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Legendary magazine editor Diana Vreeland began her career at US Harper’s Bazaar in the 1930s, going on to achieve immortality in the fashion world. With the release of an intimate documentary on the style icon, film-maker – and Diana’s granddaughter-in-law – LISA IMMORDINO VREELAND describes her journey to uncover the lore surrounding the family’s enigmatic matriarch

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PHOTOGRAPHS: HORST P HORST, 1979, © ESTATE OF HORST P HORST/ART & COMMERCE, COURTESY OF THE DIANA VREELAND ESTATE

CRIMSON QUEEN This page: Diana Vreeland photographed by Horst P Horst in her Park Avenue living-room.

Opposite: in furs and turban

HIGH PRIESTESS

2011, we had a dinner for the family, and 85-year-old Frederick, Diana’s son and Alexander’s father (a former US ambassador to Morocco, nicknamed Frecky by the family), made a speech. He said that one thing I have in common with Diana is that I never take ‘no’ for an answer. I worked hard to get funding for the film and to request interviews with some of Diana’s friends and colleagues – from Anjelica Huston, Lauren Hutton, Penelope Tree and Veruschka (who she put in her magazines, celebrating their unconventional looks) to Hubert de Givenchy, David Bailey and Lillian Bassman, who worked with Diana at Harper’s Bazaar. I used 80 Richard Avedon and 18 Irving Penn images in the film, an interview with Mick Jagger that had never been seen before and a letter from Jackie Kennedy consulting Diana on what she should wear to John F Kennedy’s inauguration.

I asked Bruce Weber if I could use his handheld footage of Diana’s Park Avenue flat, with its red living-room, which she had Billy Baldwin design from her typically whimsical artistic direction: ‘I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in hell.’ One of the best finds was a television interview with Diana from the Dick Cavett Show, which had been thrown out by his assistant – we tracked it down in the Library of Congress. Another key discovery was a family movie in which Diana is standing outside her house in Brewster, New York, wearing a snood and a pair of high-waist trousers, and smoking a cigarette. Frecky and Tim, her eldest son (who became an architect), are playing in the distance. It’s only eight seconds of her, but it is so divine.

One of the difficulties of making the film was the uncertainty of the biographical information. ‘Don’t tell a story if it’s boring, even if it’s true. Invent something,’ Diana would say. There were such myths surrounding her childhood. She told tales of Vaslav Nijinsky leaping around her parents’ house in Paris and how she, her sister and their nanny were the last people to see the Mona Lisa before it was stolen in 1911.

As a young girl, Diana had a challenging relationship with her mother who, like her younger sister, was very beautiful. Diana was seen as the ugly duckling. She developed a stutter after the family moved to the US and kept a diary as a teenager, in which she wrote about how she must stand out, act differently. She was driven throughout her life by this desire for self-improvement.

From a young age she fell in love with the idea of how she presented herself to the world. At 16, she began to wear kabuki-style make-up – the famous rouge on her ears and forehead. Getting ready became an important ritual; she would have her clothes taken out of plastic and ironed, and her shoes polished on top and on the sole, and when she returned home everything would be pressed again and wrapped in plastic.

Diana loved to dance, and she claimed to have ‘never been out of Harlem’ throughout the Roaring Twenties. In 1924, she met the handsome and elegant Reed Vreeland, who would be her husband for the next 40 years. In 1929, they moved to London and she spent her time in Paris in the couture houses of Chanel and Balenciaga, opening her own lingerie business in London. In typical style, she

A FAMILY LEGACY Above: Diana at her presentation to the court at Buckingham Palace, May 1933. Below: with her husband Reed and their sons. Opposite: Lisa Immordino Vreeland

PORTRAIT: TRENT M CGINN. STYLED BY JADA FITZGERALD. HAIR BY WESLEY O’MEARA AT THE WALL GROUP. MAKE-UP BY KATE ROMANOFF AT L’ATELIER NYC, USING MAC. PHOTOGRAPHS: LOUISE DAHL-WOLFE, COURTESY OF THE DIANA VREELAND ESTATE, GETTY IMAGES

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met my husband, Alexander Vreeland, 25 years ago when we both worked at Polo Ralph Lauren in Milan. I had worked in fashion all my life and, of course, knew of the legendary Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor of American Harper’s Bazaar from 1936 to 1962 and editor-in-chief of Vogue throughout the rest of the Sixties, who then went on to stage groundbreaking fashion exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But though she was still alive then (she died in 1989), it never occurred to me to ask Alexander if I could meet his grandmother. In fact, I never asked him or his family about her until I decided to make a film about her.

Alexander once said: ‘My grandmother is no longer a person, she is an adjective.’ When you think of her, you immediately recall those red nails, cheeks and lips and her eccentric one-line proclamations. But I felt Diana was misunderstood. She was trying to tell us more than how to put a glove together with a skirt. She was a philosopher who used fashion to transmit a message; a real citizen of the world.

Diana was born in Paris at the turn of the century, the daughter of American socialite Emily Key Hoffman and a Brit, Frederick Young Dalziel, and her life spanned almost its entirety. She lived through World War I, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the Swinging Sixties. She was alive through the greatest cultural shifts of the 20th century – she was a huge exponent of the Youthquake movement when she was in her sixties, and even in her seventies would declare such things as ‘I just love skateboarding!’ She changed the meaning of the role of the fashion editor and fashion magazines for ever. Her ‘Why don’t you…’ columns, published in Harper’s Bazaar in the 1930s, when she was hired as a columnist by editor Carmel Snow – she was spotted by Snow dancing at the St Regis Hotel in a white lace Chanel dress – were about women becoming stronger and more secure, starting to have the confidence to stand out and be different.

I kept asking myself why, apart from her 1984 autobiography, DV, there was so little written about Diana’s life. I thought perhaps people were scared to take on a fashion icon. I kept churning it over and then woke up one morning and said to Alexander: ‘I’m going to do it.’ I had never made a film before, but I knew I had to try. We based the film on George Plimpton’s tapes of his interviews with Diana for DV. There were 18 double-sided tapes – 35 hours of interview – and I transcribed them myself. I would listen to her voice while looking at the incredible imagery she created for Bazaar.

I got increasingly entrenched in her world and fell under her spell.

Working on the project taught me that, through perseverance, you can do whatever you want, which was very much her message.

At the film’s screening at the Venice Film Festival in September

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I would listen to Diana’s voice while looking at the incredible imagery she created for Bazaar.

I fell under her spell

WOMEN AT WORK Clockwise from above: Lauren Bacall’s 1943 Bazaar cover. Editor Carmel Snow with Diana in the Bazaar office, December 1952.

A September 1936 ‘Why don’t you…’ spread

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course, I can’t use them because there’s not enough languor in the lips.’

Diana was known for her extravagances, like sending a team to Japan for five weeks to scout a sumo wrestler for a love story with Veruschka, or Bailey to India to shoot a white tiger. The December issues were explosions of her fantasies, from full-page pictures of whales to Penn’s tulip photographs. She took the readers’ minds to exotic places, ones they couldn’t reach in reality. These extravagances are considered part of her downfall (although they were sometimes exaggerated). Those tulips shot by Penn were brought in from Holland but were ruined by the cold, so Diana called her friend Bunny Mellon, who had a farm in Virginia, and had new flowers flown in. Diana was always able to pull in a favour like this – she knew she could go to socialite Mona von Bismarck’s home in Capri, or the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s country house near Paris.

Despite her travels, Diana considered herself British. When she visited the White House under Ronald Reagan, she met Prince Charles and curtsied.

Someone said: ‘You can’t curtsey!’ To which she replied: ‘But he is my King!’ She inherited the British stiff upper lip from her father.

Reed had affairs, which I chose not to cover in the film, but he loved her and their life together. Berenson tells of how, when Reed had lunch with her parents and Diana, he would always set a red rose by Diana’s plate and have her food ready for when she arrived.

When Reed was diagnosed with cancer, she never talked about it with anyone. He died in 1965. She wore white at his funeral and then threw herself into her work even more.

When she was eventually fired from Vogue in 1971, there were so many stories that it’s impossible to know what actually happened. But she found a new place for her visions, as consultant to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan, where she curated 12 exhibitions until 1984, and raised the profile of one of the world’s most prestigious fashion galas, the Met Ball.

The last years of Diana’s life are part of fashion legend. She withdrew to her flat and let her hair go white, but Alexander tells me that she didn’t go blind, as was reported.

Some say it was a time when she reconnected with family; she was visited a lot by Alexander and his two children from his previous marriage. I didn’t cover these last years in the film because I didn’t want Diana to die; I wanted to linger on the greatness of her life. Instead, there is an animation of her flying in Charles Lindbergh’s plane – she claimed to have seen him zoom overhead on his 1927 non-stop New York to Paris flight even though she was nowhere near his route. When the family saw the end of the film, they choked up. When you see her name on the plane’s banner, it pulls on the heart strings. I love that scene, but I wish I could have made her smile a second earlier – it will drive me nuts for the rest of my life. It would have cost me $25,000 to do it, but would have been worth it. It would have been a true excess in the spirit of Diana Vreeland. I think she would have understood.

‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel’ is released in cinemas on 21 September and on DVD on 29 October. A book, by the same name (£35, Abrams), is out now.

She discovered Lauren Bacall; and declared in 1946: ‘The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb’

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CULTURAL NOMAD Above left and right: Veruschka in fashion shoots from 1968 and 1967. Left: Diana at work in her office.

Opposite: a June 1940 Bazaar cover

PHOTOGRAPHS: FRANCO RUBARTELLI/© CONDÉ NAST ARCHIVE/CORBIS, REX FEATURES, RICHARD YOUNG, JAMES KARALES, COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF JAMES KARALES

claimed that the nightdresses she supplied to Wallis Simpson on a certain weekend brought down the British monarchy.

When World War II broke out, the excesses of ‘Why don’t you…’

– ideas like ‘Why don’t you paint a map of the world on all four of your boys’ nursery walls so that they don’t grow up with a provincial point of view?’ – began to feel absurd. Snow made Diana fashion editor of Bazaar, and it was during this time that she influenced the direction of these magazines, filling them with her unique visions, inspiring photographers like Richard Avedon and working with legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. She discovered Lauren Bacall in the 1940s; and declared in 1946: ‘The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb.’ She threw parties at her Park Avenue apartment, attended by Cole Porter, CZ Guest and Cecil Beaton, and flew off to remote parts of the world.

By 1957, Paramount Pictures had based the character of Maggie Prescott in Funny Face on her (an honour that William Klein, in his 1966 fashion satire Who Are You, Polly Magoo?, would also bestow upon her, basing fashion editor Miss Maxwell on Diana), but Tim and Frecky grew up wishing they could have ‘any other mother than this mother’. She always told them: ‘Be original. Be first or last, but never in the middle.’ Diana was a society woman who had a professional job that took over and, though she was there, she wasn’t 100 per cent there for them. Reed was a prototype house-husband, organising the home and making breakfast in the morning, as Diana usually didn’t rise before 11am.

The boys did suffer. They wanted a more conservative mother. Referring to the 1960s, when his mother began to hang out with Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Andy Warhol at the Factory and Studio 54, Frecky comments in the film: ‘She became a celebrity, and it did affect me.’ Talking to Diana’s sons about her made me understand them more. But Diana also taught them a sense of curiosity for the world. Tim, now 87, tells me he rarely reads a book without thinking of her, and Frecky credits his desire to roam the world and become a diplomat to her travelling eye.

Despite the difficult connection with her sons, Diana had a good relationship with her grandsons, Alexander and his brother Nicky. The boys grew up in various locales around the world and, when they were very young and she had moved to Vogue, Diana would fly to Morocco to see them.

Nicky went on to assist Richard Avedon and Irving Penn (he later became a Buddhist monk).

At Bazaar, Snow gave Diana a tough time, not letting her own fashion editor attend the Paris shows and passing her over for promotion, handing the editor-in-chiefship to her niece. So Diana joined Vogue in 1962, becoming editor-in-chief of the magazine in 1963 and redefining beauty by photographing women such as Cher, Marisa Berenson and Tree. David Bailey recounts an occasion when, having already shot a story with Tree twice (both of which were rejected by Diana), he presented her with the contact sheets of a third attempt. She stared at them and declared: ‘These are divine! Of

ORIGINAL AND BEST Above: with Yves Saint Laurent in London in 1982. Left: with Andy Warhol and Jordan, star of London’s punk scene, in Paris in 1978 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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LUSTFOR LIFE Gloriously provocative and powerful, Helmut Newton’s iconic images redrew fashion’s frontiers. As the legacy of his fetishistic aesthetic is re-embraced in A/W’s sexiest looks, STEPHANIE THEOBALD discovers the intriguing man behind the audaciously artful visions. Photographs by HELMUT NEWTON

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PHOTOGRAPHS: © THE HELMUT NEWTON ESTATE/MACONOCHIE PHOTOGRAPHY

TEETER YE NOT This page: Helmut Newton’s ‘High & Mighty, American Vogue, 1995’.

Opposite: ‘Self-portrait with wife June and models, Paris, 1981’

est Hollywood, early 1990s.

Helmut Newton is leading a six-foot-tall model – naked, oiled and stiletto-clad – into the kitchenette of a whitewashed penthouse, where he directs her to arch athletically over the cooker.

Cut to the Hôtel de Paris in Monaco, where Cindy Crawford, in a tight white leotard and gold heels, is stretched out in apparent ecstasy at the feet of an orchestra of blindfolded old men. ‘Throw your chest out,’ a voice both sharp and languid yells at Crawford. ‘Ja! The more chest I get, the better it will be for everybody!’

Cut to Claudia Schiffer styled as an imperious housewife, holding a French maid on a leash, and then to Sigourney Weaver in a tight Lycra catsuit about to pounce, and on to countless other scenes from Helmut by June, the definitive documentary of a seventysomething Newton at work, made by his wife June in the 1990s.

Newton’s entire career consisted of capturing such fantastically deranged erotic tableaux on film. His currency was power and sexual provocation, and he is rightly attributed for having coaxed fashion away from the demure mainstream of Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton towards some altogether darker corners. ‘Without Helmut,’ says Manolo Blahnik, ‘fashion today would be far less liberLADIES’ MAN ated.’ And far less licentious, too.

‘Self-portrait, Halensee His photographs conjure up starkly lit Beach, Berlin, 1934’ dramas of sexual deviance, populated by longlegged Amazonians, tended by stylised gigolos, menaced by voyeurs and intruders, and accessorised by a whole arsenal of sadomasochistic paraphernalia including spiked high heels, whips, corsets, blindfolds, mannequins and manacles. As such, says Christian Louboutin: ‘He narrowed the frontier between fashion and fetishism.’

obsession with the art of sexual play? And who was he, when he wasn’t being the world’s most famous fetishist? Newton might jokingly have dubbed himself a ‘pornographer’, but his images are far more suggestive and mysterious than that. Professionally, he earned himself a reputation as an egotistical monstre sacré; Yasmin Le Bon recalls an incident backstage at an Azzedine Alaïa show when she was posing for Newton before the catwalk. ‘Then he said, “No, this is not right!” and became so demanding… I said, “I’m sorry, Helmut… we need to get on that runway.” And Helmut didn’t like that. He threw his camera down and stormed off.’

However, his friends tend to remember him as playful, gregarious and charming. And though his photographs are widely regarded as ‘fantasies’, Newton saw them instead as ‘based on reality’. ‘I have no feverish imagination,’ he said. ‘Every scene is plucked from the reality, the harshness of everyday life amongst the rich.’

No less surprising, perhaps, given the charges of misogyny levelled against him, is how passionately he championed women.

‘I’ve always liked strong women,’ Newton once said, ‘because I feel secure.’ And there were no greater ‘tower[s] of strength’ than his mother and his wife June, both of whom helped forge his artistic temperament. Indeed, June, now a vigorous 88-year-old, stands alongside her husband as not only his lifelong professional anchor, but also as a tremendously talented photographer, under the name Alice Springs, who has enjoyed a worldwide renown of her own making. Tim Jefferies, whose London gallery Hamiltons represents Newton in the UK, says that Helmut and June ‘resembled other great art-history couples, like Picasso and Dora Maar, or Man Ray and Lee Miller’.

And certainly, the stark absence of romance in Newton’s work belies the deeply romantic attachment he enjoyed with June over the course of their 55-year marriage.

‘I’m often asked if I’m jealous of the girls he photographs,’ June once remarked, teasing out the apparent conflict of being married to the King of Kink. ‘It’s a job, it’s his livelihood, it’s how he makes his living. He was photographing the girls when I met him, so nothing has really changed.’

Like other recurring motifs, those strapping, robotic women can be traced back to his early years. He was born Helmut Neustädter in Berlin in 1920 to a middle-class Jewish family, and later claimed

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Tom Ford once said that Newton’s photographs ‘are burned into my subconscious’; and the photographer, who died in 2004, still exerts an incredible power over fashion image-making and design; never more so than today. This season, designers from Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton to Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy and Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen have channelled his S&M aesthetic in their collections, sending out models in PVC bodices, rubber harnesses and straps, suspender belts under sheer coats, and the restrictive trappings of a dominatrix.

But while Newton’s visions of sex and domination continue to play on our minds, the question of who the man behind the camera was remains largely shadowy. What drove his life-consuming

PHOTOGRAPH: © THE HELMUT NEWTON ESTATE/MACONOCHIE PHOTOGRAPHY

‘His pictures were what some might call “kinky”, but they were always women in power, never submissive’ – CINDY CRAWFORD

IN THE FLESH Photographs from the new book ‘Helmut Newton, Polaroids’, clockwise from top: Cindy Crawford in ‘American Vogue, St-Tropez, 1991.’ ‘Focus, Milan, 1997’. ‘Stern, St-Tropez, 1978’

it was the ‘great big’ East Prussian maids who worked in the wealthy household (his father owned a button-and-belt factory) who inspired the ‘Big Nudes’ series that made his name in the 1980s.

He was a delicate child with a tendency to fainting fits. When his parents took him to spa hotels in the summer, he always noticed the ‘gigolo and gigolette’ sitting at a table away from other customers.

In decadent Weimar Berlin, with its mingling of everyday life and sinfulness, the purveyors of sex were never far from view.

In his autobiography, Newton recalls how he used to masturbate so much that his besotted mother (who had dressed him as a girl when he was a child) took him to a doctor, who advised him to ‘do boom-boom with girls’ – which he did, starting at the age of 14.

There began a fantasy world filled with sexual attachment to fantastically odd objects, from stockings to crutches to frumpy underwear. Aged 12, he bought his first camera from Woolworths. He showed promise as a photographer, and on leaving school at 16, began an apprenticeship with a society photographer known as ‘Yva’.

But a more immediate reality was about to trouble the erotic wonderland playing out in his head. In 1938, Simon’s studios were

a job as a photographer for a paper, from which he was soon fired for incompetence. Luckily, she was ‘keeping’ him.

But with Britain’s declaration of war, his status as a German put his residence in jeopardy. He claimed he was delighted to be sent to an internment camp in Australia – from which, via jobs as a peach picker and a stint in the national army, he landed a job freelancing at Australian Vogue. It was during this time as a young photographer that he met the woman who would change his life for ever.

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n 1947, an Australian actor called June Browne walked into his studio in Melbourne, looking to be photographed for modelling work. ‘All the other girls were really only about fucking,’ he said later. ‘With her, there was another dimension.’ For June, it was his photographs on the walls of his office that first impressed her, ‘the like of which I’d never seen before’, she says, ‘and suddenly he threw the door open and said, “Come in.”’ It still counts as the best moment of her life. The pair hit it off instantly. He warned her that his first love would always be photography, but she would be his second. She accepted the terms, and they were married a year later. In 1957 the couple moved to London, but found the genteel era of Parkinson (and ‘the British lack of talent for sex’) too staid, so they uprooted again to Paris.

It was here that Newton started to build his reputation, constructing starkly cold sets with props found at sex shops in the Pigalle on shoots for magazines such as Le Jardin des Modes, Queen, Nova and Playboy. It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that he won international attention, with gallery shows in New York, Japan, Paris and Amsterdam, and a series of high-impact books. Although his works were rated on a par with Horst, Penn and Avedon, Newton’s inspiration lay closer to Brassaï’s Parisian nightscapes, the work of Berlin documentarymaker Erich Salomon (who specialised in trials and conferences), Arthur Schnitzler’s erotic stories, Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, and Story of O by Pauline Réage. Among his most notorious images were a 1973 portrait of Charlotte Rampling, naked on top of a table in a brooding wood-panelled study; a 1975 shot of Elsa Peretti as an haute-fashion Playboy Bunny on a Manhattan rooftop; and, from the CONTINUED ON PAGE 358

closed down by the Nazis (she was later dispatched to Auschwitz), and after that year’s notorious Kristallnacht pogrom, when 91 Jews were killed and 30,000 Jewish men sent to camps, Newton’s father was taken to a concentration camp.

It was thanks only to Newton’s mother that the family survived.

Claire was, he says, a ‘very spoiled woman. But when it counted to save her family in the first days of Hitler in Berlin… she was very, very strong’. She had inherited the button-and-belt factory from her first husband before marrying Helmut’s father, Max Neustädter. By 1935, Nuremberg racial laws meant Max was forbidden to work in his own factory, and when the family was forced to sell its car because Jews weren’t allowed to own one, Claire hid their money in the linen press. It was only through her intervention that a ‘good German’ Gestapo officer released Newton’s father in 1938 – at which point she used the hidden cache to buy the family’s passage out of Germany. With good reason, says Newton, ‘this kind of Amazon woman’ – she possessed an ample bosom and beautiful legs – ‘has always appealed to me.’

His parents escaped to South America, where Newton’s older half-brother Hans had fled in 1936. But the budding photographer took a boat to Singapore, where he immediately activated his skills of seduction. By now, he was a slender, debonair 18-year-old, with tousled hair and sparkling eyes, whose attention was taken up exclusively by married women over 30 because, he said: ‘They had all the sex appeal, the glamLOUNGE LOVER our and the excitement I was looking for.’

This page: Alice Springs’ ‘Helmut On landing in Singapore, he caught the Newton, rue Aubriot, Paris, 1971’. eyes of a Belgian woman on the refugeeOpposite: Newton’s ‘Catherine welfare committee called Josette Fabien, Deneuve, Paris, 1976’ who had a suite at Raffles hotel and got him 304 |

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PHOTOGRAPHS: © ALICE SPRINGS/MACONOCHIE PHOTOGRAPHY, © THE HELMUT NEWTON ESTATE/MACONOCHIE PHOTOGRAPHY

‘I have no feverish imagination,’ Newton said.

Every scene is plucked from the reality, the harshness of everday life amongst the rich’

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they were directly involved. I was desperately worried about Sean’s life, and though it never entered my head that we would get back together, everyone around me certainly felt we would. My boyfriend felt helpless and second-best. This was something he couldn’t help with, and I shut him out. I was also juggling a high-pressure job and distressed kids; I didn’t have the energy for another person’s insecurities. Eventually he left me. I felt desperate and alone, as though the new life I had worked so hard to build up after the divorce was unravelling.

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ean was finally released on 21 June 2008, after being incarcerated for nearly three-and-a-half months. An undisclosed ransom was paid, but far less than the millions the insurgents had originally demanded – and this was due entirely to the brilliant work of the documentary team at Channel 4, Alan, who worked tirelessly, the negotiating skills of the security team, and the other journalists on the ground in Afghanistan who risked their lives to get Sean out.

The security company set up an emergency room at Channel 4 in those final crucial weeks of negotiations. As the deadline for Sean’s release got to within a couple of days, I was ordered not to answer any unknown foreign calls. This is apparently a key time, when kidnappers try to get through to loved ones in order to negotiate for more money. As predicted, Sean did try to contact me, and left a message on my answerphone. I knew I couldn’t call him back, which, after all those months of no contact, almost killed me. I wanted to comfort him and tell him we were working hard for his release. Locked as he was in his prison, he had no idea what was happening.

The handover is often the most scary and dangerous part of a kidnap. Sean was taken from the village where he was incarcerated and, dressed in full burka so as to be unrecognisable, brought to a halfway house in Peshawar. The place was being used as a Taliban hospital and orphanage. And Sean was there for two days while final negotiations were going on. He was made to sit with children on his knees while watching repeated scenes of beheading on television. He had a gun to his head at the final handover, and thought he was going to die just before being released.

He was a broken man when we finally spoke on the telephone.

Sean had been handed over and was at a hotel in Islamabad recovering before the flight home. He was finally able to make a couple of calls to family. Having been incarcerated in a dark room for three months, somewhere in the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, he suffered fever and dysentery, and his only view of the outside world was through a tiny window. He could see a single peach on a tree, and talked about watching it ripen day by day and being so painfully aware of the distance between him and the outside world. He missed the children – a fact made worse by mentally torturous night-time visits from Taliban commanders, cloaked in black. Once they made him look at ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs of a child suicide bomber who was about the same age as the boys. Every night he wondered if he would be executed.

I’m ashamed to say, on that first phone call, I didn’t give him an easy time. It was an unbelievable relief that he was safe, but I couldn’t help but unleash the full force of months of stress, fear and anger.

During his incarceration, Sean had lost three stone and several teeth, and I was tense when I, the kids and Sean’s family went to pick him up from the airport a few days after the rescue. I was fearful about the man who would emerge from the arrivals gate, and 306 |

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whether I had done the right thing by bringing the children along.

As it was, Sean looked like Sean, though his hair was white and he was sporting a long beard and a haunted, fragile look. The kids ran to him and gave him a huge hug. We all cried and embraced. That evening, Sean, his family, Alan and close friends celebrated at my flat with a big meal I had prepared. Sean was regaling everyone with stories – he was almost his usual charming, affable self.

It was such a relief that he was back safely, and I thought it was all over then, but the next weeks were the hardest of all; surreal in fact, like a bereavement. The shock of holding it together over the past months hit me like a tsunami. I was physically drained and had to take time off work. Once the newspapers got hold of the story, there was a fight to get the exclusive interview with Sean. And when, still feeling shaky, I finally gathered myself enough to go into work a few days later, my boss demanded Sean give the first story to our paper, and I found myself in a hideous negotiating role for the exclusive.

It felt extremely odd and emotionally confusing to be the ex-wife, and also so much at the centre of Sean’s homecoming. Luke and Gabriel, who had been so stoical when Sean was gone, were now becoming increasingly upset by the state of their dad, and also by friends’ reactions – usually sobbing emotionally – when they saw Sean. They sensed that something very dramatic had happened, and needed lots of hugs and attention. I felt so happy for the kids that they had their dad back, but really, really angry that they had to go through this emotional trauma at such a young age.

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t is now three years on, and we are all still suffering the fallout from those three months Sean spent in a dark room. I had locked those traumatic months deep in my memory, but just writing this feature, I started to have sleepless nights again. Sean has been diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress disorder – which makes his behaviour totally unpredictable. When he was released, he promised to be a better father and ex-husband, but the truth is sometimes he just can’t manage it. He often doesn’t turn up when he is supposed to collect the kids. Sometimes, even though he lives round the corner, he goes off-radar for months at a time and we simply can’t get hold of him. The boys have suffered terribly from his absences. It is difficult to get on with my life, too, because it is impossible to plan anything.

When I read about the four journalists who were kidnapped in Libya in March this year, I felt terrible for them and the torments they would be going through, but I felt most sorry for the loved ones they had left behind. The journalists, after all, had made a career choice, while those back home were left to pick up the pieces.

Two weeks ago, we held my son Gabriel’s seventh birthday party at Sean’s new flat. It was the first time I had been there, and what struck me was that his walls were plastered, in equal measure, with pictures of the boys, and of soldiers and war – his two great loves. He is going back to Afghanistan in a few weeks. This time he is making a film for ITV, but the subject remains the same. War is a drug for some journalists; I guess Sean will never learn to kick the habit.

‘LUST FOR LIFE’

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same year, a photograph of a model in a slit gown climbing the stairs of a French château, her plump derrière brazenly exposed.

Newton increasingly took advantage of shoots for his own ends, using the models, make-up artists, hairdressers and locations for extra set-ups. ‘He referred to it as “beating the system”,’ says June. Marie Helvin, who was shot by Newton several times in the 1970s while she was married to David Bailey, recalls: ‘A lot of the shoots he did progressed from a fashion shoot to a nude shoot. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

He would finish taking the fashion shots, then make the model strip and do a nude shoot in the very same set of poses. You can look at several of his nude photographs side by side with his magazine work, and all that is different is the absence of clothing. The poses are exactly the same. He worked an idea for all he could get out of it, and they were such great ideas to begin with that he always got away with it.’

Even now, June puzzles over her husband’s extraordinary sway.

‘I will never know how he got them to take their clothes off,’ she says, chuckling. ‘On one occasion, I was present when he was photographing a gentleman seated at his desk. His girlfriend stood beside him. “You’ll be better,” he said to the girl, “without your clothes on.” So she took them off – and he was right.’

It was hardly surprising when the public took objection, particularly in America, where implications of bestiality and threesomes (as in one editorial) caused uproar. Crawford, who was photographed by Newton for the first time in 1991 with the blindfolded orchestra at the Hôtel de Paris (‘he was 71, but he had more energy than I did’) admits they were what some might call ‘kinky pictures’, but what was important was that ‘they were always powerful, always women in power, never submissive’.

Whether his images are exploitative or empowering is perhaps beside the point. His work is the truest expression of his point of view, in all its murky solipsism. And he made no bones about it. ‘You know,’ he once asserted, ‘I never think of anybody else but myself.’

But if his photographs were slavishly self-regarding, his life beyond work was anything but. At houses on the Left Bank and, later, Ramatuelle in the South of France, the Newtons entertained with gusto, welcoming guests who included Grace Coddington, Anjelica Huston and Blahnik. Joan Juliet Buck, former editor-inchief of French Vogue, said the couple ‘taught everyone how to live’.

‘The Newtons were gregarious and had a large group of friends.

Their enthusiasm and social life didn’t diminish with age.’ Helvin recalls what an extraordinary raconteur he was at dinner parties.

‘I remember him telling this story about how he went to see a photographer hero of his in Berlin, and when he arrived, he met the photographer’s wife, who passed him a bowl of what he thought was cocaine. At the last minute, he realised the photographer was dead and these were the ashes.’

It was exactly the kind of thing to appeal to his dry, Germanic sense of humour. Karl Lagerfeld, who worked for him as an assistant (in 1983, when Newton was doing a portrait of Princess Caroline of Monaco) and as a subject, recalls: ‘He had this wit that Berlin was famous for, and which disappeared from 1933 on – he was like Billy Wilder.’ It was a savage drollery that sometimes infected his work – such as when he claimed, tongue in cheek, that he posed his models in crutches as a lesson in health and safety. ‘If women wear such high heels,’ he said, ‘then they may fall over and break their legs.’ In short, he was a mischief-maker; surely the best way to parse his 1973 shots of June dressed as Hitler, and Jerry Hall as Eva Braun.

It was around this time, by Newton’s indirect encouragement, that June found her footing as a photographer in her own right.

When they moved to France, the language barrier had halted her career as an actor. ‘She couldn’t act,’ said Newton, ‘so I gave her a box of paints, and then she got fed up with that, and I gave her a camera and she started taking pictures and they were very good. If that’s not annoying, I don’t know what is.’ In 1970, she stood in for her husband, who had come down with flu, on a commercial shoot in Paris for Gitanes cigarettes, which proved a tremendous success.

After that, she launched her career under the pseudonym Alice Springs, which was chosen by sticking a pin in a map. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

Besides her fashion and commercial work, June excelled at portraiture, shooting everyone from William Burroughs to Roy Lichtenstein. But despite her burgeoning career, she continued to work with her husband. She modelled for him; she lent her lighting and scene-setting skills to shots; she recruited and even coached models in the S&M dumb-play her husband craved. But her impact proved even more fundamental. In 1971, after he nearly died from a heart attack, it was June who urged him to focus on taking pictures ‘from inside himself ’, based on his Berlin youth. Later, while working on his ‘medical’ portraits (a series of models in surgical corsets), Helmut feared he had gone too far, only for June to insist that he finish.

Helmut was often asked in interviews whether he slept with his models. His photographer friend Don McCullin suggests that his libido was largely sublimated during work. ‘As a photographer, the more naked women you look at, the less they become interesting. The challenge is for the photography, not the sex,’ he says. But a number of flings have been documented, including one with Australian model Maggie Tabberer, now in her seventies. In her autobiography, she admits that the couple became close in the 1950s, when Newton was still living in Australia. She was in her twenties and he was in his thirties. ‘[It was] a very secretive, controlled relationship,’ she says. ‘I was never silly enough to think it could go on. June was Helmut’s wife totally.’

In spite of any indiscretions, the bond between husband and wife clearly remained tight. Helvin insists: ‘Helmut and June were the most devoted couple I ever knew,’ and that ‘when models came on to Helmut, she’d just laugh. She could be very dismissive. Say something like “cut the bullshit, Helmy”. He hated being called Helmy’.

It seems symptomatic that when June fell gravely ill in 1981, Helmut sank into depression. ‘When she wasn’t functioning, I felt very lost,’ he said. ‘I’m not a very strong person.’ His camera became a coping mechanism, as he began taking photographs of her in her hospital bed. ‘I have a theory that in war, or any trauma, if a photographer has a camera between him and the horror, he can face it,’ he said. ‘If there’s something that upsets me, I get my camera out.’

For both of them, taking pictures became an expression of their love and a document of their life. ‘We take pictures of each other whenever we want, knowing that we have a veto, if we don’t want the picture to appear,’ said Newton. As it turned out, not much was vetoed from their joint 1998 show ‘Us and Them’, which included a series of shots of them naked and at rest, exercising, posing, joking and bathing. With characteristic lack of sentimentality, Newton said: ‘My wife and I get on tremendously well, and that, I guess, is love, true love, going on between two people.’

The day Newton died, in 2004, aged 83, after suffering a heart attack at the wheel of a Cadillac while leaving the Chateau Marmont, he had been about to shoot a big advertising job in LA. After lunch with the production manager at his favourite diner, Mel’s Drive-In, June decided to do the job herself. ‘That’s how I got over it.’

McCullin says we must be sanguine about his death – see it, rather, through the prism of Newton’s elegantly twisted fantasy world. ‘He did it in extraordinary style. It could have been one of his pictures – although there’d have to be a naked lady in there somewhere!’ He concludes: ‘He lived a sumptuous feast of a life, squeezed out every last drop. It’s like great people in history, like Picasso – they come and they go and you must just smile and think, “Well, that was fun, wasn’t it?”’

The exhibition ‘Helmut Newton Polaroids’ runs at the Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin (+49 30 3186 4856; www.helmut-newton.com), until 20 November. The book ‘Helmut Newton, Polaroids’ (£34.99, Taschen) is out now.

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BELLE EPOQUE Coco Chanel with dancer Serge Lifar in 1937. Above, from top: dancers in the Ballets Russes production of ‘Le Train Bleu’ (1924), in Chanel costumes. An illustration by Leon Bakst of Vaslav Nijinsky in ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ (1912) 92 |

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SEE STOCKISTS FOR DETAILS. HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY ANGELA DAVIS-DEACON AT NAKEDARTISTS.COM, USING CHANEL S/S 09 AND ‘ROUGE ALLURE LAQUE’. WITH THANKS TO LISA SENSIER AND TEAM AT ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPHS: © GIANNI DAGLI ORTI/CORBIS, GETTY IMAGES, JEAN MORAL © BRIGITTE MORAL/CHANEL

WHITE LIGHT Dancer Elena Glurdjidze photographed at the English National Ballet studio in London. Tulle, lace and bead embroidered gown, from a selection, Chanel Haute Couture. Styled by Carmen Borgonovo

A kaleidoscope of artistic talents, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes brought together the 20th century’s most dynamic creatives – from Chanel to Stravinsky and Picasso – injecting ballet with a sexy, avant-garde exoticism.

To celebrate the company’s centenary, English National Ballet is paying tribute with a Chanel-costumed performance; NAOMI WEST takes a peek backstage.

Portrait by KRISTIAN SCHULLER

CORPS CÉLÈBRE

– is ‘very scary’, she says, but this history also spurs Glurdjidze on to make the dance her own. ‘There is a structure there, but everything else is nuance, very individual.’

English National Ballet’s artistic director Wayne Eagling has decided to take a ‘something old, something new, something borrowed…’ approach to their centenary performances – and will present a mixed bill of Ballets Russes’s classic repertoire (Les Sylphides, Scheherazade, Le Spectre de la Rose, ‘The Dying Swan’) alongside a revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s version of The Rite of Spring and a brand-new L’Après-midi d’un Faune, choreographed by David Dawson.

Their tribute is fitting. English National Ballet is one of the few companies to enjoy direct links to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: two of its three founders, Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, danced with the original company. Speaking about making the association with Lagerfeld, Eagling says: ‘Diaghilev had a very good eye; these were the sort of links that he forged. He put the right people together, and 100 years later we’re still talking about them.’

To Diaghilev, Coco Chanel was a friend, benefactor and artistic collaborator. She donated 300,000 francs to finance The Rite of Spring; and she clothed dancers for several Ballets Russes productions

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t’s a Saturday afternoon, and Glurdjidze is rehearsing Fokine’s amazingly un-human choreography in the company’s sweltering Kensington studio; with beating of limbs and inclines of her head, she transmogrifies into the white bird. ‘It’s very hard work with the arms,’ she says, sweating heavily after dancing the heart-rending sequence. ‘So much happens even in the last 40 seconds – a whole life.’ The solo’s heritage – it has been performed by many of the greatest ballerinas since Pavlova 128 |

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Top, from left: dancers in ‘The Rite of Spring’ (1913). A 1921 programme cover, with an image by Picasso.

Above: some of the Ballets Russes circle, from left: violinist Yvonne Giraud, pianist Jacques Février, Serge Lifar, socialite Marie-Laure de Noailles, Igor Stravinsky, Véra de Bosset Soudekine (the composer’s future wife) and Coco Chanel

Clockwise from right: Nijinsky performing in ‘Les Orientales’ in about 1910. A costume design for ‘La Légende de Joseph’ (1914) by Leon Bakst. A sketch of Diaghilev

by Karl Lagerfeld. A sketch by Bakst www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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iaghilev turned to Chanel to give his productions a contemporary look, explains Jane Pritchard, English National Ballet’s archivist and the curator of next year’s Ballets Russes exhibition at the V&A museum. In 1924, for Le Train Bleu – named after the train from Paris that took pleasure-seekers to the Côte d’Azur – Chanel clothed the dancers in modish striped knitted sportsand swimwear (her fellow collaborators included Picasso, who designed the curtain and the programme).

Five years later, she clothed the muses for the second staging of Balanchine’s Stravinsky-scored Apollon Musagète. For this, Chanel created simple pleated tunics for the dancers – a departure from the earlier ornate creations of other Ballets Russes designers – that were easy to move in and flattering. But these were not her only contributions. ‘There are a number of productions not credited to her,’ says Pritchard. ‘With Les Biches, several years after the premiere, Diaghilev still wanted it to look absolutely up-to-date, so he asked [dancer] Felia Doubrovska to go to Chanel to get a new costume made.’

‘Diaghilev was a natural matchmaker,’ says contemporary choreographer Javier de Frutos of the impresario’s skilful corralling of dancers, designers, composers and choreographers. Initially, Diaghilev had envisaged the ballet as a platform for the work of Russian artists – painters Leon Bakst and Alexandre Benois, choreographers Fokine and Nijinsky, and composer Stravinsky. But in time, ‘a Who’s Who of early 20th-century art’, as Pritchard puts it, was drawn into Diaghilev’s orbit, gravitating around Sert’s Rue de Rivoli apartment.

Landmark ballet Parade (1917) brought together composer Erik Satie, Cocteau, Picasso and choreographer Léonide Massine. ‘He introduced the finest painters to the finest musicians,’ recounted Chanel. ‘He would find out the names of unknown enchanters from just around the corner – Dukas, Schmitt, Ravel, Picasso, Derain – and introduce them to the snobby French crowds…’

Many artists involved were starting to achieve success, but the platform Diaghilev gave them speeded their ascent. As Balanchine, who joined Ballets Russes as ballet master in the mid-1920s, put it: ‘Diaghilev had the capacity to not only see the potentialities

PHOTOGRAPHS: CHANEL, MAGNUM PHOTOS, JEROME ROBBINS DANCE DIVISION/THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, PRIVATE COLLECTION/ROGER-VIOLLET, PARIS/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY, PRIVATE COLLECTION/ARCHIVES CHARMET/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/© SUCCESSION PICASSO/DACS 2009, PRIVATE COLLECTION/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY, ROGER SCHALL/CHANEL

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ne grey Venetian dawn in August 1929, two gondolas made their progress across the lagoon to the city’s island cemetery, San Michele. It was the final journey of 57-year-old impresario Sergei Diaghilev, following his death due to complications from diabetes. In 1909, 100 years ago this year, Diaghilev created a point of no return in 20th-century culture when he founded dance company Ballets Russes in Paris. His productions stunned audiences, introducing the exhilarating talents of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, composer Igor Stravinsky, choreographer George Balanchine, writer and artist Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso, who designed sets and costumes for several ballets. The results were, as contemporary choreographer Matthew Bourne puts it, ‘supremely theatrical, adventurous and daring’. So shocking was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – musically dissonant, with its pagan storyline expressed in savage choreography by Nijinsky – that it famously sparked a riot on its debut in 1913.

In the black gondola following the vessel bearing Diaghilev’s casket were: Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, along with Misia Sert, the patron and muse who had introduced the designer to Diaghilev’s circle; Boris Kochno, Diaghilev’s secretary and librettist; and Serge Lifar, his star dancer (the latter two had also been his lovers). It was an occasion of high drama; at the burial, Lifar leapt into his grave.

The women were dressed – as the dying man had wished – entirely in white. Chanel had financed the funeral, lending her assistance to the impecunious Diaghilev – and his Ballets Russes – in death, as she had in life.

To Diaghilev, Chanel was a friend, benefactor and artistic collaborator. ‘With neither fuss nor fanfare, she was a companion in all our pursuits,’ wrote Cocteau, a member of Diaghilev’s closest circle. She quietly donated 300,000 francs for him to stage a revival of The Rite of Spring after World War I; and she clothed dancers for several post-war Ballets Russes productions – most notably Bronislava Nijinska’s Le Train Bleu in 1924, and Balanchine’s Apollon Musagète in 1929.

This spring, English National Ballet is marking the centenary of Ballets Russes with a special programme at Sadler’s Wells – and, in an echo of Chanel’s association with the company, it has called upon Karl Lagerfeld to design a costume.

Georgia-born senior principal dancer Elena Glurdjidze will wear Lagerfeld’s design to dance ‘The Dying Swan’, the famed four-minute solo by Ballets Russes choreographer Mikhail Fokine, originally created for Anna Pavlova in 1905. Lagerfeld recalls: ‘As a child, I was impressed by old images of Pavlova dancing that ballet.’ He has set out to create a costume of ‘classic’ beauty: a winged white tutu.

inherent in an artist… he also knew what work, what style, what period suited that artist best.’

The seductive aesthetic of the company set couturiers’ hearts racing from the start. For the hot-blooded ballet Scheherazade (1910), Bakst’s designs formed a ‘chromatic jungle’ – in critic Richard Buckle’s memorable description – of peacock-green and blue, coralred and rose-pink. As a result, the jeweller Cartier was moved to set emeralds and sapphires together, while Paul Poiret reflected the exotic shapes (harem pants, lampshade skirts) and rich palette of Bakst and Benois in his collections.

Propelled by Diaghilev’s talent for controversy, Ballets Russes became Paris’ must-see, season after season. Rodin declared L’Aprèsmidi d’un Faune (1912) a modernist masterpiece. In Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, he wrote how the Ballets Russes ‘infected Paris with a fever of curiosity’.

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PHOTOGRAPHS: CHANEL, © BETTMANN/CORBIS

FLIGHT OF FANTASY An illustration of the costume for ‘The Dying Swan’ by Karl Lagerfeld. Below: Anna Pavlova performing the dance in about 1910

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t was not just the cleverly arrayed talents that drew the crowds: the experience of Ballets Russes was powerfully sexual. ‘Before Ballets Russes, people were used to seeing ballets that were rather tame,’ says Pritchard.

‘Suddenly there was this strong masculine presence, with magnetic stars like Nijinsky and Adolph Bolm, and a virile male corps de ballet.’

Nijinsky’s choreography and performances were enough to stoke a press furore. L’Après-midi d’un Faune ended with the dancer thrusting his pelvis repeatedly on the nymph’s discarded veil: as journalist Joan Acocella put it, Nijinsky was ‘not so much a sex object as sex itself ’.

It was little wonder that the onstage spectacles appeared quite so alluring, given the charged artistic hotbed from which they emerged. Diaghilev lived with Nijinsky, before the mercurial dancer left the company to get married; he subsequently became the lover of Nijinsky’s successor, Lifar, and librettist Kochno. Chanel herself became passionately entwined with Stravinsky. The affair ignited over the winter of 1920–1921, when she allowed the composer and his family, exiled by the Russian Revolution, to live and work in her villa in Garches, on the outskirts of Paris. Stravinsky composed a series of children’s symphonies, Les Cinq Doigts, there. By coincidence – or design – Chanel introduced the perfume Chanel No 5 the following May. (Their love story is the subject of a forthcoming film.)

Meanwhile, Ballets Russes’s female stars cast their own glamorous spell. Veteran dancer Frederic Franklin, now 94, was 15 when he first saw Ballets Russes perform at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1929.

‘I went all by myself, up in the gallery,’ he says. ‘The programme was Les Sylphides, Le Tricorne, and Aurora’s Wedding. There was a ballerina by the name of Alexandra Danilova dancing with a man by the name of Serge Lifar. I fell madly in love with her.’ Nine years later, Franklin was dancing a repertoire of lead roles with Danilova.

Diaghilev’s revolutionary ballet company closed with his death in 1929, but in January 1932, Ballets Russes returned under the new name, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Under the directorship of Balanchine, the company’s productions continued to thrill, with guest choreographers Massine and Nijinska, and designs

by Matisse, Miró and Dalí. (This post-Diaghilev period, up until the company’s eventual demise in 1961, is gloriously captured in the 2006 documentary Ballets Russes.) www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

Franklin – who still dances with the American Ballet Theatre – recalls asking Danilova and Massine for tales of the great Diaghilev. ‘But she [Danilova] would say, “Oh, no, that was another time.” Mr Diaghilev’s name was never mentioned.’

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oday, few are reticent about acknowledging Diaghilev and his impact on both dance and fashion.

The exotic and imaginative designs of his ballets have inspired repeated tributes down the years. In 1976, Yves Saint Laurent’s haute-hippie ‘Ballets Russes’ collection was hailed on the front page of The New York Times as one that would ‘change the course of fashion’. John Galliano revisited Saint Laurent’s take on Bakst’s brilliance for his jaw-dropping A/W 02 collection. For A/W 09, US designer Monique Lhuillier showed a collection billed as a modern take on Ballets Russes; while Lagerfeld, for his part, says that he has been influenced particularly by ‘the work of Leon Bakst and Picasso’.

The repertory and collaborative spirit of Ballets Russes changed dance for ever. Matthew Bourne recounts that his vision for his allmale Swan Lake (1995) was shaped directly by photographs he had seen of Nijinsky as the Faun: ‘The animalistic, two-dimensional nature of his movements went into creating the feral flock of wild and masculine swans… a whole flock of Nijinskys!’

‘It is inspiring to think back to those great works and remember that design is more than “ just what they wear” and music is more than “ just what they dance to”,’ says British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, who has earned Diaghilev comparisons for inviting composer Joby Talbot and fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez to work with his company Morphoses.

Ballets Russes’s centenary is bringing its incomparable influence into focus once more: a programme of newly commissioned works at Sadler’s Wells in October plans to create more intriguing combinations of talents. ‘I thought, “If Diaghilev were alive, what would he try and do?”’ says Alistair Spalding, Sadler’s Wells’ CEO and artistic director. Choreographers Wayne McGregor, Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Javier de Frutos are all creating collaborative works inspired

by Ballets Russes. De Frutos is taking Ravel’s La Valse (a piece rejected by Diaghilev), and has asked designer Katrina Lindsay to dream up a scenario worthy of Cocteau: ‘transcendental and terribly sexy’. (He is also developing a new ballet, due in 2011, with music by the Pet Shop Boys: ‘a new adventure with great companions… Diaghilev would have approved!’)

Back in the English National Ballet studio, Glurdjidze has peeled off her practice tutu to enjoy an extremely high-end dress-up session in purest white Chanel Haute Couture. In a camellia-scattered dream of a dress, she executes a series of leaps and arabesques, the tulle suddenly animated into a weightless floral blur.

‘I still cannot believe it is happening,’ says the palpably excited Glurdjidze of being dressed by Lagerfeld. ‘I have seen his drawing of the tutu – it looks so light, almost alive. We always say that the look is 50 per cent of how you are going to dance, so it is very important to have a beautiful costume.’

English National Ballet (www.ballet.org.uk) performs Ballets Russes at Sadler’s Wells (0844 412 4300) on 16–20 June.

Propelled by Diaghilev’s talent for controversy, Ballets Russes became Paris’ must-see. Rodin declared L’Après-midi d’un Faune a modernist masterpiece. Proust wrote how the company ‘infected Paris with a fever of curiosity’

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YEARS

When Pablo Picasso left Paris for southern France after World War II, he embarked on a bright and colourful period, the sun-drenched coastline both fuelling his creativity and providing a glamorous setting for his extensive coterie of friends and lovers.

As a new exhibition examines his Mediterranean days, his daughter Paloma recalls the joys of growing up in the sunny South. By NAOMI WEST 112 |

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PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

HALCYON

PHOTOGRAPHS: EDWARD QUINN © EDWARDQUINN.COM, ARNOLD NEWMAN/GETTY IMAGES, PRIVATE COLLECTION COURTESY HEATHER JAMES FINE ART, PALM DESERT, CA (WWW.HEATHERJAMES.COM)

PURPLE PERIOD Pablo Picasso in his studio at La Californie, his villa in Cannes, in 1956.

Opposite, from top: with his daughter Paloma in the South of France in 1954. A 1951 portrait of Paloma

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SOUTHERN BELLES Clockwise from left: Picasso in his studio with Brigitte Bardot during the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. His ‘Paloma Debout’ (1954).

With Claude and Françoise Gilot in 1948

PHOTOGRAPHS: DAVID DOUGLAS DUNCAN/HARRY RANSOM HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTER, THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, JEROME BRIERRE/GETTY IMAGES, PRIVATE COLLECTION © PHOTO: ERIC BAUDOUIN, RENÉ BURRI/MAGNUM PHOTOS, ROBERT CAPA © 2001 BY CORNELL CAPA/MAGNUM PHOTOS, COURTESY OF PALOMA PICASSO, EDWARD QUINN © EDWARDQUINN.COM

t was a new beginning,’ says Paloma Picasso.

As part of his idyllic new beach life, Picasso, by then in his late ‘The war had ended, he had two children right sixties, also embraced a fresh medium, beginning to produce afterwards. It was so happy, hopeful and posiceramics at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, a small town just tive.’ She is describing the prolific, sun-drenched inland from Antibes. ‘He mastered it incredibly quickly,’ says period in the life of her father, Pablo Picasso, Sooke, ‘completely ignoring rules on glazes, disregarding orthodox which this summer is to be celebrated in an exhibshapes, creating all sorts of wild and wonderful objects.’ More than ition at the London Gagosian Gallery, entitled 30 such plates, jugs and sculptures will appear in the exhibition.

‘Picasso: The Mediterranean Years (1945–1961)’.

‘Picasso was a man of the South,’ Richardson adds. ‘When he For Paloma, born in 1949, and her brother Claude, gets there, the sun comes out, there’s a joie de vivre in his work.’ two years older, this was their early childhood.

There is no one better placed than New York-based Richardson, ‘I can’t imagine a better setting to grow up in,’ now in his eighties and working on his fourth and final volume of she says, at her home in Marrakesh. ‘Everything the artist’s biography, to gather the ceramics, sculptures, linocuts was very easy and natural. There was no separaand paintings that capture this time, many of which are on loan tion between life and art. We would be at the from Picasso’s surviving relatives. For it was during this period that table and then lunch would end and my father would push his plate Richardson, a former art student living in Provence with his thena little bit to the side and start working right there.’ partner, art collector Douglas Cooper, became friends with Picasso, By that time, he had long been internationally fêted and was an visiting him at his studio and at home, and spending afternoons on unrivalled art celebrity. ‘Even as a child, there was no way to escape the beach (Paloma remembers Les Flots Bleus and La Garoupe as that Picasso was considered the greatest painter of the 20th century,’ favourites). They also visited Arles and Nîmes to watch the bullsays Paloma who, at 61, is still raven-haired and elegant. ‘If we fight, which was one of Picasso’s essential joys in life; the symbol of went out to a café in Saint-Tropez, it was like being with a rock the bull (and, by extension, the Minotaur) was as essential in his art. star.’ Despite his fame, her father would After the fights, Richardson and invite rubberneckers to join their table.

Cooper would often hold dinners at their ‘He would call these people nos amis home, Château de Castille, for a motley d’enfance, childhood friends.’ The gregacast of writers, artists, photographers, rious artist clearly felt at ease in the South celebrated bullfighters like Luis Miguel of France. Paloma recalls how it was ‘a Dominguín, and family members, includkind of replica of Andalusia’ for Picasso ing Paulo, Picasso’s wayward son by his (who was born in Málaga and raised in wife Olga. Superstar poet and artist Jean Barcelona) – the next best thing for a man Cocteau, an exceptionally witty raconteur, who refused to set foot in Spain while was often present, but sparkling away at Franco was in power. the centre of it all was Picasso, with his Picasso’s post-war output has typically uniquely potent gaze. ‘You couldn’t evade been considered of scant importance in those eyes,’ remembers Richardson. ‘One comparison with the era-defining works flick of those eyes and people did what he produced in the first part of the they were expected to do.’ Over many century, from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon days spent in the artist’s company, (1907), which sowed the seeds for Cubism, Richardson deduced that ‘Picasso was to Guernica (1937), his shattering response something of a vampire. He would draw to the bombing of the Basque town. But his energy from his friends – then he the Gagosian’s new exhibition, curated would strut off into the studio and work by the artist’s esteemed biographer John most of the night. You would wonder Richardson (in partnership with Bernard when you went back home, “Why am I so SELF-PORTRAIT Ruiz-Picasso, Picasso’s grandson by his exhausted? I’ve had a wonderful day…”’

Paloma Picasso in Cannes in 1957 first wife Olga), is set to prompt a new consideration of this time, when Picasso moved from Paris to the Paloma recalls how, despite her father’s considerable wealth, the South of France after the war. family lived relatively unshowily. They ate simply and healthily; ‘He was looking to regenerate his art. You sense this real freedom Picasso rarely drank. La Galloise, the house in Vallauris where he and excitement,’ says writer and broadcaster Alastair Sooke, who moved with Gilot and Claude in 1948, the year before Paloma was dedicated a programme to Picasso in his recent BBC series Modern born, was ‘kind of small; it only had one floor’, and was reached by Masters. As Sooke explains, the end of Nazi occupation sparked a long series of steps through an orange grove. ‘My first memories a dramatic shift. Tortured portraits of Dora Maar, the brilliant ever,’ says Paloma, ‘are of being in my father’s arms and the and intensely neurotic photographer, painter and poet who rhythm of him going up those stairs.’

Picasso had met in 1936, ceded to bright, fecund paintings portrayRichardson offers a less romantic recollection of ‘a terrible little ing his subsequent love, Françoise Gilot, a young artist 40 years house of absolutely no charm and impossible to find. When you got his junior. His grey, claustrophobic still-lifes, which spoke of the to the address there was a garage blocking the road. A mad old lady fear and privations of living in wartime Paris, were followed by lived above it who would say, “No, Monsieur Picasso doesn’t live here. the exuberant paintings of goddesses, nymphs and sea creatures He’s a horrible painter!” Picasso said, “The perfect concierge!”’ produced using plywood and boat paint in the Château Grimaldi For Picasso, family life was fulfilling, and Claude and Paloma (now the Musée Picasso) at Antibes.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 147 became frequent subjects of portraits,

FRIENDLY PERSUASION Clockwise from above: Picasso with hat and gun given to him by Gary Cooper. Paloma in about 1958. Picasso in a bull mask in 1959.

His ‘Femme et enfants: le dessin’ (1954)

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beaches after Paradis, Lily-Rose, Jack and his heroes, Marlon Brando and Hunter S Thompson included.

Paradis confirms that, yes, the couple do indeed affectionately call their retreat Fuck Off Island, and reach it on another of Depp’s baubles – his yacht Vajoliroja, the name a mélange of the family’s four first names and a witty riff on ‘the Jolly Roger’. (By the way, Vajoliroja is available for charter this summer, a snip at $130,000 a week, and comes with accommodation for 10 guests, a crew of eight, a formal dining room, master suite, four guest cabins and a library.)

But why call it Fuck Off Island? ‘Maybe because we found peace over there; it’s so very lovely there. It’s really amazing to be able to go to such a place.’

Close friend and confidant Lagerfeld feels that family life has been the key to the blossoming of Paradis over the past decade. ‘She is stronger today than in 1992. I feel that she really became Vanessa Paradis since she had children,’ he enthuses. ‘Her [partner], in her life, everything seems very happy. I think she is 100 times better than when she was a little singer. I thought she was a very good actress, and she has a certain magic that has come with age.’

It is exactly this magic that I experience first-hand when Paradis ends our meeting with a, ‘So zat is the 30 minutes up, n’est-ce pas?’

– though it was actually a lazier 50. She tilts her head, points at my skinny, rocker-red jeans and dove-grey boots, and smiles with that puckered mouth only French girls can pull off, saying: ‘L’ensemble, j’aime bien.’ And off she saunters onto the terrace for the first pose of her shoot.

‘L’Arnacoeur’ is released on 2 July.

From vintage classics to contemporary Chanel, view Vanessa Paradis’s chicest fashion moments at harpersbazaar.co.uk

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while the flotsam of family life provided rich source material.

Picasso once described himself to Cocteau as the ‘king of the ragpickers’; working at his studio at Le Fournas, a disused perfume factory in Vallauris, he assembled sculptures including Girl Skipping Rope (1950) – the rope a metal tube bent into shape by a local ironmonger, the girl’s torso a basket, and her head made using the lid of a box of chocolates. For Baboon and Young (1951), which also appears in the Gagosian exhibition, Picasso stole two of his son Claude’s toy cars and stuck them together to make the head of the monkey. Paloma recalls that her father, unwilling to throw anything away, would even transform the refuse from his four-pack-a-day Gitanes habit: ‘When he had finished, he would start tearing the pack into little dolls, shapes of birds.’

This convivial-sounding existence was not without its dark storm clouds. Richardson admits that, although to be enveloped in the physical warmth of Picasso’s friendship was sheer heaven, ‘to have him as a son, a father, a lover must have been torture, because he liked to control everything around him’. As Gilot wrote in her frank 1964 memoir Life With Picasso: ‘He was rather fond of saying, “For me, there are only two types of women – goddesses and doormats.” And whenever he thought I might be feeling too much like a goddess, he did his best to turn me into a doormat.’

Gilot found life with Picasso at La Galloise so intolerable that she eventually left him in 1953, though Paloma and Claude continued to spend holidays with their father (at least until he banished them, following the publication of Gilot’s memoir). Gilot reflected that Picasso had a kind of Bluebeard complex, still wielding power

over his estranged wife Olga and former mistresses Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter, who continued to be constant presences, whether in person or in spirit, throughout Gilot’s time with him – ‘still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain’. The artist would also visit other mistresses in the area, often driven there by Paulo, who would maintain a loyal silence about his father’s activities.

In 1955, Picasso moved with his new partner Jacqueline Roque (who had worked at the Madoura pottery) and her daughter Catherine to a villa in Cannes. La Californie, described in a newspaper as ‘a three-storeyed wedding-cake affair, built by a Victorian champagne millionaire’, may have been some degrees grander than La Galloise, but it was still, as Paloma recalls, ‘a huge organised mess’. Her father’s artistic detritus was everywhere, joined by the non-stop flow of eccentric gifts – a deerstalker from Scotland, a knitted mask from Peru, an elephant’s-foot wastepaper basket, even whoopee cushions – from friends and visitors who included Gary Cooper and Brigitte Bardot. Then there were the animals that Picasso adored: ‘He was like St Francis,’ says Paloma, referring to his menagerie of dogs, goats and songbirds, which were a rich source of joy, inspiration and domestic mishap (their goat Esmeralda – the second so named – once managed to consume half the plans for Barcelona’s Picasso Museum).

Unlike Gilot, Roque was submissive by nature, and prepared to sacrifice herself on the altar of his art. Not only a muse to Picasso – he committed her large, decisive features to canvas many times – she also offered him the absolute and unwavering support that he desperately needed as he reached his mid-seventies. Picasso was aware that during the 1950s he was falling out of step with the art world – by then the avant garde was being led not from Paris but New York, by abstract artists including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. As he grew older, he was more conscious of claiming his place in the artistic pantheon, and during this period produced works responding to a number of Old Masters and Romantic paintings, such as Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Delacroix’s Women of Algiers.

Accessibility to the formerly gregarious Picasso decreased as Roque came to act as a gatekeeper for him. In 1958, when a high-rise sprang up overlooking their Cannes villa, they acquired a magnificent 16th-century country house, Château de Vauvenargues, in the foothills of Mont Sainte-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence. Here, Picasso relished playing the country gentleman, with Roque his châtelaine – Paloma remembers that if he wanted to shake off guests in Cannes, he would suggest moving the party 150 miles to Vauvenargues. Roque was to remain at the side of the man she referred to as ‘Monseigneur’ until he died; she shot herself 13 years after his death. They are both buried at Château de Vauvenargues.

While the environment, the friends and the women of the South energised Picasso to produce striking and varied work into his old age, Sooke reflects that the sun, the sea and the good life of these Mediterranean years may have prevented these works being taken entirely seriously. ‘People have been attached to the romanticised idea of Picasso, the bohemian artist creating great art in the face of poverty in the first decade of the 20th century. They are quite suspicious of this Picasso, the international celebrity playboy lounging around on white-sand beaches. How can he be creating great work?

But that idea has been blown out of the water by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, enormous superstar artists who have followed in Picasso’s footsteps. Perhaps now people will look at this phase of his career again.’

‘Picasso: The Mediterranean Years’ is at the Gagosian Gallery, 6–24 Britannia Street, London WC1 (www.gagosian.com), until 28 August.

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For those in the know, Elsa Peretti was the fashion icon of the Seventies: friend and muse to Halston and Helmut Newton, darling of Warhol, model for Dalí, and Tiffany’s hugely influential jewellery designer.

SARAH BAILEY meets a unique, larger-than-life style guru as the British Museum celebrates her work August 2009 |

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PHOTOGRAPHS: © THE HELMUT NEWTON ESTATE/MACONOCHIE PHOTOGRAPHY, ORIOL MASPONS, COURTESY OF KOWASA GALLERY BARCELONA

SURREAL LIFE Elsa Peretti (right) and fellow model Natacha Gounkevich, both wearing Paco Rabanne, with Salvador Dalí at his country house in Port Lligat, Spain, in 1965. Opposite: Peretti photographed by Helmut Newton in Manhattan in 1975

‘I picture myself in that moment perfectly,’ she says of her Studio 54 days. ‘It was the right moment for youth.

You walked into a club and you were known.

I was treated very well in 54. It was like a crazy, big family’

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DECADES OF DECADENCE Clockwise from top left: Peretti modelling in Italy in 1969. A 1984 Tiffany & Co ad featuring a Peretti design, photographed by Hiro. Marisa Berenson modelling Halston and Peretti for US Bazaar in 1972. Peretti and Karen Bjornson with Halston in US Bazaar in 1972. A page from the catalogue of a 1990 exhibition of Peretti’s designs for Tiffany & Co. Centre: black jade Freeform pendant on 18-carat yellow-gold mesh chain, £1,925, designed by Elsa Peretti exclusively for Tiffany & Co www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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two weeks before she was due to marry a Milanese publisher, she scandalised her family and Italian society by flitting to Barcelona. In Catalonia, she immersed herself in the bohemian artistic circles that would define her subsequent creative journey, and she began to model, often wearing a blonde wig. She sat for Dalí (‘He booked me like a normal model’) and became part of his charmed circle: ‘He always had this group of young people and was inviting us to beautiful restaurants, and for us it was incredible, because we were a little starving.’

Mixing the rough with the smooth seemed to fire the Peretti imagination. ‘Spanish people hate it when I say it, but I preferred Spain when Franco was alive,’ she says with a mischievous flourish. ‘It was a fantastic quality of life because everybody was a revolutionary.’

The defining relationship of Peretti’s New York years was with Halston, the snake-hipped American fashion superstar and prince of the Studio 54 dancefloor, whose hedonistic nights with best friends and clients Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli were the stuff of Manhattan social legend. As Peretti once said: ‘I had a deep love affair with Halston, without having a love affair.’ To this day she keeps the designer’s fabled white and mirror-clad apartment as her Manhattan address. ‘Halston was really chic – terrible temper…’ she says, trailing off. One time, when she and Halston rowed over money, she threw a sable coat he had given her into the fire. ‘I burnt the coat because I was mad with him. That was the story. Forget about it,’ she harrumphs.

Peretti first encountered the designer on the set of a photo-shoot when she was modelling for US Bazaar. Halston, who started out as a milliner (and famously designed the pillbox hat Jackie Kennedy wore for the president’s inauguration), had been hired to apply feathers to the models’ faces to make them look like birds. ‘First of all, he was very handsome,’ says Peretti. ‘Very tall with blue eyes. And also the hands: if you saw him working, the hands were magical.’

Modelling for a designer like Halston in swinging New York was ‘not like it is now, where you have an hour then everybody leaves… You stayed’, she remembers warmly. ‘There was a fantastic group of people; we had fun.’

By her own admission a notoriously temperamental model, Peretti might have been born to be a designer’s muse. Before she hooked up with Halston, she’d been in golden-boy stylist turned designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo’s fashion gang (one that included Veruschka and Bianca Jagger). In fact, Peretti’s first jewellery creation – a flat silver bottle on a chain to hold perfume or a flower, inspired by a trinket she found in a second-hand store – was originally made for di Sant’Angelo.

Her involvement with Halston, a designer who was also wont to wear a slinky Peretti bottle around his neck, was more intense and all-consuming. Not only was Peretti wearing – and consequently selling – Halston’s liquidly sensual pieces, but she would also work with him on his collection late into the night. Her style, her flamboyant mannerisms and her ‘throw it on’ ability to wear anything inspired Halston and helped him discover his edge.

The pair partied with the same ferocity – on the dancefloor of Studio 54 with Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol and the gilded Manhattan demi-monde, and on the beaches at Fire Island, dancing until dawn, dressed in full disco-luxe glamour. ‘I picture myself in that moment perfectly,’ replies Peretti when I ask how she

PHOTOGRAPHS: © COLITA/CORBIS, COURTESY OF ELSA PERETTI, HIRO © TIFFANY, HIRO (AS ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN US HARPER’S BAZAAR, MAY 1972), BILL KING (AS APPEARED IN US HARPER’S BAZAAR, FEBRUARY 1972), GRAHAM WALSER. TIFFANY & CO (00800 2000 1122; WWW.TIFFANY.COM/UK)

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t’s 1975. Late afternoon sun beats down onto a Manhattan rooftop. The model Elsa Peretti, a 5’9” Italian beauty, dressed in a playfully haute-fashion take on a Playboy Bunny costume designed by her best friend Halston, throws back her head and strikes a pose of erotic abandon. The photographer Helmut Newton has been shooting since 11 o’clock in the morning, but it is only at 5 o’clock, when the shadows lengthen, that the moment is captured; the image will come to symbolise the decadent, sexually charged glamour of 1970s New York.

Of the influence of Newton and Halston, so much has been said.

But the importance of the woman in this picture – a tempestuous and unconventional 35-year-old beauty from a wealthy and influential Roman family – is a less-told, but no less important, story. Peretti, Halston’s premier gal pal, darling of Warhol’s Interview magazine, mentored like a little sister by Diana Vreeland, had just been signed as a named designer at Tiffany when Newton’s shutter clicked in 1975, to create sensual, organic – and decidedly sexy – modern jewellery at prices recession-strapped American women could afford. Inspired by the muscular architecture of Gaudí, the elemental power of Brancusi and Noguchi sculptures, as well as natural forms – be it the humble kidney bean or the slick articulation of a scorpion – Peretti’s bold, sleek, potent pieces revolutionised not just the history of Tiffany, but of modern jewellery.

Does Peretti remember this sitting with Newton, I ask her one morning earlier this year. ‘I can’t forget about it,’ she says, laughing, her voice gruff, thickly Italian and unmistakably that of a chain smoker. She has flown in from Barcelona to preside over preparations for an exhibit at the British Museum representing 35 years of jewellery- and object-making for Tiffany.

Imposingly tall with feline eyes, and dressed in a mannish Chanel sweater and pants, with trademark short hair, she is intoxicating company. It may be a cold spring day, but she insists we talk on the terrace of her hotel so she can smoke endless cigarettes through lunch and feed tidbits of bread roll to a robin she has befriended.

‘And also we had a little love affair,’ she says about Newton, and shrugs. ‘He never used me as a model when I wanted him to, but then I cut my hair and he said, “Don’t get excited but I want to photograph you.”’ She admits that afterwards she was desperate for a copy of the rooftop picture, but Newton would not give her one. ‘I had to give him $400. Stingy. I’m talking stingy.’ Last year, an artist’s print of the same shot sold at Christie’s in New York for $79,000. ‘That picture? Crazy.’

Elsa Peretti arrived in a febrile and exciting New York in February 1968 – a city throbbing with sexual liberation, the emerging gay scene and the heady syncopation of disco – although her first impression (‘It was freezing and there was a garbage strike’) gave no hint of the passionate adventures upon which she was about to embark. The daughter of a self-made oil man and a temperamental and sensitive mother, with whom she clashed, she describes her upbringing with characteristic disarming frankness: ‘A very bourgeois life. I escaped at 21. I could not stand my mother any more.’ She taught English and skiing at her Swiss finishing school before returning to Rome to study interior design. An almost animal urge to escape confinement has propelled Peretti throughout her life, and in 1966, aged 26 and just

celebrity that surrounded Halston and his courtiers in the mid-1970s. Just think of the frisson when it was announced that Philip Green was going into business with Kate Moss, and amplify, amplify, amplify. The matchmaker in the unlikely marriage of the Italian supermodel and the Fifth Avenue dowager, as Tiffany was characterised at the time, was Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Carrie Donovan. Aware that Tiffany was unhappy with its stuffy jewellery offering, Donovan introduced Peretti to Tiffany president Harry Platt, and a deal was struck. In September 1974, the Elsa Peretti range was launched with doughnuts and coffee at a ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’ party; women flooded the Fifth Avenue shop in droves. As Time magazine would later report, it took Tiffany’s workrooms months to catch up on the orders for Diamonds by the Yard – Peretti’s radical reinvention of the diamond necklace. The cheaper stones, set at intervals on a fine gold chain and best worn in multiples against bare skin with low-lowcut silk jersey – as Peretti demonstrated herself – were affordable and sexy. ‘In the first year, the store sold two miles of Diamonds by the Yard,’ reported Time, ‘plus 10,000 teardrops, 10,000 bean pendants and hundreds of $200 belt buckles.’

Significantly, Peretti’s pieces were offered in diamonds, gemstones, gold… and silver.

Until her first collection was minted, the latter was deemed so lowly in some circles it was actually banned on Tiffany’s shop floor. But silver not only sat well with Peretti’s democratic vision for her jewellery; it also suited her aesthetic, its ‘absence of colour’ so much more appropriate to her minimalist stylings than gold. As Koda puts it: ‘It was as if it was invented on the atomic chart for Elsa.’

‘You think Peretti and you think the Seventies,’ says couturier Ralph Rucci. ‘She’s in a black cashmere tube in a room that’s all white, with one perfect vase and one perfect calla lily.

Total minimalism and totally magnificent’

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n light of the Peretti revolution, jewellery in the late 1960s/early 1970s seemed fairly uninspired. Fussy settings and dowdy ‘matched sets’ felt too matronly for the contemporary woman, and too conspicuous. Peretti’s natural forms captured the changing mood – tapping into the flower-power generation and a growing interest in the environment. The personal, emotional aspect of her pieces – a heart, a teardrop… and, of course, their tactility – spoke to the sexually liberated 1970s woman, who wore slinky DVF wrap-dresses and jumpsuits and wanted to buy her own baubles.

To imagine the seismic impact of Peretti signing a deal to create jewellery for Tiffany in 1974, one has to appreciate the feverish

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second meeting with Peretti, a few days after her 69th birthday. She is in London again for the opening of her British Museum exhibit. In quieter moments, she has been reading a book she was given for her birthday: The Beautiful Fall (2006), Alicia Drake’s elegiac telling of the rivalry between Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld in the last days of disco-infused decadence in the 1970s, before Aids closed the curtain on that glittering era. It has, of course, struck a chord.

For all the glory of Peretti and Halston’s disco heyday, a savage recklessness underscored the excess. As we talk, a sense of real anger and sorrowful bemusement seeps through when she discusses Halston’s decline – be it a grumble about the silver-heart platter she made for him, then had to buy back at auction after his death (‘for $30,000’); or simply the painful exasperation of watching her once-beloved mentor squander his talent and his own name in licensing deals, then run away to the West Coast to die (in 1990), shamed by the revelations of cocaine-fuelled bad behaviour in The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989). ‘It was a stupid thing to do. He should have written what he felt, instead of disappearing; should have said, “It doesn’t matter about the drugs and the Aids. I did what I did.

They didn’t take me seriously.” He suffered so much after the diary of Andy Warhol,’ she says in her heartfelt, forthright manner.

‘Nobody deserves a book like this.’

Throughout all the upheavals of the past 35 years, the losses of her fashion circle to Aids and the relentless travel (today she splits her time between four European homes – in CONTINUED ON PAGE 144 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPHS: © HIRO, © HIRO (AS ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN US HARPER’S BAZAAR, MARCH 1972), CHARLES TRACY, © PATRICK M CMULLAN/PATRICKMCMULLAN.COM, IAN SANDERSON, GRAHAM WALSER. TIFFANY & CO (00800 2000 1122; WWW.TIFFANY.COM/UK)

feels when she looks back on those nights. ‘It was the right moment for youth. You walked into a club and you were known. We were treated very well in 54. I had a bottle of vodka immediately. I never paid for it… it was like a crazy, big family.’

Halston encouraged his muse in her jewellery design (passing on the memorable advice that she should make everything in small, medium and large); showcasing her tactile silver pieces – the cuff, the bottle, the Mexican horsebit buckle – in his uptown boutique and integrating them into his looks (think a boldly curvaceous horse-bit buckle cinching an Ultrasuede jacket or a Grecian gown).

And it was Peretti who designed the sexy gourd-like bottle for his fragrance ‘Halston’ – shot by photographer Hiro for the advertising campaign with a surreal white shadow – which went on to become the second most successful fragrance ever, after Chanel No 5.

Harold Koda, curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, identifies a ‘coincidence of aesthetic’ in the pair’s approach to design.

Both were inspired by the look of the Far East and an approach to 1970s minimalism that was at once sensual and womanly. ‘I think what they did was heat up their minimalism with hedonism and sensuality,’ says Koda. ‘With Halston, it was doing a sweater dress that discloses every bump and curve of a woman’s body, but in four-ply cashmere or silk jersey. With Elsa, it’s her rock crystal, Japanese lacquer, polished silver or black jade. It’s something that’s visually simple, but very rich in its evocative materiality.’

Long before Tom Ford launched his sexed-up persona on the world for his reinvention of Gucci, Halston really pioneered the idea of the designer’s lifestyle and image embodying the brand. And Peretti, arguably the highest-ranking in his retinue of ‘Halstonettes’ – an elite group that included Marisa Berenson, Pat Cleveland and Anjelica Huston – was like a living, breathing (and thoroughbred) billboard. For American couturier Ralph Rucci, now a close friend and devoted collector of Peretti objets, who begged a job in Halston’s studio and found himself too awestruck by Peretti’s presence to even speak to her, the potency and modernity of her style defined not just the Halston mission, but the era. ‘You think Peretti and you think the Seventies,’ says Rucci. ‘She’s in a black cashmere tube and she’s chain-smoking with the big glasses and the hands flying and she’s surrounded by these slinky men, you know, her entourage. And she’s in a room that’s all white, lacquered and totally modern with one perfect vase and one perfect calla lily. Total minimalism and totally magnificent.’

ENERGY FLASH Clockwise from above: Peretti photographed by Hiro for US Bazaar in 1970. Peretti (left) and Nati Abascal with Valentino in US Bazaar in 1972.

Peretti at Fire Island in about 1970. Sterling silver Open-heart pendant on Diamonds by the Yard chain, £930, designed by Elsa Peretti, exclusively for Tiffany & Co. Peretti at home in Sant Martí Vell, Spain, this year, with the platter she made for Halston. Grace Jones wearing a Peretti cuff in 1986

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Barcelona, Rome, Monte Carlo and Sant Martí Vell, the rural Spanish village she has been restoring for decades and where, despite a conflicting relationship with her own fame, she keeps a museum dedicated to her life’s work), the constant in Peretti’s life has been her exquisitely wrought creations for Tiffany. She produces one collection each year, reflecting her slowly evolving experiments not only with precious metals and gems, but with lacquer, bamboo, pearl and rock crystal, as well as one-off art pieces that few other than her inner circle and visitors to Sant Martí Vell will ever see.

Timelessness and intimacy, a lack of obvious ostentation and a passionate belief that jewellery should not impose itself upon the body (a loathing for painful adornments being a legacy of her modelling days) are all core Peretti-isms. ‘You see some people with beautiful earrings, but they have their lobes down to here,’ she says with a snort. ‘I’m a Taurus. We want to be comfortable. If you are comfortable, you are ahead of everything. I always felt very comfortable in everything Halston did.’ It is on this note, specifically discussing the ergonomic clip mechanism on the earrings Peretti is wearing today, that she decides that they must be mine. When I thank her for bestowing such treasures, she bridles at my use of language. ‘They are not treasures; they are very easy to wear.’ And indeed they are – the polished silver is luminous and flattering next to the face, and though they are ‘vintage Peretti’ (despite searching the Tiffany website, I cannot find their like), there’s something very strong, almost futuristic, about their swoopingly elongated teardrop shape.

T

he British Museum. The opening night of the Peretti exhibit. Hiro, the 79-year-old photographer, walks me through the display cases, drawing my attention to the gold mesh scarf Peretti designed in the 1970s and ‘knitted’ from thousands of tiny metal links. ‘It’s very sexy,’ says Hiro. ‘The way it moves, it’s like a live snake.’ Hiro, who first met Peretti in the 1960s when she modelled for US Bazaar, where he was the staff photographer, understands his friend’s duality. ‘She had her background. Elegance and an affluent lifestyle. But she is a rebel,’ he says, laughing. Hiro’s iconic advertising images for Tiffany play to Peretti’s fascination with the ambiguous side of nature, with their Magritte-esque surreal touches and latent sexual charge, and are produced with an exacting attention to detail rivalling Peretti’s own legendary perfectionism. For the famous image of the gold cuff on a bone, Hiro bought a cow bone from his butcher and boiled it for three days, stinking his studio out in the process, and only hit upon the idea of ladybirds adorning the composition at 5 o’clock on a Friday evening, sending his assistants – who eventually had to transport the insects cross-country from the agricultural department at Berkeley University – into overdrive. ‘When the bill went to Tiffany, Harry Platt said, “My God! Hugely extravagant.”’

The opening party is an elegant hum. Peretti surveys the scene in her tuxedo suit, a silver pin of her own design with a red silk flower on her lapel; her eyes are made up to look more magnificently cat-like than ever. It feels extraordinary to see her collection of sculptural modern design among the ancient artefacts in the museum, but also, given the talismanic nature of many of the pieces, absolutely fitting.

As we walk, Hiro recalls seeing ‘The Treasures of Tutankhamun’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the late 1970s: ‘I went to see it and thought of Elsa. It was visually different, but emotionally the same – very personal, kind of like for ever.’

Elsa Peretti’s jewellery and objets are on display at the British Museum (020 7323 8000; www.britishmuseum.org) until 16 October.

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STRIKE A POSE Donyale Luna, photographed in 1966 by William Claxton near Salvador Dalí’s Spanish home in Cadaqués. Opposite: Luna photographed at Montauk Point, Long Island, by Peter Beard in 1977

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CELESTIAL

BODY

Venerated by artists, directors and photographers; adored by rock stars and actors; and idolised by future generations of black models, Donyale Luna launched fashion photography into another orbit, transcendıng notions of beauty and race. Then, just as suddenly, her light flickered out.

Thirty years after her untimely death, DAVID VINCENT looks back at the flawed goddess who seemed to come from another planet

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Luna was venerated

by Miles Davis, Brian Jones and every fashion designer there was. She hung out with Halston, partied with Warhol and starred in Fellini films

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D

onyale Luna was born Peggy Anne Freeman on 31 August 1946 to Detroit working-class AfricanAmericans Nathaniel and Peggy Freeman. Right from the start, it was clear she was not destined for normality. At school, she called herself Donyale, and then insisted her real father was a man with the surname ‘Luna’.

‘There was a lot of abuse in her household,’ says Poe. ‘Her father was violent. She would go to her room and pull out her stuffed animals and play each character in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

She did that in painful moments in her life – replaced pain with www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

FLIGHTS OF FANTASY Clockwise from above: Luna shot as Icarus by her husband Luigi Cazzaniga for Playboy in 1975. Photographed by William Claxton in Cadaqués in 1966.

Her likeness sketched for the cover of US Harper’s Bazaar, January 1965. In William Klein’s ‘Qui Êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?’ (1966)

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markers in the civil-rights struggle. She has never been fully embraced, however, by either the black community or the fashion industry – one of the reasons she is, surprisingly, little known today.

Some in the African-American community bristled at her perceived rejection of her black heritage and ambivalence to the civil-rights movement. In 1966, she told a Detroit magazine: ‘I never think of colour. There are all sorts of ancestors in my family, Irish, Indian, Mexican. My husband was half-coloured. The boy I am engaged to now is blonde with blue eyes. The civil-rights movement has my greatest sympathy and support, but I don’t want to get involved racially.’ In an environment where solidarity was everything, putting self before black unity was tantamount to treachery.

Equally, the fashion world had grown tired of her drug-taking and unreliability. Beverly Johnson, the famous black model who followed in Luna’s footsteps, said of her: ‘She doesn’t wear shoes winter or summer. Ask her where she’s from – Mars. She went up and down the runways on her hands and knees. She didn’t show up for bookings. She didn’t have a hard time, she made it hard for herself.’

There is some truth in this criticism, but 30 years after her death, many commentators are beginning to realise the important contributions made by this flawed goddess.

‘There is no getting away from the fact she broke the barrier, made the breach for Naomi Sims, Beverly Johnson and the black models who followed,’ says Harold Koda of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and curator of its exhibition ‘The Model as Muse’, which features Luna. ‘Pat Cleveland wouldn’t have had as good a reception without Donyale Luna paving the way.’

‘She didn’t see things in colour,’ says Jennifer Poe, who is developing a script for a ‘fairy-tale’ documentary on Luna’s life. ‘She wanted to be a model and artist, not a black model and artist.’

In the 1960s, however, there was no escaping her ethnicity. ‘Ethnicity ceasing to matter was a luxury not available,’ says Koda. ‘Though in one important way, she did transcend it. She extended the vocabulary of posing. It was nothing to do with race and everything to do with her and her physicality.’

‘She wasn’t afraid of stepping out of the box and was very much a part of the creative process – something that you don’t often see nowadays,’ adds Campbell.

In Halston shows, Luna would slither down the runway like a snake, on her hands and knees. It broke all the standards of propriety.

‘She introduced this kind of theatrical presence that nobody else had,’ says Koda. ‘She was significant not just editorially but on the catwalk. Rather than just present herself as a clothes hanger, she treated modelling as performance art. That is her legacy.’

PHOTOGRAPHS: © WILLIAM CLAXTON LLC, COURTESY OF DEMONT PHOTO MANAGEMENT, LLC, REPRODUCED BY SPECIAL PERMISSION OF PLAYBOY MAGAZINE, PHOTOGRAPHED BY LUIGI CAZZANIGA © 1975 BY PLAYBOY, © WILLIAM KLEIN/COURTESY HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY

A ‘

girl of staggering beauty and magnetism.’ ‘The reincarnation of Nefertiti.’

‘A snake with legs; a Masai; the pathfinder for black models.’ That is Richard Avedon, Salvador Dalí and David Bailey, respectively, describing Donyale Luna, the first internationally renowned African-American fashion model.

Her phenomenally long legs, elongated arms, angular facial features, enormous brown eyes and feline grace entranced all who fell under her gaze, including the editors of Harper’s Bazaar. In January 1965, Bazaar put the then-unknown 18-year-old on the cover – mainstream fashion’s first black cover girl – and overnight, Luna’s career was delivered into the same celestial orbit as her namesake. For the rest of the decade, she was the hottest model in the world, breaking racial barriers with a theatrical contortion of her 5’ 10” willowy frame or a signature hand-framing-eye gesture – with an intensity that became known as the Look.

As one commentator put it, using the then politically correct vernacular of the 1960s: ‘The beautiful thing about Donyale is that she is a Negress… the completely New Image of the Negro woman.

Fashion finds itself in an instrumental position for changing history however slightly, for it is about to bring out into the open the veneration, the adoration, the idolisation of the Negro…’

Luna was accordingly venerated by Miles Davis, Brian Jones, Klaus Kinski and every fashion editor and designer there was. She hung out with Halston, partied with Andy Warhol at the Factory, and starred in films directed by him, Federico Fellini and Otto Preminger. Avedon put her on a one-year exclusive contract; Bailey shot her six times in 12 months; and Paco Rabanne thought her looks the ideal vehicle for his otherworldly designs. Dalí sequestered her in his Spanish hideaway in Cadaqués, where William Claxton photographed the artist scribbling on Luna’s body.

Later, she participated in the Surrealist film Salvador Dali: A Soft Self-Portrait. During this time, her loves were numerous and fleeting.

She captivated as much with her sweet nature, wit and innocence as her looks. ‘She was a fantastic woman,’ says Sixties icon Anita Pallenberg, who became friends with Luna when the model dated her ex, Brian Jones – Pallenberg had moved on to fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards two years earlier. ‘She wore blonde wigs, [and] green, blue and gold contact lenses. She was such a great personality. It never went to her head – she was too stoned to realise what was going on. She lived in a fantasy land, thought she came from the Moon. It was appealing. It was the Sixties. Everybody was chasing after her, wanted to date her, photograph her.’ ‘She was untouchable,’ says Naomi Campbell. ‘She was a beautiful, magical and mystical figure. No one will ever be like her again.’

‘I started at the top,’ said Luna in 1966, anticipating the law of nature. And as she predicted, as quickly as she had blasted beyond our stratosphere, she was gone and forgotten: dead from an accidental heroin overdose at the age of 32. Ironically, one of her last shoots had her posing over the Los Angeles skyline as that other tragic space traveller who wouldn’t settle for a lower orbit: Icarus.

She left behind a catalogue of iconic images that pushed the boundaries of fashion photography and became important cultural

walking backwards on all fours wearing a tiger-stripe billowing chiffon sheath by James Galanos. ‘Photographing me was a whole other thing,’ said Luna. ‘I think the reason I was so successful was that I was a free person. “Be an animal,” a photographer would say, and an animal came out. “Play a tiger… Be a snake…”, and I was.’

The Avedon-Luna working relationship continued, but he was forced to use her less and less, and then stopped altogether. ‘For reasons of racial prejudice and the economics of the fashion business,’ said Avedon in 1975, ‘I was never permitted to photograph her for publication again.’ Luna could no longer ignore her ethnicity, and the racial bigotry still rife in America – despite conjuring up a fanciful Irish-Mexican lineage. ‘They said beautiful things on one side and turned around and stabbed you in the back,’ she said.

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er love life had also taken a turn for the worse.

Shortly after arriving in New York, she married a young actor and divorced him 10 months later, banning his name from being mentioned. She fled New York and the strictures of the ‘black model’ label, and headed for London, where she was received with open arms. Charles Sanders wrote in African-American weekly Jet: ‘American fashion photographers missed the boat (and we all know why) when they ignored the talents of Detroit’s Donyale Luna. Maybe it was best that they did, since Donyale’s now living in London and is probably the most photographed girl of 1966.’

Immediately, she was in David Bailey’s studio, and on the cover of British Vogue in March 1966. ‘He’s fantastic,’ said Luna of Bailey. ‘I could almost rape him when he photographs me, and I tell him so while we work.’ That March cover has Luna, in a Chloé dress and Mimi di N earrings, staring out of the page through her fingers, which form a V. It was a cheeky retort to Avedon’s blinking eye, though some thought that the hand was placed in front of Luna’s face to conceal the fact that the cover girl was black. This is patently not true when looking at the themes in the rest of the magazine and the issue title, ‘Eye on the International Collections’. ‘I didn’t cover her face because she was black, but for the pose,’ says Bailey. ‘At the time, I was inspired by Picasso and the way he used the power of the isolated eye. I did not use her because of her colour, but because she was beautiful. She was right for that cover.’ The staring eye, framed by a hand, soon became one of Luna’s signature poses.

In the spring, Paris Match ran a massive nine-page mise-en-scene on Luna. Eleven different photographers had her floating underwater, in the midst of a rugby game, or hovering in a helicopter framed between two 18th-century portraits. Her blackness was there for all to see but was not thematically alluded to either in words or pictures. ‘The cover girl from America was allowed to fully represent la mode nouvelle in all of its stylish and unconfined varieties,’ wrote Richard J Powell in Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture.

The ‘unwearable’ dresses of Paco Rabanne also appeared that year, each made from hundreds of plastic discs. Luna, with her neverending limbs and alien aura, was perfect for these futuristic fashions.

In Europe, Luna continued with her complex love life. She was engaged to Austrian actor Maximilian Schell, a Danish photographer, and German actor Georg Willing. She lived with Klaus Kinski until he threw her out because of her excessive drug habit, and canoodled around London with Stones guitarist Jones.

In Halston shows, Luna would slither down the runway like a snake, on her hands and knees.

It broke all the standards of propriety

T

he Bazaar cover saw Luna’s career firmly in the ascendancy, but it also marked a tragic personal event.

Luna’s mother shot and killed her father in selfdefence not long after the magazine hit newsstands.

Luna did what she had learned to do from a young age: escape into another world. This time, she immersed herself in the social whirl of New York. She hung out with Sammy Davis Jnr and James Earl Jones, and dated Miles Davis. ‘Miles just thought she was incredible,’ says McCabe. ‘But that was the time she started to do things she shouldn’t have. It was all very free-spirited. Everyone was doing stuff, LSD and more harmful things…’

Luna was also hanging out with Warhol at the Factory. In the spring of 1965, she participated in his Screen Tests, a series of silent portraits. In 1966, she starred as Snow White in A Mod Snow White, a 33-minute colour film that Luna collaborated on with Warhol.

She’d been perfecting that role since childhood.

Of her arrival in New York, she said: ‘For the first time, people said, “Oh wow, she’s beautiful’” instead of “Oh wow, she’s a freak.”’

Avedon had signed her to a one-year exclusive contract, and plastered her all over the April 1965 issue of Bazaar. The issue was guest-edited by the photographer and is considered to be the US fashion scene’s official kick-off of the Swinging Sixties. Luna jumped off the pages of three fashion spreads. In one famous image, she is 176 |

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fantasy.’ She invented a multiracial ancestry, saying her mother was Mexican and that one of her grandmothers was Irish. She was ‘a very weird child, even from birth, living in a wonderland, a dream’, says her sister Josephine Armstrong.

Luna herself was aware she was different: ‘No one at home was as tall as I was. I wasn’t accepted because I talked funny, I looked funny and I was a weirdo to everyone. I grew up realising I was something strange, and I was either a genius or crazy. All I knew was that when I left school at 17, I wanted to be a starving actress.

Why starving? Because I was always dramatic, even then.’

After school, Luna would head to auditions at Detroit’s community theatres. It was during one of these trips that she was spotted

by British photographer David McCabe. ‘Donyale walked past in her Catholic-school uniform, plaid skirt and with an armful of books,’ says McCabe. ‘I was stunned. She was so tall and so slender, and had the most incredible bone structure.’

McCabe gave her his card and told her if she ever came to New York and wanted to pursue a career as a model, to give him a call.

Within the year she was there, and McCabe was introducing her to Avedon, Warhol, Fellini and the modelling agencies. He shot her with Woody Allen for Mademoiselle magazine.

Soon she was taken to the Harper’s Bazaar office and shown to editor-in-chief Nancy White and art directors Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel. Their response?

‘Look at this extraordinary apparition.’ There and then, White stopped production of the January 1965 issue and had Katharina Denzinger sketch Luna for a new cover. In all, there were seven colour drawings of her in that month’s magazine. On the cover, she wore a green David Crystal tunic dress, a white Adolfo straw pith helmet and white gloves. She sat in a rattan chair. Her complexion, turned 10 shades lighter, makes it hard to recognize her as AfricanAmerican; whether this was editorial or artistic licence has been much debated.

Luna’s affection for modelling gradually dwindled. In one interview, she cavalierly likened it to prostitution. Her opinions were designed to shock. ‘I do not call myself a model. I just earn my living modelling. I don’t get on well with most women. Women are scared of me and think I am grotesque. What I am is just me. I want to be my own woman. I’m an artist. I do modelling and acting as part of my artistry; instead of a paintbrush and canvas, I use film.’

She appeared in mainstream and low-budget productions over the next decade. William Klein’s Qui Êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? begins with a parody of a catwalk show, with Luna wearing unwearable sheet-metal clothes and displaying her runway theatrics. In 1968, she starred in Preminger’s comedy Skidoo, playing the over-sexed mistress of crime boss God (Groucho Marx). Perhaps her most memorable role was in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969), in which she plays the witch Oenothea, whose cruel rejection of a powerful magician sees her cursed to live with fire between her legs. In 1972, now settled in Rome, she took the title role in Carmelo Bene’s film of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, naked, and with a shaved head.

While in Rome, she met and married photographer Luigi Cazzaniga, and in 1977 they had a daughter, Dream, who became a dancer and now works on ecology projects. Sadly, despite becoming a mother, drugs began to play an evergreater part in Luna’s life. In the late 1960s, she expressed her love of LSD: ‘I think it’s great.

I learned that I like to live, I like to make love… It also showed me unhappy things – that I was stubborn, stupid, selfish, unreasonable, mean, that I hurt other people.’

She was also using heroin, and became a fully fledged member of Rome’s hardcore drug scene. By the summer of 1979 she was dead, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter and a distraught husband.

‘She was unbelievable, a very particular person,’ says Cazzaniga.

‘She always wanted to do better, be more knowledgeable. Everybody thought she was doing these incredibly heavy drugs like heroin, but actually by then she was only smoking joints and drinking wine. So when somebody gave her a shot of heroin, she died. She didn’t have the tolerance for what a junkie would think a normal shot.

‘She had a higher relationship with reality and with the world. She had a connection with the gods – she would always look up to the sky and talk to them. She was a kind of magic. I miss her very much.’

In the end, her personal life overwhelmed her professional life.

She didn’t want to be a standard-bearer, but she broke barriers and brought a new vocabulary to the refined comportment of the catwalk. She’d hip-pop her way down, stop for no reason, make eye contact with the audience, crawl, walk backwards, robotdance… ‘She made it about how you show the dress,’ says Koda.

‘About body language and a kind of empathetic reaction to what you are wearing; projecting, appealing to the consumer or the reader.’

In 1973, when American designers Donna Karan (for Anne Klein), Stephen Burrows, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta and Halston showed at the Palace of Versailles to raise money for the Versailles Restoration Fund, Givenchy wasn’t looking at the clothes – though they made the French couture look like a stodgy meal – he was looking at the black models. They were so relaxed and free in their physicality and the way they animated the clothing. Donyale Luna taught them that. She acted out on the runway. In fact, she acted out all her life. She didn’t know any other way.

‘He’s fantastic,’ Luna said of David Bailey.

‘I could almost rape him when he photographs me, and I tell him so while we work’

ROCK ’N’ ROLES From top: with Dalí after a ‘performance’, photographed by William Claxton in 1966. With Brian Jones in 1968.

Starring in Fellini’s ‘Satyricon’ (1969).

In ‘Screen Test: Donyale Luna, 1965’

by Andy Warhol

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ENTENTE CORDIALE Stella Tennant, photographed by Markn.

Wool and satin jacket; matching dress; satin bow-tie, all Chanel Haute Couture A/W 10.

Opposite: Coco Chanel photographed by Cecil Beaton in London in about 1938

A VERY

BRITISH AFFAIR

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Photographs by MARKN and TRENT McGINN. Styled by NATALIE RIDDLE

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On the eve of a new biography of Coco Chanel, NAOMI WEST examines how the designer’s iconic creations were influenced by the classic sartorial refinement of her English lovers. And Chanel’s creative director Karl Lagerfeld tells CLARE COULSON how this connection continues today, through his own very modern British muses

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Lagerfeld’s GIRLS

During his 27 years at Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld’s style has been informed by the the quirky individuality of the quintessential British girl. Here, he tells CLARE COULSON how his modern muses keep him inspired

I

t was a chilly scene as Karl Lagerfeld presented his faux-fur-themed A/W Chanel collection against the vast iceberg backdrop in the light-filled Grand Palais in Paris.

Models sloshed through water and ice, wearing shaggy fur-embellished bouclé tweed jackets and coats, and elaborate chunky knits. Then out came a willowy girl with a messy bouffant, sporting a sleek, faux-mink tailcoat with a crisp white blouse, a satin ribbon rosette at the collar, and winter white riding breeches.

It was, for anyone familiar with the court of Karl, a look straight out of the wardrobe

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of Amanda Harlech, his thoroughly English right-hand woman.

This injection of Britishness has become a recurring theme in Chanel collections since Lagerfeld took up the helm of the French house almost three decades ago. Harlech’s panache, rooted in her English heritage, has become a key note of inspiration to the designer’s work. But along with his arch-muse, a coterie of highly individual British women have stirred Lagerfeld’s creative passions – from stylist Charlotte Stockdale, models Stella Tennant and Jacquetta Wheeler to personalities Alexa October 2010 |

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THIS PAGE: PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF KARL LAGERFELD, GETTY IMAGES. OPPOSITE: PORTRAIT: TRENT McGINN. HAIR BY PAUL MERRITT AT JED ROOT. MAKE-UP BY CHERYL COREA AT MANDY COAKLEY. PREVIOUS PAGES: PORTRAIT BY MARKN. HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY CHERYL COREA AT MANDY COAKLEY. PHOTOGRAPH: CECIL BEATON/CORBIS

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ENGLISH COUNTRY GARDEN Alexa Chung, photographed

by Trent McGinn.

Organza and sequin jacket; matching culottes; leather and faux-pearl platforms, all Chanel Haute Couture S/S 10

befriended Winston Churchill. But her affair with British fabrics hen Coco Chanel was in her and tastes endured, its influence lasting even after her death in 1971. sixties, casting her mind back The tweed, the knitwear, the pearls; all these helped to build the over her life for the benefit identity of the fashion house and remain Chanel icons to this day. of potential memoirist Paul Chanel met Boy Capel – who she would later describe as ‘the Morand, she singled out one only man I have loved’ – in 1908. By this point, she had already summer night as the starting distanced herself from her impoverished origins (after her mother’s point of her ascendancy. Around death she was abandoned by her father and left to grow up in an 1909, a nervous Chanel – in her orphanage). As a young adult, she had made her living singing in mid-twenties – had been taken to dine at the Casino in Deauville Paris’ music halls; it was here that she met wealthy soldier and by her lover, wealthy English industrialist Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel. It horseman Etienne Balsan, later moving to his estate, Royallieu, was a gala evening, and among the corseted denizens of English as his mistress. Boy Capel was and French society, festooned an atypical addition to Balsan’s with blooms, feathers and crowd: he worked for a living and fine jewels, Gabrielle Chanel had built up a significant wealth, cut an arresting figure. Clad partly through substantial interin a ‘wonderfully simple white ests in Newcastle coal. Chanel dress’ of her own devising, was captivated by ‘his nonher spare, boyish frame would chalance and his green eyes’, have looked as graphic and she said, but also by how he unfussy as one of her long perceived her. He encouraged cigarettes. Chanel sensed, her ambitions to broaden her with pleasure, the curiosity horizons beyond Royallieu, and and admiration of the to set herself up as a milliner. high-born English women.

Whereas Balsan had little inten‘My success dates from that tion of showing Chanel off in evening,’ she said decades society and kept her tucked later. ‘To begin with, it was an away as his irrégulière, Capel was English success.’ For Chanel, happy to have this engaging and gaining the approval of ATLANTIC RECORD unusual creature (often wearing Capel’s English social circle Coco Chanel and her lover Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel on the beach in Saint Jean de Luz in 1917 a plain shirtwaister and an was a pivotal moment. unadorned boater) on his arm.

The house of Chanel has Capel’s aristocratic English friends summering on the Riviera long been regarded as the quintessence of Gallic chic, but its iconic offered Chanel social acceptance on a level that the French would output owes much to Chanel’s enthusiastic embrace of British style. not. Her friend and biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux concludes Chanel was a passionate anglophile whose life was strikingly bound that the strength of her affection for England stemmed directly up with this country. She had long affairs with prominent Britons from these experiences: ‘The first houses whose thresholds they – first Capel; later the Duke of Westminster, through whom she

in setting up a business in Paris – she opened her premises at 21 Rue crossed together were English… The vehement sympathy she disCambon in 1910, the plate by the door reading ‘Chanel Modes’. played throughout her life for all things British, her conviction of Three years later, Capel put up the money for Chanel to open a shop England’s superiority in every respect, had no other cause or origin.’ in Deauville, where her design ideas took flight. In the summer of But Chanel was not inspired by the richly dressed English ladies 1914, she ordered bolts of flannel and jersey, fabrics ‘characteristic she met in her lover’s company – it was Capel and his wardrobe that of the British locker room’, as Charles-Roux puts it, to produce her made an impression. For Chanel was the true originator of the ‘boyfirst original designs, blouses friend look’. She coveted Capel’s that skimmed over breasts and sweaters and blazers, the knitted hips. These garments could not jerseys he would wear for polo. have contrasted more with the In director Anne Fontaine’s colourful, highly decorative 2009 film Coco Before Chanel, output of reigning couturier which depicts their tender Paul Poiret, who accused Chanel affair, one scene shows Chanel of peddling ‘poverty deluxe’. (played by Audrey Tautou) US Harper’s Bazaar took note converting his blue polo jersey – a sketch of ‘Chanel’s charminto a chemise for herself. ‘Can’t ing chemise dress’ was featured you leave this one alone?’ Capel in the magazine in 1916, its complains, affectionately. ‘I can masculine cut featuring lapels, only get them in England.’ slim, straight sleeves, and a sash Even before she and Capel tied loosely around the hips. were intimate, Chanel had While Chanel’s career was in shown a penchant for English the ascendant, in December menswear. While learning to 1919, having survived his servride with Etienne Balsan she ice, Capel was tragically killed had borrowed a pair of English driving to Cannes from Paris. jodhpurs and asked the tailor at It was a terrible blow to Chanel.

Lacroix-Saint-Ouen to copy ‘To me, he was my brother, my them for her.

DAY AT THE RACES Hugh ‘Bendor’ Grosvenor, Second Duke of Westminster, father, my whole family. We ‘She got her sense of elegance at Chester races with Coco Chanel on 1 May 1924 were made for each other.’ from men,’ the late US Vogue Through her years with editor and publisher Alexander Capel, her business and her sure-footed, simple aesthetic were Liberman once observed. When she created Chanel No 5, in 1921, set on track. Cecil Beaton, writing in his diary shortly after her the flask was inspired by the bottles in a man’s travelling kit. death aged 87, compared her to a legendary English dandy.

During their time together, Capel was not faithful to Chanel, and ‘She was a female Brummell. Just as the Beau got rid of frills and he went on to marry a wealthy Englishwoman, Diana Wyndham, furbelows overnight, so too Chanel proved that nothing was in 1918. But he never gave her up, remaining to her a powerful more chic than fine linen, navy blue serge and lots of soap.’ combination of lover, patron, business advisor and continuing This sensibility was cemented during her love affair with the source of inspiration. He and Balsan had both helped her financially

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terms of style, what Amanda and Stella and the others are now. The “conventions” have changed but the style survived.’

‘I think what joins all “us girls”,’ says Harlech, referring to the muses gathered in the British countryside in this porfolio, ‘is that we are free from prissiness or fussiness or pretension. English girls go out in all weather. In Karl’s collections, there are always coats and macs and gloves, amazing Aran knits and Shetland wools.

Coco Chanel had that same sense of practicality. A Parisian girl would never think to throw a sweater over a long bias-cut lace dress, but a British girl would.’

It’s unsurprising that Lagerfeld has found his modern-day Coco in Harlech. She admits that there’s an ‘odd synchronicity’ between her own life – split between the Ritz in Paris and riding daily in the www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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unexpected in their attitude and in their way of living,’ the designer says. ‘They can be like Stella – now a country girl – and they stay the chicest thing in the world… [It’s] not so easy to do that.

Their eccentricity and their irreverence are full of invention.’

Lagerfeld’s band of Brit girls plays with the same points of reference in their style that Coco Chanel drew on during her ‘English period’. Just as she fell in love with the tweeds, heritage knits, pearls and sporty attire of the British countryside, women like Stella Tennant or Amanda Harlech continue that theme with their truly modern takes on tradition – but always with a twist. To Lagerfeld they hold their own place in a long line of British style icons: ‘Lady Londonderry and Lady Mountbatten in the 1920s were, in

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Chung and Lily Allen – their idiosyncratic style and interpretation of his creations contributing to his groundbreaking vision at Chanel.

‘They are the girls of our times – but they are no stereotypes,’ asserts Lagerfeld of his modern British muses. ‘They are all totally different in looks and styles. That is what I love. I never think for one second that they could be from another place than England.’

Lagerfeld’s band of inspirational women may seem wildly varied at first glance, but beyond their distinctive style, there is a synergy, as well as an insouciance that Coco Chanel infused in her label almost a century ago.

That sense of innovation and wit is also what draws together Lagerfeld’s muses.

‘They always have a touch of the

FIELD OF DREAMS Amanda Harlech, photographed by Trent McGinn. Zibeline dress with metal belt, Chanel Haute Couture A/W 10. Suede heels; tights, both Amanda’s own

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‘British girls always have a touch of the unexpected in their attitude and in their way of living. Their eccentricity and their irreverence are full of invention’

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KARL LAGERFELD

SCARLET MISS CHARLOTTE Charlotte Stockdale, photographed by Markn. Tweed coat, matching top and dress, all Chanel Haute Couture A/W 10 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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Duke of Westminster, Hugh Arthur Richard Grosvenor, known While in Westminster’s company, Chanel relished the life of from childhood as ‘Bendor’ after one of his grandfather’s Derby constantly moving from property to property – she spent the latter winners. By the time she met Westminster, Chanel was in her half of the decade between Britain and France – and flung herself Forties and one of the best connected women in Paris, collaborating into outdoor pursuits, hunting and fly-fishing, and proving no slouch and mixing with leading creatives including Cocteau, Diaghilev (‘Coco got three fish yesterday,’ Churchill recorded in a 1928 diary and Stravinsky (with whom she had an affair) and, on occasions, entry). She was not only drawn to Westminster ’s aristocratic wardfinancing their work. Her robe – the tweeds, the sweaters, business was thriving – she the sportswear – but also to the called work ‘my drug’; her functional garb of his teams of modern, unrestrictive designs staff: the striped waistcoats of the proved the perfect wardrobe footmen at his many properties, for the Jazz Age. In 1919 she the peacoats with gilt buttons moved to 31 Rue Cambon, worn by the 40-strong crew of his which remains the headQueen Anne-furnished schooner quarters of Chanel to this day.

Flying Cloud, and the 180 who Chanel and Westminster crewed the 883-ton Cutty Sark. were introduced at the Hotel She grew to delight in the antique de Paris in Monte Carlo in decor of his properties. ‘A knight 1925, and he wooed her in armour stuck into the corner of lavishly, sending packages a staircase, that does look a bit from England: flowers from overdone – unless it has always his orchid rooms, salmon and been there,’ she said. ‘Then you exotic fruits from his estates, see it as something that grew out once a box of vegetables of the earth, proud and straight.’ with an enormous emerald Lore has it that he expressed his hidden at the bottom. She devotion by including Chanel’s LEADER OF THE PACK continued to resist this luscinterlocking Cs (which she regisCoco Chanel hunting with Winston Churchill and his son ious onslaught for some time; tered as her trademark in 1925) Randolph in forests near Dieppe when she eventually conon his crest on lampposts in the sented to join him on his yacht at Monte Carlo he had taken an borough of Westminster. She made her own mark on Westminster’s entire orchestra onboard to serenade her. surroundings, redecorating Rosehall with beige wallpaper in the Despite being wealthier than the royal family, this ‘big hunk of state rooms and hand-painted flowers in her bedroom. a man’ possessed a style that was a curious mix of fastidious and She valued his love of his natural environment, his joy in its unconcerned; his valet would iron his shoelaces daily, even as the detail. ‘What gave him the greatest pleasure was to bring me soles were wearing into holes. Chanel said of him: ‘Westminster the first snowdrop, picked from the lawn, in a box.’ In turn she is elegance itself – he never has anything new… he’s been wearing was seduced by the beauty of the well-maintained gardens at the same jackets for 25 years.’ Later, the bouclé tweed suits she Eaton Hall. ‘The French don’t have a sense of blocks of colour,’ she created would have comparable longevity in women’s wardrobes. said. ‘What makes a herbaceous border beautiful in an English

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bleak landscape that surrounds her Shropshire farm – and the times that Coco Chanel travelled from Paris to gallop across the same land when she stayed at Eaton Hall. ‘There is nobody like Amanda,’ coos Lagerfeld of his co-conspirator, who jumped ship from Dior and John Galliano more than 12 years ago to join Lagerfeld.

‘British girls have class – perhaps from another time – but they are never “classic”,’ he says. ‘They have a spontaneous, natural elegance in the way they move, the way they dress and the way they talk.’

It helps of course that these women also share the same androgynous figure celebrated by Coco Chanel. Their linear frames are the perfect base for Chanel’s boxy, unforgiving shapes. ‘All us girls are quite boyish,’ says Harlech. ‘Look at Coco, look at her body and then look at www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

Stella and that’s it – that’s what Karl loves.’

A case in point – Tennant’s very first Chanel campaign in 1997 in which she wore an updated version of the floppy white beach hats and high-waisted linen pants Coco herself had worn more than 70 years before.

The same could be said of the boyish shape of Jacquetta Wheeler, who was first booked early in her career in 2000 to walk in a Chanel couture show. It was, she says, a seminal moment, ‘a big milestone’ in every model’s career. ‘The Chanel clan, the Chanel world, is a pretty impressive one,’ says Wheeler. ‘Everyone is chic, everyone is beautiful, it’s all heightened.

The girls are always immaculate.’

Central to Lagerfeld’s vision at Chanel is also a heady dose of rebellion, a continuing revival of the audacious spirit

of Mademoiselle, who founded a fashion house in 1910 based on her own revolutionary look. And it’s that sense of daring that attracts Lagerfeld to girls like Alexa Chung, whom he describes as being thoroughly ‘modern’, juggling a career that straddles music, television, fashion and culture, seamlessly blending high and low.

‘The girls are all cultivated and have all the cultural references needed for inspiration, but the great thing is that they represent it in the best and most inspiring way,’ Lagerfeld says. ‘They are the living identity of a unique kind of woman with style and attitude. They are also fun.’

It is this joie de vivre and sense of wit that perhaps defines his muses most accurately. Lily Allen’s first encounter with Lagerfeld happened as she stumbled, post-party, around the Rue Cambon October 2010 |

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RHAPSODY IN BLUES Jacquetta Wheeler, photographed by Trent McGinn.

Organza and sequin beaded dress, matching top and boots, all Chanel Haute Couture A/W 10

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I think Coco Chanel was about the same thing. He’s inspired by ways of wearing, and then taking things that he’s seen and reworking them in new ways.’

And of course, Karl’s girls wear it so well because Chanel is also part of their fashion heritage, a label that has become synonymous with timeless style for generations of British women. For Tennant, the label’s longevity is key: ‘Chanel is the embodiment of chic,’ says the model. ‘It has a classiness that goes way beyond fashion’s fickle seasons.’

Stylist and brand ambassador Charlotte Stockdale remembers coveting her mother’s quilted Chanel pumps, and Poppy Delevigne reminisces about her grandmother’s collection of tweed jackets and immaculate handbags. The model was given her own when she was 18. ‘It

was the classic quilted handbag in navy blue, really iconic,’ she remembers. ‘I didn’t take it out of its canvas bag and its beautiful box for two years. I’d take it out, look at it, and then put it back.

Eventually I felt more secure in wearing it. Now it’s battered and bruised and looks all the better for it.’

It’s this lack of preciousness – the result of an attitude that is quintessentially British – that keeps the label, and Lagerfeld’s vision, fresh. (‘[They] are all about now! All of them!’ he says.) Coco Chanel liberated women with practical, streamlined and thoroughly modern clothes that were witty, fun and sometimes rebellious, and Lagerfeld continues that tradition almost a century later by keeping a little bit of England at the heart of the most Parisian of labels, in a way that is ‘very Chanel’. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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headquarters searching for the loo: ‘I went into a room marked Mademoiselle Privé – and there was Karl, working inside the studio. I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry”, but he said “Hello”, and told me he liked the title of my record [It’s Not Me, It’s You]; it had made him laugh.’ A week later, Allen was asked to star in a Chanel advertising campaign. And it’s no coincidence that, months later, when Allen took to the stage to perform at Chanel’s pastoral S/S 10 show, the flirty, full miniskirts that most models wore mirrored the fun, feminine and youthful pieces of the singer’s signature look.

Harlech agrees that Lagerfeld’s muses show him how clothes are really being worn by spirited women in today’s world: ‘Karl loves the reality of what he does, creating clothes that have a life, and

POPPY APPEAL Poppy Delevigne, photographed by Trent McGinn. Silk tulle and sequin dress; matching top; leather and sequin boots; jewelled cuff, all Chanel Haute Couture A/W 10

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broker an Anglo-German peace. When France was eventually libgarden is the massed array; a begonia, a marguerite, a larkspur…’ erated, Chanel was arrested by the Resistance, but released within From 1926 to 1931, Chanel’s style became increasingly British, hours – a turn of events ascribed to an intervention from Churchill dominated by broad-stripe blouses, masculine-cut blazers and sports in London, at the behest of the Duke of Westminster. Through her coats. ‘I brought in tweeds from Scotland; homespuns ousted crepes British connections, Chanel was spared the punishment meted out and muslins. I arranged for woollens to be washed less, so that they to other Frenchwomen accused of collaboration horizontale; after the kept their softness; in France we wash too much.’ She came to enjoy war, she moved to Switzerland where she would remain for almost the English habit of living in jumpers, but would accessorise them a decade until the launch of her comeback collection. with long pearls, jewellery that women would normally reserve to wear with evening gowns – However, back in England, an initially startling look that Chanel’s revolutionary aesthetic became a widespread fashion. had already taken hold, radiChanel and Westminster cally influencing the wardrobes never married, and she later of British women. In 1929, insisted that she had turned him British Bazaar launched; its down. He may have had plans pages were filled with Chanel’s to marry her, but his priority groundbreaking designs. In was to produce an heir. Chanel, 1932, the French house was then in her forties, tried to recommended for ‘sport and improve her chances of having country’ chic, while Lady children, conducting spuriousPamela Smith, London’s most sounding exercises on the celebrated debutante, modelled advice of a doctor. But she and a bonbon-pink gown, fashioned Westminster were unable to from British lace by Chanel conceive together and he went (her label of choice). Socialite on to marry another.

Maxime Birley, mother to Yves Her British connections not Saint Laurent’s muse Loulou de only had a lasting influence on la Falaise, later appeared in a her designs; years later, they ELEGANCE IN BLACK AND WHITE white and black design and a arguably saved her life, or certLady Pamela Smith (standing) with Coco Chanel at Chanel’s short black bob, her silhouette ainly spared her considerable fashion salon in London, 1932 reminiscent of a British Coco. suffering. With the onset of the These aristocratic pioneers were the first in a long line of British German occupation in 1940, Chanel had closed her fashion house women – Lady Diana Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Shrimpton, and spent the war living in the Ritz, involved with an EnglishDaphne Guinness – who came to adore the house, regarding it as speaking Nazi intelligence officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, the epitome of both modern and timeless elegance. aka Spatz (‘the sparrow’), 13 years her junior. Through von Dincklage, she became mixed up in an ill-conceived German operTo learn more about Chanel’s British years, read ‘Coco Chanel: The Legend ation codenamed ‘Modellhut’ (Operation Hat) – she naively believed and the Life’ by Justine Picardie (£25, Harper Collins), out on 16 September; she could use her acquaintance with Churchill to convince him to to read a Q&A with Justine, visit harpersbazaar.co.uk from 13 September.

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When Damien Hirst opened his restaurant Pharmacy in 1998, its potent cocktail of drugs, rock ’n’ roll and money epitomised not only the spirit of the age but the kind of in-your-face attitude with which the enfant terrible was ripping up the art world. But while the restaurant’s fortunes – and the partnerships it was founded on – burned brightly and flamed out, Hirst himself emerged with all guns blazing: newly sober, seriously wealthy and outrageously famous. As the artist prepares to open two new London exhibitions, CAROLINE ROUX looks back at the extraordinary alchemy that turned notoriety into success

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PILLS AND THRILLS Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy restaurant, in Notting Hill Gate. Opposite: Hirst with Kate Moss in 1997

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MEDICINE MAN

ew Year’s Eve 1997 began – for a carefully selected few – at a restaurant in London’s Notting Hill Gate that within two months would be the talk of the town. Owned by the inimitable PR guru Matthew Freud – who had been busy promoting 72 openings of Planet Hollywood from Valencia to Vancouver throughout the 1990s – and events master Jonathan ( Jan) Kennedy, Pharmacy, as it was called, had something very special going for it: an extraordinary bespoke interior by artist-of-the-moment Damien Hirst. ‘The restaurant hadn’t even opened, so we invited about 50 people to see in the new year,’ recalls Kennedy, who had organised Trainspotting’s 1996 premiere in Cannes, where the film went on to pick up every award going.

‘That New Year’s Eve dinner really was friends and family. A few Freuds, Richard Curtis, Ewan McGregor, Stephen Fry… Even Damien wasn’t there – he was at home in Devon.’

But Pharmacy’s launch party a few weeks later was an altogether more explosive affair. By then, Hirst was the most notorious and celebrated artist in London and the Pied Piper of the Young British Artists (YBAs) – among them Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas – who had emerged, mostly from Goldsmiths College, as an influential, iconoclastic new group of conceptual artists. Hirst suspended animals in tanks of formaldehyde, drank and snorted his way through the day with a coterie of celebrities – Alex James from Britpop superstars Blur and actor Keith Allen, as well as a thirsty band of adoring acolytes – and was well on his way to making a fortune.

‘We tried to contain the thing, but it just went out of our control,’ says Kennedy. A dinner for 70 turned into a total roadblock that staggered on well into the early hours. The YBAs and the court of King Damien intermingled with the likes of Mariella Frostrup and Malcolm McLaren; fashion types crowded in with film folk on their heels. Within days, Rod Stewart, John Malkovich, Steve Rubell and David Bowie had all been in. Kate Moss missed the opening, but popped along as soon as she got back to town. Jude Law and Sadie Frost swung by. Pharmacy hadn’t just arrived; it had eclipsed any other new restaurant in London in terms of sheer insanity and glamour. ‘It was,’ says Freud, ‘the ultimate shooting star.’

The food reviews were mixed; the basement only served a variety of things on toast. But you could order an excellent Formalin martini (courtesy of mixologist Dick Bradsell), and the interior was simply sensational. Hirst, given free reign and an unlimited budget, had delivered an absolute masterpiece. A vast sculpture of his own DNA occupied the centre of the space, there were 13 ‘Butterfly’ paintings integrated into the design, the ashtrays were like pill boxes (most of them ended up in customers’ handbags) and the urinals were made in glass speckled with medical waste like syringes and suppositories. ‘For all his bonkers hedonism,’ says art critic Louisa Buck, ‘it was beautifully thought through.’

The waitresses glided by in lab coats designed by Prada, and Hirst commissioned hot young London designer Jasper Morrison to create the bar stools, with neat little pill-shape seats. ‘Damien’s attitude to interior design was not the usual one,’ says Morrison. ‘It

was a much bolder vision of what you could do to a space. Hirst was concerned with every detail – even the tablecloths – and whatever anyone said about the food, the interior was pretty impressive.’

But for a restaurant that was taking £120,000 a week, it wasn’t making a profit. ‘Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly being run by people obsessed with inventory management,’ says Freud. Sometimes food took so long to arrive from the kitchen, Hirst would treat his guests to pizzas from the Pizza Express over the road. Though the London art scene was by then firmly embedded in the east, Hirst still managed to lure people west for a rollicking good time.

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he unruly working-class boy from Leeds had come to prominence when he curated an exhibition in 1988 called ‘Freeze’, featuring a careful selection of his own work and that of his fellow art students from Goldsmiths. In 1995 he won the Turner Prize with Mother and Child, Divided, an installation of a cow and calf cut in half and immersed in formaldehyde. The media attention around the exhibition was unparalleled, and attendance figures went through the roof.

Art impresario Charles Saatchi had snatched up his work along with that of fellow YBAs. He herded it all together and showed it amid great hype at London’s Royal Academy in 1997 under the title ‘Sensation’. The city was in the grip of Cool Britannia, where a cross-pollination of the art and music worlds was tearing up Soho.

‘In the drug-fuelled filth I was involved in, you can lose your vision

CHEMICAL WORLD Clockwise from above: Hirst with David Bowie and Julian Schnabel in New York in 1996.

Charles Saatchi with his daughter at Pharmacy in 1999. A sculpture in the window of the restaurant.

Kate Moss and Alexander McQueen at a fashion party at Pharmacy in 1998.

Keith Allen, Hirst and Alex James at the Groucho in 1996

Within days of its opening, Rod Stewart, John Malkovich and David Bowie had been in. Jude Law and Sadie Frost swung by

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of everything. Sometimes if a piece is worth too much money, you can’t see the art for the dollar signs,’ Hirst would say later of the financially inflated, socially chaotic way his life was going at the time.

Hirst, however, had been fascinated by the two-way connection between money and art from the off – he’d been very influenced by banker turned artist Jeff Koons as a student in the 1980s. Even older British artists of merit were taking notice. Matthew Freud recalls a visit to his house from his uncle, the brilliant painter Lucian, in the 1990s, and pointing out to him a ‘Spin’ painting by Hirst with the artist’s own gold HSBC Visa card set in its centre. ‘And Lucian nodded and said, “Yes, Damien has always been interested in the relationship between art and money,”’ says the younger Freud.

Pharmacy wasn’t Hirst’s first experience with the restaurant world. Matthew Freud had met him in 1996, through Frostrup (‘She called me from the Groucho one afternoon and said, “Come by now, he’s not too drunk,”’ says Freud) and went on to set him up with Marco Pierre White at Quo Vadis, a venerable Soho institution in which Freud and Kennedy had invested in 1996. The linking of White, the country’s most rock ’n’ roll chef, with its most hedonistic and provocative artist was typical Freud bravura. Though Hirst declined to invest at the 11th hour (‘He sent me and Jan a ‘Butterfly’ painting each, by way of apology,’ recalls Freud), he agreed to lend some of his art collection instead. Work by YBAs decorated the walls; in return, Hirst asked that the artists themselves were given infinite credit. ‘You’d just sort of turn up and see who was hosting a dinner and join the party,’ says Gregor Muir, now director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. ‘Suddenly we were eating very

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good food and drinking very good wine. Damien is like that. He has always looked after his artist friends really well, and as much as possible, has taken them along with him.’

White and Hirst were, of course, a combustible mixture. When the chef decided to redecorate in 1999, it was apparently not to the artist’s taste, and he withdrew all the work. White replaced it with art he made himself, including a butterfly painting of his own on a red background called Rising Sun. When a few months later, Hirst offered to send an artwork – a butterfly painting on a red background called Butterflies on Mars – to Mars with the first space mission, White threatened to sue. Hirst was fond of a bit of litigation himself. In 1999, he attacked British Airways, which launched its budget airline Go with an advertisement that featured a grid of 30 coloured spots, reminiscent of his own ‘Spot’ paintings.

In fact, turning to the law was becoming a pursuit du jour. A year later, Hirst faced charges of plagiarism when his 20-foot bronze sculpture Hymn was recognized by toy makers Humbrol as bearing an uncanny likeness to a figure in its Young Scientist Anatomy Set. Hirst, for once, went for the quiet option, and settled out of court.

But things were changing. Tate Modern opened with a vast VIP party on 12 May 2000, and the London art scene seemed to enter adulthood. Alexander McQueen, Yoko Ono, Neil Tennant, Paul McCartney and anyone who was anyone gathered beneath Louise Bourgeois’s giant spider sculpture Maman as Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass was played and Bill Forsyth’s dancers leapt across trestle tables to entertain the international art world. ‘London had arrived,’ says Matthew Slotover, publisher of influential art magazine Frieze.

The art-world enfants terribles were growing up, too. Hirst and Emin were towering forces on the international art stage.

But Pharmacy had been languishing for quite a while. Rumours circulated that a rift was beginning among its creators: that Hirst increasingly felt his name was being exploited by his PR-maestro business partner. Nine months after it opened, Pharmacy was sold to the Hartford Group, a restaurant conglomerate, with Freud, Hirst and Kennedy owning shares. Hirst commented on the takeover in a broadsheet interview in 2001: ‘It means the worst thing in the world for me emotionally and personally and I wish I’d never got involved. Everybody looks at me and thinks I only care about money… but you’re only winning because you don’t give a fuck about money.’ On Freud he ranted: ‘What did [he] see in me that he wanted to destroy? Freedom.

Choice. Understanding. Art. A reason to live. A belief in something above and beyond cash.’ Within 18 months, Pharmacy had become the territory of gawpers looking for celebrity action rather than of celebrities themselves. By 2002, Hirst had even stopped drinking and moved to the country. In 2003, Pharmacy’s doors finally closed; none of the original owners had been near the restaurant in years.

But despite Hirst’s new sobriety, the feuding was not yet over.

The press reported new fissures in the artist’s relations: this time with his longtime patron Saatchi, who funded Hirst’s first YBA show in 1992. The quarrel surrounded the way his work was being displayed at Saatchi’s new gallery at County Hall, London – he appeared particularly incensed by the inclusion of a Mini car emblazoned in the style of his ‘Spot’ paintings. In 2003, he bought back 12 of his own works from the dealer and exhibited his new show later that year at friend and dealer Jay Jopling’s White Cube gallery (reportedly scooping up £11 million for it).

There are varying accounts of what happened next at Pharmacy

that year, but in one of them, Frank Dunphy, Hirst’s redoubtable Irish manager, stepped in. ‘I heard the restaurant was folding on a Thursday night,’ he told The Observer later. ‘And I went straight down there with a truck and bought up everything we didn’t own – the doors, the lights, the signs, the ashtrays, the spoons, the egg cups.’ Everything else, though, Damien did own, in an arrangement made prior to the restaurant’s opening. ‘We rented it all from him for £1 a year,’ Freud says.

A year later, another great party took place. At Sotheby’s on New Bond Street, 1,000 guests, including Norman Foster, Mick Jones and Elle Macpherson, crowded into the auction house’s first-floor rooms, where Hirst had once again created an elaborate installation of the remains of Phar macy. The walls had been papered with the Pharmacy wallpaper; a giant medicine cabinet, titled The Fragile Truth, took pride of place with the DNA helix that had once dominated the restaurant. The auction itself attracted 500 bidders for the 168 items; estimated to make £3 million, it grossed £11 million.

‘Suddenly,’ said Hirst at the time, who pocketed the proceeds, ‘my restaurant venture seems to be a success.’

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isitors to Tate Modern’s retrospective of Hirst’s 24-year career this April will also be treated to a re-creation of a work called Pharmacy, but this time it is a more conventional, if extreme, art piece – a gallery lined with white shelving, fully stocked with boxed and bottled medication. It is 20 years since the artwork was first shown, and Hirst is now the wealthiest artist, as well as one of the most notorious and era-defining, of the 21st century: ‘Damien hasn’t just made a name for himself, he’s made some of the more memorable artworks of our time,’ says Muir. ‘He’s ingrained himself in art history.’

PRESCRIPTION FOR SUCCESS Clockwise from top left: Hirst’s ‘Hymn’ sculpture. Marco Pierre White and Hirst at Quo Vadis in 1997. A Sotheby’s gallery technician in front of Hirst’s ‘The Fragile Truth’ in 2004.

Artist Sam Taylor-Wood and Jay Jopling at the party to celebrate Hirst’s 2004 auction at Sotheby’s. Hirst with his sons Connor and Cassius in about 2002

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The Pharmacy years, fuelled by intoxicants and multiple feuds, reinforce not only Hirst’s commercial and marketing genius (‘In my lifetime, art meets business; artists become businessmen – nothing you can do about it,’ he said) but also the Teflon nature of his career, which ascended in tandem with his own notoriety. In June 2007, Lullaby Spring – an extension of the Pharmacy theme (a metal cabinet meticulously filled with over 6,000 pills) – sold for £9.65 million, the European record for work by a living artist. And later that year, he trumped that with For the Love of God, a replica of a human skull in diamonds and platinum, which sold to a business consortium for £50 million while appearing at the same time to mock the very materialism of that sale and indeed the new era it defined for contemporary art. A typically Hirstian manoeuvre, it was outmatched in September 2008 by his two-day Sotheby’s auction in which he sold an entire show for a total of £111 million, despite the financial crash of the time; one newspaper declared: ‘He got away with it.’

And, with new works to be unveiled at St Paul’s Cathedral and his first ever UK retrospective this spring, there is little doubt that Hirst will continue to get away with it for a long time to come. But that is, after all, the point, isn’t it?

‘Damien Hirst’ is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 (020 7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk), from 4 April. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPHS: CLIVE ARROWSMITH/CELEBRITYPICTURES.CO.UK, GETTY IMAGES, REX FEATURES

The Pharmacy years reinforce not only Hirst’s commercial and marketing genius, but the Teflon nature of his career

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COURTESY OF THE CECIL BEATON STUDIO ARCHIVE AT PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX SOTHEBY’S; BEATON/CONDÉ NAST ARCHIVE, © CONDÉ NAST PUBLICATIONS

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Transsexual actor, model and Warhol Superstar Candy Darling was a heroine of New York subculture, lauded in songs by the Rolling Stones and immortalised in iconic photographs. DAVID VINCENT reflects on her short but vibrant life – and on how her fearless outlook still resonates with artists and musicians today

FACTORY GIRL ‘ ndy Warhol and Candy Darling’ A (New York, 1969) by Cecil Beaton www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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swallowed daily to give her breasts. Not long after, the pill was banned.

Later this year, there will be Candy, the movie. Produced by her friend Jeremiah Newton and directed by James Rasin, Beautiful Darling will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February, before touring the international festival circuit. The film tells the wonderful but tragic story of Darling’s life, with privileged insight from the cast of misfits who hung out at the Factory and Max’s, and from those on the off-off-Broadway theatre scene. ‘The film maps Candy’s short journey from Long Island to New York,’ says Rasin, ‘but really it is a huge journey of myth-making proportions: of being a boy in post-World War II Long Island, to being a glamorous, influential woman in downtown New York. It is also a Greek tragedy: in fulfilling who she needed to become, she ended up getting cancer and dying.’

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‘If we still had French Symbolist poets, they would all have written about her,’ says Bob Colacello. Instead, she was eulogised by the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground – and in images by Avedon, Beaton and Mapplethorpe

DIAL C FOR CANDY Clockwise from above: ‘Candy Darling’ (1973) by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Darling, Jed Johnson, Andy Warhol, Cory Tippin and Donna Jordan, photographed by Bill King in 1971. With Jackie Curtis in his play ‘Vain Victory’, photographed by Jack Mitchell in 1971. A still from ‘Women in Revolt’, used on the cover of the Smiths’ 1987 single ‘Sheila Take a Bow’

PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

Candy Darling was born James Lawrence Slattery on 24 November 1944 in Queens, New York. James’ mother, Theresa Phelan, was a bookkeeper at Manhattan’s prestigious Jockey Club; his father, Jim Slattery, a violent drunk soon given the boot. Mother and son moved to the suburbs: Massapequa Park. From the start, Jimmy was mistaken for a girl. Theresa entered him into a beautiful-baby contest. He won: Most Beautiful Baby Girl.

Jimmy’s schooldays were spent playing truant and watching the Million Dollar Movie feature on TV. ‘Back then, a film repeated three times a day for a week,’ says Newton. ‘Jimmy would watch again and again, carefully studying his favourite performers, their dialogue, make-up, costumes, the quirks of their acting styles.’ He became a brilliant mimic. Of course, it wasn’t the male leads he was acting, but the women’s: Joan and Constance Bennett, Hedy Lamarr and Kim Novak. These fantasy women were the template of what he would become.

By 17, Jimmy was going to the local gay bar dressed in his mother’s clothes. When challenged by his mother, Jimmy simply said: ‘Mom, I’m going to show you’ and disappeared upstairs, coming down 15 minutes later as Candy. ‘I knew then that I couldn’t stop Jimmy,’ his mother said.

‘Candy was just too beautiful and talented.’

Darling started wearing 1940s clothes from thrift stores – tea-dresses, gorilla-fur coats, hats with roses – accessorised with old crocodile handbags and armfuls of 19th-century glass bracelets. ‘Her look has been an inspiration for many designers, and feels particularly relevant now,’ says Jeanette, aka James Main, gender illusionist and owner of cutting-edge East London boutique Jeanette’s. ‘She knew how to look super-glamorous living on the breadline.’

In Manhattan, Darling made friends through the salon of Seymour Levy, first calling herself Hope Slattery, then Hope Dahl, then Candy Cane. She adopted ‘Candy’ because of her love of sweets and, finally, ‘Darling’ because her transvestite friend Taffy Terrific would drag her around, constantly saying: ‘Come on, Candy, darling.’

She soon met playwright (and fellow transgender) Jackie Curtis, who in 1967 cast her as Nola Noonan in the play Glamour, Glory and Gold; Robert De Niro got the male lead. It became an underground sensation. Darling’s friend Taylor Mead brought Warhol to the show. Dan Sullivan’s New York Times review read: ‘A skinny actress called Candy Darling also makes an impression. Hers was the first female impersonation of a female impersonator that I have ever

CANDY DARLING (1973) BY ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE: SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK; GIFT, ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION, 1995; © THE ESTATE OF ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE/ART + COMMERCE. 1971 MAGAZINE PHOTOGRAPH: © BILL KING 1971/JANET KING M CCLELLAND, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 1971 PHOTOGRAPH WITH JACKIE CURTIS: © JACK MITCHELL. STILL-LIFE: GRAHAM WALSER

‘I

am not a genuine woman, but I am not interested in genuineness. I am interested in the product of being a woman. And how qualified I am.’ That’s Andy Warhol Superstar Candy Darling – model, actor, fêted idol of 1960s downtown New York and icon of the transgender community – describing her painstaking and uniquely glorious transformation to female form.

More than any other Superstar, Darling left a lasting imprint on our cultural landscape. It wasn’t just her fashions and colourful eye make-up – a throwback to 1940s Hollywood and a major influence on the androgynous look of glam-rock stars including David Bowie – but also her groundbreaking refusal to live on society’s fringes, as was expected of her. In her short life she became a legend, a benchmark. As Antony Hegarty, the transgender lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons, puts it: ‘She is a subculture hero, and has been for every generation since her own, especially in New York City.’ Hegarty put her image on the cover of his 2005 album I Am a Bird Now. Nearly two decades earlier, Morrissey had done the same with the Smiths’ 1987 single ‘Sheila Take a Bow’.

Candy Darling, the girl with the platinum-blonde mane, creamy white skin, Fortuny dresses and Kim Novak looks, entranced New York’s demi-monde of rock stars, artists, photographers and playwrights with her flawless appearance and acting talent.

Discovered by Warhol, she went on to star in his films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971), as well as Tennessee Williams’ play Small Craft Warnings (1972); she starred opposite Jane Fonda, in Klute, and Sophia Loren, in Lady Liberty, both in 1971. She held court in the infamous backroom of Max’s Kansas City nightclub, where she would entertain such luminaries as Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Lauren Hutton, Julie Newmar, Francesco Scavullo and Bowie with her charmingly wicked one-liners, while Warhol uttered the odd ‘Gee’ or ‘Wow’. She was the Dorothy Parker of the ensemble. When she failed to get the lead in Myra Breckinridge, the Hollywood production of Gore Vidal’s satire of a shemale run amok, Darling ever so sweetly said: ‘They decided Raquel Welch would make a more believable transvestite.’

‘If we still had French Symbolist poets, they would all have written poems about her,’ says Bob Colacello, former editor of Interview magazine. Instead, she was eulogised by the Rolling Stones in ‘Citadel’, the Velvet Underground in ‘Candy Says’ and Lou Reed in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ – and immortalised by Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton and Robert Mapplethorpe in iconic images alongside Warhol and her Factory cohorts, as well as alone. Finally, she was cast as that tragic heroine – the one she had spent three decades rehearsing to be – in photographer Peter Hujar’s portrait ‘Candy Darling on Her Deathbed’. At just 29, Darling died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma – probably caused by the ‘German Pill’, the black oblong female hormone supplement she

earned little money from acting (Warhol paid $25 a scene), relied on rich people to take her to supper, and often needed friends to give her a couch for the night. In her diary, along with her make-up hints and fashion sketches, she would puzzle over who she was: ‘I’ve been up all night worrying about my identity, trying to look for an explanation for living this strange stylised sexuality… I try to explain my identity as being a male who has assumed the attitudes and somewhat the emotions of being a female. I don’t know which role to play.’ Nevertheless, she had a number of suitors, Roger Vadim among them. ‘She attracted so many men,’ says Woodlawn. ‘She would borrow my clothes… come back and they would be shredded, and I’d say, “Obviously, your date didn’t go that…” And she would say, “He wanted me to put out.”’

She was a pre-op transsexual. The operation had not been perfected, and Darling also worried it would turn her from something unique into simply another woman.

That did, however, limit her romantic options. Regardless, after a trip to the doctors in 1973, Darling announced to Newton she was pregnant. ‘Pregnant? How could you be?’ was the astonished reply. ‘Well, it could happen,’ she said wryly. Sadly, X-rays showed she had a tumour. And when doctors operated, they found it wrapped around her spine. Nothing could be done.

Just before she died, she sent a final note to Warhol and friends: ‘By the time you read this, I will be gone. Unfortunately, before my death I had no desire left for life… I am just so bored by everything.

You might say bored to death… did you know I couldn’t last, I always knew it.’

‘Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe – they all died young and beautiful,’ says Woodlawn.

‘Candy wanted to go that route.’

On her deathbed, she summoned Hujar to take her last portrait. ‘I went with him to take that picture,’ says author and social commentator Fran Lebowitz. ‘I was horrified at the idea. I said, “Peter, she is dying. Why would she want her picture taken?” She loved that picture, and she made a big effort to look like that… She was extremely sick when that photograph was taken.’ It is the one Hegarty chose for his I Am a Bird Now album cover. ‘It embodied everything the album was circling thematically,’ he says. ‘It is such a transcendental picture of someone living in so many different polarities: between the light and darkness of the room; between life and death; and obviously between male and female. Although she was very, very female.’

Candy Darling died on 21 March 1974 at Cabrini Medical Center in New York. She had arranged her own funeral at the chicest funeral home in the city: Frank E Campbell’s. She was laid out in a Giorgio di Sant’Angelo peau de soie floor-length gown, platinum with a lavender hue, with long sleeves and rhinestones on the back. Above the open coffin was a stunning picture of her by Roy Blakey. The roll-call was suitably impressive: David and Angela Bowie, Pat Ast, Lebowitz, Paul Morrissey, Lauren Hutton, Yoko Ono, Tennessee Williams, di Sant’Angelo, and Gala and Salvador Dalí – whom Darling had interviewed CONTINUED ON PAGE 156

‘It is such a transcendental picture of someone living in so many different polarities: between light and darkness; between life and death; and between male and female’ ANTONY HEGARTY

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THIS PAGE: PHOTOGRAPH: © 1975, THE PETER HUJAR ARCHIVE LLC; COURTESY OF MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY, NEW YORK. OPPOSITE: PHOTOGRAPH OF CANDY IN BED: ANTON PERICH. BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPH: PETER BEARD, © PETER BEARD/ART + COMMERCE. JANE FONDA AND CANDY DARLING FROM ‘LITTLE RED BOOK NO. 110’ (POLAROID PHOTOGRAPHS, 1969): THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH; FOUNDING COLLECTION, CONTRIBUTION THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS INC; © THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/DACS, LONDON 2009

seen.’ Andy Warhol proclaimed: ‘For the first time I wasn’t bored.’

Afterwards, Darling and Jackie went to celebrate at the Salvation Club. Warhol was there with Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Jagger. They were beckoned over, and soon the two, and Darling’s close friend Holly Woodlawn, were fixtures at the Factory, along with Capote, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Judy Garland.

‘She knew Jagger well,’ says Newton. ‘He was fascinated by her in the same way he became fascinated by Bowie.’ ‘[Darling] felt that she was discovered by Warhol, the new MGM of the East Coast,’ says Woodlawn. ‘That he was going to make her the next Jean Harlow, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe all rolled into one, and she would be the biggest film star on the planet.’

In 1968, Warhol did make Darling a star when he gave her a small part in Flesh. He thought her a big hit, with exquisite comedic timing as ‘she sits, very ladylike on the couch with Jackie and reads old movie magazines out loud while Geri the topless go-go dancer gives Joe [Dallesandro] a blowjob’.

With Darling, there was no send-up of femininity, even though her performances were an amalgam of the screen heroines she idolised. Three years later, Warhol cast her as his lead in Women in Revolt, the hilarious spoof of feminist politics directed by Paul Morrissey. The West Coast premiere was held at the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre; Darling’s dream of Hollywood stardom had come true.

There were other independent films, and cameos in Klute and Lady Liberty. (As Darling said: ‘I’ve been in eight films: small parts in big pictures, and big parts in small pictures.’) But she was perhaps more at home on the stage, especially the avantgarde of off-off-Broadway. In Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned, another Curtis play, she played a mermaid in a wheelchair.

In 1972, Tennessee Williams offered her the role of Violet in his play Small Craft Warnings.

It was a huge break. ‘It was her first chance of getting away from doing the Warhol stuff,’ says Darling’s friend Richard Golub. ‘She was beginning to believe she could do a lot of other things.’ And she was a hit in it – with Williams, anyway. ‘Tennessee didn’t suffer fools,’ says film-maker John Waters. ‘Maybe if they were a cute guy.

But they weren’t sleeping together. He liked her, plain and simple.’

The actors were another matter. ‘They didn’t treat her well,’ says Newton. ‘The male actors didn’t want her sharing a dressing room.

The female actors didn’t want her sharing a dressing room. She ended up getting a broom closet, which angered Tennessee. So he got even by changing the lines every day. They would go crazy, because there was revision after revision after revision. And to make it worse, Tennessee went into the play, taking the character of Doc the lovable abortionist. He’d come on [the] stage, [which was] set as a bar, with the Times, and spread it across the bar and start reading it aloud. The actors, looking for the cue, would just stand there with their dicks in their hand. He never changed Candy’s lines, just everybody else’s. He got even with them.’

Despite her apparent success, Darling lived hand to mouth. She

NEW YORK DOLL Clockwise from above: a Polaroid shot by Andy Warhol of Darling with Jane Fonda in 1969. Darling photographed by Peter Beard in 1971. In bed at friend Sam Green’s apartment, photographed by Anton Perich in 1972.

Opposite: ‘Candy Darling on Her Deathbed’ (1974) by Peter Hujar (the image was also used for Antony and the Johnsons’ 2005 album) February 2010

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for Interview. Julie Newmar gave the eulogy, and Faith Dane played the piano. Warhol didn’t attend; he had a pathological fear of hospitals and death.

As the flower-bedecked coffin was being carried out, film star Gloria Swanson went by in her limousine. The window came down: ‘Tell me, who is this funeral for?’ ‘Candy Darling,’ the mourners replied. ‘Candy Darling. Dead. Argh,’ she exclaimed, as she saluted Darling with her gloved arm and drove off down Madison Avenue.

‘We all worshipped Candy Darling,’ says photographer Nan Goldin. ‘She had the courage to live out her true self.’ ‘She was witty, funny, smart, beautiful,’ says Waters, ‘and had a certain cachet in being revolutionary, just by the way she lived her life, especially at that time. She was one of the frontrunners. The other ones were freakish, and she was beautiful.’ ‘With someone like Candy Darling,’ adds Hegarty, ‘what some might perceive as artifice, this gesture of femininity, is actually a revelation of a true sense of herself.

Sometimes form and creative expression magnify the truth.’

Candy Darling dared to live a life that few imagined possible in 1960s America, where the act of putting on a dress could land her in jail, beaten or even worse. She did what she had to do, and ended up doing something groundbreaking and influential. As Beautiful Darling poignantly shows, she created a role model for the proceeding years, and a lesson for us all on how to live our lives. Darling explained it best: ‘You must always be yourself, no matter what the price – it is the highest form of morality.’ Candy Darling was more genuine than she realised.

‘Beautiful Darling’ will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival (www. berlinale.de) in mid-February.

‘SPIRIT OF THE EAST’

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elegant Amantaka, converted from a 1900s French hospital, yet preserving the Indochine tone; you almost expect to see Catherine Deneuve settling into a cane chair for breakfast. As with all Amanresorts, pared-down aesthetics rule, here dominated by black and white photos of local monks and Buddhist ceremonies.

Nothing is far away in this town of 20,000 people, but I find the best way to get around is by bike. I pedal down quiet back lanes dotted with palms, hibiscus and bougainvillea. I cross the Old Bridge (made of teak, it is banned to cars); stop at the Ecole des Beaux Arts – a time capsule of an art school in the old queen mother’s house; and sip fresh rosella juice at a shady riverside café.

An excursion in a hired boat leads me to Wat Chom Phet, a crumbling temple at the top of 123 steps, where impish ‘Tom’ and ‘Lynn’ sell me offerings for a well-preserved Buddha. As the light fades, I revel in the views, the hills dissolving in a vaporous dusk and, below, lights twinkling on the Luang Prabang peninsula. I hear hammering, and know another hotel is taking shape.

At dawn, Amantaka’s guests are encouraged to take part in the ritual of kneeling and offering food to the monks making their rounds with their rice bowls. Our immaculate new containers and mats feel incongruous, but the sticky rice is hot and the spirit is there as the groups of monks and young novices file past in their saffron robes, begging-bowls in hand and their eyes lowered.

A 10-day itinerary, including two nights at the Anantara Golden Triangle in Thailand, a two-day cruise on the Mekong (including an overnight stay at Luang Say Lodge), three nights at Amantaka and two nights at AriyasomVilla in Bangkok, costs from £2,280 a person B&B, including flights, transfers and private escorted excursions, with Audley (01993 838125; www.audleytravel.com).

STOCKISTS

3.1 Phillip Lim at Harvey Nichols, 109–125 Knightsbridge, London SW1 (020 7235 5000)

A, B, C Acne (+46 8 559 25 380; www.acnestudios.com) Alberta Ferretti 205–206 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7235 2349) Alexander McQueen 4–5 Old Bond Street, London W1 (020 7355 0088) Alexander Wang at Selfridges (0800 123400) All Saints (0870 458 3736) Alp (020 7627 3529; www.alp-design.co.uk) Altuzarra at Liberty, 210–220 Regent Street, London W1 (020 7734 1234) American Apparel (0800 630 0074) Amrapali (020 7584 4433) Antonio Berardi at Harrods, 87–135 Brompton Road, London SW1 (020 7730 1234) Astley Clarke (0845 680 6848) Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière 12 Mount Street, London W1 (020 7317 4400) Balmain at Browns, 23–27 South Molton Street, London W1 (020 7514 0000) Bottega Veneta 15 Old Bond Street, London W1 (020 7629 5598) Brian Atwood at Net-a-porter.com Burberry Prorsum (0700 078 5676) By Malene Birger (020 8969 4441) Calvin Klein at Harvey Nichols (020 7235 5000) Camilla Skovgaard at Harvey Nichols (020 7235 5000) Celine at Harvey Nichols (020 7235 5000) Cesare Paciotti 8a Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7235 3393) Chanel 26 Old Bond Street, London W1 (020 7493 5040) Chloé 152–153 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7823 5348) Christian Louboutin 17 Mount Street, London W1 (020 7491 0033)

D, E, F Diane von Furstenberg 25 Bruton Street, London W1 (020 7499 0886) Diesel Black Gold (020 7833 2255) Dior (020 7172 0172) Dolce & Gabbana 6–8 Old Bond Street, London SW1 (020 7659 9000) Donna Karan 46 Conduit Street, London W1 (020 7479 7900) Dries Van Noten at Browns (020 7514 0000) Eddie Borgo at Liberty (020 7734 1234) Elie Saab at Harrods (020 7730 1234) Elke Kramer at Liberty (020 7734 1234) Emilio de la Morena at Matches, 60–64 Ledbury Road, London W11 (020 7221 0255) Fendi 22 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7838 6288) Fenton at Dover Street Market, 17–18 Dover Street, London W1 (020 7518 0680)

G, H, J, L Gianfranco Ferré 29 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7838 9576) Giorgio Armani 37 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7235 6232) Giuseppe Zanotti Design 49 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7838 9455) Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci at Selfridges (0800 123400) Givenchy Haute Couture by Riccardo Tisci (+33 1 44 31 50 00) Graeme Black (020 7565 1150) Gucci 18 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7235 6707) Hermès (020 7823 1014) Hugo Boss (020 7554 5700) Hussein Chalayan (www.husseinchalayan.com) Jaeger (0845 051 0063) Jimmy Choo 32 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7823 1051) John Galliano at Dover Street Market (020 7518 0680) John Rocha 15a Dover Street, London W1 (020 7495 2233) Jonathan Saunders at Harvey Nichols (020 7235 5000) Joseph (020 7610 8441) Lanvin 128 Mount Street, London W1 (020 7491 1839) Laura Lee (020 7379 9050) Liberty of London (020 7734 1234) LK Bennett (0844 581 5881) Louis Vuitton (020 7399 4050)

M, N, O Manolo Blahnik 49–51 Old Church Street, London SW3 (020 7352 3863) Marios Schwab at Dover Street Market (020 7518 0680) Mary Katrantzou at Harvey Nichols (020 7235 5000) Matthew Williamson 28 Bruton Street, London W1 (020 7629 6200) MaxMara 19–21 Old Bond Street, London W1 (020 7518 8010) Miller Harris (0844 561 0992; www.millerharris.com) Miu Miu 123 New Bond Street, London W1 (020 7409 0900) Moncler 197 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7235 0857) Moschino 28–29 Conduit Street, London W1 (020 7318 0555) Mulberry 41–42 New Bond Street, London W1 (020 7491 3900) Nicole Farhi 158 New Bond Street, London W1 (020 7499 8368) Nina Ricci at Harvey Nichols (020 7235 5000) Norma Kamali at Browns (020 7514 0000) Oasis (01865 881986) Oscar de la Renta at Harrods (020 7730 1234)

P, R, S Paule Ka 161 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7823 4180) Pebble (020 7262 1775) Peter Pilotto at Feathers, 176 Westbourne Grove, London W11 (020 7243 8800) Phi (www.phicollection.com) Pierre Hardy at Dover Street Market (020 7518 0680) Prada 16–18 Old Bond Street, London W1 (020 7647 5000) Preen at Selfridges (0800 123400) Prestat 14 Princes Arcade, London SW1 (020 7494 3372) Pringle 111–112 New Bond Street, London W1 (020 7297 4580) Proenza Schouler at Harvey Nichols (020 7235 5000) Rachel Roy (www.rachelroy.com) Ralph Lauren 1 New Bond Street, London W1 (020 7535 4600) RM by Roland Mouret at Harrods (020 7730 1234) Roger La Borde at Selfridges (0800 123400) Shaun Leane at Harrods (020 7730 1234) Stella McCartney 30 Bruton Street, London W1 (020 7518 3100) Sweet Pea 77 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 (020 7449 9292) Sykes at Matches (020 7221 0255)

T, V, W, Y Thakoon at Selfridges (0800 123400) Tod’s 2–5 Old Bond Street, London W1 (020 7493 2237) Topshop (0845 121 4519) Valentino 174 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7235 5855) VBH at Browns (020 7514 0000) Versace 183–184 Sloane Street, London SW1 (020 7259 5700) Victoria Beckham at Selfridges (0800 123400) Vionnet at Harrods (020 7730 1234) Wallis (0845 121 4520) Warehouse (0845 122 2251) Whistles (0845 899 1222) Yong at Liberty (020 7734 1234) Yves Saint Laurent 32–33 Old Bond Street, London W1 (020 7493 1800)

FLASH OF

INSPIRATION

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Clockwise from top left: Deborah Turbeville photographed in New York in 1976. ‘Ecole des Beaux Arts’ (Paris, 1977). ‘Women in the Woods’ (Versailles, 1978). ‘The Glass House’ (Normandy, 1978)

PHOTOGRAPHS: © DEBORAH TURBEVILLE/COURTESY STALEY-WISE GALLERY, NEW YORK, GETTY IMAGES

Deborah Turbeville’s provocative and poetic images revolutionised fashion photography in the Seventies.

A former model and Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor, she brought pioneering themes and techniques to the medium, creating a stylised aesthetic that was as shocking as it was influential. On the eve of a new exhibition of her work, DAVID VINCENT examines the life and career of the still-prolific visionary

story, middle-aged male twins manipulate two young women as if they are mannequins: one, ashen-faced with a dark bob and looking like a doll, is made to stand with her arms aloft; the other, as if an inanimate shop dummy in a military overcoat, is collapsed on a chair. The clothes are blurred, hinted at and even obscured, taking a decidedly secondary role to the pictorial melodramas – a sensibility that had an enormous impact on fashion editors when Turbeville’s work first appeared. ‘I don’t consider them fashion photographs,’ she says – so forcefully, it would be a brave person who disagreed.

Shoots like this have given rise to Turbeville’s reputation as an antifashion fashion photographer, though Turbeville rejects the label.

She wants her work to be placed within the fine arts. ‘I don’t think I’m a fashion photographer at all, and that is a controversial point.’

This dismissal of the straightforward fashion shoot is something she says she acquired as editor of the ‘Fashion Independent’ section of Harper’s Bazaar in the Sixties – it covered personalities and children.

Here, she commissioned some of the most famous photog raphers of the time: Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Hiro, Jimmy Moore and Bob Richardson. She was experimental, using off beat locations, extreme fashions and storytelling to transform her pages from humdrum to cutting-edge. ‘I got this wonderful job: a dream job,’ she says. ‘And that was when I really learned about photography.

Bob saw the whole thing as cinema, not fashion. Diane’s philosophy was “do anything, but don’t make it look like a fashion picture”. Dick saw what I was doing and asked to work with me.’ The two produced quirky stories such as ‘Frug that fat away’, with models Veruschka and Donyale Luna dancing the Frug in acid-green and shocking-pink Rudi Gernreich dresses.

When Turbeville was dismissed from Bazaar in 1966, after a Diane Arbus shoot (‘I asked her to photograph a society couple.

She made them look like the Addams Family.

They sued for a million dollars. I got fired’) and a hell-raiser of a trip to Texas with Richardson, Avedon asked her to join a photography seminar he and ex-Bazaar art director Marvin Israel were giving. ‘They got me going,’ says Turbeville. If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t have done anything.’

For someone in her twenties, she had already done a great deal.

The Boston girl whose mother called her ‘a shy and scary child’ had two careers behind her. Before her role as a Bazaar editor, the five-foot-ten redhead had, by age 19, already been McCardell’s head model. Arbiter of fashion Eugenia Sheppard nicknamed her ‘Debbie with the Debutante Slouch’. ‘I never describe my career without saying Miss McCardell was the biggest influence in my early years,’ says Turbeville.

It would be a decade until her next mentor, Avedon, would see her unique talents. ‘You are going to be very important to photography,’ he told her when he saw her first attempt behind the lens.

Later, her groundbreaking work was hailed as the start of a new era.

Israel called it ‘visionary’. And famed Condé Nast editorial director Alexander Liberman proclaimed her images ‘a pioneering breakthrough’, and gave her her first big commercial chance. ‘He thought some lobby in a nice apartment house would do,’ she says. ‘I found this old cement factory on the West Side Highway. The models, in Geoffrey Beene dresses, were marching through the mud to the shaft of light where I wanted to shoot. The fashion editor with me was horrified and kept reporting back. I told Mr Liberman that I

From top: ‘Portrait of Diana Vreeland’ (New York, 1981). ‘Pototski Palace’ (Krakow, 1997)

‘Working with her was magical.

She gave to my clothes a pure luxury. Even shooting in a dirty old building, she gave to the models a sense of great unrepeatable grandeur’ VALENTINO

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‘ I met Turbeville when she was at Bazaar. What immediately interested me was the “fictıon” part of her work, the demanding direction in the way she sets everything, the way she creates everyday life with romance. It’s very timeless.

She always plays with the themes of shadow and light, ingenuity and perversion, which provokes a delicious ambiguity’ SONIA RYKIEL

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he was like Scheherazade. She’d get out the chilled vodka, and the tales went on and on. We’d forget we were there to work. I’d have to go back a second time, and we’d start the whole scenario all over again: the chilled vodka, the tales…’

Deborah Turbeville is reminiscing about her mentor Diana Vreeland, and about the time they finally got to shoot together in 1981 for a collage piece nicknamed ‘The old empress’ – Vreeland is the old empress.

Turbeville, the legendary lenswoman, and Vreeland, the infamous fashion editor, missed being colleagues on US Harper’s Bazaar by a matter of months. Instead, Turbeville had to make do with Richard Avedon. ‘He was not as chatty, but he took me under his wing, if you can think of him doing that for anybody.

The freedom in my pictures jarred with him. He’d been working in the studio for so long. He was the King of Slick. I was the opposite.’

Turbeville has been a rebel at the centre of the fashion world for half a century, making her mark in various guises: first as head model for the mother of American sportswear, Claire McCardell; then as a famously radical editor at Bazaar; and, for the past 40 years, as the avant-garde New York photographer whose groundbreaking works include the Bath House, Glass House and Women in the Woods series.

Her images of women in Geoffrey Beene frocks stuck in the mud at a cement factory, bathers in swimsuits languishing inside a bathhouse, girls in Sonia Rykiel dresses trapped in a derelict greenhouse, and collaboratrices horizontales in Valentino smocks abandoned in the forest gave fashion photography the shock of its life in the 1970s.

Before that, it had all been uncomplicated staging and jolly social mise-en-scènes.

With a prod from Turbeville’s digitus secundus, such frivolity was given the heave-ho.

Instead, we got images full of decay, disintegration and alienation, isolation, anxiety and dislocation. They were delivered in such a lyrical, enigmatic and erotic way, however, that the melancholy was masked.

What one sees at first glance is a delicate, poetic, hazy blur.

Her gaze is most definitely that of a woman. Working at a time when there were few female photographers, Turbeville was part of a triumvirate, with Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, of unlikely bedfellows who found a common cause in blasting away at the boundaries of decency, sexuality and good taste. ‘The difference was they were two men, two very macho men, and it goes different for them than it does for me,’ says Turbeville in her signature rapidfire delivery. ‘If you look at my pictures, it is obvious it is a woman taking them. It is a woman handling the camera. It is a woman with a softer lens. I admire them tremendously, but they are a separate thing. Women like myself and Sarah Moon, Sheila Metzner, Ellen von Unwerth and Corinne Day bring something else to photography, a more personalised view.’

An exhibition of Turbeville’s work is taking place at the Wapping Project Bankside in London in March. And it still jolts. ‘They are dark pictures, but also theatrical,’ says Wapping Project director Jules Wright. ‘The 1997 Krakow series in particular. Turbeville doesn’t nor mally photograph men; here she does. They are threatening and disturbing.’ In scenes that would sit well in an Edgar Allen Poe short

want this to look like an Antonioni film, with Monica Vitti walking around, lost, in her Armani suit.’

When he saw the prints, Liberman wasn’t disappointed. He jumped on top of the art-department counters and exclaimed: ‘We have never done this. The most revolutionary pictures of the time.’

What has followed has left an indelible mark on modern photography. In 1975, Liberman commissioned Turbeville again, for a swimsuit shoot. She turned it into an acclaimed insight into female sexuality with her Bath House series – perhaps the most important fashion shoot of the past 50 years.

Five models languish in a damp communal shower. Two of the girls are slumped on the floor, another erect, spreading her legs and pushing her pelvis towards the camera. It caused a stir: sapphic and druggy undertones, and images some thought reminiscent of photographs from Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.

‘We found an old condemned bathhouse – nobody had done that before,’ says Turbeville, hesitating for a second before adding: ‘I hate to sound like an old Louise Dahl-Wolfe [the standardbearer of environmental photography and a favourite of Diana Vreeland’s] here, bragging about it. I am not bragging about it. Alex Liberman should get more credit. He was a svengali and genius.’

In 1977 and 1978, she shot Women in the Woods for Italian Vogue, first with Blumarine and then Valentino collections. The psychological charge in the images is palpable.

Playing off the space between the models, Turbeville imbues the women with both strength and vulnerability.

Later in 1978, the edgy French magazine Façade sent her to Normandy with a pile of Sonia Rykiel dresses to shoot, in typically controversial style, a feature about suicide.

Never one for the pristine, she found a derelict conservatory. The outlines of the models are barely there, just a ghost-like imprint of the past or, indeed, the future. The dresses are hardly distinguishable. ‘The women are sealed into a vacuum,’ says Turbeville. ‘They can’t get out. It is analogous of life. People are trapped.

You can take it any way you want: they chose to be there, they are prisoners, they are in an asylum, something is terribly wrong.’

Many think Turbeville’s work nostalgic, looking to the 1890s or 1930s, but it is much more complex than that. It has a quality of past, present and future. This timelessness and architectural essence prompted Jackie Onassis to collaborate with Turbeville on Unseen Versailles when Onassis was working at publishers Doubleday.

The book, with text by revered American novelist Louis Auchincloss, explores the eerie backrooms of Le Brun’s masterpiece for the Bourbon kings, places rarely seen. ‘I wanted her to conjure up what went on there,’ said Onassis, ‘to evoke the feeling that there were ghosts and memories.’

‘It was a coup that she managed to get in,’ says Turbeville. ‘We drove to Versailles to see the curator. She could, because of who she was. She was an aficionado of French history. She loved Versailles.

‘She was serious, but liked to joke. On the way back, she had to go to the bathroom, and she made the guy stop at a little place. The people on the porch almost fainted. Then she got back into the car and leant over and, in that mysterious whispery voice of hers, said, “They have striped toilet paper.” She was fun.’

The curators at Versailles were not so jovial. Much of the palace had been restored to its gaudy heyday, which didn’t suit Turbeville,

so she brought in leaves, monkeys and an owl, and even tried out a spider-web-making machine behind the curator’s back. A battle of wits ensued. ‘The curator wanted to include only the finished, slick rooms, which is the last thing someone like me would want,’ Turbeville says, the inflection in her voice rising and turning into a throaty laugh.

‘I’d get a call from the curator and he said, “What are you doing?”

“It is a very poetic thing,” I explained. He said, “I’m sure it is a very poetic thing, madam, but not in my museum.” And he slammed down the phone. That was the relationship I had with him. Jackie would have to call from New York to get permission.’ The results show the château in haunting, mysterious hibernation, and the book has become a collector’s item.

Turbeville is still prolific at Italian, Casa and L’Uomo Vogue; she shot Chloë Sevigny for this magazine in 2003. Her unique vision is rooted in story telling, gleaned initially from her childhood love of Russian literature. Her work has strong narrative and filmic qualities; in her collages, repeated images are often taped, stuck and pinned together. Her grainy sequences of stills are inspired by the great silent-film directors – Eisenstein, Vertov and Murnau – and the later work of Cocteau, Visconti and Fassbinder.

The shabby, soft-focus, distressed and jarring appearance of her images is achieved through a huge bag of technical tricks, including crude ones such as tearing, scratching, overexposing, mutilating, cropping, obscuring with tape, and covering negatives in hair and dust. ‘I destroy the image after I’ve made it, obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there,’ says Turbeville. ‘The idea of disintegration is core to my work.’

Unlike the inheritor of her filmic obsessions, Peter Lindbergh, who has used supermodels to create a genre all his own, Turbeville prefers to use non-professional models. She rejects aesthetic perfection in favour of the odd look. ‘There’s a French horror film from the Sixties called Eyes Without a Face, where a mad professor’s daughter has her face cut up in an accident. He murders girls, sticking their faces on hers. I felt like I’d been seeing the same face for years. A different girl but with the same old face stuck on,’ she says of the models the agencies used to send her.

Turbeville’s unerring personal vision has had an enormous impact on modern photography and stylists and editors drawn to unconventional beauty. Her work has been seen in campaigns for labels including Sonia Rykiel, Emanuel Ungaro, Romeo Gigli, Karl Lagerfeld and Comme des Garçons. Steven Klein’s D&G campaign for S/S 06 drew inspiration from her Bath House series.

A romanticist and a modernist, Turbeville has managed that rare thing in photography – bridging the schism between the business of commercial fashion shoots and the refined world of fine art. She demands explicitly that her work be judged as art. The enig matic, timeless quality of her images, and her interplay with space, architecture and ephemeral figures implicitly – and successfully – does the same. She is one of the great photographers of our generation, and her influence on the world of photography – fashion or otherwise – will be felt for years to come. Just as Avedon predicted.

An exhibition of Deborah Turbeville’s work is at the Wapping Project Bankside, 65a Hopton Street, London SE1 (020 7981 9851; www. thewappingprojectbankside.com), from 2 March.

‘Her work inspires me to pick up my camera and start shooting. Her images are not obvious – they are sexy and feminine. They don’t seem too set up; instead, the photographs seem to capture private moments – there is a narrative and a sense of mystery that surround her sitters. Who are they? What is their story? There is a tantalising feeling of mystery that enchants me’ MARY MCCARTNEY

‘I have the most respect for photographers who create their own world, coming out of themselves rather than from outside influences.

I really do like Deborah’s images very much, as they always reflect her personal substance’ PETER LINDBERGH

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PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

PHOTOGRAPHS: © DEBORAH TURBEVILLE/COURTESY STALEY-WISE GALLERY, NEW YORK

From top: Chloë Sevigny photographed for the October 2003 issue of Harpers & Queen.

‘Bath House’ (New York, 1975)

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It was 1968 – one of the most important years of my life. For the first time, my career had reached a point where I had complete carte blanche as a photographer, working for The Sunday Times Magazine. At the start of the year, I was accredited to the American army in Vietnam and I reported on the Battle of Hue, where I shot some of the best war photographs of my life. A couple of months later, I was back in the UK and I got a phone call out of the blue from Apple Records offering me £200 to spend a day photographing the Beatles for the cover of Life magazine. I would have given them £200! I jumped at the idea.

The shoot was scheduled for a Sunday. When the band turned up at the studio at the top of The Sunday Times office building on Gray’s Inn Road, there was a strange stand-off because no one really knew what to do, least of all me. I wasn’t a studio photographer; I worked on the battlefield. I’ve never been good with famous people either, so I was completely out of my depth. But the four of them were very nice and we soon got cracking.

Paul and John dominated the group. George and Ringo were very quiet, almost subdued.

I think they realised they were in the shadow of the other two.

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PHOTOGRAPH: © DON M CCULLIN 2010

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FLOWER POWER The Beatles photographed

by Don McCullin near St Pancras Station, London, on his day out with the band in 1968

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HIGH SPIRITS The Beatles photographed by McCullin in a community hall in London in 1968

As I found out later, there were a lot of tensions in the band; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Hey Judeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; had just been released, and the four of them were recording The White Album (both Ringo and George walked out during the sessions). I only noticed that tension from John. If you said the wrong thing in his company, you knew it could all go badly wrong. Yokoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help, though the others put up with her. John must have realised he wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t going to stick around much longer; he was much too gifted and creative. At the same time, Paul was the pretty boy, the one the girls liked, and John must have had some resentment about that. There must have been resentments all round. For me, after all the terrible things I witnessed that year, it was an incredible privilege that they asked me. Although, even now, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m amazed at how shambolic that day was. There were no plans, no directions, and no discipline. We just went where the flow took us. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why we called it â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;our mad day outâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;A Day in the Life of the Beatlesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; by Don McCullin (ÂŁ20, Jonathan Cape) is out now. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPH: Š DON M CCULLIN 2010

me to take a fresh batch of photographs for publicity, and they had handed themselves over to me for the day, so I decided to take them on a ramble around London. We headed first to St Pancras.

I wanted to find a quiet corner of London we could have to ourselves, and I knew a spot behind the station where there were some beautiful municipal gardens and a Gothic church. It was very ad hoc. I started taking some shots and the four of them got bored posing and started messing about in the flower beds. The whole thing was a bit of a laugh.

We went on to Old Street where I got them to climb on the roundabout, and they started boxing each other and doing silly things as the taxis drove past. Back in the limo, I quickly got a sense of John. I was in a car with him and Yoko Ono. Waiting at the traffic lights, a car suddenly pulled up alongside with a glum-looking family inside. When the mum looked across and saw John Lennon, she started gasping and screaming in surprise. John wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t impressed, and started mimicking her right back. He was a stirrer like that. There was always something edgy about him.

I wanted to go somewhere with some grit, so we headed to the East End, around Cable Street. I thought the docks would appeal to them, perhaps remind them of Liverpool. On the waterfront, Paul started taking off his clothes and chaining himself to a wall. It was quite bonkers. Then John pretended to be dead, which was ironic and creepy, given his death only 12 years later. John was by far the most forceful in the group. He knew he was the leader.

But I warmed more to Paul. (In fact, a couple of years later, Paul invited me out of the blue to have dinner with him and Linda at the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath.)

We found ourselves in a nearby community hall where, for some reason, there were all these costumes and a parrot. The band got dressed up. Paul played around on the piano. At one point, John had the parrot on his big toe. He did funny things like that.

Yoko, who was with us for the whole day, didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t say much, but the few words I heard her utter offended me. At one stage she was saying: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Oh why is the photographer standing there? Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in the wrong place.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; You can imagine how I felt. I had read enough about her before to know she wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be my cup of tea.

After the shoot, Paul said: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Why donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you come back to my house and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have tea?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; So we all went to his house in St Johnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wood, which was besieged by young girls.

We had tea in the conservatory out the back, which looked like something out of the space age â&#x20AC;&#x201C; like the Eden Project on a smaller scale. There was a bloody great big fluffy dog and lots of minders. Conversation was difficult because Ringo barely said anything. George and John had just been to India, one of my favourite places, so I asked about that. Then John asked me about the war in Vietnam. You could see he was anti-war, and talking about the battle Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d just been part of must have re-enforced his views that it was wrong and it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t going to last.

That evening, I went home worried and convinced I hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t got any good shots. To be honest, I thought Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d cocked it up. But what I ended up with were pictures you wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t normally get. What I admired about the band was that they had come from the same kind of background as me â&#x20AC;&#x201C; lousy and poor. Liverpool is as tough as any place youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll find. I was pleased that they had got out.

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Ever since we first met, it has been the same. Grace comes to my birthday party, and I go to hers. Our birthdays are just three days apart. This photograph was taken at Grace’s 42nd birthday party, on 21 May 1990. We were in New York at Grace’s restaurant, La Vie en Rose. I was just about to turn 20. I remember it was an amazing night.

This year I turned 40, and Grace performed at my birthday, which was wonderful.

It was a surprise party. She jumped out of a cake, sang all her hits and was on top form. It really was great. She gave a speech about how the two of us are strong women with the same Jamaican heritage. I think Grace and I had a connection because of that.

I never listen to what other people say, and prefer to judge people on their own merit.

We met at one of my first shows in 1987. Grace was extremely sweet. Before the show, she took me out to sit in the courtyard and gave me lots of advice about the dos and don’ts of the business, trying to keep me from making mistakes. She is a very intelligent woman and very honest. She told me to stay focused, to come to her if I needed support, and that I should always do what made me happy. She took me under her wing. Afterwards, I couldn’t wait to see her on the runway.

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PHOTOGRAPH: RON GALELLA/GETTY IMAGES

GIRLS’ BOND Naomi Campbell and Grace Jones photographed by Ron Galella at Jones’ birthday party in New York in 1990

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seeing that Island Life album cover in 1985 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it was shot by Jean-Paul Goude, who I later worked with â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and wondering whether it was real, or if Grace had a secret twin. I loved her tracks. One of my dearest memories is of dancing to her music with my friend and stylist Ray Petri, one of the first people I worked with when I started modelling. Ray and I used to go every Monday to CafĂŠ de Paris, where the last song of the night was â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;La Vie en Roseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. He could be found dancing on the dancefloor alone as the lights would go off and everyone had to leave.

As a live performer sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen her many times but I particularly remember one of her gigs at Area in New York. She went on stage around four in the morning. I woke up just to see her. Those people definitely got value for money. Onstage sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s got such a great personality and sense of humour.

After that first meeting, Grace and I saw each other in New York, or Paris, where we had mutual friends such as Azzedine AlaĂŻa.

Grace used to walk for him, and though we never walked an AlaĂŻa show together, she came to watch his shows when I was starting out. I think Azzedine was drawn to our flair for risk-taking â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a quality we both share â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but also our trust in what he did, and our loyalty. Grace always looked amazing in AlaĂŻa. I remember those catwalk videos from the 1980s; he put a lot of masterpieces on her.

As someone who wears a lot of AlaĂŻa myself, I have definitely been inspired by Grace in the way I dress. I am always saying: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Can you find me that vintage AlaĂŻa dress? â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it looked so beautiful on her.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; She has her own unique and timeless sense of style. She made hoods so beautiful, fashionable and mysterious at the same time, and she showed off the shape of her shaved head when so many women would have been afraid to.

She made it beautiful, like a sculpture.

When I was in Paris, I used to stay at Azzedineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house. He is a very generous man, and because I was so young, he told my mother I could stay with him. It was a very special time. He would be working in his studio, then stop whatever he was doing, come down and cook dinner for us all â&#x20AC;&#x201C; wonderful French and Tunisian food. No matter who was in town, all the girls, Iman to Cindy Crawford, would come for dinner and stay for hours. Artistic people like Julian Schnabel and Duran Duran would show up, and Grace would pop by to get clothes for shoots or whatever and would stay for dinner.

Azzedine is very family-oriented, which is why I have always felt close to him. Many who worked with him, including Grace, saw the way he treated me and considered me his daughter. I call him Papa because he has been so important to my life and career.

Going out with Grace in Paris was always exciting, whether it was to a restaurant or a club like Les Bains Douches. She was

UNLIMITED CAPACITY FOR LOVE Above: Campbell and Jones out on the town in New York in the early 1990s. Left: the pair with Patrick Kelly and Iman, photographed

by Roxanne Lowit at Les Bains Douches in Paris in 1989

always in a great mood; you never knew what was going to happen. She might get up on stage and dance, or sit and talk. She may have had a diva reputation, but that was just part of her persona. The Grace I know is big-hearted, sweet and very friendly. She never takes herself too seriously, and truly enjoys what she does.

During our time in Paris, we used to meet up with another mutual friend, Patrick Kelly, who died in 1990. He was one of the first black American designers, along with Stephen Burrows. Grace was one of his muses; the other was Toukie Smith. I have fond memories of going to one of his last after-show parties with Grace and Iman â&#x20AC;&#x201C; two women of colour who I respect for what they have achieved, for opening doors and making it easier for me.

I look at Grace now and I see a woman of colour who has both strength and sensitivity, who has enjoyed a colourful, mysterious and very joyful life â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and still does. She is very much someone I look up to and admire for what she has achieved in acting, singing and modelling. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done it all. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know if she ever wants to stop.

And why should she?

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PHOTOGRAPHS: Š ALPHA PRESS, ROXANNE LOWIT

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BUNNY SIDE UP Lauren Hutton at the New York Playboy Club in 1963

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PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF PLAYBOY

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When I was 18 years old, I worked as a Playboy bunny for three months at the new Playboy Club in New York. It was the second of Hugh Hefner’s clubs after the Chicago one opened two years earlier in 1960. You had to be brave to be one of the early Playboy bunnies. We were pre-hippie era feminists, forging our way in a new world, learning to take charge of our lives, exploring our sexuality and investigating the newest boundaries of the sexes.

When I look back, my overriding memory is of being in the dressing room with all those bunnies − girls from all over the world. We’d be putting on our make-up, false eyelashes and dark kohl (they gave me chestnut-coloured henna to darken my dark blonde hair to brunette, I guess they thought it was more glamorous). It was like a border crossing − when you were all made-up and looked in the mirror, you suddenly felt very grown-up. We’d all be chatting excitedly about the changes the world was going through. We’d just got the birth-control pill and had grown-up with rock ’n’ roll. That changing room was filled with historical excitement and terror. To some extent, the early Sixties were still like the puritan Fifties in America – the swinging part had yet to begin. My generation was caught between worlds: we had modern minds but our grandparents’ hang-ups, especially about sex.

I was only 10 when Hugh Hefner set up Playboy magazine in 1953, though I remember hearing about it later in high school. I wasn’t hip enough to know what it was.

At 18, I dropped out of university in Tampa and set off for New York. I had this impetus to see the world. I wanted to get to Africa. Back then you couldn’t get a plane to anywhere without going to New York first. I only had $35 to my name, so I needed a

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way to earn more money. When I got to New York I saw this newspaper advertisement for Playboy bunnies for the new club.

Although I had worked in college as an art-class model (you couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t pose nude in those days, you had to wear a bikini), my first thought was that I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t possibly be a bunny because those women were like glamour queens. I had no idea that I wanted to be a model or an actress back then. Of course, I worried about what my Mother would think, but I applied and was invited to a group audition at the new club on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. They asked me to put on these silk bunny costumes, which were very daring. It was Brigitte Bardot time, and bikinis were newly in fashion, but these were cut right up to the hipbone. Inside they were really corsets with a bathing-suit-style bottom and they pulled in your waist to about 18 inches.

I was too young to work the evening shift, so they hired me as a lunch bunny to work during the day.

You were given a costume; most of the girls wanted black ones, but I liked the red and green ones best.

We were given â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;bunny trainingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, which lasted eight hours a day for a week. We also got a manual and sat an exam. They taught you all these moves: the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bunny Stanceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (where you stood on one hip, looking over your shoulder); the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bunny Perchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (when you sat down); and the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bunny Dipâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (a way to bend backwards instead of forwards with your tray when you were serving drinks, so that your breasts didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fall out of your costume â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a sort of reverse curtsy).

There were a lot of bunnies with large breasts, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;muchas papasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;many potatoesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;) as they say in Mexico. One Swedish girl called Elki had these volcanic breasts, and whenever she was near a heavy hitter (a big tipper) she would shoot her arm in the air and call: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bus boy! Bus boy!â&#x20AC;&#x2122; and her right breast would pop out. She thrilled her customers. It was a job that taught you the meaning of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;pussy powerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. The bunnies were paid low wages, but with tips I was earning over $600 a week. (I guess that would be over $3,000 now). Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d shove the notes in the bra cups inside the costume, which were there to put in falsies (I used to stuff them with bunny tails too, because I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have much dĂŠcolletage). I was known for coming to work in my raincoat, well buttoned but with nothing underneath; there was no point getting dressed to get undressed. Each girl had a bunny name to go on a big tag on your hip. My real name was Mary Laurence, but there were already three or four Marys. I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fit Laurence on the tag so I shortened it to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bunny Laurenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, the only other Lauren Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d heard of was Lauren Bacall. I told smarter customers I was named after DH and TE Lawrence.

The club was the shiniest, newest thing in New York, and was frequented by celebrities. One time, I remember Paul Newman came in with Joanne Woodward. In those days, women would really dress up with heels and lots of make-up, but she was just wearing flats and a plain skirt, and was completely unmade-up. The second they got to my table, my manager said to me: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Keep them from leaving. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m calling a photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. As I put my napkin down, I said to them: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sorry to have to tell you this, but if you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want your

picture taken here, you should leave.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; They knew I could be fired for that, so they thanked me and left. But most of the clients were ad men from the agencies on Madison Avenue. It was just like Mad Men. One agency owner was always surrounded by a dozen bunnies. He used to throw around $100 bills at the girls.

I was a war baby, so I never really knew my grandfathers, or my father â&#x20AC;&#x201C; who stayed in Europe when peace came and later died â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but I learnt a lot about men from waiting tables at the Playboy Club.

It was safe, because I could be sassy and flirtatious but I felt protected and empowered by my costume. It was like Boudiccaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s armour. I found a new sexual confidence; I had never felt beautiful before (I was anorexic as a kid). One of my regular clients was a Russian prince from Georgia. I guess he liked my funny lines. We never saw each other outside the club, but when he went on a business trip, he mailed me multi-million-dollar life-insurance documents in case his plane went down. The club taught me that sex was, in some ways, the ultimate power; and it could keep you alive, without having to take anything from you.

That year, Gloria Steinem went undercover as a bunny at the club with us, and wrote a piece called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;A Bunnyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Taleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; for Show magazine; she painted bunnies as exploited victims, but I think that was an over-simplification.

SIXTIES SWING Betty Friedan also brought out The â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Playboyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; covers from August 1962 and May 1964 (left) Feminine Mystique at that time, and it started to change womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attitudes.

I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t read it back then. I already knew I was a feminist; my attitude came from living on the hoof, not from books.

After three months I left the club â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it was always dark inside during the day, and I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t take New York any more. I was saving to go to college, so I went to the Bahamas to work at a casino, and then a jazz club in New Orleans, where I studied. But I had to return to New York. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d read an article in Playboy about LSD in the early Sixties, and that was one reason I wanted to go back â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I took it for the first time in 1964 when it was still legal. I finally turned up in New York again with everything I owned in two suitcases, and slept on a bunny friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s couch. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to go back to waitressing, so I answered an ad for a modelling job at Christian Dior. It paid only $50 a week. There was a lot of snobbery in modelling back then, and I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell anyone about my Playboy past, but my experience helped me in the early days, teaching me how to deflect passes from male photographers and ad agents with a hip one-liner. In 1966, I was spotted by fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who sent me to Richard Avedon. She thought of me as one of a new wave of the baby-boomer generation she saw on the street. I wore tennis shoes, jeans and no bra or make-up (seeing Joanne Woodward at the club taught me that you could be beautiful without a lot of make-up).

It was not until the mid-1970s, when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d become a big model, that I ever got a call from Hugh Hefner. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d got hold of the only nude modelling shots of me, which were unseen and taken when I was young, and he asked if he could publish them in Playboy. I knew it could ruin my career because I was about to sign a historic contract with Revlon, so I asked him not to and he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t; he was a real gent and I was grateful.

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PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF PLAYBOY

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NEW YORK DOLL Diane von Furstenberg in her New York apartment (complete with her Andy Warhol portraits), photographed by Horst P Horst in 1976

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I was very young, just 29, when this photograph [above] was taken. It was 1976 and for a Newsweek cover story. I was wearing a DvF dress and pants â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I really knew how to move my legs! That was my New York apartment, and hanging behind me were the portraits Andy Warhol painted of me two years earlier. Andy was always trying to do portraits of me. It was flattering, a form of recognition. The cover of Newsweek was established recognition; his portraits had the cool factor. Actually, he took the Polaroids for those in that same apartment. I remember it was about one in the morning and we were hanging out. He said: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Let me take a few Polaroids,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; and I said: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Why not?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; He needed a white wall to shoot against, but as you can tell, my apartment didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have much white wall. So we had to go into the kitchen where the white wall was very narrow. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why I put my arm up. It wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fit otherwise. It took me a year before I looked at the painting because I was terrified of what it would look like. Now I actually kind of like it. You have to understand, Andy Warhol made money out of portraits. He was always trying to convince people to do portraits.

People always ask: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;How was it, spending time with Warhol? He must have been so interesting.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But the truth is, Andy didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t talk much. He was very quiet, very much a voyeur. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d either tape-record you or take pictures August 2010 |

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PHOTOGRAPH: HORST P HORST/Š CONDĂ&#x2030; NAST ARCHIVE/Š THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS/CORBIS

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WRAP STAR Above: von Furstenberg, wearing a wrap dress of her own design, with Warhol in 1974. Left: a 1984 Warhol Polaroid of von Furstenberg

him at the Factory for an exhibition he was planning called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Beautyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. He asked a lot of different women to pose, and made us wear this white powder, like kabuki girls.

Actually, when the images came out, I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like them at all. He gave me one, and that was it. Of course, when he died a few years later, I bought everything.

I was in Paris when I heard he was dead. It was on the television. I was so shocked. I had this weird reflex to call him. I picked up the phone and called his number, and I heard his voice on the machine. It was the strangest thing. I flew back to New York to go to the memorial at St Patrickâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cathedral. Afterwards there was a big party, but it felt like an era had come to an end. It was good to be back in New York. Familiar and sad.

Looking back, I think I was always a little intimidated by Andy.

He and I were not intimate friends. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a person who likes intimacy.

I hate small talk. He was not a person you had intimacy with. I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t one of those people like Candy Darling or Edie Sedgwick, who heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d spend hours and hours with. Of course, he loved his mother, which I cherish. He lived with her till the day she died. She used to take him to these Russian churches, and his love of those icons â&#x20AC;&#x201C; those Madonnas â&#x20AC;&#x201C; was to some degree the essence of him.

I think one thing we definitely had in common was that we were very much a part of the Seventies. With that I still very much identify.

Diane von Furstenberg has exclusively designed a new collection of rooms and suites for Claridgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in London (www.claridges.co.uk). A new edition of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Andy Warhol Diariesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (ÂŁ20, Penguin) will be published this autumn.

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PHOTOGRAPHS: Š THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS/CORBIS, GETTY IMAGES

of you, but he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t divulge much of himself. He wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t outgoing; he was very serious.

He didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do any drugs, he let other people do them. In person, he was ghostly. He wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wear bright colours, just grey. But he captured the colour of the society around him. That was his role. He understood our period before anyone else did â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that world of branding, logos, publicity. I can only think what he would have done with the internet, with Facebook and Twitter.

It was fame and beauty and aristocracy that attracted Andy. I was married to my first husband Egon [von Furstenberg] when I moved to New York in 1970. We were European royalty, and looking back now, I can see we were young and glamorous and good-looking and very open. It was a very open time. We thought we had invented freedom, we smoked pot, everything was possible. We were always at nightclubs and Andy was there. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how we met. We saw a lot of him. We hung out. I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a party without inviting him.

By 1976, I was living this American dream. Though I was separated from Egon, I had two children and I was running a big business, with more than 300 people working for me. Being on the cover of Newsweek â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that was a big deal. In many ways I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t equipped to handle the success. Sometimes you have so much exposure that it takes on its own life. But it was exhilarating and fun.

People say my wrap dress was about sex and liberation. It liberated me because it made me financially independent, and I think through my clothes I was establishing a new kind of role model and dialogue for women. But the dress itself wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sexually liberating â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the dress itself could be anything.

Sometimes Andy would compliment me on a dress, saying: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Gee, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; which heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d say over and over. He had an incredible sense of colour, for sure.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, he had been obsessed with fashion.

He started out designing shoes. In the past few years Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been working with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and using his prints on swimwear.

When Studio 54 opened in 1977, Andy and I used to go. It was the greatest nightclub I ever went to. It was big, it was the time of disco, and they would only ever let very beautiful people in. So it was also a great place to pick up. I remember Richard Gere would ride a little motorcycle; he loved his music and wanted to be a big movie star. What you wore depended on where you went before, because Studio 54 was a place where you ended up after a party. If you went to a ball, you went in your ballgown. I used to go in a disco dress with cowboy boots. I wore a lot of cowboy boots to Studio 54.

Andy painted me a second time, in 1984. He asked me to pose for

SNAPSHOT

TERRY O’ N EILL on shooting his friend Elizabeth Taylor

The photographer recalls capturing the moment the silver-screen goddess met the young David Bowie www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

Every bit the million-dollar star, Elizabeth – she was always Elizabeth – lived her life on high drama. When I look back at my photographs of her, it’s always this set that I come back to – a young David Bowie in a nervous embrace, Elizabeth in total command. In the fading light of Hollywood director George Cukor’s home, a pop star meeting a superstar. At Elizabeth’s request, I had arranged the whole thing. An unlikely meeting, an intoxicating pair; the shots were instantly snapped up all over the world.

It was the summer of 1974 and Elizabeth Taylor, at 42, was the biggest star on Earth. I had first clapped eyes on her in person some years before, in 1960, at London’s Pinewood Studios. As a jobbing photographer for The Daily Sketch, I’d snuck on set with a pap from the Daily Express and snared the first pictures of her as Cleopatra. There she was, all jet-black hair and full costume. Stunning, she just floored the set. You knew immediately you were in the presence of a top star – Elizabeth just exuded it.

But then she fell very ill and filming was abandoned for a year, by which time production had been moved to Italy. When I got to know Elizabeth June 2011 |

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PHOTOGRAPH: © TERRY O’NEILL

CIGGY STARDUST Elizabeth Taylor with David Bowie, photographed by Terry O’Neill in Los Angeles in 1974

SNAPSHOT

and Richard Burton better later, I owned up to taking those early pictures. She laughed it off; she couldn’t care less. I think she loved all the drama of it – it boosted her confidence.

We were friends; I would see her at parties and dinners. But she didn’t go out a lot – anywhere she did go, she was mobbed.

Those were heady London days in the Sixties, hanging out with the Beatles and the Stones in the Ad Lib Club, on top of the Prince Charles Cinema on Leicester Square, though it was soft drinks for me. I never had a drink until I was 24. We joked about the future: Mick singing at 40; what ‘real’ jobs we would take on.

But then I moved on to LA, accompanying showbusiness writer Donald Zec, and suddenly met people like Fred Astaire and Shirley MacLaine. All they wanted to talk about were the Beatles and the Stones!

It made me think: ‘Maybe this will all last.’

I had come over to LA using 35mm film, the first person to do it, so I was getting great, candid shots – not the usual stills. The Los Angeles Times’ colour supplement started giving me lots of jobs. Then the film studios employed me for publicity shots, taking Sinatra and Newman on set.

By 1974, I’d been spending a lot of time on the LA circuit, usually in three-month stints, and had rented houses all over – Malibu, Bel Air, Canon Benedict and Cielo Drives, just up from Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. That summer, Elizabeth knew I was in town working with Bowie who was on tour, and she was keen to be introduced. I had worked with him a lot at the beginning of his career in London. By this time, he was starting to get hot in America. I could see it in the crowds at his gigs. He had a good face, and I think Elizabeth was curious about him. There was talk of casting him in her next film, The Blue Bird, which Cukor was directing.

A tea was arranged at Cukor’s white-walled house in Brentwood.

It was the first time I had been there, though he was famous for his

parties; Cukor and Cole Porter were always trying to outdo each other. He was old-school Hollywood, adored by the big female actors – Katharine Hepburn was often a guest in one of his poolside cottages. So you can imagine there was a lot of teasing between him and Elizabeth as we waited for Bowie to arrive for the 2pm meeting.

An hour passed; then two, three. Waiting for Bowie became like Waiting for Godot. His tea was cold and still he hadn’t shown up.

Naturally, I felt responsible. Every half hour or so there would be a call from his secretary, a girl called Cherry Vanilla, to say: ‘We’re on our way; we’re coming.’ They were still at the hotel, of course.

It was Elizabeth who had the reputation REEL LOVE for being late – that was the funny part.

Left: a contact sheet from Taylor and Bowie’s I would have banked money the latecomer shoot with O’Neill. would have been her! She was on the verge Below: Taylor with of going home when – at last – a limo rolled Richard Burton in 1965 up and Bowie stepped out looking the dandy.

He was three and a half hours late.

But Bowie was on drugs at the time and didn’t really know what he was doing. He was 28; it was the height of his cocaine addiction, although it never really showed.

It had been agreed that I would photograph them together, so immediately we went down to the pool and started shooting.

Bowie had always been great to shoot before, coming up with ideas and visual feats. He had a very sharp mind, very intelligent, a really decent guy. But there at Cukor’s house with Elizabeth, he hardly said a word. He was shy, perhaps a bit overcome, and sort of moved around a bit in slow motion.

He was very thin – that was the drugs, too.

The light was going, as it does in LA at about 5.30pm, and I had just one roll of film.

Quick as a shot, Elizabeth turned it on. She took over the whole thing. There she was in his hat, doing all these things with the cigarette… toying with him. Bowie just stood there – dazed, I think, by it all actually – but that was Elizabeth, the great pro.

She could flirt. She’d flash you a look with those fantastic violet eyes and you went to jelly. She was all woman. But she had to trust you. You had to be good at your job to know her, to be accepted. Trust was the thing that bound us all.

And she was loyal – a great friend. Despite their inauspicious beginning, Bowie and Elizabeth became good friends. He didn’t get the part. She must have forgiven him, though, because not so long afterwards he met John Lennon at one of her parties. They wrote ‘Fame’ together, and Bowie got his first US chart-topping hit.

There was never any hardness in Elizabeth, no cynicism. She had a fierce sense of humour. She was a very funny girl, just like one of the lads. Elizabeth had that quality; she got on great with girls and guys, a rare woman who did. I think we all felt we knew so much about her. What a great girl she was. The last of the great icons. Elizabeth lived her life very publicly: her loves, lovers and husbands. She was a glorious, old-fashioned broad, a one-man woman; she just married all the men she went out with.

To see Terry O’Neill’s work, visit www.terryo.co.uk. His prints are available at Chris Beetles gallery (www.chrisbeetles.com).

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She could flirt. She’d flash you a look with those fantastic violet eyes and you went to jelly. She was all woman.

But she had to trust you

SNAPSHOT

David BAILEY on the ultimate

The legendary photographer recalls a heady Mediterranean odyssey in 1973 with the cream of the style world It wasn’t the Famous Five, it was the Famous Six on holiday – Grace Coddington, Helmut Newton, Manolo Blahnik, Anjelica Huston, June Newton and me, all hanging out together for a night at Helmut’s cottage in the tiny village of Ramatuelle in the South of France.

That was where this photograph was taken. I don’t understand why June isn’t in the shot. She was probably off cooking.

It was for a fashion story in the French Riviera and Corsica with Anjelica. I never liked working with models. I preferred ‘real’ women like Jean Shrimpton or Penelope Tree. Anjelica was definitely ‘real’.

I first met her when she was about nine at her father John Huston’s www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

house, off Eaton Square. Then when she was 15, I shot her for the first time for Vogue. She went on to work a lot with Bob Richardson and Avedon. After that, I used her all the time. She was great. She could mimic anyone: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis…

In late summer, we all headed down to the Côte d’Azur. My idea was to do a story inspired by Picasso in the 1950s in the South of France. There’s a great photograph Robert Capa took in 1951 of Picasso and Françoise Gilot walking up the beach, with Picasso holding a parasol for his wife. I wanted to bring in berets and sunglasses and things like that. I spoke to Grace, who was styling the shoot. I’d known Grace for years. She started as a model, but never made an impression on me until she became a fashion editor in 1968.

(She has a great sense of style – not just in the way she dresses, but the way she puts a girl together. I really trust her.)

It was my idea to take Manolo along, though I had to fight for that. I hated using male models and often included make-up artists or hairdressers or designers instead. Manolo was one of my mates (now he’s godfather to my son Fenton). The shoot couldn’t have worked without him, though he was a pain in the neck at the time.

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fashion road trip

RIVIERA REVIEW Grace Coddington, Helmut Newton, Manolo Blahnik, Anjelica Huston and David Bailey, photographed with a remote control by Bailey at Newton’s home in the South of France in 1973

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UNE CHAMBRE POUR DEUX Bailey’s shot of Manolo Blahnik and Anjelica Huston in the Hôtel Negresco in Nice

He complained about everything. ‘Oh Manolo,’ I would say, ‘can you put on a black suit?’ and he’d say: ‘No, I want a white one.’

So if I wanted him to wear a white suit, I’d ask him to put on a black one! Also, I had to do everything first, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. On the beach in Nice, I wanted to bury him in the sand next to Anjelica with just his head showing. In those days, you had to include a picture of an airplane so the airline would pay for the trip.

I couldn’t face another plane shot and a girl standing on the runway with a Louis Vuitton case. So I came up with the idea of sticking an Air France flag into the sand next to Manolo. He was so nervous that I had to bury myself first just to prove it was safe.

We shot a whole load of set-ups at the Hôtel Negresco, including Anjelica and Manolo on the phone in bed together. Then we drove down to Helmut’s cottage that night. It was very relaxed. We were all having fun before dinner and I took a picture using a remote control. (I seem to remember David Hamilton lived up the road, and there are a few pictures of him too.)

I had known Helmut for years. We met working for the French magazine Le Jardin des Modes in the early Sixties. He was great; difficult, but great. We used to spar a lot, but there was no jealousy between us.

Financially, he was pretty mean. He used to send me bills for seven-and-sixpence (about 37p) for prints that I published in my magazine, Ritz. I used to say: ‘Helmut, surely it takes you more trouble just writing the slip.’ But he was a great photographer.

One of the last portraits he did, a few weeks before his death, was of me. It still hangs in my studio. The inscription reads: ‘For Bailey, the World’s Greatest Photographer With Love from a Fan and Debutante, Helmut, 17/10/2003.’ He used to call June his ‘debutante’.

The next day we flew over to Corsica on a stormy plane ride, which for some reason was filled with nuns. When we got off, a man from the tourist board came to meet us. He opened the boot of his car and it was full of guns. It turned out the whole of Corsica had shut down for some sort of revolution. There were shotguns going off all night, and you had to be careful walking on the beach with no shoes on because it was covered in empty shotgun shells.

We didn’t feel under threat, though. We reckoned that if they shot anyone, they’d probably shoot each other and not us.

We stayed a few days. At one point, we drove up into the mountains where the roads were full of hairpin turns. I remember saying to the driver: ‘Oh, there are terrible drivers in Corsica,’ and he said: ‘No, all the terrible ones are dead.’ Then, Manolo said: ‘Anjelica, Anjelica, have you got any Tampax?’ ‘Why do you want a Tampax?’ she said. ‘Because I’ve got a nosebleed.’ So Manolo went up the mountain with two Tampax sticking out of his nose like some kind of vampire.

Later, Anjelica and I went off for a drive together. I remember walking into a bar with her and there were all these Foreign Legion soldiers with square shaven heads. I just knew we had to get out of there quick. As it turned out, Anjelica and I went out together for about a year. After that, and when it was over, we stayed good friends. Now, whenever she comes to England, I see her.

I look back on that trip with fondness. It was pretty successful and great fun, and quite unlike anything else. Now it’s one of my favourite shoots. In many ways, it has also become a moment in fashion.

Photographs from the book ‘Is That So Kid’ by David Bailey (Steidl).

Anjelica and I went for a drive.

I walked into a bar with her and there were these Foreign Legion soldiers. I knew we had to get out of there quick

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SNAPSHOT

Jade JAGGER on her Long Island

rock ’n’ roll childhood

The jewellery designer recalls summers with Warhol , Peter Beard and the Stones www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

I always have a happy feeling when I think back to Montauk. It’s this amazing, wild, remote place, with clean air and long empty beaches, that feels like an island at the end of the world.

Andy Warhol had a house there, and I used to go to stay with my mum [Bianca] and dad. Montauk is at the southern tip of Long Island, and back in the Seventies, it wasn’t a fashionable part of the Hamptons. There was no golf-buggy scene, and that’s why it attracted the fascinating bunch of people who used to congregate there. Aside from mum and dad, there was Peter Beard, Warhol, Halston, Steve Rubell from Studio 54, my paternal grandparents and Thomas Ammann, a Swiss art-dealer friend of my mother’s.

He was a wise man who taught me a lot about modern art when I got older.

Steve Rubell was fun. He was always giving me disco-mix tapes, and he used to have Coca-Cola for breakfast. Halston wasn’t a big fan of walking on the beach. He was more elegant and reserved – not quite so crazy. Most of them are gone now, apart from Peter. He’s a survivor. Peter was Andy’s next-door neighbour, and for a child like me, he seemed like a kind of July 2011 |

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PHOTOGRAPH: © PETER BEARD, COURTESY OF THE PETER BEARD STUDIO/ART + COMMERCE

FORTY LICKS Jade Jagger’s father Mick on Lake Montauk, Long Island, in 1972.

The photograph was taken and embellished

by Peter Beard

modern Tarzan man. His house was a windmill, and he had this snake pit where he kept snakes as pets. There was a lid on it, and he’d taken the venom out of the snakes, but it was still scary – and exciting. When I saw him a few years ago at one of his exhibitions in New York, I remembered that scary/exciting thing.

In 1975, when I was four years old, my parents rented the house from Andy while the band rehearsed for the Black and Blue tour, and I lived there for a year. I went to this hippie progressive school called the Little Red School House. I can’t remember much apart from the fact that we peed in these huge barrels!

When I went home, I used to play with Andy if he was there, but mainly I hung out with Peter. With Andy, I’d do things like art. He encouraged me to express myself in whatever way I thought was right. As a four-year-old, that mainly meant a lot of glitter. Later in life, I developed a taste for his diamond-dust paintings – work he did with industrial diamond powder. It was the glittery thing again.

With Peter, it was more about nature and the big outdoors. We’d go for wild walks along the cliffs collecting stones and shells and artefacts and bits of dead animal. I loved how his photos mixed up things like African elephants and beautiful women, and then how he’d write all over the photos in black ink. I remember watching, fascinated, as he did this. Some people said it wasn’t ink at all – it was his own blood. You never knew with Peter.

I spent a lot of time with Peter during that year in Montauk. I loved his windmill. You’d climb up a ladder and go from one circular room to another.

We went out from New York to stay at Andy’s house in Montauk regularly until I moved back to England at the age of 13 to go to school. Apparently, Andy let me try champagne one afternoon when I was four, but I can’t remember it. Between the champagne and the playing with snakes, I don’t know who was the better

influence on me. I think that both were really good creative forces.

When I was a little older, I taught Andy to play Monopoly and backgammon. In fact, I taught Halston and Peter too. I thought it was funny that they’d got through their lives not being able to play Monopoly and backgammon. I can’t remember where I learned – on the road, I imagine. Andy liked me speaking Spanish to the cleaning ladies best. I’d say: ‘Un vodka tónica para el señor Warhol.’ Andy’s place in Montauk was like a big compound. The main building was a 1930s white clapboard house that smelled NEW YORK, of wood and the sea inside. The floor was NEW YORK covered in old flagstones, and there were Left: Jade Jagger photographed by Peter enormous fireplaces. There were a bunch Beard in Montauk in of guest houses surrounding it like a big 1975. Below: with caravan park, so there were lots of different Beard at a YSL little areas to play in. show in Manhattan When dad was rehearsing with the band the previous year in one of the cottages on the compound, the whole of the peninsular would echo with the sound of the Rolling Stones. Loud bandpractice noise has been a constant in my life!

But it was melodic with guitars and singing – not like high-octane rave music. Dad wrote ‘Memory Motel’ about a hotel in Montauk just down the road from Andy’s house.

There was a lot of revelling in Montauk, but it was relaxed hedonism compared with what was happening in New York.

I mean, we were at the top of a cliff so it was very blowy and you couldn’t do the sophisticated martini-cocktail thing. It was more naturalistic, like dad playing with me on the beach.

Mum loved all the shellfish, and we’d go to crab shacks together and take away steamed soft-shell clams, or ‘steamers’ as they call them there. I had a great eighth birthday party, when mum brought a piñata.

That’s her South American influence. You get blindfolded and smash the piñata with a stick until sweets fall out.

Sometimes you’d see whales, and everyone would get really excited. No matter how glamorous people think you are, everyone feels natural inside when they see something amazing like that.

But Peter was the main jungle man. He was this wild hippie who really enjoyed life. I can’t remember a wife, but he was always surrounded by Amazonian women whose photos he was taking.

I remember him taking pictures of mum, but it didn’t seem a big deal at the time. I thought all mums wore Yves Saint Laurent dresses and did that. There’s a photo of me with Peter in my butterfly jumper, and another that Bob Colacello took of me climbing through the roof of a limousine at old Montauk airport, after I’d spent the weekend drawing with Andy Warhol – that was all I’d known, so it’s hard to imagine life any different to what it was.

I now realise it was an amazing childhood with inspiration and encouragement flying around. I was hanging about some of the most creative people in the world, added to which I was an only child, so I developed this deep need for stimulation. I suppose some mollycoddling went on, but I didn’t realise that until I got older.

The whole of the peninsula would echo with the sound of the Rolling Stones. Loud band-practice music has been a constant of my life

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PHOTOGRAPHS: © PETER BEARD, COURTESY OF THE PETER BEARD STUDIO/ART + COMMERCE, RON GALELLA/GETTY IMAGES

SNAPSHOT

TRIBUTE MUSE HOUSE Lucian and Bella Freud, photographed in his studio in about 1985 by Bruce Bernard

PHOTOGRAPH: BRUCE BERNARD Š ESTATE OF BRUCE BERNARD

% 1RPRZOR_ & ÂŻ 7bYf

Following the deaths of both her parents, BELLA FREUD reflects on special moments with her artist father, and her grief at her double loss

I

n 2008, Bella Freud interviewed her father Lucian for Bazaar. After the death of the legendary artist in July this year, she agreed to write again, not only about losing her father, but about her mother Bernadine, who also, tragically, died in July. Here, she recalls their final days, and we reproduce the conversation between Lucian and Bella.

My father died on 20 July. His death was expected and our family and closest friends had been caring for him as he lay in bed in the room that he loved, with a huge Bacon and some Auerbachs on the wall and the buddleia from the garden tall enough to be waving about outside the second-floor window. Expected or not, www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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his death was a dreaded separation. A month before he died, I brought my mother Bernardine to visit him. They had split when I was two years old and when my sister Esther was just born, but they had become friends in recent years. Two weeks after her visit to my father, my mother, 20 years younger than him, who had stayed with us on that trip to London, checked herself into Ipswich hospital, where she was diagnosed with advanced cancer. She died two weeks later. There had been no warning to us. When Esther asked her if she knew she was going to die, she said with calm: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I knew there was something wrong, but this is unimaginable.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; My grief takes the awful form that, each time I think of the death of one parent, I want to talk to the other about it.

After Mumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death, Esther, my younger half-brother Noah and I went to her house and found a rare photograph of our parents together. They are sitting in a restaurant in the South of France, in Nice around 1960, eating lobster. Mum, beautiful, aged about 17, wearing a gingham dress; my father in an open shirt, clearly spellbinding her with his conversation, his whole body focused on her.

A few years after they split up, my mother, sister and I spent two years travelling around Morocco (a time described by Esther in her book Hideous Kinky. In the film made from it, my mother is played

by Kate Winslet). When we returned, we settled in genteel East Sussex. When I was 16, I moved to London to study for my A levels, and I also started sitting for my father. I would go round to

TRIBUTE

BF When you decided to stop drawing, did you miss it?

LF No, I used to draw on the canvas with charcoal to map out the

painting. I still do, but I didn’t fill books with drawings.

BF I was interested in this one drawing of the [winged] galloping horses – did you draw those from life?

LF No, it is made up. Obviously they didn’t have wings.

BF Of course! [laughs].

LF There’s another horse drawing (Horse Lover) that was from The Freud-Schuster Book. I was very friendly with Stephen Spender, the poet. We made up a joke about an imaginary firm called Freud BARING ALL Above: ‘Pregnant Girl’ (1961) by Lucian Freud, a portrait of Bella’s mother when and Schuster (Schuster was Stephen’s mother’s maiden name). We she was expecting her. Above right: Lucian with Bella in his studio in about 1985 filled the book with rhyming verses of his and drawings of mine. One of the maxims was in German: ‘Von Freud und Schuster, Freud ist der freudigster aber der grosster Gauner ist Schuster.’ his flat about three times a week and we [‘Of Freud and Schuster, Freud is the most would have some tea and then work for an joyful but Schuster is the biggest rascal.’] hour, have a break then continue through When I lived in the attic flat above my the evening, sometimes slipping out for parents at 2 Maresfield Gardens, Stephen dinner then returning to the painting until /299. 3?2B1 moved in. Then his girlfriend Natasha, who at least 1am. (Once, I asked him how many he later married, moved in too, and she hours he slept for and he said he didn’t assumed I was having an affair with Stephen and was very unpleasreally sleep much, maybe one or two hours.) As soon as I arrived, ant to me and tore up my work and smashed things up. She then I left my anxieties (being a teenager, they were very pressing) at the had the locks changed, so I was turned out. I moved to Paddington. door and relished the time spent with my father.

I saw my father regularly, though not often, when I was a child.

BF Who’s the boy in the blue-and-red jacket you drew in 1945?

Sitting for him was like finally meeting the person I had always loved, LF That was Charlie, who I sort of brought up. He was one of the and more so each time I saw him. He was so funny and interesting; children of my Irish neighbours in Delamere Terrace, Paddington. he would tell me the most surprising anecdotes of people I was curious BF What happened to him? about, like Cocteau, Picasso or old-time gangsters and gamblers.

LF Well I sort of kept him (for far too long) until he was over 40; In 2008, I asked him some questions for Bazaar while we sat lookuntil he died. I did a lot of pictures of him. ing through his then new book Lucian Freud on Paper, a collection BF I have always loved the picture of the girl in the ocelot coat. of his drawings and etchings from his earliest to his latest works.

Who was that?

LF That was my first serious girlfriend, much older than me, called Lorna Wishart. She was the mother of [artist] Michael Wishart.

Bella Freud I remember you saying you weren’t good at drawing; I assumed you were right, as I believed everything you said. Looking BF I remember you telling me about when you met Picasso with at this book, your drawings were absolutely brilliant.

Caroline Blackwood [Freud’s second wife], that you went to his house and he whisked her off for a tour of the house and she came Lucian Freud I must have felt it when I said it, but I don’t remember back with little drawings on her nails. How did that happen? Was saying that. that the first time you’d met him?

BF I was just reading Sebastian Smee’s introduction to the book, about how people drew conclusions about your work because you LF No, I’d met him before because I was friendly with two nephews were so good at drawing. of his, one called Javier Vilato; they were both painters. Javier used to take me round there, so I took Caroline. He said to her: ‘I’ll show LF Yes, that’s why I stopped drawing [in the early 1950s]. I got tired you some pictures,’ and took her away. of people going on about my drawing – ‘you can see he can draw from looking at his painting’. It sounds childish, but it annoyed me.

BF It’s a very clever manoeuvre. Was he friendly to you?

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PHOTOGRAPHS: BRUCE BERNARD © ESTATE OF BRUCE BERNARD, © LUCIAN FREUD COURTESY LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE. PHOTOGRAPH: JOHN RIDDY

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TRIBUTE

BF I remember one drawing, but I have never seen the other [in the book] before.

He looks so good-natured.

LF Well, he was.

BF Was he always sympathetic to you wanting to be a painter?

LF He drew very well. He loathed my work; he wanted to be a painter and was discouraged, made to become an architect. Well, not â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;madeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; toâ&#x20AC;Ś BF Oh, really? How did you know he loathed your work, did he tell you?

LF Well, it was fairly clear.

BF So he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t say very much about it?

LF Yes, in a hostile kind of way. He told me LF He didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to see it. to look around the studio and sort out the BF Did that put you off him? paintings I liked best. I showed him what Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d LF No, I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;onâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; him. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t chosen and he said: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m glad you like those know him well. because theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re among the things I did BF Was that because he was away a lot? last week.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; There were pictures stacked LF No, I was away.

9B06.; 3?2B1 everywhere â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to my amazement, one was BF You were at school. Did you worry about a Cranach. earning money, as painting is famously difficult to earn money from?

BF How incredible! Did you ever show him any of your work?

LF I had a small income from my grandfather [Sigmund Freud]â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s royalties, which helped me a lot. But I was always in debt.

LF Yes, that was probably stupid.

BF What was his response? Was he competitive?

BF Did you start selling paintings early on?

LF No, he was 40 years older. Polite contempt, really.

LF For very little, I think. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like friends of my parents buying things â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I felt they would never be seen again. I liked the idea of BF I was looking at the picture of Pauline Tennant [A Girl, 1946]. someone actually interested in art [buying them].

She was so beautiful. What was she like?

LF I was very attached to her, though she was mean-spirited. Her BF How old were you when you had your first show? mother was a famous comedian called Hermione Baddeley.

LF It was in 1944, so I was 21.

BF I like the way it is quite fashion-y, the drawing makes the clothes BF You never go to your own openings. Did you go to the first one? look beautiful, and the hair is lovely.

LF Yes, and all my relations were there. [Laughs] Great aunts, that kind of thing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; awful. I thought: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll go and see whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interLF She very much minded about all that. When I had money ested in my work,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; thenâ&#x20AC;Ś â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Oh, no!â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I sometimes used to buy her clothes. I used to think it was really exciting going into womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clothes shops.

BF Is that what put you off openings for life?

BF Was she interested in art?

LF Yes. LF No, money, but she liked the idea of fame. There is a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Lucian Freud on Paperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is published by Jonathan Cape, priced ÂŁ50. picture of my father.

To see more images from the book, visit harpersbazaar.co.uk.

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PHOTOGRAPHS: BRUCE BERNARD Š ESTATE OF BRUCE BERNARD, PRIVATE COLLECTION/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

BALANCING ACT Left: Lucian and Bella in the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio in about 1985. Below: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Bellaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (1981) by Lucian Freud

SNAPSHOT STAR MEN David Bowie and Mick Jagger at the party to celebrate the ‘retirement’ of Ziggy Stardust, at the Café Royal in 1973

Angie Bowie on ‘N

farewell party

David Bowie’s first wife recalls the night some of the biggest stars of the Seventies paid homage to the flamboyant singer and his glam-rock creation Ziggy Stardust at the Café Royal www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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PHOTOGRAPH: © MICK ROCK

Ziggy’s

ot only is this the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show we’ll ever do,’ said my then-husband David Bowie from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon. It wasn’t David who was retiring, of course, it was his alter ego Ziggy Stardust. There was a hush, a mighty intake of breath from the audience as what he’d said sank in. Why was he killing off Ziggy? Was he sick?

Was he dying? Why was it the last show? The audience was bewildered. Showbiz – why must it be fraught with such drama? But he wouldn’t go without a send-off. We had planned a ‘retirement’ party after the show – Mick Jagger and Bianca, Paul and Linda McCartney, Lou Reed and Barbra Streisand were all there, at the Café Royal in the centre of London, then the most glamorous city in the world.

It was July 1973 and the last gig of our 10-month tour – across America, Japan, everywhere. David had created his spaceman persona for his 1972 concept album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, the story of an intergalactic messenger who was a popstar and would right the wrongs he saw by singing

SNAPSHOT about them. The Spiders From Mars were his band – Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey.

The concept was really different to anything that had come before – it was the beginning of glam rock. On tour, I paid particular attention to the wardrobe onstage and off. The boys paired shiny velour bomber jackets with Stirling Cooper trousers like suits, and each came in a different colour – blue, pink and gold, and David’s was always a little patterned. They wore platform boots and make-up and had their hair very well coiffed. I was never part of the band, but I did play a part in the look of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

David and I had met in 1968 and we married in March 1970.

He was hugely creative, but didn’t know his ass from his elbow as far as getting what he wanted business-wise, so I sorted that out.

I also got involved creatively, dressing the stage, improving the lighting and mixing the live sound so it was as good as the records, along with doing the press and publicity.

Once the idea of Ziggy Stardust and the album had been promoted, David felt it was time to retire the character in preparation for the next album. There had also been tensions on tour when the band members had tried to get David to sit down with their manager Tony DeFries and give them a raise. David took this as a personal slight and decided to replace them.

The last show in Hammersmith was incredible, though. The venue was a favourite, so it is not surprising that we were all thrilled to be back in ‘The Smoke’ and performing for the fans who had supported us from the beginning. It turned into the performance of a lifetime when Jeff Beck, Mick Ronson’s idol, joined the band and David onstage and played them out and into the encores with ‘White Light/White Heat’. But since David was not just retiring the Ziggy character, but the band as well, the retirement party afterwards was bittersweet for the boys.

At first I’d planned to hold the party at our house in Oakley Street, in Chelsea. I thought it was just going to be an end-oftour wrap party, but about a week before the final show, David said to me it might be larger. I thought: ‘Why not do something special and book the Café Royal?’ I was relieved that the house wouldn’t be trashed!

On the day of the party, I went to my hairdresser, Ricci Burns, and had my coiffure done. He wasn’t so much a showbiz celebrity hairdresser – he mainly looked after politicians and industrialists.

Also, we needed a party suit for David and an outfit for me. We went to Freddie Burretti, who was a designer whom we’d first met at Sombrero, a gay club on Kensington High Street. Before the tour, I had moved him into our house and he made the stage costumes.

He was tall, gorgeous and funny as hell. He told me that he had a dress and overcoat for me to wear to the party and a suit for David.

I had great hopes for the fabric and thought it would look amazing.

Well, David’s did, but not my outfit. The minute I tried on that mintgreen and brown dress with a green overcoat, I didn’t care for it at all.

I told him: ‘I can’t stand it. Cut the arms off. Do something!’ But David said it looked fabulous and insisted that we both wear Freddie outfits. So that was that. There was a Norman Hartnell streak to Freddie – given the opportunity, he would have dressed me up as the Queen in a goddamn hat – and it had to be curbed. But that was

I’M ONLY DANCING Angie Bowie and Bianca Jagger at the party. Below left: Ringo Starr, Lulu and Angie and David Bowie

the only thing he made for me that I didn’t like. After that he was really careful.

I thought that holding the party at the Café Royal would bring out the celebrities.

It certainly did that. The Café Royal wasn’t really cool, but a lot of venues need rejuvenating from time to time and bringing out of the Dark Ages, and I think it’s fun to get people to go and to realise how fabulous these places are. About 200 people turned up that evening, and the guest list included Paul and Linda McCartney, Keith Moon, Lulu, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Spike Milligan and Britt Ekland. It was a great compliment that the party was so well attended. As well as the usual faces from the London scene, there was some international flavour – Cat Stevens, Lou Reed, Barbra Streisand and Elliot Gould, Sonny Bono… We even had live music from Dr John. And, yes, they all wanted to tell David and the boys how brilliant they were – so that was fine.

I don’t remember much from the party itself, but deals were done and promises to work together began at that party, so despite all the tensions on tour, the party was a good thing! David posed for photos with Ringo Starr and Cat Stevens, and chatted to Mick Jagger and Lulu; Lou Reed invited us to his next recording session; Bianca and I danced together to ‘ Honky Tonk Women’ and one woman even exposed her breasts to Barbra Streisand, or so I heard.

We didn’t leave for our hotel on Hyde Park until about 5.30am.

David and I stayed together for another few years before we got divorced in 1980. As for Ziggy Stardust, the character still has a huge impact today, inspires musicians and artists and remains one of the most colourful alter egos in rock. I can’t help thinking back to that party – four years after David and I began our working partnership and we had London at our feet. For that night at least, in the city of glamour and lights, the stars kept shining and we felt justified in feeling the world was our oyster. We would swallow it in one gulp.

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PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY IMAGES, © MICK ROCK

David chatted to Mick Jagger, Lou Reed invited us to his next recording session, and one woman exposed her breasts to Barbra Streisand

TRIBUTE

Eve E Arnold

LIGHTS, CAMERA Isabella Rossellini, captured learning her lines by Eve Arnold in 1985

PHOTOGRAPH: EVE ARNOLD/MAGNUM PHOTOS

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI on her close friendship with Arnold

remembered by

Isabella Rossellini & Terence Stamp Photographic genius Eve Arnold, 21 April 1912 to 4 January 2012

ve was a wonderful person. There was an enormous warmth and openness about her. You could tell her anything. And that tenderness showed in her photographs.

We were very good friends from the moment we met. It was 1984, on the set of White Nights, my first American film, alongside Misha [Mikhail] Baryshnikov, Gregory Hines and Helen Mirren, who met her director husband Taylor Hackford on that film. Taylor loved photography, and had asked Eve to come on the set.

I already knew of Eve as one of the first women photographers at Magnum, alongside Robert Capa, Henri Carter-Bresson and David ‘Chim’ Seymour, who were all friends of the family. But it wasn’t only that she was one of the first women, it was what she photographed: fashion models in Harlem, women in childbirth, harems in Dubai, housewives preparing dinner at home. She had a woman’s eye, and she brought a dignity to all her subjects.

Of course, she also shot some of the greatest movie actresses. Her photos of Marilyn Monroe are particularly wonderful because you can see how Eve created this atmosphere of trust, which she also created with me and I’m sure with Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford too. She wasn’t there to catch you out like a paparazzo. There was always a kindness and humour. One of the most extraordinary photographs of Monroe is of her in the bathroom fixing her hair and she hasn’t quite pulled down her skirt. There’s an intimacy and warmth to that moment, the kind that women share when they’re in the bathroom.

TRIBUTE

POSTER GIRLS Arnold’s images, clockwise from left: Marilyn Monroe in 1960. Joan Crawford in 1959.

Terence Stamp and Jean Shrimpton in 1965

so that one strap would come off in the middle, to break the solemnity. She was a clown, always playful, which wasn’t something I’d have known if Eve hadn’t told me.

After White Nights, Eve and I worked together a number of times, though not specifically on a film. She became good friends with David Lynch, and I’m sure she came to Los Angeles to shoot us working together.

Whenever she came to New York, we had dinner or went to the movies. We spent Christmas together and went on holidays to Florida. She would take her camera and might take a picture, but she wasn’t on assignment. Unlike Andy Warhol, she wasn’t compulsively taking photos.

Occasionally, a magazine would commission her to photograph me with my children, who were happy to have her around – she was like a benevolent grandma.

I also visited her in London, at her beautiful flat near the Connaught, where she gave you a dinner of potato, caviar and vodka, very simple but refined. You had to walk up four flights and we were amazed she could do it at 80 with her camera and equipment. You’d enter a beautiful living room, full of photographs, books and personal things from her travels. She had photographed the world – China, Russia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia – and more than the strains of being a woman in a male-dominated field, she talked about the difficulties of leaving her family, saying it had been a battle to leave her son and how she had tried her best. A year ago, I visited her at her nursing home in London. She was smaller than ever, like a little doll sitting up in bed. She didn’t recognise me.

She had been such an active woman and now she was so frail; it wasn’t the same Eve we had known.

In my entrance hall, I have a photo of Eve by Brigitte Lacombe.

Brigitte gave it to me 10 years ago because she knew how much I loved Eve. The other day, Brigitte sent me a little note by email, saying: ‘I was thinking of you when I read about Eve.’ I replied: ‘Oh Brigitte, when I found out that Eve had passed away, I kissed that print many times.’ Eve was 99 years old when she died. With her dies an entire century of memories. AS TOLD TO AJESH PATALAY

In person, Eve was tiny. She had an incredibly deep voice, and we could never tell how old she was. She had grey hair in a chignon and was very wrinkled, but with beautiful, expressive wrinkles.

I loved the way she dressed, simple but incredibly elegant: often in trousers, maybe a Chinese shirt and then a beautiful Indian shawl.

On the set of White Nights, she used to photograph barefoot, which I thought had special significance. She went about like Tinkerbell. You wouldn’t know she was there. If you noticed her out of the corner of your eye, she’d know immediately and put down her camera. She always wanted to photograph you when you were unaware of her lens. Years later, I saw her photographing in shoes and asked her why she had been barefoot on White Nights. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I didn’t have a very good pair of shoes.’ I had made a whole mythology out of it, but Eve was just being practical.

On White Nights, Eve not only became a good friend; she became my guardian angel. It was my first film, so I was very nervous. I also had a love scene with Gregory Hines, which I found particularly embarrassing. Eve asked to come on set for that scene. Later, I asked her why, and she TERENCE STAMP said: ‘Because I knew you were going to be very vulnerable.’ I felt her kind eyes watchI had been photographed by Eve during ing over me, so that if the guys pushed me the making of Modesty Blaise in 1965.

Later that year, Jean Shrimpton and in any way I didn’t want to be pushed, I moved in together in Mayfair. Eve I knew I could look to her for guidance. happened to live up the road and would Everyone loved having Eve around, and drop in. She always had a camera, but we used to ask her about everything. She didn’t always use it. This one evening she knew people from all walks of life: Malcolm came by when we were getting ready to go out. Jean was a top model but I feel she X, peasants in China, Mother Teresa, Indira wasn’t used to being photographed as her.

Gandhi. I remember her talking about Joan I think Eve understood that. She did this Crawford, who wanted Eve to photograph brilliant thing. She said: ‘Why don’t you exactly what it took for her to live up to her stand in front of me as though I were the iconic image: the massage, the girdles, the mirror?’ It was so natural. It wasn’t this supermodel and this actor. It was two hours of make-up. The photos were people, obviously in love, getting ready. unusual for Eve, but extraordinary.

That’s what made the picture wonderful.

I always wanted Eve to write down her When I worked with Angelina Jolie, stories, which were wonderful. She once I remember she pointed this picture out. told me about Monroe attending a press It must have made her laugh – I guess we were a sort of Brad and Angelina of our day. conference. Monroe had modified her dress

PHOTOGRAPHS: EVE ARNOLD/MAGNUM PHOTOS

on his favourite Arnold shot

TRIBUTE

Lillian Bassman

remembered by PhilipTreacy, CarmenDell’Orefice,Sarah Moon, David Bailey and Martin Harrison Photographer Lillian Bassman, 15 June 1917 to 13 February 2012 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

The Harper’s Bazaar legacy of photographer Lillian Bassman, who died this February, stretches back to the 1940s when, as a young protégée of renowned art director Alexey Brodovitch, she joined the magazine as his assistant and was made art director of Junior Bazaar five years later. Her singular fashion shoots cast statuesque models in an intimate interplay of ethereal light and shadow. She abandoned fashion photography in 1969, and shortly after disposed of her work, which was rediscovered and reprinted in the late 1990s to newfound acclaim. Here her colleagues and admirers pay tribute.

Milliner PHILIP TREACY

L

‘

illian Bassman was the quintessential hat photographer. Her work was original, instantly recognisable. She loved hats, and they were integral to some of her most famous images. From the 1940s to the 1990s, she saw hat designs chronicle the times, developing from a conformist accessory to one of rebellion. I had been a fan of Lillian’s work since college, so I was not May 2012 |

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PHOTOGRAPH: © LILLIAN BASSMAN, COURTESY OF BASSMAN HIMMEL STUDIO AND STALEY-WISE GALLERY, NEW YORK

MAGIC EYE ‘Krönung des Chic’ (1998) photographed by Lillian Bassman, featuring a ‘man in the moon’ hat designed by Philip Treacy

TRIBUTE

Model CARMEN DELL’OREFICE

‘Lillian was an authentic artist. We worked together throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She was very impressionistic as a photographer. She looked very carefully at how light fell on the object, the clothes and the model; how to express a feeling, an attitude, the image in her head. But she was also a wonderful visual architect. Her pictures weren’t caught in motion; you weren’t jumping around as one would with Avedon.

Of course, as one of her models, you had to have stamina to be able to stand long enough. She would have you in a position for an exposure that might last two or three seconds. Her pictures may look fluid, but you would have been there for hours.

‘On one shoot in 1953, we were pressed for time. Her secretary was hurrying us to get the picture done, because Lillian was due at the hospital to have a Caesarean. That was her daughter, Lizzie, who ended up being a playmate of my daughter. Lillian and I were great

PHOTOGRAPHS: © LILLIAN BASSMAN, COURTESY OF BASSMAN HIMMEL STUDIO AND STALEY-WISE GALLERY, NEW YORK

only honoured but also very lucky when, in 1998, at the age of 81, she said she wanted to photograph my hats.

‘When she telephoned my office, a blissfully ignorant intern answered, and not knowing who she was, asked her to send in some work. This was Lillian Bassman! Mortified, I sent every hat and did everything under the sun I possibly could by way of apology.

‘The shoot was for German Vogue with Jade Parfitt and Stella Tennant. It’s the opening image of Jade and the Hollywoodspotlight-eye man-in-the-moon hat that stands out to me. Lillian’s pictures shaped a mood, a fantasy, and showed off that sharply honed technique. Her photography, like Irving Penn’s, was based on simplicity, but it was borne in a completely different way – ghostly, textured images of fantastical photography.’

SPLASH DANCE Clockwise from left: Bassman working in her studio in the early 1950s. A shot from one of her fashion spreads in 1964. The 1994 updated version of her 1959 shot of Carmen dell’Orefice

friends. As a woman, she was warm and hospitable and made the best big vats of chilli. But she was also sexy, cerebral, with a soft, mellifluous voice. She had a quiet way of speaking, half-closing her eyes, as though she were always looking through a lens in her mind.’

Photographer and film-maker SARAH MOON

‘Lillian was an extraordinary woman who turned models into stars, heroines. In her photographs, they were more women than models. She worked at a time when most photographers were male. Avedon made her take her first photograph in 1946. He lent her his camera and studio and just said, “Go.” Her vision was different to that of male photographers. She expressed elegance and femininity, as well as an incredible strength and power.

‘I made a documentary called There’s Something… About Lillian in 2001 and filmed her in her New York studio; she was 84 and still working. It was the first time I’d met her, and I was a little nervous because I admired her so much. When I arrived, she was mid-shoot.

The session was very intense – it was like a silent stage. She didn’t talk a lot. She directed the model with her very beautiful hands,

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‘She had a quiet way of speaking, half-closing her eyes, as though she were always looking through a lens in her mind’

TRIBUTE

SHARP FOCUS Clockwise from right: a series of unpublished 1949 cover layouts for US Bazaar. A 1954 Bazaar shoot. Bassman and husband Paul Himmel in Massachusetts in the 1940s

Fashion curator and historian

dressed in black and white with white hair. There was an incredible complicity – it was like an extraordinary collaboration. There were no hair or make-up artists; she did it herself. She and the model would work together on gestures and body language. It was like choreography. Lillian loved ballet. For one woman photographer watching another, it was very empowering.’

Photographer DAVID BAILEY

‘She and the model would work together on gestures and body language.

It was like choreography.

Lillian loved ballet’

‘I was about 20 when I became aware of Lillian Bassman, having seen her pictures in Harper’s Bazaar in America. But it wasn’t until 12 years ago that we met. We had tea and she was completely charming. She knew what was going on, for sure. I spent half a day at her Upper East Side converted fire station, like those a lot of photographers and artists lived in; we talked about her life and her favourite models.

‘Hers was a typical New York story: she ran with the good people, was friends with Richard Avedon and Alexey Brodovitch, probably one of the best art directors ever. She was in the right crowd. She and her husband, Paul Himmel, an intellectual who also took pictures, were a very aware couple. Lillian Bassman wasn’t a revolutionary like Avedon or Klein, but extremely intelligent; she was no fool. She was a really, really good fashion photographer and probably one of the best women fashion photographers there’s ever been.’

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‘Lillian Bassman had innate style: you see it in pictures when she was young; and even in her nineties, she had a rare look.

I remember Bill Klein, having only just met her in 1994 at her exhibition at the Louvre, after she republished her work, being gobsmacked. (He was at Vogue while Lillian was at Bazaar, so they never met.) “I always imagined a big Bauhaus lady,” he said – not this small, lively but somewhat frail lady, now in her eighties.

Even at that age, she retained an incredible work ethic. I suppose it goes back to her work with Brodovitch (“Surprise me,” he would say), Constructivism and her roots, as the bohemian daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.

‘Lillian and I became friends from our first meeting in 1984 (I was curating a fashion-photography exhibition at the V&A); her place became my home in New York. My room was on the top floor, across from the darkroom, from which in 1991 emerged bags of bundled negatives from her work for Bazaar and Junior Bazaar.

Quite by chance, we rediscovered together, after 30 years, this fraction of the lost work she had thrown away.

‘The art historian in me was freaking out, but she was absolutely indifferent. Then she found a way to be interested again.

She reprinted them in a radically re-envisaged way – the way she would rather have done, had it not been for commercial imperatives, when she first took them for Bazaar. Suddenly her pictures were sought after again. Her work spoke of empathy, a collaborative spirit shared with her models. That is the essence that she conveyed, and even intensified with her later revisions.

It continues to resonate for us today.’ www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPHS: © LILLIAN BASSMAN, COURTESY OF BASSMAN HIMMEL STUDIO AND STALEY-WISE GALLERY, NEW YORK

MARTIN HARRISON

FIRST PERSON

NaomiontheWolf

OCCUPIED TIMES Naomi Wolf being arrested outside a ‘Huffington Post’ awards ceremony in Manhattan in October 2011

Occupy protests

I

t still seems impossible that it really happened – even as I write this at 5am, after a restless night, waiting to go to criminal court to be arraigned for the subversive act of standing on a pavement peacefully, in evening dress, obeying the law.

On 18 October of last year, I was with my partner, film producer Avram Ludwig, on the pavement outside an event to which we had been invited – the Huffington Post Game Changers awards ceremony, at a venue on Hudson Street in downtown Manhattan. It was a high-profile, glamorous event, held in honour of the year’s best innovators and visionaries, and attended by guests including Arianna Huffington and Robert Kennedy Jnr. We were dressed for a formal evening, me in a calf-length dress and heels.

A crowd of Occupy Wall Street protesters were peacefully picketing outside the event. I asked them what their concerns were, and they had a list of issues ranging from advocating higher taxes on

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millionaires to ending the practice of ‘fracking’, a polluting method of extracting natural gas. I said I would pass the issues on to New York Governor Cuomo, who was to be arriving later, and we went inside. By the time we emerged later, the police had pushed the protesters across two lines of traffic, to the far side of the street. The police repeatedly referred to a permit, held by the awards’ organisers, which forbade protesters from being near the event. I knew no permit in Manhattan existed that could grant that kind of control; so I asked around, got confirmation that lawful protest was still permitted, and led a dozen people back to the pavement outside the event, where we walked in single file, perfectly obeying the law.

Within minutes, seemingly out of nowhere, several more officers arrived – these ones more imposing and apparently more senior, wearing white. They surrounded us. One officer stood face to face with me, about four feet away, and said – through a megaphone, which the protesters had been forbidden to use – ‘Will you back down?’ I admit I was scared. The officer was large and intimidating, and I found the brutality of his form of communication shocking.

But I said, calmly: ‘Officer, I don’t understand. I checked the April 2012 |

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PHOTOGRAPH: CURTIS MEANS/ACE PICTURES

The feminist author recalls her arrest in New York during Occupy Wall Street, and considers the impact the movement has had on protest

FIRST PERSON

FEMININE THINKING Author of ‘The Beauty Myth’ Naomi Wolf in 1997

permit…’ He stared at me with hostility, and shouted: ‘Will you get out of my way?’ – and I froze. I had been taught from a young age to treat police respectfully, but I could not believe that an American police officer was ordering me to do something I knew to be wrong.

My family understands protest. My great-grandmother escaped from Tsarist Russia and, like a lot of immigrants who escape repressive countries, her daughter – my grandmother – believed you show your love for America by exercising your First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Fay Goleman was a lovely woman, tiny at 4’10”, and a professor in sociology. She marched – peacefully – for every issue of her day, for civil rights in the 1950s and against nuclear warfare in the 1960s. She was always ladylike, so before every march she would put on one of her tweed suits with white gloves and high heels, and have her hair done. She dressed up because taking part in a march was, she believed, an occasion when you were honouring your country. It was an expression of patriotism. She always said to me: ‘Protest is how you pay your civic rent.’

During the Vietnam War, my mother, an anthropologist and writer, marched for peace with me in my stroller. As an adult, I have taken part in many protests, from the abortion marches in Washington DC during the 1990s to the Gay Freedom Marches that take place right outside my door. Similarly, many of my books have been part of what I call ‘the advocacy tradition’, which aims to get people to think and thus act differently, to change things. I was even arrested – once – in London in 1985, during my years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. A few of us sat outside the US Embassy protesting American policy in El Salvador.

A couple of ‘bobbies’ showed up, gently handcuffed us and politely escorted us to cells. It was a civilised experience on both sides.

There are times, as in London all those years ago, when you want to break the law, in an act of civil disobedience, because you feel so strongly for a cause. But last October wasn’t one of them. I just knew that what he was asking me to do was based on force, not on the law.

I soon felt my hands being pulled behind my back: we were

surrounded by police, and handcuffs were being placed on us. We were bundled into a police van, escorted by two officers. I shouted: ‘Can I have a lawyer meet me?’

One of the officers – wrongly – said no.

Hearing that was a shock. At the Seventh Precinct, our possessions were taken, we were not read our rights, and we were placed in two side-by-side cells. Mine was smeared with blood or faeces. In a state of emergency like that, you feel yourself getting very still and calm. I sat quietly, under surveillance via a camera pointed directly at me, thinking that I shouldn’t do anything stupid and hoping that I wouldn’t break down. After a half-hour wait, a sergeant explained that if they let me go and ‘I went to join my friends the protesters’, they could arrest me again. Avram and I were given summonses to appear in court to face disorderly conduct charges for allegedly refusing to comply with a lawful order to disperse.

I felt shaken afterwards and I still can’t escape the disturbing after-effects of being bullied by my own city’s police. The fact that other people have been so supportive has been very moving. I get drivers leaning out of their trucks and giving me a thumbs-up. I know it’s not about me personally. Other protesters experienced worse. It’s more about every person out there who knows that it could be them.

This is a global phenomenon. People around the world are ‘waking up’ to the need to oversee government, to identify fraud and corruption at the highest levels. As a result, we are seeing a wave of crackdowns and intimidation from the authorities worse than we could have imagined just a few years ago. And I think in my country, as in Britain, it is going to get worse before it gets better.

But the Occupy movement has been brilliant. Unlike the approach adopted during the 1960s civil-rights movement, those taking part in these protests don’t have to all believe in the same things. Many people agree that we have seen major assaults on civil liberties and, with the rise of social media, that has fuelled a resurgence in protest. I don’t agree with everything Occupy calls for. But I support their drawing attention to issues such as income inequality and the suppression of civil liberties. And I unreservedly support their right to assemble. I have been following Occupy London, which has incredible echoes with Occupy Wall Street. Here is a peaceful movement centred around a church, whose mission is about supporting social justice. Despite the protesters being non-violent, the Metropolitan Police have referred to them as terrorists and been prepared to use baton rounds. We have to be vigilant against measures like these. I think a lot of my grandmother, who believed passionately in freedom and democracy.

She died a year ago, and in retrospect I could swear that I felt her presence close to me when I was being shouted at by the officer. She would have said something like: ‘Don’t you dare move! He is just being a bully.’ And she is right: whether bullies are in a classroom or in the streets or in the mayor’s office, we must never show them their bullying works on us.

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PHOTOGRAPH: JILLIAN EDELSTEIN/CAMERA PRESS

My grandmother marched peacefully for every issue of her day. She believed she was honouring her country – it was an expression of patriotism

FIRST PERSON

Jeanette Wınterson I on meeting her birth mother

The bestselling writer left her adoptive family home at 16, unaware that her biological mother was still alive. Here, she tells the story of their emotional reunion more than three decades later www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

t is strange to meet your mother for the first time when you are 50.

Manchester. 2010. A freezing snowy day. I knocked on the door of the little bungalow and two tiny hairy dogs bouncing like yo-yos shot out, followed by a small bright-eyed woman hidden behind a vast armful of laundry. ‘I thought I’d get the washing done before you arrived,’ she said.

At sub-zero temperatures this showed true optimism, and the absurdity of it broke the ice. It was just the sort of thing I’d say myself. This was the moment I had worked towards for over a year, hunting her like a detective, knowing that even if I did find her, she might be dead.

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PHOTOGRAPHS: NEIL DRABBLE/CAMERA PRESS, COURTESY OF JEANETTE WINTERSON

TEST OF TIME Jeanette Winterson at her London home in 2004.

Below: as a child

FIRST PERSON been a drunk, a drug addict, a mental patient, and a woman who had exploded. I didn’t really believe any of this, but it didn’t make me eager to start looking for the alarming parent either. Mrs Winterson was alarming enough.

I had been adopted as a baby by the Wintersons, who had no children and believed that God would find them one. They were Pentecostal evangelists, with their own Gospel Tent, and I was meant to grow up and be a missionary. Instead I fell in love with a woman and left home at 16. Disaster.

I wrote about that life, part fiction part fact, in my first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Mrs Winterson said: ‘It’s the first time I’ve had to order a book in a false name.’

Books had been forbidden in our house, so for me to have written one, and had it published, and had it win a Whitbread Prize only confirmed to her what she had suspected early on – that the Devil had led her to the wrong crib.

She was a flamboyant depressive; a BEACH BABY woman who kept a revolver in the duster Winterson on the beach drawer and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. with her adoptive father A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father. A woman with two sets of false teeth; matt for everyday, and a pearlised set for best.

Her version of religion was her own; although she made Dad give up drinking she would not give up smoking, and believed that Jesus understood. Terrified that anyone might find her out at church though, she kept an air freshener in her handbag and told everyone it was flyspray. She did it with such aplomb that nobody thought to wonder why anyone needed a permanent supply of flyspray in their handbag.

She was a great story-teller, or a monumental liar – depending on how you see things. Her complaint against Oranges (a novel, after all) was that it was ‘untrue’.

This was odd from a woman who explained the flash-dash of mice activity in the kitchen as ectoplasm.

I am a writer because she was a story-teller. All adopted children are self-invented, we have to be. A crucial part of our story is missing, and violently, like a bomb in the womb. The baby explodes into an unknown world only knowable through a story of some kind.

I realise that’s how we all live – the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. You feel that you will just have to make it up as you go along.

I learned to read myself as a fiction as well as a fact – if life was a story, I could change the story. Crucially, I could re-write the disordered narratives Mrs Winterson presented as truth.

I never imagined I would search for my mother but then a few years ago I found some paperwork in an old chest belonging to Mrs Winterson, long after she was dead, and when I was clearing out my father’s things.

There was a kind of baby MOT saying that I was not a mental defective, and an Adoption Order dated January 1960. John William Winterson, Labourer, Constance Winterson, Clerk, were being

given an infant. That infant had a name – violently crossed out. The name of the Adoption Society had been ripped off the top.

Suddenly there was another identity, another person. Who was I? I was troubled enough and curious enough to risk going further.

And it is a risk. Such a search is threatening at a cellular level – by which I mean the body has a memory. Deep trauma – I call it lost loss – seems to be able to be held in some kind of cellular safetydeposit box. Open the box and the pain, the terror, the fear, floods back into the bloodstream. That is what it feels like.

If that happens you have to work it through the body as you would a toxin. I had fevers, nightmares, hives, a kind of sleepless weakness. And every time I got a bit nearer on the detective hunt to find my biological mother, I lost something – phone, purse, keys – the identity badges of the grown-up me in the grown-up life.

Adoption is an identity issue. Your birth mother has no idea what she is giving away. Your adoptive parents have no idea of what they are getting.

Where do you belong? You won’t look like your new parents – and no matter how much they love you, you are the oddity and the angle. It isn’t straightforward to be different from the very beginning, but you are.

I discovered that my real name was Janet – and I guess Mrs Winterson Frenchified it into Jeanette.

But what would have happened to me as Janet? As I discovered, my birth mother Ann is one of 10 children – so I come from a huge family of uncles and aunts and cousins, which is odd when you are stamped as an only child.

My birth family all love ballroom dancing. None is educated. The more I told Ann about Winterson-world the more I realised how much that world has made me who I am – especially the writer I am. I sent Ann the DVD of Oranges as a kind of ‘This is what happened while you were out’. She was so distressed by Mrs Winterson’s craziness. Yet I would rather be this me than the me I might have been if she had kept me.

I would have had to look after my brothers. I doubt I would have gone to Oxford. It sounds like a rejection, but DNA is not enough.

Ann and I had a terrible row on our third meeting, when she travelled down to London to meet me. I took Ann back to Euston, both of us bruised from our fighting, and as I stood on the platform putting her on the train, a young woman ran up to me with a book in her hand. She said: ‘Are you Jeanette Winterson?’

Ann looked stricken. I was confused for a moment at my identities merging – or were they coming apart – in a railway terminus; point of arrival, point of departure. Ann boarded the train. I signed the book because I am Jeanette Winterson. That is my name. That is my identity, given and made, hard-won.

I am glad I found Ann. I am glad I know the true story. There are no happy Hollywood endings, but understanding is more important than that, and I have understood why she had to give me away.

Just as difficult is for her to understand why I can’t come back.

And I am thinking of a line from William Blake’s poem ‘Broken Love’: ‘And throughout all eternity/I forgive you, you forgive me.’

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PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF JEANETTE WINTERSON

All adopted children are self-invented, we have to be.

A crucial part of our story is missing, and violently, like a bomb in the womb

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fter Clara’s father, the young caporal Gaspar Dufay, fell in the mud at Verdun with a bullet through the heart, Clara began to dance. Her mother Eglantine Dufay made her costumes, sometimes dressing her as a doll, or a cherry (in summer), a holly berry (at Christmas) or a pixie, and would sit watching her closely while Clara performed in cafés and bars; three years later, the little dancer was noticed by a customer, a tall gentleman in a top hat and gloves, and procured a place in the corps de ballet at the Paris Opéra. Clara became one of that select and celebrated company known as les petits rats, whom the greatest artist of the dance, Edgar Degas, has immortalised in a famous bronze standing figure wearing the real tutu. In the photograph which the unfortunate Gaspar had in his pocket close to the entry point of the German bullet that killed him, the little dancer was curly-haired and chubby, consistently inspiring her first audiences to coo, ‘Comme elle est adorable! ’ as they fixed their monocles to see her better.

By the age of nine, however, Clara had changed; she’d grown rangy, with a surprisingly long thin neck, wrists and back, like the saluki dogs coming into fashion in that pleasure-loving decade after the First World War; in the chorus, dancing en pointe and wearing the flounced muslins of a wili or a sylph, she moved with an easy languor that belied the difficulty of the steps and arduousness of the regime. For, in spite of the hours, the rigours, the fatigue, dancing at the Opéra became a place of safety for Clara, with friendly allies in the company and friendly faces in the pit, where the musicians played so beautifully: the violins’ www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

sweet singing lines and the music’s intricate rhythms gave her passage to an enchanted island where she could reach the grace inside her, beyond the turbulent world of the smoke-filled cafés where she had skipped and strutted as a tot. Yet she was growing tall, taller than most of her partners in the chorus line.

The gentleman in the top hat and gloves had continued to take an interest in the little family. He was an inventor, a collector, a designer who specialised in curiosities, which he sold to other collectors. He had a reputation. He supported Clara’s mother, who was now making fans and painting them with scenes inspired by their benefactor’s taste for chinoiserie and other Oriental motifs.

M. de Grivegarde, for this was the tall gentleman’s name, backed a boutique on the Rue Saint-Honoré where she sold her wares: Chez Eglantine: Fabriquant – Eventails – Aigrettes – Fantaisies.

To Clara, M. de Grivegarde was Tonton, her odd old uncle who made funny jokes and even funnier faces, and liked to show off queer things he’d found and even queerer things he’d made.

He was so ancient that he had seen the Emperor Napoleon and Empress Josephine in the flesh and even contrived for Josephine a silver rose which sang a serenade in the voice of the Emperor after the imperial couple had been so sadly forced to part.

On the day of Clara’s fourteenth birthday, Tonton called for her at the stage door with a bouquet of white roses (though her birthday fell two days before Christmas when it is impossible to find roses). Petits rats are forbidden to go out before a performance, but Tonton slipped a wad of notes to the stage door porter to sing dumb and turn a blind eye.

With her birthday so close to Christmas, there was always the December 2010 |

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danger that it might be swallowed up. Tonton was very aware of this: ‘Ma petite Clara,’ he’d say, ‘I shan’t forget; I ’ll make the day memorable. You are growing up now and who better than I to show you the world?’

So, true to his word, he was now wishing her a very happy birthday and making a big, old-fashioned sweep of a bow, as if he might be mocking her. But she knew his weird and awkward ways, and she took the bunch of roses and dropped a stage curtsey in response. ‘And I offer you my congratulations, ma petite Clara,’ he went on, ‘on becoming a young woman.’

They began walking together down the Avenue de l’Opéra and turned left into the Rue Saint-Honoré.

‘Are we going to see Maman?’ she asked, as Chez Eglantine stood in the same street.

‘I have a different treat in store,’ replied Tonton.

So Tonton was taking her out on her own; this had never happened before.

a

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ILLUSTRATIONS PHOTOGRAPHED BY GRAHAM WALSER

he candied fruit in Verlet’s window was piled high in wooden crates for the season; Clara stopped to gaze at the café’s famous specialities, glinting with caster sugar, and gleaming with waxy highlights like jades of different colours: translucent pears and fat peaches like Japanese lanterns, frosted pineapple trapezoids and spheres of plums and mirabelles and greengages, small round mandarins, crystallised ginger jujubes, deep black wrinkled prunes, and scarlet and blue gleaming beads of berries like necklaces.

‘You can have one – only one, mind – if you will let me have a little bite, you will, ma petite, won’t you?’

Clara looked at them through the window; so gorgeous, so many, she couldn’t decide. She’d tell Tonton he must decide which one; but she knew she would drink a grand chocolat au crème Chantilly, which would keep her warm inside till the end of the performance that night.

There was a bit of a queue for a table at Verlet’s and they stood near the counter where M. Gérard – Tonton knew the patron – was serving at the coffee grinder, scooping and measuring out the different coffee beans and speciality teas for customers. He was telling M. Gérard it was Clara’s fourteenth birthday, and she became aware that people were looking at them inquisitively. She was used to Tonton’s peculiarities when at home with her mother, but as she followed others’ eyes in the small, crowded space of Verlet’s front room, she could see why he would draw everyone’s

attention, in his huge patterned and belted tweed coat à l’Ecossaise, his large-brimmed velour hat, the gold fob watch that played a little tune every quarter, his big round spectacles, and the high, stiff collar he liked to wear, which was pushed up under his jaw so that his head looked rigid, like a ventriloquist’s doll’s. But here, out alone with him, their conspicuousness together was giving her a sense of unease. How to move through the packed room to their table without disturbing the other customers worried her; she wondered if she should take off her coat before she sat down, but there wasn’t really room. So she kept it on, until M. de Grivegarde signalled to the waiter and he took off his own, bundled it with hers, and handed it over to the young man, who smiled knowingly at Clara, and carried them off. She kept tightly in her place against the wall, looking down at the huge swirling peak of foamy cream in the cup which arrived and stood before her, and the lucent crystallised peach on a dish beside it.

‘Ah, if only I could give myself such treats,’ sighed Tonton, rolling his eyes at her spoon, loaded with the lovely light foamy stuff. ‘You must eat for me and let me experience the pleasure by proxy. Youth! How you warm our old bones!’

He did have such a very odd way of looking, Clara couldn’t help thinking. And she wondered how her mother felt about Tonton’s funny smirks and twitches and grimaces.

Some of the company recognised who he was, she could sense it from their reactions; he was known in the sort of circles who frequented Verlet’s, where the chocolat au crème Chantilly was the best in the city. It was his connoisseurship that had sparked the craze in Paris for Chinese furniture and Japanese screens and Arabic garden swing-sofas with a canopy overhead; his music boxes and ornamental clocks with figurines in kimonos twirling parasols were admired by all the top cognoscenti and the collectors, or so her mother said, and her mother benefited in her shop from the way Tonton led the vogue for le goût oriental.

After looking at her so conspiratorially that she felt even more uncomfortable trying to drink her chocolat, he produced a package, trailing ribbons, and pushed it towards her, tapping it with one of his long fingernails, and said, ‘Here is your birthday present from me. I took advice of course from Mme. Eglantine – your dear mother. You are very precious to me, and you’ll soon be out in the world, and when you are, you will need lots of useful things to look after you and make sure all is as it should be. So this is a practical present, even a necessity, and I hope as well that it will bring all kinds of unexpected

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mother was married she wouldn’t have to please Tonton so much.

Clara felt the little man jump – could he be cutting a caper in her hand? She put him back in the box.

‘It’s amazing,’ she said. ‘You always make amazing things.’

She tried to inject some warmth, rather than apprehension, into her voice. But she did feel apprehensive. And she really wanted to hear what the important news was that he wanted to impart.

‘I’ve been collecting them for you for a while. Some I did make myself, some I came upon… here and there.’

When Clara turned over all these funny devices Tonton had attached to the hoop, they seemed to grow and to move; it was like the theatre, when a figure on stage, even very far away and very very small, doesn’t look it; you could be sitting in the gods but as you watched the stage the dancers filled the whole field of vision and could be giants. There was a miniature wheeled blade with a handle made in the shape of a woman who seemed to be laughing as she rode on the wheel, and a penknife with a hound lying along its sheath who seemed to be leaping, and a miniature spoon with its shaft made in the shape of a manikin with sapphires for eyes. They twinkled at her as she looked closer.

‘Here,’ said Tonton, ‘let me show you something.’ Leaning over, he singled out the penknife from the bunch, cut a small piece from the glazed peach, and commanded it, ‘Up now, up!’

The piece jumped into his mouth.

‘You see – they do what you say!’ cried Tonton and patted her hand. ‘Wait till we get home, petite chérie, and you can thank your nice kind uncle then, and give him a little kiss.’ He patted his cheek. ‘There’s another surprise waiting for you there.’

‘Are you going to marry Maman?’ There, she had said it. She shouldn’t have, but now it was too late.

Tonton was laughing, again. ‘Ha! Something like that, yes indeed. Your dear mother Eglantine and I have been talking, and making plans. But not what you think, not those plans.

‘No, first things first. You are a young lady now. You must realise that you are grown too tall – too elegant – and that the corps de ballet is no longer for you.’

Seeing her face, he waved a hand: ‘You must have known. You are a swan, my dear – what shall I say? – and altogether too splendid for the chorus. You’ll not be going back there. That’s a relief, isn’t it?

‘No. Instead, you’ll be entering the best society. At my side.’

They took a cab back to the Rue Marbeuf, where Clara and her mother had lived together on the CONTINUED ON PAGE 304 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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pleasures to a very pretty young lady like you, ma petite Clara.’

Clara wiped her mouth; she was feeling acutely self-conscious and wondered if she had a moustache of whipped cream on her upper lip and on the tip of her nose.

‘Go on,’ urged Tonton, smiling. His teeth were the oldest-looking part of him, and he was usually careful not to smile so widely that he revealed them. ‘Open it.’

Inside, lying on a bed of mauve satin, was a hoop of silver, with a bunch of silver trinkets jangling from it, like a charm bracelet.

But they weren’t miniatures of Notre Dame or a tennis racket with a pearl tennis ball, as she had seen on gifts to others among the bande of petits rats.

‘It’s called a châtelaine,’ said Tonton, ‘And it’s to show that you’re no longer a little girl. You are a châtelaine in the making.’

The cluster was so brightly polished it shot lights from the box – and it was surprisingly chunky when she picked it up.

Tonton lent over: ‘Take it out of its box. Look at it piece by piece. Each one of them has unusual properties at your service.

Secret springs and magic powers: the comb for your hair’ – he picked it out from the hoop – ‘will let you put up your hair in any style you like… the key will open doors when you need to…’

She noticed a pair of scissors made in the shape of a stork with a long beak.

‘That pair of scissors will cut you the fabrics you choose in any shape you want,’ murmured Tonton, purring.

There were a dozen other devices – but one of them was even odder than the rest, a podgy little man, and when she tried to work out what it could be, she saw – she thought she saw – him give her a wink.

‘By the way now,’ remarked Tonton, seeing her start, ‘that little toy is the most vital thing of all – can you guess what it does?

Clara shook her head.

‘It keeps the fizz in champagne!’ Tonton was laughing and nodding. But he then stopped and grew solemn. ‘I have something important to impart to you today, something more than usually important, my dear.’

Clara looked up from the strange stopper. She was excited, but also afraid. Tonton was going to tell her he was marrying Maman.

Maman would like that, Clara knew she would. Maman was hoping for that. Though she didn’t expect to. It would be unusual for a gentleman in M. de Grivegarde’s position to marry someone like her. But it would make their lives less precarious. Maman didn’t articulate this in so many words, but Clara understood that if her

ILLUSTRATIONS PHOTOGRAPHED BY GRAHAM WALSER

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lara was looking at the room, at the fancy wallpaper, the deep, soft patterned carpet, the figured curtains with tassels and fringes: against a field of deep sky blue, the colour of high summer, there were scenes of pleasure and leisure, all done in pretty Chinese costumes and scenery, a man and a woman strolling by a pagoda, and a boating party approaching an island in a river with coloured lanterns hanging on the landing stage, and in the park on the island, a pair of dogs were playing together and several slender dancers trailing streamers from their outstretched hands, while a band played on a fancy bandstand.

Beside them, another group of merry-makers out in the park

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‘Hurry up, Clara, hurry up – we can’t wait to be off.’

‘To the Isle of Lanterns!’

The cries were coming all together, the tappety-tap of dancing feet, the chinking and clinking and scurrying were growing louder and faster, and she picked up the stopper and sat bolt upright and looked at it and yes, the tubby little man winked at her again, and jumped off her hand onto the carpet and started leaping across it like someone running in a sack race to the window, where suddenly a shaft of light broke in.

‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ came an answering tinkle from over there, and she could see now that the scissors were dancing with the penknife and the thimble with the mirror. And they were all jumping on to the island in the river and into the boat with the party on their way there, and she could now hear the musicians playing on the bandstand.

‘Come along, come along!’ The tumult was rising.

The young man in the gondola of the balloon was waving at her. ‘Clara,’ he was calling out, ‘Clara, this way! I’m letting down the ladder! Catch hold of it!’

She flew in her bare feet across the carpet towards the music and through the clatter and the cries.

The young man in the balloon was smiling at her – was he a friend? He certainly looked friendly. As she drew closer, she thought, Yes, he was familiar. Could he be the second violin?

The young player with the shock of lovely black hair and the sweet lopsided smile?

Her feet were light, her head was giddy, but she felt soft little prods as she caught the rope ladder dangling from the balloon.

‘Hold on tight, Clara, I’ll pull you up!’

She put her foot on the first rung, and began to swing below the balloon. The sensation was exciting, like dancing. She was rising up, rung by rung, as he was making encouraging sounds to her, until she reached the rocking gondola of the air balloon and with a final last pull from the young man, tumbled into it.

‘There,’ he said, taking her hand to help her to her feet again.

‘We’re off! At last.’

were looking up and gesturing towards a young man in an air balloon who was sailing towards them – waving.

What was he doing there? What was he calling out as he waved?

Then Clara noticed that there was a girl below him, looking up, and the young man in the gondola of the balloon was calling out to her, and while he was waving he was letting down a rope ladder to the ground.

That night in her strange new grown-up bed, she couldn’t sleep for fear that Tonton on the other side would come in and follow up on those meaningful glances he’d exchanged with her mother when she put on one of the dresses from the wardrobe and went in to have dinner with them. They had never before sat down to dinner together like this in his apartment.

Her body in the bed grew hot and cold by turns; she lay rigid in the dark. The night dragged on, as Clara drifted on the current of her unnameable fears. How could she escape? How could she avoid their plans for her?

As she lay there sleeplessly she thought she heard Tonton approach; she pushed herself down deeper in the bedclothes, prickling with fear.

But the sounds in the room began to take a different form, not a door handle turning or footsteps tapping closer, but a clickety clack and tinkling much nearer to her, followed by murmurs and laughter.

‘Shhh,’ she heard, ‘less racket, please.’ Then the voice whispered, closer to her ear. ‘Clara, just say the word!’ The voice was like a little bell, silvery and light. ‘We’re yours to command.

Tell us what to do!’

There was a giggle from somewhere else, and a stifled hiss, ‘You know how it is, you know how it is! “To hear is to obey.”

That’s what we say!’

In this strange, dark, new room there was hubbub breaking out on all sides: something from over by the wardrobe was playing the spoons while another jingling thing beside it was dancing a jig.

‘We don’t think it’s fair. Monsieur de Grivegarde isn’t the one, not the one for our Clara.’ This came with a kind of skittering, like a pair of scissors.

‘Tonton’s too old. He’s much too old. He kept ordering us about. And now he wants to do the same to you.’

‘We’re with you now.’

‘We know what you wish for.’

‘Strike up the music!’

‘We’re throwing a party! A party for you!’ This voice was lower. ‘You’re coming with us. To the Isle of Lanterns – this way!’

‘This way!’

Clara sat bolt upright; the noises were springing up around her like the percussion section, the triangles and the finger cymbals and the drums giving her her cue. She still couldn’t see anything in the curtained room, but the chinking and clinking and cries were coming from her dressing table, while the other sounds, the whispers and chuckles, seemed to be coming from all around her from the walls, the curtains, and the carpet.

As she peered around her, she felt a tug on her nightdress, and there, standing on the bed and jumping up and down was the little fat champagne stopper and he was saying, ‘I can’t wait to pop!’

‘But you have to wait,’ hissed another, shriller voice. ‘Wait till we get there – don’t start now.’

‘Come on, Clara! Get out of bed, it’s time.’ www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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seventh storey in the attic five floors above M. de Grivegarde ever since he first saw her dancing. Their single mansard window gave a glimpse over the river towards the Tour Eiffel, which was ablaze with the new electric lighting, picking out its scaffolding in golden pearls for Christmas.

They were going upstairs, Clara on edge, clutching the box with the strange silver baubles and her bouquet of white roses, and desperate to find her mother and ask her what all this meant.

They reached the double doors to Tonton’s apartment, and he ushered her ahead of him. But she held back, begging him to let her go to her room upstairs.

He shook his head. ‘You have a new room now. You’ll be here with me in this apartment.’

Her mother appeared in the hall.

‘Maman! ’ cried Clara, and rushed into her arms.

Eglantine stroked her head, ‘You see, chérie, you’re entering – we are entering – a different stage in our lives.’ Behind her, two workmen were carrying in a dressing table with a mirror across the hall into a room down the corridor. ‘You will have time to get used to it. Nobody’s going to force you to do anything.’

Clara clung to her mother, though she was now taller than her.

She huddled, trying to make herself smaller, trying to stop this birthday from happening and plunging her into a future she had never imagined, where there would be Tonton at her side. She wouldn’t lose herself in the music of the ballet, or dance any more at the Opéra; there were to be no more petits rats, no more friendly violins and percussion players sawing and drumming in the pit for the dance.

She felt a special stab at the thought of the second violin, the merry young man with his lopsided smile under a shock of black hair who used to look up at her and give her encouraging glances and always seemed to applaud her in particular when the orchestra rose to take its bow and some of them turned to the stage to salute the dancers. Now she would never see him again.

She wanted to bolt for it through the double doors of the apartment, down into the street or up to her old chambre. But she also wanted to throw herself on the deep wide bed in the room they were showing her into, where some workmen were adding finishing touches to the décor and the furnishings, and which looked more luxurious than anything she had seen outside a picture; she wanted to haul out the outfits hanging in the wardrobe and try on the hats her mother was pointing out to her; she was still clutching the box with the curious baubles and felt a panic mounting.

Half-laughing, half-crying, she didn’t know where to begin.

‘We’ll leave you to look for yourself, now, and we’ll talk more later, over dinner.’ Her mother closed the door.

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n the morning, the room was quiet and dark and when her mother went in to see why Clara wasn’t getting up, she found the bed empty, unslept in, and no trace of her daughter.

She stood stock still, her heart like a stone. Could Clara, sweet, docile, quiet Clara, have taken fright at their plans and run away?

Mme. Eglantine looked around; she was scared of what M. de Grivegarde would do. She was frightened for herself. But deep down inside her, a little trickle of relief began to form; then a bubble of hope.

As she took in the room, she noticed that the silver trinkets M. de Grivegarde had given Clara for her birthday the day before were missing: the mauve satin-lined box was standing open and empty on the dressing table. But she didn’t see, because she didn’t know to look, that the young man with the shock of hair in the balloon was no longer waving at the young lady at the foot of the rope ladder and that the young lady in question was now up in the gondola beside him. They were smiling as the breeze lifted the balloon towards the Isle of Lanterns, where the band was playing and the boat party disembarking for the dance.

English National Ballet’s new production of ‘The Nutcracker’ will open at the London Coliseum (www.eno.org) on 10 December, and celebrates the company’s 60th anniversary. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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a while, everyone wanted one. We had problems with black at first as well, because of the contrast levels on the screen settings – you couldn’t see the detail on a black dress, for example. The internet has its limitations, which we work within. You want the site to look beautiful, but it also needs to be easy to use, so it’s a compromise.

RM: But Net-a-porter balances function with beauty.

NM: The visual element of things is very important. I remember I used to go shopping and come home with all these boxes stacked up. But then shopping became more about the plastic bag, and you really never got that experience in full again. So, for me, packaging was everything, it was the only thing about our brand that you could actually touch, and we wanted to juxtapose the 21st-century nature of shopping online with something really old-world. We needed to create something that was better than the shopping experience you’d had before. So when you buy from Net-a-porter, the doorbell rings ‘ding dong’, and these boxes arrive – it’s like sending yourself flowers.

RM: Yes, that’s what I did! When you first came to see me about joining Net-a-porter, because I am French I thought: ‘Oh, this won’t work.’ It was the second season of 2001, and I said to my business partner: ‘Let’s buy something.’ So we bought a Luella shirt. When it arrived in the post, the packaging just blew me away. It was like the notion of what pure couture is, just so French. We have lost that in the shops. But every time you buy something with Net-a-porter, it’s like Christmas time, the old-school glamour of the movies, when the porter arrives carrying an armful of presents.

NM: When we started, there were very few women who would have bought fashion on the internet; the early sites were very functional, there was no glamour to them.

RM: How much do you think the mentality has changed for people in the industry, as well as the customer?

NM: When we first started, I think people thought we were destroying fashion instead of enhancing it. But I think that the internet will be a place in the future for designers. You could do a collection and put it online and ask women worldwide if they wanted to buy it. If they did, it could go into manufacturing and be delivered in a matter of weeks.

RM: Incredible. I think one of the most important innovations you made is a more direct link between the customer and the designer.

NM: Yes, I think ultimately that connection will become closer.

I think, in the future, it will be about the virtual atelier. A customer can send a photograph of themselves to the designer and he can say: ‘Oh, you look great, but why don’t you try wearing it like that?’

That could happen simultaneously with people all over the world.

In a way, it will be like the relationship between client and designer that existed in the old couture houses – a bespoke service. It’s going to change the way designers show. I think that fashion shows will still exist in some form, but they are going to be different.

RM: That’s really interesting.

NM: I think we are moving away from the concept of trends, where everyone is wearing a miniskirt or safari chic. It’s much more about ‘anything goes’. I think it will be less about the seasons, so instead of making autumn/winter 2011 collections, it will be: ‘Read Roland Mouret’s new ideas on a Tuesday.’ And the customer will feed back instantly whether they love it.

RM: Fantastic. What have been the highlights of the last decade?

NM: There’s been many. Today was amazing though, when all Net-a-porter designers came to the shoot. Clements Ribeiro was one of the first labels on board, and now there’s Richard Nicoll and Camilla Skovgaard and Julien Macdonald, they are all part of the story. It was a real This Is Your Life moment.

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SEE STOCKISTS FOR DETAILS

items: cages and uppers so heavily metalled that ankles can barely lift them. Gone is the animal-house madness: numbers that turn feet into the hoofs of defunct mammoths; heels that mimic the segmented tails of Precambrian sea-critters. Instead, those longforgotten items â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the ankle and the upper â&#x20AC;&#x201C; have been liberated into view, and after years of going to extreme lengths to avoid the humdrum, designers have lapsed back into the slender and the sexy.

Item number one in that restoration project is the stiletto heel, triumphantly on show in the shoes of this season.

The pages of high-minded â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;shoe studiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; are packed with fierce contention about whether or not high heels have hobbled or liberated womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of their personal power. But there seems no question that, historically, the highest of all heels â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the broad chopines, essentially slippers or mules mounted on platforms up to two feet tall, worn by Italian women and especially Venetians â&#x20AC;&#x201C; presented their wearers as towering, erotically intimidating presences. Denunciations of the chopines by Renaissance guardians of morality like Jacopone da Todi make it clear that the high shoes were taken as a sign of brazen immodesty. (Pianelle flats, by contrast, were the footwear of the chaste.) In Venice, where the fashion was adopted in the early 17th century, just as it was being stamped out in Florence and Rome, the assertive gait â&#x20AC;&#x201C; encouraged by very high heels, hips drawing attention to themselves beneath swathes of brocaded silk â&#x20AC;&#x201C; was assumed to be the costume of courtesans, and mostly it was. Altitude meant attitude.

But one cavaliereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s anxiety was anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s excitement. For generations, trembly Classical poets like Petrarch had been elevating women on literary pedestals. But those paragons of purity were â&#x20AC;&#x201C; even when hymned as agonisingly unreachable â&#x20AC;&#x201C; products of a ²

hoes are the exclamation marks of a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wardrobe, the punctuation point from which you read back the grammar of her body. An arresting pair of shoes, taking possession of the street, will pull a glance upwards, till it meets the personality that decided for this particular day on a strut or a stride.

Shoes are the front office of a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s self-designed brand. A flash of scarlet Louboutin sole on the underside of a high-heeled black pump will undercut the severity of elegance with a colluding wink of come-on. The stacked sole of a Ferragamo classic is in every sense a platform from which oncoming curiosity can be confidently confronted. Each detail of a shoe will add a particular accent.

A slingback on a pump will expose more of the face of the foot, a spaghetti strap acting as the grace note between the shoeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s two ambiguously balanced characteristics: seductive exposure and firm tread. Shoes are the drivers of the hips; the choreographers of body language. A strappy sandal carries memories of the classical graces: the taunting challenge of the fleet-footed. A close-fitting high boot makes something feral of the second skin sheathing the thigh: the walk as wild ride. Even a slipper-flat, ostensibly desexualised, implies a quicksilver scamper beyond the reach of a pursuerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flat-footed tread. A wedge plants the wearer to the earth with its build of cork, wood or straw. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;My stature is grounded,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; the shoe says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Want to make something of it?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; We always do. So when a sudden swerve of style presents itself, we want to know whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s truly afoot. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what has happened this autumn. A great simplification has taken place in the name of anatomical grace and visual desire. Banished are the fantastical constructions that came clumping forth from the hyperventilating imaginations of the designer supremos. Dead are the fetish freakshow

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WORKS OF STAGGERING BEAUTY From left: pony-skin stiletto courts, ÂŁ625; leather stiletto courts, ÂŁ475, both Christian Louboutin www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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self-neutering male imagination. The frosty disembodiment of women-angels saved men from having to confront their fleshy power. But the billowing women aloft on their chopines were something else again: mighty-high and earthy at the same time, their yards of cascading silk an invitation to be drawn apart like Renaissance tapestry-curtains. The French court of Louis XIV famously elevated social status on raised red heels. But the stature-swagger was confined to men. It took the late-19th-century invention of a metal shank inserted between sole and insole to make possible a miracle of anatomical balance: the weight of a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body supported on an improbably narrow base. With it came a shift in the centre of a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bodily gravity: bust forward, derrière back, the spinal curve arched, leg and angle stretched to flatter the calf. That â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Grecian tiltâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, muttered the alarmed critics, was, in primates, the unmistakeable posture of invitation. Erect women, the implication went, were making a beastly show of their animal magnetism.

The crash of the male empire â&#x20AC;&#x201C; on Wall Street in 1929 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; opened up space in which assertive, high-arched women could strut their stuff. In screwball movies, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Kate Hepburn were talking back, and some men discovered they liked high spirits on high heels. Post-war ambiguities played it both ways. The shoulder pads and cinched waists of Diorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s New Look made women look a true match for their demobbed men. The petticoat-bulked flounces of the Fifties seemed to advertise the opposite: a womanly arrangement of curves. But the living hourglass still challenged men to put down their Vargas-illustrated Playboys and do something about it. Either way, Bacall or Monroe, the strut or the shimmy, unprecedentedly narrow stilettos (named after the blade-like shaft inside the heel) made legs the centre of erotic attention. As hemlines rose dramatically with the advent of the mini, a stiletto-heeled shoe became the departure point for a dual carriageway to heaven.

The shoe now became fully an extension of the leg, but it also transmitted new messages about how to move, all the way from the raised arch to the swinging thigh. High-heeled shoes made every woman who wore them the composer of their very own hipmusic. If worn with a strapped, open-backed heel, the effect was simultaneously graceful and sexually inviting. The beauty of those heels presupposed an uninterrupted musical flow between leg and shoe: a neat fit between body and leather, with the ankle articulating the streamlined connection. What the classic designers of the 1950s and 1960s â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Vivier, Ferragamo and Yves Saint Laurent â&#x20AC;&#x201C; had in mind was a dance of the eye between wearer and admirer.

But over the past few years a third party has muscled into the encounter: the ego of the ornamental designer. It might have begun with the heavy beribboning and bejewelling of Vivierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s buckles (a throwback to the excessive 18th century). But in recent years, designers competed with each other to invent ever more fabulous rococo concoctions, strangled with applied decoration. Revelling in clunkiness, those big numbers became exhibition sites for designers to parade their superiority to convention; their indulgence in encrusted caprice. The art-show shoe aesthetic was bound to win converts, and it did. The fashion-conscious fell for them, sometimes literally. Even though McQueenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s monster platforms, curved like a

dugongâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s proboscis, required women to do little more than insert their extremity into its trap, the lure of the outrageous was irresistible. Festoon me darling. Stud me up baby. Dig my clunk. Watching trim ankles and shapely lower calves disappear into shoe-prison, men, on the other hand, wondered what the hell was going on. Were they too conventionally dim to Get It? Or was there real reason to grieve at the indignities inflicted on the legs, the feet, the walk of women: the vision of sexy grace cherished since the Greeks?

Praise be, then, for our moment of chastening. The style outrĂŠ has fallen, along with the bloated money world that made it possible.

The instantly obsolete pachyderm-hoofs were the perfect expression of a financial universe itself clotted with junk: instruments useless for anything except their own feverish self-reproduction. In their absurdity and ugliness, the terminal towers on which feet have been mounted are reminiscent of the mad coiffures, primped and piled ever higher, that found favour in the fashionable French monde before the French Revolution.

Within clouds of powdered hair, fairy forests teemed with tiny creatures and live songbirds, and three-masted ships proudly sailed, fore-gallants fully rigged. Then they sank, and the necks that had supported them bowed to the guillotine.

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PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

he relics of excess linger on in the A/W collections of 2010; if thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your thing, you can still find a bootee this season that swells and billows above the ankle. For the most part, though, there has been a coming down to earth, though not a lowering of heels. Louboutinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chrome-bright stiletto is a thing of beauty, but its hybrid of the straightforward and the elegantly outrageous depends on its abandonment of platform soles. And it is possible to over-correct. In a misplaced nostalgia for all things Fifties, as if that was our last safe haven, the low-down pump has returned to make everything sweetly pretty again, the buckle stuck just-so on the upper, like a slightly creepy chin-chuck from Maurice Chevalier to the pubescent Gigi.

So can a return to the sexy sharpness of classic high-heeled numbers be made contemporary? Some houses have risen to the challenge.

Clergerie, which never really lost its way amid the frantic rococo madness, has always been positioned to design shoes, many of them with high but wide heels, some with platform soles, that continue to make strong lines elegantly smooth. Gucci has produced some spectacularly sexy numbers with the sides of the shoe cut right away, a snaky strap winding round the back. But the palm for reinvention goes to Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, who has managed to remake the pump in a truly modern idiom. It helps, of course, that Elbaz designs integrally, thinking of the body line, top to toe. In common with Gucci, his fall collection is full of high necklines and form-fitting but flowing dresses that make the length of leg from mid-thigh to ankle once again a site of enticement. In his most stunning pump, worn with a clingy pencil, the play between concealment and exposure has been pretty much perfected. The line of the upper is cut sinuously on a bias across the top of the foot, leaving everything else out there. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a shoe that both restrains and releases in one svelte number. Which, in these tough times, may be all we should ask for.

SEE STOCKISTS FOR DETAILS

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HEIGHT OF FASHION Snakeskin studded stilettos, in brown and green, both from a selection, Valentino Garavani www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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While our society becomes ever more confessional and audacious, there are still certain subjects that people rarely want to talk about. Bazaar asked WILL SELF, JILLY COOPER, LIONEL SHRIVER and TOBY YOUNG, among others, to explore their own forbidden topics – from failure to money to sex – revealing ‘like it or loathe it’ views of our modern world Photographs by GUY BOURDIN Month 2010 |

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I was in Madrid the other day, in one of those super-flashy minimalist homes that are so perfect – like something clinical out of Wallpaper* magazine – and I was chatting away to my hosts, thinking: ‘This is so terrible, this house is so disgusting.’ And then I saw this beautiful painting on the wall by Julio Romero de Torres, who is famous for painting gypsies, and that calmed me down.

I find there is always at least one beautiful thing in a house full of ugliness that makes you forget the rest.

I don’t believe in cruelty so I don’t like to say if I think a friend has bad taste. My only exception is if a woman is wearing stilettos with platforms. These are so vulgar – especially the ones with the perspex platforms like you see in 1970s porno films. So shocking!

To friends I can say anything, so I might say: ‘Those shoes are vile!’ (I like to tell the truth in a funny way if I can), while to someone I don’t know, I might say: ‘My God you look wonderful! Your dress is divine but the volume of your leg is wrong in those shoes.’

For me, bad taste is not a taboo; without bad taste, we could not survive.

TOBY YOUNG on failure One of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever been taught was by an old Fleet Street hand whom I met for a drink shortly after being fired from The Times, my first ever job.

‘How’s it going at The Times?’ he asked.

‘I no longer work there.’

‘How come?’

‘Let’s just say things didn’t work out.’

‘What?’

‘It wasn’t a good fit.’

‘Listen, mate, if you’ve just been fired from somewhere, don’t say you were the victim of cutbacks or you decided to spend more time with your family. Just say, “I was fired,” and leave it at that.

Never complain, never explain.’

That turned out to be good advice, not least because, in the 25 years since, I’ve been fired from The Independent, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Mail on Sunday, the Evening Standard, the New Statesman and Vanity Fair.

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WILL SELF on religion Religious faith makes everyone who doesn’t share it a little uneasy, doesn’t it? It seems unfair to lump all religious faith into this, but we do that as well – don’t we? I mean, many is the time I’ve been at a cocktail party, in a perfectly calm and reasonable conversation, with a perfectly calm and reasonable person, when some chance remark has revealed that they believe in an immaterial being which created everything around us, including the canapés.

I can’t help it: it’s as if they’ve said that fairies live at the bottom of their garden, or that flowers are the souls of dead bunny rabbits – I may try to recapture my first impression of them as calm and reasonable, but it’s been irretrievably replaced by an image of a dervish, whirling in full lotus position whilst scourging himself unmercifully.

Of course, religious faith has a bad press in secular society: we unbelievers easily conflate it with fanaticism; faith, we think, would be all right if it kept itself to itself and remained entirely voluntary, a bit like rubber fetishism, but it will insist on making converts, attacking other faiths, and generally behaving at once loutishly and superciliously. And then there’s the past, faith has baggage, whole Terminal 5s full of it. Wars, persecutions, pogroms – and the repression of all forms of enlightenment, from the equality of women (and their right to do what they want with their bodies), to the very scientific enquiries that led us to believe it was caterers who were making the canapés – if the faithful had their way we’d still be living in mud huts, and the only gay in the village would be strung up from a gibbet.

As I say, almost all of this will flicker through my mind with supernatural speed whenever I encounter someone with supernatural beliefs, but then I check myself: hang on a minute (this is me, preaching to myself ), you yourself believe in all sorts of things that you cannot prove, the most obvious and relevant being that you (that’s me, remember) have the sort of free will and autonomy that make it possible for you to critique the faithful.

But the clincher for me is that while religious faith may make me feel uneasy, it’s an uneasiness that, if I am rigorously honest, I also feel about myself. I exhibit a lot of the negative characteristics I wish to load on to them, from bigotry to zealousness to intolerance. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

LIONEL SHRIVER on money A close friend emailed to say that she’d just had a dream about ‘a terrible showdown between the two of us in which I ended up throwing you off a bridge, killing you, assuming a new identity and going on the run while I tried to clear my name. The reason you had banished me forever from your sight, in front of all our mutual friends, was for not being as poor, you felt, as I had always made out. You had seen my chequebook and realised I wasn’t a total pauper. It was unforgiveable. So I killed you.’ It goes without saying that my homicidal girlfriend is British.

Brits don’t talk about money – in particular, about having money; poverty is announced with pride. Successful authors in London never reveal their book advances. My fellow journalists exclusively reveal their fees when the pay is rubbish. Earning, accumulating and (the horror) inheriting money in Britain is shameful.

Social secrecy about personal finance may explain a cor responding nosiness about personal finance in the press. When Martin Amis is paid £80,000 a year for teaching creative writing at the www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

University of Manchester, it’s all over the papers. That’s a ‘better than a poke in the eye’ salary, but hardly newsworthy in a world where Tony Blair can earn £240,000 for a 20-minute speech in China.

This don’t-mention-the-dosh rule has developed one glaring exception: what you paid for your property. If you’ve recently moved house, so overwhelming is the social thirst for the inside dope on property prices that Brits will lean forward conspiratorially at dinner to begin: ‘If you don’t mind my asking…’

But the purchase price is the end of it. No one will ever ask how you could possibly afford this place or whether any external party is helping out. Thus it’s commonplace to visit newly relocated friends in some cavernous three-storey goldmine with a sense of bewilderment: these are the same people who routinely bring three-for-£10 wine, and who recently begged off joining you for a Chinese because they couldn’t afford it. How did they pull off a purchase that would require even Tony Blair to speak for a full hour? Of course, the answer is reliably Mum and Dad. But you will never get that answer, because you will never ask the question. Fiscal coyness is frustrating because money November 2010 |

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MANOLO BLAHNIK on bad taste

GUY BOURDIN title to go here please 1972

not talking about your professional setbacks can be more embarrassing than talking about them. If you allow someone to tiptoe around the subject, tactfully avoiding it for fear of hurting your feelings, that’s tantamount to an admission that you’re deeply ashamed.

Much better to broach the subject head on and cheerfully volunteer the information that your last employer threw you under a bus.

Having embraced this policy for 25 years, I can assure you it’s by far the best approach. Given how blissfully unaffected I appear to be by one career disaster after another, people assume I must have some other, more enduring source of self-worth. Am I privately wealthy?

Have I got another job offer in my back pocket that I’m not at liberty to discuss? Or am I blessed with an unusually large penis?

I would love to say it’s the last of these, but the truth is I have learned to see failure as a spur – a reason to try harder rather than an excuse to give up. If you stop treating it as a source of embarrassment it ceases to be one and you no longer have to worry about falling flat on your face.

As the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Samuel Beckett put it: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’

Or in the words of Winston Churchill: ‘Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.’

PHOTOGRAPHS: © 2010 THE ESTATE OF GUY BOURDIN, IN BETWEEN BY GUY BOURDIN, SHELLY VERTHIME PUBLISHED BY STEIDLDANGIN/WWW.STEIDLVILLE.COM

I

s anything taboo any more? In a no-holds-barred culture such as ours, where kiss-and-tells chase serious news off the front pages and social-networking sites groan under the weight of outrageous personal disclosures, Bazaar wonders what still isn’t talked about.

According to the worldly writers and tastemakers we asked to tackle the question, a great deal. As a new book is published celebrating the work of French photographer Guy Bourdin, whose sexual imagery shattered taboos and the status quo in fashion photography, Bazaar sheds light on those salty topics that continue to overshadow our conversations.

at least two bottles while his wife finished off upstairs. It’s shocking; but the awful thing is that, at the time, I really laughed a great deal.

As for my glamorous brother Timothy, he was at a dinner when he announced: ‘Jilly and I are going to sue our parents.’

‘Why?’ everyone inquired.

‘Because they never sexually abused us,’ he replied, ‘so we’ve got nothing to write about in our autobiographies.’ You can imagine the mayhem that caused.

I am not sure that today we are any more open about sex at all.

People are fairly reserved about their particular fantasies – if they liked being whacked by the vicar its not something likely to be revealed in company. In fact, despite changing morality, sex is always difficult to talk about in company without putting your foot in it, especially if one’s husband or wife is present.

NICKY HASLAM on cosmetic surgery

JILLY COOPER on sex on sex It was 1969 and I was at a dinner party in London, telling the lovely man next to me, Godfrey Smith, about being a young wife; working, doing the shopping, the housework, cooking your husband’s dinner, making love all night, getting up again day after day until you died of exhaustion. He roared with laughter and then said: ‘Terrific, write about it.’ He was editor of The Sunday Times Magazine and the 220 |

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week it was published was magic; I was offered nine jobs and, best of all, a column in The Sunday Times.

I was allowed to write about anything, particularly sex: from gay clubs to [1970s sexual study] The Hite Report. I’m not sure it was scandalous, but occasionally everyone was rather shocked. The Bishop of Leicester got absolutely furious about a piece on the best cars to make love in, and I remember Harry Evans, my editor at The Sunday Times, deeming my description of a male stripper (I had compared his rotating member to an excited English Setter’s tail) too risqué for a Sunday newspaper.

Don’t forget, Gloucestershire was always naughty, but in the Sixties and Seventies – it was wild. At dinner parties, guests would form a circle and grab hold of a counterpane, a feather would be put in the middle and you would all shake and shake until whoever the feather got to took off a garment of clothing. At one dinner party, a woman announced that another guest’s husband was hotly pursuing her, which caused great consternation. That’s the sort of thing people should always keep to themselves; I think it’s despicable to kiss and tell. At another, the hostess and a very handsome guest simply disappeared upstairs between courses. The poor husband had just served up an expensive Barsac and we ended up drinking www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPHS: © 2010 THE ESTATE OF GUY BOURDIN, IN BETWEEN BY GUY BOURDIN, SHELLY VERTHIME PUBLISHED BY STEIDLDANGIN/WWW.STEIDLVILLE.COM

matters are so emotionally crucial. Are your friends terrifyingly in debt? Resentfully in hoc to in-laws or parents who expect (as benefactors always do) payment in return, if not in kind? Few details provide a better guide to state of mind than the sort that begins with a pound sign. Without a grasp of the economic foundation on which their lives are built, you don’t fully know people.

So I decoded my girlfriend’s email about her nightmare: ‘Aha! So she does have means, but the money’s surely from her family. She feels guilty and keeps her resources secret, especially from other friends who are skint.’ I like her no less for that, and understand her far better.

I truly believe in cosmetic surgery, and I cannot understand why people are so nervous talking about it. Perhaps they don’t like discussing their own surgery because they want us to assume their wonderfully smooth faces are down to their youthful genes – everyone knows they aren’t.

I happily talk about mine. If people find it shocking, that’s often because they don’t realise I’ve had a facelift (because it’s an extremely good one). I don’t think surgery is embarrassing. One hears the human body goes downhill after the age of 28, and there seems to me to be nothing vain or sinful about trying to upgrade one’s appearance.

Vanity is when people don’t have surgery; when they believe that’s the way they have been since birth and they are perfect just as they are.

Of course, some people are nervous not so much about having the facelift, but about admitting to taking time out for vanity’s sake.

The English don’t reveal their hand very much, anyway. Just consider the number of people who claim not to dye their hair. People don’t want to reveal that they spend time on themselves. Certainly, in California, men and women talk about surgery all the time, probably because they’ve been doing it 40 years longer than we have.

The much greater taboo is to ever say anybody looks tired or ill.

Always say they look wonderful. If you see an example of bad surgery, only laugh about it later with friends; never react in front of the victim.

ALLISON PEARSON on having children A female director of a Californian internet company told her boss that she was pregnant. ‘But Helen,’ he said, sighing, ‘you’ve already had one of those.’ Another woman, British this time, says of attitudes at her City firm: ‘Frankly, you’d be better off admitting to being a cocaine addict than a mother. Drug addiction is treatable, but motherhood is a lifelong and incurable condition.’

It’s stories like these that put young women off having kids. A third of today’s female graduates will never have children – a 20 per cent increase in just over a decade. The cleverer you are, the less likely you are to reproduce. How’s that for an evolutionary owngoal? Boy, I bet Charles Darwin didn’t see this one coming: the female of the species becomes too successful to breed.

Until recently, talking about how tough it can be to reconcile work with that time-consuming invention, the baby, was strictly taboo. The ban has lifted, though only amongst sympathetic www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

GUY BOURDIN title to go here please 1972

girlfriends. As Gloria Steinem put it: ‘I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.’

We keep shtoom because owning up to fears that you are an inadequate mother can still get you lynched. If you’re wealthy, you may throw money at the problem. One prominent financial wizard recently bought a house in which to store her difficult teenager and a nanny. The child’s shocked housemistress whispered to me that professional parents neglecting their kids was common, but never to be spoken about.

All of these taboos have conspired to create one final taboo: childlessness. How many of us know a woman who has ended up, though not voluntarily, without a baby of her own? We prefer not to talk about it. Too painful. Instead, when the childless come to call, we conceal the evidence of how much we love our kids; we run down the snotty-nosed brats, emphasising the burden of motherhood and guiltily concealing its sweetness.

Life without my children in it is unthinkable. Like a world without music or lightning. We need to say that out loud more often to encourage young women to get down to what Mother Nature intended.

Reproduction? Um, do they have an app for that?

HADLEY FREEMAN on other people’s partners I’m going to be honest with you here: I never like my friends’ boyfriends. At least, not initially, anyway. But do I ever tell them? Well, the fact that I describe them in the first sentence as ‘my friends’ as opposed to ‘my ex-friends’ should give you a clue. Pay attention!

Unless you have inside information that he is a criminal on the lam, or you caught him making out with the waitress moments before your friend introduced him to you, you cannot tell your friend that you think her new boyfriend is a bit dull, a bad dresser and has an annoying laugh. She might look at you with those pleading eyes, insisting she wants the truth from you, her trusted best friend, but your job right now is not to be brutal: it’s to be supportive and keep her floating on the cloud of early love.

Nor is this just about her and him – it’s about her and you. Saying that you don’t like him is either going to make your friend feel awkward every time she sees you because she hasn’t dumped him and she knows you disapprove, or she’ll dump him and then resent you for it. Neither of these scenarios is good for friendships.

(Incidentally, if she later breaks up with him, wait for at least six months before telling her that you never liked him, because it is a semi-scientific fact that it takes at least five break-ups and make-ups, with one extended period of sleeping together while still officially broken up, before the break-up becomes permanent.)

But this is also about him and you. It is unlikely that your judgement is fair, after only one meeting and coming, as you do, from your biased position. I almost never like any of my friends’ boyfriends because, in my eyes, no one’s ever good enough for them.

They could produce someone with the looks of Don Draper, the wit of Jon Stewart, the intellect of Bill Gates, the kindness of the Dalai Lama and the charisma of Keith Richards, and I’d still think: ‘Hmm, an open-mouthed breather. I bet he snores.’

Sometimes I come round and realise that he is great. Sometimes I don’t. But I’m happy that my friend is happy, and that is the only thing that matters. After all, she’s the one going out with him. And if there’s one thing worse than not liking your friend’s boyfriend, it’s liking him too much – but that’s a whole other taboo story.

‘Guy Bourdin: In Between’ (£34, Steidl) by Shelly Verthime is out now.

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THE BIG TURN-ON

I hadn’t realised the extent to which I depended on humour to chat up women until I moved to New York in 1995. I was 31 at the time, and had just started working for Vanity Fair. I was young, free and single, and had a glamorous job with an unlimited expense account.

I also had a title and a posh English accent to go with it. I thought it would be only a matter of time before New York’s most powerful robber barons would be queuing up to introduce their daughters to the Honourable Toby Young.

In fact, successive generations of freeloading ex-public-schoolboys have poisoned that well. These days, whenever New York women hear the dulcet tones of a true blue Englishman they think: ‘Small apartment, low income, alcohol problem.’ And they’re usually right.

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TOBY YOUNG on HUMOUR

PHOTOGRAPH: © PIRELLI – 1974 CALENDAR BY HANS FEURER

What is it that makes someone sexy, that transfixes us and fires our desire? Bazaar asked leading figures to ponder what constitutes a modern-day aphrodisiac.

CELIA WALDEN extols the attraction of powerful men; BELLA POLLEN explains how she can’t resist danger; and TOBY YOUNG writes about the power of humour to win women over

LUST IN TRANSLATION Nick Rhodes gives his take on the seductive power of red lips overleaf

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There is also the small matter of my physical appearance. I’m short, bald and ‘husky’, to use the polite American euphemism for overweight. My teeth leave something to be desired, too. I was once talking to a girl at a party on the Upper East Side when she beckoned her friend over. ‘Check this out,’ she said, pointing at my molars. ‘This guy has English teeth.’

No, if I was going to make any headway with the opposite sex, I would have to rely on the only weapon in my arsenal – humour.

Plenty of things have been identified as aphrodisiacs through the ages and, at first glance, humour might not seem the most promising. Tried-and-tested aphrodisiacs include power and self-confidence, even a whiff of danger. All these attributes conjure up an intoxicating aura of masculinity, something most women, even the most feminist and politically correct, find sexually alluring. Yet, paradoxically, it is the ability to make women laugh – a clownish, unmasculine quality – that works best of all. When it comes to sexual stimulants, humour is king.

Needless to say, I was initially too macho to admit this when I first arrived in New York. I liked to tell myself that the reason I’d had some success with women back in London was because I was pretty damn sexy – in a mysterious, short-bald-and-fat kind of way.

What worked for Phil Mitchell, worked for me. I used to squint into the mirror and think: ‘I could be mistaken for Bruce Willis, provided the lights were low, the woman was drunk and she wasn’t wearing her glasses.’

In fact, what success I’d had was only because I’d been able to make women laugh.

My general strategy was to go up to a beautiful woman in a club and pretend I was way out of her league. ‘Listen,’ I used to say, sidling up to her at the bar. ‘I know you’ve been checking me out all night and I just wanted you to know that I’m not interested. Sorry. You’re just not my type.’ If Brad Pitt said that to a woman, it wouldn’t be funny. But if it comes out of the mouth of a strange little homunculus whose head barely comes up to her navel, it’s hard not to laugh.

Another favourite was to say: ‘I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I promised myself that before I left tonight I’d talk to the best-looking woman in the room. D’you mind if I practise on you first?’

All right, I’m no Woody Allen, but at one o’clock in the morning on a rainy night in Soho these lines have been known to work. After an evening of being hit on by merchant bankers hoping to impress them with the size of their wallets, women appreciate a bit of selfdeprecating humour. They feel comfortable around men who can make them laugh. Is it because being funny speaks of a certain self-confidence? Or is it because women instinctively warm to men they find funny, thinking: ‘If he can give me this much pleasure standing up, I wonder what he’d be like lying down’?

At least, British women do. American women proved a little harder to impress. I experienced a rude awakening on my first day at Vanity Fair, when a girl standing next to me in the lift tried to hold the doors open for her friend. They slammed shut, almost trapping her hand, and I turned to her and said: ‘They’re fashion sensitive.

If you’re not wearing Prada or Gucci, they’ll take your arm off.’

‘But I am wearing Prada.’

Clearly, trying to flirt with women in the lift wasn’t going to work.

I decided the important thing was context. It’s not that Americans don’t have a sense of humour. They do, but everything has to be in its proper place. In day-to-day life, that place is at parties.

‘So, Mercedes,’ I said, talking to a Latin American beauty at a party in Tribeca. ‘Are you self-confident enough to accept a compliment without getting all defensive about it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Me too. You go first.’

She gave me a blank look, made her excuses and left.

It sounds ridiculous, but the winning formula I hit on, after months of trial and error, was to dress up like Austin Powers. On would go the shaggy, blond wig, the thick-rimmed spectacles and the blue velvet smoking jacket. Off would go any pretence of sophistication.

They would ‘get it’ immediately. They realised I was trying to be funny because I had taken the precaution of wearing a clown costume. Before long, they’d be laughing like monkeys. A running gag involved me pretending that the wig was my real hair: ‘Hey baby. Don’t touch the hair.’ By the end of the evening, I was inviting them to hop on the good foot and do the bad thing.

If all this sounds like quite a lot of hard work, that’s because it was. But it was rewarding work, even if it didn’t always result in success. To me, there are few things more pleasurable in life than making a woman laugh. I don’t just mean a titter or a giggle, but a big, full-throated laugh. If she’s reduced to helplessness and has to cling on to your jacket to stop herself collapsing to the floor, so much the better. When you’ve given a woman that much pleasure, the sex is almost an afterthought.

Danger wakes us up.

It turns us back on. As RHODES an aphrodisiac, it has NICK on RED LIPS a powerful trick up its There’s something about red lips. They’re so luscious; that slash of colour across sleeve. The mere threat of just a face, the impact it can have. It’s deliciously it floods our bodies with suggestive. It invites one to stare at the to put it under consideration. Red exactly the same chemical mouth, lips are like a siren call. as sexual attraction When you meet a girl for the first time BELLA POLLEN

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and your eyes meet, you fixate on her face.

If she happens to be wearing beautifully applied red lipstick with a nice lustre to it, one does tend to stay looking a little bit longer. If it’s really beautifully applied – on the right girl – who knows how long that fixation could last?

Red is a colour you always think of people wearing when they’re out looking for trouble. Some girls are uncomfortable with red lipstick because it’s a statement. It suggests edginess, flair, even a flash of danger. A girl has got to be able to carry it off.

Red lips photograph beautifully, Guy Bourdin being the ultimate photographer of them. His images still look so modern and perverse, which of course makes them all the more glorious. Duran Duran has just provided the soundtrack to a commercial for Dior’s new lipstick, featuring Kate Moss. There is nothing sexier or more suggestive than the application of red lipstick, and Moss is fairly expert at that.

What can I say? The world will always have room for red lipstick.

Viva La Lipstick Rouge!

BELLA POLLEN on DANGER

For all the complexities of our 21st-century world, most women live strangely anodyne lives. It’s not our fault we opt for safe and dull – routine and duty are requirements imposed on us by an increasingly confining society. Too much safe though, and we wither and die. We stop feeling. We switch off.

Danger wakes us up. It turns us back on. As an aphrodisiac, it has a powerful trick up its sleeve. The mere threat of it floods www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

our bodies with exactly the same chemical as sexual attraction.

Dangerous men can be hard to spot. They don’t have to come armed with knives, they just have to be not good for you. Those I have fallen for have messed with both my head and my safety.

More than once I’ve played Bonnie to some boyfriend’s Clyde, taken stupid risks to prove myself, but I’ve never regretted any of them.

Danger makes us feel alive, and feeling alive is a primal need.

Still, a woman’s instinct for self-preservation ultimately rights itself. Sure, we’ll eat the entire box of chocolates in one go, but we’ll fast for days afterwards. We understand that the dark side can be rarely visited, but that doesn’t stop us flirting with it, fantasising about it and lusting after it. After all, as every woman knows, ’tis the vampire’s kiss that is the sweetest.

GEOFF DYER on BRAINS

Back in the 1980s, I often heard feminists claim that men were intimidated by clever women. Crazy! There’s nothing more attractive in a woman than brains. Well, hang on a moment… Remembering Henry James’s description of George Eliot – surely one of the most intelligent people who ever lived – as ‘magnificently, awe-inspiringly ugly’, I realise that my romantic-aesthetic tastes aren’t as cerebral as I like to claim.

So let’s concede that it all starts with looks. There’s nothing more beautiful than beauty. But things get instantly complicated, as Italo Svevo understood when he wrote: ‘Beautiful women always seem intelligent at first.’ The longing provoked by beauty contains the hope that what is going on inside the head will be on a par with what you are seeing. This feeling can be fleeting, but when it persists, when you discover that you’re having trouble keeping up, that things are being pointed out to you about the world which you had never noticed before (or sort of noticed but never, um, noticed)… then the beauty acquires an extra wattage and, before you know it, you’re head-over-heeling.

We see this in screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby.

Katharine Hepburn is gorgeous, obviously, but what makes her so alluring in Cary Grant’s – and our – eyes is the prospect of a lifetime of being kept permanently on one’s toes, of never being bored, of watching someone speak. Back in the 1930s, such mental exuberance was not expected of a woman. These days, it is – which means the bar has been raised. That’s why performers such as Rachel Weisz, Emily Blunt and Renée Zellweger – beautiful, sexy and quick-witted – are so thrilling to watch.

This touches on the question of whether you can fancy someone who is pretty and intelligent, but without a sense of humour. Of course you can’t. Proximity to such people is like being in a waking coma. But who cares about them? Better to remember the beautiful woman I’d just been introduced to who delivered a brilliant monologue about how artists should not write, just paint. ‘What about Van Gogh?’ I said. ‘He wrote amazing letters.’ ‘Yes,’ she snapped back. ‘But have you seen the paintings?’ I didn’t even laugh. I just stood there, gazing, paralysed by love.

because she was so intelligent. It was also because of her extraordinary looks. Beauty is a kind of defence for beautiful women.

Most men are dull and just want to get women into bed. But the men I’m friends with, like Jack Nicholson and Julian Schnabel, have got more to them than that. Sometimes, it’s just nice to be with someone, and that should be the aim.

There’s charm in a long seduction. I liked the days when the woman would tease the man and when it might take you three months to get to someone. The trouble now is that if the girl doesn’t give out on the first night, the man’s on to someone else.

My thing was to make women laugh, because if you laugh you’re not threatening, are you? It’s never what you do, it’s how you do it.

And judging by my résumé, it worked.

DINOS CHAPMAN on SMELL

It’s smell that does it for me. And there’s a certain special smell that has been following me around since childhood. I can’t locate where it comes from, or what it is, but I’ll be somewhere – in the street, at a restaurant – and I might get a whiff of it and it’ll set me off. I can’t pin it down. If I could, I’d put it in a bottle and sell it.

When the smell’s not there to help me, it’s eye contact that’s my most effective aphrodisiac, although I don’t give eye contact much myself. I’m shy, you see.

Power, for us, eclipses ERDEM MORALIOGLU looks, wit and on CONFIDENCE describe myself as a romantic, intelligence. It curdles Ibutwouldn’t my instinctive idea of an aphrodisiac our stomachs with lust, is an empty house, a bottle of wine and the company of someone who is superturning gnarled old Confidence is a kind of supreme men and bland young confident. optimism and if someone can promise you that everything will be all right, that everysuccess stories into thing will turn out OK in the end, then that’s objects of desire going to set off a big spark in me. Behind CELIA WALDEN

DAVID BAILEY on UNAVAILABILITY

I always went for women who were a bit different. I suppose it was that classic thing about the excitement of the chase. Resistance is a turn-on. Take my wife, Catherine: lots of men were scared of her www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

confidence seems to lurk an unexpected surprise – a good surprise, hopefully.

CELIA WALDEN on POWER

Women make a lot of phoney admissions when it comes to what turns them on. We don’t so much lie, as conform to accepted stereotypes.

So we’ll gleefully ‘confess’ to a penchant for ‘bad boys’ and admit, with bitten bottom lip, to a weakness for a washboard stomach. One dirty truth we rarely like to discuss is how much we love a man with power.

Power, for us, eclipses looks, wit and intelligence. It curdles our stomachs with lust, turning gnarled old men and bland young success stories into objects of desire. You’ll see its aphrodisiac effects in Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s eyes as she gazes down at her husband, the French President, and in Naomi Campbell’s subjugated air around her Russian tycoon, Vladimir Doronin. You’ll see it too in the headmaster’s wife’s ever-so-slightly smug expression and the jobbing musician’s girlfriend’s face as she watches him play.

Because a love of power doesn’t always make women grasping social climbers. The barmen I serial dated as a teenager were infinitely powerful to me; as were the many teachers I had crushes on at school, the regional manager of the pizza joint I waitressed in as a student, and the elderly, deeply unattractive university professor after that. Everyone who has ever fallen for their boss has been seduced (at least in part) by power. Perhaps, in the end, it’s about the power kick we get from rendering a powerful man powerless.

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TALKING POINTS

WAR AND PEACE Anabel Cutler, with her sons Gabriel and Luke this year, wearing a McQueen coat, Erdem skirt and Jimmy Choo boots. Right: her ex-husband Sean Langan reporting from Helmand, Afghanistan, in 2006

9WR\O^^SR Pg bVS BOZWPO\ For ANABEL CUTLER, learning that her reporter ex-husband was missing in Afghanistan was the start of a long, painful drama. Here she tells of being involved in the rescue and ransom negotiations, keeping the secret from their children, and his emotional homecoming

I

t was a glorious spring day in March 2008 when the call came that Sean Langan, my ex-husband, was missing, presumed kidnapped, in Afghanistan. I was lifestyle editor on a national newspaper back then, and I was working on a story about how to look 10 years younger. Sean had been reporting from war zones for 10 years, and it struck me for the millionth time over the years that I had known him just how hugely trivial it was that I was www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

here doing this while he was God-knows-where risking his life.

I remember that life-changing telephone conversation with Seanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s executive producer for Channel 4, Alan Hayling, so well: the way my mouth went completely dry, the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, how I suddenly felt weak and had to sit down, the thoughts that flashed through my mind like a high-speed train â&#x20AC;&#x201C; what would I tell the kids, our sons Luke and Gabriel, who were five and four at the time? If it came to it, how hard would it be for them to grow up without a dad? What would I say at his memorial service?

An award-winning documentary-maker, Sean was working on a film about the Taliban. He was chasing an interview with al-Qaedaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s second-in-command in the tribal areas between the Afghan and Pakistani border regions, a no-go zone for civilians, and hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t made the prescribed weekly call to let the team back home know he was safe for a couple of weeks. Alan was very worried. As was I, September 2011 |

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PORTRAIT: MARKN. STYLED BY NATHALIE RIDDLE. WOOL TWEED COAT, ÂŁ1,995, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. WOOL TOP, ÂŁ39, COS. SILK CHIFFON SKIRT, ÂŁ160, ERDEM. TIGHTS, ÂŁ16, FALKE. LEATHER BOOTS, ÂŁ650, JIMMY CHOO. SEE STOCKISTS FOR DETAILS. HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY ROZELLE PARRY AT DW MANAGEMENT, USING ARMANI. PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF SEAN LANGAN

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TALKING POINTS LOVE AND MARRIAGE Cutler and Langan on their wedding day in Ibiza in 2000

but I was also angry and conflicted. With the risks Sean took, it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, and for me, him going in to such a dangerous area felt like a supremely selfish act for a dad. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been sucked back into the drama I had fought hard not to be part of. I had a life, and after a couple of hard years on my own, a new boyfriend who I adored and who had been there for me.

I had met Sean when I was 24 (he was a freelance journalist writing for the nationals, not a war reporter, then). Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been attracted by his easygoing charm and sense of adventure and fallen head over heels in love.

We married in Ibiza in 2000. But after a 12-year relationship, we had split up in 2005 and finally divorced two years later. His love affair with war, months spent apart worrying for his safety, and endless disappointments when he had promised to come home and then didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, had long extinguished our more domestic relationship. When he came back from a war zone, often having witnessed unbearable horrors, he understandably needed to depressurise, which often manifested itself as long nights out getting trashed, and days when he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get out of bed. After the months that he was absent filming, during which I was left on my own to hold down a job and look after the babies, I needed a break too. I loved him but I was also exhausted; the day-to-day reality of kids and bills could never compete with the romance of war. In the end, it felt easier to leave.

I was still friendly with Sean â&#x20AC;&#x201C; he was the kidsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; dad, and still often came to my flat to tuck them into bed in the evenings â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and I had spoken to him just a few weeks before the kidnapping. He had called from Kabul in Afghanistan. It was the evening before he was about to set off on the fateful trip into the tribal areas. He tried to stay chirpy when he spoke to the kids, but I could sense his fear when we spoke, and with good reason. A CBS journalist had recently been kidnapped in the same area. A huge ransom had been demanded and, most importantly, paid in order to get him released. In other words, Sean might as well have had 100-dollar

bills stapled to his forehead; to any secondrate Afghan criminal, he would be a walking bank. I had begged him not to go to the tribal areas himself.

But like most war junkies, Sean has a consuming passion for the front line.

He is also a brilliant journalist and has been reporting from Afghanistan and other war-torn countries for more than a decade. He is known for his achievements in Iraq, where he was one of the first journalists to report on the insurgency, in Zimbabwe and especially in Afghanistan, where he conducted the first TV interview with the Taliban. For him, it was out of the question not to follow a fantastic lead.

And just as he felt the need to follow his lead, I felt honour-bound when I heard of the kidnapping to help get Sean released, partly for the sake of our children, but also because I was asked to. Unknown to me, Sean had put me down as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;next of kinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in case of an emergency. It was a powerful call to action â&#x20AC;&#x201C; like he had made me responsible for his life. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to abandon him. Alan and Channel 4 would be doing most of the initial search and negotiations, but I was there, along with Seanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s siblings, to make decisions about what to do.

And so it was that a few weeks after the initial call, when it had been confirmed that Sean had been kidnapped, though we still didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know where he was, that Alan and I found ourselves sitting around a table with two bureaucrats in bad suits at the Foreign Office in London. Neither of us had slept properly since the whole episode began, and the meeting seemed surreal; a scene from a bad spy novel. I felt totally out of my depth, and nervously giggly as a result. The men were sympathetic but I felt unsure of their motives. Was Seanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rescue really at the top of the agenda, or was their interrogation an intelligence-gathering exercise? It all seemed so cloak-and-dagger.

Meanwhile, Channel 4 had employed a security team that specialised in kidnap rescue to help pull Sean out, and I was attending crisis meetings there with Alan and Seanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family every few days. We had decided to keep the story out of the papers as it was felt this might up Seanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s value as a hostage, and it was a blessing not to be in the public eye. One thing the security firm said kept me going: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Remember, Sean is worth more to the rebels alive than dead.

Out of sheer greed, and also because of the traditional tribal honour code of Pashtunwali, they will treat him well and keep him alive.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

By May, as the weeks after his kidnapping rolled into months, the kids, who had last seen Sean in January, were asking more and more frequently where their daddy was and when they would see him again. It was hard to stay upbeat and jolly while fobbing them off with half-lies. I told them he was in the mountains on a top-secret mission and couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use his phone, then I said he was ill and couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t come down from the mountains. I was running out of excuses.

My new relationship with my boyfriend was also wilting with the stress. I was pouring so much emotional energy into getting Sean back that there was not much left. I found it hard to talk to anyone about what was happening unless CONTINUED ON PAGE 358

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PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF ANABEL CUTLER

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Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrity Wife Swapâ&#x20AC;Ś? Did he foresee YouTube sensations? The Twittocracy? Or the second-generation celeb, the sons and daughters of people who gained fame on legitimate grounds, but who have yet to prove they are capable of anything other than spending their parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hard-won fortunes? The glamour models turned multi-media sensations? Actors and singers turned one-person exercises in brand extension, with their perfumes and their lifestyle blogs, their leggings ranges and their hair products? Did he foresee technically credible celebrities choosing to rely not on their talent to generate profile and work to sustain their career, but instead the rollercoaster ride of their personal lives?

Probably not. But thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what we got, through the course of the late Nineties and the entire 2000s. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s quite as if we took Warholâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s prediction as a challenge, rather than a warning.

Several things have driven the culture of the C word. Money is, inevitably, the great factor. Reality television â&#x20AC;&#x201C; progenitor of much of the modern celebrity culture â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is the consequence of the industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unwillingness to invest in drama; so expensive to produce, so risky in terms of generating profit and guaranteed viewing figures.

Reality TV, on the other hand, is much cheaper, much more instant, much more likely to generate sensation and, therefore, viewerattracting press coverage. It made extremely good financial sense.

The first series of Big Brother aired in the UK in 2000. It caused a sensation, altered the landscape of TV for good and launched a new generation of famous people. We, the viewing public, were charmed by how normal, unpolished and unexceptional that first cast were; their tiny dramas became our dramas. We wanted more â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and we got it. Eleven series in all, alongside the Celebrity spin-offs, each representing a twisted evolution on the one before. The charm of the normal was replaced by the flinty-eyed, grasping ambition of the untalented but violently determined and increasingly entitled.

Reality TV flourished as a genre, throwing up all manner of variants: The Apprentice, Castaway, Britainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Next Top Model, The X Factor; and the most recent and curious scripted reality phenomenon: The Hills, The City and The Only Way Is Essex. Each series of each show spewed out yet more flinty-eyed celebrities of dubious merit, and achieving and maintaining fame became an endgame in and of itself.

Meanwhile, the media and the public became accustomed to an access-all-areas type of relationship with contemporary celebrities. People who had become famous via the medium of simply being themselves while locked up in a house in full view of endless rolling cameras had no issue with sharing every aspect of their lives with their new public on an ongoing basis. More conventional celebrities began subscribing to the shifting rules on fame.

In 2002, Ozzy Osbourne and his family first allowed the MTV cameras into their Beverly Hills mansion. By 2003, Nicole Ritchie and Paris Hilton had signed up for The Simple Life. Increasingly, personal life replaced talent as the hard currency of fame. The more tumultuous that personal life, the more there was to sell. Boundaries were diminished; so were qualities such as mystique, and elevated distance, and a kind of reverence generated by remove â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all of which were once interchangeable with the notion of fame. Where once we had untouchable Hollywood glamour, ethereal, unknowable superstars floating along La Croisette in Cannes, we now have mugshots of a pallid Lindsay Lohan â&#x20AC;&#x201C; caught again on a DUI (driving under

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7

t is surely the most tired, over-used, empty word currently at large in the English language. The word invoked in the most routine, thoughtless and lazy manner. A word rendered meaningless with mal-application. A drab, flimsy little word that (oh, the exhausting, piteous irony!) was intended to denote something exceptional and glamorous, something aspirational and rare.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a word that now serves as linguistic shorthand for every failing of popular culture. A word whose subtext is the cheap and the throwaway, the temporary and the essentially pointless, and, as a result, sullies the public profiles of those to whom it is also regularly and unthinkingly applied: the accomplished, the beautiful, the truly talented and the significantly charismatic.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beyond a clichĂŠ. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dated. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clumsy, indelicate, utterly without nuance. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vulgar. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ugly. It is the real C word. (So much more offensive, so much less thrilling, brave and powerful than the original C word, letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face it). Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (and I hesitate before typing the word, because I always do; I always pause and take a moment or two to wish, as a journalist, that there was an alternative expression, a subtler, newer, contemporised, more relevant, less pejorative way of addressing a particular person, or a particular scene, at my disposal, but there isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, and so â&#x20AC;&#x201C; oh dear â&#x20AC;&#x201C; here goes, brace yourselvesâ&#x20AC;Ś) â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;celebrityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re entering 2011. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been a rough couple of years, but weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve survived, so far at least. And itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to start thinking in terms of refreshing, renewing, cleansing, improving. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve another decade at our disposal; unblemished, untainted, all possibility and potent. We can do anything we like with it.

In which case, a proposal: if we achieve one thing culturally in the course of the next decade, let it be that we fall out of the thrall of the C word, of the diminished and spurious qualities and achievements it has come to represent, of the grubby scene it suggests.

But first: how did we get here, to this bizarre point at which straightforward celebrity has become the vacuous, grasping, mindless, shameless C word?

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not as if we werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t warned about the toxic diminished stew of fleeting, unsupported, pointless fame. Andy Warhol first put up a distress flare 42 years ago for heavenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sake. A line in a catalogue for his exhibition in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1968 announced: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; In 1979, Warhol revisited the assertion, saying: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;My prediction from the Sixties finally came true: in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; It seemed like an opaque yet ominous pronouncement when it was first issued. Warhol would never be drawn on precisely what he meant by it. When pressed, he would say variously: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;In the future, 15 people will be famousâ&#x20AC;Śâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, or â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;In 15 minutes, everybody will be famous.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But the most accepted interpretation was that the traditional hierarchy of individuals and subjects worthy of recognition and acclaim would some day be abolished, allowing individuals who were not worthy of fame in the traditional sense to become famous nonetheless.

You have to think weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve exceeded even Warholâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bleak expectations on that score. The artist was, indisputably, a visionary, but did even he foresee reality TV? Or scripted reality TV? Did he foresee Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!,

the influence) charge â&#x20AC;&#x201C; instantly available via Perez Hilton and the Smoking Gun. We have Katie Price insisting on telling us things we really didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to know about every aspect of her life; broadcasting them on a rolling-news basis through tabloid headlines, her documentary series and her endless cameos on reality-TV shows.

An entire industry of magazines and gossip blogs evolved around the C-word scene, all designed to build up celebrities, with a view to knocking them down at some undetermined point. That narrative arc has come to rule the publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship with fame and the famous. We love our stars up to a point, and then we love to watch them fail, and fall. If they manage to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and find a new way in which to be famous â&#x20AC;&#x201C; well then, hoorah! We will love them yet more than we did the first time around. Inhabiting a trajectory â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a journey, in the jaded vernacular of reality TV â&#x20AC;&#x201C; has become central to the modern idea of celebrity.

We, the C-word-spectating public, have become warped by this dynamic. More inclined to dehumanise, to viciously critique, to perceive the suffering of others as little more than a diverting soap-opera script. For example, we became so fixated by 2010â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s high-profile celebrity break-ups â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Tiger and Elin, Sandra Bullock and Jesse James, Cheryl and Ashley Cole â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that last summer The New York Times rather cleverly declared divorce the new pornography. It isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t good for us. Which is why we need to let this go.

Although it may just be that our love affair with the C word is coming to an organic end. There are some positive signs. Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother have ended their Channel 4 run, for starters. The broadcasterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s official line is that it will be dedicating money, energy and scheduling to new drama. Elsewhere, a different kind ofâ&#x20AC;Ś what to call them? â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Star? Famous person? Individual of note? Celeb 2.0? â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is gaining currency. They are, perhaps, the post-celebrities. Their profile hangs on their being truly, palpably talented, truly interesting, truly worthy of our time and attention.

The actor James Franco is an excellent case in point. A polymathic star who looks like James Dean, acts like a dream, makes brilliantly unpredictable role choices, has been accepted to do a PhD, has just written a novel, and appeared in drag as the cover star of glossy transvestite magazine Candy. He also never trades on his personal life. He never needs to. On which: Lady Gaga.

Gaga might, ostensibly, seem like something of a fame whore who has no fear of the spotlight and who embraces every opportunity to shock. But, nevertheless, she keeps us at a dignified distance. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really know who Gaga dates, or where she hangs out when she is not on fame duty; her interviews are gratuitously oblique. She hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t written a premature autobiography, or put her name to a clothing range. She is â&#x20AC;&#x201C; from a public perspective â&#x20AC;&#x201C; her work, and nothing else.

Elsewhere, existing C-worders are finding other, post-C-word ways to be famous. There is Victoria Beckham, whose excellent new clothing and handbag collections give her the edge of credibility that had been lacking in her pop years. And there is Justin Timberlake, whose Oscar-tipped portrayal of Napsterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sean Parker in The Social Network marks a stylish reconfiguring of his public profile.

Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hope that these individuals are the prototype for newgeneration celebrity, for fame in 2011. Because a pop-cultural landscape built on the principles of well-applied talent and discreet private lives sounds blissful, doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it?

In which case, only one issue remains. What to call it, this successor to the C word? How to describe the inhabitants of this brave new scene? How to denote a state of elevated importance, of recognition, earned through extraordinary ability and hard graft? Tricky, isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it? We may have to get back to you on that. www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PARTNERS IN STYLE Valentino with Jackie Onassis in Capri in 1970

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ou donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have celebrities like Jackie Onassis any more, who go out dressed as elegantly as she was. Even walking the dog in Central Park, she wore a beautiful coat, scarf and shoes. Everything was well chosen.

Being elegant all the time was something the film stars of the 1940s and 1950s understood.

Lana Turner and Katharine Hepburn were always well dressed. They wore beautiful gowns on-screen, but in their private lives they were also obliged â&#x20AC;&#x201C; by the studios â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to show themselves in public as beautiful.

I have had the luck to dress some of the most elegant women in the world, including Jackie Onassis and also Audrey Hepburn, who loved

beautiful things and loved to be fantastically dressed.

I recently went to an exhibition of photographer Jean Pigozzi at the Gagosian Gallery and I saw pictures of Elizabeth Taylor in one of my white organza dresses in the 1970s. She looked amazing. She once said to me: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Valentino, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t insist on making me an elegant woman. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not an elegant woman.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; But she understood glamour and loved clothes and I made several dresses that were beautiful on her.

Elegance like that has almost disappeared. There are some celebrities who still value it.

But looking too perfect is no longer the fashion. If celebrities want to wear anything in public as they do now, they risk one day looking glamorous, and one day looking much less so.

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to her that they just can’t cope without their wonder pills. Some are taking Xanax. Others rely on Stilnoct (a sleeping pill with the active ingredient zolpidem) to get their eight hours. ‘These are highly professional over-achievers. For them, their tablets are like Botox for the mind.’ But Kate does not take her pill-popping lightly. She worries about the effects of Xanax, to which, it is reported, a tolerance level can build up over four to six weeks, requiring an increase in dose to be effective. ‘It is supposed to calm you, but the next day I always feel so much worse. It’s a vicious circle; it just makes you want more. One businesswoman friend wasn’t fully aware of how addictive it was, and it became something she took more and more.

The withdrawal was horrendous – with insomnia, dysphoria, tremors and cramps – and she had to go into rehab to kick the drug.’

Addiction to prescription drugs – including Seroxat, Xanax and sleeping pills like temazepam and Stilnoct – is now becoming an increasingly urgent problem in the UK, particularly among women.

In January, a year-long government investigation into legal-drug dependency highlighted the dangers of benzodiazepines (psychoactive drugs used for the treatment of anxiety, including Xanax, temazepam and Valium), antidepressants and over-the-counter painkillers, particularly those containing codeine.

Outside of the plot of TV’s Nurse Jackie (where Edie Falco plays a nurse having an affair with the ward pharmacist to get the painkillers she needs to feed her habit), this is usually seen as a Hollywood problem. Robbie Williams, Kelly Osbourne and Owen Wilson have all been linked to issues with legal medication, which affected their ability to function. More extreme cases, involving cocktails of drugs, have led to lethal overdoses. Prescription drugs (three of them issued in London) were cited in the death of Heath Ledger, along with pneumonia. Ten types of medicine were found in Brittany Murphy’s bedroom, including Topamax (for migraines), Fluoxetine (for depression), Ativan and Klonopin (for anxiety) and Vicoprofen (for pain relief ). Although coroners also ruled the primary cause of her death as pneumonia, ‘multiple drug intoxication’ was said to be a contributing factor.

However, this is by no means a celebrity disease. In the US, legally prescribed drugs kill 20,000 a year, a figure that is www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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bout 10 years ago, I had a couple of strange five-minute episodes that I eventually realised were panic attacks. I lost my breath for seconds at a time, felt tight-chested, disoriented, claustrophobic. It happened to me once in a changing room, where I suddenly felt trapped. And once on a plane, where I felt I had to get off.

(A few weeks before this happened, I had been with my grandfather when he died, and I had been feeling depressed and confused since then.) I went to see my GP. Within two minutes of me walking through the door, she barely looked up from her desk and said: ‘I can give you a prescription for Seroxat.’

When I got home I read up on the drug; Seroxat is the antidepressant paroxetine, usually prescribed for anxiety. The potential side effects listed included tremors, sweating, insomnia, agitation and possible addiction; the cure seemed far more damaging than the problem. On my return to my GP, I asked about other options.

There was the possibility of counselling, but there was a six-month waiting list. Seroxat was the quick-fix option; it would take effect in as little as two to four weeks. In the end, I never took the drug.

I chose to seek therapy privately instead; after a year of counselling, my panic attacks ceased. I haven’t had another one since.

I was reminded of this at a recent fashion event, after complimenting my friend Kate*, who was giving a talk, on her confident public-speaking skills. ‘I get terrible panic attacks when I know I have to give a speech,’ she confided later, then delved into her handbag to produce a packet of Xanax (a short-acting anti-anxiety drug that commonly causes rebound symptoms with withdrawal). Kate, 34, is a high-powered fashion executive, and takes Xanax occasionally to soothe her nerves under pressure. ‘It gives me a feeling of calm and serenity, just when I need it. I just don’t have time to take the therapy route. Public speaking is an essential part of my job.’

Kate says that over recent months, several of her friends – all running their own businesses in media and finance – have ‘come out’

*NAME HAS BEEN CHANGED

With prescription-pharmaceutical use on the rise in the UK, the risk of long-term addiction has never been greater. What begins as a cure becomes dangerously habit-forming – and two-thirds of those hooked are women. VIV GROSKOP looks at Britain’s hidden drug problem. Photograph by JENNY VAN SOMMERS

17.5 per cent higher than deaths from illegal drugs. In the UK, there are an estimated 400,000 heroin addicts, but it is believed that seven times more people are addicted to legal opiates and antidepressants in this country. According to the NHS, prescriptions for antidepressants reached an all-time high of 31 million in England in 2006, a six per cent rise on the previous year.

From 2007 to 2008, the number of prescription drugs issued rose by 5.8 per cent. Department of Health figures for 2009 suggest that more than 1.5 million people are now addicted to anti-anxiety prescription medicine in the UK; two-thirds of these are women.

‘Highly professional, busy working women are one of the most vulnerable groups because, anecdotally, they are the worst at looking after themselves,’ says Dr Justine Setchell of the Westover, a private health clinic in London.

‘They run a company, have families and marriages, and they are often so busy juggling everything that the last person on the list is themselves. These are women who often don’t have time for a counselling session to stop and get to the root of the problem – be it insomnia, depression, anxiety or pain. Instead, a pill can be a short-term sticking-plaster, which helps them to cope and carry on with their stressful lives.’

As I know from personal experience, prescription drugs are easy to obtain on the NHS. But what begins as a short-term treatment can spiral into a much bigger problem, with risks of debilitating side effects and ongoing drug dependency.

Setchell worked as a GP for the NHS for 18 years before joining the Westover. ‘With the current time limitations on a consultation with an NHS GP – about seven-and-a-half minutes – there is a tendency not to talk about all the possible side effects,’ she says. This includes the addictive nature of some anti-anxiety and painkilling drugs in just two to four weeks.

Film producer Jessica*, 38, became dependent on prescription painkillers after a serious car accident in which she fractured her spine and skull. Because of the severity of her injuries, she was prescribed a combination of three painkillers – including the codeine-based Co-codamol. ‘The problem was that I was due to start work on a new big-budget production funded by the UK Film Council. It was a big break for me, so I forged ahead regardless and returned to work three weeks earlier than the doctor recommended, relying on the drugs to manage the pain.’ Jessica ended up taking double the prescribed dose of painkillers to cope. ‘My accident had been near-fatal, but no one addressed what effect that trauma might have had on my mental state. Instead, I felt that I had been handed all these bottles of pills and just left to fend for myself.’ When she started to wean herself off the medication, Jessica, who was managing a crew of over 100, began to experience withdrawal symptoms, becoming increasingly confused, depressed and anxious (even bursting into tears in front of her lead actor on set). She was unable to eat and her weight plummeted from nine-and-a-half to seven stone in a month. As a result, Jessica’s doctor prescribed a course of antidepressants to deal with withdrawal symptoms (although she eventually sought therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder).

‘Within the 25–45 age group, it’s very normal for women to regularly take codeine-based medication, but they are not educated about the risks of long-term use,’ says Emmy Gilbert of Recover, a

rehab centre that treats prescription-drug addicts. Codeine is an opiate, like heroin and methadone, and functions by inhibiting pain receptors and creating artificial endorphins in the brain, producing a ‘codeine euphoria’, or high. With continued use it can cause the body to stop releasing natural endorphins; instead, it relies on more and more codeine for the same effect. Withdrawal from prolonged use can cause insomnia, irritability, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting and sweating. ‘We frequently deal with women who have had back problems and been put on a long-term pain management programme, and then abuse the medication because it stopped having the same effect. They end up with an opiate-addiction problem.’

Jessica now sees herself as a ‘high responder’, someone with a high sensitivity to medication, and has since avoided prescription painkillers. The problem with pill-popping is that no two people have the same level of drug tolerance: for some women I spoke to, 5mg of valium ‘has the same effect as a martini’; for a ‘high responder’, it can blot out three days from their life. This also applies to the tendency for addiction: where one can withdraw easily from anti-anxiety drugs over several weeks, another will continue to be dependent for years, and may need further medication to deal with side effects such as insomnia, mental confusion and depression.

This happened to Charlotte*, 32, who was working as an arts fundraiser two years ago. While she was suffering a period of depression, her doctor prescribed mirtazapine, an antidepressant used to treat anxiety. However, the drug reacted with a course of antibiotics Charlotte had been given on a work trip to Italy for a chest infection.

Next came the side effects: restless-leg syndrome, sleeplessness and ‘more drugs to combat the side effects of the drugs’, including temazepam and Valium. ‘I couldn’t concentrate or read, let alone look at a computer. The drugs totally took away my personality.

I shut myself away and didn’t speak to friends for months. In the end, I lost my job and my career because I was unable to function.’

It took Charlotte 10 months, cutting down by 10 per cent a month, closely overseen by a specialist, to come off all the medication; during this time she moved back in with her parents. ‘I kept thinking, “You don’t want them, they’re making you ill.” But when you stop, you go through this withdrawal where you feel you need the drug.’ Charlotte has only recently moved back into her own place, from where she now freelances for another arts-based charity.

ction a r t t a e th r.

‘A lot oef secrecy factfoair. is in th having an af nd It’s likele like to lie. Ag Peop e’s somethin ou ther l about it: y personiattle bottle with get a l r name on it’ you

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is over, then it’s all about treating the psychological addiction. With benzos [benzodiazepines] it can take months, even years, for the withdrawal symptoms to end. There are former addicts who have said it was easier for them to get off heroin than benzos.’

It’s enough to look at the shelf space at your local supermarket allotted to alluringly coloured packets of pills to believe that prescription medicine is not the only problem. Twenty-seven million packets of codeine-containing painkillers are sold over the counter every year in the UK, including Solpadeine, Nurofen and Feminax, some of which, according to recent reports, can become addictive in ‘as little as three days’. David Grieve, project manager of Over-Count, a telephone helpline set up to help those addicted to over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, says that OTC painkillers are fast becoming the biggest ‘hidden’ addiction; he believes that at least 50,000 people have problems with codeine in the UK, but suggests that with unreported cases factored in, the real figure could be double that.

Again, the greatest problem is with women. The online support group CodeineFree has twice as many female members as male ones. Last year a survey of callers to Over-Count found the most common age range of those addicted is 18 to 36, and that two-thirds of them are women. ‘Women just don’t have time for pain any more,’ says nutritional therapist and naturopath Vicky Edgson, who works a lot with addiction. ‘Painkillers have become the universal panacea.

I recently treated a client who had become addicted to a codeine-based painkiller they took to manage pains caused by over-exercising.’

Edgson says that regular use of OTC codeine-based medicines can lead to stomach ulcers and can alter enzymes in the liver and cause a subsequent disruption in hormones. ‘When taken with alcohol – which is actually very common – persistent codeine intake can contribute to liver failure.’

‘Today, we are so reactive,’ Edgson continues.

‘We have a pain, we take a pill. But pain is the body’s way of alerting us that something is wrong; we should pay attention to it, not block it out. We take a painkiller for a headache because they are so readily available to us, without even looking at the underlying cause.’

Setchell believes that getting to the root of a problem may be the answer for sufferers of anxiety, depression and panic attacks. ‘I think that there is a strong link between the rise in antidepressants, for example, and the lack of access to talking therapies on the NHS, where waiting lists for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be up to a year,’ she says. ‘A combination of therapy and antidepressants has been found to be the most effective treatment for depression, but people don’t always need medication where counselling and CBT are available.’ The findings of a Department of Health review looking into addiction to prescription medicine will be out later this year.

I’m still relieved I never touched Seroxat. (Subsequently, reports have revealed that some have found it hard to stop using the drug; and it has even been linked to self-harming and suicide.)

Maybe I could have taken it for a few weeks, felt better and walked away. Or maybe it would have been more complicated than that.

Who knows? I’m glad I chose therapy instead. Although expensive and time-consuming, it made a long-lasting difference to my life.

For more information, visit www.recovernow.co.uk, www.codeinefree.me.uk or www.over-count.org.uk.

Although women who ta anti-anxiety pil ke regular basıs rals on a view themselverely ‘drug addicts’, t s as are dependenhtey on medication that is often mo difficult to kick re t illegal drugs han

*NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

harlotte’s drugs were prescribed by doctors.

But in the US, the internet is a common source. Google ‘buy Xanax online’ and you get over two million hits; search for ‘buy Valium’ and you get even more. In the UK, it’s easy to get exactly what you are looking for from a GP when you know what to say, claims Tamsin*, 38, a onetime regular user of antidepressants such as Prozac and Seroxat. A successful film executive with a packed schedule of constant travel and deadlines, Tamsin uses her anxiety medication for the times when she has to miss an appointment with her therapist. She mentions a work acquaintance – ‘one prominent woman’ – who has insomnia problems and plays off

various private and NHS doctors to get a steady supply of sleeping drugs while avoiding serious questioning. Another ‘shops for consultants’, visiting three private psychiatrists at a time for antianxiety medication, sleeping tablets and antidepressants. As with most addictions, ‘need’ becomes the mother of invention.

Other friends of Tamsin’s are ‘prescription-drug tourists’ who stock up on supplies (‘like Valium’) when they are on holiday in unregulated countries. Camilla*, 41, who works in investment banking, is also a dab hand at this. ‘I’ve learned that you can buy a lot of stuff abroad that you just can’t get here. When I lived in the US 20 years ago, they had these diet pills. That was my first taste of it.’

Now she buys the entire contents of her medicine cabinet overseas, mostly in the US, where drugs such as the painkiller Vicodin are available. Those in the know have all sorts of tricks and advice, she adds. ‘The Spanish do really good sleeping pills. The thing is to get “behind-the-counter”, not “over-the-counter”. You don’t need a prescription, but you will need to speak to the pharmacist.’ She adds: ‘I hoard pills, too. I have my ex-boyfriend’s anti-anxiety pills, and I left him three years ago. I take them before I give presentations.’

Camilla avoids contact with her private doctor – ‘because it costs £150 a session’ – and prefers to manage her own health, medicating away life’s small irritations. ‘If I’m on a long-haul flight, I want a glass of red wine and a couple of sleeping pills. When I’ve slept badly at home, I take a Unisom [a sleeping pill bought in New York], and I wake the next day knowing I won’t have a sleep hangover. Tylenol PM [another New York purchase] is great, too: it’s a painkiller with a bit of sleep enhancer in it.’ Does she never worry that this selfmedication could be dangerous? Or that there’s a reason these drugs aren’t available in the UK? Could she be an addict-in-waiting? ‘No. I feel like I’m being practical.

If I have something that lasts longer than 48 hours, I go to my doctor. In the meantime, my little home pharmacy makes me feel safe and secure.’

Whereas Camilla views her flirtation with prescription drugs as merely convenient, author Tania Glyde (who wrote about her experiences with drink and drugs in Cleaning Up: How I Gave Up Drinking and Lived ) believes that at the heart of this kind of pill-popping lies a greater lure. ‘A lot of the attraction is the secrecy factor. It’s like having an affair. People like to lie. And there’s something personal about it: you get a little bottle with your name on it. It’s not like you’ve had to buy something off a dodgy bloke in a pub to get a high.’

This is a world away from being in the grip of taking prescription drugs on a daily basis. But then, who ever intends to become dependent? Sarah*, a laywer, found herself on a cocktail of tranquilisers and antidepressants in her early forties, in the wake of her marriage breakup. Now a voluntary moderator of an internet support group for benzodiazepine addicts, she says she ended up dependent within a few months. (The word ‘dependent’ is important, she adds.

Those who abuse prescription drugs don’t intend to – they are ‘accidental addicts’.) What Sarah considers most alarming is that, although women who take anti-anxiety pills on a regular basis rarely view themselves as ‘drug addicts’, they are dependent on medication that is often more difficult to kick than illegal drugs. ‘With alcohol and opiates, once the initial “acute” withdrawal period of a few weeks www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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