Return of 'Randi Mandi'

"I was always in too much of a hurry to want to be told anything," says Mandi Norwood. "I had this reputation as someone who had nerves of steel. But also a heart of steel." It is a brutally honest assessment of her career so far by one of the most brilliant and ambitious figures in the world of women's magazines. Once an unstoppable force, the former editor of Cosmopolitan, now 37, admits that she no longer lives a life she described as: "Moving from 0-60 in about 10 seconds."

That particular high-speed chase came to an end barely two years ago, with the closure of Mademoiselle, the American magazine she was recruited to kick-start into the 21st century.

Norwood's idea of taking it easy will still sound like a nightmarish combination of Christmas Day, packing for the summer holidays and the first day of school to most working women. She has a new book and a new magazine in the works, but it is still a far cry from the last days of Mademoiselle, where she admits she was working virtually 24 hours-a-day. Then, she was the toast of the New York gossip columns and in her spare time was throwing parties in the Hamptons for people such as Sex and the City actress Kristin Davis.

It is obvious she lives and breathes women's magazines. As part of the deal that first brought her to New York in March 2000, husband Martin initially agreed to stay at home with their two daughters, Daisy and Rosie, now seven and 10. Today Martin is back at work, as production editor of Cosmo Girl.

"When we are at home, we do tend to talk about magazines a lot," she says. "But having two children puts a limit on it." And, she says, that getting sacked after dragging her family across the Atlantic has worked out well. "I had been on the fast track all my life and I felt exhausted."

She clearly welcomes the chance to step back from what has been a non-stop rise to the top since her early 20s. After growing up in a working-class, single-parent family in Tyne and Wear, Norwood admits that she was always fiercely determined. Her father walked out when she was five and her mother remarried a biology teacher when Mandi was 13. By then she was whiling away her time reading magazines alone in her room and harbouring ambitions to work in the rarefied world of the glossies.

Seven years later, she arrived in London armed with a college diploma and started work as a magazine secretary. She went on to achieve her seemingly impossible ambition to edit a major magazine by the age of 25 when she took over Looks. A year later she was editor of Company, where she doubled the circulation, before moving onwards and upwards to be editor of Cosmopolitan at the age of 30.

Her resignation four years later was marked by bitter rows over working out her notice. At one point she was only talking to her National Magazine bosses through lawyers, apparently because she didn't want to be shouted at. But that is water under the bridge now. "I take it as a compliment when someone doesn't want you to leave," she says diplomatically.

Despite the glamour of life at Condé Nast tower in Times Square - rubbing shoulders with American Vogue and Vanity Fair - it is clear that Norwood and Mademoiselle never stood much of a chance. Condé Nast, the owner of the 67-year-old magazine, wanted a makeover. What it got was the publishing equivalent of a face-lift and a boob job. Boasting cover lines such as, "Six Guys to Do Before You Say 'I Do''', the recipe was sex.

But there were doubters from the start. "Randi Mandi and the Death of Hot Sex" was the headline in the trade publication Media Life, saying that the "tarty editrix" was "a bomb to readers".

Until then it seemed that no American publishing house was complete without an English accent at the top. Along with Anna Wintour of American Vogue, the late Liz Tilberis at Harper's Bazaar and her successor Glenda Bailey, Norwood was the last of a wave of British editors who took New York by storm in the 1990s. In her case, the storm was more of a tempest.

Five months after Norwood started, Condé Nast pulled down the shutters on Mademoiselle, blaming dwindling circulation figures in the 11 September aftermath. Even today, Mandi disputes the decision, believing that with more time she could have turned it around.

There were persistent rumours that Condé Nast had all but decided to close the magazine up to six months before she arrived to take up the job. "I did my best, we all did, but if anything the patient was dead on arrival," she said after losing her job.

But in America, it's not falling down that matters, but getting back on your feet. And in true New York style, Mandi has stormed back like the last act of a Broadway musical. Already a best seller in the US, her book, Sex and the Married Girl, will be published here next month.

The book - a follow-up to legendary Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl - shows that "Randi Mandi" has lost none of her enthusiasm for sex. The style is straight from the pages of Cosmo. It is so relentlessly upbeat that you feel exhausted after just a few pages. Chapter two starts: "Married Girls love sex. We want it. We need it. It isn't a chore. It's a necessity.''

Discussing the book over lunch at an Italian trattoria in mid-town Manhattan, it's difficult to imagine that this no-nonsense woman - who sends back her Coke because it isn't diet - keeps a Victoria's Secret sequined thong in the knicker drawer or recommends a sexual position called The Scissors with as much enthusiasm as the restaurant's lamb cutlets.

It is clear that Mandi still knows what she wants. Earlier this year, she was signed up by Hearst - the parent company of National Magazines, her old bosses - to launch a new women's magazine, hopefully next spring.

"I can't tell you too much about it," she says, but the industry gossip is that it will take a real-life look at fashion, probably with a heavy dose of celebrity, like InStyle. And almost certainly plenty of sex.

Sex and the Married Girl by Mandi Norwood (Hodder Mobius, £10.99) is published on 5 June.