A Story Lately Told (26 page)

Are you and Bob well acquainted in Paris? I know a lot of people from its various worlds that you might care to meet—Rothschilds, Anouile, Suzanne et al—but I won’t write them unless you tell me to.

This is my first extended time in Spain and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. The Spaniards themselves are singularly attractive, a Latin version of the Irish, a combination of elegance and primitiveness, trusting and touchy. Knowing the Mexicans as I do, it’s fascinating to meet up with their antecedents.

We had a bullfight scene in the film and your brother, acting on inspiration, leaped into the ring and faced the bull with a cape. He made several passes with the cape and was only mildly bumped. The onlookers were lavish with their olés, and the scene ended with Tony being borne aloft on the shoulders of the crowd.

Do you get multicolored letters from Allegra? She writes me regularly in a fastidious hand in a variety of inks. She seems very happy. You might, if you have a spare weekend, run over. She’d love to see you and so would I.

Much love to Bob.

As ever,

Dad

When Dad wrote to tell me that he was putting St. Clerans up for sale, it was already a fait accompli. He had not asked
Tony or me for our counsel or input or even our feelings on the matter. I was speechless and didn’t write back to Dad about the impending sale of my childhood home. Gladys was taking care of his business affairs, as usual. He had already sold much of the art and furniture to personal collectors and museums and through auction houses. Tony and I had always assumed that St. Clerans would be ours forever, especially when Dad referred to Tony as “my son and heir.” I believe that it broke Tony’s heart, as it did mine, when St. Clerans went. And if Dad’s heart was broken, he didn’t share that information with us. As the Irish say, Dad gave up the ghost when he let go of St. Clerans.

•  •  •

Bob and I worked on some remarkable shoots in Europe. One for Valentino in Rome, which attracted a good deal of attention, was an homage to Luchino Visconti’s film
The Damned.
It involved a series of photographs for Italian
Vogue
of me and a male model, Lipp Jens, dressed as a Nazi, posing at various locations, including the Borghese Gardens and the Termini train station. We did a story for French
Vogue
in Ireland during a particularly intense period of IRA violence, for which Bob photographed me on the Sarsfield Bridge at St. Clerans, with a shotgun by my side and a bullet hole above my heart. On another sitting for French
Vogue,
I wandered the aisles of the brasserie La Coûpole in hot pants and a huge black picture hat, in floods of tears. The diners kept taking pity on me and tried to get me to share their meals. It was actually very sweet.

Bob and I were at our happiest when we were working together, and getting wages for doing what we loved helped alleviate the stresses in our relationship. But it took at least three months for Bob to be paid by the magazines, and although we also worked for advertisers, those bookings
were less frequent. One morning as we were sitting outside the Café de Flore in St. Germain, I saw a familiar face across the street. It was my Rhodesian friend Jeremy Railton, whom I hadn’t seen since he left London to become a stage designer in Los Angeles. Our eyes met. I couldn’t tell him at the time, but I knew that merely recognizing him would probably lead to some unpleasantness, some manifestation of jealousy or insecurity, on Bob’s part. So I nodded perfunctorily and widened my eyes in a warning for him not to come any closer. He got the message and moved on down the sidewalk. I felt that my real life was slipping away.

At the spring collections in Paris, I was working with Guy Bourdin at the
Vogue
studios in the Place du Palais Bourbon. Gil of Max Factor—I never came to know his surname—was doing my makeup, and I was very unhappy. Guy had told everyone that he wanted the models to look fresh-faced and all-American. This was decidedly not my look. Gil was painting my eyelids turquoise when I spoke up; the tension had been building in me, and I began to cry uncontrollably. The two other models working in the studio, Wallis Franken and Tracy Weed, lifted me up and carried me out of the dressing room to walk me around the square, one under each arm.

I guess I was having a full-on nervous breakdown. When I stopped choking on my tears, they brought me back to the studio. Guy, who spoke very little as a rule, asked what was going on. I replied that I was ugly—my eyes too small, my nose too big—and that the makeup was not helping. Guy pondered this statement for a little while and said, “If your eyes are small, then we should make them smaller, and likewise, if your nose is big, we have to make it larger. You think these are your failings, but it is just the opposite.”

I went back to the makeup chair. My eyes were swollen from crying. “How do you want to look?” asked Gil of Max Factor.

“Make her look like a vampire,” Guy said. This worked beautifully for us both, and we ended around midnight in high spirits. When I walked into Tony Kent’s apartment, where Bob and I were staying, the phone was ringing. It was an editor at
Vogue.
She asked if I could return to the Place du Palais Bourbon. “It’s for the lead page,” she said. “Helmut Newton is photographing.”

This was music to my ears. I called a taxi and went back to the 7th arrondissement. It was three in the morning. The famous Mr. Newton was standing in the dark, naked street, with one light and a Polaroid camera. I had heard that he was mean to girls, and that he was scary to work for, but my experience was just the opposite. He photographed me stalking the pavement, the red flash reflecting in my eyes like something out of
Night of the Living Dead,
as he called out instructions—“Faster! Slower! Head up! March!”—until dawn broke over Paris.

I often made the trip across the border to Milan. The overnight train compartments were perfectly designed, with mahogany interiors and a little sink in the corner for ablutions; the windows actually opened. I loved lying in the dark under a crisp cotton duvet, watching the snow-covered fields almost phosphorescent under a white moon, falling asleep to the motion of the train, as we powered forward through the night. Out of Bob’s orbit, my mind would wander back in time to my former life, to Mum, and to all that I had left behind.

I usually traveled to Milan to work with either of my two favorite photographers in Italy, Gian Paolo Barbieri or Alfa Castaldi. Alfa was married to the brilliantly bizarre editor of Italian
Vogue,
Anna Piaggi. Alfa and Anna had met in Rome
during the Second World War, when she worked for the food section of a popular newspaper and he was a staff photographer. Alfa told me Anna would cook these amazing meals that he would photograph in the most romantic light, and then they would sit down and eat. That was how they fell in love. Anna lived and breathed extreme fashion, and the times I spent in Alfa’s studio, eating fresh mozzarella and salad in the afternoon before starting a night’s work, are some of my happiest memories from that time.

It was, however, always a slightly traumatic affair to be working in Italy, because we didn’t have permits. Unless we were lucky enough to be put up at the Grand Hotel, the models usually wound up staying at one of the smaller places in town, like the Hotel Arena, and every so often the police would do a swoop, and all the girls who didn’t have papers would be paddy-wagoned off to the train station. Naturally, the girls would disembark at the next stop and make their way back to Milan, but it was inconvenient. A lot of girls were underage, and you’d see these little blonds in the lobby, sweet and fresh from Denmark and Sweden. Some of them were supplementing their income by going on “dates” with the local businessmen. I remember one of these girls in the lobby of the Arena, looking like a wet kitten in a sodden fur coat, dripping from head to toe. Her date hadn’t liked her attitude, so he had held her under a cold shower.

Usually, the booking agency—in my case a company called Models International—controlled the payments. They had agencies in both Paris and Milan, and every Friday there was a long line of girls waiting to collect their checks at the accounting window before the agency closed down for the weekend. If you arrived too late, the window would shut in your face. After
one such Friday, I left Paris with no extra money in my purse. I picked up my prepaid ticket for the train to Milan from the Gare du Nord and went straight to work with Alfa. It was a long day, and as a sweet gesture, the designer Mario Valentino gave me a pair of shoes I’d admired, with six-inch silver heels, which I put on immediately. I was to collect my fee from the Milan agency that night in cash, and go directly back to Paris.

I took a taxi to the office. When I asked for my check in halting Italian, they stared at me blankly. “No,” they said, they didn’t owe me any money, and after all, who had paid the train fare? It was understood that if a client brought you in from Paris, the travel would be covered. I pleaded with them and told them I had no money. They gave me a map and instructed me to go to a train station where a prepaid ticket would be waiting for me. Naturally, when the taxi got to the station, I had barely enough money to pay the fare. When I asked for the last train to Paris, they told me I was at the wrong station. A ticket master took pity on me, drove me fast across town, and dropped me in the main square close to the terminal. By now I was limping in the six-inch heels, struggling to balance on the cobblestones. It was cold and night was falling.

As I made my way forward to the ticket booth, my heart was in my mouth. What if they had not prepaid the ticket? I knew that Bob was in the same position I was, broke, in Paris. He wouldn’t be able to bail me out.

“No, signorina, no prepaid ticket.”

I began to cry. I had nowhere to go, no one to ask for help. The situation was hopeless. A gentleman turned to me. “Take my ticket,” he said, pressing it into my hand. “My wife will be happy I did not leave tonight.” This was a miraculous incident, though it did not reassure me that all was going to work out
blissfully. As much as Bob wanted control, he was unable to protect me.

•  •  •

We lived in a series of hotels, each room more modest than the last. It was possible to exist in Paris on very little money, yet we were always low on funds. Joan Buck, who had been working as a stylist for Guy Bourdin before we came to Paris, was going on location as a freelance fashion editor for the magazine
Vingt Ans
and offered us the apartment she had been renting on the rue du Bac. I placed my suitcases in a corridor outside the apartment in a storage closet with a padlock on the door. Stupidly, I had not imagined that anyone would try to break in. Almost everything I owned was stolen, including the watch I had bought Mum from Cartier and all of Bob’s cameras and lenses. I called Dad’s lawyer, Henry Hyde, and asked if I could withdraw some money from my Swiss bank account to get to England. To do me the favor, he charged almost as much as I withdrew.

I did not enjoy being broke. In my heart, I knew that if things got really dire, I could go to Dad. But I was convinced that the only way to retain my power with him was not to ask for money. I did not want him to have an advantage over Bob and me.

Later that year, when I was booked to do runway work for the designer Zandra Rhodes in London, Bob and I moved into a bed-sit in Ladbroke Grove, a room with worn brown carpet and a gas meter that you had to put shillings into for heat. If there hadn’t been a trace of the ridiculous about this tragically shabby downgrade, I might have despaired. At one point finding ourselves without the cash to buy our next meal, I called Mum’s old friend Peter Menegas to ask him for a small loan. He came over to the bed-sit with a bag of groceries in his arms
and gave me ten pounds. It felt like winning the lottery. And it was true that with the next check cashed by Bob with the Bank of England, our circumstances changed and we were relatively happy, ensconced at Cyril Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, in a cozy flat sublet to us by a model called Vicki Howard. But there were always the black moods, the silences, the accusations, the isolation of Bob’s world.

It was around this time that Bob first said he wanted me to have a baby; he asked whether I was taking birth control. Why wasn’t I getting pregnant? Indeed, I had stopped taking birth control and had not become pregnant. He told me I wasn’t a real woman. “Real women get pregnant and raise children,” he said. I remembered the flash pains in my lower abdomen that had taken my breath away in the back of the taxicab with my mother in London.

I went to a gynecologist, who told me they would have to operate in order to find the obstruction. I refused to have surgery. In my heart I was very afraid to have a child. Woman or not. I realized that in order to find out why I was not becoming pregnant, I would have to become so. Although I thought there was a possibility that such an undertaking might change Bob for the better and make him a transformed and happy man, I also knew that, at twenty years old, I was not ready to be a mother and that having his child would tie me to him forever. I was not ready for that, either.

The one thing I loved more than anything was doing shows. Zandra Rhodes had booked me through Eileen Green, my lovely new Irish agent in London. Zandra was a joy to work for. The first time I did a show for her, the girls walked up and down a spiral staircase at a boutique called Piero di Monzi on the Fulham Road. It was always a treat to wear her clothes, the
most romantic of the period, and Zandra was a wonderful bird of paradise herself, with all these different colors in her hair and a thick Cockney accent.

The Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto put on an extraordinary first show in London. The girls had pen-and-ink drawings painted on their bodies by a master tattoo artist. Kansai had imported some fantastic exotics for the runway—among them, for the first time ever in England, the Hawaiian beauty Marie Helvin, later one of England’s top models and a bride and muse of David Bailey’s.