Feature

Bazaar Behavior

It was no secret that Fuller wanted Bazaar. She'd made a relatively public play for the magazine when Tilberis died in 1999. It wasn't long after Betts beat her out that Fuller hopped to Cosmo's historic rival, Glamour. At the time, the press reported that Fuller and her ever-present collaborator, creative director Donald Robertson, actually produced mock-ups of Bazaar as they would render it and sent them to Hearst as a virtual job application, even after Betts had been hired.

"Those reports simply weren't true," Fuller says. "I was out of the country in Israel with my son at the time. I don't even know what could have started the rumor. I know that James Truman at one point had asked Donald to do some cover ideas for Teen Vogue -- maybe that's what people saw." Most who know Fuller believe her. "Hearst had wanted her, then Si wouldn't let her out of the contract," says one well-placed editor. "Then she became damaged goods. And by that time, Glenda said that she wanted the job or she was going to go to Condé Nast, so Hearst gave her Bazaar to keep her."

When Betts was axed, word was that Fuller made another play for the magazine and even delayed signing an existing extension of her three-year Condé Nast contract while making a bid to outmaneuver Bailey into Hearst's marquee seat. One source close to Fuller says she had been offered a contract renewal -- which she planned to accept -- in the late stages of her pregnancy and had simply put it off until after the baby was born. Fuller, for her part, insists she made absolutely no overtures of the sort.

"I was really committed to Glamour magazine," Fuller says. "Now, the Harper's Bazaar thing, I had been approached two years ago to go back there. I did not. I thought my future was at Glamour. There was absolutely no contact between myself and Hearst. None. None none none."

The perpetual interest in Fuller is hardly surprising. Wherever she's landed, Fuller has shown an uncanny, almost Spielbergian instinct for what regular American flyover-type women believe, wish, fear, and, most important, understand. "I've always thought the key was to empathize with the reader, and then to talk to her," Fuller says. "I've always thought it's very important to be a reader's friend and make magazines that felt like they were a club you could belong to."

Bonnie Fuller:
"I thought my future was at Glamour. There was absolutely no contactbetween myself and Hearst. None none none."

In a spunkily teenage-ish show of inclusiveness, Fuller tended to abandon her corner office at Glamour, preferring to rule more democratically from an open pod in the center of the office. To some, the effect was a little too teenage: "She and Donald were the ones at the cool table," one staffer said, "and everybody else was always trying to be cool by sitting as near to them as possible."

As befits an editor of her stature, Fuller is burdened with the usual luggage cart of underling-bludgeoning stories. She astonished with her hands-on micromanaging. "She'd even go pore over the photo credits: 'Are we sure this is beige and not ecru?' " recalls one former employee. Phone calls from the slopes in Utah were routine, and when Fuller took a bike tour of Tuscany with her husband, Michael, staff members had to map her mile-by-mile progress so they could FedEx copy to her next pension.

In her first week at Glamour, Fuller assigned several members of the art department -- all of whom had just seen their immediate boss fired -- the task of making decorative party-favor picture frames for her daughter's birthday party (Fuller insists the incident occurred because an assistant had misunderstood a simple directive to go out and buy some cheap frames).

Last-minute changes were frequent; hours were often brutal. "With Bonnie," says a Glamour editor, "you'd be working until 2 a.m. for days on end. I guess if I were going to give her credit, I'd have to at least say she was a workaholic." Attrition became a fact of life. Some called her the "Fuller Brush," says former senior editor Barrie Gillies. "People were always getting swept away." Others, less charitable, dubbed her "the Bonster."

"Bonnie can be monstrous in her pursuit of what she thinks is right," says one Fuller loyalist. "But she's grateful to those who help her. She's a person with a lot of drive, and sometimes she runs over people. But she's a decent person."

"If you were a thick-skinned person, then you could do fine under her," recalls Lisa Simmons, a former Cosmo editor and a Fuller supporter. "She would write in 'Duh' in your copy. She would get mad at you if you had bad handwriting, as if you were trying to get at her by not having good handwriting. But she was amazing at seeing what a story needed to work."

In the end, it might have been Fuller's ambitions for another fashion magazine, Vogue, that did her in. At the time Fuller took over Glamour, the press was brimming with rumors that Wintour might soon step down. One Condé Nast source says Fuller told intimates that she took Glamour so she could get Vogue. "I know for a fact that Anna heard that," says another. "Anna hasn't spoken to Bonnie since Bonnie got here."

The simmering rivalry bubbled over this spring, when Fuller attended her June-issue print-order meeting, a monthly meeting at Condé Nast in which editors of each magazine show off the upcoming issues to the suits in order to determine how many copies will be printed.

Much to the shock of her superiors, Fuller unveiled a cover featuring a photo of actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. Vogue had wrangled a hard-fought exclusive cover story with the actress and new mother for the July issue. Glamour had done a "write around" on the actress and put an older photo on the cover. Within weeks, Fuller had visitors from upstairs at 4 Times Square, the company's headquarters. She was out.

A source in Fuller's camp insists that Vogue's plans didn't even come up in the meeting. Moreover, the source says, when Fuller heard about the tension at Vogue, she raised the possibility of pulling the cover, but the implicit directive was that she go forward with it.

The story of her dismissal is liable to become a classic. One version had her stubbornly camping out in her Glamour office, refusing to leave even as movers were hoisting in boxes of files belonging to new Glamour editor Cindi Leive, who had once worked under Fuller. "They asked me to stay," Fuller insists. "I asked Cindi what she wanted to do, and she asked if I could please help finish the August issue."

"In the end," says the Condé Nast source, "Anna's tantrum sealed the deal."

"When I was at Vogue, everyone was lamenting the bringing-down of Vogue," says one writer. "Now it looks like the last bastion of fashion culture. Anna is the one who's holding out."

Back at Bazaar, Bailey is said to be in talks with Fabien Baron about a return engagement -- tantalizing insiders with the prospect of the revered logo making its return with him. Bringing him back might be a P.R. masterstroke. It could usher in the era of updated glamour that Cathie Black covets. It could also be the season's most fashionable fig leaf.