With the chefs from Mr Chow Restaurant.
Though I didn’t accept, I realized Clare was completely correct about my instinct for styling. I was opinionated and always thought I knew better than most of the people whose job it was. And now, after living in Paris and with my newly acquired French assuredness, it was truer than ever. In photo sessions, I increasingly found myself reaching into my model bag and saying things like “I just bought these Charles Jourdan shoes. Maybe they would work better with this outfit” or “I think these Paco Rabanne earrings could help a bit.”
Meanwhile, my personal life in London was looking good. After my breakup with Albert, I was about to enter into a serious relationship with Michael Chow, the soon-to-be-famous restaurateur.
Michael was charming, dapper, and very attractive. We had first met many years earlier when I was sharing the flat in Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, with three Chinese actresses, one of whom was his sister, Tsai Chin. She and Michael were born in Shanghai and came from a large, highly cultured family. Their father was a legendary grand master of the Peking Opera, and in 1952 his parents sent Michael and Tsai to be educated in England. All three flatmates were in the stage production of The World of Suzie Wong, and Michael had a small part in it, too.
I was walking along the Kings Road when I bumped into him again. He had come from having lunch with Alvaro, who at that moment was the most celebrated restaurateur in town. “Do you want to see my new project?” Michael asked.
He took me to a building site in Knightsbridge. Everything was under construction. He explained that the concept was a Chinese restaurant with Italian waiters, because traditionally, they were much friendlier than the Chinese. He was also going to make the decor cleaner and much more modern, because most Chinese restaurants in London’s East End and Soho at that time were far from glamorous; more like cheap canteens with tables crammed together to accommodate the large Chinese families who were their primary patrons. And he opted for Pekingese cuisine, not Cantonese. In short, he wanted an attractive environment where he could eat his own food. He took Sandro, a waiter from Alvaro’s, to be his headwaiter, went to Hong Kong to seek out his chefs, and housed them in glamorous lodgings off Cadogan Square, not far from the new premises.
It was a sunny day. Michael is very impulsive. We had dinner, spent the night, and pretty much right away I moved into his apartment above a bank in Chiswick High Road. He shared it with the pop singer turned filmmaker Mike Sarne, who directed the legendarily awful Myra Breckinridge, starring Raquel Welch.
Michael was the first person I ever met who could genuinely be called a multitasker: actor, restaurateur, painter. He also studied architecture. Before I came along, he was dating a hairdresser with a salon in Sloane Avenue on the cusp of South Kensington and Knightsbridge. He had redesigned her space quite beautifully, but then she left him.
Living with Michael opened my eyes to a new kind of lifestyle: total minimalism. His apartment was as stark as an igloo, with none of the clutter and memorabilia that I, as a typical British girl, was used to living with. I remember seeing that there was hardly a knife or fork in the place, it was that extreme. But in the end the lack of possessions was beguiling, and I began to appreciate how cleansing it was to live this simply. Almost as if to cement our relationship, Michael and I had by this time also traded in both our cars and bought a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud in beige and cream. It was very serious, and very fun.
Despite Clare Rendlesham’s offer for me to join Queen, my sights were firmly set on my longtime favorite, Vogue. Marit Allen was the cool, in-the-know editor of British Vogue’s Young Idea section and the wife of Sandy Lieberson, who produced the extraordinary film Performance, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox. She set up a job interview for me with Beatrix (Bea) Miller, British Vogue’s new editor in chief, who had recently been poached from Queen. The two of us talked over lunch at Trattoria Terrazza in Soho. Bea touched lightly on many fashion subjects. She was also curious to know what my academic credentials were, and she seemed far more interested in what I was reading than in what I was wearing. Was I, for example, familiar with anything by her friend the famous author Lesley Blanch? “No,” I said, because truthfully I had never heard of him. “Her, you fool,” said Bea testily. I could sense myself being mentally marked down as a dimwit. Nevertheless, by the end of the meal I was recruited and would begin the New Year as a junior fashion editor on a salary of eleven hundred pounds per annum plus luncheon vouchers.
My nascent fashion-editing career was destined to coincide with the opening of Mr Chow, a starry affair that Michael combined with the birthday of the waifish Geneviève Waïte, a baby-voiced starlet of the day whose birthday cake arrived on the stroke of midnight.
Soon the restaurant was attracting a galaxy of celebrities and, even more significantly, the leading artists of the time. It was Michael’s brilliant idea to provide them with free meals on the understanding that they would donate some of their art to the restaurant, which would make a perfect showcase for it. In fact, my contribution to opening night was to make sure the most famous artists delivered their finished works in time for the party. The American Jim Dine created a series of drawn hearts. The English pop artist Peter Blake produced a graphic image of two turn-of-the-century wrestlers, with Michael as their manager. Claes Oldenburg and Patrick Procktor supplied prints. Clive Barker made bronze casts of three Peking ducks, which still hang from the ceiling of the downstairs dining room. David Hockney’s portrait of Michael ended up as the cover of the Mr Chow matchbox (I had attended Michael’s initial sitting for this Hockney portrait, but I managed somehow to irritate the artist so much that he angrily tore up his original and insisted Michael return alone). Later the painters Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, and Jean-Michel Basquiat would contribute to subsequent incarnations of Mr Chow in Los Angeles and New York, adding to what, at today’s prices, must be a fabulous art collection worth a not so small fortune.
Michael Chow and me - not quite on top of the world but on top of a soup can.
By this time Michael and I had moved house and were pursuing our new life in a quirky, Dickensian-looking gray brick terrace on the unfashionable outskirts of Fulham. I think he was keen to show off his prowess as an architect because he quite simply gutted the place and made it up to the minute with an interior full of white space, spiral staircases, and giant “pop” artworks. (Later, for his next marriage, he added a downstairs swimming pool, one end of which started in the kitchen.) Naturally, we were forever being photographed at home, draped among our symbols of “with it–ness” as one of London’s most happening couples: him, the cool young restaurateur, nonchalantly swinging in a hammock hung from the minstrel’s gallery; and me, the sophisticated style-maker, perkily sitting cross-legged atop a giant pop-art version of a Campbell’s soup can.
Meanwhile, during all these demanding new changes of circumstance, my hair had gone from chicly gamine to weirdly bushy. In retrospect, I think it must have been a silent cry for help.
IV
ON
BRITISH VOGUE
In which
Grace takes a
pay cut, goes
vintage-crazy,
grows her hair,
and tries
married life.
Entering Vogue House at One Hanover Square on a cold London morning in January 1968, and moving through that unremarkable wood-paneled lobby at the fashionably late hour of 9:45 a.m., I realized with a sudden shock that this would be my first ever day job.
The building wasn’t unfamiliar to me because, as a model, I had been there many times, taking the lift to the sixth floor to be photographed in the Vogue studios. Now everything would be different. Exiting on the fifth floor, I would be stepping into the brave new world of Vogue fashion editorial, one I knew existed, but only as a mystery behind the scenes of my favorite glossy.
The lift doors parted—and what a disappointment it was! Stretched out in a messy open-plan jumble before me was a sea
of cheap, mismatched wooden furniture, cluttered desks that looked as though they had been salvaged from the streets, and rack upon rack of clothes squeezed tightly together. The old cork flooring was stained, there were endless rows of antiquated filing cabinets, and the fashion cupboard was literally that, rather than the huge streamlined hangar I am used to these days at American Vogue. Such a mess! And so shockingly different from the starkly minimalist life I was leading with Michael. Then there was the fashion staff—fewer of them than you might expect, and all in some strange way as mismatched as the furniture.
“I’ve had this GREAT idea Bea”
My Vintage look
Senior fashion editor Sheila Wetton stepped forward, charged with showing me around. A tall straight-backed woman with waist-length iron-gray hair scraped severely back into a chignon, she looked more like a ballet teacher than a fashion person but was in fact an extremely stylish ex-model from Molyneux, the chic couture house responsible for dressing Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, before the war. Then came the fashion editor Melanie Miller. Small, smart, and American, she seemed very foreign, loudly calling everybody “darling!” Mandy Clapperton was even smaller but quieter and more elfin, in vivid contrast to the editor of the social pages, Veronica Hindley, who was a big-boned, sexy blonde with a wayward, falling-apart Brigitte Bardot beehive. Helen Robinson, yet another fashion editor with prematurely graying hair, specialized in the more sporty clothes and rainwear; and right at the back in her floral Foale & Tuffin minidress and granny glasses, exuding cleverness, sat the petite and owlish Marit Allen, the person directly responsible for my being there. Oh, and Sandy Boler. This editor was one I’d had a bit of a falling-out with just before joining the magazine because she’d booked me as the model for a Vogue photo session but failed to mention I would be wearing only bras and knickers. Usually, models would be told if the job concerned underwear. Some girls refused because “underwear models,” who specialized in this sort of photography, weren’t thought of as being very “nice.” So I was naturally a bit snippy with her.
After I’d been shown the ropes and allocated a half share in a cluttered desk, I was introduced to Di James, my warmhearted, highly capable assistant who has remained a lifelong friend. (Assistants are a crucial lifeline for a fashion editor, and I always become attached to mine.) I was obliged to share her with Mandy and Veronica. I was then shown the tearoom, which, of course, was pretty important, and fussed over some more by Sheila and Melanie, Sheila in particular because I had worked with her quite a bit as a model, and she was very nurturing (although she had one of the foulest mouths in fashion, and swore every second word). She looked on all the other women in the department as her daughters—even though in group photos, I was always as tall and alien as a giraffe. Eventually, it was lunchtime. Scampi and chips with a bottle of wine or two! As we walked around the corner to the Vogue team’s regular little lunch venue, Buon Appetito, pushing through crowds of shoppers because our offices were sandwiched between the busy retail thoroughfares of Regent Street and Bond Street, I thought how odd it was that from now on my life would take place in two diametrically opposed environments, both concerned with style: shabby chic Hanover Square by day and super-slick Mr Chow’s after dark.
Even though I was working from the first for a fraction of what I could be paid as a model, my time at English Vogue was absolutely fantastic. It may have been a little like being back at school at times, but I could realize all my fantasies. Which was why I ended up hoping my years there (all nineteen of them) would never end. I couldn’t see why they should. Making money has never been a great concern of mine (I have never asked for a raise in my life), and at British Vogue no one had much money to do anything, which almost made it better.
My first photo session was a bit of a disaster, however. It was a kind of unisex idea modeled by the well-upholstered pop artist Peter Blake and his artist wife, Jann Haworth, dressed in matching polo shirts. Thinking back, I don’t know what possessed me to come up with the idea other than that I knew them both quite well, having dealt with Peter and his paintings for Michael’s restaurant. Anyway, the clothes would undoubtedly have looked better on models.
I spent a lot of time researching ideas in the Chelsea Antique Market on the Kings Road, a ramshackle tourist attraction where a jumble of stalls was busily selling off England’s past—World War I army greatcoats, chrome-plated thirties cocktail shakers, flapper dresses, steam radios, West End theater programs, posters from the 1920s, that kind of thing. I would comb through racks of vintage clothing, seeking inspiration for fashion shoots. In these early days a photographer like Helmut Newton or Guy Bourdin was very strong and came up with all the ideas for a Vogue photo shoot. I merely brought along the clothes to dress their pictures. But then I started having things made. Whole outfits. I mean, how else can you do what no one else is doing? However, one of my earliest and most unlikely assignments had nothing to do with fashion at all.
In 1969 the whole country was obsessed with Prince Charles’s impending investiture as the Prince of Wales, to be held at Caernarvon Castle in an ancient Welsh ceremony reserved for the elder son of the reigning British monarch. The press had made much of the new crown, created for the occasion by Lord Snowdon and designed in such a way as to deemphasize the prince’s jug ears. Although Snowdon was also a famous royal photographer—and indeed, part of the family—it was Norman Parkinson, in the end, who was selected to take His Royal Highness’s official portrait at Windsor Castle, and he asked me to come along and help. “Bring some makeup,” he said. “We might need it in case he comes in flushed from the polo field.”
Good Lord Anne, who are these people following you? …
Naturally, I was nervous. It’s one thing to make yourself up but quite another to apply makeup to the future King of England. And yes, when he walked into the room, he was red as a beetroot. “You’re going to have to work on him,” whispered Parks, while I noticed how the hot lights were turning the prince even redder and he was already sweating into his official ermine-lined robes. Meanwhile, I was trying to stick to protocol and keep my composure. My Cherry Marshall training came in handy at last as I curtsied—even if the attempt was rather ungainly. He, on the other hand, charmingly tried to put us both at ease. “I bet you do this all the time,” the prince said as I blotted him with some face powder. “No, actually I’ve never done it before,” I admitted embarrassedly. Parks then took some pictures, and while I leaned forward to give another little touch-up to the prince’s face, he took a Polaroid. “If you stole that picture, I bet you would make yourself a fortune,” the prince suggested conspiratorially.
Next came a series of action shots of Princess Anne riding her horse across the castle grounds. As we raced alongside her in Parks’s open-top Mini, with Parks standing on the passenger seat in order to poke up through the roof taking pictures, and me driving carefully so that he and his camera wouldn’t fly out, we almost collided with the Queen, who, along with a crowd of yapping corgis and a tray-bearing manservant, was on her way to take tea on the lawn.
When I first arrived at British Vogue it was fun going to the fashion shows—a different kind of fun from how it is now. We weren’t there to be seen or to be fabulous. Everybody was kind of anonymous, there to look at the clothes.
The London equivalents of a Paris couture show were usually held in Mayfair, at heavily mirrored, slightly oppressive, marble-clad establishments such as Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell. We called them couturiers but these people—with names like John Cavanagh, Victor Stiebel, Mattli, Worth, Digby Morton, and Michael—were more like highly accomplished dressmakers to the rich, titled, and famous, using beautiful materials for personally fitted clothes. A number of them were “by appointment to the Queen,” and the outfits were all stiff and rather unmemorable, like those the Queen wore, and were shown on stately, older-looking models who bore a passing resemblance to the Queen, too. They stepped out onto a long, low catwalk installed in the salon, heads erect an
d shoulders back, holding a card which had the number of the outfit on it—so much easier for me, because I didn’t have to draw it in order to remember it; I just wrote down the figure. They then continued walking very, very slowly, leaving enough time halfway to execute plenty of twirls so the audience could absorb all the details. And that’s how the whole show went. There was no music, no scenario, and no drama to distract you from examining the clothes.
The couture in Paris was much more exuberant and exciting, but still one hundred percent about the clothes. Scores of dedicated petits mains and hundreds of man-hours combined to give us these uniquely fresh creations. Designers like Patou, Scherrer, Givenchy, Ungaro, and Nina Ricci debuted collections that were lighter and younger than those in London and shown on models who conveyed a cosmopolitan and insouciant attitude. These were the looks that dictated the direction of fashion across the world.
During a typical week of shows, the magazine teams were expected to supervise the shooting of the couture all night and attend the shows during the day. In order not to exhaust myself, I was a bit exclusive and didn’t try to see every collection after having so little sleep.
Yves Saint Laurent was one I never skipped. He was modern. He proposed an entirely different couture, one that reflected the influences of youth, popular music, and what was happening in and around the streets of Paris’s Left Bank. It was not at all for little old ladies. Cardin and Courrèges were modern too back then, but theirs was a different kind of modernity: It was futuristic, and I don’t usually “get” futuristic, because I think it’s just an effect. Dior I found a bit shocking. There was always one point in the show where they sent out three exotic fur coats together in a group for les petites bourgeoises and they were usually made from some extremely endangered species like snow leopard. I considered it rather disgraceful and didn’t care for Dior at that time.
Grace Page 7
