I remember being crazy about Montgomery Clift and James Dean. I loved all the boys with soft, sad eyes and lost souls. I loved horses, too: National Velvet, with Elizabeth Taylor, and Black Beauty, which was dreadfully sad, although not as sad as Bambi. When I saw that, I cried all the way through to the end. Duel in the Sun was another favorite—such a tragic love story. I adored Gregory Peck; his voice was so warm and reassuring. I sometimes imagined myself marrying him—well, perhaps not marrying in the carnal or conventional sense, but of being with him on a mysteriously prolonged “dream date.”
I was enchanted by The Red Shoes, with Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann. This was the first film I ever saw. So beautiful! Her mane of red hair! Her red ballet shoes! A few years later I saw it again and thought, “Well, there is a really dark side to this film.” But I was just twelve when I watched it first with my mother and saw only the romance of the ballet.
Audrey Hepburn, too, was so chic and adorable in her skinny pants and little pumps. Watching the romantic comedy Sabrina, I easily pictured myself as Audrey sitting in that tree—the chauffeur’s daughter, looking down yearningly at all the handsome boys, was just like me whenever I spied on my elder sister and her good-looking boyfriends. I loved Audrey, not only through her films but because of some reportage photos I saw in the magazine Picture Post that struck a chord. She was shown happily riding around on her bike and cooking in her tiny apartment. Everything was so clean and shiny. I aspired to live in exactly that same perfect way.
Back home I often attempted to make outfits similar to the sophisticated looks worn by the actresses on the big screen. Throughout my teens I made most of my own wardrobe—even suits and coats—on our Singer sewing machine, which you worked with foot pedals. All it took was patience, and lots of it. I would use Vogue patterns and fabrics from Polykoff’s, a big old department store in Holyhead. I never made anything outrageous. My mother only allowed me to dress in relatively conservative clothes. Everything else she knitted for me. As many old photographs will attest, my mother seldom stopped knitting. She took her knitting everywhere, night and day, making things that were the bane of my life because they would become saggy, especially the knitted bathing suits: saggy and soggy.
Even when I was a child, Vogue was already on its way to being my magazine of choice. I used to see my sister’s copy lying around the house after she was done looking through it—so in a way, it was Rosemary who introduced me to fashion. When I was older, I would make a special trip to Holyhead to buy it for myself. It always arrived rather late in the month, and there were usually only one or two in stock. Presumably, Harper’s Bazaar was around then, too, but for me it was always Vogue. I bought it for the fantasy of looking at beautiful clothes, and I liked getting lost in its pages.
Leafing through the magazine, I was fascinated by the new styles, those ladylike fifties outfits implying a softer, more approachable type of glamour than that which dazzled me at my local cinema. But what I particularly loved were the photographs themselves, especially those taken outdoors. They transported me to all sorts of exotic places—places where you could wear that kind of thing. Après-ski wear under snow-topped fir trees! Beachy cover-ups on sun-kissed coral islands!
The images that stood out for me the most were by Norman Parkinson. He was one of the few fashion photographers back then who was a celebrity in the modern sense. Tall and skinny in an elegant suit with a small, bristling, old-fashioned military mustache, he was always putting himself in his pictures. I began to recognize his work for its lighthearted humor and irrepressible personality. Parkinson would come to play an important role in my life.
During the years after I turned thirteen, I spent even more time studying Vogue, since my sister left home to get married, and I inherited the sophisticated privacy of her room. It was very much hers when she lived with us; I wasn’t even allowed through the door without an invitation. So the first thing I did was redecorate. She had painted it yellow. I painted it pink. Or was it the other way around?
My mother never questioned my sister getting married so young—she was only eighteen—because her obsession was for us girls to find husbands. My sister’s, John Newick, was a lecturer at Birmingham University some years older than she who had been married before and had two children.
The funny thing was, after Rosie moved out, we became much closer. I even saw her more often. Our relationship changed dramatically: When I was younger, she had been able to push me around, and I bore the brunt of her terrible temper tantrums. But by the time she left home, I had grown a lot bigger and taller, and found I had a new way of dealing with things. The more someone gets angry with me, the calmer I become, a policy I have stuck to all my life.
Le Bon Sauveur was the name of the convent school I attended from the ages of nine to seventeen. It was run by a French Catholic order in Holyhead and was small and a little bit exclusive, being the only private school in the area. It had beautiful wooden floors, high ceilings, tennis courts, and wonderful grounds with rolling lawns and pretty gardens. Apart from the standard lessons and games, we were also taught ballet, needlework, and several other pastimes intended to prepare you for married life without a job.
My sister, who had been sent there before me as a boarder, wasn’t much taken by convent life, complaining that she found the excessive amount of chapel worship hard on her knees. However, a note from my parents explaining that we were perfectly content to remain Church of England and had no intention of converting to Catholicism cleared the way for me to skip the devotionals.
There were about sixty girls at the school. This was the first time I had been thrown into such a sizable crowd, and I experienced tremendous anxiety. I would become nauseated and even physically sick around too many new people, and while this affliction eased as I grew older, it hasn’t entirely gone away. Throughout my childhood, I couldn’t sit down to eat with all the other girls at school without feeling a dreadful fear-induced sense of panic. At one stage, I persuaded my mother to let me return home for lunch, despite the long ride—an hour there and back—leaving barely enough time to eat. Finally, my parents were able to organize prepaid lunches at a quiet little café in town, where I didn’t have to talk to anyone. I still seize up sometimes when I have to do something that should be painless, such as speaking up during our weekly fashion meetings at Vogue.
My Winter School Uniform
In the summer, I would cycle to school past empty golf courses and fields filled with horses, cows, and sheep in my simple uniform of a blue short-sleeved shirt and gray knee-length pleated shorts. Winter mornings, however, were quite a different matter. They were invariably so cold that I could see my frosty breath despite warming up my room with the small one-bar electric fire I was permitted to switch on for only ten minutes at a stretch. So I would get dressed in bed. I kept my school uniform—a gray worsted wool tunic with a blue flannel long-sleeved shirt and tie, a gray woolen cardigan, and thick lisle stockings—neatly tucked under the pillow, and I’d squirm into it under the bedclothes.
Pupils from the nearby state school hated us convent girls and considered us snobs. There was a lot of name-calling. “Posh,” they all hissed in my direction as I sat there in my school beret and gray raincoat, protectively hugging my satchel on the morning bus and hugely outnumbered by my persecutors.
At recreation times we girls were expected to converse in French. We called our headmistress, or head nun, “Ma Mère.” The teachers were called “Madame,” because they were all married to God. I think very few of the nuns actually were French, but they were certainly quite groovy, even if they did wear the obligatory severe-looking black habits and white wimples. The convent had an extensive area of flat roof, and in the hour-long break after lunch they went roller skating up there, flapping about in their robes like crows on wheels. Very good some of them were, too. They didn’t exactly kick their legs up high, but they did pirouette.
My one special friend was Angela, although I didn’t see much of
her outside school because she lived twenty miles away at the other end of the island. Our occasional adventures involved slipping off to the mainland by train, across the Menai Straits to Bangor, in order to take ballroom dancing lessons for which we always seemed to be partnered by boys so short they barely reached our chins. My only other friend, Mary, was bright and the “rebel” of the class. For a fourteen-year-old, she also had the most enormous breasts. On our way home, we often chatted at the bus stop, which was next to the local garage. A cute mechanic worked there, and Mary the rebel soon became pregnant.
The moment the news swept through class, we were all transfixed with excitement because the school taught no sex education whatsoever. Obviously, you couldn’t ask your parents or the nuns any questions. So we were thrilled to get every bit of information right here, firsthand. At break, there we were, breathlessly gathered around Mary, asking urgent things like “So what did you do?” and “So what did he do next?” and “So what did it feel like?”
one two three, one two three .… ouch!!
I was fifteen when I fell madly in love for the first time. His name was Ian Sixsmith, and he was the middle son of one of the families who stayed with us each summer. Ian was lanky and handsome with dark, shiny hair combed straight back. His younger brother was a pupil at the prep school next door to us.
Our family was never one to get together to discuss love, life, and sex or anything. With us, there were no touchy-feely moments. I don’t even remember hugging or kissing my mother apart from the odd peck on the cheek. This, however, didn’t strike me as at all odd, because it seemed to be the way all families behaved.
Ian and I had our first kiss on my front doorstep. I prayed that my mother wouldn’t see. My sister had previously suggested I should “Put some lipstick on, make yourself more attractive.” So I did. But Ian and I never slept together. Young girls—apart from hopeless cases like Mary—didn’t sleep with young boys in those days until after marriage. Then, all of a sudden, Ian was gone. Conscripted: called up to join the RAF and packed off overseas to Cyprus. I went to say goodbye at the railway station, and it was like a scene from the eighties film Yanks. There I was in my printed frock (which in all likelihood I had made myself), waving him on his way, so handsome in his uniform, the train whistle blowing, steam clouds swirling. My heart was broken. We wrote to each other every week for some time. But eventually, I fell for someone else, and we lost touch. Absence, I guess, did not make the heart grow fonder.
Ten miles from the hotel was an air base called RAF Valley—its motto was In Adversis Perfugium (Refuge in Adversity)—which housed a branch of the Fleet Air Arm (and was later attended by the Queen’s grandson Prince William). These were seventeen- to eighteen-year-old kids, only a few years older than I, young boys sent out to the Welsh countryside to learn how to fly in battered old training planes and master the incredibly difficult tasks of piloting blind and taking off and landing on an aircraft carrier anchored offshore—terrifying feats that occasionally ended in tragedy.
During the season, the young fliers grouped together on Saturday afternoons and came over to the Tre-Arddur Bay rugby club to play against our local team. Now in my midteens, I helped out at the club, making cups of tea for them at halftime. They looked so heroic, covered head to foot in mud.
Each one seemed to possess a sports car that he drove really fast during time off. Bob Holiday, my pilot boyfriend of the moment, had an open-top Austin-Healey that he sped about in fast and furiously, often hitting around 100 mph, taking corners too tightly and going into a spectacular spin. He was a tall, good-looking blond, forever in trouble with his superiors. He grew his hair longer than regulations allowed, which landed him in hot water when someone in authority spotted it poking out beneath his flying helmet. After a while he became serious about me, and we almost got engaged. Then Bob transferred to Devon. His best friend, Jeremy, drove me down one day to join him. Jeremy owned a vintage MG, had a sunny personality, a smart family town house in Kensington, and was great fun. Halfway there, we realized we quite fancied each other. And that was the end of Bob.
By the time I turned eighteen, I knew I must leave my tiny Welsh island. Although I had nothing like a good alternative plan, there was no choice if you stayed in Anglesey. You could end up working in either a clock factory or a snack bar.
All through my teens, people had remarked upon my height, saying that I was tall enough to be a model (probably because most Welsh girls are pretty short). My old school friend Angela always encouraged me, saying, “Let’s go to London. You can go to modeling school, and I can get a job as a secretary, and we will see where it leads.” So, before I left home, I cut out and posted a coupon from the pages of Vogue. It was a tiny snippet, a paragraph in the back of the magazine promising, for twenty-five guineas, a life-transforming two-week course at the Cherry Marshall modeling school in Mayfair.
Modeling seemed like an amazing escape into a world of wealth and excitement, a chance to travel to new places and meet interesting people. At the very least, I reasoned, it could lead to a greater social life, a respectable home, and marriage, all of which would make my mother deliriously happy. Besides, I loved seeing beautiful clothes in beautiful photographs and dreamed of being part of it.
II
ON
MODELING
In which our
heroine leaves
home, lands a job,
learns how
to walk, runs
naked through
the woods,
and discovers sex.
Having arrived back at my American Vogue office in New York after the Paris collections, I find myself inundated with paperwork. Because I categorically refuse to squint all day at a computer screen, a snowdrift of printed e-mails has buried my desk. Budget estimates for upcoming fashion shoots and their ever-spiraling costs wait to be whittled down. Photocopies of model hopefuls—referred to nowadays as “the new Daria” or “Kate” or “Naomi” and never as girls in their own right—litter my in-tray. Urgent notes summoning me to write introductions to photography books and requests for me to design a special bag covered with my cat drawings for Balenciaga clamor for my attention.
After a week first stuck in Paris traffic en route to noting the clothes in more than thirty ready-to-wear presentations, followed by a swift shoot in the South of France with my favorite model, Natalia Vodianova, and the actor Michael Fassbender (I still blush after seeing him in Shame), during which I became trapped in the hotel lift and had my luggage misplaced on the journey home, I am exhausted. Now I am expected to address requests to design the shop windows at Prada to coincide with the annual Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to trawl through heaps of film stills of the actress Keira Knightley in a new production of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, as she is the possible lead for our October issue.
My first modeling job
“I know the leaves are falling Parks, but did my clothes have to fall too?”
At the same time, I have to try to find a day that works for both Lady Gaga and the photographers Mert and Marcus to shoot the cover of our all-important September issue, which this year, even more importantly, celebrates 120 years of Vogue and is more than 900 pages thick.
“Multitasking,” I think they call it. Whatever, it’s a far cry from the carefree fashion career I envisioned as a coming-of-age teenager appraising Vogue’s photographs of girls draped across country gates gazing dreamily at the cows. And an even longer way from the world I would discover after setting off from home for pastures new over half a century ago.
Early in 1959, I arrived in London by train one afternoon with my few belongings packed in a smart new blue fiberglass suitcase. The capital city, so steeped in history, was well on its way to becoming the hugely overcrowded metropolis it is today. The area I was about to move to, Notting Hill, was crammed with recently installed black tenants, mostly arrived by boat from overseas British territories such as Trinidad and othe
r Caribbean islands. Terrace upon terrace of tall, elegant, white-painted Victorian houses, each with its own impressively grand front door and porch, had been recently subdivided into warrens of small rooms that the landlords were renting out to large immigrant families and hard-up students at inflated prices. There was a great deal of racial tension in the air.
My friend Angela and I shared a bed-sit in one of these converted row houses in Palace Gardens Terrace, a large stuccoed room on the second floor with two narrow single beds and a washbasin. There was an open fireplace in which stood a gas fire on a meter and a little electric ring for boiling an egg or warming up uncomplicated things like baked beans, and a pay phone on the wall in the outside corridor for general use. Our rent for two was four pounds a week. The last bus home was at ten-thirty, and if I spent the evening out or was delayed on the late shift at work, I would be highly nervous returning alone. This was around the time of the notorious Notting Hill race riots, when resentful gangs of blacks and whites lay in wait for each other armed with cutthroat razors and petrol bombs.
I worked as a waitress at the Stockpot in Basil Street, Knightsbridge, a literal stone’s throw from the vaunted halls of Harrods department store. My actress friend Panchitta, who worked at the Stockpot part-time, set up a job interview for me with the owner, Tony. It was a bistro, the kind of continental-looking place where they usually stick candles thickened with dripped wax into picturesque Chianti bottles wrapped in raffia, and cover the tables in red-and-white-checked tablecloths, except this one had lacquered pine tables and banquettes. All the smart girls of London used to work there—demure young ladies from respectable backgrounds in the home counties, fancy girls from fancy families talking about fancy clothes, and pouty debutantes with beehive hairdos and pale pink lipstick, each reasonably pretty and all hand-picked by Tony, who thought himself God’s gift to women.
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