14.

I was summoned to Paris for the day, to the Condé Nast hôtel particulier at 4 Place du Palais Bourbon, built on land first acquired by Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, in 1769. Inside, in an office overlooking the magnificent square, sat the current Prince of Condé Nast, Jonathan Newhouse, then living in Paris. Behind him, on a shelf, was a display of tourist mugs bought in the cities he regularly visited for work – Milan, London, Madrid, and so on – in which he kept leftover lira, pound coins and pesetas.

No sooner had I entered than Jonathan asked if I would like to become Managing Director of the British company, while also remaining Editorial Director. He slid a sheaf of papers across the desk. These, he explained, were the results of a secret handwriting analysis he had commissioned from a French graphologist, based upon a letter I had written earlier in the year.

My letter must have been written early in the morning, with unstressed hand, because the analysis was, in parts, rather flattering. In other parts, chilling.

It began, ‘Overall impression: highly independent in both thought and action, thorough, alert, quick to comprehend the whole picture, decisive but cautious in thought, sense of responsibility, externalizes himself in his work but is somewhat isolated deep down, scrupulous.’

It went on, ‘The writer has the high level of intelligence of a decisive man whose mind is quick, incisive and shrewd in dealing with the problems in hand. He has an analytical mind, high ideals and rather a creative side. He is able to break down a problem into simple terms, and has quite a free imagination which is not hampered by prejudice. He is a man who very quickly goes for the main point. He is selective in his intellectual interests. Although he may not seem to take much time in examining projects proposed to him, this does not stop him from selecting what appears essential and profitable to him.

‘He has a determined sense of enterprise. He does not hesitate to commit himself, and his dynamism is reinforced by his own sense of pride and competitiveness. He hates everything that is pre-established. He can be impatient. The writer has strong potential for renewal. His character is that of a man who is superficially sociable and charming, but in whom the solitary side can sometimes dominate. He is impulsive, and does not like to wait for an order to be carried out once he has given it. He has strong powers of persuasion, and is able to convince others with his well-chosen, incisive and irrefutable arguments …’

The French handwriting analysis continued in this vein for several hundred more words.

When I had finished reading it, Jonathan said, ‘I should clarify, we haven’t made our decision to offer you the job based only on your handwriting. But these things can sometimes be perceptive.

‘Why not think about it,’ he went on, ‘for twenty minutes, then give me your answer. Take a walk round the block.’

Clearly, I had zero credentials for the job of Managing Director, knowing very little at the time about business or advertising, but it occurred to me that, if I declined, someone else would surely be brought in to do it, and perhaps I wouldn’t click with them. Whereas if I replied yes, I would probably rub along perfectly well with myself. So I took the role, and held on tight for the next twenty-six years. It was kind, and brave, of Jonathan to give me the break.

It was decided I should be sent to New York for a month, to live at the Pierre hotel and undergo training at the Condé Nast headquarters on Madison Avenue. This consisted largely of having lunch at the Four Seasons Grill Room or the Algonquin hotel with a succession of different Editors, Publishers and executives. It would be an exaggeration to say that much actual training was involved.

I had been told to present myself, on my first morning, at the office of Si Newhouse, but no specific time had been mentioned. It was well known that Si arrived in the office each morning at 4.30 a.m., which raised the question of when I should show up myself.

I decided that 6 a.m. would look appropriately keen, so booked a wake-up call for 5 a.m. The sidewalks of New York were entirely deserted as I strolled the few blocks to 350 Madison Avenue. The Condé Nast offices were similarly deserted, every floor of them, still plunged in an eerie semi-darkness. A lone security guard dozed at reception.

I found Si’s office on the corporate floor, and his senior PA, Ann Marcus, ushered me into the presence.

Si wore a grey sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms. He must have been sixty at the time. He had assembled one of the greatest collections of modern art in America, but his office was austere. On the floor that morning were displayed seventy-two front covers – the past three years of American Vogues and American Elles, arranged in lines on the carpet.

‘Er, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Good, I’ve been waiting for you.’ He glanced at his watch, indicating mild dismay at my leisurely timekeeping.

Attached to each front cover was a yellow Post-it note, showing the news-stand sale of each issue. ‘I’m trying to figure out what sells,’ he said. ‘Can you deduce a pattern here?’

We stared down at rows of near-identical images. The Elle covers were all close-ups of gummy, smiling blonde models, with cover lines incorporating large unrounded numbers. ‘Your 563 new fall essentials’, ‘1021 winter trends you will LOVE …’

We hovered over the covers, analysing the performance of blonde girls versus brunettes.

Si said, ‘With numbers on front covers, they work best if they are precise and uneven – readers trust them better. “1000 new trends” sounds like it might be exaggerated, but “1021 new trends” indicates value and service.’

The following morning, I reckoned I’d better raise my game, and arrived at the office at 5.15 a.m. The streets were full of stragglers, heading home from the night before. A black jazz trumpeter swayed by, carrying his instrument.

‘Er, Nicholas, good, I was waiting for you, I want to show you something …’ Si was sitting behind his desk, manually counting the advertising pages of the new issues – his own and the competitors. On a yellow legal pad, he made a pencil mark for each sold page, then struck a line through them for each fifth one. In a column, it said Vogue 471, Harper’s Bazaar 312, Glamour 337 and so forth.

‘Do you do this, Nicholas? I find it helpful.’

‘Well, I don’t count the pages by hand. Perhaps I should. Our media research department provides the data.’

‘But not as quickly, I’m sure,’ said Si. ‘The new Elle came in last night, so I’ll have these figures ahead of the Vogue Publisher. It sends a signal.’

Alexander Liberman, the legendary Ukrainian-born Editorial Director and Si’s Svengali, took me to the Four Seasons Grill Room and discussed magazines in a mesmerizing, cultivated and discursive manner that positioned them at the fulcrum of all civilization. I sat in on meetings with Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, Art Cooper of American GQ and Bernie Leser, President of Condé Nast in the States. A Publisher named Ron Galotti, with oiled-back hair and the demeanour of a Mafia don, told me that he’d recently had his sports car flown over to Aspen for a sales conference, and this had been highly motivating for his sales team, to see his high-performance convertible parked outside the hotel, as something to aspire to. Another Italian slickster, this one heftier, named Steve Florio, assured me he had personally and single-handedly saved The New Yorker, and then proceeded to undermine all the Newhouses, Tina, Anna, Bernie, everyone in fact, in succession.

Si Newhouse, with enormous generosity, invited me out to dinner with his wife Victoria, not once but several times, at his home and at the Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village he loved, Da Silvano. His home in those days, an Upper East Side brownstone, was entered through a high-security bulletproof-glass decontamination chamber, like on a submarine. You rang the front doorbell, entered a glass bubble which slowly closed behind you, sealing you in, until a second glass panel slid open in front. Through the glass, you could already see numerous paintings by Jasper Johns, Mondrian, de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

It was illuminating to spend time in the court of King Si, submerged with his numerous, perpetually warring, high-maintenance divas and dysfunctional barons. But it was also a relief to escape unscathed back to London, to the relative safety of Vogue House, and the bosom of wife and growing family.

Within a week of my appointment as Managing Director, the Editor of Vogue, Liz Tilberis, resigned to take a job in New York as Editor of Harper’s Bazaar, working for Hearst. Whether it was my confirmation as her new boss, or the lure of the bumper American pay packet which decided her, was never spelt out, but it was certainly helpful. We spent the days following her departure ensuring that all the Vogue photographers remained onside, and wouldn’t defect with Liz to Bazaar, and this largely worked. Condé Nast’s not-so-secret USP was the ability to have first dibs on photographers, models and stylists, and this privilege was fiercely enforced.

You were either a Vogue photographer or you were not a Vogue photographer, you couldn’t hawk your talent from title to title. Similarly, if you wanted to be a Vogue cover model, there was no point queering your pitch by fronting Elle, Bazaar or Cosmopolitan. Photographer’s agents and model agencies had always understood this nuance, which very nearly but didn’t quite qualify as restraint of trade. Nowhere was it written down, it was simply understood. An Editor murmured, ‘Obviously it’s entirely your choice where you want to work. It’s a free world and up to you. It would just be very sad for Vogue, never being able to work with you again. Or any of the other international Vogues. But don’t let me try and influence you. It’s your call.’

Alexandra Shulman was doing a great job on GQ, and it was tempting to switch her to Vogue. She still looked slightly too hippy-chick to be a Central Casting shoo-in for Vogue Editor-in-Chief, but she was clever and understood the magazine. An interesting phenomenon about Vogue is that you receive fewer external applicants for Editor than for other titles. So revered is it, it deters most chancers from throwing their hats into the ring; they self-edit themselves from the running. This is the exact opposite of, say, Tatler or House & Garden where you might get ninety or more applicants for Editor. Anyone who has ever been to a party or bought a cushion or made a pair of curtains, sees themselves as a credible candidate.

Seeking an Editor for Tatler in the late nineties, I received an application from the ex-wife of a world-famous banker. She wrote, ‘I have attended many of Europe’s grandest parties and balls, and am experienced at dealing with staff. We had more than forty staff in our houses around the world.’

Alex took Vogue and ruled for twenty-six years. Stephen Quinn was Publisher, and it was one of the most successful double acts in magazine history, generating revenues of £500 million. We resolved early on to try and grow the circulation, which had stood at around 150,000 copies a month during the Liz Tilberis period, then regarded as a respectable number; it was the largest-selling premium glossy. But if we could find another 50,000 regular readers, and hike the yield (price per page after agency commission) accordingly, the rewards would be exponential.

Alex brought Lucinda Chambers to the magazine as Fashion Director, and she fostered the roster of Vogue photographers, from Mario Testino and Nick Knight to Tim Walker and Patrick Demarchelier. The features content became sharper and more contemporary, with appeal well beyond fashionistas. The timing was good too. Fashion was widening its horizon from Bond Street to the high street, with the department stores grabbing their share of designer magic dust through diffusion lines and increasingly blatant rip-offs. Alex’s Vogue harnessed this appetite, and circulation edged up.

Meanwhile, on GQ, we installed a loudmouth Chicagoan financial journalist, Michael VerMeulen, as Editor. When he arrived, he was thin as a broom, noisy but respectful. He would say, ‘Okay, okay, I know what you want, Nicholas, and I’m giving it you in spades. I’m giving you women, I’m giving you sweet babes, I’m giving you investigative journalism, I’m giving you yuppie stuff, grooming, fashion, flash cars, sex. You’re going to cream yourself, boss.’

He put a naked rear-view photograph of Naomi Campbell on the front cover, and sales spiked by 60 per cent. He burst into my office. ‘Okay, okay, so now we know what sells … its black butt.’

Each time I saw him, he’d put on more weight. In his first twenty months as Editor, he ballooned by seventy pounds. I signed off his expenses and they read like an episode of Man Versus Food – vast breakfasts, lunches, two dinners the same night in different places, all expensed. And booze, so much booze: Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, and Southern Comfort. And cocktails.

As a Christmas bonus, I ordered Michael a Savile Row suit with elasticated waistband, since he could no longer fasten up his old ones. We cautioned him about his health, but he replied, ‘You ever seen me drunk, boss? I’m a working journalist, ergo I drink. You get that. I’ve got you Kevin Costner for the July cover, you’ll see it tomorrow. You’re going to cream yourself.’

Our second son, Frederick Timothy Coleridge, was born at St Mary’s, Paddington, on 14 January 1993; Georgia insisted this second birth should take place in a birthing pool, a newly fashionable practice designed to create a more relaxed, laid-back experience. It was an early example of Georgia’s lifelong fascination with alternative therapies, and a somewhat functional plastic tub was set up in her hospital room. What no one had explained was that a water birth dramatically slows down the action, with the unborn child soothed into reassuring slumber. Freddie’s birth was the longest ever known. He eventually emerged, a round, scowling figure, skin wrinkled by hours in warm water. He grew up to be our tallest child at six feet and five inches.

We had moved from the wild Fulham frontier to Notting Hill, to a white stucco house at 29 Chepstow Crescent. There we were joined by the first in a series of energetic Australian nannies, Janene from Perth, followed by Jodi from Sydney. We glazed the drawing-room walls in Colefax yellow, and hung our growing collection of Indian miniatures in a pyramid shape above the fireplace. This has remained a design habit ever since.

One August, on the final evening of a holiday in the Orkney Islands, on the tiny isle of Rousay where we’d borrowed a croft from the architect Christopher Bowerbank, I received a telephone call from Stephen Quinn.

‘I’ve got terrible news, Nicholas. The police just contacted me. Michael VerMeulen is dead.’

‘Christ … what happened?’ I was horrified.

‘They don’t know yet. But a blood sample indicates a great deal of whisky.’

‘Jesus …’

‘I’m afraid it’s a bit worse than that. They’ve found traces of illegal drugs in his blood too.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘I’m afraid it gets worse. He was in bed with an Eastern European hooker …’

Through the window of the croft, I could see a raging sea towards the Broch of Gurness. We were in about as remote a place as it was possible to be, at least twenty-four hours’ travelling time to London. The press would be all over it, once this got out, the story had everything. There was only one thing for it: the great British cover-up.

‘Who knows?’ I asked Stephen.

‘Almost nobody. Kimberly does [Kimberly Fortier, our Communications Chief, later Mrs Quinn]. And the police …’

‘Listen, I’ll get the first ferry off Rousay, catch the car ferry from Stromness to Scrabster, then drive south. Georgia and the boys can stay somewhere overnight. I should hit London late tomorrow if I drive non-stop. Think we can keep the lid on it till then? I’d like to be there when we break it to the team. I should tell Jonathan too.’

We crossed at dawn to the mainland, and drove across the vast, empty prairies of Caithness at breakneck speed. The roads in this part of Scotland are dead straight, you can see several miles ahead, the scenery a blend of heather, bog and dramatic hills. Pre-mobile phones, communication meant stopping at red telephone boxes in lay-bys.

We were passing Berriedale Water when, half a mile ahead, we spotted two men crossing the road, weighed down with fishing rods and angling equipment. The first was wiry and stooped, and turned out to be a gillie; the second, abnormally tall, was increasingly familiar. It was Max Hastings, Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

We slowed down on the empty road. ‘Max? Is that really you?’

‘God, it’s you, Coleridge.’ He peered through the car window. ‘Bloody bad luck about your Editor. I hear he was having a whale of a time.’

‘Ah, you’ve heard.’

‘Just went out on the wires, ten minutes ago. I was checking the news back at the lodge.’

‘Well, I’m sure it won’t be something for the Telegraph,’ I said. ‘Very tabloid.’

‘Not at all, old boy. We’re going big with it tomorrow. It’s August. Nothing happening, no other news.’

We weathered the maelstrom of hideous publicity that followed, and gave Michael a serious memorial service at St George’s, Hanover Square, packed to the rafters with writers, cocktail barmen and beautiful sobbing women in veiled hats. Michael was thirty-eight. I felt guilty afterwards, wondering what else I might have done to help him. His death was a blow to GQ too, which didn’t recover its mojo until three Editors later, when we hired Dylan Jones.

On other floors of Vogue House, there was constant activity. We had launched Vanity Fair in Britain with a simultaneous printing of the American edition, but with different advertising, sold separately, and a multimillion-pound launch budget. Annie Holcroft, Publisher of Tatler, took on Vanity Fair as well. Media analysts cautioned that Tatler would be cannibalized by Vanity Fair, or vice versa, but this never happened, and both magazines grew in circulation and revenue, finding parallel audiences, both rich. Tina Brown, my old Tatler boss who had moved to New York to the relaunched Vanity Fair, quit for The New Yorker, and it was a joy when Graydon Carter, our old friend from Spy, was appointed her successor. Henry Porter joined soon afterwards as London Editor.

Along the corridor, in the soft furnishings department, Robert Harling finally retired from House & Garden, aged eighty-four. He had spent the final phase of his career squabbling with eighty-year-old Peter Coates (‘Petticoats’), the discreetly camp Gardens Editor who was close to the Queen Mother and went to Royal Lodge for lunch, so was deemed unsackable. Robert and Petticoats communicated exclusively by memo, despite occupying adjacent offices. These carping notes ostensibly concerned the worthiness or otherwise of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire gardens, and how many pages they should be allocated in the next issue; but, in truth, they were proxies for deeper animosities.

I persuaded Sue Crewe to become Editor, which was regarded as a slight risk at the time, but turned out not to be, because she remained gloriously in post for twenty-three years. House & Garden is a very particular magazine. It is a vital piece of kit for that great swathe of interior decorators, professional and amateur, which inhabits every part of the country – fabric lovers, people with swagged curtain pelmets and fabric valances around their beds, people who love needlepoint cushions, silk lampshades and expensive wallpapers. The readership inhabits Old Rectories and Glebe Houses in every English village. If you choose a village at random – let’s say Aston-under-Wold or Brassington Magna – you can be 90 per cent sure that the largest three houses in the village – Manor, Old Rectory and Glebe – all take House & Garden on subscription, with a couple more copies going to weekenders.

It was striking, when interviewing possible Editors, how many wanted to change House & Garden into a version of hard-nosed urban Elle Decoration. These were credible, qualified candidates, but they inhabited another, different universe, with little overlap to the world of H&G.

I devised a killer question to sort the sheep from the goats: ‘Where do you stand on padded headboards?’

Elle Deco people despise them. They replied, ‘They’re seriously uncool. I like headboards on beds made of African Izombe wood or beaten corrugated metal.’

True House & Garden people reply: ‘I adore padded headboards. You want them made quite high, so you can lean against them, covered with fabric. Colefax & Fowler or Osborne & Little or Pierre Frey.’

Sue passed the headboard test with flying colours. She had rather an interesting aristocracy-meets-boho background, honed by good taste, hard work and a penchant for clever husbands. It was a lucky day for us when she joined.

It was a bonus to work in an organization where an overwhelming proportion of staff were female. At one point, it reached 86 per cent. Stephen Quinn and I and a few other male publishers, then nine-hundred or so ambitious, highly competent women, then fifty more men running the mail room, IT and office supplies. I felt I was lucky to work amongst multiple women, especially having had no sisters. Inevitably, large numbers of our staff were off on maternity leave at any one time. I once complained about this to Barbara Tims, our veteran Personnel Director, thinking she would sympathize.

‘I’m sorry, Nicholas,’ she said tartly, ‘I don’t sympathize with you at all. If you will insist on hiring all these attractive, desirable, blonde women to work here, you can hardly be surprised if their husbands or partners wish to make love to them from time to time.’

I joined the Council of the Royal College of Art, my first taste of a public board. The process of becoming a Trustee was much less complicated back then, largely consisting of having lunch with the Chairman, Sir Michael Butler, a cadaverous former diplomat and collector of seventeenth-century Chinese porcelain. He spoke in very precise, posh tones, and struggled to keep the Council under control in the face of perpetual provocation.

The cocktail of RCA Council members in the mid-nineties, ostensibly supervising Britain’s most progressive art school, was pyrotechnic and, to me at least, gripping. Lord Snowdon, Lord Saatchi, Lord Douro, Sir Terence Conran, Sir Alan Bowness (the Tate Director), Sir Christopher Frayling (Pro-Rector), Dr Alan Borg (V&A Director) were all on the board. Many were quarrelsome, belligerent, fractious. It didn’t help that Council meetings were held straight after lunch. At any moment, one Trustee or another would explode with fury, veering off at a tangent or amplifying some private peccadillo. The board seethed with prima donnas. At the end of every Council meeting you felt jittery with the sheer emotion of it all.

Fortunately I made some calmer friends on the board, who were sweetly welcoming. Helen Hamlynfn1 was one, Amabel Lindsayfn2 and Caromy Hoarefn3 were beacons of sanity, and I got to know the legendary former Editor of Vogue, Beatrix Miller, who puffed on cigarettes through every Council meeting, and narrowed her eyes when the divas struck up. Afterwards, we all had tea in the Senior Common Room, surrounded by works by Peter Blake, David Hockney, Henry Moore and Lucian Freud.

My father, seemingly overnight, had become front-page news. Lloyd’s of London, as he had predicted, was facing two consecutive down years, and dozens of syndicates across the market announced colossal losses, requiring their ‘names’ (investors) to post big cheques to Lloyd’s rather than receiving one every year, which had been the attractive tradition. Following decades of annual profits, which names had come to rely upon, it was understandably harrowing to have to stump up, even though, in theory, this was a possibility they warned you about. Suddenly, having seldom been mentioned in newspapers at all, we read about David Coleridge, Chairman of Lloyd’s, every day. One woke up to him on Radio 4’s Today programme and went to sleep with him on Newsnight. It was anxiety-inducing.

Lynch mobs of aggrieved Lloyd’s names were set up, employing expensive QCs to search for any pretext in the small print not to pay their bills. Some of the hardest hit incubated conspiracy theories, meeting in Norfolk pubs to goad each other on. A Member of Parliament accused Lloyd’s of London of being little more than ‘a den of thieves’, but had to apologize to the House shortly afterwards for the slur.

The newspapers began to refer to my father as ‘the beleaguered Chairman of Lloyd’s’. City Editors predicted that Lloyd’s could not survive.

When we went home to Sussex for weekends, my father was miraculously unrattled by it all, and appeared as calm as always. He only mentioned the crisis if someone else did first; otherwise it never came up. My mother was irritated when a photographer from The Times turned up one Sunday, unannounced, to take a portrait of the beleaguered Chairman, who was inspecting his azaleas in the garden at the time.

The AGM in Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building was filled to capacity (normally only a handful of retired names turned up, for the free biscuits, but this time there were thousands), and I watched my father take questions for six hours without once sitting down, and without once losing his cool, his thread, or his natural good manners. It was a brilliant and heroic performance, which probably saved Lloyd’s; it made us all very proud, and taught me a life lesson. When the pressure mounts, and critics attempt to taunt or undermine you with carping points of process, or poorly understood matters of fact, or simple ill will, or lack of common sense, it is important to smile, remain utterly polite, be empathetic, and move on. I’m not sure I always manage it myself, but it is something to aim for.

Lloyd’s of London survived, of course, and recovered full profitability with time.