Me with Rosie, Tristan & Finn
In which
our heroine
recognizes
that life
is often a
long series
of losses.
Having shared both a desk and an assistant for a while at British Vogue, I graduated to having Di James to myself, but then she departed. Thankfully, my next assistant, Patricia McRoberts, was exclusively mine from the start.
An English girl of independent means who went on to marry a world-class polo player, Patricia was flamboyant. She always drove her Mercedes dangerously fast until the day she crashed and wrote it off, only to replace it immediately with an Alfa Romeo. Meanwhile, I moved gingerly around town in the Rolls-Royce I shared with Michael. By some means I even managed to win a rare parking space in the Vogue garage—although it unfortunately turned out to be unsuitable for anything bigger than a Mini.
Patricia and I took off on frequent shopping sprees to YSL. She dyed her hair magenta and, with my friend Polly Hamilton, who before coming to Vogue had worked for the British teenage fashion magazine 19, we formed a formidable little trio. We sat together at fashion shows in a tight-lipped line, along with friends like Caroline Baker, fashion editor of Nova, and Norma Moriceau, fashion editor of 19, extremely aloof and wearing severe 1930s felt hats or the latest thing from Yves. Or facsimiles of Yves, depending upon our individual circumstances.
By then I too, having gone from a little to a lot of hair hidden under my hats and scarves, decided, with the hairdresser Leonard, his colorist, Daniel, and the photographer Barry Lategan, to create a radical new look. My hair was to be dyed with henna, which is messy but great for the condition, and I would be given a perm, a big frizz rather like the ones my mother gave me when I was a little girl. We planned to unveil it to melodramatic effect in a set of photographs taken by Barry as a major pre-Raphaelite or Renaissance moment. Apart from cutting it short and going radically blond after my second divorce, then trimming it down again in my early days at American Vogue when Anna Wintour—much taken by the cute-looking short hair of Linda Evangelista—pressured me into doing so, nothing has changed much over the past forty years.
In the seventies and eighties we were usually waiting to see what Saint Laurent had done simply to know in which direction fashion was going. The power of the dresses! The grandeur! The girls so tall and imperious! I loved the beginnings of his fashion shows, which started with looks that were mannish and strict, then progressed to the amazing colors of the dresses. If you went to Morocco, where he kept one of his most beautiful homes, La Majorelle, set in an intricate perfumed garden that, once seen, was never forgotten, you would understand. Le smoking, his version of a man’s tuxedo for women, so chic and flattering; the indulgence and voluptuousness of the Ballets Russes collection; the Braque collection; Cocteau; Picasso; Russian peasants; Spanish toreadors; Porgy and Bess—so much creativity and such prolific talent that just sitting and watching it was exhausting. I feel very fortunate to have seen those shows; to me, they were like a series of art exhibits. I did faint a couple of times in the early days but I’m not sure if that didn’t come from missing breakfast rather than being overcome by emotion. Whatever it was, Bea Miller would revive me with the barley sugar sweets she kept in her handbag expressly for that purpose.
Yves and I were never very close personally. We didn’t go out to dinner or anything like that. But I was good friends with the people around him—his muse, Loulou de la Falaise, who designed the extravagant YSL costume jewelery; her husband, Thadée, son of the painter Balthus; and Clara Saint, who handled the international press. It was Clara who always rang me after the show to see what I thought of the collection because Yves, flatteringly, “wanted to know.”
When he began to show from his own little salon in the rue Spontini after quitting as the chief designer at Dior in the sixties, many of the world’s press who could not get in stood huddled outside in the street, pleading, “How was it?” as we all filed out. But I shall never forget the terrible sight of him in the late eighties after his défilé had moved to the Grand Salon in the Hotel Intercontinental. He was so hopelessly bloated and out of it. Pierre Bergé, the president of Saint Laurent, on one side and a bodyguard on the other had to grab him by the elbows and literally drag him along the catwalk, under that huge chandelier and beautifully painted ceiling, to take his bow. The newspapers that morning had reported that the great couturier was on his deathbed, so I presume this was their way of showing it simply wasn’t true. And I remember the ghastly grandeur of his final couture show held at the Centre Pompidou in 2002, just six years before he died, with its cold industrial hardness contrasting with the sweepingly operatic clothes, and with the great and the good and every model and face he was ever associated with there—but looking much, much sadder and older.
In the seventies I dressed almost exclusively in Saint Laurent. Save for one disastrous evening, that is, when I turned up for dinner at the home of Clare Rendlesham. By now this crushingly intimidating woman had quit the world of glossy magazines and become the directrice of the newly opened London branch of Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. Legendary for terrorizing her contemporaries in her magazine days, she added to her notorious reputation for rudeness by chasing customers from the shop if she decided that whatever they were buying didn’t suit them. And if she considered their image to be one not worthy of wearing the Saint Laurent label, she even accosted them in the street. Which makes me wonder why, as I pressed her front doorbell, I didn’t see my unfortunate mistake. “What is that terrible thing you’ve got on?” Clare demanded through gritted teeth, blocking my way through the entrance. It was a perfectly beautiful vintage dress from the antiques market. “You have to go back and change, because you’re not wearing Saint Laurent,” she sniffed, closing the door sharply in my face. And so back home I went.
Once again I was spending a lot of time in Paris, not just as a Vogue editor but because I had started seeing the young Vietnamese photographer Duc, for whom I left Michael Chow. My assistant, Patricia, who had generously lent me the deposit on the St. John’s Wood flat I had moved to, helped me out again by occasionally lending me the travel money to pop over to France and see him.
At the beginning of our relationship, Duc assisted the photographer Guy Bourdin, which is how I first met him. He was tall and skinny, with beautiful shoulder-length hair, and he always looked immaculate, even in worn jeans and a jean jacket. There was something otherworldly and innocent about Duc. One of the cameras he used was shaped like Mickey Mouse, and I loved the way people reacted to it by making the funniest faces whenever he took their picture.
There was a sort of cabal in Paris back then, made up of a great many of Duc’s Vietnamese cousins, many of whom at one time or another also worked as assistants to Bourdin. Whenever it was convenient, these relatives would use each other’s papers to travel, because the French authorities were rarely able to tell them apart. Sometimes, when he had misplaced his, Duc would visit me in London using his cousin Hyacinth’s passport, even though they didn’t resemble each other at all.
He lived in a tiny, rented room on the Left Bank’s quai des Grands Augustins above Lapérouse, a dark and cavernous eighteenth-century restaurant riddled with secret passageways. Here he slept on a foldaway bed and played Doors albums on an old gramophone. We ate at Vietnamese restaurants such as Long Hiep around the corner in Saint-Germain’s rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, newly fashionable because of the fad for Vietnamese cuisine that had just hit Paris. We also went to many lower-profile restaurants serving authentic Vietnamese food that Duc knew about but were totally off the fashion track. He had no money (Bourdin seldom paid Duc’s or anybody else’s wages on time), but he was idealistic and loyal and, like many of his peers, considered it an honor to work for Bourdin.
It was an exceptionally romantic, bohemian period in my life. Duc and I would wander along the banks of the Seine for hours, hand in hand, like all those lovers you see in old black-and-white French photos. He was penniless, and I wasn’t much better off. But we were always chicly dressed.
We stayed together on and off for almost five years, until late 1972. He gave up his tiny room soon after I met him, so after that, whenever I arrived in Paris—which was most weekends—I never quite knew where I would be staying because he moved around from friend to friend, cousin to cousin, often sleeping on the floor. We spent our days together scouring the flea markets for bargains. Or we would drive out to Deauville, stay in cheap hotels, and gorge ourselves on shellfish. It was a fun time for shopping. Yves Saint Laurent was at the peak of his fame, and Duc gave me his illustrated children’s book, La Vilaine Lulu. In return, I gave him some Yves Saint Laurent trousers to go with a vintage satin baseball jacket sent to him from New York.
Whereas I knew most of the clique around Yves Saint Laurent, Duc knew many of the people around Kenzo, my other favorite designer of the time. These included the models Wallis Franken and Louise Despointes; the press officer Barbara Schlager and her photographer boyfriend, Uli Rose; and another up-and-coming young photographer, Arthur Elgort, whose first ever job with me was photographing Kenzo’s startlingly bright clothes on a group of girls and boys running through the Jardin des Tuileries. Personally, I started having a big Kenzo moment, too. I loved wearing his pretty, peasanty clothes. There was a particular long, ethnic-looking, wraparound skirt with multiple pleats that I wore constantly back then. It fastened low on the hips with strings that wrapped round and round and held it in place. But those strings could also come unfastened in a second, and you would occasionally find yourself standing in your underwear. Then there were his huge oversize blazers and rugby-striped knits. Everything Kenzo did was so joyously colorful and naive—a bit like his spectacular fashion shows, which had models dressed as toy soldiers and ballerinas, firework displays, and on one unforgettable occasion, a snow-white horse trotting down the catwalk carrying a girl dressed as a fairy princess.
Eventually, Duc went out on his own as a photographer. When he came to London, he stayed with me in my little basement flat in St. John’s Wood. It had a beautiful stretch of garden, which pleased him greatly because he loved gardening. He was also a wonderful cook, teaching me Vietnamese cuisine and, most important, how to make my favorite Vietnamese soup, a seriously complicated dish consisting of chicken—with extra chicken feet—pork, noodles, bean sprouts, dried shrimp, Chinese pickles, spring onions, and lots of fresh mint and coriander, that took an entire day to prepare but was inexpensive and lasted us a week. He was unbelievably strict about neatness. I smoked at the time, and if so much as a tiny piece of ash spilled on a table, he would pounce. It seemed odd to me that someone who didn’t have a house of his own could be so intensely house-proud.
The other strange thing about Duc was that, unlike any other photographer I worked with, he preferred to shoot very few pages. No wonder he had no money. Two were ideal for him because he could envisage an entire story in a single spread. He also had the most terrible temper, especially after a drink or two. On a Vogue shoot in Kensington Gardens, he lost it dramatically while posing the individual-looking American model Wallis Franken, who was dressed in a sailor suit, in the middle of Round Pond. When I happened to mention that her top was looking a little wrinkled, he snarled, “Why don’t you fix it, then?” As he turned on me, his camera flew straight from his hand into the water and sank like a stone. He was forced to finish the session using the tiny quarter-frame Canon Dial camera he had bought me as a present and which I carried around with me all the time.
Gradually, Duc and I saw less and less of each other due to circumstances pulling us in different directions. Our final break came when I spoke to him long-distance after my sister, Rosemary, died. He seemed so detached, unable to comprehend how deeply sad I felt—possibly because in Asian culture, death is perceived so differently.
I had taken on the heavy responsibility of my sister’s welfare several troubled years before I arrived at British Vogue. Having divorced her husband, John, in 1962, Rosemary came down from the Midlands to live with me in London, bringing her large ginger cat, first to my temporary flat in Pond Place off the Fulham Road, then to one in Beaufort Street, Chelsea. I had been looking forward to moving there because it was supposed to be my first big apartment to myself after many years of sharing.
Every attempt to find Rosemary employment didn’t work. I did get her a job waitressing at the Soup Kitchen, an offshoot of the Stockpot, but she lasted only a day. She wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted to do. She loved art and applied herself by staying at home painting small watercolors that, with their orange skies and purple grass, were all pretty trippy. But mostly, she spent her days wandering around London’s various museums—a country girl who never really found her place in society after her separation.
At first my sister’s marriage had gone well. She created the most beautiful, romantic environment near Stratford-upon-Avon for herself and John. Ivy Bank was a tiny thatched cottage with one of those perfectly typical English gardens, tangled and overgrown with flowers and vegetables that she then set about filling with local children, to whom she gave painting lessons. It was a dream life. Except for one thing—the lack of children of her own.
Had Rosemary been brought up in London, she might have become a debutante and attracted the perfect suitor. Or maybe she could have become a model and traveled, like me. But despite having taken a secretarial course in typing and shorthand (which, incidentally, most young girls did in those days as a matter of course), she was never cut out to be a serious working woman. She had married young and been a country housewife, gardening and painting and preparing for children that didn’t arrive, which was all a far cry from pursuing a career path in the city. When she came to stay with me, she was more than a bit lost. She fell into the habit of chatting with complete strangers, druggie types and serious addicts whom she ran across outside the museums she visited. One of them (who easily could have been a homeless person) she married in a registry office almost as soon as she met him, while I was out of the country.
Modeling assignments for catalogs and magazines regularly took me to Germany now, and this was great because they paid me in cash. I kept all the money in a chest of drawers in my bedroom. But one day when I returned to England, the cash was gone, and Rosemary’s highly suspect new husband was gone with it.
Shortly afterward, Rosemary suffered some kind of nervous breakdown. After collapsing in the street, she was taken to Cane Hill Hospital, a grim, Victorian-looking institution in the London suburb of Croydon, full of gibbering patients cowering in corners. They strapped her to a bed and gave her electric shock treatment. She was there for three weeks or so, and then she was back on the streets. And yes, it was the same old, same old.
Then my sister met a pavement artist, Kevin Rigby, who was working in Trafalgar Square outside the National Portrait Gallery. He was twenty-two. She was around thirty. Kevin was sweet-natured, idealistic, and gentle, with long red hair down to his elbows. He came from a good army family up north but had since become a bit of a rebel.
Kevin and Rosemary embarked on an affair that quickly led to my sister becoming pregnant, although they never lived together. She took a room off the Kings Road in Markham Square in a house where, once upon a time, I had rented a room. Nine months later, Tristan, my nephew, was born down the road in a hospital in Parsons Green. Soon after, Kevin drifted to Nepal and became a Buddhist monk, illustrating books about his religion. In 1974 he would be found dead under mysterious circumstances on the border with Afghanistan.
During the pregnancy, Rosemary had contracted jaundice and from then on remained terribly sickly. Our mother was unable to deal with the situation. She wanted nothing to do with Rosie, pretending to anyone who asked that the baby was the fruit of a brief reunion between my sister and her ex-husband.
After four years of living in London with Tristan, Rosemary moved back to Wales and a house in Holyhead provided by her ex-husband, John, who thought she would be better off in close proximity to my mother. Of course, as soon as my mother saw her cute little red-headed grandson, she was transformed into the typically doting grandmother.
During all this time many of Rosemary’s druggie friends followed her down to Wales and were supplying her with certain substances. She eventually acquired a new boyfriend, a local shipyard worker who lived at home with his mother, and she became pregnant again, giving birth to her second son, Finn, in 1970. The details are a little sketchy after that. She was suffering from bronchitis, skinny, ill, and had an argument with her boyfriend. Afterward, she supposedly took an overdose of Valium and fell asleep. The boyfriend called an ambulance that took her to a medical center. Somehow a stomach pump was wrongly used. Her lungs collapsed. She died two days later, on Christmas Day 1972. I paid my last visit to find her on life support, unconscious.
It was horribly tragic seeing Rosie hooked up to all those tubes. After her funeral, Finn, who was eighteen months old, was taken into care by the boyfriend’s mother. Tristan was taken off to be fostered by Karen Alderson, a friend of Rosemary’s who lived nearby in Tre-Arddur Bay and whose children he was already friendly with. Because he eventually boarded at the boys’ prep school next door to our hotel, my mother was able to see him all the time.
One thing I shall never forget was the incredible kindness of the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. He came to my flat when I returned home from my sister’s funeral, consoled me, and kept me company all night so that I wouldn’t be alone. He really helped my peace of mind. It’s remarkable how someone with such a flighty reputation, from the upper reaches of fashion, which are often so heartless and cold, could in reality be so thoughtful and caring.
A few months after my sister’s death, I attempted to adopt Tristan. I had been helping out his foster parents up until then, paying for his schooling, among other things, and having him stay with me during part of his school holidays. But because I was unmarried, the authorities suddenly turned nasty and threatening. They told me I was an entirely unsuitable person, and if I continued to push with adoption proceedings, Tristan would be taken away and placed in a children’s home. So he remained with the Aldersons awhile longer, and it wasn’t until I finally remarried that he came to live with me and went on to further his education at Normansal, a prep school in Eastbourne, and the public school (English for private school) Milton Abbey.
I last saw Tristan’s half brother, Finn, who I believe is quite mathematically bright, at my mother’s funeral. He was fourteen years old. I understand he still lives somewhere in Wales. In the meantime, Tristan, who has pursued numerous careers—from tending to the hounds on an English country estate to selling property in the Dominican Republic—set about the task of learning more about his father via the simple recent expedient of Google. My nephew has now followed his trail to Nepal, fallen in love with the country, and started to learn about Tibetan art.
