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edited in their own lives as well as in their work. If I said to Charles at Sunday lunch, ‘I’m reading a most marvelous book,’ he’d say, ‘What a bunch of slop!’”
    Wintour and Lasky both were womanizers, and the Laskys’ marriage was also troubled. Both Anna and Vivienne shared the emotional upheavals ignited by their parents’ travails.
    Lasky’s coeditor at
Encounter
was Sir Stephen Spender, the literary and art critic, journalist, and social commentator. Unlike Lasky, who had an eye for beautiful women, Spender was bisexual. His daughter, Lizzie Spender, had grown up with Vivienne Lasky and had attended North London Collegiate, where she got to know Anna. After a giddy and madcap life, the tall, elegant blonde, who was an actress and a friend of Prince Charles, settled down, and became the fourth wife of Barry Humphries, better known as the drag queen talk-show host and stage performer “Dame Edna Everage.”
    Despite all of those intrigues, none of it seemed daunting or of concern to Anna. As she told Lasky, “We’re the daughters of celebrities. So be it.”
    While the one subject at NLC that interested Anna was history, the most contemporary event taught was the Boer War, which Anna instantly dubbed “the Bore War.” Academic studies were of little interest to her. Anna loathed
everything
about school, especially the classroom couture. She thought the uniform “looked liked shit,” Lasky asserts. “It was the same color.”
    In fall and winter, young Anna, who one day would rule the fashion world draped in Chanel, standing confidently in Manolos, was required to wear a brown felt blazer that had the feel of a horse blanket, the jacket worn over a stiff, scratchy tan poplin blouse, and a pleated brown skirt that was too large because the elderly spinster educators who ran the school wanted her to grow into it. Anna complained that it made her look pregnant. Moreover, the skirt was made of a synthetic fabric that once actually melted when Anna leaned against a classroom radiator to try to warm herself. The powers at North London Collegiate, like those at Queens College, kept the heat in the bitter and damp midwinter at a minimum, thinking it would inspire the students to work harder.
    For a time, when she was at Queens, Anna had been a runner, the only extracurricular activity in which she is known to have participated during her school years. “When she was ten she was amazingly fleet of foot,” her father once observed. “Some sports instructor indicated that if she really worked at it she could probably become a sprinter of Olympic standard. That finished it. Anna said, ‘How frightful! What on earth will happen to my legs?’ and stopped running.”
    By the time she got to North London, the teachers had to force her to run. “She hated that,” Lasky recalls. “She’d hide in the toilet.” Manolo Blahnik was years away from designing
Sex and the City
shoes, but somehow adolescent Anna foresaw that one day her legs would be a part of her signature look, so they needed to be slender and shapely, not thick and muscled.
    Besides the impact she thought running would have on her legs, Anna avoided gym by either cutting the class or claiming she was ill because she was physically sickened by the suit she was required to wear—scratchy brown culottes with a culotte skirt studded with dozens of little buttons on each side that made getting in and out of the outfit a formidable task. All of this wasset off by a light blue preppyish polo shirt, brown and blue being the school colors.
    Another reason she always tried to skip gym was that she had to participate in bare feet, a school rule based on some obscure turn-of-the-century health theory Anna feared picking up a skin irritation, such as the highly infectious virus called verrucae, a wart on the sole spread through athletic activity, which her friend had caught. “Actually, Anna thought it was terrific because I just got to sit on the