The Press

A Kingdom for the Queen?

By CLIVE IRVING

IN the late afternoon the shadow of Mr. Cecil King's Daily Mirror skyscraper falls across the window of a small office in a much more discreet building further down Fetter Lane. To the young man looking out of that window the shadow is taking on considerable substance. It represents temptation and the prospect of power.

The phone in the small office rings and the voice of Mr. King beckons with olympian economy. It takes Jocelyn Stevens, the editor and proprietor of the Queen, only two minutes to complete the journey. The view from Mr. King's office is dimmed by no shadows, and has only the contradictions of the Old Bailey and St. Paul's obstructing the view.

At the age of thirty-one Stevens as a publisher is a newt to King's whale, but for all this the whale apparently takes the newt very seriously. Stevens's reputation, built basically on one maga- zine, the Queen, ig sufficient to earn him the attentions not only of King, but also of about the only other publisher in the world who can match the Mirror empire for size: Mr. Henry R. Luce of Time, Life and Fortune.

Stevens, who was raised under the influence of his uncle, Sir Edward Hulton, and inherited money, bought the Queen in 1957. It seemed an unlikely vehicle for revolution. For nearly a cen- tury, under various proprietors, it had been a journal of refined insularity (once praising Hitler for his kindness to animals), with a set of values which made sense only in a gradually diminish- ing world of privilege and gentility.

Stevens threw out the sepia and introduced picture reporting in the grainy, Paris Match way, and mixed with it the extravagant glamour of the fashion magazines. The new Queen was aimed at an archetypal character called Penelope, who seems to have been a projection of the Queen's own staff: aristocratically rooted but rebelliously unbending.

Stevens gathered a staff who were both socially smart and professionally clever : they were in and also way out, to use their own jargon. The Queen preserved just enough of its old strato- spheric attitudes not to lose those readers with the nerve to hang on for the ride, and those who did go were replaced with Penelopes. It did, however, develop a dichotomy in its new personality, one part of it becoming rhetorically indignant over slums in Wales while in the back of the magazine readers were being advised to spend 200 guineas on a gold ice-bucket. It was rather like an aged duchess suddenly converted to social work in the East End.

This is the vulnerable part of Stevens's achievement: the radical journalist embarrassed by his glossy paper. Imagine Tribune with advertisements from De Beers.

Stevens says the social gossip has now been cut down to only 10 per cent of the magazine, although Jennifer, the Queen's diarist and top name-dropper, appears unashamedly nature (sample : 'Wednesday. Caught the train to Newmarket, arrived 12.26 to find only two very small taxis taking three passengers each, for which there was immediately an ugly rush—I did not compete. So found myself standing in pouring rain hoping a taxi would turn up. None did!).

Stevens says that a liking for Jennifer is the kind of thing that people love to hate in them- selves. Even Mrs. Harold Wilson, he says, reads it, not of course vicariously but from her husband's potentially predatory position.

Lady Pamela Berry's succinct estimate of Stevens's impact is: 'Here is the young man who has killed the thing he loves, Society; and now we are treated to the spectacle of his committing necrophilia with the copse.'

In search of more momentum after an unsuc- cessful bid for the Illustrated London News group, Stevens turned the Queen from a fort- nightly to a weekly, but this was clearly not its natural rhythm. This year it reverted to its old pace, and in doing so recovered its character.

The Queen's circulation is about 60,000 and this seems to be its natural ceiling, at which its economics make sense. As Stevens himself admits, to have put the Queen where it is at the age of thirty was reasonable fulfilment, but at forty he will want to have done far more.

This is the crunch. If Alfred Harmsworth had arrived seventy years later than he did it is doubtful that he would have chosen publishing as the way to power and fortune. The North- cliffe empire is today somewhat static but it remains a considerable monument to the gold- mine that publishing became in the early part of the century. If today there were a guidebook to quick fortune-making, publishing would come low on the list of promising vocations: property speculation and commercial television are the Klondykes of our age.

Stevens is the prisoner of the economics of modern publishing, in which only the big can grow bigger. The brilliant specialist can flourish if, like Stevens, he creates his own metier. King, whose mind has a ruthless clarity, has said that while Stevens produces the Queen nobody will compete with him, because he knows the field too well. But if he tried to fight the goliaths their superior resources could extinguish him. `Ideas against money will always lose,' says Stevens. `If it was simply ideas against ideas, then I wouldn't worry.'

The money, however, has been talking to Stevens. The dialogue began eighteen months ago when King asked Stevens to join his group —taking the Queen into the Mirror group but allowing it complete freedom. The implica- tion was that Stevens should apply his editorial instincts to some of King's properties. The temp- tation was immense, but in the end Stevens chose the small man's freedom. His decision Was

impulsive: he had just been introduced to the other members of King's board at a cocktail party. Suddenly he put down his drink and fled. It was the instinct of the trapped animal for freedom. 'Just as I was dropping into the net I couldn't face the thought of life in captivity. So I

ran.' He sent King a note, composed after soul- searching in the early hours, and the courtship appeared to be over.

Soon afterwards some of Mr. Luce's executive outriders arrived in Britain, looking for a publisher to join them in producing a British

version of a new magazine called Panorama. Luce's men saw Roy Thomson and King with the

proposition. Neither was very interested. Then

Luce read a piece about Stevens in his own magazine, Time, and put up to him Panorama.

Stevens was interested. A 'dummy' of the maga- zine was produced and the production costs were worked out in every detail up to what Luce's men called, in their astronaut argot, 'year Six.'

Taking his 'dummy,' Stevens went to the Time- Life temple in New York and spent weeks going through the most intensive cross-examination he had ever endured. It was, he says, an intellectual assault course which impressed him with its sheer professional thoroughness Luce, too, was int' pressed, and Stevens says the ordeal taught hill a lot. Then the collapse of the Common Market talks caused concern at Time-Life, who were ex- pecting the European market to open up. At this stage Stevens revised his ideas and produced a new `dummy' which he thought Was much better than the original one. Another Luce -posse arrived in London and the whole project was chewed over again with the customary dedication. Stevens found that the Time bureau- cracy, once pointed in one direction, was difficult to head on to another. A decision now seems just as distant as ever, and the -Luce men are due in London again on another bout of the negotia- tions for which they, unlike Stevens, have an apparently masochistic taste.

Meanwhile, back at the skyscraper, King was watching with, it is reasonable to suppose, some interest. In the last few weeks, as the talks With Luce dragged on, King saw Stevens again. Stevens, in fact, admires King, as well as the view from his office. Although he now feels the limita- tions of the small pond, the final jump into the big one, with Luce or King, will be an agonising renunciation for him.

• The essence of Stevens's appeal for King is that he would give the Mirror group a connection with the most tantalising and least understood market in publishing, the generation that King's `new' Sunday Mirror defined in its recent, grop- ing and revealingly dated way as 'young moderns.'

Aware of a revolution in readers' demands IS fundamental as the one which enabled Harms' worth to make his fortune, Fleet Street has nevertheless largely failed to make contact 'WW1 it' . . . another phrase which the editors dis- covered only when it had already passed into the mortuary of the ephemeral new language: Stevens is young enough and sufliciently tuned to the wavelength to have an instinct for pressing the right buttons, just as, twenty-five years age', the emergent Hugh Cudlipp had a brilliant instinct for the tabloid brutalism on which the Mirror rode to its skyscraper.

The rewards of captivity may now be big enough to bait the wild animal,