9.

Anybody succeeding the great, flamboyant Willie Landels as Editor-in-Chief risked seeming callow by comparison, and my own appointment was far from a shoo-in. For a start, I was twenty-nine, less than half Willie’s age, and Harpers & Queen regarded as the stately flagship of Hearst, their classiest publication. The case for appointing a young, single man, who had never edited anything before, was not overwhelming, and for several weeks rival candidates presented themselves at Terry’s door, in whose gift as Managing Director the coveted prize resided.

It was helpful (to me) that Willie’s phone box resignation had been inconclusive and faintly embarrassing and so prevented a full and orderly search for a successor, since he had left no official resignation letter. Less helpful was the conviction of Betty Kenward, the magazine’s social diarist, that I was ‘far too young by at least twenty years, it would be perfectly ridiculous’. She had Terry’s ear, and her disapproval counted.

But eventually, as weeks became months and Willie failed to surface, it became necessary to fill the void. Terry declared he would take a risk on me. It was good of him, and I am forever grateful. He added, somewhat forebodingly, ‘I have to tell you, Nicholas, that Mrs Kenward has serious reservations about your appointment. It must be your first task to reassure her. This evening I am escorting her to a Grosvenor Furs fashion show at Harrods, and I suggest you come along too. I hear some of the fur “antis” may be present, holding a demonstration, which is most unfortunate. Many of them are Communists, you know, with a prejudice against mink coats.’

We arrived at the front door of Harrods to find a vocal band of protestors clustered on the pavement. Several held placards stating ‘Blood on their hands’. It was risky, or brave, of Mrs Kenward to have chosen to wear her ankle-length mink in a show of support for our 36-pages-a-year fur advertiser.

As we stepped from Terry’s Daimler, the booing and fist-shaking intensified. ‘Would you wear human skin on your back, bitch?’ jeered one.

‘Nicholas, we must protect Mrs Kenward,’ Terry said. ‘I will cover her right side, you cover her left.’

Mrs K, with velvet bow in hair and mink coat swinging, glided towards the door, oblivious to the baying throng. Inside, in the Harrods fur department, a miniature ice-skating rink had been erected, upon which a dozen models glided to and fro on skates, each one in a mink jacket, or else fox pelt, ocelot or jackal. The models in no way resembled the cool, edgy supermodels found on designer catwalks, these were genteel crooked-fingered mannequins with beehive hairdos.

Once we had paid due homage to the owners of Grosvenor Furs, Terry drew me aside, ‘Nicholas, we have a serious problem. We cannot risk taking Mrs Kenward back past that rabble, she’s too important to the well-being of Harpers & Queen.’

‘Perhaps we could leave by a different door?’

‘That is a very smart idea, Nicholas. I shall discuss it with the Managing Director of Harrods.’

We exited through an underground staff passage, beneath Knightsbridge, where the Daimler was waiting for us, ready and purring.

‘Well done,’ said Terry. ‘Your suggestion came in very handy, Nicholas.’

‘Goodnight,’ said Mrs Kenward tepidly, in the last word she would address to me for several years.

Thus my first day as Editor drew to a close.

I set about hiring a team, one by one, and the cast of characters we assembled largely defined my working life for the coming few years. It was a crack squad. Let me introduce the band: on Feature writing, the witty and poised Miss Nicola Shulman … on the Literature desk, Lady Selena Hastings, distinguished biographer and consort of dukes … Features Editor, the substantial and always well connected Ms Meredith ‘Minky’ Etherington-Smith … on Interior Decorating, Notting Hill’s Miss Caroline Clifton-Mogg … Shopping Editor, please show your appreciation for Miss Sue Crewe … on the Arts beat, give it up for Mr Rupert Christiansen … star restaurant reviewer, man about town and primetime television face, Mr Loyd Grossman …

I had inherited, as Managing Editor, Uta Thompson, who became a loyal supporter, as well as a particularly clever Chief Copy Editor, Anthony Gardner, around whom a posse of sharp and punning headline writers coalesced, including the author Ysenda Maxtone Graham. In the fashion room was Liz Smith, procured from the Evening Standard, who soon gave way to the foppish post-Raphaelite Hamish Bowles as Fashion Director. Andrew Solomon from New York was Office Intern, Raffaella Barker the Features Assistant, Julia Elliot my soignée PA.

That was the first wave. It took a little time to upgrade the Travel Editor, who was a curious Frenchman named René Lecler, author of an undiscriminating guide book, René Lecler’s 300 Best Hotels in the World. He had earned the right, through decades of service, to be regarded as indispensable, though he was a terrible writer and freeloader. As a copy editor, I had frequently fretted over his toe-curling articles. One began: ‘I think it was the gnarled old hands of the orange seller in the market place which made me fall in love with Marrakech all over again.’ Eventually he retired to Turkish Cyprus to a bungalow with a corrugated tin roof, where the heat got to him; he wrote me a letter, out of nowhere, saying that he’d been completely cleared by the Cypriot police of any involvement in the death by suffocation of his wife, and anything I’d heard to the contrary should be disregarded. He was eventually spotted strolling down the Old Brompton Road in pyjamas and dressing gown, and had to be rescued by Terry’s chauffeur.

The new Travel Editor was another legend, John Hatt, hitherto a distinguished publisher of vintage travel books. A man of abrupt charm and intensely held opinions, he was arguably an eccentric choice of travel guru for a glossy magazine. He held a deep-seated prejudice against all the Caribbean islands and most luxury hotels frequented by our readers, and an aversion to piped music (‘the dreaded muzak’) in hotel restaurants, bars or lifts. Large sections of his articles were devoted to this topic, and his writing was superbly trenchant. Terry Mansfield regularly shared with me his reservations about John; he had preferred René Lecler ‘who had special relationships with the PRs, Nicholas’.

The Harpers & Queen of the late eighties was fat with advertising, editorially coherent and occupying a fertile space between Vogue on one side and Tatler on the other. Magazine DNAs are complex entities, built up over many years, ultimately defined by the expectations of readers and non-readers alike, but accruing competences in related fields; so Harpers & Queen was, at its core, a luxury and social magazine, but with acknowledged competence in fashion and beauty, and a parallel proficiency in literary and intellectual matters. The trick was to keep all these disparate audiences in play at once: the rich-bitch Knightsbridge lady who lunched, the Fulham and Parsons Green divorcée, country wives (for whom Harpers was their last umbilical link to metropolitan life), boho literati, hard-core fashionistas, metrosexual cool-cats. Different groups found in its pages entirely different pleasures, focusing on the bits which interested them and quickly flicking over the rest. One reader (let us say a 65-year-old Gloucestershire grandee) scans Mrs Kenward’s Jennifer’s Diary, glances at the decorating pages, horoscope and a profile of a racehorse trainer, and feels well served. Another (27-year-old Ladbroke Grove singleton) connects with a Peter York style essay, Loyd Grossman bar review, modern furniture shoot and the fashion. It was the tension between all these elements which brought character and success to the title.

We spent much time compiling composite articles with social punch but geographical reach. All magazines devote disproportionate space to London stories, since these tend to be shinier, more glamorous and happen underneath editorial noses. But half the readers of Harpers & Queen lived outside the M25 beltway. So we invented pieces with non-London strands: the 100 smartest/most beautiful women in Britain, the 100 most comfortable spare bedrooms, the 100 best-connected people (the barber at White’s was No. 1, I think), Britain’s 25 greatest life enhancers, the 50 coldest houses in Britain (with freezing rooms photographed by Christopher Simon Sykes, all with one-bar electric fires), Britain’s most alluring teenagers and young mothers (two separate articles, not girls who were both). These were deemed ‘heartland’ pieces, reflecting the world of core readers back upon themselves. It is striking how little celebrity journalism we published – no Hollywood front covers, no PR-driven interviews with LA film stars, no pre-approved questions or deals with publicists. All this would come later, of course. For now, we were gloriously uncorrupted.

I learnt it was the most unexpected articles which caused most offence. The 100 most comfortable spare bedrooms in Britain was one such. It consisted of twenty-five lavishly photographed bedrooms of the sort we admired (four-poster beds, Roberts radios, sofas, Turner watercolours, trouser presses, et cetera), twenty-five illustrated with smaller photographs, and then a listing of the best of the rest, with a paragraph of description about each. One of these belonged to Lady Young of Graffham, wife of the Trade and Industry Secretary of State, David Young. She sent a blistering letter of complaint, citing unforgivable inaccuracies. ‘The bedroom wallpaper is not red with white stripes; the wallpaper is in fact white with red stripes. Furthermore, it is not a “spare bedroom” as you state, it is a “guest bedroom”.’ I obtained a sample of the disputed wallpaper and, as it turned out, the red and white stripes were identical width. Nevertheless, we published a fulsome apology, which entertained all those who spotted it.

Another complaint arrived from the wife of a business tycoon. ‘My attention has been drawn to a photograph in your current issue …’ it began. The expression ‘my attention has been drawn to’ is a sure sign you’ve got a pompous bore on your hands. ‘It shows my two sons, but they have been incorrectly captioned. Michael is miscaptioned as Robert, and Robert as Michael. Please inform me, as a matter of urgency, what steps you will be taking to correct this. And check your facts in future!!’

I turned to the page in question. The boys were identical twins. Presumably their mother could tell them apart, but no one else on earth. We republished the offending photograph and apologized for any embarrassment caused; it looked and read like a Private Eye spoof.

The life of an eighties magazine Editor followed an eternal routine of features meetings, sucking up to advertisers, lunches with contributors and, inter alia, attending fashion weeks twice a year in the various fashion capitals. Exactly like life in a medieval or Tudor court, there was a well-understood concept of turning-up and paying homage. If Giorgio Armani or Gianni Versace was in town opening a new store, you turned up; if Estée Lauder or L’Oréal opened a counter for a sub-brand at Harvey Nichols, or Cartier a new concession in Selfridges, you turned up; if Louis Vuitton opens a branch in Sloane Street, there you are again. It is the contemporary equivalent of kissing the ring, bending the knee, respecting the pasha. You needn’t stay long: just time enough to bow low and get photographed. It was a rare evening when I didn’t drop in – or ‘fly by’ – at two or three of these parties.

When the stationery brand Smythson launched a new shop on Bond Street it was, quite literally, a case of going to the opening of an envelope. But all this turning up had a purpose: to keep the magazine front of mind, and the advertising dollars flowing.

Although my days were largely devoted to editorial matters, the business side of publishing was never far away; on glossy magazines, the Chinese wall between editorial and advertising is less the Great Wall of China than a clackety bead curtain or rice paper screen. The Publisher (commercial chief) of Harpers & Queen, Stephen Quinn, was by now a close friend; a charming and mesmerizing huckster, one of the few Publishers in the business who read every word of every issue, to better project the brand. He had arrived alone in England aged sixteen, on a night ferry from Dublin, and never lost the passion which first drew him to publishing. He took it as a personal insult if any advertiser had the temerity to reduce their spend; a visit from Stephen at full throttle sorted them out.

Stephen and Terry were polar opposites: the Irish socialist firebrand in the Blazes Boylan tradition, fond of a drink, idealistic, always ready to boil over, versus the controlling but eager Essex CEO with establishment ambitions. Terry had begun his working life as a Redcoat at Butlins and still had something of the holiday camp cheerleader about him, beneath a driving energy and studied gravitas.

What they had in common was a deep, almost pathological competitiveness with Condé Nast, which was seen as the dark side of publishing: our reviled rivals. Anna Wintour had recently arrived at British Condé Nast for a brief stint as Editor of British Vogue, and this only ratcheted up the competition still further. I used to have lunch with Anna from time to time at Cecconi’s, in the days before she began wearing dark glasses at all times, and you could look into the whites of her eyes and assess the competition. She was very determined. And easier around men than around women.

The two rivals – Hearst and Condé Nast – had plenty in common, but were diverging in ambition. Hearst was named for its founder, William Randolph Hearst, the punchy American businessman and newspaper tycoon, inspiration for Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane. His famous Californian fantasy mansion, Hearst Castle, stood on a hill above the Pacific Ocean at San Simeon. Condé Nast was founded by the French-American publisher Condé Montrose Nast, with the purchase of Vogue in 1909. It was bought in 1959 by the newspaper billionaire Samuel Newhouse (father of Si Newhouse) as an anniversary present for his wife, Mitzi, who was an enthusiastic Vogue reader.

By the time I entered the gloss machine, Hearst was consolidating its grip on the high-circulation middle market, while Condé Nast’s acquisitions and launches were all in the luxury market, the kings of high gloss.

It was the conviction at Hearst that Condé Nast people were vainer, shallower and more arrogant than Hearst people. Perhaps, at some primal level, we were haunted by the possibility that they were also smarter and more glamorous?

‘God doesn’t read Vogue,’ was Terry’s daily catchphrase. ‘Never forget that, Nicholas: God isn’t a Vogue reader.’

Whether Terry was correct is another matter. Nobody knows whether or not they take glossy magazines in the afterlife but, if they do, it is highly probable that God reads Vogue.

The photographers working for Harpers & Queen during this period were stellar: Hamish Bowles had brought Mario Testino to the magazine, and all his early shoots were published there. Ellen von Unwerth, Paolo Roversi, Andrew Macpherson and Claus Wickrath were regulars. As the fashion pages became cooler and edgier, the Jennifer’s Diary social pages remained gloriously unbothered, proceeding in their stately way. Despite being a friend of my maternal grandmother, Mrs Kenward succeeded in barely exchanging a word with me for four years; she lurked inside a tiny cabin, with a porthole window in the door, veiled against snoopers by a lace curtain. Inside, she compiled her twelve-page column with its lists of guests and idiosyncratic punctuation. Untitled guests were followed by a comma (‘Mr and Mrs John Smith, Mr and Mrs Philip Jones,’ et cetera). Titled guests got a semi-colon (‘The Earl of Margadale; The Marquess and Marchioness of Pershore;’) – the semi-colon signalling superior status, and allowing the reader to draw breath in wonder. Members of the royal family merited a full stop (‘Her Majesty the Queen. The Prince of Wales.’). Jennifer’s Diary was the only section of the magazine where puns were expressly forbidden, society being a serious business.

Elsewhere, puns proliferated and were often literary in inspiration. A fashion shoot of mothers dressed in couture, saying goodnight to their children, was titled, after Philip Larkin, ‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad.’

The Harpers & Queen years were endlessly fun, and it felt inconceivable that I would ever leave.

Least of all to join the dreaded Antichrist, Condé Nast.