The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
No sympathy for the devil
‘Vogue’ editor Anna Wintour’s spurned sidekick André Leon Talley takes few prisoners in his exposé of nasty fashionistas, says Lisa Armstrong
seems to have imagined that if you were talented, the fashion industry would be colour blind, until an acquaintance told him that someone he’d considered a friend referred to him as “Queen Kong”.
Most of his friendships seem highly conditional on him acting as a striking, childlike aide de camp. Wintour, the ultimate small, great, white woman to whom this book is really a rejected lover’s lament, took him with her when she was appointed editor of US House & Garden. A year later, they were both at US Vogue, where Leon Talley’s chief duties were to dance attendance on important designers and socialites, and accompany Wintour on her many couture fittings in Paris. That degree in French culture had set him up to be a courtier.
These were the years of plenty at American Condé Nast: private planes, suites at the Paris Ritz, interest-free loans to buy houses – all of it underwritten by the company. He took it all at face value and never seemed to have had an inkling that this was the ancien regime’s slow death dance.
It sounds as though it should be fun – but was it? He was friends with Naomi Campbell, but on a private plane once to Lagos, she was in such a foul mood, he dared not talk to her. He was friends with John Galliano, although that didn’t stop Galliano letting him down over an exhibition Leon Talley curated. He was best friends with Karl Lagerfeld, a latter-day sun king, whose generosity to his friends knew no bounds, until he grew bored, froze them out and demanded everything be returned. He was constantly treading on eggshells – not easy for such a large man. Since much of Leon Talley’s value to US Vogue was by then wrapped up in Lagerfeld’s financial and creative importance to Condé Nast (as creative director of Chanel and Fendi, he was in charge of millions of pounds of advertising), when Lagerfeld dropped him in 2014, the writing was on the wall.
To compound his problems, Leon Talley suffered from the worst addiction you can have in fashion: food. Abused as a child, “sex was not on my radar”, he writes. “Success was. If I felt sad, I would eat and keep on eating until I felt better.” By his own reckoning, he became an embarrassment to Wintour, who staged several interventions to get him to a diet camp – all on Condé Nast’s dollar, and all of which were ultimately destined to fail.
No one told Leon Talley he was officially fired. He just found his to-do list – and salary – dwindling. The final humiliation was discovering, a few days before the Met Ball – the same project on which he’d worked decades earlier with Vreeland, but now under Wintour’s auspices – that he’d been unceremoniously replaced as the event’s sole red carpet interviewer, streaming directly on to Vogue’s own website, by an “influencer” with 17million followers “who didn’t even know what a martingale was”.
The book is full of seemingly confected outrage and hyperbole. A shoot with Beyoncé was “history in the making”. A battle with another Vogue editor to shoot the same dress resulted in them not talking to one another for five years. Most of the time, it’s impossible to tell whether Leon Talley is being tongue in cheek or deadly serious. Wintour “not being capable of kindness” is given the same weight as her inability to carry off the pink feathered cape she wore at last year’s Met Ball. But he does seem to have been heartbroken when Wintour stopped returning his emails.
This is the point at which he discovers her faults. “There are so many people who worked for her and have suffered huge emotional scarring,” he writes. Yet while the money and power flowed in the right direction, he was delighted to be one of her chief handmaidens. Even now, it is her name, more than his, that has turned this book into such a conversation point.
For someone who made at least some of his living from being a writer, he is not given to analysis, preferring observation instead. Mind you, when the observed are as wildly exotic as the creatures here, it’s an entertaining trip to the zoo. The self-entitlement of so many of its characters shimmers off every page, but no one seems happy. Lagerfeld – like Leon Talley, a binge eater – was apparently tied to his bed as a child to prevent him raiding the fridge in the middle of the night. (With mothers like that…) No wonder the TV adapters are queuing up.