FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (22 page)

Anyway, Nicole and I were, quite unusually, waiting in the dressing room at
Vogue
studios for Norman to turn up, when she suddenly asked if she could do my make-up. I'd come out of my Beatnik phase by then, and can't remember now what kind of half-hearted job I did with lipstick and eyeshadow, pre-Nicole – but that morning, she transformed my face from completely nondescript into something quite glamorous by painting on rather extreme eye make-up involving white highlights and grey shadow and black pencil and drawn-on false eyelashes. ‘Baboon eyes', my aunt called them when she first saw my new look, but I loved this version of myself and from that moment I never went out without my eye make-up, even though it took ages to put on.

Back at the newspaper, after much scheming and plotting between me and Meriel, my dear friend from the
Daily Express
, Mrs Carter hired Meriel as her new assistant. ‘What is your star sign, dearie?' asked Mrs Carter the first day she arrived for work. ‘Libra,' said Meriel. ‘Oh dear,' said Mrs C, ‘I am Libra too, I am afraid we will not get on.' She was right – they were a disastrous combination – but it ended up happily, with Meriel becoming a brilliant fashion editor of the colour magazine, while Mrs Carter and I stayed in charge of fashion on the main paper.

For me, one of the best things about Meriel coming to the
Sunday Times
was that we got to work at the Paris collections together. In January 1964 (before Meriel moved over to the magazine) we were told by Mrs Carter to cover an opening show by a more or less unknown designer André Courrèges; she herself couldn't be there for some reason. We went along – and became part of fashion history: it was a spectacular, innovative collection in which Courrèges showed beautiful, simple clothes in pale gaberdine fabric, with skirts
above the knee
, worn with short flat white boots. It shook fashion like an 8.0 earthquake. I don't think Mrs Carter believed us when we reported on the collection – especially the short skirts – but she soon had to, because the tremors were being felt everywhere. Jean Shrimpton wore a short skirt to the Melbourne Races the following year and made banner headlines – there couldn't have been more fuss if she'd gone topless, though when you look at the photographs now, the skirt length seems positively demure. There has always been controversy about who invented the miniskirt – was it Mary Quant or Courrèges, or even John Bates? My answer would be Courrèges – because I saw the skirts at that collection with my own eyes, and they were well above the knee, and I'd never come across anything like them before in London.

I missed Meriel when she finally went off to the magazine, but if she hadn't gone to work in colour, my favourite story about her would never have happened – I have heard various versions as it gets repeated over and over again, but this is the true one, straight from the horse's mouth. Meriel went on a fashion shoot to Goa with the Dutch photographer Sacha, her partner and a model girl. One afternoon they came across a shop selling the most wonderful clothes – Indian-style tunics and trousers in pale faded cottons. They were wildly excited and started pulling the outfits off the shelves, and then Meriel said, ‘We must be organised about this: we'll make a pile of the things we like, and then we'll find out how much they cost.' At which point the owner of the establishment said, ‘Oh, madame, I am so sorry but this is not a shop, it is a laundry.'

11

People always put the Sixties and illicit drugs together (if you can remember the Sixties you weren't really there etc.), but in the early years of the decade no one took drugs, except speed, which we thought was a slimming tablet. I interviewed Mary Quant about twenty years after her heyday and in the course of the conversation asked whether she'd taken drugs. She frowned at me as though I was being silly: ‘Of course not,' she said.

I do remember Harold Carlton, an artist friend who lived in New York, coming back to London and telling me about LSD. Should I try it? I wondered, and Harold said, ‘It's up to you, I will give you a sugar lump with LSD on it and you can decide.' He gave me the lump and I put it in my sugar bowl while I thought about it. In fact, I more or less forgot about it until a couple of days later when, in the office, I remembered that my cleaning lady was due in my flat that morning, and she took sugar in her tea and PERHAPS SHE WOULD PUT THE LSD IN HER TEA AND GO CRAZY. I rang Harold hysterically, and he told me there was no LSD on the sugar lump – ‘I would never have done that to you,' he said. (I later discovered that this cleaning lady had, over time, stolen nearly all the beautiful clothes I had acquired, at wholesale prices, as a fashion editor, so I rather wished that the sugar lump had been laced with a triple dose of LSD, and that she
had
taken it.)

Harold Carlton invented the graphic letter in which, instead of writing in the normal way, you stuck pictures taken in a photo-booth on to the paper and wrote witty captions for them. I persuaded my assistant, Edwina, to come with me to Woolworths in Holborn to help me with a return photo-letter to Harold. We took a bag of accessories and were in the booth for a long time, dressing up, putting on hats and make-up for the different pictures, when suddenly, under the curtain, a man exposed himself. We cowered in the corner, cringing as far from the horrible sight as we could – we worried it might be in the picture, in which case Harold would think we'd gone too far – and then I plucked up the courage and pulled the curtain back and told the exposer to go away. He was a weedy little bloke and ran off looking scared.

It wasn't illegal substances in the early Sixties, but cigarettes and alcohol that we consumed in large quantities. Everyone smoked everywhere – in theatres and cinemas and planes and through meals: there was some public debate about whether it was bad manners to smoke between courses, but we were smoking between
mouthfuls
; the cigarettes would be smouldering away in ashtrays next to our plates as we alternated a forkful of food with a puff on the fag.

Alcohol was responsible for most of the stupid scrapes I got into. To my embarrassment, even as I write this, one of them involved Gerald Scarfe, the great cartoonist. The story started in France. Meriel and Michael Rand, the art director of the colour magazine, were always thinking up new ways of covering the Paris collections, and one year Gerald Scarfe was invited to
draw
the shows, particularly the audiences of celebs and important fashion editors: Eugenia Sheppard of the
Herald Tribune
, Diana Vreeland of American
Vogue
, Beatrix Miller of British
Vogue
, Winefride Jackson of the
Telegraph
, Iris Ashley of the
Daily Mail
, etc.

We stayed together in the Hôtel de La Trémoille – Meriel and I always stayed there for the Paris collections; in fact we got to know it so well that when, later on, the hotelier Charles Forte took over the establishment and refurbished it, we bought the old brass beds that had been in our rooms. Anyway, at some stage during this visit Gerald mentioned that he never liked to see his cartoons framed as they were not meant to be ‘art' but commentary.

More than a year after this, Meriel and I and Derek, my boyfriend of the time, happened to be invited to dinner by friends who were renting an apartment in Gerald's house, and in the stairwell there were some of his cartoons,
framed
. By the end of the evening, we had all had far too much to drink and, giggling like fools, we decided that Derek and I should steal all the pictures. With our friends' help we unhooked them from the walls and loaded them into my Mini and drove home (no drink-driving rules in those days) across the river to my flat in Battersea.

Next morning it was the Wake of Shame as, through my dreadful hangover, I remembered the crime I had committed. I was still in the flat, desperately late for work, wondering what on earth to do, when Meriel rang from the
Sunday Times
office, where Gerald was employed at that time. ‘He is furious,' she whispered, ‘but says he will take no action if you return the pictures.' I drove my Mini back to Chelsea Embankment, parked at the end of the path to his house, and then carried in the cartoons – it took more than one journey – until they were all stacked by his front door. I have never felt so foolish, especially as I imagined he was probably watching from a window.

12

In 1965 the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon opened his first salon outside England, on Madison Avenue in New York. By now he was famous – apart from anything else, he cut Mary Quant's hair and she was even more famous, iconic even – so this opening, which was to be celebrated with a glittering party, was a major event in the fashion world, and the
Sunday Times
sent me to cover the story. It cost the newspaper a fortune, I discovered after I came home, because I couldn't decide which celebrity photo to wire to London with my story, so, being completely ignorant of the procedure, I sent them four or five. ‘You could have bought a little car with what that cost,' one of the printers told me later.

I don't know if all my generation of women were painfully shy and inept at handling predatory men, but I certainly was, and I seemed to give out such a feeble, ‘no threat' vibe that I was always being flashed at or followed on the tube. My worst experience – and it's painful to think it was my own fault – took place on that same visit to New York. A good friend (she was another English journalist there to write about Vidal Sassoon's new salon) asked me to make up a four for an evening at El Morocco, the most famous nightclub in New York; I would be a blind date for her American boyfriend's mate, an older man.

At the end of the evening my ‘date' said he would take me home, but instead, a chauffeur drove us to his apartment, where he asked me up for a coffee. I definitely didn't want to go, and asked if the chauffeur couldn't just take me home, but the chauffeur said it wasn't his business, and the ‘date' convinced me that there was no hidden agenda and I felt rude to refuse – we were all so ridiculously polite and naive in those days – so I went up with him and as soon as he'd closed the door of his apartment he jumped on me. I fought him furiously, and managed to get away, but in the course of the struggle he ripped my dress all down the back, and now I had to walk through the streets of New York at two in the morning to where I was staying with another English girlfriend, and my clothes were falling off me, and my hair was standing on end, and of course I had no phone. I remember being petrified that I'd be attacked again, and so thankful that New York was designed on a grid pattern so I couldn't get lost.

My sister Tessa had gone to work in Hong Kong, and I missed her so much that I saved up and went to visit her in my holidays – and there I was struck by what I thought was a terrific moneymaking idea. That year, 1966, Yves Saint Laurent had shown a series of spectacular, boldly striped dresses, just like knee-length T-shirts but entirely covered with sequins – no one had seen anything like them before. (It was an expensive copy of one of these that Norman Eales had photographed for me on Shirley Fossett, the trapeze artist.) Now, in Hong Kong, I could tell that it would probably not be too difficult to make much cheaper versions of these dresses out there. I knew absolutely nothing about how to set about doing this and in any case I had to go home, so I left it all in Tessa's hands, and after a couple of false trails, she managed to find someone who could copy the dresses, and they produced a handful of samples that I showed to Meriel when they arrived. Meriel thought they were stunning and decided to photograph them for the colour mag; she interviewed me about how they came into being and, without much consideration, I related Tessa's difficulties finding a manufacturer – mentioning that at one stage a Chinese businessman had taken her in a Rolls-Royce to look at a factory that turned out not to belong to him. (Tessa had told me she'd gone in a very expensive car, but I didn't know what it was . . . I just said Rolls-Royce because it was the most costly motor I could think of.)

Meriel's story appeared in the magazine and, next thing, the Hong Kong Government was suing the
Sunday Times
for damaging the island's manufacturing reputation. The only Rolls-Royce there, it turned out, belonged to the Governor. I had to go to Harry Evans, the editor at the time, and confess that I had lied about the car. Somehow he smoothed it all over, and that was the last I heard of it, but it kept me awake at night for months.

In Hong Kong, Tessa and I met a charming Chinese man Albert Poon; he had nothing to do with our efforts to make sequined dresses, but was keen to open a London-style boutique in Hong Kong – it would be a first for the island. Albert's father, a judge, had sent him to sixth form at Millfield in Somerset where, he told us, sixth-form boys were allowed to smoke, but just
pipes
; only sixth-form girls could smoke cigarettes.  Albert was hilarious about his own Chinese/English culture clashes. Some time after he left school the new posh friends he'd made there invited him to go shooting and, not knowing the protocol for such an outing,  Albert had accepted the invitation and turned up with something like a machinegun – they were appalled. ‘Poon,' they cried, ‘for God's sake put that in the car where no one can see it, and borrow a proper gun.' Since I was viewing all the dress collections in London anyway, Albert wondered if I could order the clothes for his boutique and, in exchange, he would give me a return air ticket to Hong Kong so I could visit Tessa. It sounded to me like a great idea.

When Trend Gallery (as it was called) eventually opened, Albert celebrated by taking us all out to supper in Hong Kong; my soup had a cockerel's head floating in it and Michael Shea, the shop manager, whispered to me that, according to Chinese custom, I had to eat it or it would be an insult to our host. I sat there, almost in tears, knowing that I would
have
to be rude to Albert, because I couldn't even look at it, let alone touch it, let alone SWALLOW it. The guests sat, stony-faced, watching me for what seemed like an age, but all of a sudden they burst into laughter and it turned out to be a joke.