While Bailey hasn't fired many people yet, she's wasted little time in making her mark. She's told her entire staff to cancel their summer plans. The hardest job to fill has been that of art director. Word is that she approached Robin Derrick, the star art director of British Vogue, in her first two weeks, but Derrick declined. The play for Derrick only fueled the theory that Bailey was going to "do a British Vogue." Vogue's English sibling is considered a more "commercial" magazine than its elitist American counterpart -- "commercial meaning that it's not 'coded,' " explains one fashionista. "It's not self-referential, by fashion people for fashion people."

Bailey, as noted, is definitely not a fashion person. Like many upcountry Brits, this daughter of England's rolling, agrarian hinterlands comes off as disarmingly "real" from the first meeting. She's charming and witty and candid and folksy and upbeat -- delightful, really, even if that particular menu of character attributes seems almost pornographic when set against the Siberian emotional landscape of high fashion.

Which is not to say that she's necessarily any cuddlier than her fashion adversaries. In fact, she seems to relish a good class war. "I've actually committed the two biggest fashion sins," Bailey says cheerily. "I'm not from a privileged background, and I don't hide my past. So I'm sure some people find that intimidating. They look at me and they realize I am where I am because of my talent. I might not have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I know how to turn a magazine into a gold mine."

Then, in fierce tommy-gun bursts, she dispatches some of the canards that swirl in the air around her.

She doesn't know fashion?

"I've been going to the shows since 1983. I've been a fixture on the front row for more years than I care to remember."

She's downmarket?

Rubbish. "I was very, very successful at Marie Claire," she says. "It was the biggest-selling upmarket fashion-and-beauty magazine. It had far more upmarket fashion advertising than any of its competitors."

Marie Claire soared partly on the strength of cover lines seemingly written for Jerry Springer (fathers who pledge their daughters to celibacy) but also on a cozy middlebrow mix of first-person confessionals and very wearable fashion. The British fashion world suddenly shut up about Derbyshire and began to lionize Bailey. Portrayed as a real-life version of Patsy and Edina of British television's Absolutely Fabulous, Bailey even starred in a fawning Channel 4 documentary, Absolutely 'Marie Claire.' A starring role in a big American Express ad campaign followed. Before long, her electric personality had her mingling with Tony Blair at cocktail parties.

"I always say I had to leave the country because I had become a question on Celebrity Squares," she jokes.

In 1996, Hearst imported Bailey to perform the same sort of alchemy she had demonstrated in England -- that is, to follow in the footsteps of her predecessor, Bonnie Fuller, who had just graduated to Cosmopolitan.

Bonnie Fuller was supposed to be sitting in Glenda Bailey's office -- if not Anna Wintour's. Instead, she finds herself in P.R. man Howard Rubenstein's corner office, 30 floors above Sixth Avenue, which is enshrouded, appropriately, in fog.

When Condé Nast fired Fuller on May 22, the industry was stunned, and so was Fuller. "I was surprised. I was very surprised," Fuller says with a pained laugh. With her girly, vaguely sixties-ish long chocolate tresses, Fuller looks sprightlier than her 44 years (indeed, she just had a son in January; Sasha and his nanny had become a fixture in the Glamour offices, since Fuller wanted to breast-feed while maintaining her punishing workload). "We had just come off two of the biggest revenue years in the magazine's history. We had the highest rate base the magazine ever had."

Fuller's Midas touch was the envy of the industry. "Wherever she went, she minted money," marvels a rival editor. "Condé Nast is saying that it's the numbers," says another rival editor. "But if you're looking to boost the numbers, Bonnie's the first person you're going to bring in."

The real sting must have been that Bailey had triumphed. "You know, Glenda and Bonnie hate each other," says one editor who knows both. "So it's unbelievable that in the end, Bonnie was outwitted by this woman. Glenda trashed Bonnie's version of Marie Claire to the French owners, then somehow has gotten it in the media now that somehow she, Glenda, saved Marie Claire. It didn't need saving."

In a larger sense, it was Fuller's ambition -- her aggressive flirtation with Bazaar and, later, her bull-in-a-china-shop approach to Condé Nast court politics -- that seemed to drive this entire wild round. "I don't think there's anything wrong with being ambitious," Fuller says after careful consideration. "I've always had a philosophy that if you go after your dreams, you're going to be a happier person. Men have always felt that they could do that. With women, that whole idea is only a generation or two old. So would you define that as ambition, going after your goals?"

Which Fuller definitely did. While editing Flare, in Canada, she wrote to the publisher of YM trumpeting her accomplishments and looking for a job, which she got. She promptly reinvented the magazine, pumping its 970,000 circulation to a lordly 1.7 million -- and wrote to Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan, trumpeting her accomplishments. Fuller was drafted by Hearst to run Marie Claire shortly after it was launched Stateside, and when she eventually replaced Gurley Brown, Fuller grew newsstand circulation at Cosmo by 17 percent in her first year.

When Fuller jumped to Glamour, Ruth Whitney, rather coldly put out to pasture, disapproved vehemently and publicly of the choice of her successor. And eventually, Si Newhouse came to share this view.

Fuller, however, had perhaps hastened her downfall two years earlier when she tried to get out of her Glamour contract to go to Harper's. It's common knowledge within the industry that Newhouse had never forgiven her, and had gone so far as to threaten to sue her.