private club for well-dressed Asian men thought to be in organized crime.

Nevertheless, it was serendipitous when Anna, desperately looking for a place to hang her Yves Saint Laurent, learned that Neville was leaving New York for New Delhi to pursue the story of a serial killer of hippies in Asia and the subcontinent, for which Neville had gotten a book contract. (When the book was published, the photograph of his wife, Julie Clarke, on the jacket showed her in an Anna designer hand-me-down.)

“There were a few Australians around who I could have put in the loft,” says Neville, “but Anna decided she wanted to rent it because her domestic circumstances suddenly changed. She needed a place in a hurry.”

He adds that never in a million years could he have imagined Anna living in such a place and was dumbfounded when she said she’d take it.

One of the Australians who had also been interested was the radical journalist Phillip Frazer, who caught Anna’s screeching phone call not long after she had taken up residence.

“Richard had told me that Anna was an English lady of breeding, or at least had that manner, and she and her boyfriend had broken it off, and she needed a place in hurry and was new to the idea of living alone,” recalls Frazer. “He told me she was not the sort of person who was used to this kind of living and asked me to be the phone contact in case she had a problem. I never thought I’d hear from this fashion person named Anna Wintour.”

But then came the attack of the cockroaches, thousands of them, like a scene out of a Stephen King urban nightmare.

“Less than a week later she called me in a distressed state, saying there were roaches everywhere and she couldn’t stand it and had to leave immediately and could I take over the lease. I explained to her how to put down poison, but she wanted to get out of there and go to somewhere more uptown—literally and figuratively.”

The next day, Frazer arrived at the loft and met Anna, whose bags were packed, with a taxi waiting. She exchanged a few pleasantries and was gone.

“I never saw or heard from her again, but I never lost track of who she was,” he says.

When he moved into the loft, he discovered something Anna had left behind—an expensive designer bedsheet in a beige and dark blue houndstooth pattern. Frazer had it washed and began sleeping on it and found it to be one of the most comfortable sheets he’d ever had. For some reason the sheet stayed in the Frazer family, and by the fall of 2003, a quarter century later, it had become known as the “Anna Wintour Memorial Sheet” and was then being slept on by Frazer’s sixteen-year-old son, Jackson.

Knowing that Anna’s career has been based on staying ahead of the curve when it came to fashion, style, and trends, Frazer feels it’s ironic that she had that brief moment in what had been a very downscale neighborhood that years later became hot and chic. “She sort of jumped the gun,” he observes. And Anna probably never forgot her experience there, either, as evidenced by the February 2004 issue of
Vogue
that had the cover line, “Inside the Red-Hot World of New York Fashion,” which dealt in part with the cutting-edge
designers and shops and living spaces of what became the hip Lower East Side, where she had fled from an army of roaches.

B
y the late spring of 1978, the situation at
Viva
had become untenable—a virtual pit of vipers. Unfounded gossip circulated that Bob Guccione was about to shut the doors, which had everyone, especially Anna, in a panic, because
Viva
had become a wonderful billboard for her work.

Moreover, there was a heated confrontation between Guccione and two very talented staffers, executive editor Gini Kopecky and senior editor Valerie Monroe, over a cover photo, which resulted in them being fired and morale plummeting even farther.

“The reason they left,” recalls Carol Mithers, “is because there was a Pet that Bob [Guccione] had put in
Penthouse
, and he wanted to put a close-up photo of her very seductive, fuck-me kind of face on
Viva
—a cover that didn’t belong on a women’s magazine.”