FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (21 page)

There was a freshness and an excitement in the air: in the Sixties we began to think we could do anything – and when President and Mrs Kennedy, with their glamorous, Camelot, new-kind-of-leader aura, visited London that year, they seemed to be a part of it, and I joined the crowds waiting for hours in the Mall to watch them flash past, dazzlingly, on their way to dine with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

Two and a half years later I was on my way back to my flat in Battersea from a press trip to Oslo, when I was stopped outside the main door of our block by Mr Mead, who lived on the ground floor and was a sort of scruffy, self-appointed porter; he told me President Kennedy had been murdered. It was shocking, impossible, as if a friend had been killed, and it seemed at the time like the end of an era – I think it was in a way.

10

I had decided to rent the little flat in Battersea when Margaret, the girlfriend whose place I shared in Chelsea, went off travelling in Iran. Now I was on my own, free, for the first time, and I decorated my sitting room in shocking pink and orange – not very Little Grey Rabbit, but it was to match a rug I bought in a sale in a shop called Casa Pupo. Actually I wasn't entirely on my own because I shared the flat with an abandoned budgerigar that Mr Mead, the porter, gave me. I called the bird Jeremiah and let it fly around the kitchen until one day it escaped; I said a sad mental goodbye to him, but, astonishingly, a few days later a budgie turned up tapping at someone else's window in our block. Mr Mead heard about this and we went, armed with the cage, and sure enough it was Jeremiah who flapped straight in without a backward glance at liberty – you could almost hear his little bird brain going PHEW!

Mr Mead loved breaking bad news. He hovered on the pavement all day, ready to intercept passers-by, and his opening words were always: ‘An 'orrible thing 'appened 'ere last night/this morning/yesterday.' In those days Battersea had not yet been gentrified, so horrible things happened quite often; my neighbour was stabbed (not fatally) when he asked a man not to pee on the landing outside our flats.

One day, as I came out on my way to work, Mr Mead cornered me and said: ‘An 'orrible thing 'appened 'ere this morning: they stole Mrs Brown's TV set; can you believe it, they walked in bold as brass, went upstairs, picked the lock and walked out with it, just like those two blokes there' – we both looked at two men carrying a big television set across the pavement. ‘How awful,' I responded and started walking towards the bus stop only to be stopped in my tracks a moment or so later by Mr Mead's shouts – the TV we'd just watched being carried out of the block was
his
.

Moira lived in a flat further up Prince of  Wales Drive and we went to work together in my Mini  Van. I have always been bad in the mornings and was usually running late, and as we batted along the South Bank, past Big Ben across the river, Moira used to joke, ‘I hope to God that clock's fast.' Mrs Carter once said to me, ‘Some people are paid for their time, and some for their talent, and in your case, dearie, I must assume it is the latter.' She used to ring me in the mornings at about eight when I was still fast asleep and say, ‘Did I wake you, dear girl?' ‘No! No!' I'd practically shout in my most hectically energetic voice. ‘I've been up for hours.' I still answer the phone in that voice early in the morning, just in case.

One of the good things about being partly responsible for Mrs Carter's pictures was that she had to take me to Paris for the collections so that I could organise them there too. On second thoughts, I must be looking back through rose-tinted glasses because being in charge of photographing the Paris collections was frantic and stressful and incredibly hard work, and not much fun at all, except in retrospect. And getting there and back took so much time because I was terrified of flying, so used to travel on the overnight boat train from Victoria to the Gare du Nord.

During the collections, I was supposed to spend the days going to the fashion shows with Mrs Carter, which usually meant fighting my way into a place at the very back of a salon, or sitting on a radiator, or on the corner of someone else's chair, because, as a mere assistant, I had not been allocated anywhere to sit. (I'll always remember Gabrielle, the press officer at Yves Saint Laurent, who used to make sure I had a decent seat.) Being American, and chief fashion editor of an important paper, Mrs Carter herself was something of a celeb and would always have a place of honour in the front row, and just occasionally I would get to sit beside her and the rather camp American illustrator, Joe Eula, she always employed for the collections. I remember a Balmain show when Joe looked at the models with their bright-blue eyeshadow and pink cheeks and red lips, and whispered, ‘
Maquillage
by Walt Disney.' Once, Mrs Carter shocked everyone – including me – by leaving a Cardin show in the middle. Pierre Cardin's collections involved hundreds of garments and his shows dragged interminably, but this time Mrs Carter suddenly stood up and turned towards the exit. ‘Madame Carter,' cried the
vendeuse
standing in the salon, ‘
Ce n'est pas finie
.' ‘Well, it's
finie
as far as I am concerned,' said Mrs Carter firmly and continued on her journey.

Nowadays the Paris collections have become spectacles held in extraordinary venues, but in my day they took place in the actual showrooms of Dior or Chanel or Cardin or whoever, and I did once have the thrill of seeing Mademoiselle Chanel herself, reflected in mirrors, sitting on the staircase in her showroom in the Rue Cambon watching her own collection (exactly as she appears at the end of the film
Coco Before Chanel
).

We assistants were not invited to the glamorous parties that took place during Paris Fashion Week, but once in a blue moon Mrs Carter would take me with her – at one reception she asked me if I would like to meet her friend Gregory Peck and of course the answer was YES, but as I followed her through the densely crowded room someone squashed a chocolate éclair on my bosom (I was in a pale-blue silk suit) so I dropped out. A decade later, though, I was interviewing his French wife, Veronique, at the Savoy Hotel in London, when ‘Greg', as she called him, came back early, and not only did I meet him, but he invited AW and me to stay with them in France – we were too overwhelmed to go. Veronique had been a journalist in Paris and they met when she was sent by her paper to interview him. They got on well, and next day he telephoned her – she was out, and a fellow journalist answered his call and left a message on her typewriter saying ‘Gregory Peck called.' She thought it was a joke.

As she viewed the collections, Mrs Carter would note down the outfits she wanted photographed for her pages, and then, at night (we had to work at night because the clothes were shown to buyers during the day), I and whoever was Mrs Carter's junior assistant at the time (they changed quite frequently) would go and collect the outfits from Dior or Saint Laurent or whoever, take them to be photographed in the studio we had hired for the week, and then return them. Of course all the fashion editors would choose the same star outfits, so you had to hang around for hours in the middle of the night, waiting for
Vogue
or
Harper's
or the
Telegraph
to bring back the garment you wanted so that you could rush it to the studio. The worst thing that could happen was if Mrs Carter chose a dress or suit that had been shown on Hiroko, Pierre Cardin's star Japanese model, because she was so tiny that no one else could fit into her clothes, which meant you would have to go and collect Hiroko herself from her apartment and take her to the studio, as well as fetching her outfit from Cardin. Writing this, I can't believe the hassle we went through; but rushing round Paris in the middle of the night with armfuls of clothes, or getting food and drinks for everyone in the studio at three in the morning, wasn't always the worst of it – you could hit an unexpected problem: my very dear friend the photographer Terence Donovan, who was going through some personal difficulties at the time, announced that he couldn't photograph anything unless he could listen to Churchill's wartime speeches. I can't remember how, but we actually managed to get the recorded speeches (it was through the British Embassy in Paris in some way) and a
Sunday Times
colleague went off and bought a gramophone and lugged it to the studio, and we got the collections photographed. (Astonishing to think that now the speeches could have simply been downloaded from a mobile phone.)

My most stressful Paris collections experience was after the launch of the
Sunday Times
colour magazine in 1962; but I'll come back to that in a moment.

Giving readers a free magazine with their Sunday newspaper was an American idea which our editor, Denis Hamilton, was the first to introduce in Britain – it was such an innovation that to start with they called it the
Sunday Times Supplement
so as not to scare ‘real' magazine producers. When it came to designing the launch cover, it was decided by Michael Rand, the art director, that it should feature the things that represented the country at its best – British icons, if you like – and I was asked to book Bailey to do photographs of Jean Shrimpton in something representing the new youthful British fashions. I chose a Mary Quant dress in grey flannel and we went down to the Thames by Lots Road Power Station to do the pictures; it was freezing cold. Later, when he laid out the cover, Michael Rand added a picture of a footballer – and that was the one-page portrait of Britain in 1962: football, Bailey, Jean and Mary Quant. Like ‘Autumn Girl', this became
Bailey's
picture – no one ever mentions that I was involved at all, but I guess that's life; anyway, I am mentioning it now.

When the time came for the magazine's first coverage of the Paris collections, I talked Mrs Carter (who was now fashion editor of both newspaper
and
magazine) into taking Bailey and Jean to Paris to do the pictures because I was so at ease and happy working with both of them by then. Mrs Carter needed persuading because she hadn't, at the start, at all approved of the takeover of the fashion world by youngsters: she had refused to look at Mary Quant's clothes, for instance, but now she was just beginning to come round to the idea (she later considered Mary as important a fashion designer as Chanel and Dior). Her conversion was partly because the American press, particularly the powerful (and terrifying) Diana Vreeland of
Vogue
, who is said to have coined the word ‘Youthquake' for what was going on in London, loved it all so much. (That season in Paris – or it might have been the next one – I saw Mrs Vreeland kiss David Bailey's hand at a party and I knew that he would fly so high that I would probably not be doing the Paris collections with him for very much longer.)

Bailey and Jean and I went to Paris with Mrs Carter; this was the very first time he had covered the Paris collections, and it got off on a bad footing when his camera broke and we had to borrow another one from a charming Australian photographer called Alec Murray. He lent Bailey one of his without a quibble, which was pretty decent in view of the fact that young snappers like Bailey were shortly to put the old ones like Alec out of work.

For some obscure reason, Mrs Carter wanted the pictures done in the gardens at Versailles, which meant me keeping the clothes that were to be photographed in my hotel room overnight so we could set off at first light. One of the dresses she'd chosen was a long evening gown from Nina Ricci; it was called ‘Ondine' and was made of yards and yards of pleated pale-green chiffon. I remember it only too well – it is engraved on my soul actually – because I tried the dress on in my hotel room that evening (what girl wouldn't have?), stood on the bed to get a better view in the mirror, lost my balance and fell, putting my foot through the hem and ripping a huge hole. I sat up half the night sewing it up with dozens of little hotel mending kits I got from the concierge. When I returned the dress next day my heart was pounding – I had visions of them charging me thousands of pounds, but no one noticed the tear.

At Versailles it was bitterly cold (it was January) and Jean – who had to change in the open air – was freezing to death, but she and Bailey just got on with it and the pictures were great (they were in black and white so you couldn't see that Jean was blue). When I think of Linda Evangelista's famous comment about not getting out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day, or read about Naomi Campbell's tantrums, I think back to that morning at Versailles and realise how lucky I was to have worked in fashion at a time when everyone was a friend, and we were all excited amateurs, learning on the job, trying our best to get our ideas across – and fashion had not yet become corporate Big Business.

I had other reasons to be grateful to Bailey and Jean: they often helped out if I needed an urgent picture taken. Not long after we'd all come back from Paris, I had a dozen outfits to get photographed for the
Sunday Times
colour magazine. The photographer I'd chosen went on an alcoholic binge and, though I had booked him and the model for
two days
, he didn't manage to take a single picture.

I was panicking – by now it was Friday evening, I had nothing to give the magazine, and the deadline was Monday morning. I rang Bailey and implored him to photograph the clothes on Jean over the weekend (they lived together at the time). He said he'd try if I ferried them over to his house. On the Monday morning he told me that they hadn't managed to get around to doing the pictures, but it was a typical Bailey joke – the transparencies were on their way in a taxi.

At around this time, a model I was working with changed my life. She was Nicole de Lamargé, the girlfriend (and favourite model of the day) of the photographer and art director Peter Knapp, who, together with its dynamic founder and editor Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, had made the French
Elle
magazine the most sought-after across the globe. Nicole had come from Paris to work in London for a spell; she was the most professional model girl in the world, a master of make-up who could transform her face in a dozen different ways; she invented cheek-shading and highlighting to give ‘good bones' as well as painted-on freckles and eyelashes (ages before Twiggy); and she always posed with a full-length mirror in front of her so that she could see exactly how to ‘work' the clothes she was wearing. I had booked Norman Eales to do my photographs that day; I loved working with him – like John French in the Fifties, he knew how to create real
glamour
in his pictures, and I have never understood why he is not on the list when people talk about the great Sixties photographers David Bailey, Brian Duffy and Terence Donovan; perhaps it was because, being gay, he didn't fit the macho, laddish narrative the newspapers had created about them, or maybe it was because he worked mostly for
Cosmopolitan
magazine and not
Vogue
. (Before it came out in 1972 I was interviewed, among many others I suspect, for the post of editing the British edition of
Cosmopolitan
by Helen Gurley Brown – famous for her book
Sex and the Single Girl
and for turning American
Cosmo
into a spectacularly successful magazine. She asked me whether, as editor, I would be thinking of the magazine
every minute of every hour of every day . . .
She might have noticed my hesitation before I said, ‘Yes of
course
,' because I didn't get the job.)