"All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others," wrote Cyril Connolly.

***

Well, I wasn’t going to say more about the R. J. Cutler documentary "The September Issue," but I have to go back on my word to myself. I saw this documentary and think it’s a work of modern art. The film about the inner workings of Vogue magazine is beautiful and dazzling, just as high fashion is. You are sorry when it ends for what it shows you about haute couture, editorial decisions at the top and the army of talents that it takes to put a magazine "up on the wall in storyboards" and then bring it to the public. It’s like a war and it’s quite amazing.

This is what I learned watching this dynamic film. Anna Wintour does not come off as an ogre, at least not in my view. But the film sometimes stuns one as it shows Anna’s comprehension of herself as – not the devil who wears Prada – but an engaged, mystifying, uncertain woman who acts all too certain in her job. She smiles, she laughs and she is much more charming and engaging than her usual public appearances. She is especially interesting discussing how her very bright, well-connected siblings view her job. The camera catches Anna with wrinkles, lines and sags, but she remains quite appealing here. She is more real than when encountered in real life.

The famed $50,000 photo shoot that Anna turns down seemed to me to have been a mistake. I found it ravishingly beautiful. And so the real hero of "The September Issue" is Grace Coddington, a fashion veteran with flaming and irrepressible red hair who speaks her mind, tells the truth and urges the viewer to join in her intellectual and cultural rebellion. She emerges as "the" personality of the film; and of Vogue. There are others – André Leon Talley, a huge endearing presence, trying to play tennis and lose weight by Anna Wintour’s direction. Anna’s daughter, Bee Shaffer, is beautiful, frank, outspoken without being outlandish and shows remarkable common sense in a somewhat nonsensical world.

I was sorry when "The September Issue" came to an end. I watched it like a snake watches a bird. It’s simply irresistible. Mr. R. J. Cutler has made his documentary high water mark!

***

Went to a "mah-velous party" as Noel Coward once opined. This was a lunch at the male-dominated Four Seasons Grill hosted by Joni Evans, the petite and powerful CEO of wowOwow.com. This gathering was in honor of Women on the Web’s cohort – the excellent Joan Juliet Buck.


Joan Juliet Buck/Image: © Robin Platzer, Twin Images 

We were saluting Joan for her splendid all-too-brief appearance in the Nora Ephron movie "Julie and Julia," wherein she plays the hard-hearted French woman who runs the Cordon Bleu in Paris and tells Julia Child that she’ll never make it. Joan just happens to actually be French, so when screenwriter-director Nora was casting the Meryl Streep-Amy Adams movie, she thought of her longtime acquaintance, Joan, and called her in to audition.

Nora prefaced this with very few words. She sent Joan Buck a message asking, "Can you act?" Joan smartly answered, "Yes, I can." The rest was history. As Nora tells it, Joan read for three separate parts. In the first she has one line in French, in the second a few more uttered wisdoms á la Francais, and then they just up and gave her the role of the villainous and very mean enemy of Julia Child. It worked so beautifully that Joan Buck is off to the Deauville Film Festival now to represent "Julie and Julia." And in the meantime, she has been to Venezuela to act in another film.