As Karl Lagerfeld moved on to another grand apartment and a new inspiration in decor later in 1973, I heard once again from Michael, from whom I was officially divorced, though we remained on friendly terms. I was working in Paris and he was there, too, staying at the Hotel Lotti while bidding at auction for several key pieces from Karl’s impressive collection of art deco furniture, including an enormous lacquered dining table he coveted that originally came from the old French luxury liner the Normandie. He called to say, “I want you to come and meet my next wife.”
meeting Tina
I had already heard from several sources that Michael’s bride-to-be, Tina, was a very pretty, cool, and avant-garde young model of Japanese-American extraction. So, to make an impression, I rushed over to the Yves Saint Laurent salon to borrow something cool and avant-garde to wear. The outfit they lent me was from Yves’s notorious forties couture collection, the one that scandalized all of Paris and included a green box-shouldered fox-fur coat called a “chubby” that came with leggings and wedge shoes. I then put on my makeup and my little blue velvet hat and went over to the hotel. Meanwhile, Tina had apparently heard that I was a very well-dressed person, too, which to her way of thinking translated as very classic, so she was dressed to meet me in a super-traditional English twinset and pearls. Thus, in a strange way, when we did meet, we were wearing each other’s clothes. Nevertheless, right from the start we got on incredibly well.
The more I saw of Tina, the more convinced I was that she was the best-dressed woman I had ever met. Her tastes were subtle, minimalist, and utterly refined, yet alleviated by the most charming touches of humor. She could wear an eccentric accessory like the fresh flower corsages she put together herself and pinned to her traditional cashmere N. Peal cardigans, but she never crossed the line into the vulgar. She bought the most ravishing examples of Balenciaga couture at auction and owned a unique collection of vintage silk cut-velvet cheongsams as well as several museum-worthy Fortunys. Yet she could wear the simplest outfit—one of the beautiful little cotton T-shirts made for her in China, a pair of the gray flannel Kenzo trousers she endlessly had copied in Japan, and some plain brown leather loafers—and still be the chicest woman in the room.
A little while later, when the opportunity arose for me to arrange a photograph of her for Vogue, to be taken by the legendary Cecil Beaton, I imagined one of those classic Beaton images from the thirties with their glamorous, highly stylized settings and Tina lounging in her antique cheongsam like the film actress Anna May Wong. But, as with many other maestros, the living legend was less interested in his yesterdays and far more concerned with looking relevant and “modern.” He wanted her leaping in midair. Hoping he would change his mind, I filled the studio with flowers and Japanese paper parasols, then waited for him to arrive for the sitting. We waited and waited. In the meantime Tina, who was an expert in flower arranging, having studied it in Japan, whiled away the hours by taking the undistinguished selection of lilies I had brought and creating a beautifully photogenic display. Finally, Beaton arrived. He looked around. “My God. This is terrible!” he said, staring at the flowers, whereupon he pulled them all out and totally rearranged them himself. I had completely forgotten that he, too, considered himself an authority on the subject.
Despite all the drama, the photograph he took of Tina lounging on the sofa surrounded by parasols was not modern at all. He had created theatrical pools of light, which gave the portrait an incredibly sad and haunting quality. The next year, a severe stroke left Beaton semiparalyzed until he died in 1980. It was probably his last great picture.
Tina died in 1992 from AIDS complications. She was the first woman I knew of who succumbed to the terrible disease. In fact, I had no idea up until then that it was even possible for women to contract AIDS.
In 1975 I paid my second visit to Jamaica with Norman Parkinson. Our models this time around were to be the illustrator Antonio Lopez and the Texan model Jerry Hall, who went on to become the girlfriend of the singer Bryan Ferry, and later to marry Mick Jagger. Antonio and Jerry were officially engaged at the time—very much a couple, albeit a fairly unlikely one—staying in their own “honeymoon” bungalow at the Jamaica Inn in Ochos Rios, around which we planned to base our shoot.
Antonio was a great New York fashion artist who famously took models with potential and turned them into glamazons or larger-than-life Warholian supermodels, advising them on how to look and pose. Jerry was his newest protegée, a towering cowgirl who stepped off the plane in Jamaica in one-hundred-degree heat wearing her first major modeling purchase—a floor-length fur coat. Because the couple shut themselves away from us in their room every evening, after a time I casually inquired how things were going. I was a little taken aback when Jerry told me that, although they slept together in the same bed, they spent their nights discussing the finer points of her makeup. Antonio would work on stylized drawings of her, and she was expected to adopt the look, paying particular attention to her hair and the enhanced contours of her face, which would turn her into the living vision of his sketches.
Years later, thanks to my frequent, enlightening trips to New York a decade before Antonio’s sad death from AIDS in 1987, I would come to appreciate the powerful relationship between the gay world and the fantasy world of fashion.
That same year I was to work with Jerry Hall and Parks once again on a Vogue trip to Russia—the first time a magazine was allowed to go there and take fashion photographs. At the planning stage back in London, we came across very few pictures confirming any of the sights we might see on our two-and-a-half-week journey across what was then the Soviet Union. All we knew was that we planned to start shooting in Moscow and hoped to finish in Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, after traveling through Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the Caucasus. And all we could be sure of was that there were many heroic statues standing from the time of the Russian Revolution.
Parks hoped to include several of these monuments in his photos, but just in case there was a problem, he said, “We are going to bring our own.” So I organized a polystyrene plinth and had it constructed and painted to resemble a slab of gray stone with “Jerry Hall, Vogue Magazine in the USSR, 1975” inscribed on it in Cyrillic letters. This we carried around with us virtually everywhere. One of our photographs shows Jerry in Red Square sitting atop it, reading a newspaper. In another she is using it like a diving board, poised as if about to plunge into Armenia’s Lake Sevan.
We were an extremely tight little group: Jerry, Parks, his wife, Wenda, who was to write the Vogue travel piece, his assistant, Tim, and me. I took suitcases filled with red clothes—a lot of which, due to a lack of color pages, were thanklessly published in black and white—and I brought neither assistant, hairstylist, nor makeup artist. Jerry had to rely on all those tips from Antonio to look the part.
The Russian authorities made it a full and binding condition of the trip that all the rolls of film had to be processed and printed before we returned home, and there would be guides to indicate where we could and could not point our cameras. Before we left England, someone told me it was likely our rooms would be bugged too, and that the top two floors of any of the country’s tourist hotels would be taken up by eavesdropping devices. We didn’t take this so seriously and, after checking into my hotel room the first night, we moved about loudly, joking, “Hey, Big Brother, are you listening?”
When the job was completed and it was time to leave for home, Parks, who was to stay behind waiting for the final film to be developed, walked up to me and murmured, “Grace, I’m really quite worried about how they will process the photographs, because when I told them what type of film I’d used, they had never heard of it. Can you smuggle one roll from each setup back with you just to be safe?” “No,” I said, “sorry, I can’t. I love Vogue, but I’m not sure I want to spend the rest of my days a political prisoner in a Russian jail.”
“I can take them,” Jerry piped up. “The authorities never, ever
search me. I’ll put them in my makeup bag.”
“On your own head be it,” I said, crossly.
We arrived at the airport, where, sure enough, the customs officers were soon going through every single bag, turning them inside out and upside down and being incredibly thorough. I became highly suspicious and asked a young official what was going on. “We have been tipped off that you are carrying unexposed films and anti-Russian propaganda,” he said, in broken English. I tried to explain that we were guests of the tourist board, but they carried on regardless.
Jerry’s new boyfriend, Bryan Ferry, had given her several of his recordings, which she listened to throughout the trip on her portable tape machine. These were confiscated and taken away to be played at half-speed in case they contained any secret messages. It was obviously only a matter of time before the officials uncovered the rolls of film in Jerry’s makeup bag and fished them out.
The film came in professional rolls of the type that, when used, are secured with a paper sticker stamped with the word “Exposed” in large letters. I quickly pointed this out to the authorities. “See,” I said, “you are looking for unexposed film, and this says ‘Exposed.’ ” Thankfully, the Russian officials managed to somehow confuse the words “exposed” and “unexposed.” Now all I needed was to keep them confused enough to let us go. Our plane was leaving. The steps were being removed, and it was about to pull away along the runway for takeoff. But we made it just in time, and escaped with our contraband!
When Parks returned to England, however, he carried with him the rest of our pictures, and all of them were perfectly processed. In fact, they were much better done than those we had so nervously smuggled back to London.
my YSL red satin blazer & Liberty print Skirt
Willie and I were married at Chelsea Registry Office in November 1976. I wore a black jacket, a royal blue silk blouse with a tie neck, and a purple-printed peasant skirt, all by Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. Willie wore an Yves Saint Laurent suit. The witnesses were Willie’s mother, Lady Jean; Willie’s sister, Carolyne; and Carolyne’s rock-star husband, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. My former assistant Di James and my then-assistant Antonia Kirwan-Taylor prepared the food back at our place in Gunter Grove, and all the Vogue girls, along with Bea Miller and the diffident Chinese art director, Barney Wan, arrived to celebrate. (There are two things I always required of my assistants. They had to look good and be able to cook, because in the early days there was no such thing as catering at any Vogue photo session).
Later that day Willie and I took the car—a Land Rover we had recently used on a photo shoot up in Scotland—and sped off to Paris to photograph the collections. We had arranged beforehand to combine our honeymoon road trip with a short French gastronomic tour, stopping off at a couple of places on the way. But our first stop was an unscheduled layover in Brighton on our wedding night after missing the last boat across the Channel. We arrived at the Grand Hotel covered in confetti. Back then, the place was crumbling and miserable, with one mournful light shining in the dining room. I remember seeing a little mouse run across the floor.
Not too long after our wedding, I journeyed to Paris again, this time with Barney Wan for a collections shoot at Studio Pinup in the rue Daguerre with the Swiss photographer Lothar Schmid; his statuesque model girlfriend, Carrie Nygren; and another girl called Marcie Hunt. The clothes were all by Yves Saint Laurent, Chinese-inspired, sumptuous, golden, and lavishly trimmed with sable. Dinner was delivered to the studio by Barney’s friend Davé, soon to open his own Chinese restaurant on Paris’s Right Bank and destined to become a firm favorite of the fashion pack. Davé had a famous habit of taking out his tarot cards at soirees and predicting the future. He had already performed for a whole bunch of celebrated jet-setters, including Yves Saint Laurent and Princess Grace of Monaco. It was the shock of seeing in the cards a few years later the car accident causing the princess’s death that led him to give up holding readings altogether. But in those days it was normal practice as a kind of party piece for him to take out the pack and foretell the future for pretty much everyone working on a shoot. “I see a suitcase. Someone is leaving,” he said when he came to me. Well, I thought, this prediction wasn’t so uncanny after all, because I was indeed leaving after the shoot to return to London.
Arriving back in Fulham the next day, I put my key in the door. And there was Willie, sitting on the sofa with a suitcase by his side, saying, “I need some time on my own.” Then he walked out on me. All of which was kind of shocking.
Later I discovered that he had left to go on holiday with a model friend of mine, and that for some time, they had been conducting a tempestuous affair behind my back. So it wasn’t so sudden after all. And even when they both came back with suntans, I hadn’t a clue until Willie’s mother told me her son had been seeing a girl called Shirley. Then everything fell into place.
We divorced after barely six months of marriage. I kept the cats and moved into a new apartment close to my former one near the Chelsea football grounds. The toughest thing about the whole situation was that Willie and I had reopened adoption proceedings and been due to pick up my nephew Tristan and have him come live with us full-time on the day after Willie walked out. Now I would be collecting him on my own—obviously not the best of circumstances for Tristan or me.
VIII
ON STATES OF GRACE
America
calls, Grace
answers,
and then
has a cow.
Hard as it was, I threw myself back into my work. With Tristan returned to boarding school, I took off for New York for the first time since my fateful trip with Clive Arrowsmith seven years earlier. British Vogue, I discovered, had a very good name over there—which came as some surprise to me, because up until then I thought our reputation stopped at Dover. It was 1978. I stayed at the Algonquin, which subsequently became my hotel of choice whenever I returned. Accompanied once again by Vogue art director Barney Wan, I set out to conquer Manhattan.
New York—“the Big Apple,” as they were calling it—was unbelievably exciting. The energy, pace, and scale were in such sharp contrast to London. And the American collections were so refreshingly pared down. I could relate to the designer Perry Ellis, whom all the young people loved. Zoran made minimal and clever clothes, and the quality of his cashmere was fantastic. Oscar de la Renta was so handsome and charming—I remember him doing a lot of sexy black lace Spanish-style dresses. Ralph Lauren made everything look so dashingly western. But it was Calvin Klein who really took me in another direction. I discovered that simple and understated didn’t necessarily mean boring; it could mean minimalist and chic. And comfortable! You could move in these clothes.
“Tell me Azzedine, does my bult look big in this?”
Soon I was traveling back and forth doing frequent photo sessions for British Vogue, always on standby to save money, which is very nerve-wracking when you carry endless customs forms and are accompanied by a load of trunks filled with designer clothes but have no assistant for support.
Only later, when I worked freelance on advertising for Calvin, was I flown to America and back by Concorde. He was very generous. (If anyone expressed jealousy, I told them I had earned it because, until I was forty-five, I nearly always traveled standby.) The money was also a great surprise. When he mentioned he must pay me and how much did I want, I said something like, “Oh, it’s no big deal. Give me whatever you like.” I’d had a very nice time, and after all, they did pay my airfare and hotel. It was a little unexpected, then, when he said he would be giving me a check and sending his bodyguard to accompany me to the bank to cash it. But when I looked, what I really couldn’t believe was the amount. It was more than I made at Vogue in an entire year. Finally, I was able to pay all of Tristan’s school fees without having to worry. Going back to London, I stuffed the cash down my underwear for fear it would be taken away by the customs officials.
Among the photographers I worked with most o
ften now were Peter Lindbergh, a German who lived in Paris and liked to do most of his shoots on the beach at Deauville; and Paolo Roversi, an Italian in Paris who never left the studio. Handsome, with a very sexy voice, Paolo did beautiful, poetic work shooting only in large-format Polaroid on a plate camera, in either black and white or in very saturated colors. I found this technique, where you immediately saw and judged the results, a little unnerving, like digital photography is now, but Paolo’s pictures were truly romantic, and I loved them.
I also collaborated frequently with Arthur Elgort, Bruce Weber, Alex Chatelain, Albert Watson, and Patrick Demarchelier. Patrick was among the band of what the American photojournalist Bill Cunningham used to call “The Frenchies,” a peripatetic group of good-looking young Frenchmen jetting between Paris, London, and New York that also included the photographers Pierre Houles, André Carrara, Gilles Bensimon, and Mike Reinhardt, and the hairstylist Didier Malige. This distinctly continental bande des mecs attracted swathes of pretty girlfriends with their seductive Gallic mumbling. Patrick, I think, spoke more clearly then than he does now, but since he repeats everything several times, you eventually begin to understand. He is a great photographer who is very good at lighting and equally at home in the studio or the open air. This is rare. He also excels at celebrity portraits—those of Princess Diana being especially well remembered—and spotting pretty girls. When we visited Barbados in 1983, for example, we took the model Bonnie Berman, freshly “discovered” working as the coat-check girl at Mr Chow NYC, and Patrick transformed her into one of the most memorable British Vogue covers ever.
Grace Page 11