After Andy

by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni

  Eighteen months later, I was rusticated from my school for sneaking out and visiting boys at Eton, the smart school. Five of us got caught. And we were sent away to our parents because it was felt that we were a bad influence on our class. I had changed, or rather, my taste in music had. My once cherished American Graffiti sound track, Supertramp, and Elton John albums had been cast aside. Instead, David Bowie’s haunting face stared out from my “Heroes” album while the Stranglers sang two of my favorite singles—“Peaches” and “No More Heroes.”

  In London, I had read about the teenage issue of Harpers & Queen, the British monthly. The magazine was looking for young writers and models. It was an opportunity. I wrote in and was amazed by the reply. During the Easter holidays, Mayotte Magnus took my portrait. The French photographer caught a virginal innocence in me with my long straight hair. But the magazine decided that it wanted more sophistication.

  Clive Arrowsmith, a renowned fashion photographer, was enlisted. Since it was during term time, I lied to my school and said I had a pressing dentist appointment. The words had tripped off my tongue. I was equally duplicitous with my mother, informing that I had been given permission to do the shoot. That day, I’d chosen to wear a brand-new pair of pearly leather perforated shoes. A mistake: I can still remember the lineup of painful blisters and thinking that God was paying me back for my fibs!

  When I was introduced to Clive, he made noises about a Renaissance painting. My long hair was plaited and full makeup was applied. Totally at ease, I talked to everyone, determined to glean as much as possible. If they were surprised by my fifteen-year-old precociousness, they never said. I was lucky to have started with Clive, who would later photograph me for the Observer Weekend Magazine. He was a romantic and wit who made the most of a woman’s face.

  The photograph was never used. Harpers & Queen informed by way of a typed letter. “Write back and say how disappointed you are because of all the time and trouble,” my mother advised. I did, and got a check for twenty pounds as well as all the negatives. It was an important lesson and fitted in with her dictum: “Try out everything but try to get paid.”

  Meanwhile, I was starting to catch the attention of older men. It rarely happened in the same way with boys in my own generation. Sometimes the incidents were funny. My first-ever day on skis, I appeared on the slopes in Saas-Fee resembling a pink-and-green ski bunny. A man appeared out of nowhere, doing a snow version of the tango, for my benefit. I attempted to join him and promptly fell on my face. Another time, I remember going to a gallery opening and wearing a gypsy-type dress that exposed my shoulders. Suddenly the likes of Terence Stamp and West End producer Michael White were at my side. A few days later, I met Nicky Haslam in the Embassy nightclub, a trendy place to dance and have a drink. I knew who he was. As well as being a famous decorator, he wrote columns for Vogue and Ritz magazine, which was owned by David Bailey and David Litchfield and strongly resembled Warhol’s Interview. Or, to quote Nicky, “I think we can safely say it was a rip-off.”

  Nicky, who was known for discovering people, came up and introduced himself. “I think you know my mother,” I said. This surprised Nicky, who ended up writing about me in his monthly Ritz column in the spring of 1978. “Natasha Fraser, the daughter of Lady Antonia Fraser, who is already rivalling the beauty of her sisters Rebecca and Flora.”

  Nothing beat that first mention. Even if I kept it from every member of my entire family. Nevertheless, I read it again and again. I was fifteen, and although I was a wee bit young, I wasn’t academic or particularly interested in my studies. I was eager to hit the big town and meet people. When Nicky sent me the invitation for his tenue de chasse ball—one of those soirées still viewed as legendary for the inspired hunting theme, the guest list, and the bucolic setting—I was both pleased to receive the stiff, engraved invite and annoyed that I couldn’t go. Once again, I had badly caught what Andy coined as the “social disease,” but I wanted to work too. I didn’t nurse ambitions to model. I was photogenic but not a skinny mini, nor did I have the patience needed.

  In my last year at St. Mary’s, I swotted for my O-level exams and was accepted by Queen’s College, a private girls’ school on Harley Street. London beckoned.

  08 Early Euphoria Under Thatcher

  Before starting at Queen’s College, I had a quick spin in Rome, where Andy and Fred Hughes had lived briefly in 1973. With director Paul Morrissey and actor Joe Dallesandro, they had shared a house with Andrew Braunsberg. Best known as Roman Polanski’s producer, as well as being behind masterpieces like Being There, Andrew was working on Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula with Andy and Paul. “They were there to make money,” Braunsberg says. “It wasn’t particularly about creativity.”

  The American art market had dried up for Andy in the early ’70s. It was a result of minimalism being in the forefront, with cutting-edge artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre who made Warhol look like old hat, or so some argued. Vincent Fremont, in charge of Warhol Enterprises, also reasons that after the assassination attempt on Andy in 1968, the American art establishment took a position that he had “lost his creative energy. It was not true,” argues Fremont. “Andy was physically healing but he had endless ideas.”

  Recognizing the situation, Fred decided to Europeanize Warhol’s operation. Having been the protégé of Dominique and John de Menil, prominent collectors who were respected internationally, and having worked for Alexander Iolas, the Paris-based gallerist, he had all the right connections and was tailor-made for the job. In 1969, Fred got together with the powerful Zurich-based art dealer Bruno Bischofberger and Thomas Ammann, who was then working for him. “I invented the forty-by-forty-type portraits,” recalls Bischofberger. “We called them ‘Les Must de Warhol.’” (“Les Must” was a play on Cartier’s famous campaign.) Starting in earnest in 1970, they were an instant hit and according to Fremont were “a good way to keep cash flow coming in in between exhibitions and other projects.”

  A constant source of income came via West Germany, Warhol’s biggest European market, where Peter Ludwig, the country’s most famous collector, and industrialists, their wives and families, and even politicians like Willy Brandt, the former chancellor, lined up to have their portraits done. “It was because the Germans understood and hungered for Pop art,” states Fremont. “The idea being that you could buy part of American culture via Pop art. After the Second World War, England was in a bad shape financially. But the Americans were giving money away via the Marshall Plan and everything.” Guided by Fred, Bischofberger took the business to another level.

  During the 1970s, Fred also set up portrait sittings with members of European society such as Gianni and Marella Agnelli, Stavros Niarchos, Hélène Rochas, Éric de Rothschild, São Schlumberger, Silvia de Waldner, and Gunter Sachs and his then wife Brigitte Bardot, the famous French bombshell. The lucrative portrait-commissioning business helped ease the way for “the five-star social climbing and shopping trips to Europe that Warhol, the awkward boy from Pittsburgh’s Slavic ghetto, grew to love,” as described by Bob Colacello in his Vanity Fair profile on Fred.

  Nevertheless, Europeans were thrilled to meet Andy. “In Rome, he was treated like a film star,” recalls Peter Brant. Jacques Grange, who was at the 1971 Venice Film Festival with Marisa Berenson and Paloma Picasso, was “electrified by Warhol’s presence.” Andy and Fred had turned up at the Palazzo Volpi, ruled by the social powerhouse Lili Volpi, and had dinner with the heiress and legendary collector Peggy Guggenheim and Yves Saint Laurent. “Peggy really wanted to meet him,” recalls Grange.

  When taking the sleeper train back to Paris, Andy bumped into Nico, one of his former Superstars, who had sung with the Velvet Underground. “Beautiful but quite out of it, she wanted to see Andy alone and then immediately stung him for money,” recalls Clara Saint, who worked for Saint Laurent. “Of course, he gave it to her, but I think he was starting to tire of that type of behav
ior.”

  A year later, Andy attended the Volpi Ball, given for the eighteenth birthday of Olimpia Aldobrandini, Lili Volpi’s granddaughter. It was viewed as the last of its kind by Cecil Beaton, the photographer and social diarist, who wrote, “It was interesting to see the influx of the new stars. Andy Warhol in a silk dinner jacket, Bianca Jagger with a swagger stick, Helmut Berger, very German and Marlene Dietrich–esque, his hair dyed yellow . . .”

  Meanwhile, Fred didn’t just make Warhol into “an old master,” to requote Nicky Haslam, or “the Sargent of the Jet Set,” to further quote Colacello: “He also established a network of important European gallery owners such as London’s Anthony d’Offay, Paris’s Daniel Templon, Düsseldorf’s Hans Mayer, and Naples’ Lucio Amelio, who were later prepared to advance hundreds of thousands for shows of much more difficult work: the Mao series, the Drag Queens, the Hammer and Sickles, the Skulls.”

  Interior decorator Suzie Frankfurt had known Andy since the 1950s. However, during her trips to Europe with Warhol and Hughes, it was Fred who won her attention. “After her divorce, my mother became a bit of a groupie,” explains Peter Frankfurt. “She was just dazzled by him. Fred had become an impresario.”

  Nevertheless, Warhol still fretted about funds and the need to finance his empire, which included the Velvet Underground and Interview magazine. “Every year, Andy would be paranoid that we had no money,” says Fremont. “And I bought into it.”

  During the making of Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula, Elizabeth Taylor happened to be in Rome. Miserable at the Grand Hotel, she was boozing, having just been dumped by Richard Burton. “Anyway, Andy was convinced that I was going to be her next husband,” recalls Braunsberg. “He did everything to push the situation, ignoring my pleas to the contrary.” Including the fact that Braunsberg was romantically attached to Faye Dunaway. Andy relished playing the role of Cupid. He often did that. And years later when he saw Braunsberg on Fifth Avenue, he reminded him of the fact. “Andy said, ‘Andrew, I am so disappointed in you. You should have married Elizabeth. You would have had it made.’”

  Andy did like to match-make. In fact, when we first met in February 1980, at a lunch given by Marguerite Littman, a southern-born society hostess, he asked if I knew Johnnie Samuels (who has since morphed into John Stockwell, an actor and horror-film director). Nicknamed “Beauty” at the time, he was the son of John Samuels III, a Warhol collector and prominent New York City Ballet benefactor who was referred to as “Beast.” “You should meet him, he’s an Armani model,” Andy said. At first I was taken aback. He was, after all, Mr. Important Pop Artist who was mentioned in a David Bowie song—the latter being major for that period. And here he was being silly. Then I remembered that Interview, Andy’s magazine, had recently published a portrait of my eldest sister. Besides, I didn’t mind. Andy knew how to tease. There was mutual interest—I was the daughter of Lady A, quite a celebrity, and he was the famous American artist. As he and I bantered, it was like being with one of the girls. According to Bob Colacello, “Andy was curious about women. He felt that he could gossip [with women] more than he could with straight men.” Still, I sensed to withhold personal details. When he was grilling me about the guy I was seeing—a dashing but dastardly playboy—I refused to reveal his name. And when Andy asked if he was married—the playboy wasn’t the type to get hitched—I was a little relieved by the arrival of other guests, who included Bianca Jagger, John Richardson, and Nicky Haslam, who was giving a party that night in honor of Andy.

  Marguerite, whose husband was one of the Queen’s barristers, was renowned for her lunch parties. Held at her Chester Square house, they were not only delicious, with food ranging from fillets of sole with ginger, southern fried chicken, and prune soufflé, but they also had an incredible mix of folk. Inclusive, she would mingle her New York pals like Diana Vreeland, writer Brooke Hayward, socialites Nan Kempner and Pat Buckley, and designer Bill Blass with her London friends such as Lady Diana Cooper and the Queen’s cousin John Bowes-Lyon.

  Marguerite had known Andy since the beginning of his career. She cohosted a party for him in the 1960s that led to decorating the walls with silver foil. Meanwhile, her range of literary-lion friends included Christopher Isherwood, poet Stephen Spender, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, and Tennessee Williams. I liked her “Keep it light” style and the fact that my mother disapproved of her long, lingering lunches.

  As for Marguerite’s strong accent, she admitted that it was pure theater: “It may sound southern to you, but when I go back to Louisiana, a lot of people don’t understand what I’m saying,” she told British Vogue’s Louise Baring. Self-parody was one of Marguerite’s many endearing features. That said, to Hollywood, she was considered the coach for a southern accent. She had prepared Elizabeth Taylor for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and also worked with Claire Bloom, Orson Welles, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward.

  As usual, Marguerite looked immaculate in one of her Yves Saint Laurent outfits. I, on the other hand, had arrived on a bicycle, sporting tight drainpipe jeans, a pink-and-white vintage sweater, and tasseled loafers. My hair had been dyed black, and my eyes, later described by Tatler’s Tina Brown as “large, dark, and grabby,” were smudged with dark purple eyeliner. Everyone else was more formally dressed and a lot more important. However, I was sixteen years old, spilling out in the right places and charged with the best accessory in the world—youth! British Vogue had also just published my full-page portrait under the title “New Beauties for the Eighties—The World Is Their Oyster . . .” Stefano Massimo, a Roman-born prince and Andy acquaintance, had taken my photograph. John Frieda, the then happening hairdresser, had done my hair, while Tom Bell, the fashion designer du jour, stitched me into the silver lamé strapless gown that made my snowy cleavage look like a pair of shimmering shells.

  Initially, I loathed the picture. Frieda made my hair resemble a dark haystack, and my dignified expression defined old-fashioned and uncool. Lord Snowdon’s portrait of model and actress Catherine Oxenberg, another beauty in the series, was much more to my taste. She looked very pretty and dream date–like. Yet if I think back, my Vogue portrait stoked mild interest and established me as a new person on London’s scene.

  Later, a school acquaintance described me as a London “it girl.” To be honest, I usually felt more like a “hit girl,” with the amount of insults I received because I was viewed as confident or even cocky, when I was actually confused by the attention yet determined to seize life by the horns. Besides, the “it girl” expression was hardly ever used during the 1980s. And to explain about the London social scene then, it was staggeringly provincial because most people were English. To quote Nicholas Coleridge (then a star writer at Tatler), “London had more of a village atmosphere and there was a feeling—certainly in the world of Tatler—that there were twenty surnames.” I remember gate-crashing two exceedingly smart weddings—of Edwina Brudenell, the daughter of David Hicks and the goddaughter of the Queen, who was naturally there; and of Eddie Somerset, whose father was David Somerset, the future Duke of Beaufort—and both went without a glitch because someone knew a member of my family. Gate-crashing such events would be unheard-of now.

  Having strong features, I was recognizable and quickly viewed as posh with cleavage. When I appeared at Nicky Haslam’s party for Andy, held at Régine’s nightclub, the crème de la crème of the paparazzi—I refer to Alan Davidson and Richard Young—made a point of taking my picture.

  True to form, Mr. Warhol also snapped away. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. I felt fairly chuffed until he said exactly the same to an American heiress sporting dental braces. Nevertheless, I stuck close and he didn’t mind my sharing his space. “You’re so beautiful,” he continued to gush as he aimlessly clicked away at London’s jeunesse dorée crowd. Being my frank, practical self, I felt the need to blurt out, “Andy, why aren’t you looking through the lens?” He didn’t reply but smiled as if to say, “I don’t need t
o.” And I remained hot on his heels until Bianca Jagger arrived.

  In those days, it was considered impolite not to dress up for a smart party, particularly when the invitation was sent by Nicky, media king. So I wore my black tutu dress, bought from a boutique in Rome called Ginger. It had cost twenty pounds. Andy immediately asked who the designer was. I didn’t quite get it. At sixteen, I didn’t wear high fashion, nor did any of my contemporaries. That was firmly for the older generation. So I explained that the black tulle dress had been on a mannequin in a Roman side street. Andy was amazed by the price. Actually, it was normal.

  Bianca, on the other hand, was wearing Halston. I shared a limousine with her, Andy, Fred, and Mark Shand—the hunky brother of Camilla Parker Bowles—who kept trying to take Bianca’s hand. It was quite femme fatale and quite off-putting until we talked about her emerald-green taffeta trouser suit. The color looked sensational with her black hair.

  Still, Halston equaled a fortune. It was serious money that I never spent on clothes. For instance, my Saturdays were taken up by either going early to Portobello Road and rummaging through the humid cardboard boxes that offered the occasional sensational bargain—sometimes the designer Ossie Clark kept me company, with his little dog stuffed in his coat—or trying the stalls at Camden Lock that were farther away but cheaper. In London then, there was a sort of inverted snob pact: the cheaper the clothes, the better. However, if parents splurged on a cocktail-length dress or ball gown, they relied upon Bellville Sassoon or Caroline Charles.

  Mine did not splurge. Instead, I borrowed dresses from Tom Bell, who was the London equivalent of Halston for a moment. He always had dresses to lend and I always had a party to go to. The atmosphere was heady and caught aptly by the Tatler, a sort of pictorial “upper-class comic” that, to quote Coleridge, was “full of jokes and insults. I remember Michael Roberts [Tatler’s fashion editor] saying that the spine line should have read ‘the magazine that bites the hand that feeds it.’” His boss was tough and demanding—“With Tina, you could go from hero to zero in seconds”—but her staff had the finger on the pulse.