“Can’t Let It Show, Can We?”
Author Terry McDonell made a deal with fellow Hearst editor—and best friend—Liz Tilberis (Harper’s Bazaar): “She would help me with Esquire’s fashion and I would help her with ‘getting on in America.’” On the 25th anniversary of her passing, McDonell shares this excerpt from his book, The Accidental Life.
In the spring of 1992, Liz Tilberis came to visit me in the Hamptons, in Wainscott, where I had a place. It was Easter weekend and that Sunday we went to a lawn party at Jann Wenner’s house. It was to be relaxed, but with an elaborate egg hunt for the children, and Jann’s guest list included a range of people from the media, show business, and publishing. Turning into the long driveway, Liz joked that she was nervous, that this was going to be her first important party since moving to America from London and she wouldn’t know anyone.
I told her she didn’t look nervous.
“Of course not,” she said. “Can’t let it show, can we?”
I said most of the guests already knew about her, knew she had come to New York to rejuvenate Harper’s Bazaar.
“Do not abandon me,” she said, widening her green eyes, a look I came to know as a kind of ironic kabuki. She wasn’t nervous at all. She was going to work that party.
I remember watching her, vivid with her shining white hair, from across the lawn. Driving home, she told me she had received six invitations for weekends over the summer.
“Imagine,” she said. “They were all very nice, but they don’t know me at all.”
• • •
Our pact was that she would help me with Esquire’s fashion and I would help her with “getting on in America.” We joked about it as she got on fine on her own, not just staffing her magazine and settling her sons in private school but becoming a Knicks fan. Her “field study” took her to gardens and museums, but also to Q-Zar, a laser-tag arena in New Jersey, for a “jolly riot.” Within less than a year, she and her husband, Andrew, had slept in the Lincoln Bedroom as guests of the Clintons. “My team,” she called Andrew and the boys, but it wasn’t sappy. What worried her, she said, was being too English: “Mustn’t ever use that word jolly.”
The premiere issue of the Tilberis era of Bazaar
For my fashion education, we traveled together to Milan, flying overnight from JFK to Malpensa, eating caviar and drinking vodka. On that flight I learned that she had refused to be confirmed at her all-girls boarding school (“I didn’t believe in God”) and had been expelled from art school for entertaining a man in her room. I also learned that she had almost moved to New York five years earlier to head Ralph Lauren’s design team. She had decided to stay in London when, two days after she’d given notice, Anna Wintour, who was then the editor in chief, told her that she was moving to New York—to become the editor of House & Garden (ten months later, she would be running American Vogue). Liz could have British Vogue if she wanted it.
Of course, topping British Vogue had been another jolly riot. Bruce Weber’s first Vogue cover shoot was for Liz—a laughing model wearing minimal makeup. “Pure Liz,” her colleagues said. And it became an even better story when the proofs came back touched up with lipstick red because the printers were sure there had been a mistake. “They actually made it better,” Liz said. When she persuaded the Princess of Wales to pose for a British Vogue cover, the image was clean and simple—the look Diana made her own from then on. “It just made sense for her as a modern princess,” Liz said. “And I’m a little like Machiavelli.”
Our first day in Milan was to end with a benefit in the courtyard of an old castle that had been tented with an enormous tarp against the forecast showers. It began to rain hard in the afternoon, and by evening the waiters were poking up at huge puddles on the sagging canvas with long poles. Sting was on the program and waved to Liz as we entered. She looked from the candle-set tables to the dripping canvas and announced that we were going immediately to Bice.
We couldn’t find our car and started walking toward the restaurant in the downpour, getting soaked. Within a block, a limo driver—not ours—pulled over. He knew Liz and liked her, and thought she might want a ride.
“Fashion,” she said, climbing in, “is about long black cars when you need them.” The driver told us the tent had collapsed.
Walking into Bice, we saw Valentino and his inner circle at the large round table in the back corner—like a tableau I had seen before but couldn’t place. The women, all in red gowns, were exquisite, the men handsome in black suits, but their frowns gave the scene a starkness. Valentino made a slight nod in our direction, and when we walked over he asked if the collapsed tent would reflect badly on the fashion houses. (Armani and Versace, both based in Milan, and Valentino, from Rome, had organized the event.)
“Not on those from Rome,” Liz told him, and she went around the table complimenting everyone on how chic they looked. “Totally Valentino,” she said, and when the great designer smiled slightly the mood changed and we were invited to join them for dinner.
“I wish we could have shot that table just exactly as it was when we walked in,” Liz told me as we left Bice after midnight. “The cold power of it, like those Bronzinos of the Medici.”
Early the next morning, we began a round of appointments at designer showrooms. All went more or less the same way: Liz explaining to me (so the designer could hear) how brilliant the new line was, and then whispering to the designer what a formidable editor I was. We had a simple lunch in the backyard of the Armani palazzo with Giorgio and his top aide at the time, Gabriella Forte, while his Persian cat, Hannibal, hunted through the garden. Giorgio, too, was concerned about the collapsed tent, but he and Liz talked mostly about the distinctive cuts he was showing that season, and the importance of fine tailoring.
“Fashion is about long black cars when you need them.”
Our week in Milan paid off in many new advertising pages for Esquire, but when it was over Liz thanked me for helping her get through it. Her advice was to bring presents the next time I visited, something personal that this or that designer could relate to, perhaps a cat toy for Hannibal.
I thought hard about this and, since Armani was the most important advertiser for Esquire, I asked Gay Talese to sign a copy of his new book, Unto the Sons, to Giorgio. Esquire had excerpted Gay’s history of his family’s immigration to America from Italy. The book’s most intimate passages were about Gay’s father, who was a tailor. I had the book with me when I saw Armani the following spring at the men’s shows in Milan. Without Liz beside me, there would be no lunch, but we had coffee in his office. Giorgio opened the book, saw that it was signed, passed it over his shoulder to an assistant without reading the inscription, and asked me about Liz. When was she coming next to Milan?
“I saw that same copy of Unto the Sons a year later on a bookshelf in Gabriella Forte’s apartment in New York.”
• • •
“Looking for fasion material for my “Editor’s Notes” column in Esquire, I asked Liz what it was she noticed first when she met someone—expecting, I suppose, something smart about shoes or haircuts. Instead she paraphrased a line from a Katharine Hepburn film: “I notice whether the person is a man or a woman.”
Very sexy, when she said it—and direct, like her taste as an editor. She had a clear eye for the sociology of fashion that could capture (or shred) any look she saw on any runway or street. “Downtown Marie Antoinette” was the look her friend Jean Paul Gaultier was showing that year. “Blind Anchorwoman,” which she pointed out to me one day when we were walking across Central Park South, was maybe a bit of a reach but I knew what she meant. Our boss was “Black Paw” because of his fingernails. “Being wicked,” she called it and we did a lot of it. Her only insecurity as an editor was dealing with writers.
In England she had been a celebrity as a fashion editor, even appearing on the sides of double-decker buses with her oldest son in an adoption-awareness campaign; but there was a disconnect with journalists, because she was just a fashion editor. She was worried that New York would be like London, where the literary scene was closed to her. This could be problematic if she couldn’t get interesting writing (part of Vogue’s mix) into Bazaar. I said I could introduce her to writers if she was feeling pressed.
“What about you,” she said. “I wouldn’t be afraid of editing you.”
“You wouldn’t be doing the editing anyway,” I said. “What’s your idea? You have to give your writers an idea first.”
“Oh, yes, I know that,” she said. “Write fashion and rock and roll. You edited Rolling Stone, or so you say.”
“What’s the piece again?”
“Roll over, Beethoven,” she said. “Tell Balenciaga the news.”
When I finally wrote that piece for her, it was called “Not Fade Away: Mingling Destinies of Rock and Roll and Fashion.” I was all over the map—her map—when it came to which designer went with which rocker. I had the obvious: Giorgio Armani with Eric Clapton, and Calvin Klein as a Mudd Club vet. Liz explained that fifteen years previous, Richard Tyler had dressed Rod Stewart in glitter and spandex for his Blondes Have More Fun tour, and last year he had fitted himself with the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s most prestigious award as Womenswear Designer of the Year. “That has to mean something,” she said.
Voguette that she was, having begun as an unpaid intern in the late ’60s, Liz was amused by my characterizations of the period. “All that hard-rocking creative sexuality and open rebellion, come on…” Where was my nuance? She told me about Pop and Op Art overpowering textile design, and Twiggy flirting around London in little gym slips. She told me not to ignore Dr. John because his gris-gris was about voodoo accessories, and that Carnaby Street had a men’s shop named I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet; it sold used military uniforms, and she had slapped several into her “More Dash Than Cash” pages as soon as she saw them.
She insisted she was not about language (“My mind is too full of pictures, not enough room then for words”) except she was as hungry for specific details as any line editor I ever worked with.”
• • •
When she took over at Harper’s Bazaar in 1992, Elizabeth Jane Kelly Tilberis was a size 12, which she said was “practically illegal in our business.” One gossip column applied the word bovine. She laughed that off and lost weight as her Bazaar came together, dropping to a size 8. She said her “slinky” staff helped her look the part but added, with a green-eyed wink, that “fashion editors should never look better than their models.”
Liz knew every fashion trick, every cliché, but she didn’t pander. Instead of snapping at the heels of the flush and splashy Vogue, she decided to simplify. Her relaunch of Bazaar (September 1992) was quieter than expected. The cover was a very graphic Patrick Demarchelier shot of Linda Evangelista looking smart and confident with a small cover line: “Enter the Era of Elegance.” It was cool, but there was no snobby chill. Even cooler, the logo was unbalanced, an act of innovation that winked with subliminal ink. By comparison, Vogue’s grunged-up models covered with type looked sloppy. Downtown suddenly seemed almost quaint. Liz’s inside pages too were sleek and inviting, with understated glamour in the white space and more of creative director Fabien Baron’s innovative typography. It was practical, democratic fashion, elegant in its execution.
“In a little over a year, Bazaar was back as one of the world’s preeminent fashion magazines, challenging Anna Wintour’s Vogue. The paparazzi loved Liz, and she dazzled them with her bob of white hair, which looked silver in photos. She was having another jolly riot. Bazaar’s circulation climbed as she nurtured her photographers, swapped risqué stories with models, complimented stylists and charmed advertisers. With readers, she stressed building personal style with common sense. One of her “Editor’s Letter” columns celebrated the humble sweater. By then she was a size 6.
“Tilberis was a size 12, which she said was ‘practically illegal in our business.’”
“THAT DECEMBER, some 250 fashion and publishing people were invited to the brownstone in the East Eighties she and Andrew had rented from director Mike Nichols. There was a huge Christmas tree in the living room and white flowers everywhere, and the townhouse was packed with her New York friends—Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder, Barbara Walters, Jann Wenner, people named Trump. The party was to celebrate her triumphant first year and Bazaar’s many honors, which included two National Magazine Awards. Hearst had taken out a full-page congratulatory ad in the New York Times. The columnist Billy Norwich wrote that it was the kind of soigné party he used to read about in urbane novels.
When Liz walked me to the bar, I said, “The gang’s apparently all here.”
“Someone named Jerome just whispered to me, ‘There are people in this room who should not be here,’ ” Liz said. “I don’t know what that means exactly.”
“Yes, you do,” I said, figuring it had to have been the notorious “social moth” Jerome Zipkin. “You want me to kick his ass?”
“Oh yes, please.”
She made a very short speech that night. “A magazine is only people,” she said. “It walks in the door in the morning, and out the door at night. Please let’s never forget that.”
None of us knew she had been diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer and had a procedure scheduled for the next morning.
• • •
“When her cancer was reported in the media, she came forward with some of what she had been going through, first on the “Editor’s Letter” page: I never wanted to be a poster girl for cancer. But cancer has become part of who I am, along with my big feet and my English accent. I have greenish eyes, I was born on Sept. 7 (the same day as Queen Elizabeth), and I have ovarian cancer. So do almost 175,000 other women in the United States.
Privately she joked that she had arrived hungover for her procedure, the day after her Christmas party. For the next seven years she would balance treatments and operations with her work at Bazaar. She wore catheters under evening dresses. She escorted Princess Diana on one of her visits to New York, even though she was in chemotherapy. Diana had been one of the first people on the telephone when Liz emerged from her first major operation.
“Diana who?” said Andrew.
“Diana Windsor.”
“Sometimes Liz didn’t feel like talking to anyone, but the depression that must have come with the cancer otherwise never showed. “My cancer diet” she said of her slender figure. There were sores in her mouth and her appetite was gone. Then her mouth dried out and her fingernails splintered. Growing weaker, she would tell a story about Andrew having to get her tights on for her in the morning, and somehow make it funny.
“I never wanted to be a poster girl for cancer. But cancer has become part of who I am, along with my big feet and my English accent.”
One morning in her office, when I said something about how good her hair looked despite chemotherapy, she laughed. “It’s a wig,” she whispered. Her sons called it “Larry,” for the way Laurence Olivier looked in Henry V.
By then she was a size 4.
Her memoir was called No Time to Die. In it she wrote about the place she and Andrew had found on the bay in East Hampton:
I’d go down to the narrow strip of beach at the back of our house each morning and sit on my favorite rock with a cup of tea, often so weak that he’d have to carry me back. In what was a real family tragedy, Sophie, one of our Labradors, had recently died.
I knew that dog. That house was where Liz and Andrew had sheltered me during the summer when my marriage was ending. Too soon after, I got a call from Andrew.
“She’s gone,” he told me. “There’s nothing left to say.”
• • •
The bare stage was edged by pots of her favorite white orchids, and overhead was a large black-and-white Patrick Demarchelier photo of Liz, smiling out at the more than a thousand people filling Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Every important designer was there, along with top editors and Hearst executives. Si Newhouse and Anna Wintour came together. Hillary Clinton sent a statement. Bruce Weber, Trudie Styler and Calvin Klein were on the program, along with Liz’s doctor, and her brother, Grant, also a doctor. I spoke, too. I said Elizabeth Jane Kelly Tilberis was a caviar hound and a rocker. Last on the program was Dr. John. He played “My Buddy.”
Excerpted from The Accidental Life: An Editor's Notes on Writing and Writers a Rolling Stone by Terry McDonell (Knopf). First edition published August 2, 2016. Get a copy here.