Hackette of steel with an eye for the main chance

IN THE NEWS: ANTHEA DISNEY

"THE second this thing came up, I knew instantly that Anthea had her fingers in it and that she would have done the dirty work," one of Anthea Disney's former colleagues at TV Guide in New York said yesterday, referring to her apparent role as chief executioner on Chris Patten's book. She's a corporate assassin," the former colleague, who preferred not to be named, continued.

"Her career with Murdoch has been characterised by her being willing to do his dirty work, including firing large numbers of people."

Last year, it was the American authors on the HarperCollins payroll who felt the sharpness of Disney's axe when she cancelled more than 100 titles previously earmarked for publication.

Around 70 were cancelled because the writers had missed their deadlines, and another 30-odd were junked because they were no longer deemed to be commercially worthwhile.

Disney had been appointed a year earlier as chief executive of HarperCollins worldwide with a mission to turn round its ailing fortunes. At that time she had told The Bookseller: "In ten or twenty years' time I want authors to say, 'Boy! She really cared about us, about publishing, about the titles.' I do not want them to say, 'Boy! She really cared about the property costs or the budget.' "

In the same interview she also recalled the day Rupert Murdoch had offered her the job. At the time, she was running News Corporation's internet site, iGuide. "He said, 'What do you think of HarperCollins?' " she remembered, "and I said, 'I really don't know much about book publishing.' " Indeed, for most of her working life Disney has been a journalist. In the Seventies she worked for the Express and in particular the Mail. She was David English's star feature writer, happy to spend a couple of weeks blacked up so she could tell the paper's readers about the coloured experience.

And she was known to be something of an operator, a hack who would use all of her wiles to get a story. By the end of the Seventies, Disney was heading up the Mail's New York bureau, but when they decided to post her back to Britain, she preferred to stay and went freelance.

Four years of comparative wilderness followed, the only blip in a career that has otherwise followed a consistently upward curve.

She eventually got back on track when she joined the New York Daily News as features editor, rising to become its Sunday editor. She went on to edit Self magazine and there followed a series of further appointments in the Murdoch empire - executive producer of the tabloid TV programme A Current Affair and editor of TV Guide, America's highest-circulation magazine.

"Tina Brown avant la lettre" is how one former colleague describes the success of this Englishwoman in New York (although she's now taken American citizenship). Some say she's jealous of Brown's media profile, but the truth is that she tends to shun glamorous parties, preferring to spend time at her farmhouse home in the company of her husband Peter Howe, a photographer.

They met when she was working on a story about Mexicans in American prisons and he was taking the pictures. "We ended up falling into the same motel room," is how she describes the beginning of their romance. "Utterly unsentimental" is how a former journalist colleague describes Disney. "She's calculating. Ruthless is too strong a term, but she does what she says she will do. She's quite formidable and she takes no nonsense."

A Murdoch employee in New York says: "The thing that's crucial to understanding Anthea is that she's a woman with her eye on the main chance. And for her the main chance has been Rupert Murdoch. He's projected her from being just another journalist, albeit a fairly talented one, to being one of the highest-paid women executives in the world." Vanity, vanity It's been pointed out by some that Disney's current official photograph differs very little from the one which used to accompany her New York column for the Daily Mail in the Seventies. Her detractors use this as evidence of vanity and further like to ci te the story of her appearance in Fortune magazine in 1996. Apparently so taken was Disney with the accompanying photographs of her in a very fetching leather jacket that her secretary was sent out to buy dozens of copies of the issue.

The Ronnie Biggs episode In 1974, the whole of Fleet Street was struck with frenzy at the news that great train robber Ronnie Biggs might be willing to sell his story. Hacks were despatched forthwith to Brazil in a mad scramble to catch up with him. The Express got to him first, splashing with "Train Robber Biggs Captured In Rio... Our Men Are There", but Mail editor David English was determined to get Biggs for himself. Disney was one of the Mail team who descended on Rio in hot pursuit. In Slip-Up, the classic book on this wh ole sorry affair, author Anthony Delano describes Disney thus: "Small, long dark hair, frequently renovated tan, the kind of look MGM used to fix up for Pocahontas parts." He also describes Disney's modus operandi as she sought to win over a Brazilian po lice spokesman: "Disney pulled her chair up to his desk, unveiling thighs rounded and browned to the most demanding standards of Copacabana."

In her own words On her appointment as head of HarperCollins: "Here is my opportunity to be distinguished. I am not going to pass on it, I assure you." One year later, following the manuscript massacre: "I'm now seen as a crass barbarian, this woman who walks around with a smile on her face and an axe in her hand." On her boss: "Rupert never said to me, 'Don't publish anything that has any intellectual value.' It wouldn't make sense. People like to be around books with intellectual content, including owners of publishing houses."

The future of publishing Disney-style "A lot of younger authors might be open to having the community of the Internet collaborate to write books," Disney told The Bookseller in 1996. "So you have a book written by a community of people rather than by one person - although one person hasto l ook after the structure and the plot."

For the Record Under Disney's editorship, TV Guide became the first billion-dollar-a-year magazine in the American publishing industry.