Front Row (34 page)

Besides the startling cover, the models inside had a more informal look.

It was what Si and Alex had been demanding of Mirabella but never got. It was
Elle. Vogue
called the look “haute but not haughty.” As Schechter notes, “The
Vogue
under Anna didn’t look or feel like the
Vogue
under Grace. Anna obviously had a different approach. Even the content that Grace railed against for whatever reason when Anna was creative director—all of it was very palatable commercially. Anna’s smart. She’s not going to do something that’s going to put her outside the corporate popularity.”

Much later, Mirabella felt certain she would never have been fired if she had only followed Newhouse’s wishes and made
Vogue
look just a little bit more like
Elle
.

Anna had followed Newhouse’s mandate to the letter, nudging
Vogue
ever closer to the look and feel of
Elle
. One of her first acts after unseating Mirabella was to lure to
Vogue a
. glamorous, high-ranking
Elle
editor who had the
Elle
spirit of being fun, mixing things up. She was an important addition to the staff in those early days.

A
nna’s first full year at the top of
Vogue
was not a pleasant time for the fashion industry. A deep recession had taken hold.

The U.S. dollar had fallen like a rock, by as much as 50 percent against the British pound. Everyone from the rag trade to couture was feeling the pinch. As a result, Anna and other power brokers in the U.S. fashion scene went so far as to ignore Fashion Week in London in spring 1989. Everyone was in the doldrums.

Anna, meanwhile, devoted as much as twelve hours a day to performing cosmetic surgery on what she and Newhouse perceived as the wrinkly face of
Vogue
—tightening it here, nipping it there, tucking it everywhere—always working toward making it look younger, getting it closer to that kicky
Elle
look that had intrigued Newhouse so much that he canned Grace Mirabella because she didn’t get it.

What Anna didn’t do was a complete makeover as she had done at
HG
. She’d learned her lesson about proceeding with extreme surgery without a real plan or a true feel for the marketplace.

Those first year of
Vogue
covers under Anna ranged from a young model in a tank top sporting a Byblos hat costing less than a hundred dollars to a formal photograph taken by the famous Irving Penn. It was all part of her loosening-up process, without going off the chart.

That included putting hot young celebrities on the cover—and none was
hotter, sexier, or more erotic at the time than a singer and entertainer formerly known as Madonna Louise Ciccone.

André Leon Talley went forth to Los Angeles to check her out for Anna, met with her, was psyched, and thus the May 1989 issue of
Vogue
had the Material Girl on its cover, with a ten-page spread of her house inside,
HG-like
.

“We put Madonna on the cover,” Anna intoned, “because we want to show the range where fashion comes from.”

In fact, Anna actually put Madonna on the cover for
“S&tS
—sales and Si,” asserts a well-placed
Vogue
source. “Madonna in those days would have sold a roll of toilet paper if she was on the packaging. Anna was all about celebrity, putting a supercelebrity on the cover sold big-time, and Si was walking on air. She was doing what Grace didn’t do, and what Si wanted.”

The New York Times
, though, noted that Madonna was “hardly the elegant, carefully coiffed woman of whom
Vogue
was enamored” in the past.

But Anna’s youth orientation didn’t show an upward spike in newsstand sales, which represented some 65 percent of
Vogue’s
circulation. That number remained much the same as when Mirabella was running the show. However, advertising pages increased somewhat, by about forty-seven pages compared to Mirabella’s final year.

As
The Times
observed, “The jury is still out on how effective Ms. Wintour is doing.”

Meanwhile,
Elle
was right on
Vogue’s
tail, having replaced
Harper’s Bazaar
in both circulation and advertising. Some in the industry had begun looking at Anna’s baby as a “me-too” magazine, meaning Anna was copying the
Elle
look and feel, which to a great extent she was.

Aware of the criticism, she declared that
Vogue
had the responsibility to “report which way fashion is going.” She added, “It is an attitude, not an age. The magazine is younger looking because that is more contemporary, but age is not the issue. We have to tread a narrow path . . . be on the cutting edge” or “lose the buzz.”

Anna had Newhouse’s full backing. His plan was to raise by 10 percent the circulation that the magazine guarantees its advertisers, what’s known in the industry as the rate base. A step like that was seen as a calculated risk and hadn’t happened since the late 1970s.

Anna was now moving on all fronts—from fashion to features—and seeking
less and less input from the one man who had guided her to the pinnacle, Alex Liberman. She essentially demanded that her mentor keep his nose out of what she was doing. “Anna told Si she didn’t want Alex meddling, that she wanted
total
control over what went into each issue,” a
Vogue
insider maintains. “When the word got around that Anna was dissing Alex, she claimed it was all nasty gossip, ‘rubbish.’”

But Alex felt out of the loop he had controlled forever. The man who had helped get her to
Vogue
in the first place came to the realization that he was no longer of any use to her. “He had done for Anna what she required, and now she felt it was time to break the cord,” notes the insider. “Alex complained and Si finally had to put Anna on notice to keep Alex involved.”

Later, Anna acknowledged that she “probably forgot how much [Liberman] had been involved before,” which is difficult to imagine since she was at his side from the moment she first came to
Vogue
as creative director and relied on him to consult on and approve her pages when she was at British
Vogue
.

“I guess,” said Anna later, “I was trying too hard to prove that I was not going to be like Grace Mirabella.”

She said that when she took over from Mirabella she had meetings with Liberman, who appeared concerned about his future role. He kept asking her, “ ‘What will it be like?’ and ‘How will we get along?’ I was probably too pushy, and all the people who had been with me at
HG
were used to reporting to me. But Alex and I talked . . . and gradually things got worked out.”

Under orders from Newhouse, Anna brought Liberman back in the ball game—somewhat—by running layouts by him and by showing him potential covers but doing what she wanted to do anyway. She placated him and he felt relieved that he wasn’t being discarded.

He saw Anna as bold and audacious in how she handled the magazine and its personnel. While he thought Diana Vreeland when she took over
Vogue
was “daring” in an “artificial” way, that she was all “flamboyance,” Anna, he determined, if he hadn’t long ago, was “closer to pure femininity” and felt “her great genius is feminine seduction. Maybe this is what it takes to make
Vogue
exciting . . . I may have made
Vogue
handsome . . . but I don’t think I made its fashion pages exciting.”

Besides
Elle, a
. new magazine had joined the fashion follies.

It was called
Mirabella
.

Anna simmered. She thought Mirabella was out of her hair forever. Now she was back.

About a week after Anna was named editor, Mirabella received a telephone call from Ed Kosner, Anna’s former editor at
New York
magazine, who told her that his boss, the media baron Rupert Murdoch, wanted to have lunch with her. Mirabella wondered why a publisher known mostly for his gossipy tabloids (but also 50 percent of
Elle)
wanted to meet, but she went along for the ride. No one turns down an audience with Murdoch.

At the fancy French restaurant La Côte Basque, he talked to her in detail about women’s magazines, asking lots of questions, especially about what was lacking in them and which audience of women was being ignored. They parted company with Murdoch saying the magic words, “Let me go over the figures,” which meant the man had a plan.

Mirabella heard nothing more. Murdoch was busy that summer buying
TV Guide
, the
Daily Racing Form
, and
Seventeen
. Then, when she thought he was off to other things, he called and they had another lunch. It went well. A few days later, she sat with one of his colleagues in a private room at another restaurant and was told she was going to be given a new magazine. She was floored when she heard it would be called
Mirabella
. Murdoch’s philosophy was “a magazine has to have a name,” and Mirabella’s was as good as any.

As Anna was working to get her first spring 1989 issue locked up, Mirabella was preparing for her first issue, which she proudly described to the media as “an upscale fashion book for women who know who they are. It’s for women who are more than fashion groups. It’s not about bubble gum and hula hoops.”

A top executive of Murdoch Magazines, though, was more specific about the target audience: “It’s aimed at the reader
Vogue
abandoned ten years ago. She’s interested in substance, not glitter.”

Once
Mirabella
began readying its launch,
Vogue
would fight tooth and nail to keep anyone from even thinking of defecting. Those who did, or were known to be negotiating with the enemy, were threatened with blacklisting from
Vogue
. That went for models, photographers, writers, and editors. It became nasty. Some key players were forced to sign contracts giving
Vogue
exclusivity, causing them to lose their other markets.

That was an outside feud, one of many Anna would have with editors of competing fashion magazines.

Within the Condé Nast organization, Anna’s main competitor was seen as “that other Brit”—
Vanity Fair
and later
New Yorker
editor in chief Tina Brown. The media loved to play up a good catfight, and magazine industry wags were constantly weaving bitchy scenarios about the two.

Anna versus Tina made for hot copy. They had become symbols of the glittery Condé Nast universe: glamorous icons presented like movie stars playing at being editors. They both ran glitzy journals in tight skirts and high heels, lived glamorous public lives, were celebrities in the gossip columns. Everything about their high-flying worlds became grist. They were
the
dons of Condé Nast’s British Mafia.

The feud between Anna and Brown wasn’t totally imagined.

Rancor between the two dated back to their younger days in London. Brown’s father, George Hambley Brown, a British B-movie producer, despised Charles Wintour because the
Evening Standard
had panned some of his films. “Charles thought Brown was a hack filmmaker,” says Alex Walker. “I didn’t think much of him, either, and my reviews reflected both of our thinking.”

The resentment carried over to their daughters once they were together in the same arena.

Embarrassed by her lack of a formal education, Anna was envious of Brown’s, who had been a proper and serious student, and graduated from Oxford’s St. Anne’s College. Unlike Anna, Brown had no problem with writing and, as was said later, took to magazine editing “like a deb to a canapé.” But while Brown was blond, tiny, buxom, and five years younger, she was no seductive glamour puss like Anna, and that caused her to be jealous.

“Here were two women who could not have been more different,” observes a female former Condé Nast executive who worked closely with both of them. “Tina is
so
smart,
so
good at what she does, and Anna is beautiful and icy and knows how to play the game.

“Their relationship with Si had many elements of a classic family structure—a classic
dysfunctional
family structure—with Si as the father figure and Anna and Tina vying to be the favored daughter. Si appreciated them
each. Tina’s perception was that Anna was the prettier sister, more girly-girl, more popular. But Tina was brilliantly finding this magazine niche that had never existed and was getting all that media attention, and that made Anna jealous. Both used their charms on Si.”

What the two did have in common was unvarnished ambition, undistilled drive, Olympian competitiveness, and an incredible need for success—all worthy traits in the bitchy magazine world.

They also had a friend in common, the London gossip columnist Nigel Dempster.

In November 1989, Anna and Brown put aside their differences for a few hours and cohosted a party for Dempster in New York to honor the publication of a book he had written about the tragic life of billionaire playgirl Christina Onassis. The event took place in a trendy downtown café owned by Anna’s pal Brian McNally.

The guest list consisted of some two hundred so-called classic-A talents and literary masters of the universe, a nice way of describing the usual suspects who show up to get free books, free food, free drinks, and a free boldface mention in Liz Smith’s mostly hagiographic column. At one point during the party, both Anna and Brown showed their wicked side, laughing hysterically when Dempster, probably soused, accused one of the guests of murdering Onassis a year earlier.

When Anna was editing
HG
and had started including celebrity coverage, Brown was livid. She couldn’t believe that Newhouse would permit her to trespass on her glitzy domain since
Vanity Fair
was all about the idolization of celebrities.

“Can you
believe
Si did that!” Brown once complained to a friend. “He’s humiliating my father. He knows Anna’s father and my father are mortal enemies! He knows!”

A knowledgeable observer, however, says, “I always thought Tina used the feud between the fathers as an excuse. Tina just saw Anna as being far more beautiful and had far greater ease, and that Si found her sexier. They were like teenagers vying for his eye.”

Anna’s pal, André Leon Talley, who once worked for Brown at
Vanity Fair
, is said to have thought of her as “tacky-tacky-tacky, dowdy-dowdy-dowdy”
and accused her of wearing “borrowed designer dresses.” Talley reportedly presented his views to Brown in a snarky note when he left
Vanity Fair
at one point to work for Anna.

Their resentment toward each other grew more intense in the 1990s.

In June 1992, Brown was named editor of America’s most esteemed but money-losing weekly,
The New Yorker
. The move caused quite a stir in the literary and media worlds, but for Anna, Newhouse’s decision to place Brown there came as welcome news. Rumors had been circulating that Brown was being considered by Newhouse as Liberman’s replacement as editorial director of all Condé Nast magazines. Anna lobbied strenuously against it, telling friends privately that she’d quit before having to report to Brown. It would have been a battle royale.