A few months after my sister’s death, I attempted to adopt Tristan. I had been helping out his foster parents up until then, paying for his schooling, among other things, and having him stay with me during part of his school holidays. But because I was unmarried, the authorities suddenly turned nasty and threatening. They told me I was an entirely unsuitable person, and if I continued to push with adoption proceedings, Tristan would be taken away and placed in a children’s home. So he remained with the Aldersons awhile longer, and it wasn’t until I finally remarried that he came to live with me and went on to further his education at Normansal, a prep school in Eastbourne, and the public school (English for private school) Milton Abbey.
I last saw Tristan’s half brother, Finn, who I believe is quite mathematically bright, at my mother’s funeral. He was fourteen years old. I understand he still lives somewhere in Wales. In the meantime, Tristan, who has pursued numerous careers—from tending to the hounds on an English country estate to selling property in the Dominican Republic—set about the task of learning more about his father via the simple recent expedient of Google. My nephew has now followed his trail to Nepal, fallen in love with the country, and started to learn about Tibetan art.
VII
ON
CAFÉ SOCIETY
Wherein
seventies chic
meets fashionable
freaks in
the smartest
of cliques.
Bea Miller had a way of coaxing the best out of everyone. She also had an instinct for recognizing special talent. It was she who first introduced me to Karl Lagerfeld. It was 1971, the beginning of his ponytail period. To me he was an idiosyncratically handsome man, with a bushy black fin de siècle beard that he scented with the last drops of a discontinued perfume, Black Narcissus by Caron, of which he had secured all the remaining stock. He wore a monocle, shirts with stiff, old-fashioned celluloid collars, and carried a fan. Usually, he was accompanied by Anna Piaggi, his muse, a latter-day Marchesa Casati who was powerful at Italian Vogue, and her companion, Verne Lambert, an eccentric Australian who carried a silver-topped cane and collected and sold antique clothing.
In Paris we might on occasion go for lunch at the Closerie des Lilas along with Karl’s boyfriend, Jacques de Bascher de Beaumarchais, who invariably arrived impeccably dressed in the style of a turn-of-the-century dandy; the illustrator Antonio Lopez and his friend Juan; the live-wire American models Pat Cleveland and Donna Jordan, fresh out of Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York; and the remarkable Polish model Aya, who was discovered selling secondhand clothes in London’s Kensington Market. She based her everyday look on 1950s fashion photographs and would stand about, her face a mask of fifties cosmetics (beneath it she had rather bad skin), striking angular period poses even when no camera was trained on her. She was always flawless in Antonio’s drawings, which made her look stunningly sculptural.
My Seventies Set
Manolo Blahnik, Anna Piaggi, Pat Cleveland, Antonio Lopez, Donna Jordan, Karl Lagerfeld
Karl was working as designer for Chloé—a seasoned French label that previously specialized in pretty blouses—as well as freelancing for a number of Italian brands where his name never appeared. He was always perfectly satisfied to play the “gun for hire” in the fashion world and, until Chanel hired him in 1982, preferred not to be associated with just one thing. In that respect, among others, he was very much the antithesis of Saint Laurent. Perhaps this is why he never tried to build his own line into something so important. But he did a great many extraordinary things for Chloé, calling on his vast knowledge of historical movements in art and design to inspire their collections.
Everyone in those days had to attend a Chloé show. A key moment in any season was when enthusiasts surged backstage afterward to congratulate Karl and he would pick out one of the must-have accessories for next season and insist that you wear it straightaway, six months before it was available. These trinkets were like priceless trophies and sometimes—as with an exquisite feather-light lamé scarf he gave me that epitomized the art deco–mad seventies—became the object of everlasting envy among friends and colleagues.
In the evenings we all congregated at the Club Sept, which was the new generation’s version of Régine’s, the traditional hangout for playboys and socialites, except this was ninety-nine percent fashion and gay. I remember dark banquettes and little tables tightly positioned around the walls of a crammed dining area skirting a postage-stamp square of dance floor where a great deal of bumping and grinding went on. Paloma Picasso was often there, looking striking with two male escorts.
We had tiny budgets in those days, and Karl generously lent us his impressively grand apartment in the Place Saint-Sulpice for our photo shoots. It was beautiful and spacious, an opulent shrine to art deco, although I had the distinct impression that the mercurial Karl was growing tired of it and would soon be moving on.
I shot Anjelica Huston and Marie Helvin there with Bailey; Pat Cleveland with Bourdin; and a model named Kathy Quirk with Helmut Newton. The Helmut shoot—a typical “rich woman living the pampered life” scenario—featured my assistant Julie Kavanagh, who went on to become the London editor of Women’s Wear Daily and the author of acclaimed biographies of Rudolph Nureyev and the British ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton. On this occasion she was obliged to dress up as a stereotypical little French maid, complete with starched apron and hair band. Cathy was shot lounging on Karl’s pristine ivory silk-covered sofa, being given a manicure by the real-life manicurist of Helmut’s wife, June.
With Bourdin, we had Pat Cleveland leaning against an exquisitely lacquered 1920s cabinet of enormous value. While the hot lights grew hotter (Bourdin used high-strength tungsten lamps for his blindingly clear lighting effects), I noticed the lacquer on a nearby door start to bubble. I shouted for the assistants to shut off the power. Thankfully, the blister receded and a major incident was averted.
Art deco was the revival of the hour. Fashion had gone entirely retro. Makeup and clothes were relentlessly thirties. Lipstick was plum, prune, or aubergine. Hair was waved or pin-curled. The ranunculus was the flower of choice. People flocked to the giant new Biba emporium in Kensington, housed in the formerly stuffy department store of Derry & Toms, to revel in the whole reproduction thirties lifestyle. Houses were filled with Clarice Cliff’s distinctive orange and black period pottery. By now I had amassed a wardrobe overflowing with beautiful vintage dresses and a huge collection of art deco bangles and pins from the Chelsea Antique Market and the Marché aux Puces (flea market) in the Clignancourt district of Paris. They were made of Bakelite, an unstable early form of plastic reputed to explode under extreme temperature conditions.
My Walter Albini Suit
The other most fashionable designer of the day, the Italian Walter Albini, in a wildly extravagant display of largesse had the international press flown to Venice to attend his latest fashion show, which was meticulously thirties-inspired. We arrived on the lagoon just before sunset, traveling by motor launch to the Hotel Danieli, where the rich, varnished interior was as filled with period detail as Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, to discover our rooms drowning in heavily scented gardenias. Later that evening we all boarded gondolas for St. Mark’s Square, where we were ushered into the fashion show at the Caffè Florian by brilliantined, thirties-looking waiters to the sounds of a string quartet. I was escorted by David Bailey and dressed all in white—a big white coat over a vintage silk 1920s tennis dress.
Helmut Newton and I had worked together as model and photographer during my career in the sixties, and it was as an unexpectedly guest-appearing model that I now worked with him for British Vogue on one of our most memorable fashion shoots. It was 1973, in the midst of his “swimming pool period,” and he had the idea of creating a shoot that looked like a slightly decadent cocktail party held around a pool. As he was spending his regular summer vacation at his little house in Ramatuelle, a village in the hills above Saint-Trop
ez, and he didn’t like to travel far to a location, we were to take the photographs at a hotel pool in town. Models arrived early to take a couple of days’ tanning time, and the evening clothes I had brought, which weren’t very inspiring, were discussed. The hairdresser on the shoot, Jean Louis David, whose wife, Danielle Poe, was one of our models, occupied himself cutting June Newton’s hair.
During all this, Helmut kept eyeing me beadily as I hung out by the pool in my purple Eres two-piece, fifties sunglasses, and brand-new shocking-pink vinyl Yves Saint Laurent high heels. Finally, he said, “This story is boring. I think we’ll put you in the pictures to make it more interesting.” And that’s exactly what he did. The odd juxtaposition of me floating about in the pool or standing there in my bikini drinking cocktails alongside models dressed to the nines in shiny evening gowns and dinner jackets gave the whole shoot a documentary feeling that is still imitated today.
Helmut and I had a fairly easygoing relationship, although he could be notoriously mean to other fashion editors and models. And he was never less than direct. Over twenty years he regularly asked me, “When can I do a nude picture of you?” As time went on and because I kept repeatedly putting him off, he would never fail to add, “Before it’s too late.” Then one day he turned to me and said, “You remember how I always wanted to do that nude before it was too late? Well, now it is.”
My assistants (I never failed to choose beautiful ones) were given strict instructions to always wear sexy high heels, never sneakers, when working with him because that would put him in a much better mood.
In all the years we worked and socialized together, the only time we ever had a major falling-out was when I wanted to include one of his more controversial photographs in the book Karl Lagerfeld was publishing of my work. Helmut and I had collaborated at one time on a series of fashion photos for American Vogue featuring the German platinum-blond Amazon Nadja Auermann wearing little black dresses. While we mapped out the session he said, “I am going to do one picture like the story of Leda and the Swan. I will need a stuffed swan, and it’s going to be raping Nadja.” Well, I just nodded, thinking, “There’s no way this will ever happen when Anna gets to hear of it.” But the next second Helmut is telling this story to Anna on the phone and she is saying something like, “Oh, Helmut darling, what a great idea!” So a stuffed swan is eventually tracked down from a shop in Paris specializing in taxidermy and shipped at great expense to Monte Carlo, with Anna now saying, “Oh well, you know, I just wanted to humor him.” Anyhow, we did the picture with a view that it would probably never appear. But incredibly, it did. And he absolutely refused to let me reprint it. In the end, however, the picture I would dearly love to have used—unfortunately never taken—was the one where Helmut was lying spread-eagled on the bed with the stuffed swan between his legs, showing Nadja exactly how it should be done.
How’s this Helmut, do we look like “Leda and swan” now …?
A money-making sideline at British Vogue in the seventies was Vogue Promotions, which inhabited a place vaguely positioned between editorial and advertising. I did very little of these, being far too busy with my single bona fide editorial shoot a month. But there was one concerning the photographer Guy Bourdin and a very French blue bubble bath product called Obao that I agreed to do and shall never forget.
Guy was a tiny and very, very mischievous photographer, like a naughty little boy. He spoke only French, and though I had forgotten most of my convent-taught knowledge of that language, we always managed somehow to communicate. He worked most of the time with Heidi Morawetz, an Austrian makeup artist who was so much more than that: She was his right hand, completely responsible for realizing many of his wilder projects, finding huge (real) fishtails for mermaid shoots and tracking down a great number of the crazy things he sketched to convey his ideas. You have to remember, there was no retouching or digital trickery in those early days, so if Guy wanted a model to fly or be a mermaid with a fishtail sticking out of the sand, he would have to find a way to create the illusion out of reality.
The pictures for the bath product were scheduled to take place near his country house at La Chapelle on the Normandy coast one dull April day when the weather was freezing and overcast and the sea had turned an unappetizingly murky gray. The idea was to have the model look as though she were flying naked over the sea, then swim through bright blue water and drip it along the beach. But Guy wanted the ocean to be startlingly blue, an eye-popping blue, and the water wasn’t blue enough. In fact, it wasn’t blue at all. So Heidi managed to assemble various blue dyes and test them out in the bath of the hotel where we were staying (I wonder if the walls are still splashed today). Finally, at the hour of the shoot, we all trudged down to the water’s edge and began tipping bucket after bucket of this blue dye into the sea. And of course it all got washed away. We tipped in more. And it all just washed out to sea again. Then we tipped in some more. And …
So we gave up on this idea to concentrate instead on the girl flying across the waves. A submerged wooden platform was built at low tide to hide the fact that she would be supported. The tide rolled in. The platform collapsed. It was rebuilt. The tide rolled in again. The whole thing collapsed again. Eventually, Guy settled for the simple idea of a girl running out of the sea leaving a trail of bright blue (paint) drips in her wake. It was surreal and beautiful. But in the end the clients didn’t like it. They wanted something more conventional and luxurious to sell their bath product.
A tall, handsome young photographer with an English pallor, Willie Christie escorted me to a Zandra Rhodes ball at the Berkeley Hotel in 1973, for which I borrowed a Cinderella-style floaty chiffon Rhodes ball gown, the kind of thing I usually love in fairy-tale photographs but not so much on me. I chose Willie, who was once Clive Arrowsmith’s assistant, to be my escort on the recommendation of my ex-assistant Patricia. They had dated at one stage but had broken up by then, and for once I didn’t have a boyfriend around. “He’s really eligible. He has his own black tie, and he can afford to buy his own ticket,” she enthused, referring to Willie’s aristocratic background (he is the grandson of the Marquess of Zetland).
We danced the night away until all the guests were gone and we were the last couple standing. Then, at the tail end of the party, he and I crammed ourselves into his little green Mini and drove back to my basement flat in St. John’s Wood, where he stayed the night. Within a short span of time I had moved out of my place and into his house in Gunter Grove, Fulham, which he shared with the manager of the pop singer Bryan Ferry, who remained for a while, then discreetly moved out.
Willie was obsessed with glamorous old Hollywood photographs of movie stars. He would copy the sets inexpensively and take great pains to study their dramatic black-and-white, shadow-filled lighting. A year later I was to work with him on his first shoot for Vogue—a moodily lit fashion story inspired by the classic Bogart movie Casablanca, with the model Marie Helvin crooning into an old microphone while a man in a white suit sat behind her playing the piano.
Lady Jean Christie, Willie’s mother, was a splendid woman, hilariously funny and outspoken. Every weekend we went off to stay with her in her roomy old country house near Newbury, deep in the horse-racing depths of the English countryside, and each Sunday her many friends hurried over for “drinkypoos.” She liked “a little tipple” for dinner, starting with sherry and ending with port. She also worried quietly about Willie running through his inheritance because his attitude to life was so devil-may-care.
Willie was a really kind person. He enjoyed life—maybe a little too much. The period before our marriage had us frequently heading down to Devon, taking my nephew Tristan with us, and staying with my friend Polly Hamilton (another new face at Vogue), her husband, Peter, and their young son, Jake, in their rambling old West Country farmhouse. While Polly and I busied ourselves cooking, gardening, and doing rustic things like shelling peas and feeding the geese and the pigs, Willie and Peter would hare noisily along the narrow, winding
English country lanes on their gigantic Harley-Davidsons, sending the locals scurrying into the hedgerows. The first time Willie took me down to Devon was, in fact, on the back of his Harley. This was moments before a strict English law came into force making it mandatory to wear a crash helmet. I remember my long red hair flowing in the wind as I pressed, shivering, against Willie’s back, even though I had exchanged my fashionable denim miniskirt for the relative warmth of blue jeans—probably the first and last time I ever wore a pair because I was absolutely never the blue jeans type.
One weekend a short while later, Polly and I visited a nearby cattery, and we decided to buy some beautiful kittens. They were a species called British Blue. Polly chose George, and I took his brothers, Brian and Stanley. Owning cats again made me extremely happy. They seemed a sign of a settled life with Willie.
A subject occupying the country during this period was self-sufficiency, the money-saving premise of growing your own food products by utilizing solar energy and preserving water by sharing a bath. Britain was at that moment gripped by endless power cuts and huge unemployment. There was even a British TV comedy, The Good Life, highly popular at the time, that made light of people trying to live in this fashion. It now became the inspiration behind a fashion shoot masterminded by me and photographed by Arthur Elgort at Polly’s Devon farmhouse. It starred the French actress Aurore Clément modeling an assortment of tweedy coats, vintage dresses, and gumboots while pegging out the washing with Polly’s new baby boy, Harry, tucked under her arm. In the photographs, Aurore looks the epitome of British pluck. Her determined expression as she marches between rows of homegrown cauliflowers and cabbages convincingly suggests that she could solve Britain’s energy crisis single-handed.
Grace Page 10
