I soon discovered that the Bar des Théâtres in the avenue Montaigne was the absolute meeting place for career-hungry models and eager photographers. By now I could afford more than “le sandwich.” My budget would even stretch to “le hamburger” and a glass of the new Beaujolais or “vin ordinaire.” Along the way I also managed to acquire a devilishly handsome new boyfriend. Albert Koski was a photographers’ agent with long, dark romantic hair. He was a Polish Jew who dressed beautifully in tailored white Mao-style suits made by Farouche, and was often mistaken for Warren Beatty. I found him deeply seductive and quickly became crazy about him. I went to live with him in a beautiful house in rue Dufrenoy, just off the avenue Victor Hugo, with a small beautiful garden and a large beautiful cat, a great big tabby called Titov.
Parisians can be mean-spirited. Although we had a maid, I sometimes looked forward to stepping out of the house to buy provisions myself—only to find that the shop owners were (and still are) so rude and dismissive, particularly in our exclusive corner of the sixteenth arrondissement, that if you didn’t speak perfect French they would just walk off, not bothering to listen or help you, saying things like “Bah!” or “Pah!” And whenever I took a cab, in the end, rather than trying to speak the language, I resorted to writing my destination down on a piece of paper as if I were living in Japan, although, of course, Albert would simply shrug dismissively and say, “If you can’t take the French, don’t try living here.”
Twice a year, in January and July, my photo sessions were mainly taken up with French couture, which was traditionally shot through the night. Well-heeled clients needed to view the clothes at the couturiers’ salons during the day, making them entirely unavailable any earlier for photographs. Even when modeling in the wee small hours of the morning, I was expected to show an appropriately haughty attitude. As the inimitable American fashion oracle and editor Diana Vreeland would say, “A little more languor in the lips.”
But with the arrival of cheaper, mass-produced clothes—later known as “ready to wear”—we models had the freedom to express ourselves and behave in a more dynamically modern fashion. The clothes were younger and had more ease, allowing for movement rather than the ladylike restriction of couture. Makeup evolved in many eye-catching ways, too. An intense focus on the eyes was now the absolute thing: They had to be more expressive and dramatic and were known as “panda” eyes. The thin line across the top of the lid that in the fifties flicked up at the corners in a little comma became thick and smudged, curving down instead.
Each girl had her own individual style when it came to piling on the eye makeup. My particular thing was to draw an extra-wide stroke emphasizing the crease of the eye socket and add extravagantly long, spidery lines below the eye, a little like doll’s lashes, then paint a dot toward the inner corner of the eye for reasons I can’t exactly articulate except that it looked nice and “now.” Later I discovered my crazy new eyelash look being called “twiglets” and credited to the young British model Twiggy. Well, they were very much mine. I was probably doing them before she was born!
Clothes were sporty, zippy, sensationally short. The modern look in fashion photographs was to be either wide-eyed, hyper-energetic, and in a hysterical rush, or floppy and passive, with knees together and feet turned in like a rag doll with badly stitched legs.
It was a wildly gregarious time for me, unlike today, when I prefer a quieter life and rarely go out to dinner with more than one other person. Albert and I never went to Maxim’s or most places on the Right Bank because even back then they were considered “old” and “stuffy.” Instead we liked to be seen at the Café Flore in St.-Germain, which was smokily packed with exciting young artists. We ate just across the road from the Flore at traditional bistros like Brasserie Lipp, with its Germanic, meat-heavy cuisine. Sometimes I would be taken as an extravagance to Caviar Kaspia, admittedly on the Right Bank in the Place de la Madeleine, but where the caviar is the best in Paris—and which remains completely unchanged. It has the same low-lit, old-fashioned, wood-paneled decor with glittering chandeliers and oil paintings of Russian sleigh rides and, to my mind, pretty much the same waiters, except that today it’s far more a place where the noisy, screeching fashion crowd gathers at collection times. Back then it was totally hushed and suffocatingly bourgeois, a hideaway for many an elderly French businessman or right-wing politician to indulge a mistress as a treat.
The other place the fashion crowd flocked to back then was La Coupole, a massive art deco brasserie in the middle of Montparnasse that had been open since the 1920s. I first went with Max Maxwell, the art director of Queen magazine, and we joined a group that included Albert Koski, which is how we first met. I loved La Coupole. I could satisfy my weakness for crevettes grises, my favorite dish, prominently displayed among mountains of mussels, oysters, and crayfish on the extravagantly ice-packed fruits de mer counter in the entrance. There was a section on the right where all the fashion people sat, and where Albert and I would eat with the photographers he represented—Jeanloup Sieff, Marc Hispard, Art Kane, James Moore, Ronald Traeger, and Just Jaeckin (who later made the original Emmanuelle soft-porn film).
Dotted about La Coupole you could really see Paris in the raw, including shaky old parchment-faced French patrons who obviously hadn’t missed a day of eating there since it first opened. Sometimes, if they were particularly impressed or amused by how you looked or what you wore, they would clap as you passed their tables. The most exotic, exceptional people entering through the swing doors—like the statuesque German model Veruschka and her Italian photographer companion Franco Rubartelli, or swinging London’s Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey—would garner extra applause. Paris was crawling with models and their relatives, boyfriends, and hangers-on, because at that time the fashion scene wasn’t just concentrated around collections time; it was fashion central all year round.
I had taken driving lessons at an early age in Wales, learning to zoom around one of the old abandoned airfields when I was about sixteen. And later—quite soon after my accident, strangely enough—I had passed my test in Central London driving barefoot, which I’m told is illegal in some countries. But even though I constantly raced through London in my souped-up Mini, in Paris I didn’t dare drive. The French, and the Parisians in particular, seem to me to have a suicidal disregard for road rules. I felt I would be taking my life into my hands if I even sat behind the wheel. I tried once, and managed to get halfway round the Arc de Triomphe before stopping the car and jumping out, screaming, “I can’t go on!” Oh my God, it was terrifying—like being in the bumper cars at a fun fair, but far more hair-raising and dangerous.
Albert and I would aim to be at Le Drugstore in the Champs Elysées on a Saturday around midnight to buy the early editions of the English Sunday newspapers. Every other night, we could be found dancing (to a twitchy form of early French pop music called yé-yé) until dawn in the fashionable club New Jimmy’s, before rushing off to work the next morning. I wore extra-small children’s sweaters in Shetland wool purchased at Scott Adie in London that were all the rage among the French fashion elite, and very, very tight Newman jeans (you had to lie on the floor and energetically wriggle your way into them) that were made of paper-thin cotton velvet or needlecord and came in a huge range of wonderful colors. At the time they could be bought only from one little shop in a back street off the boulevard St.-Germain that was regularly packed with fans. I also shopped at the Elle boutique, which was new and completely cool. Elle magazine photographed select outfits, then put them into their boutique for one week to stimulate demand. My penchant for wearing super-modern, very short miniskirts was much tut-tutted by the easily disapproving French, whose fashionable and what they considered far more tasteful “mini-kilts” fell discreetly to the knee.
My idol was a French model, Nicole de Lamargé, who was very chic and also wore “le mini-kilt.” She was the girlfriend of the photographer and Elle art director Peter Knapp and was known as the models’ model. She wa
s an extraordinary chameleon who could seem absolutely nondescript until she put on her makeup, and always ended up looking a dream. When it came to creating her own look, she was very sure of herself. And her personal style really typified Elle. It was modern, breezy, and approachable, introducing a fresh, positive, and upbeat note to the pages of the magazine. Nicole was the Linda Evangelista of her day but unfortunately died young in a car accident.
I derived a completely different, far more sophisticated sense of clothes from living among the Parisiennes and working for magazines like Elle and French Vogue—which was the one we models secretly longed to appear in, since Europe’s two best-known fashion photographers, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, worked for it. I was also soon made aware of the way fashion dictates style and how rapidly trends can come and go. Albert had an E-Type Jag that we drove down to Saint-Tropez every weekend; or we would put it on the train. We stayed just above the port in a small pension called La Ponche, took our café complet on the narrow balcony outside our room each morning, and rode our VeloSolex (a basic kind of moped) to the most fashionable beaches, either Pampelonne or Club 55 but more often Moorea, owned by Félix, man about Saint-Tropez and the proprietor of its chicest restaurant, L’Escale, in the port.
I sunbathed in the latest Eres swimwear made from a recently developed feather-light Lycra, but I refused to go topless even though it was the fashion of the day, thanks to Brigitte Bardot and the entirely relaxed attitude of the Saint-Tropez beaches. However, you needed to sunbathe and get at least a little bit brown, otherwise you couldn’t compete with anyone. So I suppose I thought I was getting a tan when I was actually going bright red, peeling, and burnt!
Saint-Tropez was super-social. We cruised around in our smart gray E-type, meeting up with friends like the film actress Catherine Deneuve and her new husband, David Bailey; Lord and Lady Rendlesham; and Ali MacGraw (before she started acting) and her boyfriend Jordan Kalfus, manager of the well-known American photographer Jerry Schatzberg. At other times we headed over to the house of the English photographer David Hamilton, the same one that appears in all his erotic pictures of very young girls.
I was astonished by how fashion could change so fast in a few days. You would go to the South of France one weekend and denim was in. The next weekend when you returned, everything was about little English florals. I used to get so worried that I hadn’t got it right. Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac were the only ones I ever saw actually wearing the hard-edged space-age clothes of Courrèges and Paco Rabanne and looking completely at ease and relaxed. Except perhaps the evening when Catherine was sitting enjoying herself with Bailey, Albert, and me in the club Régine’s and the waiter spilled an entire bottle of red wine over her new white sculpted Courrèges couture shift that must have cost thousands of francs.
If you went to L’Esquinade wearing the wrong thing, it was critical. You would be laughed at. They could be pretty bitchy, those fashion-mad French girls. I would never dare talk back to them about clothes or food. For me, the French were always so superior in matters of style. England was cool but never chic.
During this particular moment I was very into the angular designs of Pierre Cardin, so my dressmaker would run me up copies of Cardin couture. Emmanuelle Khanh, Dorothée Bis, V de V, and Christiane Bailly were among the absolute leaders of the new French ready-to-wear designers. Their clothes were accessible, short, and of the moment, in highly technological new fabrics like PVC and printed stretch jersey, which turned up a lot as hooded catsuits.
Throughout much of my Paris period, I commuted back and forth to London for work. At home, a major women’s lib movement was under way. Everything was connected to the Pill. And everyone without exception was listening to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Words like “far out” and “heavy” were in common currency. I would run around each night in my fashionable French gear to seriously trendy clubs like the Ad Lib, off Leicester Square, with a fast crowd that included the actors Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, the photographers Duffy, Donovan, and Bailey, and people in vogue like Jane Birkin, Pattie Boyd, Rudolf Nureyev, Marianne Faithfull, Roman Polanski, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and various other rock groups who came and, equally suddenly, went. I don’t remember ever getting completely blotto, though. It scares me to be that much out of control. So in situations involving a great deal of alcohol, I somehow managed to simply stop drinking and go home. After one wild night, I remember accepting a lift from Polanski. He stopped short at his house and tried dragging me inside. I escaped but had to walk the rest of the way back to my place.
The other thing that never hooked me was drugs. Some years later, in the early days of New York’s decadent Studio 54, I was on the dance floor when a famous American film actor tried shoving poppers up my nose. That was horrible. Uppers and downers seemed stupid, too. And even though I don’t mind being a bit relaxed, joints never did it for me either.
I kept my small rented apartment in West London Studios to use when I was not with Albert in Paris. The old brick building was popular with a number of successful young photographers, one of whom, Eric Swayne, was a particular friend who made a habit of dating the most eligible girls in London, such as the leggy model Pattie Boyd before she married the Beatle George Harrison, and Jane Birkin before she got together with the French singer Serge Gainsbourg. Eric was equally friendly with cool, newly famous folk like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. They sometimes came over and hung out in my studio. One afternoon not long after I had moved in, Mick had come over and started making out with me. But just as it was about to get interesting and I began thinking, “Here I am, kissing THE Mick Jagger,” the telephone rang—it was Albert, whom I had not yet started dating, inviting me to Paris for the weekend—and the moment passed. A quick fling with Mick Jagger would have been one thing, but Albert was someone I felt I could really have a future with.
The studios were next to the grounds of Chelsea football club. The team usually played at home on Tuesday and Saturday afternoons, so on those days my entire neighborhood became overrun with charged-up fans. Chelsea was a notoriously aggressive team with a hard core of supporters, something I hadn’t factored in as a potential problem when I took the apartment, although the seething roar of the crowds in the stadium next door might have provided a clue. I therefore shouldn’t have been surprised when, driving home one afternoon on a visit to London from Paris, I ran into an especially nasty bunch milling about outside my door. The police were attempting to close off the road. Crash barriers were being erected. No matter how gently I tried inching my car through the mob, they grew more and more incensed until all of a sudden my little Mini, with me inside, was lifted off the ground and thrown heavily on its side. Although I wasn’t injured, I was seven months pregnant by Albert at the time, and the next day I suffered a miscarriage. This turned out to be the only time in my life that I was able to conceive. The incident was one of the most traumatic of my life.
Although the late sixties were predominantly about Paris for me, there were events that frequently brought Albert—who had an office in Mount Street, Mayfair—and me back to England. By then we had also acquired a London pied-à-terre together, a modern penthouse apartment in Ennismore Gardens, Kensington. It had a spacious terrace and large French windows with acres of glass. (This I will never forget because we owned a ginger tom who would run at them and bash his head, thinking he could get out onto the balcony. Then one day the window was left open when the cat ran at it and …)
The apartment was beautiful, but it never felt like a home to me. And though we were engaged for a while, Albert ended up spending most of his time in France, while I began to realize how much I preferred London.
My Paris moment had lasted four, maybe five years, during which time I had gone from having fairly long hair to a daringly short, drastic pixie cut—very much a copy of Mia Farrow’s in Roman Polanski’s hit film Rosemary’s Baby. Now the time had arrived for m
e to bid a final adieu. I was to leave France considerably wiser about clothes, and not a little bitter about false relationships and infidelities.
I soon learned that Albert, my handsome fiancé—the ring, appropriately enough, was in the shape of a snake—had been conducting a lengthy affair directly under my nose with Catherine Deneuve’s sister Françoise Dorléac. This continued right up until her untimely death, when her car burst into flames on the road to Nice airport. She was rumored to have been on her way back to Paris to beg him to marry her when she was killed.
I was in bed with Albert the morning the phone call came through, telling him that she had died. So he didn’t lose just her at that moment. He lost me, too.
I was heading toward twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and though I was still a model, I knew, upon my return to living in Britain, that I wanted something more. I recognized I would have to turn away from modeling before long. It was not so enjoyable anyway, the peripatetic lifestyle, the constant jumping on and off planes, the odd working and eating hours. Also, younger and younger girls were coming into fashion, like the slightly androgynous, fresh-faced teenager Lesley Hornby, who was given a short bobbed haircut by my friend and Sassoon protégé Leonard, and launched on the world as Twiggy. I thought I had a couple more seasons left in front of the camera, but then, while I was being photographed in a London studio for Queen magazine, the formidably outspoken Lady Clare Rendlesham, a recent defector from Vogue, regarded me closely and said, “Grace, you should be a fashion editor. You’re too old to be a model.” Of course she was right. She asked me if I would like to join her at Queen, an idea that had never crossed my mind before and wouldn’t have if it weren’t suggested by someone of Clare’s stature. She may have had a reputation for being a bit of a dragon, but the woman was very clued up about fashion. She was, in fact, the first editor in England to embrace the groundbreaking modernist designers of Paris such as Courrèges and Paco Rabanne.
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