Vanity Fair, its Exiting Just-So Editor and Gwyneth Paltrow

Rhadika Jones is soon to exit the Vanity Fair editorship. Thank goodness for that. She seeks to climb a new career Matterhorn, as you usually do when the bosses leave the exit door ajar. Ages back I wondered aloud at the sheer dullness of her VF. Cover after cover out-wallflowered the last on the magazine shelves, desperate not to excite or be noticed. Quite why she was appointed in the first place is a mystery to me, though I suspect Anna Wintour had a lot to do with it. Darling Anna will have wanted le total Graydon Carter Exorcism, a ridding of vulgar political engagement, controversy, and funny hair (Graydon's). In its/his place? The joys of just-so. Rhadika strikes me as awfully just-so. She and I could spend an hour together over a Matcha Three Mint tea in a Dorchester tea room and t(w)inkle in light convo. Faint giggles. Not one reputation would be pulled apart. No gossip exchanged. We would depart the hotel in a state of sobriety, before I rushed headlong to a local boozer for restoration of stupefied clarity. 

It is then a surprise to discover the latest VF with Gwyneth Paltrow as its star image. In her dying days as editor Radhika decides at long last to produce a not-uninteresting cover. Gwyneth is nonchalance itself seated (not sat) on a carpeted staircase, long seemingly bare legs crossed in Saint Laurent elegance. The SL scanty torso clobber is a tease: the cliched sexy tropes may give rise to sub-Hefner concern, but are struck dead in an instant by Gwyneth's unsmiling countenance. The hauteur of self-possession (or CEO power display - a male [XY!] thing for too long). Her expression is fuck you with a touch of Miss Whiplash admonition. What have we peeping toms done to be admonished about? For causing Gwyneth to pose in high-end lingerie? Which has been volunteered into our lives courtesy of mega-stardom? Courtesy of VF? Punish me!

Smile-seekers will be disappointed when they turn to the fawning, almost unreadable PR piece on (sorry, interview with) Madame Goop. More flesh is revealed yet the face remains inert, joyless, wrinkle-free strategic. Commercial. More lingerie is displayed out in the garden on a sun-lounger, and in other places. She is saying: I don't have to smile or please/I don't have to say cheese. It all seems so novel not to smile until you recollect that runway models rarely smile, either. What could Gwyneth be selling?

It's not a cover to ignite the world. Not like Tina Brown's Demi Moore one or Carter's Caitlyn Jenner. But in its own terms, the Paltrow triggers a low-wattage glance on the just-so spectrum. A pulse is detectable on the gurney. It's elegant, dry, sexless and noir-glam. It's a welcome spritzer after a tiring day before the cocktail hour. That's about as nice as I can be about our Radhika's editorship. See, I am all heart. Almost.   

Duncan Fallowell: Why he's given up on star interviews

Duncan Fallowell: The modern
approach to flogging books

In Duncan Fallowell's latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Celebrity Interview: A Personal Account - a long essay best read in one gulp - Tina Brown is blamed for... oh, let's start again. I'm getting ahead of myself.

I've had some personal experience of Mr F. In another age I feature edited the late IPC glossy Woman's Journal. In my first week in the post, following years as a jittery freelancer, I had to deliver on promises made (aka wishes expressed) to the grand editor-in-chief Laurie Purden MBE and produce big-name interviews by writers. Now. Not just hacks, not just "professionals", but prose naturals of the stylised kind. Of the sort likely to take Laurie by surprise. Because nothing bored her more than an expectation confirmed. She wanted to be taken unawares by an expert in seduction. Only people with a voice and a gift for animating their perverse reflexes in the written word would do. Byron Rogers could do it. I did not know DF but he'd already made an impact (on me and innumerable publications). He really did take one's breath away. He'd pissed off Gore Vidal big time. "He's lazy," bitter, angry Gore growled when I mentioned DF in an interview. "He said that I said writers are like cows - I am not a cow." I liked the way DF started his slebby pieces, as if idly picking up on a conversation begun sometime earlier or out of earshot. By some magic he seduced one into thinking that it was worth listening in on, to see what happened next. All an illusion, of course. All artifice. But this is what he calls a celebrity interview. An unfamiliar voyage into the familiar.

So, I made contact with DF from one of the top floors of IPC Towers and before I could say "lunch" he'd delivered the nightclub queen Regine to me from the sunny south coast of France. The piece enraptured Laurie, not normally given to orgasmic display, such was her intimacy with disappointment. I knew I was safe for a while. Yes, DF: you played your part in my survival.

So, let's start again. In his latest book, DF holds Tina Brown responsible (not solely, but majorly) for the destruction of his brand of celebrity journalism in newspapers and glossy magazines. She's to blame for his decision to give up on interviewing the stars. You'll have to read the book to find out how precisely, but the word "corporatism" is repeated. No matter Tina's glory at Tatler/Vanity Fair/New Yorker/Whatever she did not get DF at all. "She became a control freak," writes DF, of her immunity to his interviews that she'd commissioned. Her editorial expectations were narrow; she favoured the "girlie and conventional": she animated the corporate move against "authorial independence" (ie DF's). Her Vanity Fair became a "watertight plastic product which no writer was allowed to upstage with a personal voice." Tina B unleashed the infection of professionalism on a generation of underling and inferior editors anxious to copycat her success in their own name. Bitch.

That aside there's much yummy goss and much reflection on the pleasing by-product of celebrity meet-ups. I won't repeat the Germaine Greer sexual position that was novel even to DF. The John Osborne letters crackle with acid intelligence and guile. Wily Mick Jagger (probably) positioned a certain druggie book title on a table as a nod to DF's chemical treks. Oh, there's much to savour. And there's no malice. Of Tina B, DF remains fond. It's just she's put paid to his career as a celebrity interviewer. Bitch.

Of course, the celebrity interview is still alive and kicking, as cat litter trays everywhere testify. DF does not credit Hello! as another foe, with its seminally inane Q&As and PR-driven drivel, draped around pendants of posy pics of orange skin. The celebrity interviewer (epitomised by the ever self-regarding Piers Morgan) is now favoured, one half of a recorded collision of a double-barrelled marketing campaign to other media, pegged to book/film/whatever releases (as identified in italics at the end).

During my time at Woman's Journal, by far the most successful interview we ran - as measured by headlines generated all over the world - was DF's discourse with Germaine Greer in which she ended up rating lovers by nationality. British men - all homosexual! You can imagine the impact. All achieved by allowing two people of learning to do battle in and on their own terms. Laurie (bless her) felt no need to interfere though she did order me to strike out a "fucking" or two. We were a smart ABC1 glossy after all.

Student hacks (among others) should read this book to script the next retro-revolution in journalism. The online extravaganza of global readerships has scarcely begun - and these billions of the jaded and the seen-it-all will be seeking tit-hardening surprises. Q&As won't do. Mark my words, poppets.

DF's book can be downloaded here now at 99p

David Starkey: If only Queen Elizabeth I had been black....

I'm sorry to see that 'historian' Dr David Starkey is in the Twitter stocks for his metaphorisation of black skin for criminality. His problem is that he has never to my knowledge written a history of a black homicidal maniac. If only Elizabeth I or her dad Henry VIII - his favourite book and TV topics - had been black he might now be metaphorising white skin for criminality: strange how chance, circumstance and schooling play a part in our avowed certainties and comforts.

Instead, like many other 'historians' before him, he has taken to identify with his lucrative subjects and even to adopt a prose style which could be mistaken for Tudorbethan pastiche. Some intellectual crossdressers go the whole hog and end up on pub stage as Madame Trollette to the joy of many. Others, merely write books and cultivate a persona that requires no wig or nail technician.

Dr Starkey has only to open his mouth and I see the Spanish Armada yonder.

Hugo Vickers: Wallis' tragic tale, Higham and the 'Howling Cunt'

Hugo Vickers: Wally?

Most Esteemed Madame,

So happy to see your blog has returned.

I write to ask: have you perchance had an opportunity to peruse Mr Hugo Vickers' new work Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic Untold Story Of The Duchess Of Windsor? I'm half-way through and it is a most seriously curious work: more the tragic untold story of its author, who stalked his subject but was never fortunate enough to be granted an audience, and uses the book for a great deal of score-settling.

Author Michael Bloch gets it seriously in the neck, but I for one am left wondering why there is also no mention of Charles Higham whose Wallis bio contained equally racy allegations and was far more successful. Was it because that one was all true? Vickers doesn't say. It's the most puzzling book I've read in ages in terms of begging the question of what is going on in the mind of its author, so I wonder if you are able to shed any light on the matter.

I'm afraid, as per Mr Vickers' other works, it's crafted in an arid manner with reams of useless trivia crying out for an editor's blue pencil. (And for all that, there's still lots that remains unpublished about the Duke: eg that he used to go cruising for sailors in the company of the automobile heir Walter Chrysler Jnr., etc.). One also senses that the author may have come to loathe the late HM the Queen Mother, but is too polite to employ the term 'Howling Cunt'.

Yours,

A Most Puzzled Reader.

P.S. Recently visited NZ. Going As Far was deliciously accurate, and could have Gone Further!

Dear Puzzled Reader

I'm afraid Madame Arcati has read her last book in her present incarnation and, alas, it wasn't a book by Hugo Vickers. I am therefore unable to offer an explanation for his workmanlike foibles or attachment to royal trivia. However, it should not surprise one that the febrile world of royal biography is a carbonated stew of bitterness and revenge: worthy of its own history I'm sure. This, too, shall be a book I avoid.

Ever

Madame Arcati x

Perfume TV ads: Autoerotic adventures this family time of Christmas

Dior Homme starring Jude Law

Phone rage. Or phone sex? Ah, the playful layered plot to be found in Jude Law's Dior Homme TV scent ad directed by Guy Ritchie. Fools of we are made, tee-hee. A man talks to someone on the phone as loyal exquisite cunt dresses him. We think the conversation is homicidal post-brothers Kray. But little does she know of his betrayal. He is wrapped in a sex dream with a co-conspiratorial cunt. What you see on the Christmas box is just an excerpt from the five minute epic, click here. It's Guy's finest work. A masterly piece of cod movie-making. After RocknRolla. And we're still talking London gangster Mockney.

(Law has lost his Bosie-beauty and now entered his manlier handsome pot-pourri stage: it will last another five years before autumn's SagnBag era. Then, he may find his testicles less responsive to temperature: on cold nights in dark streets, passersby may think him just another middle-middle-aged man with patchy pate. His scent TV ad-days will be long gone. Never mind. Character parts are aplenty. A knighthood in his 50s cannot be ruled out.)

Matthew McConaughey is serially The One in D&G's latest, click here. A lone good-looking narcissist survives a welcome paparazzi pounce outside his hotel before unveiling himself of his shirt in his suite to reveal the spray-tanned six-pack. Look at me. Most men dream of this moment, imagined in shop window reflections; a glimpse of body theatre minus super-cape. The admiring audience is unseen cunt. What would spoil the moment is corporeal evidence of his sex appeal (ie presence of cunt). How clever of D&G to capture the reality of a male autoerotic nano-fantasy. Thank you Miles Davis for the moooooozak.

Naturally, wittiest perfume ad is Gaultier's Madame. Aygess Deyn re-edits herself with a pair of scissors: the essence of Madame, to repackage you. I should know. We are the mirror of transition for unseen cock. Instead of cock, we see Gaultier kissed.

Who's probably the oldest face in a current perfume TV ad.

Diana Athill and Molly Parkin: Two legends nowhere towards the end



Molly Parkin (left) and Diana Athill. Pic © Laura Lockington

 
Here's a very special and exclusive picture of two legends who met last week for dinner in London: Molly Parkin, close on 79, and retired premier UK literary editor and latterday celebrated memoirist Diana Athill, 93 in December.

I shall be reviewing Molly's extraordinary memoirs Welcome to Mollywood next week. Diana - who is an honourable exception to my general bar against Dianas - won the Best Biography of the Year at the Costa Book Awards 2008 for her frank memoir Somewhere Towards the End at the age of 91. The judges described the work as: 'A perfect memoir of old age – candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and above all, beautifully, beautifully written.'

Both Molly and Diana represent an amazing (re-)flowering of talents at ages usually treated as infirmity. Molly is writing at the height of her powers; her erotic novels will be reissued next year; and she's putting on her one-woman show at Ronnie Scott's on November 24 (on stage at 8pm).

In Somewhere, Diana reveals, among other things, that she preferred black men as lovers (least boring...): and for more details you'll have to buy her book. She describes atheism as, 'vastly more exciting and beautiful than any amount of ingenuity in making up fairy stories', a thought that went down well with fashionable secularists of the British intelligentsia raised on science drip-feeds.

Well, I didn't say Diana was wise. But at least, and unlike a lot of other Dianas, she does not whine.

Vote for Roger Lewis to be Oxford's next Professor of Poetry!

Esteemed Arcatiste, legendary memoirist and wit, Roger Lewis, has been nominated for the Oxford Chair of Poetry. Oxford grads such as Duncan Fallowell (can a knighthood be that far away?) Lynn Barber (a damehood?), Rachel "The Lady" Johnson (the sack?), and many Bright Young Things (pah!) in publishing / the media/ journalism, have rallied to his cause, God bless them.

Oxonians need to (a) register to vote by June 4th and (b) actually vote. Polls open on May 21st and close on June 16th. This can all be done online - click here. This is a new departure for Roger; I just hope he is not robbed of his comic ingenuity in the process. I shall be most displeased. Very.

In the past people had to turn up in person in Oxford, so the dons always had it all sewn up, the tarts. Madame Arcati won't be thwarted.

The Independent's new look: Madame Arcati review

Certain darling Arcatistes have messaged me privately imploring me to cast my eyes on the redesigned Independent. It's not as if I haven't other things to do. I'm busy. But as I sit here drinking a lunchtime latte mocchiato from my Tassimo coffee machine - barcoding has never been put to better use - I succumb to blandishment and compromise by summoning up the front page. Only.

To quote the No 1 single of the moment: omg! I am utterly appalled. Return editor Simon Kelner simply has not a clue about visual seduction. The Mail grabs and molests and you yield against better judgement; the Telegraph emits a tractor beam with its high-low mix of hoity-totty. Even the ghastly Express catches your attention with a waggle of a varicose veined pin before you hurry past. But the Independent! I just don't want to look at it. It makes me feel all Hannah Montana and want to go ew!

Why can't Kelner simply steal some ideas from other papers if he can't master the idiom of sexy look?

Now, of all the papers, the Indy is my least unfavourite. Its mind is in the right place, it does not demand the return of the Coliseum, it doesn't hire tomb-toothed loony James Delingpole; atheistically, it's on the side of the angels. The case for the Indy is a good one. New owner Alexander Lebedev potentially has a great asset here. So why the hell (to use a Carole Malone-ism) can't it get its face right?

Where to start? First, why all that white space to the right of the headline? How many trees were felled for that art statement? A front page must demand our instant interest; there's no time for lolling. If a paper wants stylised it must commit not omit. The only case for white space on a front page is a signposted area for reader shopping lists or moustache doodling - a playpen for idlers. And is "Goldmans" literate? Is the plural accepted use for Goldman Sachs? It just doesn't read right.

And what's with the fancy font for the new Viewspaper? You expect to see those squiggles on wedding invites or Valentine's cards or in a movie starring Margaret Lockwood - for lickle sticky-out finger occasions when silly tarts dress like Jordan and the men breathe in for the cummerbund.

Logically and aesthetically, the front page makes no sense. The Indy primarily is a read paper. One way to signal this fact is to have plenty of words on the page and several stories. What we have instead is the one story body copy squashed down at the bottom in favour of a hideous great plane and a dumb monster screamer (with tabloid exclamation mark). The overall sell is basically tabloid though the product is broadsheet all but in size. What is Kelner thinking of?

The only thing going for this front page is the come-on for Gauguin's Girls in the bottom right hand corner, featuring a patch of female pubis: an advert for the editor's cock-cunting inclination no doubt because it would be hard to imagine, say, a naked Alex Reid here with his flaccid four-incher hanging down like a rotten corgette.

Oh no. Must do better. The overall impression is that of a local newspaper with airs. This may work if the paper does go freebie. But not if you're looking for cash.

Tony Blair: The Journey of his face - a review

What does this front cover tell us of Tony Blair's current state of mind and his memoirs The Journey (out September)? Arcatistes will be familiar with my appraisals of books by their cover alone: so let's examine the method and the message of this presentation.

Most striking is the light bleaching. I haven't seen anything quite like it since Beth Ditto's cover pic for Love magazine. Two white lamps are trained on the left-hand side of his face: one flat on, the other just off-central visage, casting shadows at the farthest reaches to our right, with illumination splashes on left cheek and mid-forehead. All this serves two purposes: to flood out most of his wrinkles and to deflect attention from the translucent bronze tanning or powder with shade brown and white contrasts.

Artfully, criss-cross lines are just discernible on the forehead while beard grain is non-existent. This succeeds in expressing a hint of the exigencies of past high office while reassuring us of a preserved boyishness, even at the age of 56, one still capable of being summoned up with discreet bronzing and lighting. To go further would be to risk Americanisation of the face. Uncapped teeth and greying hair are another concession to British ideas of authenticity (or another way of maintaining blue transatlantic water between Blighty grunge and American perfectionism). He's still a Brit even if he, like Thatch, is an honorary Yank.

Black open-necked shirt essays a smart-casual, Paul Smith-ish brand of 21st century cool statesmanship, in keeping with the not-quite smile: a smile or grin would incite public violence. So instead we get a Mona Lisa countenance: one that may suggest a certain conflict of feeling. This is a face sensitive to tone (and Tone). Notice how the corners of his mouth level off against the suggestion of a promised smile from the parted lips: it's the look of someone no longer certain of his reception. He looks you straight in the eye but he's wary. Not to be confused with contrition.

Much planning has gone into this pose of informal authenticity. His book promises much as a result, but will it deliver?

Did Michael Lutin's USA horror-scope stick in Vanity Fair's Uranus?

Michael Lutin

One of the minor mysteries of our time is why Vanity Fair dumped its esteemed and popular astrologer Michael Lutin back in 2007. For nearly 25 years he wrote for the mag: his monthly Planetarium page nimbly balanced seership and edgy wit to please reader hopers and staff cynics alike: then he was gone without explanation - such bad manners! He was the one stargazer who impressed those of my friends who think my studies in astrology a sign of lunacy.

Lutin himself appears to have been nonplussed by his apparent dumping, judging by a message he left on his Where's The Moon? site in 2007:  "I can't personally answer the thousands of people wondering what happened to the VF Planetarium so all I can say is maybe you should ask them [the mag]." Thousands? And yet not one letter published in VF on the matter. There's journalistic democracy for you.

Lutin now can be found on the Huffington Post and one of his postings last year perhaps contains a clue to the reason for his departure: do remember, if the first and second parties do not explain, a third party is entitled to speculate.

Back in 2006 Lutin wrote an alarming piece for VF titled Special Alert: Horoscope USA. Alas, it failed in many respects to be as breezily optimistic as its editor Graydon Carter never was while Bush was in power. Lutin, as latterday Nostradamus, foresaw a parlous and dark future for America: "We've gotten fat and we've gotten lazy," concluded Lutin. "So don't blame George Bush [as Graydon Carter did every month - MA's note] or Bill Clinton or any of the elected officials in Washington. A country gets the leaders it deserves, and when we're ready to rise from the ashes of a fallen empire, we will find the leaders to help us do so. It will happen, but not in 2008. We have to go through the Pluto transit first."

Now I notice that Lutin used his Huffington Post blog to tell us of his problems in getting the piece published in VF in the first place, though he was a contributing editor. Was the article too dark? He writes: "That's what my editors at Vanity Fair thought when I submitted the piece... [it was] finally published... after it had been thoroughly edited 'for size'." Ah, does he mean toned down? Censored? His quote marks. Lutin adds: "Just as the issue was going to press, I told them how important I believed the piece was, and they should drop out my regular column if space were the problem, and replace it with the Horoscope USA. They did, but afterward I received a note from the editor-in-chief [Carter], saying, 'I hope you're wrong.'"

With evident relief, Lutin writes: "Thank God for the Huffington Post. Now I can say what I've been trying to say for going on three years," before regaling readers with more talk of revolution in the Cancerian US as Pluto does its worst in Capricorn, despite Obama. I am sure Carter would not have wanted to read in his glossy: "People are funny. Just before the catastrophic explosion, they get lethargic, apathetic and goofy, almost catatonic, crippled by shock into denial... "

Is it possible Obama-adoring Vanity Fair let their very own John Dee go because they preferred a toothpaste smiley view of the future, expected to be reinvented in 2008? Would they have preferred Lutin to spin some upbeat guff for their Pluto-fearing readers? Aren't stargazers just expected to be giggly? I don't think VF has ever replaced Lutin: one hopes the magazine is not getting, er, "goofy, almost catatonic, crippled by shock into denial."

Book Review: Redeeming Features by Nicky Haslam: Joy of being souffléed alive

Seasoned Arcatistes will know that I am not given to incontinent praise. So when I say that Nicky Haslam's memoir Redeeming Features is the most brilliantly trivial book I have ever read (since the Andy Warhol Diaries) you may need to pause and take a deep breath. Yes, you have my permission not to work for the rest of the day. By all means have sex. At least buy a good champagne.

Redeeming Features is the book Proust might have written had he not literary talent - his curse I'm afraid - or the book Duncan Fallowell might have penned had he not a brain or Oscar Wilde might have dashed off had he not a sense of humour. This is not to say that Nicky lacks literary talent or brains. Or a sense of humour. It is that he has neither (nor the sense of humour) in sufficient quantity to get in the way. His naked magnetism to society and celebrity figures is pure, romantic, child-like: nothing takes priority over his natal desire to nurture intimacies that are worth it.

A reader of average intelligence, and with an above average interest in names (obscure upper class aristo satellites, especially) will find their own delight unchallenged by artistic soul delving, behavioural over-noticing or mere satire. Many a memoir is utterly ruined by the simple inability of the author to maintain the consistency of a soufflé in matters entirely inconsequential. Nicky avoids this. He rises to the occasion all puffed up like a pillow, his named crowns golden, and with a yielding middle bit: yes, he did have a romance with Tony Armstrong-Jones. Redeeming Features is that scrummy.

In keeping with the frothy nature of the book it would be unseemly then to try to paraphrase his tale: it matters only that he is here and the book is there. To say more would be to ruin the effect, to puncture the soufflé. Light things, such as a joke, cannot bear to be named or explained. To write a book which is just there is a high accomplishment: it is an act of witting or unwitting humility. I can't say better than that.

Like all good books, Redeeming Features hosts a mystery. On p283, Nicky writes of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll "meeting a supposed sex-change relative." Of this encounter he recalls once writing in the defunct magazine Ritz: "With a song in her heart, Marg beheld an adorable face. It may be a her to you and me, but it sure is a him to Her Grace." I can't imagine why the "supposed sex-change" is not named but if he means who I think he means he should know she's highly litigious. And she's no sex-change.

Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography - judging the book by its covers

At over 1000 pages, William Shawcross' Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography is more heavy collectible than an actual read, something to position near a west window on bright afternoons when sunlight can play on the title gold lettering. Mind the dust motes.

Certainly very few people will read it through. Aside from its weight - the osteoporotic are advised to stack up on splints - its prose is so exquisitely formal as to garrote any semblance of breathing life. It is a words vacuum for image mummification: a relic for grazers of Majesty magazine; and a posthumous and flattering gift from the Queen to the memory of her venerated mother. That's evident from the covers, so let's keep the book shut and just savour its wrapping.

Where to start? Well, royalty's pet paparazzo, Cecil Beaton, natch. His two portraits of the Queen Mother adorn front and back: both left-profile visions of a benevolent goddess. In both she smiles, a royal heresy that won over her publics long before teeth bleaching was considered necessary. The front photo rings bells if you collect royal mugs: it's how we remember the old girl in tissue paper in the commemorative box. It's a clever resonance for the sentimental ma'am-ers. The myopic may treat the background vases as a reminder to visit the optician once again, but they should be reassured that the ornaments are indeed a little out of focus: all the better to draw the eye to the sharply focused simplicity of Elizabeth and her pearls (the body) while furnishing a sense of hinted splendour (the vases in the palace).

The pic at the rear is an "intimate" and surprisingly close-up shot of Elizabeth as pretty young Queen: crowned and bejewelled. It is nonetheless, like the front pic, a formal shot of knowing, crafted intimacy - a visual suggestion here that we're about to get personal between the covers. But not that personal: absence of any qualifying or promising text makes that clear. Here's the image - let's go with it.

Which brings us back to the front cover. The book title - which is nothing more than Elizabeth's royal title in her epic widowhood - alone is a promise that whatever revelations are made, none will dishonour the subject. To emphasise this message, the embossed gold of "Queen Elizabeth" marks the value of reverence. The bulla words "The Official Biography" stamp Elizabeth II's own imprimatur. There's no sell, no sensational under-the skirts IVF promise. Here's the monument: bow or curtsey with your debit card. No wonder Shawcross writes of being "honoured" by the Queen's invitation to construct her gift to mummy. No warts 'n' all, ducky.

The funereal monochrome of the two photos subliminally repeats the Queen's own view that the royal family is not showbiz: her instinct for dullness explains her enduring neutrality as a public figure, a dullness her mother did not possess. Now open the book and learn at the feet of a master-flunky.

Bow or curtsey

Tatler alert: The editor is starting to become tiresome

I hear Tatler is a vale of tears as new editor Catherine Ostler externalises her inner misery in order to harmonise the outer weather with it. Ambient misery is the perfect climate for those who dramatise the subjective. She was prone to peculiar behaviour at ES Magazine. One can only hope her Condé Nast boss Nicholas Coleridge will intervene before we have another Jane Procter situation. A magazine insider writes me:

"Currently Tiny Tears is being a total B!!!! and the staff are scared witless by her moods, lots of shouting and bullying. Will Saint Nicholas step in before the troops desert?"

Meantime, here's Tatler's ad rates:

Whole Page £10,500 £13,700
Outside Back Cover £20,500
Outside Back Cover Gatefold £62,000
Double Page Spread £21,000 £27,300
Inside Front Cover Spread £41,000
Inside Front Cover Gatefold £71,000
Half Page £6,100 £7,900
Quarter Page £3,100 £3,900

Anna Wintour and the curious case of the exorcism

Can it be true that US Vogue editor Anna Wintour wanted to have an exorcism conducted in her office after seeing The Devil Wears Prada? This is what one well-informed Arcatiste tells me. The "exorcism took the form of a fumigation and redecoration. And she asked her friend, the photographer Eric Boman (Blahnik by Boman) to hang some of his tastefully bland photos on the walls.

"Anna thought Eric's photos were very soothing and hoped they would change the decor a la blamange. She told Eric she wanted all traces of 'that bitch' exorcised for an eternity!" This is thought to be a reference to the infamous Miranda Priestley character played in the pic by Meryl Streep, plainly modelled on Wintour.

However, novelist and famed gosser Frances Lynn has something further to add: "I hear Anna Wintour asked Eric Boman to hang his soothing snaps on her office walls AFTER the exorcism ... she wanted a complete New Look."

Can anyone shed further light on the precise nature of the exorcism? Was it anything like this:?

Michael Gross and the furious Social Empress of New York

Is it the case that the uncrowned "Social Empress of New York" has waved her sceptre and decreed that a book she finds either embarrassing or inaccurate or both should be ignored by Anyone Who Cares What She Thinks? That it should in effect be allowed to die by ordained silence? Who knows?

The Empress in question is Annette de la Renta, the book, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum, and its author the legendary, the inescapable, Michael Gross. His oeuvre includes non-fiction bestsellers Model and 740 Park.

Mrs de la Renta is the wife of the - omg!, gimme the grandest-sounding adjectival phrase, please - multiversal fashion designer Oscar. They are among the society Caesars and Cleos of America (NY in particular) - with the tragic ends missing, respectively. Apparently. They're so huuuuuge that even American Vogue editor Anna Wintour over-arches her back into an ageing stoop as she scrapes about in their presence. Not even the newly refurbished Hubble telescope can fully capture their social enormity. There isn't a lens big enough!

So, when this goddam writer Gross produced his sensational NY museum history book, which does not portray Annette (the sometime guardian of the late Social Empress of New York Brooke Astor's estate, and a trustees board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in an entirely approved light, all hell broke loose. Museum types raged for and against Gross' book: indisputably, Gross had hit a raw nerve about a national institution. And Annette threatened legal action - she could sue yet in the US or turn libel tourist.

Suddenly, promised book reviews did not run, scheduled interviews did not appear. All this in the Land of the Free. No writ has been served as I write.

Was she offended by the stories about her and her late, wealthy philanthropist mother Jane Engelhard or was she aggrieved by Gross' impertinence in delving into Oscar's well-known sexual past? Or all of the above?

Annette de la Renta is rich enough and powerful enough to hire the best lawyers to speak on her behalf. I spoke with Michael Gross about the affair. (If you want more background, read Jesse Kornbluth's excellent report, click here)

Michael, my dear. You're imagining that sections of the US media have banned coverage of your book, aren't you? You've got sensitive?

"No. I did a fascinating interview with Daphne Merkin, a celebrated writer, for a publication-day story on The Daily Beast, Tina Brown's web site, that has still never appeared. I also know of at least one reporter who has received a warning letter from Mrs de la Renta's lawyers saying the book is 'full of misinformation' and another, at another newspaper, whose story on the book was killed by an editor who said that they would cause the book to be withdrawn and/or corrected and the newspaper would be left 'holding the bag.' I also know of several reviews that were scheduled and then mysteriously postponed. I hesitate to be more specific since I fear that the reporters and editors who have filled me and my publisher in on what's been happening (or more precisely, not happening) might themselves be at risk of retaliation."

You're saying the New York elite have closed ranks against you in defence of their Empress?

"I know that the New York elite - call them the 4,000 - love to know and discuss things no one else (ie, the public, the great unwashed, the NOCD types) knows. Much of what is in my book is no surprise to them. Many of them were my sources.

"That said, I suspect that the core issue here is not this or that nugget of revealing information but rather something larger and perhaps more threatening, my exposure of two things: the way things really work behind-the-scenes in a great American cultural institution - which no one involved wants revealed - and the picaresque saga of Jane Engelhard, whose riveting life story still has holes in it, despite my attempts to fill them, but which is nonetheless told in full for the first time in Rogues' Gallery. Both she and her daughter have battled every attempt to shed light on this saga - battles referred to in the book."

Is this just about the de la Rentas - or have you also upset the cultural snobs by telling the unauthorised and all-too-human story behind a national treasure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

"The sad fact is that the sort of people who create and sustain historical repositories like the Metropolitan do not want their own histories, or those of the institutions, revealed. Otherwise, why would they repeatedly obstruct researchers and make a mere book like mine into an object lesson, a warning to any who might think of following a similar path of crumbs?"

I understand the de la Rentas' friend Anna Wintour made her feelings known ....

"I ran into Anna Wintour at Graydon Carter's Monkey Bar shortly before the book came out. We have 'crossed swords' before, beginning when she was the editor of British Vogue and began an interview by instructing me in no uncertain terms that I was not to refer to her as Nuclear Wintour, so I was not surprised when she gave me a look I can only describe (by paraphrasing a designer) as 'standing in a strapless dress next to an open icebox.'"

As Kornbluth writes of the matter: "A rich woman has used a two-ton gorilla to threaten a writer, and, for whatever reason, silence has descended." If Annette de la Renta's legal threats are intended to chill interest in Gross' book, then they may well have succeeded for now.

But would it not make more sense, and be more in keeping with the freedom-loving spirit of the US, if she published a statement of rebuttal for all to see? What is unacceptable is the suspected exercise of informal social power to, in effect, banish a book to obscurity, and with the acquiescence of a generally gutless American media. Tina Brown - when will you become the mouse that roared?

For a great read, order a copy here.
Michael Gross website

'Graydon Carter an amazing fuck' - Rupert Everett

Miss Marple has a big cock

Rupert Everett, currently triumphant in play Blithe Spirit, has this to say of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter: "I was once staying at a hotel and I was in the room directly under his. He is an amazing fuck. And you can quote me on this. The screams coming from the woman were some of the purest sounds of pleasure I'd ever heard. And there I was sitting alone in my room unfucked. Suddenly it all made sense. That messy hair of his that I always thought was buffoon hair was buffoon hair hiding a monster cock."

For more of this tasteless porn click here. The interview is on the Daily Beast - edited by Tina Brown, former VF editor and not a noted pal of the Miss Marple lookalike giant cock-cunter. I wonder whether this tribute will not imperil Rupes' contributing editorship of VF. I always said the magazine is essentially vulgar.

Graydon Carter denies he's an amazing fuck, click here.

Catherine Ostler to edit Tatler. Oh dear

Yes, indeed. But my lips are sealed. I'm not one to gossip. Catherine, married conveniently to Condé Nast general manager Albert Read, is perfect for Tatler, a money- and status-worshipping priestess whose idea of heaven is a string of pearly noughts - she certainly never discouraged writer William Cash at ES from regaling us with news of his latest heiress love interest.

More to the point, Catherine suits her boss Nicholas Coleridge whose own craven attitude to wealth and status has to be seen to be believed - well, read one of his novels: just money measures set to dialogue. I shall never forget observing him running around like a deranged whippet at a Cartier polo day many years ago, trying to get a photo shot of the Queen blocked off by a crowd of ghastly gawpers. In those few moments I sensed all the materialist kinetic energy that drives him on.

As for Catherine, I'm just praying we don't have a Jane Procter re-run. I understand that she is blessed with a clear sense of purpose that sometimes is enforced by a voice that might be appreciated at the Royal Opera House. Or Wembley.

'Geordie Greig's resignation letter to Nicholas Coleridge'

A naughty Condé Nast person has given me sight of what could be Tatler ed Geordie Greig's first draft leaving letter to his boss Nicholas Coleridge as he departs for the Evening Standard editorship. Is it authentic? Let me know ....

Dear Nick,

It is with much regret that I resign the editorship of Tatler. We’ve talked about this so I know this comes as no surprise – Alexander sends his best wishes, by the way. And he said to tell you, cryptically, “Keep the door ajar, my friend.”

This however does not dilute my sense of sadness at departing a magazine that has been my life (and social/restaurant/hotel/Media Guardian/whatever visa) for nearly 10 years and that is indubitably better for the faith you vested in me, needless immodesty aside. If the Evening Standard fulfils me just half as much as Tatler has done then - in terms of hotel and restaurant reservation pulling-power, notwithstanding - I’ll be a happy man. I am already spoilt with expectation!

Tatler now sits at the apex of British journalism, alone: its society guides and upscale celebrity lists provide those media water cooler moments such as Coronation Street once did among those not quite within the magazine’s immediate target reader demographics.

There cannot be a hereditary living writer anywhere who does not covet space in our hallowed glossy pages; and royal photographers vie to shoot the latest hereditary English actressy Rose. Catch-up newspapers stumble over themselves in a pathetic scrum of social climbing to lift our pictures and parrot our judgements - I’ve often said to you, the Evening Standard would be lost without its monthly Tatler for lifting copy, or should I say, inspiration. And now look – they bought the editor!

I feel like Victor Frankenstein right now, insensible to what I created, even as Tatler celebrates its 300th year! Did it all start with me? Well, it's tempting to think ...

To me Tatler is a celebration of all that is best in the international gene pool, a champion of glamour social eugenics and an unforgiving barrier to anyone who fails to meet those exacting standards as set by our best British public schools and universities (over 500 years old, that is), the finest catwalks, The Sunday Times Rich List, Drebrett's and, if I may say, you.

Tatler is a template for the Better Future to come – I am proud to have worked with you on the long march to physical, intellectual and seating plan perfection. In short, I think we have started the ball rolling to the next Conservative government – and better service at Le Caprice!

And if I could continue to contribute in anyway – how about the six best-looking 6* global old Etonian hotel owner heirs under 30, for a feature? - I would be honoured to do so.

Best wishes (and love to Georgia and the children),

Geordie x

Tina Brown: She sees the light at last. Hallelujah!

Tina Brown has followed my advice and reduced the number of bylines she gives herself on her Daily Beast commentaries from three to two. She has also done as I asked and stilled that irritating moving left-hand byline that stalked the reader as he or she scrolled up and down her long sentences. This is the power of blogging, darlings. You could put her in a ducking stool and immerse her in Kung-Fu Panda's wee-wee for the next four years and she would still deny any such influence, but Madame Arcati knows better.

I am also enraptured that her piece on Obama reveals signs of a warming to mystical order after years of merely fashionable materialism - her ex Martin Amis, and her admirer Christopher Hitchens (as vicars of the Church of Atheism), will be most put out. "This has been an election full of magic," she writes, correctly. "White Magic that only the black man from everywhere and nowhere could perform. Even his adored grandmother dying on the eve of the victory had a mythic feeling of completion to it in a candidacy full of signs and symbols."

Isn't that marvellous? She's so up there with Ian Fleming who also respected the paranormal signs that guide humanity, presented as coincidence, numerical key and miracle - indeed without this knowledge we would never have had 007, the worldly presentation of the search for gnosis through union with a Bond Girl (Grace Jones was lovely). Of course, there will be those who say Tina is only being metaphorical and figurative, likening an amazing moment in our history to the supernatural claims of yesteryear's cave-dwellers and beardies, to convey her sense of awe at beheld wonders.

But I think otherwise. Tina is my new friend and I take back all the elegantly written abuse I have heaped on the poppet. Click here

Tina Brown: Three bylines look like rampant egotism

Last year I so brutally trashed Tina Brown’s Diana cash-in book that Time Out delightfully made me blogger of the week. So sweet of them. As some of you know, Tina (or Anit as I prefer to call her) has now resurrected herself with her news grab-bag site, the Daily Beast. I suppose she envied Arianna’s great success with her Huffington Post and thought: I want one! Gimme gimme gimme. That’s my Anit!

It’s too early to pass judgement though my initial feeling is it lacks oomph even if it kicked off by upsetting Jennifer Lopez by publishing her withdrawn comments about a nervous breakdown. I believe legal action is threatened. I might have expected this stunt of her old Vanity Fair and her defunct talk, but of her sober news aggregator? She may need to think through the purpose of this new vehicle for herself, her dinner companions (hello Andrew Neil!) and those whom she probably adores for their contacts, personal hygiene and adoption of secular passing novelties (hello Tyler Brûlé!).

However, while I deliberate on the Daily Beast and its future, one small piece of advice to Anit. Please, please get rid of that sodding byline on your “blog” that goes up and down the page as you scroll. Just when you think you’re free of Anit’s name, here it descends slowly into view like some parachuting stalker or paparazzo with no underwear. Not only is it distracting it’s pointless. Like any normal reader I usually look to see who has written the piece I am about to read. It saves time, I find. Anit actually has three bylines on the one page. One sits monolithically and hugely in black, like a movie title, above the body text. She is part of the story, in other words. It’s a Tina Turn. This sits below the second byline right at the top of the page. Then there’s her elevator byline to the left.

This is too too, as a spoof Oscar might have said. Please Anit. Think that you are addressing intelligent people. Anit is plainly many things but not a nitwit. So stop behaving like one.

And in a spirit of friendliness, here’s the link to the Daily Beast.