Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (21 page)

O
ur hearts sank when we saw it. Number 230 Edna Street was a painfully ordinary two-story row house with a bay window and minuscule front garden. England is full of such houses. They are the epitome of British respectability.

Biddie and I had not come to London to be respectable or ordinary. That was the whole point. We had come to London to have a smashing time and wear outrageously groovy
clobber
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and to lounge on floor pillows with the Beautiful People while eating lotuses and guzzling champers.
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Number 230 Edna Street was not what we had in mind.

But we didn’t have much choice. Rental apartments were in short supply. And, delusions of grandeur aside, we knew we were lucky to get it.

We would just have to make it extraordinary.

The humble, unprovocative exterior could not be changed. We would have to ignore it or, better yet, throw it into sharp contrast. That was it! Instead of capitulating to the crushing ordinariness of the exterior, we would fight it tooth and nail. We would create a dazzlingly dissonant interior. We would create a cesspool of unmitigated decorative excess.

First stop: Biddie’s boudoir.

We began by tenting the ceiling with miles of navy and purple polyester satin. We cut the fabric in lengths and gathered them into the center of the room, forming a giant sphincter. This confluence of fabric was secured around the top of a crappy brass Moroccan light fixture. The rich swathes of synthetic satin were then stapled to the perimeter picture rail. The fullness billowed down, evoking the ceiling of a Bedouin tent. The walls were then draped with synthetic moirés and brocades, window display fabrics “borrowed” from my various places of employ. Mirrors were interspersed among the fabrics to create the illusion of infinite space. The concept was inspired by Léon Bakst’s famous design for the Ballets Russes
production of
Scheherazade.
With my staple gun and Biddie’s soft-furnishings experience, we did Diaghilev proud.

In the middle of the room, upon mounds of nylon-lamé-covered cushions and tasseled throws, lay Scheherazade herself, a.k.a. Biddie. Here he lolled for hours, listening to Yma Sumac
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records, making phone calls in a regal kind of way, and trying to pretend that he could not hear the traffic from Battersea High Street in the distance.

Happy Harry was always within arm’s reach. Time had not been kind to Happy Harry. His bow tie was missing, his suit was food-stained, and there was a hairline crack in his skull. With this loss of looks came a loss of power: He no longer had the ability to make me question my sanity.

The floor pillow, which seemed quite pedestrian in this exotic environment, was plonked next to the bed. Biddie now used it as a vide-poche, valet, and nightstand.

In the four corners of the room, sitting upon gold-painted Styrofoam columns, were four large, shiny blackamoor statues. They were Vac-U-Form plastic and weighed about two ounces each. These “antiquities” came from a window display at the Wallis shop on Oxford Street. Armfuls of peacock feathers, from a window display at Aquascutum on Regent Street, shot out of the tops of their heads like exploding volcanoes.

Biddie initiated much of this insanity. My contribution was
the props. I was a busy window dresser with access to all kinds of tchotchkes and geegaws, which we enthusiastically funneled into our abode.

The prop-filled bathroom was inspired by our time at Butlins. A whole Tippi Hedren
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of fake birds of various sizes—lifelike rubber parakeets and evil-looking egrets—dangled from the ceiling on monofilament. All other surfaces were covered in bright green Astroturf. The bath was surrounded by ramparts of plastic flowers.

These rooms prompted us to stage endless photo sessions, the results of which I have preserved for posterity. I pore over them once in a while and marvel at our highbrow-lowbrow theatrical chutzpah. Here’s me, dancing through Biddie’s room dressed up as Nijinsky. There’s Biddie as Ophelia, drowning in the bathtub in a filmy negligee and a long auburn wig. Here’s me and Biddie in a Versailles tableau: he’s in a pale blue chintz eighteenth-century court gown, which we made from a bolt of fabric we found under the stairs, and I’m dressed as his blackamoor, looking not unlike the window display props in Biddie’s bedroom.

Within a relatively short period of time we had succeeded in creating our own alternative universe. As with the Malaysian Simulator, it was a place where we always felt happy and squishy and safe. We kept reality at bay by never reading newspapers and never acquiring a TV.

This living diorama of hokey costumes and staple-gunned sets was the ultimate defense against the horrors of the world
and, more important, the gritty ordinariness of our working-class neighborhood. On the adjacent high street, in the cold light of day, grim-faced housewives with dangling cigarettes scowled at us disapprovingly and shopkeepers frequently addressed Biddie, with a “Good morning, madame—oops, I mean, sir!” In the evening, when we got dolled up for a night on the town, gangs of horrid youths would chase us down the street, forcing us to escape onto double-decker buses which were headed in the opposite of our intended direction. Thank God we had our Red Rover bus passes! But more on those later.

We were not the only nellies in the neighborhood. Far from it. There was, coincidentally, another window dresser living upstairs, a soigné gentleman d’un certain age. He, to his everlasting regret, was the acquaintance who had alerted us about this apartment when it had fallen vacant.

This upstairs window dresser, a former civil servant, trimmed the window displays at various genteel Bond Street emporiums. He was good-looking and charming, and despite his age, enjoyed the attentions of a handsome live-in lover, who was considerably his junior.

The upstairs window dresser augmented his window-dressing income with money earned from regular photographic modeling assignments. With his elegant manners and waxed mustache, he represented an archetype which has all but disappeared but was, back then, a staple of advertising imagery: I refer to the
sophisticated older gentleman.

He was the man with the graying temples—a colonel, a bishop, or a butler pouring Tio Pepe into guests’ glasses. There he was again, enjoying a cigarillo, or helping a silver-haired,
bitchy-looking lady into a white mink stole as they both contemplated their gleaming new Bentley. The upstairs window dresser played his roles with aplomb. He had a posh, snooty air, which was perfect for marketing the
finer things of life.

The upstairs window dresser kept all his old display props in a shed in our backyard. We loved to watch him rummaging through his extensive repertoire in search of inspiration. There was nothing radical or avant-garde about his displays. They were both wildly appropriate and relentlessly seasonal: autumn leaves, spring blossoms, Easter lilies, et cetera. We could track the seasons by watching his activities. We did not really believe that summer was over until we saw him dragging out that sack of plastic acorns and that stuffed squirrel.

Though his displays were rather predictable, the upstairs window dresser’s apartment was exquisite and unbelievably chic. He had Jacobean side tables and Fornasetti plates. There were no plastic blackamoors plonked around his bed. He would never have dreamt of incorporating display props into his residential decor.

We were the opposite.
All
of my window displays—every single prop and ostrich feather—went straight into our house, elevating each room to new heights of excess and cheesiness.

Nowhere was the window dresser’s “Art” more shamefully evident than in my own room. While Biddie’s room recalled the glories of Byzantium, mine evoked the decadent opium dens of nineteenth-century China.

I covered the walls in raging red Chinois wallpaper and slapped red gloss paint on everything I could get my paws on.
To finish it off, I hung an oversize red and gold paper Chinese lantern from the ceiling.

The light was on most of the time because I never opened the curtains.

The other houses in Edna Street had net curtains which were swagged back, proudly displaying decorating styles which, with the exception of the upstairs window dresser’s, recalled the frowzy mod interior of Doreen Biddlecombe’s parlor.

Though my room faced directly onto the sidewalk of Edna Street, I was determined to deny the fact. I draped and swagged that front window to within an inch of its life, blotting out the painful reality which lurked on the other side.

Rather than bother with all the usual rails and hooks and curtain rods, I took a shortcut. I
glued
the curtains in place. Taking my trusty glue gun, I dribbled hot glue along the wall and the top of the window frame. And then I glued them in place. Burgundy crushed velvet they were, discarded from a tailor-shop window display on Saville Row.

“By the year 2000 everyone will be hanging their drapes like this,” I cackled as I hacked and adhered my magnificent curtains into place in under twenty minutes. To hide the enormity of my crime, I hot-glued some additional whooshes of fabric along the top. This not only hid the blobs of glue and the raw edges but added an instant—albeit somewhat un-Chinese—baroque flourish.

One day our landlord, a nice man who lived in fancy Chelsea digs across the river, stopped by to collect the rent. He took one look at my glue-gunned curtains and let out a
high-pitched, piglike sound. He turned pale and then puce. “All fur coat and no knickers. That’s what you two are!”

I was taken aback. We were very proud of our relentlessly overdecorated pad, and quite certain that nowhere else in London offered a greater contrast between the outside and the inside.

He stared at my glue-gunned drapes and looked at me as if I was the Antichrist.

“All fur coat and no knickers!”

This stinging indictment of me and my drapes was not of his own creation. It is a fairly common U.K. expression, used to describe a person whose flashy façade hides a multitude of stylistic and moral deficiencies.

The grieving, confused landlord then turned his attention to the toilet, now Afro-themed and covered in snakeskin wallpaper. The flush was operated with the aid of a dangling Tarzan vine. Inventive though our decor might have been, it could not distract the landlord from the rust-stained toilet bowl. He yanked back the raffia blind which covered the tiny window of our toilet. A shaft of unforgiving light penetrated our fantasy world.

“Look at the filth!” he gasped.

After one more “all fur coat and no knickers!” he left, crunching off down the gravel path.

He was right. It was filthy. We had neither the money for a cleaning lady nor the inclination to do the job ourselves. Our incentive to clean was zero. None of our guests ever commented on the dirt. Our excessive decor rendered the subject irrelevant.

Biddie and I justified our aversion to housework by quoting Quentin Crisp, the famously blue-rinsed bohemian who lived across the river in Fulham. Mr. Crisp in his autobio
The Naked Civil Servant
advised against becoming a slave to cleanliness: “After four years the dust doesn’t get any worse.”

Number 230 Edna Street was a monument to this terrible truism.

Even if we’d had the inclination to clean, we had no time. We were much too busy being fabulous. Biddie and his new singing partner, a voluptuous redhead called Eve Ferrett, had become a fixture on the London scene, specializing in campy standards and retro costumes. They had even appeared on TV.

Eve was busty and glam and had garnered the attention of the press with the aid of two stuffed ferrets—a not very oblique reference to her name—which accompanied her everywhere. The ferrets had wheels attached to their feet and long sticks attached to their bejeweled collars. The sticks gave the illusion of straining leashes and enabled Eve to trundle them in front of her wherever she went. Eve’s concept was a low-rent version of those Art Deco statuettes which depict a lady in a cloche hat being pulled along by two elegant greyhounds.