Showing That Compassion Is Always in Fashion
Most of the time, the cancer is in a box under the bed. Liz Tilberis, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, gets up most mornings and leaves her illness there--out of sight and, as much as possible, out of mind. But now that the 50-year-old wife, mother and arbiter of style is touring the country promoting a book that chronicles her rise in the fashion industry and her struggle with ovarian cancer, the disease is out in the open.
In her role as the head of a high-profile fashion magazine, she has become a self-described “mini-celebrity.” People have long seen her offering TV sound bites on the state of style, and familiarity breeds instant intimacy. Women curious to know whether stilettos were really a requirement for the look of the moment used to solicit her opinion. Since she’s added the job of ovarian cancer spokesperson to her resume, strangers who recognize her, and feel as close as old school chums, are comfortable enough to discuss everything from the vagaries of their feminine plumbing to their family tragedies.
After a plane carrying her from San Francisco touched down in Los Angeles late last month, Tilberis rushed toward the exit door, seconds from a clean getaway. Then a flight attendant approached her and confided, “My sister has ovarian cancer.”
“What do I say to that?” Tilberis wondered. “I mean, do I stop and talk, or just wish the person well?”
Such encounters can often be important opportunities to exchange information. One cancer survivor tells another about a chemotherapy cocktail that blends such small amounts of a variety of drugs that it doesn’t cause hair loss. Or word is spread of a Chinese herbal tea that stimulates the appetite, a necessity for people battling the wasting disease.
Tilberis fixed her soft gray-green eyes on the woman and said, “Oh, I’m desperately sorry. Send her lots of love.”
And then she walked off into the crowded airport. The lid of the box opened, and the cancer was tucked back inside.
“No Time to Die” (Little, Brown) grew out of a pair of articles Tilberis wrote with Bazaar contributing editor Aimee Lee Ball. Tilberis, who was chosen to lead the ailing magazine after a 22-year career at British Vogue, was urged by her staff to share her experiences as a cancer patient with Bazaar’s readers. Initially, Tilberis hid behind her inborn British reserve.
“This is America,” her editors told her. “Magazines are about information and helping people.”
The two stories, one describing her diagnosis in 1993 and first course of treatment, the second detailing the agonizing bone marrow transplant Tilberis underwent two years later, elicited a tremendous response. Both friends and readers applauded Tilberis’ candor and were grateful for knowledge that could help them monitor their own health. Tilberis never thought she would be a crusader on women’s health issues.
“But, in one sense, I’m terribly proud that it’s happened this way,” she says. “Because if one can save even one life, that’s a major triumph.”
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Backed up by some controversial medical research, she is convinced that infertility treatments she received in her early 30s caused her cancer. So part of her mission is to make women aware of the dangers of overstimulating their ovaries with powerful drugs in the hope of becoming pregnant.
She had been married for a few years to the handsome Greek art professor she met in school (he was only five years her senior) when they began trying to conceive. Doctors discovered she had contracted a pelvic inflammatory disease at some point, and her Fallopian tubes were badly scarred.
“Infertility is one of the most underrated problems a woman can have,” Tilberis says. “I was so unbelievably depressed and so obsessed. I wasn’t quite suicidal, but I was almost there. At that point, I said, ‘I’ve got to take this in hand and try to adopt.’ ”
The couple’s two adopted sons are now 13 and 17, and she writes movingly of her love for them in the book. Her message to women undergoing fertility treatments is to be informed and not overdo it.
“Even if they’d told me I would suffer from cancer later, I wanted a baby so desperately that I’d certainly have overdone them,” she admits. “But at least I’d have had the knowledge in the back of my mind that I was at risk for ovarian cancer, so I’d have gone for checkups and kept an eye on the situation.”
By the time her cancer was discovered, it had progressed to Stage 3, spreading to the lymph nodes in her abdomen.
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The ups and downs of Tilberis’ life have been dramatic enough to attract the attention of TV movie makers; “No Time to Die” has been sold to Meg Ryan’s Prufrock Pictures. The background of a major fashion magazine is a colorful canvas. Who will play the randy fashion photographer, the drugged-out model, the rival magazine editor with ice water running through her prominent veins?
In Tilberis’ years in fashion, she encountered every cliched character in the catalog. She began working as an assistant at British Vogue fresh from the Jacob Kramer Art College in Leeds. Her father was a country eye surgeon who instilled in her the belief that she could do anything she wanted (except become a doctor). She had trained as a designer but admits she had little talent for it. What she had was determination, a pleasant personality, an unshakable work ethic, a love of clothes and an eye for an arresting image.
Her contemporaries were fledgling designers Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, and photographers Bruce Weber, Arthur Elgort and Patrick Demarchelier.
“We were all nobodies in the early ‘70s,” she says. “As we grew to be more senior in fashion, the industry grew up around us. All of us who came up at that point were helping to internationalize fashion. Everything changed when the realization hit that there was a lot of advertising in fashion, and a lot of money to be made.”
In Tilberis’ nonfiction narrative, characters come and go in a novelistic way, appearing early in the story, then turning up years later in different guises. A model reinvents herself as a mature editor. A shy, fairy-tale princess grows from super-shopper and betrayed wife to fashion icon and international saint.
Grace Coddington, now creative director of American Vogue and a successful model before she went to work at British Vogue, gave Tilberis her start there. Their close friendship has survived career changes and separate moves to the States. Coddington worked for Calvin Klein for a while, and both Lauren and Klein offered Tilberis jobs while she was editor of British Vogue. Now the designers want her magazine to feature their clothes in its pages. Vogue editor Anna Wintour gave Tilberis her greatest opportunity, handing her the editorship of British Vogue when Wintour left to come to America. Now, with Wintour editor in chief of American Vogue, the former colleagues are competitors.
The press created a faux feud between Tilberis and Wintour, two British expatriates charged with making their magazines indispensable to stylish American women. With Wintour’s chilly demeanor and Tilberis’ ready smile, it was easy to cast them as the bad and good witches of an Oz-like fashion kingdom. In fact, they are neither friends nor enemies, and Tilberis credits Wintour with helping her learn how to edit a magazine when they worked together.
“There is a bitchy side to the fashion business, but if you don’t want to go there, you don’t have to,” she says.
No wonder Tilberis is often described as down to earth. She even admits to occasional bouts of insecurity.
“The most important rule I’ve learned about relationships is not to panic,” she says. “Sometimes you won’t hear from someone for an awfully long time, and you’ll think, ‘What have I done?’ You have to remember that they are probably three times as busy as you are.”
As she rose through the ranks of British Vogue, she and her husband decided he would stay home with their children and concentrate on his art.
“Nobody considered the editor of British Vogue particularly important.” she explains. “I was this nameless person who knew about fashion, but I was never invited to a dinner party because of it.”
In London, the financial, literary, theatrical, fashion and art worlds didn’t mix. When Tilberis and her husband moved to New York in 1992, they were accepted into the city’s cross-professional social elite.
“We were suddenly included among these incredibly gregarious people who never questioned Andrew because he didn’t have a job, and just loved him for the fact that he was an artist,” she says.
It must have seemed a particularly cruel trick of fate when, with a raft of accomplished new acquaintances seeking her company, her magazine attracting attention and winning awards and her family happily settled in a beautiful Upper East Side brownstone owned by Mike Nichols, Tilberis became ill.
“She isn’t one to ask, ‘Why me?’ ” co-author Ball says. “Her attitude is, ‘What do I have to do to fix this?’ Certainly, she’s had moments when she’s cried bitter tears, but her public persona is, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ ”
Had her own experience not taught her that the gods have a strange sense of humor, inexplicably tormenting those they have seem to have favored, her friendship with the Princess of Wales surely did. British Vogue had traditionally documented events in the lives of the royal family. They weren’t held up as any paragons of style, but Diana increasingly became just that, and enjoyed being photographed by British Vogue photographer Demarchelier.
The relationship between the two women was well known enough that Tilberis received many letters of condolence when Diana died. Some media outlets with scant interest in ovarian cancer or a magazine editor booked Tilberis for interviews about “No Time to Die” because she was “Diana’s friend,” then shot volleys of questions about the princess at her.
“That bothered me, especially when it was very unsubtle,” Tilberis admits. “And then, it occurred to me that what Diana is doing, in a kind of long-distance way, is helping women learn about ovarian cancer, and I shouldn’t feel bad about it. Wherever she’s looking down from, she’s probably really pleased. Because the one thing she wanted to do was to save lives and help people to be healthy.”
In a business riddled with outsize egos, Tilberis is a refreshing anomaly.
“It isn’t always about her,” Ball says. “While I was working on this book, I had knee surgery and was in a cast and on crutches, but I didn’t have cancer, or anything. Liz was always really solicitous about my health. She’s great for a good giggle, and thoughtful and concerned about other people.”
Before she got sick, Tilberis was conspicuously unusual in another way. She was a beautiful, 150-pound size 14 at the top of a world that worshiped the model-thin silhouette. Ten days after her first surgery, she arose from bed to find that she’d lost 30 pounds. But any pleasure over being suddenly slender was slow to come.
“I was very frail, and I was very scared,” she remembers. “I looked at myself in the mirror, and I thought I looked disgusting. But as I got through the chemo and began to get better, it began to dawn on me that I needed a new wardrobe. It gave me a really great boost. With cancer, you need to take any positive you can get.”
When her hair grew back after chemotherapy treatments, she kept it short and let it be naturally white or gray (“It changes color, and every time it falls out, it comes back differently”). A leggy size 6, at 5 foot 7, she resembles a wizened Twiggy, an older version of the models she hires. She favors tailored, understated, dark-colored clothes and for a day of appearances in Los Angeles wore low-heeled Manolo Blahnik slingbacks and a charcoal Isaac Mizrahi pantsuit with a sea foam green Prada shell.
The bonus of being modishly thin would be a hollow victory if Tilberis were too sick to do the job she loves.
“I’ve been trained in it since I was 20, and it’s a fascination and an addiction,” she says. “I’m very nasty when I’m bored.”
Since she was diagnosed, she has missed remarkably little work, even if staff meetings had to be held in her hospital room.
“I don’t feel ill,” she says. “I’m tired from time to time, but my assistants say to me, ‘You do a lot. No wonder you’re tired.’ It really has nothing to do with cancer.”
At the Fire and Ice Ball here in December, an event Revlon and other corporate sponsors organize to raise funds for women’s cancer research, Tilberis addressed the black-tie crowd and endorsed denial as a coping mechanism. She depends on an aggressive medical team to manage her health, then turns her attention to family and work. And that is why she keeps her cancer locked in that little black box under the bed.
“It’s there, but it stays away from me.”
