Focus

by Michael Gross

  Meisel and Sohl had been haunting gay bars since junior high, says Gabriel Rotello, a nightlife entrepreneur who met them in the midseventies. “They both had real wild streaks and wanted to be where the action was. Richard would entertain us with stories about coming into the city on the subway, changing into rouge and heels, prancing around Manhattan, washing it off, and going home. Steven was not that way at all. He was very reticent.” But they shared a conspiratorial streak and a secret language rife with nicknames and veiled put-downs. “I found them a little scary,” says Rotello. Adds Annie Flanders, “They sat on the sidelines and observed.” Voyeurs.

  Like Weber, Meisel was committed to gaining acceptance for what he called the “queer sensibility.” His relationship with Toye was an early public expression of that; they would later announce their engagement as a prank to celebrate a nightclub opening. “They were so enigmatic,” says Helen Murray, a former fashion editor and agent. “The coolest of the cool, threateningly cool. They walked around like every mother’s nightmare.” But oddly, Murray adds, “They were cleaner than the guys working for Bear Stearns.”

  In the late seventies, Meisel began toying with photography and, after standing in for a friend who taught illustration at the Parsons School of Design, was allowed to take a photo course free and began shooting for WWD. “He was very focused, very ambitious,” says Kenneth Paul Block, a senior illustrator at the fashion newspaper. “It was perfectly clear he had no desire to go on being an illustrator in a world in which illustration was dying.” He was also ambitious for material things. Block and Meisel would walk around Greenwich Village, and Block would point out houses he liked. “I don’t care,” Meisel said. “I want to live on Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue.” He would end up with a grand apartment on Park Avenue and a gated midcentury Modern home in Trousdale Estates in Los Angeles with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and sweeping views (which he would sell for $11.36 million in April 2014).

  Meisel started out testing young models such as Phoebe Cates, who would later become an actress. “He was just different and playful,” she says. She and her sister Jo “were girls from Park Avenue. He was our first grown-up friend, our introduction to the Village. He was the first man we’d met with really long hair who was into dressing us up.” Thanks to Cates, Meisel won an assignment from Seventeen magazine. “He had one camera,” says Seventeen art director Tamara Schneider. “His mother took messages for him. But he had good design sense and a definite style.” Annie Flanders saw that first effort and offered more work. “I’ve got to practice a couple more years,” he demurred. “C’mon, shoot for us,” Flanders countered. His first job for the SoHo News tackled plastic clothing.

  At the time, Frances Grill’s most important photographer client, Toscani, “was giving everyone trouble,” Flanders says. “She was desperate for someone who could shoot like Toscani. I said, ‘I found who you’re looking for.’ ” Grill says, “I was looking for playfulness, for fun, and one day into Carnegie Hall walked this guy with his hair under a hat.” He “technically knew nothing, but he showed a very special, individual flair. He had an eye for fashion and a fantasy and used his camera to transform everything into that fantasy.”

  Grill worked a few blocks from Keeble and Cavaco’s apartment-office and took a carousel of Meisel’s slides to them for their opinion. “The pictures were so adorable,” Cavaco says. Keeble got Meisel several small jobs, and then, when she was hired to produce covers for Self, a new Condé Nast magazine about women’s health, she got him in the door and, says Cavaco, “he started to do covers on, like, his second try, which is unusual for a starting photographer.”

  It was a coup for Keeble and a coup de foudre for fashion. Meisel’s knowledge and photographic memory of sixties fashion photographs inspired him to take pictures that harkened back to the genre’s glory days. They were past, but he made the work seem urgent again. That brought him attention both good and bad. For years, he’d be derided by many as a plagiarist. “He tacked my pictures to the wall and said, ‘C’mon, let’s go shopping,’ ” Richard Avedon later charged. “They’d look at the pictures for a movement, a gesture. If you throw a pig an apple, he’ll run with it.”

  Years later, Meisel worked often with Madonna and shot photos of her inspired by Bert Stern’s “Last Sitting” with Marilyn Monroe. Stern had met Meisel at Mel Sokolsky’s studio when the former was still a fashion-struck preteen and the latter was shooting Twiggy. Years later, Stern would threaten to sue Meisel for copying him, but after meeting with lawyers representing Meisel and Madonna, Stern “kind of let it drop,” he said. “I know for a fact they had the book at the studio, literally going through it copying pictures. His early stuff was Avedon-ish. Then, he went through other photographers. It’s very inventive, very clever. It’s almost a style [itself]. We live in an age of nostalgia. But his [appropriation] is very extreme.” Meisel even aped Stern’s obsessive music-playing, though without a jukebox. “He’d play a track over and over and over,” says J. P. Masclet, who assisted Meisel. “No matter what you were doing, you’d have to go to the player again. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I heard ‘Beat It.’ ”

  But Meisel was more than a skilled postmodernist playing cut and paste. “He didn’t know much about photography, but his illustrator’s eye was sensational,” Masclet says. “He applied his sensibility to photography, but he needed assistants to fill in the blanks. He’d come in with tear sheets and ask assistants to duplicate the light. He wanted to understand light and then do his own thing. He was learning on the job.” Keeble masterminded his on-the-job training. “He absolutely knew nothing,” says another assistant she hired for him. “I’d do all the lighting, I’d shoot the Polaroids. He gave no direction. He’d sit in the corner. He’d look, and either he would shoot it or Kezia would. The guy had a dream come true. Every one of us who busted his ass watched him have everything handed to him.” But that happened for a reason. “He drew with his camera,” Grill says. “He re-created faces.”

  At the time, Grill was helping out a friend at a failing modeling agency, and Meisel, who’d recently moved to Manhattan, shot test photos for them. “They didn’t think his pictures were any good,” says Grill’s son and partner, Joey. “She said, ‘If you think that, I’m out of here.’ ” When the agency folded soon thereafter, several male models asked Grill to represent them, and she stopped representing photographers and opened a modeling agency of her own in summer 1980. She called it Click. Bruce Weber’s association with it was strong; he, Donald Sterzin, and Grill were “simultaneously doing the same thing,” says Joey Grill. “They’re scouting beaches, we’re scouting lacrosse teams, looking for people who could model but hadn’t. We were all on the same page about where fashion was going and willing to try different images.” Men’s fashion was finally going to matter.

  Rumor had it that Weber was backing Grill’s agency. In fact, it was the much younger Meisel who wanted to be part of it, somehow. He shared the same viewpoint, and at first Grill was willing to entertain the notion of him as a photographer-partner. She loved his sense of humor. “Even the way he wore black was humorous,” she says. “Something’s torn, something’s hanging, something’s old. It’s so untogether, it doesn’t feel forbidding.” She called him Mary Mary Quite Contrary.

  But someone privy to their conversations says they had a falling-out when Meisel insisted that his therapist get a cut of the Click deal, too. Asked why they parted company, Frances Grill gets gnomic: “He is fashion. He moves on. That’s fashion. It changes as fast as you think you’ve got it. That’s how Steven is. He moved on. We didn’t have an ongoing connection after that.” But the person privy to their talks elaborates: Meisel’s therapist “was a religious Jew and Frances thought, ‘This is where Steven got his look.’ But she also thought his therapist was a thief, manipulating Steven. He claimed Steven couldn’t operate without him, but Frances didn’t want him, so they went their separate ways.”

  Meisel next appro
ached Nan Bush, but she was already representing Weber. Seeing Meisel’s talent, but wanting to keep her client list small, Bush gave him some names, and he signed with a firm that represented photographers, stylists, art directors, and even copywriters. “Steven clicked the shutter, they managed him and marketed him as an incredibly cutting-edge cool person,” says Helen Murray.

  Before long Steven Meisel was working regularly for Mademoiselle and Lei. Mademoiselle’s editor, Amy Levin, looked askance at Meisel’s appearance. “He wore eye makeup and no lipstick,” says one of her editors. “A wig. A raincoat because he thinks he has fat thighs. You get very hardened to what people look like. At least he was clean.” But as fast as he’d appeared at Mademoiselle, he disappeared. “Alex [Liberman] had his eye on him,” says the editor. “Vogue plucked him.”

  Not everyone admired him. Oliviero Toscani called him a rephotographer, “but the fact is, a page by Steven Meisel had a signature,” says Grill. “I didn’t need to look for a credit.” And if elements of that signature were Richard Avedon’s, Meisel had made the right choice, thinks Ruth Ansel: “Why not go for the master?” The line between plagiarism and inspiration is fine, but it’s a distinction with a difference in fashion where line-for-line knockoffs are the coin of the realm. Meisel was fashion’s first advocate of sampling, the postmodern tool of choice.

  One of the first editors Meisel worked with at Vogue was Andrea Quinn Robinson. He cited chapter and verse on “everything about me that had ever been printed,” she says, and blew her away. He also blew her away with his look: kohl eyes and a skirt over pants. And then, there was the style of his photographs, starkly different from the look of the times epitomized by Arthur Elgort. “He really brought an illustrator’s point of view,” says Robinson. “He was very aware of the human form, the way artists are. Keen awareness of anatomy forces a more posed, formal picture.” Robinson watched in awe as Meisel grew confident. “He was a maestro,” she says of shoots where loud music played and he silently directed his models, commanding them through force of personality to match a look, a pose. “I remember thinking, ‘Is this too much for Vogue?’ ”

  In 1982, Vogue offered Meisel a complex, time-consuming shoot of clothes from all the international ready-to-wear collections, and he wavered. “I had to fire him so he could get going on his photo career,” says his boss at WWD, art director James Spina. Meisel worked with the flamboyant editor Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, and their collaboration would continue through the supermodel era and beyond. Meisel got a $60,000 annual guarantee from Condé Nast.

  In 1984, with Kezia Keeble’s connivance, Meisel caused an uproar when he named Teri Toye Girl of the Year at a meeting of the Fashion Group, a trade association. Their black-clad cabal imploded under the weight of the ensuing attention. Only Meisel survived and prospered. Sprouse had a brief moment in the sun but couldn’t stay in business and died at fifty of heart failure. Toye moved back to the Midwest. Keeble divorced Cavaco and married a New York Times fashion columnist named John Duka, and the unlikely ménage à trois founded Keeble Cavaco & Duka, a public relations and fashion-event management company that survived as KCD, even after Keeble died of cancer and Duka of AIDS, and Cavaco sold the company and went to work for a series of fashion magazines.

  “People like to assign credit—who made a career,” says Cavaco of Keeble, Weber, and Meisel. “We all helped each other. The fact that our careers moved forward was the fallout of the love of working together. There’s a way they see the world, a way they see a picture, that’s very similar even if, stylistically, their manner of working is different. They have an ability to see the next thing, and they’re not afraid of it.”

  Cavaco ping-ponged among them for years. “Being on a set with them is the funniest,” he says. “I could sometimes not believe I was laughing so hard. They see everything. Their observations are hilarious, and that sympathy makes their pictures beautiful. You feel cherished, so you do great work.”

  In the mideighties, Steven Meisel began working for both Italian and American Vogue. But often, his pictures were discarded. “He was ahead of his time, and that scared people,” says an editor who was there. “Carlyne [Cerf] and Steven were after aggressive, contemporary images that were against everything Vogue stood for under Grace Mirabella,” says a prominent art director. By 1987, “Steven’s name was never brought up with any enthusiasm. They never gave him anything big.” Even when his photos did run, he was upset about the way they were used and about editors hanging over his shoulder, demanding to see film before he was satisfied with his edit. “He wanted the freedom Bruce Weber had, and people wouldn’t give it to him,” says Annie Flanders.

  “He began getting difficult,” reports a Condé Nast editor. “At Mademoiselle, the art director had let him review his layouts. At Vogue, he had to do as he was told. He was not happy. He got frustrated” and began holding on to his film until the last moment, “hatching the pictures,” the editor says. Eventually, he started turning over one frame per page of a planned layout. Liberman grew furious. “Vogue is not a photography magazine,” he said. Grace Mirabella acknowledges the creative differences, but offers no details. “It’s like clothes I don’t like,” she says. “I just decide I don’t remember. Not that he’s not strong and interesting. But I wanted a direction he didn’t want, and I have trouble doing things halfway.”

  Meisel wasn’t the only newcomer to Condé Nast whom Mirabella didn’t like. The mideighties were treacherous times; Vogue was in a crisis, alarmed at the success of the upstart Elle. “Grace and Alex had established a vocabulary,” says a Condé Nast art director of the time. “As much as they wanted to hear about new people, they didn’t want to have to deal with their development, which means you have problems, failures, egos. Elle caused scurrying, whispering, worrying. Why was a giant worried about this irritant? They’d lost focus. Something terrible and terrifying was happening, and they just didn’t know what to do.” Then, the future arrived.

  Chapter 41

  * * *

  “A FASHION MUSICAL”

  Anna Wintour’s journey to the top of fashion’s pyramid is well chronicled. The daughter of an American mother and a newspaper editor from London’s Fleet Street, she had what she describes as “a totally undistinguished academic career” and started her real one as a fashion assistant at British Harper’s Bazaar in 1970. “By the time I left,” five years later, she’s said, “I’d risen to the heights of deputy fashion editor.”

  In 1976, Carrie Donovan hired her to work at Bazaar, but she was quickly fired for “not understanding American fashion,” and she admitted, “They were probably right.” Wintour joined Viva, an ill-fated women’s magazine, until it went out of business, and then New York magazine, where Alex Liberman noticed and started courting her to work for Grace Mirabella. “He can be very seductive,” Wintour said later, and in 1983, he hooked her with an offer of a new title, creative director, and a vague mandate to collaborate with Mirabella on the magazine’s visuals. They didn’t hit it off—and no wonder. At their first meeting, Wintour famously made it clear she was gunning for Mirabella’s job. Her relationship with Liberman was another story. “I learned more from him than I can imagine,” she said around that time. “He’s always right.”

  A year later, Beatrix Miller retired from British Vogue after twenty-two years at its helm, and Wintour was offered her job by the head of Condé Nast’s international division. It had been her childhood ambition, and feeling underused at Vogue, she accepted. So even though she’d established a life with a husband and newborn in New York, and Liberman didn’t want her to go, Wintour moved to London, took over a staff that was “nervous and apprehensive,” she’s said, and turned an eccentric, whimsical magazine into a glossy, Liberman-style frock-selling machine. “Whimsy was disappearing,” she said. “I was coming from an American Vogue point of view and I certainly brought that to England.”

  Six months into the job, her fashion director, Grace Coddington, quit and moved t
o America to join Calvin Klein’s design studio. Coddington’s departure fed red meat to a British media pack that had shoveled abuse on Wintour from day one, even though Coddington was quickly replaced by Elizabeth Tilberis, a prematurely gray-haired sittings editor with a jolly, friendly outward demeanor and a core of tempered steel.

  Wintour never expected to stay in London. “One was always aware it wasn’t going to be forever,” she said. But her departure came “a little sooner than originally expected.” By early 1987, she was pregnant again and rumored to be restless and talking to Harper’s Bazaar. That summer, Tilberis announced she was leaving, to join Ralph Lauren in New York. Alex Liberman stoked the fire when he told a New York Times reporter Wintour might return to America “within a certain period of time.” The day that appeared in print, he called the reporter. “Dear friend,” he said, using a phrase that signaled quiet fury, “it seems we have gotten me into some trouble. Now, how are we going to get me out of it?”

  Si Newhouse did that for him, flying to London to offer Wintour just what Liberman had implied—and later that summer, after giving birth to her second child, she returned to New York, but not to take over American Vogue. Newhouse “said quite firmly that Vogue was not available,” Wintour recalled. Instead, she replaced the editor of Condé Nast’s home-design magazine House & Garden (he left for Hearst). Tilberis was convinced to stay at British Vogue and replace her. Wintour’s magazine was renamed HG and given a stiff dose of chic, leading wags to nickname it House & Garment. It was generally reviled, but Liberman and Si Newhouse were nonetheless impressed with Wintour.

  Elle’s sudden ascent caused panic—and a series of abrupt personnel shifts—at Condé Nast. The most significant was a change at the top of Vogue. As with Diana Vreeland, Newhouse and Liberman had tried for several years to nudge Grace Mirabella to alter her course, see that times had changed, and confront the French usurper; Wintour’s 1983 stint at Vogue may have been their first glancing attempt to do that. Wintour was front and center when they confronted the problem head-on in spring 1988, moving her into Grace Mirabella’s job so abruptly that Vogue’s editor learned the news from her husband, who’d heard it announced on television by the gossip columnist Liz Smith.I