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hair cut and styled in the new fashion, which became a key component of her chic image, the cut she still wore in her mid-fifties, a cut that not so coincidentally has been favored and popularized by the British dominatrix, as Anna, the editrix, would later be described by some submissive and mistreated underlings.
    The bob had been around for ages, first given public attention in the 1920s when the actress Louise Brooks wore it as the character Lulu. Also a model, Brooks appeared occasionally in fashion ads exposing the bob to the masses, which helped define the flapper look. Now it would define trendy London birds in the revolutionary and exuberant sixties.
    Among those whose look inspired Anna to get the bob was Maureen Cleave, one of Charles Wintour’s talented favorites on the
Evening Standard
staff.
    “Charles simply adored Maureen,” says journalist Valerie Grove, one of Cleave’s close friends and a colleague on the paper. “She was petite, dark, brisk, brilliant, clever, sharp, and very articulate—adorable in every way And Charles was absolutely enthralled with her. Maureen had the bob, and it became sort of her trademark. Everybody on the paper thought that Anna copied Maureen’s hairstyle and that is the origin of the Anna Wintour look. People thought Charles was expressing his adoration of Anna, and his ambitions for Anna, through his keenness for Maureen. It was really some kind of dynamic there.”
    In fact, Alex Walker believes that Anna’s decision to copy Cleave’s hairstyle was, indeed, psychologically complex—more than just her desire to be in fashion. “Charles revered Maureen, Charles was Maureen’s mentor, and Anna desperately wanted Charles to cherish
her
, too,” he maintains. “It’s quite complicated, but I’m sure Anna wanted to be able to say, ‘Look at me, Daddy. I
look
like Maureen.’ Anna always desperately—
desperately
—sought Mr. Wintour’s love and attention, and he wasn’t always there to give it.”
    Wintour wanted a hipper, younger readership, and twenty-three-year-old Cleave, an Oxford graduate with a degree in art, was given the youth page beat—the same with-it demographic that Anna later targeted, likely on her father’s advice, when she first became a fashion editor.
    “Charles ran many of his ideas for me through Anna because she was keeping her eye on [trendy] things,” Cleave says, looking back. “She was a hip kid, so to speak. I got in trouble once for not knowing the difference between ‘hip’ and ‘hep.’ Anna obviously told her father about that. I’d written the wrong word and Charles said it should be the other word. I knew he’d gotten the correct one from Anna.”
    Cleave had virtual free rein to cover the smashing rise of swinging London. The nonpareil Maureen Cleave interview became dinner table and cocktail party conversation.
    Her biggest score came when she got a tip from a friend in Liverpool. “She said to me, ‘I hope you realize there’s a lot going on here. There’s this group called the Beatles.’” The quartet had recently cut their first single, “Love Me Do,” and had signed a five-year contract with a manager named Brian Epstein.
    Cleave ran the Beatles story idea by Wintour, who asked Anna whether she had ever heard of them. Of course, she told her father, they’re fab. The next day Cleave headed north, thinking she had an exclusive, but was disappointed when she arrived to find a competitor on the scene from the
Daily Mail
, who had also gotten the word to check out John, Paul, George, and Ringo—known as “the Fab Four”—and this new Mersey Beat.
    The gentleman from the
Mail
didn’t have a chance, though. Lennon preferred Cleave as their interviewer, which she attributes to her bob. “I had a fringe like the Beatles. They liked me from the start because of my hair. I guess they felt we could relate.”
    Beginning on Thursday, October 17, 1963, and continuing for three days, the first major interview with