A Story Lately Told (20 page)

I would have much preferred to work with Zeffirelli. The prospect of making a movie with Dad, his directing me, surrounded by his regular crew, most of whom had known me since babyhood—Basil Fenton-Smith on sound, script supervisor Angela Allen, the lighting cameraman Ed Scaife, Russ Lloyd in the cutting room—would diminish my power to self-invent on my own terms. It was as important for me to present a new persona off-camera as it was to play an original character on film.

O
n country weekends in England, house parties would assemble for friends to share living quarters, go to the races, have lovely meals, play tennis, do a little gardening, wander with the dogs in the local fields and woods, ride on horseback, visit other friends for Bloody Marys or Pimm’s Cups, drive to the beach, and eat delicious Sunday roasts with Yorkshire pudding.
Mum and I often went to Dirk Bogarde and Tony Forwood’s beautiful old farmhouse in Kent. Before lunch, the usual party of smart, attractive, sophisticated people—from Joe Losey to Boaty Boatwright, then a top executive at Universal, and her husband, the producer Terence Baker, to Bumble Dawson, the actors Georgia Brown, Roddy McDowall, and Michael York, to Jean Kennedy Smith and Sybil Burton—would gather in the bright living room with its pastel sofas and chintz pillows, its bowls of pink roses and bluebells, to talk about art and theater and movies and books.

It was there that Mum met the actor James Fox, twenty-eight years old, a tall, blond, remarkably handsome, Harrow-educated British movie star. Everyone called him Willy. His father was the famous theatrical agent Robin Fox. Willy was working with Dirk on a film called
The Servant,
directed by Joe Losey. One night he came to Maida Avenue for dinner, and I felt him appraising me—sizing me up. I was seventeen, and I looked back. I was wearing a chocolate-brown velvet dress with a lace collar that I’d found at Antiquarius. I was aware that I looked fetching. I heard him tell Mum he thought I was beautiful.

Later that week, she came to my room and said, “Willy Fox wants to take you to dinner. I’m not sure if I should let you go.” I said, “Oh, Mum, please. I’ll be good.” And she said, “All right.” I think she had a word with him too; quite honestly, she must have felt that if it was not going to be her, at least it would be me. So she consented.

Willy took me to a small house in Belgravia, in a mews called Three Kings Yard. That night, I met his friends the actress Deborah Dixon and the director Donald Cammell. I thought they were the coolest, most attractive, most seductive people. A joint was passed around and we ate lamb stew. Willy drove me
home and kissed me. We arranged for him to pick me up during school hours the following day; it was to be our secret.

He had a new purple Lotus Elan, the color of the red cabbage leaf he’d given as a sample for the custom paint job. As we drove out to the country, he put a tape in the machine, and for the first time in my life I heard Otis Redding. We had lunch at the home of the production designer for his new film,
Isadora.
Afterward, when we returned to London, he took me back to Three Kings Yard and made love to me. Thus began a short series of after-school visits, none lasting longer than a few hours. I had taken to getting myself to Belgravia as well, so I was waiting for him one afternoon alone in his apartment when Donald Cammell walked in from next door. “What are you doing here alone? Come keep me company. Let’s have a smoke.”

Whatever it was he gave me, everything went sideways. Donald Cammell was a dangerous man. I don’t know what he said to Willy, but when I saw Willy next, he said, “Did Donald go after you? What was he thinking? You’re my girlfriend.” But I wasn’t. He had a girlfriend—Andee Cohen, an American he’d met months before. I heard from Mum that she was coming to London and that Willy was meeting her at the airport. Mum had no idea that Willy and I had slept together. I began to dread seeing Mum’s little silver car parked outside 31 Maida Avenue. It meant she’d be home. That she’d ask questions, require answers.

Andee looked like a Gernreich model, with a Vidal Sassoon haircut—pretty and stick thin. She and Willy were obviously very much in love and demonstrative in public. I remember going to a lunch with Mum at Leslie Waddington’s apartment and Willy and Andee disappearing into a bedroom directly afterward. I never confronted him.

The winter before, I had gone to Klosters and stayed with the Viertels. One day, I found myself in a blizzard at the top of the Graubünden alpine range with Peter, and we almost got lost in the whiteout; he kept his humor and didn’t falter, but I could see he had a moment’s pause, blind in the freezing cold. That night, I met a handsome young man in a floor-length wolf coat whose name was Baron Arnaud de Rosnay. He was a photographer and was dating Marisa Berenson. I danced with him at the disco in town. Percy Sledge was singing “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Before I left Switzerland, we had exchanged telephone numbers. Now Arnaud had broken up with Marisa and wanted to come to London to take my photograph for British
Vogue.

When he arrived at the house, my mother took one look at Arnaud and thought he was fabulous. She couldn’t understand that I wanted nothing to do with him; Mum and I posed for him, walking together in Irish capes along the bank of the Regents Canal. It was a nice day, but I didn’t even invite him to stay over for dinner. Willy Fox had broken my heart.

One morning as I was getting into a taxicab on Maida Avenue with Mum, I felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my lower abdomen. I must have temporarily turned white, because she noticed and was concerned, asking if I was all right. I answered that yes, I was. I did not want her to take me to a doctor to get examined. The truth would come out—that I was only seventeen and already having sex would be shocking to her—and she would tell Dad and all hell would break loose. So when the pain recurred, again I said nothing. Eventually, it went away and I thought no more about it.

•  •  •

I loved Deborah Dixon’s haircut. It curled at the nape of her neck like the marble portrait of a young Greek boy. I decided I wanted
to look like her. So off I went to Vidal Sassoon, but only weeks before I was due to start work on
A Walk with Love and Death.

Dad was seriously displeased and saw this as a sign of rebellion, sure that I had chopped off my hair as some form of protest. But the truth was, I didn’t want to do the film, and I hadn’t reckoned on its coming to fruition in any way.

Mum took me shopping and bought me a yellow wool suit that we hoped Dad would like. Days later, as I was fretting about an acting debut I did not want to make, I got a call from British
Vogue
asking me to pose for my first portrait with David Bailey. At this point, modeling was much more alluring to me than acting in a movie for Dad. It was remarkable how things came so easily to me. In every generation a flock of pretty girls was released into society with the help of their mothers, via the pages of the glamour magazines. They wore the bright plumage of the newly initiated, and the adornments of their ancestors only served to enhance their youth. Often they were the progeny of good bloodlines—rich, clever, famous fathers and the beautiful women who married them. I was no exception to this fortunate rule, but in retrospect I remember wishing I had something to fight for. This was the beginning of a habit of making things harder for myself than they needed to be.

The first time I had seen Bailey was across a crowded room at a cocktail party in Jules and Joyce Buck’s flat in Belgravia when I was twelve and he was in his late twenties. He was not tall but seemed physically strong—that is to say, he filled his jeans. He was wearing a black leather jacket and black stack-heeled cowboy boots. He had black eyes and shaggy black hair. Beside him, in a soft pink ultra-minidress, with long pale gold hair, sat the ravishing Catherine Deneuve. I was introduced to them as a child is introduced to grown-ups. I can still see them,
like day and night across the room—light and dark, her cool and his intensity.

His reputation, of course, preceded him. Bailey was known to have been the discoverer and lover and photographer of the other most beautiful woman in the world, Jean Shrimpton, who was living with the handsomest man in the world, Terence Stamp. I had passed them walking toward the Albany in Piccadilly once, and had literally gasped at their collective radiance; she, with her doe eyes, perfect pout, and pointed little chin, was hanging on his arm. Many of the iconic photographs of the day were Bailey’s. Then Penelope Tree became his girlfriend. I had seen them come out of an elevator once in Paris. She was an amazing-looking girl, with endless legs in thigh-high boots and no hips at all. Her eyes were widely spaced, with a distant expression, like those of a beautiful insect.

I’d been in the dressing room for hours, trying without success to learn the knack of applying individual lashes to the lower lids. Glue was everywhere, my eyes were a sticky mess, I was on the verge of tears. Celia Hammond, my favorite model of the moment, popped her head with its mane of silky blond hair through the doorway to say goodbye to the editor. She was even more exquisite in the flesh than in her photographs. As the door closed, I was left in her wake as if the sun had disappeared behind a cloud. I was out of my league. It was dark in the studio except for the blinking of a strobe light under a silver umbrella. Against the wall, a sheet of gray no-seam paper was suspended from the ceiling.

Bailey looked me up and down and said cheerfully, “Hello, missy.”

I felt both nervous and defensive. “Please don’t call me that,” I said coolly.

Bailey took my picture in a version of the haute gypsy look that Marisa Berenson and Penelope Tree had made popular—with eyes like starfish. I faced the lens warily, as if it were a dog about to bite. But Bailey seemed not too concerned with my negativity. He clicked off a few rolls and that was it. The end of the session.

When I got home the next afternoon from school, Mum said, “Dad wants you to go to Paris tonight. It’s for hair and wardrobe fittings for
A Walk with Love and Death.
”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Do I have to?”

“I guess, darling, if you want to be an actress.”

I changed into the yellow wool suit and left for Heathrow airport in a taxi. When I arrived in Paris, I was taken for costume fittings with the artist Leonor Fini at her atelier. I tried on a voluminous wig with clusters of gold braid at Alexandre de Paris’s salon. He was Elizabeth Taylor’s hairdresser. That day, student riots broke out on the Left Bank, and all the flights from Orly to London were canceled. Making every attempt to avoid my father, I was stranded for the next four days in my yellow wool suit, which had started to pill and stretch, without so much as a hairbrush or toothpaste in my possession. Finally, I took a taxi through the demonstration to get on a plane back to London.

The wheels were in motion for
A Walk with Love and Death.
The studio wanted still photographs, and the important British photographer Norman Parkinson was engaged at significant expense to do a sitting with me. I applied my usual mask of makeup, with additional eyelashes, pearly highlighter, and the sweep of black shadow in the crease of the eye. When Dad saw the stills, he was horrified and demanded that a session be set up with Eve Arnold.

Eve was a Magnum photographer who had worked on
The Misfits.
We were sent off to some ruins in the Irish countryside with explicit instructions that my face be unsullied by so much as a speck of makeup. I felt unpleasantly exposed, but Eve was as kind as she could be and made no judgments. I grew to love her very much, and we worked together often throughout the years.

•  •  •

A Walk with Love and Death
was at first postponed, and later the location was moved to Austria, as Paris was still in a state of unrest. Assaf Dayan, the son of the Israeli prime minister and war hero Moshe Dayan, was to play my love interest. But I had a crush on the boy who was playing my cousin in the film, Anthony Corlan. The three of us were taking off to the local funfair to ride go-karts in the evenings. I was distracted and having trouble learning my part, and avoiding Dad as much as possible in my off hours. During a scene where I was to describe the murder of my father, a nobleman (played by Dad, incidentally), I forgot my lines, and he lit into me in front of the crew with such ferocity that I hyperventilated. In another scene, I was to kiss Assaf, half-nude on a riverbank, and I did this two inches away from the nose of my angry, impatient father.

For the final fortnight of the shoot, we flew to Italy to do some exteriors. I was asked by the production department if I would go to the studio of the new set photographer to have my portrait taken for publicity stills for the movie. I was told to bring some personal clothes and jewelry. Midway through the session, I was surprised when he asked me to remove my top, and although it made me uncomfortable, I complied with his request. I had done several scenes in the film that required partial nudity, and assumed it was part of the assignment.