It was there that Mum met the actor James Fox, twenty-eight years old, a tall, blond, remarkably handsome, Harrow-educated British movie star. Everyone called him Willy. His father was the famous theatrical agent Robin Fox. Willy was working with Dirk on a film called The Servant, directed by Joe Losey. One night he came to Maida Avenue for dinner, and I felt him appraising me—sizing me up. I was seventeen, and I looked back. I was wearing a chocolate-brown velvet dress with a lace collar that I’d found at Antiquarius. I was aware that I looked fetching. I heard him tell Mum he thought I was beautiful.
Later that week, she came to my room and said, “Willy Fox wants to take you to dinner. I’m not sure if I should let you go.” I said, “Oh, Mum, please. I’ll be good.” And she said, “All right.” I think she had a word with him too; quite honestly, she must have felt that if it was not going to be her, at least it would be me. So she consented.
Willy took me to a small house in Belgravia, in a mews called Three Kings Yard. That night, I met his friends the actress Deborah Dixon and the director Donald Cammell. I thought they were the coolest, most attractive, most seductive people. A joint was passed around and we ate lamb stew. Willy drove me home and kissed me. We arranged for him to pick me up during school hours the following day; it was to be our secret.
He had a new purple Lotus Elan, the color of the red cabbage leaf he’d given as a sample for the custom paint job. As we drove out to the country, he put a tape in the machine, and for the first time in my life I heard Otis Redding. We had lunch at the home of the production designer for his new film, Isadora. Afterward, when we returned to London, he took me back to Three Kings Yard and made love to me. Thus began a short series of after-school visits, none lasting longer than a few hours. I had taken to getting myself to Belgravia as well, so I was waiting for him one afternoon alone in his apartment when Donald Cammell walked in from next door. “What are you doing here alone? Come keep me company. Let’s have a smoke.”
Whatever it was he gave me, everything went sideways. Donald Cammell was a dangerous man. I don’t know what he said to Willy, but when I saw Willy next, he said, “Did Donald go after you? What was he thinking? You’re my girlfriend.” But I wasn’t. He had a girlfriend—Andee Cohen, an American he’d met months before. I heard from Mum that she was coming to London and that Willy was meeting her at the airport. Mum had no idea that Willy and I had slept together. I began to dread seeing Mum’s little silver car parked outside 31 Maida Avenue. It meant she’d be home. That she’d ask questions, require answers.
Andee looked like a Gernreich model, with a Vidal Sassoon haircut—pretty and stick thin. She and Willy were obviously very much in love and demonstrative in public. I remember going to a lunch with Mum at Leslie Waddington’s apartment and Willy and Andee disappearing into a bedroom directly afterward. I never confronted him.
The winter before, I had gone to Klosters and stayed with the Viertels. One day, I found myself in a blizzard at the top of the Graubünden alpine range with Peter, and we almost got lost in the whiteout; he kept his humor and didn’t falter, but I could see he had a moment’s pause, blind in the freezing cold. That night, I met a handsome young man in a floor-length wolf coat whose name was Baron Arnaud de Rosnay. He was a photographer and was dating Marisa Berenson. I danced with him at the disco in town. Percy Sledge was singing “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Before I left Switzerland, we had exchanged telephone numbers. Now Arnaud had broken up with Marisa and wanted to come to London to take my photograph for British Vogue.
When he arrived at the house, my mother took one look at Arnaud and thought he was fabulous. She couldn’t understand that I wanted nothing to do with him; Mum and I posed for him, walking together in Irish capes along the bank of the Regents Canal. It was a nice day, but I didn’t even invite him to stay over for dinner. Willy Fox had broken my heart.
One morning as I was getting into a taxicab on Maida Avenue with Mum, I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my lower abdomen. I must have temporarily turned white, because she noticed and was concerned, asking if I was all right. I answered that yes, I was. I did not want her to take me to a doctor to get examined. The truth would come out—that I was only seventeen and already having sex would be shocking to her—and she would tell Dad and all hell would break loose. So when the pain recurred, again I said nothing. Eventually, it went away and I thought no more about it.
• • •
I loved Deborah Dixon’s haircut. It curled at the nape of her neck like the marble portrait of a young Greek boy. I decided I wanted to look like her. So off I went to Vidal Sassoon, but only weeks before I was due to start work on A Walk with Love and Death.
Dad was seriously displeased and saw this as a sign of rebellion, sure that I had chopped off my hair as some form of protest. But the truth was, I didn’t want to do the film, and I hadn’t reckoned on its coming to fruition in any way.
Mum took me shopping and bought me a yellow wool suit that we hoped Dad would like. Days later, as I was fretting about an acting debut I did not want to make, I got a call from British Vogue asking me to pose for my first portrait with David Bailey. At this point, modeling was much more alluring to me than acting in a movie for Dad. It was remarkable how things came so easily to me. In every generation a flock of pretty girls was released into society with the help of their mothers, via the pages of the glamour magazines. They wore the bright plumage of the newly initiated, and the adornments of their ancestors only served to enhance their youth. Often they were the progeny of good bloodlines—rich, clever, famous fathers and the beautiful women who married them. I was no exception to this fortunate rule, but in retrospect I remember wishing I had something to fight for. This was the beginning of a habit of making things harder for myself than they needed to be.
The first time I had seen Bailey was across a crowded room at a cocktail party in Jules and Joyce Buck’s flat in Belgravia when I was twelve and he was in his late twenties. He was not tall but seemed physically strong—that is to say, he filled his jeans. He was wearing a black leather jacket and black stack-heeled cowboy boots. He had black eyes and shaggy black hair. Beside him, in a soft pink ultra-minidress, with long pale gold hair, sat the ravishing Catherine Deneuve. I was introduced to them as a child is introduced to grown-ups. I can still see them, like day and night across the room—light and dark, her cool and his intensity.
His reputation, of course, preceded him. Bailey was known to have been the discoverer and lover and photographer of the other most beautiful woman in the world, Jean Shrimpton, who was living with the handsomest man in the world, Terence Stamp. I had passed them walking toward the Albany in Piccadilly once, and had literally gasped at their collective radiance; she, with her doe eyes, perfect pout, and pointed little chin, was hanging on his arm. Many of the iconic photographs of the day were Bailey’s. Then Penelope Tree became his girlfriend. I had seen them come out of an elevator once in Paris. She was an amazing-looking girl, with endless legs in thigh-high boots and no hips at all. Her eyes were widely spaced, with a distant expression, like those of a beautiful insect.
I’d been in the dressing room for hours, trying without success to learn the knack of applying individual lashes to the lower lids. Glue was everywhere, my eyes were a sticky mess, I was on the verge of tears. Celia Hammond, my favorite model of the moment, popped her head with its mane of silky blond hair through the doorway to say goodbye to the editor. She was even more exquisite in the flesh than in her photographs. As the door closed, I was left in her wake as if the sun had disappeared behind a cloud. I was out of my league. It was dark in the studio except for the blinking of a strobe light under a silver umbrella. Against the wall, a sheet of gray no-seam paper was suspended from the ceiling.
Bailey looked me up and down and said cheerfully, “Hello, missy.”
I felt both nervous and defensive. “Please don’t call me that,” I said coolly.
Bailey took my picture in a version of the haute gypsy look that Mar
isa Berenson and Penelope Tree had made popular—with eyes like starfish. I faced the lens warily, as if it were a dog about to bite. But Bailey seemed not too concerned with my negativity. He clicked off a few rolls and that was it. The end of the session.
When I got home the next afternoon from school, Mum said, “Dad wants you to go to Paris tonight. It’s for hair and wardrobe fittings for A Walk with Love and Death.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Do I have to?”
“I guess, darling, if you want to be an actress.”
I changed into the yellow wool suit and left for Heathrow airport in a taxi. When I arrived in Paris, I was taken for costume fittings with the artist Leonor Fini at her atelier. I tried on a voluminous wig with clusters of gold braid at Alexandre de Paris’s salon. He was Elizabeth Taylor’s hairdresser. That day, student riots broke out on the Left Bank, and all the flights from Orly to London were canceled. Making every attempt to avoid my father, I was stranded for the next four days in my yellow wool suit, which had started to pill and stretch, without so much as a hairbrush or toothpaste in my possession. Finally, I took a taxi through the demonstration to get on a plane back to London.
The wheels were in motion for A Walk with Love and Death. The studio wanted still photographs, and the important British photographer Norman Parkinson was engaged at significant expense to do a sitting with me. I applied my usual mask of makeup, with additional eyelashes, pearly highlighter, and the sweep of black shadow in the crease of the eye. When Dad saw the stills, he was horrified and demanded that a session be set up with Eve Arnold.
Eve was a Magnum photographer who had worked on The Misfits. We were sent off to some ruins in the Irish countryside with explicit instructions that my face be unsullied by so much as a speck of makeup. I felt unpleasantly exposed, but Eve was as kind as she could be and made no judgments. I grew to love her very much, and we worked together often throughout the years.
• • •
A Walk with Love and Death was at first postponed, and later the location was moved to Austria, as Paris was still in a state of unrest. Assaf Dayan, the son of the Israeli prime minister and war hero Moshe Dayan, was to play my love interest. But I had a crush on the boy who was playing my cousin in the film, Anthony Corlan. The three of us were taking off to the local funfair to ride go-karts in the evenings. I was distracted and having trouble learning my part, and avoiding Dad as much as possible in my off hours. During a scene where I was to describe the murder of my father, a nobleman (played by Dad, incidentally), I forgot my lines, and he lit into me in front of the crew with such ferocity that I hyperventilated. In another scene, I was to kiss Assaf, half-nude on a riverbank, and I did this two inches away from the nose of my angry, impatient father.
For the final fortnight of the shoot, we flew to Italy to do some exteriors. I was asked by the production department if I would go to the studio of the new set photographer to have my portrait taken for publicity stills for the movie. I was told to bring some personal clothes and jewelry. Midway through the session, I was surprised when he asked me to remove my top, and although it made me uncomfortable, I complied with his request. I had done several scenes in the film that required partial nudity, and assumed it was part of the assignment.
• • •
I was lonesome for Mum. Before I left for Austria, I’d met a new friend, an art student, at one of our dinner parties. He was a friend of Peter Menegas and his name was Jeremy Railton. We’d begun a romance before I left London, and he was now staying as a guest at Maida Avenue, in my room, under my Chinese bedspread. He wrote that he was having a good time with Mum. But then Tony wrote that Mum had not been in good form lately and that the atmosphere in London was “approaching the tragic.” In his letter, he said he’d gone to her room a couple of days before to find her crying in her bed. She had claimed it was the weather, and he had put on a detached expression, because he did not want to engage in her personal problems, lest he get trapped.
Tony felt that her world must have crumbled as we became adults but that this was a fact of life, and to draw out the parting would make it all the more painful. He remarked that Mum was an exceptionally motherly woman; all her friends were children who needed looking after, which was one reason she had no older friends. But one old friend had returned to the scene—John Julius. It was a relationship that could hardly leave frivolity in its wake. Mum’s efforts to seem gay and lighthearted around him reminded Tony of bad funny postcards. He said that lighthearted was not the way she felt and that Mum was no actress. Tony and I had begun to dread Mum’s sadness, resenting that she confided her pain to her friends even as she isolated herself from us.
Tony offered to write to Dad on my behalf—since I found it hard to speak to him—or to speak to Dad with me in the room. He advised me that a concentrated study of literature was important, though achieving A-level exams was a little irrelevant if I was to be an actress. He pointed out that once I was able to judge a script’s artistic merit, I would be able to make up my mind whether it was worth my time. He apologized for sounding pompous and offered to come over to Austria, should it be helpful. I don’t think I ever acknowledged that letter. I felt that Mum had asked him to plea bargain with Dad for me.
Because I was under twenty-one when we filmed A Walk with Love and Death, my payment for the film was placed in a Swiss bank account. My father’s lawyers had made it all but impossible for me to access my own money. But on the way back from Austria, I went to the tiny town of Chur, nestled high in the Swiss Alps, and withdrew enough money to pay for a platinum watch Mum had talked about having seen in the window of Cartier on Bond Street.
Returning to London, I found myself, by an amusing twist of fate, in a twelve-seat airplane flying with the Monkees. I was wearing a fetching yellow, embroidered Afghan jacket that smelled strongly of goat. On a whim, I decided to be French and took to answering their polite line of questioning with Gallic shrugs and broken English. As the journey progressed through the snowy night, Davy Jones invited me to their concert, and upon arrival at Heathrow, Davy and his manager offered to drop me off at my house in their limousine. When we came to Maida Avenue, they walked me to my door. Mum opened it. “Bonjour, Maman!” I exclaimed, and I introduced them to her in heavily accented English. As they wandered back to their car, I waved—“Bonsoir”—and shut the door.
“Now, what was all that about?” asked Mum.
I was in my bedroom one morning, soon after I came back from A Walk with Love and Death, when Mum walked in holding a copy of an Italian soft-porn magazine. I think it was called Playman. Inside was a photograph of me, nude to the waist, with a bemused expression on my face.
“I cannot imagine how this happened,” said Mum. “Sometimes they use tricks, like putting your head on someone else’s body, but I know what you look like without your clothes on.”
I was embarrassed and ashamed and very worried about what Dad might do or say. But to his credit, he never spoke to me about the incident. Although I hate to think what happened to the photographer.
I wrapped the Cartier watch in its little red box in sheets and sheets of newspaper, so that Mum would think it was an enormous gift. It was almost worth all the problems I’d had on A Walk with Love and Death—a moment of great pride for me to be able to buy Mum something she desired.
• • •
A few months later I was asked by British Vogue to go to Paris to be photographed for the collections by David Bailey. I was flattered, and happily accepted. Upon arriving in Paris, I was surprised to learn that I would have a companion in the pictures, and I practically fell over when I learned that, ironically, it would be Willy Fox. All the next day, we worked for Bailey’s camera, and all day I tried to be cool and keep my distance. That night after shooting, we went to Castel’s, and there, lo and behold, was Arnaud de Rosnay. He and I danced and he said, “Come on, let’s go somewhere!”
I said, “I’m going back to the Crillon. Call me upstairs in half an hour.”<
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I returned to the hotel with the others, with Willy giving me the full press, determined to take me to his room. I pleaded fatigue and shut my door, and when Arnaud called a few minutes later, I ran downstairs and jumped into his Ferrari. We went to his aunt’s deserted mansion in the Bois de Boulogne and made love on his big wolf coat by candlelight till dawn. By my loose standards at the time, a fine case of revenge.
Arnaud was a sweetheart. A gorgeous athlete, a real old fashioned French playboy. He married one of James Goldsmith’s beautiful daughters, Isabel, and invented a board game called Petropolis, which was like Monopoly but with gold-dipped oil rigs to replace hotels and houses. He presented one of these games to me, much later, when he came to visit California. He disappeared not long after, in 1984, windsurfing to Taiwan on the China Seas.
• • •
I had been studying for A-levels at a crammers, Davies Laing and Dick, when Mum took me to a party at the apartment of Tony Richardson. He was one of the important film directors of the time, making quintessentially new-wave British films like A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Tom Jones, and The Charge of the Light Brigade. He told me that he and his partner Neil Hartley were mounting a stage production of Hamlet starring Nicol Williamson, and he suggested that I might like to try out for the role of Ophelia. I subsequently read for Tony but did not get the part. It went to Marianne Faithfull, the girlfriend of Mick Jagger. From the moment I saw her, I found her astonishingly pretty. In the dark overhang of the Roundhouse, where the play was in rehearsal, it felt like the interior of a great ship, and sitting in a halo of light, in a pink angora dress and white tights, she was the baddest angel I’d ever seen. So, as it happened, I didn’t mind at all when I got the chance to understudy her.
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Page 15
