By his own admission Lee had achieved far more than he had ever dreamed was possible. But his season in the sun had been threatened by a shadow, the dark spectre of the depression that had started to torment his friend Isabella Blow.
Chapter Twelve
Joyce McQueen: ‘What is your most terrifying fear?’
Lee McQueen: ‘Dying before you.’
The car slowed down and stopped outside the grand white building that looked a little like a castle from a fairy-tale. Lee McQueen stepped out of the vehicle, followed by Philip Treacy, Shaun Leane and a fragile, but well-dressed, Isabella Blow. The four friends walked across the drive and into the Priory, the psychiatric hospital in Roehampton that had developed a reputation for treating the rich and famous. There, Isabella was questioned by doctors who then admitted her for treatment, a programme that would necessitate a three-month stay, part of which was paid for by McQueen.
In the last few months, Isabella’s lovable eccentricities – for instance, her habit of spelling out the address of her London home in Theed Street to taxi drivers with the words, ‘T for tits, H for horny, E for erection’ and so on – had started to mutate into a kind of mania.1 At a lunch with a PR from Prada it was said that her breasts had escaped from the constrictions of her corset and she had remained seated throughout the meal without adjusting her outfit, simply letting her breasts remain on the table. At Tatler, where she worked as fashion director, she was running up huge bills: one shoot, which involved celebrities wearing Manolo Blahnik shoes, cost a reported £45,000, the entire annual budget of the fashion department. Her own personal spending had reached excessive levels and she and Detmar were sued for£10,000 by a taxi firm. Friends said that if Isabella had been given a million pounds on Friday she would have blown it all by Monday morning.
Isabella and Detmar had been having problems in their marriage, there had been a number of failed IVF treatments, and Detmar’s mother had been threatening to take their house, Hilles, away from them, a prospect that awakened old fears in Isabella. As a child she had been taken to live in what she called the gardener’s cottage in the grounds of Doddington Park and she would spend hours gazing at the big house in the distance, which the family had been forced to leave because of dwindling resources. ‘People thought that Isabella was obsessed with fashion – and Isabella was very interested in fashion – but her obsession was Hilles,’ said Philip.2 By January 2003, Isabella’s behaviour had become so erratic that Detmar filed for divorce; the fact that she had started to have an affair with an Italian hotelier – whom Detmar referred to as ‘the gondolier’ – did not help their relationship. A holiday in Barbados did little to revive her spirits and she returned from the Caribbean feeling exhausted and on edge. She felt a failure on every level: she was ugly, she said, she worked hard but never had any money and she could not have children. ‘Detmar – I hear you’re firing blanks,’ McQueen had said when he heard the news.3
Lee thought that part of Isabella’s problem was her toxic relationship with her husband and he pleaded with her not to see Detmar. ‘When Issie and I separated he took her to the Priory and said whatever happens you’re not going to see Detmar again,’ he said. ‘I thought that was wrong because Issie was very fragile and I knew without me she was going to crash.’4 At the hospital, Isabella befriended a young woman who called her ‘Miserabella’, a girl who turned out to be the singer Lily Allen. Another patient told Issie that she was checking out of the hospital as it was too expensive and that she was going to book herself into Claridge’s instead. Isabella was allowed out at weekends and she would often spend time with Philip Treacy and his boyfriend Stefan Bartlett at their house in Elizabeth Street. When the Priory discharged her in September, Isabella knew that she was far from well and she had to take a course of medication that included lithium which friends said turned her into something of a ‘zombie’. She did not lose her zippy sense of humour altogether. She jokingly called her pills her ‘Marilyn Monroes’ and told one journalist why she had always favoured Alexander’s clothes – ‘you can always fuck in McQueen,’ she said. ‘You just have to lift up the skirt.’5
McQueen may have paid for Isabella’s treatment at the Priory, but he found it difficult to cope with the reality of his friend’s mental illness. Perhaps it would have been healthier for both of them if they could have severed contact altogether. Yet their relationship was powered by a strange co-dependency: Isabella was clearly addicted to McQueen’s clothes, while Lee felt bonded to her almost as if she were a vision of a misshapen psychological twin or a distorted mirror image. ‘He was frightened of Issie’s darkness, because he had it himself,’ said Detmar. ‘Alexander had his own demons. So he wouldn’t go there, and I don’t blame him. Issie was always trying to rebuild the early days, but that world had gone and they had moved on.’6
In August 2003, McQueen rented a large villa in Ibiza with some friends, including Kerry Youmans and Sebastian Pons, who had made contact with Lee after not seeing him for three years. When Sebastian arrived at the luxurious house he discovered that there had been some kind of argument and Lee had locked himself in his room. Sebastian was already nervous at seeing his friend for the first time since they had parted company, and when he walked up the stairs and knocked on Lee’s door he found himself shaking. When McQueen eventually opened the door Sebastian did not recognize him. ‘He wasn’t the person I left in 2000 or the one I had met back in 1995,’ said Sebastian. ‘He was half the size I remember him, really pale and lost.’ The two men hugged and started talking. Sebastian asked him what had happened to his body, and Lee lifted up his shirt to reveal the scar from his gastric band surgery. The friends spent the next six or seven hours talking and catching up. McQueen asked him what he had been up to and when Sebastian told Lee that he had designed a collection ready for the New York season but that he had been let down by financing, he offered to lend him the £30,000 he needed to put on the show. McQueen’s kind gesture touched Sebastian, as Lee had always told him that you should only give people one opportunity, not two or three; he realized then that the designer was breaking his own rules. Then, after a moment’s silence, the conversation turned serious.
‘On top of everything else I have the bug now,’ said Lee.
‘What?’ said Sebastian.
‘Yeah, the fucking bitch passed it to me.’
McQueen told his friend who he believed had infected him with the HIV virus. Lee felt too upset to continue the holiday and later that day Sebastian and Kerry drove him to the airport, where he took a flight back to London.7 The designer sought treatment for the virus at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead and took a number of antiretroviral drugs to manage his condition. Lee told his family about his HIV diagnosis about five or six years before he died, and the news left them devastated.8
Although a positive status no longer meant premature death, as it had in the eighties when Lee had been discovering his sexual identity, there is no doubt that the news contributed to McQueen’s mental-health problems and perhaps also his desire to escape reality through increased drug use. ‘He made a lot of drug dealers rich,’ said Archie Reed, who believed that McQueen regularly spent £600 a day on drugs. ‘He could do three collections in a day and half with cocaine – it opened up something in him. But it also took a piece of him away, and with that came the paranoia.’9 When he was with friends, Lee would often sing, ‘Paranoia will destroy ya’ and although he meant it as a joke the statement proved to be a prophetic one.10 Fashion designer Roland Mouret told Plum Sykes, ‘the thing about Alexander is that he loved the coming down from drugs because it was so dark and he carried on taking them not for the highs, but for the lows.’11
Those who wore McQueen’s clothes thrilled to his dark aesthetic, yet they had little idea of the legion of demons that haunted him. That August, Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, Dazed & Confused’s Rankin, Mark Rodol of Ministry of Sound and designer Ozwald Boateng singled out Alexander McQueen as the ‘coolest brand in the world’
, ahead of Bang & Olufsen, Agent Provocateur, the Tate Gallery and Ducati. On 25 September Lee won, once again, the Designer of the Year award. When Pamela Anderson presented the prize one commentator sitting in the audience at Old Billingsgate Market observed, ‘Just when we were beginning to think that the awards organizers could not possibly have picked anyone more inarticulate than the Baywatch Bombshell, up popped Alexander McQueen. His thank you for the British Designer of the Year award made Neanderthal Man sound like Sir John Gielgud.’12 Designer Jeff Banks criticized the result, believing that the award should have been given to Julien Macdonald. ‘Alexander McQueen’s things are a bit like the Emperor’s Clothes,’ he said. ‘In my opinion, they are totally unwearable and don’t sell. He’s funded by a big Italian company and was the “in” thing to vote for.’13
Yet comments like this were made redundant by the spectacle of McQueen’s next show, Deliverance, held at the Salle Wagram, a former dance hall, on 12 October. Inspired by Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the designer constructed the show around the theme of a dance marathon. The film, set in Depression-era Los Angeles, ends with an exhausted and depressed contestant, Gloria (played by Jane Fonda), begging her dance partner, Robert (Michael Sarrazin), to help shoot her, which he does. When the police question him, he replies, ‘They shoot horses, don’t they?’, a reference to an injured horse that he saw being killed when he was a boy. In McQueen’s show, as a disembodied voice repeated the refrain, ‘They must keep moving, they must keep dancing at all times,’ over the PA system, the message was explicit, articulating as it did the pressures, both professional and personal, that McQueen felt he faced. ‘The show ended with the losers strung out, immobile or dead, wearing clothes rendered in patchwork or miserably, exquisitely torn up,’ said the New York Times.14 The reaction from the audience was rapturous, yet Colin McDowell thought that the social realism of the dance marathon phenomenon sat at odds with the show’s underlying capitalist intentions. To use this particular theme ‘as a vehicle for selling extremely expensive clothes seemed shocking to me’, he said. ‘What next? The Holocaust? It’s a marvellous opportunity to sell stripes, darling. Don’t laugh: it could happen. The current fashion world is crude and insensitive enough to accept anything, as long as it comes with the right designer label.’15
McQueen returned from Paris to London where on 15 October he co-ordinated a show at the Royal Albert Hall, which involved Björk performing her song ‘Bachelorette’ as part of Fashion Rocks, in aid of the Prince’s Trust. Then, on 29 October, and dressed in a kilt of McQueen tartan, Lee received his CBE from the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Some of the other guests, he said, sneered at his appearance, as if to say, ‘You’re just a skinhead in a kilt’, yet he was not immune from indulging in a little sartorial criticism himself;16 he regarded Jamie Oliver, who had turned up in a Paul Smith suit and open-necked shirt to receive an MBE, as a little too dressed down. ‘I think Jamie should at least have worn a tie today,’ he said. ‘Whether ties are in or out, it just looks better.’17
McQueen had always seen himself as a republican and had only agreed to accept the award because he knew it would make his parents proud. Before the ceremony Lee had told himself that he wasn’t going to look into Her Majesty’s eyes, but when the moment came he could not help himself. He later compared the encounter to falling in love. ‘And I looked into her eyes, it was like when you see someone across the room on a dancefloor and you think, “Whoa!”’ he said. She asked him how long he had been a fashion designer. ‘A few years, m’lady,’ he replied. ‘There was a simultaneous lock, and she started laughing, and I started laughing,’ he said. ‘It was obvious that she had her fair share of shit going on. I felt sorry for her. I’ve said a lot of stuff about the Queen in the past – she sits on her arse and she gets paid an awful lot of money for it – but for that instant I had a bit of compassion for her.’18
McQueen was tired and hungover after the previous night’s partying at Annabel’s and Claridge’s, but he gamely posed for photographs with his parents and then went with his family and a few friends, including Isabella, to the Mayfair hotel for lunch. Later, Lee gave his mother the CBE, and for a time she displayed the award proudly in her home, something that prompted his brother Tony to joke, ‘If I bring a brick home, will she put that up too?’19
At the beginning of November, Gucci chiefs Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole announced that they were stepping down from the company. A month later, Serge Weinberg, the chief executive of PPR (which in addition to Gucci owned Yves Saint Laurent, where Ford had been creative director), travelled from Paris to London for an appointment with McQueen to discuss the possibility of him taking over at YSL. But the designer decided to miss the meeting. ‘I just had a panic attack, I think,’ he said. According to Isabella, McQueen stayed in bed. ‘It could have been fear,’ she said at the time. Lee turned to her for advice, as she had always thought that YSL and McQueen would have made a perfect match. He told her about his concerns and how he did not want to abandon his own label or leave London. He looked at Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel and how the German-born designer had made a success of the French couture house at the expense of his own label. McQueen was in two minds about whether to accept it, but finally he turned down the offer. ‘I am such a fan of Saint Laurent that my heart would break if I damaged the house,’ he said. ‘It was a major decision not to take that job. I wanted to do it so badly.’ François-Henri Pinault, the son of PPR’s founder, took the news quite well and discussed the possibility of Lee taking over at YSL at some future date when he had transformed his own label into a recognized brand. ‘But I need to be doing McQueen with my eyes shut,’ said Lee.20
McQueen loathed meetings with the ‘suits’ of the fashion industry. Daphne Guinness remembers the three occasions when Lee had asked her along to a formal lunch with François-Henri Pinault and his executives only for him not to turn up. ‘François-Henri was very difficult, not exactly charm on a stick,’ she recalls. ‘I couldn’t think of a thing to say.’ One day, Lee called Daphne in a panic. He had heard that PPR wanted 100 invitations to a show, meaning that some of his friends would have been unable to attend. Daphne telephoned François-Henri and told him that McQueen would not attend the event if this happened, a threat that resulted in the number of requests for invitations being reduced to five. Daphne rang Lee back and told him that she had ‘fixed it’.21
At the beginning of December, McQueen started work on the installation of Silent Light, a Christmas tree made from 150,000 Swarovski crystals and designed with Tord Boontje, at the V&A. ‘It’s inspired by when snow turns to ice,’ said McQueen.22 The tree stood on a large turntable and as it slowly revolved it created an ethereal, magical effect. McQueen had long been fascinated by alternate states of consciousness, aliens and space travel (when he first interviewed Sarah Burton for her job he had asked her whether she believed in UFOs) and these themes were reflected in his show Pantheon as Lecum, held on 5 March 2004. A ‘cavernous’ concert hall in north Paris had been transformed into an alien landing pad and the pale-faced models with particularly long, thin legs who stalked the circular runway looked like something from another planet. The music veered between electronic pop, Kate Bush’s ‘Babooshka’, and the themes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Doctor Who. ‘If that Tardis did exist, I’d be the first to buy one,’ he said.23
Fifteen minutes into the show, the lights went down and onto the darkened stage stepped not so much a woman as a spectral form, a ghostly figure that drifted across the stage, her silvery, lampshade-like dress a vision of light illuminated by an LED necklace. Then, as the stage cleared, the music faded to be replaced by the sound of a heart monitor and the model Tiiu Kuik, wearing an hourglass-shaped grey lace ensemble, stepped forwards into a circle of light. The heartbeat slowed until finally it flatlined; the model, bathed in a beam of light, raised her palms towards the sky and waited to be transported to the next dimension. The image articulated McQueen’s des
ire for transcendence, for a state beyond his earthly existence.
During a mother-and-son question-and-answer session, published in the Guardian in April 2004, Joyce asked Lee about his most terrifying fear. ‘Dying before you,’ he replied. ‘Thank you, son,’ Joyce replied. Unknown to the outside world both mother and son had potentially life-threatening conditions: Lee was HIV-positive, while Joyce had started to suffer from kidney failure for which she received dialysis three times a week. ‘What makes you proud?’ she asked him. ‘You,’ he replied. ‘Why?’ she asked. McQueen was too moved to answer.
In the same interview, Joyce went on to ask Lee a series of questions: whom would he invite to a dream dinner party? ‘Elizabeth I . . . ’cause she’s an anarchist,’ he said. If he could live and work as a designer in any era what would he choose? ‘Fifteenth-century Flemish, Netherlands,’ he said. ‘My favourite part of art. Because of the colours, because of the sympathetic way they approached life.’ What was the most breathtaking building he had ever seen? ‘The chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp by Le Corbusier’, he replied. How would he have broken into the fashion industry if he had not trained on Savile Row? ‘I’d have slept my way there,’ he joked. If he lost his wealth tomorrow what would be the first thing he would do? ‘Sleep. I’d be pleased,’ he said.24 Lee often felt exhausted not only by overwork, but also by a clutch of anxieties and stresses that left him feeling drained. One of his biggest worries was a concern for his personal safety, he said, which is why in May he bought a Rhodesian ridgeback as a guard dog. During one interview Lee told a journalist that he could not let the animal – Callum – into the room ‘because he’ll bite you’.25 Sebastian Pons remembers that, during one holiday with Lee in Majorca, he had been so scared of the dog that he had been unable to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. ‘I opened my door to go to the bathroom and the dog was there, growling at me, so I had to open the window and pee out of it,’ he said.26
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