20.

Vanity Fair published a landmark profile of the Egyptian-born tycoon Mohamed Al-Fayed in September 1995. It was written by the American journalist Maureen Orth and, in comparison with later articles about the controversial owner of Harrods and the Paris Ritz, it was unexpectedly restrained. On a scale of one to ten, with one as a ‘puff piece’ and ten as a ‘total hatchet job’, this was a six. Maureen was sympathetic towards Fayed’s campaign to get a British passport, but hinted at episodes of alleged sexual harassment. I remember reading it and thinking, ‘Skilfully done. She hasn’t dodged the issues, but we probably won’t lose the multimillion-pound Harrods advertising account either …’

How wrong I was.

Less than a week later, there arrived at Condé Nast the most aggressive, rapacious and bellicose legal letter ever received. It had been composed by Schillings of Bedford Square and you had to hand it to them: it was a humdinger. As is customary in such letters, it ran to three pages of vehemently expressed indignation at how their saintly client had been traduced, and culminated in a demand for an abject apology and compensation of £100,000,000. At least I think it was a hundred million, there were so many noughts, you had to count them carefully. More alarming still, not only was Graydon Carter named personally in the suit as Editor-in-Chief, as well as Maureen Orth and Condé Nast, but so was I.

I always wonder, when firms of libel lawyers construct such letters, especially when acting for people like Fayed, what is going through their minds. Presumably they don’t believe a word they’re writing, and are howling with laughter, holding their noses and thinking only of the fat fee. But, on the receiving end, I find legal letters rather unnerving, with their especially thick writing paper, sombre letterheads and fake outrage.

The Fayed opening salvo was a collector’s item. It was the start of a two-year-long war, as dirty as they come, with a thrilling sequence of devious tricks and double-bluffs.

It was greatly to the Newhouses’ credit that they never even considered caving in. Si Newhouse just shrugged and laughed, and so did Jonathan. As the stakes rose, they never once blinked.

Having agreed to fight it, we needed to defend our case. Maureen Orth’s article had invoked sexual misconduct but given few specifics. It was clear we needed to find credible witnesses and sworn affidavits, but where to begin? Vanity Fair’s London Editor, Henry Porter, and I met with the magazine’s London lawyer, David Hooper, and made plans. As the months passed, we became increasingly paranoid at our meetings, and communicated in quieter and quieter voices, until we were almost whispering. Henry felt we might be being bugged, and the Vogue House phones and meeting rooms were regularly swept.

Henry and I visited a firm of risk management experts (code for private detectives) at an office behind Buckingham Palace. The entrance was in a basement, with state-of-the-art security. We were ushered into a meeting room, where three executives were awaiting us. They resembled smooth, groomed actors from the TV show Suits.

We began outlining the legal challenge and our need to identify young women who claimed to have been harassed by Fayed; ideally four or five convincing witnesses prepared to testify. Was this something they could help us with? The risk experts exchanged glances.

‘Gentlemen, I’m going to stop you right there,’ said the boss. ‘Don’t say another word. I have to inform you, we are already retained by the gentleman in question.’

The room suddenly turned chilly, the meeting ended abruptly. As the junior member of the team walked us to the door, he said, ‘I think you’ll find most of our competitors work for him too. Just to warn you.’

Henry and I stood at the top of the area steps, in mild shock and rolling our eyes. This was going to be interesting.

Henry received an overture, out of the blue, from a man purporting to be a disgruntled former Fayed security man, with important information to impart. After some due diligence (including confirming we couldn’t pay him for any information), Henry met him in a pub in the East End, in a run-down neighbourhood of boxing clubs and seamen’s missions.

The disgruntled security guy said he had been unfairly fired by Fayed, and wanted to get even. He hinted at a trove of explosive material he was eager to share, but constantly reverted to the prospect of being paid. ‘Even a couple of grand would help.’ The meeting ended inconclusively.

The following weekend, a story appeared in a Sunday tabloid, stating that enemies of Mr Al-Fayed had been caught in a honey trap, attempting to buy dodgy information to discredit him. The security man had been a plant, wired for covert recording. The article reported that a complaint had been made to the Crown Prosecution Service, the tape submitted as evidence of an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

This was a problem for several months, until it could be demonstrated that the tape had been spliced and edited, by a person or persons unknown.

I had met Mohamed Al-Fayed regularly in my working life. Sometimes I accompanied our Publishers on forays to sell advertising to Harrods, which meant calling on the Chairman, and being made to hang about for an hour or more in a waiting room full of reproduction Regency furniture. This room was rumoured to be bugged; I have no idea whether or not it actually was.

Eventually Mohamed would appear: stocky, powerful and swearing. ‘I hope you haven’t been waiting fucking long time? They should have told me you were here, the cunts. Now we talk. You giving me fucking special deal, yes? Otherwise fuck off.’ He brimmed with similar banter.

It amused him I was losing my hair, as he was himself; it was a bond. ‘You like me, no fucking hair. That’s because we always fucking, all the time fucking. Hah! How many girlfriends you have? Your cock big, yes?’ Then he pointed to the Harrods Managing Director, hovering in his slipstream. ‘That man has too much hair. No fucking! He is not like us, always fucking sweet pussy. Am I right, my friend?’

There were generally four bodyguards in attendance, scowling bruisers with fat necks and earpieces. They accompanied him everywhere. It was never clear why the Harrods owner needed a personal security team, when the owners of Harvey Nichols and Selfridges had none.

The fight got dirtier. Fayed’s Director of Public Affairs, Michael Cole,fn1 a tall, claret-faced courtier in a Turnbull & Asser suit, was instructed to contact Harrods’ suppliers (the fashion brands, jewellers, luxury companies) and deter them from advertising in Condé Nast titles. Had this strategy worked, it would have cost us several hundred million pounds. Every week, we received phone calls from fashion companies in Milan, Paris and New York, or from jewellers with concessions in Harrods. ‘We have been told not to advertise with you any more. What should we do?’

Fortunately, the Condé Nast relationships ran deeper than their fear of Fayed, and only one Italian lingerie brand was sufficiently intimidated to ditch us. The two hundred others held their ground.

Slowly, very slowly, we were building our defence. A perfect witness was found, a young woman who had been plucked from the shop floor to work for the Harrods Chairman. She had an astonishing story to tell, full of credible details about his Park Lane apartment and Scottish castle, Balnagown. But would she swear an affidavit, and be prepared to appear on the stand?

A date had been set at the Royal Courts of Justice, for a case expected to last three weeks. The Fayed side was marshalling its own witnesses, including children’s charities, to testify to his good character. Some of our own witnesses were nervous, fearing reprisals. I called on the boss of another department store, who insisted we speak up on the roof in case we were under surveillance.

For the fashion shows in Paris, I customarily stayed at the Ritz. This was another Fayed trophy-asset, and it felt like madness to continue, but some recklessness made me. It was a stupid decision, I was perpetually on edge. I felt the receptionist giving me a strange look, before disappearing too long to an inner office … to do what, to tell whom? The Assistant Manager who showed me to my room said, ‘We have put you in a special suite this visit, Monsieur Coleridge.’ It overlooked the Rue Cambon.

The human mind plays tricks. Did I imagine it, or were there strange clicks on the telephone? There was a big gilt mirror, mounted on the wall at a peculiar angle opposite my bed; was I being watched? Perhaps a bunch of goons were sitting behind a two-way mirror. I undressed in the bathroom.

Adjoining my suite was a ‘service area’, permanently locked, which fed the paranoia. The smoke detectors in the suite appeared abnormally large, almost like CCTV cameras. The trundle of a room-service trolley, passing along the corridor, made me start. And when I checked out, I carefully repacked my suitcase, to ensure nobody had fitted me up with a pilfered bathrobe or Ritz soap.

The court case was barely eight weeks away. We had somehow found four strong witnesses and a host of lesser ones; the files ran to several hundred pages of statements. The impending showdown promised extensive press coverage. Teams of QCs were retained by both sides.

We reached the moment of disclosure: the exchange of documents, when each side can see for the first time what the other side has. We wondered what they’d make of our roster of red-hot affidavits.

Shortly afterwards, Leonard Lauder of the cosmetics conglomerate rang me at home. He was one of our largest advertisers, and a key supplier to Harrods. He was in peacemaker mode. ‘If you hear anything from Harrods, any overture, you should seize it. We want you to make peace … that is, I want you to.’

The next morning, I took a call from Michael Cole. His voice was wonderfully inveigling, you could hear the treacle. ‘And how is the lovely Georgina? And the children?’

‘Georgia and the children are great, thank you.’

‘Nicholas, it would be useful for us to meet up. To talk about this distressing situation.’

‘Sure. I must run it past the lawyers, but I don’t see why not. Where? A restaurant? My office? And when?’

‘Why don’t we meet today in the steam room at the Bath & Racquets?’ he said. ‘It’s discreet. And if we meet there, we will know neither of us is wired …’

The Bath & Racquets Club, in a mews behind Claridge’s, is an exclusive men-only gym. It had been started by Mark Birley, the nightclub king, several years earlier: it looks exactly like Annabel’s, with oil paintings and Turkish rugs, but with Cybex exercise machines instead of a dance floor. Half the members are Greek shipping billionaires (‘Good morning, Mr Embiricos. Good morning, Mr Goulandris. Good morning, Mr Niarchos,’ says the glamorous receptionist). The rest are hedge fund managers. And it has the best Turkish bath, lined with Carrara marble.

I shuffled into the swirling mist, towel wrapped around my waist. Michael Cole, defiantly naked, lolled on a marble slab. The steam was so dense, we could scarcely see.

‘Nicholas,’ Michael began, in philosophical mode. ‘You and I, we are very similar. We both work for great men, immensely rich men. They are stubborn, and always have to win, is that not so?’

I nodded along.

‘It is left to people like ourselves, Nicholas, to sort these matters out for our principals. To save them from themselves, if you will.’

I continued nodding. Here comes the deal …

‘We shouldn’t be at war. We should be working together, not against each other. Condé Nast is the greatest magazine publisher in the world, Harrods is the greatest department store. Mohamed is a man of honour, I can personally attest to that. And he wants to advertise with you again, to increase it in fact …’

The case was quietly dropped. Condé Nast asked for nothing in return and we made no deal, but we agreed not to disclose our affidavits, and never have.

Condé Nast was expanding around the world at dizzying speed. Jonathan Newhouse had a new company mantra, which he regularly proclaimed: ‘More magazines, more money.’ We were launching brands like Vogue, Glamour, Architectural Digest and GQ in new markets at the rate of 20 a year. In a heartbeat, we were big in Japan, big in Korea, in China, Brazil, Greece and across Eastern Europe. Now there were 18 editions of Glamour, 20 Vogues. And the newer brands were rolling out too: multiple Condé Nast Travellers, multiple Wireds, multiple Vanity Fairs.

As a company, Condé Nast sometimes felt like a precarious place to work, though I worked hard to keep the British part stable. I have a theory that, providing they don’t become bored, experienced Editors and managers do a better job than a perpetual churn of replacements. Many of our top team worked twenty-five to thirty years in Vogue House, and knew every nuance, expectation and client intimately. And Editors produce their best work from their thirty-seventh issue onwards, once they’ve learnt by trial and error what works and what doesn’t.

Did I ever worry about my own tenure at Condé Nast? Tina Brown once told me she never took Si Newhouse for granted, and I did the same for his cousin, Jonathan. He rang repeatedly at weekends – sixteen times was the record – to get my take on this or that, important or trivial. Whenever Jonathan had good suggestions to make, and they often were, I embraced them at once; when they were bad, I played for time until they withered on the vine. I am a believer in ‘owner’s privilege’ to play freely with their own toy, but also in the duty of the Managing Director to call it right, and to manage the cat’s cradle of relationships and consequences which characterize the inner workings of any organization. I considered myself lucky in our owners, and lucky to be working for a private company.

A small international board, known as the Executive Committee, met every couple of months to plan and review our world domination. Four or five of us assembled from around the globe, numb with jet lag, for meetings lasting eight or more hours in a sealed conference room. It is a truism about all boards that members always gravitate to the same seats, in the same configuration, and frequently say the same things too. So it was at Condé Nast. There was a brilliant Italian named Dr Giampaolo Grandi, who ran Condé Nast in Milan. He was an unexpectedly professorial figure at the epicentre of the fashion industry, with his wool V-neck jerseys and dusty tweed jackets like an English prep school geography master. But he was always worth listening to, and I greatly admired him. After lunch, with a flash of anger, he would exclaim, ‘If I may be a little provocative, what you are speaking is complete rubbish, I am sorry to say this but you clearly know nothing about reality, and nothing about publishing.’ We looked forward to his outbursts.

Then there was James Woolhouse, a super-polite and reserved Englishman based in Hong Kong, who oversaw our Asia Pacific titles. In an earlier age, under the British Empire, he would have been Chief Collector for the State of Maharashtra. From time to time, he would say, ‘Being brutally frank, that magazine will never make money.’ Being brutally frank was James’s stock-in-trade.

And there was Bernd Runge from East Germany, who brought an enticing note of John Le Carré to the group. He ran our Russian and German operations, as well as overseeing the Eastern Bloc. He was a dashing, duplicitous, rather handsome figure who had been educated at Moscow State University, spoke multiple languages and was hard to pin down. His fellow board members were instinctively suspicious but couldn’t quite explain why. It was unfortunate when Bernd was exposed in Der Spiegel, the weekly German news magazine, as a former Stasi informant who had spied on his own sister under the Honecker regime. It caused quite a brouhaha at the time. With almost incredible magnanimity, he was allowed to stay on at Condé Nast. But it all went wrong in the end.

During this period, almost all focus was on print; the agenda at our board meetings was filled with careful analysis of this magazine or that, and its DNA, and which markets were ready for an edition next. (Although we had launched vogue.co.uk, our first website, in 1992, six years before the 1998 launch of Google and twelve years before the 2004 launch of Facebook, digital still remained a tiny enterprise within Condé Nast, next to the profits of print.) Or we discussed photographers: how to hold on to Mario Testino, Patrick Demarchelier, Bruce Weber, Craig McDean. The annual retainers offered to work exclusively for Condé Nast became larger and larger, running to multimillions of dollars. Photographers were key components in fashion’s febrile microculture. Celebrity photographers work with celebrity stylists, which guarantees celebrity models, which in turn invested our magazines with an aura which made them irresistible to advertisers, and made Condé Nast rich.

Despite heavy investment in new launches, annual profits for the international division were spiralling towards $200 million. There was a glorious confidence and optimism. Almost anything felt possible, everything an opportunity. We launched a dozen Vogue restaurants and GQ bars around the world, Vogue luxury conferences, a Condé Nast fashion and design college in Soho, with Susie Forbes as headmistress, and another in China.

As well as peddling our own brands, we tried to acquire new ones. I devoted much time to trying to buy The Spectator for Condé Nast, when Conrad Black was selling it, but in the end Lazard’s couldn’t separate it from the Telegraph Media Group. And we had a twenty-year ambition to buy Country Life, but neither IPC nor Time Inc. would let it go. (This was hardly surprising: Country Life has a near-perfect business model, made a ton of money, and furthermore stands at the fulcrum of a clearly defined world where estate agents in wellington boots meet scholarly architectural historians.) Each time a new CEO was appointed at IPC, I wrote again offering ever larger sums for Country Life. One of them (rather rudely) simply returned my own letter with the message ‘Not in a million years, mate’ scrawled across it.

I was fast approaching forty, and an idea was hatched for a big joint-fortieth birthday party with the old Cambridge gang: Nick Allan, Kit Hunter Gordon, two Stourtons – James and Edward – and Peter Pleydell-Bouverie. Numerous meetings were held to review possible locations for the great event, which grew larger and more ambitious each time. We discussed guests ad infinitum, quickly regressing to old jokes, already twenty-years stale, about university contemporaries who definitely should or shouldn’t be there.

We worked out that half our potential guests were held in common, half were ‘exclusive’. So a complicated system like a single transferable vote was devised, administered by Jane Pleydell-Bouverie, identified as the most efficient wife. Under this scheme, if a guest was nominated by three or more hosts, they didn’t count against anyone’s personal allocation. Then the remainder of spaces were distributed equally. It was decided we would invite 800 people to a giant Battersea warehouse overlooking the Thames named Adrenalin Village (since bulldozed to make way for Norman Foster apartments). It amused us, when inspecting the Gents lavatories at Adrenalin Village, to find a contraceptive vending machine on the wall offering curry-flavoured rubber johnnies.

Scenery and sets were borrowed from an opera company, dim sum in Chinese baskets catered by Christopher Gilmour, the restaurateur brother of Jane. Nick supplied the playlist. James oversaw the printing of the invitations.

By now, several months had been spent negotiating the guest list. The invitations were minutely supervised by Jane, with all the precision of a polling officer at a general election.

The party was an uproarious success. The theme was ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and many guests turned up virtually naked, wrapped only in cling film. Some came as Roman emperors, others as Chinese emperors, Ottoman pashas and Rajput maharajas. Georgia wore a Vivienne Westwood bodysuit and came as Eve from the Garden of Eden. The cocktails were knock-out.

Halfway through the party, there was a surprise influx of unidentified extra girls, who had featured on nobody’s list, and never undergone Jane’s meticulous scrutiny. Who on earth were they? They seemed loucher, chavvier and more exotic than the rest, in basques and bras.

They turned out to be special additions by James, who had simply handed out a stash of spare invitations at some nightclub he frequented, to jolly things along.

I was friends at Condé Nast with John Morgan, a man of charm and good manners, who was the Style Editor at GQ. We had sushi lunches together, where he talked about British tailoring, etiquette (he wrote a column on this topic for The Times) and being gay. (He teetered on the brink of coming out, but never quite took the plunge. He developed crushes on grand, straight young men, which would never come to anything, and made him unhappy.) I found his life intriguing: he subsisted largely on canapés at drinks parties which he attended for the purpose, and prioritized good Savile Row suits above all else. He lived in Albany on Piccadilly, in a tiny top-floor room hardly bigger than a cupboard, which would once have been a manservant’s lodging. It was Jeeves’s room, exquisitely decorated, with his enormous suit collection overflowing from the wardrobe. He did all his food shopping at Fortnum & Mason across the road.

He was absurdly extravagant, and often sought my advice on his finances, which he never then took. I recommended he stopped ordering bespoke suits, he had at least forty, it felt like plenty. But he loved the interaction with tailors: discussing horn buttons and turn-ups. He could spend an entire morning at Huntsman or Henry Poole, deciding whether or not to have a ticket pocket in his next suit.

His last words to me were, ‘You’re so wise, Nicholas. I’ve taken your advice and cancelled four new suits. Well, postponed them. But you’re going to be cross with me – I’ve commissioned a full-length portrait of myself in oils, wearing my silk opera cloak in the courtyard of Albany …’

Shortly afterwards, John killed himself one lonely Sunday afternoon. He had clambered through the tiny bathroom window of his flat and plunged down into the internal well. I believe he had chosen the internal well, rather than the courtyard, so as not to disturb other Albany residents. It was characteristically polite of him.

Early on Monday morning, two police officers turned up at Vogue House, and were sent up to see me. They explained a body, presumed to be John’s, had been recovered, and could I please identify it in the morgue on Horseferry Road. Although badly cut and bruised, I identified him at once, and indeed the Huntsman suit.

Condé Nast gave him a magnificent send-off at St George’s, Hanover Square, which 800 people attended, including half the tailors of Savile Row. I tried hard to persuade John’s parents to come down – they lived in a bungalow on the outskirts of Perth – but they didn’t feel able to. I wish they had, to see how well loved and respected their son was. I often think how different it might have been, had one person rung him on that fateful Sunday afternoon and invited him over for tea.

John was civilized and a gentleman, in the best sense, and I missed him.

I was still arriving at Vogue House each morning before 8 a.m., and was lucky to have PAs prepared to do likewise, though later my PAs had assistants to cover the early shift. During my thirty Condé Nast years I had six PAs,fn2 who did an average of five years each; most eventually left to get married. At least two of them had long-term boyfriends who never popped the question. My job, in these situations, was to corner them and ask, ‘Well, what are your intentions towards my PA? It’s been six years … it’s no business of mine, but I think she’d appreciate it.’ Both times, they were engaged within a month.

Si Newhouse returned to London, this time with a problem he hoped I might solve.

His beloved pug dog, Nero, had recently died, and Si and Victoria were heartbroken. I knew how much they had loved Nero: when they flew from New York to Paris on Concorde, Nero had his own seat. In fact, they booked four seats, with the fourth one for Si’s briefcase.

‘What I need you to establish,’ said Si, ‘is whether Nero’s air miles can be transferred to our new pug, Cicero? Nero built up quite a stock of these air miles, and I wonder, with your connections, whether you could, er, facilitate this?’

I asked, ‘You don’t think you could simply substitute Cicero for Nero? I mean, the people at the check-in desk might not be able …’ my voice trailed away. This was playing badly.

‘You mean, they might confuse Cicero with Nero? But they look quite distinct. There’s no resemblance between the two dogs.’

I rang Rod Eddington, Chief Executive of British Airways, and explained the conundrum. He was sympathetic, but obdurate: no pug-to-pug air miles transfer was possible. But, out of respect for Mr Newhouse, some bonus air miles could be awarded to the billionaire Condé Nast proprietor.