FULL MARKS FOR TRYING

by BRIGID KEENAN

  12

  In 1965 the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon opened his first salon outside England, on Madison Avenue in New York. By now he was famous – apart from anything else, he cut Mary Quant’s hair and she was even more famous, iconic even – so this opening, which was to be celebrated with a glittering party, was a major event in the fashion world, and the Sunday Times sent me to cover the story. It cost the newspaper a fortune, I discovered after I came home, because I couldn’t decide which celebrity photo to wire to London with my story, so, being completely ignorant of the procedure, I sent them four or five. ‘You could have bought a little car with what that cost,’ one of the printers told me later.

  I don’t know if all my generation of women were painfully shy and inept at handling predatory men, but I certainly was, and I seemed to give out such a feeble, ‘no threat’ vibe that I was always being flashed at or followed on the tube. My worst experience – and it’s painful to think it was my own fault – took place on that same visit to New York. A good friend (she was another English journalist there to write about Vidal Sassoon’s new salon) asked me to make up a four for an evening at El Morocco, the most famous nightclub in New York; I would be a blind date for her American boyfriend’s mate, an older man.

  At the end of the evening my ‘date’ said he would take me home, but instead, a chauffeur drove us to his apartment, where he asked me up for a coffee. I definitely didn’t want to go, and asked if the chauffeur couldn’t just take me home, but the chauffeur said it wasn’t his business, and the ‘date’ convinced me that there was no hidden agenda and I felt rude to refuse – we were all so ridiculously polite and naive in those days – so I went up with him and as soon as he’d closed the door of his apartment he jumped on me. I fought him furiously, and managed to get away, but in the course of the struggle he ripped my dress all down the back, and now I had to walk through the streets of New York at two in the morning to where I was staying with another English girlfriend, and my clothes were falling off me, and my hair was standing on end, and of course I had no phone. I remember being petrified that I’d be attacked again, and so thankful that New York was designed on a grid pattern so I couldn’t get lost.

  My sister Tessa had gone to work in Hong Kong, and I missed her so much that I saved up and went to visit her in my holidays – and there I was struck by what I thought was a terrific moneymaking idea. That year, 1966, Yves Saint Laurent had shown a series of spectacular, boldly striped dresses, just like knee-length T-shirts but entirely covered with sequins – no one had seen anything like them before. (It was an expensive copy of one of these that Norman Eales had photographed for me on Shirley Fossett, the trapeze artist.) Now, in Hong Kong, I could tell that it would probably not be too difficult to make much cheaper versions of these dresses out there. I knew absolutely nothing about how to set about doing this and in any case I had to go home, so I left it all in Tessa’s hands, and after a couple of false trails, she managed to find someone who could copy the dresses, and they produced a handful of samples that I showed to Meriel when they arrived. Meriel thought they were stunning and decided to photograph them for the colour mag; she interviewed me about how they came into being and, without much consideration, I related Tessa’s difficulties finding a manufacturer – mentioning that at one stage a Chinese businessman had taken her in a Rolls-Royce to look at a factory that turned out not to belong to him. (Tessa had told me she’d gone in a very expensive car, but I didn’t know what it was . . . I just said Rolls-Royce because it was the most costly motor I could think of.)

  Meriel’s story appeared in the magazine and, next thing, the Hong Kong Government was suing the Sunday Times for damaging the island’s manufacturing reputation. The only Rolls-Royce there, it turned out, belonged to the Governor. I had to go to Harry Evans, the editor at the time, and confess that I had lied about the car. Somehow he smoothed it all over, and that was the last I heard of it, but it kept me awake at night for months.

  In Hong Kong, Tessa and I met a charming Chinese man Albert Poon; he had nothing to do with our efforts to make sequined dresses, but was keen to open a London-style boutique in Hong Kong – it would be a first for the island. Albert’s father, a judge, had sent him to sixth form at Millfield in Somerset where, he told us, sixth-form boys were allowed to smoke, but just pipes; only sixth-form girls could smoke cigarettes. Albert was hilarious about his own Chinese/English culture clashes. Some time after he left school the new posh friends he’d made there invited him to go shooting and, not knowing the protocol for such an outing, Albert had accepted the invitation and turned up with something like a machinegun – they were appalled. ‘Poon,’ they cried, ‘for God’s sake put that in the car where no one can see it, and borrow a proper gun.’ Since I was viewing all the dress collections in London anyway, Albert wondered if I could order the clothes for his boutique and, in exchange, he would give me a return air ticket to Hong Kong so I could visit Tessa. It sounded to me like a great idea.

  When Trend Gallery (as it was called) eventually opened, Albert celebrated by taking us all out to supper in Hong Kong; my soup had a cockerel’s head floating in it and Michael Shea, the shop manager, whispered to me that, according to Chinese custom, I had to eat it or it would be an insult to our host. I sat there, almost in tears, knowing that I would have to be rude to Albert, because I couldn’t even look at it, let alone touch it, let alone SWALLOW it. The guests sat, stony-faced, watching me for what seemed like an age, but all of a sudden they burst into laughter and it turned out to be a joke.

  Trend Gallery was beautifully fitted out, and very central, but it never became quite as successful as it should have, because though it was aimed at Westerners, the manager and the chief shop assistant were Chinese and so the customers it attracted tended to be Chinese too – very quickly, we had to start ordering clothes in sizes 6 and 8 instead of 12 and 14.

  Then Albert branched out into hair. The Cultural Revolution had just started in China, and Chinese women had to cut their hair short, meaning that there were literally tons and tons of the stuff coming on to the market. This coincided with a sudden craze for wigs and hairpieces in the Western world – or perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence, perhaps the glut of hair led to the passion for hairpieces. Somehow I was talked into trying to sell Albert’s hair in London and, goodness knows how, I found a man who had a concession at one of the big supermarket chains, who ordered a few dozen of a straight, shoulder-length bob stitched to an Alice band. The trouble was that when the package arrived in London, the hair wasn’t straight, but frizzy, and Moira and I had to stay up late for nights on end, ironing it. I can’t really believe I am writing this; sometimes now my younger self astonishes me.

  I also ordered a whole lot of little ringlets on kirby grips which you were supposed to push into your hair above your ears to give a sort of wispy Twiggy look. These did arrive as per the specification, but unfortunately at that moment the bloke with the concession went bust and never took the ringlets, which were still in a box under my bed almost a decade later, long after I had met and married AW and had children. He suggested that if we stitched them to homburg hats we might find a market among bald members of the Hasidic sect of Jews who are not allowed to cut their sideburns.

  In the event, I don’t know what happened to the ringlets; AW probably threw them out when I wasn’t looking.

  All in all, my business ventures in Hong Kong were about as successful as my mouse-skin fur coats in Somerset; but even though none of them worked, it had all been extraordinary and exciting – I still keep a sequin dress in the attic in case I ever wonder if I made the whole thing up.

  13

  In the early Sixties our forward-looking editor, Denis Hamilton, who had just launched the Sunday Times colour magazine, started a new investigative column called ‘Insight’ which later became famous for its coverage of the thalidomide disaster and led to the victims of the drug being properly compensated.

  ‘Insight’ recruited feisty young Aus
tralian journalists, and a whole gang of these suddenly invaded the paper – the most colourful of them, Murray Sayle, becoming a legendary correspondent. In the course of his career with the paper Murray climbed Mount Everest (he didn’t get to the top), sailed across the Atlantic single-handed, tracked down Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle and the spy Kim Philby in Moscow. But Murray’s greatest renown in the newspaper world was for his wildly inventive expenses claims. Once, on a sailing story, he put down a claim for ‘old rope’ and got it – money for old rope. It was probably the very least amount he fiddled, but everyone loved the wit.

  The now-famous war photographer Don McCullin joined the paper at around the same time, and all of a sudden the Sunday Times had perhaps the best and bravest group of reporters ever to work together on a publication. There was a new macho mood that could be felt even in the offices of the Women’s Pages (for a start, we were all in love with Don who was extremely handsome striding about in his battle-worn fatigues – at least that’s what we liked to think they were – but also disarmingly modest. He once gave me an old Girl’s Own Annual; I was the envy of my colleagues and I still have it).

  I became friendly with two of the young Aussies, Tony Clifton and Alex Mitchell, who were irreverent and funny and on a mission to make the world better; they nicknamed me Battersea Bridge because of where I lived. I admired them greatly and, largely because of them, spent my weekends on protest marches. There were so many demonstrations and protests in the Sixties – I remember a bewildered policeman trying to sort out a muddle of marchers in Trafalgar Square, yelling: ‘Civil rights for Ireland over to the right please, Biafra to the left, CND wait over there, Vietnam down the middle.’ There was no kettling of protesters in those days.

  The young Aussies, who were Marxists, made me feel a bit of a wimp being on the Women’s Pages; they’d say, ‘Aw, come on, Bridge, do you seriously want to spend the rest of your life in fashion?’, and they fired me up to do something more daring and serious – such as go to Vietnam and try to be a war reporter.

  In 1967 I was leaving the Sunday Times anyway because I’d been recruited as assistant editor of a brand-new magazine – Élan, it was called – so I decided to take a bit of time off between jobs and go to the Far East where I could a) check up on Tessa who had moved from Hong Kong to Bangkok (Mum was worried about her being away so long, and wanted me to try and persuade her to come home), b) visit Hong Kong and see Albert Poon and all my friends connected with the shop and the hair, and c) stop off in Vietnam and become a world-famous war correspondent. (The Sunday Times news editor agreed that if I came up with any stories he would give them due consideration.) And d ) Tessa and I could visit our cousin Simon (now a British Army officer), temporarily serving with the Trucial Scouts in Dubai.

  Extraordinarily, the other day, in a box in the attic, I found the bill for my ticket for this journey; it says London–Bangkok–Saigon–Hong Kong–New Delhi–Bombay–Dubai–London, £395.

  Just before I left the paper I did perhaps my starriest fashion piece – on the Beatles’ wives; well, three wives and a sister-in-law: Maureen Starr (Ringo’s wife), Cynthia Lennon ( John’s wife), Pattie Harrison (George’s wife) and her sister Jenny, because Paul didn’t have a wife then. The photograph was taken by Ronald Traeger and it came out in the paper in September 1967. I think the wives agreed to do the story because they were eager to promote their new discovery: a group of Dutch hippy designers – they called themselves The Fool – whose crazy clothes they loved and wore themselves, and had chosen to stock in the Beatles’ new boutique, Apple, which was about to open in Baker Street. We all met up at the studio and I was amazed how pleasant and unspoiled they seemed to be; I don’t remember any security people being there, and I don’t think we even had a hairdresser. I felt a bit sorry for Cynthia Lennon because, though the others all had the same Sixties look with pretty elfin faces almost hidden by their long hair and fringes, she was in a different mould – a bit plumper (which is why I think we put her at the back) and round-faced, and I had to spend some time trying to get her curlier, shorter hair to look the same as everyone else in the picture.

  14

  Before I set out on my great Eastern adventure, Tessa decided that she would like to come home with me at the end of the trip, and in the meantime she would join me on my travels, and so we met in Bangkok and flew together from there to Tan Son Nhut (as it was then known) airport in Vietnam.

  On the plane we had to fill in our Vietnamese immigration forms – I put ‘Sunday Times reporter’ (later I was awarded a press card by the Vietnamese authorities as well as one from the US Army, giving me the title of honorary major), but Tessa put ‘Tourist’, which meant that every morning in our hotel we were telephoned by the Minister of Tourism himself offering us an excursion to Dalat, a beautiful place in the mountains. We were keen to go, and he agreed to take us, but in the meantime there was always the small problem that the Vietcong had seized the road in the night and we would just have to wait through the day until the Americans got it back again; he’d let us know. We never did get to Dalat, but the Tourist Office sent round some brochures for Tessa: one of them said ‘Go for a walk in the fairytale woods that surround Saigon.’

  Tan Son Nhut was the busiest airport in the world at that time, and Tessa and I hadn’t given a single thought as to how quickly we would be able to get a flight out of Vietnam and on to Hong Kong, so, though we’d planned to be there for five or six days, we ended up having to spend more than three weeks in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) before we could get seats on a plane.

  Neither had we given a thought to what a war reporter should wear – we just went in our normal London clothes. I clearly remember the look of incredulity, mixed with horror, mixed with thin humour, that crossed the face of the Sunday Times’s Far East correspondent, David Bonavia (who had been asked to meet us at the airport), when he saw us coming through Customs towards him in our miniskirts. He took us to the ‘journalists’ hotel’ in Saigon, the Caravelle, which had a pavement café/bar with wire netting around it so that grenades couldn’t be chucked in, and introduced us to some reporters and then, probably with a sigh of relief, he rather disappeared out of our lives.

  The journalists – some British, some Australian, some American – were welcoming, suggesting stories I might do, and generally trying to be helpful. A few of them have remained friends to this day, and one of them, Derek, an Aussie, came into my life in a serious way after I got back to London; we went out together for two years – he was my accomplice when we stole Gerald Scarfe’s pictures. We went to France together on holiday which was very daring in those days, and the hotel receptionist gave him the registration form to fill in. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘the French are so open-minded, there is even a place on this form to put the name of the girl you’re with,’ and he pointed to where it said Nom de Jeune Fille. Sadly, I pointed out that this meant Maiden Name, and not Name of Your Young Girlfriend, in French. He was very disappointed. Mum and Dad didn’t like him at all – once we turned into their driveway and we could hear, quite clearly through the open windows, Dad calling out: ‘Here’s Brigid with that awful man again.’ (This was quite unusual for Dad whose normal comment on meeting our boyfriends was: ‘Well, he’ll be bald by the time he’s thirty.’)

  Back in the Caravelle café in Saigon, it turned out that I might be able to help the journalists – there had recently been an election in Vietnam and the new president, an army officer, Nguyen Van Thieu, was being difficult with the press corps about interviews. But our new friends thought he might agree to see me, a woman and a fresh face on the scene, so they offered to write my questions and lend me a tape recorder if I would share the results with them. Amazingly enough, they were right, I did get an interview with President Thieu – I was all set for my SCOOP, but the day before my appointment, something happened to my throat, I couldn’t speak, and Tessa had to cancel it. I had no idea what was wrong: I had a huge lump in my throat and watering eyes and I had
to keep swallowing – with great difficulty – every five seconds; at the time I thought I must have got cancer, but now I know it was my voice having a nervous breakdown at the very idea of interviewing the President of Vietnam with an unfamiliar tape recorder, and a list of political questions about a war and a country I knew very little about. It took a week or more for my voice to start going back to normal.

  Saigon was an attractive city that could almost have been in France, with its outdoor cafés, and people on bikes and scooters; but there were coolie hats and policemen in khaki shorts with thin brown legs, and slender black-haired Vietnamese women in traditional, skin-tight ao dai dresses to remind us that we were in the Orient, and most of all there was a perpetual THUD THUD THUD in the air from endless helicopters flying over the place, and a pit of fear in our stomachs to remind us that we were in a war zone. Not long before we arrived, a woman they called the Dragon Lady had been scaring Saigon: she would appear from nowhere, riding on the back of a motorbike, and open fire on US soldiers on the streets.

  I had booked us into the Majestic Hotel which overlooked the Saigon River; I think our room was on the third floor, but every time we got into the elevator, the lift boy would press the button for the top floor where there was a popular bar. The doors would open, the crowd of American soldiers would turn to see who was coming in, and there were Tessa and I in miniskirts, the only two ‘round eyes’ in town apart from the real women war correspondents (a couple of whom had been banned from going to US bases because their toughness demoralised the troops who preferred to think of ‘their’ Western women as gentle and soft-spoken). There would be yelps and shrieks of delight, while we would be frantically wrestling with the lift boy, trying to press all the buttons for any other floor, just to get us out of there.