Shirley Lord, Beauty Editor, Novelist and Society Fixture, Dies at 93

Shirley Lord, an English-born journalist whose early success on Fleet Street in London led to prominent jobs at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Helena Rubinstein, along with a sideline as the best-selling author of steamy novels, and whose high-dose vivacity and 1987 marriage to A.M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of The New York Times, made her a society fixture and tabloid target, died on June 10 in Manhattan. She was 93.

Her death, at a nursing home, was from complications of a stroke, her son Richard Lord said.

Ms. Lord had several stints at Vogue, first as the magazine’s beauty editor — the arbiter of trends in makeup, hairstyles, skin-care breakthroughs and exercise routines — from 1973 to 1975, and then as the beauty director, from 1980 to the late 1990s. After leaving to join the 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 the multibillion-dollar behemoth it is now,” the cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms said in an interview with Ms. Lord in 2021 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 was also well aware that skin-deep beauty was sometimes plenty deep enough.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Norwich recalled, Ms. Lord burst into the office of the magazine’s famously formidable editor in chief, Anna Wintour, with what was reportedly an exclusive: a research paper confirming that Renova, a tretinoin cream derived from vitamin A, reduced wrinkles in mice — and would, as night followed day, do the same for people.

Then Ms. Lord offered her boss incontrovertible proof: a cage whose occupant, a frisky rodent, had been conspicuously rejuvenated by this new elixir.

“Such was Shirley’s enthusiasm that we arranged a shoot with Irving Penn on the spot,” Ms. Wintour wrote in an email.

“She was a great force in the beauty industry,” Ms. Wintour added in Vogue’s tribute. “The focus of her journalism was always the medical and scientific developments of beauty. Industry greats sought her out, and valued her research and her thoughts about where the industry was headed and where it needed to go.”

Actually, many people sought out Ms. Lord. She had a socially advantageous perch, a bulging Rolodex and a crowded calendar.

“You know,” she said on “Sighs and Whispers Podcast,” “being an editor at one of the big magazines is a very sort of open-sesame opportunity. You meet tons of people, people who want to be in the magazine.”

Shirley Florence Stringer was born on Aug. 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 a Cockney sparrow.”

Her father, Francis James Charles Stringer, was a salesman for a locksmith; her mother, Mabel (Williamson) Stringer, managed the household.

“I was very blessed, because I always knew what I wanted to do,” Ms. Lord later recalled. At 11, she wrote herself a letter, to be opened 10 years later — though she unsealed it the very next day — in which she confessed that she wanted to be an author, spelled “auther.”

She left school in 1948, at 16, to join the typing pool of the readers’ services department at The Daily Mirror, a tabloid, and waited hopefully for a summons from above. If a low-level functionary at the newspaper called in sick, someone from the pool would fill in, she said, “and it was my idea of heaven to go where the newspaper was.”

After a year in the typing pool, she was dispatched to Reveille, a weekly tabloid that covered entertainment and the royal family, to fill in for the ailing secretary of the managing editor, and was kept on after the aide returned to work. It was there that her first pieces were published.

She was subsequently hired as the assistant fiction editor at the weekly lifestyle magazine Woman’s Own and then worked for an assortment of other women’s lifestyle magazines and newspapers before landing, in the late 1950s, on the staff of The Evening Standard (now The London Standard) at the behest of its editor, Charles Wintour, the father of her future boss Ms. Wintour.

There, she wrote stories on such topics as cocktail party chatter, the sure way to ruin a romance and the status of the stiff upper lip. “I was in my element,” she said.

She also profiled celebrities — among them, Cyril Lord, a self-made textile magnate known in Britain as the Carpet King. Though Mr. Lord had allotted 20 minutes for the interview, he was smitten with his interlocutor, and the conversation went on for hours. Although both were married and had children — and despite a 26-year age gap — the two married in 1960, after divorcing their spouses.

They had a son, an estate in Northern Ireland and celebrity-filled weekend gatherings, but at the insistence of Mr. Lord, who had run into financial difficulties, the couple relocated to Barbados in 1968 to avoid Britain’s high taxes. That put the work-obsessed Ms. Lord at a very unhappy remove from the London newspaper world.

In short order, she fell in love with David Anderson, a Caribbean-based homebuilder and real estate developer, and left Mr. Lord. By the early 1970s, she had moved to New York, where she worked for a time as the beauty editor at Harper’s Bazaar. She decamped for Vogue in 1973, married Mr. Anderson in 1974 (he died in 1983), and in 1975 began a tour of duty as a vice president at the cosmetics company Helena Rubinstein.

“I was five years, I suppose you could say, in the real world,” Ms. Lord said in 2021. “I was certainly a decision maker about products in development. Before that time, I didn’t even know what a profit-and-loss statement was. It wasn’t my mind-set at all, but I learned a lot and traveled all over the world.”

Ms. Lord made good use of all that learning. Three of her five novels were set in the beauty industry: “One of My Very Best Friends” (1985), which The Times described as “a glittery, gossipy tale,” “Faces” (1989) and “My Sister’s Keeper” (1993). She also published a memoir, “Small Beer at Claridge’s” (1968).

Ms. Lord, whom W Magazine had labeled “that great marzipan creation,” began dating Mr. Rosenthal in 1985, after an introduction during the lunch service at the Four Seasons, a matchmaking scheme reportedly cooked up by her friends Barbara Walters and the opera diva Beverly Sills.

Guests at the couple’s wedding in June 1987 included the future President Trump and his first wife, Ivana Trump; the writers Renata Adler and Gay Talese; Nancy Kissinger, the philanthropist and wife of the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Edward I. Koch, then mayor of New York City; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York; the feminist leader Gloria Steinem; and Helen Gurley Brown, the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, and her movie producer husband, David Brown. Ms. Walters and Ms. Sills were among the bridesmaids.

Mr. Rosenthal died in 2006. Ms. Lord married her longtime companion, Peter Heywood, an artist, in 2020. In addition to her son Richard, he survives her, along with another son, Mark Hussey, from an early marriage to James Hussey, a design engineer, that ended in divorce in 1959; and four grandchildren.

“My mum was driven from a young age,” Richard Lord said in an interview. “She wanted to achieve what she wanted to achieve. When she put her mind to something, she accomplished it. That strength of character was very pronounced.”