"Kate always thought of herself as a fashion outsider," says a friend. "She mostly figured she was an outsider because she was smart, and fashion designers are very dumb. Kate was always rolling her eyes at something Alexander McQueen or Miguel Adrover said."

"Kate is very smart, but most important, she's of that life," says Bazaar writer Karen Marta. "She's been formed by fashion; that's the crucible. Still, she approached it as a serious reporter, which was what made her stand out."

Another of Betts's assets was her youth. "The idea was that under Liz, the reader was 40 years old, and Kate was going to go after Miss 36, Ally McBeal herself, the girl who watches every episode of Sex and the City," says one Betts supporter at Bazaar. "It was perfect, because Kate was 36. The focus would get a little bit younger, the fashion would skew a little more to the edgy side. I mean, that would be a great magazine, you'd think."

But Kate wasn't quite as "mass market" in sensibility as Ally. Just before she took over Bazaar, she did a Today show segment with Katie Couric, previewing the new swimsuits for spring. Betts, then Vogue's fashion-news director, said bikinis were back in a big way. "Any advice you can give this morning for women in terms of finding the best look for their body?" Couric asked. "Start getting in shape now," Betts said coldly. Couric seemed dumbfounded.

Which brings up another truth: What some view as her refreshing, often amusing bluntness, others see as plain rudeness. "I think she views it as kind of 'up front,' " says writer Lynn Hirschberg, a staunch Betts defender. "You know, you can see the knife, where others are of the you-can't-see-the-knife-but-it's-going-in-your-back variety. She has a trait that I think is very rare: She doesn't care if people like her or not."

Betts also enjoyed playing the role of fashion arbiter with comic Vreelandesque certainty. "She can be really funny," says Hirschberg. "Over Christmas, I wrote a column about underwear, and I mentioned that I have all these matching sets, and some of them are browns and beiges. Kate was recovering from some minor surgery at the time, but she called me from her hospital bed. 'Lynn,' she said. 'Three words: Earth tones, no!'

Glenda Bailey:
"I may not have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I know how to turn a magazine into a gold mine."

"'You mean you want them out of the piece?' " Hirshberg asked.

"'No,' Betts said firmly. 'I want you to throw yours out. Now.' "

Early on, Betts played up the competition with Vogue and Wintour, her former mentor, while batting away the persistent suggestion (ironic in hindsight) that she was going to turn Harper's Bazaar into InStyle. And her imperious, Anna-in-training persona (gossip columns had her taking her baby's nanny on the Concorde and throwing a tantrum at Michael's restaurant when her table wasn't ready) didn't help.

Another part of the problem was structural. "Kate inherited bad numbers, and she was following a saint," says one Betts underling. "There was a lot of talk that even Liz would have been fired if she had not gotten sick." Tilberis, yet another British import, had been a fashion anomaly -- a humane, widely beloved mother figure in an industry of spoiled children. Tilberis's elegance in personal style translated to elegance in the style of the magazine, which she remade when she took over in 1992. With its Fabien Baron design that looked back toward the glory years of legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, Bazaar had an otherworldly beauty -- though the aging demo that appreciated it was of serious concern to Hearst.

Betts was brought in to bring change, and change was swift. Relying on the sensibilities of art director Michael Grossman, who had given Entertainment Weekly its defining look, Betts jerked Bazaar into the present with a striking, even shocking, makeover, featuring MTV-zesty shoots. The venerable logo was discarded, as was, for the most part, Baron's (and Brodovitch's) beloved white space.

Every small detail was an excuse for another operatic squabble -- it seemed to amount to a management strategy. "It was as if, with no drama, it would be like trying to cook an egg in a cold frying pan," says a former staff member. "She tried the same sort of divide-and-conquer strategy that Anna does at Vogue. The idea is, if you keep people in fierce competition with each other, you'll get their best work -- but after a while, it just seemed like harshness."

Betts and Hearst even allowed the turmoil to be caught on film, inviting in cameras from Hearst's Lifetime television division to tape a behind-the-scenes documentary about a brand-new editor producing, essentially, a brand-new magazine. The tape became a camp classic -- Mommy Dearest about fashion's own family. The show portrays Betts needling her staff: "I feel like I don't have any support," she snaps. "I feel like I have to do everything myself . . . It's making my life miserable."

Unfortunately, while advertising perked up a bit, the newsstand numbers didn't respond. They weren't bad, mind you. A magazine being off 8 percent of newsstand during a recession is hardly alarming. Fair or not, though, Betts had failed to stop the slide at Bazaar, which was now selling 722,000, against 1.2 million for Vogue.

Meanwhile, the fashion Establishment was her toughest audience. Every cover was second-guessed -- too young, too stodgy, wrong celebrity, wrong model. No one could put a finger on what fantasy Betts was trying to sell.

Last spring, she had the magazine redesigned yet again, adding a tone that attempted to reclaim the sophistication of Baron's work. But in her last months, she was increasingly bunkered and anxious as she cast about for a formula that would save her job.

"The magazine business is in a phase of dumbing down," says one Betts loyalist, by way of postmortem. "In the end, they just wanted '100 Looks for $100.' But it doesn't all have to be that. Everything doesn't have to become 'Find Your Inner Clitoris.' There's room in the business for more than one kind of success."

But not for Betts, at this moment. When executive editor Mary Duenwald left Bazaar in the spring, she confessed to Betts, "I guess I'm just not a fashion person." Betts joked, "I'm not, either."

Many found the timing of Betts's dismissal perplexing, since she was in the midst of closing Bazaar's September issue, the most important one in a fashion magazine's year. But with the Glamour job open (Fuller had been fired days before) and Bailey therefore in play, Black had strong motivation to move quickly, whether or not Bailey had actually been in contact with Condé Nast.