Bruce was really hoping, while we were there, for an opportunity to take a portrait of the rawboned O’Keeffe, but he was completely rebuffed by the reclusive artist right up to the last minute. Then Barney Wan, who was holidaying in San Francisco, flew in to help. Dressed from head to foot in red, O’Keeffe’s favorite color (he really did his homework), he spontaneously knocked on her front door to ask if he could cook her a Chinese dinner. She, equally spontaneously, said yes and, after mellowing significantly, agreed to be photographed by Bruce.
Bruce with his new Puppy Hud
That same year I stayed with Bruce in his house on Shelter Island. I had been invited there, along with my nephew Tristan, to spend the summer holiday. It was a small place, completely charming (all the buildings on the island were charming in that “gingerbread house” kind of way), and the lawn sloped gently down to a small dock where a little wooden motorboat was tethered. I probably compared it to the island of my Welsh childhood—except the weather was so much better.
Bruce was always surrounded by such attractive people. There was something so appealing about this large extended family and the easygoing summer-camp atmosphere he created. It wasn’t fancy, like going to stay with the Duke and Duchess of Whatever. You would sit with a bottle of wine or two and talk until the early hours. And he would engineer his photo shoots to take place around the house and include all the people who were hanging out there. He generally worked every day, even when everyone else was on vacation. That summer his major shoot was a story for GQ with a fishing boat and “clam diggers” dressed up in big knits, big aprons, and even bigger waders. Bruce put Tristan in the photographs, and they are some of my favorites ever taken of him. I have prints of them all over my home. And Nan was always there, calmly in control and ready to cook for everyone. “Dinner for twenty-three? No problem.” Nothing fazed her.
Bruce was always incredibly generous when you stayed with him. His car would suddenly become your car. He would invite me to borrow his station wagon and go for a spin. Or he would accompany me to the local antique shops, where he often tried to persuade me to buy more than I could ever afford. “Oh, come on Grace, you know you deserve it,” he would say with a laugh whenever I hesitated over yet another purchase. And, inevitably, if I didn’t get it, I would find out later that he had bought it for me.
I’d like to say I adopted Bruce and Nan’s lifestyle (though not the large groups), but I guess I copied it—certainly their aesthetic and their decorating style, which is always so comfortable. I definitely copied Bruce’s way of propping up hundreds of photographs on shelves and having piles of books dotted about everywhere.
Bruce and I have many friends in common. One is the Scottish stylist Joe McKenna. Previously a jobbing actor with nothing whatsoever to do with fashion, Joe got his early break when he was cast in Coronation Street, a popular British television soap opera, in which he played the son of some leading characters.
Hud
He and I first met because he regularly turned up at British Vogue during the eighties to borrow slides from the fashion shows while he worked at Tatler magazine, which was one floor below us at Vogue House. From then on, we became firm friends, and he has always supplied a shoulder for me to lean on through all the highs and lows in my life.
Joe loves magazines and occasionally accepts a job on them. But he is also incredibly mischievous, a practical joker in the worst possible sense in that he is so good at it—which doesn’t suit an office environment. So he has carved a niche for himself styling freelance for photographers such as David Sims, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Bruce, with whom his working relationship dates back to the eighties. Joe also works a great deal in Paris with Azzedine Alaïa, another great practical joker, and when they get together …
At the height of the supermodel craze, they rang Linda Evangelista from Azzedine’s workroom very late one night, disguising their voices, and convinced her she was needed urgently for a fitting with Karl Lagerfeld at the Chanel premises on rue Cambon. And so off she went—despite it being the early hours of the morning—to find the whole place shuttered and dark. More recently, when I was having a tortured time trying to finalize the deal on my present Manhattan apartment, Joe called up pretending to be the realtor and made me believe that the deal had fallen through, whereupon I broke down in tears. No amount of apologizing helped there at the time, but he is someone you just can’t be angry at for long.
In 1982 Bruce suggested that he and I pay homage to the legendary pioneering photographer Edward Weston. A cast of thousands was assembled in Bellport, Long Island, where Bruce had now moved. He always had a working team in place that included Didier for hair, Bonnie Maller for makeup, and John Ryman, a local artist, to build all the props. Canvas backdrops were erected to imitate Weston’s makeshift portable studios. A lithe and sloe-eyed young dance student named Nathalie (the real-life girlfriend of the boy playing Weston for us), who had never modeled before, was co-opted to play a version of Tina Modotti. The seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican model Talisa Soto was brought in to portray the equivalent of Weston’s partner, Charis. Sundry other characters included a young girl named Shelly; an older woman named Joli, who owned an antique shop on Bleecker Street; another, larger, more masculine-looking local woman called Betty, who was Shelly’s aunt; and a whole group of boys.
To me this was the most powerful story we ever did together. Bruce says that one reason Weston came to mind as a mythical character who deserved to have a story built around him—albeit a fashion story—was that he was so totally dedicated to photography that his fingers turned black from forever being immersed in the chemical fixative.
Hud
It was also the first time I had ever styled a male nude—if you can call it styling. The darkly good-looking American model Bruce Hulse, who was our Weston, was asked to climb a tree for a portrait, and as I stood beneath it, all I could hear was Bruce saying things like, “Oh, gee, you look so handsome. Could you take off your shirt?” And the shirt would flutter down. Then it was, “Wow, that’s so great. Now can you take off the trousers?” And down would come the trousers. Finally, it was “And the underpants?” This was where I averted my eyes, just as the Y-fronts came tumbling down about my head.
As a memento, Bruce made me a beautiful scrapbook of photographs from the shoot. It is probably my most treasured possession.
“You know,” Bruce said to me one day in 1983, “there’s this painter Andrew Wyeth, and I really love him, and he lives in Maine. His paintings are all in these pale, washed-out colors. So wouldn’t it be great to do some pictures using clothes in the same colors?” He went on to tell me that there were three generations of Wyeth painters—Andrew, his son Jamie, who lived nearby on Monhegan Island, and Andrew’s father, N. C. Wyeth, who did the original illustrations for Treasure Island. Bruce spent a great deal of time working on the shoot in Andrew’s house in order to re-create precisely the diffused light in his work. We all felt so privileged to be invited into the lighthouse he sometimes escaped to. Stepping inside was like stepping into one of his paintings: Chalk-white, sparse, curtains blowing.
Just as we were about to leave, Andrew turned to me and said, “I would love to paint you. How long are you staying in Maine?” I could sense Bruce beside me, almost about to faint. “It would be so great, Grace,” he whispered. “You should stay on.” I, being the fool that I am, heard myself saying in my English way that, while I was honored to be asked, I was “expected back in the office by Monday.”
Homage to Edward Weston, with Talisa Soto and Bruce Hulse, Bellport. Photo: Bruce Weber, 1982
Homage to Edward Weston, with Talisa Soto and Bruce Hulse, Bellport. Photo: Bruce Weber, 1982
Homage to Edward Weston, with Talisa Soto and Bruce Hulse, Bellport. Photo: Bruce Weber, 1982
Homage to Edward Weston, with Talisa Soto and Bruce Hulse, Bellport. Photo: Bruce Weber, 1982
Homage to Edward Weston, with Talisa Soto and Bruce Hulse, Bellport. P
hoto: Bruce Weber, 1982
Homage to Edward Weston, with Talisa Soto and Bruce Hulse, Bellport. Photo: Bruce Weber, 1982
In 1984 Bea Miller wanted to dedicate the December issue to “the Englishwoman.” Bruce and I were inspired to do a story with a Cecil Beaton mood in the country gardens belonging to the great-aunt of British Vogue’s features editor, Patrick Kinmonth. We were also influenced by a magical shoot we had done earlier that year at Karl Lagerfeld’s French country estate. It was conceived as the publicity campaign for Lagerfeld’s first collection in his own name, and the photographs were taken in the fairy-tale forest surrounding his chateau in Brittany.
The models, Linda Spierings and Lynne Koester, were both tall, willowy, and spritelike, with dark hair. The clothes were beautiful and chic, though not perhaps very Bruce. He, of course, wanted to do woodland nudes. Meanwhile, the women representing Lagerfeld’s company had become more and more agitated throughout the day as they saw the high heels and jewelry that accompanied the clothes on the catwalk not being used in any of the photographs. To tactfully remove them from the scene, Bruce suggested they go off and find some men to put in our pictures. Meanwhile, Didier, who had been wandering around the forest, discovered a huge tree stump covered with moss and ivy that he thought might be useful as a hat, and he promptly put it on a model’s head.
Hud
Everything had started to look surreal and mysterious. The company women then returned, having picked up a choice of two hitchhikers, one a French soldier with a shaved head, the other an unremarkable local lad. The men seemed taken aback by the scene. I really think they were expecting an orgy. “Can you make them outfits out of ivy?” Bruce asked me eagerly. And so I did—dressing them up over their underwear, I hasten to add. Sadly, the resulting pictures were never used, despite their being close to my heart and loved by Karl. They were replaced in the campaign by some rather boring catwalk photographs.
Hud
While we were preparing for the Vogue shoot in the English countryside, Didier and I had been watching Patrick’s great-aunt prepare some exquisitely hued dried flowers from the garden—she preserved them with glycerin—and we were determined to use some in the pictures. The resulting story, with the faded, dusty-colored flowers pinned to slightly old-fashioned, English-looking clothes, or arranged in the hair with yards and yards of tulle, was ravishingly romantic. I even forgot the heart-stopping panic I felt as the girls were being photographed hurdling over the great-aunt’s precious rose beds.
Back at Vogue, I waited expectantly for the pictures to turn up. But Bruce had done a layout of his own and made them into a crazy scrapbook. So what eventually arrived were collages with the photographs of the models cut out and stuck down, and no sign at all of the incredibly atmospheric gardens. “This was not what I envisaged,” Bea Miller said evenly when she saw them. In the end, Bruce did hand over the sublime, unadulterated images, but because he felt artistically betrayed, he was rather upset with me.
Later we made up, and one of the first bouquets I received when embarking on my short career at Calvin Klein after leaving British Vogue was from Bruce and Nan.
X
ON
DIDIER
In which
Grace learns that
love means
never having
to run out of
hair spray.
Things with Didier were becoming more serious. I wasn’t pushing for marriage, though. I haven’t got such a great track record in that department. Besides, the state of marriage seems to bother him, too. If Didier wants to be somewhere, it is because he really wants to be there and not because he is being forced.
In a relationship you have to give a lot. You can’t be too selfish. You can’t have everything your own way, and you do give up a certain independence. Living with someone all the time is great if you keep it surprising and don’t allow yourself to become too complacent. It’s also highly risky doing a job with someone you are living with, so I’m always nervous whenever Didier and I are slated to work together on a shoot. First, he is a problematic traveler because he is very susceptible to sound, and if the room we get is too noisy, we may have to move several times. On a recent shoot in England, we stayed at Brighton’s Grand Hotel, which was famously targeted in a bomb blast when Margaret Thatcher and the delegates for the Conservative Party conference were grouped there in 1984. Here, we moved rooms six times before we found one to his liking. Second, because Didier likes a touch of intrigue and game-playing, you have to be prepared to be tweaked around when he’s working on a shoot. “Am I doing a catalog?” is a favorite sarcastic remark if he is ever so gently reminded to get a move on with the subject’s hair. On the other hand, he is very, very romantic. Since the first days of our friendship, whenever we worked together, he always wrote me wonderfully flattering notes afterward in formal, old-fashioned English. They said things like “Thank you very much for inviting me” or “It gives me great pleasure to be in your company.” Or he would send me bunches of pretty flowers, usually roses, or a postcard of some beautiful painting from an exhibition he had seen.
“Zis is ’ow we do ze Kitty Comb-out”
Our first summer together, without my knowing, Didier went out and bought a sailing boat. He knew that, as a child, I had been slightly jealous when my father built a little wooden dinghy for my sister and me and named it Rosie, after her. As a further surprise, when we went to collect his boat from Shelter Island, where it had been shipped, I discovered Didier had named it Grace.
At the time he hadn’t a clue how to sail, and going out with him became rather unnerving, as the waters around Long Island Sound can be quite choppy and the winds quite squally. Often the fog comes down with little or no notice and obliterates the coastline. These days I seem to have lost my pioneering spirit, and I feel rather guilty, as I refuse to sail with him unless there is absolutely no wind. Then of course we become becalmed, and that drives him really crazy, since we have to use the engine to return home.
As a child, Didier used to visit his mother at the veterinary clinic where she worked. There, it was his job to groom the cats and dogs. This is probably where his love of hairstyling began. The vet had some very important clients, the famous Carita sisters, who owned a hair salon in Paris. I think they agreed to take Didier on as an apprentice after seeing what a good job he had done on their poodle.
I faintly remember working with him as far back as 1972. I was still going out with Duc, and we were photographing in Paris for British Vogue. As well as being the fashion editor on that shoot, I was modeling. The photos had me standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with two other girls and wearing the same forties Yves Saint Laurent outfit I wore when I dressed to impress Tina Chow. Because my hair was enjoying one of its more unsightly in-between moments, I had a hat clamped tightly to my head and was the only one not to have my hair styled by Didier. Afterward I worked with him rather a lot with all the new young French photographers.
Didier likes telling people how much I ignored him back then and how I even acted in a snooty manner toward him. As if I would! He spoke no English, so I just couldn’t understand a word he said. Besides, he was married then, so it was impossible to get together.
Years later I discovered he hadn’t particularly liked me at first; in fact, when I modeled, he always thought I was terrible-looking and not pretty at all—at least not his idea of pretty. As it was, in his early days of working for British Vogue, he fancied my close friend and colleague Polly Hamilton much more than he did me, until they fell out thanks to their mutual stubbornness. But for some time he retained an eye for a pretty French girl, as I would discover on a rather tense shoot in Paris with the grand royal photographer Tony Snowdon.
Didier with Bart & Pumpkin
During his heyday, Snowdon always gave fashion pictures a certain stature, rather like Annie Leibovitz does now, although he liked to play at being humble. “Call me Tony,” he would say, but if you crossed the line and wer
e overfamiliar, it was back to “Snowdon, actually.” When we traveled to Paris to shoot the couture collections on the young French actress Isabelle Pasco, then the partner of the iconoclastic film director Jean-Jacques Beineix, the French press got wind of it and started chasing after us. But as I tried ushering the royal photographer back into our chauffeured car to keep him from being bothered, I realized he was getting terribly annoyed with me because he actually rather enjoyed it.
Our couture shoot was fairly hazardous. We worked in a very small studio with one of those very large Lipizzan dressage horses. Snowdon wanted the animal to rear up in front of Isabelle, who was improbably tiny and stood on a pile of telephone books so her long dress wouldn’t concertina on the ground. Meanwhile, I grew more and more furious because Didier, who was semi-officially my boyfriend by then as well as the hairdresser on the shoot, had become rather taken with her. So every time I caught him being very French and flirting while he combed her hair, I rushed in on the pretext of adjusting her dress and stuck a pin in her behind. Yes, I can be a bitch, too, sometimes.
Grace Page 14
