LIBBY PURVES: Profane, sniggering, rum-swigging: my merry hell as editor of Tatler
11th October 2009
Look, this isn’t a bit of my CV I normally dwell on. I like to think of it as a rare and elaborate form of postnatal depression, in which you accidentally edit the most unsuitable magazine in sight.
It began in the freezing January of 1983 when, as a new mother, I received an inexplicable letter care of the BBC office where I was doing some freelancing. It asked whether I would consider being editor of the Tatler when Tina Brown left. The BBC man who passed me the letter kept giggling and we assumed it was a hoax.
Weirdly, it was not. Condé Nast kept sending enormous cars down in the snow to collect me from Greenwich – complete with Moses basket, I had no nanny as yet – and persisted in offering me money.
I was a precarious freelance, having packed in being a Today presenter because I seemed unable to get pregnant while rising four days a week at 3.45 am. In the fog of flattered confusion, I overlooked three facts: that I had never edited anything, hated smart parties and was – then, as now – known for a distressing indifference to personal chi.
I remember those trips to Vogue House in Hanover Square vividly. Every lift contained well-painted girls in hand-crumpled Kenzo, looking one another up and down and saying: ‘Oh, it’s lah-vley. Who’s it by?’ I felt very M&S. This was, of course, the same building into which Princess Diana was being regularly smuggled, to be advised by Vogue stylists. Never saw her. Or maybe I did and took her for one of the 40 or 50 well-born clones of her who worked there.
Mystery shrouds the management’s determination to have me: one story goes that I was recommended by Min Hogg, founding editor of World Of Interiors, after a cheeky piece I wrote in Punch saying her magazine was nothing but ‘a great big glossy nose pressed to the windows of the rich’. Miles Kington, on the other hand, wrote that Condé Nast was probably scared of Tatler – which it had only lately bought – and wanted someone reassuring. As the most reassuring institution in Britain is Radio 4, they picked me.
Well, I fell for it. What Eng Lit graduate wouldn’t? Tatler was founded by Addison and Steele at the dawn of the 18th Century, flourishing in an atmosphere of pseudonymous mischief and political gossip to instruct ‘Persons of zeal and weak intellects what to think’. Jonathan Swift wrote for it, H.M.Bateman drew for it, Diana Mitford penned breathless ‘Letters from Paris’. Moreover, its recent history was piquant: after a moribund, drearily atavistic debby doldrum in the Labour years, it was revived by Tina Brown in 1979.
She, a fearless twenty-something, was one of the first to create an Eighties spirit of spendthrift, irreverently boho snobbery which mocked and adored in the same breath; her philosophy was in the title of her 1983 anthology – Life As A Party. She tripled the circulation to nearly 40,000, whereon, just before my advent, its owner sold it to Condé Nast, owners of Vogue and Brides magazines.
This change – though I did not realise it in my innocence – had been an emotionally cataclysmic one for the magazine staff. It was like co-opting a pirate ship into the Royal Navy and expecting its crew of profane, swaggering, rum-swigging rapscallions to conform.
Tatler had moved from its shabby, matey offices into the British headquarters of the world’s most exclusive and rarefied magazine empire; it felt huddled and defiant, existing in an uneasy bubble of individualism and faint contempt. This may have contributed to Tina’s decision to leave and become a full-time writer again (though within weeks she was lured back by Condé Nast to work her magic on Vanity Fair in the US).
In my handover meeting, she was brisk, unsentimental, and betrayed no evidence of sorrow at handing over her creation. Sitting, immaculate, at her icy marble table she ran her finger briskly down the names on the masthead. ‘Good at layouts, temperamental, don’t let him get away with anything – this one’s a real party boy, tends to kick off – this girl’s an efficient sub, but no ambition. Ah now, her – mmm. Pretty thick, frankly, but great connections. If you want 20 titled Kentish ladies in a rowing-boat on the Serpentine...’
Condé Nast decided that it would help if I met some other editors, so I had a soothing technical conversation with the editor of Brides and an unnerving audience with the legendary Beatrix Miller, veteran editor of Vogue. She looked at me (and my postnatal outfit) with an expression I could not quite fathom but which, in hindsight, was probably pity. The only advice I remember was: ‘Watch your chromosome count...you can’t run a magazine without the boys but if you get too many together there are always ructions.’
I didn’t know what she meant. Then. She wished me luck. And so it was that a quarter of a century ago, with a new baby, random outfits and no interest whatsoever in high society, I edited Tatler for six months before coming to my senses and resigning, thankfully, to the life of a newspaper and radio hack.
Rightly, I tend to be airbrushed from Tatler’s official history because when I left they did what they should have done in the first place and recruited the great Mark Boxer, a good leader and a committed socialite. He liked the magazine’s awful world of shrieks and cocktails and titles just enough, yet he was a thorough grown-up. He also saw through it enough to mock it gently and drive Tatler onwards and upwards through the rest of the crazy Eighties.
However, for those significant months of transition I was there. And you may want to hear what it was like. Frankly, it was a bit like being the mousy heroine of Rebecca, with a mass chorus of Mrs Danvers. Never a day passed without a mournful murmur of ‘Tina would just have told him to **** off’ or ‘Tina would just have torn it up’ or sometimes ‘Tina wouldn’t even have taken that call’. This was invariably followed by a misty ‘She was wonderful!’ I never was unkind enough to repeat to the staff what Tina had said about them in her brisk handover.
In another way, it was like being a Middle East peacemaker: Tatler had been independent, but now had to fit into the production and administrative systems of big Condé Nast. I did a lot of matronly brow-smoothing of both factions. I also discovered some strange, leftover arrangements: notably that the social photographer’s deal was that he covered all the parties they wanted, for a flat fee to include materials.
Thus in those pre-digital days, the harder he worked the less he took home. We fixed that. I also enjoyed sorting out a fracas between a particularly highly-strung contributor who was convinced he was owed money and the corporate finance man who was equally convinced he wasn’t owed a bean. The pleasure of a private company – after the tortuousness of the BBC – is that you can go straight to the MD in his office and work out a system whereby the rude genius gets the money and the finance man never finds out.
It was also refreshing to be given the direct US phone number of the CEO and chairman, Si Newhouse. Never rang him. But I could have. I also liked a lot of the staff, seeing glimmers of real talent especially in the humbler ranks (Alex Shulman was subbing: now she edits Vogue. Nicest-natured of them all, and the least fanatically groomed, too).
I loved meeting Norman Parkinson, though I never felt brave enough to take up his insouciant offer of photographing me. Even so, in five minutes’ conversation the old wizard made me feel like Garbo. I suppose that was his trick. He made women glow.
Other figures flitted past on their way to the fashion department: Joseph Ettedgui the designer; Manolo Blahnik; the tiny exquisite figure of Marie Helvin. All interesting in their own right as artists and humans, but the curse of ‘smartness’, in a curious way, made them less interesting to contemplate, not more. To me, people at parties were just crowds: in their studios or studies alone they came to life.
I enjoyed commissioning a few pieces, notably a mickey-take of the Sunday Times empire at the moment Andrew Neil took it over; but I was unmoved by breathless, glossy-haired networkers sidling into the office saying they’d found a ‘rahhlly, rahhlly bwilliant’ (and invariably titled) writer or artist.
They all seemed to have an unhealthy interest in anybody called Tennant, and a reverence for Princess Margaret’s Mustique Set which I could never quite identify with. I was equally irritated by the insistence that ‘wrinkled oldies’ should never be pictured on glossy paper and that we should never, ever cover ‘people from south of the river’. One staffer threw a hissy-fit because Tessa Dahl was in – they didn’t think we should feature someone who lived in Battersea.
I grew bored and impatient. I am a hopeless editor anyway, because if someone brings in a rubbishy bit of writing I can’t be bothered to explain what is wrong with it, but prefer to rewrite it quickly myself. I did, often.
As to office relationships, there was a gossip-column legend that the staff hated me and that I fed my baby in the office. Wrong. He only came in once, for five minutes, because the girls begged to see him. I don’t think they hated me: they were more baffled by me, really. The only thing I did which roused real enthusiasm was to get the magazine an exclusive entreé to the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes and an interview with the Commodore Sir John Nicholson: my liking for small boats which ruined your blow-dry was a cause of great marvelling among the tribe.
They made a wonderful farewell collage when I left, of me in a sailor hat with silly bylines and a poem by Vicki Woods, who was later to be editor of Harpers & Queen. It went: ‘Libby Purves/Is known for her curves/For her lack of ‘glamour’/And for crossing the Atlantic in a windjammer/She was briefly/Editor-in-Chiefly/But pined for something healthier and haler/Goodbye, sailor’.
My favourite memories are of sushi lunches with the nervy, brilliant Michael Roberts (then art director, now a magazine legend) and our agreeing that, unexpectedly, we rather liked each other. I liked him so much that I went along with his most famously uncommercial cover, showing not a lipsticked celeb but a pair of elegant, anonymous monochrome legs. I also let him put, in tiny print next to a winter coat sleeve, the legend ‘fur cuff’. It made him happy. The management were brave.
The worst lunches, obviously, were when Condé Nast decided that the Editor should schmooze important advertisers such as the Estée Lauder people. It was hell. They would lean forward and analyse my skin tone over the avocado ’n’ kiwi fruit starter. I did once meet Estée herself: indomitable, immaculate, terrifying.
Four months in, I gave notice. My husband Paul wanted to move to Suffolk and I had finished my admin reforms and realised a great truth about magazines: that they must only be edited by those who truly love them and their lifestyles. I just didn’t. The management asked me to stay and generously said: ‘Why not make it a magazine you could love?’ But then it wouldn’t be Tatler, would it?
For two months, I hung on while they looked around and finally recruited Mark. I gave him the same warnings that Tina had given me, updated. Especially about always checking that the layouts hadn’t been mischievously changed, even if it was late on a Friday.
The coda to this is that some months later, a somewhat notorious issue came out with all the clothes on the fashion spreads shown in indistinguishable blurred background (to the dismay of the designers) while the foreground featured nothing but male sailors stripped to the waist. I phoned Mark.
‘Have you come out of the closet, or did they lock you in one?’ ‘Neither,’ he said gloomily. ‘We had a long weekend in the country.’ Well, I did warn him.
So happy birthday, 21st Century Tatler. You’ve grown up now, and are none the worse for that. But I am proud to have shared, however briefly, your stormy adolescence.
I hope you are right in thinking it could be good.I don't want it to go totally.
