15.

The lifts in Vogue House were notoriously unreliable, one or other of them semi-permanently ‘out of service’, occasionally both. Installed in the 1950s to a quickly redundant pattern and dimension, no service company dealt with them or kept spare parts. The weird rectangular shape of the shafts meant they couldn’t be replaced without dismantling the entire building. As Managing Director, I felt simultaneously responsible but wholly powerless where the elevators were concerned.

When the lift doors opened (if they did) it could be anyone inside. The Princess of Wales came in and out of Vogue House all the time in the early nineties to borrow clothes. Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, processions of male models on their way to castings at GQ, interns collecting coffees, posh totty walking dogs, interior designers delivering lampshades to House & Garden or plaster frescoes to Min Hogg on The World of Interiors … this was the daily traffic of the Vogue House lifts.

In these early years at Condé Nast, my life was punctuated by certain regular fixtures. There were London meetings every couple of months when I met with Jonathan Newhouse, our Chairman, for three or four hours to riff the British business; I would prepare long lists of issues, both serious and trivial, for discussion. Should we launch a travel magazine? Dare we launch Glamour? How worried are we that GQ (our upmarket men’s title) had been overtaken in circulation by FHM and Loaded (downmarket); should we ignore it, or adjust our own editorial recipe to compete more vigorously with cruder front covers? Jonathan had a razor-sharp mathematical brain, and a taste for rolling the dice, boldly or recklessly, depending on how you viewed it. He also had a notably short attention span (shorter even than my own) so I would plant a nugget of gossip every sixth or seventh item, to perk him up. Just as we became weary of reviewing subscription renewal data, I would say, ‘Oh, rather a good story from the Vogue Steven Meisel shoot last week …’ or, ‘GQ has appointed a new sex columnist, hotter stuff than the previous one.’ And Jonathan would brighten up, and we would discuss the boundaries of taste for a GQ sex column (oral sex, yes; anal, probably not; S&M, maybe, but no imagery involving blood).

Then, annually in May, there was the yet-more-gruelling visit by Si Newhouse, when he flew by private jet around Europe, reviewing his continental outposts. These visits followed an unchanging pattern: Paris (which he liked), Munich (didn’t like), Milan (loved), Madrid (‘Can someone remind me why we have a business in Spain?’), London (dinner at the Connaught, lunch at Wilton’s). I crammed for these visits like a university viva: mugging up on every nuance of circulation and trends, and exploring the most obscure appendices in the monthly accounts. And yet, each time, Si would pose a question I didn’t know the answer to. One was: ‘Er, Nicholas, I see the postal and carriage costs for the subscription copies of Brides & Setting Up Home magazine have risen by 2 per cent, but on Vogue, which carries a greater volume of pages, they have risen by 1.8 per cent. Er, do we know why?’ I don’t believe he was actively trying to catch me out, he simply had a photographic memory for figures and a driving curiosity for unexplained minutiae.

Si’s visits frequently coincided with viewing a painting he was considering buying; he would slope off from Wilton’s unaccompanied (he never used bodyguards, despite being the fourth richest man in New York) to view a Lucian Freud or Jackson Pollock.

‘Did you like it?’ I would enquire afterwards.

He shrugged, and sighed. ‘I think so. It’s, er, it’s … a powerful piece.’

His parallel preoccupation was the British royal family, and part of my role was to feed him morsels of choice gossip about them (he wasn’t fussy, though the Queen interested him the most). I would make sure I had a couple of stories to hand, each time he was due in London. His face lit up with pleasure. The Newhouses were the royal family of the publishing world, and Si the reigning hereditary monarch, so he felt a special affinity towards Britain’s head of state.

Graydon Carter came to London regularly to visit the British Edition of Vanity Fair, and we put on lunches and parties for him. Graydon had become a big figure in every sense. Already the sharpest, most glamorous Editor in New York, he became the toast of Hollywood with his annual Oscars parties. He was a first-rate journalist with a flair for retro typography. His hair grew wilder and madder the longer he was Editor, until he resembled Ludwig van Beethoven, and his Anderson & Sheppard suits became more flamboyant. When he was in town, I would lure a mix of actors and actresses, journalists, politicians and novelists to amuse him and rustle up a bit of publicity.

We were short of one woman for a boardroom lunch at Vogue House, and I thought we might invite Princess Diana as a last-minute addition; she had recently separated from the Prince of Wales, and was living alone in Kensington Palace. My driver, Brian Greenaway,fn1 dropped a letter to the Palace, handing it in at the sentry box by the gate; within minutes, Diana was on the line saying she’d love to come.

The following day, a large photograph of her appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror, showing her sunbathing topless on a balcony in Spain. The picture was so blurred and pixelated, you couldn’t see much at all; but it caused a scandal and raised intrusion issues, and every columnist piled in. I thought: damn it, she’s sure to cancel. The lunch was tomorrow.

Her Private Secretary rang to say she was still coming, but there could be no publicity, nothing. I must ring every guest personally and swear them to secrecy.

The Princess arrived and looked fabulous. Looking at the photographs today, her blue suit with gold buttons has something of an Aeroflot air stewardess about it; but, at the time, it seemed perfection.

She sat between Graydon and me at lunch, and was very tactile. It was unexpected. You can be seated next to a thousand women at lunch, and not one touches you physically. But Diana touched your elbow, your arm, covered your hand with hers, it was alluring. And she was disarmingly confiding, speaking without filter.

She said, ‘Nicholas, can I ask you something? Please be truthful. Did you see the photograph of me in the Daily Mirror? The topless one?’

‘Um, Your Royal Highness, yes, we get all the newspapers in my office. I think I did glance at it … not that it was very clear.’

‘William rang me from Eton. Poor boy, he’s only fourteen. He was upset. He said some of the other boys were teasing him, saying my tits are too small.’ She held on to my elbow. ‘Nicholas, please be frank, I want to know your real view. Are my breasts too small, do you think?’

I became breathless, I needed oxygen. I went as red as a guardsman’s tunic. I stuttered ‘Er, Your Royal Highness, in as much as I can see under your suit, they seem, um … perfect to me. I wouldn’t worry.’

‘Thank you, Nicholas. I knew you’d tell me the truth. Thank you, I feel better now.’

At the end of the lunch, I walked her to her car, which was waiting outside Vogue House. Suddenly, four paparazzi sprang forward, taking a thousand snaps. In the pictures, Diana looks radiant, I look like her bodyguard or stalker.

Afterwards, I rang a newspaper friend, to see if he could find out who’d leaked her visit. He rang back in five minutes. ‘I just spoke to our picture desk. Diana rang herself from her car, on the way to lunch. She often tips them off about where she’ll be.’

My days in the office assumed a fixed routine. I arrived early at Vogue House, generally around 7.45 a.m., much helped by Brian Greenaway, who arrived outside our house from 7.30 a.m. to drive me in. Brian was to drive me for twenty-seven years; I spent more time in his company than with anyone else, probably including Georgia. He is a handsome former professional footballer, who played for Fulham at Craven Cottage. It was a lucky day when he entered our lives. There is nothing he doesn’t know about me.

En route to Vogue House, I made lists of the twenty or so things I needed to accomplish that day: people to see, calls to make, reports to read. My office had three large windows overlooking St George Street, with a glass Le Corbusier desk, sleek modern sofas, a couple of hundred magazines on shelves, and a pair of Andy Warhol Chairman Mao prints, intended to imply ruthlessness. I tried to do everything dull in the first four hours of the day, so it was out of the way. After that, we chose front covers, discussed advertising problems, or invented ways to do-down our competitors. Lunch was at Le Caprice or the Wolseley or in the Sakura sushi bar next to the office, where sumo wrestling was broadcast on TV with the volume down. In the afternoons, I liked to drop in randomly on the magazines, to hear about articles in progress or exchange gossip. I enjoyed roaming the corridors. Nothing gives me more pleasure than a half-formed future issue pinned up on the boards, and reviewing the running order. I enjoyed messing with the sequence of articles and fashion shoots, which can make a significant difference to reader reaction. It is a similar skill to fixing the running order of tracks on a rock album.

I am allergic to long meetings. Some people see meetings as the highpoint of their day, settling down around a conference table with a plate of Bourbon biscuits and custard creams, the tea ceremony, the agenda, everyone having their say, very often formulating their opinions as they go along, or repeating what has already been said. I find meetings lasting longer than ninety minutes a form of torture; long presentations worse (Slide 1: ‘Good morning’, Slide 45: ‘Thank you’). I can never resist turning straight to Slide 44 and reading the conclusion. I discouraged long meetings at Condé Nast. Almost everything can be resolved in forty minutes, by properly prepared people.

I started going to a tailor at 95 Mount Street to have suits made. Doug Hayward was not only an excellent tailor, but the model for John le Carré’s Harry Pendel, The Tailor of Panama. His premises were filled with his celebrity customers, who sat in a row on a sagging sofa at the front of the shop, drinking coffee served by his manageress Audie Charles: Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Michael Parkinson, the photographer Terry O’Neill, Johnny Gold the owner of Tramp nightclub, and the Mayfair hair-loss expert Philip Kingsley. They used Doug’s shop as a meeting place-cum-club. They would sit there half the morning, then move on to Harry’s Bar next door for lunch.

Michael Caine and Doug had almost identical accents, you couldn’t tell them apart. Rather weirdly, Ralph Lauren was another customer who you sometimes saw slinking in and out. Doug held strong opinions on tailoring. It irritated him that I carry a wallet in the inside pocket of my suit jacket, which he said spoilt the line of the cut: ‘You don’t need a wallet, Nick. What d’ya need a fucking wallet for anyway? Maybe one credit card – the rest is rubbish.’

Jane Procter had been Editor of Tatler for ten years. She had been a resounding success – though, over time, the magazine felt unstable. She was brittle, with something of the little girl lost about her. Staff departed on bad terms with the Editor, and there was an air of suppressed hysteria. There were diva issues too, occupational hazards on Tatler. To people who don’t read it, no magazine in the Condé Nast stable is more trivial than Tatler. But to its circle of devotees, it is a magazine of almost totemic prestige; it can confer legitimacy on social climbers, endorse new social stars, and withhold status too. It is a special peril for Tatler staff to confuse their own status with that of the magazine, and to forget they are merely reporting on this glamorous world of the super-rich, and not actually part of it themselves. It is a magazine which thrives on illusion and provokes delusion.

On the rare occasions I needed to change an Editor, I always tried to do so with maximum dignity. I would have these conversations privately in my office. I would say we needed a change, offer a generous settlement and ask for their resignation. The press release, Pravda-style, would present it as the Editor’s own choice to move on.

I rang Jane and asked for a meeting. I explained our decision. Jane stared with wild eyes, like Bambi’s mother in the Disney film during the forest fire scene.

‘You-can’t-sack-ME,’ she declared, in a scary, quavering voice. ‘I-AM-Tatler.’ She stood up, and threw open my fourth-floor office window onto St George’s Street. ‘If I can’t edit Tatler …’

I think it was a gesture as much as a real threat. She smouldered in a chair. She produced a mobile phone and dialled her husband. He must already have been lurking somewhere in the building, because he turned up moments later. We were suddenly quite a party.

‘Jane won’t sign any gagging order,’ he announced. ‘Read my lips. We’re going down to Tatler right now to tell the staff exactly what’s happened. You’re going to regret this.’

The assembled staff of Tatler heard the news in surprise, but not dismay. Within minutes, the whole building knew, then the world.

On Sunday, an article of unparalleled ghastliness appeared in the Mail on Sunday, titled ‘Who killed The Purley Queen?’, a reference to Jane’s childhood home in that suburb of London. Every disgruntled staff member had weighed in, dissing their old Editor in unkind terms. Jane sued the Mail on Sunday. The case rattled on between lawyers for many months, each side gathering witness statements and evidence, before petering out with a token settlement.

I conducted a worldwide search for a new Tatler Editor but couldn’t identify the perfect person. I had interviewed at least fifteen candidates when, one Sunday afternoon, glancing out of the window of our Notting Hill house, I spotted Geordie Greigfn2 of the Sunday Times in the communal garden, reading a newspaper and holding a glass of wine. I thought, ‘I just wonder …’

A reporter by training, Geordie soon brought his hard news skills to the frontline of society, as well as signing up David Hockney and Lucian Freud as Tatler contributors.

The highlight of his Editorship was a glamorously incongruous annual fund-raiser he founded, held at Althorp House, the Spencers’ stately home in Northamptonshire, co-hosted by Geordie and President Mikhail Gorbachevfn3 of Russia. The Geordie and Gorby Ball was an event you could not possibly have invented, even after the Berlin Wall came down, packed with British and Russian socialites, vodka and Caspian caviar. There are moments when you recognize how far the world has moved on in your lifetime, and this was one of them: seeing the ex-President of the Soviet Union, with his distinctive red-wine birthmark on his bald head, standing cheek-by-jowl with Geordie, Editor of Tatler, both in white tie and tails, joyfully greeting guests at the door of Princess Diana’s old house.

Geordie produced an excellent magazine for the next ten years, and never fell victim to the lurking hubris of Posh Publishing. He would become one of my closest friends in the media and beyond.

Geordie had hired Isabella Blow as Tatler’s new Fashion Director, with the intention of groovying up the fashion pages. I had known Issie from years before, when she was a daffy boarding school pupil at Heathfield, who wore pie-crust frill blouses like Princess Diana and was a constant presence at Hampshire teenage parties. Over the intervening years, she had reimagined herself as an edgy fashionista, muse to the milliner Philip Treacy and to Alexander McQueen, and a key voyager in the darker fens of fashion. She frequently wore a hat with a giant pink lobster on top, a corset or medieval armour.

I think that, even before Issie arrived at Tatler, it was understood she would need careful supervision. Her genius was driven by abrupt enthusiasms and impulse passions, and she viewed any attempt to rein in her spending as a challenge to her creativity. In her first week, she took a black cab from Liverpool to London, having hailed it in the street, later explaining she hadn’t realized there was a railway station in Liverpool.

Issie was both fearless and fearful. Fearless in her approach to photographers and models, when she brought big names to the magazine. Her Gothic shoots with McQueen and the photographer David LaChapelle are among my favourite fashion shoots ever, also her Naomi Campbell butterfly hat front cover, which everyone loved, but didn’t sell well. Issie was perpetually fearful of the world, plagued by breakers of depression. She worried about money, considering herself underpaid (she wasn’t).

One evening, she had a drink in my office with Geordie and me, to make her case for a spectacular pay rise. This mostly consisted of a list of beautiful, expensive things she wished to buy, but couldn’t currently afford on her salary. She stated that, being men, we had no idea of the cost of running two houses, including Hilles House near Stroud, her Arts and Crafts Cotswold mansion, and buying couture and paintings. We eventually awarded her a token pay rise and she left looking happy enough.

The next morning, I happened to pass Issie in her office. She was sitting at her desk, which was covered with fabulous pieces of antique jewellery. A salesman from S. J. Phillips of Bond Street was displaying emerald and diamond necklaces on a baize tray.

‘Are these for a shoot?’ I asked.

‘For me, actually,’ replied Issie. ‘I’m spending my pay rise in advance.’

I was seated next to Issie at a fashion dinner at the Natural History Museum, and she had arrived wearing a full black burqa, with a veiled slit for her eyes, and a pair of stag’s antlers on top. It made it impossible for her to speak a word, you heard only muffled sounds from inside. A posse of paparazzi permanently circled our table, taking pictures – which was, I suppose, the whole point.

I asked, ‘Issie, are you going to be able to eat anything under that?’ Waiters were arriving with the first course.

‘I’m not here to eat,’ she replied. ‘That is not something I’m the least bit concerned about …’

Every month, some new saga erupted: her trip to Delhi when she booked herself into a suite at the Imperial hotel, with no means of settling the bill, and assuming Condé Nast would pay, even though it was a holiday; the love affair with a Venetian gondolier she’d met on the Grand Canal; her various, tragic attempts to commit suicide, by jumping off the Hammersmith flyover onto the road below, and asking her driver in Milan to take her to a Navigli canal to drown herself, late at night (but the driver couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find it). As a company, we paid for poor Issie to register into a succession of clinics and hospitals, some for months on end, but they did no good. The compulsion to kill herself was too strong inside her, and she eventually succeeded at Hilles with the aid of the weedkiller Paraquat.

Her memorial service at the Guards’ Chapel was a full-blown fashion moment, with 2,000 mourners, led by Anna Wintour. Some commentators at the time blamed the savagery and malice of the fashion and magazine industries for her death, but I suspect the causes lay much deeper in childhood, and even in her DNA, and her many friends were powerless to change that.

I began visiting New York regularly for work, to catch up with the Condé Nast gossip and call on advertisers. Generally I had supper with Graydon Carter at his first restaurant, the Waverly Inn, next to his house on Bank Street in the West Village, and Tina Brown kindly threw dinners ‘for’ me in Sutton Place South, filled with film stars and socialites, writers like Dominick Dunne and Fran Lebowitz, and activist curios like Bianca Jagger and Gloria Steinem.

Often I would visit my friend Cristina Monet Zilkha at 125 East 74th Street. I had first met Cristina when she was a cult rock star, married to the pop mogul Michael Zilkha, and her album Sleep It Off on ZE Records was riding high. Over time, she had morphed into a souped-up Madame de Pompadour figure, inhabiting an apartment filled with English Regency furniture, Charles X chandeliers, Empress Josephine cabinets and a prevailing spirit of the grande horizontale. On each visit to the city, I would take her out to dinner at some fashionable restaurant where it would be impossibly hard to secure a table. ‘Don’t be late,’ I would plead, knowing she would be. She always was, causing unbearable anguish, as I waited and waited and head waiters menacingly enquired, ‘Do you still wish to hold the table, sir?’ longing for me to relinquish it. Eventually Cristina would appear, and it was worth it, just. She is never dull. She is part of my New York.

Back in London, an Editor named James Brown was appointed to GQ; we had lured him from Loaded, then at the height of its reputation, a lads’ magazine full of energy, vulgarity and wit. It was another risk, since James wasn’t house-trained and had an alluring hellraiser reputation, but it was hoped he might bring a bit of pizzazz to our men’s title, which had been looking too safe lately. James was the Damien Hirst of magazines, or possibly the Banksy, and it felt pleasingly iconoclastic to shoe-horn him into GQ. This is the sort of thing magazine executives do from time to time: the reckless gamble which proves we still have it.

James was short and adolescent, with a disarming smile and long, curly, footballer’s hair. It was impossible not to like him. He was intriguingly unsophisticated, and everything was new to him.

‘Have you ever read the Daily Telegraph?’ he asked me one day. ‘I found one on my seat on a train, I’d never opened one before. It’s quite good, you know.’

He seemed particularly delighted to be issued with a company American Express card, which was to see much action in the vodka bars of Soho.

I think we realized early on that a terrible mistake had been made, but these things need to run their course. Each week, some further rock star-style outrage was reported to me.

The curtain fell on James soon afterwards. He was fun while he lasted.

Georgia, the children and I were staying one weekend in Sussex with Dominic and Rosa Lawson. Dominic edited the Sunday Telegraph, Rosa ran Tiffany & Co., the Bond Street jeweller. They had also invited William and Ffion Hague – William was Leader of the Opposition – and the Irish rock star Bob Geldof with his girlfriend Jeanne Marine and his daughter Peaches.

We were an incongruous party, thrown together at the Lawsons’ mill house in a bucolic East Sussex valley. The Coleridges, Lawsons and Geldofs all had young children, so were up and about by 6.30 a.m. each morning, making breakfast in the kitchen. Across a stable yard was the Hagues’ bedroom, above the garages. The curtains remained defiantly drawn.

Geldof, who turned out to be a Tory voter, gazed across the yard. ‘I hope to fok he’s fokking her,’ he declared. ‘If they don’t produce a sprog before the General Election, we’re fokking finished mate, it’s fokking essential.’

We ate breakfast, waiting for the curtains to twitch. Hours passed. At last the curtains opened, followed by the door.

‘Look out for high colour, the fokking flush,’ said Geldof.

William and Ffion wore matching baseball caps. William was carrying a hardback biography of Lord Salisbury, with a bookmark stuck halfway through. ‘Morning all,’ he said in his broad Yorkshire voice. ‘Sorry we’re late, I’ve been reading this fascinating life of the third Marquess of Salisbury.’

‘We’ve only fokking lost,’ groaned Geldof.

Not long afterwards, I was commissioned by Dylan Jones to profile Hague for GQ. I only occasionally wrote for our own magazines; it worried me that, if the Editor didn’t like the article, it could cause them embarrassment to reject it. This time I said yes, and headed to the Houses of Parliament.

The first ninety minutes of the interview were unremarkable. It is hard to get anything fresh from an MP, and the Hague story was well trodden. But then he began reminiscing about his teenage years in Yorkshire, in Richmond, where he delivered barrels of beer to pubs from a dray.

‘It was hard physical work,’ he said. ‘But at least they gave you a pint of ale in each pub, when you’d finished the delivery.’

‘So how many pubs would you deliver to in a day?’ I asked.

‘Oh, it would have to have been twelve, sometimes fourteen. It varied.’

I felt the electric current down my spine, when you know you’ve struck gold.

‘So you might easily have drunk fourteen pints in a day.’

‘On a hot day, yes, it would have been,’ replied Hague. ‘You sweated it out.’

The interview, when published, made the front pages of every national newspaper: ‘Fourteen pints a day was normal – Hague’. The story ran for days. ‘I was Britain’s Biggest Boozer’ – Daily Mirror. Some commentators suggested it was a PR plant, designed to hot-up Hague’s good boy image, but I don’t think it was. I think it was exactly as he told it.

The Labour party produced special commemorative William Hague beer mats (‘Tory froth’), which were distributed to hundreds of pubs. They were intended to undermine him, but probably had the opposite effect.