The unspoken keyword was “networking.” Hired and eventually promoted to correspondent and commentator, Weidenfeld lunched with his colleague George Orwell, roomed with Diana Athill and started a New Yorkerish magazine called Contact (rejecting Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English Language”), which, because of paper ration rules, had to be printed under the shell of a book publisher. He conscripted Nicolson — the younger son of the diplomat Harold Nicolson and the poet Vita Sackville-West — who invested money in (and contributed a piece to) the new venture. George reciprocated by giving Nigel romantic advice.
Portly and balding from a young age — the writer Antonia Fraser likened him to Louis XVI, with “enormous rolling eyes, like gooseberries” — Weidenfeld had a reputation with women, but what it was isn’t completely clear from “The Maverick,” a title with discordant “Top Gun” echoes.
He referred to his childhood nanny as “that slut from the country,” saying she’d locked him away so she could sleep with her boyfriend, and at 17 lost his virginity to a married Milanese lady over twice his age. Michael Korda wrote in his memoir “Another Life” that he once overheard Weidenfeld refer to himself as “the Nijinsky of cunnilingus.” He wed four times, twice to heiresses who, it’s suggested, contributed financially to his business, and was not always faithful. He may or may not have slept with the philanthropist Ann Getty, with whom he started an ill-fated American company, called Wheatland after her hometown, that for a time took over the storied Grove Press. A longtime assistant insists he “was not a groper.”
But “there’s a word that keeps coming into my head,” Sackville-West’s granddaughter, Vanessa, tells Harding about his subject’s habit of getting too close at parties. “It’s ‘creepy.’ ”
There were a lot of parties — and yet Weidenfeld was in some respects remarkably abstemious, drinking milk, Earl Grey tea or apple juice instead of alcohol or coffee. He was not religious, but cared hugely for Israel, enough that he let the Netanyahu family censor parts of a biography of its scion Yoni, killed during the Entebbe raid of 1976. “I thought George in every way a loathsome human being,” its frustrated author, Max Hastings, wrote in 2021.
