London Blitzed: the full text as originally submitted

At 9:30 in the morning on the last Monday in August, Paul Spike telephoned his friend Michael Vermeulen. They had arranged to play golf that day, a holiday in Great Britain. Spike got the answering machine. Knowing Vermeulen to be an early riser—he usually began his day with a pot of coffee, a joint and seven or eight newspapers—Spike phoned back half an hour later. Busy. He tried three more times and got no answer. Figuring Vermeulen had found something better to do than to play golf, he set off on his own.
When Spike returned that afternoon, he found his wife, Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue, in tears. She had just learned that Vermeulen’s corpse was being discovered, probably as Spike had been trying to reach him that morning.

Vermeulen was 38. Before moving to England in 1986, he was a prodigiously talented magazine feature writer in his native United States. As editor of the commercially successful British GQ from 1992 until his death 4 weeks ago, Vermeulen singlehandedly established men’s magazines as a viable market in England, spawning a rash of imitations and alternatives.

Vermeulen had a dual personality: on the one hand, he was a brash, arrogant and loud man who offended delicate English sensibilities with his overbearing personality and outrageous appetites for alcohol, food and young women. But those who knew him have described him to me as “dedicated and loyal and extraordinarily generous, with a largeness of heart.”

The papers in England are calling Vermeulen’s death “a suspected drug overdose,” and the coroner’s report, to be made available in November, will most likely state “death by misadventure,” a euphemism used to cover accidents, overdoses or any untimely death in which foul play is not suspected.

Paul Mungo, who, like Spike, is a contributing editor to GQ and was as close to Vermeulen as anyone, told me that “heroin was just a guess” as to the cause of Vermeulen’s cardiac arrest, “and it would turn out to be wrong. Michael died of self-indulgence, but I think there’s more. What you have is accurate, and is more than anyone else knows.” The “more” Mungo refers to may be cocaine, it may be something else—it may, indeed, turn out to be heroin after all.

“The fact that Michael could get away with his shit,” says a source who would not be named, “is indicative of the crazy English journalistic scene: supposedly reputable people, who are in fact back-biting, completely ethicsless, mediocre journalists, partying like mad. Through the extreme example of Michael’s life and death, you get a really good idea of the magazine culture in Britain and how mediocrity can be sold within glossy covers.”

Michael Vermeulen was born in 1956 in Lake Forest, Ill., a WASPy suburban utopia on the North Shore of Chicago. His parents are modest people, and although the town had outstanding public schools, Michael insisted on wheedling his way into the private grade school, and then into Lake Forest Academy, where he paid his own way working in his father’s animal hospital. Even in youth, Vermeulen had self-confidence in the extreme: at his interview for grade school, the kid asked how long recesses were, and at LFA he was emphatic about attending board meetings as a writer for the school newspaper.

After graduating from high school at sixteen and quickly dropping out of the University of Chicago, Vermeulen was hired as a contributor to The Hyde Parker, a neighborhood Chicago magazine. “He was very eager to learn, a very good writer from the beginning, and probably his own best teacher,” says David Martin, his first boss. Soon Vermeulen became a fixture on the Chicago theater scene; it was the mid-Seventies, and Steppenwolf—the company that launched David Mamet and John Malkovich, among others—was producing some of the most avant-garde theater in the U.S. Vermeulen was the company’s chief champion in the Chicago press, writing rave, though no less intelligent, critical and inquisitive, reviews for the Chicago Reader, the city’s free alternative weekly.

Vermeulen moved to New York in the late Seventies, after a short stint as editor of the Detroit Free Press Magazine. By 1982, at the age of 25, he was established as one of the premiere talents in magazine feature writing, penning profiles, financial analyses, and medical news for The Atlantic, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and American GQ. In that year, he wrote a piece on AIDS for this magazine, the first piece on the disease to appear in a national, non-medical magazine. The epidemic had yet to claim its 300th victim.

Vermeulen’s writing, such his Martin Amis profile for British GQ in 1991, or on Bill Buford, now literary editor for The New Yorker and former editor of Granta, shows a rare, uncanny insight into people. Other features demonstrate an eerie understanding of the human dark side, the side that makes people sin. Yet, Vermeulen failed to recognize this side in himself, and its danger to himself. While some friends are more reticent than others about Vermeulen’s possible drug use, no one denies that he had a voracious appetite for food, drink, and indeed, life. “My theory,” speculates Vermeulen’s friend and colleague, Chris Silvester, “is that this was a way of dealing with depression in its early stages: he’d eat and drink wildly to feel better. He’d get into this cycle where the effects of the drug make you feel bad, and in order to escape feeling bad you use more of the drug.” Nevertheless, Condé Nast’s British CEO, Nicholas Coleridge, says, “I never found his brain anything less than 100% sharp, whatever detail it was, whatever time of day.”

“Yes, I do. I know exactly why Michael came to London in the first place, or I know why Michael says he came to London in the first place,” says Alexandra Shulman with a slight smile. The correction alludes to the duality in Vermeulen’s nature that shows he may have had more aspects to his personality than any single friend could ever know; his deputy editor at GQ, Angus MacKinnon, described him as “someone you knew very well and not at all.” In her office on the fifth floor of Vogue House, Condé Nast’s British headquarters, sitting at a round table that looks more like it belongs in a country kitchen than in the office of the editor of the world’s premiere fashion magazine, Shulman tells her perspective on her friend Vermeulen.

“It was 1985, I guess,” Shulman continues, “and I was working on the Tatler (a CN magazine that might be described as a less brash version of the original Spy) as features editor. Michael had sent in a package of features cuttings; they were very good cuttings and it was quite rare that someone sent in such good work.” Shulman figured the visiting New York journalist would like to see the Groucho Club, a members-only club for magazine types and a place Vermeulen would come to use as halfway between home and office. Friends have described the Groucho as “the place where Michael would hold court” and “the scene of many a Vermeulen conquest.”

“When I arrived,” recalls Shulman, “I didn’t see Michael Vermeulen anywhere. I was hanging around waiting for him in the lobby for about 20 minutes or so, and finally I went in to find Michael already ensconced at the bar—having almost immediately become sort of a member himself—saying, ‘Wow, what a cool place.’” Shulman, her round, milk-white face framed by shoulder length, brown hair pulled back in a barrette, smiles faintly at the memory. But it’s clear that she’s uncomfortable discussing, probably for the first time since Michael’s death, their first meeting. “We had lunch, and it was very empty, and Michael’s voice just ricocheted off the walls. He desperately wanted to write for the magazine. Michael just said, ‘I’m going to move to this country. I think it’s so great, I love this club, you’re fantastic.’ It’s just very Michael, you know: ‘I’m going to move here.’ I took it as a very American over-enthusiasm that would be gone by the end of lunch—but, surprise, surprise, about a month later Michael’s voice was on the telephone saying, ‘Hi, I’ve moved here.’”

Shulman dismisses the conventional wisdom that Vermeulen saw easy opportunities in London for an experienced journalist, his oft-cited quotation that “it was like taking candy from a baby” more an example of his playing to an audience than what he really felt. Looking around the room of teal walls, a cluttered, light wood desk and matching shelves stacked with art history books and back issues of Vogue, Shulman folds her hands in her lap. “I don’t know why he was disillusioned with New York, but I think he came to London and thought here was an opportunity to start again. I think he just thought, hey, this would be a good place to live. He just fell in love with it on that trip.”

In the next nine years Vermeulen would go from freelancing correspondent for American GQ in 1986 to contributing editor for the Tatler to features editor for British GQ upon its 1988 launch, to deputy editor of the magazine under Shulman, and, finally, editor in 1992. In the three years following, GQ’s influence produced the most drastic shift in English journalism in the last ten years. Loaded is a down market version—more “laddish,” in the local vernacular—that’s swept the British awards; FHM and Arena are others; and British Esquire, launched in 199x, has directly and shamlessly copped Vermeulenisms on its cover and within the book. GQ’s circulation rose 40% in three years under Vermeulen.

Vermeulen was a man whose “physique embodied what he was carrying around inside,” as Spike puts it. Dissheveled, hair a mess, wearing unpressed khakis in a crowd of tailored suits, and dreadfully overweight by the time he died, he was never accepted as anything more than the crude American by people in no position to judge him as a journalist. Those who only met him once or twice, such as an antique dealer he never bought anything from, describe him as “crass, vulgar, with a loud, obnoxious voice” and a girth that seemed to expand two or three sizes with each successive meeting. The stock phrase on Vermeulen’s personality is “larger than life”: David Martin used it to describe Vermeulen’s youth, and the GQ staffers who knew him late in life can’t escape it either.

In a small restaurant just around the corner from Vogue House, on a tiny streeet peculiar to London, wide enough only for a motorcycle, Paul Spike recalls Michael’s capacity for drawing attention among the reserved English. Already regarding Americans as lacking restraint, Vermeulen seemed to some of them merely a buffoon.

“It wasn’t a matter of a roomful of people standing around hanging on his every word,” Spike relates, “but of him telling a story to a few people and suddenly bellowing out, ‘And I said to him, well you can SUCK MY COCK!’ And 30 people would turn around, ‘Excuse me?’”
To a sensitive English feminist without a sense of humor, Vermeulen must have seemed the devil incarnate. Yet friends maintain he had a sensitive side, a generous side. Shulman recalls that “he ran a kind of lonely hearts hostel in his flat. There’d always be someone escaping some messed up relationship camping out there.” Spike, a New Yorker by birth, son of a slain civil rights leader and a novelist-turned-journalist who looks a bit like Martin Sheen, says several writers owe their careers to Vermeulen’s recruitment of them.

William Leith is one such writer. Now a columnist for the Sunday Mail and a successful freelancer on both sides of the Atlantic, Leith was a sixteen-year-old university dropout when Vermeulen rang him out of the blue one night nine years ago. “I’d written for New Musical Express, was living in a grotty place, and he called saying he’d read one of my pieces,” Leith recollects. “He said, ‘I love this piece, and I’m going to help you make a lot of money.’ Well, nobody said this. ‘When can you meet me?’ And I’m expecting he’ll have time for me next month or something. ‘How about tomorrow night?’” They met at the Groucho Club and Vermeulen proceeded to teach the teenager how to approach editors with story ideas. Soon he arranged a lunch for Leith with Mark Boxer, who had founded the Sunday Times magazine and was at this time editor of The Tatler. Eventually Leith had a contract with the magazine, and soon was writing covers for GQ and travelling to the States as a top-drawer feature writer. “Michael really pushed me, and gave me a sense of how to sell myself. And he was very clever; we’d sit in his flat watching television at night and he’d come up with ten story ideas. I felt bad about it but I’d say, ‘Do you mind, I’m going to sell that idea tomorrow.’ He never did mind.”

In an office on the fourth floor of Vogue House, Angus MacKinnon is sitting, legs crossed, smoking. We’ve had our interview and now are talking loosely, about Thatcherism, British music, the differences between English and American magazines, really anything that comes up. The conversation drifts back to Vermeulen, and he says, almost as an aside, something I’ll hear several of Vermeulen’s friends and colleagues repeat in the the week to come. “Plainly,” he says, employing one of his favorite expressions, “his insecurity was the key to his personality.”

A couple of anecdotes illustrate this quite, well, plainly. Silvester tells of having dinner with Vermeulen and his girlfriend, Fiona Gee, at the Groucho Club one night last summer. He “just happened to mention” that Rosie Boycott, editor of British Esquire and one whom Vermeulen regarded as a fierce competitor, had been made a board member of the prestigious club. “Now, Michael had a longer association with the club than Rosie, and had spent a lot of Condé Nast money there—I’m sure very usefully, too—and when I told him this he completely flipped, saying, ‘Man, do you know how much money I spent in this club last year?! Twenty-seven-fucking-thousand pounds, that’s how much!’ See,” Silvester explains, “he was impatient for recognition. Rosie’d won the awards despite just copying the GQ formula, and while he’s getting a lot of respect now that he’s dead, he wanted it faster than it was coming to him.”

Paul Spike tells of a similar incident, also involving the Groucho Club. A friend Vermeulen had recommended for membership was turned down, and Vermeulen “took this as a great personal insult. He confronted the guy in charge, saying, ‘I’m the nigger here, aren’t I? I’m the nigger here! Well, this nigger is telling you that I spend a fucking lot of money in here, and if she’s out, I’m out!’” Spike explains the compulsion driving his friend with self-deprecation. “As with all of us neurotics,” he told me at lunch, “Michael had a habit of re-opening self-inflicted wounds; he had a large degree of self-doubt, and there was a voice inside him telling him he was a bad person, which gave him his self-destructive tendency, and the tendency to see any little thing as a social slight.”

Vermeulen’s insecurity manifested itself as sadness, as well as anger, and often in substance abuse. He would sometimes break down in front of close friends, saying he felt close to the edge. Silvester tells of him bursting into tears in a Soho restaurant about a year ago. “He was very depressed. The problem was twofold: one, there was this sense that he’d reached a plateau in his career, and wasn’t quite sure where’d he’d go next. Should he go back to America, either as a writer or an editor, and would he be welcomed back? Perhaps he’d go off and write a novel or something. And another reason he was depressed that night was that he hated his body, he was really overweight, and that made him more depressed.” Silvester says he had bought a rowing machine but never used it, and a huge freezer three weeks before he died. The hope, perhaps naïve, was that he’d cook microwave meals, and, spending more time at home, his consumption might reduce.

Despite his weight problem, Vermeulen could charm and impress young women with his wit, his worldliness, and his audacity. Articles in British papers following his death wink knowlingly about how pretty, young interns were always welcome to join him after work at the Groucho Club, and colleagues spoke to me generally of his peccadilloes. Yet, this seems to have been another example of his insecurity; one friend said he was “never settled domestically, and extremely human in his relationships, in that he never got what he wanted.”

Last Christmas, Vermeulen arranged a Caribbean vacation with Kate Spicer, GQ’s sex columnist, with, in the words of a source, “the obvious intention of some hanky-panky.” For some reason, she left, and Michael was left stuck in a bar on some tropical beach, “really regretful, and really depressed. That was his glamorous Christmas holiday,” says the colleague.

Spike spoke with Vermeulen the Friday before he died, and on the phone late that night Vermeulen was distressed over his relentless womanizing. “He was looking for a place to rest,” is how Spike put it. “Though he was most fond of Fiona, he felt unable to commit to any one person.”

Vermeulen lived on a main road traversing the rather sleepy North London borough of Islington, in a modest brownstone whose top levels are set back from the street, the green paint on its front door chipping. Next door, a pub called Hourican’s, advertises the next boxing or football matches on the telly. The curtains at ground level appear to have been refashioned from a small child’s bedsheets, their print fading. Tonight, exactly two weeks after Vermeulen’s death, a single light shines through transluscent, white window-dressing on the top floor.

Vermeulen paid a lot of money for the house at the peak of London’s real estate market in the late 80’s; friends speculate he might have been caught in a negative equity trap. “It was the result of an impulsive act, as, apparently, was much of his time in London,” claims a friend. Inside, Vermeulen had the flat redone by an interior decorator; Spike says, “He took a perfectly nice flat and had it done over in the manner of a Lower East Side tenement.” Another describes the bathroom as “something out of Dante’s Inferno, with gold faucets and dark green countertops that looked like he’d smeared bird shit everywhere.” Downstairs, piles of newspapers—Vermeulen astonished even his journalist friends with his ravenous appetite for news—covered the floor and furniture. At center stage of the living room—and it is not a big living room—was a huge painting, perhaps 12’x6’, resting on an easel, that’s been called “a picture of pain: I can’t visualize it and I don’t want to.” The first time an aquaintance saw it, despite Vermeulen’s insistence that the painter was a rising star and would be famous one day, all she could think of Vermeulen was, “This…guy…is…fucked…up.” In living color, in the center of his house, Vermeulen’s psyche was writ large on canvas, for all visitors to see, and to shy away from.

It was here that Vermeulen died on a holiday morning. His body was discovered by a woman known only to me as “Danielle.” Paul Mungo told me, understandably under the circumstances, “I know her last name, and I know how to reach her, but I’m not going to tell you.” Danielle’s relationship to Vermeulen remains a mystery. His colleagues admit she was a “hostess,” a delicate term for a woman whose company one pays for. That company may or may not include sexual companionship; Silvester, Spike and Mungo all assert he was not paying Danielle for anything. But another friend “know(s) he was paying prostitutes. It was a function of his extremely fucked-up inability to deal with women. So knowing his history with prostitutes, I can’t see him not having paid (Danielle) at some point to have sex with him.” But the source admits that specific contract is “conjecture.”

In any case, Vermeulen seems to have been victimized somewhat by the magazine scene in England, an atmosphere of relentless drinking and cavorting, in which booze was brought out every Friday afternoon in the GQ offices and parties at the Groucho Club were an essential part of fitting in.

“It started in New York, his nonstop zest for living, and the community he was with in London certainly encouraged it,” says David Martin, who knew him at all stages of his life. Vermeulen was an outsider in London, and one way to get attention for himself and his magazine was to act out as the brash American. But he pushed himself into a hole by playing this role. He was trapped in London: trapped by luxury, trapped in his magazine that needed sex and sports to keep up its spectacular commercial success, but to which he always wanted to bring the hard journalism and investigative pieces that British magazines have never embraced and British readers have never developed a taste for.

If he had moved back to America, an idea which friends say he was entertaining but not committed to, he might have a had a similar affect on magazines here. Everyone I spoke with stated he was magnificently talented as an editor, brimming with fresh ideas and always able to make a piece better.
“He was dying to go back to America and take over a magazine, make a big splash, you know,” says Paul Spike. “But he would’ve done it for two years and then thought, What next?”

Hunched over the table now, head in his hands, Spike looks not at me and not at anything, just stares forward, emptily. “The consensus among his friends is, Isn’t it a shame he couldn’t settle down? We would have wanted that, but you can’t tell someone how to live their life.” He sighs, leans back, raises his eyebrows and shrugs. “On the other hand, I don’t think Michael would have wanted to die two weeks ago.”

(c) 1995 Paul Tullis