We didn’t have a uniform as such but wore a navy-blue-and-white-striped cotton apron over our street clothes. The Stockpot was informal and inexpensive. Close to the cash register was a counter and a hot plate where omelettes were prepared, each flavored to the customer’s liking with exotic fillings such as Italian cheese, tomatoes, and ham. This was called the Omelette Bar. I was sometimes put there to work but did it reluctantly because my cooking was always considered suspect, and up to this point I had never made an omelette in my life.
“I’d really like you to meet Norman Parkinson … oh, and one Italian cheese omelette please … …”
We, the girls of slender means dreaming of potentially glamorous lives and debonair boyfriends with smart foreign cars, were generally overworked and underpaid. There were also two Cypriot chefs, both with fiery tempers, who thought us all terrible waitresses (which, for the most part, we were). So on occasion they would angrily hurl their chopping knives at us across the kitchen. Despite this, the hours were good and allowed many of us would-be models and aspiring actresses (I think the British film starlet Susannah York was one) time to attend auditions and go-sees.
Between shifts at the Stockpot, we would meet up and go to the soda fountain at Fortnum & Mason, the grand department store in Piccadilly that also carried the proud title of officially being By Royal Appointment, greengrocer to Her Majesty the Queen. There we would sit, sipping our afternoon tea, as a fashion show went on around us. It was our fashion fix! I was so amazed at how the models walked—with that precarious slant, as if they were about to topple over backward—and how they could pause, turn, and move around the little tea tables so elegantly and hold their gloves in a certain expensive manner.
I was soon deeply immersed in my two weeks of evening classes at the Cherry Marshall modeling school in Grosvenor Street, W1. Down the road in one direction, Ban the Bomb demonstrations were being orchestrated at nearby Speakers’ Corner in Marble Arch by earnest Cut Nuclear Defence members in horn-rimmed glasses and duffle coats. In another, Lady Docker, the richest woman in the land, would swan around Berkeley Square in her gold-plated Daimler with zebra-skin upholstery. Within barely a fortnight, I would be taught how to apply my makeup, style my own hair, and walk about elegantly in spiky stiletto shoes. In those days it was called deportment, although I don’t think we balanced books on our head to keep ourselves more erect or anything like that. We also learned how to curtsy, which was useful if you were a debutante but not exactly something needed if you were not. Finally, we learned how to walk the runway, how to execute a three-point turn, and how to properly unbutton and shrug off a coat while at the same time gliding along and smiling, smiling, smiling. This was something I was never much good at. My coordination and synchronization have always been a problem. And yet somehow, at the end of my fortnight, I was signed up and placed on the agency’s books.
Working girl.
Unlike now, when everything is done for them, a model back then had to apply her own eyeliner, shape her brows, and put on her lipstick. She also had to set and style her own hair, back-comb it and fold it into a neat chignon, or make the ends curl outward in the look of the time, the “flick-up.” Makeup artists and hairdressers who specialized in photo shoots were completely nonexistent. Each model was expected to own a model bag, and what she put into it was terribly important. There was no such thing as a stylist, either, so the better your accessories, which you carried in your bag too, the more jobs you were likely to get.
My bag was huge, about the size of one of those big nylon holdalls-with-wheels that you haul onto planes these days, except, of course, mine didn’t have wheels and I had to drag it everywhere. In it I put all my makeup, wigs and hairpieces, hairpins and hair lacquer, gloves of all lengths, fine stockings in beige and black, safety pins, a sewing kit, false eyelashes, false nails, nail varnish, an A to Z of London, a large bottle of aspirin, pennies for the phone, a book, some kind of knitting or a tapestry to while away the tedious hours of waiting, an apple, a sandwich in case there was no time for lunch, and maybe even a cheap bottle of wine if the shoot went on into the night. I carried stiletto pumps, pairs of which were likely to be beige or black (you could always tell the poorer models by their badly scuffed shoes). And I had a huge selection of costume jewelry. I always included a push-up bra, which helped me look a little more busty, and heated hair rollers. You had these if you were madly up-to-date and avant-garde, which I was.
But however well equipped you might be, as with most situations in life, friends with influence are much more useful than face powder and rouge.
A man called Tinker Patterson was often a customer at the Stockpot; he was tall and very good-looking, with a pale complexion, sandy hair, and freckles. He was a London painter as well as an in-demand part-time model, and although he already had a girlfriend, he was to become my very first affair.
Tinker invited me to spend the weekend in his delightful little rose-covered cottage in Kent. I could hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of getting out of town for a few days. We drove there on a Friday evening, chugging through the countryside in his little Austin 7, a compact British car from the 1930s that had become popular again in the economy-conscious 1950s and contained so little legroom, it would make a Mini seem spacious. When we arrived, he cooked a beautiful candlelit dinner for two, after which I was shown up to what I thought was the guest bedroom.
I undressed, put on my nightie, pulled down the top sheet, and there, neatly laid out on the pillow like one of those little chocolate mints you find in boutique hotels nowadays, was a condom. “What is this?” I wondered. I really hadn’t a clue. Moments later, to my surprise, I was joined by Tinker carrying a steaming cup of cocoa and looking adorable in his stripy cotton pajamas. But his air was not that of someone about to read me a bedtime story.
Tinker regularly worked for the fashion photographer Norman Parkinson, whose pictures I had pored over back in Wales, and he told “Parks,” as he was known, that he should see me. So I dressed up in my smartest Kiki Byrne two-piece, which had a cropped jacket and a box-pleat skirt that I pouffed out with some nice crisp petticoats (my secret was to wash them in sugar water to make them stiffer), and off I dashed to meet him at his studio in Glebe Place, Chelsea. When I arrived, I asked if he would like to see my portfolio (I was told by my agency that this was the thing to do). He replied, “No, I don’t want to see other people’s pictures of you. I’m only interested in my view of you.” And then he said, “I have this little job at the weekend on my farm in Pishill. It’s a nude photograph, if you don’t mind.”
Well, I only registered the word “photograph,” I don’t recollect why, but I guess it didn’t occur to me that he meant I should take off all my clothes. Later on I did wonder whether it was the proper way to behave. Not that I was embarrassed by my body (which, now that I think of it, Tinker probably told him was pretty good), just worried about what my mother would say. To Parks, however, all I said at the time was “Okay” and off we went to take pictures of me running through the woods naked. He demonstrated what I should do. “This is what I want!” he shouted, mustache twitching as he leaped through the air from behind a tree, a tall, gentlemanly figure wearing one of his lucky little woven Ethiopian skullcaps. And that was that. I think it was for an arty fashion catalog called something like Leaves from the Autumn Collections. Anyway, I had a lovely time. It was my first modeling job. And afterward we all went home for tea.
Meeting Parkinson in my Kiki Byrne suit
A model competition ran in British Vogue in 1959, publicized with a picture of a pretty young girl, Nena von Schlebrügge (later to be Uma Thurman’s mother), and a caption asking, “Could this be you?” Someone at the Stockpot said to me, “Why don’t you try this route?” and so I did. There were four categories for entrants—one for the more mature model, called Mrs. Exeter; categories for models in their twenties and in their thirties; and a junior category called Young Idea. Because Cherry Marshall had previously
arranged for me to visit a photographer’s studio and pose for a model card, I had a picture of myself in pigtails wearing a big sweater and a straw boater, so I sent that in. A few months later, a letter arrived from Vogue informing me I was on the list of finalists and thus invited to a formal tea party at Vogue House to meet everyone involved in the competition.
So off I trotted to Hanover Square, anxious as hell because, as I’ve mentioned, I’m nervous even on the best of days. There was a long table with tea served from giant urns and piles of cucumber sandwiches cut into perfect little triangles. All the finalists were there, as were all the senior editors and Vogue photographers, including Norman Parkinson and an American, Don Honeyman, who, a couple of weeks before the party, had hired me for what I would call my very first fashion job. In this picture, taken with a group of girls standing on top of a vintage car, I was actually wearing clothes.
A little later it was announced which of us had won in the various categories. I won the Young Idea section. Our prizes included a photo session with Vogue’s top photographers, and we were allowed to keep any piece of clothing we wore in the pictures. I was photographed twice, once wearing a lovely cocktail dress and a second time fishing in rubber waders. Somehow these items never came my way.
Suddenly, everyone began asking for me. I was a success! It was truly a Cinderella moment. My mother was over the moon with excitement. I didn’t go back home to visit too often in those days, but whenever I did, she proudly showed me photographs of myself snipped from various magazines. In fact, quite a few were not of me at all but of other, similar-looking girls. “That’s not me,” I’d tell her. But she would say, “Oh well, it’s a nice photo and I like it anyway,” and pop it back into my file.
My editorial rate for magazines and newspapers was two pounds a day, and my advertising rate was five pounds (although I must say I didn’t get many advertising jobs). As we were often paid by the hour, we had to arrive fully made up and ready to roll. Funnily enough, though I’d only recently mastered the art of professionally applying cosmetics at Cherry Marshall’s, I was booked for a Vogue shoot by Frank Horvat. This internationally renowned photographer preferred almost no makeup at all for the models in his pictures. If my first lesson in modeling was to “expect the unexpected,” this was further confirmed when another photographer, Saul Leiter, booked me. He famously used a long lens and specialized in fashion photographs that felt uncannily like reportage. After dressing in Vogue Studios, I was told to go out into adjacent Hanover Square, where he was waiting for me. After walking around the square several times, I went back into the dressing room, distraught at having somehow missed him, only to be told that Mr. Leiter was very happy with the picture he had taken.
My contemporaries were girls like Bronwen Pugh; Sandra Paul, a classic English beauty who married a politician; and Enid Boulting, whose daughter, Ingrid, also became a famous model and went on to marry John Barry, who composed much of the music for the James Bond movies. Another contemporary, Tania Mallet, who herself was cast in a Bond film (only to be killed off after a fleeting appearance), and many of the other girls ended up marrying lords. There was a kind of Upstairs, Downstairs feeling to things at the time. I suppose that’s why my mother didn’t object so much to my going to modeling school. But the models-pursued-by-aristocrats phenomenon was not destined to last. The Profumo Affair, a sex scandal that hit the British headlines in 1963, was a sordid sensation involving government ministers, aristocrats, Soviet spies, and two call girls, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. They were referred to in the popular press euphemistically as “models”—which gave our profession a terrible name because, to the British public, the word “model” became pretty much synonymous with “prostitute.”
Not so long after, while the establishment still reeled from the Profumo Affair, along came the snap, crackle, and mod of the sixties youthquake. Social barriers came tumbling down, and it became far cooler to go out with cheeky East End boys than public school toffs. Everything wasn’t solely about privilege, title, or money anymore—although I saw it happening financially for these East End boys, too, because the ones I knew were all driving around in Rolls-Royces and Bentleys.
This was a sensational twist to the status quo. The working-class boys were much more fun. And they looked up to women. I befriended the cockney photographer Terence Donovan, who, along with his mates Brian Duffy and David Bailey—the ringleader and certainly the most famous of the three—were the likely lads at the head of the pack.
Donovan had a little studio in Knightsbridge opposite a pub called the Bunch of Grapes, and the first time I arrived on a go-see with my portfolio, he informed me he had just gotten married that day. I was so surprised that I asked, “Then why are you sitting in your studio?” To which he replied, “Well, I still like photographing pretty girls.” I really adored Terry. He was funny and outrageous, cheeky and yet so wise. As he grew into a national personality, he also grew in size and became a black belt in judo. He remained a very close friend until the day he died. At his funeral, Bailey made a great speech. At one point he said, “All us working-class lads love a posh girl,” then turned and looked directly at Princess Diana, who was best friends with Donovan’s widow, a classy woman called DiDi.
I had a little crush on Bailey, too. It was just after he split up with the great model Jean Shrimpton. But he had a harem of pretty girls available to him and a wildly promiscuous reputation. “David Bailey Makes Love Daily” was the famously racy saying of the day, which gave us all fair warning. And yet he was so skinny and undeniably attractive, even better-looking at the time than the Beatles.
With my original eyebrows in a picture taken on winning the British Vogue model competition. Photo: Norman Parkinson, 1959. © Norman Parkinson Limited / Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive
An early job for British Vogue. Photo: Frank Horvat, 1960. Courtesy of Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.
With the Chelsea Set in British Vogue. Photo: Frank Horvat, 1960. Courtesy of Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.
Dressed to the nines in couture for British Harper’s Bazaar. Photo: Richard Dormer, 1962. Courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar UK
On British Harper’s Bazaar’s cover. Photo: Richard Dormer, 1962. Courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar UK
My first British Vogue cover. Photo: Peter Carapetian, 1962. Courtesy of Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.
Playing a fashionable mum for British Vogue. Photo: Frances McLaughlin-Gill, 1962. Courtesy of Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.
Feeling sophisticated in British Vogue. Photo: Helmut Newton, 1964. Courtesy of Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.
With my new Vidal Sassoon haircut in a Paris hammam for Mademoiselle. Photo: Marc Hispard, 1965
Giving a wink on French Elle’s thousandth issue. Photo: Fouli Elia, 1965. Courtesy of Elle France
A futuristic look in Queen magazine. Photo: Marc Hispard, 1967
Meeting Eileen Ford
oh these English girls, so unprofessional, no sweater bra, no waist which. FAT! FAT! FAT! … and off with those eyebrows
Early on, my agency sent me to Paris for an introduction to Eileen Ford, the American doyenne of all model agents. She was in France setting up deals with other agencies to expand Ford throughout Europe. Some of the better girls were sent over to meet this small, intimidating woman. I was chaperoned by my agent.
When I entered the room, the first thing she wanted to know was why I didn’t possess a waist cincher (a wide elasticized belt), followed by the whereabouts of my sweater bra, which is a bra without seams to keep a cleaner line under your clothes. She then told me she didn’t think I had what it took to be a successful runway model anyway. To see if I could possibly look any better in fashion photos, she personally came at me with a pair of tweezers and plucked my eyebrows (they used to be dramatically heavy) into a thin arch—only to afterward declare me unfit material for fashion photographs as well. For goodness’ sake, I was f
ive feet nine, with an eighteen-inch waist, thirty-three-inch bust and hips, and long legs—and Vogue loved me. How bad could I honestly be?
Back at the London agency, they at least recognized that I had perfectly nice hair. I was sent to a celebrity hairdresser of the 1950s called Teasy-Weasy, who was famous enough to make cameo appearances as himself in several British films of the period, had a camp pencil mustache, and whose real name was Raymond. He said he would make me fabulous. He didn’t; he dyed my hair white-blond, cut the sides short, and left the back long, all of which gave me a frumpy, lopsided look. It was awful. I was then sent to Snowdon (known in those days as the society photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones and just about to become engaged to Princess Margaret) to do some test shots. After that, Teasy-Weasy dyed my hair yet again—a kind of red this time, which looked even worse than before. At this juncture it began to fall out and had to be cut very short to get rid of the color. Abandoning Teasy-Weasy, I defected to Vidal Sassoon in Bond Street, which was the best thing I ever did.
Vidal was an East End boy who had been brought up in an orphanage from which he kept running away. He had spent time on a kibbutz and later paid a voice coach to get rid of his incomprehensible cockney accent. By now he had transformed himself into a hip and happening hairdresser with neat hair and shiny shoes, fastidiously groomed in a Beatles-style suit, who had recently opened his own sensational new hair salon—a cool, jazzy place with big plate-glass windows so that people passing by could see the clients inside having their hair styled—all of which back then was shockingly different. He also employed a lot of uncouth lads in the salon who, after cutting the customers’ hair, took them upstairs and attempted to shag them.
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