The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  Prince Andrew was to marry Sarah Ferguson in the summer of 1986, and AT&T was promoting a new high-speed technology to transmit colour photos by satellite. Alistair Duncan, the picture editor, persuaded AT&T to demonstrate it free of charge, and they agreed to transmit photos of the Fergie-Andrew wedding from London to New York. We beat our competition with colour photos of the wedding and saw a big lift in sales.

  It doesn’t seem much now, in the age of FaceTime with the grandkids, but in 1986 Rupert was impressed: ‘Your magazine looks fabulous this week,’ he told me. ‘I can hardly believe it.’

  CHAPTER 17

  Pissing with Picasso

  I felt pretty good in my new fawn seersucker suit. It had cost $60 at the Moe Ginsburg discount store in the Flatiron district of New York City. I wore it for the first day of my new job, along with one of the $6 defective Arrow shirts I routinely bought at a downtown street stall. I wanted to look my best.

  I had spent three years in Boston before moving back to edit The Star from offices in a suburban Westchester business park. Now, I was in Manhattan — the centre of the world — newly in charge of Rupert’s stable of glossy magazines.

  Carl J. Portale was not impressed when I arrived at the Madison Avenue offices of European Travel & Life, a periodical aimed at the very rich. Its mission was to reach that touching part of the American psyche that is dazzled by anything more than a century old. It did so by presenting a flawless fantasy of Scottish castles, Tuscan villas, and an idyllic rustic life of wine, fresh bread, and pure air, as if the entire European continent were embalmed in a perfect past.

  Portale was the magazine’s publisher. He was born to the role. His skin had a Mediterranean hue, and his slicked-back hair was black with matching streaks of white at each temple. His dark-blue suit was creaseless, with the tiny hint of sheen, and his silver tie had a broad knot; the kind I had never been able to master. As we shook hands, he raised his chin and peered at me down his Roman nose.

  My appointment as executive vice president of Murdoch Magazines was a jolt. I had always been a newsman, living with the immediacy of newspapers and news agencies. Now, most of the publications I had to work with were glossy monthlies, including Elle and Premiere. There were just two weeklies: New York and The Star, the twilight zone tabloid I knew so well. With these exceptions, my new world was an unrushed one. It could be intense, even fiery at times, but no one was ever in a hurry.

  For the first time, I had the task of overseeing the business as well as the journalism. This was a challenge. I was suddenly in charge of a multi-million-dollar enterprise without ever before having looked at a balance sheet.

  Rupert had surprised me again. In the autumn of 1987, he called me to his oval-shaped office at the New York Post. It was in a dirty-white slab of a building that sat anonymously in downtown Manhattan in the shadow of the FDR Drive. According to office lore, it had been anonymous since the previous owner, Dorothy Schiff, removed the New York Post sign for fear a disaffected reader would take a shot through her office window. This made sense because the FDR offered a perfect line of fire and an easy getaway.

  ‘Welcome to super management,’ Rupert said, and announced my new salary, which was agreeable but not lavish.

  I had never worked with people like Carl Portale. I moved into an office next door to him and he took me into his care, advising me I needed to look the part when visiting clients. They represented, he said, the world’s most desirable hotels; they were purveyors of expensive fashions, jewellery, and high-end European cars. The Moe Ginsburg suit I was so proud of wouldn’t do at all. He took me to his Italian tailor on the 15th floor of a building on Central Park South. ‘Three decent suits for this young man, and don’t overcharge him,’ he ordered.

  Other colleagues joined in. Julie Lewit-Nirenberg, the sleek publisher of Elle, disapproved of my shirts and their wayward collars. She recommended an expensive substitute, and told me to use collar stays. I had thought those plastic strips were part of the retail packaging. A stylist at the magazine told me to wear long socks to avoid the unacceptable exposure of skin when I crossed my legs at meetings. Ed Kosner, editor and publisher of New York magazine, explained that seersucker suits were strictly for summer, to be worn only between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

  The dress code at The Star had not been so demanding. No one cared about my shaggy dark-green coat or brown plastic boots lined with faux fur, or the happy yellow pom-pom ski hat I wore on cold days. My briefcase was a Sloan’s Supermarket bag. It wasn’t much different at the Herald, where I kept a tie on the back of my chair in case someone important came to lunch.

  If genetic coding links all journalists, those working for fashion magazines and supermarket tabloids are at opposite ends of the chain — although Elle staffers did snatch up the free copies of The Star that were left in piles around the building.

  At Elle, looking chic was essential. Black dominated the tribal costume, with added semaphores of taste such as the H buckles on Hermes belts; Chanel’s interlocking Cs; the Gucci strip; and the golden LV monogram. Accessories were commonly layered around necks and wrists, and there was subtle disapproval of those who didn’t get it quite right, who overloaded the accessories, or clashed their colours, or fabrics.

  After I took the job, we launched Mirabella with the doyenne of Manhattan fashion magazines, Grace Mirabella. Her chiming accessories acted as an early-warning system when she prowled the office. At Elle and Mirabella, I developed an inconvenient work-related condition — a sneezing allergy to strong-smelling perfumes.

  Grace Mirabella was one of the best-connected journalists on the Manhattan social scene. Dinner parties at her Upper East Side brownstone were full of notable people. I met Donna Karan there, just as she was hitting the big time; Peggy Noonan had gained renown for the speeches she wrote for Ronald Reagan; Tom Wolfe sang Christmas carols — and I saved the company millions of dollars after meeting Carl Icahn.

  Icahn was already a billionaire and famous for his forceful takeover tactics. He had gained control of Trans World Airlines (TWA), so it seemed polite to show respect for his success. I asked the kind of question sure to flatter a towering tycoon: ‘When you acquire a company, what is the first thing you do?’

  He smiled. ‘I fire all the procurement people,’ he said. ‘Not because they’re crooked or taking kickbacks, but if they stay in the job too long they become friends with the people they’re buying from. They play golf together, they go to shows. That softens them when they’re renewing deals.’

  Soon after my conversation with Icahn, we were negotiating to renew a multi-year printing deal. I put the company’s most cantankerous finance executive alongside the regular negotiators. He was a stranger to the people we were buying from, and he was tough. We reduced our costs by $90 million.

  The least fashionable member of the Elle staff was also its most important. Regis Pagniez was the publication director, and he dressed in a simple shirt with an old V-neck sweater. Sometimes, but not often, he combed his grey hair. He had spent years in the superficial atmosphere of fashion, and I suspect most of its rituals bored him. He cared only about shapes — a handbag, a silk scarf, a face.

  Pagniez could crop a picture so that a simple shoe looked like a beautiful sculpture. It was wonderful watching him work; he would select a shape or a photo that he knew was right, but no words could explain, only the sight of it on the page.

  Elle was a 50-50 venture with the French publisher Hachette Filipacchi, and Pagniez made it an instant success, which caused brief but satisfying anxiety at Vogue. He was a perfect example of how exasperating the best creative people can be, and a lesson for me in dealing with them. I worked with many: art directors who stormed off after mild criticism; columnists who went into hysterics when a sub-editor invaded their fine prose with a clumsy comma; editors who sulked after a gentle rebuke about an underplayed story or an oversized headline. But in my entire
career, no one compared with Regis Pagniez. Any challenge provoked in him a wild Latin tantrum. We had many arguments. Didier Guerin was my French counterpart in the joint venture and once had to jump between us as Pagniez reached for my throat.

  Pagniez’s boss, mentor, and defender was Daniel Filipacchi, chairman of Hachette Filipacchi magazines and a legend in France. He had started as a Paris Match photographer and made many millions in media. He also had a vast and renowned collection of surrealist art.

  I once complained about Pagniez over lunch at Filipacchi’s country house near Paris. Filipacchi gave me an understanding look. ‘Certainly, Regis is a prima donna, but he is brilliant also, and worth the trouble he causes. Companies must always burst with imagination, and they need people like him.’

  It was good advice. I repeated his lecture many times to orderly minded executives struggling to cope with crazy creatives. All the same, I was secretly relieved in 1988 when we sold back to Hachette our 50 per cent share of Elle.

  But I did not forget Filipacchi’s wisdom, or my visit to the toilet down the long corridor leading from his dining room. The walls of his home were covered with paintings, and that included the bathroom. There was an eye-catching blue abstract low on the wall to the left of the toilet where I stood. It was a perilous position for a valuable work of art, easily within splashing distance. I mentioned it to the waiting butler as he led me back to the dining room.

  ‘Yes. It is a Picasso, sir,’ he said.

  The job did have variety. Glossy magazines dominated the group when I arrived, but we brought it down to earth by buying Soap Opera Digest. This came with the rights to an annual awards ceremony for soap operas. Within a few weeks of watching the high fashion parades in Paris of Gaultier, Givenchy, and Chanel, I was in the ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hilton applauding winners from classic daytime soaps such as The Young and the Restless and One Life to Live.

  John B. Evans was president of Murdoch Magazines, and theoretically my boss. He was a brilliant, quixotic Welshman and an important figure in the history of News Corp.

  Evans was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and always eager to share the details of his struggle. He had spent years crewing private yachts in Europe and the United States before becoming a classified advertising salesman at The Village Voice. In a company tolerant of quirky characters, Evans rose to become publisher of The Voice, then president of its magazine division.

  As a manager, he was haphazard and restless; too distractible to spend time on detail, and with a propensity for madcap ideas. But in his search for excitement, Evans gave the first warning of the thing that would threaten News Corp’s newspapers more than anything before.

  In the late 1980s, when Tim Berners-Lee had yet to become famous for creating the World Wide Web, Evans began warning of the dangers of a dull sounding thing called ‘electronic publishing’. He became a digital apostle, the canary down the mine who sensed the changing atmosphere that would demolish the business model that for generations provided riches for the owners of print.

  He told us that the end of days was coming for any business that depended on ‘smearing ink on crushed trees’. In the future, he warned, everything would come to us on screens and these screens would become mobile. They would act as ‘butlers’, organising our lives with calendars, and access to banks and restaurants. They would also, he said, provide customised news, tailored to the interests of each user.

  He took groups of us to the pioneering Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where its founder Nicholas Negroponte issued terrifying predictions. The coming age would offer instant and absolute communication, he said, and fresh news would no longer be delivered in lumbering trucks.

  When Microsoft was still the spear-point of new technology in the early 1990s, Evans arranged a visit to its Seattle HQ, and we flew there with Rupert. After signing an agreement to keep their secrets, Microsoft told us they had purchased electronic rights to Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia and were going to compress its entire contents onto a single CD-ROM — a disc that looked like the one that transformed the music industry. This disc would be searchable by typing ‘keywords’ on a computer keypad. Its contents would include sounds and images; at the touch of a few keys, you could see a bird and hear its song. This vast, magical, almost weightless encyclopaedia would be called Encarta.

  Microsoft gave us a glimpse into the future, and while CD-ROMs were not the future for long, we knew that the information business was heading for an upheaval. But it was only a hint of what lay ahead, and we left Seattle uneasy but not yet alarmed.

  When I went to Murdoch Magazines in 1987, digital media was not a threat, but new technology was already changing the industry. Software that produced magazine pages quickly and cheaply had lowered the cost of entry, and the market was crowded. Magazines, like most newspapers, earn their profits from advertisers. With only so much advertising money to go around, the competition was intense.

  Having moved to the business side of media, I spent a lot of time with advertisers. Apart from Portale’s instructions on the dress code, there were other rules. When meeting advertisers, it was important not to wear or carry a competitor’s product. Wearing a Hermes scarf to a Chanel sales meeting was never a good idea, nor was drinking a Diet Coke in the company of a Pepsi marketing director. Once, when Ralph Lauren came for lunch with Rupert, an advertising executive handed us Ralph Lauren ties. ‘Be sure to wear them. He will notice.’ I found an old Lauren sports jacket in my closet and wore that, too. It might have helped. Back at his office, Lauren told his marketing team: ‘I want to advertise in that magazine every week.’ Unfortunately, it was a monthly, but we liked his attitude.

  It is dangerous to appease advertisers when they complain about editorial content. When New York magazine was working on a long profile of Calvin Klein, and the writer Michael Gross was asking penetrating questions about Klein’s personal life, all Calvin Klein advertising was pulled from the magazine. They were spending about $1 million a year, so it was a big deal. I took one of Klein’s partners for a long lunch and he gave me an ultimatum: fire Michael Gross or lose the ad revenue. I have always found threats like this easy to handle; if we capitulate to one advertiser, others would soon try the same trick. I told Klein’s partner what he could do with his $1 million a year ads, and the lunch came to an abrupt end. Gross continued writing for us, and Calvin Klein returned to the magazine, but not before we lost millions.

  Years later, when I was running Rupert’s British newspapers, the Korean company Hyundai was starting to gain a foothold selling its cars in Britain when The Sunday Times’ motoring writer Jeremy Clarkson gave one of their new models a scathing review. He added that no country whose citizens ‘ate dogs’ could ever make a decent motorcar. Hyundai threatened to pull its advertising from all News International newspapers unless there was an apology. I told our panicking sales executives to let the Koreans know that Clarkson was the country’s most popular motoring writer and that over-the-top remarks were part of his brand. I also told them to assure Hyundai that the company had no opinion on the Korean tradition of dog eating. They kept advertising. The hard reality was that the pages around Clarkson articles were prime real estate for selling cars.

  At Murdoch Magazines, it wasn’t just the intense world of advertising that was new to me; there was also The Numbers. I had never seen a balance sheet, or a profit and loss statement, or heard terms like discounted cash flow, or accretion. Most journalists think they’re the only people in the business who matter. They aren’t interested in what goes on behind the scenes in the less obvious or visible parts of publishing. I know because I was like them.

  Now, I had to cope with it all: advertisers, printing contracts, marketing budgets, distribution costs, paper prices. These were all areas where numbers ruled, not words. Numbers had never been my friends. The grades and comments on my school mathematics reports were painful. The s
tories numbers tell are stubborn and unchangeable; you can’t add a flourish, as you can with words, at least not legitimately.

  For some clever people, numbers live and breathe. Rupert loved and understood numbers. It was always fun to see him show off in meetings, scratching billion-dollar figures on a pad with his green pen, working out if deals made sense. He might have made bad decisions now and then, but it wasn’t because he couldn’t count. I never saw him use a calculator.

  I worried about numbers, but Marty Singerman calmed me down. He was one of the few who could match Rupert when it came to mental calculations. ‘It’s common sense, just common sense,’ he would say as he guided me through my first profit and loss statement.

  He was right. Any business comes down to this: the proper balance between spending and earning; increasing revenue while controlling costs; how much actual cash the business earns; whether customers are being charged enough; and whether debtors pay up on time.

  In making acquisitions, you need, simply, to understand the business and be confident that you can make it worth more than you’re paying for it. Mostly, it is about the talent who will come with the purchase; the most valuable assets go home at the end of the day, and that doesn’t always need to include the bosses. Will the new people be easy to work with and fit into the company’s personality and style? If it’s a business with a new idea, is their intellectual property safe — patented — or easily copied? How crowded is the competition? If it is crowded, will our purchase accelerate the target company’s chance of success?

  In deciding whether to buy a new company, other calculations come into play, but the final decision is more abstract than any mathematical equation. There is a natural tension between ‘ideas people’ and ‘numbers people’, but they need each other. Numbers keep a creative business grounded, but ideas make it fly. You can’t rely too much on piling statistics into a computer when the most important currency is ideas, and everything depends on those quirky, mercurial, undependable readers.