Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

Her home is warm and small and feminine: little fancy boxes on dainty little antique tables: Queen Elizabeth I looking sourly down from one wall, and horse pictures everywhere. She’s crazy about flippin’ horses. It’s a good home, she says, for a single person — and even if she marries she’ll probably hang on to it just for herself. It would be good to have that much independence when one were married.

  It would be good to travel more, she says. She was looking at a picture book of Ethiopia the other day — ‘all those cheetahs and the animals and the women are just so beautiful — it would be nice to go there.

  ‘I’m happy, and yet I’m frustrated. I don’t like what I’ve been doing particularly, and yet I don’t have the talent to do anything else. I don’t admire what I’ve done, but I wouldn’t alter anything. I realise now I’ve been terribly selfish in some of the things I’ve said in interviews and my mother has been very upset. I’m sorry about that. Mum would love to see both Chrissie and me settled down and married. She’s had it very tough with both of us.’

  POSTSCRIPT Fourteen years on I still haven’t met anyone as beautiful as Shrimpton. Now aged forty she is married and runs a hotel in Penzance with her husband Michael Cox. She has one son, Thaddeus. Despite her age she is still a sought-after model and was recently re-united with Bailey for a fashion promotion aimed at ‘the working mother or professional woman’.

  Bailey’s comments when he saw her again after her years in Cornwall were hardly complimentary, but compliments were never Bailey’s style.

  February 1969

  Jane Birkin

  There’s a little bit of Katmandu off the road and by the lake in the Bois de Boulogne. All this week, Jane Birkin has been shivering there in one of those baroque old houses which they use as restaurants in the summertime, and which in winter leak rain and sleet through the gaps in the green roof. She and a film company are pretending they’re in the middle of the Himalayas.

  The film is called Les Chemins de Katmandu. Contrary to rumour it won’t all be filmed in Paris, and there won’t be elephants lolloping around the Bois de Boulogne, and for that the ladies of the woods are no doubt grateful. Next week the entire crew are to take themselves off to farthest and highest Nepal.

  This will be Jane Birkin’s third film in France. In it she gets successively raped and drained of all her blood, before summoning the strength to commit suicide by leaping out of a window. Since the only French she knows well are the lines which have appeared in her parts, she ought to have just the right comments to hand should she ever find herself raped, drained or defenestrated.

  Her first film in France was called Slogan, and hasn’t been shown yet: her second has been showing for two weeks and is called The Swimming Pool. In it she stars with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, and, it appears, steals all the honours. In Paris they’re saying that Jane Birkin is a sensation.

  ‘I’ve been very lucky because I play the fourth person of two couples,’ she says, ‘and since all the other three were stars, everyone has noticed me. My name hardly appears on the credit titles, although I’m on the screen practically all the time, and the French have taken to me because being English I’m just that bit different.’

  In London her film Wonderwall is still showing at Cinecenta, although the reviews were crippling.

  She is twenty-two, lanky, and has great schoolgirl enthusiasm. She never walks, she runs everywhere: knees slightly together, lower legs spindly and clumsy, she jogs around the vast pavilion, long skirt, blouse practically unbuttoned, oblivious of her appearance because she knows she’s one of those girls who always looks fresh and scrubbed. Her front teeth have a slight prominence, and her bosom has no prominence at all.

  Her bosom provides the joke of her life and she harks back to it time and again: how when she was a girl they laughed at her at boarding school because she was flat: how she bought her first bra when she got married (size 30 AA) hoping it would make her look sexy, then made one for herself out of old pink elastic that turned out like two fried eggs on a string: and then triumph! how when she had her baby she had so much milk that she not only fed her own child but had some drained off to feed somebody else’s.

  ‘Bosoms are not sexy,’ she says, with the recurring emphasis that punctuates her conversatons. ‘And anyway I never think of myself as having bosoms — just a chest.’

  At eighteen she married composer John Barry. Last year they separated. Now they’re waiting for a divorce. She is an anomaly. Brought up in Chelsea, and gloriously a woman of her time, she still appears naïve, still the innocent recounting with great relish her schoolgirl crushes, dirty thoughts but actual chastity.

  ‘I was very innocent. I used to share an orangeade with boys and be terribly pure, but when I got home my mind would begin to work, and I’d embroider what had happened and it was always very hot stuff. My father used to tell me that if I hung around outside the Chelsea Potter in my tight jeans someone would pounce on me… so I hung around outside for ages. I was ever so disappointed when no one pounced.

  ‘At seventeen I was still at school and taking “O” levels and there was this man who used to live opposite who painted all the time. I planned everything to attract his attention, and as soon as his light came on I would practise my ballet lessons in my bedroom. I wanted him to think I was mysterious and not just a very dull schoolgirl. Then one day he was watching me from his balcony and making signs, and my mother saw him and came upstairs and caught me dancing with just a bathtowel around my hips. She said: “Aren’t you ashamed?” and I said “Yes,” because I was, although he couldn’t have seen anything from that distance and anyway there was a tree blocking most of the view.’

  She tells her anecdotes with great gusto and verve, enjoying the role of the gauche dreamer, the young girl trying to behave like a sophisticated vamp and failing terribly. In her own stories she is always the fall-guy.

  After a spell at finishing school in Paris (’I was in the same house as Edith Piaf, and one night when she’d just died the watchman took me up to see her lying in an open coffin’), she came back to England, and through the influence of her actress mother she went for an audition for a West End play. ‘I was wearing a party dress with a bright red rose stuck in the middle by my father as I was going out of the house. As luck would have it, they were short of a girl to play a deaf mute and I got the part. Sir Ralph Richardson was the lead, but the play didn’t do very well.’

  A small part in Dick Lester’s film The Knack, ‘which you would have missed if you dropped your ice cream,’ was followed by the musical Passion Flower Hotel and a wildly erotic part as one of the nymphets in Antonioni’s Blow Up. ‘I thought I’d be shy of appearing nude in films, but I find I’m not. I can do it in films, it’s just in real life that I’m shy… you know, lights out, all that.’

  Her child Kate was born eighteen months ago after she fell over in the Kings Road. Shortly afterwards her marriage began to break up. She shows no bitterness.

  ‘You can’t say what goes wrong in a marriage. I’d known for six months that it was coming but I kept hanging on hoping things would get better, and then one day John just said: “I think it would be better if we went our own ways.” He was very sweet. He offered me the house, but I said “No, I don’t want anything” and took Kate and went to live with my parents again. It was like reverting to childhood. He was the first man I’d loved, and so everything was associated with him that happens to you in that situation. Everywhere I’d been I’d been with him and I hardly knew anyone I hadn’t met with him.

  ‘I used to worry that I was doing nothing, and once when he came back from America he’d seen Blow Up and said he was very proud of me. So I made Wonderwall, thinking that it might all come right again. But perhaps that wasn’t what he wanted me to do at all. I was so terribly besotted with him.

  ‘Sometimes I used to think I was doing all right… that I was winning. But he would come to see Kate, and I’d do sad things like trying to make myself look pretty, thinking that
when he walked through the door he’d say: “God, you look gorgeous” and it would all be all right again. But of course it couldn’t be.

  ‘We should have separated earlier but when you love someone very much you’re happier to be with them even though you’re unwanted than anywhere else in the world. He was never unkind.

  ‘I wouldn’t go back to him now, although six months ago I would have done. But the situation could never have arisen. It wasn’t up to me. There was nothing that could be done. I just became another sad statistic at twenty-one. I can’t think why. I would like to have been able to say I don’t care, but I cared so much. Someone has to win and someone has to lose. I lost.’

  When she’s serious she stops pushing her hair back over her shoulders, and plays with a tiny locket which hangs on a silver thread around her neck. There’s a deep tooth mark in the centre of the heart, a memento of her hours in labour with Kate.

  ‘I just wish I’d had another baby quickly. But I’ve got Kate, and she’s everything that little girls should be.’

  And now Jane Birkin is a sensation. All of a sudden people are stopping her in the street, not the never-ending pester, you understand, but she’s being recognised, and she’s had the front cover of Jours de France, and this month’s Lui, and now Vogue want her on their cover.

  And she’s singing, too. There’s an LP with her friend Serge Gainsbourg with whom she stars in Slogan and Katmandu, and a single, too.

  ‘Yes, I can sing. I do a lovely song on my record, all about a girl who is raped by the roadside…’

  At least she knows the French word for that.

  POSTSCRIPT All through the seventies, Jane Birkin was the Parisian’s ideal of the sweet, toothy, naughty English girl, and she made a succession of French movies in which, like the cartoon character Jane, she inevitably lost her clothes. Her coy public appearances (she always appeared on TV chat shows carrying her shopping basket) were certainly calculated, but she has a charm and wit which is never less than seductive. Now, at last, she is beginning to get good notices (and keep her clothes on). She has two daughters and lives in Paris and Normandy. Her marriage to Serge Gainsbourg broke up in 1980.

  February 1969

  Iain Quarrier

  Iain Quarrier is having his breakfast: a glass of Mateus Rosé and a Rothmans King Size. It’s twelve-thirty p.m. and he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in a torn nightshirt which leaves his legs bare but covers his hips like a deeply cut kimono. He talks a lot about girls, and the girl he talks about most is Nathalie Delon.

  He’s had another late night, it seems. ‘Mama Cass is in town,’ and he shakes his head in sympathy with his hangover.

  Over his nightshirt is an astrakhan jacket, and on his feet and round his ankles are soft boots of abundant fur. They look like they belonged to some hippy Eskimo.

  ‘Please excuse the mess…’ Unapologetic arms indicate an area of semi-sumptuous squalor: the three-foot-square cushions lying like life rafts among the bear and tiger skin rugs; wires; toy pistols and pellets; the slagged ash trays; carelessly tossed-aside Valentine cards, and curtained and sash-hung walls which disguise the green-and-gold decor.

  He’s a handsome man, and not unaware of it: all eyelashes and blue eyes and fair, scruffy hair. He looks arrogant. Now he’s talking about Nathalie Delon, about how he goes to Rome most weekends to see her, gets into fights continually with the paparazzi, thinks she’s a wonderful woman — andspeaks to her virtually every weekday by phone.

  As he talks, blown up pictures of Nathalie and her son watch from the mantelpiece. Light machines glow through the perennial midday gloom of his flat, and the colour television, all contrast and shade distortion, makes silent patterns in vivid harmony.

  A week ago Nathalie and matinee idol Alain Delon were divorced in Paris. The unsolved murder mystery, the Markovic affaire, continues to rage around them.

  ‘Nathalie is just one very groovy woman. I usually go out with girls, but she’s a real woman. Last weekend I met her son Anthony in Rome. And suddenly instead of being herself, she became a mother. But this involves problems and responsibilities. I’ve been free of responsibilities for seven years, and now I seem to be getting back to them.

  ‘We’ve tried to break up a couple of times — but we go on. We just seem to like each other. You know how it is.’

  He’s twenty-seven and Canadian, an actor and lately a film producer. The company in which he is a partner (with Lord Cowdray’s son Michael Pearson) is Cupid Films, which made the Jean Luc Godard film One Plus One. Now they’re working on a film with Richard Todd called The Last of the Long Haired Boys.

  He describes his relationship with Pearson as one of mutual interdependence: ‘Cupid couldn’t happen without my presence, and it wouldn’t happen without his money. But, of course, he’s much more than that. He’s only twenty-four, but he’s a very wise man.’

  Quarrier is more notorious for his off-screen activities than famous for his work on it and for it. He took offence when David Bailey once described him as a deb’s delight, and he gets upset when it is suggested that he might be a playboy, but his name has been linked with an amazing number of famous ladies.

  Apart from Madame Delon there has been Jean Shrimpton, Tuesday Weld, Donyale Luna, and even Jane Birkin, whom he remembers as an incredibly innocent sixteen-year-old. He’s reluctant to list his lady friends, although his conversation is otherwise littered with the names of the successful and wealthy.

  ‘Girls are my opium,’ he admits. ‘I’m addicted to the chase. I’m never alone. Always there’s a girl, or a couple of girls. I seem to have the ability for stunning people very quickly.’

  It’s 2.30 and we’re in Quarrier’s Mini-Cooper looking for a restaurant called the San Lorenzo and eddying along the pavement, exhaust trumpeting and window down: ‘Is there a place here called the San Lorenzo?’ he calls to a pretty girl. She brims with pleasure: ‘Yes, just there… a very nice restaurant…’ one foot to the other. And, point made, she’s dismissed without a smile as he guides the way down the sawdusted stairs. He must have known where it was all the time…

  He has an unnerving magnetism for attracting violence. When Jean Luc Godard lost his temper during the showing of One Plus One At the National Film Theatre it was Quarrier’s chin which caught the clouting, and when he and Mia Farrow and Donyale Luna visited a West End hotel in the early morning the result was what was described in court as a ‘furious scrimmage’ and a £10 fine for obstructing the police. And then, only the other day, didn’t he get involved in a punch-up with a gang of drunks in the King’s Road?

  He was born in Scotland, never saw his father who was a preacher, and was brought up in Montreal until his mid-teens: ‘I think I was some kind of delinquent,’ he says. ‘I was from the back streets and I had my nose broken before I was ten. Then my mother came to England, and I went to school here. She’s been married a few times now. Four times, I think. She’s quite well off.’

  At eighteen he joined the Royal Navy and trained to become a pilot, but by the time he was twenty he was trying everything to get out of uniform. It was difficult, but he managed it. From then until Cupid Films was set up last year he was free of responsibilities other than for himself.

  His view of the freedom of the individual, and the individual’s place in relationship to the rest of society is his favourite philosophical conversation. England, he says, since he crossed with the law, is becoming a Socialist police state.

  When he was twenty-two he met film director Roman Polanski. ‘My meeting with Roman changed the whole course of my life. I’d acted in one film and then we met at a party. After that I was in the production team for Repulsion and acted in Cul De Sac. I learned so much from him about films.’

  In the San Lorenzo he is shaking hands and ruffling Italian heads and saying ‘ciao’ and pronouncing pasta as patsa, and we’re not inconspicuous. Then, over lunch with Danieli — a Rome film producer friend — the names and figures come bubbling out: ‘Kubri
ck … yeah … Mastroianni … how much? … six million …?

  ‘I’ve never found money to be a problem,’ he says. ‘It’s never worried me. I’ve never stolen or cheated, and I’ve no private income, although if I had to I could always fall back on my family. I’ve always been lucky. If I’ve been broke I’ve always had a girlfriend who’s had some money.

  ‘But there was a time a few years ago when things were so bad that if I went around to anyone’s flat the first thing I did was ask if I could boil myself an egg. Once my parents bought me a house, but it involved a commitment on my behalf to them… and I wasn’t ready for that.

  ‘Now that it looks as though I may begin to earn quite a lot of money, I’m going to have to get my accountants to find out how to invest it safely for me.’

  By 6 p.m. the telephone in his Pimlico flat is beginning to take on a life of its own, moithering away with its social calls as he fiddles with the lights system, illuminating me with any variety of different colours rather like a domestic South Pacific.

  ‘I’ve got the tickets, so I’ll see you later then. Maybe you should come around here in about an hour …’

  Then to me: ‘It’s the premier of Candy tonight. I’m going.’ But of course.

  POSTSCRIPT Iain Quarrier was a gloriously sixties figure, a Kings Road cowboy whose name was a semi-permanent fixture in the gossip columns. I last saw him about eight years ago when he called at my house in Kensington with his wife at the time, dress designer Alice Pollock. So far I don’t believe his plans for a wealthy future have quite come off.

  March 1969

  Twiggy

  The second thing you notice about Twiggy is the smell, a lingering Dettoly, camphor oil scent which comes in minute four-sided bottles from San Francisco.

  Today she’s wearing Oil of Patchouly, garnished with Oil of Jasmine. Patti Harrison introduced her to them, and the combined aroma reminds Twiggy of the freshness of a pine forest early in the morning, although, in truth, she’s never been in a pine forest early in the morning.