COVER STORIES Nicholas Coleridge’s scintillating memoir of his Harpers & Queen days
Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir celebrates the magic of magazines
One afternoon, ill in bed, the teenage Nicholas Coleridge picked up his mother’s magazine to pass the time. It changed his life.
‘I was mesmerised by the wit, by the blend of serious journalism and trivia, by the glamour of the fashion photography, sheen of the paper, punning headlines, understated snobbery… I knew in a heartbeat I wanted to make a career in glossy magazines,’ he writes. The periodical in question was Harpers & Queen (as the British edition of Bazaar was then known, following a merger with Queen).
The Glossy Years, Coleridge’s sparkling, gossipy and often hilarious memoir, is full of gems from his years at Condé Nast Britain, where he is now chairman. But for me, it is his recollections of working at Harpers & Queen, the title that launched his glittering career (and, incidentally, introduced him to his wife) that resonate the most. Coleridge’s first article was published on these pages, and thereafter, he became a regular contributor and interned during his holidays. By 29, he had been made the magazine’s editor. Shortly after his appointment, he was kind enough to print my own schoolgirl scribblings in a 1987 issue, though he was long gone when I joined as features editor in the late 1990s. In both his time and my own, Harpers & Queen aimed to satisfy a disparate readership encompassing the rural smart set, London ladies who lunched, bohemian intellectuals and modish trendsetters with a mix of edgy fashion, in-depth cultural reviews and the gloriously anachronistic snobbery of the Jennifer’s Diary social pages. These were overseen in Coleridge’s era by the fearsome Betty Kenward, who used punctuation as a code to indicate status (untitled guests were separated by a comma, titled guests a semi-colon, ‘allowing the reader to draw breath in wonder’; only royalty merited a full stop).
‘The Harpers & Queen years were endlessly fun,’ Coleridge declares, recalling the pithy maxims of the then CEO Terry Mansfield – ‘God doesn’t read Vogue, never forget that, Nicholas’ – and the anarchic atmosphere of the Soho offices: ‘drunks, punks, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley from Wham! You never knew who’d show up.’ Angry letters from readers were a reliable source of mirth: he cites Lady Young of Graff ham complaining that her wallpaper had been described as red with white stripes, when it was in fact white with red stripes. ‘I obtained a sample of the disputed wallpaper, and as it turned out, the red and white stripes were identical in width. Nevertheless, we published a fulsome apology.’
‘There’s a huge place in my heart for Harpers & Queen,’ Coleridge says. ‘It opened my eyes to a way of thinking and seeing, and a kind of attitude and poise that I found very influential.’ Reading The Glossy Years catapulted me straight back into that intoxicating, irresponsible magazine heyday in which I also had the good fortune to participate. I only wish I’d had the sense to keep a diary too.
‘The Glossy Years’ by Nicholas Coleridge (£25, Fig Tree) is out now.