NYT Syndicate
When Joan Juliet Buck completed the first draft of her new memoir, The Price of Illusion, for Atria Books, the manuscript was more than 1,000 pages."It was like a deposition," she said, an apt description considering the material she had to cover.
In 2000 Buck, known for being the only American woman to edit Vogue Paris, was abruptly dismissed after nearly seven years there, and sent to rehab by her boss, Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Cond` Nast International, for a drug problem she did not have. (Though she said she agreed to go because it was part of her severance package, she also admitted that with a writer's perverse curiosity, she wanted to see firsthand what went on in a drug-treatment centre.)
Eleven years later, as a contributing writer for American Vogue, Buck received a different sort of public drubbing. She had been assigned a profile of the first lady of Syria, Asma al Assad, a piece that was published under the cringe-making headline, A Rose in the Desert, just weeks before the Assad regime began torturing and bombing its own people.
In the aftermath, Buck was exposed to the outrage of the internet, and Vogue declined to renew her contract. (Months later, the article was scrubbed from the magazine's website, and Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor, issued a statement deploring"the actions of the Assad regime in the strongest possible terms.")
"They probably called me because wiser heads than mine had turned it down," Buck said of the assignment."I wish I had."
On a recent Monday afternoon, Buck, husky-voiced and animated, was in the basement of the Morton Memorial Library, a corner of which she rents as an office and has outfitted like a Bedouin's tent. She has been holed up here for the last three years, working on her memoir and trying to shed, not altogether successfully, the material relics of her former life. (She rents an apartment in nearby Rhinebeck.)
Last year, she auctioned off a Cartier watch, Herm'e8s and Chanel bags and her mother's sapphire-studded compact, along with more idiosyncratic belongings, like a collection of R Crumb comics. Buck's library has been only slightly culled to 7,000 volumes, which are spread out between a storage unit in Poughkeepsie and on walls of steel bookcases in this basement.
In the wake of the Assad piece, Buck, now 68, said she was"tainted, like a leper," and developed lesions on her feet that still cause her to limp slightly. Still, she had her defenders.
"I think she was very shabbily treated by Vogue," said Tina Brown, who has edited two Cond` Nast titles, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker."Frankly, it was an editing responsibility. You don't just blame the writer. Not renewing her contract was harsh and she had no doubt why it was. The fact is, the piece comes in, there are a lot of eyes on it, and a lot of discussions. For Joan to be excommunicated for her work was very shabby." (A spokesperson for the magazine declined to weigh in.)
Buck said:"There was so much opprobrium sticking to me. I was so flayed. My life as I knew it had vanished. And so it was a process of trying to figure out, Where did I come from? Where am I going? What really happened? I didn't know, until I wrote the book, that I had the right to my own life, that I could tell my own story."
Buck's father, Jules Buck, was a movie producer whose best friend was John Huston, an Army buddy whose life he had saved. Jules Buck struggled to find work after leaving Los Angeles. Her mother, Joyce, was an actress whose best friend was Lauren Bacall.
Joan Buck learned to speak French before English, setting Frenchness firmly inside her, as she writes,"as a hunger for rules and form that went unmet in the margins of my family's fantasy of a beautiful French life." When a French nanny told her that her Jewish family had killed Jesus Christ, Joan Buck, just 7, apologised politely.
The Bucks landed in London, where Jules would discover a young Peter O'Toole and arrange to have him cast in Lawrence of Arabia, after which the two men formed a film company. Joan Buck grew up partly in the eccentric households of the Hustons, playing dress-up with Anjelica Huston, a surrogate sister.
Jules Buck's fortunes rose with O'Toole's, only to vanish when they had a falling out over The Ruling Class, their 1972 film. Hurt and humiliated, Jules was later found to be a manic depressive.
When Buck and the English writer John Heilpern, now a contributor to Vanity Fair, married in London in the late '70s, her friend Karl Lagerfeld made her wedding dress; Manolo Blahnik, a friend since they were teenagers, was her attendant.
After the couple moved to New York in 1979, Buck wrote The Only Place to Be, a novel about"people who wanted to be famous," she said, though"it was too long and didn't really have a plot." Still, it was not badly reviewed, and its publisher, Jason Epstein at Random House, promoted Buck, to her chagrin, as"the intellectual Judith Krantz."
When her marriage to Heilpern ended after five years, Buck writes,"I'd tried to have a normal life and failed."
Buck will tell you she was miscast as French Vogue's editor, but others will disagree. She upended what had been the magazine's rather staid coverage, often devoting its pages to single-topic themes, like film, sex and quantum physics. She also nearly doubled its circulation.
"After French Vogue and the rehab stint, Buck moved to Santa Fe, looking to make a home for her aged father, who had been in her care through much of her time in Paris, though he died before she was able to move him there. (Early in her tenure at French Vogue, her mother had died of lung cancer.)
"She picked up the tradition of the men and women who used to inhabit Santa Fe," said Richard Buckley, a former editor of Vogue Homme,"the black sheep who didn't belong anywhere else and could be who they wanted to be there. And she gave pretty good parties. I don't mean wild parties where people are hanging off the chandeliers, just ones with interesting people. Where else but Joan's would you meet Tuesday Weld?"