When the going was good, p.34
When the Going Was Good, page 34
I agreed with much of what Henry said, but I thought a follow-up report might come off as self-serving. I went back and forth on this, worried that we could look like braggarts. In the end, the decision was sort of made for us. Two months after Fayed received our letter about the diplomat’s stepdaughter came the news of the death of Princess Diana and Fayed’s son Dodi following a car chase with paparazzi in pursuit through the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. Si decided that we didn’t want to be in a legal dispute with a man who was grieving for his son and let it all go. In 2010, Harrods fell out of Fayed’s hands when it was bought by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Almost three decades after our original story on Fayed ran in Vanity Fair, the full depths of his depravity were reported by the BBC. The number of women who have charged the former owner of Harrods with sexual offenses is now in the hundreds.
* * *
A couple of sentences buried within a seventeen-page story on Elaine’s triggered another major libel case that would go on for more than two years. And to my mind, it should never have gone to court. The story was written in 2002 by A. E. Hotchner, the distinguished journalist and author who had been a pal of Hemingway’s. Deep in his copy was an anecdote told by then Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, an Elaine’s regular. Lewis said that the only time he remembered the place being reduced to silence was when Roman Polanski had walked in not long before the funeral of his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, a victim of the brutal Manson killings up in the Hollywood Hills in the late summer of 1969. The director, he said, had stopped in New York on his way to Los Angeles, where the funeral was to be held. Lewis said that Polanski had sat between him and a Scandinavian model who was there with his friend, Edward Perlberg. Lewis was quoted in Hotchner’s story saying that Polanski had made a pass at the model, invoking the name of his late wife as he did so.
Polanski denied that the incident had ever happened. He claimed, for one thing, that he had flown directly to Los Angeles from Paris for his wife’s funeral. He sued Vanity Fair for libel. I had met Polanski a few times before this and admired his work as a director. Warren Beatty, Diane von Fürstenberg, and Bob Evans, all friends of his, called me on his behalf. They urged me to settle the case with a correction and an apology. All argued convincingly that Polanski believed the magazine had wronged him. I met Polanski after this at a dinner, talked about the case, and thought there might be a way of resolving it.
Some cases are worth fighting, but I didn’t think this was one of them. Polanski made a compelling argument as to why he would never have said what had been reported. As much as I respect Lewis’s memory, most of us believe what we want to believe. And most of us have trouble recalling exactly what was said at dinner the night before, let alone three decades earlier—and in a crowded restaurant during a night of drinking. And there was this: after all that had been said against Polanski, that he took a stand on this particular anecdote gave me cause to believe he had, in my mind, a reasonable argument that he was innocent.
After a long phone conversation with Polanski, I drafted a correction and an apology based on our general agreed-upon wording. It was one paragraph long, and I was ready to send it to him. I checked first with the Condé Nast lawyers, who had told me that they wanted to see it first. They kneaded it and added clauses here and there to the point that it bore little resemblance to what we had agreed to on the phone. I knew there was no way that Polanski would sign off on it. And from that point, it all got out of control.
Polanski was—and still is, at the time of this writing—the subject of one of the longest cases in California legal history. He served time in prison in 1977 for unlawful sex with a minor, fleeing Hollywood for France only when the judge—unlawfully—threatened to reincarcerate him. The case stunned the American public even in the libertine days of Hollywood in the late 1970s. Included in the indictments were counts of sodomy and rape involving the use of drugs. Since then, and because of the misconduct of the judge, which took years for the courts to admit, the authorities have said that if he returns to the United States he would be discharged without further incarceration, having served the full sentence imposed on him. Polanski doesn’t trust the courts, so the arrest warrant remains in place. As it was in place then.
Polanski sued us in the UK, and if he showed up in person, he would run the risk of extradition to the United States. His lawyers argued that he should be allowed to fight his case from the safety of France via video link. This was fairly unprecedented, and the Court of Appeal unanimously ruled against it. But his legal team appealed to the House of Lords, which in a landmark decision overruled the lower court. One other advantage for Polanski was that his past actions—the crimes in Los Angeles that he had originally been charged with—in terms of possible damage to his reputation couldn’t be aired in court. Nor could Polanski be seen by those in the courtroom watching the proceedings via video link except when he was actually giving evidence, which I thought was unfair to him. Polanski is a superb actor and in court he was a forceful and disarming witness—measured and polite. And how could he not be? He directed himself in his testimony.
He called the disputed anecdote “an abominable lie” that showed “callous indifference” to his wife’s murder. He also had a very good lawyer in John Kelsey-Fry, a barrister with a background in criminal law and a scrappy and eager way in court. He had prosecuted one of the notorious Kray brothers—for decades the scourge of East London. I also liked the fact that Kelsey-Fry stole outside for a cigarette from time to time.
Our own barrister, on the other hand, was the posh and laconic Tom Shields, son of the former managing director of Associated Newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail. I was told that he had his own cricket pitch in the country—a bit like an American having his own baseball diamond. To my mind, he was no match for Kelsey-Fry. Lewis Lapham was a long-respected editor and writer, and I had enormous admiration and affection for him. But he was a shockingly bad witness. Lewis’s memory, which had seemed reassuring when the story was being prepared for publication, was, on the witness stand, shaky. His friend Edward Perlberg testified that, although he saw Polanski at Elaine’s, he didn’t see or hear his reported advances toward his girlfriend. The date of Polanski’s visit to New York was blurry. Mia Farrow testified about a dinner she’d had with Polanski at Elaine’s a few weeks after the funeral.
The trial, which lasted a week, took place in the fabled Royal Courts of Justice—barristers and judges wore wigs, and it was all very Witness for the Prosecution. On the last day, Anna and I slipped away for lunch at a locally popular pub called the Seven Stars, close to the courts. It was where the lawyers and justices often ate during long trials. As we walked in from the street, the publican, a woman of sturdy build and claret-colored hair, exclaimed to the room, “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Graydon Carter himself. Welcome to the Elaine’s of London.”
She was indeed, as I discovered, something of an institution among the legal set. Her name, and I’m not making this up, was Roxy Beaujolais, and she waved her arm at the room and said, “Now a gentleman such as yourself will, I expect, be wanting a table.”
We got a small one outside on the sidewalk. It was quite a social lunch, as it turned out. A woman I’d seen in the courtroom got out of a cab and rushed over to Roxy to give her a hug and a kiss.
“Mr. and Mrs. Graydon Carter, I’d like you to meet Marilyn Lownes,” Roxy announced.
She was the wife of Victor Lownes, who had been part owner of the Playboy Club when Polanski first came to London. The three had been good friends. Roxy explained that Marilyn—who must have cut quite a dash in her earlier years—was a public figure in her own right.
Roxy expanded on Mrs. Lownes’s place in the cultural firmament by explaining that she was “the first Playboy Playmate to go full frontal. You know, the tits, the bush, the whole thing.”
The verdict was less amusing than the lunch. The jury found for Polanski and awarded damages of £50,000. Condé Nast was also on the hook for the legal costs of both sides—a penalty that ran into the millions of dollars. I was angry less with the verdict than with our own stumbling actions leading up to it. It was, I felt, a self-inflicted wound.
Chapter 20.
The Golden Age Begins to Tarnish
I have Anna Wintour to thank for bringing me firmly into the Condé Nast fold—and also for either inadvertently or advertently giving me reason to leave that fold thirty years later. We didn’t meet the way normal people do. She essentially inherited me. When Si asked her to take over House & Garden in 1987, she was given a magazine with a charmed history and a number of staff and contract writers, me included. Louis Gropp, the cheerful steward of House & Garden prior to Anna, had given me a writing contract that equaled nearly half the salary I was making at Spy.
I knew almost nothing formal about interiors or decorators, but the assignments I was given were more about the people than the places. Lacking the discernment of previous editors of my freelance offerings, Anna kept me on contract when she took over. I found Anna in those days to be cozy, conspiratorial, and completely enticing. My feelings toward her ran in opposition to the tagline “Nuclear Wintour,” which was then at the beginning of its long run. She was a great and loyal friend, and as a result, she had a lot of close friends. Also, she had gone out with Christopher Hitchens, a big validation in my book.
Anna turned House & Garden into something it hadn’t been—flashy and a bit obsessed with fashion and with people who were then considered fashionable. It developed the nickname “House & Garment.” Within a year, she had renamed it HG, for reasons that I never understood, and it began a slow and steady slide off the newsstands. The magazine folded in 2007. I had always assumed that giving Anna House & Garden was Si’s way of getting her to New York from London, where she had been the editor of British Vogue. It was a way station on the path to the editorship of American Vogue.
As much as I liked her, I found Anna’s efforts to seem intimidating and powerful almost comical. Her son Charlie and my son Max were in the same class at Collegiate, in Manhattan. One year a number of their classmates decided to put on a fashion show. They went to an awful lot of effort, with a catwalk down the center and rows of chairs on each side. Like a real fashion show, but much sweeter and with young boys in place of supermodels. As a show of support, I dropped by to see it on my way out to dinner. The lights were already dimmed by the time I got there. Family members had filled out the rows of chairs, and there, in the front row, was Anna. And she was wearing sunglasses. I almost burst out laughing and had to turn my back.
Another time, she and I shared a car out to the Oyster Bay home of Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio. This was a once-a-year get-together for editors and publishers and Condé Nast executives. It was a strained affair, in that the editors and publishers at the various magazines were pitched in mortal combat the other 364 days of the year, and many actively despised their counterparts at the other titles. It was about 6:00 p.m. when we set off. We took her car, and I was surprised by how blackened the windows were. It was difficult to see outside in the back seat even with the late afternoon sun. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I was surprised to see Anna in her dark sunglasses. “You are kidding,” I said. She took them off and said something to the effect of “There, Graydon, happy now?”
People who think arriving late is a power move could take a lesson from Anna Wintour. Late is not a part of her arsenal. Early is. She likes to play tennis in the morning and then get her hair done—I think I have the order right—before beginning her day. When she began to spend more time on the organization of the Met Gala, the people at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art would set the first meetings for 9:00 a.m. Anna would arrive at 8:45, which would cause the Met staff to scramble to establish a quorum. When they officially changed the time to 8:45, Anna would begin arriving at 8:30. More scrambling. The times just got earlier and earlier. The meetings by now may well have been pushed back to the evening before. This was a technique she also applied at Condé Nast. I was well aware of the early-arrival act through friends at the Met. Near the end of my time at Vanity Fair, Anna’s office called to request a meeting to discuss something. We set the get-together for 11:00 in the Vanity Fair conference room. At about 10:40, my assistant came into my office and in something of a panic said that Anna was already in there. I said, “Good, ask her if she’d like anything and tell her I’ll see her at 11:00.” I have never felt so brave and in control of a situation.
The Met Gala, held on the first Monday in May every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a must-attend obligation for most of the attendees: actors, models, and now TikTokers and assorted influencers. They and others in the sway of fashion no doubt feel they have to be there, if only to be photographed looking especially outrageous. The sponsors, who pay upward of $350,000 for tables at the affair, are essentially held hostage. It’s not quite on the level of a protection racket. Fashion companies need credits in fashion magazines. The magazines get the word out and provide a form of second-party validation. Buying a table does not necessarily get you fashion credits in Vogue. But not buying a table does not exactly win the loyalties of the editors responsible for credits in the magazine. I doubt that a quid pro quo is ever mentioned in the negotiations over the tables. But as it is in many dictatorships, these understandings can be tacit.
A decade or so ago, Carolina Herrera realized that she needed to be in London the week of the Met Gala to attend the wedding of the daughter of her closest friend, Alexandra Theodoracopulos, the wife of Taki, the Greek shipping heir and longtime Spectator columnist. She called Anna to explain why she wouldn’t be able to take a table. Anna said she completely understood, but that she would still like her to pay for a table—$250,000 back then—for “my charity,” as she put it. Carolina explained once again that she couldn’t attend and therefore she wouldn’t be taking a table.
At dinner a few nights later, Carolina told me this story and asked what she should do. I told her not to send the check and just move on. Well, she didn’t take my advice. She called Anna to tell her that she would take the table and that her daughter Patricia, who was working with her, would host the table. She said that Patricia and her husband, Gerrity Lansing, would invite their friends Seth Meyers and his wife, Alexi, along with Tom Brady and his then wife, Gisele Bündchen, to sit with them. Anna would have none of it. She had already assigned Seth and Alexi and Tom and Gisele to other tables. In the end, Carolina flew back the day after the wedding, and on the Monday night, there she was at the Met Gala, with her husband, Reinaldo, and Patricia and Gerrity. And seated at her table were the only two people she could corral at the last minute: my wife, Anna, and me. Loyalty can exact a high price sometimes, and it was a pretty dismal affair. Except for one thing. I noticed across the room a number of taut Upper East Side wives clustered around Donald Trump. This was before his run for the presidency. I motioned for Carolina to see this. “Interesting,” I said. “No, no, no,” she replied. “He likes them much younger.”
I occasionally went to the Met Gala at the behest of advertisers. Often, I’d bring along a friend to ease the agony. Fran came with me a few times. And one year I brought Anjelica Huston, or she brought me, I forget which. In any event, on that night the first moment we could, Anjelica and I bolted across the street to the Stanhope Hotel. The bar was open but deserted. We found ourselves in there with a half dozen other escapees, including George Hamilton and Meg Ryan. The bartender had gone, and so George went behind the bar and pulled out a bottle of scotch. That little after-dinner party was the best part of the whole evening.
My excursions into this world were such that I got it down to a routine that made the ordeal survivable. Most attendees began to arrive at 5:30, not only to get photographed but ostensibly to see whatever exhibit the Met had done up for that year. My system was to arrive at 8:00. By that time, the photographers who lined the red carpet were gone, the crowd had thinned dramatically, and people were heading toward the dinner tables.
Anna Wintour runs the whole affair like a military operation, which is a good thing. Food on the table at 8:15, prompt. Nobody in that crowd eats dessert, but Sean Driscoll, then the chief of Glorious Foods, the city’s premier caterer, served it anyway, and so the moment the dessert course hit the table, at 10:00, everyone stood up to mingle. That was the signal to escape, and my Anna and I did it with the precision of Navy SEALs. Our routine is thus: She would head to the exit first and then, about fifteen seconds later, I would follow, taking a slightly more circuitous route. No goodbyes. No obvious rushing. We would be in our car in fifteen minutes and on our way home. One year I bumped into a faintly miserable-looking Larry David. He literally threw himself on me, asking what the evening was going to be like. I gave him the key: the moment dessert arrives, you make a run for it.
Anna and I followed our plan that night. And about 10:30 I got a call from Larry on my cell phone.
“I’m out! I’ve done it. Where are you?” he asked.
“Larry,” I said, and I felt badly one-upping him, “we’re almost home.”
* * *
Anna Wintour tends to greet me either like her long-lost friend or like the car attendant. Shyness on her part might have something to do with it. But it might also be a technique to throw the other person off their game. The trouble is, you never know which Anna you will get. Which is unfortunate. As I say, she can be a warm and loyal friend. She can also be a cold and loyal friend. Dinner with her at a restaurant is like something a McKinsey efficiency expert would admire. Seated at 8:00. No need to see a menu. Steak, rare. Not sure if she drinks. I think not. And when there are Vogue staff involved, the moment Anna has eaten the last piece of steak, there is a call for the check. Her dinner mates might be mid-bite. More often than not, after a meal with her, I’ve stopped off on the way home to get something to eat.
