10.

Georgia and I became engaged at the Tollygunge Club in Calcutta on 4 March 1989, my thirty-second birthday. We were sitting by a polo field having an evening drink when I asked her to marry me.

Luckily, she replied, ‘Yes.’

The Tollygunge Club, sometimes called the Tolly, is the Hurlingham of Calcutta, a glorious oasis of green in the heart of the city, with golf course, cricket pitches, polo fields, banyan trees, and run-down colonial bungalows rented to travellers at appealingly cheap rates. It was outside our bungalow, overlooking a polo chukka, that I made my proposal. I must have been feeling confident because I’d trudged round India with a bottle of champagne in my suitcase, rolled up in a shirt, now cooling in the minibar.

In those pre-mobile, pre-social media days, getting engaged risked being an anticlimax. Today, we would have taken an immediate selfie, posted it on Instagram and Facebook, got 300 likes in a couple of hours, and excitedly Skyped our families. In 1989 Calcutta, you had to place a telephone call from the Central Post Office, and wait twenty-four hours for a crackly line.

The manager of the Tolly strode by, a Jimmy Edwards-moustachioed Brit who had stayed on after independence, and become a pioneering tiger conservationist. We told him our thrilling news.

‘You’d better come to dinner with Ann and me on our veranda,’ Bob Wright OBE declared.

When we arrived, he said, ‘Thought it might be a bit dull for you, with just us oldies, so we’ve invited another young English couple. They’re renting the golf caddie’s hut, our cheapest accommodation.’

Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley arrived five minutes later. Not yet famous.

Georgia and I had made half a dozen Indian trips by now, travelling around by Ambassador car, finding nicher and nicher heritage hotels to stay in, the more eccentric the better. The old palaces and guest houses at Ghanerao, Kumbhalgarh and Dungarpur were our favourites. And we discovered Goa, in the days when it was still a series of distinct villages along the coast, with a mile of palm trees between each, not yet coalesced into a continuous ribbon of villas and shops. Calcutta was a favourite city, we had made friends with Indian journalists like Virfn1 and Malavika Sangghvi,fn2 and the Bengal newspaper proprietor Aveek Sarkarfn3 and his wife Rakhi, the art collector. The historian William Dalrymplefn4 and his artist wife Olivia Fraserfn5 were old friends of Georgia’s. Willie was thin as a rake back then, already wearing the flowing, homespun dhotis that would become his style trademark. He and Olivia were living in Delhi on daal and air. When we took them to dinner at the Bukhara restaurant in the Sheraton, Willie ordered every dish on the menu and had the leftovers put in take-home doggie bags, to last the week ahead. The Dalrymples’ encyclopaedic knowledge of India, and Willie’s bumptious enthusiasm, made them favourite guides and hosts; they could turn up anywhere in the country, like Madame Bianca Castafiore, the Milanese Nightingale from Tintin, bringing energy and commotion to the scene.

Georgia and I began collecting Indian miniature paintings. I can now see that our earliest purchases were mostly fakes, but we hang them side by side with genuine ones. I had moved in London to a cottage on the Chelsea-Fulham frontier, in Wandon Road. For this house we started collecting more grown-up pictures. Philip Mould, the art dealer, told me that he’d found, in the basement of Spink & Son, a long-forgotten life-sized portrait of a Maharaja from Bihar, which he thought I’d like. I did. It cost an astronomical £6,000 and I took a deep breath, and went for it.

The next day, the man from Spink’s rang me at my office. ‘I need to tell you we have another interested party for the Maharaja.’

‘But I’ve already bought it, haven’t I?’

‘You have indeed, sir. But I promised this other gentleman I’d pass on the message. He would like to buy it from you for £12,000.’

It was tempting. Very. But I passed.

The next day, he rang again. ‘The gentleman is most persistent, sir. He is now offering you £20,000 for the painting.’

‘God, who on earth is this guy?’

‘I’m afraid I cannot say, sir. But I can tell you he’s an American client.’

‘Banker?’

‘Actually he’s in the fashion business, but I really shouldn’t have told you that.’

‘Not Ralph Lauren? It is, isn’t it? He wants it for his new Bond Street store.’

There was a long silence. ‘Er, it is best if I don’t actually confirm that, sir. But you are perceptive.’

I kept the painting, and love it still. The substitute picture hanging above the stairs in Ralph Lauren’s Old Bond Street store is of a First World War British officer.

I continued researching The Fashion Conspiracy, which grew longer and longer. In a coffee shop in Madras I met a retail sourcing expert from New York who took me to several heart-breaking sweatshops, full of just-turned-teenagers at sewing machines turning out American sportswear brands. And in London, in the labyrinth of streets off Brick Lane, the neighbourhood representative of the National Union of Garment Workers took me on tours of gimcrack workshops I could never have found without his help. Meanwhile, the length of Park Avenue, I interviewed super-rich couture-wearers such as Nan Kempner, Anne Bass and Mercedes Kellogg, who kept fashion’s cash tills ringing. And then in Kuwait City, I finally located a dry cleaner I’d heard whispers about, but which had proved so elusive, where the basement was filled with hundreds of the most expensive beaded couture and designer dresses, dangling forlornly from rails. They had been sent for cleaning by their Middle Eastern owners but never collected, because the new season’s collections had arrived and there was no longer any need for the old ones. It was the elephants’ graveyard of fashion.

The book came out and Harvey Nichols’ boss, John Hoerner,fn6 gave a splashy party for 400 in the department store, and it went to Number One … for one week only, before tumbling back down the charts. It was published in the United States, and Leonard and Evelyn Lauder gave a launch party at Mortimer’s, which they filled with Manhattan’s finest. The American publisher, Harper & Row, sent me on a nine-city book tour from Detroit to Atlanta.

A few days before I set off, I had lunch with the novelist Jeffrey Archer at Le Caprice and was given the following advice, which I have never forgotten.

‘Young man,’ he said, ‘when you have been on as many coast-to-coast book tours as I have, you learn the tricks of the trade. Whenever I arrive at any American radio station, I say, “I assume you haven’t read my new book. No, please don’t pretend. I’m making life easier for you. Here is my list of questions. Just read them out, and I’ll give you good answers.”’

‘Don’t they object? The interviewers, I mean?’

‘Not at all. They appreciate me doing their job for them. My first question goes: “How should I address you, Lord Archer? Should I call you ‘Your Lordship’ or something?” To which I reply, “Certainly not! Call me Jeffrey. Here in the land of the free, the world’s greatest democracy …”

‘The second question goes: “Okay, Jeffrey, I hear that the Queen of England and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher are both big admirers of your novels?” To which I reply, “Good God, who told you that? It’s meant to be a secret. I shouldn’t really comment … but seeing as we’re in Kansas/Houston/Phoenix, I can confirm it is perfectly true, Her Majesty and Prime Minister Thatcher both adore my books …”’

One morning, not long after The Fashion Conspiracy was published, I received a handwritten letter from the Chairman of Condé Nast, Daniel Salem, saying some kind things about the book which he had evidently read rather carefully, and asking if I would like to have tea at his flat in Ennismore Gardens. It was the most courteous of letters and it piqued my curiosity.

Daniel was the epitome of elegance: sophisticated, half French, half American, an investment banker turned publisher in his mid-sixties. His double-height-ceilinged flat was chic and restrained. And perched on one of several white sofas was a surprise extra guest: ‘S.I.’ Newhouse Jr, the billionaire owner of Condé Nast in New York.

As a double act, they were irresistible. Daniel was tall, relaxed, shrugged a lot. He reminded me of Babar the Elephant but with perfect tailoring. He said, ‘You know, this may not remotely interest you, but we have an idea …’

Si (as he was generally known) Newhouse was short, delphic and cultured. He was in London, he said, for the day to look at a painting and, er, to meet you. He was complimentary about Harpers & Queen, and referred in detail to several articles we had published. It was clear he read the magazine closely, and he referred approvingly to photographers and writers we were using. Condé Nast, he explained, had recently launched the men’s magazine GQ in Britain, which was performing strongly on the business side but editorially weak (I already knew this). Tatler, he went on, which Condé Nast had bought five years earlier in 1984, was underperforming. The Editorial Director of the company, Mark Boxer,fn7 had recently died young, leaving them with a vacuum. And furthermore, their Managing Director, Richard Hill, was strong with advertisers but had no editorial instincts. Might I consider moving to Condé Nast as the new Editorial Director of the British company?

‘Please take your time to consider,’ Daniel said. He made an elegant gesture with his hand, indicating a glorious lack of indecent haste. ‘We need not speak of money, I am sure you would be well satisfied.’

On my way back to Broadwick Street, my taxi passed Vogue House in Hanover Square, the Condé Nast HQ. I peered at the revolving doors, through which I could see a procession of Vogue, Tatler and House & Garden staffers tottering about on Manolo Blahnik heels. I had always been curious about what went on behind those revolving doors, in the dark empire which, all of a sudden, seemed less forbidding than before.

There followed a month of most painful indecision. Perhaps I had already decided to leave, seduced by the alluring combination of sophistication and power? Nevertheless, I tortured myself, aghast at the thought of abandoning the team I’d assembled, quitting a safe job for what might prove to be a perilous one, in an organization I’d been trained to mistrust. A move from Hearst to Condé Nast was like defecting from Christie’s to Sotheby’s, or Rothschild’s to Lazard’s. Furthermore, Georgia and I were getting married in a couple of months’ time. I had a wife to think about. The timing could scarcely have been worse.

I am by nature decisive, but found myself in a slough of sickening, stress-inducing confusion. Terry Mansfield, who knew nothing of the dilemma, rang to offer me the loan of the Hearst Rolls-Royce for my wedding, a generous gesture I could hardly accept while contemplating treachery. Stephen Quinn, already at Condé Nast to launch GQ, was the only other person who knew, and urged me to sign up.

Whenever I came into the Harpers & Queen office, I felt worse. The previous year, Hearst had dangled a New York Editorship in front of me; I had been flown to New York on Concorde and told only that it was either Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country or Esquire – they’d disclose which one after I’d accepted the post. I had declined: I had no wish to live in the dark canyons of Manhattan with a new wife. But Condé Nast was tempting.

I made the decision; my move was announced. It was alarmingly public, with long articles in the newspapers, and undeniably painful.

‘What have you done?’ asked one of my more candid friends. ‘Are you crazy? The people who love you are furious with you for leaving, and the Condé Nast Editors are furious you’re coming. None of them want you. I’ll be surprised if you last six months in that snakepit.’