After the epiphany of seeing my first poem published I wrote incessantly, obsessively, compulsively. Like a child who has just discovered masturbation, I simply could not leave it alone. I stole sheets of copy paper from my father’s study and hand-wrote stories in which I punched holes and tied together with hair ribbons to make into books. Sitting in Sasha’s bed by the kitchen radiator, I read these aloud to my mother, always an appreciative audience while her hands were in a mixing bowl or she was sewing or ironing.
Basking in the praise of having my essays read out in class by encouraging English teachers, by the time I was fourteen, I knew I wanted to be a writer. No one disputed the aspiration as folly. On the contrary, I was taken seriously. By way of encouragement, my father gave me an Olivetti typewriter to make my work look more professional. I loved trying to match the high speed of his typing through the wall between his study and my playroom, and the way the little bell rang when the carriage needed to be returned by pulling on a winged metal handle. Precocious in my ambition, I looked for opportunities to be published.
When I spotted an ad in Vogue magazine (a publication I scanned regularly at the library) for a writing competition, I entered without even bothering to read what the first prize was beyond publication in a future issue. All I craved was seeing my name in print again.
To my amazement, I was shortlisted and invited to lunch at Vogue House in Hanover Square for the final hurdle. My mother helped me choose a new outfit for the occasion—a beautifully cut French printed blouse and matching skirt with just enough of a contemporary edge to disguise my schoolgirl status with more sophistication than I possessed. It allowed me to walk into a roomful of strangers with a semblance of poise.
At sixteen, I was by far the youngest of the candidates. Some were outrageously attired, in outfits that looked more like fancy-dress costumes, including a monocled fellow from the Royal College of Art who had a waxed moustache and wore a frock coat with a large spotted orchid in his buttonhole to great effect. I felt distinctly underdressed.
The final round of the contest was social. First, we were to help ourselves to food from an elaborate buffet, demonstrating our ability to coordinate cutlery and conversation smoothly. I approached the spread with confidence. Brought up on hotel smorgasbords, I knew how to balance a plate and pile it not too high. But I soon recognised that this was no ordinary buffet: it was booby-trapped. All the food was slippery and chosen to test our dexterity. Textures were soft, gelatinous, silken, semi-liquid or hard to grasp. It was not a question of helping yourself to a simple slice of ham or a spoonful of well-bound chicken salad; unfamiliar rogue ingredients wriggled and skittered across vast platters or fell apart as you tried to lift them to your plate. I opted for an elaborate fish-shaped salmon mousse covered in scales of cucumber: it looked safer than oysters, which I had never eaten.
Sitting randomly on gilded chairs in pairs at tables of four, with two of the magazine’s editors, we attempted to make ourselves sound interesting, talented and original. Disconcertingly, at any given moment, without waiting for us to finish our sentences, the editors rose and circulated to other tables, until every editor had sat with every finalist, in an elaborately choreographed quadrille that lasted several hours.
I disgraced myself at once. Talking too enthusiastically, I dropped a large dollop of mousse in my lap. Scooping it back up onto my plate without missing a beat, I thought, Well, that’s that. Might as well relax and enjoy lunch. At one point, knowing all was lost, I even spoke with my mouth full while regaling my table with an account of my recent school trip to Russia.
After lunch, we were given a guided tours of Vogue’s editorial premises and a sneak preview of the next season’s colours, of which my only memory is eggplant. We were promised an audience with David Bailey upstairs in the photographic studio where he was shooting with Marie Helvin, but when we got there, the door was locked. The editorial assistant who was our navigator knocked, was briefly admitted, sworn at, and pulled the door smartly behind her, murmuring, ‘Perhaps not today,’ as her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. I later learned that she was Princess Diana’s sister, Jane, prone to blushing fiercely and frequently.
We were told we would be summoned to the boardroom in an hour. But the hour passed, and no decision had been reached, so we were all sent home. I travelled on the tube and found my mother waiting at the station, where she handed me my first-ever telegram: I had won.
It was as simple as that. My destiny was decided then and there: journalism. The prize, it turned out, was a year working for the magazine, which I planned to take up as my gap year before going to university. This gave me tremendous kudos at school: paid employment at the world’s most glamorous magazine conferred instant status. Teachers shook my hand in the corridor. Even the stern unsmiling headmistress offered muted congratulations.
Six months later, I turned up for work at Vogue having made a surprising discovery: back in 1951, the most illustrious predecessor as a winner of the US version of the same contest was none other than Jackie Kennedy. We were connected at last, if not by family, then by employer.
Day one threw me in at the deep end.
‘You speak Russian, don’t you?’ asked the beauty editor, remembering our exchange at the finalists’ lunch. ‘Tony’s shooting some Russian ballet dancers upstairs and they don’t speak a word of English. Could you go up there and interpret for him?’ Her clipped tone suggested it was not a request.
Up in the studio were Valery and Galina Panov, two defectors who had been under house arrest prior to their escape to Israel, where they were starting a new life as guest stars on tour to Britain for the first time. Tony turned out to be Lord Snowdon, perched on a ladder while the dancers went through a series of poses and arabesques. Without acknowledging me, he barked various instructions for them to turn this way and that, angle their head more up or down, twist their arms more to the right or left. I translated falteringly.
Later that day I was given a desk in the features department, facing that of Joan Juliet Buck and in the same space as writers Georgina Howell, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Polly Devlin and the towering Titian-haired beauty that was Candia McWilliam. My duties were not defined but I was to answer the phone, take messages, compile a diary of upcoming premieres and other cultural events for the magazine, and try my hand at a few captions.
At the time, Joan was conducting an affair with someone who called frequently from his suite at Claridge’s. I had been brought up by my father to take detailed phone messages and to always ask for a caller’s surname, so when this man announced himself as just ‘Donald’, I insisted. He declined, but must have mentioned my persistence to Joan.
‘It’s Sutherland,’ she laughed, amused at my pedantry.
I had only just seen the actor buck-naked in the terrifyingly adult Don’t Look Now. The explicit sex scene in it, rumoured to be for real, was not easily forgotten. Joan would return from her afternoons with him seemingly unaware that her mascara was running halfway down her face. Were there no mirrors at the hotel? Could she not look in a powder compact on the way back to the office in the taxi? The smudged bad-girl look (perfected as très rock’n’roll by French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld many years later) was unnerving: evidence of just how sweaty things must have got on that side of Mayfair.
Fashion was turning towards the New Romantics. Candia adopted this look with élan, wearing vintage, bias-cut, satin nightdresses garnished with cascades of lace. Inevitably the elaborate full sleeves caught in the carriage of her typewriter, resulting in desperately contorted attempts to wrench herself free without tearing the delicate antique fabric or staining it with ink. As she leaned into the typewriter to salvage her sleeve, she would catch some of her opulent curls in the machinery, compounding her distress and the similarities with a stylish game of Twister. I took messages from her beau, too, a Rothschild with whom she spent grand weekends at country houses that sounded like locations from the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, by which the entire nation was gripped every Sunday evening.
The editorial team were opinionated, eloquent, funny and sharp. They wore bohemian and vintage clothes trimmed with velvet, satin petticoats showing deliberately beneath their hemlines, their feet in embroidered Turkish babouches or green wellies depending on the season, paying no lip service to the dictates of fashion that the magazine expected readers to follow slavishly. I inhaled the office chat of daily reviews of films, plays, books and exhibitions as if it was super-charged oxygen. I rarely ventured into the world on the other side of the corridor, peopled by creatures as exotic as birds of paradise or coral-reef fish and ruled over by Grace Coddington. She strode past like a haughty empress with a mane of crimped pre-Raphaelite flame-coloured hair. No one entered her kingdom without an invitation. Sometimes models looking for her would hover at my desk and I would redirect them, while trying not to stare at their poreless perfection and chiselled bone structure.
At lunchtime I window-shopped up and down Bond Street or ate a sandwich from a brown paper bag on a bench in Berkeley Square, reminding myself of my good fortune. But the truth was that despite the glamour of the masthead and the prestige of my win, my day-to-day job grew increasingly dull once the gloss of novelty wore off. It was formulaic drudge work and there was no mentoring or apprenticeship to feed my appetite to learn and be stretched.
Possessed of formidable cheek, within a matter of just a couple of months I made an appointment to see the editor-in-chief, Beatrix Miller, known to all as Miss Miller. Queen of the pussy-bow blouse, she rivalled Mrs Thatcher when it came to the permed helmet coiffure. Stern of visage, she had a voice that crackled like desiccated autumn leaves thanks to her smoking habit. She wore a seemingly inexhaustible wardrobe of Chanel tweed suits whose gold buttons gleamed like polished medals, turning her outfits into the chic version of a forbidding military uniform and leaving no one in any doubt: she was the top brass.
I announced to an incredulous Miss Miller that I was bored and contemplating leaving before my time was up: I simply had nothing substantial to get my teeth into and was not prepared to settle for captions. Momentarily stunned, she mulled for a moment, puffing on her cigarette holder, then barked into the phone and told me to report to Polly Devlin on a new book project, a history of the magazine’s fashion photography. Our exchange lasted less than five minutes.
My work experience was recharged on the spot. Given enormous responsibility by Polly as her researcher, within days I was on a plane to Paris to interview Helmut Newton. I had never heard of him, but together with his wife June, he received me with mild-mannered hospitality at his apartment in the Marais, wearing a slightly effeminate puffy-sleeved Liberty floral-print shirt. I was plunged into a world of hunting down negatives and prints, scouring archives and libraries, talking to curators and learning what made an image iconic. It was a crash course in visual language, sexual politics, art, pop culture, fashion and design.
Thanks to Vogue I got to know the work of the world’s greatest fashion photographers. Soon I could tell a Richard Avedon shot from an Irving Penn, a Sarah Moon from a Deborah Turbeville at a glance. My eyes got sharper, taking in the layers of nuance suggested by how an image was composed, lit and cropped; how a location, a model and a dress could tell a story, express an emotion and sell a product. Long before anyone described glossy magazines as ‘aspirational’, I learned to assess whether an image was exploitative, degrading or empowering, and whether the fantasies Vogue conjured gave women more or less freedom (for decades my answer to this flip-flopped before coming down squarely in the negative once I was more secure in my feminism). I discovered how to read a photograph and decode its sensationalism, seduction, aggression and shock value. I understood that women and their bodies were commodities, that their beauty was made and unmade like a bed. It was like being presented with a hyper-world painted in a fresh palette of brighter pigments or lit in neon.
But despite the job giving me legitimacy and focus, I remained very much a junior outsider. I was still mostly wearing clothes my mother had made me. Neither urban punk nor cashmere-and-pearls Sloane, I did not belong to any of the tribes that made up the Vogue nation. I was too young to make long-term friends with my sophisticated colleagues. It was time to go to university.