FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  Nowadays the Paris collections have become spectacles held in extraordinary venues, but in my day they took place in the actual showrooms of Dior or Chanel or Cardin or whoever, and I did once have the thrill of seeing Mademoiselle Chanel herself, reflected in mirrors, sitting on the staircase in her showroom in the Rue Cambon watching her own collection (exactly as she appears at the end of the film Coco Before Chanel).

  We assistants were not invited to the glamorous parties that took place during Paris Fashion Week, but once in a blue moon Mrs Carter would take me with her – at one reception she asked me if I would like to meet her friend Gregory Peck and of course the answer was YES, but as I followed her through the densely crowded room someone squashed a chocolate éclair on my bosom (I was in a pale-blue silk suit) so I dropped out. A decade later, though, I was interviewing his French wife, Veronique, at the Savoy Hotel in London, when ‘Greg’, as she called him, came back early, and not only did I meet him, but he invited AW and me to stay with them in France – we were too overwhelmed to go. Veronique had been a journalist in Paris and they met when she was sent by her paper to interview him. They got on well, and next day he telephoned her – she was out, and a fellow journalist answered his call and left a message on her typewriter saying ‘Gregory Peck called.’ She thought it was a joke.

  As she viewed the collections, Mrs Carter would note down the outfits she wanted photographed for her pages, and then, at night (we had to work at night because the clothes were shown to buyers during the day), I and whoever was Mrs Carter’s junior assistant at the time (they changed quite frequently) would go and collect the outfits from Dior or Saint Laurent or whoever, take them to be photographed in the studio we had hired for the week, and then return them. Of course all the fashion editors would choose the same star outfits, so you had to hang around for hours in the middle of the night, waiting for Vogue or Harper’s or the Telegraph to bring back the garment you wanted so that you could rush it to the studio. The worst thing that could happen was if Mrs Carter chose a dress or suit that had been shown on Hiroko, Pierre Cardin’s star Japanese model, because she was so tiny that no one else could fit into her clothes, which meant you would have to go and collect Hiroko herself from her apartment and take her to the studio, as well as fetching her outfit from Cardin. Writing this, I can’t believe the hassle we went through; but rushing round Paris in the middle of the night with armfuls of clothes, or getting food and drinks for everyone in the studio at three in the morning, wasn’t always the worst of it – you could hit an unexpected problem: my very dear friend the photographer Terence Donovan, who was going through some personal difficulties at the time, announced that he couldn’t photograph anything unless he could listen to Churchill’s wartime speeches. I can’t remember how, but we actually managed to get the recorded speeches (it was through the British Embassy in Paris in some way) and a Sunday Times colleague went off and bought a gramophone and lugged it to the studio, and we got the collections photographed. (Astonishing to think that now the speeches could have simply been downloaded from a mobile phone.)

  My most stressful Paris collections experience was after the launch of the Sunday Times colour magazine in 1962; but I’ll come back to that in a moment.

  Giving readers a free magazine with their Sunday newspaper was an American idea which our editor, Denis Hamilton, was the first to introduce in Britain – it was such an innovation that to start with they called it the Sunday Times Supplement so as not to scare ‘real’ magazine producers. When it came to designing the launch cover, it was decided by Michael Rand, the art director, that it should feature the things that represented the country at its best – British icons, if you like – and I was asked to book Bailey to do photographs of Jean Shrimpton in something representing the new youthful British fashions. I chose a Mary Quant dress in grey flannel and we went down to the Thames by Lots Road Power Station to do the pictures; it was freezing cold. Later, when he laid out the cover, Michael Rand added a picture of a footballer – and that was the one-page portrait of Britain in 1962: football, Bailey, Jean and Mary Quant. Like ‘Autumn Girl’, this became Bailey’s picture – no one ever mentions that I was involved at all, but I guess that’s life; anyway, I am mentioning it now.

  When the time came for the magazine’s first coverage of the Paris collections, I talked Mrs Carter (who was now fashion editor of both newspaper and magazine) into taking Bailey and Jean to Paris to do the pictures because I was so at ease and happy working with both of them by then. Mrs Carter needed persuading because she hadn’t, at the start, at all approved of the takeover of the fashion world by youngsters: she had refused to look at Mary Quant’s clothes, for instance, but now she was just beginning to come round to the idea (she later considered Mary as important a fashion designer as Chanel and Dior). Her conversion was partly because the American press, particularly the powerful (and terrifying) Diana Vreeland of Vogue, who is said to have coined the word ‘Youthquake’ for what was going on in London, loved it all so much. (That season in Paris – or it might have been the next one – I saw Mrs Vreeland kiss David Bailey’s hand at a party and I knew that he would fly so high that I would probably not be doing the Paris collections with him for very much longer.)

  Bailey and Jean and I went to Paris with Mrs Carter; this was the very first time he had covered the Paris collections, and it got off on a bad footing when his camera broke and we had to borrow another one from a charming Australian photographer called Alec Murray. He lent Bailey one of his without a quibble, which was pretty decent in view of the fact that young snappers like Bailey were shortly to put the old ones like Alec out of work.

  For some obscure reason, Mrs Carter wanted the pictures done in the gardens at Versailles, which meant me keeping the clothes that were to be photographed in my hotel room overnight so we could set off at first light. One of the dresses she’d chosen was a long evening gown from Nina Ricci; it was called ‘Ondine’ and was made of yards and yards of pleated pale-green chiffon. I remember it only too well – it is engraved on my soul actually – because I tried the dress on in my hotel room that evening (what girl wouldn’t have?), stood on the bed to get a better view in the mirror, lost my balance and fell, putting my foot through the hem and ripping a huge hole. I sat up half the night sewing it up with dozens of little hotel mending kits I got from the concierge. When I returned the dress next day my heart was pounding – I had visions of them charging me thousands of pounds, but no one noticed the tear.

  At Versailles it was bitterly cold (it was January) and Jean – who had to change in the open air – was freezing to death, but she and Bailey just got on with it and the pictures were great (they were in black and white so you couldn’t see that Jean was blue). When I think of Linda Evangelista’s famous comment about not getting out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day, or read about Naomi Campbell’s tantrums, I think back to that morning at Versailles and realise how lucky I was to have worked in fashion at a time when everyone was a friend, and we were all excited amateurs, learning on the job, trying our best to get our ideas across – and fashion had not yet become corporate Big Business.

  I had other reasons to be grateful to Bailey and Jean: they often helped out if I needed an urgent picture taken. Not long after we’d all come back from Paris, I had a dozen outfits to get photographed for the Sunday Times colour magazine. The photographer I’d chosen went on an alcoholic binge and, though I had booked him and the model for two days, he didn’t manage to take a single picture.

  I was panicking – by now it was Friday evening, I had nothing to give the magazine, and the deadline was Monday morning. I rang Bailey and implored him to photograph the clothes on Jean over the weekend (they lived together at the time). He said he’d try if I ferried them over to his house. On the Monday morning he told me that they hadn’t managed to get around to doing the pictures, but it was a typical Bailey joke – the transparencies were on their way in a taxi.

  At around this time, a m
odel I was working with changed my life. She was Nicole de Lamargé, the girlfriend (and favourite model of the day) of the photographer and art director Peter Knapp, who, together with its dynamic founder and editor Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, had made the French Elle magazine the most sought-after across the globe. Nicole had come from Paris to work in London for a spell; she was the most professional model girl in the world, a master of make-up who could transform her face in a dozen different ways; she invented cheek-shading and highlighting to give ‘good bones’ as well as painted-on freckles and eyelashes (ages before Twiggy); and she always posed with a full-length mirror in front of her so that she could see exactly how to ‘work’ the clothes she was wearing. I had booked Norman Eales to do my photographs that day; I loved working with him – like John French in the Fifties, he knew how to create real glamour in his pictures, and I have never understood why he is not on the list when people talk about the great Sixties photographers David Bailey, Brian Duffy and Terence Donovan; perhaps it was because, being gay, he didn’t fit the macho, laddish narrative the newspapers had created about them, or maybe it was because he worked mostly for Cosmopolitan magazine and not Vogue. (Before it came out in 1972 I was interviewed, among many others I suspect, for the post of editing the British edition of Cosmopolitan by Helen Gurley Brown – famous for her book Sex and the Single Girl and for turning American Cosmo into a spectacularly successful magazine. She asked me whether, as editor, I would be thinking of the magazine every minute of every hour of every day . . . She might have noticed my hesitation before I said, ‘Yes of course,’ because I didn’t get the job.)

  Anyway, Nicole and I were, quite unusually, waiting in the dressing room at Vogue studios for Norman to turn up, when she suddenly asked if she could do my make-up. I’d come out of my Beatnik phase by then, and can’t remember now what kind of half-hearted job I did with lipstick and eyeshadow, pre-Nicole – but that morning, she transformed my face from completely nondescript into something quite glamorous by painting on rather extreme eye make-up involving white highlights and grey shadow and black pencil and drawn-on false eyelashes. ‘Baboon eyes’, my aunt called them when she first saw my new look, but I loved this version of myself and from that moment I never went out without my eye make-up, even though it took ages to put on.

  Back at the newspaper, after much scheming and plotting between me and Meriel, my dear friend from the Daily Express, Mrs Carter hired Meriel as her new assistant. ‘What is your star sign, dearie?’ asked Mrs Carter the first day she arrived for work. ‘Libra,’ said Meriel. ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs C, ‘I am Libra too, I am afraid we will not get on.’ She was right – they were a disastrous combination – but it ended up happily, with Meriel becoming a brilliant fashion editor of the colour magazine, while Mrs Carter and I stayed in charge of fashion on the main paper.

  For me, one of the best things about Meriel coming to the Sunday Times was that we got to work at the Paris collections together. In January 1964 (before Meriel moved over to the magazine) we were told by Mrs Carter to cover an opening show by a more or less unknown designer André Courrèges; she herself couldn’t be there for some reason. We went along – and became part of fashion history: it was a spectacular, innovative collection in which Courrèges showed beautiful, simple clothes in pale gaberdine fabric, with skirts above the knee, worn with short flat white boots. It shook fashion like an 8.0 earthquake. I don’t think Mrs Carter believed us when we reported on the collection – especially the short skirts – but she soon had to, because the tremors were being felt everywhere. Jean Shrimpton wore a short skirt to the Melbourne Races the following year and made banner headlines – there couldn’t have been more fuss if she’d gone topless, though when you look at the photographs now, the skirt length seems positively demure. There has always been controversy about who invented the miniskirt – was it Mary Quant or Courrèges, or even John Bates? My answer would be Courrèges – because I saw the skirts at that collection with my own eyes, and they were well above the knee, and I’d never come across anything like them before in London.

  I missed Meriel when she finally went off to the magazine, but if she hadn’t gone to work in colour, my favourite story about her would never have happened – I have heard various versions as it gets repeated over and over again, but this is the true one, straight from the horse’s mouth. Meriel went on a fashion shoot to Goa with the Dutch photographer Sacha, her partner and a model girl. One afternoon they came across a shop selling the most wonderful clothes – Indian-style tunics and trousers in pale faded cottons. They were wildly excited and started pulling the outfits off the shelves, and then Meriel said, ‘We must be organised about this: we’ll make a pile of the things we like, and then we’ll find out how much they cost.’ At which point the owner of the establishment said, ‘Oh, madame, I am so sorry but this is not a shop, it is a laundry.’

  11

  People always put the Sixties and illicit drugs together (if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t really there etc.), but in the early years of the decade no one took drugs, except speed, which we thought was a slimming tablet. I interviewed Mary Quant about twenty years after her heyday and in the course of the conversation asked whether she’d taken drugs. She frowned at me as though I was being silly: ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  I do remember Harold Carlton, an artist friend who lived in New York, coming back to London and telling me about LSD. Should I try it? I wondered, and Harold said, ‘It’s up to you, I will give you a sugar lump with LSD on it and you can decide.’ He gave me the lump and I put it in my sugar bowl while I thought about it. In fact, I more or less forgot about it until a couple of days later when, in the office, I remembered that my cleaning lady was due in my flat that morning, and she took sugar in her tea and PERHAPS SHE WOULD PUT THE LSD IN HER TEA AND GO CRAZY. I rang Harold hysterically, and he told me there was no LSD on the sugar lump – ‘I would never have done that to you,’ he said. (I later discovered that this cleaning lady had, over time, stolen nearly all the beautiful clothes I had acquired, at wholesale prices, as a fashion editor, so I rather wished that the sugar lump had been laced with a triple dose of LSD, and that she had taken it.)

  Harold Carlton invented the graphic letter in which, instead of writing in the normal way, you stuck pictures taken in a photo-booth on to the paper and wrote witty captions for them. I persuaded my assistant, Edwina, to come with me to Woolworths in Holborn to help me with a return photo-letter to Harold. We took a bag of accessories and were in the booth for a long time, dressing up, putting on hats and make-up for the different pictures, when suddenly, under the curtain, a man exposed himself. We cowered in the corner, cringing as far from the horrible sight as we could – we worried it might be in the picture, in which case Harold would think we’d gone too far – and then I plucked up the courage and pulled the curtain back and told the exposer to go away. He was a weedy little bloke and ran off looking scared.

  It wasn’t illegal substances in the early Sixties, but cigarettes and alcohol that we consumed in large quantities. Everyone smoked everywhere – in theatres and cinemas and planes and through meals: there was some public debate about whether it was bad manners to smoke between courses, but we were smoking between mouthfuls; the cigarettes would be smouldering away in ashtrays next to our plates as we alternated a forkful of food with a puff on the fag.

  Alcohol was responsible for most of the stupid scrapes I got into. To my embarrassment, even as I write this, one of them involved Gerald Scarfe, the great cartoonist. The story started in France. Meriel and Michael Rand, the art director of the colour magazine, were always thinking up new ways of covering the Paris collections, and one year Gerald Scarfe was invited to draw the shows, particularly the audiences of celebs and important fashion editors: Eugenia Sheppard of the Herald Tribune, Diana Vreeland of American Vogue, Beatrix Miller of British Vogue, Winefride Jackson of the Telegraph, Iris Ashley of the Daily Mail, etc.

  We stayed together in the Hôtel d
e La Trémoille – Meriel and I always stayed there for the Paris collections; in fact we got to know it so well that when, later on, the hotelier Charles Forte took over the establishment and refurbished it, we bought the old brass beds that had been in our rooms. Anyway, at some stage during this visit Gerald mentioned that he never liked to see his cartoons framed as they were not meant to be ‘art’ but commentary.

  More than a year after this, Meriel and I and Derek, my boyfriend of the time, happened to be invited to dinner by friends who were renting an apartment in Gerald’s house, and in the stairwell there were some of his cartoons, framed. By the end of the evening, we had all had far too much to drink and, giggling like fools, we decided that Derek and I should steal all the pictures. With our friends’ help we unhooked them from the walls and loaded them into my Mini and drove home (no drink-driving rules in those days) across the river to my flat in Battersea.

  Next morning it was the Wake of Shame as, through my dreadful hangover, I remembered the crime I had committed. I was still in the flat, desperately late for work, wondering what on earth to do, when Meriel rang from the Sunday Times office, where Gerald was employed at that time. ‘He is furious,’ she whispered, ‘but says he will take no action if you return the pictures.’ I drove my Mini back to Chelsea Embankment, parked at the end of the path to his house, and then carried in the cartoons – it took more than one journey – until they were all stacked by his front door. I have never felt so foolish, especially as I imagined he was probably watching from a window.