In the fifties, hairdressers had been very, very gay. Vidal changed all that. He employed hip young people like Leonard and another called Rafael, who was outrageous and within minutes had his hand up your skirt.
I was a “character” rather than a pretty model, and I suppose that’s exactly what I look for in the girls I now select to put in American Vogue—the ones who are quirky-looking. English girls have so much individuality. I can’t stand all the sappy blondes, or athletic girls with too much of a tan. I like freckles. I like girls such as Karen Elson from Manchester, with her amazingly pale face and mass of red hair that reminds me of … well, I can’t think! I pick my models as if I were casting a film, because I’m choosing a girl to play a role. I don’t like it when they complain, but I’m happy to look after them when they don’t. I do feel for them if it’s too hot or too cold. I always check to see if they are too tired to continue. Some are okay in a group. Others fall to pieces if there’s another girl in the picture. I try not to put them in dangerous situations—like when some stupid photographer tries to pose them on a wall with a hundred-foot drop on the side.
What makes it difficult today is how hard it is to get time on the caliber of girl I’m going for. They all have huge, lucrative advertising contracts they can’t get out of, and even the lure of Vogue simply can’t compete. Some, like Daria Werbowy, hate modeling. But she’s so stunningly beautiful, I have to catch her when she’s in the mood to work. Unfortunately, she loves sailing and doesn’t put into port too often. The Russian model Natalia Vodianova is a dream, with her faraway gray-blue eyes. Inconveniently, she keeps having babies—although I’m always happy to utilize them as beautiful props in my pictures when they are old enough.
Linda Evangelista was always a fantastic model, although when she famously said that she wouldn’t wake up for less than ten thousand dollars … well!! She was always a little militant, organizing the other girls, telling them to walk out if the conditions weren’t right. But you must admit that Linda is special, because even now, twenty years after her supermodel heyday, she still looks amazing and brings the same enthusiasm and something extra to all her photo shoots.
I first met her way before she cut her hair short, a move that skyrocketed her career, then dyed it blond or red at the drop of a hat. Then, she was just a long-haired Canadian brunette working with the French photographer Alex Chatelain. One night we all went out to dinner and I took along my nephew Tristan, who at the time was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. He became so besotted with Linda that he and Alex were both coming on to her long before the meal was over.
Naomi Campbell is a beautiful enigma, difficult sometimes but unique. She was fifteen when I first met her. I brought her from England to America to work with the photographer Arthur Elgort for a session based on dance because she was said to have had formal ballet training. But Arthur, who is something of a balletomane, was having none of it. “This girl has no more had ballet training than I have been to the moon,” he said, and kept up a string of complaints about her stance and poor footwork and the way she scrunched her shoulders. Afterward she met Steven Meisel, and the rest is history.
my beatnik look with beelive hair-do
Kristen McMenamy was another great star, a model who has sustained remarkable longevity. With her cool, stately looks, she has the stylized quality of a 1950s couture model, but in front of the camera she always manages to look truly modern. Christy Turlington was and still is an out-of-this-world beauty from whichever angle you photograph her. She is probably the most beautiful model I have ever seen.
I also love the Puerto Rican American model/actress Talisa Soto; Twiggy, of course; and the strange-looking American girl Wallis Franken, who married the eighties fashion designer Claude Montana and suffered a mysterious death. The model turned Academy Award–winning actress Anjelica Huston was an all-time favorite, with her wicked sense of humor. And Uma Thurman, another fifteen-year-old infant model, like Naomi in her time, was a beauty with incredibly wide-set, hypnotic eyes and very strong opinions.
I think it was the photographer John Cowan who nicknamed me “The Cod.” You know, Jean Shrimpton was known as “The Shrimp,” so therefore … I thought it was quite charming at the time because usually, only a model as iconic as Shrimpton was given a nickname, although I must say that “shrimp” sounds a lot better than “cod.” Cowan worked in a reportage style and is best known for the fashion pictures he took in the sixties of his athletic-looking blond model/girlfriend Jill Kennington doing amazingly risky things like perching on the tip of an iceberg or standing on top of a high statue. I worked with him quite a bit at the beginning, and he photographed me waiting at a bus stop in a bikini or arranged on the cold marble of a fishmonger’s slab.
I was appearing in a lot of British hair shows for Vidal Sassoon who, in a short span of time, had become internationally famous for his abstract geometric styles. I went to him all the time and was one of his muses for the Sassoon Look. He even created one special, super-modern style on me called the Five Point Cut.
We used to drink and dance till dawn in those early days but had the youthful stamina to bounce back in the morning. I would quickly change out of my fancy dancing dress, then rush off to do some job hauling my enormous bag of accessories. James Gilbert, an account executive and keen amateur aviator, was now my boyfriend, and he took me flying practically every weekend. He flew flimsy open-top biplanes called Tiger Moths, with me in the passenger seat in front of the pilot wearing a flying helmet and goggles as we popped across the Channel for lunch, often to the small French coastal town of Berck. Or he would take me through a series of hair-raising dives and loop-the-loops, shouting, “This is rather fun!” while I sat there staring at my terrified face, distorted by gravity, reflected back at me from the speedometer. He never did any of this on the journey back from France, though, for fear of losing his meal. Then one day, just as my career started seriously to take flight, we had a terrible car accident.
It was twilight and raining. He went through a red light in Eaton Square, Belgravia, one of the most exclusive residential areas of London, and rammed straight into a passing delivery van. I smashed my face in the driving mirror, and my left eyelid was sliced off. Luckily, they found my eyelashes.
I must have been thrown clear of the wreckage because I woke up on the side of the road in the arms of a policeman, bleeding all over him. My leg was injured, too, and losing blood, so they had to cut open my favorite skinny pants to treat it. I was rushed to the emergency room and remember hearing the wail of the ambulance siren all the way there. At the hospital, they wouldn’t let me look in the mirror. When James saw me, he nearly fainted.
I was taken into the operating theater to be sewn up, and although I was still in deep shock, I remember chatting with the doctor and telling him I was a model. At which point he decided to take out all the stitches he had already sewn into my eyelid and start again, making them much smaller and neater. I was horrified. Even if I wasn’t a model, shouldn’t I be getting the best treatment possible?
After that I didn’t really work again for two years. I lived on very little, which was okay because I’m quite frugal. My friends were extremely generous and they all looked after me, and my mother even managed to send me a little extra money. I did odd jobs for John Cowan around his photographic studio. Terry Donovan was particularly kind. He gave me any small modeling assignment he could, shooting me from the side or the back.
I had five plastic surgery operations over two years. I hid my scars behind huge dark glasses—fortunately, Jackie Kennedy was making them popular at the time, so I didn’t look too out of place. But perhaps because they remind me so much of that painful period, I now have a total aversion to wearing sunglasses.
Little by little I started working again. I developed a new look for my eye makeup, using large quantities of black eye shadow, shading and blending it into the sockets. And people liked it, although, admittedly, it was a form of camouflage, a way of hiding th
e damage.
Eventually, I did a few fashion shows, dancing the twist along the catwalk for Mary Quant. By now she had a new shop in Knightsbridge. It was very small, but she would hold her presentations there anyway. You had to come down a flight of perilously steep stairs and onto a runway that was all of four feet long. I did more hair shows for Vidal Sassoon, too, who required us girls to shake our heads like little wet puppies to show how his revolutionary technique allowed the hair to fall back instantly into place. But James’s insurance company had by then gone bankrupt, and I couldn’t afford to pay my doctors’ expenses.
Things had not worked out quite as I had planned.
III
ON
THE FASHIONABLE LIFE
In which
England swings,
France goes
yé-yé, miniskirts
rule, discos go
kapow, and pop
art makes
a lovely seat.
Although my position as creative director allows me to do fashion shoots in practically every corner of the globe, I’ve rarely taken the opportunity to return to London since moving to New York almost thirty years ago. In fact, I can think of only a handful of occasions when I’ve developed a fashion story that specifically had to be shot back in Britain. Do I somehow suffer from a mysterious aversion to my British past? Certainly, these days I seem to spend far more time arranging photographic sessions just across the Channel, where Paris always makes for a delightful location.
Recently I did, however, crisscross the ocean several times to work in the English countryside, once to do a story based on the remake of the film Brighton Rock, and then for a fashion story in Cornwall inspired by Steven Spielberg’s film of the hit British play War Horse. And I must admit I was overcome with unashamed nostalgia for the landscape’s wild, romantic beauty. There really are nothing like English fields, woods, gardens, and flowers for providing a background with magical effects. On the last occasion, I also revisited the Kings Road in Chelsea, which in the early sixties had been my home territory and the center of my fashion universe. From World’s End to Sloane Square, this sentimental journey led me past the building where, as a young model, I first graduated to my very own flat, the pub where my social group—the Chelsea Set—regularly hung out, and the places once occupied by the bustling Italian restaurants and coffee bars that fueled us all between boutique spending sprees. The quaintness is no longer there, the pavements have been widened, and much of the shop frontage has been modernized—and not in a pretty way. Yet in the little side streets I could still detect quirky pockets of charm and character.
“St Tropez here we come!”
As we walked on, at one point it became obvious that I was being stalked by two whispering schoolboys. Fidgeting and nervous, they kept pace with us, throwing long, meaningful glances over at me and nudging each other. It surprised me, not just to think that my five minutes of fame brought about by The September Issue also resonated in England, but that I now even mattered to prepubescent boys who should be off playing football or cricket. “So what did they want?” I asked my dinner companion, who had gone over to see if they were expecting an autograph. “They thought you were Vivienne Westwood,” he said.
Fifty years prior to this ego-crushing moment found me finally moving out of my first London rental in fractious Notting Hill and relocating to the relative calm of Battersea, just across the river from Chelsea. There, along with three Chinese actresses, I shared a flat on Prince of Wales Drive overlooking the rolling green acres, fun fair, and rhododendron bushes of Battersea Park. I then moved house about another hundred times before eventually settling in Royal Avenue in the center of Chelsea, which was very cool.
I knew just about everyone on the street. To me it was totally like a little village and had no connection with anywhere else. I hung out at all the Kings Road hot spots, which were full of experimental young artists, writers, people working in advertising agencies, fashion, and film, and I found it all madly existential. I saw many movies around this time because a lot of my friends appeared in them. I particularly loved the gritty new-wave British films from that period: A Taste of Honey, A Kind of Loving, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Whistle Down the Wind. I was even offered a part in one. The English director Tony Richardson, who was for a time married to the actress Vanessa Redgrave, picked me up one day as I strolled barefoot (I was being offbeat) along the Kings Road and asked me to be in his film version of John Osborne’s stage play The Entertainer, starring Sir Laurence Olivier. It was a fun party scene full of modern-day debutantes, and I was required to tumble off a low roof into a rose bed, land on top of Vanessa’s brother, the actor Corin Redgrave, and kiss him, which I did—although my bit was cut out of the film.
I also spent many hours decorating my various apartments, painting the walls plummy purple or dark blue, buying brightly patterned rugs and chunky Spanish/Mexican pottery from a shop called Casa Pupo in Pimlico, and seeking out must-have items like stripped pine tables and Welsh dressers from the parade of secondhand furniture shops along the New Kings Road. This was very much a thing of the time, applauded as a sign of one’s ineffable taste by the color supplements that had started to accompany the Sunday newspapers. Later, when I traveled abroad on my magazine trips, I would shop in Africa, picking up tin plates in Nairobi, or return home with lots of colorful objects from Russia or linen from China. In Sri Lanka, I even became obsessed with the circular mosquito nets, which I found soft and romantic. Everywhere I went, I bought something else and invariably had to buy extra suitcases to carry my haul back home.
The artistic Chelsea people I usually ran around with congregated each evening at the Markham Arms, a rowdy pub next door to Bazaar, Mary Quant’s Kings Road boutique, where I became a serious shopper—there and at Kiki Byrne, farther down the Kings Road. These were two of the first clothes shops in England to be called “boutiques,” and two of my favorites. The fresh designs that changed every week were strictly for younger customers and nothing at all like the items for “young grown-ups” carried by the bigger stores that were simply clothes for mature women scaled down for teenagers.
Mary Quant’s clothes were extremely popular. She was very advanced, ushering in the swinging sixties with her modern looks. I bought a sleeveless striped Quant dress with a low-slung belt and a short skirt that you could wear either over a skinny sweater or by itself. It had the kind of versatility that led me to wear it time and again, accessorized with extremely pointy shoes with kitten heels. As the “Mary Quant Look” spread and skirts rose higher and higher until they were little more than skimpy pelmets of fabric, there was a big problem with going upstairs on double-decker buses without showing your knickers or—even more disgracefully—your stocking tops and garter belt. So Mary began making little shorts to wear under her dresses. And then she revolutionized fashion once more by fostering the tights industry.
As it went on to become the very hub of London hipness, the Kings Road became crowded with achingly smart Italian restaurants, as well as the groovy and popular coffee bars the Sa Tortuga and the Fantasie, and impossibly bright boutiques with trendy names like Top Gear and Countdown. These were co-owned by Pat Booth, a brash blond model from the East End of London who cleverly sank her earnings into the boutique business along with her boyfriend, James Wedge, a gifted milliner.
Despite its supremacy being challenged for a while by the West End’s Carnaby Street, in the period when it buzzed with mod boutiques and mod teenagers on fancy scooters, the Kings Road remained the more natural haunt of rock aristocrats, international jet setters, and long-haired movie stars—and stayed that way for approximately the next thirty years.
Fashion became of even greater significance to me at the height of the sixties, when I began regularly flying to Paris for work. By then my eye was pretty much healed and I was back to working full-time. I had become fairly well known in British modeling circles, always included on top ten lists—but inevitably cr
eeping in at number nine because I was considered avant-garde and fashionable rather than pretty. My nickname of “The Cod” had caught on. “Cold as a codfish but hot as a four-bar fire,” trilled the headline of a personal profile in a now-defunct tabloid called The Daily Sketch, which I must say I kind of loved as it made me out to be sizzling and sexy, whereas I was more often viewed as kind of the opposite.
I started appearing in French Elle, which was then enjoying a reputation as a really good fashion magazine, and stayed in either a cheap little hotel decorated with chintzy wallpaper just off the Place de la Madeleine, or another, called the France et Choiseul in the rue St.-Honoré, that has evolved into the trendy and extremely noisy Hôtel Costes.
Since I was a new girl in town, my French agency, Paris Planning, sent me off on endless go-sees, where I was frequently pushed to the end of a long line of chattering and snooty French models, most of whom wouldn’t give me the time of day. And when I did find work—such as at Elle Studios, which employed a number of photographers who could each use you for a couple of hours—the girls would disappear at lunchtime without saying where they were going. I would sit there, cold-shouldered and starving in the dressing room, wondering where they were until they returned, replenished and refreshed. It turned out that Elle Studios had a cafeteria, but they failed to tell me about it. It was a bit like being in one of those blackly humorous Jacques Tati films, so popular at the time, full of social misfortune resulting from snotty French bloody-mindedness.
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