“I Mean…What?!?” – Abe Gurko

No, I have not yet seen The September Issue yet…film or magazine. I’m going to do the ritual this weekend, see the movie then flip through Vogue. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again, I think Anna Wintour is fierce. Anyone from Lauren Wiesberger to Maureen Dowd can say what they want about Anna, but they are simply riding her Oscar de la Renta coattails. Having worked for years in Hollywood, inside the inner sanctum of celebrity, you learn really quickly that “those” people are not what they seem. When I moved to Los Angeles, my goal was to become a mechanic to the machine called celebrity…I wanted to know how it worked. In a very short time, one thing led to another and I was working on a project with Meryl Streep and Carrie Fisher. They wrote a screenplay together. I learned that how celebrities act when they walk out their door is not who they are in an intimate setting. If we didn’t have as many kooks and paparazzi crawling about, maybe people’s persona’s would be a bit more accessible. But that is not the culture that we live in…on the contrary. People that are hounded by press and fans will put up a shield, and rightly so. No, they should be all sweetness and light to some schnook? Yikes…are fans needy.

I met Anna through God’s Love We Deliver, a New York based AIDS service organization that I used to fund-raise for. With the Counsel of Fashion Designers of America, she started the CFDA AIDS Fund, allocating millions of dollars for service organizations in need. Between that, and the Costume Institute Gala, which raises money for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, what else do you haters want from Anna? Designer blood? My mother used to say, “They’re just jealous,” when she thought people were speaking ill of her. In hind sight now I see that as paranoid grandiosity. But in the case of Anna Wintour, I absolutely think that is so.