By this time I had grown close to the people from Browns, the little London shop that was the first to endorse the new wave of American designers. Together with its owner, Joan Burstein—affectionately known as just “the Mrs.”—and her team of assistants, we would try out the latest New York restaurants while they were visiting on buying trips. There was Odeon, where the cast of Saturday Night Live hung out; Hatsuhana, which introduced me to Japanese food and went on to become my favorite; Da Silvano, where the fashion crowd had just begun to gather; Un Deux Trois, popular among theatergoing folk, with its cute canister of crayons on every table (they are still there) so you could doodle on the paper tablecloths. And afterward, Studio 54 or one of those crazy alternative clubs such as the Gilded Grape, where trapeze artists hung overhead by their heels and which was truly like going to a freak show or some over-the-top circus with drag queens dressed as Grace Jones. I also remember all the straight boys around this time being mad for the husky-voiced disco diva Amanda Lear, whose sexual origins were shrouded in mystery. They were dying to go to bed with her just to find out what lay beneath.
my disco look
Robert Forrest, the indefatigably social fashion director of Browns, took me to all these gay clubs along with his friend the Australian hairstylist Kerry Warn. They were always warm and chatty, although it sometimes seemed as if I were eavesdropping on some secret, impenetrable language based on gender change. “Ooh, she’s a butch woman!” they would say to each other, for example, ogling the straightest-looking waiter in a restaurant, or President Gerald Ford would metamorphose into “Miss Geraldine Ford.” Robert was inexhaustible, always seeking out the newest this or the latest that. It was he who brought back home from his trips the latest American chart-toppers such as “Native New Yorker” or disco hits like “Le Freak.” He and Mrs. Burstein spent their free American weekends at a little place she rented in the notoriously gay enclave of Fire Island. Kerry was also a veteran of my photo sessions with Albert Watson, a bustling Scot living and working in Manhattan whose photographs—hard-edged, energetic, and disco-bright—most accurately captured the spirit of the day.
I think I first heard of AIDS when I was out and about with Kerry and Robert. All the talk up until then had been about herpes, with herpes jokes becoming hugely popular in a vulgar kind of way. Now AIDS came along, and this was serious—and deadly. There was so much fear and rumor connected to it, like that if you shook hands with a gay person, you were going to catch the disease: People were that naive. Everyone didn’t suddenly pull out their condoms, though, and in England, AIDS and its dreadful consequences were hardly ever mentioned at all.
That same year I went to a wildly different part of America—Tucson, Arizona—for a shoot with Alex Chatelain. By now our team for trips had been extended. Didier Malige came to style the hair, and Bonnie Maller would do the makeup. The model was Kelly Emberg, a breezy American ex-cheerleader who later moved in with the singer Rod Stewart and had a daughter with him. The location manager was, I remember, intense about the search for enlightenment (so fashionable at the time) and tried introducing us to the world of EST. She even suggested we all sit around in a hot tub holding hands and telling the truth. I always find that kind of thing, as well as health fads like colonic irrigation, more hokey than meaningful.
The clothes we took with us for this shoot were mostly made of leather. One Zoran wrap was practically a whole cowhide. We shot in the kind of rugged cowboy country where spiritual cults are rarely embraced and where men are men and not easily confused with the Village People.
Breaking for lunch at some dusty diner or other, I scanned the menu looking for something recognizable to eat. Ribs, I thought in my very English way. Wouldn’t that be something like a dear little lamb chop with mint sauce? A carcass arrived. Not only did it not fit onto the plate, but it was the size of an entire herd. I nibbled away politely for a while, then offered it to the huge cowhands sitting and salivating at the next table. It was gone in a minute.
In 1979 British Vogue traveled to China on what was to be the first fashion trip to that country undertaken by a Western glossy magazine (that is, if you didn’t count Arthur Elgort going there for American Vogue some months before to follow Nancy Kissinger around). Again my photographer was Alex Chatelain and the hairdresser Kerry Warn, and the model was Esmé, the latest American “it” girl, who had strikingly boyish features, thick eyebrows, and short, cropped hair. The negotiations had been complicated, political, and long, and resulted in two photo shoots that had to be carried out at the same time, mine and a commercially driven Vogue promotion styled by my colleague Liz Tilberis and supervised by a smooth-talking South American fashion Mr. Fixit named Roberto Devorik, who was paying for the entire historical venture.
For my photographs I chose a wardrobe of fanciful, brocaded chinoiserie-inspired clothes, which, on arrival, I immediately abandoned. Stepping off the plane, I had been surrounded by hundreds of people: men, women, and children all wearing plain, functional Mao suits in either khaki or blue. Everyone, no exception. Little babies might have been allowed to wear clothes with a duckling or some such embroidered on them, but after the age of three, everyone looked exactly the same. (This was a far cry from my subsequent trip to China some twenty years later, when the uniforms had been jettisoned in favor of sequins and a rather garish notion of Western dress.) Completely inspired, I rushed off to buy these suits to put on my model (and, I have to admit, acquire a whole new wardrobe for myself). After all, we were there to make pictures of modern-day China. Thankfully, we didn’t need to worry about clothing credits so much back then.
We took trains everywhere: sleepers. It was amazing. We stayed in huge hotels with vast bedrooms—many bigger than my present apartment—that were normally occupied by important Chinese delegations. We took pictures of Esmé drinking tea in a railway carriage, sitting in a station waiting room on a huge white sofa with our guide, and standing by a lake in her utilitarian cotton suit in homage to a famous lakeside propaganda picture of Chairman Mao, whose inescapable image was everywhere. Our guide, Mr. Ko, was wonderful. He was well read, spoke very good English, and on our final night, sang “Edelweiss” to us dreamily over the dinner table.
Later, I received the most beautiful letter of thanks from him, saying how his time spent with us had changed his life and expressing how much he wished he could visit us in England—although regulations were so strict in those days that he never would have been allowed out of China.
Returning to London, I felt completely exhilarated by my trip. It left me appreciating minimalism in new ways, which was ironic, seeing as I arrived back overloaded to the maximum with Chinese badges, sheets, bedcovers, starched white cotton slipcovers, and antimacassars. These last were on every chair I saw in China, in every school, hotel, airport, station, and on every train seat. Maybe it’s because the men put so much grease in their hair. Now, filled with a new desire for plain, unfussy functionalism, I draped them over all the furniture in my London apartment, exchanging my chintzy covers for plain white.
Throughout the seventies, Bea Miller regularly held the most amazing dinner parties. Guests would include Tony Snowdon and his wife, Princess Margaret, alongside Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland, Paul and Linda McCartney, Liza Minnelli, the author Antonia Fraser, journalists Mark Boxer and Kenneth Allsop, fashion designer Geoffrey Beene, the actor Michael York (who was a fixture, as was I), and George Harrison and Pattie Boyd. The dinners were always catered, and the hired waiters were often more than a little drunk and incapable before the end of the evening.
Bea was a wonderful hostess who managed to cram so many famous people into her tiny basement flat in a small gray brick house off the lower end of the Kings Road that it was like one of those competitions to see how many students can be stuffed into a telephone box. Afterward Barney Wan and I would stay behind to do the washing up in the minuscule kitchen because by then the waiters were completely out of it.
Many of Bea’s famous friend
s would also drift in and out of Vogue’s offices to see her. Despite being intensely private personally, she seemed to operate a very relaxed open-door policy as far as hip Londoners were concerned. I, on the other hand, rarely received visitors other than the photographers who came to discuss or show their work. So the day the punk designer Vivienne Westwood came calling, I was completely flummoxed.
She marched directly into the fashion room totally unannounced (a far easier thing to do in the days before security guards sat in the lobby) with a bag full of bondage trousers and a ring through every orifice, saying, “I should be on the cover of Vogue wearing things like these.” She had a very aggressive manner. Everyone in the office shrank from her challenging demeanor. But in the end, I stood my ground, talked her down, and she eventually left, while startled people went back to looking through their clothes rails, saying, “What was that?”
As we entered the eighties, the designer whom the entire fashion community gossiped about was Azzedine Alaïa. Small and Tunisian, with a short temper to match, he had the chicest French girls lining up for his clothes. He operated out of a town house in Paris on the rue de Bellechasse but never held full-blown fashion shows, only hush-hush in-house presentations for buyers, friends, and clients. I heard about him through the Browns network of Robert Forrest and Mrs. Burstein, and I was persistent and intrigued enough to wangle a viewing even though he was rumored to harbor a distinct aversion to the press.
We arrived at Alaïa’s Left Bank salon at the appointed time and were asked to wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, we were allowed back to where the buyers had gathered to watch a solitary girl wearing his intriguingly cut black clothes wander through the little suite of interlocking rooms that made up the floor, followed, after a long pause, by another. Onlookers, studded about on little poufs or sitting at the buyers’ tiny tables, were focused with laserlike intensity on the way the designer’s fluid seams and zips shaped the clothes across the lines of the body. People looked as if they had unearthed the Holy Grail.
When it was over, Alaïa came out, a tiny figure dressed head to foot in black with an even tinier dog under his arm. We were introduced and I gathered, despite my limited French vocabulary, that he was seriously saying Vogue should put him on the cover along with Patapouf, his little Yorkshire terrier. It took a while to sink in that he was joking because his sense of humor is so wickedly deadpan. But finally, he chuckled.
Azzedine came on the scene at a time when Yves Saint Laurent, Kenzo, and Karl Lagerfeld were at the pinnacle of Paris fashion. Yet he astonished everyone with such a different way of looking at the body. His clothes were flattering and sensual and made you look so curvy. You couldn’t help but marvel at all those darts shaped to give you a very small waist, which I’ve always found attractive. I thought it was great, too, that such a small operation created things so beautifully. There was so much artistry and couture cutting—and it wasn’t even couture. Nothing was hidden away beneath embroidery or layers; they were just very feminine clothes contouring the body perfectly. You could see fashion turn a corner at that moment, and the eighties became defined by his look—no doubt about it.
I loved Azzedine’s clothes and began wearing them exclusively. From then on he was in every story, and if it wasn’t an Azzedine story, it looked like an Azzedine story.
The marriage of Lady Diana Spencer to Prince Charles in 1981 turned the whole country—and British Vogue—upside down with the endless rumors that Diana was in close consultation with the magazine about her trousseau and royal wardrobe. While some paparazzi and journalists skulked around the Mayfair salon of David and Elizabeth Emanuel, the young couple chosen to design and make the wedding dress, and even stooped low enough to raid their outside dustbins for telltale scraps of likely material, others hung about Vogue’s doorstep just up the road in Hanover Square, hoping to run across the bride-to-be. At one stage Diana’s sister Sarah did work for Bea Miller, and the princess did indeed come into Vogue House several times to discuss clothes with Anna Harvey, a discreet senior fashion editor who was the best person to advise her; she was also called upon to visit Kensington Palace, help Diana make clothing decisions, steer her through the heaps of craziness coming from the English designers, and keep her choices on the straight and narrow. If I, on the other hand, had been consulted, I probably would have suggested a few of my favorites and put her into Yves Saint Laurent, Azzedine Alaïa, or something by Karl Lagerfeld, which would have been entirely out of order because she was supposed to dress patriotically in British designs. But I wasn’t remotely interested. I was also the last to know whenever she was visiting, although I do recall the offices becoming spectacularly quiet when she was rumored to be on the premises.
Much of my time between 1980 and 1984 was dedicated to creating photo stories in the great outdoors with Bruce Weber. Not only did we refine the narrative style of shooting that he and I became most associated with at British Vogue, but we also collaborated on several campaigns for Calvin Klein.
Calvin was one of the first to take out huge wedges of promotional material in the international fashion press. So I wasn’t surprised when the phone rang one day while I was sitting at my desk at Vogue and I picked it up to find him on the line. “Grace, who do I have to contact about advertising?” he asked. “I want to do twenty-five pages in British Vogue.” I almost fell off my chair. “Richard Hill,” I said, giving him the name of our affable, laid-back publisher. Assuring Calvin that I would put them in touch with each other as soon as possible, I immediately raced off along the corridor to find Richard, and arrived at his office just as he was putting on his coat. “I have Calvin Klein on the line, and he wants to buy twenty-five pages of advertising,” I gushed triumphantly, feeling not a little overexcited and, I must say, pleased with myself for having played some small part in this immensely lucrative moment. Richard, on the other hand, looked rather put out. “But I’m just going to lunch,” he said, continuing to slip into his coat. “Can’t you tell him to call back in a couple of hours?” I couldn’t believe it. Here was British Vogue, which usually dropped to its knees pleading for a mere single page from a designer, being handed twenty-five, and this guy was going out for lunch! It was, as they say, the limit.
By now I had forged a steady relationship with the French hairstylist Didier Malige. We became closer and closer because he was working with Bruce constantly, as was I, so we were always being thrown together. We didn’t really start dating seriously until 1983. I remember this because in 1982 we had been working in Barbados with the photographer Patrick Demarchelier, and Didier was always lighting my cigarette in a romantic, chivalrous way. A year later, he had become my steady boyfriend and was always ripping the cigarette out of my mouth. (Now I no longer smoke, having given it up when I came to America.)
Back in Wales, following Uncle Ted’s death in the sixties (and long after I had departed for London), my cousin Michael had inherited all his father’s interests, including our hotel. But because his heart wasn’t in being a property owner, he bought a caravan and took to the open road instead. Then, after discussions with other family members, he decided to sell off our hotel to a large brewery, but he built my mother a house adjacent to the annex, which enabled her to retain use, in retirement, of her beloved little garden. She had remained quite active, giving rides to children on a couple of ponies and a donkey she kept specifically for that purpose. The house was not terribly well built, but it did have four bedrooms, where she could house all the local stray cats and dogs she had begun to take in. At a certain point, it seemed to me that whenever I visited, hundreds of animals were lodged there, on every chair, with some of them climbing onto the mantelpiece. And on particularly bitter nights she even brought the donkey inside to shelter in the kitchen.
All that caretaking had to be given up when she herself was encouraged, in her eighties, to move out of her place and enter an old people’s home, situated a short distance away in another part of our village. Completely on her own after
losing a husband, a daughter, a brother, and a sister, she was increasingly opposed to anyone helping out and couldn’t countenance the prospect of welfare people visiting her because she was certain they had come to steal from her. She also imagined herself being constantly spied on.
In the home, which was more of a large house, there were no more than six or seven other elderly people. A Yorkshire terrier was also living there and as she no longer had a dog of her own (she had kept Yorkshire terriers all her life), my mother was happy to adopt this one as her new canine companion. She loved it dearly, often saying, “I hope I die before this dog.” Then one day, after accompanying it for a walk around the garden, she came in and sat down on a big comfy sofa, it jumped in her lap, and she died. So she got her wish. She was eighty-two.
I was on a photo shoot in Hawaii with the photographer Hans Feurer when the news reached me in a late-night call from Liz Tilberis, my close friend at British Vogue, but I told no one—except for Didier, who was with me when the call came through. I have always had a strong aversion to thoughts of death and showy demonstrations of grief, far preferring silence and grieving inwardly. Besides, it was impossible to get off the island where we were staying. We were forced to remain and had two more days to finish the job. I know many people might find my way of thinking about work at a time of tragedy somewhat callous—but to me it was form of consolation. I somehow managed to get the funeral delayed, then went back home. On my return, Willie, my ex-husband, was kindly waiting back in London to rush me straight there.
That same year, 1985, I was, somewhat belatedly, made fashion director. My first act was to redecorate the Vogue fashion room with the help and guidance of Michael Chow. Basically, I had all the tatty old flooring ripped up and chic blond wood laid down. Modern plate glass and tubular steel Le Corbusier tables were installed, replacing the rickety old wooden desks that seemed to have been salvaged from the Great Fire of London. The whole fashion staff was given natural wicker and chrome Breuer chairs, and the walls were painted white. Michael thought there should be a strict rule that no one was to be allowed to attach more than one photograph of a child, boyfriend, or animal to a pinboard (an implausible notion in sentimental old England). A corner of the room was partitioned off with plate-glass walls, and this was to become my office. Liz Tilberis called it “the fishbowl.”
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