Its reverent prose and glossy photographs have recorded every excess of
celebrities during their journey from The Wedding to The Baby, The
Heartbreak and - inevitably - The Divorce. This month Hello! magazine
paddles in a puddle of pride at its 20th birthday party.
Hello! launched the extraordinary phenomenon of the democratic age of
celebrity. Monarchs, writers, footballers’ wives and reality-TV nobodies now
rub shoulders in celeb media and internet outlets. Andy Warhol was proved
right: anybody could be famous for 15 minutes. But the magazine created a
Frankenstein’s monster that has left the master’s control.
For serious-minded types acquaintance with the magazine may be restricted to
dentists’ waiting rooms, but few people can resist the gruesome fascination
of peering with Hello! into the living rooms of film and soap stars, models
and girlbands, only to exclaim: “God, with all that money, is that the best
sofa they can manage?” Part of the appeal is the conflict between the
mythical curse of Hello! - which has appeared to nip many a celebrity
romance in the bud - and the magazine’s desire to gild reality. Its reports
sometimes have the cutting edge of warm treacle, although one interviewer
was sufficiently emboldened to ask Mother Teresa if she had ever been in
love. (“Yes,” she replied, “but with my family - and then I went to God.”)
Hello! also painted in a silver lining when the actor Anthony Perkins was
dying of Aids. His drawn features were attributed to a successful diet.
In its latest issue, fronted by Princess Anne’s son, Peter Phillips, and his
fiancée, Autumn Kelly, Hello! has taken off the silk gloves to ask some
searching questions of Lembit Opik, the Liberal Democrat MP engaged to
Gabriela Irimia, of the pop group the Cheeky Girls. Such as his reaction to
being described by his former fiancée Sian Lloyd as “a drunken, tight-fisted
show-off with hideous clothes”. His answer: no comment.
Similarly illuminating insights are given by Meg Mathews “as she invites us
into her chic new home”; by Gwyneth Paltrow, who denies that her marriage to
Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, is in trouble, even if they are
rarely photographed together; and by Amy Winehouse’s mother-in-law, who
swears the troubled pop diva is not splitting from her husband, Blake
Fielder-Civil, who is on remand.
Hello! is the younger sister of ¡Hola!, a Spanish celebrity magazine owned by
Eduardo Sanchez Junco, a Madrid-based media magnate. Launched in the era of
Dynasty and Dallas, when PR men began demanding copy approval for their
clients, Hello! and its chequebook notched up some notable scoops. Prince
Andrew and Sarah Ferguson consented to be featured in their stately pad in
1990. For an outlay of £250,000, Hello! sold six times as many copies of
that issue as of any previous one.
For £150,000 it bought rights to the wedding of the footballer Paul Gascoigne
and hit the sales jackpot. Photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales, had been
the magazine’s mainstay, so when a picture of her topless was touted, out of
gratitude Sanchez Junco bought it for £1m. Nobody would see it - except him.
Diana’s death coincided with the rise of OK! magazine, launched in 1993 by
Richard Desmond, owner of the Daily Express and Daily Star. Whereas Hello!
remained in thrall to international glamour, OK! courted the Blist while
competing with its rival for exclusive rights to celeb weddings, notably
winning the nuptials of David and Victoria Beckham in 1999.
For such a successful product, the Hello! operation was shambolic. A former
member of staff recalled: “The London office was full of people who had
never worked on newspapers. They hadn’t the first idea of how to get an
interview or ask questions that might provoke interesting answers. Nobody
would be rude about interviewees, because they wanted to get to them again.
You accepted everything they said at face value.”
The company’s structure did not help. Editors sent the week’s pages to Madrid,
where Sanchez Junco decided which pictures should have prominence. With
improvements in technology, freelance writer-photographer teams could bypass
the London office and send their material direct to Sanchez Junco and his
son, Eduardo Sanchez Perez. “The editor would often open the magazine on
Monday and be quite surprised,” said the former staffer.
One person was to short-circuit these tangled lines: the shadowy Marquesa de
Varela, a “celebrity wrangler”. Preening stars and aristocrats would eat out
of her hand - which was full of money. But the 65-year-old Uruguayan, who
fixed the Peter Phillips photo shoot, was to find herself embroiled in a
historic lawsuit.
“She’s an intuitive journalist who has never had any training,” said a former
colleague. “But she has a nose for a story and the tenacity to follow it up.
She’ll be talking to somebody at a dinner party and see a story in something
they say. She’s got a lot of charm; when she offers you a hundred grand to
talk and have some photos taken, it’s hard to resist.”
Born Maria Julia Marin, the marquesa first married an Italian businessman and
then a titled Spaniard. She had the first marriage annulled – even though it
produced two daughters - and she divorced her second husband, proclaiming
him “a naughty, naughty man” for seducing her friends after she bore him a
son. “I was feeling just like a dog, a dog on the streets.” By coincidence,
at her ranch in Uruguay she runs a rescue shelter for dogs, occasionally
castrating them herself.
Forced to support herself by booking guests for Spanish chat shows, she came
to Sanchez Junco’s attention when she secured an invitation to a Moroccan
royal wedding. Recognising her flair, he sent her to London.
The marquesa’s success and direct access to the boss put colleagues’ noses out
of joint. “She never had an office in the magazine, and that’s always been
her problem,” said an admirer. “She always felt shut out and never got on
with the editors.
If you worked in the office you weren’t allowed to talk to her and vice versa,
even though she had a fantastic network the staff couldn’t hope to match.”
For the launch issue on May 21, 1988, she bagged Princess Anne for what was
claimed to be the first one-on-one royal interview in a British glossy. She
later added Prince Andrew’s scalp, among many others. Everything was going
swimmingly until she encountered her near-nemesis.
In 2000 the Hollywood actors Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones were
looking forward to a baby and a wedding. Hello! offered to pay a record
price - nearly £1m - for the world exclusive. When the magazine was
outmanoeuvred by OK!, Hello! decided to run a spoiler by publishing
unauthorised pictures of the wedding. Douglas and Zeta-Jones sued.
By the marquesa’s account, she was cut adrift, forced to sign papers falsely
implicating herself and deprived of both her monthly retainer and help with
her lawyers’ fees. Throwing herself on the court’s mercy, she said she
supported “three children, six grandchildren, an elderly mother and almost
200 dogs”. On the courtroom steps she sobbed: “They stabbed me in the back.”
The judge absolved her, but not Hello! magazine. OK! was awarded just over £1m
in damages while the indignant stars received £14,600. Hello! appealed and
won in 2005, but the original payouts were upheld by the House of Lords last
year.
For a while the marquesa was estranged from Hello! but she made it up with her
boss. “Eduardo is a coward,” she said. “But I can’t forget that he helped me
long ago.”
These days, even devoted former staff find it difficult to sustain the
magazine’s boast that it is “the Rolls-Royce of celebrity journalism”. One
said: “Hello! brought in a lot of innovations that were widely copied, such
as paparazzi shots of celebs pushing a pram. And it wasn’t all celebrities:
one of our biggest issues was the Jamie Bulger story. We had the first
interview with the mother, and when she had a new partner, we put their baby
on the cover.
“Sadly they’re not getting the big news stories because it’s become rather
naff to be in Hello!. They wouldn’t get Gazza’s wedding now: he’d probably
go to OK!. I’m afraid Hello! has passed its sell-by date. It’s not enough to
read about Joan Collins again.” However, the magazine still sells 400,000
copies a week in Britain and 8m around the world.
The marquesa plays a less active role now. Coping with a showbiz scene in
which Girls Aloud take precedence over European princesses has not been
altogether to her liking. “There are in England many incredibly elegant
people,” she said once. “I wouldn’t say that about the celebrity world.”
