by Ray Connolly
But, first, you’re caught by those great oval eyes, magnet grey and deceptively sad; eyelashes not exaggerated these days, but still Daisy Duck coy and curled. Twiggy at nineteen: shunning gimmickry, ballyhoo and press, working when she wants to and earning more than ever.
Last week she completed twenty-five pages for Italian Vogue; in May and June three different magazines will have Twiggy covers; nearly a thousand people are still employed on producing Twiggy dolls, Twiggy dresses, Twiggy stockings, Twiggy raincoats in nine factories around the world. Then there is a whole line in Twiggy make-up. And when Harpers Bazaar had a Twiggy cover recently the issue was their best ever seller.
Twiggy at nineteen, going on twenty. Justin de Villeneuve, at thirty, going on a foturne: ‘Actually we’re not very rich,’ he reckons, smiling like the friendly tiger. ‘My bank account is quite low, but my assets are very big. That’s the way to run a business.’ And Twiggy is still very big business indeed, particularly in America.
Justin’s biggest asset is his mews studio behind Tottenham Court Road, where a lady called Nina invites — or summons — guests to eat at Twiggy Enterprises. Justin prefers to meet people on his own territory.
At the front, Justin’s white Lamborghini is being inspected for scratches by the man from the salesroom. It looks like a flatter, and carefully-resculpted, Titan missile — and when the engine is started the whole building shakes. Counting insurance and all it took £11,000 to get it on the road.
‘I did have a chauffeur-driven Rolls,’ he says. ‘But I began to feel like an old man. So I bought myself this last Christmas Eve. Having a Rolls-Royce is too show-business for us.’
Twiggy and Justin are now associated with nine different companies. Justin is managing director of five of them: ‘Then there are the ones which produce Twiggy products, for which we get a royalty. In that way we can’t lose anything. We have complete control of everything. No Twiggy garment can go on sale unless we have passed it, and we control all pictures and advertisements too.’
As well as the Twiggy enterprises, Justin is also in partnership with hairdresser Leonard in his new Sloane Street salon: then there is his photographic company and Olivia Hussey Ltd, his venture into the film world.
‘I’ve already signed Olivia to three leading parts in films for this year,’ he says. Then the other week he decided to go into pop management and, at the suggestion of Paul McCartney, began looking after Jackie Lomax, a Liverpudlian friend of his Beatle friends.
Twiggy is still as thin as when she became a pop culture sensation at fifteen; still with the prominent shoulder blades, but now crazy about the styles of the twenties and thirties (’I think Garbo had a perfect face’). Justin with a slight weight problem — stocky, big-shouldered, barrel-chested and small-footed — is growing a beard.
They remember their early successes with a nostalgia reserved only for the eminently contented: ‘Do you remember when I used to pinch tins of baked beans from my mum’s for you?’ she asks. ‘Or those letters we used to get in America accusing you of starving me to keep me thin.’ Then to me: ‘They used to write recommending diets of porridge and starches so that I’d put on weight.’
Says Justin: ‘People think of me as a Svengali. And I resent it. I’ve never been a Svengali at all. I wouldn’t know how to. We’re chums. Best friends in the world, aren’t we, Twigs? We can no more see the possibility of breaking up than you can of divorcing your wife. We just can’t imagine it. We’re never apart.’
‘Until a year ago I’d seen Justin every day for three and a half years,’ says Twiggy. ‘When he went off to New York for two days there were big dramas. Farewell scenes, and presents when he came back.’
Twiggy’s home is down at Twickenham, in the house she bought for her family with its fifty-five foot mooring space on the Thames: Justin is still in the £9-a-week Ladbroke Grove flat that he’s had converted into a positive palace, and gallery for his kinetic pendulums.
‘There would be no point in living together,’ Justin is talking: ‘Twiggy’s parents would be upset. And she likes living with them. She loves her mother and father, although some people seem to think there’s something unnatural about this. In her house she’s got a beautiful apartment, and if she were to leave home her mother would be heartbroken.’
Says Twiggy: ‘We’re not prudes, we think people ought to live together if they want to. But I like being at home. It will be different when we’re married. As it is we see much more of each other than most married couples do. We’re together every day. I drive up (she has a Mini) to the studio every morning, and we share all our friends.’
Twiggy’s hair is long these days, and regularly tinted at Leonards. The roots are dark: ‘Really it’s a mousy brown colour. I never liked having it short, but I had to when I first started because it was in such a terrible state. I’d been bleaching it myself when I was at school, and it was splitting everywhere.’
Later, at Justin’s meticulously-neat flat, Glyn— the manservant — serves more tea. Twiggy’s humming ‘Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play,’ and Justin’s showing off his pictures. ‘Glyn, will you bring those new ones from the blue room?’ he calls. Silently, Glyn slides in with his errand: more pictures of Twiggy. There are pictures of Twiggy in a Danish castle, Twiggy as Gabor, Twiggy as Rita Hayworth, Twiggy against huge and elaborately-built sets, Twiggy everywhere.
‘She’s a great model,’ says Justin.
POSTSCRIPT Twiggy and Justin never did get married as they planned. At the time of writing she is now separated from her American husband Michael Whitney, while Justin is separated from his model wife Jan Waters. After her career as a model went into decline Twiggy tried a variety of careers, from film actress to pop star, finally finding success again in the new Broadway musical ‘My One And Only’. You have to give her marks for persistence.
April 1969
Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin is instantly, aggressively friendly. I’m a complete stranger and right away she’s asking me to massage her neck and kissing me ‘hello’ with a scorching cat-lick of my right eyebrow. She wears her sexuality with an arrogance tainted with derision. Yet she’s a woman of little femininity. Her voice is wild, raw and Leadbelly strangulated, and her features are rough and workmanlike. She is a formidable lady.
The Deadwood Stage could have made good use of Janis Joplin. She’s the current American singing idol of the hard-rock-blues era, and does for male rock and roll fans what Hendrix, Jagger and Jim Morrison do for the girls. According to all reports her act is an experience of eroticism.
‘But I’m not as sexy as Hendrix. He’s really something,’ she claims, licking her top lip from left to right, a habit she indulges in each time she mentions men.
Yes, she would make a great calamity Jane or Annie Oakley. Born in Texas, and resembling an only slightly more female Gabby Hayes, she boasts a facade of over-shock — a constant barrage of four-lettered, non-descriptive adjectives.
This week she was to have been the cover story on Newsweek but Eisenhower’s death meant that the feature on her had to be postponed. She had some very un-American things to say about Eisenhower.
I met her this week in her hotel bar. She was holding court with members of her eight-piece band, and the barman was pouting his lips and making those silent sucking motions that are intended as manifestations of shock and disapproval.
Tonight, she says, she’s feeling very brought down. She’s been drinking all day (she says she drinks every day) and the first thing she’s told when she lands in Britain is that Mick Jagger won’t be going to her concert: ‘If I want to hear black singing,’ Jagger is reputed to have said, ‘then I’ll listen to black singers.’ She’s cut to the quick.
She began her astonishing career at the Monterey pop festival in 1967. Before she went on stage hardly anyone had ever heard of Janis Joplin, but when she opened her mouth the trauma was unforgettable. Janis, it seems, can sing several notes at the same time.
&
nbsp; ‘I don’t really know how I do it, but I do. It happens when I’m tired and I’m pushing. I now find I can sing all the notes in harmony with each other. I don’t know why. I just open my mouth and it comes out.’
She lives with her friend Linda in a small flat in San Francisco. Linda, who is one of those tall black-haired brown-eyed Americans, has come along for a holiday. She’s twenty-nine, Janis is twenty-six. Her twenty-sixth birthday party has become almost folk lore.
‘How did you hear about my twenty-sixth birthday party? Oh! Well there was Linda and me, and this crate of Southern Comfort, and then these two guys came that we know. So we asked everybody else to leave. And we knew, and they knew… and it was a beautiful party. I didn’t realise until after that it was my twenty-sixth birthday. That was just pure love.…’
Her parents, she figures, are more proud of her than they ever hoped to be. At Port Arthur, a small Gulf town in Texas, she says she was a problem for them, running wild and fooling around. At school she chose the wrong friends and her class mates threw stones at her and called her ‘nigger lover’. But as she got older it became fashionable to be a beatnik, to run wild and to fool around. ‘I don’t know whether it’s fashionable yet to be a nigger-lover in Texas,’ she says.
After dropping out of Austin University she went to Los Angeles and eventually ended up in San Francisco when the hippy cult suddenly threw her into national prominence.
For a while she sang with a group called Big Brother and the Holding Company and an album she made with them sold over a million copies on the day it was released. But internal arguments over billing and the size of her name led to the group’s disbanding. She now has her own band. ‘I wanted to call them the Cheap Thrills, but that had been the name of my album. So they’re just “my band”,’ she says.
She sits back in her leather-bound chair and stretches. Then carefully placing her left hand along her jawbone and her right hand on her skull she breathes in and gives the most almighty jerk. Crack! Her neck joints pop as though she had pulled all her fingers out of their sockets at once. My own head nearly falls off in shock.
‘Man, that’s better,’ she cackles. ‘He, do you wanna know how I got my fur coat? Southern Comfort! I had the chick in my manager’s office photo-copy every goddam clipping that ever had me mentioning Southern Comfort, and they sent me a whole lot of money. How could anyone in their right mind want me for their image? Can you imagine getting paid for passing out for two years?’
Southern Comfort is a brand of bourbon. On stage she used to boast she could drink a whole bottle during her act. Tonight she is doing her level best to prove she can do the same with Gordon’s gin.
‘Nobody ever asks me about my singing,’ she complains. ‘All anyone ever wants to know is about fellas and booze and sex. I want to be known as a singer.
‘When I get scared or worried I tell myself “Janis, just have a good time.” So I juice up real good and that’s just what I have. I just live for happiness. You should use everything you’ve got to be happy.
‘My doctor said my liver was a little swollen, and got all melodramatic about me, saying “What’s a good, talented girl like you doing with herself?” and all that…
‘Man, I’d rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy sitting in some goddam chair watching TV.’
She’s quite a change from the luvvy-duvvy hippy Americans we’re used to receiving. Tonight she looks like Davy Crockett, with her hat of bleached foxes’ tails, boots and purple pants. Only the beads are there as a token of her adopted home town. She says she wants to go out to Speakeasy or the Revolution and find these English boys she’s heard so much about.
‘Yes, I suppose you could call me promiscuous in one sense of the word. But it’s not really all that superficial. I just don’t have one person. It’s sad. But I couldn’t just stay home baking bread and having babies. I know it’s a fine trip, but I couldn’t do it.’
She’s great rollicking company, a female version of J. P. Don-leavy’s Ginger Man. But there’s also the occasional touch of pathos, the sudden hurt innocence. ‘What sign are you? I went out with a Scorpio once. I wanted to marry him, but he turned me around and kicked me about.
‘And you know what I wanted most in the world… I wanted to be on the same bill with Otis Redding. It was all arranged, and then he was killed. He was my idol. I wanted him to tell me I was good.’
But then brightening immediately and grinning like mad, she’s back on her pet subject.
‘I think my interest in men is growing as I get older. It used to be a casual interest but now it’s day and night,’ and her tongue shoots along her lips at the idea of it.
‘Now how’s that going to look in print?’
POSTSCRIPT Janis Joplin died from an overdose of heroin just eighteen months after this interview. Although she had claimed not to touch heroin, her death might almost have been predicted so self-destructive was her life style. What this interview didn’t tell at the time was that throughout our conversation she continually mauled and groped me. In 1979 Bette Midler appeared in a salacious and unpleasant movie, Rose, a fictionalised account of Janis Joplin’s life.
May 1969
Ken Kesey
You don’t meet too many men with the Stars and Stripes painted in enamel on their false teeth. Truth to tell Ken Kesey is the only one I know. Every time he smiles, which is pretty frequently on a good sunny day, the zip in his mouth breaks apart and his upper right incisor says a pepperminted ‘God Bless America’ in red, white and blue.
We’re rolling and waltzing, and power jerking and swanking and feeling good behind the deceptively blue anti-glare windscreen of his maltreated Cadillac — Kesey and me and a New York girl disciple, all doe eyes and sweeping adoration; round we go along the edges of Hampstead Heath, down the lanes and under the blossom, and Kesey’s telling us how he came to be the one guy we know with an American flag printed on his tooth. And he’s talking in that down-home cowboy way that he does:
‘You see I was running from the FBI when I crashed into my lawyer and wrecked my car. And somehow I caught my head, so that my tooth was hanging out by the nerves. But I had to keep hiding. So I waited in a laundromat for a while. It’s funny how you can just sit in a laundromat and no one ever thinks of looking for you there. But the pain was terrible, so I finally made it over to a dentist I know. But he also happened to be an acid-head. And while he was fixing me he said “Hey, d’you want a tooth with the Stars and Stripes on it?” and I said “Yeah, that’d be nice” and so here it is. You never think these things can really happen.’ And he unplugs his plate with its garish token and waves it around for all to see.
Ken Kesey, the man who began the LSD fascination of hippy California, who believes he invented the word ‘trip’, to describe the sensation of that fascination, and then introduced psychedelia to provide a form of it; who turned on Hell’s Angels, and went on the first Magical Mystery Tour ever — years before the Beatles, is here in London, in a borrowed flat, en route for Stonehenge, the Wailing Wall and the Great Pyramid.
Here in London with his three children, his wife Faye, his friend Spider, and now some new followers like Dilly Disciple from New York who’s sitting here with us saying how we ought to stop and get some of Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne on account of how it has some opium extract, and rabbiting on about this trip and that trip and whatever kind of trip a man can imagine.
And then there’s this other girl, too, who’s staying with the Keseys, ‘like she’s a Wasp,’ says Dilly Disciple, ‘with the hair and the turned up nose, and she’s very virginal and all that.’ And I get the idea that there’s no love lost between the Wasp and Dilly Disciple. But what a household it must be.
Kesey is thirty-three, and was born in Oregon. Faye, who is a woman of remarkable yet passive, tranquil beauty, was his childhood sweetheart, and they married in their first year of college. After college they graduated to a beat generation community, where Kesey wro
te his first two novels one of which (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) was considered brilliant by some reviewers, and sold his body to a local clinic for their experiments into a drug called lysergic acid diethylamide — LSD. Under the surveillance of the white-coated clinic staff Ken Kesey had become the world’s first acid-head guinea pig.
Soon he was turning-on everyone in his community, and when the bulldozers came to remove the community they up and went and bought a bus, ‘an old 1939 International Harvester yellow schoolbus,’ wired it and taped it for the thousands of watts of sound needed to play their rock and roll music, aerosolled it in Day-Glo mandellas and took themselves off on a long cross-continent acid trek of the United States.
Back in California on various narcotics charges, he faked a suicide to give the FBI the slip, slipped over the border into Mexico, and was eventually captured when, with a degree of contempt bordering on the foolhardy, he went back to San Francisco and appeared on television.
Considering the mischief he and his followers had created in the eyes of the police he was lucky to get off with six months on a work farm. But by this time he was beyond acid. The LSD, he said, wasn’t necessary.
‘No I haven’t taken acid in quite some time,’ he says in his Hampstead flat, pulling on his socks, one bright red, one brighter orange, and snorting up his cold. He had come to the door just in his trousers, big as a bear, chest coated with blond curls, hair almost gone on the top but thick as a rug down the sides and round his ears.
He pulls on a T-shirt and the inevitable Indian token around his neck and finds a leather jacket: ‘I shot this elk with a bow and arrow myself. And had Mountain Girl make it up into this jacket for me,’ he says.