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Authors: Jerry Oppenheimer
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recounts Vine. “Charles Wintour was a rather conservative chap and a powerful editor, and he couldn’t think of his daughter going out with this sort of a scurrilous gossip hack. Nigel wasn’t acceptable to the Wintour family.”
Nevertheless, Anna was enthralled with the glitzy world Dempster opened to her, and their relationship continued on and off, Dempster claimed, for seven years.
“Dempster likes to
suggest
that he had [a relationship] with Anna,” asserts London
Daily Mail
gossip writer Peter McKay. “Dempster tells a story of how he was on a sofa in the drawing room of the Wintour house with Anna one evening when he looked up to see this very unnerving sight of these two scuffed suede shoes beneath the set of doors to the room. Charles [Wintour] had come home unexpectedly, didn’t come in the room, but was standingquietly outside eavesdropping. Dempster says he had to hide it [the romance] from Wintour, who was in a position to get him fired.”
Brian Vine heard a similar tale from Dempster, with the details tweaked a bit. In that scenario, Dempster said he had to duck into a closet because Anna feared that her father would storm into the room and discover them together.
Those who know Dempster feel certain that the relationship was not intimate. “Dempster would be frightened because he wanted a career as a journalist,” observes Vine.
Dempster’s first wife from the early 1970s, Emma de Bendern, who came from a titled background, says, “Anna was very young and Nigel thought she was terribly beautiful. I’m sure it was a dating thing,” she maintains. “Before I married Nigel, he brought Anna to Spain where my mother had a little house on Majorca and I was living there. She came to stay with Nigel for a long weekend. She wouldn’t go in the sun because she had the most wonderful translucent skin and sat under an umbrella so as not to get any light. She was sort of a porcelain doll, absolutely perfectly manicured, very quiet and very unassuming, hiding behind the fringe of her very immaculate bob, and her body incredibly skinny—but with extraordinary, lurking determination.
“She didn’t seem to have
any
personality, and I didn’t feel there was
any
sexuality about her. I just remember Nigel being rather protective, acting like a father towards her. I didn’t feel there was any romance. But perhaps I was just being fooled, perhaps that was a clever ruse to not arouse my suspicions. But if he was having an affair with her, there was no vibe. It didn’tfeellike it.”
If anything intimate was going on, one would have expected Anna to confess all to her best friend. But she remained mum. “Anna
never
talked about sex or relationships,
ever
,” says Vivienne Lasky. “We were not
Sex and the City
girls. And Anna’s very British, very private, and she’s not touchy-feely. She’d never talk about what happened between her and a man.”
By 1971, Dempster had moved from lowly legman at the
Daily Express
to second in command under Paul Callan, who hired him to work on his new
Daily Mail
“Diary” column. Callan quickly realized he had made a major mistake hiring Dempster, who tried to steal his job. According to one report, “Dempster knifed him. It was classic stuff. He kept all his decent stories untilCallan was away, then produced them in a way that made Callan look second rate.”
Whatever Callan might have thought about Dempster’s career manipulations, Anna is said to have respected his cutthroat methods. They shared a similar philosophy: “Get to the top any way you can,” a journalist who knew them both says.
six
Shopgirl Dropout
I f there is a singular, defining moment for young Anna Wintour, it might have been the day her father summoned the
Evening Standard’s
fashion editor, Barbara Griggs, into his office and said, “I wonder if you could do me a great personal kindness?” Griggs, who had been covering fashion for years and had once worked at
Nevertheless, Anna was enthralled with the glitzy world Dempster opened to her, and their relationship continued on and off, Dempster claimed, for seven years.
“Dempster likes to
suggest
that he had [a relationship] with Anna,” asserts London
Daily Mail
gossip writer Peter McKay. “Dempster tells a story of how he was on a sofa in the drawing room of the Wintour house with Anna one evening when he looked up to see this very unnerving sight of these two scuffed suede shoes beneath the set of doors to the room. Charles [Wintour] had come home unexpectedly, didn’t come in the room, but was standingquietly outside eavesdropping. Dempster says he had to hide it [the romance] from Wintour, who was in a position to get him fired.”
Brian Vine heard a similar tale from Dempster, with the details tweaked a bit. In that scenario, Dempster said he had to duck into a closet because Anna feared that her father would storm into the room and discover them together.
Those who know Dempster feel certain that the relationship was not intimate. “Dempster would be frightened because he wanted a career as a journalist,” observes Vine.
Dempster’s first wife from the early 1970s, Emma de Bendern, who came from a titled background, says, “Anna was very young and Nigel thought she was terribly beautiful. I’m sure it was a dating thing,” she maintains. “Before I married Nigel, he brought Anna to Spain where my mother had a little house on Majorca and I was living there. She came to stay with Nigel for a long weekend. She wouldn’t go in the sun because she had the most wonderful translucent skin and sat under an umbrella so as not to get any light. She was sort of a porcelain doll, absolutely perfectly manicured, very quiet and very unassuming, hiding behind the fringe of her very immaculate bob, and her body incredibly skinny—but with extraordinary, lurking determination.
“She didn’t seem to have
any
personality, and I didn’t feel there was
any
sexuality about her. I just remember Nigel being rather protective, acting like a father towards her. I didn’t feel there was any romance. But perhaps I was just being fooled, perhaps that was a clever ruse to not arouse my suspicions. But if he was having an affair with her, there was no vibe. It didn’tfeellike it.”
If anything intimate was going on, one would have expected Anna to confess all to her best friend. But she remained mum. “Anna
never
talked about sex or relationships,
ever
,” says Vivienne Lasky. “We were not
Sex and the City
girls. And Anna’s very British, very private, and she’s not touchy-feely. She’d never talk about what happened between her and a man.”
By 1971, Dempster had moved from lowly legman at the
Daily Express
to second in command under Paul Callan, who hired him to work on his new
Daily Mail
“Diary” column. Callan quickly realized he had made a major mistake hiring Dempster, who tried to steal his job. According to one report, “Dempster knifed him. It was classic stuff. He kept all his decent stories untilCallan was away, then produced them in a way that made Callan look second rate.”
Whatever Callan might have thought about Dempster’s career manipulations, Anna is said to have respected his cutthroat methods. They shared a similar philosophy: “Get to the top any way you can,” a journalist who knew them both says.
six
Shopgirl Dropout
I f there is a singular, defining moment for young Anna Wintour, it might have been the day her father summoned the
Evening Standard’s
fashion editor, Barbara Griggs, into his office and said, “I wonder if you could do me a great personal kindness?” Griggs, who had been covering fashion for years and had once worked at
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