The Devil Wears Prada, shown at the Venice Film Festival last week, is a thinly disguised portrait of Anna Wintour, British editor of American Vogue. 'Nuclear Wintour' has been an object of fascination for almost 20 years now. Her sunglasses, model slimness, paranoid secrecy and frosty persona have been analysed endlessly not only by fashionistas but by women who don't know their Prada from their Pringle.
It's not just women who find Wintour interesting. Men who don't give a fig about Sienna Miller, Mischa Barton or other cutesy female celebrities will read anything about Anna. This woman embodies the stereotype they love to hate: the she-devil.
Inside that size 4 Chanel suit is, men suspect, a predatory fiend driven by ruthless ambition and insulated by her contempt for others. Watch your back or she will have your job; watch your step or she will have you out on your ear.
Women at the top of corporate life know this and will either exploit the typecasting (terror is useful in instilling discipline among the underlings) or employ a great deal of time, energy and ingenuity to overthrow the prejudice. One woman CEO I know pointed out Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of Pearson, at a party: 'Do you know why Marjorie wears low heels? Because stilettoes give the men in the office too much ammunition.'
The she-devil fantasy is not so much about S&M as about reduction. Men may get a kick out of imagining the she-boss in suspenders, brandishing a whip, but what they really want to do is cut her down to size, snipping her into a two-dimensional creation with the inner life and emotional register of a paper doll. Only in this way can they deal with her success; she must pay for it by sacrificing humanity and appeal. Then they can feel pity for her personality disorder rather than envy her professional excellence.
The fantasy of the she-devil informs the way men view relationships between women, as well. When, at a book launch last week, Veronica Wadley, editor of the Evening Standard, upbraided me (long and hard and very publicly) for criticising her editorship, I thought her assault a bit on the rough side. By the time the incident was reported in the papers, though, it was a cat fight in tooth and claw and our very genuine difference of opinion was an undignified hissy fit.
Meryl Streep, the 57-year-old Oscar winning actress who plays the Wintour character in The Devil Wore Prada, recently moaned about the 'gorgon roles' into which Hollywood shoehorned its older actresses. 'These are the roles that they write for women my age. Maybe there is something in society that sees older women this way.' Yes - that 'something' is called men.
Profit and loss
Easyjet's Stelios, Kimberly Quinn, Ed Stourton, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, and Peter York were among the guests at the Economist's annual party last Thursday at the British Library.
So was Michael Jay, the recently retired head of the diplomatic service. Jay scotched any speculation that he would publish his diaries, reminding me that last year he launched a stinging defence of Civil Service confidentiality when Christopher Meyer, former ambassador to Washington, called his former bosses 'pygmies' in a crawl-and-tell book.
'There has to be such a thing as trust,' Jay pronounced. Within minutes, though, Jonathan Powell and Andrew Adonis were entering the party, as was Stuart Proffitt, mega-publisher at Penguin. Tony Blair had better hope that those two loyal lieutenants share Jay's principled stand and will never make a quick buck by selling their memoirs with accounts of No 10 indiscretions.
