Abstract
Alexander Chancellor, who died in January, was a gifted and industrious journalist, although he did his best to give the opposite impression. His obituaries duly recorded his liking for long lunches, cocktail parties and salacious gossip, and his disarming giggle – all of which were true. But he was also the successful editor of three magazines and a reliably witty, perceptive and prolific columnist. As Craig Brown said in his eulogy at Chancellor's funeral: “Dreary qualities like hard work and diligence, that lesser writers and editors parade, he kept hidden like a guilty secret.”
This, the only book he wrote, reflects that in several ways. It is chiefly about his two forays across the Atlantic: first as Washington correspondent of The Independent and then, controversially, on Tina Brown's New Yorker. Interspersed with his impressions of the American way of life and tales of his social adventures (chiefly enjoying the patronage of wealthy widows) are some perceptive insights into journalism on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as self-deprecating reflections – the suggestion, for instance, that he would not have got anywhere without string-pulling by his father Christopher, a big wheel at Reuters.
But the intriguing theme that pervades the book is his relationship with Tina Brown. When she came down from Oxford in the mid-1970s with the aim of making an instant splash as a journalist, she befriended Auberon Waugh, who tried to persuade Chancellor, recently appointed editor of The Spectator, to hire her. He resisted because “I may have feared that she would create too turbulent a whirlpool in the journalistic backwater into which I was then nervously dipping my toes”. Instead she joined Punch for a spell and launched her brilliant career when made editor of Tatler at the age of 25.
Chancellor's rejection of her flagrant talents did not deter her, 15 years on, from offering him a job he couldn't refuse but certainly should have done. Her whirlwind ascent through the commanding heights of magazine journalism had led to the editorial chair of The New Yorker, to the consternation of its traditional readers, who feared that her leanings towards glitz and gossip would destroy that great national institution known for its unique mix of sobriety, wry humour and impeccably crafted articles of inordinate length. Moreover, she was British: how could she possibly be attuned to the zeitgeist of their fabulous city?
As if to goad the doubters further she recruited Chancellor – not merely the quintessential Englishman but one described some years earlier by her husband Harry Evans as personifying “the effete old tired England”. He was to edit the Talk of the Town section, a fixture since the magazine was founded in 1925, comprising comparatively short and often quirky takes on aspects of metropolitan and national life, usually contributed by staff writers. Many of the magazine's best writers, resentful at having two uppity Brits imposed on them, took it out on him by declining to write for his section. Moreover, where he might have expected firm support from the editor who had hired him (“You would be perfect for it,” she had sighed), she gave him quite a hard time.
“She wanted Talk of the Town to be instantly brilliant in vindication of her risky decision to entrust it to an Englishman,” he explained. “I, of course, wanted the same, but what constituted brilliant and how to achieve it were never very clear to either of us… As time went on, I made the disconcerting discovery that stories that appealed to me seemed to appeal to practically nobody else.” After a month or two he told his wife that things were going badly because “I couldn't do the kind of column Tina wanted, and she didn't want me to do the kind of column I could do”. He had signed up for a year and at the end of it was relieved to hand over to an American.
Although he continued to regard Brown as a friend, it was a remarkably candid friendship. The book includes several barbs directed at her behaviour and style, such as her “constant burnishing of her own public image and sharp reaction to criticism”. As an editor, he maintained, she had the habit of rejigging the contents of the magazine right up to deadline and leaving it to the staff to pick up the pieces. While circulation improved during her six-year tenure, The New Yorker continued to make a substantial loss.
Back in London, Chancellor returned to his true métier of elegant columns for upmarket British publications. Before long he was aggrieved to receive a letter from Brown reacting to a column in The Guardian in which he suggested that it might be time for her, too, to return home. She raged at his “shitty” comments, maintaining that, under his editorship, Talk of the Town “had been the object of pretty much universal derision” and it was only to avoid embarrassing him that she had let him carry on.
His times in America, then, were not his finest hours. The pity is that he never wrote a more comprehensive autobiography, giving proper weight to his successes as well as to this rare but palpable failure.
