Front Row (10 page)

A
nna’s first discovery of a new face and potential cover girl at
Harpers & Queen
was a debutante on the London social scene named Annabel Hodin, who had been a year behind Anna at North London Collegiate. They rode the same underground line, passed in the hall on the way to classes in their drab brown uniforms, nodded at one another, but didn’t mix because of the slight age difference. But both were intrigued.

“I knew of Anna because I liked pretty people, and she was pretty,” says Hodin. By the time Anna was promoted to assistant fashion editor in late 1971 under Jennifer Hocking, Hodin was just breaking into the modeling game. She had quite a timely look—her bright orange bob was cut by Sassoon and she wore microminiskirts. She was the real deal. Anna was hooked. “Like attracts like,” Hodin observes. “She discovered me as a model, liked my look, took me under her wing, and gave me my first job.”

Anna had created a story called “London Originals” and had booked Hodin for the layout with hopes of getting her on the cover against stiff competition—the stunner Charlotte Rampling, of television’s
The Avengers
fame. Rampling made the cover of the February 1973 issue, but Hodin was one of the featured London beauties, and from there her career took off.

Anna had pulled together quite a team for the shoot, including the South African photographer Barry McKinley, who was hot at the time, and the innovative Barbara Daly, who handled the extraordinary makeup for Stanley
Kubrick’s 1971 terrifying sci-fi classic
A Clockwork Orange
and his 1975
Barry Lyndon
. The period photos of the models with crimped hair and marcelled waves were shot in the dramatic art nouveau–style apartment of the renowned Chinese art director and designer Barney Wan, whom Anna knew.

She was quickly building a reputation of being able to round up the best people and locations, mainly because of her connections through her father, pals like Nigel Dempster, and other well-placed types with whom she networked socially.

“Her shoots were always very high style, very classy,” notes Hodin. “Anna would have the best of the new designers, top makeup. She had
the
most immaculate eye. She never chose mediocrity in any form, and when you get a good team, you get a great shot.”

After “London Originals,” Anna booked Hodin for a shoot in Corsica, with her lover James Wedge as the photographer, with fashions by Missoni and jewelry from the posh London shop Emeline—everything in coral, ebony, and ivory. Such location shoots usually took about a week. “Afterwards, the jeweler gave everyone marvelous bracelets,” recalls Hodin, “and then we’d go off to San Lorenzo [an expensive celebrity restaurant in Knightsbridge] where we’d all have lunch.”

Rigid in so many ways, such as with her bob, which she kept for a lifetime, and her signature sunglasses, Anna also never digressed from her luncheon regimen. “It was so odd, because she had the same meal every day at a little Italian restaurant around the corner from the magazine,” says Liz Walker. “It was smoked salmon and scrambled eggs—
every single day
. She would eat nothing else. She was practicing the high-protein thing even then. We all had at least a glass of wine, but if she did, she drank the tiniest amount.”

Besides kick-starting the careers of models like Hodin, Anna launched up-and-coming photographers in her early days at
Harpers & Queen
. One was Eric Boman, whom Landels describes as a “very beautiful, wonderfully blond, and charming” college boy who had done some “very lovely” drawings that had caught his keen art director’s eye. Anna had planned to do a feature on lingerie, and Landels, looking for a different slant on what he thought was a boring and cliché subject, asked her to get Boman to sketch the models.

A few days later, the pair appeared at Landels’s desk with spectacular photographs of a beautiful girl in underwear, sitting at a dressing table in a luxurious
room at the Savoy. “Anna took a room and they went there and those photos were shot,” says Landels. “So Anna made Eric, an artist, into a photographer. I thought, ‘What vision on her.’ It was very perceptive of her to know he would be good. I adored the photographs. Maybe Eric said, ‘Let me shoot pictures.’ But the fact that she let him, and took the risk of me saying, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ said something about her.”

A
s much as any woman could bond with Anna in those days, Annabel Hodin did. It was a time of constant partying, with many champagne-filled evenings spent at the Clermont, a posh gambling club on Berkeley Square, or at Annabel’s, or at any of the other chic nightspots where rich and powerful men and beautiful young women on the make gathered in the glitzy, disco seventies. Very briefly during this period, Anna dated, among others, Tony Elliott, who, just out of college in 1968, had founded the very successful weekly events listing magazine
Time Out
, and impresario Michael White, who produced the first London stage performance of
The Rocky Horror Show
.

“Everybody wanted to go out with Anna,” says Hodin. “She was very beautiful, and any powerful man with any aspirations would want to be with her.”

There was an endless line of high rollers who adored Anna and competed for her affections. Two among them were friends, part of a hard-drinking, playboy rat pack of sorts. One was a powerful British advertising executive twice her age, the other a freelance American journalist a dozen years her senior.

“Anna was attracted to older men, and thank God for that! Otherwise I wouldn’t have had a hope,” states dashing John Pringle, who at the time was nearly fifty and had been the chairman of the European branch of the powerful American advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach. “Oh, God, Anna was much younger, but that never hindered me. I always rather fancied a young woman.”

By the time Anna met Pringle, the ad business was in a recession, DDB had lost some big clients, and he had been appointed director of tourism for Jamaica, based in London, with offices worldwide. He was quite successful in putting the island on the map, vacationwise. He had big-time family connections there. An ancestor, Sir John Pringle, had arrived in Jamaica, then still part of the British Empire, in the early 1900s as supervisor of the lunatic asylum
in Kingston. He later made a killing by buying up abandoned sugar plantations and planting bananas.

Pringle fit Anna’s profile. “Anna only liked men who were stimulating and exciting, and she would fall in love with that,” notes Hodin. “Anything else would be just a sex thing.”

The moneyed Pringle had just ended a long marriage and was playing the field when he was introduced to Anna by a mutual pal at one of the clubs. “Because of the divorce I was terribly unhappy,” he says. “I’d been married for a number of years and did all sorts of stupid things. Anna came into my life during that period, and she was very exciting.”

A charming raconteur and good-looking man-about-town—the type who calls both male and female friends “dahling”—Pringle was utterly smitten with the chic young assistant fashion editor. “I found her extremely attractive, she flirted with me, and I had a big crush on her,” he acknowledges. “I saw quite a lot of Anna, took her to Annabel’s, the usual places. She was just so sexy and funny and amusing and attractive, but at the same time she was a tough little bird.”

As he got to know her, he found downsides to what he considered to be Anna’s intriguing persona. For one, he came to the conclusion, after numerous attempts to seduce her, that she was a tease. “Anna was cold in a very sexy sort of way, if one can cope with that sort of strange statement. She flirted. I stuck my tongue in her mouth, and she rather liked that. But I never got to bed with her.”

He also was put off a bit by her vanity and imperiousness. “She always struck me as being
incredibly
spoiled,
very
flirtatious and slightly naughty, and
enormously
secretive. She isn’t one of those people who disclose their innards to anyone. She never told you anything about her feelings, about what she was going to do or not going to do. She just did it.”

And one of the things Anna did was to fall in love with Pringle’s best friend, an American freelance writer named Jon Bradshaw. “I was very fond of Bradshaw, I
loved
Bradshaw. He was a complete rascal, and he was magic to women, who fell in love with him all over the place. And Bradshaw came along and had a crush on Anna, and I had a crush on her, but Bradshaw started fucking her.”

A
nna and Jon Bradshaw—everyone called him Bradshaw, never Jon—were introduced in 1972 by their mutual friend Nigel Dempster, who had known Bradshaw since his arrival in London from New York City in the early sixties when he went to work as a freelance for
Queen
magazine.

Giving a gossip item ring to how he played Cupid, Dempster says, “I introduced them, and Bradshaw said to me, ‘Anna’s a wonderful girl,’ and went off with her to Tramp,” the hot, celebrity-studded nightclub in posh Mayfair. “Afterwards, he told me, Anna’s the girl for me.’” Bradshaw’s attraction was that he “was a discoverer, an interesting character who came to our city and showed us things we’d never seen before,” says Dempster, extolling his friend’s virtues.

A dozen years Anna’s senior and recently divorced from a wealthy Englishwoman after less than a year’s marriage—the two actually had a well-publicized London divorce party—Bradshaw was a devilish rogue with enormous appetites: of liquor, Johnny Walker Black being his favorite, but anything would do as long as someone else was picking up the tab; of recreational highs—a toke here, a snort there; of nicotine—at least three packs of unfiltered British Rothmans a day; and of rich foods. He also was a gambler who played high-stakes backgammon and wrote a book about it called
The Cruelest Game
during the halcyon days of the backgammon boom in the seventies.

The writer Nik Cohn, a close friend of Bradshaw’s who penned the
New
York
magazine story that became
Saturday Night Fever
starring John Travolta, had an apt description of the man for whom Anna fell hard: “His calling cards were wit and charm, a world-class talent for gossip, and good looks of an almost Hollywood order. A louche, more dissolute version of James Garner, he carried himself with conscious roguery, a Rothman’s perpetually dangling from one corner of his mouth and that lopsided shark’s grin plastering the other. He sported Turnbull and Asser silk shirts and Gucci loafers, flashed gold lighters and a Piaget watch; slathered himself with Vetiver cologne; tended to speak in mock-abusive italics: ‘the
awful
Mailer, the
dreadful
Elaine, the
unspeakable
Timothy Leary.’ The insults were his style of showing admiration. Awfulness, if married to flair, was golden. . . . His devouring passion was for action.”

Men, straight and gay, as well as women loved and fawned over him. In the new millennium he’d be typed a “metrosexual.”

Anna found everything about Bradshaw incredibly fascinating and attractive, especially his family background.

In New York, Bradshaw’s mother, Annis Murphy, a drinker, a smoker, “strong and domineering,” had been a copy editor at
Vogue
and was a close friend of Beatrix Miller, the longtime editor of British
Vogue
whom Anna would replace in the mideighties. She also was a chum of Anne Trehearne, the clever, longtime fashion editor at
Queen
with whom Bradshaw stayed when he first hit London and who was his entrée to start freelancing for the magazine. Bradshaw’s father had abandoned the family early on, so besides his mother, he was raised by an uncle, an executive at the Vanguard Press in New York who helped oversee publication of the 1954 best-selling novel
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. Bradshaw grew up in a book-filled apartment in a genteel building overlooking the East River at Seventy-second Street, where family friends included the writer and Renaissance man George Plimpton and the famed Tiffany’s window dresser Gene Moore. Bradshaw had gone to a prep school in Pennsylvania and later attended writing classes at Columbia University, and tried to sell pieces to the
New York Herald Tribune
before splitting for London.

Despite Dempster’s assertion of having brought Anna and Bradshaw together as lovers in 1972, there are some who believe they had actually gotten to know each other much earlier—when Anna was in her club-hopping mid-teens.

A journalist who had worked for the
Evening Standard
in the early sixties and later had an “on-and-off romance with Bradshaw” recalls seeing him in Charles Wintour’s newsroom—“sprawled all over the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ desk, making personal transatlantic calls to New York”—as early as 1963, when Anna was just fourteen. Moreover, she recalls seeing him around that same time at the Wintour house.

“I just have this picture in my mind’s eye of being in the house in Phillimore Gardens and seeing Bradshaw and Anna going downstairs to her flat and somebody saying to me, Are they living together down there?’ It was extraordinary because her father was a stern father figure to everybody at the
Evening Standard
. He was quite possessive, so why he would allow his favorite daughter to be with this charming guy who never earned a penny is a mystery. Bradshaw might have just been bumming a bed off her down there then because he never seemed to have a place of his own.”

Since Dempster was already a friend of Bradshaw’s, and Dempster was seeing Anna when she was in her mid- to late teens, it’s likely Anna had met Bradshaw in Dempster’s circle, which included the likes of John Pringle long before they became romantically involved publicly.

How and when they met, and whether Charles Wintour took kindly to his daughter’s latest suitor, became a moot point because Anna and Bradshaw quickly became an item and moved in together, renting a partly furnished quaint town house in trendy Chelsea.

“Anna had done a lot of decorating, with all very warm touches,” recalls Vivienne Lasky. “She had
such
style. What were hers I could pick out—the books, and the way they were stacked, the Provençal fabrics, and Bradshaw had a lot of his very tasteful memorabilia on display.”

Anna’s lover’s possessions included a series of stamps that he and his buddy, the photographer Patrick Lichfield, the queen’s first cousin once removed, had produced as a publicity stunt. On a lark, the pair had started a private postal service—Rickshaw Limited—using six couriers on Honda motor scooters in January 1971, during a postal strike in central London. “Back comes royal mail—posted by the Queen’s cousin,” declared a headline in the
Daily Express
. The story was illustrated with two photos, one of Lichfield, looking amazingly like a Las Vegas Elvis impersonator, with coiffed hair and sunglasses, and one of “Lord Lichfield’s postman Jon Bradshaw,” straddling a Honda, wearing a
hippie-style leather-brimmed hat, loafers, and velvet slacks. He was shown handing over mail to a long-legged and slender beauty in a microminiskirt and boots at her shop in Chelsea, who was described as “one of their satisfied customers.”

Lasky first saw Anna and Bradshaw as a couple when she returned to England in June 1972 to attend graduate school at Cambridge’s New Hall College. She found him handsome and charming.

“Anna wanted to pick up where we left off when I went away to Radcliffe. She would say, ‘Oh, come to dinner. We’re all going. I want you to come and meet my friends. They’re all interesting. You haven’t got anything else to do.’ Anna was forceful. She was always with a group of men, never other women.”

Besides Bradshaw, Anna’s posse consisted of Anthony Haden-Guest, whom Vivienne found “amusing and effete;” Dempster, who she describes as “weaselly;” and Lichfield, whom she thought of as bright, good-looking, and well-bred.

“Maybe Anna wanted another girl there because it was all sort of guy camaraderie. If they talked about sports, we would talk in the corner. She would say, ‘We can talk while we eat and at least we’ll get to be together.’”

Lasky looked and felt like a college kid compared to her glamorous assistant fashion editor best friend who, during London’s cold and rainy months, went about town wearing a dramatic floor-length coat made of the fur of a white wolf.

Of all of the men in Anna’s circle, Lasky adored Bradshaw. “He had a teddy bearish quality to him. He was genuine, the only one who would say hi and give me a hug, the only one who had an ounce of warmth, and I thought she needed a warm person in her life. I knew Bradshaw was older, but it wasn’t a Pygmalion relationship. He wasn’t trying to make her over into someone else. Anna was very well versed, lovely looking, well-spoken, had read everything, seen everything, and traveled a lot. What man wouldn’t want to spend time with her?”

In fact, it was Anna who apparently tried to change Bradshaw, or at least encourage him, cheer him on in terms of his writing. She knew he had aspirations to write the great American novel, or screenplay, but was too much of a layabout ever to succeed. He needed, she believed, her guidance. Her
goal became apparent in intimate letters she wrote to him, which Bradshaw saw fit to share with his friend A. J. “Jack” Langguth, a Vietnam war correspondent for
The New York Times
, author, and much later a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications.

Langguth, who had had many uproarious adventures with Bradshaw over the years and loved him dearly, was surprised that his friend revealed the intimate and private correspondence to him. “He would read them not with a malicious attitude,” emphasizes Langguth, “but to let me know that Anna was crazy about him. Anna was seeing herself as Bradshaw’s muse who would inspire him to new heights, cheering him on as a young lady would write to Lord Byron, somehow influencing his life and production. And I knew Bradshaw would play the wounded artiste to the hilt. I’d say, ‘Come on, Bradshaw, this young woman really has been taken in by this.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, Langguth, I’m a very sensitive person. You don’t give me credit for that.’”

From the letters, Langguth came to the conclusion that Anna was sincere, “a nice young woman” who he thought “was too good” for Bradshaw.

But Anna and Bradshaw’s relationship was far more complex than Langguth had perceived from letters. Others in closer proximity saw Bradshaw as a father figure to Anna, both emotionally and professionally. They felt she played a needy little girl role with him, and Bradshaw was always a sucker for people in need. Because of his many connections, he would be able to help her get in the door for jobs and meet the right people after she arrived in New York.

As John Pringle notes, “Bradshaw was a terribly generous man, and if he liked you—and he
loved
Anna—he would do anything to help her.”

Anna, friends of the couple observe, would come to be the dominant figure in their tumultuous relationship.

I
t was a wild and crazy time, those early to midseventies years of the Wintour-Bradshaw romance.

But Annabel Hodin, who was a part of the scene, observes that despite all of the partying, Anna was “quite solitary. You’d always think of Anna being
apart
in the group—not
needing
to be liked,
very
self-contained.”

Besides wild nights in the trendy London clubs, Anna and Bradshaw were
frequent hangers-on at Shugborough Hall, Patrick Lichfield’s magnificent two-hundred-acre, seventeenth-century ancestral home in Staffordshire. For Bradshaw, it was a platinum card freeload—lots of marvelous food, drink, fascinating men, beautiful women, and servants at his beck and call.

For Anna, it was a wonderful environment in which to network. Lichfield, who had snapped his first photo when he was six, was an influential friend to have if, like Anna, you were trying to make it in the fashion magazine world. He hung out with the new breed of fashion photographers, such as David Bailey, whom he once described as “strongly hetero East End kids,” as opposed to what had been a mostly gay elite of shooters.

But of greater interest to Anna was the fact that Lichfield had developed a close relationship with Diana Vreeland, the doyenne of fashion editors, and had shot fashion for five years under her at American
Vogue
. His fellow photographers included the greats like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, who also shot for
Vogue
. He was close to designers like Oscar de la Renta, with whom Anna later became friends. Most important, Lichfield was a respected friend of Alex Liberman, the all-powerful editorial director of Condé Nast who ran the show at
Vogue
and down the road would become Anna’s guru, mentor, and Svengali.

Long before she came to America, Anna’s name was known to many of the key players in the upper echelons of the fashion magazine world because of the contacts she made for herself during those fun weekends at Shugborough Hall.

For her, working at
Harpers & Queen
was like a power pitcher working his way up through the minors, but with George Steinbrenner keeping a keen eye on his record.

Sometimes Anna and Bradshaw went to Lichfield’s with Annabel Hodin and her boyfriend, Robert Wade, who managed the British rock group The Kinks. Ironically, the group had put down as obnoxious and pretentious the whole London fashion scene, including fashionistas like Anna, in a rant of a single called “Dedicated Follower of Fashion.”

“We did lovely things,” reminisces Hodin of the weekends spent with Anna and Bradshaw at Lichfield’s country estate. “Chauffeurs would take us to the woods and we’d all be given a gun so we could shoot at helium balloons. Then the butlers would lay out the picnic. There’d be movie shows in
the evening. We’d stay all night, and in the morning the women would have their breakfast on silver trays, and then the men would go to the breakfast room where you pulled the doors back and the scrambled eggs and sausage and everything were. And then the men would read their newspapers. It sounds all very
Gosford Park
, but
Gosford Park
was about an industrialist, and Patrick was an
aristocrat
. It’s
very
different. Then we’d all play tennis and run around on the lawns. He had funny cars for us to ride in and motorbikes. We could do anything we wanted.”

But sometimes it all became too much for the lord of the manor, especially if someone like Bradshaw took advantage of the good life the earl offered to his friends and hangers-on.

John Pringle remembers one particular weekend when “that shit Lichfield was in one of his peevish, bitchy moods, and Bradshaw had tummy problems. He was not feeling well and he’d been staying at that rather grand house for what seemed like weeks and he knew all the servants. I was sitting at the table, and he said to one of the butlers, ‘I can’t eat very much. Can you make me a bowl of soup?’ And Lichfield, at the other end of the table—and there were eighteen people at the table—said, ‘Bradshaw, this is
not a
. fucking hotel!’ I got up and left the table and left the house that very afternoon because he was so rude to Bradshaw.”