SOMEWHERE in the hearts of all self-made wealthy people, said Felix Dennis, is a “sliver of razored ice”. He liked being rich, and liked advising people about how to achieve that enviable state. But making money, and then yet more of it, was to assuage inner demons, not to achieve happiness. Indeed what made him happy (and that only occasionally, he stressed) were modest pleasures: “Walking in the woods alone, or deeply ensconced in composing a difficult piece of verse, or sitting quietly with old friends over a bottle of wine, or feeding a stray cat.”

Fun and success, however, were another matter. To say he lived high on the hog would be an understatement. By his own estimate he spent $100m on drugs, drink, women and high living in just one decade. He had 14 mistresses on his personal payroll (“If it floats, flies or fucks,” he once said, it was better to rent than to buy.)

He could afford either. His publishing empire, by his death worth hundreds of millions of pounds, started when he turned up at the office of a backstreet rag called “Oz”. He was penniless, having sold his drum kit to pay for a girlfriend’s abortion. Minds met, and he became co-editor—only to end up in jail, briefly, on an obscenity charge when the “schoolkids” issue featured Rupert Bear, a children’s comic-strip character, deflowering “Gipsy Granny”. The judge sniped that the scruffy youngster was “very much less intelligent” than his two co-defendants.

If so, it did not hold him back. His publishing genius lay in spotting gaps in the market and launching titles to fill them. When he saw youngsters queuing in the street in Soho at 9am to watch Bruce Lee films, he launched “Kung-Fu Monthly”, flying to Hong Kong to interview the maestro, who conveniently then died, mysteriously: the media blackout which followed made his material sizzlingly interesting.

When the titles flourished, he licensed them in other countries, or sold them and started new ones. His later successes included the laddish “Maxim” and “The Week”, a lively digest of other outlets’ content. Its huge success in America confounded cynics who thought that the magazine market there was moribund.

He was no great editor and had mostly no interest in the subjects of his titles. Though he made a fortune from computer magazines, he abhorred gadgets. He found management boring too, revering cashflow, but boasting that he could not read a balance-sheet. Why bother, when you could hire people who could?

The secret of getting rich, he reckoned, lay in using other people’s talents—finding them, nurturing them, rewarding them, and when necessary dispensing with them. On top of that you needed persistence, practicality, stinginess, innovation, ruthlessness and fearlessness. The greatest hurdle to fortune was the desire for safety—as addictive as his beloved crack cocaine, but much worse for you, he said.

Biology caught up with him. He nearly died from Legionnaires’ disease, which, he wrote, is “especially lethal to coked-up, overweight, cigarette-smoking, malt-whisky-swilling idiots with too much money who believe they are built of titanium”. Having survived a nurse pouring icy water on his genitals to keep him from falling into a coma, he eventually resolved to ditch the drugs and took up a five-hour-a-day poetry habit instead.

Rhyme and reason

That seemed like a rich man’s folly at first. He paid his publisher to produce the first volume and toured the country by helicopter to give public readings. The promise of free (and rather good) wine brought punters flocking, and they liked what they heard. The books flew off the shelves just as fast as the magazines did. He was perhaps not Britain’s greatest living poet, but he was certainly one of the most popular. At their best, his verse—ironic, self-deprecatory, bleak and amusing by turns, had echoes of Kipling:

They tell me I’m riddled with cancer

So I’m planning to croak with élan

If you’ll pass the cigars and decanter

I’ll be dying as hard as I can.

He had other projects too, notably starting a 20,000 hectare hardwood forest (immodestly named the Forest of Dennis) on his estate, at a cost of £200m ($340m). By his death, more than 1m trees were planted. He created a garden of heroes there too, featuring life-size bronze statues of, among others Bob Dylan, Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin (the latter astride a Galapagos tortoise) and of course himself. Thrifty to a fault when it came to business expenses, he enjoyed making big, capricious donations to friends in need, and to good causes. He once sent $50,000 to a cricket team of former gang members from Los Angeles, to help them tour England. His vocal ambition was to spend his money before he died—which was impeded only by his ability to make more of it, even during his final illness, of throat cancer.

His hippy streak could be deceptive. The restlessness was matched by a fiercely competitive approach to everything from collecting to conversation. He liked intimacy on his terms, but nobody else’s. He had never “properly surrendered to love”; for all his audacity in other parts of life, it would require, he admitted, a particular kind of courage which he lacked.