2015 Artist and Media interviews

IN THE

FLESH Jenny Saville made her name in the Nineties with her confronting nudes and unique depiction of the female form. On the eve of a provocative new show in New York, the artist talks to STEPHANIE RAFANELLI about Botox, body image and the creativity of motherhood

CREATIVE SPACE British artist Jenny Saville in her studio in Oxford

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PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

Photographs by BRYAN ADAMS

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enny Saville welcomes me into her Oxford studio, carefully stepping over an array of tiny containers filled with paint in a seemingly infinite range of muted skin tones, like pots of melted-down flesh. There are raw, rosy pinks (the colour of a baby’s cheeks, of third-degree burns, of our insides), an assortment of beiges (milky, sandy, neutral, golden), ashen greys and red-blue shades of blood in different states of oxygenation. This is the human paste that Saville uses to bring to life the visceral effigies on the ceiling-height canvases for which she is famed. Here, on the far wall, is a painting from her Stare series (to appear in her New York show at the Gagosian in September), a child’s head gazing blankly into space; to the right, Rosetta, a blind Sicilian girl with silvery eyes like orbiting planets; and in the centre, an image of Saville’s own blood-drenched daughter emerging from her body into life so unapologetically physical that I can almost smell the saline scent of birth.

‘The birthing room was like a photographic studio. My friend, photographer Jack Webb, was taking the pictures and feeding me arnica homoeopathic pills at the same time. I wanted to do a modernday nativity and I knew that this was my chance,’ Saville, petite with faded-blue eyes, recounts with excitement. Her grey T-shirt and jeans are violently splattered with crimson paint, as if she had worn that very outfit during labour. ‘I made this painting from the birth pictures to replace a nativity by Caravaggio that was stolen by the Mafia in 1969 from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo.’ Saville moved to the Sicilian city in 2003, buying a 21-room derelict apartment in an 18th-century palazzo. ‘Legend says that it is rolled up in a coffin somewhere and that it only comes out at Mafia weddings for couples to be photographed in front of. I loved the romance of that. I used the same lighting as Caravaggio’s painting – the colouring and the flesh are similar. But the Vatican made objections to it. They didn’t think it was very religious, so the whole thing is on hold.’ Still, the project has its own admirers. ‘My daughter is three now and she really loves looking at the photos. She loves to see the moment that she was born.’

Such photographs line the walls and floor of Saville’s studio, images scavenged from art history, the internet and those of trauma victims from medical journals that serve to inform her paintings; torn pages from a de Kooning book flutter next to photocopied works by Bacon, a picture of a mutilated bus from the 7/7 bombings, images of other pregnant women, a close-up photograph of a failed suicide: a man with his brains blown out, but still alive. ‘I used to have a lot more grisly images from pathology books, but the kids come here and skateboard around the studio after playschool so I don’t keep as many of them out these days.’

Motherhood has changed 41-year-old Saville, both as a woman and an artist, although she sees no differentiation between the two.

Before the birth of her son, now four, and her daughter a year later,

time was her luxury. Painting hours stretched into days as she worked in the studio, often through the night. Today, she paints by discipline: she works between 8am and 3pm, returning to the studio until midnight once her children are in bed (watched over by her partner, painter Paul McPhail). ‘I think it’s a myth that motherhood is a drain on your creativity as an artist. It’s about finding art everywhere. Even in the colour of shit in your children’s nappies. I remember breastfeeding my newborn son, and I looked at his face and thought, “When will I ever get the chance to study someone up close for this amount of time, for 45 minutes?” And, “Ooh – look at the way the lemon-yellow goes around his eye.”

I work with the colours of birth a lot now. I have found the whole experience very creatively liberating.’ This newfound perspective began when her babies were in utero. ‘I painted with my brush on a stick until I was eight months pregnant. It was an amazing experience, to grow flesh – create a body inside your body – at the same time as I was mixing flesh tones and painting flesh on canvas.’

It is Saville’s figurative depiction of human tissue that has made her one of the most defining artists of her generation, not to mention the most expensive living artist under 30 in 2000. Her expansive fleshy nudes of corpulent female bodies, showcased in Saatchi’s ‘YBA III’ show and 1997’s ‘Sensation’ (followed by a series of her own solo exhibitions) – which balance so ambiguously the glorious and the grotesque – threaten to rupture the prevailing norms of female beauty. In their unflinching physical honesty (a candidness

‘It was an amazing experience, to grow flesh – create a body inside your body – at the same time as I was mixing flesh tones on canvas’

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HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY CAROL BROWN AT DWMANAGEMENT.CO.UK, USING KIEHL’S. PHOTOGRAPHS: © JENNY SAVILLE, COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY, © JENNY SAVILLE AND GLEN LUCHFORD, COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY DOUGLAS M BARKER STUDIO

that has itself become shocking in our airbrushed age), Saville’s behemothic, all-confronting billboards have become rare antidotes to the continuing myths about the female form, portraying not only what it is to live inside the female body (and its potential monstrosity) – the anxiety and often brutality with which we see ourselves – but also the inherent neuroses and distorting dysmorphias that so many of us find contained within our own self-image.

As such, Saville’s nudes hold up a critical challenge to the Old Masters, the founding fathers of those myths about the female form. ‘I like trespassing on territory that actually should belong to women,’ she says. But recently, she has turned her attention to the iconography of the mother and child in art. ‘Rather than thinking, “Oh my God – Bacon, Freud, Cassel didn’t have to deal with this, I think, “They never had the chance to experience this,”’ she says, beaming. ‘Now when I’m painting a baby or a pregnant woman, I think that I have the extra power, that extra edge.’

Last year, she showed her Reproduction series of sketches at the Gagosian in London. She found sketching an easier medium to juggle with her newborn son than oil paint (working in the hours in which he slept). The drawings are based on nativity sketches by Leonardo da Vinci (The Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist) and Michelangelo, but from the viewpoint of her own experience. Mother and child are no longer idealised and composed, but in symbiotic flux, the multiple outlines CONTINUED ON PAGE 322

THE SKIN I LIVE IN Clockwise from above: Saville in her studio with her paintings. ‘Propped’ (1992) by Jenny Saville. A view of the installation ‘Closed Contact’ (2002) by Saville and Glen Luchford at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills

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‘IN THE FLESH’

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of her sketch mirroring the movements of her writhing infant.

She is currently working on her new show for the Gagosian (along with paintings and drawings in the Mother and Child series and Stare paintings, there are new images, faces and bodies mediated by technology this time: a face negotiated by the blurred imaging of Skype; a pregnant woman projected with an Arabic text found on the internet). She is also due to donate a new work to a Christie’s auction in October in aid of Women For Women International, an organisation that sponsors women in educational programmes in war-torn countries. The project is being co-curated by Saville and Nadja Romain, who she met when Romain invited her to take part in an artist portfolio for a special edition of Tank magazine for the charity in 2010. Her donated sketch sold for £180,000 – and the total raised was enough to put 800 women through the programme. For the new auction, Saville handwrote letters to fellow artists asking them to donate work. Those confirmed now include Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Bridget Riley and Taryn Simon.

Motherhood has been a call to action for Saville: ‘I am fortunate that I was born into a time and place where women can be the creators of culture too. Women hundreds of years ago fought that battle for me – so that we could eventually be taken seriously as artists, writers, actresses and scientists. Now that we can also be the creators of culture, it’s important to carry that on. That’s what ties me to Women For Women.’

One of the women who opened doors for Saville was fellow artist Cindy Sherman. ‘She was a huge icon of mine at college. She worked with the same myths of femininity that I was interested in, and she used herself in her art in a similar way.’

Saville, too, appears in her own art; in Reflective Flesh (2002–03), she paints the anatomical detail of her own vagina with the detachment of a gynaecological textbook. This steady eye of a surgeon, and with it a fascination for flesh, began in early childhood. ‘I always used to play with the liver when my mother was cooking. I found it thrilling to watch its colour change in the pan,’ she says. ‘I remember that my father took me to a merry-go-round when I was five, and a child fell off and cut her leg open. He was trying to shield my eyes, but I remember all I wanted to do was see the blood.’

S

aville was born in Cambridge in 1970, one of four children. She was a natural painter, taking up the brush when she was just eight years old – the one consistency in a childhood in which she moved from school to school around the country (her father was a county-council director of education).

Her interest in rotund female forms was also triggered early on. ‘I remember when I was five or six, sitting on the floor looking up at my piano teacher’s thighs under her Fifties tweed skirt. She was big, and they rubbed together as she played. I was fascinated with the way her two breasts would become one, the way her fat moved, the way it hung on the back of her arms.

I found it very animalistic.’

Her instinctive interest in the body was compounded by the rise of the body-beautiful culture of the Eighties. In 1988, Saville attended Glasgow School of Art. ‘At college, there were so many super-talented women who were obsessed with dieting. I had one friend who used to draw a line on her legs of where she would like the outline to be. This obsession with body image became a real disability for these women.’ She sighs. ‘It still annoys me how it

distracts talented women. I have friends who are brilliant barristers, who think about their weight all the time. I think, “You’re going to be rotting in 20 or 40 years’ time anyway, so what are you worrying about that for?”’

She was a prodigy at Glasgow, winning the Craig Award, the Newberry Medal and a six-month scholarship to Cincinnati University, where she observed masses of white flesh at shopping malls – women who ruptured the expected physical norm. ‘Huge, huge, obese bodies. It was shocking.’ These were the women who inspired her 1992 graduate-show paintings. Branded depicted a corpulent woman with pendulous breasts, squirming in her own form, inscribed with adjectives – ‘petite’, ‘delicate’ – to which she clearly did not conform. In Prop and Propped, giant fleshy bodies attempt to balance and fit, awkwardly and painfully, on the tiny, rigid barstools of accepted convention.

It was such early paintings that drew the attention of Charles Saatchi, who spotted her work, tracking down and buying up the pieces sold from her degree show (which he later put up at auction for the sum of £2 million). Saatchi then commissioned her for the next two years, giving her carte blanche to paint a body of work to be shown at his gallery, saying: ‘Whatever you want, whatever you dream – do it.’ For 18 months, Saville slept three hours a night, painting solidly until she completed the commissions, with seven works being shown in Saatchi’s exhibition ‘Young British Artists III’ in 1994. ‘She was only 23, but critics were already likening her to Lucian Freud,’ says Jenny Blythe, who was curating the Saatchi Gallery at the time.

Later that year, Saville returned to America to observe the operations at a plastic surgeon’s clinic in New York. ‘I met the women; the way they talked, it was like they actually thought that they were ill. They had this fictional idea that the operation would make them normal. They saw the surgeon and handed themselves over, and they would come out looking horrific. They were basically morphing themselves,’ she explains, still with the remnants of horror in her voice. ‘It was incredibly violent to see a surgeon’s fist inside a woman’s body, pushing up a breast, making space for an enormous implant. Liposuction was really violent too.’

Mesmerised by the concept of self-moulding, the following year Saville began to collaborate with fashion photographer Glen Luchford for a new work called Closed Contact (originally meant as the preparatory photographs for a painting series, and later shown in its own right in 2002). Her idea was to press her body against Perspex and to be shot from below, in order to emulate the surgical procedure. ‘But first I needed to fatten up to get more fleshy for the photographs. I stuffed myself with muffins and doughnuts. Glen would take me to a diner and say, “Come on then, eat up!’’’ ‘There was a Robert De Niro/Raging Bull quality to it,’ Luchford tells me.

‘I hadn’t seen anyone before who was ready to use their body in such an aggressive way to achieve their goals. It really hurt her body to be squished on glass for hours.’ The resulting Polaroids, expertly lit by Luchford to replicate not only surgical lighting but fluid too (Saville resembles a biological specimen floating in a jar), are at once both gruesome and beguiling. Her flesh is squashed, contorted and distorted, as though she has sliced through a cross-section of herself.

That’s how I feel sometimes, I tell her, laughing: pressed up against the glass. ‘So many women have said to me about [Closed Contact and] my paintings, “That’s just how I feel.” I have noticed this secret dialogue among women,’ she replies. I point out the inherent metaphor of the glass ceiling. ‘Other women have said that too.’

The hint of formaldehyde links her to another artist: Damien

Hirst, who Saville showed alongside in Saatchi’s notorious Royal Academy show ‘Sensation’ in 1997. ‘The shark was phenomenal.

The moment I saw it, I knew it was iconic,’ she says. ‘Charles Saatchi did this amazing thing for a generation. He didn’t care about your background or whether you were male or female. It was just “Could you do it in the time?” and “How big was your idea?” He gave everyone a platform for their dream. There was this group of energetic post-punk aesthetic artists, who mixed with this immigrant guy who had money and no hang-ups about belonging to the right family. Saatchi put London on the art map.’

At ‘Sensation’, five of her giant canvases hung next to Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley portrait and the Chapmans’ Great Deeds Against the Dead as the only traditionally figurative works of art, although ‘Jenny’s anarchic attitude to the tradition of nude painting was true to the exhibition,’ says Blythe. Even so, Saville feels that her inclusion in the YBA bracket is inaccurate. ‘I didn’t go to Goldsmiths, I came out of the tradition of Bacon and Freud. My work was labour-intensive. I was in my studio a lot, so I wasn’t part of that drinking, coke-taking, rudeness thing…’

In the predominantly conceptual world of contemporary art, Saville was swimming upstream; but the importance of her stoical commitment to her method cannot be underestimated in today’s art canon. ‘In the 1990s when painting was “dead”, Jenny emerged with a body of work that helped restore the art world’s interest in the medium by playing with the technical aspect of figurative painting and championing the aesthetic diversity of the female body,’ says gallerist Dasha Zhukova. ‘Jenny created a dialogue that encapsulated her time while criticising the status quo.’

But for painting it is the end of an era, Saville says wistfully. ‘It was a double whammy to lose Cy Twombly, who I knew and adored, and Lucian Freud almost at the same time. I felt very empty for a few days. Cy worked in Gaeta between Rome and Naples, when I worked in Palermo. Freud was my guiding light; I saw his Hayward show when I was 17. He was a painter who came to represent Britain.’

It is a baton that has passed to Saville herself, who shares with Freud a tireless commitment to ‘the search for something human, which isn’t instant like a photograph, something that takes a long time to get’.

In this search, Saville has explored human tissues, the recesses of our bodies, the folds of our epidermis and adipose layers. In her 1999 show ‘Territories’, featuring paintings of transsexuals, she turned her eye to the mutations of gender, and in 2003’s ‘Migrants’, to the brutalities of trauma victims. But it is in her studies of the female body that Saville holds her greatest power.

Works such as Closed Contact are now over a decade old, yet their pertinence is ever-growing. ‘In 1994, I had to explain to people in England what liposuction was; now it has swept across the Western world, along with Botox… I find it fascinating that the best Botox comes from the corpses of other bodies; the fact that women are willing to inject themselves with that… We need to question why older women are not something we can look at in our culture.’ Perhaps, she says, it is a topic that she will explore one day. Although she may not like me saying it, I, for one, cannot wait for Jenny Saville to age.

Jenny Saville’s ‘Continuum’ is at Gagosian Gallery, New York, from 15 September to 22 October. ‘Artists for Women For Women International’ is at Gagosian Gallery, London WC1 (www.gagosian.com), from 27 September to 1 October. Christie’s (www.christies.com) will auction the works on 15 October. To see images that will feature in the auction, visit harpersbazaar.co.uk.

‘SOLE SISTER’

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hostile men, and wins. The steel inside comes, I think, from a wound that has never healed, an irretrievably broken relationship with her mother, another story that is hers to tell. It also comes, I think, from not yet finding that elusive love of her life. I used to groan whenever she mentioned another reprobate's name.

There was Kid Rock: adorable and beautifully mannered, but life in a Detroit house with Playboy bunnies and a bunch of rednecks as your housemates didn’t quite cut it for the Chester Square girl who likes staff and is a little OCD about cleanliness. There was a rapper once; he was beautiful, famous, and rather quiet and polite. I was almost more keen than she was, but rappers don’t go for monogamy.

When she married banking heir Matthew Mellon in 2000, a sweet, kind and very rich boy from Pittsburgh, she gave it everything, but neither of them was ready for marriage. They still get on incredibly well, and recently went on holiday together with Matthew’s new wife Nicole and their baby Force, and of course Tamara's daughter Minty. My goddaughter is the real love of Tamara’s life, the one person she allows herself to properly show love to, which is a relief because she was shown so little love by her own mother.

Her father was her tower of strength, a man she looked up to and the only one I’ve ever known her to really love. When he died her world caved in – it hardened her a little more. When she told me that he had died, I had a sense of foreboding – how would she cope without him? Her relationship with Christian Slater, who she met a couple of years after his death, was a great comfort. She really fell in love, but Hollywood was a stronger pull for the career actor whose life was out of sync with her sophisticated European one. I remember a car journey from the Mercer Hotel to JFK with Tamara sobbing on my shoulder as he jetted off back to a movie set. She was destroyed when that ended.

She’s convinced now that she’s ready for an older man, but I love to tease her whenever I see a beautiful bad boy chasing her around the room at a party. ‘Stop it, stop it,’ she says. ‘I don’t want that anymore.’ Actually, I think she might be right. An older man would do her good, because she can be quite princessy at times, particularly when it comes to staff and to packing. Before a business trip or a holiday, a stylist, PA and housekeeper pack her bags: one puts together the outfits she will wear (including ones for potential dates); another logs each item on a laptop; a third folds and packs. I lie under her duvet watching a movie with Minty, rolling my eyes. I secretly love it, and give unsolicited views. ‘Hate that,’ I’ll say as she struts in front of her mirror. She glares at me, giving me her death stare, but I just stare her down; she can be intimidating, which I suppose in business is quite useful. It recently earned her an OBE – I am inordinately proud of her, like a sister.

Has she changed? Yes and no. The difference is now you have to look for her. The old Tamara, the one who laughed at everything, the one who was so free with her emotions, has by necessity clammed up. It’s difficult to comprehend quite how busy she is – she flew across the Atlantic and back six times in five weeks earlier this year. Her diary is fixed for months in advance, her days crammed with meetings and conference calls and appearances and photoshoots. She prioritises Minty, her sweet and lovely little girl, above all, and takes her to school every morning. So what if she doesn’t always return calls or emails immediately? I know that if I rang her at 4am with a crisis and told her I needed her, which I recently did, she would move mountains to get to me – which she did, with bells on.

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representation, artist and muse – Claudia presents the ideal subject: rouched intently over a battered her ivory complexion a screen on which to project their visions.

1940s luggage case, in a blood-red In a sunlit room in Notting Hill – adorned with Danish sideboards satin slip that slides off one shoulder and a Murano chandelier – Claudia is showing Dinos Chapman her to expose a cruelly tight black bra, art collection. ‘I’ve been passionate about art since I was young. I Claudia Schiffer is searching for was obsessed with reading biographies of artists’ muses: Suzanne something. Her louche mane, freshly Valadon, painter and muse of Toulouse-Lautrec; and Picasso’s muses, smoothed into undulating golden Dora Maar, Marie-ThĂŠrèse Walter and Françoise Gilot,’ she says as waves, falls forward as she scans they stare intently at a Butterfly painting by Damien Hirst, then a an array of blade-sharp stilettos, Louise Bourgeois Spider sketch (which hang alongside works by gunmetal peep-toes and murderKiki Smith, Roni Horn, Gerhard Richter, Adam Fuss, Dan Colen ously vertiginous platforms – all and Nigel Cooke). In her film-producer husband Matthew Vaughn’s with sanguineous crimson soles. She settles on a Beretta pistol, office, above a porcelain statue of a Jack Russell on the fireplace, whose barrel glistens from the adjacent props box. With only a hangs an Andy Warhol canvas: a tri-layered image of a revolver in slight wrinkle of her retroussĂŠ nose as a warning, she points the black, red and yellow – one of four Warhols in Claudia’s collection, revolver towards her fishnet-clad feet, and fires. including another pencil sketch of a gun.

Click. She barely flinches, then slinks back into the full beam of ‘I bought my first Warhol, a picture of a butterfly, when I was the studio flares, where she takes up a melodramatic pose as ‘dammodelling in New York in the mid-1990s. But in sel in distress’ – a scene from the cover of a 1940s the end I traded it in for this one,’ she says in pulp-fiction magazine – running for her life her soft German accent. ‘I’m fairly comfortable from an invisible aggressor. The photo-shoot’s with guns – and insects.’ She laughs, her words art directors, Turner Prize-nominated Jake and incongruous with this vision of purity, a white Dinos Chapman – notorious for their misanbroderie anglaise blouse against her oyster skin. thropic, gory visions of war – look momentarily ‘I used to collect spiders, bugs and tarantulas terrified. Dinos’ turquoise eyes widen: ‘My God. and frame them; but I threw some of them away That might have been loaded. I thought I was because Casper [my son] was starting to be dark, but I think you might be darker than me.’ scared by them at night. It’s like the Chapman It’s 7pm: our noir heroine sits astride a vintage Brothers’ work: even when there are visions of leather chair, her alabaster face impassive as horror, I can see the beauty in the detail.’ Dinos binds her wrists behind her back. (‘It’s important that I tie her up personally,’ he explains to the shoot’s prop assistant, who hands ack in the Chapman Brothers’ him a length of rope. He grins. ‘This is my biggest studio, Dinos is poring over his triumph. It’s every boy’s dream to tie Claudia images of Claudia. Around him, Schiffer posing for artist Chris Bucklow Schiffer up.’) Chapman tugs tightly on the slipa thousand inch-high figurines knots, before his victim mimics a terrified scream, engage in acts of violence: bloodand the camera shutter snaps tightly shut. ied Nazi heads sit on matchstick-size spikes, Claudia bound; Claudia on the hunt; Claudia and penguins rip the flesh from polar bears – pursued by shadowy figures: lecherous ghouls the brothers’ latest version of their Hell series. and hollow-eyed demons that lurk in the dark‘You could never say you know who Claudia ness. Claudia captured. This is the Chapman Schiffer is – or find anything bad about her.

Brothers’ first fashion shoot, part of a portfolio She has this squeaky-clean, very controlled of portraits of the supermodel as imagined by image. In some ways, she doesn’t exist outside contemporary British artists for Bazaar. the pages of a magazine,’ Dinos reflects, shifting Claudia could be described as the quintessenhis weight from one Nike trainer to another. tial muse. At the height of her modelling career, ‘I think she’s tired of her Barbiefied image. she was the ultimate ‘canvas’ upon which We wanted to dirty her up, push her to see how designers Lagerfeld and Valentino imagined far she would go.’ their sartorial creations. Roland Mouret, who regularly dresses her, The Chapmans’ Claudia is ‘a Hitchcock-style heroine’: ‘I calls her ‘a chameleon. She can absorb the identity of the designer watched The Birds, with Tippi Hedren, when I was really young, or photographer, while keeping what’s inside protected’. An unexand mum had a copy of The Exorcist that I used to steal – she kept ploded German bombshell, she caused a sensation when she walked it hidden behind the fridge. I’ve been obsessed with horror and gore Chanel’s 1990 haute couture runway, launching herself as a defining since I was a boy,’ Dinos says. ‘I guess I’m like Tarantino in that icon of the pre-grunge era, her implausibly athletic limbs idolised I return to that theme again and again.’ by the likes of photographers Steven Meisel and Peter Lindbergh.

Chapman set out to make ‘the poster of the [B-movie] horror With her corn-colour tresses and Aryan beauty, she seared herself I always wanted to see: the male-fantasy film with guns and girls,’ into public consciousness as a doll-like version of womanhood (part he says, laughing. ‘Claudia’s image is very malleable. She shifts very Snow White, part Barbarella, part Heidi). For contemporary artists, easily to become someone else: the girl [Beatrix Kiddo] in Kill Bill, whose approach to portraiture is as subversive as it is complex – Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential, Laura Dern in David Lynch’s with their idea of the portrait as a space in which to explore the Wild at Heart‌ There’s almost a weird subconscious desire in all conflicted relationship between self and the universe, concept and these films to kick the blonde girl around, so she’ll turn around and

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Lancastrian Leonardo da Vinci whose existential opuses – including his Nature, History and Operator paintings – use mathematical and scientific systems to probe the nature of the universe and human existence. He leans over her like a swarthy Freudian therapist, jotting down occasional notes, the spot of neon paint on his suede n a former leather factory in east London, now converted brogues the only signal of his true vocation. into artists’ studios, Claudia arrives, three Louis Vuitton When was the last time you cried? At ‘Britain’s Got Talent’. cases in tow, en route to a shoot in Austria. She is an Your first pet? A black and white mouse named Nakima. apparition from an early-Seventies Chloé show – a vanilla How did you come to be a model? I was discovered by accident in goddess – her puffed-up flaxen mane tumbling over a a nightclub in Düsseldorf, on my first night out. I was very shy – one of the cream peasant blouse; bleached jeans with a gentle flare. Today she girls that all the mums would like. is sitting for Chris Bucklow – V&A curator turned artist and ‘student’ How do you feel about your nationality? The German government of William Blake and the ‘unfashionable’ Romantic artists – whose hired me as an ambassador for the country during the World Cup [in work ranges from his grafted-plant sculptures to ‘automatic’ dream 2006]. I was wrapped in a German flag… paintings that spill out of his subconscious onto the canvas. Claudia Claudia is a Virgo; the cinema in Rheinberg, her hometown, is to appear in Bucklow’s Guest works – a ‘collective self-portrait’ burnt down when she was a child; she misses sauerkraut and liver featuring life-size silhouettes of an anonymous cast of acquaintsausage (‘All the things British people find ances and friends – made using a homedisgusting’)… Tyson is ‘information-gathering’ made camera obscura and 19th-century for an Operator painting, part-mathematical pinhole-camera technology. Stripped to a white equation, part-image, ‘triggered’ by Claudia.

G-string, her candy-floss hair now pinned Tyson explains that, like the famous koan in Zen above her ears, she steps behind a white muslin Buddhism that asks: ‘What is the sound of one cloth which, when lit from behind, throws her hand clapping?’, so the Operator series is inacshadow onto the screen. A golden aura outlines cessible to rational thought. Only by a change the contours of her Amazonian thighs, the in our thinking can we achieve enlightenment, upward curve of her breasts and the wisps of and the question makes sense. hair at the nape of her neck, while the real ‘If you stare at clouds for more than 10 minClaudia blinks behind her other ghostly self. utes, you realise they don’t exist as objects but ‘I only include people I’ve dreamt of in my as states,’ Tyson continues. Claudia draws her Guest series, but Claudia is everybody’s dream knees to her chest; for a moment, she looks girl,’ says Bucklow, elfin and silver-haired, more like an attentive schoolgirl mesmerised by geography teacher than artist in a neat gingher professor. ‘The question “Who is Claudia ham shirt, as he fires off photographs. ‘How else Schiffer with Keith Tyson Schiffer?” breaks down into a complex philodo you explain her supermodel status? It is sophical one: it extends beyond you as subject because we project our fantasies about the ideal [to become] Claudia Schiffer as a dynamic of the feminine onto her. She is just a normal system, a collision of personal, social, biologigirl, but she is goddess-like in our imaginations.’ cal, economic and historical forces that have Over the next two months, he will trace his brought us to this moment. My painting is more model’s giant perforated outline, created laboria portrait of these universal forces than it is ously from 25,000 pinholes (‘the number of days of Claudia Schiffer – an angle on the way the in a lifetime of the Biblical three-score years and world works through my eyes.’

10’) onto a sheet of tinfoil laid on photographic But for 40-year-old Tyson, who once invented paper, before exposing his effigy to the sun. an ‘Artmachine’ to dictate his creative decisions, The figure that emerges – an ethereal being this will not be his first portrait of a supermodel. hovering in a halo of coloured light (gold, red As a young boy in Lancashire in the 1970s, he or blue, depending on the time of day of expobegan his art career by obsessively sketching the sure) – will form part of Bucklow’s ‘collective cover models of fashion magazines: ‘They all looked the same: Coco self-portrait’, a Jungian anima projection (in the psychoanalysis of Chanel-ish and aloof. I’d draw them putting their lipstick and mascara dreams, the male psyche’s repressed female self ). ‘Why do women on.’ His cheeks are ruddy as he laughs. ‘It was very oedipal, about my buy images of Claudia in magazines?’ ponders Bucklow, as his existential angst of not having a girlfriend, but my anxiety somehow model releases her tresses down her back. ‘Because they aspire to turned into a kind of wonder about the complexities of the universe.’ be the perfect anima projection for the male – and so by projecting fame onto Claudia, we paint a portrait of ourselves.’

From the inscrutabilities of Tyson’s cosmos to the gritty realism of a Woolwich warehouse, where a giant eye emerges from a canvas laudia is lying on a couch in a studio in Notting Hill; like a shredded fragment of a black and white photograph. With a tiny her hair splays around her face as if she is floating in airbrush, artist Jason Brooks delicately sprays on a lash, then a vein in water. (In her red striped Margaret Howell sweater the membrane of the eye, and a section of a lower eyelid, pore by pore. and flared jeans, her iconic overbite in natural repose, Brooks is reproducing, with monastic discipline, a blow-up of a she is the doppelgänger of a Gunter Sachs-era photograph of Claudia taken two weeks ago – make-up-less – under Bardot.) She is listening to a hypnotic stream of quick-fire questions the unflattering, direct glare of two flare lights: ‘The photograph is spewing forth from Turner Prize-winning artist Keith Tyson, a wreak her revenge. Claudia is the avenging heroine: the brutalised and the brutaliser. She may totter around in high heels for a bit, but then she’ll turn around and shoot you in the head.’

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else sees,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Dalwood says, as he daubs the canvas. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m playing with artistic convention, examining the difficulty of the regurgitation of an image that already exists, and how to do portraiture in a new way.

Claudiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face is captured on every billboard, but perhaps â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in a way â&#x20AC;&#x201C; my portrait looks more like her than any of those [images].â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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the artists Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve met, this is the only time Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve posed in the traditional sense of a sitting,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says Claudia, who is a Dalwood collector. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Just concrete walls and hundreds of paint pots and brushes everywhere; this is how I imagined it to be if Van Gogh or Matisse were in their studios, painting their muses. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so relaxing, calming; weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re chatting as if Dexter was a hairdresser giving me a very complicated haircut.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; It is precisely this dynamic â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the relationship between artist and muse â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that interests Dalwood. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;There is the problem of the male gaze in art history, with male painters representing women on the whole,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; he says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;In some ways, the Old Mastersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; paintings are almost like soft pornography. The reality is a lot of fashion shoots involve the male gaze. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what Cindy Shermanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photographs are about: men looking at women, and how women represent themselves.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Dalwoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s portrait of Claudia is based on Lichtensteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Girl in Mirror, but her reflection is painted in the style of abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Thousands of photographs exist of Claudia, but this is her private moment in the mirror that no one 138 |

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Claudia is a kind of Sleeping Beauty, a Snow White,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says Marc Quinn, whose portrait of Claudia is realised between 3pm and 3.40pm on a balmy August afternoon. Quinnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s two-floored studio is a hybrid of slick advertising agency and Buddhist temple, dotted with orchids (real and cast in bronze, with added phallic symbols) and statues of Buddha, moustached and skeletal, in various incarnations of enlightment. Quinnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assistants buzz about in chic black dresses, dwarfed by wall-height, intensely coloured flower canvases, a life-size statue based on the infamous image of an Abu Ghraib torture victim, and hidden â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;projectsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; for his upcoming cosmetic-surgery-based exhibition at White Cube. No sign of the freezer containing Self, Quinnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head cast in nine pints of his own frozen blood, shown at Charles Saatchiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Sensationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; 12 years ago.

Claudia lies as if on an operating table, on a bed of polystyrene snow, next to six vases of sunflowers, blue delphiniums, yellow calla lilies and anthuriums so perfectly waxy that they appear synthetic, even to the touch. Quinn snips the head off CONTINUED ON PAGE 222 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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or the past 30 minutes, May has been licking Claudiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s feet with relish, as the model slouches in a grey T-shirt and jeans on a dented oil drum, surrounded by soft toys.

The Staffordshire bull terrier, suddenly distracted by the Cleopatra-style eye of a plastic pig, snatches up its pink carcass and runs rings around Claudia, as the toy lets out an inelegant squeal. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;May â&#x20AC;&#x201C; thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s short for Mayhem,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says the dogâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s owner, Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing, who circles Claudia in the opposite direction, taking photographs.

Wearing directs Claudia to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;slouchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;stareâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; into the distance from her makeshift plinth. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The idea is to see what she looks like in an ordinary setting, when sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not posing for a shoot or selling clothes â&#x20AC;&#x201C; almost like a British teenager hanging around on the street,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; the artist explains. Her documentary-influenced photo and video projects featuring ordinary people â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Signsâ&#x20AC;Ś, Confess All on Videoâ&#x20AC;Ś, Drunk and Album (in which she posed in silicone body suits as members of her own family) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; examine the disparity between who we are and what we represent. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Claudia has a child-like quality to her, and she reminds me of a girl who was in my school play at infant school in the 1960sâ&#x20AC;Ś she was beautiful, blonde, dressed in white, and I wanted to be her. If she was a doll, I would have bought her,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says Wearing, her poker-straight brown hair the negative image of Claudiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Perhaps as a female artist, I am able to view Claudiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beauty aspirationally, rather than as a sexual object of desire. We collected Barbies when we were younger, because they were the archetypal girls we wanted to be; you werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t that girl when you looked in the mirror, but you didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t realise it because youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d spent so long looking at your doll.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

THIS PAGE: PHOTOGRAPH: SCOTT DOUGLAS. OPPOSITE: Š DEXTER DALWOOD AND GAGOSIAN GALLERY. PREVIOUS PAGES: Š KEITH TYSON. PHOTOGRAPH OF ARTWORK BY KEITH TYSON STUDIO

kind of an interrogation; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about scrutiny of the flesh â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the forensic, pornographic gaze of a frozen moment,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; he says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Claudia is so used to being photographed, but this is different; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about Claudia Schiffer allowing herself to be exposed.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Brooksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; other hyper-real paintings, the subject of a recent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, include a portrait of Nigella Lawson, a series of unknown tattoo artists, and women urinating outdoors. In contrast to the instantaneousness of the photographic moment, Brooks will spend eight weeks reconstructing two giant Claudias cell by cell, pore by pore. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I am interested in the Warholian idea of reproduction. I am like a camera,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; he says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I recreate the image burned on the back on my retina. Claudia Schiffer is the image of perfection that we all aspire to, and yet if you scrutinise her, she isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t perfect. Her eyes arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t perfectly symmetrical. But thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what beauty is. Today we airbrush images to eradicate information, to create some kind of perfection. For me, perfection is the opposite: itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about getting turned on by a line, a stray hair or a pockmark â&#x20AC;&#x201C; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what makes that person real, human.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Claudia slowly appears from Brooksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; canvas, not an idealised, idolised image, but a woman laid bare in flesh and skin. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nothing hidden really,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says Claudia, as she blinks in front of her portrait on a visit to Brooksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; studio. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so liberating to be freed from the constraints [of the perception of my looks]; in fashion shoots, everyone is trying to achieve perfection â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the more, the better in every shoot. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to be beautiful in art: through Jasonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes, imperfection is beautifulâ&#x20AC;Ś even wrinkles can be beautiful someJason Brooks times. In art, there is no retouching, and there are no special angles. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just the real, bare me.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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TAKE FIGURE-HUGGING FANTASIES TO EXTREMES WITH TIES THAT BIND IN FISHNETS, SILK AND LACE This page: silk dress, about £1,170, Michael Kors. Leather belt, £200, Elie Saab. Fishnets, £19, Wolford.

Opposite: lace bra, £80, Agent Provocateur.

Previous pages: silk wool strapless dress, £2,065, Lanvin

DARK MEETS LIGHT, AS A VISION IN BURGUNDY MEETS AN APPARITION IN GREY Silk trench, £2,520, Valentino

STEPPING INTO THE SHADOWS, SHE’S DRESSED TO KILL IN BLOOD-RED SATIN AND LACE This page: silk slip, £635, Rochas.

Opposite: silk organdie and lace blouse, £695, Stella McCartney. Satin pencil skirt, £475, Yves Saint Laurent. Lace bra, £147, La Perla. Fishnets, £19, Wolford. See Stockists for details. Hair by Raphael at Streeters London. Make-up by Kristin Piggott at Jed Root for Rimmel. Manicure by Nichola Joss at Premier, using Chanel. Props and set by Lucy Butler (www.lunallure.blogspot.com)

Interviewing iconic sculptor Kiki Smith was never going to be straightforward. In fact, Bazaar was warned that it would barely be an interview – Smith won’t stop working for such a pedestrian occurence – but the chance to enter her unconventionally wonderful world is not to be missed

Art,pray,

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By STEPHANIE RAFANELLI Portrait by SUSAN MEISELAS

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HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY VALERY GHERMAN AT DE FACTO

metaphor for terror, like in Hitchcock’s The Birds. For me, it’s about not being bound by gravity,’ she adds, before drifting back to her work.

Though such statements are ethereal, one only need look around Smith’s home to find clues to the iconography of her art over the past 30 years. All the motifs are present: from her early unflinching fascination with the human body (an 18th-century anatomical study by Jacques Fabien Gaultier d’Agoty hangs on the wall: a female body, sliced cruelly open); to her re-casting of the representations of women in mythology (giant cut-outs ascend her garden wall like witches) and the Bible (Catholic crosses swing on pendants around her neck as she draws); vintage lightbulbs (‘I love that Leonard Cohen lyric: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”’); and finally her attention to nature and the cosmos in her most recent work – her hallway is covered with the blue-and-gold-star-motif wallpaper Maiden & Moonflower that she made for her 2008 ‘Kiki Smith: Her Home’ show in Germany.

Since Smith began casting isolated body parts like holy reliquaries in the early 1980s, the 58-year-old artist, icon of the New York art scene – and ‘one of the most important sculptors of her generation’, according to Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery – has travelled from human cells outwards through the body walls, into the natural world and beyond. Her work has dealt with death (she has witnessed the passing of one of her sisters, Beatrice, who died of Aids aged 33, and both her father and mother), rebirth and resurrection, and is viewed as part of a group of New York-based female artists alongside Nancy Spero and Louise Bourgeois whose sculptures – in formally denigrated materials such as paper – speak from the psyche of the individual to the universal female experience. Smith’s interest in the past has been ▼

F

rom a tapestry on the wall of her living roomcum-studio on the Lower East Side, a behemothic snake unfurls like a giant halo above the head of artist Kiki Smith. The serpent, one of the legendary New York sculptor’s many creations, surges upwards like a tail from the body of Eve – Smith’s very own naked doppelgänger – as though fused into a single mythological beast of primitive feminine power. In front of this effigy (Smith works in both two and three dimensions, in fabric, bronze, glass, wax, ceramics and paper), she sketches another creature into being: a wolf stretches across her dining table on a sheet of Nepalese paper, life-size and lachrymose, crying tears of blood.

‘What can you do now? What else could happen?’ she mutters as if to herself or her lupine etching (a pattern for a tapestry in her London show), but in reality addressing her two assistants – Uchenna and Emma – who hover eagerly with primed perception like satellites around a sun. She dictates an email to one, and directs another on archiving, while I loiter awkwardly, like an alien in the midst of a choreographed ritual based on rules that I don’t understand. ‘My assistants usually last about seven years. Longer than most of my relationships,’ she says (this time to me), with a warm chuckle. Her eyes flash lavender; her skin is powdery white, her outgrown silver mane like the locks of the Rastafari. But Kiki Smith rarely looks up. Not until she hears the skip of a blackbird across her terrace (she once had 30 doves that freely roamed her home – birds often feature in her work). ‘I have a very strong identification with birds,’ she explains. ‘I’m not really interested in them as a

SHE WOLF Sculptor Kiki Smith at work in her Lower East Side home

sculptor Tony Smith, to commemorate the centenary of his birth.

A black geometric L-shape sculpture, a piece of his work, sits on the sideboard in Smith’s living room – a reminder of the kind of macho minimalism of the Sixties and her own blue-blood artistic heritage. A trained architect of Irish descent, Tony Smith nestled at the centre of that era’s East Coast art community – Tennessee Williams was best man at his wedding to Jane Lawrence, a Broadway actor and opera singer – with friends Mark Rothko, Richard Tuttle, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock frequent visitors to the Smith household in South Orange, New Jersey. Here, from an early age, Kiki and her sisters assisted their father in making cardboard octagons and tetrahedrons for his sculptures.

As a young girl, Smith built shrines to the Virgin Mary and adorned dead animals ceremonially with bandages and necklaces.

‘Childhood is a very formative time. We make sentimental attachments that have resonance for the rest of our lives,’ she says, now pasting branches of a tree with a bowl of glue in hand. ‘My biggest childhood influence was Catholicism and the iconography of belief, as well as the ritualistic behaviour.’

But the artist’s unrelenting handiwork is perhaps less to do with religious metaphor than neurological need. Smith suffers from attention-deficit disorder, which necessitates constant fiddling. ‘My mind just goes around too fast so I can’t concentrate on things for long,’ she explains. ‘But at the same time, I can do long stretches of repetitive, detail-orientated work.’ She cuts up some shards of splintered rainbow. ‘It was terrible growing up. I had practically no reading comprehension until at least the third grade. Instead, I developed very acute visual skills. I can see a lot more than most people in a situation – the details. But I was terribly under-confident as a child. Being an artist has been a great compensation.’

As a habitual of the lowest classes in school, Smith decided to train as an industrial baker, the first of a chain of career moves that would include: college dropout (she attended Hartford Art School in Connecticut from 1974), census taker, cook, bartender, electrician’s assistant, garment worker and emergency medical technician – before she settled on artist.

In 1976, she moved to New York. It was the year that a 16-yearold Jean-Michel Basquiat began graffiti-ing; that artists like Warhol mixed with poets and musicians at Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs; that Patti Smith’s Horses still played on the radio. A 23-year-old Kiki Smith settled into a Bowery loft with artist Robert Sestok, making Super 8 films and T-shirts and working at Tin Pan Alley (the bar where Nan Goldin, who photographed the gay scene in the district, would also work), as well as taking a job in a garment factory.

‘I airbrushed stars and flowers on dresses. I think I got to do some flames too…’ In 1978, she moved in with boyfriend Jody Harris, guitarist in punk-jazz band the Contortions. ‘I had a lot of friends who were into the No Wave scene. A lot of artists were in bands back then.’ Did she see Patti play? ‘I wasn’t hip in the slightest. I was an artist. I wanted to stay at home and draw for 12 hours a day.’

Around the same time, Smith joined Colab, a socially engaged artist collective based on the Lower East Side, which included Jenny Holzer. She exhibited alongside them in 1980, the year that her father passed away following a long period of illness, after which Smith turned her attention from printing T-shirts to anatomy. ‘It seemed

Mark Rothko, Richard Tuttle, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock were frequent visitors to the Smith household in South Orange, New Jersey

I

f there is an overarching theme for the London show – a rich range of new tapestries, sculptures, linocuts and drawings – it is that of ‘doubling’, Smith explains.

‘I made Super 8 films when I got out of art school; I loved the way that one frame sits with the next… It’s also about my twin sisters,’ she says, her train of thought making leaps and bounds. ‘The way you can have a sister and the sister can go away and then come back again and she can still be your sister…’

Her surviving sister Seton (Beatrice’s twin), 57, is also an artist, and is living once more in New York, after spending almost two decades in Paris. In September, they are to share a show in Bielefeld, Germany, with their late father, American minimalist

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PHOTOGRAPHS: © THOMAS HOEPKER/MAGNUM PHOTOS. ALL ARTWORK © KIKI SMITH; COURTESY PACE GALLERY, NEW YORK; TIMOTHY TAYLOR GALLERY, LONDON; EARTH, 2012, PHOTOGRAPH BY DONALD FARNSWORTH, COURTESY MAGNOLIA EDITIONS; BORN, 2002, PHOTOGRAPH BY KERRY RYAN MCFATE/COURTESY PACE GALLERY, COLLECTION ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY, BUFFALO, NY, SARAH NORTON GOODYEAR FUND, 2002; TELLING, 2010; ANNUNCIATION, 2008, PHOTOGRAPH BY KERRY RYAN MCFATE/COURTESY PACE GALLERY; COLLECTION: BROOKLYN MUSEUM

firmly in the reviled: from the female body, often wretched and abused (crouched over a trail of faeces in 1992’s Tale), and the defamed women in biblical and mythological tales (Eve, Lot’s Wife, sirens and harpies…) to the maligned creatures of the natural world including moths, crows and wolves.

Smith has always found beauty in the abject: in 1994’s Trinity, the trickle of menstrual blood made from glass beads glitters like a necklace of ruby jewels. Explains Blazwick: ‘All the symbols used by the artist bestow the female body with natural power and connect it with the cosmology.’

Smith herself is, in a sense, a living work of art: her hands tattooed with jade pentacles and turquoise dots like a Maori priestess. ‘I got my first tattoo when I was 14 in New Jersey,’ she says, without lifting her gaze from her pencil. ‘I made them by hand with a boy from across the street. I did the first one myself, then I slowly got more over the years…’

Such body art is explored in American Beauty, a drawing in ink and glitter, included in her London show. ‘I had this idea to draw these girls in my neighbourhood with tattoos of animals and nature on them,’ she says, her eyes smiling but her voice monotone. ‘In some ways, we consider them corny, but to put animals on the body is a kind of animistic calling to be connected to the larger whole.’

Birds also feature in the show, in a new eagle tapestry. Smith’s feathered creations address both her ecological concerns and her own interior iconography – like all her animals, they are partly aspects of the self.

In Telling, also a new work, a golden bird perches on the back of a cast aluminium chair; conjuring up the domestic realm of storytelling and myth-making (an edition of the piece sits in the corner of Smith’s walled garden, hidden in a mass of ivy).

‘Talking about domesticity has become scary in our culture. People really hate you for it, but I think it’s about a natural instinct for nesting, making a safe haven. I spend more time than most people at home,’ she says, giggling to herself. ‘But as you can see, I don’t ever make tea. I’m not cooking dinner.’ Indeed, her helpers silently follow instructions for chocolate rice cakes: more borderline carers than PAs. They hover as Smith cuts out images – roses, trees, stars – to make a collage for the wolf tapestry. Strips of more Nepalese paper tangle like giant strands of fettuccine. ‘Can you put those things in order?’ she says, as if to no one in particular. ‘My brain is so confused. If they [her assistants] weren’t here, this whole room would just be a huge pile of stuff…’

to me a form that suited me – to talk through the body about the way we are here and how we are living,’ she has said. In 1985, Smith began training as an emergency medical technician. ‘I realised that I shouldn’t be a medic. I remember looking at a guy with a knife wound in a hospital and all I felt was, “Oh, isn’t that great, I can see the insides and the outsides at the same time.” I just cared how the wound looked aesthetically. I wouldn’t leave someone in my hands.’

Smith’s pieces featuring dismembered body parts prefigured and echoed the Aids crisis (to which her sister Beatrice fell victim in 1988). Likewise, in the early 1990s, her Virgin Mary (1992), a beeswax effigy flayed down to her muscle and sinew, and 1994’s Mary Magdelene, chained by her ankle, offered a manifestation of the statistical rise of domestic violence against women in America.

‘Feminism in my mind is part of a historical liberation movement like civil rights and gay liberation,’ she explains. ‘Social battles are much more complex than military battles.

They don’t stop. I think if you ask most people they would say they support equal opportunities. But my work is not didactic.

I don’t want my work to be pinned down by one ideology. Where you can go with art and what you can explore is infinite. The universe is larger than your idea.’

In the last decade, Smith has explored different universes: from the cosmos (cosmology is the focus of a new show in Turin in October) to the feminine domestic realm.

Yet she has successfully kept her private life shrouded in mystery, despite provocatively referring to her work as her ‘dowry’ and exploring, in one show, the role of the unmarried woman who lives alone.

In 2011, she showed a series of photo selfportraits in the guise of bats and witches calling to mind the debased stereotype of the ageing ‘hag’. ‘When you stop menstruating, you are suddenly much freer,’ she says, waving her hands in the air. ‘Once you get past your menopause, you realise that you have been poisoned since the age of 13 by all these [ideas of how you should look and behave]. There’s a new world out there…’

She fiddles now with a branch from the tapestry pattern, peeling it off and re-pasting it with surprising slapdash. If only life were like art, you could get to re-glue your mistakes, I murmur. ‘Oh, you can! You can!’ For the first time since my arrival, she halts and fixes me right in the eye: her gaze bright like woodland bluebells. ‘Every day, we have the opportunity to address the balance… and our natural resources are the most precious thing we have. Without them, there’s not much point to being here.’

She stands back and circles the wolf, her hair knotted up like a Sadhu’s, surveying the ‘cosmology’ of stars, rainbows, trees and roses that cover its body like random petals blown with the wind.

‘Being an artist is fantastic. You can go any way: from the human body, to nature, to the cosmos. Who knows where I’ll go next.’

Smith releases her locks, the graphite colour of the wolf. ‘Perhaps into outer space… What can we do now? What can you do?’

Kiki Smith’s new show is at Timothy Taylor Gallery, 15 Carlos Place, London W1 (020 7409 3344), from 12 October.

‘It was terrible growing up. I had no reading comprehension until the third grade. I was under-confident. Being an artist has been a great compensation’

ORIGIN OF THE WORLD From top: Smith working on ‘Mother/ Child’ in 1993. ‘Earth’ (2012). ‘Telling’ (2010).

‘Annunciation’ (2008).

‘Born’ (2002)

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WOMENOF THEYEAR POST MODERNISM Arianna Huffington at home with an artwork

by Kunie Sugiura

INTERNATIONAL WOMAN OF INFUENCE

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON STEPHANIE RAFANELLI meets the former socialite turned self-made media tycoon and political pundit who has changedthefaceof global journalism Photographs by TRENT McGINN

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Dwarfed by an army of Transformer-like cranes that wage a campaign of relentless construction, a small crowd shuffles solemnly through New York’s Ground Zero a few days after the 9/11 10thanniversary memorial service, congregating under the lone ‘survivor’ pear tree, the newest and most fragile symbol of national hope.

While the country reflects in mourning, downtown at AOL HQ, the recently acquired Huffington Post, the progressive comment and aggregated-news site turned online newspaper, is breaking a story, a new angle on the disastrous repercussions of America’s war in Iraq: the $700 million bill for the Vatican-size US embassy in Baghdad.

The online team, clad in Boxfresh hoodies and zany cuts of denim (whose average age might shame even Mark Zuckerberg), scurries about the football-pitch-size offices furnished with Arne Jacobsen replicas in zingy shades of orange and lime. Video technicians, news aggregators, comment editors – Huff Po, with newly launched sites in Canada and Britain, currently has 10,000 citizenjournalist bloggers – all hurry past with the same urgent zip in their step, which says collectively: we are the future of global news.

From a small corner office filled with gilt-framed photographs, bowls of potpourri and wooden shelves heaving with books she has authored, emerges the improbable face of this future: 61-year-old Arianna Huffington, née Stassinopoulos, the notorious Greek-born author, former NY-Lon socialite, political commentator, one-time Republican go-to woman, doyenne of the blogosphere and, since AOL’s $315 million buyout in February 2011, the eponymous editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group (overseeing all of AOL’s online content).

‘Did you know they are making a comic book about me now?’ she drawls warmly, in an accent that suggests a daily gargling of rock salt and honey, as she removes one of her three BlackBerrys from the side of her fiercely blow-dried, impressively buoyant mane.

Hot off the stand, the Bluewater Comics book charts her ascendancy from suburban Athens to one of the ‘most talked about media

WOMENOF THEYEAR THE SOCIAL NETWORKER This page and previous page: Arianna wears silk satin jacket, £995, matching trousers, £495, both Burberry Prorsum; leather pumps, £370, Miu Miu, all at Net-a-porter. Silk camisole; jewellery, all her own

personalities in the world’. On its cover, she is immortalised midcapitals that became the ace card in Huff Po’s hand, enabling her debate, a foxy rhetorician, part Aristotle, part Wonder Woman, her to enlist an army of famous left-leaning bloggers to discuss the cartoon bosom as dynamic as her jawline, the title, Female Force: pertinent political issues of the day.

Arianna Huffington, her very own leitmotif.

‘With Arianna, it was not six degrees of separation, it was two,’ That Huffington is a force to be reckoned with – relentless, evanLerer has said. Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Hillary Clinton, Nora gelical, unshakeably confident – is a fact so undisputable that even Ephron, Donatella Versace and Tim Robbins have all been coaxed her own hypnotic powers of persuasion could not dent it; her ascent into blogging for Huff Po. Her friend Donna Karan has penned a as deserving of mythology as any superheroine’s. At 17, she procontribution on the return of female veterans from Iraq; John pelled herself from Greece to the UK with limited English; she went Cusack, on Obama’s failure to hold torture under the Bush regime on to Cambridge University where she was president of the Union. to task; Madonna, on Malawi. ‘Of course, I would love Lady Gaga [to At 23, she took on Germaine Greer with a controversial response blog for me],’ she says, slurping a takeaway Starbucks coffee through to The Female Eunuch; writing 11 subsequent bestsellers (on subjects a green straw. ‘She’s particularly passionate about the repeal of “Don’t as diverse as Maria Callas, Picasso, spirituality and self-help, plus Ask, Don’t Tell” [the US policy on homosexuality in the military, tomes of fierce political criticism with biting titles such as Right Is which was overturned on 20 September 2010]. I’d love her thoughts Wrong in 2008 and Third World America in 2010). In the late 1980s on the continuing fight for equality and how she sees her role in it.’ and early 1990s, she became the toast of Republican America, before It is doubtful that Gaga could resist her. The Huffington powers moving to California and courting the Hollywood Democratic set, of highbrow seduction are legendary. ‘She is in possession of such performing – both shamelessly and elegantly – a seamless political a powerful brain that she exudes an intellectuality that is almost U-turn and running a failed bid for the govsexual,’ a male friend once said. Comedian ernorship against Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Bill Maher revelled in her guest appearIt doesn’t get much more ballsy than that. ances on his TV show Politically Incorrect, Except that then, in 2005, she set up the even, in the early 1990s, when she was a What was your highlight of 2011?

Huffington Post with Kenneth Lerer and confirmed Republican. ‘We used to joke ‘Definitely the merger with AOL Jonah Peretti (a year after the launch of that if we booked Arianna on a show with in February. It was like stepping off Google and Zuckerberg’s Facebook). It was a guest who we hoped she would argue a fast-moving train and onto a a chance to harness the voice of liberal with, if they spent five minutes together in supersonic jet. We have the same goals America online with a potent cocktail of the Green Room, she’d have converted and the same destination, but we’re progressive comment and the immediacy them,’ Maher comments. ‘People don’t getting there much, much faster.’ of online news. And with it, the emphasis of know how seductive she is.’

Which career moment do you look global-current-affairs coverage shifted from Such allure rarely travels without the back on most fondly? print to online. Today, Huff Po boasts dark shadow of schadenfreude (or, as ‘The early days of the Huffington Post 37 million unique visitors a month (outstripthe Greeks say, epichairekakia). ‘The most in 2005. I often reminisce with our first ping the former US leader, The New York upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus’ is an reporter, Sam Stein, about our humble Times online), with the potential to reach epithet repeatedly applied to Huffington beginnings in a single room in the 100 million users thanks to the new AOL over the years. ‘People have constantly Washington offices of The Atlantic, before deal. The future looks set, and with it world underestimated her because of her charm, we could afford rent. That can-do start-up domination: with the launch of Huff Po’s her accent, her ability to move effortlessly spirit is something I hope we never lose.’ new international editions in Canada, and in through the cocktail circuit,’ explains What makes you feel as if you the UK in July 2011 (France, Spain and Brazil Cusack. But her secret weapon has always could rule the world? are now in the pipeline), the ‘Madonna of been the thickness of her skin. ‘My mother ‘A good night’s sleep.’

New Media’ has expanded her empire. used to say that opinions are like noses: Most valuable advice you’ve People of the world – prepare to be Huffed. everybody has one,’ she says, dismissively, ever been given?

If Huffington is in possession of a superthrowing me a classic Huffington sound‘My mother’s notion that “angels fly power, it is, of course, her notorious charm bite. ‘The important thing is not always because they take themselves lightly”.’

– what she calls a ‘talent for intimacy’. Our to look over your shoulder.’ departure from Huff Po’s Broadway office space to her apartment Indeed, she is appealingly good-natured about her lampooning, takes almost an hour, so many introductions are made and Blackpainted as she is as a power-crazed Zsa Zsa Gabor. Tracey Ullman’s Berry calls answered, along with promises to send flowers to sketch caricatures her mid-Pilates-contortion, working on her staffers’ partners and dispatches of signed copies of her books.

BlackBerry (she is now a friend). Nor is Huffington beyond selfAll the while, she insists on carrying my handbag, despite its parody. She has played herself in an episode of the animated series considerable heft, until we are safely installed on the couch in her Family Guy, and one senses that her liberal use of ‘dahling’ is tinged minimalist Uptown loft, I have been suitably fussed over and a large with a touch of irony. plate of Greek pudding has been placed on my lap.

To Huffington, all is fair game in politics and war; after all, she Huffington is, of course, a legendary hostess, one who comprehas built her entire career on her controversial viewpoints. With hends the seductive mix of ripe figs and high-minded conversation, the launch of Huff Po’s UK edition last July, her critical eye has her skills honed in the upper echelons of intellectual society in 1970s zeroed in on our shores. In 2005, she blogged under the snappy title London, 1980s New York, 1990s Washington and Noughties Holly‘The Blair Bitch Project’: ‘The lion needed courage, the scarecrow wood. Such ‘social networking’ skills – once disdained as vulgar a brain and the tin man a heart. Tony Blair – he needs some balls,’ self-promotion – have come into their own in the digital age. It was she wrote, on the then prime minister’s inability to revoke his supHuffington’s crucial connections at the heart of America’s power port for Bush during the Iraq war. In July, when the phone-hacking www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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SEE STOCKISTS FOR DETAILS. HAIR BY ARTURO SWAYZE FOR ARTURO NEW YORK, USING KÉRASTASE. MAKE-UP BY EVE PEARL FOR EVE PEARL

Arianna’s WORLD

WOMENOF THEYEAR scandal exploded, putting increasing pressure on the coalition prime minister David Cameron and his links with the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, she wrote tartly: ‘Big Society, small world.’

‘Ed Miliband blogged [on the need for Cameron to take action on phone hacking] when we launched in London. And I decided to make it a live blog event. So you had this sense that you were constantly at the centre of things – getting the latest news and blogs…

Rebekah Brooks made a very dramatic picture with her red hair and curls, and I think that added to the drama… But I don’t think that the News of the World would have closed down so quickly were it not for people tweeting, getting advertisers to withdraw their ads.’

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istory, as it turns out, has justified Huffington’s long-held belief in the emancipatory power of the internet. ‘A lot of people who did not have a voice before, now have a voice – from those involved in the Arab uprisings to people getting together to clean up the streets after the London riots,’ she says and pauses, weighing up her arguments fairly. ‘But of course, social media can be used for evil. They were also used to help organise the violence in London.’

Besides such civilian social activism and the democratising platform for the everyman social commentator that Huff Po provides, Huffington has pillaged her golden Rolodex to recruit high-profile London names to her tribe of loyal blogarazzi. Bianca Jagger has

the opera I want to see before I die.”’ Her chest heaves passionately.

With Levin as mentor, the young Greek Pudding inserted herself in the London intelligentsia as its newest thinking-man’s woman.

When, in 1970, Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch, the self-possessed Huffington countered her theories without a second thought. Her The Female Woman was published three years later, arguing for the inherent differences between the genders – a point of view deemed in some feminist quarters as reactionary. ‘My point was that if women were able to have children and not work, then we should respect their choices. It seemed to me that there wasn’t anything inherently amazing about having a career.’

Huffington’s theories reflected her own early yearnings for a family – an urge that was repeatedly thwarted as she hurtled towards her 30th year. Levin suffered from ‘intimacy issues’; he refused to marry or have children. And so, with iron-clad will, Huffington left him, catapulting herself in 1980 across the Atlantic to forge a new life.

It was here, installed on the Upper East Side, that the Huffington clan threw fabled dinners for New York society, her charismatic, kaftan-clad mother, Elli – whose inclination to befriend all and sundry meant that guests were as likely to sit next to the boiler man as a Jewish intellectual – swanning around barefoot, smoking cigars. ‘Those dinner parties were just an extension of Cambridge.

The guests were better known, the food was better, but it was the same principle of bringing people together to converse,’ she explains, resisting, with difficulty, the urge to attend to a flashing light on her BlackBerry.

Huffington rose phoenix-like from the ashes of Levin’s painful rejection with a capacity for reinvention that has defined her career. ‘Always make new mistakes’ were the wise words of Elli, who taught Huffington the fearlessness that has been the elixir of her life. Courageousness is a quality that was passed down to her through the bloodline of both of her parents. During World War II, her father Constantine was put in a German concentration camp for editing a Resistance newspaper, one of an endless chain of ailing publications that he founded in his career. Her mother, a Red Cross worker, hid Jewish teenagers from soldiers during the early Greek Civil War. With such a history, operatic in its grandeur, it is perhaps unsurprising that Huffington chose the life and times of Maria Callas as the subject of her third book, in 1981 (‘I remember crying when I was writing Maria Callas, because it was so much about me too…’) Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend was serialised in The Sunday Times. It was through the newspaper’s then editor, Harold Evans, that she met his girlfriend Tina Brown, who went on to become the illustrious editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and in 2008 launched rival comment site the Daily Beast.

‘I met her in London and went to their wedding, when she was editing Tatler,’ explains Huffington. ‘Then we reconnected when we moved to New York – we have both led strangely congruous lives. We’ve had fun vacations together, one in Ireland and one on the border of Mexico at a health spa, going for hikes by day and watching movies at night.’

Among the high-powered Manhattan women that Huffington befriended – including Brown, Barbara Walters and Lucky Roosevelt – was Ann Getty who, in 1985, set her up on a three-day opera blind date with Michael Huffington, who a year later was made Ronald Reagan’s Deputy Assistant CONTINUED ON PAGE 313

‘I still think there are glass ceilings for women in business. Ambition is a word used about women pejoratively, but not about men’ recently written on Huff Po in defence of Julian Assange and to campaign for the release of Ai Weiwei; Bill Nighy reported in advance of the G20 summit, Emma Thompson on the tricky relationship between celebrity and charity, and Sarah Brown on maternal health.

Such renewed immersion in the UK scene has brought back fond recollections for Huffington of the decade or so she spent there in her youth: ‘I lived in Cadogan Gardens, so walking around now and seeing my old haunts has been wonderful. I took my two daughters to Girton College in Cambridge. That was such a transformational time for me; getting into Cambridge was the one thing that made everything else possible.’

Her transportation from suburban Athens to blue-stocking academia is testimony to her powers of visualisation. The teenage Huffington applied to the university having been mesmerised by a picture of Cambridge life in a magazine. Upon being accepted, she moved to our shores with her mother and sister Agapi.

Within three years, Huffington (given the sassy moniker ‘the Greek Pudding’ by male undergraduates) became the first foreign president of the Cambridge Union, pitched in debate against – among others – Benazir Bhutto, her Oxford Union counterpart.

It was on the strength of such dialectic skills that she became a pundit on Radio 4 and 1970s TV panel shows like Face the Music, where, aged 21, she met acclaimed Times newspaper columnist Bernard Levin, 21 years her senior.

‘I prepped the Soviet Union, Northern Ireland and Wagner for our first date. On our second, he took me to Covent Garden to see Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and, as the lights went down, said, “This is 280 |

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SEE STOCKISTS FOR DETAILS. HAIR BY PAUL MERRITT AT JED ROOT. MAKE-UP BY NIKKI PALMER AT MANDY COAKLEY, USING DIOR ADDICT AND DIOR HOMME DERMA. MANICURE BY AMANDA BRAGOLI FOR LEIGHTON DENNY EXPERT NAILS. MODEL: AMBER ANDERSON AT TESS MANAGEMENT. WITH THANKS TO SPRING STUDIOS

THE CHEEK OF IT! David Walliams and model Amber Anderson recreating Herb Ritts’ famous 1993 shoot with KD Lang. Amber wears Lycra body, £395, Eres. Leather heels, £1,059, Tabitha Simmons at Selfridges. Metal cuffs, £380 each, Balmain. Gold and pearl ring, £7,000, Solange Azagury-Partridge.

Walliams wears wool trousers; matching waistcoat (sold as suit), £2,850, Tom Ford. Silk tie, £120, Dior Homme.

Watch, cotton Tom Ford shirt and leather Yves Saint Laurent boots, all his own

KING OF COMEDY David Walliams , joker extraordinaire, acclaimed writer, serious actor, husband to a supermodel, swimming fundraiser and all-round national treasure, tells STEPHANIE RAFANELLI about his love for Wonder Woman, bringing up ‘gay babies’ and dressing as Pippa Middleton Photographs by TRENT MCGINN Styled by PIPPA VOSPER

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avid Walliams is grinning like a Cheshire cat. I note said beam because this is not a mien to which he is naturally predisposed. Though he is prone to triggering outbursts of hysteria in others, merely by the prolonged upkeep of his own curious brand of composure (if there were a visual aid on YouTube to illustrate the word ‘deadpan’, he would surely feature heavily), he is not an actor-comedian in the Cordenian lolloping Labrador or quickfire motormouth moulds.

David Walliams is a very serious man. But given his current predicament (one in which he seems not altogether uncomfortable or unaccustomed) – his torso straddled by a one-piece-clad model in some haute-fashion wet shave-cum-lap dance – Walliams is hamming up his best camp Bond, by way of Lurch and Frankie Howerd.

This is all part of his wholehearted embracing of Bazaar’s homage to Herb Ritts and his 1993 celebration of sexual ambiguity for Vanity Fair starring KD Lang and Cindy Crawford; Walliams has enthusiastically proffered both his own savvy model suggestions and collection of Tom Ford suits (he is rather obsessed, more on which later). But then Walliams is a man who himself thrives on the frisson of ambivalence – able, since Little Britain took off in 2003, to slip, sans embarrassment, between three-piece suits, fat suits, skirt suits and wetsuits (at one point today, it looks as though a Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit will be added to the list, as he flicks, with a mischievous glint in his eye, through the fashion rails). He revels in the provocation. Or perhaps he just can’t help himself. For instance, when I suggest that he is both overachiever and polymath

I met him at Kate Moss’ wedding. I mean, it was like meeting Mozart,’ he recounts, counterintuitively poker-faced. (For the record, we are eating porridge pre-shoot, a stone’s throw from his Supernova Heights home – the notorious former abode of another friend, Noel Gallagher). ‘Lara suddenly got a job and had to go to New York, so I took my friend James instead. I saw [Paul] before the show and I said, “Sorry Lara couldn’t come, I brought James.” And he said, “Ahh, come on, we all know the real reason, David.”’ I act dumb as to the meaning of it all. ‘He was insinuating that James was my boyfriend,’ Walliams explains. ‘I just thought, “Bloody hell! Macca is making a joke about my sexuality. How did that happen?”’

It’s heartening to know that Walliams can be gracious when the tables are turned. ‘No one should be above having the mickey taken out of them,’ he tells me (except perhaps Tom Ford) – and, he adds, especially not Simon Cowell. Walliams has just returned from Britain’s Got Talent ’s Birmingham auditions: ‘Simon is the king, and I’m the court jester.’ He shows me a picture of the pair on his iPhone, his chin resting on Cowell’s shoulder from behind, like a showbiz version of Zaphod Beeblebrox from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. ‘I asked the show’s producers, “Can I make jokes about Simon? About him being camp? About being friends with Sinitta?

About his hair?” And they said, “No, no, no.” I feel ready for him to crack into a grin, but his face remains impassive. ‘Then the first act came on and said, “My dream is to perform in front of the Queen”, and I said, “Well, he’s right here – go ahead.”’

Suggestive homoerotic ad-libs and double entendres aside (he must rein himself in for the live part of the show, he says: ‘The innuendo-meter is definitely a problem. I’m going to have to have a second’s delay in my brain’), Walliams is sure to be good cop to Cowell’s bad. ‘I’m the new Cheryl Cole,’ he declares without batting an eyelid. Walliams agrees that he’s swimming in his native habitat on Britain’s Got Talent, which is, after all, the real Little Britain. Early audition candidates Dolly Mix (girl band), Joe Santini (rock guitarist) and Little Mee (puppeteer) are characters that Walliams himself might invent. And although he and Matt Lucas are famed for their grotesque, cartoonish caricatures, Walliams insists there is always a fondness to his lampooning: ‘Humour celebrates people in a way – we are all absurd.’

Walliams as lachrymose bastion of empathy is not an angle I would necessarily buy, had I not read his award-winning children’s novels – including The Boy in the Dress (2008), Mr Stink (2009) and Gangsta Granny (2011) – which showcase such a range of storytelling skills, observational insight and touching sensitivity about the absurdity of our world from the point of view of a child, as to convert any former sceptics. That his tomes are proliferated with toilet gags, irreverent humour and low-brow contemporary references makes his moral messages less turgidly didactic and all the more digestible. Walliams is a natural populist, a man of the people – but an intellectual one, as much in his element referencing Hogarth and Dickens (we are talking Little Britain as social satire) as Strictly Come Dancing. He flips between them like a master juggler, with the kind of shamelessness with which he morphs between his characters Emily Howard (‘I’m a laydee!’), Sebastian Love (‘Bitch!’), Carol Beer (‘Computer says no’) and Melody Baines.

Gangsta Granny, the tale of Ben and his secret-diamond-thief grandmother, who plot to steal the crown jewels (subtext: be kind to the elderly and don’t assume they are boring) – its paperback release rather fittingly timed to coincide with CONTINUED ON PAGE 194

– actor-comedian (co-creator of Little Britain and Come Fly With Me), award-winning author (he has written four novels for children that sold more than a million copies, and is working on a TV adaptation of one of them), serious actor (Pinter, Poliakoff, Dickens – he has a role in Mike Newell’s upcoming Great Expectations), endurance swimmer (and subsequently, in the words of his own dear mother, ‘the nation’s sweetheart’) and now a new judge on the sixth series of Britain’s Got Talent alongside Simon Cowell – he blurts out in a faux Freudian slip: ‘I’m definitely a Polly, a poly-something anyway…’

Certainly, Walliams has overachieved in at least one area of his life: l’amour. And I really don’t feel that he would mind me saying this. In May 2010, he married 28-year-old Dutch ‘sex bomb’ Lara Stone (barely a month goes by without a fashion bible’s love letter to her comeliness and the gap between her incisors), simultaneously discombobulating and intriguing most of London, tabloids and celebrity scenesters alike. It’s not that Walliams isn’t attractive – all the traditional ingredients for handsomeness are there: he is tall, dark, wide of jaw. Yet it’s as though his outline had been etched by childish hands: his head disproportionately large, his frame too Hulk-like, his eyes exaggeratedly flinted. Walliams is surprisingly good-natured about such physical shortcomings in relation to his paramour and the nebula of speculation that surrounds them; although when emanating from certain quarters, it is tantamount to flattery. ‘Lara and I had planned to see Paul McCartney in concert.

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‘I asked the show’s producers, “Can I make jokes about Simon Cowell? About him being camp? About his hair?” They said, “No, no, no”’

‘KING OF COMEDY’

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the Jubilee – was inspired by a recent date: ‘I had just visited the Tower of London. My wife, even though her father is English, grew up in Holland, so a lot of British culture is new to her. It’s a rather lovely thing to say: “Have you ever been to the Tower of London?

No? Let’s go!”’ In the book, Ben and his granny are caught in flagrante in the Tower by the Queen herself (she later flashes her knickers during her Christmas speech in homage to Gangsta Granny’s rebellion). ‘I’ve become a bit of a monarchist,’ he says.

He was invited to Buckingham Palace in 2006, after swimming the English Channel for Sport Relief, and again last year, after his dramatic 140-mile, eight-day swim along the Thames, which raised over a million pounds. ‘Whatever is happening in the country – the world – the Queen is a symbol of continuity and unison.’ Royal anecdotes ensue in a more typical Walliams vein: ‘I met Wills and Kate at an awards ceremony with my mum. He just kept on saying, “You must be very proud of him, Kathleen” [brilliant lock-jawed Wills impression]. I said to Kate, “Oh, did you see the picture in Heat magazine of me dressed as your sister?”

penchant for women’s clothes: ‘My sister used to dress me up as soon as I could walk,’ he says unequivocally. ‘We had a little dressing-up box, and she used to dress me up like I was a dolly in a bridesmaid’s dress and a fur hat. I never thought it was anything unusual…’ He trails off. ‘Anyway, that’s how I ended up in Little Britain dressing up as Emily Howard [the unconvincing transvestite] and all the other women, because that was always in me. You don’t have to be gay to be camp. In Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant puts on Katharine Hepburn’s frilly bathrobe and answers the door saying, “Oh, I’ve come over all gay!” Men used to wear wigs and make-up and it was a sign of masculinity. Look at the New Romantics or Bowie in that “Ashes to Ashes” period…’

Still, the childhood anecdote reminds me somehow of Grayson Perry, and the complex dynamic of self-degradation and selfaffirmation that he gleans from his ritual outings as Claire. Is there any element of humiliation or self-flagellation that plays out either in his masochistic endurance swims or his frumpy female roles? ‘Well, yeah. Hmm. I never saw it as that, but it’s difficult to psycho-analyse yourself,’ he muses. ‘Getting a laugh is the best feeling in the world. Even if you completely degrade yourself to get one, you’ve still got a laugh, so that’s still a very good thing.’

Either way, Walliams is refreshingly frank about this, as well as his past struggles with self-loathing, insomnia and depression (he sought therapy during the filming of the first series of Little Britain. On his 2009 Desert Island Discs appearance, he requested a gun as his ‘luxury’ – just in case). ‘For me there’s a kind of manic depression that happens where there’s been a manic phase of creativity or performing. I mean, even just being in front of the audience of Britain’s Got Talent, I do have this manic energy, and that has to be counter-balanced with something… That’s just the way things are. There have been these manic phases, and there have been these depressive stages. It does colour the way you see the world. Everything is grey. You have to get good at spotting it.’

But presumably he has coping strategies these days, I say – not only the hottest wife on the planet, but his Herculean charity feats (swimming the Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar in 2008, and the Thames, despite contracting ‘Thames sickness’, with a monomaniacal commitment to his cause): ‘I do like to have something that I’m striving for. But I remember feeling pretty low after I’d done the Channel, because you’ve worked so hard for this goal, and then after everyone has jumped up and down for a day, it’s like, “What’s next…?”’

Walliams has won numerous accolades for his natatorial achievements, including being invited to be ambassador to the British Olympic swimming team, and earning his very own swimmingrelated sobriquet from Elton John and David Furnish: ‘They call me Esther Walliams [after Esther Williams, the 1940s Olympic-level swimmer turned Hollywood starlet]. You know you’ve made it when Elton and David give you a drag name. All their friends have one.’

Whether in the guise of Esther or David, Walliams is still surprisingly starry-eyed about some of the people with whom he now circulates, none more so than the man Lara Stone credits as being the third person in their relationship: Mr Tom Ford. And the admiration is mutual: ‘I can spend hours reciting Little Britain quotes, and have seen every episode many, many times. Desiree DeVere always has me in stiches,’ the designer tells me. ‘When I first met David, I was very surprised to see the deeply sensitive and caring side of his nature and that he is, indeed, quite serious.’

‘They call me Esther Walliams. You know you’ve made it when Elton and David give you a drag name. All their friends have one’ And she said, “No.” And I said, “You’ve got to Google it when you get home.” I don’t know if she did, but it was a very absurd conversation to have with the future Queen.’ He erupts in an impromptu giggle. This is David Walliams: teetering curiously on the border between thoughtful and absurd.

T

o explore further the Walliams psyche, we must await his upcoming autobiography, which he is currently scribing along with a television adaptation of Mr Stink, his tale of a shy, bullied girl called Chloe who makes friends with a tramp, which won the Children’s Award in the inaugural People’s Book Prize in 2010 (the story was conceived while playing opposite Michael Gambon in Pinter’s No Man’s Land in 2008: ‘His voice was in my head when I wrote it,’ he says). But his fiction is already revealing. Walliams deals as adeptly with Chloe’s anxiety about her weight – he himself was a chubby child – as he does with the urge of 12-year-old Dennis to secretly cross-dress as Denise in The Boy in the Dress, which was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize: ‘I was naturally effeminate as a boy.

I would play Wonder Woman in the playground, spinning around and pretending to be Lynda Carter, fighting for your rights in her satin tights. When she ran, her boobs bounced up and down.

I fancied her, but I also wanted be her.’

Walliams grew up in suburban Banstead, Surrey, the son of Kathleen, a lab technician, and Peter Williams, a London transport engineer (he altered his name for Equity). As a result of his innate campness, he was anointed with the moniker ‘Daphne’ for his entire school career. ‘It was like a word for gay. Homosexuality is the biggest fear in an all-boys school.’ And so Walliams began to play up to his reputation. ‘A person becomes a comedian so that they can control the laughter directed at them, so that people are not laughing at you, but with you.’ His first theatrical role was as a Jacobean queen in a play at school, but this was not the real genesis of his

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Walliams’ eyes brighten when I mention the designer: ‘Everything I’m wearing right now, except for my watch and my boxer shorts, is Tom Ford. Even my bag is his.’ (He does look immaculately dapper.) ‘He’s a genius. He is very handsome. He’s aspirational as well. You sort of want to be like him when you meet him. His stores are so beautifully designed, you want to move into them.’ Indeed, Walliams had the interior of Supernova Heights renovated according to photographs of Ford’s own LA home. But despite such imperial fashion connections, Walliams’ taste in friends remains as high-low as his cultural references, as the quirky cross-section of guests at his Shoreditch House wedding reception – from Mario Testino to Barbara Windsor – attests. ‘There was a moment when I looked up and Dale Winton was talking to Tom Ford… Tom isn’t tanned at all when he’s standing next to Dale Winton.’

W

alliams and Stone will celebrate their two-year anniversary this May – doesn’t he ever feel physically intimidated, I ask, by the male models that Stone works with, for instance in her recent Calvin Klein campaign? ‘Lara always calls them “boys”, and she says they’re always eating protein shakes and doing press-ups and sit-ups between shots.’ He raises a brow sardonically. ‘I mean, they’re incredible specimens, aren’t they? But have they swum 140 miles of the Thames? No. Have they ever dressed as a naked black woman on television? No.’ It is hard to believe that the playground Daphne Walliams of yesteryear could have ever imagined his luck. ‘I was good at talking to the girls – I was only really friends with the pretty ones – but I had no idea how to make a move. But when I turned 20, I got my first girlfriend, Katy Carmichael: she was the most attractive girl in university [Walliams attended Bristol University with Matt Lucas after meeting him at National Youth Theatre], and I thought, “Oh well, maybe…”’

Nowadays, he is a more experienced connoisseur of the female species. Is he proud of his wife for helping to bring back curves – more specifically a bust – into fashion and art? ‘For me, breasts have never been out – they have always been in the forefront of my mind,’ he deadpans. ‘I do think there seem to be more voluptuous models out there at the moment. Lara is really sexy, like a siren of the screen. She is halfway between Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, isn’t she?’

Speaking of fecund forms, Walliams is, he says, unashamedly broody. At 41, his biological clock is ticking loudly – though he recently petrified his nephew by reading the part of a troll in a bedtime story rather too vividly. On this thread, he whips out his iPhone again to show me ‘Bert’, a young border terrier they are picking up on Stone’s return from LA. Well, puppies today, babies tomorrow. Or even ‘gaybies’, as Stone once drolly quipped (the pair are as bonded in humour as in gloominess – Stone has often cited doleful Smiths lyrics to express her state of mind). ‘I am effeminate and Lara is a model, so there will be a lot of feminine energy in that house.’ He threatens to chuckle for a moment. Tom Ford would make the perfect godfather, I suggest. He holds my stare for a second. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he retorts solemnly. ‘But maybe Dale Winton…’

‘Britain’s Got Talent’ is on ITV1 on Saturday evenings. ‘Gangsta Granny’ (£6.99, HarperCollins) is out in paperback on 5 July. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

‘LA VITA BELLA’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 160

Coverley had walked into Ipswich hospital in pain and found out that she was in the advanced stages of cancer.

Freud herself was one of the most painted of Lucian’s many offspring (among them Susie and Ali Boyt, Paul and Lucy Freud and artist Jane McAdam Freud), and she says she doesn’t want to offend her siblings by appearing to ‘own’ their father more than they do.

‘It means so much to me that we all stay close,’ she says. ‘It just depended on the relationships our mothers had with our father. My mother made a big effort to make sure we saw our father. The older we got, the more involved we became with him.’

She only has to share her mother, on the other hand, with her younger sister, the novelist Esther Freud. Bernadine Coverley was the daughter of Irish pub owners who settled in London for a while.

She met the fortysomething Lucian in Soho as a teenager, got pregnant and gave birth to Bella at the age of 18. The pregnancy was immortalised on canvas in Lucian’s Pregnant Girl 1960–61. Bella talks about her mother’s ‘incredible strength’: she was a dancer, model and latterly a writer on gardens, who took her children to live in Morocco when Bella was seven (which Esther Freud wrote about in Hideous Kinky), before returning to the UK and putting her daughters through a Steiner school in Sussex (‘Mum was totally self-made. So lovely. So beautiful as well’). She brings out a photo she has recently acquired of a grinning 15-year-old schoolgirl with black hair and a 100-watt smile. ‘I love this picture of my mother because she just looks so up, so excited about life.’

Freud offers to take me on a tour of the rest of the house, including the slightly rickety upstairs. She is looking forward to when Maria Speake of Retrouvius begins the final revamping phase on the top floor (new bedrooms all round and a new office for Fox).

Fox’s influence can also be felt in a wealth of tomes on subjects ranging from Diaghilev to the Black Panthers and Mario Testino, as well as fiction by Will Self, Martin Amis and Noël Coward. Then there’s the metre-high doll of Keith Richards as Captain Teague in Pirates of the Caribbean with a real Keith Richards voice that says things like ‘Get out of my way, boy’ as you walk past it.

Freud and Fox’s worlds join with the Rolling Stones guitarist: they both met Richards before they met each other. As well as writing White Mischief, the glamorous tale of philandering and murder in colonial Kenya, later made into a film, Fox helped Richards craft his autobiography; they met in the 1970s when Fox interviewed Richards for The Sunday Times. Freud met him in Italy in her twenties, when she was studying fashion in Rome (he was a friend of her boyfriend of the time, the eccentric playboy Prince ‘Dado’ Ruspoli).

Richards commissioned a coat from her on the strength of some of her drawings he’d seen; her old Seditionaries boss Westwood, who was spending time in Italy manufacturing her Mini-Crini collection, helped her out with the coat’s teething problems. There is no doubt that the Fox-Freud residence resonates with the maverick spirit of art, literature and good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll. We end up in the sitting room where two Chardin maids, etched by Lucian from nights he spent in the National Gallery, look down on the robust-looking drum kit. Freud confides that she’s been rehearsing ‘Ziggy Stardust’ because ‘there are lots of drum rolls in it’.

‘It’s great when you do something that – you know, when you’re an adult and you think, “Oh, I can’t do that…”’

She hesitates before adding: ‘Since both of my parents died – that’s one thing that’s happened – I’ve just thought, “I don’t care if I’m bad. Fuck it. I’m just going to do it!”’

For details of the Hoping Foundation, visit www.hoping foundation.org.

May 2012 |

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| 195

‘KING OF COMEDY’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 132

the Jubilee – was inspired by a recent date: ‘I had just visited the Tower of London. My wife, even though her father is English, grew up in Holland, so a lot of British culture is new to her. It’s a rather lovely thing to say: “Have you ever been to the Tower of London?

No? Let’s go!”’ In the book, Ben and his granny are caught in flagrante in the Tower by the Queen herself (she later flashes her knickers during her Christmas speech in homage to Gangsta Granny’s rebellion). ‘I’ve become a bit of a monarchist,’ he says.

He was invited to Buckingham Palace in 2006, after swimming the English Channel for Sport Relief, and again last year, after his dramatic 140-mile, eight-day swim along the Thames, which raised over a million pounds. ‘Whatever is happening in the country – the world – the Queen is a symbol of continuity and unison.’ Royal anecdotes ensue in a more typical Walliams vein: ‘I met Wills and Kate at an awards ceremony with my mum. He just kept on saying, “You must be very proud of him, Kathleen” [brilliant lock-jawed Wills impression]. I said to Kate, “Oh, did you see the picture in Heat magazine of me dressed as your sister?”

penchant for women’s clothes: ‘My sister used to dress me up as soon as I could walk,’ he says unequivocally. ‘We had a little dressing-up box, and she used to dress me up like I was a dolly in a bridesmaid’s dress and a fur hat. I never thought it was anything unusual…’ He trails off. ‘Anyway, that’s how I ended up in Little Britain dressing up as Emily Howard [the unconvincing transvestite] and all the other women, because that was always in me. You don’t have to be gay to be camp. In Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant puts on Katharine Hepburn’s frilly bathrobe and answers the door saying, “Oh, I’ve come over all gay!” Men used to wear wigs and make-up and it was a sign of masculinity. Look at the New Romantics or Bowie in that “Ashes to Ashes” period…’

Still, the childhood anecdote reminds me somehow of Grayson Perry, and the complex dynamic of self-degradation and selfaffirmation that he gleans from his ritual outings as Claire. Is there any element of humiliation or self-flagellation that plays out either in his masochistic endurance swims or his frumpy female roles? ‘Well, yeah. Hmm. I never saw it as that, but it’s difficult to psycho-analyse yourself,’ he muses. ‘Getting a laugh is the best feeling in the world. Even if you completely degrade yourself to get one, you’ve still got a laugh, so that’s still a very good thing.’

Either way, Walliams is refreshingly frank about this, as well as his past struggles with self-loathing, insomnia and depression (he sought therapy during the filming of the first series of Little Britain. On his 2009 Desert Island Discs appearance, he requested a gun as his ‘luxury’ – just in case). ‘For me there’s a kind of manic depression that happens where there’s been a manic phase of creativity or performing. I mean, even just being in front of the audience of Britain’s Got Talent, I do have this manic energy, and that has to be counter-balanced with something… That’s just the way things are. There have been these manic phases, and there have been these depressive stages. It does colour the way you see the world. Everything is grey. You have to get good at spotting it.’

But presumably he has coping strategies these days, I say – not only the hottest wife on the planet, but his Herculean charity feats (swimming the Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar in 2008, and the Thames, despite contracting ‘Thames sickness’, with a monomaniacal commitment to his cause): ‘I do like to have something that I’m striving for. But I remember feeling pretty low after I’d done the Channel, because you’ve worked so hard for this goal, and then after everyone has jumped up and down for a day, it’s like, “What’s next…?”’

Walliams has won numerous accolades for his natatorial achievements, including being invited to be ambassador to the British Olympic swimming team, and earning his very own swimmingrelated sobriquet from Elton John and David Furnish: ‘They call me Esther Walliams [after Esther Williams, the 1940s Olympic-level swimmer turned Hollywood starlet]. You know you’ve made it when Elton and David give you a drag name. All their friends have one.’

Whether in the guise of Esther or David, Walliams is still surprisingly starry-eyed about some of the people with whom he now circulates, none more so than the man Lara Stone credits as being the third person in their relationship: Mr Tom Ford. And the admiration is mutual: ‘I can spend hours reciting Little Britain quotes, and have seen every episode many, many times. Desiree DeVere always has me in stiches,’ the designer tells me. ‘When I first met David, I was very surprised to see the deeply sensitive and caring side of his nature and that he is, indeed, quite serious.’

‘They call me Esther Walliams. You know you’ve made it when Elton and David give you a drag name. All their friends have one’ And she said, “No.” And I said, “You’ve got to Google it when you get home.” I don’t know if she did, but it was a very absurd conversation to have with the future Queen.’ He erupts in an impromptu giggle. This is David Walliams: teetering curiously on the border between thoughtful and absurd.

T

o explore further the Walliams psyche, we must await his upcoming autobiography, which he is currently scribing along with a television adaptation of Mr Stink, his tale of a shy, bullied girl called Chloe who makes friends with a tramp, which won the Children’s Award in the inaugural People’s Book Prize in 2010 (the story was conceived while playing opposite Michael Gambon in Pinter’s No Man’s Land in 2008: ‘His voice was in my head when I wrote it,’ he says). But his fiction is already revealing. Walliams deals as adeptly with Chloe’s anxiety about her weight – he himself was a chubby child – as he does with the urge of 12-year-old Dennis to secretly cross-dress as Denise in The Boy in the Dress, which was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize: ‘I was naturally effeminate as a boy.

I would play Wonder Woman in the playground, spinning around and pretending to be Lynda Carter, fighting for your rights in her satin tights. When she ran, her boobs bounced up and down.

I fancied her, but I also wanted be her.’

Walliams grew up in suburban Banstead, Surrey, the son of Kathleen, a lab technician, and Peter Williams, a London transport engineer (he altered his name for Equity). As a result of his innate campness, he was anointed with the moniker ‘Daphne’ for his entire school career. ‘It was like a word for gay. Homosexuality is the biggest fear in an all-boys school.’ And so Walliams began to play up to his reputation. ‘A person becomes a comedian so that they can control the laughter directed at them, so that people are not laughing at you, but with you.’ His first theatrical role was as a Jacobean queen in a play at school, but this was not the real genesis of his

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Walliams’ eyes brighten when I mention the designer: ‘Everything I’m wearing right now, except for my watch and my boxer shorts, is Tom Ford. Even my bag is his.’ (He does look immaculately dapper.) ‘He’s a genius. He is very handsome. He’s aspirational as well. You sort of want to be like him when you meet him. His stores are so beautifully designed, you want to move into them.’ Indeed, Walliams had the interior of Supernova Heights renovated according to photographs of Ford’s own LA home. But despite such imperial fashion connections, Walliams’ taste in friends remains as high-low as his cultural references, as the quirky cross-section of guests at his Shoreditch House wedding reception – from Mario Testino to Barbara Windsor – attests. ‘There was a moment when I looked up and Dale Winton was talking to Tom Ford… Tom isn’t tanned at all when he’s standing next to Dale Winton.’

W

alliams and Stone will celebrate their two-year anniversary this May – doesn’t he ever feel physically intimidated, I ask, by the male models that Stone works with, for instance in her recent Calvin Klein campaign? ‘Lara always calls them “boys”, and she says they’re always eating protein shakes and doing press-ups and sit-ups between shots.’ He raises a brow sardonically. ‘I mean, they’re incredible specimens, aren’t they? But have they swum 140 miles of the Thames? No. Have they ever dressed as a naked black woman on television? No.’ It is hard to believe that the playground Daphne Walliams of yesteryear could have ever imagined his luck. ‘I was good at talking to the girls – I was only really friends with the pretty ones – but I had no idea how to make a move. But when I turned 20, I got my first girlfriend, Katy Carmichael: she was the most attractive girl in university [Walliams attended Bristol University with Matt Lucas after meeting him at National Youth Theatre], and I thought, “Oh well, maybe…”’

Nowadays, he is a more experienced connoisseur of the female species. Is he proud of his wife for helping to bring back curves – more specifically a bust – into fashion and art? ‘For me, breasts have never been out – they have always been in the forefront of my mind,’ he deadpans. ‘I do think there seem to be more voluptuous models out there at the moment. Lara is really sexy, like a siren of the screen. She is halfway between Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, isn’t she?’

Speaking of fecund forms, Walliams is, he says, unashamedly broody. At 41, his biological clock is ticking loudly – though he recently petrified his nephew by reading the part of a troll in a bedtime story rather too vividly. On this thread, he whips out his iPhone again to show me ‘Bert’, a young border terrier they are picking up on Stone’s return from LA. Well, puppies today, babies tomorrow. Or even ‘gaybies’, as Stone once drolly quipped (the pair are as bonded in humour as in gloominess – Stone has often cited doleful Smiths lyrics to express her state of mind). ‘I am effeminate and Lara is a model, so there will be a lot of feminine energy in that house.’ He threatens to chuckle for a moment. Tom Ford would make the perfect godfather, I suggest. He holds my stare for a second. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he retorts solemnly. ‘But maybe Dale Winton…’

‘Britain’s Got Talent’ is on ITV1 on Saturday evenings. ‘Gangsta Granny’ (£6.99, HarperCollins) is out in paperback on 5 July. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

‘LA VITA BELLA’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 160

Coverley had walked into Ipswich hospital in pain and found out that she was in the advanced stages of cancer.

Freud herself was one of the most painted of Lucian’s many offspring (among them Susie and Ali Boyt, Paul and Lucy Freud and artist Jane McAdam Freud), and she says she doesn’t want to offend her siblings by appearing to ‘own’ their father more than they do.

‘It means so much to me that we all stay close,’ she says. ‘It just depended on the relationships our mothers had with our father. My mother made a big effort to make sure we saw our father. The older we got, the more involved we became with him.’

She only has to share her mother, on the other hand, with her younger sister, the novelist Esther Freud. Bernadine Coverley was the daughter of Irish pub owners who settled in London for a while.

She met the fortysomething Lucian in Soho as a teenager, got pregnant and gave birth to Bella at the age of 18. The pregnancy was immortalised on canvas in Lucian’s Pregnant Girl 1960–61. Bella talks about her mother’s ‘incredible strength’: she was a dancer, model and latterly a writer on gardens, who took her children to live in Morocco when Bella was seven (which Esther Freud wrote about in Hideous Kinky), before returning to the UK and putting her daughters through a Steiner school in Sussex (‘Mum was totally self-made. So lovely. So beautiful as well’). She brings out a photo she has recently acquired of a grinning 15-year-old schoolgirl with black hair and a 100-watt smile. ‘I love this picture of my mother because she just looks so up, so excited about life.’

Freud offers to take me on a tour of the rest of the house, including the slightly rickety upstairs. She is looking forward to when Maria Speake of Retrouvius begins the final revamping phase on the top floor (new bedrooms all round and a new office for Fox).

Fox’s influence can also be felt in a wealth of tomes on subjects ranging from Diaghilev to the Black Panthers and Mario Testino, as well as fiction by Will Self, Martin Amis and Noël Coward. Then there’s the metre-high doll of Keith Richards as Captain Teague in Pirates of the Caribbean with a real Keith Richards voice that says things like ‘Get out of my way, boy’ as you walk past it.

Freud and Fox’s worlds join with the Rolling Stones guitarist: they both met Richards before they met each other. As well as writing White Mischief, the glamorous tale of philandering and murder in colonial Kenya, later made into a film, Fox helped Richards craft his autobiography; they met in the 1970s when Fox interviewed Richards for The Sunday Times. Freud met him in Italy in her twenties, when she was studying fashion in Rome (he was a friend of her boyfriend of the time, the eccentric playboy Prince ‘Dado’ Ruspoli).

Richards commissioned a coat from her on the strength of some of her drawings he’d seen; her old Seditionaries boss Westwood, who was spending time in Italy manufacturing her Mini-Crini collection, helped her out with the coat’s teething problems. There is no doubt that the Fox-Freud residence resonates with the maverick spirit of art, literature and good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll. We end up in the sitting room where two Chardin maids, etched by Lucian from nights he spent in the National Gallery, look down on the robust-looking drum kit. Freud confides that she’s been rehearsing ‘Ziggy Stardust’ because ‘there are lots of drum rolls in it’.

‘It’s great when you do something that – you know, when you’re an adult and you think, “Oh, I can’t do that…”’

She hesitates before adding: ‘Since both of my parents died – that’s one thing that’s happened – I’ve just thought, “I don’t care if I’m bad. Fuck it. I’m just going to do it!”’

For details of the Hoping Foundation, visit www.hoping foundation.org.

May 2012 |

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| 195

REBELS WITH A CAUSE

In the heady drink-and-drug-fuelled days of booming Eighties Britain, three fiercely driven, trailblazing women fought their way to the heart of the male-dominated worlds of TV and journalism, reshaping the landscape. But did their pioneering iconoclasm bring about any lasting change? And what does the future hold for today’s high-profile female media figures?

STEPHANIE RAFANELLI and STEPHANIE THEOBALD investigate

I

t was a deranged Algonquin Round Table, a labyrinthine stage set called the Groucho Club where, any night of the week, you could find an alluring cast of Bright Young Things from the new media world.

The setting was ‘1985 to 1995’, the dramatis personae were all seditionary, and yet, just as it was Dorothy Parker who dominated the uproarious 1920s meetings at the Algonquin Hotel, so it was the fabulous dames of the Groucho (the first members’ club to admit women when it opened in 1985) who caught your attention. On its grand staircase, you might bump into the bullish ‘First Lady of youth TV’, Janet Street-Porter, who’d be boasting to her friend Neil Tennant about the Bafta she’d recently won for her groundbreaking music show Network 7 on the alternative and newly emerging Channel 4. Or you might spy ‘Princess of punk’ Paula Yates, just back from filming The Tube in Newcastle, whispering secrets to her coterie of Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart and the Le Bons, all guests of honour at her recent 1986 wedding to Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof at the height of his acclaim after the successes of Live Aid the previous year. At a long table at the back of the club, if you’d been brave enough, you might have sneaked a peek at ‘Queen of the Groucho’, one Julie Burchill. Famous for spouting shimmering profundities about Situationism, the Viet Cong and Marge Simpson to a court of beautiful young acolytes, both male and female, Burchill would tip the waiters lavishly before rushing off to the bathrooms where the toilet seats had conveniently flat lids.

www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

This flamboyant female triumvirate was emerging triumphant into changing times. Until then, the media had been a predominantly male arena, an old-boys’ club reminiscent of Mad Men, clinking with whisky glasses and permeated by the pungent whiff of machismo; women were in a minority, often working on female-focused sections or in secretarial posts, while positions of power – newspaper editors and broadcast executives – were the exclusive domain of male suits.

It was in this stifling environment (at El Vino’s on Fleet Street, women were forbidden from ordering at the bar) that a young Rebekah Wade began working as a secretary at the News of the World in 1989, the very beginning of her epic media trajectory.

(Even later in her career, shortly after being made deputy editor of the News of the World in 1995, a senior male executive famously thrust his shirt and a handful of buttons into her hands, saying: ‘When you have a minute, darling, sew them back on for me.’)

Yet the mid-Eighties was also an exciting time: the UK economy swung out of dark recession into a boom, opening up the workplace to women, empowered by both the individualism of Thatcher and the aftermath of Seventies feminism. ‘A big transformation was happening in the media too,’ recalls Lynne Franks, whose notorious PR agency (famously parodied in Absolutely Fabulous), which she set up in 1970, was at its height in that era. ‘Women like Eve Pollard [the second woman to head up a national newspaper, the Sunday Mirror, in 1987] and Sue Douglas [assistant editor of the Daily Mail, later editor of the Sunday Express] were just starting to edit newspapers and change Fleet Street from being an alcoholic all-boys club.’

Aside from the few women, including Kate Adie, Jean Rook and Ann Leslie, who had broken down barriers in the stodgy 1970s, a new group of controversial young writers and editors were making waves: columnists Suzanne Moore and Lynn Barber; Sheryl Garratt, March 2012 |

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▼

PHOTOGRAPHS: REX FEATURES, THE PICTURE LIBRARY LTD, ALAMY IMAGES, JOHN FROST NEWSPAPERS

BROADCAST NEWS Julie Burchill in 1989. Right: Paula Yates in 1982. Far right: Janet Street-Porter in 1986. Below: press cuttings from their controversial careers

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one would grab their share – or flaunt their winnings – more single-mindedly, more brilliantly or more notoriously than Street-Porter, Burchill and Yates. Each would forge her own destiny, transcending the limited opportunities then available to her gender: Street-Porter by sheer ball-breaking willpower; Yates by flirtation; and Burchill by rebellious irreverence, searing a range of female archetypes onto the consciousness of future generations.

The brash Eighties were in full swing: the epoch of Filofaxes, spritzers, liquid lunches, Kurt Geiger heels, and teddies by Janet Reger. Soho swarmed with hacks, rock stars and designers (Betty Jackson, Katharine Hamnett, John Galliano and Rifat Ozbek) sealing deals over cocktails at the Groucho, or at L’Escargot, Le Caprice or the Covent Garden offices of Franks. Among them, impossible to miss, was the strident figure of Street-Porter: a gangly six-footer with thick glasses, the daughter of an electrical engineer and a dinner lady from Perivale, with a penchant for dyed hair and miniskirts, who swore like a builder in a thick Estuary accent. She was hardly the cliché classic beauty who might rise through the ranks via seduction. ‘I was born with big frilly teeth, milk-bottle glasses and beige hair,’ she used to say. ‘It didn’t hold me back.’ Nor was she an Oxbridge graduate. She had dropped out of architectural college after two years, immediately landing a role at Petticoat, a girls’ magazine.

In 1973, she had worked for LBC Radio, where she was juxtaposed with RP-speaking reporter Paul Callan, his accent ‘cutglass’ as opposed to her ‘cut-froat’. (One listener complained that she sounded like ‘she is eating a plate of spaghetti with a fork and spoon’.) But it was not just her accent that provoked others. She was ‘ruthless, single-minded, driven and self-centred’, as she later admitted in her 2006 memoir Fall Out. She had perfected her abrasive manner during ‘a drunken two years’, from 1969, as a fashion journalist in Fleet Street. She’d observed her boss Sandy Fawkes (‘A red-haired, tempestuous journalist with a legendary temper and a huge appetite

Yet Street-Porter was also always fiercely talented – ‘I never applied for a job, I always went in at the top’ – and from LBC Radio she soared colourfully through the grey-suited ranks of the BBC, presenting shows including Saturday Night People, her on-camera persona spawning a wave of venomous imitations, most notably from Pamela Stephenson on Not the Nine O’Clock News, and later Spitting Image. She once recounted how ‘one feeble harpie assaulted me [in the Groucho] with a broken glass because I called her “flotsam”.’ But in certain quarters she was as adored, amassing a celebrity court that included the Pet Shop Boys and Elton John.

‘One night in the Groucho,’ Street-Porter regaled, ‘Courtney Love declared that she wanted to have sex with me. She had watched my programmes on TV on tour and she was a big fan.’

Whether loved or loathed, Street-Porter was on the up. In 1987, she was poached by Channel 4 to head up Network 7, a new, edgy youth-current-affairs programme that dealt with serious issues, such as death row and Aids, with a fast-cut, fast-paced delivery. ‘Her greatest selling point was her skill as a trendspotter,’ according to Lynn Barber. ‘She had no trouble identifying with “yoof culture” (although the term wasn’t invented then) because she never grew up… In some ways, she reminds me of our mutual friend Tracey Emin. They both give the impression of being engaged in a constant battle against a world that is always trying to put them down, to deflate them.’

By now, Street-Porter’s tireless railing – as well as her programmes – had got her noticed. In 1988, Alan Yentob appointed her head of youth and entertainment features at the BBC, where she defined a new era with irreverent programmes such as Rapido, Red Dwarf and Rough Guide. Janet Street-Porter had become the undisputed Queen of Youth – and she would leave her mark on TV schedules for ever.

J

ulie Burchill, too, exploded riotously into the media, riding in on a crest of youth culture – specifically, punk.

Growing up on a council estate in Bristol, the daughter of a trade unionist and a cardboard-box-factory worker – ‘dressed in black, smoking purple cigarettes and spouting Oscar Wilde’ – she escaped to London, answering an ad for ‘a hip young gunslinger’, subsequently landing the job at the heart of the music scene, at the NME. ‘I was paralytically shy when I came to London. I knew it was make it or break it if I didn’t become a more interesting person. So I remade myself, and became this snarling, switchblade punk girl.’ Within a decade, the sneering teen ‘gunslinger’ would become the highest-paid female writer in the history of British journalism.

At the NME, she fell in love with journalist Tony Parsons, who she moved in with in 1981, later marrying and having their son, before abandoning both for Cosmo Landesman. ‘When I first met her in 1983, she looked like Jane Russell in The Outlaw, and squeaked like Minnie Mouse,’ Landesman said. Fellow journalist Toby Young noted that she had ‘a photographic memory, a razor-sharp wit and a brilliant, original mind’. Burchill herself was not known for her modesty. She exclaimed later in her 1998 autobiography: ‘I wrote like an angel on angel dust.’ (A reference to her copious drug habit – she once said she had snorted enough cocaine to ‘stun the entire Colombian armed forces’.) Burchill’s copy spewed out, irreverent, funny, acerbic. She wasn’t interested in sycophancy or ingratiating herself with key media power-brokers: ‘I was born without the vulnerability gene… I’ve never minded what people called me. Just couldn’t care less.’ She made her way in the world on her

‘I was born without the vulnerability gene…

I’ve never minded what people called me.

Just couldn’t care less’ JULIE BURCHILL for booze and men’), and was ‘awed by her confidence and ready put-downs’. Street-Porter cultivated her own audacious demeanour.

‘When she went to interview Barry Manilow,’ says friend Peter York, ‘one of his minders pushed her over, so she went over and pushed him back.’ According to one ex-employee: ‘She was a bit like one of those Spartan women who put their babies on the roof to see if they would survive the night. If you did, good. If you didn’t, too bad.’ In her private life, she was equally aggressive, and adulterous, later marrying four times. ‘I was always the dumper, never the dumpee,’ she has boasted. ‘Always shag men when you first meet them, because if the sex is shit you don’t have to see them again.’

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own terms. The establishment would have to come to her. And it did.

It was another woman – Sue Douglas – who gave Burchill her break in newspapers with a political column in the Mail on Sunday in 1986. And in 1991, Burchill went on to launch Modern Review (tag-line: ‘Low culture for highbrows’) with friend Toby Young; at its launch party at the Groucho, she spied 27-year-old gamine beauty Charlotte Raven, for whom she left Landesman. The pair set up home in Blakes hotel. ‘We’d lie in this four-poster bed in this room that was done up like a gentlemen’s club,’ says Raven, ‘and think up bespoke torments for people we didn’t like, such as Will Self and Damon Albarn.’

I

n some ways, Paula Yates was the antithesis of Burchill.

‘We loathed each other from the word go,’ says the latter, who worked with Yates on her brief stint at the NME. ‘I came back to my desk one afternoon and she was sitting on it, legs wide apart, no knickers, screeching about sex.’

But Yates, like Burchill, emerged onto the London punk scene at 17, escaping her childhood in Colwyn Bay. Yates was ambitious, using her ‘punk Marilyn Monroe’ look, coquettish manner and wasp waist to land both the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats and a naked spread in Penthouse in 1978. Rupert Everett, who Yates seduced, recounted: ‘She has this certain fragility that was erotic to men. She could break if you squeezed her too hard.’

But Yates was also fiercely bright, with off hand wit and toughtalking bravado, and it was Geldof who encouraged her to go into journalism: ‘I said if she could write as funny as she could speak, she could make her living from that.’ As a result, she wangled a music column called ‘Natural Blonde’ in Record Mirror, the perfect showcase for her talents; and in 1982, she was hired to co-front recently launched Channel 4’s edgy music show The Tube alongside Squeeze’s keyboardist Jools Holland. Yates and Holland became synonymous with the savvy, anti-authoritarian glamour that emanated from this new channel; her outrageous, flirtatious interviews crackled compared with the staid styles of broadcasters such as Terry Wogan and Michael Parkinson. Like Burchill, Yates defined the irreverent attitude of the era. Her relationship with Geldof also gave her access to music-industry insiders – and her interviews were the first to put sex into TV. For Yates used her sexuality audaciously. ‘She wanted to be thought of as a sex symbol,’ said one writer, ‘but she wanted to be taken seriously too.’

In contrast to Yates, Burchill and Street-Porter’s iconoclastic behaviour had smashed the expectations of female deportment.

They didn’t need to play sexy. They flouted attitudes towards motherhood too: ‘My relationships have taken the place of having children – and so has my career,’ said Street-Porter. When Burchill abandoned her son by Parsons, and then another child by Landesman, the Daily Mail ’s headline screamed: ‘Is Julie Burchill the worst mother in Britain?’ But Yates’ own trailblazing should not be underestimated: she was one of the first sexualised role models for working mothers (she gave birth to Fifi Trixibelle in 1983, Peaches in 1989 and Pixie in 1990, at the height of her career).

She was photographed, babe in her tattooed arms or pregnant while working, rupturing another long-held taboo: the merging of the boundaries between sex and motherhood. (She made a risqué TV series about the former – Sex with Paula – and wrote a book about the latter.) ‘She purposefully nurtures this image of wild child and dizzy blonde…’ said a friend at the time. ‘But not everyone can look after children, make TV programmes, model, write

magazine articles, run two houses. She is a very disciplined person.’

Yet Yates’ careful life-work balance was to be radically destabilised when she met INXS singer Michael Hutchence; their famously lascivious interview, conducted on a bed, live on The Big Breakfast in 1994, left little to the imagination. In 1995, Yates left Geldof, getting ever more drawn into Hutchence’s seductively decadent world.

In 1996, opium was found at their flat, causing her to lose custody of the children temporarily. But when, in 1997, Hutchence was found hanged at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel while on tour in Sydney, in an apparent suicide, and when it was subsequently revealed that her biological father was in fact Opportunity Knocks presenter Hughie Green, Yates descended into despair and drug addiction. The oncedevoted mother unravelled before our eyes.

In September 2000, Paula Yates was found dead of a heroin overdose in her flat by her four-year-old daughter by Hutchence, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily. Her funeral – attended by her fellow Eighties luminaries, including Lennox, Bono, Holland and Jasper Conran – felt like the sad postscript to an era already long gone.

T

he fall had begun long before. The excess and hedonism of the Eighties turned in on themselves; the era’s brash, rampant capitalism saturated everything; a new recession loomed; and Thatcher, Burchill’s heroine, left Downing Street in 1990 an ever-more-hated figure, replaced by John Major, the ultimate grey suit. At the same time, a new age dawned in the media, breaking up the close-knit camaraderie of the old days. Newspapers began to trickle out of Fleet Street, finding cheaper office space elsewhere. The internet and email arrived in 1993, radically altering the way journalists worked for ever – it was now more efficient to be desk-bound – although their explosive effects on the print medium would not yet be fully grasped. The increasing

‘The blight is management. The dreaded four Ms: male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre’ JANET STREET-PORTER

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commercial demands of TV meant that, in that same year, Channel 4 became the Channel 4 Television Corporation, with a new remit to move away from the fringe and focus on cheap programming, bringing forth a new generation of DIY shows and lifestyle series that would one day help open the floodgates to reality TV. Street-Porter herself perhaps played a part in precipitating this all-conquering new form of entertainment. In 1994, she left the BBC after missing out on a promotion. ‘The blight is management. The dreaded four Ms: male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre,’ she said the following year. She went on to set up Live TV with Kelvin McKenzie, but the partnership was fraught with power battles and divisions over McKenzie’s plans to take the channel down-market with programmes such as Topless Darts, and Street-Porter left after just five months. In 1996, her fourth husband, 28-year-old David Sorkin, sold his story to the tabloids, chronicling in detail StreetPorter’s sexual appetite during their 20-month marriage. Still, Street-Porter was not washed up. It was simply not in her nature. In 1999, she notoriously manoeuvred herself into the editor’s seat at The Independent on Sunday, a move dubbed by The Daily Telegraph: ‘The most spectacular act of dumbing down in media history.’

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who later edited The Face; and Rosie Boycott, former editor of Spare Rib and director of Virago Press, who went on to edit men’s magazine Esquire, The Independent on Sunday and the Daily Express. The renegade energy and DIY ethic of punk, born out of recession, had gone mainstream, and there was a sense that everything was up for grabs.

‘The emerging tough girls of the media knew they were winning out against that old culture,’ says social commentator Peter York.

editorship, by rising like a phoenix from the ashes, Street-Porter had reinforced her unofficial title of Most Hated Woman in the Media.

‘If I were a man, my career would be described as eclectic,’ she commented. ‘But because I’m a woman, I’m trivial… what utter bollocks.’

In 1995, Young ‘torched’ the Modern Review rather than see Burchill and Raven’s ambitions to take it over come true. This led to a vitriolic public war between the two snarling writers. Meanwhile, Burchill, by now dumped by Raven, took up with her lover’s younger brother Daniel, moving to Brighton and slipping into semiretirement with a serious case of ‘Grouchitis’. There, she wrote a book about Princess Diana like ‘a pissed Barbara Cartland’, as well as an autobiography, I Knew I Was Right, in 1998 (both slaughtered by critics). Others began to doubt her talent. ‘I lost my mojo,’ she admitted. ‘Writing talent is a finite thing.’

While Burchill’s fire seemed quelled (although she went on to write a column for The Guardian from 1998 to 2003), there were reasons to be optimistic. In May 1997, New Labour won the general election, with 120 women MPs elected to the House of Commons (twice as many as in 1992). As the new Prime Minister stood grinning on the steps of Church House in Westminster with 101 Blair Babes, it seemed to symbolise the dawn of an exciting new era for women. The future looked bright.

‘We can’t expect every woman thrust into a high-profile job to be a combination of Rosa Parks, Madonna and Thatcher’CAITLIN MORAN

Above: Yates with then-boyfriend Bob Geldof in 1979. Right: presenting ‘The Tube’ with Jools Holland and guest Sting in about 1984.

Far right: the infamous live ‘Big Breakfast’ interview with Michael Hutchence in 1994

CULT OF YOUTH Above, from left: Street-Porter in 1976. With fellow ‘Saturday Night People’ presenters Russell Harty and Clive James in 1980. With the ‘Network 7’ team in 1987

PHOTOGRAPHS: REX FEATURES, CORBIS, STARSTOCK/PHOTOSHOT PHOTO, ALPHA PRESS

F Above: Burchill with Tony Parsons at the ‘NME’ Christmas party at Dingwalls in 1977.

Right: with the editorial team of ‘Modern Review’, including, front row from left, Cosmo Landesman and Toby Young. Far right: Burchill (right) with Charlotte Raven in 1995

entertainment and news at Sky); Helen Boaden (director of BBC News and rumoured possible successor to director general Mark Thompson); and Janice Hadlow (controller of BBC Two). In print: Marjorie Scardino (CEO of Pearson); Sly Bailey (CEO of Trinity Mirror); Tina Weaver (editor of the Sunday Mirror); Dawn Neeson (editor of the Daily Star); Katharine Viner (deputy editor of The Guardian); Nicola Jeal (Saturday editor of The Times and editor-inchief of The Times Magazine); and, until very recently, Rebekah Brooks.

The latter’s trajectory has, after all, been perhaps the most meteoric of all. She was the first woman to ascend to the lofty heights of CEO at News International when she was promoted in 2009. In two decades, she had risen through the ranks of the company from secretary in 1989 to editor of the News of the World in 2000 (the youngest

ifteen years on – despite the trailblazing of women like Burchill and Street-Porter and the promise of Blair’s government – change has been slow to come. In the critical areas of politics and media, men are still dominant and shaping our world. The figures are damning.

Only 22 per cent of the coalition-government MPs are women.The media shows a similar ratio: 78 per cent of newspaper articles are still written by men; 84 per cent of reporters on Radio 4’s Today programme are male, as are 72 per cent of pundits who appear on Question Time; and 92 per cent on Have I Got News for You, according to recent research by The Guardian.

‘The point is that that era in the Eighties just didn’t effect any changes,’ comments Rosie Boycott. ‘It was just a blip and it went away. So you can’t really say it was meaningful. It didn’t really change the structure of the media in any way. Was it a golden age for women?

No, not really. I don’t think Thatcher made much of an effort to change culture to make it more female – I don’t think any of them did.’

Yet those female mavericks did leave their impact on the future generation. Author and Times columnist Caitlin Moran is in some ways the natural successor to Burchill. ‘She was a massive role model and inspiration to me growing up. She came in like this lady boss from a Lynda La Plante novel. She didn’t play the game. She didn’t primp up or lose weight. She did it all, like a man, but in a really good way.’

But is the empowering effect of individual role models ever enough to change such a deeply entrenched system? ‘Women still have to work twice as hard,’ says journalist Rachel Cooke, who believes that, to some extent, women are still ghettoised. ‘I write book reviews. Say, out of 18 reviews in a week, about 13 of them will be written by men. I will never be given Jonathan Franzen to review.

I would be given Hilary Mantel… To a degree, women in the media have internalised the old sexist attitudes.’

But this not an exclusively dark tale. There are beacons of hope on the horizon: a new set of women, working more discreetly than their trailblazing predecessors, some holding powerful key executive roles. In television: Sophie Turner Laing (managing director of www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

female editor of a Fleet Street newspaper) – and finally The Sun in 2003, aged just 35. For the first time, the paper’s influential threemillion-strong readership was in the hands of a female editor.

Brooks, like Street-Porter, has always had her critics – firstly, over her recapitulation on scrapping Page 3. ‘It would have been a huge move to make. She would have remained a hero to a lot of people,’ says Boycott. ‘One of the papers that can bring about enormous change in our culture is The Sun.’ More crucially, like many people, Boycott ‘feels let down’ by Brooks over the phone-hacking scandal (though on the exact nature of her involvement, the jury is still out). ‘I have this naive notion that women could make better leaders. If there isn’t an ideal of a better woman leader, why does it matter that there are no women?’ she says. Moran, however, goes some way to letting Brooks off the hook. ‘We can’t expect every single woman thrust into a highprofile job to be a combination of Rosa Parks and Madonna and Margaret Thatcher and to single-handedly save our culture. When you are the only woman in a completely male environment, it’s exhausting, and probably your last priority is forwarding feminism.’

Whether motivated by feminism or not, the very existence – and in some cases persistence – of women in the media continues to at least challenge. Street-Porter, once the embodiment of youth culture, is now a pin-up for 60-plus women on television. And one suspects that in the next decade or so, women such as Mariella Frostrup, Kirsty Wark and Kirsty Young will still be stubbornly and brilliantly gracing our screens. (The BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders and Sky News’ Alex Crawford are also rising stars.)

What is vital for women, says Cooke, is the creation of a strong mutual-support network. ‘It’s really important to nurture women on their way up. There are brilliant bosses like Katharine Viner and Nicola Jeal, who are tremendously supportive,’ she says. ‘You decide what you write about. You can try to be positive about other women.’

There is still a long way to go. Some consider that the time is again ripe for firestarters like Street-Porter and Burchill. ‘We could do with a lot more Janets,’ says Boycott, ‘women with sheer ballsy brilliance.’ But perhaps in their fire and bile, they were ultimately creatures necessarily of their epoch. There is an alternative: the stoical power of the slow burn. ‘I think today there is also a quiet kind of feminism,’ says Cooke. ‘In the end, it will be how we get our revenge – just by being better than the men.’

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BORN TO DO IT

JASPER CONRAN Portraits by

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Charlie Gray

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Fashionable life Jasper with Naomi Campbell at his show at London Fashion Week, 2003.

Opposite: in the revamped Conran Shop

R AY TA NG/ R E X

At 15, he fled his family for New York and Studio 54; at 21, he dressed Diana; at 26, he was crowned Designer of the Year. But Jasper Conran has had to wait a quarter-century for the big one: taking over his father, Sir Terence’s, design empire. By Stephanie Rafanelli

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JASPER CONRAN

‘MY FATHER THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO BE A FOP, A DILETTANTE; SLIGHTLY TALENTED BUT USELESS’ and properties in France and Greece. He likes to look good for his ‘other half’ of two and a half years (he won’t name him), and has happily admitted to having Botox — ‘I am no stranger to the needle. Only a dab. Bad idea to overdo’ — and regular spa visits: ‘I go to starvation clinics in Austria. I like the austerity and the quietness. You can empty your mind and come back two dress sizes smaller.’ But he is cautious, and nervous about being misquoted. I sense that a cauldron of spirited sauciness bubbles beneath, if only he didn’t have to be so diplomatic. The interview is like a game of Twister — I’m never sure where to tread next.

The Conrans are an impressive dynasty. In Jasper’s generation there’s his older brother, designer Sebastian, 58, who works with robotics from his West London studio. Like Jasper, he is the son of the writer Shirley

New arrivals at the Conran Shop

N A C H crocodile porcelain stapler, £ 7 5

L Y N G A R D lustre glaze pendant,

£300

J O H N D E R I A N découpage glass plate, £ 2 5 5

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Conran, Terence’s second wife. Then there are his half-siblings by Caroline Conran, wife number three: restaurateur Tom, 50, responsible for The Cow, Lucky 7 and Tom’s Deli; cookbook writer and interiors guru Sophie, 48; and artist Ned, 43, who runs the El Camino Mexican restaurants. I ask if there has been any sibling rivalry over his father’s decision to appoint Jasper. ‘We’re not competitive with each other,’ he says calmly.

‘There’s a worker-bee drive in all of us but they know why I’ve got to do The Job.’ Conran has placed his brothers and sister strategically on various boards throughout the company, and their children will eventually inherit the Conran sceptre.

I wonder if he would like to produce an heir of his own for his kingdom. ‘I don’t think I’d adopt,’ he says pensively. ‘I don’t say “no” to having children. My partner would like to.

I do feel quite strongly that children need a mother, so I wouldn’t want to bring up a child without them knowing their mother.’

I imagine that the other Conran children are rather relieved that Jasper was anointed Boss of Bosses? ‘I think they are!’ He finds this idea very amusing. ‘I won’t tell you that it isn’t a heavy burden. The Conran Shop needed a lot of tender loving care: top-to-toe restoration.’ When I say that it looks like it’s working rather well, he does a little dance in his chair: ‘It’s still got a long way to go.’

It’s no secret that The Conran Shops have accumulated a little dust over the past decade, not helped by the growing number of online, affordable, sleek furniture outlets such as Made.com and the introduction of design classics by high-street retailers such as John Lewis. But with Jasper Conran at the helm, things are already looking up. Footfall went up by 45 per cent under his initial creative direction; he removed 6,000 items

D AV E M B E N E T T/ G E T T Y I M A G E S . D O M I N I C O ’ N E I L L . A L A N D AV I D S O N / T H E P I C T U R E L I B R A R Y LT D .

GROOMING BY CH A R LOT TE GASK ELL USING YSL BE AUTÉ A ND BUMBLE A ND BUMBLE

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Santa’s helper Jasper Conran

by The Conran Shop’s Christmas window display

Father figure Terence and Jasper Conran at a London Fashion Week Party at Harvey Nichols

A L A N D AV I D S O N / T H E P I C T U R E L I B R A R Y LT D

J

asper Conran and I are discussing God. Upon his arrival at a small boardroom in the newly spruced Conran Shop in South Kensington, he silently ushers me to switch chairs so that he can sit at the head of the table. And by rights, he should.

After all, Jasper — the erstwhile wünderkind of 1980s London fashion and inventor of the British designer/ high-street collaboration — is the chosen heir of his father’s retail and design empire, out of five Conran children. In March, Jasper Conran, 54, became chairman of Conran Holdings, a business comprising nine Conran Shops in the UK, Paris and Japan, plus the architectural firm Conran + Partners, worth £35m. ‘I started doing the creative direction in 2011,’ he tells me. ‘Then I was promoted to chairman of The Conran Shop in 2012.

Now I’m...’ God? I suggest. He bursts into laughter, then says wryly, ‘No, God is still living. He’s in Berkshire. But God is not directing me from his armchair; God is overseeing his own projects.’

The god in question is his father: the formidable Sir Terence Conran, pioneer of the modern lifestyle concept; the man responsible for transforming postwar London from a drab, Spam-eating society to a gastronomically savvy, design-conscious metropolis where Bauhaus-era chairs, duvets, woks and flat-pack furniture — all of which Terence is credited with introducing after he set up Habitat in 1964 — became commonplace accoutrements of urban existence. Notoriously dictatorial and a workaholic, it seemed that Terence, now 83, might never loosen his iron grip on his kingdom; the devolution of his monarchy has been progressive, as if he couldn’t bear to relinquish it just yet. ‘He adores working; he loves the rush of making a deal. It’s hard to give up your baby,’ Conran explains tactfully.

‘But it’s even harder to hand over your power.’ It’s all very King Lear, I say. Conran giggles: ‘You’re telling me!’

Gym-bunny trim, clad in a blue cashmere jumper (his father’s favourite colour), Conran is not the haughty blond dandy I had envisaged. He is suave, fun and charmingly camp in the vein of a veteran thespian. He knows how to live as well as work, dividing his time between homes in London, Somerset (an 18th-century Grade I-listed pile with 100 acres), New Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, in which he owns apartments,

from the store, added lines from British designers such as Russell Pinch and reinstated classics such as lighting by Charlotte Perriand. In March, Conran Holdings swung into profit, boosted by the sale of its 51 per cent stake in D&D London, Terence’s 30 restaurants including Le Pont de la Tour and Quaglino’s, in 2012. The company is now thought to be worth £100m, with pre-tax profits of £4.3m last year, compared to a £3.1m loss the previous year.

Before I meet Conran, I wander around the shopfloor, dotted with fuchsia and tangerine balloons and jelly mould-shaped candles good enough to eat. There is a new brightness and levity to the place. The effect is something akin to a soigné New York fashion designer’s Christmas party in rural France. Jasper says his own career in fashion, comprising 30 years of London Fashion Week and collaborations with the likes of the Royal Ballet, have given him ‘a strong sense of theatre’. He adds: ‘It’s got to be a fun experience. I’ve got to get my customers out of bed, into clothes, down the street... take them on an adventure. People tell me that when they get depressed they come here to look around. I do feel that The Conran Shop is much-loved again.’

In some ways, Jasper has been in training for his new position all his life. His 18-year fashion collaboration with Debenhams has given him ‘a sophisticated understanding of retail’. So why was the Conran business failing? ‘I think there was a perception in the group that the restaurants were the flagship brands, and the shops got a little left behind.’

I ask how different his management style is from his father’s. Terence has a reputation for being a... I grapple for a euphemism: ‘tyrant’. He smiles: ‘I believe in flat structure.

Why employ somebody if you’re going to do their job for them? That’s preposterous.’ He says he’s using that word a lot.

‘I AM NO STRANGER TO THE BOTOX NEEDLE. ONLY A DAB. BAD IDEA TO OVERDO’

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o one was more shocked than Jasper when his father named him as successor. ‘I don’t think he had a very high opinion of his rather fey son from the beginning,’ he chuckles. ‘He thought I was going to be a dilettante, a fop; slightly talented but useless. He once said: “You’re going to end up like Ossie Clark.” [The 1970s designer was shot dead, bankrupt, by a former lover.] It was an extreme insult but it made me much more determined to succeed. It’s very tough when you’re not supported. But as it turns out... here I am.’

Until three years ago, Conran had never worked with his father. He struck out on his own as a teenager, creating his own empire, Jasper Conran Holdings, which is reputed to be worth £25m. He currently designs 20 collections a year: on top of J by Jasper Conran for Debenhams, and his ready-towear collections, he has designed pretty

much everything on the high street: bone china for Wedgwood, wallpaper for Designers Guild, glasses for Specsavers, even a range of fireplaces for Chesney’s. At one point in the 1990s, the Conrans played their part in the battle of the department stores: while Jasper designed for Debenhams, his brother Sebastian created products for John Lewis. Meanwhile, after Terence opened the high-end Conran Shop in 1973, Habitat went into decline and was eventually bought by Homebase in 2011, the same year Terence began a collaboration with Marks & Spencer.

Conran must have wanted to prove something by remaining stubbornly independent from his father. ‘We weren’t actually ever invited into the family business,’ he counters. ‘A job wasn’t on offer.’

It must give him a huge sense of satisfaction to be his father’s saviour now.

Born Jasper Alexander Thirlby Conran in 1959 in London, his parents split up when he was just two years old. As a child, the prolific Terence must have been a heroic figure to him. ‘No! I was terrified of him! I didn’t see that much of him,’ he cries. ‘I think it would make him sad now to hear that.’ He and Sebastian spent a period of their childhood in Portsmouth being looked after by their granny, while their mother edited the women’s pages of The Observer. Shirley was also a powerhouse, later the author of Superwoman, in which she wrote ‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom’ (a great motto for women, but perhaps not so great for her children), and Lace, the 1980s equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Conran fell out with his mother more than a decade ago. In an interview in 2012, Shirley Conran said, ‘I haven’t seen Jasper for ten years. He won’t tell me what the problem is.’

On this subject Conran says carefully, ‘It’s a very difficult position to be in when your parents are so well-known, and so... er, er...’

Larger than life? ‘That’s a good way of putting it. As a child, it’s very overwhelming, difficult to know what bit of the world you should occupy when there’s only a tiny corner that hasn’t been touched [by your parents].’ He pauses and chuckles. ‘It can be very daunting. A lot of people in that situation would take drugs, drop out. You just collapse, collapse through a sense of lack of self-worth.’ It is reasonable to suppose that this weight took its toll on the youngest of Terence’s children, Ned, who has suffered from mental health issues in the past (he was convicted of a sex assault on a tourist in 2002

The Conran clan, above from left: restaurateur Tom, 2005; artist Ned, 2007; Terence, designer Sebastian, Jasper and cookery writer/designer Sophie, at the Jasper Conran show at London Fashion Week, 2010

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JASPER CONRAN Five Conran-stocked items that changed the London home

EASTERN PROMISE

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CLUCKING GOOD

The chicken brick, c.1964 A perennial favourite on wedding lists, the humble terracotta chicken brick was the foundation of Terence Conran’s early homeware empire

The Akari paper lantern, 1951 The Japanese-inspired paper lantern by designer Isamu Noguchi was part of the eclectic offering at Conran’s first Habitat shop, opened in 1964

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A TOUCH OF CLASSIC

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The Balance walnut coffee table, c.2003 Conran Sr loved the Bauhaus movement. This coffee table is a bestseller from the affordable Content by Conran diffusion line

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UP IN SMOKE

HAUS PROUD

and served time in a secure psychiatric hospital), although he now seems to have recovered and has been placed high up in the internet arm of the business.

Jasper Conran himself was not unscathed.

He was sent to his father’s alma mater, Bryanston School in Dorset. ‘I found it a very lonely experience,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘I was a chubby chap. I suffered from anorexia and bulimia.’ At the age of 14, he stopped eating and went from 14 stone to seven in the space of months. ‘I was fainting all the time, but there wasn’t really anybody there to notice.’ Conran had a flair for fashion from an early age — his father guessed he was gay when he was three years old: ‘The dolls might have been a giveaway. You can tell when a child is not a bloke, when they have a propensity for pink, according to my father.’

By 15, Conran had had enough: he needed to escape being ‘drowned’ by his family surname. And so he applied to the prestigious Parsons School of Design in New York, whose later alumni include Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, to study fashion, and was accepted as its youngest-ever student. He insists that he paid his own way through college: ‘I was as poor as a church mouse. I worked as a waiter, I worked at Fiorucci...’

Meanwhile, he ‘burned the candle at several ends’. At 16, he was introduced to Studio 54 founders Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager and

SPOUT ON

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The Quaglino’s ashtray, 1991 So covetable were the Q-shaped Terence Conrandesigned ashtrays at Quaglino’s that nearly 25,000 went ‘missing’ in the space of ten years

The Red Globe teapot, 1991 Designed exclusively for The Conran Shop, designer David Birch solved the problem of a dripping spout

went to ‘every gay club in New York’ with them. He describes himself back then as ‘pretty cute’. It was the early disco era: ‘I had long blond hair and wore gold hot pants. I caused traffic accidents,’ he shrieks with glee. When Rubell and Schrager opened their club he saw it all from the inner circle. ‘I was at the opening. I was there at Bianca Jagger’s legendary birthday party. I met Truman Capote and Andy Warhol — he was the dullest man you ever did meet. Diana Vreeland.

Donna Summer. Halston. Calvin Klein. Oh my god,’ he sighs, with a little chuckle.

At 19, he abruptly left New York for good: ‘I got held up with a gun in a lift one night. It was the most terrifying experience.’ He looks unsure whether he should be telling me this.

‘I just thought, “I can’t cope, I want to go home.” I didn’t even graduate.’ Back in London, after working for Wallis and Bill Gibb, he started his own womenswear label in 1979, aged 19; by 1981 Princess Diana was wearing his clothes. He showed at the first London Fashion Week in 1984, and two years

‘I DON’T THINK I’D ADOPT. I DO FEEL QUITE STRONGLY THAT CHILDREN NEED A MOTHER’

later he was voted Designer of the Year by the British Fashion Council. ‘I did encounter some jealousy back then,’ he says without rancour. But the general assumption that he had ridden on his father’s coat-tails must have been galling: ‘Really annoying. I lived with that for a very long time.’ By the mid-1980s, Conran was firmly at the centre of the inner circle of British fashion alongside Rifat Ozbek, Vivienne Westwood, BodyMap, John Galliano and Katharine Hamnett: ‘I was there when Katharine flashed [her T-shirt with the logo ‘58% Don’t Want Pershing’ at] Mrs Thatcher.’ They were all regulars at the legendary Blitz Club: ‘Steve Strange was on the door, Boy George was in the cloakroom, stealing the coats. I wish I’d had an iPhone back then. What I’d have up my sleeve would be amazing.’

Then in the early 1990s, the partying came to an end: the recession hit, and the prospect of bankruptcy loomed. ‘Next was doing exact copies of my designs and getting them in before me for half the price. So I thought, “Why don’t I do it myself?” ’ When he signed his lucrative deal with Debenhams, the fashion industry gasped. ‘I didn’t really care,’ he says. Is it a case of who’s laughing now?

‘I feel justified because everyone else has followed in my footsteps.’ He cites Marni, Versace and Karl Lagerfeld, who have all designed for H&M. Victoria Beckham is rumoured to be up next.

O

ne of the secrets of Conran’s longevity has been his ability to design simultaneously for the mass- and up-markets. Despite his new workload, he has no intention of withdrawing from showing at London Fashion Week: ‘I’d be miserable if I didn’t do it,’ he cries. ‘I manage. It’s in my DNA to deliver work.’ When I ask what changes he has witnessed in the industry over the years, he says thoughtfully, ‘There are unrealistic pressures in fashion put on fragile people; this idea that sensitive, creative people can work 24/7 and party like they do and, to some extent, have to. There’s a ruthlessness to the corporatisation of style: these big luxury conglomerates require too much. Somebody like John [Galliano] can be pushed right to the edge.’ Conran is rumoured to have dated Galliano in the 1980s, along with the writer Bruce Chatwin.

In 2008, Conran was presented with an OBE. I wonder what he will be doing at his father’s age; Terence said on his 80th birthday that his ambition was to ‘stop f***ing around and do more’: duly, a sister hotel to The Boundary in Shoreditch is imminent, along with other projects. Conran leaps in: ‘I’ll be retired, you bet.’ He slaps the table for emphasis. ‘I have a long list of nice things I want to do. My father’s a pioneer. I don’t feel the need to keep on, to hang on.

I shall hand it all over in very good shape and say, “Now you get on with it.” ’ By that time, I suspect that Jasper Conran will be a legend in his own right, albeit a camper, more playful and affable one than his father. ES (conranshop.co.uk)

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Rose Hilton with some of her favourite artworks, including those by (clockwise from top right) Alfred Wallis, Hilton’s late husband Roger Hilton (two works), Terry Frost, Frank Phelan, Henri Matisse and Sandra Blow (behind Hilton)

A work of art can speak volumes about the person who chooses to display it. Here, three prominent female artists reveal their own favourite pieces – from Matisse to Jake and Dinos Chapman – to Stephanie Rafanelli Photographs by Alastair Levy

The artist as collector

Rose Hilton

R

ose Hilton, 83, is the widow of the postwar abstract artist Roger Hilton, who died in 1975, aged 64. The couple were based in Botallack, in Cornwall, where Rose still lives. Tall, sprightly and soignée, Hilton drives every day from the Hilton family home – three cottages on the rugged coastline that have been knocked into one – to her studio in nearby Newlyn to paint. On the way out, she often pauses to look at Oh Pulchritude, a portrait of her in pencil that Roger drew in 1970 (pictured,

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Rose Hilton with her late husband Roger Hilton at home in 1973

far right). “I look extremely cross in it.

We’d just had an argument,” she says with a laugh. “The tautness of my face reminds me of the pressure I was under managing Roger.”

At this time her husband was drinking three bottles of whisky a day, often out on the town with the poet WS Graham.

“Roger used to come back and paint through the night. I would have to collect a letter in the morning of things to do, art materials to pick up. Some of them were funny: ‘You son of a —, you’ve taken the last of my whisky’; ‘Where is my pot of flowers?’; ‘I want some caviar.’”

Roger also made it clear that there was room for only one painter in the

Rose and Roger were introduced by the abstract artist Sandra Blow in 1959.

Roger was 48, divorced and already an established artist; Rose was 28. Blow was one of the first women, along with Bridget Riley, to break through in the macho culture of abstract art. The giant beige canvas behind Hilton in our picture, a collage of paint, sand and sacking, is by Blow, picked up in a local auction a few years ago for £4,000. On the wall next to it is a painting once owned by Roger called Sailing Boat by Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), a St Ives fisherman who started painting at 67 after the death of his own wife in 1922. “He was a bit eccentric. He had a portrait of his late

‘I’m not angry when I look back. I learnt more about painting from the 16 years I was married to Roger than I ever did at the Royal College’ relationship. “I’m not angry when I look back,” Rose says with surprising good nature. “Some people are very hard to leave. But I learnt more about painting from the 16 years I was married to him than I ever did at the Royal College.”

One of her favourite pieces by Hilton is a seminal abstract work painted in ochre, black and blue in December 1953 (also pictured). “I kept it because it’s an important part of Roger’s development.”

wife on a wardrobe cupboard that he used to talk to,” Rose recalls. On the floor below this is a work by the abstract artist Terry Frost, a friend of Roger, which was a Christmas card he painted for Rose in 1980 in red, white and black that she later framed. “I like it because it’s so like Terry as a person – positive, optimistic.”

Rose Hilton’s own work is influenced

by French art of the Post-Impressionist school, such as Pierre Bonnard’s

dream-like interiors. “Roger once said to me, ‘Why are you still doing this old [figurative] stuff?’ But I didn’t want to be influenced by Roger. I identified with the women I painted going about their domestic worlds.” She also drew inspiration from Henri Matisse’s use of colour and form. She owns an untitled Matisse lithograph of a pot of flowers from the 1940s (on the floor, left), which she swapped for one of Roger’s paintings at a London gallery. “Picasso was a genius, a one-man show. But you could learn from Matisse. Also, he was dedicated to his family. I liked that.”

Rose exhibited a new body of work recently at her gallery, Messum’s in London. When she is town she visits her friend, the Irish artist Frank Phelan.

The taupe abstract (on the floor, middle) is a present from him. “He’s a very sensitive painter,” she says, chuckling.

“He’s not demanding like Roger. There’s no question that he would ever say, ‘I paint, so you can’t.’”

Polly Morgan

B

efore Polly Morgan (pictured overleaf) became best known as an artist who works with taxidermy, she managed the east London bar the Electricity Showrooms, whose late-night habitués included Young British Artists such as the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and Mat Collishaw. She began to explore her own artistic inclinations when, after searching in vain for a piece of vintage taxidermy to furnish her flat above the Showrooms, she took a one-day course so that she could make her own. Within five years she had produced a body of still-life sculpture using the cadavers of small British wildlife. Her first solo show, “Psychopomps”, was held at the Haunch of Venison gallery in 2010.

Since then Morgan, now 34, has moved on to more exotic species. Just inside the entrance of her mews house in Bethnal Green, east London, stands a stuffed baby giraffe. Downstairs is her taxidermy studio (the fridge is full of Stella 47

twisted corpses of tropical snakes for a forthcoming show in New York).

Upstairs is the cosier living space, where the only stuffed animal is a flea-market chimpanzee (not by Morgan). Above the concrete dining-table hangs a work from her boyfriend Mat Collishaw’s Insecticide series (2006-2009), a moving-in present from him two and a half years ago.

Both Morgan and Collishaw work with creatures that are already dead. “They are scans of butterflies and moths which he blows up,” she says, dressed in her blue work overalls. “He crushes them under the scanner glass so you get the dust from the wings and any kind of juices from inside the body. There are loads of tiny dots that look like stars.”

Morgan recalls travelling to London, aged 17, from her home in Oxfordshire to go to “Sensation”, the YBA show at the Royal Academy in 1997 that sent shockwaves through the art world.

Morgan owns two works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose notorious Fuck Face sculpture featured in “Sensation”.

One is an original etching of a tree taken from a children’s dot-to-dot book given to her as a 30th-birthday present (on

table, far right); and a limited edition print of their irreverent de-facings of Goya’s Disasters of War (2003), another gift doodled with “Happy Birthday Polly”(on table, far left). Morgan’s 30thbirthday party was a profitable affair for her art collection. The pop artist Peter Blake gave her one of his portrait sketches: Line Drawing 373, 10 minutes (on table, wooden frame), and Tim Noble and Sue Webster painted her a joint self-portrait (on table, middle.)

“They look like two mischievous genies

Vienna, a photograph by Patti Smith, was given to her by the gallerist Hannah Watson, who co-founded the art-book publisher Trolley Books with Gigi Giannuzzi who died of pancreatic cancer in 2013. Morgan, Collishaw and friends raised £250,000 via an art auction for Giannuzzi’s treatment. “It’s less important to me that it’s by Patti Smith, than the fact that it reminds me of Gigi,” she says.

Morgan’s father, an animal breeder and trader, also died last year. She attributes her fascination with animals

‘I told Sue [Webster] that I often use human hair to pad out animal bodies. So whenever she cuts Tim’s and her hair she sends me bundles of it’ coming out of a bottle; it sums them up completely. They stuck real hair on the heads, and their pubic hair on the pubic region with Sellotape,” Morgan explains, laughing. “I once told Sue that I often use human hair to pad out animal bodies. So whenever she cuts Tim’s and her hair she sends me bundles of it in the post.”

There are also sadder memories in Morgan’s art collection. Rabbit Death in

(dead or alive) to him: he owned a menagerie of dogs, cats, budgies, cows, llamas and 200 goats. “Dad was very emotionally attached to them, so I got used to handling the dead animals for him,” she explains. With some money left to her by her father she is planning to buy her very first piece of ungifted art: a work by the up-andcoming painter Celia Hempton.

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Sue Webster

S

ue Webster not only lives to make art, she lives in it. The Dirty House, her East End studio, was converted from an old warehouse by the architect David Adjaye in 2002, complete with an opticalillusionary floating roof. Her floorboards (see picture) are, in fact, printed laminated copies by the interiors artist Richard Woods. Until last year, Webster, 47, shared this space with her artistic collaborator of 28 years, Tim Noble. The duo, best known as “Tim and Sue,” became known for their self-portraits in the form of neon light installations and shadow sculptures made from detritus and roadkill. Webster and Noble had been in a love-work relationship since they met at art college in Nottingham in 1986. They were married by Tracey Emin in 2008, but divorced in 2013. They now work both together and individually.

Webster keeps some of her favourite “Tim and Sue” works in her collection.

FuckingBeautiful (2000, pictured centre) is a light sculpture in her handwriting – she also has the line tattooed on her right wrist. “Tim and I got all our inspiration

from watching old black-and-white Vegas movies,” she says. When they sold their first piece of art, Toxic Schizophrenia – a light sculpture of a heart tattoo pierced by a dagger – to Charles Saatchi in 1997 for £6,000, they blew the money on a trip to Vegas. (In 2011 the work sold at auction for £229,000.) “We went for two weeks.

That’s a very long time to be in Vegas. We just spent all of our time going up and down the strip photographing signage.”

Webster’s father was an electrician, and, as a young girl in Leicester, she often helped him wire up cigarette machines.

On the bookshelf (bottom) is a copy of Nick Cave and the Badseeds’ 2008 album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, for which Webster wired up 775 light bulbs: the cover is a photo of the installation. Webster also owns a work by the feminist Manchester artist Linder Sterling: a naked women crowned by binoculars (second shelf down, left). “The DIY aesthetic of punk has always influenced our work,” she says. “In punk, anyone could pick up a guitar and make music. Likewise, there should be no excuses for not making art.

It can be made from anything. I still wander the streets looking for garbage.”

Visit telegraph.co.uk/stella

The pink Snowman sculpture was bought from her friend, the artist Gary Hume “It’s such a beautiful idea. So simple,” she sighs. “Our work is so laboured over. Maybe I don’t think it’s art unless you’ve almost died for it.” The framed poster is a print of the 1992 stencilled word painting If You Cant Take A Joke by the American artist Christopher Wool, obtained from their Greek art dealer (the original recently sold for almost £15 million): “It’s very punk, it’s like the cut-out letters of ransom notes.”

The white boxes (right) are some of the remnants of Rachel Whiteread’s work Embankment (2005), made for the Unilever series at Tate Modern.

Whiteread is a friend and neighbour; her studio, a former synagogue, sits next to The Dirty House. “We wave at each other from our studios. We swim together every morning. We confide in each other,” she says, grinning. “I wanted to have a souvenir from her show so she let me choose a few boxes.”

“Blind Paintings”, by Tim Noble & Sue Webster, is at The Suzanne Geiss Company, New York (suzannegeiss.com) until 20 December Stella 51

FOOD SPECIAL Portrait by

Summer 2014

David Yeo

W

hen Jeremy King and Chris Corbin opened The Wolseley in 2003, they introduced a new ready reckoner for celebrity value: did you get a table in the horseshoe, the inner circle of red leather banquettes where Kate Moss, Lucian Freud and Robert Downey Jr got fast-tracked on arrival? If not, you were freezing out in ‘Siberia’, the chilly circumferential seats.

For 33 years, these unlikely, intellectual gentlemen restaurateurs have presided over the London dining scene as alchemists of haute celebrity hangouts, to which the gifted and glamorous (and the aspirational) swarm.

Their establishments have served as clubs for the transatlantic glitterati: Le Caprice in the 1980s, where Princess Diana came to gossip at her favourite table (number nine), and Joan Collins met Gianni Versace; J Sheekey and The Ivy in the 1990s where, behind the mullioned windows, Madonna ate sticky toffee pudding flanked by Harold Pinter and Tom Cruise; The Wolseley in the 2000s, and latterly The Delaunay, where the Beckhams dine en famille..

Such is the slavish loyalty of their habitués that Corbin and King opened their latest venture, Fischer’s in Marylebone, under the radar three weeks ago (they never do opening parties unless it’s for the staff).

Since then, the likes of Nigella Lawson, Salman Rushdie and Nigel Slater have eaten from its Viennese-themed menu, presided over by the gentle presence of Jeremy King — who towers over everything like a soigné public school-bred quarterback — and the bespectacled, bookwormish Chris Corbin.

But there is a new pretender in town who threatens to topple their stable monopoly.

André Balazs, the pre-eminent hotelier of US celebrity purlieus Chateau Marmont in Hollywood and The Mercer in New York City, has opened his first London venture, Chiltern Firehouse, down the road on Chiltern Street, aceing his British debut with the acquisition of Robert Pearsall’s gothic fire station and a Michelin-starred chef. Walking there from Fischer’s chocolate-box Austrian exterior is like going from turn-of-thecentury Vienna to 1990s-era Met bar: Cara Delevingne, Lindsay Lohan and the Camerons have all recently dined on its roast Lebanese cucumber with seaweed fregola.

It’s showy, faddy, naughty. They love it.

So is it gloves off on Marylebone High Street? Not at all. It’s just not the way Corbin and King roll. ‘I love Chiltern Firehouse. It’s got a bravado we’ve never seen before in London,’ King told me recently at Fischer’s.

‘I don’t see it as a competitor. Fischer’s is a neighbourhood restaurant. There’s room for us all in Marylebone.’

This sporting attitude is typical of the famously discreet old-school restaurateurs who politely shun publicity. Both cringe at the idea of any showiness, still uncomfortable with their default celebrity

Room with a view Chris Corbin (left) and Jeremy King outside their hotel, The Beaumont, which features the inhabitable sculpture ROOM by Antony Gormley

CA F É H IGH SOCI E T Y From the old-school luxury of Le Caprice to chic European dining at The Wolseley, gentlemen restaurateurs Jeremy King and Chris Corbin have barely put a foot wrong in their 33 years at the top. As their first hotel, The Beaumont, nears completion and their latest restaurant, Fischer’s, opens, Stephanie Rafanelli finds out why the pair are still our dish of the day status. They eschew all splash or gimmicks.

Next to Balazs’ modishness at Firehouse, and Richard Caring’s LVMH-style acquisitions (he co-owns Balthazar, The Delaunay’s Covent Garden rival, as well as the pair’s former restaurants Le Caprice, J Sheekey and The Ivy), Corbin and King are more vintage Chanel. It’s no accident that they’ve named their restaurants after classic cars: Wolseley Motors; the Delaunay-Belleville; and the Zédel (for Piccadilly’s Brasserie Zédel, which opened in 2012). These are all run like well-oiled machines. It’s apposite that the duo are widely regarded as the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of the London restaurant scene.

For Corbin and King are less modern-day brand than the masterminds of bespoke projects. Theirs is a guiding philosophy of nostalgia and old-school service. Nothing overshadows their patrons; they (not the design nor the menu) are the progenitors of the locales’ fizz. Corbin and King are masters of conjuring ambience; they create theatrical stages on which gilded customers can perform. They do this through evoking past eras with a cultural frisson. At Fischer’s, it’s the cafés of Vienna circa 1913 inhabited by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Leon Trotsky, Egon Schiele and Koloman Moser; at Colbert on Sloane Street and Zédel, it’s 1920s Paris.

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FOOD SPECIAL This is a subliminal form of flattery, which plays to the inherent narcissism of their clientele. After all, are Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst not the Schieles of our day?

The Beaumont, the double act’s debut hotel in Mayfair, is due to open this autumn and bears all the hallmarks of a classic Corbin and King project. In contrast to the contemporary design-led international brands — the Shangri-La at the Shard and the upcoming Mondrian on the South Bank, designed by Tom Dixon — The Beaumont recalls the grand hotels of Prohibition-era New York, the Plaza and the Waldorf Astoria, with its porte-cochere and revolving doors.

Its American-style bar and its restaurant, The Colony, are inspired by the New York restaurant of the same name, which opened in 1923 and was beloved of the Vanderbilts and Orson Welles — making it the perfect hangout for wannabe Dietrichs and Sinatras.

KINGS OF LONDON

DAVID LOFTUS

T

he backdrop to all this theatre is a Grade II-listed former garage built in 1926 by Grosvenor Estate architects Wimperis, Simpson & Guthrie. The hotel has been rebuilt with part of a £21m injection from Graphite Capital, which also owns the Groucho Club, with pre-eminent hotel architects Reardon Smith at the helm. It might all be in danger of pastiche if it weren’t for the injection of a little contemporary art. This has been a vital ingredient in the Corbin and King mix, learned during Corbin’s days as manager of 1970s celebrity haunt Langan’s, co-owned by Michael Caine, where David Hockney donated art and designed the menus. (At The Ivy they commissioned works by Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield and Bridget Riley.) Last week, Antony Gormley’s two-storey inhabitable sculpture ROOM, a stainless-steel ‘brutalist buddha’ built into the The Beaumont’s façade, was unveiled. (A few eyebrows have been raised: is this an attempt to steal some limelight from the competition?) ‘They have always understood art as an integral part of the way an environment makes you feel,’ argues Gormley, a friend and stalwart client. ‘Their restaurants have never been just about food but the curating of an experience.’

There will be no Chiltern-inspired octopus legs or barley risotto at The Colony when it opens: a classic grill room is planned, without a big name in the kitchen. Corbin and King don’t do celebrity chefs. Few would be challenged by their nostalgia-fuelled all-day-eating menus — choucroute à l’Alsacienne at The Wolseley; Wiener schnitzel at Fischer’s — although the likes of Mark Hix have come from their stable. ‘The philosophy under Chris and Jeremy was always to give the customer what they want to eat, not what the chef thinks they want,’ Hix tells me. ‘Dishes like salmon fishcakes at Le Caprice could be eaten with just a fork, while you were conversing. What was important was the social experience, the atmosphere, with a high standard of service. It raised the bar

Summer 2014

in 2002, they came across a former bank converted from the Wolseley Motors building. It was their epiphany; the space breathed fin-de-siècle Grand Café style.

In fact, it was not until Corbin and King were researching The Wolseley that they first visited and were entranced by the café culture of Vienna. King had fallen in love with the music of Gustav Mahler as a teen at Christ’s Hospital School in West Sussex, and wanted to become a singer or an architect; but because of his arithmetical ability he landed a job in merchant banking. (He is the business mind of the duo.) He hated it, applied for a place at Cambridge, and meanwhile, worked at Charco’s wine bar in Chelsea, where he was quickly promoted.

Bored, he read Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man, a cult classic that imagines life lived by chance, and with one roll of the dice, decided to stay in catering, moving on to become maître d’ at Covent Garden’s

‘ R E S TA U R AT E U R S A R E NOTORIOUS FOR FEELING T H R E AT E N E D B Y N E W A R R I VA L S . I T ’ S M O R E I M P O R TA N T T O D O W H AT Y O U D O B E S T ’ JEREMY KING

From top: Fischer’s; an artist’s impression of The Beaumont; The Wolseley; the Crazy Coqs club at Brasserie Zédel. Below: lamb goulash at Fischer’s

for London restaurants.’ The Ivy was voted Londoners’ Favourite Restaurant by Harden’s nine years running. The Delaunay won Tatler’s Best Restaurant in 2012, Colbert in 2013. Only once have the pair faltered, with St Alban on Lower Regent Street, which opened in 2006 and closed three years later: ‘Its smart Mediterranean menu... simply never found a place in the affections of the city,’ wrote food critic Jay Rayner.

Corbin and King’s move from awardwinning restaurants to hotels is a long-fermented idea. The duo decided on a new direction after Corbin’s bone marrow transplant in 1994 (he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1990, just as they acquired The Ivy) and the sale of Caprice Holdings to Belgo PLC in 1998. It was during their search for a hotel site that,

theatrical haunt Joe Allen’s. It was here that he met his first wife, the American theatre producer Debra Hauer. (They divorced in 2005. In 2009 he met Lauren Gurvich, whom he married in 2012.) Here he also met Chris Corbin, then the manager at Langan’s, who had trained in London after working in hotels in his native Bournemouth. Corbin now lives in Clapham and Bechamp, France, with his French wife Francine.

Corbin and King, who were considered to run the tightest ships in London, were poached in 1981 by designer Joseph Ettedgui to join his takeover of the faded Le Caprice.

Ettedgui left, and within a few years not even David Bailey (whose pictures lined the walls) could get a table. When Corbin and King restored the moribund Ivy in 1990, Le Caprice’s clientele simply moved in. ‘At every lunch or dinner, anyone who reads a Sunday paper will recognise a dozen relaxed, smooth-toothed, autocue-animated faces, and the ones you don’t recognise are likely to be the movers and shakers, the fixers and dealers of the culture,’ wrote AA Gill in 1997.

The Ivy brigade followed Corbin and King to J Sheekey, The Wolseley, The Delaunay...

The brief glitch of St Alban aside, there’s been little jeopardy to the success of their establishments since. Until now. I wonder if King is nervous at opening a New York-style hotel at the time of Balazs’ invasion.

‘Restaurateurs and hoteliers are notorious for feeling threatened by new arrivals,’ he says. ‘It’s more important to worry about what you’re doing. And do what you do best.’

They sure know how to do it. Fashion is a fleeting fad, style lasts forever. ES

ES M AGA ZIN E

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