Front Row by Jerry Oppenheimer Read Free Book Online Page B

“Anna never talked about him again, and I never heard anything about the dead brother from other members of thefamily. But neither Anna nor any of the other children were permitted to ride or had bikes.”
    The Wintours moved to an elegant late-nineteenth-century four-story white stucco home at 9 Phillimore Gardens, in fashionable Kensington, close to the area’s fancy department stores and antiques shops, a neighborhood “still stuffily grand at that point in time,” observes Valerie Grove. “Grandeur and wealth was the keynote.” It was a fine family house for entertaining, with a large garden, immediately adjacent to bucolic Holland Park. Compared to their previous home, the Wintours’ new house was enormous: nine bedrooms, four bathrooms (one en suite), three reception rooms, many fireplaces (the mantels of which were stolen during the renovation), a kitchen and breakfast room, and a cloakroom, all high-ceilinged with beautiful moldings. The facade had eight windows that faced the street, flooding the front rooms with light.
    It was, as Grove notes, “an appropriate house for an editor of a newspaper in those days, and for an American heiress. The first thing anyone said about Nonie when one first arrived [on staff] at the
Evening Standard
was ‘Charles Wintour has a rich American wife.’ It was understood that, however well-heeled his army family was, it was Nonie’s money that had enabled them to buy the house in Kensington.”
    Alex Walker believes that Beaverbrook may also have had a role in helping Wintour with the purchase, by giving him a loan, the kind of special perk he offered favored high-level employees. (Years later, Anna would also have a powerful and enamored media king for a boss, Condé Nast’s S.I. Newhouse Jr., who is said to have assisted her, too—one of his favorite editors—in buying a town house in Greenwich Village with an interest-free $1.64 million mortgage on the property from Condé Nast.)
    Back then, though, teenage Anna didn’t care how her parents got their financing. She adored the fact that they now lived in a classier neighborhood, closer to the action, with powerful and well-to-do neighbors, and fancy shopping steps away. But most of all, she was enthralled with the lower level of the house, where there were servants’ quarters—a staff flat, consisting of a living room, kitchen, and bath, with a private entrance.
    Anna believed she was old enough to have her own place, even though it was just a stairway away from the rest of the family. She asked, and her parentsreadily agreed. The permissive Wintours viewed Anna as mature and responsible enough to live somewhat independently from the rest of the family and felt that she deserved her privacy They were ahead of their time—by the nineties homes would be built with separate teenager suites.
    “So, at fifteen, Anna had her very own flat and total privacy to come and go as she wished,” says Vivienne Lasky. “Once she had her flat, she didn’t really participate upstairs at her house unless it was Sunday lunch, which was sort of sacrosanct in the Wintour household. She was very precocious, very adult, and was playing at being an adult.”
    Discerning and opinionated about what she wanted, Anna furnished most of her flat at Habitat, the decor lifestyle store that brought designer Sir Terence Conran to prominence, a store that sparked a design revolution in the middle-class British home. To Anna, the shop was known as “Shabitat” because everything was relatively inexpensive—her parents footed the decorating costs, of course—but had a chic look. Habitat was the Ikea of its day, only classier.
    Anna’s bedroom was all blue and white, but spare, and not very girly-girl. Against one wall was a fabric-covered kidney-shaped dressing table. The duvet on the queen-sized bed had matching fabric. (Conran asserted later that his introduction of the duvet had a positive impact on the supposedly boring British sex life