Julie Burchill, columnist

My career has been up and down more often than a bride’s nightie, but the late 90s were particularly volatile. I had just inked a hefty mortgage on a six-bedroomed fun-palace complete with outdoor swimming pool when I got the heave-ho from my cushy billet at the Sunday Express, where I later learned my nickname had been “Caligula’s Horse” because my best friend – briefly the editor – had appointed me. For the first time in my brilliant career, no one wanted to hire me. Somehow I limped into a column on the doddering Punch – and then I got the boot from there, too! Surely I had reached the mythical rock bottom at last?

And then my mate Suzanne Moore brought her mate Deborah Orr down to see me in Brighton, and while our combined children frolicked in the pool, Deborah narrowed her eyes, exhaled cigarette smoke and said in that combative Scottish husk: “Well, it looks like you’ll just have to come and work for me.” And so began my most improbable career move to date – as a Guardian columnist. But it didn’t feel like I was working for the Guardian – it felt like I was working for Deborah. She was the dream editor. Many editors will hire you for your USP, then try to change you; Deborah never touched a word.

This gig was the gift that kept on giving; I’d already had two collections of journalism published but never all from one source; now I had the Guardian Columns 1998–2000, and the playwright Tim Fountain shaped an excellent play – Julie Burchill Is Away – from them. I, in return, was the giftee who never stopped being grateful; in a 1999 interview with her then husband Will Self, I said, “Of course, it’s all down to Deborah, my renaissance – she was the only one who’d give me a chance.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We did a cover about the joys of smoking, which went so against the grain of everything in the culture.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

I eventually left the Guardian in 2003, and never kept up with Deborah after that. We didn’t have much in common apart from the fact that we were both triumphantly working class in an industry increasingly drearied-down by the boring spawn of the nepotistic media-ocracy. When I heard that she was moving to Brighton – “escaped” as she put it – I was excited at the thought of getting to know her. Sadly, it was too late. But she died a “free woman”, as she described herself on her Twitter account, and her masterpiece autobiography Motherwell will ensure that her reputation as a writer lives on. “Fierce” is a stupidly overused word, but Deborah really was. RIP, you fierce, frightening, fantastic broad.

Linda Grant, writer

“Linda. It’s Deborah. Drugs. Five thousand words?” This was a commission from Deborah Orr. The phone rings, a laconic one-word subject is aimed at you like a missile and you’ve no idea what she is talking about. It could have been schoolchildren. Or arson. Or tattoos and piercings. And you were left with this single word which had been bouncing around her brain and a month to come up with something that would satisfy her – a properly argued, thoroughly researched feature which would shed some light on a defining moment of that particular zeitgeist.

Because once you started to make some phone calls, you realised she was months ahead of everyone else. She could tell which way the wind blowing. I don’t know how she did it, but I’d ring her back a couple of weeks later for a follow-up and say, “Well, initially I didn’t know why you were asking me about tattoos of all things, but it seems that...” “Aye, I thought so.” She knew.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘She let me interview the mavericks and misfits.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

She was more generous than anyone else I worked for – with the amount of time she let you spend on a piece, the number of words, and how much she’d pay you. She was also pleasingly generous with herself. I worked from home, but would sometimes come into the office to find her gliding about in a Jil Sander suit.

In her forthcoming memoir Motherwell, she says her mother never understood what it was she did on the magazine because she could never see her byline there. When I read that I messaged her to say I could explain it, but Deborah insisted that her mother would never have got it. As the person whose byline it was, I know that without her ideas, her hunches, her far-sightedness, her clarity and bravery, those features would never have appeared. She was funny, sharp as a chef’s knife and a great soul. I miss her like hell.

Helen Oldfield, deputy editor

Deborah was in many ways a brilliant editor: she had great ideas and a kind of vision for the whole thing. She cultivated good writers and gave them confidence; she could single-handedly design and lay out the whole mag, write the headlines, and if need be the features, too.

I thought one of her exceptional covers was of Joan Collins. Joan wouldn’t do a shoot for us, so Deborah had this idea of using a (delightful) black and white photograph and putting red lipstick on her mouth. It looks terrific and very stylish. She actually made a virtue of having no new shoot. Some time later there was an interview with Joan somewhere else. They did have a shoot, and you saw Joan sitting in front of a wall at her home covered with magazine covers of her. And there to the forefront was Deborah’s black, white and red brainwave.

My most vivid memory is not of her as an editor but as a writer. (Apart from the one spat I had with her. I had used a letter she didn’t want included and she gave me a bollocking. I said, “You sound like the bloody headmistress”, and she said, “I am the bloody headmistress.”) Anyway, she was interviewing Tom Hanks at nine on a Tuesday morning and our deadline was at about 2.30pm that day. She returned to the office, sat down and simply wrote 4,000 words by lunchtime, straight off the bat. Amazing. Not the best interview ever written, but pretty damn good. It was for Apollo 13, and Deborah was very knowledgable about space travel. She asked me what I thought and all I could come up with was that she was an outstanding typist – there wasn’t a single typo. It became a bit of a joke whenever a piece of bravura copy showed up: excellent typing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark Porter: ‘She was brave and iconoclastic.’ Photograph: Guardian archives

Mark Porter, art director

In 1995, Alan Rusbridger decided he wanted Weekend to be redesigned, and to look more like a magazine. Up to that point, all the layouts had been done by the subeditors and editors, like the rest of the paper. I think Deborah had mixed feelings about having a designer, because she had had complete freedom over the visuals. But after a few weeks, I think she saw that we were raising the bar, and we went on to build a really good relationship.

She was brave and iconoclastic; she didn’t worry at all about breaking magazine conventions. We did a cover about the joys of smoking, which went so against the grain of everything in the culture. The idea was that we commission an ad for smoking, so we asked Robin Broadbent, who had done a lot of advertising work, to do it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Martin Parr went to North Korea on a tourist visa and did a photo essay. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

She really believed in photography. It wasn’t just writers whom she invested in. We competed to get a contract with Martin Parr, who worked exclusively for us for a couple of years. He went to North Korea on a tourist visa and did a photo essay, which was a brave and reckless thing to do – and it probably worked because he looks like a tourist.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest We did cover tries with the really unusual shots and the weird angles, before settling on the iconic shot of their shoes. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

The Spice Girls cover was an example of her contrary approach to celebrity journalism. The first twist was hiring Kathy Acker to do the interview. And when it came to the photography, we decided to ask Nigel Shafran, who was great and very experienced, but not a conventional celebrity photographer. We had had so many conditions laid down about the band: we had to use their stylists, their makeup artists, and we wanted to get behind the gloss. But they were very firm. Still, Nigel filed these incredible shots. You saw the band’s faces inside the magazine, but we did cover tries with the really unusual ones and the weird angles, before settling on the iconic shot of their shoes and Deborah’s cover line.

It’s a cover that has followed me my entire career as a creative director. It’s been reproduced in books, made best cover lists, and if I give a talk in Brazil, I’ll be asked about it. And that comes down to Deborah’s attitude: I don’t think many editors would have run with it.

Alastair Hendy, food columnist

I first met Deborah when she popped around to see her friend, John – my partner now for 27 years – and his new boyfriend (me). We all sat in front of the TV watching something akin to Acorn Antiques. Deborah was sporting a Suzy Menkes pompadour, and launched into an uninterruptible tirade about the closing of the coal mines. The wobbling pompadour added oomph to her rage. I was terrified, so I vanished and fixed supper. She liked the supper. Calm descended. “Heavenly,” she said, and we were launched.

Next, Deborah came for dinner at mine. We ate quail and faggots under a canopy I’d rigged up in the garden, with D in rock-chick gear: leather jacket, something velvet, all legs, with signature hair and signature fag in hand. It was 1993, and Forest Gate had never seen the like. “You can have a food column in the Weekend Guardian, let’s start next month,” she casually announced during pud. I was elated but still a little terrified, not of Deborah this time, but of the typewriter – I’d never used one. “Write from the heart, about what you know – and use a Biro,” Deborah said.

Remains Of The Day was my Christmas debut, a recipe for readers who might have a pig’s trotter, a frisée lettuce and a few other recherché ingredients lazing in their fridge on Boxing Day. (I’d just done MasterChef with the Robert Carrier, of 70s French cooking fame. I had a pig’s trotter in my fridge.) I was naive. I was out to impress.

Readers were not impressed: they did not have pigs’ trotters. “I have a half tin of baked beans, a forlorn iceberg, and two withered spring onions,” came the replies. “What can I do with that, Mr Hendy?” I’d never been called Mr before. There was absolute wrath, but it was just what D wanted – a bit of action in the food section.

She was a giver, a nurturer of talent, honest and true to herself, which made her a world-class editor and an unfailingly faithful friend. But it was tough love; there were always moments of brilliant unpredictability when you’d be torn to smithereens. She’d ask my opinion (of the fluffy things in life: food, interiors), get furious with my answer, yet come back the next day wanting more.

Our last holiday together was in Ischia, where we overdosed on “heavenly” rosemary-and-garlic braised rabbit with tomatoes harvested from Vesuvius soil. I cooked it on repeat; honest, simple cooking was our thing. Her last plate from me was at her funeral. She had requested my omelette from her hospital bed, as her dish to come home to, but she never made it. So I read the recipe to her as she lay in her tulip-strewn wicker coffin, how to make the perfect omelette – cooked up with metaphors about life and friendship. It was also about a damn good and “heavenly” plate of food. Which was just what Deborah ordered.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jim Shelley: ‘The interviews would be 5,000 words, but Deborah never briefed me or discussed an angle.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Jim Shelley, writer

To get an idea of Deborah and what she was like as Weekend editor, you really have to experience her for yourself. And you can, even now: she made an appearance on Radio 4’s Saturday Review (24 March 2018, still on BBC Sounds) which was Ultra Deborah, or Orrissimo. Who else would turn up for a discussion of the week’s “cultural highlights” without having done their homework? She thought nothing of beginning her negative critique of Philip Hensher’s new novel by purring, “I’m only halfway through it.”

She let me interview the mavericks and misfits who, in the mid-90s, might have had cults devoted to them but were not considered cool: James Ellroy, Iggy Pop, John Waters, Meat Loaf. She gave me the freedom to represent our fellow outsiders’ cases – people life Def Jam’s Russell Simmons, Kathryn Bigelow, Ice-T (post Cop Killer), David Cronenberg (circa Crash), Julian Schnabel. The headline for the latter (In Defence Of The Fat Guy) wouldn’t happen now; neither might the whole profile.

The interviews would be 5,000 words, but Deborah never briefed me or discussed an angle. She let me see the proofs, too, and was as protective of the copy as I was. Well, almost. Once, a subeditor rewrote my piece on Tricky, even changing the colour of his clothes. When I told Deborah she went ballistic, going back to the office to fix it (from the pub), even though it had theoretically gone to print.

This is how she was: relentlessly herself. She sailed through the job – gloriously oblivious to, or just untroubled by, the significance of being a factory worker’s daughter from Motherwell who had become the editor of Weekend Guardian at 31. I’m not sure any of us realised how astonishing she was, or what she achieved. Now she’s, rightly, become bloody legendary. At the time she was just Deborah.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bob Granleese: ‘Deborah always knew what she wanted, knew how to get it done, and heaven help anyone who got in her way.’ Photograph: Guardian archives

Bob Granleese, subeditor

The evening before my first ever shift at Guardian Weekend, a friend warned me about my new boss: “That Deborah Orr is abso-bloody-lutely terrifying, so keep your head down if you know what’s good for you.” I did exactly as I’d been told, and meekly minded my own business while keeping a wary eye on the actually-rather-pleasant-seeming woman sitting opposite, before scarpering at the end of the day with a loud, “Phew!”

It turned out Deborah had taken that Monday off. The next morning, an abso-bloody-lutely terrifying Scottish Boudicca-alike turned up with a mass of hair, fag ablaze (those were the days), raging about this and that, before turning to me with a “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck are you doing here?” Ah, this was more like it.

Deborah always knew what she wanted (even when she was wrong), knew how to get it done, and heaven help anyone who got in her way. But she had a soft side, too. We were once sent a pitch for a column on profanity, for which the writer proposed picking a swear word each week and writing 500 words about it. Deborah replied with an unnecessarily long, thoughtful thanks-but-no-thanks explanation as to why the idea would never work in a broadsheet Saturday magazine, ending with the line, “And, to be quite honest, too much swearing is a bit of a cunt.” Pure Deborah.

I last saw her a couple of weeks before she died. She was waiting for a transfer from London to a hospital in Brighton, where she’d hoped to start a new life on the south coast. I took her a pot of stupidly expensive manuka honey as a bit of a joke, because of its supposed healing properties. Her response? “It’s a bit fucking late for that now.”

Ritchie Parrott, senior administrator

I joined the magazine in 1996 and it was an exciting, heady, sometimes completely daunting time. It was never dull. Deborah expected high standards of everyone, and to start with she scared the hell out of me.

Not long after I started, we sent Ken Lukowiak, a Falklands veteran, to Argentina. He couldn’t go without some money upfront for his expenses, which the Guardian didn’t do. So Deborah dug into her own pocket, a considerable amount, to ensure he could go. Ken came back with a powerful piece about being ambushed in Buenos Aires by the family of the Argentinian soldier he’d killed during the conflict.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

I remember Deborah working on a piece that Marian Partington had sent in on spec, about her sister Lucy, who was a victim of Fred and Rose West. She spent a lot of time nurturing Marian, who was nervous and still grieving, and edited her piece into something incredibly moving. It generated a huge postbag from readers expressing their admiration, rare in a time before email.

Deborah had a biting sense of humour and would sometimes use this in replies to complaints. We once published a cover that was a block of text, and somebody wrote in to say we’d stolen their idea. Deborah was incredulous: had they invented putting one letter in front of another, or the ability to read from left to right?

She was fearless and fabulous, and inspired friendships that were hugely loyal. I’ll never forget her brutal honesty, or her laugh.

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