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CITY | INTERVIEW
A life in pictures
Growing old wasn’t something that young people in the sixties and seventies thought much about – they were too busy enjoying the present. Model, actress and photographer Carinthia West faces up to three score years and ten...
M
y friend Emily Young, one of England’s foremost sculptors, once gave me a wise piece of advice. Every ten years, she said, on a significant birthday, you should look down at your previous self as if helping them up imaginary stairs, and decide where you want to be at the end of your next decade. Well, with the help of a house move and at least 30 boxes of photographs and paperwork, love letters and diaries, I have been doing just that. In May I turned 70, an age that as a teenager I thought I’d never reach (in common with most of my generation, singing along to The Who’s lyric I hope I die before I get old, so redolent was it of zimmer frames, sour grapes and senility. However now that I’ve reached this age I am finding it a golden opportunity to revisit my former self, and re-evaluate my present. Every box brings new surprises. I’d forgotten how many celebrities I had interviewed over the years of working for British and American magazines as a contributing editor, with names including Oprah Winfrey, Helen Mirren, Dennis Hopper and Donald Sutherland. As a guest editor of Marie Claire, Joan Collins sent me to Hong Kong to interview the wives of millionaires. Also for Marie Claire I flew to Guatemala to travel among the povertystricken people of the Highlands, and to Indonesia to be adopted by the Asmat Tribe, who only a few years before had been carrying out head hunting raids (these had
been a key element of Asmat culture). It seemed to me that my life was either Concorde or cargo and I joked then that I was flying by the seat of my hotpants. At 43 I wrote a piece for New Woman about my fourth decade (in 1995), which I now find unbearably upbeat and self-confident. (The cover line, written by the editor, was ‘Midlife oasis – the older you get the better life gets’ … Aaaa the arrogance of it!) In the piece I quoted American model and actress Lauren Hutton: “It will never be as hard for anyone to turn 40 as it was for me; I had become very, very old and had no hope!” She was only 45. I interviewed Isabella Rossellini, who had just been sacked by Lancôme at the age of 42 for being “too old” for their ad campaigns and she told me “I am so bitter. They make me feel like a middle-aged woman!” The premise of the piece was that life keeps getting better once you hit your forties; in the words of editor Helen Gurley Brown, “You can have it all”. But did I truly believe it? Now that I have woken up to the fact that I am officially ‘older-age’ not even middle, I am fully aware that the article was all about ambition, and did not tap into humility, serenity, wisdom or compassion, or indeed love, all of which I now feel are the greatest gifts turning 70 can bring. On the subject of love, I am horrified at how fickle I was throughout my adolescence and twenties. In my boxes there are bundles of weepy letters from boys pouring out their
Carinthia with drummer Twink (John Charles Edward Alder) and Jarmila Karas on the market stall they had on the Portobello Road, around 1974–5
40 TheBATHMagazine
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sepTeMber 2021
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issue 223
Selfie, around 1974
deeply held emotions when I had already written in my diary “bored with Chris/Tom/Max” or whoever the latest crush had been. When you are young and desired there is always another train coming down the road to catch, and I clearly subscribed to the Tarzan/Jane theory of not letting go of one vine until you’ve caught another. This romantic road trip of course means I missed many trains which would often have been far better for me than many of the ones I caught! To my eternal shame, I once boasted to a friend, “The only way I can remember which year is which is by remembering who I was with at the time. Men are like the rings around trees.” According to my diaries, I was motivated by either romance or a job, which while being admirably independent in one way, hardly qualified for marital bliss. A box marked ‘Divorce Papers’ pulsates like green kryptonite in the corner reminding me of the deep pain emotional conflict brings, and in my case two marriages, although I am proud to say I remain on good terms with both husbands. I feel so lucky to have travelled a great deal in my life and collected friends from all over the world, particularly from America, Europe, Australia and Indonesia, and still today I feel these scattered friends are truly ‘my tribe’. I count among them Valerie Taylor, the great Australian ‘dive queen’ who is now in her eighties and the subject of an award-winning documentary and Robert Patten, one of the world’s greatest experts on Dickens. But I am most grateful to my girlfriends who have been the greatest
