Grace
Page 8
Sometimes, while we editors were discreetly elbowing to enter a show, there would be a ripple through the crowd and a low whisper, “It’s Mrs. Vreeland!” It would be like the sea parting as she swept in, an imposing, angular figure who marched rather than walked, her entourage from American Vogue following behind in a long trailing line as in a scene from Funny Face. The British Vogue contingent, meanwhile, was decidedly more low-key. I think our representatives consisted solely of Bea Miller and me. We had no entourage and there was no British Vogue office in Paris to look after us, although Susan Train, American Vogue’s point person there, did help out a great deal. But until the eighties, when Anna Wintour came along as editor, we mainly worked out of our hotel rooms.
At the shows, the team from American Vogue, with Vreeland in the center, usually sat in comfort on a deep sofa, and American Harper’s Bazaar sat on another. Lowly British Vogue didn’t qualify for a sofa. I sat on my tiny gilt chair behind Bea and surreptitiously drew the clothes, my sketchbook shielded in my lap. Many women in the front row wore gloves. There were certainly smokers; ashtrays on tall stands stood next to some of the chairs. There was always a particular reverential kind of hush about the couture. The ready-to-wear, on the other hand, was much more relaxed and abuzz.
I always sketch at fashion shows. Drawings jog my memory more than any photograph. At the time I began attending the Paris haute couture, there was much secrecy surrounding the collections. The clothes were always hidden away in the designers’ ateliers beforehand beneath large, concealing dust sheets, and there was a strict embargo on releasing any photographs until an agreed-upon publishing date. If this embargo was broken, you were banned from all future presentations for life. While you watched the show you were absolutely forbidden to draw the outfits, although I always did. If any hawk-eyed employee of the salon caught you, both you and your notebook were immediately confiscated and you were ignominiously ejected from the maison on suspicion of stealing: of selling the ideas to manufacturers who would copy them. Those were also the days when you couldn’t turn up one minute late for a show because the door would be slammed in your face.
In between the fashion obligations of my new life at British Vogue, I married Michael Chow in September 1969. In the months beforehand, we briefly separated but got back together, and when we did, he was eager to marry straightaway. I was a bit apprehensive, but invitations were suddenly on their way while I was at the collections in Paris. Di, my assistant, rang me out of the blue and said, “Did you know Michael is drawing up the guest list right now?” Later, I realized that this could only be the action of someone strongly accustomed to making decisions for other people.
The ceremony was to be at Chelsea Registry Office. We arrived in our Rolls-Royce and promptly received a parking ticket. Only two other people were present, the South African photographer Barry Lategan and his girlfriend, Mary (she was also his assistant), who acted as witnesses. I wore a green crushed-velvet dress with trumpet sleeves by Laura Jamieson from the Sweet Shop. Michael wore a velvet suit by Piero de Monzi and handmade two-tone shoes. For the wedding photographs taken afterward by Lategan in his little Chelsea studio barely five minutes away, I gazed lovingly into my husband’s eyes while he, being somewhat shorter than I, stood on a box.
At the wedding reception, held in Michael’s brand-new Knightsbridge restaurant, I was rather intimidated by all the celebrity invitees, so I hovered on the edge of the party all evening. Michael’s sister Tsai Chin took the opportunity to berate me for having walked out on her brother some months before. She said, “Now that you’ve married into our family, you had better behave yourself,” or words to that effect. Michael, meanwhile, wanted to leave early. An expression my mother used came floating back to me: “East is East and West is West and ne’er the twain shall meet.” She, however, completely missed the wedding, having not wished to leave her little dog at home in Wales because he had grown too old to travel.
After spending our wedding night at the Carlton Towers hotel just around the corner from the restaurant, Michael and I took off for Capri, arriving by helicopter on the tiny island for our glamorous honeymoon, whereupon I immediately came down with chicken pox. The spots appeared the moment we got to our hotel. I spent five days in a darkened room recuperating before flying back home.
During my first twelve months at British Vogue, I acquired a reputation for being impressively eccentric because I was never seen in public without a hat or a tightly wound headscarf. I owned tons and tons of these long twenties scarves, most of them printed with art deco patterns and each similar to the ones that pop stars like Mick Jagger were draping around their fashionable necks at the time. I experimented by wrapping them around my head, then twisting and tying the long ends to make a tight, concealing turban, which, apart from an alternate hat or two, I wore every single day. The sole reason for this was the terrible state of my hair. I had been trying to grow it out, yet hairdressers wouldn’t stop snipping away at it, making it look even more dreadful than before.
By now Michael was going into the restaurant every single night. And I, as what now would be considered an early example of the “trophy wife,” accompanied him, even though I was exhausted from a long day at Vogue. As you might imagine, I didn’t really take to playing the social hostess, sidling up to customers to ask if they were enjoying their meal or listening patiently to a litany of their complaints. So in the end I opted to stay isolated in the booth downstairs and play hat-check girl instead. It was peaceful and the tips were very good. But being the owner’s wife, I naturally felt obliged to add my earnings to the pool of cash shared out among the general staff.
Whenever we were not in the new restaurant, at Sunday lunchtime, for instance, Michael and I entertained at home. I cooked Peking duck in our bright red Aga after it had been prepared by the chefs at the restaurant. (To make the meat more tender, the birds for some reason had to be inflated with a bicycle pump.) Lunch was served on a full-size billiards table, which cleverly transformed into an extremely generous dining table.
It was all highly contemporary, exquisitely photogenic, utterly enviable domestic bliss … until I fell in love with someone else.
V
ON
TAKING PICTURES
In which
Grace peers
through the
lens of her new
world of
happy snappers.
Trips were a real luxury at fashion magazines in the seventies. I loved them. There had never been an opportunity for long-distance travel when I lived in Wales, where our glimpse of the outside world came from such publications as National Geographic and Picture Post. I didn’t travel far at all until I was eighteen, and then I left home for good.
Unlike today, when an average location shoot—complete with photographer, models, hairdresser, makeup artist, production people, scouts, prop stylist, and numerous assistants for everybody (although I have only ever had one)—can be concluded in two or three hectic days, back then we might take off for anything up to three leisurely weeks. We absorbed the atmosphere, waited as long as necessary for the best light, and took time off for the models to get suitably tanned. Things would always turn out fine as long as our pictures included a good publicity shot of the airplane—or even just the tail of the plane—because the flights and accommodation were normally given for free.
My shoot in Hyde Park makes the wrong thing look so right.
My first fashion trip as a Vogue editor was to Jamaica in 1970 with my old friend Norman Parkinson, who built his dream house in neighboring Tobago. I can still recall the first moment of incredible warmth that enveloped me as I stepped off the plane in Montego Bay, the sudden awareness of the friendly people all around, and the perfection of the white sand. In Wales I had not come across any black people at all, so to discover a whole island of them was overwhelming. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the West Indies.
My take on traveling had very much to do wit
h Parks. He educated me, making me see that you need to get involved with a place, not just take a bunch of clothes on a plane and photograph them on a beach. Nowadays, there are fashion teams who can go to the same locations I have been to and come back with photographs showing just a tiny bit of blue sky. How modern! And they think they have done a fabulous job! But what’s the point?
Parks taught me such a lot about how to work when you are in foreign lands, about always keeping your eyes open, as you never know when you might find something inspirational to enhance the photographs. For instance, he and I were on a shoot in the Seychelles in 1971 with the model Apollonia van Ravenstein, standing on miles and miles of virgin white sand. Suddenly a dog appeared out of nowhere. Apollonia stretched out her arms to call it, and at that moment, the picture sprang to life. Parks became a kind of mentor, a father figure during my early Vogue years. And I would work so hard to learn about the location before we went away. Sometimes I failed, as when our trip to the Seychelles took us to a remote island bird sanctuary. After a nightmare ten-hour ride on a tiny fishing boat, during which we all threw up most of the way, the sanctuary turned out to be little more than a stinking dung heap of bird droppings—although we did manage to get some of our most memorable pictures there.
It is always so difficult to capture fashion combined with a sense of place, so I would throw myself into research. Whenever these trips were in the planning stage, there were books piled high all over my office. Bea Miller would put her head around the door and stare in shock. “But Grace, you never read!”
Apart from Parkinson, the stable of photographers I worked with during my early years of fashion editing included Bailey, Donovan, Barry Lategan, and Clive Arrowsmith, with occasional guest appearances by Snowdon, Sarah Moon, Sacha, Duc, Cecil Beaton, Peter Knapp, and Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, the great stars of French Vogue. But the one photographer I would dearly have loved to work with was the legendary American perfectionist Irving Penn. I had to wait another twenty years for the opportunity.
Rumors circulating at Vogue soon after I joined had it that Mr. Penn was in England to take pictures of flowers—a certain rose, to be exact—for his latest book. Having always wanted to meet this world-renowned figure, I went up to the Vogue studios on the sixth floor to hang about in hopes of bumping into my idol. There I discovered that he hadn’t been given a studio at all but a corner of the tearoom, where he set up his composition on a little table near the window. As he didn’t want to upset the rose with an electric lightbulb, he was augmenting the natural light with a candle. I looked around, searching him out and dying to cross paths with him. But in my youthful ignorance, I somehow expected to see someone cool, like David Bailey. So I didn’t notice the slight, unassuming figure in the pressed shirt and trousers who walked by me in the corridor until someone said that if I was looking for Mr. Penn, I had just passed him.
Toward the end of my time at British Vogue, in the early eighties, I had a second chance to meet my hero on one of my many trips to New York, where I both attended the collections and worked freelance on Calvin Klein’s advertising shoots. One day I confessed to Calvin, with whom I was now very friendly, that one of my dreams was to finally meet Irving Penn. Because he was involved with Penn, who was shooting the pin-sharp still-life advertising shots of the company’s products at the time, Calvin said, “I’ll set it up for you.” And so I went to the great man’s studio on Fifth Avenue. It was absolutely tiny. He came out of his office and we sat at a small Formica-topped table where we talked for hours, chatting away like two old friends about photography then and in the past, and about what made a great fashion image, a subject on which he set a very high bar. It was amazing to have a conversation with such an astonishing master. He was so passionate about his work, yet so diffident and self-deprecating about his towering achievements.
David Bailey, whom I had previously worked with as a model, was tough. The most important person on any of his shoots was, without doubt, the photographer. Followed by the model. He used the same girl again and again, and that girl was usually his current girlfriend.
Bailey liked making fashion editors run. He would tease us a lot and never show the shoes, cropping in really tight on all the photographs because he liked to make them fill the frame. As I have always been known as an editor who likes to show the shoes, you can appreciate that this upset me more than most.
However, I did go on a great many very enjoyable trips with him—Peru, Africa, Australia, Corsica, the Côte d’Azur—and he didn’t crop those pictures so much. Although he was a great traveling companion, for one trip to South America he came up with the concept—a particularly bad one, in my opinion—of going there by himself to shoot all the backgrounds, then returning to a London studio, where he wanted to project the images and photograph a model standing in front of them. I offered a favorite model of mine at the time, a Hawaiian/Japanese beauty named Marie Helvin, who was exotic, with a bit of a tan—which was convenient, since she wasn’t going to acquire one in the studio. Bailey’s reaction was “I don’t want to work with any fuckin’ girl you suggest,” or something equally polite, but I insisted. The next second Marie and Bailey were madly in love, he married her, and they were living together in an enormous dark house filled with screeching parrots in North London that also served as his studio, looked after by his Brazilian manservant, Cesar.
Another frequent collaborator was South Africa–born Barry Lategan, known for his softly lit studio pictures and poetically misty location work. His images epitomized the fashion mood in London, when makeup was very painterly and fashion was rather ethereal, something Bea Miller allowed me to indulge in with him, even for numerous covers.
Because she had a journalistic background and was pretty smart, Bea insisted that fashion should have something to say, or at least deliver a lively point of view. “I had this idea in my bath this morning” was something she regularly said to us.
One of my favorite Bea ideas was a shoot in 1971 with the photographer Peter Knapp. It took ten (I think) long-held rules governing ladylike behavior in public, as determined by Emily Post in her books on etiquette, then demolished them by showing ten photographs of models doing the exact opposite. For example, in contrast to a caption ruling, “A lady never applies her makeup in public,” model Cathee Dahmen was seen at a table at Mr Chow looking glamorously self-absorbed, in high-voltage 1930s style, as she applied her lipstick in the mirror of an art deco compact. Another showed a typical group of middle-aged, traditional English nannies pushing prams through Hyde Park while the flame-haired model Gala Mitchell, in vibrant satin hot pants, pushed her pram past them in the opposite direction. The caption this time read something like “A lady never dresses to stand out in a crowd.” This eagerness to flout stuffy old rules gave British Vogue relevance again after it had languished for years in the wake of its more forward-thinking rival, Queen, and enabled readers liberated by the swinging sixties to relate to it.
Meanwhile, avant-garde young fashion designers as accomplished as any in Italy or France were on the rise. London’s Royal College of Art and various other seed beds of British talent produced names like Ossie Clark, Foale & Tuffin, Zandra Rhodes, and Bill Gibb, a talented group joined by newcomers Sheridan Barnett, Katharine Hamnett, and Adrian Cartmell. The thirties style of Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba was proving seriously influential. British icons of glam rock such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan were delivering androgyny and men’s makeup to the mainstream. Glitter and a peculiar tinselly glamour filled the air.
The Welshman Clive Arrowsmith was a wild photographer who fitted well with these crazy times. He was a bit of a rock and roller, never far from one of his collection of guitars, occasionally breaking out in extremely loud jam sessions with his assistant Willie and a few friends. I knew Clive throughout his blissed-out Hare Krishna seventies phase. He produced beautifully lit, somewhat hallucinogenic photographs, very much of their era, mostly shot in the studio. Somehow, we did manage to go on one dis
astrous trip to New York (he had a terrible fear of flying and needed to get roaring drunk to board a plane, ably supported by Willie), where he became totally paranoid and refused to go outside. Our intention was to photograph all along the eastern seaboard of America, but he was interested only in places he could get to and immediately return from the same day—the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, Chinatown, New York’s St. Regis Hotel, Connecticut, Yale University, etc. He was a really good photographer, just unbelievably off-the-wall.
It was on this same trip that I went to Madison Avenue and paid an early visit to American Vogue (which I was in awe of), escorted around the building by Bill Rayner, the Condé Nast financial director. Bea Miller had persuaded him to look after me. Walking down a corridor, we bumped into fashion editor Polly Mellen, who mistook me for an assistant, thrust a bag of clothing into my hands, and instructed me to return it to the designer Oscar de la Renta. Then we ran into Leo Lerman, the witty and urbane features editor (as well as a familiar face at Bea Miller’s London parties), who seemed to know everyone who was anyone and arranged for me and my team to visit Andy Warhol’s Factory and photograph all the extraordinary-looking people there. I was fated not to meet with American Vogue’s legendary editor Diana Vreeland, though. Looking me up and down as I stood outside her office, knees knocking under my miniskirt, while all around us whirled the chic and dynamic Vogue staff, Bill Rayner thought better of it. “Maybe I won’t take you in there today,” he said.