Shirley Lord, an English-born journalist whose early success on Fleet Street in London led to major jobs at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Helena Rubinstein as well as being sidelined as a best-selling author of steamy novels, and whose high-dose liveliness and marriage in 1987 to AM Rosenthal, former executive editor of The New York Times, made her a society fixture and tabloid target, died on June 10. He died in Manhattan. She was 93 years old.
His son Richard Lord said that his death in a nursing home was due to complications of a stroke.
Ms. Lord served several stints at Vogue, first as the magazine’s beauty editor — arbiter of trends in makeup, hairstyles, skin-care breakthroughs and exercise routines — from 1973 to 1975, and then as beauty director, from the 1980s to the late 1990s. After leaving to join dot-com start-up iBeauty, she returned as a contributing editor.
She was therefore one of the most consequential figures in the beauty industry, “contributing to the field of beauty-writing at a time when the industry was undergoing a seismic shift from a magazine and commercial backwater to a billion-dollar giant,” cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms said in a 2021 interview with Ms. Lord on the “Sighs and Whispers Podcast.”
Ms. Lord was an early tub thumper for the mind-body-health-beauty connection, her former Vogue colleague William Norwich said in a tribute on the magazine’s website. But she also knew well that skin-deep beauty was sometimes much deeper.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Norwich recalled, Ms. Lorde burst into the office of Anna Wintour, the magazine’s famous editor-in-chief, who reportedly had a special thing: a research paper confirming that Renova, a tretinoin cream derived from vitamin A, reduced wrinkles in rats — and, like day after night, would do the same for people.
Then Ms. Lord presented her boss with irrefutable evidence: a cage whose occupant, a fearsome rodent, had apparently been revived by this new elixir.
“Shirley was so enthusiastic that we arranged a shoot with Irving Penn on the spot,” Ms. Wintour wrote in an email.
“She was a major force in the beauty industry,” Ms. Wintour said in Vogue’s tribute. “The focus of his journalism was always on medical and scientific developments in beauty. Industry veterans sought him out, and valued his research and his ideas about where the industry was going and where it needed to go.”
In fact, many people sought out Ms. Lord. He had a socially advantageous perch, a bulging Rolodex, and a crowded calendar.
“You know,” he said on the “Sighs and Whispers Podcast,” “being an editor at a big magazine is a very open opportunity. You meet a lot of people, people who want to be at the magazine.”
Shirley Florence Stringer was born on August 28, 1932, the only child in a working-class family in the East End of London. “I didn’t want to be known as a Cockney, which I was,” Ms Lord said in 2021. “I was the Cockney Sparrow.”
His father, Francis James Charles Stringer, was a locksmith’s salesman; His mother, Mabel (Williamson) Stringer, managed the household.
Ms. Lord later recalled, “I was very blessed, because I always knew what I wanted to do.” At the age of 11, she wrote herself a letter, which was opened 10 years later – although she opened it the very next day – in which she confessed that she wanted to be a writer, beginning with “Author”.
She left school in 1948 at the age of 16 and joined the typing pool of the reader services department of a tabloid, The Daily Mirror, and waited expectantly for a summons from above. If a lower-level executive at the newspaper called in sick, someone from the pool would step in, he said, “and it was my idea of heaven to go where the newspaper was.”
After a year in the typing pool, she was sent to Reveille, a weekly tabloid covering entertainment and the royal family, to replace the managing editor’s ill secretary, and was kept on even after the associate returned to work. It was here that his first works were published.
She was later hired as assistant fiction editor at the weekly lifestyle magazine Woman’s Own and then worked for other women’s lifestyle magazines and newspapers before landing on the staff of The Evening Standard (now The London Standard) in the late 1950s, at the behest of the editor of her future boss, Ms. Wintour’s father, Charles Wintour.
There, he wrote stories on such topics as cocktail party conversation, the surest way to ruin a romance, and the stiff upper lip situation. “I was in my element,” she said.
He also profiled celebrities – among them, Cyril Lord, a self-made textile industrialist known in Britain as the Carpet King. Although Mr. Lord had allotted 20 minutes for the interview, he became infatuated with his interlocutor and the conversation lasted for hours. Although both were married and had children – and despite a 26-year age difference – the two married in 1960 after divorcing their spouses.
They had a son, an estate in Northern Ireland and celebrity-filled weekend celebrations, but at the insistence of Mr Lord, who had fallen into financial difficulties, the couple relocated to Barbados in 1968 to avoid Britain’s high taxes. This led to the tragic departure of the work-obsessed Ms Lord from the London newspaper world.
Within a short time, she fell in love with Caribbean-based homebuilder and real estate developer David Anderson and left Mr. Lord. In the early 1970s, she moved to New York, where she worked for a time as a beauty editor at Harper’s Bazaar. She left Vogue in 1973, married Mr. Anderson in 1974 (he died in 1983), and began working as a vice president at the cosmetics company Helena Rubinstein in 1975.
“I was five years older, I guess you could say, in the real world,” Ms Lord said in 2021.
Ms. Lord put all that learning to good use. Three of her five novels were based on the beauty industry: “One of My Very Best Friends” (1985), which the Times described as “a glossy, gossipy tale,” “Faces” (1989) and “My Sister’s Keeper” (1993). He also published a memoir, “Small Beer at Claridge’s” (1968).
Ms. Lord, whom W Magazine labeled “that great marzipan creation,” began dating Mr. Rosenthal in 1985 after an introduction during lunch at the Four Seasons, a matchmaking plan reportedly hatched by their friends Barbara Walters and the opera diva Beverly Sills.
Guests at the couple’s wedding in June 1987 included future President Trump and his first wife, Ivana Trump; writers Renata Adler and Gay Talese; Nancy Kissinger, philanthropist and wife of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Edward I. Koch, then mayor of New York City; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York; feminist leader Gloria Steinem; and Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown and her film producer husband David Brown. Ms. Walters and Ms. Sills were among the bridesmaids.
Mr. Rosenthal died in 2006. Ms Lord married her longtime partner, Peter Haywood, an artist, in 2020. In addition to her son Richard, she is survived by another son, Mark Hussey, from an early marriage to James Hussey, a design engineer, which ended in divorce in 1959; and four grandchildren.
“My mother was inspired from a young age,” Richard Lord said in an interview. “She achieved what she wanted to achieve. When she set her mind to something, she accomplished it. Such was the strength of character Very Pronounced.”
