MY LIFE WITH A VERY GLOSSY POSSE
More hot society gossip from the impeccably well-connected magazine supremo...
ON SATURDAY, in the first part of Nicholas Coleridge’s deliciously indiscreet memoirs, the society magazine supremo revealed the secrets of his life rubbing shoulders with aristocrats, royalty and celebrities. Today, he tells how he landed a job at Tatler with a mission to make it more racy — and how Lady Diana Spencer helped to turn it into the toast of the town . . .
THE week I left Cambridge university, I spotted in a newspaper that Tina Brown had just been appointed as the new editor of Tatler. I applied at once.
I was interviewed at the terrace house she shared with her boyfriend, Harry Evans, editor of The Sunday Times. We sat in her kitchen. Tina was 27: blonde, foxy, watchful.
Spread out on the table between us were 30 or so party photographs, taken at the recent 18th birthday party of the Duke of Rutland’s daughter, Lady Theresa Manners, at Belvoir Castle.
Tina asked: ‘Do you know who any of these chinless characters are?’ I did. ‘Actually, I was at that party.’ ‘I need a headline,’ she said. It was a test. ‘ Something snappy.’ ‘ Saturday Night Belvoir?’ I was hired on the spot — as associate editor.
Note: the headline ‘Saturday Night Belvoir’ is a near-perfect example of early Eighties glossy magazine wit, being both a pun on a recent film title and deliciously excluding.
Only in-the-know readers who realise that Belvoir Castle is pronounced ‘Beaver’ and not ‘Bellvoir’ would get it. So at least half the paying audience would miss the joke, and the in-crowd feel smug.
In 1979, Tatler was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Its offices were of unmatched decrepitude: you went up to the fourth floor in a jerking, pre-war lift, walked up a further flight, passed by the offices of a debt-collecting agency, and entered a tiny sloping catacomb.
Tina occupied a windowless office at the back, the other ten of us hunkered down at a mishmash of Edwardian school desks with antique Bakelite telephones and 40-year- old editions of Debrett’s and Who’s Who.
She quickly gave her us her vision for the new-look Tatler.
OuTwould go photographs of galloping majors at point- topoints and hunt balls, out would go the wedding portraits of pudding-faced Herefordshire debutantes and anything else elderly, dowdy or staid.
Instead, readers would be treated to sexy London It-girls, philandering men about town, disgraced dukes, libidinous novelists, upwardly mobile hostesses and knighted thespians.
‘ It’s an upper- class comic,’ declared Tina.
My job description soon accrued three distinct duties. The first was to write at least four articles a month, under multiple pseudonyms. unable to pay many outside contributors, I’d write two under my own name, then several more as Marcus von Trout, Harry Haviland, Percy Peverel and so forth.
My second role was to sell the review copies of books for cash. Tatler was sent numerous expensive art volumes, and these we augmented by ringing round publishers and pretending we were planning a big feature on the best new illustrated books.
They’d courier these round. My job was to take them by taxi to a second-hand bookshop, and flog six large boxes of them.
The £300 of cash I would hand to Tina, who passed it straight to the novelist Julian Barnes, our restaurant critic, who spent it on reviewing Langan’s Brasserie or The Savoy Grill.
My final task was to collect the
monthly column of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, who lived all alone in a rococo- and- chintz service flat in the Grosvenor House hotel. She was still notorious as the protagonist in the 1963 ‘headless man’ scandal, when she’d been photographed through a keyhole performing a sexual favour on an unnamed gentleman with an obscured face, but visible d***, in the drawing room of Inveraray Castle.
Tatler was rehabilitating her reputation by commissioning a social column of unparalleled drivel, named ‘Steppin’ out with the Duchess of Argyll’.
Each visit, while I speed-read her latest effort, the Duchess sat disconcertingly close, leaning across to ensure I’d fully appreciated some witticism or namedrop, though the column was sadly short on both. Her claw-like hand rested on my knee.
‘One evening we must drink cocktails together in the suite,’ she murmured.
At editorial conferences, we competed to suggest stories to delight Tina, the more lascivious the better: British dukes with the biggest d***s . . . posh wives who had started life as escort girls . . .the most unctuous royal courtiers.
The magazine still sold shockingly few copies, but the advertising department spun it as a slam- dunk success, and so it was perceived.
Meanwhile, in the parallel world of illusion, Tatler parties became ever more frequent and glamorous. Minor royals, major tycoons, nightclub greeters, social astronauts, posh teenagers and serial seducers like Dai Llewellyn, Sir William Pigott-Brown and Rupert Deen defined the guest list.
Tina wrote a pseudonymous column, ‘Rosie Boot’s Guide to London Bachelors’, and returned fired up with disparaging descriptions from lunchtime encounters with playboys. She had a theory that dull men invariably order cheese souffle, the preparation of which entailed an additional 25 minutes in their company.
It was the arrival of Lady Diana Spencer on the scene which finally saved Tatler. Her combination of London Sloane, Northamptonshire blue-blood and princessdesignate played to all the magazine’s core competencies at once.
A special Sunday Times- style Tatler Insight team was set up at a designated Diana desk, with every detail about Lady Di amassed and tabulated. The Coleherne Court mansion flat, where she lived with her three flatmates, was permanently staked out by Tatler staff.
As the whole world yearned for more and more Diana Spencer information, Tatler become the go-to source. Circulation soared. The magazine was suddenly the toast of the town. IT’S rare to get two job offers in one evening, especially at 23, but that is what happened.
The gossip columnist of the