He has a reputation for shyness, hauteur and snobbery, yet Sir Rocco Forte is
actually, when you get to know him, quite good fun. Indeed, “fun” is one of
his favourite words. He trusts that our visit to Berlin together for the
opening of its film festival will be fun; he hopes this article, if nothing
else, will be fun.
I would, however, advise against breaking bread with Sir Rocco in one of his
own restaurants. On these occasions he wears the expression of someone
expecting the worst, which is silly, since his days of presiding over Happy
Eaters are long behind him. A Rocco Forte hotel is a hotel with five stars
to its (and his) name. Its chefs know how to cook.
Our first lunch, a sounding-each-other-out session fixed up and attended by
his PR, is at Brown’s, the Mayfair hotel that he reopened in 2005 with
Baroness Thatcher as guest of honour. We both choose the watercress soup, a
murky, oddly metallic brew that Forte declares horrible. Now we are in
Berlin and lunching at the newly opened Hotel de Rome and there is trouble
already. The menu offends him with its unappetising description of
“lukewarm” carpaccio of swordfish.
I tell him, when we get to it, that my main course, a red wine risotto, is
delicious. “Well, my fish wasn’t all that brilliant.” He wishes he knew more
about cooking. “Maybe I should learn. But it’s a bit late in life.”
He is 62, although with his dark head of hair and beard, he does not look it.
He favours Ferraris, overcomplicated Swiss watches, predawn runs and a
blonde wife 20 years his junior. “I would at least be able to explain what I
mean,” he grumbles in his slightly regal mutter. “You know, I say ‘I want
simple food’ but they don’t understand what I mean by simple food and it’s
very difficult to describe.”
Fortunately the guests at the Hotel de Rome, who tonight include Sharon Stone
and Arthur Penn, the director of Bonnie and Clyde , are more easily
pleased. As for the locals, they regard Forte as a hero for fashioning this
146-room palace out of a ponderous old bank. It is the tenth of the new wave
of Forte Towers. Each is run to the grandest standards. Staff not only
unpack your luggage but also pack it again, layering your undies with tissue
paper. Since some customers are, he claims, considerably wealthier than he
is (and he is worth £385 million, according to The Sunday Times Rich
List) and may arrive with 30 “pieces”, this must take some time.
It is all many stars, then, from Trust House Forte, the company his father
founded and that Rocco took over and ran for less than four years before it
was snaffled by Granada in 1996. True, THF owned the George V in Paris and
the Ritz in Madrid, but most of us knew it for its Travelodges and Little
Chefs. Before, as he puts it, he was “rudely interrupted”, Rocco had plans
for these, too, but his true love was always for the luxury end of the
market. He recalls the day, ten years ago this month, that he broke back
into it by buying The Balmoral in Edinburgh. “As I walked down Princes
Street against this cold north wind, I felt a warm glow inside me looking at
this building. With the old Trust House Forte Group we had a shareholding
but we were not direct owners of anything. This was the first time I could
say ‘This is my hotel’.”
The takeover battle had left Forte bereft but rich. In a few weeks he levered
up the group’s worth from £3.50 a share to £4, at which point the
institutions could not resist selling. Personally, he landed £30 million of
the family’s £300 million winnings. “It’s funny,” he says, “all my American
friends sent me congratulatory telegrams: ‘You’ve sold the business very
well’. But, I mean, that’s not the point.” The point was not to lose and
then the point was to start winning again. As Granada gradually disposed of
what it had bought for less than it had paid, the new Forte group grew. By
last year it was making £13 million on a turnover of £93 million. Although
it is trying to dispose of its hotels in Cardiff and Manchester, it will
this year open new ones in Munich and Prague. Despite his feeling of
impotence in the kitchens, his grasp of detail impresses. A problem with the
turndown service in Berlin? He has a solution. He is tough, too. Michael
Goerdt, whom he had lured from a THF hotel in Warsaw to open his Astoria in
St Petersburg, was recently let go. “Not easy,” he mutters of the slaying.
I ask about his father. Charlie Forte was born in a village of 400 people in
southern Italy, arrived in Scotland at the age of 5, opened a milk bar in
Fleet Street at 25 and ended up with an empire of 800 hotels and a peerage.
Had he ever criticised his son for what happened? “All the time!”
I meant when he lost his company? “Oh no, no, not at all.”
It must have been the ultimate paternal gesture. Rocco, whose awkward manner
is sometimes compared to that of the Prince of Wales’s, had until then
suffered all the frustrations of an heir to a throne. Joining the business
in 1969, he did not become CEO until 1982 and still laboured under his
father’s chairmanship. He did not succeed until 1992, by which time he was
47 and his father 84. “The thing I regret in life is I was never clever
enough in finding a solution that kept him involved yet let me run the
business. I’m not as clever as he is, so I couldn’t do it. I had huge rows
with my father. There was a period of two years where he sacked me three
times. I said I was going to leave. He was very clever at playing it long,
and said ‘Well, I’ve got to go away on holiday and think about it’, and when
he came back and I’d ask what he had decided, he’d say ‘Well, I’ve decided
I’m staying on’. I said ‘Well then, I have to resign.’ So then he said
‘That’s fine’. I said ‘Well, what are you going to put in my place?’ And
he’d say something ridiculous and I knew that the stock market would have
gone crazy. And on that basis I couldn’t go. But that was the only period
that I had a difficult relationship with my father. Apart from that it was
very good.”
He will not make his children, should they wish to enter the firm, wait so
long. Equally, retirement is not imminent. He may be in his sixties but he
is an insanely fit athlete who camefirst in his age group in the World
Triathlon Championships in 2002. Today, his only Achilles’ heel is his
Achilles heel, wounded in training for the next tournament.
Lord Forte dies a few weeks after we talk, aged 98, but even before his death
Rocco cannot hide his pain at his diminishment. He was, he says, not just a
business genius but a devoted Italian parent who would visit his son every
weekend at boarding school and take him fishing. But it was, one gathers, an
old-fashioned upbringing. Lord Forte was not particularly amused that
through his twenties and thirties his son preferred to squire beauties such
as Bianca Jagger to settling down. Finally, at 36, he met Aliai Ricci, the
16-year-old daughter of a Roman neurologist, and proposed to her three years
later. What on earth, I ask, did his father make of him falling in love with
a teenager?
“I don’t think he thought anything so long as I got married. I had five
sisters and was the only one carrying on the Forte name and she was sort of,
I suppose, suitably virginal, from their point of view — although she wasn’t
that virginal.”
Prince Charles again, I think.She has, he says, turned out to be a wonderful
mother to their three teenagers. She probably needed to be. After the
eldest, Lydia, was born, mother and daughter timidly moved out of Rocco’s
one-bedroom flat, allowing the new father his sleep. He was informed of
another child’s birth during a board meeting. And the age gap? “She thinks
a lot of my friends are ancient, and I think a lot of her friends are very
silly,” he summarises.
During the war, as the holder of an Italian passport, Charles Forte had been
interned. Afterwards, says Rocco, he deliberately countered any lingering
stigma by “playing up” his Scottish side, turning up in a tam-o’-shanter at
Scotland-England matches. In turn, or so it seems to me, Rocco plays up his
Englishness: no tam-o’-shanters but Savile Row suits, Turnbull &
Asser ties and bespoke shoes. He even owns a 2,000-acre shooting estate in
Surrey. The late Giles Shepard, of the Savoy Group, famously called the
Fortes “purveyors of eateries on the arterial roads”. Perhaps it is in
reaction to that snobbery that one of the roles Rocco plays is country
squire. It did him no good, of course, during the Granada takeover. It was
widely reported that he got news of the bid while with a shooting party. He
returned immediately. “But after that my advisers said ‘You can’t risk being
caught shooting’. Buggered up my whole season.”
Why, I want to know, are the Fortes so posh? His sister Olga, who designs his
hotels’ clever interiors, is rumoured never to have travelled by Tube. “I
don’t know. She may not. I’ve taken Tube trains from time to time. I think
that if you’re well-off and can afford a comfortable life, you have a
comfortable life. I don’t think it’s a question of being posh. Posh is, to
some degree, being distant and actually not talking to people, and I don’t
think we’re like that at all.”
Some of his awkwardness, I conclude, is simply due to his deafness, caused —
and what a liability this sport has turned out to be for him — by shooting.
“When I was young I was quite shy. I may have been a little insecure. I
don’t know what causes that. But I was hard of hearing as well. In those
days we didn’t have good hearing aids. Now they’re quite good hearing aids.
It’s changed my life, actually.”
When relaxed he displays a blunt, satirical humour that I like. Unfashionably
right-wing, he despairs of David Cameron. “I don’t think it’s the right
direction, and I think he’s alienating a huge section of his Conservative
support in the process. The fact is, no one’s standing up for business. No
one’s basically standing up for the principles of capitalism.”
Beattie McGuinness Bungay has recently won a £4 millon advertising account
with Rocco Forte Hotels and Rocco, outvoted by his board, has reluctantly
agreed that his own profile will need to rise. It will be fascinating to see
what the agency does with him. Sporting hero? Man of sophistication? Last of
the fogeys?
At least there will be no image problems to counter in Germany. On the red
carpet at the opening of the film festival the evening after our lunch he is
treated as an Alist celebrity. After the screening of La Vie en Rose ,
a biopic in which an Édith Piaf impersonator spends a long time dying, he
tells the local press that he enjoyed it (he hated it). Later his local PRs
find us a table in East Berlin’s scruffiest but most bohemian restaurant.
Black tie undone, his hearing-aid struggling, the schnitzel-themed food
simple but not delicious, he is an introvert in agony. My favourite moment
comes when an eager young publisher bounces up to show off a picture-book on
global warming. Forte does not believe a word of it — or, rather, he thinks
that the world may be getting warmer but not because of capitalistic
emissions. I tease him that he is sceptical only because climate change is a
left-wing cause and maybe the Left are right. “They have never been right
before,” he counters.
His resolution is to have lunch with Lady Thatcher once a month. The thought
cheers him. Well, like hotels, I suppose, fun comes in many different forms.
At least the Baroness can rest assured that the watercress soup is off the
menu at Brown’s.
