“Zis is ’ow we do ze Kitty Comb-out”
In which
Grace learns that
love means
never having
to run out of
hair spray.
Things with Didier were becoming more serious. I wasn’t pushing for marriage, though. I haven’t got such a great track record in that department. Besides, the state of marriage seems to bother him, too. If Didier wants to be somewhere, it is because he really wants to be there and not because he is being forced.
In a relationship you have to give a lot. You can’t be too selfish. You can’t have everything your own way, and you do give up a certain independence. Living with someone all the time is great if you keep it surprising and don’t allow yourself to become too complacent. It’s also highly risky doing a job with someone you are living with, so I’m always nervous whenever Didier and I are slated to work together on a shoot. First, he is a problematic traveler because he is very susceptible to sound, and if the room we get is too noisy, we may have to move several times. On a recent shoot in England, we stayed at Brighton’s Grand Hotel, which was famously targeted in a bomb blast when Margaret Thatcher and the delegates for the Conservative Party conference were grouped there in 1984. Here, we moved rooms six times before we found one to his liking. Second, because Didier likes a touch of intrigue and game-playing, you have to be prepared to be tweaked around when he’s working on a shoot. “Am I doing a catalog?” is a favorite sarcastic remark if he is ever so gently reminded to get a move on with the subject’s hair. On the other hand, he is very, very romantic. Since the first days of our friendship, whenever we worked together, he always wrote me wonderfully flattering notes afterward in formal, old-fashioned English. They said things like “Thank you very much for inviting me” or “It gives me great pleasure to be in your company.” Or he would send me bunches of pretty flowers, usually roses, or a postcard of some beautiful painting from an exhibition he had seen.
Our first summer together, without my knowing, Didier went out and bought a sailing boat. He knew that, as a child, I had been slightly jealous when my father built a little wooden dinghy for my sister and me and named it Rosie, after her. As a further surprise, when we went to collect his boat from Shelter Island, where it had been shipped, I discovered Didier had named it Grace.
At the time he hadn’t a clue how to sail, and going out with him became rather unnerving, as the waters around Long Island Sound can be quite choppy and the winds quite squally. Often the fog comes down with little or no notice and obliterates the coastline. These days I seem to have lost my pioneering spirit, and I feel rather guilty, as I refuse to sail with him unless there is absolutely no wind. Then of course we become becalmed, and that drives him really crazy, since we have to use the engine to return home.
As a child, Didier used to visit his mother at the veterinary clinic where she worked. There, it was his job to groom the cats and dogs. This is probably where his love of hairstyling began. The vet had some very important clients, the famous Carita sisters, who owned a hair salon in Paris. I think they agreed to take Didier on as an apprentice after seeing what a good job he had done on their poodle.
I faintly remember working with him as far back as 1972. I was still going out with Duc, and we were photographing in Paris for British Vogue. As well as being the fashion editor on that shoot, I was modeling. The photos had me standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with two other girls and wearing the same forties Yves Saint Laurent outfit I wore when I dressed to impress Tina Chow. Because my hair was enjoying one of its more unsightly in-between moments, I had a hat clamped tightly to my head and was the only one not to have my hair styled by Didier. Afterward I worked with him rather a lot with all the new young French photographers.
Didier likes telling people how much I ignored him back then and how I even acted in a snooty manner toward him. As if I would! He spoke no English, so I just couldn’t understand a word he said. Besides, he was married then, so it was impossible to get together.
Years later I discovered he hadn’t particularly liked me at first; in fact, when I modeled, he always thought I was terrible-looking and not pretty at all—at least not his idea of pretty. As it was, in his early days of working for British Vogue, he fancied my close friend and colleague Polly Hamilton much more than he did me, until they fell out thanks to their mutual stubbornness. But for some time he retained an eye for a pretty French girl, as I would discover on a rather tense shoot in Paris with the grand royal photographer Tony Snowdon.
During his heyday, Snowdon always gave fashion pictures a certain stature, rather like Annie Leibovitz does now, although he liked to play at being humble. “Call me Tony,” he would say, but if you crossed the line and were overfamiliar, it was back to “Snowdon, actually.” When we traveled to Paris to shoot the couture collections on the young French actress Isabelle Pasco, then the partner of the iconoclastic film director Jean-Jacques Beineix, the French press got wind of it and started chasing after us. But as I tried ushering the royal photographer back into our chauffeured car to keep him from being bothered, I realized he was getting terribly annoyed with me because he actually rather enjoyed it.
Our couture shoot was fairly hazardous. We worked in a very small studio with one of those very large Lipizzan dressage horses. Snowdon wanted the animal to rear up in front of Isabelle, who was improbably tiny and stood on a pile of telephone books so her long dress wouldn’t concertina on the ground. Meanwhile, I grew more and more furious because Didier, who was semi-officially my boyfriend by then as well as the hairdresser on the shoot, had become rather taken with her. So every time I caught him being very French and flirting while he combed her hair, I rushed in on the pretext of adjusting her dress and stuck a pin in her behind. Yes, I can be a bitch, too, sometimes.
Apart from the flirtations, I was always struck by Didier’s beautiful manners, but it wasn’t until we moved in together that I came up against how deep-seated his old-fashioned reticence and sense of decorum really are. One day soon after I had moved to New York, he called me from a work trip in Japan and asked me to pick him up at the airport upon his return. I had not seen him in several months, and this was the first time he had been to my new residence. “Are you coming upstairs?” I asked as we arrived at my apartment. “Maybe. We’ll see,” he replied. And then, sometime later, “Will you be staying for dinner?” “Maybe. We’ll see.” “Are you staying the night?” “Maybe. We’ll see.” And then the next morning at breakfast, “Will I be seeing you later?” “Maybe. We’ll see,” he said once more.
This went on for several weeks in its considerably noncommittal, delicate way. It was only when hundreds of extra bags turned up containing can after can of aerosol hair lacquer, wigs, brushes, combs, tongs, and hair dryers that I knew our situation was permanent, and I settled into a life which, during its finest moments, balances home and work with a gentle equilibrium.