Grace Coddington Gives Inside Look at Vogue in Memoir Roadside Attractions, via Associated Press Grace Coddington, left, and Anna Wintour in "The September Issue." The arrival of Grace Coddington's splashy, dishy, very giftable memoir, "Grace," can be directly traced to "The September Issue," R. J. Cutler's 2009 documentary about the inner workings of Vogue magazine. Although Anna Wintour, the magazine's editor in chief, appears at first to be the main subject, the film is hijacked by the feisty, grousing Ms. Coddington, Vogue's creative director, who is seen fighting hard for her own ideas, reacting bitterly when they are rejected and generally upstaging her boss, coming across as the brains of the operation. Fashion insiders ("Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue") and cat fanciers ("The Catwalk Cats" by Grace Coddington and Didier Malige) already knew Ms. Coddington - not from her two earlier books but from the extreme, hallucinatory beauty of the photo spreads she dreams up, styles and supervises. But in "Grace" Ms. Coddington credits "The September Issue" as "the only reason anyone has ever heard of me." She's being modest of course. One of the film's surprises is that Ms. Coddington, who by her late 60s (she is now 71) had the look of a vengeful wraith, was once a fresh-faced young beauty with a high-profile modeling career. "Grace" contains many pictures of her, from her Welsh girlhood to the London fashion world at its most fab, then on from a career at British Vogue to its American edition. Throughout, her chameleonlike quality is phenomenal. At first she could look like a young Patty Hearst or a young Garbo. She did couture sophistication and 1960s pop futurism with equal ease. She says that she was the model on whom Vidal Sassoon created his famous five-point haircut and that she was drawing doll lashes below her eyes long before Twiggy did it. Her appearance changed most dramatically after Eileen Ford, queen arbiter of the modeling world, plucked her full, beautiful eyebrows to give her an ethereal quality - and to eradicate a natural look that never came back. "Grace" is more than a companion piece to all these pictures. But since Ms. Coddington has "barely read two books in my life that aren't picture books," the text here (on which she collaborated with Michael Roberts) is light and glossy. It is also charmingly forthright, as when she recalls the use of push-up bras and heated hair rollers at the start of her career. "You had these if you were madly up-to-date and avant-garde, which I was," she says. She had many impetuous romances, as well as modeling jobs, yet approached everything with an eye for fashion. "Stripy cotton pajamas" figured in her first sexual affair. Ms. Coddington was working as a waitress when she was asked to model for Norman Parkinson, the fashion photographer she then most admired. She describes her first job with him as an assignment to run through the woods naked and says, "I had a lovely time." Soon she would run with the best-known models and photographers of London's Chelsea elite. Abruptly she mentions the ghastly car accident that severed one of her eyelids. The injury was miraculously repaired, but it sidelined her for a while and pushed her to affect dark and heavy eye makeup. Today, still a provocateur who prefers extremes to the dull middle, she lightens the area around her eye sockets to achieve what she calls "that pale, bald Renaissance look." It's a look that sends a spooky message to the conventional beauty world. Ms. Coddington's work as an editor does not outglam her youthful adventure stories. But it's at the heart of this book, and she presents it with both passion and whimsy. She fills the book with comedic little sketches and handily caricatures many friends and colleagues. Her captions are wittily self-explanatory. Here is a lightly expurgated version of what she writes to Azzedine Alaïa, known for his tightfitting designs: Tell me, Azzedine, does my rear end look big in this? It happens that Mr. Alaïa is also known for a scornful attitude toward Ms. Wintour, just as Ms. Coddington has come to be. So this memoir includes an appreciative chapter about Ms. Coddington's working relationship with Ms. Wintour, about how much Ms. Wintour loves her children, works hard, maintains a steely veneer and so on. Yet while lauding "the creative push and pull of the way Anna and I work together" and loyally voicing contempt for "The Devil Wears Prada," Ms. Coddington gets her digs in too. It's nice that Ms. Wintour has done so much to make Vogue a global brand, Ms. Coddington says. Nevertheless, a little nostalgia for the days when fashion came first doesn't do any harm. One of the best aspects of this book is its appraisal of the styles of major fashion photographers. Ms. Coddington has worked with them all. She bristles at diva behavior (Annie Leibovitz's perfectionism is mentioned), is astounded by photographers who don't travel outside their comfort zones and is amused by the crazy demands that photo shoots can create. One of her funnier stories involves Puff Daddy's wanting to appear smack in the middle of a Leibovitz two-page spread despite being told he would disappear into the fold of the magazine. Another, about the Lewis Carroll fantasy shoot that is one of Ms. Coddington's greatest triumphs, tells of Tom Ford's arriving, impeccably dressed, to play the White Rabbit. But the photo would depict him going down the rabbit hole. To his surprise Mr. Ford found himself upside down against a slope of black velvet. So he asked the ever-resourceful Grace to keep his necktie out of his face and to keep too much sock from showing.