Grace Page 13

  my Calvin Klein check suit

  My assistant was now a girl named Lucinda Chambers, who before coming to me had worked for the editor. She would arrive each morning looking like a flower in outfits she made herself, and sat at her desk outside Bea’s office sprouting petals of organza. I have never known anyone more passionate about clothes. Nor more blissfully scatty. Once we had to go off together for a New York fashion shoot. She was supposed to pass by my flat in the taxi and pick me up on the way to Heathrow Airport. But she hadn’t written down the street address. And although she urgently needed to call me, she couldn’t find my phone number, as I was unlisted. She stopped at a public telephone and rang the operator in floods of tears, but they wouldn’t give out any information. “But you don’t understand. I am her assistant,” she wailed. Finally, the operator relented and phoned me. “I’ve got this madwoman on the phone who says she is your assistant,” she said.

  On that same trip—the first time a fashion editor at British Vogue was actually allowed to take an assistant abroad—we checked into the Algonquin in Manhattan, and I warned the two friendly doormen, Mike and Tony, that Lucinda was a little absentminded, whereupon they tied a label to her wrist that read, “If found, please return to the Algonquin.”

  Despite that, the girl was just so cute to have around. She had tons of friends who would pop in to visit her at the Vogue office. One of them was a young Peruvian photographer named Mario Testino, who was always hanging around. In the end I couldn’t help myself. “Who is that annoying boy?” I asked exasperatedly. “You have to get him out of here.” But it never really deterred him. Mario kept right on coming.

  After Lucinda—who has since gone on to my old job as fashion director of British Vogue—my assistant was Sophie Hicks. Everything about Sophie had to do with being a boy. No makeup, hair cut like a boy’s. She even wore men’s underwear. Her idea of evening dress was the thirties lounge-lizard Noël Coward look of a man’s silk dressing gown worn over a pair of tuxedo trousers with men’s patent lace-up dress shoes. Sophie went on to become an architect, married, and had three kids, including two beautiful daughters whom everyone is now dying to photograph.

  When Bea Miller retired from editing British Vogue after twenty-two years, she told me I should try for her job. I did go for an interview with Bernie Leser, the managing director of British Condé Nast, but deep down I knew I wasn’t suited for it. When the high-ups at Vogue asked me for my honest opinion, I said, “Anna Wintour should get the job,” not knowing that Anna, then the creative director of American Vogue, whom I knew from the fashion world on both sides of the Atlantic, had already been asked. What the pro-Anna power brokers at American Vogue probably said to her was “Go over to England for a few years, get some experience, and when you come back, we’ll make you editor in chief of American Vogue.”

  The first time Anna came to the British collections made a telling impression. She hadn’t officially started at British Vogue quite yet, but she wanted to work out exactly who was important. We, the editorial staff, were all used to hanging about together, being chummy and chitty-chatty, but she wasn’t. She was far too busy running off to important meetings. And the fact that she turned up at the British shows accompanied by her friend André (Leon Talley, fashion news editor of American Vogue) didn’t go down too well either. For a time it almost seemed he was running the whole show because Anna kept deferring to him, telling us things like, “André thinks we should be doing a story on so-and-so” or “André feels such-and-such is really important.”

  Anna made it clear from the first day that although she liked me and was very supportive, work was work, she was the boss, and that was that. No contest. In an employee/employer situation, it was never going to be like sitting down with a mate. Two days into her editorship, she said to me, “Oh, I’m going to a screening, and I want you to come with me.” The film, a French production titled Betty Blue, starred a new sexy actress called Béatrice Dalle, whom everyone was talking about and whom Anna thought of having photographed for the magazine. So we sat down in anticipation as the lights dimmed. Now, anyone who has ever seen this film knows that the opening scene, which goes on and on in dead silence for well over five long, embarrassing minutes, shows a naked couple screwing on a bed—very vividly and very realistically—while the camera pans in closer and closer. As we watched, I became more and more fidgety, sinking lower in my seat and feeling extremely uncomfortable while Anna was rigid and unmoving. No sign of any emotion at all. I then realized how much significance Anna places on willpower trumping feelings.

  During the preparations for her first issue of British Vogue, I was expected to oversee the shooting of the collections and was summoned to a meeting at the rented apartment Anna was living in with her then-husband David Shaffer, which was rather beautiful and overlooked a pretty square in Kensington. She was sitting cross-legged on the sofa looking very skinny in her eighties Azzedine Alaïa leggings and a huge orange sweater, despite the fact that only a few weeks earlier she had given birth to Charlie, her first child. She had a thing about the coltish young English film actress Amanda Pays, whom she wished to have photographed for the cover of her first British collections issue wearing a traffic-stoppingly bright orange coat by the designer Jean Muir. I can’t tell you how many cover tries of that coat we shot and reshot until we arrived at the ultra-simple image on a stark white background that she wanted.

  It was such a different way of working for me. Anna’s mission, coming as she did from the commanding heights of American Vogue, seemed to be to take its whimsical little cousin by the scruff of the neck and propel it forward into a brave new world. I didn’t want to have a battle over this or give her a hard time. So I began thinking seriously about the conversations Calvin Klein and I had been having in which he urged me to come and work for him in America.

  A new hair cut & Calvin Klein dress

  It was 1987, two years since my mother had died. Tristan was through school by now and living in Oxford, cramming for further exams and intent on taking a business and computer course in London, which basically meant I could leave. Before, it would have seemed so final and far away, but with Tristan becoming more psychologically independent and Didier encouraging me by saying, “I’m sure you will move to New York one day,” I was on my way.

  There was such a buzz about New York. A self-confidence. Working girls wearing snowy-white trainers and clutching polystyrene cups of coffee elbowed determinedly past you in the mornings on their mission to climb the corporate ladder. Times Square glittered dangerously. Tabloid headlines screamed about Central Park killers and cocaine busts. Fashion designers like Bill Blass, Diane von Furstenberg, Ralph Lauren, Halston, Donna Karan, and Calvin were fast becoming mass-media celebrities. Money appeared to be no object, even though everyone talked about New York living on the edge of bankruptcy.

  I stayed on at British Vogue for another nine months, during which time I went from wearing everything Azzedine Alaïa to wearing everything Calvin Klein. Meanwhile, our daily work ethic changed considerably along the way.

  Gabé Doppelt, Anna’s new assistant, who came from the British society magazine Tatler, was sent to New York on a crash course to learn how things were done over there and brought back, among other things, “run-throughs,” the practice of trying on a stand-in model, before a shoot, all the clothes you intended to use. We had to go through so many hours of run-throughs, it was awful. In my opinion, it simply isn’t possible to simulate the mood one hopes to achieve in a beautiful photograph taken on location by putting the same clothes on the wrong girl in a grimly lit office. Besides, no decent-looking model ever wanted to come in and try on the clothes just so we could see how they looked, because how far was that going to advance her career? Neither did we have the same extensive and efficient messenger service to pick up and return all the clothes as they do in New York. We often dragged them around ourselves. Or we had a nice young chap called Alistair ferry all the clothes back and forth in his
secondhand rattletrap, and probably stop a few times along the way.

  I honestly don’t know how Anna survived. There was no spirited atmosphere, no determination, everything was deemed “impossible” or “Ooh, I don’t think so,” and the solution to most problems was “Mmmm, let’s have a nice cup of tea.”

  I must say, the way the English press attacked Anna all the time was pretty stupid, with stories calling her Nuclear Wintour or headlined “The Wintour of Our Discontent.” She made news because of what she was doing to old British Vogue, where everyone was used to getting in late and not working terribly hard. If Anna ever saw anyone sitting around, she would immediately give her ten shoots to do. She didn’t like the English tweedy and Wellington boot thing I was fond of because she considered it frumpy. The Italian designer Romeo Gigli was hugely influential at the time—skirts worn close to the ankles with flat shoes. She didn’t care for this, either. Anna’s Vogue was all about chopping down the skirts and modern girls running through the streets in very high heels.

  I flew to New York to do a great many of these shoots for the new cleaned-up Vogue, especially covers. On strict instructions from Anna, my mission each day was to take the film over to Alexander Liberman so he could cast his critical eye over it and tell her what he thought. Mr. Liberman, a dapper magazine gentleman of the old school secretly known around the Condé Nast building as the Silver Fox, was the right-hand man to Condé Nast’s owner, S. I. Newhouse. He oversaw every publication. A white Russian who, quite early on in his career, became American Vogue’s art director, he was also a well-known modern artist and a sculptor of enormous painted metal constructions destined for public and corporate spaces. I found him an elegant man, with his trimmed gray mustache, tailored gray suits, and overpoweringly quiet voice. He never thumped a hand on the desk to make his point and was very spare and direct. I had met him several times previously: Every five years or so he had flown over to see British Vogue, comment, and dispense advice to Bea Miller. She was not a complete fan, though. She thought everything he told her to do was appropriate for American rather than British Vogue.

  I’m a person who usually likes an ordered, straightforward home life. I don’t leave a house or a job often. But when Calvin offered me the position as his design director, he made it easy for me to move. I thought, “If I don’t go now, I’ll be here for the rest of my life.” I was loving all things American at the time, and I suppose I was also being a little bit daring. After all, it’s not so adventurous to make this kind of move when you’re young, but a bit more so when you’re forty-eight or forty-nine. Most important, I was in love with Didier, and he lived in New York—I thought he would take me more seriously if I went to live there.

  I gave my notice while I was away on a fashion shoot in America. Someone told me that the story broke in Women’s Wear Daily, but I never saw it because I never read it. Anna coolly accepted my resignation on the day she turned thirty-eight. “I would have preferred a different birthday present,” she was rumored to have said.

  At Calvin I learned to think fast, act fast, move fast. Anna had taught me that nothing is forever. “Let’s just move on, shall we?” she will invariably say, because she knows you can’t dwell on things you unfortunately cannot change. In their way, Anna and Calvin are very similar. Their birthdays are only days apart.

  With Albert Koski in New York for Harper’s Bazaar. Photo: Louis Faurer, 1966. Courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar

  Test-driving Mary Quant’s minidress and shorts with the designer, London. Photo: Eric Swayne, 1966

  Going head to head with Vidal Sassoon in his Mayfair flat, London, 1964. Photo courtesy of Vidal Sassoon archives

  Eating shrimp in Normandy. Photo: Duc, 1971.

  Powdering Prince Charles for his official investiture photograph, Windsor Castle. Photo: Norman Parkinson, 1969. © Norman Parkinson Limited / Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive

  My marriage to Michael Chow, London. Photo: Barry Lategan, 1969

  With Helmut Newton, Manolo Blahnik, Anjelica Huston, and David Bailey in the South of France. Photo: David Bailey, 1974

  My boyfriend, Duc, left, playing dress-up with Guy Bourdin, 1971

  With Karl Lagerfeld, Paris. Photo: Julie Kavanagh, 1974

  At my wedding party with Willie Christie in Gunter Grove, London, 1976

  Tristan plays model, Shelter Island, N.Y. Photo: Bruce Weber, 1980

  IX

  ON

  BRUCE

  In which

  Grace goes to

  the dogs, and to

  Australia, New

  Mexico, and

  Maine, then ends

  up in England

  with a garden on

  the head.

  Bruce Weber’s pictures and his life are one. His photographs are all about relationships, and the people he works with become his extended family. And when those people bring in more people, the family grows bigger and bigger until it includes their outer circle, too. It’s a bit like Bruce and his dogs. He loves golden retrievers and keeps acquiring more and more. He can never be done with one of anything. It’s always about a crowd.

  I first met him in the disco-crazy New York of the late seventies. Naturally, I knew about him because he and the British Vogue fashion editor Liz Tilberis had worked together earlier on. She loved him because he was “real and earthy.” Also the photographer Barry Lategan, whose LaGuardia Place apartment I sometimes stayed in, told me, “You must meet my agent’s boyfriend, Bruce. He’s a wonderful young photographer.”

  down Tao, down Billy, River, Dream … Kodi down …!

  So we set up an appointment, and he and his agent, Nan Bush, came to see me, she with Bruce’s portfolio tucked under her arm. Bruce handed me the book, and I started leafing through it. All I could see was page after page of photographs of his dog, a beautiful golden retriever called Rowdy, but a dog nevertheless. This was followed by some pictures of his cats, followed by pictures of his station wagon and his 1965 Chevy. Finally, on the very last page, there was one photograph of a girl. “Oh, it’s just pictures of things I love,” said Bruce with a shrug. But the moment he started his storytelling, I felt an immediate connection, and we both sensed that we would enjoy working together.

  Bruce really is a hopeless romantic. When I returned to London, we would talk on the phone at night for hours—long, late, very costly transatlantic conversations—about our ideas and stories for British Vogue. He particularly fantasized about casting, and talked about putting disparate people together, or which boy and girl would make a couple with great chemistry like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. I’m convinced Bruce fantasized about Elizabeth Taylor when he was a child and then began a lifelong unrequited love affair with her in his imagination—although in her later years they did finally meet and become close friends. And he would come up with a lot of visual concepts involving American painting, photography, and writing. In a way, he is responsible for my love of America and its culture. I mean, I’m hardly a reader, and in those days the States seemed such a long way away from me back home in England. But he would tell me about artists like Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham, and Ansel Adams. Bruce knew all their stories so well that he could make them come vividly alive.

  Our first trip together—which, strangely enough, was to Australia, not America—came out of a story Bruce saw in National Geographic about a girl who traveled across the outback by camel. Initially, we wanted to use the same girl for our photographs—she seemed rather pretty—but we could never track her down because she was always off riding her camel. So we used the model Nancy DeWeir instead.

  Bruce and his crew from New York, the model, her boyfriend, who was Bruce’s assistant, and the hairdresser Kerry Warn flew to Australia one way around the globe, while the Vogue travel editor, Martin O’Brien, and I flew from London the other, with me dragging heavy suitcase after suitcase of army surplus clothes and enough paraphernalia to
furnish a campsite.

  Twenty-two hours later, we finally reached Perth, where the customs officials decided to go through every bag. Out came each pot, pan, can of beans, gas ring, sleeping bag, and mosquito net. “What’s this?” they asked, roaring with laughter after fishing out a bush hat with hundreds of dangling corks that I had sewn on for what, back in England, we thought was an authentically Australian outback look. Luckily, it put them in such good humor that they allowed us to pass, even though I hadn’t been particularly careful with the customs forms.

  Our next shoot, in 1981, was a story set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and inspired by the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. We happened upon an old tepee standing right there on the trail and used it in the pictures, but our main props were the extraordinary church in Taos and various adobe buildings. Our models were a very pretty and preppy American girl named Sloane Condren and a boy, Jon Wiedemann, who went on to marry the actress Isabella Rossellini and whose father started the Outward Bound School in Albuquerque. We took mostly black clothes and silver and turquoise jewelry in homage to O’Keeffe, and frothy white cotton Victorian nightdresses worn under rough knits and plainswoman jackets, which in turn seemed to provide strong inspiration for the next collection—“The Santa Fe Look”—by designer Ralph Lauren. The tousled hair and bare scrubbed faces of the models in the story also heralded a whole new look in beauty. Up until then, the fashion had been for heavy makeup and tough-looking hairstyles. Bruce’s vision brought a completely new, natural aesthetic to fashion photography.