Did You Really Shoot the Television? (9 page)

Several of her Oxford friends had become academics – Sally Graves ended up as principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford – or joined the Civil Service. Anne felt much more serious about her career than about a love life. She wanted to become a writer, for which
Vogue
offered no scope. She knew that some time she would have to move on. Meanwhile, however, she set about learning the art of glamour, as practised and proselytised by the magazine, which then appeared fortnightly. She learned the basics of layout and typography, and under the tutelage of Harry Yoxall became a meticulous copy editor.

She formed a friendship with one of
Vogue
’s most exotic contributors, Lesley Blanch, later author of
The Wilder Shores of Love
. Lesley displayed a characteristic flourish of imagination when invited to submit an article for a series by well-known hostesses. Earlier published pieces were headlined ‘My Cook is a Russian’, ‘My Cook is Hungarian’, and suchlike. Lesley entitled her own contribution ‘My Cook is a Catastrophe’. Anne was captivated by her exotic lifestyle, feverish conversation, passionate loves and hates:

She lived in a whirl of melodrama – something as trivial as a missed bus became a black tragedy. She wore exotic clothes of Russian ballet inspiration and moved in a nimbus of veiling, often topped with a fur shako, to the accompanying music of jangling bracelets. She had the sweetest of smiles, and always seemed penniless. She was devoted to cats, and burst into a storm of tears when informed by a skin doctor that she had a cat allergy. Lesley’s favourite country was Russia, and she claimed to have visited its remotest districts with a Russian admirer at some unspecified time in the past. Siberia, Samarkand, the Caucasus were as familiar to her as Piccadilly or Chelsea.

Fashion drawing was then in its heyday – the magazine included Raoul Dufy among its star illustrators. Anne commissioned Rex Whistler to draw family groups of the Royal Family for a 1937 Coronation Gala special issue. He sat in the
Vogue
office with his head in his hands saying, ‘I hate it, I hate it, can’t I be let off?’ and indeed his efforts proved a disappointment. For the same issue, she persuaded Vanessa Bell to paint a royal needlework design. Cecil Beaton photographed five duchesses – Buccleuch, Westminster, Richmond & Gordon, Marlborough and Sutherland – one countess and three
viscountesses, with Lady Louis Mountbatten and Lady Diana Cooper thrown in for good measure. This Gallery of Beauties was deemed a great success, save that the New York office expressed incomprehension about the absence of the Duchess of Windsor from the line-up. Anne, however, was underwhelmed. High-society coverage never interested her. She found tiresome this aspect of
Vogue
’s agenda, and likewise the need to address it herself.

Magazine photography, hugely influenced by Hollywood, was a study in artificiality:

The backgrounds devised by the photographers were of Babylonian luxury…Glamour implied not only beauty but wealth, and
Vogue
’s sitters, whether society women or professional models, had to look
rich.
Furred, bejewelled, masked in make-up, set among silks and satins, gilding and flowers, the sitter posed under intense lighting for a photographer who used a plate camera and slow film, so that the pose had to be held for several seconds. Their beauty was much enhanced by heavy retouching of the negatives, every flaw in the complexion painted-out, every bulge in the body tactfully smoothed away. Horst, Andre Durst, Cecil Beaton, Erwin Blumenfeld were pre-eminent among the photographers of this wondrous never-never land, Horst the finest, Beaton a lightweight by comparison.

A recurring element in the fashion photography of the thirties was surrealism, as was not surprising in the heyday of Salvador Dali. Beaton often abandoned his usual tinsel backgrounds and turned to surrealism, with its sinister undertones, photographing the dancer Tilly Losch entrapped in coils of paper, or models standing in empty corridors among broken columns symbolic of decay. I myself worked with Blumenfeld, a brilliant German, to produce a surrealist photograph which was considered a triumph.

I once needed a picture of a beautiful face to illustrate an article on skin care. Blumenfeld had elected to take the model, a fine-boned blonde with an exquisite nose called Cora van Millingen, in profile, smelling a long-stemmed rose. In the studio he changed his mind,
and sent me out to buy a swansdown powder-puff. When I returned, he snapped the rose from the stalk and pinned the powder-puff in its place for Cora to sniff with an expression of ecstasy. It sounds silly, but it was enchanting.

Yet suddenly, studio photography looked dated. Across the Atlantic in 1936 Henry Luce launched
Life
, which hugely impressed
Vogue
’s proprietor, Condé Nast. Two German publications,
Berliner Illustrierte
and
Munchener Illustrierte
, seized the imagination of Europe. London photographers began to shoot fashion pictures outdoors, using models with lighter make-up and flying hair. When the publisher Edward Hulton’s
Picture Post
burst upon Britain in 1938, Anne, like Mac, instantly yearned to work for the new magazine: ‘It reported news through the eye – the eye of the camera.’ The mood of
Post
also appealed to her radicalism, undiminished by the
Vogue
experience: ‘It looked into the future as well as the present. It was a young, spirited and provocative magazine, political and reformist, and though it might claim to be non-party, its heart was with the poor, the unemployed, the wretchedly housed.’ Yet Anne lacked all reporting experience. She saw no chance of getting a job with
Picture Post
, and for its first three years did not try. Instead, she found herself editing an issue of
House & Garden
, then published as a supplement with
Vogue
. It was a heady experience. She revelled in creative authority. She always knew what she wanted, and by now she had the skills, as well as the natural eye, to get it.

British
Vogue
was a poor relation of its US parent. Beaton was its only contributor whom New York recognised as an international star: ‘Otherwise, they patronised us, were friendly but unrelenting critics of our efforts and bombarded us with uncomplimentary cables. At one stage, deploring our old-fashioned typography and lay-out, they sent over an American art editor to buck us up. He was disagreeably surprised at the small resources, being accustomed to an army of assistants to do the donkeywork.’ US
Vogue
waxed rich on sales of its paper dress patterns, while its British edition struggled to make a profit.

Most English people in those days were shamelessly condescending to Americans, a habit that would do their nation no favours when war came. Anne, however, had a warm admiration for them. When New York editors visited London she found them twice as energetic as their British counterparts, more imaginative and receptive to new thinking. They were brutally frank, as the London office discovered during a visit from
Vogue
’s fearsome US editor-in-chief, Edna Woolman Chase. ‘Who wrote this nonsense?’ she demanded, scanning an issue with contempt, and demolished executives before the eyes of their wide-eyed staff. When Chase left for Paris, said Anne, ‘We all felt relieved, but stimulated, pleased to be roused from our British lethargy.’

Soon afterwards, she scraped the money for a holiday in New York, outbound – steerage, of course – on the
Bremen
, homeward on the
Queen Mary
. She was awed and enchanted by the city, which she saw at its stylish zenith in 1935: ‘I thought I had never seen so many lovely girls, heard such witty conversation, been dazzled by such rich merchandise. I loved the pace, the bright lights, the instant service, the late nights in a city which never went to sleep, and I cried all the way home.’ Condé Nast himself offered her a job there, but she did not take it, because when she returned to London she fell in love. She afterwards believed that had she accepted, she would have failed, because she lacked the ruthlessness necessary to prosper in New York. I am not so sure. Though she always perceived herself as a blushing violet, in truth she was never less than formidable, clear-sighted and decisive. All her life she possessed a greater gift for attracting the respect and loyalty of people who worked for her than for social intercourse. What is for sure is that her career benefited from her unabashed enthusiasm for Americans, in an era when so many British people – notably including Mac – disdained their supposed naïveté and philistinism.

In 1937, Violet Scott-James inherited a legacy from her aunt Eleanor, and used some of the money to buy a cottage, The Forge at Upper Basildon in west Berkshire. One weekend a year later, when Anne
was staying there with her parents, she and her mother were driving through the local lanes when they chanced upon the hamlet of Aldworth, high on the Downs. Outside a little cottage stood a sign: ‘For sale by auction’. Built in 1806, it had recently been lived in by two elderly women who, as often happens, died within weeks of each other. Its two downstairs rooms had only earthen floors. The brickwork crawled with mice and woodlice, and water was drawn from a well outside the front door. Anne fell in love on sight, and borrowed £1,000 from Violet to buy and restore it. For the rest of her life, Rose Cottage remained the only home which she cared a straw for.

In those days when traffic was scarce, the road running downhill past the cottage scarcely mattered. Anne gazed entranced at the view beyond: ‘We looked onto a triangular village green, with a group of elm trees in the middle, half-hiding the fourteenth-century church. Just across the green was a pair of thatched cottages inhabited by two ancient men who never exchanged a word except to quarrel over the use of their shared pump. Their front doors would open simultaneously and they would pop out with buckets and have a row. Behind their cottages was pasture grazed by horses whose dung produced pearly, pink-lined mushrooms in late summer. In the distance was a farmhouse with a mighty barn, and beyond that a copse of wild cherry.’

She designed the cottage interior with inspired simplicity, much influenced by John Fowler, the fashionable decorator of the day. She herself made the red-and-white-striped living-room curtains. She bought a Regency couch for £5, Victorian dining chairs for £10, and a painted dining table from the Colefax & Fowler shop for £15, which together with the builders’ bills plunged her into debt. She did not care: ‘The cottage looked like a spring morning when I had finished it, and though it has been decorated many times since, I have tried to keep the whiteness and feeling of fresh air.’

She was not alone when she began housekeeping at Rose Cottage. A journalist named Derek Verschoyle, literary editor of
The Spectator
, moved in with her. Verschoyle was a self-consciously raffish character, who kept a .22 rifle at the magazine’s office in Gower Street,
with which he potted local cats out of the window, or merely conducted target practice addressed at the garden wall, while seated with his feet on his desk. A colleague described him as convivial and hard-drinking. He had some notoriety as a former pupil of Evelyn Waugh at the awful Arnold House prep school in North Wales, being characterised in Waugh’s novel
Decline and Fall
as Peter Beste-Chetwynd, the grand, languid, depraved and absurdly precocious boy whose mother Paul Pennyfeather almost marries. Waugh borrowed from real life for the book his attempt to teach Verschoyle to play the organ, while himself absolutely ignorant of the instrument. At the
Spectator
, the now famous novelist became one of his former pupil’s favourite reviewers.

Verschoyle’s literary enthusiasms, rather than his marksmanship with the .22, presumably recommended him to Anne. But she was drawn to wild spirits, surely in reaction against the rigours of her childhood. In the eighteen months she and Verschoyle were together, they spent every spare hour labouring to make Rose Cottage habitable. On an impulse, in the summer of 1939 she married him. When war came in September, he joined the RAF – Graham Greene took over his role at
The Spectator
– and the following year they were divorced. ‘It was as though [the marriage] had never happened,’ she wrote later. ‘Neither of us seemed to feel anything at all…My only excuse [was] that in that summer of 1939 there was a fair amount of false emotion in the air.’ Children are the least plausible judges of their own parents’ emotional lives. I know nothing of what made Anne love her first husband, or so swiftly become disenchanted with him. Verschoyle continued his exotic career as a post-war spy, then publisher, and enjoyed short-lived relationships with four more wives.

It was not entirely true that he and Anne became painlessly uncoupled. For some reason, Violet Scott-James had made the loan to buy Rose Cottage payable to Verschoyle rather than to her daughter. Always feckless in money matters, he proved, to the Scott-Jameses’ exasperation as evidenced by several solicitors’ letters, a sticky debtor. This may help to explain why Anne sought to expunge him from her consciousness after their divorce. For years, she never included
the Verschoyle marriage in her
Who’s Who
entry. When she was ninety, however, he was suddenly inserted. She said that she relented in response to a priggish tease of mine. I suggested that no one who has practised journalism for a living should censor the facts of their own CV.

Again and again during the first fifty years of her life, in her search for love she entered culs-de-sac. Though she yearned for the fulfilment of a partnership, few men met her exacting standards of intelligence and competence. She was intolerant of weakness, save in her brother John, subject to illness and depression all his short life, until he died of lung cancer at the age of forty. She cared for John devotedly, and employed him for some years at Rose Cottage as her gardener, the only work of which the poor soul was capable. She once blurted bitterly to me: ‘All my life I have had to take responsibility for people less strong than I am. I think it’s about time somebody took care of me.’ The price of being so formidable a personality was that, again and again, she found herself in relationships with weaker men, whom she grew to despise. Only in middle age, when she married Osbert Lancaster, did she find a partner for whom she sustained love and respect, yet who also proved capable of relishing her dominance.