GRACE
a memorable account of
Coddington’s 1960’s modeling career
Early in 1959, I arrived in London by train one afternoon with my few belongings backed in a smart new blue fiberglass suitcase. The capital city, so steeped in history, was well on it’s way to becoming the hugely overcrowded metropolis it is today. The area I was about to move to, Notting Hill, was crammed with recently installed black tenants, mostly arrived by boart from overseas British territories such as Tinidad and other Carribean islands. Terrace upon terrace of tall, elegant, white painted Victorian houses, each with its own impressively grand front door and porch, had been recently subdivided into warrens of small rooms that the landlords were renting out to large immigrant families and hard-up stu-
dents at inflated prices. There was a great deal of racial tension in the air. I worked as a waitress at the Stockpot in Basil Street, Knightsbridge, a literal stone’s throw from the vaunted halls of Harrods department store. My actress friend Panchitta, who worked at the Stockpot part-time, set up a job interview for me with the owner, Tony. It was a bistro, the kind of continental-looking place where they usually stick candles thickened wax into Chianti bottles.
Grace, issue 1, p. 3
In which our heroine leaves HOME, la walk, runs NAKED through the woods
A model competition ran in British Vogue in 1959, publicized with a picture of a pretty young girl, Nena Von Schlebrugge (later to be Uma Thurman’s mother), and a caption asking, “Could this be you?” Someone at the Stockpot said to me, “Why don’t you try this route?” and so I did. There were four categories for models in their twenties and in their thirties; and a junior category called Young Idea. I won the Young Idea section. Our prizes included a photo session with Vogue’s top photographers, and we were allowed to keep any piece of clothing we wore in
the pictures. I was a “character rather than a pretty model, and I suppose that’s exactly what I look for in the girls I now select to put in American Vogue- the ones who are quirky-looking. English girls have so much individuality. I can’t stand all the sappy blodes, or athletic girls from too much of a tan. I like freckles. I like girls such as Karen Elson from Manchester, with her amazingly pale face and mass of red hair that reminds me of…well, I can’t think!
ands a job, learns how to s, and discovers SEX.
Q
Grace, issue 1, p. 5
Not so long after, while the establishment still reeled from the Profumo Affair, along came the snap, crackle, and mod of the sixties youth-quake. Social barriers came tumbling down, and it became far cooler to go out with cheeky East End boys that public school toffs. Everything wasn’t solely about privilege, title, or money anymore-although I saw it happening financially for these East End boys, too, because the ones I knew were all driving around in Rolls-royces and Bentleys. I was appearing in a lot of British hair shows for Vidal Sassoon who, in a short span of time, had become internationally famous for his abstract geometric styles. I wen to him all the time and was one of his muses
I think it was the photographer John Cowan who nicknamed me “The Cod.” You know, Jean Shrimpton was known as “The Shrimp,” so therefore…..I thought it was quite charming at the time because usually, only a model as iconic as Shrimpton was given a nickname, although I must say that “shrimp” sounds a lote better than “cod” Cowan worked in a reportage style and is best known for the fashion pictures he took in the sixties of his athletic-looking blond model/girlfriend Jill Kennington doing amazingly risky things like perching on the tip of an iceberg or standing on top of a high statue.
Grace, issue 1, p. 7