He performed the same service for Mr. Carter when he took over the magazine in 1992. In 1996, Mr. Carter was eager for the writer Sally Bedell Smith to pursue a piece about the Rothschilds, the European banking family, and he thought the funeral of one of its scions, who died by suicide at a hotel in Paris that July, might be the way in. But how to sneak Ms. Smith into the service? Mr. Herrera knew just what to do.
“Hire a small dark car with a driver, wear a simple black dress, a plain black hat, black gloves, all for ‘the look.’ Just walk in and be yourself,” he told Ms. Smith. It worked.
“The only time we had a tiff was when Christopher Hitchens did a story that was hard on Mother Teresa,” Mr. Carter said in an interview. (In 1995, Mr. Hitchens excoriated Mother Teresa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and would later be canonized, as a “Vatican fundamentalist,” lover of dictators and “presumable virgin,” among other things.) “Reinaldo stormed into my office and declared, ‘You’ve gone too far. I’m canceling my subscription.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that, you’re on the comp list.’”
Mr. Herrera also taught Mr. Carter how to entertain Princess Margaret (bottles of Famous Grouse whisky and barley water were important) for a dinner he persuaded Mr. Carter to hold for her at his apartment, saying she would be helpful in promoting the European edition of the magazine.
Since protocol, as Mr. Herrera had patiently explained, required that no guests could leave before the princess, and since she stayed past midnight, the evening was a bust, Mr. Carter wrote in his memoir, “When the Going Was Good” (2025). Once everyone was released, Mr. Carter added, “The relief on the faces of the other guests,” among them the entertainment mogul Barry Diller and Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist, “was the sort of look that survivors of a difficult airplane landing have when they step out onto the tarmac.”
