AIR-KISSING & BACK-STABBING
After a desperately damaging childhood, top Vogue stylist Andre Leon Talley thought the love of his fashionista friends would last for ever. But in this blistering memoir, he reveals how they cruelly dropped him when he was no longer useful
GRoWing up in Durham, north Carolina in the Fifties and Sixties, the young Andre Leon Talley spent hours in the local library devouring the glossy magazines. ‘i dreamed of living a life like the ones i saw in the pages of Vogue, where bad things never happened,’ he writes at the beginning of this gossipy, bitter and poignant memoir.
Where bad things never happened? Well, we’ll see about that. Bad things certainly did happen to the young Andre.
His mother, miserable after her divorce from his father, handed him over to his grandmother. The granny was kind but strict and she did not hug him. He was sexually abused by a local adult, and kept it secret, for fear of bringing shame on himself and on his devout Baptist family.
He emerged into adulthood a supreme expert on high fashion, a snappy dresser, deeply sexually repressed after the horror of that trauma, emotionally fragile, and craving approval.
Tall, slim and handsome (before the decades of compulsive eating set in), he dazzled Seventies new York in his Bermuda shorts, pin-striped shirt, aviator glasses, knee socks and moccasin penny loafers.
He began his meteoric rise as an apprentice to Diana Vreeland at the Costume institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (he referred to her as ‘Mrs Vreeland’ and touchingly still does), then worked for Andy Warhol’s magazine, while living in a youth hostel. ‘From time to time Andy would put his pale white hands on my crotch, and i would just swat him away…’
TALLEY had a unique gift for dressing others and for writing knowledgeably and seductively about fashion. His advice and expertise would become increasingly invaluable to magazine editors.
When he arrived in Paris in the late Seventies, promoted to European fashion editor of Women’s Wear Daily, the fun really started. But so did the constant sense of insecurity, and the racism which he sensed ‘sleeping below the epidermis of everything i did’. He was referred to by an Yves Saint Laurent publicist as ‘Queen kong’; and a jealous colleague falsely accused him of having been in and out of every designer’s bed in Paris.
He resigned, but in 1983 he was taken on by Anna Wintour at American Vogue, where she promoted him to creative director. He stayed for 30 years. From the dawn of his success, we see his relationships with powerful people developing into two distinct types: the steadfast friends, such as ‘Mrs Vreeland’ and later Lee Radziwill, socialite sister of Jackie kennedy onassis, who stuck by him through thick and thin (or rather, fat and thin), and the fickle ones who showered him with love for decades, then cast him into outer darkness when he was no longer useful to them.
The two main culprits in the second category? karl Lagerfeld and editor-inchief of American Vogue Anna Wintour. They adored and doted on him for years. From the day he interviewed Lagerfeld for a magazine profile, their friendship blossomed. Lagerfeld sent him daily handwritten letters, and most nights they talked for three hours on the telephone.
They were not lovers, Talley stresses. Sex seems to have been totally absent from his adulthood — which saved his life, he writes, during the Aids epidemic. He lapped up the high life. if Lagerfeld liked you, he showered you with generosity: private jets, chauffeured cars to bring you to his country residence, expensive clothes chosen by him. Even Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, wore diamonds and had her own maid and a personal dentist.
For a black-tie launch at Maxim’s, Lagerfeld dressed Talley in an oscar-Wilde-style dressing-gown, which both shocked and enthralled Paris. ‘i depended on sartorial boldness to camouflage my inner vortex of pain, insecurity and doubt,’ he writes.
With Anna Wintour, ‘the bond of friendship was never spoken about. it was just perfectly understood by us, like a silent language’. Talley was thrilled when she promoted him and he became ‘the highest ranking black man in the history of fashion’.
He describes her quirky, impatient habits, such as eating so little that going out to restaurant lunches with her was pointless: she would say ‘shall we go back to the office?’ before the first course even arrived.
She liked office meetings to be no more than eight minutes’ long. if they went on for 15 minutes, ‘something was seriously wrong’.
She really did seem kind, treating Talley ‘like family’. She was emphatically not the notorious ‘nuclear Wintour’ to him; she even got him an interest-free loan
so he could buy a house in Durham for his grandmother.
With hindsight, we can glean that what Wintour most valued in Talley was his deep understanding of, and closeness to, Karl Lagerfeld. ‘I was the Karl Lagerfeld editor of Vogue,’ he quips.
SO WHEN, in 2013, after 40 years of friendship, Lagerfeld turned off the love, like turning off a tap, it was the beginning of a slow but sure downfall. Lagerfeld was cross because Talley had agreed to help with an exhibition of a rival photographer’s work (Lagerfeld prided himself as a photographer). ‘The guillotine dropped . . . The luxury stopped. I just became a ghost from his past.’
Binge-eating was his way of drowning out the pain. It had started when his grandmother died and worsened after the Aids epidemic.
Wintour sent him off, expenses paid, to the Duke Diet & Fitness Centre in Durham, where he lost 55lb, but he soon put it all back on again, and more, stuffing his face with ‘chocolate anything’.
one gets the sense that this eventually all became too much for the fastidious, bird-like Anna Wintour, whose main obsession was with drycleaning her clothes. She and Talley had had a brief first falling-out back in the mid-nineties, when Talley felt that she wasn’t valuing his talents.
He stormed out of her office, slamming the door, and went to work at Vanity Fair for a year. But they had a touching reconciliation when he later turned up at her mother’s funeral in england. She broke down in tears during the eulogy and he cradled her in his arms. She invited him back to Vogue to be an editor-at-large.
Talley was of less use to her from 2013, after he’d been dropped by Lagerfeld. She gradually froze him out, spiking his stories, not inviting him on shoots, quietly stopping his podcast and maintaining a ‘sphinx-like silence’ when he asked her why. ‘She had decimated me with this silent treatment so many times. This is the way she resolves any issue.’
The ‘chiffon trenches’, he now understood, were a place of ‘airkissing and back-stabbing’. Wintour ‘simply put me out of her existence’. When they see each other now, they exchange ‘perfunctory salutations’.
He laments: ‘The empress Wintour, in her power, has disappointed me in her humanity . . . she has mercilessly made her best friends people who are the highest in their chosen fields. Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Mr and Mrs George Clooney are, to her, friends. I am no longer of value to her — too old, too overweight and too uncool.’
All a tiny bit self-pitying, whingeing and self-indulgently score-settling? It is rather, especially as Talley was 69 when he was finally dropped from doing the Met Gala interviews, and flounced out in a huff.
Beneath it all, though, we see the damaged boy. His final poignant sentence sums up the way his whole life has been one big emotional cry for help: ‘I only wanted love.’