published 23/02/2014 at 08:45 PM
Beatrix Miller was the editor of Vogue who brought benevolence and a literary lilt to the modish world of fashionistas
Beatrix Miller, who has died aged 90, was the exacting and benevolent longtime editor of British Vogue, who for two decades cultivated a hothouse of creativity at the glossy bible to
high-fashion.
With quiet precision she steered the magazine with enormous success through the swinging Sixties, the fey Seventies, and into the hard-nosed Eighties with the same incisive intelligence and
feeling for the moment, the same rigorous literary standards and visual discrimination that kept the magazine ahead of its competitors. But it was in her ability to help others achieve their
aspirations that she found her forte. “What do you really want to do, darling?” she asked of leagues of impassioned writers, editors, photographers, models and designers.
Beatrix Miller (often known as Bea) was born on June 29 1923, the daughter of a country doctor. Educated abroad, including a period at the Sorbonne, she started her journalistic career as a
secretary on the society magazine, The Queen (later Queen), eventually rising to the position of features editor.
Beatrix Miller in 1964
After several years, however, she decided to broaden her horizons and in 1956 left to work in New York, where she was offered a job on American Vogue. Two years later she received a call from
Jocelyn Stevens, the recently appointed proprietor of The Queen. “You don’t know who I am,” he said, “but I am ringing to offer you the job of editor of The Queen.” Half asleep, she dismissed the
offer. “It’s 4am, you’re mad,” she replied and put the phone down. Eventually, after several further nocturnal requests, she was persuaded to return to England and, with the maverick Stevens and
the accomplished artistic director Mark Boxer, formed part of a triumvirate which was to turn the magazine into a byword for wit and originality.
In 1964 she was asked to take over the editorship of British Vogue, a magazine which, at the time, represented a life lived in the drawing-rooms of Eaton Square and on the lawns of country
houses. But English life had already become much looser, livelier and unconventional. It was to this new world that “Bea” Miller began to introduce the Vogue reader.
“Vogueland” she believed, was “relatively superficial but in the broadest sense it is the mood of the moment translated visually — the words people use, the books they read, the sounds they hear,
the houses, they live in, the pictures they look at.” The magazine she created from this brief possessed a freshness and quality that was a particularly English version of glossiness. Opening the
pages of one of her issues was like being invited to an exclusive party of the creative, the patrician, the exotic and the influential. Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling, Joanna Lumley, Jean
Shrimpton, Lady Antonia Fraser, Bianca Jagger and Michael Caine were just some of those who appeared in Vogue under her editorship.
Even in the demotic Sixties, however, she continued to attach great significance to the aristocracy and the Royal Family, and was prepared to hold back an issue from the printers to get in
photographs of a noble wedding or party.
Often she had insider information. Sarah Spencer, the older sister of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, was at one stage her secretary, while their other sister, Jane, worked in the beauty
department. It was scarcely surprising that the 19-year-old Diana Spencer turned to Vogue for advice when she entered the public spotlight.
Unsociable and uninterested in her own personal style (though she always dressed in Jean Muir, her outfits were chosen by the fashion department), Beatrix Miller was not someone who herself
craved the spotlight. Her strength as an editor lay in her unerring ability to spot and nourish the talent of others. “Bea Miller had a way of coaxing the best out of everyone,” said the model
Grace Coddington.
Drawing of Beatrix Miller and Grace Coddington
She rarely took writers from other magazines but liked to discover and foster new talent. Some writers — like Marina Warner — she hired straight from university, but many others (Candia
McWilliam, Georgina Howell, Helen Simpson, Leslie Forbes) were the product of the annual Vogue talent competition, which was her entrance examination to the magazine. On hiring editorial staff,
she would appraise interviewees’ suitability by asking if they knew the work of the novelist Lesley Blanch (Vogue’s feature editor from 1937 to 1944).
She also had an eagle eye for those whose talents lay in images rather than words and she was fearless in her appointments and commissions. “I’ve got the photographer here for that idea of yours
about men of back-stairs influence,” she told the journalist Adrian Hamilton in the late sixties. “Why don’t you come in and try to persuade him?” Her choice was the “famous and choosy” Henri
Cartier-Bresson. She also despatched Cecil Beaton to photograph Roy Strong on his appointment as director of the National Portrait Gallery and ushered in a young, wayward David Bailey to becoming
Vogue’s unofficial chief photographer.
Grace Coddington, meanwhile, stepped off the catwalk to become Miller’s unexpected choice as junior fashion editor. Miller interviewed her over lunch at the Trattoria Terrazza in Soho. “She
seemed far more interested in what I was reading than in what I was wearing,” recalled Coddington, “I could sense myself being mentally marked down as a dimwit. Nevertheless, by the end of the
meal I was recruited.”
Miller was a truly great patron because she would permit experiment but not madness, encouraging and understanding and at the same time knowing how far she could push them. She trusted her
fashion editors to bring back something marvellous, but never wanted to know too much about how they managed it until afterwards. The downside of this liberal approach was that she was totally
unimpressed by practical difficulties.
On one occasion Lord Snowden — a long-time contributor to Vogue — went to photograph the couture collections in Paris in a shoot which involved performing horses, forty-foot backdrops, all-night
photography, and a model nearly getting killed. All Beatrix Miller said when she examined the result was: “The dress is no good”. The pictures were never used.
She could, on the other hand, be immensely supportive and would allow editors, against all received wisdom, their head and never allowed editorial to be dictated to by the demands of
advertisers.
On retiring, in 1985, she helped set up a “think tank” with, amongst others, Sir Terence Conran and the designer Jean Muir, to provide a link between the government and the fashion industry.
Often likened to a headmistress (all but a select inner band addressed her at all times as Miss Miller), with her upright bearing, ample bosom, round Teutonic face and short, curly blonde hair,
she was a quietly formidable presence. Witty and at times endearingly considerate, she avoided all show of ambition, effort or anxiety.
She never appeared on television or gave an interview, rarely attended public engagements and seldom entertained, preferring, when not at her Hanover Square office, to garden or read a book at
her home in Chelsea.
Beatrix Miller never married. She was an intensely private and shy woman devoted to her career — a dedication that strove for nothing but the very best. “Legends collect around such editors,”
commented one writer on Beatrix Miller’s retirement. “But I was there when one day she summoned 48 members of staff into her office and told us: 'I want you all to know that, as far as I am
concerned, the July issue is a write-off. There is a mistake on page 136.”
Beatrix Miller, born June 29 1924, died February 21 2014