White Boots & Miniskirts

by Jacky Hyams

  Unlike me, who merely reacted to events as they unfolded and used my brain only when I had to, Angela had it all planned out. She knew exactly where she was heading. Think of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair and you won’t be far off. After less than a year in London working as a secretary and not terribly impressed with what she’d landed thus far in the love stakes – a reasonably well-off, attractive and very attentive boy from the ’burbs, training to be a solicitor and poised to be the proud possessor of a big five or six-bedroom house in Weybridge – Angela came up with a bright idea. Why didn’t the two of us hunt for bigger, better prey in a much better setting? New York, she calculated, would offer the single girl supremely better chances of bagging a multi-millionaire.

  Neither of us had been there, of course. In the popular imagination, it was the New York of myth and ’60s movies like The Apartment or Barefoot in the Park, all honking yellow taxis, towering buildings, cocktail hours and fast-living, megabucks spenders. London had now emerged as a happening place, ever since the famous Time cover in 1966, proclaiming LONDON: THE SWINGING CITY. Yet the city was still dotted with wartime debris and shabby buildings – a long way from the fast-paced, slick consumer world, with all its 24/7 temptations, that Manhattanites were already accustomed to.

  Today, we revisit the New York of that time through the carefully recreated prism of Mad Men, the advertising drama on TV. Ad agency secretaries in skyscraper buildings being shoehorned into a life of sizzle and consumer luxury by the likes of leading man Don Draper. Martinis at dawn. Even in the ’60s, the idea of New York as a glamorous backdrop to a successful life was a global media-led phenomenon. It wasn’t just the movies that sold New York as the epicentre of – well, everything glam. The books did too. An avid paperback reader, I’d already devoured The Best of Everything, the phenomenally successful 1950s Rona Jaffe book about Manhattan girls in acting or glamorous publishing jobs and single mums rescued by love or chased by married men on the make, four decades before Sex and the City made its mark. Best… impressed me: a high-octane story of young women choosing career and illicit affairs over the security of marriage. But I was even more impressed by what I was now reading in the pages of Cosmopolitan: the idea that you could pick and choose your men – and the way you ran your life.

  The New York of my room-mate’s dreams was very much a heady panorama of skyscraper luxury with rich Don Draper types seeking love in the arms of an English secretary. Perhaps not one with thunder thighs, but she’d find a way round that. As I’ve said, Angela wasn’t going to let anything get in her way. And so somehow, in one of our many midnight conversations as we lay in our little single beds, talking boys, laughing at our flatmates’ peccadilloes and sharing confidences, she convinced her restless, though distinctly unambitious room-mate with a love life that didn’t bear too much close examination, to join her in a big enterprise. We’d be secretaries still. But in New York.

  I must have said yes to the idea in one of my more reflective periods when I could see quite clearly that the Jeff thing, while exciting beyond belief, was even more emotionally hazardous than the previous road I’d embarked on with Bryan, who had been more or less fixed in his life, his ad-man world, his posh pad and his need for weed and booze. With Jeff, however, I didn’t have a clue what he was up to. For all I knew, he could have been living part-time in another city. With another woman.

  As for the New York idea, this was how it panned out. At the time, English secretaries were very hot with New York bosses. The Brit accent, mostly, over the phone was a sure fire way to impress their peers or clients. Angela had spotted an ad for a London-based employment agency that specialised in helping secretaries with good experience relocate to New York. The agency would arrange it all, including the visa to work in the land of the free. Essentially, the deal was that you had to sign a contract to work exclusively for a New York secretarial agency as a temp. As Brits, our technical skills were deemed to be vastly superior to those of the locals from Queens, Brooklyn or Yonkers, who were, to be fair, probably used to a more diligent work ethic. What these agencies blithely ignored was how slack many London employers were in the ’60s. By then, I’d job-hopped quite a bit. Secretaries were too often underemployed, little more than a status symbol.

  The London agency, once they’d interviewed us and checked us out, took over all the paperwork. The Americans also insisted on a medical and various other administrative checks. The entire process, we were warned, would take several months. But what troubled me about it all was the somewhat draconian (to me) deal with the New York employment agency: they’d provide you with each placement as a temp. Once you’d done your two or three weeks at one place, they’d send you to another, and so on. But the contract you signed with them was binding. If you didn’t like the work or jumped ship, you were out. Back to Blighty you must go. The agency would point you in the right direction to find suitable accommodation initially but you were more or less on your own when it came to finding a permanent place to live. The money, though, was good, much better than our London secretary’s wages of £12–13 a week. Not quite double but close. Having Ange there would make the difference. It all pointed to a much better life, brighter prospects of finding more exciting men. Or so she convinced me at the time.

  ‘You’re not getting anywhere here, are you? Jeff’ll ditch you one day and then where will you be?’ she’d say in her somewhat blunt northern way. ‘You don’t wanna wind up with someone like that big fat fool, do you?’ Meaning Bryan, which was cruel. But apt. She was spot on. None of my other girlfriends dared to push my nose into the reality of my dodgy affair with an obvious lothario. And eventually I’d confided in her about the illegal abortion and the Jeff/Bryan deception, so she knew exactly where I was coming from. What she said seemed to make sense, so I agreed.

  Yet I had a niggling feeling that the agency dictating where I worked might not be such a good idea for someone like me, who resented any form of authority. I’d been exploiting my situation at the shoe company, had won a bit of autonomy and was lucky to have a boss who was hardly ever there. That worked for me. Job-wise, I could only hang around if I got a bit of freedom. I couldn’t cope with a typing pool, for instance. A room full of girls at typewriters with a supervisor keeping an eagle eye on everything was far too authoritarian and disciplined. Less opportunity to – well, play it your own way.

  Another big unconsidered weakness in The Plan was my relative lack of travel experience. Two teenage trips to Italy and one £30 all-in package holiday to Benidorm just before moving from Hackney do not a seasoned traveller make. And as with millions of ordinary people who now found sunshine packages affordable – thanks to tour companies like Clarksons or Horizon Holidays – my Benidorm trip had shown me there were certain drawbacks to these cheap sunshine deals. By the mid-1960s, the 400-page glossy Clarksons’ holiday brochure was being pored over at night by families all over the country through the dark winter months, the shiny, enticing pictures of sun-baked sandy beaches and brand new, high-rise hotels in Spain proving irresistibly alluring to sun-starved, pale-skinned Brits.

  In 1966, the year of my first-ever Spanish package, the average earnings were about £1,200 a year for men and around £600 a year for women. Which meant that the £30-£40 price tag had become affordable, something to save up for. Yet what the British holidaymaker didn’t know – and how could they? – was that tour companies had spotted the huge potential of the cheap charter flight even in the 1950s. By the ’60s they’d really got stuck in, doing deal after deal with eager Spanish hoteliers or developers, all desperate to cash in on the demand to accommodate the sun-starved millions from northern Europe. Alas, the demand for these holidays didn’t match the ability of the Spaniards to fulfil their side of the contract, i.e. build the new hotels in time for the arrival of the tourist hordes.

  Back then Spain was a very different place, still under the thumb of the dictator Franco, who had ruled with an iron fist since the 1930s. The hunger of Spanis
h businessmen and hoteliers to start making good money from the new tourism could not match the reality: this was the land of mañana. They just couldn’t build the hotels fast enough. You’d book from the picture in the brochure, a beautiful brand new building, complete with swimming pool and palm-fringed, sunny terraces and pay for the holiday, only to discover at the eleventh hour that the builders were still very much on site. Or on extended siesta. If, indeed, they’d started working on the hotel at all.

  I’d had this experience on my first Spanish trip with my friend Shirley. We’d arrived at Alicante airport to be met by the rep. ‘Er… the hotel you booked isn’t ready.’ Shrug. ‘We can put you up somewhere else. But it won’t be what you booked. So sorry.’ No hotel? What did they think we were there for? Today, with all those outraged holidaymakers going crazy, there’d be an irate and very public Twitter storm, with MDs making hurried statements at frenetic press conferences out on the steps of their headquarters, surrounded by nervous advisers. Yet then, with the package tourism industry still in its early stages, people understood less about their rights, their entitlements, so they tended to stay meek and go where they were told. Unless, like me, they were of the instantly militant type. I ranted. I shouted. I whipped up a storm of fury, helped by a few of the accompanying group of package tourists.

  It worked. Within an hour Shirley and I were hustled onto a coach taking us to one of Benidorm’s finest hotels, the Gran Hotel Delfin, on the edge of the amazing Poniente beach. To us, it was terribly luxurious. It proved to be a fairly uneventful fortnight, just loafing around the hotel pool in our bikinis with uncomfortably wired tops, wandering around the palm-fringed terraces, and venturing into hot, dusty Alicante for a few hours on a coach trip. Yet the dry, barren expanse around us, the huge tracts of undeveloped land and the sheer sense of the long history of this vast landscape where the sun burned down relentlessly, was the beginning of my decade-long love affair with Spain and its scented islands.

  That was all I’d known of travel. Compare that to the idea of crossing the Atlantic to work and find a home, essentially alone in the Manhattan jungle. I’d blithely overlooked some hugely important things that I needed to consider, my homework if you like.

  Jeff, of course, was constantly dismissive of my plan. For a start, he didn’t like the Yanks, as they were called. Amazingly, given their huge presence in London in wartime and the impact they’d made on many women’s lives back then (the GI bride was a post-war phenomenon that lingered on in British minds for decades), he was like so many of his generation. These were the guys who were too young for war but had had to do two years of national service in the 1950s and still harboured disdain for Americans. Or, come to that, his rejection of the idea of most people who didn’t come from our sceptred isle. ‘They think they won the war’ was his view on all Americans, ‘but they bloody didn’t.’ And so on. Or I’d get: ‘You’re a Londoner, what do you need to go there for?’ ‘And you’re my bird, anyway. You don’t really wanna go.’ And so on.

  Yet when the moment came for my big medical at the American Embassy, I turned up and had the obligatory examination and chest x-ray. I was going, and sod Jeff. Even so, I told no one else about the plan, apart from the other girls in the flat. But that was it – not my parents or girlfriends. Even my best friend, Lolly, now a mum of two and still living in east London, knew nothing of it.

  And then that letter arrived. At last. What it told me was this: I’d cleared the medical and been given the visa. Inside was the paperwork to authorise my application to work in New York. Angela’s application too was being processed, though her medical had been booked for a couple of weeks after mine. Soon she too trotted off to Grosvenor Square. This was it. Soon we’d be sipping cocktails in a skyscraper, typing letters and making eyes in the elevator at the handsome execs with the sexy Yank drawl – in short, the envy of our flatmates left behind in the big, tacky flat on the Finchley Road. Yet destiny had other ideas. One afternoon at work, I got a call from Angela. She was sobbing her heart out.

  ‘They won’t accept me because the x-ray shows I’ve got TB,’ she told me. ‘I can’t go. I’m going home tomorrow: my mother’s coming down to collect me.’ Instead of flying to Don Draper’s arms and a life of highballs, Angela was destined to return up north, take her medication and recover in the comfort of her big family home. It wasn’t a very severe case of TB; indeed she was lucky to discover it because she insisted she had no symptoms. But the US authorities were no longer interested in her application. Our plan was wrecked. Unless, of course, I was prepared to go it alone. Yes or no?

  I never regarded myself as a shoulda/woulda/coulda type person. So many of us go through life saying, ‘If that had happened, if I’d done that, well, maybe…’ Yet there was never a single occasion, even when things were quite bleak later on, when I looked back and questioned the decision I’d made not to fly solo and be a secretary in Manhattan.

  I toyed with the idea, a fairly bold move for the times, even for someone like me. But while I acted daring, I secretly remained as unsure of myself as most young women were then. I had told no one. I tried hard to envisage myself, without any familiar faces, in a strange place a long way away from London, and it wasn’t long before I had to admit to myself that I just wasn’t up for it. It was all too daunting. And, anyway, I didn’t feel bad about not going. After all, it hadn’t been my idea. Perhaps if I’d been totally disillusioned with London life, it might have propelled me forward. Yet I still doubt it.

  New York – and the USA itself – fascinated Brits back in the ’60s because it seemed to be a Technicolor world we largely knew nothing of, filled with huge fridges, air con, big cars, cocktails and full-on consumer luxury. OK, we were on the way to consumerism then, ever since the mini-explosion of advertising for clothes, cars and gadgets, Sunday supplement style, had started to exert its influence on us. American culture was worshipped and exalted way beyond ours by many in the UK, yet I didn’t see a need to acknowledge or experience this by gracing the place with my presence.

  A true Londoner since childhood, when I’d first climbed all those stairs up to the Monument in the City and stared down at London from above, I’d known that despite the grime, the dirt, the shabby, lingering after-effect of war, here was one of the world’s greatest cities. My city, with all its history, its buildings, its pageantry, its traditions. And now, thanks to our chums across the pond and the defining moment of the Time article of 1966 – a superlative PR exercise the effect of which lingered for decades – I’d fully absorbed all the London hype. The real action was here, on London’s streets, in the tiny clubs and boutiques that were popping up all over the place. And in bed with Jeff.

  I knew a girl who did head for Manhattan in the ’60s to type and find a better life. She too came from London’s East End, was an only child like me and hankered for a brighter perspective. And she got it. She’s still there, married to a genial local, living happily in the ’burbs, sunning herself at their second home in Florida in winter. She’d had a few tricky moments, initially living in a women-only hostel in Manhattan where male visitors were forbidden. But she’d stuck with it – because she believed in her dream, knew it was right for her.

  I was far too immature and undisciplined to embark on that adventure in such a determined way. You need passion, a drive for reinvention and a fierce desire for change. Had I not liked my first or second temp assignment, I’d have promptly walked out – and probably had to fly back home in a hurry. What the whole thing represented to me, as thought up by the persuasive Angela, was the idea of an adventure, another lark. But the determination to alter my life completely, create another mode of living just wasn’t there. I was an unfocussed, sensation-seeking girl without real ambition. I’d grown up with parents who more or less lived for the moment, so to me that was life. Today was what mattered. Which set me on a hedonistic, pleasure-seeking path for a long, long time.

  As for Angela, it all happened for her anyway. Once she’d recove
red, she came back to London and found a new job with a big American multinational company. There, one sweet day, a good-looking young executive walked over to her desk and started chatting her up. He was from a wealthy English family based in America. Did she fancy going out to dinner? It didn’t all happen overnight, mind you. He was a catch, but no pushover. She had to plot to keep him interested. One ploy involved getting her flatmates to send her a huge bouquet of flowers, no signature, to the office one day, much, as she’d hoped, to his chagrin.

  In the end, it all worked out as she’d wished and they wed. Many years later, I ran into her by chance outside Harrods in Knightsbridge. I won’t say she was dripping with diamonds but she looked… well, just incredibly rich. They had a flat in Sloane Square, she told me. There was a second home, a big house near the lake in Geneva. You can only stand back and admire the woman who knows, right from day one, exactly what she wants.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE GO-GO GIRL FROM GUILDFORD

  A small, steamy Italian café just off Oxford Circus, in the early spring of 1968. The smell of fried eggs lingers in the air. A girl in a smart, black Wallis double-breasted wool coat with a fake fur collar is seated at a Formica table, furiously scanning the small ads in the Evening Standard.

  I am desperate to move. With the collapse of the New York plans and Angela’s dramatic move back north, I want to make a getaway. Now. The atmosphere in the flat has changed a lot. Angela’s replacement, Shoshana, an Israeli student, moved in six months ago. She has hordes of friends from home, some in London to study – but also wanting to party like crazy in the swinging city. Sandy and Denise welcome the diversion of having these boisterous, lively friends of Shoshana around. Sandy even manages to beguile one of the boys, Sam, into her boudoir oubliette (unlike the unfit Brits, Sam, who has recently served in the Israeli army, emerges the next day without any visible signs of exertion). Meeting the young Israelis is a learning curve for me. In conversation, they’re blunt, direct. What you see is what you get. A couple of the men are quite good-looking. Yet they’re so direct in their ways, without any subtlety of manner, I find it difficult to relate to them. English men are like this too, sometimes, but a lot of them manage to hide it. With the Israeli men, it’s all a bit ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’.