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Kitabı oku: «Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow», sayfa 3
CHAPTER SEVEN
Heathfield
For most children of divorcing parents at boarding school, it is customary for the parents to come to the school and explain what is happening, but this was not to be the case for Isabella, who was at Heathfield in Berkshire. Her schoolfriend Rosie Pearson remembered the dramatic moment when Isabella discovered that her parents were divorcing: she rushed out of the dining room at Heathfield in floods of tears, holding a letter. Helen had written to Isabella telling her that Evelyn wanted to divorce her.
Up until this moment, Issie’s days at Heathfield School had been among the happiest of her life. I hated my boarding school, but Issie was one of those who thrived in the system. She found Heathfield tremendously good fun compared to the boredom of being at home. Even more crucially, at Heathfield she also experienced the unfamiliar sensation of security, which she had not known since her own family had been thrown into turmoil by the death of Johnny five years previously.
Heathfield was, and remains, an old-fashioned school, but old-fashioned in the best sense of the word, with a disproportionate emphasis on manners. Issie’s instinctive generosity and desire to help others were fostered here, developing into the generosity that would see her so ready in later life to devote such great time and personal energy to her discoveries and protégés.
Issie (bottom row, second from right) during fun times in the sixth form at Heathfield.
When Miss Eleanor Beatrice Wyatt founded the school in 1899, one of her guiding principles was, ‘My girls come here not to only to learn their lessons, but to learn how to live as well.’ The school’s main priority then, and still in Isabella’s time, was the turning out of accomplished and marriageable ‘gels’. Things have changed somewhat since then, but not too much. When I visited the school in January 2010, I was struck by the warmth and cosiness of the institution.
The school is not a big one and has 170 pupils spanning the ages of 11 to 18. Housed in an elegant late-Georgian building with white stuccoed walls and a Palladian colonnade, it is set in 36 acres of grounds with mature ornamental trees, rhododendron bushes, lawns, and the usual school facilities of science laboratories, art studios and playing fields. It is not a beautiful place, but its size and architecture give it a definite feeling of friendliness.
Academic achievement may not have been obsessively sought in Issie’s day, but when it came to pass it was welcomed. When any student passed the Oxbridge exams, the school motto was invoked – ‘The merit of one is the honour of all’ – and the whole student body would be a granted a day off. Issie remembered this happening when Rosie got into Oxford – even though she had left Heathfield the year before and actually passed from Marlborough.
Heathfield is situated just 15 minutes by public bus from Eton College. This made for a handy supply of well-bred boys for the Heathfield girls, as the socially obsessed Evelyn noted. The close links between the girls of Heathfield and the boys of Eton were strengthened because the headmistress, Mrs Parry, was the wife of an Eton housemaster.
Issie made full use of this extra-curricular benefit, joining the Caledonian Society, which was invited for annual dances at Eton, providing an ideal excuse for illicit snogging. Issie’s first boyfriend was her Cal Soc dance partner Cosmo Fry, an artistic scion of the Quaker Bristol chocolate family. She would go to Eton at weekends to watch him play soccer, yelling ‘Come on Cosmo!’ from the sidelines. Cosmo found that Issie’s vociferous attention usually made him want to ‘find somewhere to hide’ on the pitch.
Issie also spent time with Cosmo watching plays at Eton in the Farrar Theatre, an ugly 1970s building that dominates the parade ground at the north end of the school. Issie and Cosmo would snuggle up for a whispered chat during house plays.
They corresponded with each other, and on one occasion Cosmo, who was also dating another girl at Heathfield, accidentally put his love letters in the wrong envelopes. The next time Issie met him she asked him knowingly, ‘Am I your only girlfriend?’
She let Cosmo squirm for a few moments, then said, ‘It doesn’t matter, Cosmo – the other girl is my best friend.’
Staff at Heathfield turned a blind eye to romances with Eton boys, especially as such affairs were usually strikingly innocent. Issie and Cosmo’s relationship involved nothing more sexual than a few snatched snogs. Issie and Rosie even took a schoolgirls’ vow not to have sex before marriage.
Issie’s other big crush at Heathfield was, somewhat bizarrely, on the school chaplain. Climbing up a ladder to change the hymn numbers in chapel, Issie would deliberately raise her skirt hoping to entice the poor chaplain, the Reverend Dick Stride. Reverend Stride, however, was an upstanding and decent man who remained true to his calling, and nothing improper ever occurred.
But Issie’s interest in religion was piqued by her attraction to the hapless vicar, and she was immensely proud when, in her final year, she was appointed Head of Chapel.
This was a real expression of trust in Isabella by the school authorities, because religion was important at Heathfield, which is a High Anglican institution. The chapel is visually very impressive: a Gothic building with stained-glass windows, with a white timbered vaulted ceiling lit by flickering electric candles mounted on iron chandeliers, each decorated by a cast fleur de lys, the school emblem. The high pews face each other and have the names of all the pupils of the school, past and present, formally carved into them. The chapel is attached to the main building by a covered brick and timber passage, simply adorned with a pale-blue enamelled classical ceramic circular plaque of the crucifixion.
Girls attended chapel twice a day, and whilst the regular gatherings were informal, more like a school assembly with prayers, full-length services on Sundays were steeped in ceremony and sacrament. On saints’ days the girls dressed in long white dresses, with white tights and lace caps, and incense was often burned in the chapel. Issie had the job of cleaning the incense censers during the summer holiday, a responsibility that triggered a lifelong love of incense and the associated paraphernalia.
The mystical and medieval rituals of the church as practised at Heathfield left a lasting impression on Isabella. In the vestry she would drink the blood of Christ, and then await a terrible punishment to befall her.
Heathfield nurtured Isabella’s taste for glamour. Socially the school was exclusive and international. Isabella’s contemporaries included a niece of the Shah of Iran (Nazak), daughters of Indian industrialists from Bombay (Aswani), a daughter of a major Greek shipping tycoon (Maria Niarchos), the offspring of a Hollywood actress (Liza Todd-Burton, Elizabeth Taylor’s daughter) and the daughters of several earls, including Warwick (Charlotte Greville) and Yarborough (Sophia Pelham). The wealthy and successful of England and its admirers were represented at Heathfield, and it was a world in which Issie – who was just 5ft 2½ inches tall and nicknamed ‘Titch’ – felt comfortable, as did Evelyn. According to Issie, ‘My father enjoyed coming to functions at Heathfield as there were so many people he knew.’
Another reason why Evelyn liked Heathfield is because he didn’t have to pay for it. Vera had left money to pay for her Broughton grandchildren’s education.
I have just one of Issie’s school reports, from the Lent term in 1971. Although it was written just a year after she went to Heathfield, I recognise acutely the depiction of her personality. The teachers speak constantly of her effort, her desire to please her teachers, her helpfulness and good-natured character. I particularly like two comments. The English teacher remarks:
I am very pleased with the improvement in Isabella’s work. While losing nothing of her gaiety, she has behaved in a more mature way in class.
And her geography mistress reports, ‘She has been much more controlled in class.’ That must have been a real effort for Issie!
Isabella was reported to be making ‘excellent progress’ in both her fencing class and her ballroom-dancing classes. The headmistress wrote:
Isabella has an enchanting character. She is one of the most genuinely good-hearted people in the school and although occasionally she talks too much, it is always in a good cause. She is always doing good to others and generally being a little ray of sunshine.
A little ray of sunshine. That phrase again.
Isabella kept only one other school report in which the headmistress wrote that she would make ‘an excellent lady of the manor’. She would show it to me and laugh about her teacher’s prescience after we married, as she set about restoring and reviving our ‘manor’ in Gloucestershire.
Heathfield has a system of awarding ‘bows’ at the end of each term. These are coloured badges worn by the girls on their jumpers, given out for ‘Striving to maintain the high tone of the school, forgetfulness of self, readiness to help others, and self control at work, at play and in conversation.’ A blue bow could be awarded to girls in their first three years at school, and Isabella was awarded a blue bow in the summer term of 1971 and then re-awarded it in the Michaelmas term of the same year. In 1972 Michaelmas term, she won the Senior Cheerfulness prize.
Issie was clearly very happy, but there was another, more vulnerable side to Issie as well. As Rosie observed, Issie ‘crumpled easily, and people didn’t always see that’.
The whole school ate together in the dining room at Heathfield. As with most boarding schools in the 1970s, the food was not up to much. Each week there was the ordeal of finding out who you were sitting next to or whether you would be ‘floating’ – meaning you could sit where you liked. At lunchtime the girls would receive with excitement their letters and communication from the outside world. One lunchtime in 1974, Issie opened that bombshell letter from her mother saying that Evelyn wanted a divorce. As her parents’ marriage broke messily apart with much recrimination on both sides, Issie developed a tendency for melodrama. Teresa de Chair remembers that Isabella had difficulty getting to the dining room for breakfast and that she would get hysterical when cockroaches were found in the dining room and scream about their size. She dropped the nickname Titch and earned a new one, ‘Huffy’. She became increasingly temperamental, theatrical and dramatic.
Issie was to win no more prizes for cheerfulness at Heathfield, as her world imploded.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rona
If Issie’s relationship with her mother had been bad, her relationship with her new stepmother, whom Evelyn married in 1974, was catastrophic.
Things got off to a bad start when Issie was evicted; Evelyn installed his stepdaughters in his daughters’ bedrooms. The next time Isabella came back to Doddington, she found she had been turfed out of her bedroom; the swan wall paper and glam-rock posters of Ziggy Stardust had been torn down and thrown out. She recalled that they were moved out of their bedrooms and installed ‘above the car port’ in the guest wing her father had added on to the house in the 1950s.
Evelyn was not a bad man but he was thoughtless and weak, and the saga of the bedrooms was typical of the way in which Evelyn now treated Isabella. Coming just months after her parents’ divorce and with that trauma still very much ongoing, it left her feeling unwelcome at Doddington in school holidays, and became a focal point for Isabella’s teenage rage and despair. It is the moment when Isabella began to feel rootless and that she belonged nowhere. This demon would develop into an obsessive fear that she would end up a homeless bag lady – a belief that would haunt her for the rest of her life and contributed to her eventual suicide, despite the fact that at the time of her death we manifestly were not homeless, with a flat in Eaton Square and also occupied Hilles, the wonderful Blow family seat on a thousand acres of land in Gloucestershire.
There was another problem with ‘The Steps’, as she called her young stepsisters; they were extremely good looking. She was particularly concerned that boys she was interested in would prefer her oldest stepsister, Louise, who was the closest in age to her.
Like many teenage girls, Isabella was very unsure about her looks. She liked her figure; she was petite, sexy and curvy, with wonderful 32B bosoms. She had huge, flashing, green-blue eyes, described by Rupert Everett as ‘mad’ and by Rosie as ‘beautiful’. She had slim hips, great legs and elegant feet.
But she felt strongly that her face was very ugly. She hated her protruding, ‘goofy’ teeth. She blamed her parents for being too mean to spend money rectifying these ‘combine harvesters’ when she was a teenager.
A father of some friends of hers who lived in Gloucestershire remarked to his sons that her face was ‘hideous’ but with a figure like hers she’d be ‘great in bed’.
Such callous remarks irrevocably coloured Issie’s view of herself. She once said to me, ‘When you’re poking the fire, it does not matter what is on the mantelpiece.’
I told her when I met her that she was beautiful – but it was too late. The damage had been done. She was convinced she had ‘an ugly face’.
A decade later in New York in the 1980s, Isabella visited a dentist who looked after Frank Sinatra’s and others stars’ teeth. The dentist told her it was too late for her to do anything about what she called her ‘yellow fangs’. Her habit of smearing her lips and teeth with lipstick was in part to deal with this perceived disfigurement. Her hatred of her face was another demon Issie carried with her for life.
Rona found Evelyn’s children hard to deal with. Rona believed in nannies, mealtimes, bedtimes, bath times and strict routines while Evelyn’s children more or less did what they liked, grabbing a bite to eat from the fridge when they felt hungry and going to bed whenever they pleased. Although ‘Baby’ Lavinia appeared to like the new structure, enjoying trips to the museum and organised activities, Rona and Issie battled each other. Rona recalls one occasion when Issie was going to a party. When Rona asked her what time she would like to be picked up, Issie brushed the request off and said she would make her own way home, which Rona found ‘ridiculous’ and completely unacceptable.
Issie was only 20 years younger than Rona, so when Evelyn told Rona, in a typically offhand fashion, that his three daughters had their own mother and that she was not responsible for them, it must have come as both a relief and a confirmation of what she already knew.
Isabella saw everything that Rona did as evidence that her stepmother was trying to drive a wedge between herself and her father. For example, one change introduced by Rona and resented by Issie was how she earned her pocket money. Issie had learned to operate the potato machine but Rona felt it was ‘beneath (her) dignity’ for Issie to work for her father. Instead, Issie had to ‘bicycle to the local Bridgmere nurseries’ to earn her pennies.
Lavinia remembered Issie crying in the morning and being very upset at having to go to Bridgemere.
Despite the sometimes brash exterior, Issie was still very much a little girl and the presence of her young stepmother created a rival and competitor for her father’s love. The battle for this love would cause Isabella terrible emotional pain, hurt and despair, and become another demon.
Isabella would never overcome this demon, or accept her stepmother. In later life she took to describing her as hurtfully as possible in public interviews, once referring to her in a profile in the New Yorker as ‘a creature my father met on a bus in Hong Kong’.
But her father had a love and a need for her stepmother, and he was about to become more dependent on Rona than ever.
CHAPTER NINE
Evelyn’s Leg
Just under a year after their marriage, on 4 February 1975, Evelyn went into the private block of the North Staffordshire hospital at Stoke-on-Trent hospital to have an operation to remove a varicose vein and some lumps on his left leg. On 5 February 1975, he had the operation. A day later, he had swollen up like a balloon – gas gangrene had broken out in the hospital and three other patients in the private wing died. Fighting for his life, Evelyn was prescribed morphine, hydrocortisone, diuretics and antibiotics to reduce the swelling.
Five days later, to try to stop the spreading gangrene, the surgeon amputated his leg below the knee.
Issie firmly blamed Rona for the disaster claiming that Rona pushed him to have the operation because she thought his varicose veins looked unsightly on the beach.
It was unfair of Issie to blame Rona for the operation, for her father medically required it. But, by 24 March 1975, death was a real possibility, and Evelyn signed a new will in the North Staffordshire hospital, witnessed by the orthopaedic surgeon and a nurse.
In fact, Evelyn survived, but the change to the will was permanent. The dramatic secret of what he had written would not be revealed until his death in 1993.
On 9 April 1975, Evelyn had a second operation amputating his leg above his knee.
There was some discussion of suing the hospital for negligence. But Evelyn was having none of it. The hospital had far more money than he did to fight in court. Besides, the surgeon was a friend of his; they shot together in Staffordshire.
Indeed, the shoots after Evelyn lost his leg were one of Issie’s happier memories. With his artificial leg, he needed Isabella to hold him in case he fell over while shooting a ‘left and a right’ bird. For Isabella, it was a special time. She had her beloved father to herself.
With his leg stub rubbing against his artificial leg, Evelyn was to be in constant pain for the rest of his life. The pain and handicap were borne by him bravely and with dignity and there was rarely any complaint or fuss. Emotionally he may have been a weak man, but physically he was brave. Isabella inherited her father’s physical courage.
What really irked Isabella was the fact that Rona had not allowed her to see her father when he was in hospital. Thirteen years later in 1988, when Isabella took me for the first time to meet her father and stepmother for dinner at their home in Kensington Square, the subject came up. Rona explained to me that, in her judgement, Isabella was too young to deal with the sight of Evelyn in hospital with gangrene. I disagreed. Isabella was over 15 years old at the time and, I felt sure, old enough to have witnessed the admittedly distressing scene. Issie and I had both been brought up in the countryside where blood, gore and death are very much part of life. Rona had grown up in the city and town, and had the sensibilities of a city dweller.
But Evelyn had lost his leg. In less than a year, Rona’s fairy-tale marriage to a rich, older, titled man had turned into a nightmare – she now had six children to look after and a husband with one leg in a wheelchair. Despite his efforts to carry on as if nothing had happened, Evelyn was now severely handicapped and heavily dependent on Rona, and she was to care for him for the next 18 years until his death.
CHAPTER TEN
Eighteenth Birthday
Most of Issie’s contemporaries were given a special present of some value for their eighteenth birthday – a pen, a piece of jewellery or maybe even a car.
Evelyn gave Issie a Bible. It was inscribed, ‘Follow in thy father’s footsteps’, and accompanied by a birthday card telling her she was ‘Off the books’.
It was a joke, but a bad one at Issie’s expense. Evelyn did, of course, continue to pay for certain expenses for his daughter, but he was letting her know in typically brutal fashion that she was now financially responsible for herself. Isabella’s early life had been very privileged, with cooks and staff to look after her things at home, and for Issie this was financial abandonment by the man she loved. She always remembered that thoughtless birthday card – it fed her demon of financial insecurity.
But now that she was 18, her arguments with Rona cooled somewhat, especially when she managed to persuade her father to lend her the farm Ford Fiesta. Despite the fact that the farm car ‘had straw sticking out of it’, she loved being able to drive herself around the country as she pleased. As she had been driving the car on the farm roads for years, she was a good driver and never had any accidents.
Even as a teenager Issie was the life and soul of any party, and she loved parties, particularly if they were grand and glamorous ones. Because she was so funny and lively she swiftly became much in demand on the stately home circuit even though, or perhaps because, her behaviour was so outrageous. Hugh St Clair, whose father was a Gloucestershire MP, remembers Issie dancing ‘semi-topless, howling with laughter in front of my stuffy father at Gloucestershire teenage parties’.
Because of Issie’s precociousness, she was often invited to the same parties as Evelyn and Rona, and, wittingly or not, Issie often embarrassed them at these events. At the famous Sitwell home of Renishaw, at a party for Alex Sitwell, which they all attended, Issie was thrown naked into the swimming pool. Issie told me that Evelyn and Rona ignored the scene. I understood by the way she told me the story that she was actually trying hard to get their attention and love by her provocations.
One of Isabella’s party pieces involved performing ‘feats of extraordinary strength’. Issie was petite – just 5′2½″ – and her strength astonished unsuspecting onlookers. When she stayed with her Heathfield friend Lady Sophia Pelham at Brocklesby Park, she carried her father, the 18-stone Lord Yarborough, twice around the long dining-room table. She particularly enjoyed arm-wrestling much bigger people, as well as humiliating fitness fanatics who, unlike her, worked out. Much later in Paris, in the late 1990s, at an exhibition of ‘Sex and the British’ at Thadeus Ropac’s gallery, I watched with amusement as serried ranks of tough, tattooed YBAs lined up to arm wrestle Issie – and were easily beaten by her one after the other.
Although the debutante season was in the process of becoming an anachronism, it still existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But, to Issie’s great disappointment, there was no suggestion by Evelyn and Rona of Issie becoming a deb, still less of her officially ‘coming out’ in society with a big party. Needless to say, Rona made quite sure that her stepsisters, by contrast, were given lavish coming-of-age parties in the castle at Doddington.
