FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  And mobile phones might have helped prevent the embarrassing restaurant débâcle which happened around the same time. This came about when an elegant older woman I met at a party invited me to lunch with her at ‘Laze-Ay’. I hadn’t a clue where or what that was but I didn’t dare ask – I thought I would find out from Moira on the morning of the date. But when the day came (I remember it was a Monday), Moira was not in the office for some reason and no one else had any idea what Laze-Ay was. (Had we had mobile phones I could have rung her and she would have known.)

  With a growing feeling of doom, I looked it up in the phone book, but the only name I could find that sounded anything like ‘Laze-Ay’ – and then only if you said it with a French accent – was a restaurant in Soho called Lezzet’s. There was nothing else, so I decided that must be it. I told my assistant where I was going and set off – only to discover when I arrived that Lezzet’s was a dingy Turkish eatery into which I knew my elegant lady would never ever set her toe, let alone foot. I found a phone and rang my assistant to say that, if my lunch date called, for God’s sake not to reveal where I had gone – but it was too late, she’d already telephoned, been given the address and was on her way to meet me in a taxi. There was no way to stop her, so I had to wait outside Lezzet’s for the awful moment when she would arrive, see the greasy-spoon restaurant and realise that I was a complete idiot: all of which duly happened before she told her taxi to take us both to Les Ambassadeurs – one of the smartest clubs in London, nicknamed Les A by the rich and famous. We had an awkward, late lunch, and then I never saw her again.

  But mobile phones would not have prevented some of the other cringe-making episodes in my life. I met a rather posh man at this time, quite a lot older than me, and was invited to stay with his sister and her husband for a weekend. My parents were thrilled – he was not a paratrooper; his mother had a title and lived in a castle; they could see their original plan for my ‘suitable’ marriage and comfortable future being resurrected before their eyes. His sister had a double-barrelled name – lots of people seemed to have them in those days: Muspratt-Williams, Tennyson-d’Eyncourt, Hamilton-Fleming, Money-Coutts; and shops did too: Marshall & Snelgrove, Swan & Edgar, Dickins & Jones, Debenham & Freebody; now I barely know a person or a shop with double names.

  I felt very ill at ease staying with these grand-sounding people and desperately wanted to go home, but though I racked my brains I couldn’t think of an excuse to leave – until on the Sunday morning it came to me: I would say that I had to go to confession; they were Catholics, was my reasoning, they would understand. So, after breakfast, when plans for the day were being discussed, I suddenly said, ‘I am afraid I have to leave now to go to confession.’ ‘Confession?’ they said in unison, looking astonished. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid so, I must leave straight away,’ and I went to collect my things. They must have thought I was raving mad; my mother was furious when I turned up. For non-Catholics I should explain that you would only ever have to go to confession if you had done something really bad like murdering someone.

  The older man was understanding; he drove me home and was not put off by my peculiar behaviour – we very nearly got engaged, but marrying him would have meant living in South America, and in the end I couldn’t go through with it. Mum didn’t speak to me for months.

  That was also the year I was sick in my handbag at a party – one given by the Golden Girl of all people. I blame my waspie – a ‘waspie’ was a Fifties corset that went around your middle; it was boned, and you (or preferably someone else) had to lace it up very, very tightly to give yourself a tiny waist – just like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

  It was warm, and halfway through the evening I knew I was going to be sick. I rushed upstairs to the loo but there was someone in it; I looked out of the window, but couples were standing chatting outside, including the Golden Girl; the wastepaper basket on the landing was lined in pretty chintz; there was absolutely NOWHERE to throw up, so I opened my bag and was sick into that. (We all had big square patent-leather handbags in those days.) The worst part about this story is that Moira and her friends took me on out to a restaurant after the party – I wasn’t allowed to refuse – so I had to carry my burden around London all evening.

  Two years later something similar happened when I went to my assistant Edwina’s twenty-first-birthday costume party dressed as Mary, Queen of Scots. There was a medieval dinner first, at which mead was served, and then the revels moved on to a boat on the Thames. What with a surfeit of mead and the rocking of the boat, I very soon had to go to the ladies’, and then, having been heard vomiting in the loo by everyone, I didn’t dare come out of the cubicle – it was my assistant’s party after all – so I stayed there, sitting on the lid, half the night, listening to people saying, ‘Have you seen Brigid? She seems to have disappeared,’ after which, when most of the guests had apparently left, I crept off the boat and fled along the Embankment to find a taxi. I sometimes wonder if anyone saw me and thought I was a ghost; it’s not every day you see a young woman in a long black velvet dress with a white ruff and a little heart-shaped headdress wandering round by the river in the middle of the night.

  I am so glad that I am not young any more.

  9

  I was twenty-one in 1961 when I became the Young Fashion editor. Only a few months before, on the Express, there didn’t seem to be many young people involved in fashion at all, and the clothes we featured were by nameless designers working for big companies – Horrockses, Susan Small, Berkertex, Reldan, etc. – but now, almost literally overnight it seemed, there was a significant number of us, all roughly the same age, and working in different areas of the fashion business, from designing to writing, to photography, to modelling, to hairdressing. How on earth did this happen? It reminds me of something Colin Thubron once said about Russia – that during the Communist regime the only females you saw in the Soviet Union were old and sour-faced, but now every woman there is a beauty; where were the beauties in the old days, he wondered, and where are the sour-faced ones now?

  We were practically children: Jean Shrimpton was eighteen, just out of the Lucie Clayton modelling school; so was her friend and fellow model Celia Hammond, as well as Paulene Stone who had won a Woman’s Own model-girl competition. Marit Allen, a young journalist who was making a big name for herself on Queen magazine (she later did the Young Idea pages in Vogue), was nineteen and David Bailey was twenty-three, the same age as many of the new designers, most of them graduates from the Royal College of Art where Janey Ironside was the professor of fashion: Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin, James Wedge, Gerald McCann, Roger Nelson and John Bates as Jean Varon. (Marit Allen chose John Bates to design her wedding dress which is owned by the V&A now and was part of the museum’s Bridal Dresses exhibition a couple of years ago.) Mrs Carter had, warily, not opened her arms to the young designers, but it was said that she liked John Bates the moment she met him because he was wearing an Old Etonian tie – it never occurred to her that he had bought it in a charity shop.

  At twenty-six, Mary Quant was a tiny bit older than most of us, and she had already opened her two hugely influential Bazaar shops. Vidal Sassoon, responsible for the huge revolution in hairdressing that was also taking place at the time (no more perms, no more ‘horns’ curling on the forehead), was thirty-two (he’d already had other careers, including fighting for the Israeli Army in 1948), and so was Jean Muir who was just leaving Jaeger (where she had designed the Young Jaeger range) to set up her own business, Jane & Jane, later Jean Muir.

  Over in the parallel world of furniture and ‘living’, Terence Conran, thirty in 1961, was doing for interiors what the young fashion stars were doing for clothes: his Habitat store, which opened in 1964, a little further down the King’s Road from Mary Quant’s first Bazaar boutique, meant that for the very first time there were household furnishings especially designed with young people’s taste – and budgets – in mind. We no longer had to make lamps out of Mateus R
osé or Chianti bottles with straw bottoms to show how cool we were.

  Fifty years later, in 2014, David Bailey and Terence Conran helped me to recommend Mary Quant for a damehood. She had long ago received the OBE but, whereas less influential designers like Zandra Rhodes (whom I love and admire) and Vivienne Westwood had been made dames since, Mary Quant – by far the most important British designer in the second part of the twentieth century – had somehow missed out. The sad part was that by the time her damehood was announced, Mary was beginning to suffer from dementia – and so, it seemed, were the newspapers: barely a single one followed up the story, and the BBC World Service announced ‘Mary Quant joins the list of Welsh honoured today,’ as though being Welsh was her claim to fame. If ever one was needed, this was a salutary lesson in the fragility of fame; society’s memory is very short.

  My new job as Young Fashion editor was to see all the young designers’ collections and choose the clothes I liked, or that fitted my ‘story’, and then get them photographed for my space which covered the top half of a page each week.

  In my early days at the Sunday Times, I nearly always chose David Bailey as my photographer (I was at ease with him by now) and Jean Shrimpton as my model. There were no make-up artists and hairdressers involved then – Jean did her own face and hair – so there were just the three of us and we could get the pictures done in no time at all. Occasionally we photographed the clothes outside the studio – once in the Establishment, a nightclub being opened by Peter Cook after the success of his hilarious satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (with Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller) which had taken London by storm the previous year. The builders were running late and there were cables and paint pots and planks all over the place, and Peter Cook was really irritated by us being there as well, and swore a lot.

  Mostly we photographed in Studio 5 in Shepherd Market, or, later, in the studios at Vogue magazine, or later still in Bailey’s house, which was painted black inside and was where he kept his pet parrots.

  The other part of my job was still helping to organise the photographs for Ernestine Carter’s page – this was much less fun as she chose the clothes and I didn’t usually like them, but I dutifully carted them off to be photographed, and did my best. When the contact sheets of her pictures came into the office from the photographers, she used to call me in while she looked at them through a magnifying glass, then she’d say: ‘Dear girl’ (she called all her staff ‘dear girl’ or ‘dearie’, and had a secret ambition, she once confided in me, to see us all dressed in the same black dresses with white collars), ‘dear girl, which picture do you like here?’ ‘I like that one, Mrs Carter,’ I would say, pointing, and every time she would say, ‘Do you? How odd, this one here is much better,’ and that is the picture that would get used.

  (Another thing about Mrs Carter is that she would give us seemingly generous Christmas presents: lavish sets of beauty products. It was only when we opened the boxes and delved inside that we’d find a card from Helena Rubinstein or Elizabeth Arden or Estée Lauder to Mrs Carter personally, wishing her a happy Christmas.)

  In the Fifties we all made our own clothes because we could never find what we wanted in the shops. Back home in Fleet there was almost always a length of fabric on the dining-room table with a Simplicity or Butterick or Vogue paper pattern pinned to it, waiting to be cut out by Moira or Tessa or me. If things went wrong with our sewing, we’d say to each other, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right when it’s ironed,’ and it usually was. (When Paulene Stone won the Woman’s Own model competition, part of the prize was an outfit from Fenwick’s but, since she and her mother had always made her clothes, they had no idea what size she was.)

  This is exactly what the newly emerging young designers were doing – they were basically making the clothes that they wanted to wear themselves or see their women friends in. Mary Quant had been the first to do this: selling her ‘own’ clothes – exactly like the ones she wore herself – in her Bazaar boutiques. I remember coveting a grey flannel suit with a box-pleated skirt that was in the window in the King’s Road shop, but not being able to afford it – and then a friend of mine got a job in Mary Quant’s workroom and she made it for me at half the price. (One of Mary’s most successful ideas was to use fabrics that had never before been seen in women’s fashion: grey flannel, for instance, traditionally a cloth for men’s trousers and suits; or gingham, more commonly found in curtains and tablecloths; or Liberty printed lawn, traditionally a choice for children’s clothes.)

  There was one other boutique in Chelsea, run by Kiki Byrne who had worked for Mary; these (and occasionally Fenwick’s) were about the only places selling clothes that tempted girls of my age – and they were way too expensive for most of us.

  Then, in 1961, the fashion revolution really took off: Martin Moss, an enlightened managing director of Woollands, the department store which once stood next to Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge (it was pulled down to make way for the Sheraton Park Tower hotel in 1969), hired a young buyer called Vanessa Denza and together they opened the 21 Shop to celebrate the new young designers and sell their clothes – including the first modern trouser suit which was made by Foale and Tuffin – at prices young women could (almost) afford. Customers poured in – so many that there were queues outside; Vanessa Denza said it was like a dam bursting.

  There was a freshness and an excitement in the air: in the Sixties we began to think we could do anything – and when President and Mrs Kennedy, with their glamorous, Camelot, new-kind-of-leader aura, visited London that year, they seemed to be a part of it, and I joined the crowds waiting for hours in the Mall to watch them flash past, dazzlingly, on their way to dine with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

  Two and a half years later I was on my way back to my flat in Battersea from a press trip to Oslo, when I was stopped outside the main door of our block by Mr Mead, who lived on the ground floor and was a sort of scruffy, self-appointed porter; he told me President Kennedy had been murdered. It was shocking, impossible, as if a friend had been killed, and it seemed at the time like the end of an era – I think it was in a way.

  10

  I had decided to rent the little flat in Battersea when Margaret, the girlfriend whose place I shared in Chelsea, went off travelling in Iran. Now I was on my own, free, for the first time, and I decorated my sitting room in shocking pink and orange – not very Little Grey Rabbit, but it was to match a rug I bought in a sale in a shop called Casa Pupo. Actually I wasn’t entirely on my own because I shared the flat with an abandoned budgerigar that Mr Mead, the porter, gave me. I called the bird Jeremiah and let it fly around the kitchen until one day it escaped; I said a sad mental goodbye to him, but, astonishingly, a few days later a budgie turned up tapping at someone else’s window in our block. Mr Mead heard about this and we went, armed with the cage, and sure enough it was Jeremiah who flapped straight in without a backward glance at liberty – you could almost hear his little bird brain going PHEW!

  Mr Mead loved breaking bad news. He hovered on the pavement all day, ready to intercept passers-by, and his opening words were always: ‘An ’orrible thing ’appened ’ere last night/this morning/yesterday.’ In those days Battersea had not yet been gentrified, so horrible things happened quite often; my neighbour was stabbed (not fatally) when he asked a man not to pee on the landing outside our flats.

  One day, as I came out on my way to work, Mr Mead cornered me and said: ‘An ’orrible thing ’appened ’ere this morning: they stole Mrs Brown’s TV set; can you believe it, they walked in bold as brass, went upstairs, picked the lock and walked out with it, just like those two blokes there’ – we both looked at two men carrying a big television set across the pavement. ‘How awful,’ I responded and started walking towards the bus stop only to be stopped in my tracks a moment or so later by Mr Mead’s shouts – the TV we’d just watched being carried out of the block was his.

  Moira lived in a flat further up Prince of Wales Drive and we w
ent to work together in my Mini Van. I have always been bad in the mornings and was usually running late, and as we batted along the South Bank, past Big Ben across the river, Moira used to joke, ‘I hope to God that clock’s fast.’ Mrs Carter once said to me, ‘Some people are paid for their time, and some for their talent, and in your case, dearie, I must assume it is the latter.’ She used to ring me in the mornings at about eight when I was still fast asleep and say, ‘Did I wake you, dear girl?’ ‘No! No!’ I’d practically shout in my most hectically energetic voice. ‘I’ve been up for hours.’ I still answer the phone in that voice early in the morning, just in case.

  One of the good things about being partly responsible for Mrs Carter’s pictures was that she had to take me to Paris for the collections so that I could organise them there too. On second thoughts, I must be looking back through rose-tinted glasses because being in charge of photographing the Paris collections was frantic and stressful and incredibly hard work, and not much fun at all, except in retrospect. And getting there and back took so much time because I was terrified of flying, so used to travel on the overnight boat train from Victoria to the Gare du Nord.

  During the collections, I was supposed to spend the days going to the fashion shows with Mrs Carter, which usually meant fighting my way into a place at the very back of a salon, or sitting on a radiator, or on the corner of someone else’s chair, because, as a mere assistant, I had not been allocated anywhere to sit. (I’ll always remember Gabrielle, the press officer at Yves Saint Laurent, who used to make sure I had a decent seat.) Being American, and chief fashion editor of an important paper, Mrs Carter herself was something of a celeb and would always have a place of honour in the front row, and just occasionally I would get to sit beside her and the rather camp American illustrator, Joe Eula, she always employed for the collections. I remember a Balmain show when Joe looked at the models with their bright-blue eyeshadow and pink cheeks and red lips, and whispered, ‘Maquillage by Walt Disney.’ Once, Mrs Carter shocked everyone – including me – by leaving a Cardin show in the middle. Pierre Cardin’s collections involved hundreds of garments and his shows dragged interminably, but this time Mrs Carter suddenly stood up and turned towards the exit. ‘Madame Carter,’ cried the vendeuse standing in the salon, ‘Ce n’est pas finie.’ ‘Well, it’s finie as far as I am concerned,’ said Mrs Carter firmly and continued on her journey.