KILLED - Episode 5: The Queen

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

In over 30 years at Vogue, Anna Wintour has killed many stories. This is not one of them. Featuring Amy Odell and Max Fisher.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

Vogue had assigned a profile of Umat Thurman in the 90s when Umat Thurman, you know, was like a hot up and coming young actor. She'd been getting great, great reviews for her latest film called Pulp Fiction, which opens today. This is a very first time on a talk show. I'm thrilled to have her. Please welcome Umat Thurman, ladies and gentlemen. The writer who was on staff at the magazine magazine spent more than three hours interviewing her

and got a completely epic interview. There was exciting material in the interview. But the photos came back from the shoot and Anna didn't like them. So she just killed the story. Pieces killed. Kill, kill, kill. The writer didn't even transcribe the tape. Because the story was just killed and that was that.

It didn't matter what had happened in the interview. Once Anna makes a decision, she doesn't go back on it. From Justine Harmon and Audio Chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Season 2 Episode 5 The Queen For more than 30 years, Anno Winter has been the head decision-maker at Fogue, the world's most famous fashion magazine. Anna's ice cold conviction has basically secured her a lifetime penthouse suite in the

high fashion high rise in the sky. When you're working for Anna, you are working for one thing, her sign-off, which she writes by hand in looping script, AW. OK. Anna mixed all the big decisions, and some of those decisions, to kill or not to kill. Carey Farmore wait, then a dashed Umathrman profile. I'm Amy O'Dell. I'm the author of Anna the Biography, and I write a fashion and culture newsletter at emiodel.substac.com. Emiodel is the New York Times' best-selling author of Anna, the biography.

And it's the most delicious, deeply reported portrait of a woman practically synonymous with her industry. When I worked at Glamour, I would often see Anna coming or going from the Kondaynast offices at one world trade. I never really got used to seeing her bobbed head, crest over the top of the escalator, or just appear between opening elevator doors. It always just felt kind of two on the nose, like walking into planters HQ and actually seeing Mr. Pinnut. And here's what makes Anna so compelling.

Everything you think about her is basically true. She is terribly exacting. She can be perceived as ice cold. And yes, she really looks like that all the time. I wish Chanel sunglasses and this way too many to count. And here's another truism about Anna Win-Tor. There is no correcting course once she's made a decision. Because what else is there to say? She makes decisions, she makes them fast, she makes them often. And she says that she operates that way because it's easier for the people who work for her. Because she thinks it's frustrating and I think this is true, that it can be frustrating to work for somebody who can't make up their mind or who makes up their mind and then changes it. What do you think would be the number one thing that you hope people learn from you and continue to learn from you?

To be decisive and to be clear. And she edits by the pictures. And this is why she takes home the book every night, which is a dummy copy of Vogue. And we see drama around the book, sort of caricatured in the Devilwurst Prada. And Andrea, I would like you to deliver the book to my honoured right.

Have Emily give it a keep. God, this is your life. Of course. That's a real thing that she does is take home the book every night and she's been doing it for decades since before she was editor-in-chief of American Vogue. And she's doing that so that she can look at the pictures really and look at the visual flow of the magazine. So that's really her primary concern is the pictures.

One very much gets the sense that Anna Win-Tor was raised kind of like a little adult. So Anna Win-Tor really was exposed to journalism from a very young age because her father, Charles Win-Tor was the editor of the evening standard. And he was widely credited with turning that paper into a very influential newspaper. We will be targeting mainly at the people who make London tick the slightly more intelligence, slightly better off people, but it would not be

an elitist paper. And what distinguished his approach was that he had a background in political journalism, but he also took culture really seriously. He took the visuals of the paper really seriously, and he was really interested in youth culture. There's so much going on in London, but the head place. She really grew up in that kind of environment.

The conversation around her dinner table was about what was in the newspapers. Famous journalists were coming to her parents' home for dinner, and she was in those dinners with them. This was her milieu, this glamorous intellectual milieu, that she's kind of spent her whole life and people I interviewed talked about how she really learned a lot about the business from her father and you can see her editorial approach mirror his in

many ways she's very interested in youth culture. Twigs or Harry Styles and of course Cara Deleven or Kendall. Young people say that she cares about what they're interested in, she asks about it. What I like about Billie's style is it's very particular to her. She's obviously channeling one person, which is herself. From a very young age, she knew that she wanted to get to Vogue and she credited her father with giving her that idea. He said that she should work at American Vogue, she should be the editor in chief and so she strove to do that. She started at Harper's in Queen in London, she came

over to New York, she saw New York as the center of the world and she wanted to move to New York. So she did, she worked at Harper's Bazaar. Then she worked at Viva, which was published by Bob Guccione, the penthouse founder, which was a bad idea. I thought I was the smartest guy in the world as far as women were concerned. I learned as a result of that experience, as a result of working deeply with women, but I didn't begin to know them.

She worked at Savi, and then I think the job that was really, really significant for her was New York Magazine, which she started doing in the early 80s. And everywhere she went, Anna stood out for her intelligence, yes, but also her per-snicity attention to detail. I don't like that. When she was at New York Magazine, she would have been around early 30s. She was going to art shows all the time and seeing exhibits and expected people she worked with to go and see exhibits too,

so that they could collaborate with her and produce great shoots. Someone I interviewed who worked for Anna and early in her editorship, so the late 80s and early 90s, remembered being in a meeting with Anna, and she was doing celebrity bookings, and Anna was like, well, what did well at the box office this weekend? And she had no idea, and she never went to that meeting without knowing the answer to that question of her again.

I think she still operates like this, like she wants her staff to be out in the world, going to fashion parties and going to see plays and musicals. She's out like every night and she expects her staff to do that too. She was fired, more almost fired from pretty much every job she had until she got to New York, Meg. It was that attitude. She got ahead sometimes because of it and sometimes in spite of it. As she rose in the ranks, Antoinette continued to hopscotch between high-profile magazines.

After her career catapulting turn at New York came a quick stop at the mother ship. She went from there to Vogue to be creative director before a quick dash across the pond. She went to London to become editor in chief of British Vogue that was her first editor in chief job. She came back to run House and Garden which she renamed HG and then she went from there to American Vogue in the summer of 1988, and she has been there ever since. And I don't like this. All right, then this is still working on that. All right, this is a mess.

Yes. You know, 34 years in the position that she's had is pretty extraordinary. Like Jeff Bezos left Amazon after 27 years. I think the average CEO tenure is something like five years. So this run that she has is like pretty incredible and you're not going to have that kind of longevity without making some mistakes along the way. There have been some gaps in Anna Winters' history as an editor.

Around the same time that she killed the juicy Uma profile, Anna Winters commissioned a shoot with an up-and-coming actress named Gwyneth Peltro. Gwyneth Peltro was 23 years old. She got the August 1996 cover, Peg, to the movie Emma, and she was dating Brad Pitt at the time, which made her like, you know, very super famous. And this is what Anna wrote. Even for Gwyneth, the road to the cover of Vogue has been bumpy. I mean, Gwyneth's paltry, we shot her three times before she got, we got the right picture out of know. But what was so funny about the Gwyneth Paltrow story,

someone told me about it and I thought I was cutting a juicy, you know, unique piece of information. And then I went and I looked at the issue and Anna wrote about it plainly in her editor's letter. And this is what she wrote. At the time of Gwyneth's first photo session, the regrettable, she puts this phrase in quotes, trailer trash look was added to peak,

and the pictures made her look like someone in the late stages of drug addiction. It's remarkable that she was able to say that in the 90s, but I think, you know, the inferredness to her, you kind of have to judge it against the standards of the time, which were quite different. In 2008, LeBron James appeared on the cover of Vogue, alongside Supermodel Giselle Bunchin.

He was the first black man to ever do so. In the image, he's shown dribbling a basketball and bearing his teeth at the camera. A lot of people thought the image was giving King Kong. Very provocative cover and there's a controversy. The bog is under fire. The bloggers have even compared this shot to the image of King Kong. But what I find interesting is that that's the photo that Vogue chose.

Anastate the course and tuned out the critics. But in 2011, she made perhaps her most egregious mistake of all. This is Kilt, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. As an editor, Anna went to toward values a good mix. She wants the magazine to flow visually, and then really slow down around the well. That addless belly of the book where the longer textier stories live. And like her newspaperman father, she doesn't shy away from high-minded subject matter. And she has, I think, always wanted to put political stories and vogue. She's always believed that that was important whether or not it was

being read. So in 2011 Vogue ran what is probably one of its most controversial stories in all of its history. And that was a profile of the Syrian First Lady, Osma Al Assad, written by Joan Juliettebach, who had been a close friend of Anna's since they were young and coming up together in London. Anna and Joan Juliette went way back. All the way back to Anna's assistant days at Harper's and Queen.

Joan had been a contributing editor at Vogue for almost 10 years. At first she says, she resisted writing a profile on Syrian First Lady, Asma Alassad. She was no expert on Middle East politics. No, no, the magazine assured her. That's why she was perfect for the piece. As the story went from the reporting stage to the fact-checking stage to getting published, a process that takes months, the situation in Syria had gone from bad to worse.

So much worse. Here's a quick timeline rundown. December 10, 2010, Joan Juliapuk arrives in Damascus. December 14, Joan Juliapuk's first interview with Osma Alasad. December 17, the Arab Spring begins in Tunisia when a 26-year-old fruit vendor sets himself on fire. In the country of Tunisia, people took to the streets, rose up, and forced out one of the toughest dictators on earth. Protesters return on mass to Tahrir Square and Cairo. Angon frustrations spilling onto the streets of Beirut.

They're saying the people demand the overthrow of the regime. Syria quickly joins the ranks of countries opposing its autocratic leaders. In this case, the Assad family, which had kept itself in power by any means necessary for four decades. February 25th, Bucks profile on Osma Al-Assad goes live on Vogue.com.

And it's said that Assad was democratically elected with 99% of the vote or something like that. You know, a pretty egregious, egregiously toned-off piece. It starts. It starts. Osma Alassad is glamorous, young, and very chic. The freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture and bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power, but a deliberate lack of adornment. She's a rare combination, a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.

Paris-Match calls her the element of light in a country full of shadow zones. She is the first lady of Syria. Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East. This was the Assad-Brigim, known for committing human rights atrocities, which were not mentioned in the story. It was a puff piece, and Anna's team told her not to run the story. They knew that it was going to be received basically the way that it was, which was with enormous and warranted backlash. And the reason Anna ran the story is because she liked the picture. She liked the picture of Osma, Alasad, standing on a vista,

overlooking Damascus with a magenta wrap around her shoulders. And Anna just wanted that photo in the magazine. This was an instance where her decisiveness worked against her. She made a decision. She didn't go back on it. It was a bad look for Vogue and it was a bad look for the writer, Joan Juliette Buck. In the weeks after Joan Juliette Buck's profile on Osma Alassade was published, Vogue and its editor-in-chief Anna Win-Tor came under fire.

The Washington Post's Paul Farhie wrote, it may have been the worst time and most tin-eared magazine article in decades. The Atlantic's Max Fisher crucified the piece's tone, saying it tried to make the couple out as fun, glamorous American-style celebrities. I could not possibly forget this profile if I wanted to. That's Max, who was a writer covering international issues at the Atlantic then, and is now a reporter and news columnist at the New York Times.

I lived in Washington, DC at this point in the foreign policy world, and people were just a god they could not believe that Vogue magazine, you know, one of the World's biggest magazines, it actually run an earnest, honest to God, puffed profile of the first lady of Syria. It came out in the middle of the Arab Spring, literally in a week in which, as my husband, Bashar Alasat, the lifelong dictator of Syria, was sending tanks and artillery into Syrian neighborhoods. First tank, shelled the neighborhood of the Danubella. One of the most horrifying crackdowns of the last, I don't know, 40 or 50 years. This was intimate killing.

This just landed on to new stands with no apology, no explanation, just here it is, here's Asma Alasad and look at how beautiful she is. Days after the article appeared on Newstans, Max interviewed Bucks editor at Vogue, Chris Canutson. It really got the sense when I started the conversation with him that he did not really understand what the reaction was or why people were so upset about it. And it was kind of only over the course of the conversation that he seemed to realize, like, oh, this is actually pretty bad.

He seemed to think that the outrage was just like, oh, this Syrian government is not people's favorite government in the world, so there's some discomfort with the idea of profiling them, and it seemed completely unaware that the basic premise of the piece, which is that the Assad's open-minded liberals was just completely false. I mean, it was just top to bottom. A giant flashing red lie that the magazine allowed the Assads to tell their 12 million readers. He seemed to be just unaware of what was happening in Syria at that moment and what had been happening

in Syria over the year and a half before them. And his kind of defense was like, oh, the Arab Spring just happened. So how could we have possibly known? And it was coincidences in timing, but if they had at any one point so much as Google the word Syria or the word Assad, they would have immediately gotten, you know, just pages and pages of news stories about sponsoring international terrorism about the government torturing and murdering political dissidents about its ferrying of insurgents into a rock to kill American soldiers. I mean, this was not a government that suddenly became bad overnight as they were going to press it.

It had always been like this. Something that I thought the peace did, it was especially weird. And, frankly, still gives me kind of the willies 10 years later is it over and over and over implies that the Assad's are Christian and that they're white. And in fact, they're, you know, of course, ethnically Arab and religiously Muslim. The story makes note of the family's Christmas tree, the children's Montessori school,

and the fact that Bashar al-Assad has blue eyes. And the way that the peas seem to make this well-full effort to say, our readers would like the Assad's more if we make them white Christians, and mislead our readers into thinking their white Christians, is just, it's a weird project, it's a weird thing to do with your magazine. to do with your magazine. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. A few months after the Atlantic's Max Fisher interviewed Vogue editor Chris Knutson, the article and all references to it, were quietly removed from Vogue's website without explanation.

In a glowing profile, Vogue magazine called her a rose in the desert, then abruptly pulled the piece off the web. These are the contradictions of Asma Al Assad, married for about a dozen years. The Hill would go on to report that public relations firm Brown Lloyd James had been paid $5,000 a month by the Syrian government to manage US press efforts like the Vogue article. More than a year after the Peace's publication, Anowentor would issue a statement deploring the, quote, actions of the Assad regime in the strongest possible terms. After the New York Times story, and Anna-Win Tor's condemnation of the Assad regime, Buck finally spoke up.

In a piece for Newsweek titled, My Vogue Interview with Sirius First Lady, the writer, who had stayed quiet for over a year and whose contract wasn't renewed after all this, tells her side of the story. Of her editors, she writes, they didn't think the Arab Spring was going anywhere, and the piece was needed for the March Power issue. She also wrote of the quote, toxic aura she observed while in Damascus. Of how she came home to her hotel room one night and found her ethernet cord violently ripped from her computer. Of a roving metal prison she saw, and then was

told she absolutely did not see. She said she was gaslit by her handlers, her editors, and the subject herself. Here she is getting absolutely grilled on CNN. Were you duked? Do you feel like a fool? I feel like a fool vis-à-vis asthma Assad. I feel for the line this woman fed me. So she took a lot of heat for it, Joan Juley at Buck. She writes about how she wasn't a Middle East expert or anything like that, and yet she was assigned this story and agreed to do it with some reluctance, you know, but did it anyway. Then after this all happened, you know, and she had to endure the Internet's wrath in a very intense way, she and Anna never talked again.

Anna never called her. Well, it is certainly true that one of the world's cruelest authoritarian regimes misled a Western reporter and it is certainly true that her editors really failed her. It's tough for me to feel too sympathetic. It's not as if Joan Julia Buck had to invent in real time in the year 2011 how to do reporting on an authoritarian government. It's something that is pretty well-known and pretty well established and there are a couple basics like you call an expert and you say, hey, this authoritarian government told me

all of these things. What do you think? Is that true? You talk to people who live under that government. You make some effort to do some basic research. So many profound journalistic sins of this. I just, I just, I didn't still, I'm still just reeling over it. And of course, Joan Julia Buck really paid for this. I mean, I think in a lot of ways it killed her career.

Holy shit. Joan Julia Buck went on to have a varied career. She's written for Tee, the New York Times-style magazine and Harper's Bizarre. She's also a bit of a thessbian. In response to a request for interview, she told Killed, I'd have to think about that at some link. She did not respond to follow-ups. Chris Knutzen declined to comment for this episode.

Some people will say Anna's very loyal. There's very, very few people that she's so loyal to, and it's kind of my impression that like, this is why people don't feel safe around her, because she can make these decisions. I think this is why she's such a successful executive because these decisions are not personal to her. I think it's worth noting that the story came to be

somewhat valued after time had passed. Yes, the tone was wrong. I'm not defend. I don't want to sound like I'm defending that, but people did go on to point out that, you know, though got time with the assaults. And that's not, that's not a normal thing for an American journalist. These days, Anna went tour is the chief content officer and global editorial director of Vogue, which means she's in charge of high levellevel editorial decisions for not only Vogue,

but all of the publisher's magazines worldwide. That is a fuck ton of decisions to make. Representatives for Vogue did not respond to Killed's requests for comment. So many people speculated that she must be so unhappy with the way she has to work now, with the standards being different and not having so much time and so much money to create the fantasies that Vogue is known for. But people also told me and it became very clear to me that she is hungry, she's still hungry, she's 73, but she wakes up hungry and ready to work. I never got the impression she's sitting there

regretting the things that she's done. If she regrets anything, she doesn't talk about it. She always talks about moving forward, moving forward. She doesn't like to dwell in the past. Like one thing that I reported in the book is that she didn't, she didn't want to do throwback Thursday. Because she doesn't see the value in looking back. She just wants to move forward. And she likes the job. the job. Next time, Unkilled. Having sympathy for Phil Spector is not something that a lot of magazines wanted to take

a gamble on. There was a lot of like fuck you energy going through me where it was like you wanted my dad to suffer, you know, well, he did Killed is an audio chuck production Created and written by Justin Harmon and edited by Alistair Sherman You can find links to all the published stories featured on the first and second seasons of Killed at KilledStories.com So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa you