So it was, on the afternoon after Sarah’s graceful and affecting wedding ceremony, that I was accosted by Christopher Hitchens, somewhere near Union Square. I did notice that we were surrounded by people who were not conventionally dressed but, hey, this was the time of club culture and I must hang with it.
Christopher has one of the most compelling voices alive. I confess I bought on CD his book god Is Not Great simply in order to hear those tones, so smoothed by cigs, so enriched by the booze, so clever and hardly vain at all, so lubriciously dated and grand.
‘Hi, Claude,’ said Christopher. ‘Happy Halloween. And what are you dressed as? A parsnip?’
As we returned to England in the aeroplane in 1976, Amschel asked if I’d like to be his lodger in Warwick Avenue. When I said yes thank you, I had no idea to what I was acceding. I did not know London in any sense at all. I had visited Madame Tussauds, a few antiquarian book-shops, Vogue House which is at number one Hanover Square, and perhaps a handful of fashion boutiques, Biba, Bus Stop and Laurence Corner Military Apparel, whose khaki siren suits were, with gold stiletto-heeled boots, my relaxation wear throughout the nineteen-seventies. I had no idea about the wires that hold a life together. All I knew was that I had that job on Vogue.
Warwick Avenue is a boulevard running down from Blomfield Road and the Regent’s Canal. Ava Gardner had lived around here. The green cabmen’s hut is famous among cabbies for the quality of its fry-ups. Amschel’s flat had been lived in before by his sister Emma and Alexander Cockburn and had clearly lain at a nerve centre of sixties radicalism. The journal Three Weeks was published from there. The chastity of the décor was something that I have come to think of as a particular form of le goût Rothschild. The first flight of stone stairs was bare. At some point a large quantity of serviceable elephant-grey carpet had become available and there it was on the floors of the drawing room, the serious library, all the way up the next flight of stairs and into each bedroom beyond and so right to the very top attic room, which was to be the epicentre of some heartbreaks. Amschel himself was fastidious and exquisitely dressed. His trousers came from Beale & Inman, his suits from Anderson & Sheppard. He was twenty-one, his jeans were ironed, his shoes from Wildsmith. But he looked like a saint, not a dandy. He was attending the City University. He would return from the country with his clothes for the week beautifully ironed and ready for his week’s study. Later he became the circulation manager of Ian Hamilton’s New Review. No situation could have been more elegantly suited to him in all its minimalism. At weekends he raced classic cars. His room contained his bed and, leaning against the wall, one ormolu-framed mirror that may have come from Mentmore.
The drawing room at Warwick Avenue was furnished with a desk made of a single curve of wood, a sculpture by the Greek artist Takis that when switched on at the wall flashed its alternating yellow, green, purple and blue lights, and an elephantine set of sofa and chairs, comfortably expiring. We did have a telly. I think it sat on a pile of telephone directories. There was a pencil drawing by Léger over the desk. Occasionally, Amschel might visit the kitchen, halve an avocado with a surgeon’s care, ease away its stone, and spoon a little Hellman’s Mayonnaise into the depression. Once or twice I saw him cut a slice of bread and turn it by various processes into toast and Marmite.
His generosity in having, as lodger, one so improvident and domestically gifted only at cleaning rather than cooking, was typical of the sweetness within the formality of this complicated yet simple-hearted man. I paid no rent. We had no romance. I suppose it was poor Amschel upon whom I learned to cook. I spared him the dish that got me through much of Cambridge, rice cooked with Bovril or tomato ketchup or, when the occasion demanded protein, whelks. I am not sure I could look a whelk in the face now. I am not talking about winkles, but whelks, that have a keratinous front door the size of a thumbnail, a flesh-coloured body that looks like a plastic model of the inner ear, and, tremendously evident khaki digestive arrangements.
Amschel’s father, who had mesmerising and often alarming charm, asked me one day whether I could cook Sole Colbert. I liked saying yes to Victor and sometimes his early morning calls demanding, for example, a crested ear trumpet, were challenges that it was amusing to rise to. I cannot imagine how his tenderly beautiful wife Tess and he got down the astounding brew I had made over three days’ reduction of beef bones. I had reinvented Bovril itself. I suppose Tess, as she always did, made it all right.
Meanwhile, I was learning the magazine trade from the bottom up. I am uncoordinated and not good with knives. Layout in those days involved the cutting out of individual letters with a scalpel and their placing at the actual point upon the page demanded by the art director. Vogue’s art director at the time was the innovative Terry Jones. The really fascinating people in the art room were the retouchers, who did by hand what computers do now, that is, make perfection real, with eyes as minutely observant as those of a jeweller, using brushes as fine as the tip of an ermine’s tail. With almost buddhistic patience and only the most cryptic of chat, these quiet, gifted people would lift a face on film from pleasantness into beauty by the application of tiny dots. At least one was a refugee from Austria. I could imagine her retouching for Horst, for Baron de Meyer. I imagine the retouchers spoiled their eyesight, though they did have lenses much like those a watchmaker might use. The rhythm of our weeks was ruled by ‘The Book’, which was the magazine itself. Copy dates were long and dictated by the seasons of the couture, so we lived always in an unreal, future time. There was nothing more precious than the dummy of the next issue, which would be full of ‘stories’ that had been thought out by the fashion room well in advance and dictated by some shift in collective mood as mysterious as the great annual migrations.
My first summer at Vogue was a summer of cream. All the girls in the fashion room had the look. If you didn’t understand how to have the look, you couldn’t be in the fashion room. The girls in the fashion room were riveting to observe. They had a susceptibility to trend and nuance that is germane to what keeps capitalism rolling round. In some this amounted to pure artistry; I think of Sheila Wetton, who had been Molyneux’s house model and who wore gloves to work every day; of flame-like Grace Coddington who cannot but breathe out new trends as she exhales, yet moves in classicism like the night; of Liz Tilberis, who epitomised for me fresh-faced, freckly, friendly, calico-wearing chic even though she ended a perfect size four for couture, thanks to cancer. The girls in the fashion room hardly spoke to the girls in Copy, or even in Features, where I ended up.
Our editor, Miss Beatrix Miller, was to me like a far less specious version of the headmistress of Sherborne. It may seem crass to compare a fashion magazine with that excellent girls’ school and the Church Missionary Society to which Dame Diana dedicated her life, but Beatrix Miller was an individual who was utterly committed to seeing and getting the best in and from everyone she worked with and who worked under her. Her leadership was generous; she was not an icon but an inspiration No liberties were to be taken yet her thoughtfulness was boundless, her private kindness silently conducted. Her office door was guarded by the magnificent Ingrid Bleischroder who was delivered to work in her father’s Rolls. Miss Miller, which was what we called her, seemed to live on fizzy Redoxon tablets. She had good hands and pencilled the underside of each nail in white crayon. Everything was in the detail.
Having acquitted myself hopelessly in the area of layout, since I vomited every time the Cow Gum was used, I was shuffled magnanimously into Features via Copy. At the time, Vogue had such writers working for it as James Fenton, Charles Maclean and Lesley Blanch. Polly Devlin, Antonia Williams and Georgina Howell were staff writers. The standard was high. I was allowed to start with writing captions. This isn’t an easy matter. You have to consider the ego of the photographer, the needs of the manufacturer of any garments depicted, who may be an advertiser, the size of the page, the demands of the font, and of course the story. I spent days thinking up the words ‘Double cream layer
s’. The photographer was Eric Boman, the model Beska and the lingerie was made by Janet Reger and Courtenay of Bond Street. The story was ‘Girl alone in bathroom in Grand Hotel with many diamonds and very few clothes. What, this side of decency, does she get up to?’
My particular incapacity was to remember to ask what the price of the garment was, so that sometimes a page might go to press with a pound sign followed by a hopeful row of zeros waiting for the real price to come through. The practicalities of working co-operatively on a magazine are similar to those of working on a film and require many of the same adaptive qualities. You need to be practical, quick-witted, resourceful, outgoing, good at working with other people, unflappable, not remotely touchy, able to cope in extreme temperature conditions and capable of soothing persons spoilt to the point of psychopathy. Miss Miller and her team did all this, and more, and evidently loved every minute. I was as bad at working on a magazine as I was later to prove duff at writing a film, though that film work did bring me two invaluable things; an attachment to Stanley Kubrick, who had asked me to write a film for him, and the startlingly prophetic words for my affliction, blepharospasm, which is indeed Eyes Wide Shut, the name of that film about my failure to write which Stanley was wryly graceful.
I came into work on my bike and left it in the Vogue car park underground. I worked out a uniform that would keep me unnoticed at first which was a pair of Amschel’s jeans, my school beige V-neck and a fox-fur scarf I had got for ten pounds (a lot of money) in a junk shop. I gave up eating, following a regime larcenously entitled ‘the doctor’s diet’. I ate a boiled egg and four prawns per day, but I did feel I was starting to fit in a bit more. I was moved from Copy, where my boss had been a pretty grey-haired lady who was fond of bird-watching and possessed unaccountably right-wing views, on to Features, where my boss was Joan Juliet Buck, Hollywood name to conjure with, playmate of the stars and later to be editor of French Vogue. At this point in her life she wore only the colour purple. It was to do with something Karl Lagerfeld, a close friend, had told her. Her eyes were purple, deep purple all around the iris’s edge. Her skin was white.
Joan was precisely the sort of person who is unique in style and therefore frustrates those legions who emulate her; that is part of being truly chic. I thought I might take up this monochrome business and I chose as my colour, probably because I am so chromatically indecisive, pure white. Between Joan and me was the admirably sane Lucy Hughes-Hallett. One day it was Lucy’s twenty-seventh birthday. ‘Oh my God you are so young,’ drawled perfectly maquillé Joan between taking calls and reading the celebrity bulletin to see who was in town that day. Her furs were good, and embroidered, as proper furs should be, with their owner’s name on the silk lining. Joan was interesting, kind and clever and I wanted to do something to please her. She was off out to lunch. Would I take her messages? Of course I would. Joan was engaged at the time. In a density of tailored yet clinging mauve, her black hair cut so perfectly that it had a ring of light around the top, Joan set forth for lunch, I just happened to know, with Donald Sutherland.
Joan knew all the stars, so I wasn’t surprised and I sat close to her phone to be really helpful and take messages in case it rang.
In due course Joan’s telephone did ring.
I picked it up.
‘May I speak to Joan?’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘Who is this?’
Although I had won the Vogue Talent Contest in my natal name, Candia McWilliam, I was very confused about names and many people knew me by my nickname Claude and the surname Howard, so, more often than not, I got into great knots of explanation. I can’t remember the name that I gave to my interlocutor but he did turn it on me. Let us say that he said, ‘Well, Claude Howard, where is Joan?’
‘Oh that’s easy,’ I chirruped, ‘she’s out at lunch.’
Forms of breathing that I should have had the instinct to recognise were audible. This was a powerful individual, changing into another conversational gear entirely.
With horrible adult lightness this man asked me with whom Joan was having lunch. The part of my brain that knew that Joan was engaged to someone ceased to function. The thought that this man might be that someone did not proffer itself. I just remembered the interesting bit and walked into the dragon’s mouth as I smiled daffily into that cupping receiver, ‘Oh, she’s having lunch with Donald Sutherland.’ There was a tremendous roar and a slam.
Joan, who arrived back at the office after coffee and petits fours, was sweet about it. I was so lucky in her and the other features writers that I did what I can do when things seem to be going rather well. I sabotaged them.
In the interests of this fascinatingly changing, daily thinner everyday me, I had forsworn alcohol. But it is perfectly possible for an alcoholic to be drunk on mood, tension or state of mind.
I was being courted by a number of countervalent men, at least three of them alarming on account of age, force, tastes or marital status. They took me at what was increasingly my face value, or rather decreasingly my face value, a skinny babe (that word was not yet coined with reference to people older than two) who worked at Vogue. I had no idea how to transmit to them that I was a trapped bookish fatty who was no good at working at Vogue.
I don’t know when I stopped going into the office, but I do remember, and I thank her for it, that Miss Miller sent me telegram after telegram asking me if I was all right when I imagine she could have sued or sacked me. I wrote her letters that I never sent and some, years later, that I did send, and do not even know where she is or if she is alive today, but I must be one of the most disappointing outright winners of the Vogue Talent Contest ever. I was just too scared to go back into that office. Having turned myself into a caricature of what I saw, I behaved like someone with an empty head. I froze like a thin white woman with a head full of snow.
It’s not a secret that Vogue in those days ran on the labour of gently reared girls with private income, so that, for example, it was possible to find Lady Jane Spencer in the Beauty Room, and a descendant of Pushkin and the Wernher mining family, who later became a virtuosic mime artist, in the administration department. It would be unfair on Condé Nast though to ascribe my defection simply to my not being able to afford to work there.
Addicted to magazines as I am, I could not bear seeing behind their pages. I was like the opposite of a conjuror who likes to make magic from his practical skills. I could not bear the bright light shed upon my dreams. I had grown ill within the very breeding ground of consumption.
There was a bad period of hiding and pretending to be going to work, but the 50ps ran out and even when I had pawned my mother’s jewellery box for eight pounds (it was ebony, silver, mother-of-pearl, had crystal phials and a box of mercury powder for wigs, was made in the eighteenth century and contained its bill of sale, handwritten; she had given it to me for my fifth Easter), even when I’d saved up cider bottles and taken them back to the off-licence to redeem the 10p on each one, even then I knew that the only sort of work I could do, with any honesty, was writing. I had dropped a stitch somewhere by not applying for a doctorate, by lazily, unthinkingly, slipping into my prize job at Vogue.
Happy outcomes from my time at Vogue were friendships. Two friends I had made just before Vogue, one the little sister of Alexandra Shulman, who went on to edit Vogue. Alex and I were friends but I was, I felt, too impractical for her; I remain devoted to her and impressed and rather intimidated by her. Her little sister Nicola became a friend of the heart. Beauty is an impossible characteristic. Women want to have affairs with men who have had affairs with beauties, as if it will up the octane of their own looks. Nicky is shrewd and innocent, a real writer, scholarly and kind. It just so happens that the capsule her soul is contained in is a beautiful one.
At school at St Paul’s with Alexandra were the famously terrifying Fraser girls. The Frasers lived in Camden Hill Square. Notoriously, a neighbour of theirs had been killed by an IRA bomb intended for their fat
her Hugh Fraser. Hugh Fraser was an example to me of everything a man might be. He looked like an eagle, he took mustard on his smoked salmon, he sang to his dog, he was upright, noble and all the Alan Breck virtues.
Flora Fraser possesses that smile to be found on some ancient sculptures, referred to as the archaic smile. It is the sad smile, the smile of an all-knowing Clio, muse of history. When first we met, Flora was reading Greats at Wadham and I was at Girton–no, it goes further back. I remember a sixteenth birthday party at Camden Hill Square and precisely what I wore, footless tights in strong pink and a knitted transparent pink lamé nightgown together with my, at the time, candy pink and hot pink striped hair all twisted up in a bun. Flora married very young her peer in intellect and in love. She was still at university. Her husband Robert Powell-Jones had read Russian and Chinese. His intelligent beauty shook with the tension and pitch of his mind. He danced on a high wire in that head.
They learned Turkish and Italian together, living on love and carrot sticks. Their daughter Stella was born to them one glorious May the 15th. But Robert carried in him what I carry too and he did not escape it. They tried everything but in the end he died before Christmas 1997. He had just completed his translation of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman. It might almost be as though Robert’s own subtlety, that was compromised by the harm drink did him, has after death joined itself in posthumous conjunction with Flora’s own subtlety. I could not have managed my life without this strong friendship that she has thrown to me when I thought there was no one in the sea but sharks and minnows.
What to Look for in Winter Page 19