Andre Leon Talley Goes In On Anna Wintour In His Memoir

Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Bette and Joan aired in 2017 and there hasn’t been a second season. The second season was supposed to be about the fall of the marriage between Prince Charles (played by Matthew Goode) and Princess Diana (played by Rosamund Pike), but that idea was tossed into the dumpster after FX felt the material wasn’t right. There have been no plans for a second season, but Andre Leon Talley just dropped the perfect Feud into Ryan’s lap. Feud: Andre Leon Talley vs. Anna Wintour starring Titus Burgess as ALT and Sarah Paulson as Anna Wintour! Or a pair of extra demonic-looking Blue Blockers in a Dutch Boy wig as Anna Wintour.

Andre Leon Talley’s memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, comes out in September and The Daily Mail got an EXCLUSIVO first look at it. In it, ALT praises Anna for turning him into a fashion star, but writes that if Anna had a Grindr account, her profile would read: No fats! No olds! No losers! Because he says that when he got too old, too overweight, and too uncool (copyright: Jennifer Aniston) for her, she banished him from her inner circle. And there’s a very good reason why ALT always looks like he’s on his way to his own graduation. He’s got his Ph.D. in reading and shows it off by reading Anna Wintour in his memoir.

ALT and Anna Wintour go way back. When she became the editor-in-chief at American Vogue in 1988, she gave him her old job of creative director, which made him the highest-ranking black man in the history of fashion journalism. He was creative director from 1988 to 1995 and editor-at-large from 1998 to 2013. ALT continued to have a relationship with Vogue and did a podcast for them and also interviewed guests at the Met Gala for Vogue’s YouTube channel. But I guess the only thing that Anna is fiercely loyal to is that haircut. ALT writes that eventually Anna no longer gave him the best assignments and that when Vogue moved its offices to One World Trade Center in 2010, it was the beginning of the end for the old guard.

ALT whines that he was only paid $500 per episode to do the podcast and that’s peanuts to him because his car service bills cost more than that. And he writes that the legendary Grace Coddington, a longtime editor at Vogue, used to stay at the Ritz in Paris and was given a chauffeured town car and now has to stand in the taxi line at the airport. Yes, poor Grace has to stand near the peasants wearing Zara while waiting for a pleb mobile (read: a taxi). Celebrities need to do a charity telethon for Grace and ALT, not coronavirus relief!

When ALT was editor-at-large at Vogue, Anna Wintour let him know his title should be changed to editor-IS-large by telling him to go to the gym. ALT got a trainer and went on an all-cabbage diet, but it didn’t work. So Anna staged an intervention with his pastor and friends, Oscar de la Renta and Oscar’s wife. He went sent to fat rehab and ended up losing 55 pounds but gained it all back. Moments like that cut ALT deep and he wishes Anna would say something human to him. Good luck with that bitch!

‘Today, I would love for her to say something human and sincere to me. I have huge emotional and psychological scars from my relationship with this towering and influential woman…

‘…she loves her two children and I am sure she will be the best grandmother…but there are so many people who have worked for her and have suffered huge emotional scarring….the list is endless. She has dashed so many on a frayed and tattered heap during her powerful rule’.

The Vogue podcast ended suddenly and ALT didn’t get an explanation from Anna. And in 2018, he was dropped as Met Gala interviewer and replaced with YouTuber Liza Koshy, who ALT says knows nothing about the history of fashion. ALT would’ve been fine with the decision if Anna broke it to him gently but says that she’s not capable of simple human kindness.

He writes: ‘This was clearly a stone-cold business decision. I had suddenly become too old, too overweight, too uncool, I imagined, for Anna Wintour.

‘After decades of loyalty and friendships…Anna should have had the decency and kindness to call me or send me an email saying: ‘Andre, I think we have had a wonderful run with your interviews but we are going to try something new’.

‘I would have accepted that…I understand; nothing lasts forever. Simple human kindness. No, she is not capable’.

Talley, who is clearly still wounded, writes that ‘for years Anna was the most important woman in my universe’ but now she had let him be ‘thrown to the curb’.

ALT says that Anna’s inner circle is currently made up of celebrities like Serena Williams and George and Amal Clooney, and he is “no longer of value to her.” ALT claims that he’s not alone and that Vanity Fair’s former editor Graydon Carter said to him about Anna, “One day she treats me like a good friend and a colleague, and the next day, she treats me as if she had just handed over her keys to an unknown parking valet.”

But ALT hopes that when he’s on his deathbed, Anna will show up and shower him with kind words. See, Ryan Murphy, ALT is even giving you delusional dream sequences!

Talley writes: ‘I wonder, when she goes home alone at night, is she miserable? Does she feel alone?

‘Anna is so powerful and busy; she simply put me out of her existence. Now she treats me as a former employee, brief greetings, never anything more than perfunctory salutations’.

Talley called Wintour ‘ruthless’ and writes that ‘the Empress Wintour has disappointed me in her humanity’.

With a dramatic flair, he writes: ‘My hope is that she will find a way to apologize before I die, or if I linger on incapacitated before I pass, she will show up at my bedside, with an extended hand clasped into mine and say: ‘I love you. You have no idea how much you have meant to me’. Not a day goes by when I do not think of Anna Wintour’.

Some might think that this is officially the end of ALT and Anna Wintour’s friendship (if you could ever even call it that), but I don’t know. Anna may reach out to ALT and say, “I read that you think I am not capable of simple human kindness. Oh, Andre, you know me, you really, really know me and that’s the best compliment I’ve ever gotten,” before texting him the number of a top gastric bypass surgeon. Hey, that’s Anna’s idea of saying “I love you.”

Pic: Wenn.com