Front Row (18 page)

Kopecky and Monroe, who had been at
Viva
for only about eight months, were furious. “We were trying to make it a more serious magazine, a more literary magazine,” says Monroe, who had hired Mithers. “Kathy had told Gini we could do whatever we wanted with the magazine. I was buying stories from Alice Munro and other wonderful fiction writers, but it wasn’t a place where anyone had a strong vision. However,
Viva
was a beautiful book, and Anna was doing beautiful fashion pages. Most people left her alone and she was doing whatever she wanted to do.”

Still, Guccione and Keeton ran the show. Beverly Wardale remembers Keeton saying, “It’s Bob’s magazine, and Bob can do what he likes, and if he wants to have this cover, he’ll have this cover!” Guccione and Keeton refused to see Kopecky and Monroe’s point of view and vision, and they were axed.

“We were told we had to leave,” says Monroe. “We were escorted out of the building.”

What became the final days of
Viva
began, probably as a corporate subterfuge, with the hiring in July 1978 of a managing editor, Helen Irwin, to replace Kopecky. It threw everyone on staff, including Anna, off guard and scotched the rumors that Guccione was about to stick
Viva’s
head in the proverbial oven.

A onetime runner-up for Miss Pennsylvania in a local Miss America pageant, the tall, thin, ash blond, and officious Irwin had some previous journalism experience, having worked for
Boston
and
Philadelphia
magazines. She secured the
Viva
job because of her friendship with Jim Goode, the editorial director for
Penthouse
and
Viva
, who recommended her to Keeton and Guc-cione. They hired her because she had a vision to produce “a magazine for today’s intelligent, independent and adventurous woman . . . affluent and well-educated and interested in the world around her,” according to a publicity memo.

It didn’t take Irwin very long to develop the same view of Anna as most everyone else on staff had—a talented and creative ice queen.

“She wasn’t an easy person to get to know,” says Irwin. “She was cold—and that’s not too strong of a word. She was aloof, ambitious, and had supreme confidence and wanted to do well. She gave off this air of ‘I’m good. I know what I’m doing. I can do this.’ She had enormous style and talent, and I gave her pretty much free rein and treated her as a separate fiefdom because I was not so secure in my own fashion editing abilities. My relationship with her was professional—and at arm’s length.”

Irwin’s only hire was a new senior editor to fill Monroe’s slot but not her duties. Catherine Guinness was a member of the hugely wealthy Guinness brewery family in England and was hired mainly because of her contacts in the edgy New York underground, where she was a close friend of Andy Warhol and had worked at his ultrahip
Interview
magazine. Catherine was hired by Irwin on orders from Jim Goode. Guinness says she had no idea who Anna was until she started at
Viva
but was pleasantly surprised.

While virtually everyone on staff headed the other way when they saw Anna coming, Guinness and Anna, two Brits, hit it off. “She was really nice, jolly, and good company.” Of all the women who worked at
Viva
, Guinness fit Anna’s profile of someone worth courting. She was trendy, part of the Warhol scene, and from a powerful and influential British family, so Anna showed the beer heiress her charming side. They even had some talks about setting up a magazine together, but it came to nothing.

“Anna had great imagination and was the most generous person in that she gave me all her ideas”—a London issue, a Paris issue, neither of which ever
reached fruition—“and inspired me without wanting herself to get the credit,” says Guinness. “The people at the magazine, like that dreary managing editor [Irwin], thought the ideas were over the top. This bloody Helen woman had stymied all of her ideas, but the ideas were just
too
wonderful.”

Guinness felt that there was “an overriding bridge-and-tunnel mentality” among the people who worked at the magazine. “They were pretty much middlebrow, the sort of people who would
not
be allowed in Studio 54.”

Apparently hoping subtly to extend her franchise at
Viva
beyond fashion, Anna suggested the story ideas to Guinness along with the names of friends in London who could do them. The ideas, though, were all nixed by Irwin at the direction of Keeton, who by the late summer of 1978 had it in for Anna.

Despite all of the backbiting and deceit, it was Irwin, strangely enough, who had become Anna’s biggest booster, as evidenced by a confidential assessment of the staff, dated August 11, 1978, that she had written at Keeton’s request.

In it, Irwin described Anna as “one of the strongest assets
Viva
has. In two years with
Viva
, she has made a name for herself, and for
Viva
in the fashion field. Because of her we are able to get top photographers to work for us at fees we can afford.”

At one memorable meeting shortly after Irwin came aboard, Anna told her she’d been offered another job, probably a ploy on Anna’s part, and demanded a six-thousand-dollar raise from her annual salary of twenty-five thousand, an amount comparable to walking-around money years later when she got the top job at
Vogue
.

In her memo to Keeton, Irwin stated, “Anna says she has received a job offer of $30,000 from a magazine for which she does not want to work but feels with that kind of outside recognition of her talents she should be offered an increase by
Viva.”

Irwin says Anna never revealed the name of the publication that was supposedly competing for her talents and just took her word for it that such an offer had been made. She recommended her for the salary increase because she did not want to lose her.

Had Anna actually received another offer from a legitimate magazine giving her a raise of 20 percent, she most likely would have jumped at it, but Irwin
wasn’t cognizant of Anna’s negative feelings about working for the Guc-cione organization.

“I would not want to lose Anna right now,” Irwin wrote to Keeton. “Fashion editors, especially good ones, are most difficult to replace. To produce the fashion pages every month is an incredibly complicated task. Coordinating an idea with what is current, particularly with our long lead time, with collecting the fashions, models, photographers and choosing a setting, and finally producing the quality of work which Anna has been doing is simply not easily accomplished. Anna has been producing approximately 18 pages of fashion an issue. We are now asking her to produce 25 to 30 pages an issue. Traditionally, more responsibility suggests greater compensation.”

Irwin had been made aware by others at the magazine that beyond her salary Anna had her own personal income, the kind of money that permitted her to fly to London on weekends for fun aboard the Concorde. “I went, ‘Oh, my God, she did that?’ It was just so extraordinary and memorable,” recalls Irwin. “Back then I didn’t know
anyone
who flew the Concorde.” (At least one friend in London, Annabel Hodin, also recalls Anna’s weekend Concorde jaunts, and says she was jet-setting in and out with a good-looking man.)

When Irwin first brought up the issue of a raise with the powers that be, she met resistance, the feeling being that “Anna doesn’t need the money.” But Irwin argued in Anna’s defense, insisting that “Anna’s income should be regarded as compensation for her own personal efforts at
Viva.”

In the end, Anna received a raise of four thousand dollars, bringing her salary to twenty-nine thousand, a thousand dollars less than she said she was offered by a competing magazine.

If there was any joy for Anna, it was short-lived. Just two months after her raise took effect, in mid-November 1978, Guccione announced at a staff meeting that
Viva
would cease publication with the January issue. He attributed the decision to “the continued prejudicial treatment on the part of the industry” toward the five-year-old magazine. “I blame it on the prejudices of the bloody distributors,” Keeton charged. “They always thought it was a dirty magazine for women, despite our expensive advertising campaign to reposition
Viva
on the newsstands.
Viva
meant so much to Bob and me. It feels like we lost a child.”

Guccione promised a relaunch of “an expensive, internationally-oriented
fashion magazine with secondary emphasis on beauty, health and general service,” which never happened. At the time of its demise,
Newsweek
noted that despite
Viva’s
“striking fashion photographs and a collection of articles ranging from salacious to kindly,” the magazine “never did manage to find its market.”

Of the sixteen editorial employees, Anna was the most devastated.

“I remember the day we were all called in and Kathy told us the magazine was closing,” says Susan Duff. “I saw Anna in the hall after the meeting, and I put my hand on her shoulder as she was getting a drink of water. I knew this was horrible for her, not just another job, and when she turned around she was crying.”

Helen Irwin says Anna was especially upset because she had just assigned Helmut Newton to do a fashion shoot and was anticipating working with him again. “She was in tears,” notes Irwin. “Anna was the most disappointed for good reason. She was the fashion editor, and those pages were so representative of her and her creative abilities, and she lost her forum. The fact that she was more disappointed than the rest of the staff is understandable. She was really losing her stage, and it was a good one.”

Although Guccione promised to try to place
Viva
people in other positions within his organization, there was no slot for Anna. She complained vociferously to friends like Richard Neville that she had actually been “locked out” of the office. He had no reason to doubt her. “She was sobbing,” he recalls. “I had never encountered the idea of somebody going to their job and the office being locked, that it could happen so suddenly. That was quite a dramatic moment in Anna’s life. She was very upset.”

When Guccione killed
Viva
, Anna didn’t need to stay around. The December 1978 and January 1979 issues were already locked up.

“Anna’s departure was abrupt,” says Neville.

She is said to have stormed out of the magazine almost immediately after Guccione’s announcement. “She really took it harder than the rest of us,” says Irwin, “and she just went her separate way.”

Anna told another story some years later when she was named editor in chief of British
Vogue
. She said, “We were told on Thursday evening it was closing on Friday and we were asked to leave the same day.”

Penthouse
editor Peter Bloch says her recollection of what happened is “bullshit.”

About a month later,
Penthouse
staff photographer Pat Hill, who had experienced that irksome ballet shoot with Anna, answered the phone in her office. It was Georgia Gunn calling for Anna. “She asked me if I had, or knew of, any styling work for Anna,” recalls Hill years later. “I just couldn’t believe that she had the gall to have Georgia make the call for her to me. I was like, ‘You’ve
got
to be kidding.’ I was thinking, ‘Right, Anna will be the
first
one I will call.’ Good-bye.”

Over the years,
Viva
alumnae who have run into Anna, or have tried to contact her, like Alma Moore, who hired her when she was out of work, were ignored. “She doesn’t like to talk about being at
Viva,”
says Moore. “She doesn’t want that connection made.”

I
n the three years since Anna arrived in New York with dreams of turning the U.S. fashion magazine world upside down with her incredibly focused vision of what style is and should be, she was pink-slipped once and given her walking papers a second time when the magazine she detested folded. At both places, she maddeningly butted heads with her superiors, infuriated her peers, and thoughtlessly maltreated underlings. Now, at the close of 1978, she once again was out of work.

Those who had closely observed her unrelenting ambition and awesome creativity at
Harper’s Bazaar
and
Viva
expected—would have bet a week’s salary, in fact—this determined, aspiring, and difficult fashionista to land on her feet. Most figured she’d instantly fulfill her dream and that her next stop would be where she thought she should have been all along—
Vogue
.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the pinnacle.

Unbeknownst to most in the ranks of fashion magazines and the media that covers that strange world, let alone some of those close to her, Anna, at twenty-nine, dropped out of the rat race, though one would never have known it from the interviews she’s given or the profiles that have been written about her over the years.

Like the infamous and mysterious eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, there’s a whopping eighteen-month hole,
give or take, in Anna’s résumé that few are aware of and that she’s never explained. Very private and an expert at spin, Anna essentially tells her story as if she had one fashion magazine job after another with no breaks until she reached the summit.

The truth of the matter is that when she was on her last trembling and pencil-thin legs at
Viva
, as it was folding, Anna hit the brakes on her highspeed career drive.

With no prospects of a proper job on the horizon, with a sketchy work history, let alone no formal higher education or even a high school diploma in her Issye Miyake pocket, Anna decided to chuck it all for a time and become delicious arm candy for the good-looking, bright, and well-to-do French record producer Michel Esteban.

For most of the three years that Anna was with Esteban, a pioneer of the Paris punk music scene, she became a high-living international jet-setter.

Anna had been introduced to the dapper and boyish Parisian in 1978 by their mutual close friend, Michael Zilkha, who was a business partner in New York–based ZE (Zilkha-Esteban) Records, a venture that specialized in new wave, punk, and mutant disco, featuring groups like Kid Creole & the Coconuts, Suicide, Daisy Chain, and a new-wave diva named Cristina—the former Cristina Monet—who became Zilkha’s first wife. One of her songs has been described as a touching story of two junkies trimming a cactus with their works and some stolen diamond earrings.

Zilkha, the half-Lebanese son of a wealthy Houston energy producer, had graduated with a master of arts degree from Lincoln College, Oxford, where he was a chum of Anna’s brother Patrick. In the midseventies, Zilkha came to New York, where he subsequently produced a film about the downtown art and music scene that featured Debbie Harry, wrote theater reviews for the
Village Voice
along with Cristina Monet, and partnered with Esteban in the record company. Zilkha, whose musical tastes have been described as “coolly exotic and extremely experimental,” was one of those responsible for Madonna’s first album.

A member of Anna’s minuscule posse of close friends, Zilkha, five years her junior, was said to have been attracted to Georgia Gunn. Because he was somewhat shy—and was romantically involved with Monet at the time—Zilkha
required the moral support of his friend Esteban for a luncheon date at the Plaza with Gunn, who arrived with Anna.

When Esteban laid eyes on Anna, he was smitten. “I fell for her immediately, and I had the impression it was reciprocal,” he says. “It was love at first sight, as Americans say.” Unlike most of the men in Anna’s life, Esteban was younger, by a year.

His first meeting with her is so memorable that a quarter century later he clearly pictures the outfit he wore the day he met her—a black-and-white houndstooth jacket from YSL, gray trousers, white shirt, and black shoes. “She told me after we met that she thought I was gay,” Esteban says, “because all the elegant men she knew in New York were gay.”

The two had a quick courtship.

A couple of days after their first meeting, he invited Anna to dinner at a chic Italian restaurant—she adores Italian food. “When I entered the place there was this amazingly beautiful girl waiting at the bar, and for a fraction of a second I did not recognize her,” he says, noting that the vision of her “is still engraved” in his memory. “It was Anna, and she was radiant. I was deliciously trapped—and we spent the following three years together.”

Anna had recently begun sharing a chic duplex apartment in a tony East Eightieth Street brownstone with her pal Brian McNally. “She was still at
Viva
, but she was waiting for a better opportunity. Anna wanted more,” notes Esteban. “I moved in and helped decorate the apartment. We had a beautiful terrace overlooking a garden. It was love, full stop, and it was not necessary for me to know the reasons. Anna was beautiful, intelligent, and witty. She had class. What else could I want?”

McNally moved out a couple of weeks after her new lover moved in.

From then on, it was a whirlwind of high living for Anna in the chic capitals and fashionable vacation spots of the world.

“We were young and we were living a glamorous life. . . . We traveled a lot between Paris, London, and New York,” reveals Esteban. “We had holidays in the south of France, Spain, Jamaica, at Chris Blackwell’s [Bradshaw’s close friend] house in Nassau. I was living my Jay Gatsby period.

“When Anna left
Viva
, she spent more time in Paris than in New York. We were quite in love, and Anna loved Paris because at the end of the seventies it
was really the place to be if you were in the fashion business. I introduced Anna to all the great restaurants of Paris—she loved the wine. Also, Anna’s family was in London, where she was a fan of the Ritz Hotel, so it was convenient. We had quite a glamorous life back then.

“Anna loved London, where she had friends, and a sister and brothers. She was closer to her mother at that time because her father was leaving her for a younger woman, and she was a bit angry with her father.”

Anna was more than just a bit angry. For a long time she refused even to speak to him, and she despised his new wife.

On August 31, 1979, after a two-year separation, Charles and Nonie Win-tour were divorced after thirty-nine years of a mostly tumultuous marriage.

On November 9, 1979, about two months after the divorce decree was finalized, “Chilly Charlie,” sixty-two, married Audrey “the flame-haired temptress” Slaughter, fifty, a divorcée, in a civil ceremony in the registrar’s office in London’s borough of Islington. The newlyweds celebrated with their friends and colleagues in the contemporary space of Hamilton’s, an art gallery, in the elegant Belgravia district of London. “It was,” recalls Valerie Grove, “a very jolly party.” No one recalls seeing Anna or any of her siblings there.

“We often joked with Anna about the flame-haired temptress because it’s one of those phrases that rolls off the tongue,” recalls Richard Neville, who was in and out of Anna’s life during the time of her parents’ separation and divorce. “Anna accepted that there was an air of jocularity about it. But she hated Audrey Slaughter. Anna was concerned about how her mother was reacting. But it was something that you felt you could mention because it was
so
out there.”

Besides his record company, Michel Esteban owned a shop in the working-class Les Halles section of central Paris called Harry Cover that specialized in imported rock and roll and merchandise like T-shirts—“nothing close to Anna’s world,” he notes. Since he was busy developing ZE in New York, Esteban needed someone to manage the shop, and Anna recommended Brian McNally’s brother, Keith, who was then the maître d’ at One Fifth. Esteban invited McNally to Paris with his future wife for a two-week stay, to see if he was interested in taking the job.

“I introduced them to all the great restaurants. We had a great time, and at
the end of their trip they decided to go back to New York and open a restaurant of their own.”

McNally subsequently opened a chic downtown place called Odeon, and then others, and became quite successful. But he has shaded the story of that visit to Paris a bit. Interviewed in 2002 for a film documentary about the New York restaurant scene, he said, “I’d been offered a job in Paris, oddly enough, by the woman who is now the editor of
Vogue
, Anna Wintour. She’d offered me a job working in a boutique in Paris with her then boyfriend . . . and in order to try to seduce me into managing the boutique she took me to all these great bistros and I thought I’d rather be working in this kind of environment.” His shop, Esteban notes, was not a boutique.

After three years, Anna and Esteban’s relationship ended. “Anna was always with older men and, like a lot of women, I think she was looking for a ‘father’ figure, and I was not that type,” Esteban observes. “I guess three years is a good period. We had the best time.”

That “best time” was underscored by the new clothing in Anna’s closet in the Upper East Side apartment she rented after the affair with Esteban ended. Recalls Paul Sinclaire, “I opened her closet and it was extraordinary—there was one Saint Laurent suit from ready-to-wear after another that she’d bought in Paris, all perfectly hung with the shoes above them, always very high heels. That was our slogan: ‘The higher the heels, the better she feels.’”

During the Esteban period, Anna had had bitchy skirmishes with her friend Michael Zilkha’s wife, Cristina. As Cristina Zilkha maintains years later, “I wasn’t very kindly disposed toward Anna. She’s not a girl’s girl—she
hated me.”

One of the reasons for Anna’s disfavor, according to Zilkha, is that she once had a romantic interlude with the hard-drinking, backgammon-hustling roué Claude Beer. Zilkha maintains Anna was jealous. Another reason is that Michael Zilkha was “like a little brother” to Anna, and she “considered him her property,” so she also was jealous of his involvement with the Harvard-educated Cristina, who was an up-and-coming writer said to have an IQ of 165. As a result, Anna “was vicious to me from the first day we met,” Cristina Zilkha asserts. “She did gratuitously spiteful things.”

In one instance, Zilkha had taken off a year from Harvard and was visiting
England when she received a call from Anna promising her a summer job at
Viva
that Anna said wouldn’t wait. “When I got to New York, she told me she’d given the job to someone else and, in front of her assistant, told me how essentially unemployable I was. Then Anna would tell Michael there were no hard feelings and that she’d still owe me this favor. It was like a mineshaft to fall into again.”

Another example she cites of Anna’s cattiness was the lunch at the Plaza when Anna first met Esteban. Zilkha believes that Anna purposely arranged the date in the hope that Michael would fall for Georgia Gunn and break off with her. “She was always being incredibly bitchy and hostile. But Michael would always say, ‘It’s all in your head.’ ” The two women constantly squabbled. Zilkha would hurl zingers about Anna—“Even her shit’s chic.” And Zilkha remembers Bradshaw saying, “Anna used to wear tidy shoes,” and Anna would say, “Ha! Not
that
tidy.”

The feud between the two never cooled over the years. To celebrate the Zilkhas’ second wedding anniversary and their tenth year together, Zilkha asked Anna, who by then was creative director at
Vogue
, to get a Chanel suit that he could give to his wife as a present. By that point, Anna was wearing nothing but elegant,
very
discreet Chanel as her Condé Nast work uniform.

“Michael said to me, ‘You know, you’ve never had a Chanel suit, so I told Anna that when she sees [Karl] Lagerfeld to get you something from the autumn collections because she gets fifty percent off,’ ” recalls Cristina Zilkha. “I said, ‘I can’t believe you gave
that
woman an opportunity like this. God knows what she’ll do!’”

The beautifully gift-wrapped present arrived a few weeks later. Zilkha opened it and exclaimed, “I knew it! I
knew
it!

“It was not a suit, and it was not a jacket,” she says, the design imprinted indelibly on her memory. “It was half a suit of a really nasty pale yellow with a puce undertone—a Mr.-Livingstone-I-presume double-breasted safari jacket with thick,
huge
gold metal buttons, each of which had a huge ‘CC.’ It was the kind of thing they make for the Jewish-Kuwaiti-Japanese nouveau riche tourist trade who want the signature. It was vulgarity one couldn’t believe and something Anna would not have been caught dead in. I said to Michael, ‘Look at this horror! I knew she’d pull something like this.’ And Michael says, Anna said you’d make trouble. She said you’d be impossible.
She said there weren’t any nice suits and this was her and Karl’s favorite piece in the whole collection and there was only one size thirty-four.’

“It was just the kind of manipulative, devious thing she would have done, to get me something hideously vulgar, unbelievably unflattering, and fundamentally unwearable, and she realized that Michael wouldn’t understand the malice of it. So at that point I took the kitchen scissors and cut this
thing
in half and said to Michael, ‘Convey this to Ms. Wintour with my compliments.’”

Zilkha then “dined out on the story gleefully all over town,” telling gloating fashionista friends of Anna’s like the eccentric Isabella Blow and Condé Nast’s Gully Wells.
“Everybody
thought it was an uproariously funny story. And Anna in turn said of me, ‘That impossible, dreadful girl.’”