Grace Coddington memoir exclusive extract: the later years Here, Grace Coddington, the brilliant creative director of US Vogue, demystifies her relationship with her boss, Anna Wintour, and relates some absolutely fabulous anecdotes. I am often heard grumbling about Anna Wintour. For instance, at the end of a fashion meeting at American Vogue in which one of my cherished ideas is arbitrarily dropped. Or if I'm required to shoot a difficult celebrity I'm not especially fond of. Or if I'm disallowed from shooting a model I mannered in that arty Italian Vogue way. Funnily enough, I had no idea how cantankerous and argumentative I can seem until I saw myself in the film The September Issue . Small surprise that, in the past, Anna has said I am the only person in fashion who can actually grind her down. As the nuns who wrote my school report when I was 14 put it, 'Grace has a very nice way of getting her own will.' READ: Behind the scenes on The September Issue I worked with Anna in London when she was editor of Vogue in the mid 1980s, and was hired to start with her when she took over American Vogue in 1988, but I remember her from way, way back in the early 1970s, when we were both working in London: I was at Vogue and she was a junior fashion editor at Harpers & Queen . We didn't communicate much, if ever. She wore layer upon layer of oversized baggy knitwear by the Scottish designer Bill Gibb and many other layered knitwear pieces by the fashionable Italian label Missoni. I don't remember her face so well because she seemed to be constantly hiding it behind layers of hair, too. I remained at Vogue until 1986; meanwhile Anna moved to America in the mid-1970s, working first at Harper's Bazaar and later New York magazine . I would run into her over the years, and she was always very nice to me, although still with that shy little habit of ducking down behind her fringe. Then one day when I was over in New York, I received a call from the child psychiatrist Dr David Shaffer, an old London friend who had relocated to Greenwich Village. He said to me, 'I'd really like you to meet my new girlfriend.' I joined him at the Algonquin to find him with Anna, who by then was working at New York and seemed far less shy. '[Alex] Liberman [the right-hand man to Condé Nast's owner, Si Newhouse] likes her very much and wants to give her this job with a new title - creative director of Vogue,' David said. 'I think it's great,' I said, because it seemed to me at this point in the early 1980s that American Vogue had become, in contrast to British Vogue , very bland. WATCH: Anna Wintour talks to the Telegraph David once said to me, 'The great thing about Anna is she doesn't care whether people like her or not.' I'm not so sure if this is true, but she never seems to falter when criticised. I care whether anyone - from the mailman to the dry cleaner - likes me. Maybe that is my weakness. But not Anna's. She does, however, care very, very much about her children. If one of them comes on the phone, I've watched her melt, which is not something you very often see with Anna. More and more over the years, especially in public after Anna became American Vogue 's editor in chief, I've come to see her as the possessor of an almost Margaret Thatcher-like, straight-faced control. One summer on her way into a Paris fashion show, for example, after being pelted with some gooey substance by the animal-rights people who are always lying in wait, she disappeared backstage, rearranged herself, had her make-up redone, and was still one of the earlier arrivals to take her seat. READ: Grace Coddington collaborates with Balenciaga And when the outrageous Alexander McQueen unveiled his new collection in New York one year, she kept her composure despite his show's deliberately provocative finale. At the time the fashion world was titillated by McQueen's design for 'bumsters' - trousers that barely reached the crotch in the front and hardly covered half the a-. One particularly mischievous model, Dan Macmillan (the great-grandson of a former British prime minister), was wearing them in the show's finale, which found him directly facing Anna in her front-row seat. McQueen stepped on to the catwalk to take his bow, and the entire cast turned to bow back at him. At which point the boy was literally mooning Anna right in the face. And she, unruffled behind her dark glasses, simply stared back. Fashion magazines have totally changed in my lifetime. If someone like Madonna is a huge success as the cover story of the November issue, next time around there must be someone or something bigger. In the end I think Anna gave up on my styling covers since I'm not good with famous people. We used to use the occasional model, but the sales difference was so marked between them and celebrities that it's now 100 per cent pop and movie stars. READ: Kate Upton scores second Vogue shoot Fashion is just a part of what the magazine stands for today, which may be hard on old-timers like myself but is definitely the modern way. I'm grateful to have lived through the 10 years or so I did at American Vogue when fashion was the most important element. Since then Anna has broadened our scope momentously. Vogue now incorporates the worlds of art, business, technology, travel, food, celebrity and politics. And this is all largely due to her vision. It was Anna's decision, for instance, the moment Hollywood talk turned to Zoolander , the comedy film in which Ben Stiller plays a knuckleheaded male model, that he should be taken to Paris and shot by Annie Leibovitz for a couture story. I have to say, I hated the idea, not merely because I respect Paris couture for its purity and exquisite workmanship but because an advance screening of the film revealed it to be a crass and truly mind-numbing experience. I think it was decided upon, really, because Anna had a crush on Ben. She gets these occasional crushes - Ben, Puff Daddy, Roger Federer. Annie wanted Ben wearing clothes resembling his costumes from the film, which were so incredibly vulgar and nasty that I had to put my foot down and say how much better he would look in a dark suit. Even then I had reservations about the whole project. So when it came to choosing the models, I secretly went for the tallest ones around, girls like Stella Tennant, Oluchi and Jacquetta Wheeler, beanpoles who would effectively show up his short stature. READ: Grace Coddington bags a seven figure deal for her memoirs Annie then became obsessed with getting the tiny actor into a tiny pair of swimming-trunks in order to spoof a Helmut Newton photograph. He refused. She tried again. He ever so reluctantly agreed to wear them. Overall, the end results, thanks to Anna's justified insistence on Ben, were, I have to admit, quite hilarious. Annie's wittiest decision was to reference key couture shoots of the past, even paying homage to the famous 1963 series by the American photographer Melvin Sokolsky, who suspended his models in strange futuristic plastic bubbles over the Seine and above the cobbled streets of Paris. Ben Stiller's frozen, panic-ridden expression, trapped inside his duplicate bubble, was priceless. He was a really good sport throughout for allowing us mercilessly to poke fun at him. In 2005 I found myself working with Madonna. She was then married to Guy Ritchie and enjoying a very English life between homes in London and the countryside. The British tabloids had embraced her to the point of fondly calling her 'Madge', as her current husband did, and expending miles of newsprint commenting favourably on how she wore tweeds, had taken up riding, and had been seen several times at the local pub. All the dismissive sneering concerning her involvement with Jewish Kabbalah had been replaced by approving articles on how its influence had turned her into a much more agreeable person with a plausible English accent. Our photographs were to take place at her country house, Ashcombe, once upon a time the estate of the multifaceted English artist/photographer/writer Cecil Beaton, whom I had worked with towards the end of his life. Our photographer was to be Tim Walker, a nostalgia-loving character whose body of work looked like he had conjured all his images from children's fairytales. Tim had travelled down early to Wiltshire to discuss all the ideas. He and Madonna met in the pub, and when I and the rest of the crew arrived a day later he ecstatically reported that she had embraced every detail he had suggested. All of which surprised me, as some of his ideas were pretty extreme. Our first shot of her was in the drawing-room wearing a pair of jodhpurs, and that went well enough. Then came a picture in which she was supposed to wear a dress with a very full skirt. She balked at it, saying, 'This makes me look like a 1950s débutante,' which, of course, was pretty much the effect we were after. Things went comparatively smoothly with our next two set-ups. We took a picture of her in bed reading the newspapers with her children. Next we took a shot of Madonna out riding with Guy. Galloping back, she couldn't have failed to notice that we had started to turn all her sheep pretty shades of pastel in readiness for a picture later on. Then she started to grow testy. 'I'm going to do the picture of her in the martini glass next,' Tim told me enthusiastically while Madonna was upstairs changing. I do remember asking if he was absolutely certain she had agreed to this. 'Oh yes,' he said as she came down, looked out the window, and saw, on her lawn, an enormous martini glass with a giant cherry in it and a ladder propped at its side waiting to carry her up. 'I'm not doing that. No way,' said Madonna grimly. She firmly vetoed the image, and when he suggested another that involved her wearing a hat that looked like a cream cake, she angrily refused that, too. Finally, she calmed down a little when we set up a photograph reminiscent of a Bruce Weber portrait of Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, feeding the chickens on her country estate at Chatsworth. But after that, even though there was another day to go, the mood was far too negative and the session was, for all intents and purposes, over. Sadly, the extraordinary dress - a huge crinoline that John Galliano had made specially for the shoot - was caught in the crossfire. She looked so gloomy in it that the photograph was never used. Despite all the problems, however, we ended up with a really charming evocation of Madonna's English interlude. Every so often I have lunch with Anna at her request. These days, though, I get worked up beforehand, usually thinking, 'This is finally the time she'll say, "You're getting on a bit. You're looking tired. I think you should take it easy,"' as a prelude to gently asking me to step down. In fact, the last time we went out, I dared to say, 'I thought you were going to tell me to leave.' At which point Anna laughed and said, 'No, as long as I'm here, you will be, too.' I never had an actual birthday party when I was a child. As with any other social happening, it was the sort of thing that made me far too nervous. Whatever anxieties I felt at seven, however, were magnified tenfold when I reached 70 and people started to mention the possibility of a large-scale birthday celebration. As the day approached in spring 2011, Anna said, 'Your big birthday is coming up, and I'm going to give you a party. Have it where you like and however many people you like. Funny how she likes celebrating other people's birthdays but ignores her own. The party was, in fact, a roaring success. Anna made a speech. 'Grace,' she jokingly began, 'this is going to be your favourite part of the evening, when we all get to talk about you.' Then she continued, 'To me you will always be the heart and soul of the magazine, its guardian at the gate, its beacon of excellence. For about as long as I have edited Vogue, one person, Grace Coddington, has made me excited to come into the office every day... I was speechless. This from a woman who normally never pays you a compliment to your face! How could I possibly respond? I could click my heels in the air or turn cartwheels, but my regular sessions of Pilates were not quite that effective. I could laugh and cry at the thought that so many painstaking years of toil were held in such esteem. I could shimmy across the dance floor knowing I still had some life in me yet. While these thoughts were running through my head, I looked at the many photographers, hairstylists, make-up artists, art directors, fellow editors and ex-assistants around me, and realised I don't really have a single friend who isn't in the business. Which is perfectly fine by me. So am I still that completely fascinated by fashion? In many ways, yes. Having worked in it for over 50 years, I gratefully accept that my world has expanded with time, not contracted. For me, one of the most important aspects of my work is to give people something to dream about, just as I used to dream all those years ago as a child looking at beautiful photographs. I still weave dreams, finding inspiration wherever I can and looking for romance in the real world. Extracted from Grace: A Memoir, by Grace Coddington (Chatto & Windus, £25), which is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk) at £23 plus £1.35 p&p