Front Row by Jerry Oppenheimer Read Free Book Online Page A

specialized in mixing a martini that left guests reeling—and was an overnight guest at their country place in West Farleigh, a village in Kent. And he got to know teenage Anna, who, he noted, was an “absolute monster” who “didn’t mind insisting on [her] own views on whatever anyone else said, particularly in that family.”
    Walker thought Anna would do or say things just to be mean. He says he thought of her as a complex amalgam of such wicked film characters as
The Bad Seed’s
Rhoda Penmark,
Mildred Pierce’s
Vida Pierce, and
All About Eve’s
Eve Harrington. As a movie critic and a serious biographer of Hollywood greats, Walker enjoyed film analogies, even if possibly exaggerated.
    “I’d stay with Charles and Nonie for the weekend,” he recalls. “I suppose Anna was fourteen, fifteen, and she had a horse. I’d hold the long harness while I delicately led her around, rather than galloping around, the paddock. When she was through riding, she’d say, ‘I think I’ve had quite enough of this, Mr. Walker. Now help me down.’ I was struck by the fact that she was very, very mature—far more mature than her age. The future editrix was in the blood there, that’s for certain.”
    Anna was crazy about riding at that time, and she made a serious pitch to her father to quit his powerful job at the
Evening Standard and
. take over editorship of the local
Kent Messenger
so that she could enroll at the local stables with thoughts of becoming a chic, miniskirted veterinarian.
    “Even as a child she had her father’s coldness,” continues Walker. “She was very much like her father. Anna had a self-possession that was beyond her years. She was in fact
more
than self-possessed. She was patrician. She was not a playful child. Her behavior manifested itself in quite small ways back then—simply in being stiffly polite but not taking very much notice of you. What she did, she did with purpose.”
    But Anna had no tolerance for rude behavior that intruded upon her life and was especially upset with people who were tardy. “Anna could be very impatient,” Vivienne Lasky emphasizes. “She was actually a perfectionist. In that way she was sort of a Martha Stewart–ish person, always in control. To Anna, the thought of anyone being late was terribly rude, and she cut off people if they didn’t arrive at precisely the specified time—at least not anyone terribly important to her. ‘Well, we’re
not
going to meet them again, that’s that,’ she’d say with finality. ‘They’re not reliable. We’ll just go on our own. What’s the point of meeting people if they show up late.’”

  four  

A Growing Independence
    A round the time Anna turned fifteen, in 1964, the Wintours decided to move from their bland contemporary town house in St. Johns Wood. The uninteresting house no longer fit the regal image of the editor of a serious London newspaper.
    Anna especially hated her tiny bedroom, though all of the rooms in the house were small. She felt hers was babyish-looking, and just prior to the family’s purchase of the new house she redid her room in an elegant green, faintly striped wallpaper.
    In general, the house held bad memories because of the death of the Win-tours’ firstborn.
    Vivienne Lasky had always found it odd that all of the windows in Anna’s room and those of her siblings had bars on them, which in those days was a rare addition in most British homes. One afternoon, sitting with Anna, she asked her about the guarded atmosphere, and Anna’s response surprised her. “My mother’s paranoid,” she stated, “that one of us is going to fall out.”
    When Lasky asked her why, Anna revealed the sad story of her brother’s death and said that her mother still feared that the worst could happen to another of her children. “Anna said Nonie was edgy, nervous about the children’s safety, that one of them might stand on a footstool or a chair and fall out”—thus the prisonlike bars.