Kitap dosya olarak indirilemez ancak uygulamamız üzerinden veya online olarak web sitemizden okunabilir.
Kitabı oku: «Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow», sayfa 4
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Lovats
When Issie left Heathfield, she spent the summer working at Laura Ashley, where, as her shop-floor colleague Phil Athill recalls:
She was utterly incapable of measuring the materials we were selling and gave people as many metres as they liked. Likewise wallpaper – anyone asking for advice as to how many rolls they needed for a certain space was in deep trouble and I can imagine that ‘Laura Ashley’ is a black name to this day with most of the customers who fell on us.
From Laura Ashley in Sloane Street to her mother’s flat at 17 Cadogan Square is a short 10-minute walk. But for Isabella there was a problem getting inside. Her mother, as her friend Charlotte Greville remembered, treated her ‘like a child’ and refused to give her a key to the flat.
When Isabella caught pneumonia, her mother offered to take care of her, but was then called out of the country. Hearing of this situation, her father’s sister, Aunt Rosie, invited Issie to convalesce with her at Balbair, their cosy Highland house next to the river Beauly, 10 miles from Inverness in the Highlands.
Evelyn was never once invited to any of Rosie’s homes, but Issie jumped at the chance, keen to spend some time with Rosie’s husband, Lord Shimi Lovat, her beloved ‘Uncle Shimi’.
Lord Lovat had become a legend for his exploits in the Second World War. He had been a leading figure in the Commandos, and an inspirational leader
Lovat sacked Evelyn Waugh from the Commandos – and was satirised by Waugh in his brilliant Sword of Honour trilogy about the war.
At D-Day, Shimi had led his Commandos on the first wave at Sword Beach in Normandy, armed only with his sporting Winchester rifle. Accompanying him was his 21-year-old personal piper Bill Millin. To encourage his men, Lovat ordered Millin to play ‘The blue bonnets from over the border’. The Germans ignored Millin, thinking him a lunatic transvestite. It was an exploit worthy of Hollywood, and in 1962 Darryl Zannuk produced The Longest Day, in which Lovat is played by Peter Lawford.
Lovat was famously handsome and vain. It was said that he would admire the reflection of his beauty in the silver cutlery.
In the mid-1960s, Uncle Shimi had suffered a series of heart attacks. Afflicted by that perennial fear of the British upper classes, the payment of death duties, he had made over the Lovat estates, which stretched across 165,000 acres of Scotland from the east to west coast, to his eldest son Simon, Master of Lovat and Isabella’s first cousin.
Isabella was to develop a close and loving relationship with her aunt and uncle, and they with her. When out walking with Uncle Shimi, he would ask her to be silent and then name all the birds that were singing. In the House of Lords, Uncle Shimi had urged potential explorers to stop irritating ‘Nessie’, the Loch Ness Monster in which he professed to believe.
Before traveling up to Inverness to stay with her aunt and uncle, Isabella found time, despite her pneumonia, to have her hair frizzed to look ‘more Fraser’. During her childhood, the Lovats’ youngest son Andrew Fraser had once stayed at Doddington to go to a local ball. On his return after the ball, the tipsy Andrew had demolished a stretch of post and rail fencing in his car, but what Issie really remembered was his frizzy hair.
Flora Fraser remembers meeting Issie on her first trip to Inverness:
She was staying with Uncle Shimi and Aunt Rosie at Balblair and Uncle Shimi was tickled pink by her, especially when she asked for crème de menthe to put on her porridge. I have an image of her hearty laughter at a picnic up the glen. Huge pale eyes, pale hair and scarlet mouth, nursing a bloody Mary in a tartan mug. She was recovering from pneumonia, so she had a Fraser hunting rug hung round her shoulders.
Benjie Fraser remembered his first meeting with Issie during this stay. It was at Kiltarlity church during the midnight mass Christmas Eve service. As the youngest member of the Fraser clan, he had the task of taking around the collection plate in the church. Dressed as a punk in his neon green jeans and leopard stripes and a nose ring, he passed Issie, who whispered to him, ‘I hope you’re not keeping any of that for yourself?’
Uncle Shimi, Aunt Rosie and the rest of the extended Fraser clan were to be emotional rocks for Isabella throughout her life. They became a surrogate family, which made it even harder to bear when, later, they were engulfed in tragedy themselves.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wolf
In the autumn, after her convalescence in the Highlands, Issie went to the Oxford and County secretarial college in Oxford – aka the Ox and Cow – to take a secretarial course. Evelyn, of course, made it clear that he was paying for this course only because it would enable her to earn her own living.
The Ox and Cow was located at 34 Giles Street, a Georgian terrace in the centre of Oxford. According to her roommate Christine Selby, Issie had a penchant for wearing dresses from the 1920s, set off with a red or green beret. She also smoked cigarettes through a cigarette holder.
Evelyn may have hoped Issie would meet a nice suitor at Oxford – instead she met Wolf.
Wolf was a dark-haired, Old Etonian history scholar at Christchurch College, whose wildness is legendary amongst their contemporaries. He is described by one Eton friend as ‘coming from another age – a buccaneer Elizabethan’. He seems to have been always in trouble: he was expelled from Eton a couple of weeks before the end of term for drinking beer, and then later from Oxford for setting alight the curtains in the rooms below his own. A friend says that Wolf never considered that ‘actions have consequences’.
Issie fell head over heels in love with Wolf and lost her virginity to him at 17. She said it was an unpleasant physical act, but it was an important milestone in her life, breaking her schoolgirl vow to save sex for marriage. Issie, when telling me about the event, pointed out with a certain pride that she was not ‘pumped and dumped’; she and Wolf were to remain together for the next two years. It was for Issie, her friend Mosh Gordon-Cumming remembered, an important relationship into which Issie channelled her love.
Wolf was given to stealing cars – ‘he invented joyriding’ one contemporary recalls – and his nefarious activities also included siphoning off petrol from cars parked on Oxford’s streets in the dead of night, helped by Issie. One of Issie’s Heathfield girlfriends remembers:
Wolf was rather like a pirate; totally wild and unpredictable and rather dangerous and frightening. When you got to know him he was adorable, though. I think he was probably slightly mad.
One night riding on his motorbike in London, they went to eat at a restaurant called ‘Up all Night’ on the Fulham Road. The restaurant was closed, and Wolf, incensed at the false claim contained in the name, threw a brick through the window before roaring off through the quiet streets of Chelsea. Issie, riding pillion and clinging to his waist, loved every moment of her new life.
Wolf was a rebel, but his love was also a wonderful escape for her from the hurt and sadness of home. She only once invited Wolf to stay at Doddington. Evelyn loathed Wolf – understandably, especially when he later went out with Issie’s sister Julia. When he would ask his daughter how she planned to get to Doddington, Issie would reply, ‘By motorbike.’ Wolf arrived after the long four-hour journey from London and, to Issie’s thrilled delight and her stepmother’s great annoyance, trampled motor oil into all the carpets.
At the end of her year at the Ox and Cow, she and Wolf moved into a grim basement flat in Oakley Street, Chelsea, with her friend Christie Saunders and her boyfriend. Christie remembers that there was almost nothing in the flat. With no money, and egged on by Wolf, Issie set about furnishing it by theft.
When, years later, Issie bought her 4.10 shotgun, I helped her fill in the form. It asked if she had any criminal convictions and she told me the story of the stolen sofa for Oakley Street. After dinner with her friend Minnie Scott at Minnie’s mansion block off the King’s Road, Issie asked Minnie if she minded if she took the plastic sofa in the block lobby. Minnie told Issie that she had no objections. Issie and her two friends in their high heels were halfway up the King’s Road with the sofa when a police van arrived and they were all arrested and taken to Chelsea police station. Issie merrily recounted to me how her rather shocked, pale, girlfriends spoke in low voices to give their names – with titles and grand addresses in Scotland and Wiltshire.
The girls got off with a warning – though Issie mentioned something to me about probation. To her irritation and complaints, I insisted that she put this into her shotgun-licence application form. It proved to be no bar to her getting her shotgun licence.
Issie was not totally faithful to Wolf. At Oxford she had a fling with Tim Hunt, curator for the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts, who later married Tama Janowitz, the author of Slaves of New York. When he and Tama got married, we went to the party they gave in London. Her ‘relationship’ with another Oxford student was even more fleeting. Aghast at learning that he was still a virgin, Issie, ever the fixer, said, ‘Well, we’d better get that sorted’, and promptly sorted it out for him.
Issie also had a casual affair with the gentle son of a Viscount, a brother of one of her schoolfriends. It was a relationship of which her father approved. He knew the family well. From this pleasant man, Issie learnt how to go duck shooting and tread in the divots between polo chukkas. When we were married, Issie would sometimes wonder if she would not have been better off marrying him and settling down to a quiet life.
‘But Issie, would he have married you?’ I would ask. Issie would sigh and think it may have been a possibility – and then we would move quickly on to the next drama in our lives.
To support herself when she was living at Oakley Street, Issie resorted to many odd jobs. She worked at a telephone switchboard, and when she worked as a cleaner with her friend Camilla Uniacke they both dressed up with hankies on her head. Once as a dare she went to a porn magazine and showed them her bosoms but, thankfully, she was not taken on.
The King’s Road played a large part in her life at this time. She drove up and down it in a friend’s blacked-out mini looking at boys and listening to Barry White.
Although Isabella had a punk-inspired look at the time, she was not into the music of punk. Issie went to her first concert aged 19 on 15 July 1978 at Blackbush Airfield in Fleet, Hampshire. ‘The Picnic at Blackbush’, as it was billed, was attended by some 200,000 people. Bob Dylan headlined, with support from Eric Clapton and Joan Armatrading.
I was there too, aged 14. It was my first rock concert and it was the first time I know of that Issie and I were in the same place. I walked the several miles from Fleet railway station to the gig, where I was intrigued by the sight of old hippies frying up sausages for their small children in the sun. This was not what I had expected of a rock concert. I was into punk music. The same year I went to see the Ramones.
After two years together, Wolf told Issie that he did not love her any more. She threw her things together in a tearful scene and moved out of Oakley Street, but, as she told her friend Mosh Gordon-Cumming, who found her sobbing in the Kings Road with a suitcase, ‘she had nowhere to go’.
Issie’s greatest demon – the fear of homelessness – was already hard at work.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nicholas
In early 1980, Isabella fell in love with Nicholas Edward Taylor, a slightly older, mature student, who was studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Merton College, Oxford. Nick was the incredibly handsome third son of Dr Keith Taylor, a lecturer at Oxford University, and Ann Jones, a Physiology don and later lecturer in Biochemistry at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford. Like many of the offspring of Oxford academics, Nicholas attended the Dragon prep school in Oxford.
What threatened to be an entirely conventional British upper-middle-class childhood was transformed in 1963, when Nicholas’s father was offered a job as Professor of Medicine at Stanford in California. After some soul-searching, Nicholas’s mother gave up her job at Oxford, and moved the young family – four brothers and a sister – to Palo Alto, in the San Francisco Bay Area of north California.
The Taylor brothers enthusiastically embraced the entrepreneurial spirit of Californian life. Nick’s elder brother Sebastian became a professional backgammon player, and today both he and the youngest brother, Daniel, are successful financiers.
Nicholas, however, was more academic than his brothers and headed back to Oxford to complete his studies after school. On his return to England he quickly became bored by his conservative contemporaries. He told his friend Robert Murphy, a scholar at Oxford, that he wanted to meet some ‘more exciting’ new people. Robert knew exactly who to introduce Nick to: his elder brother Antony’s friend Isabella, who was constantly flashing her bosoms and at the centre of an exciting, destructive, law-breaking set with, as he puts it, ‘no sense of modesty, decorum, or respect’.
Isabella was without a boyfriend following Wolf’s dramatic announcement that he was no longer in love with her, and Robert’s introduction worked well. Nicholas and Isabella soon became an item. Isabella told me that sex with Nicholas was fantastic.
Flora Fraser, then at Oxford studying for a history degree at Wadham College, knew Nick well because she was living in his parents’ old house in Jericho, which Nick now occupied, renting out spare rooms as student digs. Flora recalls:
When she and Nick went out, I used to hear she did a fabulous striptease after dinner. It was part of her personality at that time. She had a fabulous figure. Her bosoms were generally on show in some way. We were all quite on top of each other and Nick found it difficult working when Issie was around, so one day he suggested she go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at the Kandinskys. She went back again and again, more excited each time.
Nick’s brother Sebastian first met Isabella in the King’s Road in London. It was a darker side of Isabella that he encountered: she was chasing the dragon – smoking heroin in tin foil.
Drugs were a big part of Isabella’s generation, which had been hit from the late 1970s by what her friend Colin Cawdor remembers as a ‘wave of heroin’. Isabella, Wolf and many of their contemporaries were into ‘hard drugs’ – heroin, coke and speed. Isabella was one of the few in her circle not to become addicted, a fact of which she was proud. Issie smoked grass now and then throughout her life, but hated hard drugs.
The Taylor brothers were very handsome and they became popular members of Isabella’s circle, but tragedy was to strike the family. Nicholas’s eldest brother, Mathew, was killed outright riding a motorbike in London, only a short time after qualifying as a doctor. Also travelling on the motorbike was Mathew and Isabella’s friend Cristina Zilkha, a half-French, Harvard-educated lyricist who had success with the dancefloor anthem ‘Disco Clone’. She survived the crash with barely a scratch on her. Cristina said that her life was saved by the protection afforded her by the fur coat she was wearing.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Disposal of Doddington
Around the same time as Isabella was falling in love with Nicholas Taylor, her father, Evelyn, was reorganising his life. Evelyn decided that the time had come to retire after 35 years of farming. He resolved to sell up and move permanently to London. With a family history of over 600 years as landowners, it was a controversial decision, and his friend Major Ormerod and some other Cheshire landowners were dismayed. They let him know that they felt he was letting the collective side down.
But, practically, of course, Evelyn’s reasons made sense. Evelyn was 65 and, with one leg, life in the country was increasingly becoming a struggle for him and Rona. He told the Major that moving to London would enable him to see more of his daughters, but the decision to sell was also bound up with his failure to produce a son and heir. Had Johnny survived, Evelyn’s attitude to the future of Doddington Park would have been very different.
However, when the crunch came, even bottom-line obsessed Evelyn could not bear to cut the ties to Doddington completely. His land agent advised him to retain the profitable farming business and get shot of the big house itself, a liability that was ruinously expensive to maintain. Evelyn, contrary as ever, did the opposite, selling the farmland, the farm units, the 1950s cottages that he had built and the hideous pink house that Isabella had grown up in, for £1.3 million to Malcolm Harrison, who had a successful haulage business in north Staffordshire.
Evelyn retained the Hall, the lake, the castle, the woods he had planted in the 1950s, and 20 Arts and Crafts cottages in the park. The way Doddington was disposed of was an extraordinary decision by Evelyn and a rare example of Evelyn allowing his heart to rule his head. Without a farm to support it, the Hall, boarded up since the school had left, would never be able to pay its way. Evelyn would certainly never be able to afford to live in it again – a fact he implicitly acknowledged by keeping a small black-and-white home for himself and Rona on the estate.
In a bizarre twist of fate, Harrison got into financial difficulties in the early 1990s, and, after Evelyn died, Rona bought back the land from Harrison. She runs the estate as a commercial farm today, spending weekends in Cheshire, and is engaged in a project to restore the Hall, which is still boarded up although the exterior is open for viewing by the public.
Issie’s friend Hugo Guinness told her how lucky she was because now she would be inheriting money instead of property, but for Issie the sale was a cause of great sadness, as the land that she had known and walked over was no longer her family’s. Another root had been cut.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Texas
Evelyn also had an offshore family legacy abroad, which needed sorting out. He was vague to the point of secrecy on the details of this money, but he did reveal that the fund had been badly managed. The real estate had been sold and replaced with high-risk, speculative investments that had largely failed. What could have been worth several million stood at under £100,000, and, to receive anything at all, and escape the hated taxman, the beneficiary had to live permanently abroad.
Isabella, Evelyn decided in typically autocratic fashion, was the most suitable candidate to receive the money. Julia had health problems and Lavinia at 15 was too young, and both of the younger sisters were temperamentally unsuited to exile anyway. And Evelyn made clear that exile was what was involved, warning Issie darkly: ‘I don’t care if you marry a waiter – you have to live abroad. If you return to this country with that money, you will go to prison.’
For Issie, the timing could not have been more propitious. Nick, on the slender basis of a conversation with a stranger on an aeroplane, had decided that he was going to make his fortune by ‘wildcatting’ for oil in Texas. Wildcatting was a highly speculative enterprise, which involved buying the rights to vast tracts of barren land – the kind of places where only wildcats lived – and then drilling, more in hope than expectation of striking oil. Through his father’s professorship at Stanford, Nicholas had the necessary permits to live and work in America. When he got lucky, Nick would tell Isabella as they hatched their plans in pubs and parties in Oxford and London, he would be able to buy back for her the life into which she had been born – a big house in the country, a townhouse in the city and private education for their children.
It was a beguiling fantasy, and in 1981 Nicholas, 26, and Isabella, 22, moved to Midland, Texas, the hot and dusty capital of the west Texas oil fields.
Midland had started as an oil town in the 1920s and still supplies one-fifth of the total oil and gas for the United States. Isabella and Nicholas would have their breakfast at the counter at the local diner next to George W. Bush, who was then running his father’s oil company Arbusto – which means ‘bush’ in Spanish. They rented an apartment in a condo on what Issie described to me as ‘a road with oil juggernauts roaring past, leaving the taste of dust in your mouth’.
As Anna Wintour observed, it is hard to imagine Issie in ‘unfashionable’ Midland, Texas. Issie, who hated being idle, found a job at Guy La Roche in Midland, but oil-rich Midlanders preferred to fly to Paris in their private jets to do their clothes shopping. Issie decided to put the time she had on her hands while minding the empty shop to good use, reading, among many other classics, War and Peace, Les Liaisions Dangereuses, books by the feminist Simone de Beauvoir and the Beatnik poets. In literature, as in all her creative inspirations, Isabella’s enthusiasm for the progressive and the new was balanced and set in context by her knowledge and understanding of what had gone before.
One night, Nicholas telephoned her from an arid corner of Texas, and warned her that unless they got married she was going to be deported. And so, on 22 April 1981, Issie, wearing a T-shirt and Fiorucci jeans, went to the town hall with Nicholas and were married by the sheriff. The sheriff tried to kiss Isabella. She slapped him and went home, got drunk on champagne and telephoned home to tell her parents what she had done. Her furious mother told her ‘Isabella you were a pain when you were born and you are a pain now.’
Evelyn was kinder. He bought Isabella a pair of aquamarine and diamond earrings and noted her marriage in Debrett’s and Who’s Who. When we were getting married eight years later, Issie criticised her father for making these entries without her permission.
It was far removed from the romantic church wedding she had dreamed of and expected for marriage.
Isabella always insisted that she had not been married ‘in the eyes of God’, and that it was a ‘visa wedding’, but she was clearly in love with Nicholas. Thanks to his fantastic appearance and physique, Issie also regarded him as good genetic stock for children, which she wanted desperately.
But they were not ready. Isabella told me that she had one abortion when she was with Nick and that a second time she became pregnant the foetus aborted naturally. But to her old friend Emily Dashwood in England, who she would call out of the blue from Texas, sometimes in tears, she said she had 10 abortions. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Later in England, working at Tatler, she would confide in her friend the writer Mary Killen, a doctor’s daughter, her sadness and regret about her abortions. When Issie and I became engaged, Issie had herself checked out and told me everything was OK. But she didn’t go into details and I always sensed a niggling doubt about her own fertility, despite the beautiful baby clothes she bought and stored in cupboards in readiness for the happy day that would never come. By another coincidence a cousin of mine had a cottage in Sussex next door to Nicholas’s father, Dr Keith Taylor. Dr Taylor told my cousin that Isabella could never have children.
I suspect Dr Taylor formed this opinion because while in Texas, Isabella had a serious case of Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the intestines. She was operated on and had 18 inches of her perforated intestines removed. From then on, her friend Natasha Grenfell remembered, her famous stripteases involved carefully shrouding with material the 18-inch scar on her stomach.
But away from the sadness of the abortions, there was a glamorous, petrodollar-fuelled side to Texan life that Issie enjoyed immensely. While Nick went off for weeks on end, covering vast expanses of Texan desert in his hunt for oil, Isabella visited places like the enormous King Ranch, the largest ranch in America, which extended to a million acres. She had Uncle Shimi to thank for her introduction to King Ranch, and she also had contacts from her friend Lucy’s father Patrick Helmore, who insured racehorses for a number of Texan owners. Soon Isabella was flying around Texas on private jets visiting the homes of wealthy Texans, pretending to admire their collections of crystal animals and having her nails and hair done by manicurists and hairdressers who were drafted into these opulent and unrestrained homes by the day.
The wealth generated by the American oil boom in America in the eighties was staggering and Issie and Nick wanted a slice of it.
But it was not to be.
‘All Nick ever found was few rusty old coke tins,’ Issie said.
By March 1983, the love affair with Texas, which she had taken to describing as a ‘den of doom’, was definitely over. She and Nick made plans to head to New York and Issie was ‘over the moon’.
She would need some new armour for New York, however. She asked a friend back home to send over her ‘Piero de Monzi skirt’ and ‘insure it for £150,000’.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
