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The launch issue of Glamour UK. Cringeing at some of these cover lines now. It was a different time!

Many of you have contacted me to request some behind the scenes stories about my days in magazines, my interactions with celebrities, or this infamous moment from the Glamour Women of the Year Awards. So I’ve decided to tell you  - the real ones, the wonderful subscribers, thank you - the celebrity cover story that still makes me break out into a cold sweat when I think about it. Seriously, I experience the same, physical ‘trauma waves’ that I did when I was 17 and crashed my parents’ car. It replays in my mind but grips my whole body with shudders and nausea. It’s also quite a long story, but if I’m going to tell it, I want to tell it faithfully. So get your loo break in now. Grab a cup of tea. And hopefully enjoy….

This is about the very first cover of British Glamour. The launch date for the magazine was to be early March, 2001. This meant the deadline for getting everything written, photographed, designed, proof-read and made marvellous, was late January 2001. I knew this from my very day on the job: 17th July, 2000. Plenty of time right? Ha. On that day I was shown to an empty room in our headquarters, in Vogue House, London. I crawled under a table to plug in my landline phone. And sat there for a few minutes wondering, what on earth I should do first to get this thing going? I needed to hire staff, which required weeks of sifting through applications, calling people I was keen to poach, meeting people for endless coffees, breakfasts, afternoon teas. 

The first of my team of about 25 were finally in place, in an office, by mid October 2000. These teams - fashion, beauty, features, entertainment - were tasked with generating ideas and making them a reality. For a launch magazine, everything is a birth, everything is made from scratch. Often you can spend a week doing something in this incubator phase and then realise it’s all wrong and you need to start again.

Throughout this entire process, one major, daunting task loomed larger than any other: what - and who -  to put on our very first cover. I don’t think I need to explain how important magazine covers are. Or at least they were back then. They’re the shop window of every issue. For a launch magazine they are your irreversible first impression. 

It was public knowledge that the company, Conde Nast, was spending millions on the launch of Glamour. There was much amusement in the industry that Conde Nast ever thought it could launch a middle-market magazine - it was widely presumed the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair had no clue how to talk to the ‘commoners’ who spent their money on the mass market juggernauts of the time, Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. 

There was another big American launch swooping in a month earlier than us too: In Style. The chat in the industry was that In Style was a shoo-in to succeed, Glamour much more of a risk: Cosmo too unassailable, the publisher of Vogue too inexperienced in the sector. Everyone seemed to have a battering ram ready for any shred of confidence I might be clinging on to. The weight of expectation was truly crushing. I felt all eyes on me and a huge number of those absolutely willing me to fail. This first cover had to be great. God help me. 

The accepted wisdom at the time was that women’s magazine covers absolutely must feature a celebrity - the more famous and popular, the better for copy sales. This meant I must convince the celebrity gate keepers - their publicists - that British Glamour was going to be exactly the kind of magazine their talent would be thrilled to be associated with.

Very few, if any, of these publicists agreed with me. As there was no physical magazine to show them, most of them decided that it was safer for them to wait and see what my magazine looked like before they would let their clients anywhere near the cover.

I spent weeks - and thousands of company pounds - flying to Los Angeles and New York to plead my case in person to the publicists for everyone from Jennifer Lopez (who everyone had only just started calling J-Lo) to Jennifer Aniston, Britney Spears to Beyonce. Most of these wouldn’t even agree to meet with me. Any face to face conversations tended to be with their eye-rolling PAs who relayed the message for me: Forget it. Maybe when we can actually see what your magazine looks like…. 

This was a nightmare. If the launch issue didn’t look like a magazine that a Hollywood star would front, all these doubters would feel vindicated that it wasn’t the magazine I’d promised it would be and therefore they’d never let me work with their talent. I was painfully aware that, without their collaboration, I couldn’t deliver my vision for the magazine.

I explored using an existing cover photo from our sister title, American Glamour, which had been going for around 60 years by that stage. So they had some material. But there’s two major political problems with going that route. One, if I launch the magazine with a photo that I’ve been happy to buy in, rather than originate myself, they would take it as a sign that I ‘don’t need’ my own photo shoots. This would make it even harder to ever get access to celebrity shoots. 

This is not a great place for a magazine to start from, especially if you’re trying to show that your British version is something original and fresh, not just a duplicate of something that already exists. And two, you almost always still need a publicist’s permission to run that second hand photo anyway. So this still gave me the same problem of those guys saying no because they didn’t yet know if they trusted the magazine. 

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Throughout this whole time, I became fixated on my dream cover star for the first issue: To my mind, Kate Winslet was perfect. She embodied so much of what I wanted the magazine to convey: glamour, yes, but with a down to earth vibe. This was the Hollywood star who’d recently gotten married in her local pub. That, to me, was a fabulously British spin on ‘glamour’.

Her publicist at the time, Robert Garlock, left all my phone calls and emails unanswered. Not even slightly interested. To him I was no doubt one of the many hundreds of foreign publications clogging his in-box on a daily basis.

We were now approaching Christmas and I still had no clue what was going to end up on this cover. My boss, Nicholas Coleridge, started asking in a tone with that was less merry curiosity and more tense demand. Similarly, the advertising agency appointed to make our TV and outdoor poster campaign were starting to say they absolutely must have a finished front cover image well before my deadline. (I do remember basically telling them to fuck off  - to my mind it was hard enough without the pressure of utterly false deadlines added to the mix. And taking out my stress on someone felt good).

I started to trudge - instead of skip - to work, weighed down by this all-consuming, cover problem. Then one of the clever fashion team, Emer Paul (now Dewar) started booking this one particular make-up artist for her fashion shoots. They’d worked together many times when she was still a fashion assistant at Vogue. Kate Lee is a brilliant make-up artist, who is also very lovely and professional. At the time she also happened to be Kate Winslet’s preferred make-up woman for any of her shoots and red carpet events. 

It’s a delicate balance, trying not to cross a line with people and take advantage of their personal relationships for your professional gain. But reader, I was getting desperate so dignity took a back seat as I begged Kate Lee to appeal for me to Kate Winslet. She agreed to deliver to her a letter, written by me. I wasn’t overly hopeful about this approach working, but at least I now knew that if Ms Winslet said no, it was a no from her, not a gatekeeper who hadn’t even told her about the request.

I can’t remember what I wrote - no doubt a lot of reassurance about how much money had been invested, the teams we’d been working with, why I thought she really was the exact person to launch a British version of this American magazine. 

By now, Christmas had come and gone and I had started to tell myself that it couldn’t be helped, I’d just have to accept the fact that my launch cover was going to be crap. I’d have to buy in something that had been seen the world over already. I was starting to make my peace with the idea of having our competitors laugh their heads off at my embarrassment. Of having to work harder, once it was out, to convince celebs and their publicists to trust us to do our own shoots. But the deadline was looming. I knew I couldn’t have worked harder for this first cover, and it was time to make sure I didn’t produce the first magazine in history with a blank page for a cover.

That very same January morning, I hadn’t even made it through the door of the office my PA, Eleanor, came running at me, like there was a fire, screaming: ‘ROBERT GARLOCK CALLED YOU, HE WANTS YOU TO CALL HIM BACK.’

Turns out, Kate Winslet had been convinced - either by my letter, or her mate Kate, or by some combo of the two - and asked Robert to get in touch with me. 

I stood staring at the yellow post-it note on my desk for a good 10  minutes, scarcely able to believe what it was saying, ‘Robert Garlock says please call him, he’s sure we can work something out for the cover.’

From there on it was like magic. As soon as New York woke up, we were talking. Yes, I can provide the photographer and hair and make-up team she wants. Yes, I can book a hotel suite to shoot and yes, we can provide an extra room nearby for her mother and newborn baby Mia to be nearby. Yes, I will show you the pictures and you can have a say in which ones we print. 

One spanner: She doesn’t have availability until after my technical deadline has passed. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. One hand gives, the other takes.

Our art director at the time, Geoff Waring, was the loosey-goosey yin to my neurotic yang. He was sure we’d be allowed wriggle room on that deadline. And my god, he was right. It was going to be heart attack tight, but if we shot it and rushed the film through, we could squeeze in in time for Kate actual Winslet to be our first cover girl.

While all of this was going on, I still had the advertising agency nagging the hell out of me to tell me who was on the cover. I couldn’t help feeling superstitious about letting the cat out of the bag. We’d been through a lot to get to this stage, I didn’t want to jinx it now. Not when we were so close to it happening. 

The reason the ad team were so insistent was this: as part of our TV ad, they wanted a model to hold up the front cover and compare her hair to the cover star’s hair. For this, they had fixated on the idea that the TV model had to resemble the cover model in some way.

I had never been sold on this as an idea. Of all the clever and funny scenarios they’d come up with to sell this new magazine to British women, this one was the one I didn’t immediately ‘get’. And even if we did run it, I didn’t really see why the model needed to look like the cover model. But I was out-voted by the ad agency and other members of the launch team from Conde Nast. So, one day before our shoot date for the cover, I told them: OK, it’s all been confirmed this morning so I guess it can’t hurt to tell you.  

Everyone was so happy with me/for me. ‘What a fantastic get, no one more perfect to launch a British magazine, congratulations Jo, you got there in the end’. I felt great. It was a feeling that was to be short-lived.

Later that day, around 4pm, Robert Garlock had now landed in London from New York and called me, concerned about a phonecall he’d just had with Kate’s British management team. The ad agency, who I had only just told about the cover, phoned Kate’s management office looking for advice. They needed a model who looked like Kate for a joke in the TV ad for the new magazine Glamour. I don’t really know how they explained what they were doing but it was enough to ring alarm bells and suddenly everyone on both sides of the pond wanted to know what the hell I was playing at. What undisclosed joke is being filmed at Kate’s expense?

I tried my best to explain that this was a simple misunderstanding. Furious with the ad agency, I was already assuring Robert that there wouldn’t be any jokey scene about Kate in the TV ad (and my next call was going to be to the ad agency to demand once and for all this idiotic skit was out. Forever). But as far as he was concerned, everyone was spooked and so, at 4.15pm he said to me something along the lines of, we don’t know what we can and can’t trust about this now so the shoot is cancelled.

I want to stress that, looking back, I can completely see why this confusing conversation about a TV ad they had scant knowledge of, for a magazine they were prepared to support sight unseen, was starting to ring alarm bells.

I felt as though all the blood was draining from my body as I begged him to reconsider. He held firm on his decision. I phoned the ad agency to ask for an explanation. I told them that whatever they’d said had got the shoot cancelled and why the hell had they taken it upon themselves to phone Kate’s manager. The woman I spoke to on the phone laughed. Nerves, I suppose, but I’ve never forgotten that reaction to the biggest looming work crisis of my life.

What did I do next? Let’s see…. Oh yes that’s right. I took myself to the office toilets and burst into tears. I gave myself around four minutes in which to wallow in howling, ugly sobbing. I had to get it out in a short sharp burst because there was no avoiding the next urgent task: explaining this unfolding shit show to my boss.  

It would become one of the first moments in which I witnessed truly great leadership in action. I tried not to cry as I phoned Nicholas, but… I just couldn’t believe what was happening. 

‘OK, get round to my office, we’ll figure this out, don’t worry,’ he said. By the time I’d walked the 10 minutes that separated our offices, he was on the phone to Kate Winslet’s manager. Concerns from that camp had spiralled out of all control. Suddenly the very idea of a TV ad, of Kate’s image being used to sell our magazine seemed problematic. I had explained - because I thought it was a big positive - that the magazine’s cover would be seen on TV ads and billboards. But their unease about this was making me doubt myself: Had I forgotten to tell them about the TV ad? Was that even possible? 

Nicholas, being the gifted, charming talker he is, convinced Kate’s team to meet us face to face. He swept up me, the marketing director Jean Faulkner, our publisher Simon Kippin and we were in the car for the short trip to their offices in Covent Garden. On the way, Nicholas ventured, ‘Jo… if this meeting doesn’t go our way, what’s our alternative for the cover?’ 

I took a deep breath and explained that this shoot, with its already extended deadline, was now our only option for the cover, which is why I was in such a state of hysteria.

‘OK,’ said Nicholas, in a measured tone that betrayed no anxiety or even anger, though both would have been understandable. 

We arrived at the meeting and were greeted cordially by Kate’s manager, lawyer, and Robert. I remember being mortified because my face was now deathly pale and make-up free save for the mascara streaks still trailing down my cheeks. But looking back, I think at least a couple of them softened immediately at that sight of this broken woman. I was 31 years old at the time and many years of experience short of becoming the editor I am now.

I don’t remember much about the actual discussion. This was now the Nicholas show and he shone. The boss of this unknown magazine Glamour was, afterall, also the boss of Vogue - no one really wants to piss off the boss of Vogue if they can help it. They calmed down. We agreed that the original bit of the TV ad that had caused upset would be scrapped. Everyone smiled and shook hands. Nicholas gave them all copies of his new novel. 

I went home - it was now around 9 in the evening - and continued bursting into tears at varying intervals. I genuinely think I was in shock. 

After a totally sleepless night, I arrived at the shoot at the Sanderson Hotel in London. The first person I saw was the publicist Robert, who hugged me like an old friend, told me Kate was on her way and we’d have a great shoot. We did. I don’t think anyone had told the photographer, Lorenzo, or his team the drama of the night before. To be honest I don’t even know if Kate knew anything about it. And I certainly didn’t want to talk about it again. I haven’t really, until writing it here some 20 years later. 

The launch issue of Glamour was a runaway success. The company had to urgently print more copies mere days after we’d hit the newsstands. No one outside of that small unit knew that that cover almost never was. To the uninitiated, it probably looked like I phoned Kate Winslet one morning and she popped round that afternoon looking ethereally beautiful and ready to launch a market-leading magazine. Drama or no drama, I will be forever grateful that Kate lent us her face and name and helped us make that impact, straight away.

When that first issue was finally launched, a couple of media commentators pronounced the pale, white on white palette of that first cover as ‘boring’. To which I can only say, ‘If only, guys. If bloody only’. 

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