Gentle giant

Tatler editor Geordie Greig talks to The Hill about luxury and W11

Geordie Greig is very 21st century Notting Hill. Slick, busy, married to an American and father of three children who love their communal garden. Surprising, then, that he only moved here five years ago and even more surprising that before that he lived in south east London. That’s really not where you imagine the editor of Tatler to live. Geordie took on Tatler eight years ago but despite his classy credentials (Eton, Oxford) his first job in journalism was on the unlikely Deptford Mercury. He may come across as pure west London but that’s not by any means all there is to Geordie.
Does he live the Tatler lifestyle? “I’m very lucky in that I get exposed to a lot of wonderful things,” he says modestly. So far this week, for instance, he’s had breakfast with Mikael Gorbachev and dinner at the Ritz for Hermès. There was a party for Condé Nast Traveller and another one for the Tatler Spa Awards. Later today it’s a meeting with Warner Brothers and then he’s off to Paris to see Karl Lagerfeld. Is it stressful? If so, it doesn’t show on his open and innocent-looking face. “You know, one’s got to remember that if all the little bits go wrong it doesn’t really matter. There’s always another appointment, another story. You’ve got to keep a perspective. There are lots of people who have a real crisis in their life and I’m very lucky.”
It must be this modest approach that makes the unlikeliest people agree to his interview requests. Geordie gets people that nobody else can – Lucian Freud, Madonna, JK Rowling for starters – and of course he puts it down to luck, but clearly it’s more than that. “Sometimes it takes a long time to persuade them,” he admits. Lucian Freud finally came round after three years of correspondence, when he agreed not to an interview but to a ‘conversation’. Geordie says: “It’s all about trust. The rule I have is that if I interview someone I should be able to face them at dinner and not think, oh God, they’re going to hate me. It doesn’t mean you can’t say harsh truths, as long as truth is the key thing. When I interviewed Harold Pinter he talked very movingly about his son who he’s estranged from and I suppose there were things he wished he hadn’t said. He rang me afterwards and I thought, oh no, he’s going to hate it but he just said ‘Geordie. Very candid and truthful,’ which was a great compliment.
Tatler, Geordie says proudly, is the oldest magazine. It’s almost 300 years old. When he took it on, he wanted to make it “more journalistic”. For his first issue he commissioned Tom Wolfe to write a lengthy piece on teenage sex. “I wanted to have some serious things along with the wonderful froth.” Greig came from newspapers; he had been literary editor of the Sunday Times for 12 years and before that American correspondent and arts correspondent. “I’d never been in a magazine office in my life and naively I thought it wouldn’t be all that different from a newspaper. Boy oh boy, how wrong was I?” Tatler sells nigh on 90,000 copies, which is a serious amount of magazines, especially when it has a target audience of the super rich. Who are these people? Though obviously not everyone reading about the super rich is one of them. It’s all about aspirations. “In the same way that most people who walk down Bond Street can’t afford Louis Vuitton or Gucci, or most people who go to the National Gallery can’t afford a Titian, one can aspire and gain from seeing these things. We’re a luxury magazine but at the same time we’re very aware of the different levels of society,” says Geordie. In the October issue, along with a feature on how to keep your diamonds safe when you’re not sure about your staff, a spread identifying Prince William’s best pals, a directory of the country’s smartest postcodes, several pages on a wedding in a stately home and an interview with George Osborne about money, is a moving piece by Old Etonian Sebastian Cresswell-Turner on the simple turns of fate that reduced him from merchant banker to penniless journalist and then to homelessness. The piece offers a knowing nod to the flip side of the glitz shown on the rest of the pages. Still, mostly people don’t read Tatler in the hope of finding anything gritty. “We’re a high society magazine and we’re proud of that. It’s a segment
of society that people are amused to see and we try to reflect it with a wry sense of humour.”
The biggest thing to happen to Tatler recently has been the tragic loss of Isabella Blow, fashion director and great inspiration. “We miss Issy hugely. Last time she was in here she was in an amazing 18 foot feather headdress and a long white skirt and we were discussing projects.
She was fantastic. More fun than anyone deserves, she made me laugh more than anyone.” She died working for Tatler and her spirit will remain, says Geordie.
The move from south east London to W11 came about when Geordie’s wife said one day: ‘We’re going to Notting Hill’. “And it was a brilliant move in every way. We’re here for good.” Does the hype bother him? “Oh, I don’t mind the hype. One should never complain about the hype.” He cites E&O as one of his favourite restaurants ever, and
likes to eat at the Ladbroke Arms and the Ledbury, and take his children to the market on Saturdays.
Geordie is gentle, understated and intellectual, far less showy than you might imagine the pulse of Tatler to be. Daily he is confronted with the world’s most luxurious products, most glamorous people and most beautiful objects and yet he is very sweetly impressed by my simple, mid-tec digital dictaphone, admiring it as if it were
sthe ultimate in desirable gadgetry. And despite the density of his diary, he makes time to organise the annual bonfire in his communal garden, sending out 400 invitations. “It’s true that busy people are better at taking on extra things,” he says. Geordie is certainly busy but also generous, gentle and likeable. That’s why they all agree to those interviews.