by George Wayne
FF:
It’s here. My assistant found it in the attic when I had to move because the earthquake destroyed my house. We’ve been talking to the Smithsonian, and they asked the very same question because they want it.
GW:
Surely one of your greatest achievements is becoming a mother at thirty-seven. What is your relationship with Ryan O’Neal, your son’s father?
FF:
With Ryan it has come to a very good place, where we are able to realize the importance of what we did, have been, and are.
GW:
I’m sure Lee Majors will never forgive himself for introducing you to Ryan.
FF:
Oh, I don’t know, he may be happy he did.
GW:
What about that infamous appearance on David Letterman?
FF:
I was talking about that the other day, because I am going to be on in October again.
GW:
You mean you are going back for more of that torture?
FF:
I don’t find it torture. The only thing I was really guilty of was being extremely fatigued. I was trying to be a bit silly. I think what I am guilty of is maybe being a bad talk-show guest.
GW:
Thank you, Farrah. Stay fabulous.
FRANCESCO SCAVULLO
OCTOBER 1997
In July of 1997 I sat with the great Francesco Scavullo. The legendary fashion and celebrity photographer. Now, looking back on this moment with Scavullo, I think I never did delve as much as I ought to have. I should have probed more about what it was like that day on the set when he photographed the macho icon Burt Reynolds nude, at the request of Helen Gurley Brown and Cosmopolitan. That nude spread caused an incredible sensation, as most any photo shoot with Scavullo did back in his heyday. From the 1970s through the 1990s and well after his death in 2004, Scavullo was still an icon of photography. And the man responsible for the careers of Brooke Shields, Cheryl Tiegs, Iman, and, most of all, Farrah Fawcett.
GW:
What does the O in Scavullo stand for?
FS:
I don’t know.
GW:
I think it stands for “ordinary.”
FS:
I don’t think I’m ordinary. I don’t like ordinary things. I like simple, but not ordinary. I love beautiful women, and I love beautiful men. I’ve never wanted to destroy beauty. I’ve always just wanted to make it more beautiful.
GW:
I know you’ve had a few nervous breakdowns, Francesco, but please don’t have a fifth one before we get through our little chat.
FS:
I don’t have any, not anymore. Now I only have mini ones.
GW:
Scavullo once said he knew in high school that he wanted to be a photographer. And you had your first magazine contract [at Seventeen] as a teenager. Did you ever look back and say, Gee, maybe I was a prodigy?
FS:
Well, no, I just thought I was lucky. I was working for Horst.
GW:
And by now you have photographed them all, from Liz to Liza to every supermodel. But didn’t you have a famous feud with Raquel Welch?
FS:
[Muttering] I get on really well with Raquel Welch, but she is difficult. She wants the best out of herself. What usually happens with Raquel is she starts crying, and I put my arms around her and tell her everything is going to be fine. And then we go put the clothes on her and we go to work.
GW:
GW’s favorite Scavullo classic is that portrait of Diana Ross “unplugged”: simple hair, little makeup, T-shirt, and jeans. It was radical for the time.
FS:
Diana Ross said she wanted a new look. And the only thing new we could do with Diana Ross was get rid of all the hair. Get rid of the makeup. I wanted to see her like the little urchin. I wanted to see her back to what she was before she added everything. So she came here, we threw on a pair of [the late supermodel] Gia’s old jeans, and went to work. Once she saw the pictures, she didn’t like them really. Then she showed them to Cher. Cher said, “Girl, you’ve never looked so good,” and then it became Diana Ross’s favorite picture.
GW:
Scavullo and Brooke Shields are forever linked.
FS:
I met Brooke when she was seven months old. Everybody knows that story. I was doing an Ivory soap commercial and all the babies were crying, and Nan Bush, my assistant at the time, said she had this hairdresser friend across the street with the most beautiful baby. I said, “Call her up immediately!” So, in comes Brooke Shields in her mother’s arms, and she loved the camera. Even at seven months.
GW:
There is a faction of fashion that pooh-poohs Scavullo, irrational snobs who call him a minor talent. In other words, he’s no Richard Avedon!
FS:
[Long pause.] That I’m no Avedon? Certainly not! I’m Scavullo! I have been working for fifty years. And I’ve had a wonderful career, a wonderful time being a photographer. And I have a book coming out [Scavullo: Photographs, 50 Years] which highlights the fifty years of my photography! I have a style which I have developed, and I’m not going to change it every fifteen minutes!
GW:
Congratulations are in order, Mr. Scavullo! I think the one thing you still have to do is direct a music video.
FS:
Thank you. But you know I directed Crystal Gayle’s first album special for CBS. But these videos are too quick. I did think about directing films. I was very good friends with Luchino Visconti. And he once said to me “If you really want to direct movies, come to Europe and be an assistant director on my next film.” I would have had to take a year off, and I thought about it. But then I said, “If I took a year off, no one would remember me when I got back to New York, and this studio would be useless.”
LEROY NEIMAN
AUGUST 1996
This great American artist is yet another fine example of GW going to do an interview and ending up becoming very close friends from that day on for the many, many years that followed. LeRoy Neiman was a dear mentor and friend, and I miss him to this day. I always loved his art and more so his innate and unique personal style—and that famous Dalí-like mustache, which he pulled off with the most debonair air. I went to his vast studio on the Upper West Side in the summer of 1998 for the very first time, and as GW is wont to say—there would be many, many more impromptu visits.
GW:
You just gifted Columbia University with six million dollars to their School of the Arts. Why?
LN:
Columbia’s art department should be the strongest, and it’s going to be. Columbia is New York, where the biggest art business is. Why shouldn’t it have the greatest art department.
GW:
And part of it will be the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. That has a nice ring to it.
LN:
Right there in the center of campus.
GW:
How did you get this long-running gig as the unofficial artist of the Olympics?
LN:
Roone Arledge lived across the street from me, and asked me to. The first [time] was in 1972.
GW:
That had to have been something. The 1972 Olympics, the Munich massacre . . .
LN:
Yeah . . . I was there, with Jim McKay and all those people. We were all staying at the Sheraton near the Olympic Village. At that time, there was no security. Anybody could walk into the Olympic Village and hang out. One morning at around five, we got a call that there was a disturbance in the Village. We took my car and went over there. We saw the whole thing—we stayed for hours and hours. Some of the victims were on the Israeli wrestling team, too, whom I had just drawn a couple of days before at the opening day march.
GW:
You’ve known Hugh Hefner for many, many years . . .
LN:
From before the magazine. At this stage in my life, he’s one of my oldest friends, actually. We
met because I was doing women’s fashion drawings for this milliner in Chicago. Hef was a copywriter in the men’s store, and he was doing a cartoon book. He did all the drawings, all the captions, and he got it published. I knew there was something special there. There was a mood going in Chicago, of skin magazines. But they were all trashy, with third-rate advertising. And we met on the street one day, and he had started this magazine, with quality advertising, and Marilyn Monroe was on the cover. I illustrated a story about jazz and won the Chicago Art Directors Club Award.
GW:
Did you ever go to any of the orgies at the Playboy Mansion?
LN:
My God! Those were firsts for everybody, new experiences for everyone involved. I used to carry a tape measure. And every girl I’d see I would measure, to see if she was the perfect 34-26-34. But we could never do this today.
GW:
Weren’t you also there when Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to J.F.K. at Madison Square Garden?
LN:
I did a painting, and it is in Madison Square Garden. I got Marilyn singing in there, carrying the birthday cake in. I got Adlai Stevenson, L.B.J., Bobby—the whole gang. It was a sensational affair. At that time, to accept a commission to paint some of those events was considered bad taste.
GW:
Why is it that art snobs so disdain LeRoy Neiman?
LN:
I’ve never tried to analyze it, but I’d like to say they’re coming around. All the things that I’ve been taken to task for over the years: Playboy and my identification with them, television art, which is another form of making money; silkscreens, where I made tons of money—everything that I touched has clicked. Things that they took me to task for are now what they want the artist to do.
GW:
You’ve been around the world many times over. You’ve met everyone of consequence. What else is there left for LeRoy Neiman to do?
LN:
It’s always new. Thirty years ago people walked differently, they moved differently, they looked different. They’re human beings. You never have to worry about seeing too much of the world, because it just keeps renewing itself.
ANNA WINTOUR
NOVEMBER 1997
This is probably still the only Q&A in history that the enigmatic, and newly anointed Dame Anna Wintour, has ever sat for. She actually did this GW Q&A for my Xeroxed, avant-garde style journal called R.O.M.E., of which she was a huge, influential fan. We met her in her Vogue office while the headquarters of Condé Nast was still at Madison Avenue. To this day I do believe it is the only interview for which Anna Wintour has ever answered pointed questions on any particular subject, including her then marriage. This GW Q&A is thus one for the record books!
I think Anna was won over by the personal note I wrote, which I still have to this day and which reads as follows:
“Anna Wintour’s complexity is always revered, and so it was such the evening’s thrill to be in your presence again at Oscar de la Renta’s bacchanal the other evening. But the reason for this particular correspondence dearest Anna, is to broach the possibility of GW having a quick audience with the legendary Editrix for the R.O.M.E. Volume XXI which debuts in November of 1997. We already have the title—‘Anna Speaks!’ A quick audience to chat and record the day would be so appreciated. . . .”
Sure enough a few days later that September our dreams were realized. . . .
GW:
When people think of Anna Wintour, they think of this cold, aloof fashion editrix. Who is the real Anna Wintour?
AW:
Oh, George, that’s for you to say. Come on!
GW:
Oh no, it’s for you to tell me if that’s true or not. Do you like that image? Do you care?
AW:
No, it’s certainly not an image that I cultivate. I think maybe it was printed in one paper and, you know, some journalists just go out and write what they’ve read somewhere else. I know what the people that I work with think about me, and what my family thinks about me. I don’t worry about it.
GW:
Tell me a little about your childhood. Was it privileged?
AW:
Privileged? Not particularly. My father was an editor of a British newspaper, and my mother worked, but stopped when she had kids. There were four of us.
GW:
Where were you in the lineage?
AW:
I was second. My childhood was kind of normal.
GW:
Did you think, growing up, that you’d one day be one of the most important fashion editors in the world?
AW:
Well, I always wanted to get into journalism, I guess because of my father, because he was so known in the newspaper business in England. I guess I chose to go into magazines because that wasn’t so much his world. I certainly grew up knowing that being in publishing was something I wanted to do.
GW:
What is a typical day in the life of Anna Wintour?
AW:
I’ll tell you what I did today. I got up at six, I read some copy, talked to my husband, got my kids up, made them breakfast, took them to school . . .
GW:
You take them to school yourself?
AW:
Every morning, yes. I took them to school, I had a nine a.m. meeting with about ten people about a trip being planned to Russia, then I read some more copy, edited, had a features meeting, then went to Seventh Avenue and had a fitting with Geoffrey Beene. Then I went to Marc Jacobs [at Perry Ellis], had lunch with him, and he showed me what he’s thinking about for his fall collection. And then I came back here. I looked at some pictures in the art department. I had a run-through with Carlyne Cerf, and now I’m here with you.
GW:
Do you meet with fashion designers a lot?
AW:
I do. I try and get into the market. I find it very helpful. Every time you go out there you get an idea; you get something that is in some way going to be translated back into the magazine. Some [of the designers] are more accessible and easier than others, but it’s fun. I love being in the market.
GW:
Are you happy with your current state of American fashion?
AW:
[Laughs] I found the spring collections very, very interesting. I thought there was an enormous amount of ideas there. There is an awful lot of choice. Obviously there’s kind of a sixties thing going on, which I think is great. What I thought was particularly strong was the amount of choice.
GW:
One thing I find especially appealing about you is the incongruous nature of your marriage. Your husband is a psychiatrist. He is not a particularly stylish man. He seems to be everything Anna Wintour is not. Tell me a little thing about your husband, your courting. How long have you been married?
AW:
We’ve been married six years, five or six years, I can never remember. I met him through English friends about seven years ago. His first wife was actually a fashion designer, so I guess he likes fashion. After he was separated from his wife, I was reintroduced to him.
GW:
So it was a quick romance?
AW:
Pretty quick, pretty quick.
GW:
What do you think about Mirabella magazine?
AW:
[Pause] Well . . . to me, it’s not a fashion magazine. I think it’s heavier on the features. It seems to be a more general interest magazine, and obviously, to my eye, it seems aimed at an older reader than some of the other magazines of that kind. I think its size is great. I wish I could have that size.
GW:
Do you read it?
AW:
No, I don’t. That has nothing to do with Mirabella because I really don’t read any other magazines.
GW:
You don’t read other magazines?
AW:
Not in the fashion world. So many other people are obsessed with what other people are doing. I take a quick look, but there’s
too much out there. For my own personal reading, I’d rather read the New York Times or R.O.M.E., something that’s not so much my world and my point of view. I don’t want to be influenced by what other people may be doing.
GW:
Do you read Vanity Fair?
AW:
Well, I certainly look at Vanity Fair and sometimes read it on the plane. But again, it’s just really a question of time. My weekends I usually read a book. Vanity Fair is a terrific magazine, but I’m not poring over it to see what they are doing.
GW:
What do you think of Tina Brown?
AW:
A brilliant editor.
GW:
Is she a friend?
AW:
Yes, I’ve known Tina for a long time, and her husband is a great, great friend of my father’s. And I have great respect for Tina. I think she’s doing an amazing job.
GW:
Would you say that Vogue under your tutelage has incorporated a “downtown sensibility”?
AW:
[Laughs] I don’t think we edit with uptown or downtown in mind. I think we edit for a woman that’s interested in fashion. It’s a personal attitude, I think. Maybe there is a bit of downtown, maybe there’s a bit of L.A. It’s a mix, more than one point of view.
