Front Row (35 page)

By June 1997, Brown had turned
The New Yorker
around, Anna was near-ing her eighth successful year running
Vogue
and, while there would never be a peace treaty between the two, things appeared copacetic. In fact, Anna had arranged for a very private lunch with one of the world’s most famous women, Diana, Princess of Wales, at the Four Seasons in New York, and had graciously invited Brown to join them.

Since
The New Yorker
for the most part wasn’t into celebrity and fashion reportage, Anna’s fear of competition from Brown had faded somewhat. But Anna’s invitation to Brown was Machiavellian, mainly because of a nasty piece Brown had written for
Vanity Fair
in the mid-1980s before she became its editor, a piece of journalism that Di would never have forgotten.

That story, which received international attention, painted the prince and princess as a highly dysfunctional couple. Called “The Mouse That Roared,” Brown described an emotionally unstable Di who spent hours isolated, listening to her Sony Walkman, dancing alone, and studying her press clippings. And she described Charles as “pussy-whipped from here to eternity.”

By the time of the lunch, though, Diana seemed to hold no grievance against Brown and opened up to the two editors, confiding her negative thoughts about Prince Charles as the future king of England. It was strictly a social lunch and everything discussed was off the record, supposedly.

Cut to September 1997 and the horrible car crash that took Diana’s life in Paris. Brown rushed out a special
New Yorker
commemorative issue and there,
as part of the package, was a blow-by-blow account of that lunch with Di, which became a journalistic cause célèbre. While
New Yorker
newsstand sales rocketed, critics like Jonathan Yardley at
The Washington Post
lambasted Brown for breaking Di’s confidentiality, calling the piece “an exercise in self-display, so odious as to shame everyone in journalism.”

Odious, shmodious, Anna was livid and complained vociferously to New-house and others in the media who she hoped would go after Brown for breaking the confidence. Mainly, she was upset because she’d been scooped by her archrival.

“Tina never so much as inquired whether Anna was okay with her using the entire off-the-record conversation,” says a
Vanity Fair
editor and writer who had a ringside seat at the imbroglio. “There was no courtesy call by Tina to Anna, which there usually is from one editor to another in the same organization under such circumstances. All’s fair in journalism, but Anna was fit to be tied. She was the one who had arranged the lunch and she was embarrassed—mainly because it was Tina and not her who had run with the story.”

But the brouhaha over the Di story paled in comparison to the controversy still to come over how Brown would use the pages of her next magazine,
Talk
, to go after Anna and her lover after the scandal about their extramarital affair became tabloid news.

As one highly placed Condé Nast executive observes, “When it involves Anna, it’s a bitch-eat-bitch world.”

A
nna had brought Laurie Schechter a long way since she first hired her as her personal gofer at
New York
magazine. With Anna as her mentor, Schechter had earned the kind of respect and hash marks that got her the first fashion editor’s job at
Rolling Stone
and was brought back by Anna as a ranking editor at
HG
and now at
Vogue
.

Schechter’s name had become known in the fashion business and the media, and she was viewed as a contender. When Anna was running British
Vogue
, she had even recommended Schechter to Carrie Donovan at
The New York Times
for a prime spot on the Sunday
Magazine
style section staff and had made that generous gesture despite the fact that Schechter had disappointed her by not following her to London.

Anna clearly saw in Schechter the same kind of ambition and drive that had taken her to the top of the fashion magazine field. She liked and respected her spunk and hard work, or at least that was the feeling Schechter had, and there was never a reason to feel otherwise.

Anna even felt maternal toward Schechter. That was amply and graciously demonstrated when Schechter eloped and Anna, overwhelmed with launching
her Vogue
, actually took time from her hectic pace to plan and toss an elaborate dinner for her.

It was quite an affair, held in Anna’s town house with celebrity florist Robert Isabell handling the flower arrangements and celebrity caterer Glorious
Foods preparing the supper. While Anna offered Schechter the option to choose from the menu, she strongly suggested lamb, so that’s what Schechter chose. Do as the boss does.

Most of the organization for the party was handled by Anna’s new favorite lady-in-waiting, Gabe Doppelt, who had taken the job of Anna’s assistant in London when Schechter declined to make the move. And Condé Nast picked up the tab. After all, this was a bash Anna was tossing, Schechter was a respected employee, and a lot of big names in the fashion world were invited—Marc Jacobs, Simon Doonan, among others. Anna’s philosophy was always to combine pleasure with business. And her world was the job.

“She was charming about throwing the party for me and I thought it was all very wonderful to have a close relationship with her,” says Schechter.

By 1990, though, Schechter was getting antsy for a couple of reasons. She hadn’t moved up the ladder under Anna as she thought she would, and she could see that Gabe Doppelt had gotten closer to Anna in
Vogue’s
inner circle. Schechter had kept her eye out for other opportunities, and one suddenly came along.
Interview
magazine, which had once rejected Anna for a job, had approached Schechter with “an appealing offer” to oversee fashions and style.

She went to Anna and told her, and was shocked by her reply.

“She said, ‘I’m
not
supposed to tell you, but there’s something they’ve been talking about for you at Condé Nast, and in light of this situation, it’s something you should know about. Go back to your office and I’ll call you.”

Within the hour, Anna called and told Schechter, “Go see Si Newhouse.”

Schechter couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Newhouse was telling her that she was being seriously considered for the top job at
Mademoiselle
. “He said it wasn’t a move they were going to make right away, but that they were considering it,” says Schechter, who saw the possibility “as my dream job. I was thrilled.” The only hitch was that the editor, Amy Gross Cooper, was married to GQ editor Art Cooper, and they had a complex clause in their Condé Nast contracts that if one was fired, both would have to receive severance. “It was a sticky deal, and they were still kind of muddling through the idea,” says Schechter. “Art Cooper made a fuss, but in the meantime, Mr. Newhouse told Anna that he wanted her to train me for the job.”

The training, for the most part, involved following Anna in and out of meetings and watching her operate, though Anna wasn’t big on editorial meetings
and was usually in and out in minutes as opposed to the hours Grace Mirabella was said to have labored over decisions. Anna got bored quickly and left it to her subordinates, for the most part, to handle the details.

Anna also strongly urged Schechter to put together a detailed plan for what she’d do with
Mademoiselle
—once described by the snarky
New York Observer
as the “Jan Brady of Condé Nast”—when and if she took it over. “If I were you,” Schechter recalls Anna saying, “I would write one.” Schechter got on it immediately. She gave a copy to Anna and one to Newhouse, but the reaction in the executive suite was not positive. “They [Newhouse, Liberman et al.] weren’t ready for a rehaul,” Schechter says.

After a few months, having watched the
Interview
job grow wings and fly away—a great career opportunity lost by heeding Anna’s advice—Schechter was told that the editorship of
Mademoiselle
was on hold indefinitely. By shrewdly holding out the carrot of a major editor in chief’s job, Anna, New-house, and Liberman had kept the talented Schechter from going to the competition.

And now they had another so-called opportunity for her. They said she was needed to help launch a new beauty magazine called
Allure
. The prototype, she says, was a disaster and “they had to throw it in the garbage. They needed me to come from
Vogue
to get it off the ground, format the whole thing and put it in order.”

The problem was that
Allure
had an editor in chief, thirty-two-year-old Linda Wells, who did not take kindly to what she viewed as Schechter’s interference, coming over with the title of creative director—the same one Anna had when she first wreaked havoc at
Vogue
under Grace Mirabella. At the same time, Schechter thought Wells was a lightweight who didn’t have her kind of magazine experience. Wells did have journalistic cachet, though; she’d been the food and beauty editor at
The New York Times Magazine
for five years. Schechter, though, felt that Wells got the job through family connections.

“But I was encouraged to go
to Allure
by Alex Liberman, and I had a message that Mr. Newhouse strongly urged me to take the position. I was sort of between a rock and a hard place because I had to go to
Allure
whether I wanted to or not. It would have been career suicide to tell them to go jump in the lake.”

The petite Jewish Schechter and the taller, blond, and WASPy Wells—both
of whom had worked at
Vogue
at the same time as assistants—were like oil and water, like Wintour and Mirabella. The two didn’t mix.

Anna could have stepped in to help Schechter—she certainly wielded enough influence with Newhouse and Liberman. But to Schechter’s surprise and dismay, Anna quietly removed herself from participation in the matter. Years later, Schechter looks back on that time and observes, “Maybe she didn’t want to go up against them. Anna is the kind of person who will give you the rope. If you’re going to hang yourself, then that’s what you’re going to do. She’s not going to necessarily help you either way. If Anna really didn’t want me to go, she could have taken a stand, but she didn’t because Si and Alex wanted me there. Politically, Anna wouldn’t have taken a stand against them.”

Was the very Machiavellian editor in chief out to “get” Schechter in some way? “Maybe.” Schechter says plaintively.

She notes that Anna “knew about my capabilities, and if you’re a potential threat to her, competition to her, she’s not going to help you do a better job at competing with her. Anna’s smart. I was a
Vogue
editor at
Allure
and that’s obviously a problem, that having a
Vogue
editor at another publication is going to be viewed by her as a possible threat. When I was fashion editor at
Rolling Stone
, I wasn’t a threat to what she was doing, as I was when I was at
Allure
. Not to say that Anna didn’t want me to do well, but I knew that to some extent I would appear as a threat to her.”

While
Allure
was mainly a beauty magazine, it did get involved with fashion, an arena that competed head-on with
Vogue
, and Schechter believes that concerned Anna because she would have started getting good word of mouth because of “my influence, my story ideas.”

Although Anna knew of the problems that existed between Schechter and Wells, she didn’t intercede or try to help Schechter. In fact, Schechter believes that Anna was “more helpful” to Wells.

While all this was going on, Newhouse had decided for a number of reasons, ranging from the economic climate to the resources required to get
Allure
launched, that this wasn’t the best time to change editors at
Mademoiselle
after all, so that possibility became a dead issue for Schechter.

She began to feel that she was in the middle of a horrific nightmare that wouldn’t end. “It was kind of a no-win situation
at Allure,”
she states.

As creative director, she was supposed to work on all aspects of
Allure
.
“With Linda, what happened was she wouldn’t let me do anything, basically.” It was the same situation Anna had faced as creative director under Mirabella.

Schechter stayed at
Allure
for about six months during the late fall and winter of 1990, then resigned in spring 1991.

About eighteen months after Schechter left Condé Nast, her rival, thirty-two-year-old Gabe Doppelt, with Anna’s full support, was named editor in chief of the 1.5-million-circulation
Mademoiselle
, the job Schechter originally had been promised. “It was my finding and recommending Gabe to Anna,” she says, “that started Anna’s relationship with her, and they became close friends.”

Schechter wasn’t at all surprised that Doppelt got the job that she had coveted. “Gaby’s clever, knows how to play her cards right, has contacts, knows a lot of people, she’s very British, and she’s very private—and in that way she’s very much like Anna. Anna was a great supporter of hers and has done great things for her.”

Doppelt replaced forty-five-year-old Amy Gross Cooper, editor since 1980. Her “promotion” to editor at large for all Condé Nast publications was reported to have been a “complete sham . . . the standard move when a veteran employee isn’t wanted at a certain position anymore.”

A native South African whose family moved to London when she was in her midteens, the brash and aggressive Doppelt was the invention of the two most powerful women in the business: Anna and Tina Brown. Doppelt had been a loyal assistant to both, starting by answering phones at eighteen for Brown when she was the editor in chief of Britain’s
Tatler
, then moving on to Anna, beginning at British
Vogue
, from where Doppelt rose to editorships under her at
HG
and American
Vogue
.

On taking on her powerful new job at
Mademoiselle
, Doppelt declared, “We live and breathe frocks, but we also want to make the magazine face issues in a modern, amusing manner.”

In less than a year, she failed miserably.

Her first issue appeared on newsstands in March 1993. It included a recipe for peanut butter pie and Cool Whip from the
Junior League Cookbook
and an advice column on spotting and removing one’s own nasal detritus. The covers were even more over the edge—druggy-looking, grungy girls, with cover lines that read “Cool Clothes from Kmart.”

Six months later, on September 29, 1993, she was out, though the Condé Nast press release, with Si Newhouse’s name on it, diplomatically stated that she had resigned. “I had one vision of the magazine,” she said. “They had another.” Newhouse said that there were “conceptual differences that we have been unable to resolve.”

If Anna feared possible competition from Schechter, whose ideas were mainstream and commercial, she had little to fear from Doppelt, whose ideas were off-the-wall—and that’s most likely why she backed Doppelt for the
Mademoiselle
job.

A day after Doppelt cleaned out her desk, Elizabeth Crow, a forty-seven-year-old magazine and publishing veteran, was named as the new editor. Just as Newhouse wanted
Vogue
to be more like
Elle
, he mandated that Crow give
Mademoiselle
“an
Allure
feel.” It went through a few more iterations but was finally laid to rest by Si Newhouse on October 1, 2001. At the time of its demise, it was being edited by another Brit, Mandi Norwood.

Looking back more than a decade later, now running her own successful fashion-styling business, Schechter says, “I don’t know if Anna betrayed me. But a couple of my story ideas that I had in my proposal for
Mademoiselle
turned up in
Vogue
. Anna’s a good editor, and a good editor is good at appropriating. She’s a very competitive person, and I don’t think she could be where she is today without being . . . very aware of what her competition is doing and who her possible competition might be.”