As we were reminded most recently by the swell of interest in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Vogue could not have arrived to where it is today without a history of sensational editors doing remarkable things with equal dashes of madcap flair and intrepid journalism. One of those editors was the legendary beauty editor Shirley Lord, who died earlier this week at age 93.
A reflection on Shirley’s storied life should start in the early 1990s. Roaring blithely from her office, she headed east down the hallway—eager to declare the latest eureka moment in beauty—and erupted into the office of Anna Wintour. Shirley had in her possession a research paper that confirmed that Renova reduced wrinkles in mice, which meant it would inevitably do the same for humans.
Not only was Shirley privy to the study before any other journalist (that happened a lot, as exclusive stories were her métier), but she brought living proof to Anna as well. That was no pocketbook Shirley carried in her hand to the meeting; it was a cage. Inside the cage was a mouse—the mouse that Renova had significantly smoothed—eliciting a few gasps from nearby assistants.
Unfazed, Anna listened to the details of Shirley’s scoop, and suggested that Irving Penn photograph the mouse. With his frequent Vogue editor Phyllis Posnick coordinating, Mr. Penn then auditioned Renova mice for their photogenic promise. He asked for two working days in his studio to get the picture.
Over the course of her storied career, which began on Fleet Street when she was 17, Shirley saw beauty evolve from potions and lotions into a business estimated by McKinsey & Company to be worth upwards of $600 billion worldwide. “From a front-row vantage point, I’ve watched the beauty business grow from a cottage industry into an extraordinary monolith,” Shirley said in Vogue in 1994.
“I credit Shirley a lot for moving with the times at Vogue,” says Amy Astley, the Global Editorial Director of Architectural Digest. Amy started at Vogue in 1993, as the associate beauty editor under Shirley. “I was young and green, and my arrival coincided with grunge and waves of change in the beauty and fashion worlds. Shirley was an excellent businesswoman, along with a creative force and a generous mentor.”
Shirley loved her job, and she loved Vogue. I’d met Shirley in the mid-1970s, when we were both houseguests at the Southampton home of the late Margaret and Winston Frost. She and Mrs. Frost were close, and I was a friend of their daughter, the artist Dora Frost. Other than the time when Dora and I went to the opening of a disco in Manhattan and saw Truman Capote (another Frost family friend), seven sheets to the wind, wipe out on the dance floor, Shirley was the first published writer I ever met. I remember seeing her in Southampton between lunches and dinners, balancing her manual typewriter on the bed in her guest room, editing the pages of her second novel. On my first day at Vogue in 1989, I found my way to the beauty department to say hello. Upon entering her lair, I was struck by many pleasant smells.
“It smells so good here, Shirley,” I exclaimed.
“Well, it should,” she scolded me. “It’s the Vogue beauty department.”
Shirley was born Shirley Singer to a working-class East End London family. Leonine, not just in appearance but also in energy and determination, she always knew that she wanted to be a writer. When she was 11, she even wrote herself a note to be opened when she turned 21. “The opening line was, I want to be an author—unfortunately spelt with an ‘er,’” she later recalled. “Because it was the end of the war when I wrote it, living with The Blitz in London, I also, not surprisingly, included my will.”
Despite the misgivings of her family and the exhausting commute from the suburbs to Fleet Street during her first marriage, which resulted in the first of her two beloved sons, Shirley was determined to work. She found her writing voice at the Evening Standard, edited by Charles Wintour, the London newspaper legend and father of Anna Wintour, and remained a lifelong friend of the Wintour parents and children.
While Shirley was interviewing for the Evening Standard, the wealthy entrepreneur Cyril Lord, known as the British “carpet king,” fell in love with her. After they married, home included his castle in Ireland, covered in wall-to-wall carpeting, which was unusual as far as Anglo-Irish castles go, then or now. (Unless, of course, you were the “carpet king.”)
Keen to avoid taxes at home, Mr. Lord soon moved his bride and himself to Barbados. There, Shirley fell in love with their architect, David Anderson. Unsettled by this unexpected plot twist and romance, she moved to New York in 1971, working first at Harper’s Bazaar and then, in 1973, doing a first stint at Vogue. But love won; she and Anderson married in 1974 and had one son.
During their marriage, Shirley left Vogue and worked as a vice president for the Helena Rubinstein company, returning to the magazine five years later, in 1980, as its beauty director. In the late 1990s, she departed the magazine again for a beauty startup, iBeauty, and then returned to Vogue as a contributing editor when the startup didn’t float.
Along the way, she managed to write and publish two books advising on beauty and health, five bestselling novels, and a memoir marvelously titled Small Beer at Claridge’s. Published in 1968, it told the story of her ascent from London’s East End to grand houses and castles.
“My siblings and I knew her almost our entire lives,” Anna says. “Shirley was such a strong link for my family to our father, really the last connection we had to him. She’d come see us in the country when my family visited in the summer. She never lost her sense of fun and life and was always interested in others.”
Patrick Wintour, brother of Anna and the diplomatic editor at The Guardian in London, said he was fortunate enough “that the more I aged—a skill I have now mastered—the more Shirley Lord liked me…presumably, since the more I resembled my father.” He added, “She was always grateful that he displayed such justifiable confidence in her journalism at a time when working-class women did not often escape the typing pool. So her warmth towards him and his foibles were transferred to me and my children, two of whom, due to her surname and demeanor, believed she was a peer of the realm. The thing about Shirley is she treasured friendships and the trust they bring.”
After her second husband’s death, I believe it was Shirley’s good friend Barbara Walters who introduced her to The New York Times executive editor and columnist Abe Rosenthal. They married in 1987, and together became a force in the social and media life of New York City. After Mr. Rosenthal died from a stroke in 2006, Shirley, aged 74, wrote about her widowhood in an essay for Vogue titled “Enduring Love.”
Like a character in one of her vivacious novels, after great loss came hope and romance. She met the artist Peter Heywood at his house in Sicily and they married several years later in a ceremony hosted by Catie Marron, Shirley’s close friend and former Vogue colleague. (The officiant was Raymond Kelly, the former New York City police commissioner and undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.)
“One evening in Sicily, we were watching a movie, and I leaned over and kissed her on the nose,” said Peter, some 10 years younger than Shirley. The film was La Cage aux Folles—and of course it was. The production comes most alive during its many brilliant beauty, hair, and fashion moments.
Catie Marron reflected on the wonderful life Shirley lived. “Shirley had a sincere love for her friends that was deep and not remotely transactional,” she said. “My lasting image of her will be seeing her in a car after visiting, smiling a smile that always made her look a good 20 years younger than she was. Shirley always looked so fresh, which reflected her spirit and attitude.”
In addition to Mr. Heywood and her sons, Mark Hussey and Richard Lord, Shirley is survived by four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
