“My husband was chief of child psychiatry at Columbia, and he quite rightly didn’t want to give up his position,” she recalled. “So we commuted quite a bit. I had my son Charlie [in 1985], and then I was pregnant with my daughter [born in 1987], so I felt like I was just endlessly pregnant.”
Tired of the commute, she moved back to New York and edited House & Garden for a few months before she was offered the top job at Vogue. The November 1988 cover marked the first of her ongoing tenure.
She and Shaffer divorced in 1999—in the wake of Wintour having already moved on with telecommunications tycoon Shelby Bryan, who was also married when they met at the Benefit Ball for the New York Ballet in 1997.
Never one to really talk about her private life, then or now, Wintour told New York magazine in 1999, “There are certain things that no one wants to read about in the tabloid press…You know that your friends and your family have one vision, and if the outside world has another, then that’s just something that you just don’t focus on.”
