Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (22 page)

Designer Mary Quant and her future husband, Alexander Plunket Greene, had opened Bazaar, a boutique on the King’s Road, in Chelsea, in 1955. By 1960 Quant was designing for the shop. She is often credited with inventing the miniskirt. In fact, it started on the streets. But without doubt Bazaar was the launching pad that put the mini—and the whole youth-driven sixties look—into orbit. When Quant came to America in 1959, she was the advance guard of what was, five years later, after the Beatles, deemed the British Invasion. Following in her footsteps came more designers who ignored the directives emanating from the Paris couture and instead took their lead from London’s kids.

For his part, David Bailey had no intention of getting into fashion. “It was just a way of breaking into photography,” he explained. “I didn’t really mind what I did. In fact, my first portfolio didn’t have any fashion in it.” But dur
ing his eleven months working for French, Bailey began to be published in
Woman’s Own
magazine and, every Thursday, on the fashion page of the
Daily Express
, where French’s work had often appeared. Bailey had become a fashion photographer in spite of himself. Late in 1959 he signed on to shoot for
Vogue
’s front-of-the-book “shophound” pages.

If he hadn’t already discovered the perks of fashion photography, he did then. “The only reason I ever did fashion was because of girls,” he admitted in 1989. “It was the gates of heaven. But I only wanted to photograph girls I liked. I had to have some sense of being with them or it wasn’t interesting.” And it was particularly interesting when they went to bed with him. “A model doesn’t have to sleep with a photographer, but it helps,” Bailey said.

Photographers everywhere had already begun evolving the language of fashion photography, seeking a new reality and naturalism within its artificial confines. But by 1960 British magazines were leading the way.
Queen
, recently purchased by a brilliant editor named Jocelyn Stevens, was using Parkinson and Antony Armstrong-Jones, who soon married Princess Margaret and became Lord Snowdon. Meanwhile,
Man About Town
, a men’s fashion trade magazine also being revived by new owners, took on England’s new angry young men, Donovan, Bailey, and their third musketeer, Brian Duffy.

A graduate of London’s prestigious St. Martin’s School of Art, Duffy had spent the fifties in the antiques business, before becoming a fashion designer. He started taking pictures in 1959 and immediately became part of the “new group of violently heterosexual butch boys,” he said. “We didn’t just treat models as clothes horses. We emphasized the fact that there were women inside the clothes. They started to look real.”

While the Terribles were learning their trade, Jean Shrimpton was doing the same at Lucie Clayton’s modeling school. “I was as green as a spring salad,” she remembered, when she took the train to London for her first day there. She was seated next to Celia Hammond in class. For four weeks they and their classmates learned to sit, stand, walk, paint their faces, and do their hair. They also learned tricks of the trade, like what a model was still expected to carry to sittings in the early sixties: stockings in various shades; jewelry; strapless, flattening, and bust-enhancing bras; a waist cincher; slips; shoes; gloves; hair ribbons, hairpieces, and hairstyling tools; makeup and brushes; rubber bands and bobby pins.

On graduation day the top graduates of the class, including Hammond and Shrimpton, were photographed for the
Evening News
striding happily down
Bond Street. The next day, armed with a new photographic composite and a list of thirty photographers, Shrimpton started her career. But she lacked both a look and confidence. In fact, by late 1960 she’d run through all her money as well as loans from her mother and from Lucie Clayton.

Finally the awkward, saucer-eyed Shrimpton was booked for a
Vogue Patterns
sitting after another model failed to turn up. Those pictures in hand, she climbed another rung on the ladder and got a job with John French. Late in 1960 Shrimpton was working with Brian Duffy in a London studio when a gorgeous black-eyed man in jeans introduced himself. David Bailey had left John French’s employ only three months before. But he was already acting superior toward “new” models.

“Come back in six months,” he told Shrimpton, she has recalled.

“God, Duffy, I wouldn’t mind a slice of that one,” Bailey once remembered saying after she left.

“Forget it,” Duffy replied. “She’s too posh for you. You’d never get your leg across that one.” Bailey bet he would bed her, and three months later, he’s claimed, they were shacking up.

Shrimpton has remembered what followed their first meeting somewhat differently. She recalls working with Duffy again, on a Kellogg’s cereal ad shot on the roof of
Vogue
’s offices on London’s Hanover Square. Bailey popped onto the set, supposedly to see if her eyes were as blue as advertised. “He rather fancied me,” she thought. He later agreed that he’d found the girl of his dreams in Shrimpton.

He was twenty-three. Shrimpton was eighteen. There was only one roadblock to commencing a relationship. Bailey had just married a typist. So Shrimpton held out for a month as their uncommon courtship commenced. Finally she succumbed, and they made love for the first time in a park up the road from Shrimpton’s parents’ house. The experience was “quite awful,” she recalled. “I was miserable…. But our lives seemed to be inexorably entwined. I was becoming his model….”

Later Shrimpton was called Trilby to Bailey’s sulky Svengali. “Bailey created the Jean Shrimpton look,” she admitted. “I owe everything that I am as a model to David Bailey.” She was a gawky urchin, the image of innocence lost sometime in about the last ten seconds. And in creating and propagating that look, she and Bailey became the archetypes of a new breed of fashion photographers and models. By letting the heat of their sexual relationship into their pictures, by letting their models seem touchable, indeed, by merely admitting the possibility of a sexual relationship between model and photog
rapher, they transformed themselves into fashion’s first real celebrities outside fashion. Things were never the same again.

A new generation was taking over the world of style, not only in London but all over the world. Suffering in part from the supremacy of
Harper’s Bazaar
, Condé Nast’s company, owned by British financiers for decades and then sold to a British tabloid publisher, had been losing half a million dollars a year. In 1959 it was sold to S. I. Newhouse, an American newspaper publisher. Shortly thereafter he bought the oldest magazine publisher in America, Street and Smith. Newhouse folded its
Charm
magazine into Nast’s
Glamour
to cut costs and competition but decided to continue publishing its
Mademoiselle
, which had a different audience.

In 1962 Alexander Liberman was promoted from art director of
Vogue
to editorial director of all the Condé Nast magazines, and one of his first moves was to lure Diana Vreeland away from
Bazaar
. Hired as
Vogue
’s fashion editor for “a very large salary, an endless expense account … and Europe whenever I wanted to go,” she recalled, Vreeland rose to editor in chief in January 1963, replacing Edna Chase’s stodgy successor, Jessica Daves, who fought against Vreeland’s innovations until the bitter end of her career.

“Boy, was I in the greatest seat at the greatest hour of the greatest time,” Vreeland said. “The year of the jet, the Pill. A completely different social world was being created.” Although the Terrible Trio was in the lead, a new generation of photographers was coming into its own all over the world, most of them dancing to what Bailey called the sexual rhythm of snapping 35 mm camera shutters. Helmut Newton, a German who started working on Australian
Vogue
, settled in Paris in 1962 and began taking provocative and unsettling pictures for
Queen
and British
Vogue
. Jeanloup Sieff was flying in from France, where he’d begun working for
Elle
in 1955. Americans like Sol Leiter, Art Kane, Jerry Schatzberg, Bill King, and Bert Stern were part of the movement, too. But the center of all the heat and light was London, and Bailey, Duffy, Donovan, and their models were the brightest of the city’s bright young things. The Terribles worked together (sometimes even secretly shooting one another’s assignments) and played together as well, at night spots like Héléne Cordet’s Saddle Room, where Shrimpton learned to do the twist, and at the Ad Lib, the center of pop society.

“There was always something happening after the day’s work was done,” Shrimpton has written. “None of the photographers went home to their wives.” When Shrimpton’s parents objected to her carrying on with a married
man, she moved out and was taken in by photographer Eric Swain and
his
wife. Soon, though, Bailey, Shrimpton, and his twenty finches and budgerigars moved into a flat of their own on London’s Primrose Hill. Her father stopped speaking to her for a year, but that wasn’t the last shock the Shrimptons had to endure. Not long after Jean started seeing Bailey, her mother walked into her younger daughter Chrissie’s bedroom and found
her
boyfriend, Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, sleeping there.

For young Terry Donovan, moving into an apartment of his own was one of the great moments of his life. “Nobody
ever
had a flat,” he says. “The only shagging that took place was up against a wall!” Now, suddenly, not only did he have a place to shag (cockney slang for having sex), but he had an endless supply of beautiful women who were eager to shag along with him. Fashion photography “
was
a good way of getting a crumpet,” Donovan recalls, laughing. “I mean, Bailey and I shagged ourselves absolutely senseless in those days. It was fun, but it wasn’t the kind of vicious scoring thing. It was like being a chocoholic in a chocolate factory. I mean, everywhere you went there were fucking women strobing past!”

Harry King, a hairdresser who began his career in London in the late sixties, recalls working on one of his first jobs with Brian Duffy, shooting the Paris collections for the
Sunday Telegraph Colour Magazine
. “
Vogue
and
Bazaar
had the luxury of getting clothes right away,” King says. “We had to wait all night. Duffy kept taking [the model] in back, fucking her. Every time a dress arrived, he’d be pulling up his pants and she’d need her hair done again.”

Donovan insists that despite their promiscuous image, all the Terrible Trio
really
cared about was taking pictures. “We were photographic nutcases,” he says. “We would walk the streets of Paris for eight hours, talking about f-stops. I used to do four assignments a day. Work, work, work. We were out every day, year after year, here, America, Paris, Rome, photographing.”

In 1961 British
Vogue
had asked Bailey to shoot a regular feature called “Young Idea.” The idea was to pair a model with brash new British celebrities like David Frost, Dudley Moore and his partner, Peter Cook, and the hot young haircutter Vidal Sassoon.
Vogue
’s fashion editor, Lady Clare Rendlesham, wanted to use a French model, Nicole de la Margé, who’d become the visual spirit of
Elle
magazine in Paris, but Bailey insisted on his new girlfriend, and he prevailed. After it was published,
Vogue
asked Shrimpton and Bailey to take the “Young Idea” to New York early in 1962. Bailey’s photos of Shrimpton on a city street corner, in a Harlem market, and in a telephone booth are among his most memorable images.

“England has arrived!” declaimed Diana Vreeland when Bailey and Shrimpton turned up at her
Vogue
office. They’d both gotten soaked with rain while trying to hail a taxi, and Shrimpton’s makeup had run all over her face; but Vreeland nonetheless declared them “adorable.” Said Shrimpton: “We both knew we had it made.”

Inevitably they began attracting attention. In 1963 Bailey’s wife filed for divorce. Shrimpton was named as the other woman. “Which, of course, I was,” she said. That didn’t bother her. What did bother her was the nickname the tabloids gave her: The Shrimp. “Shrimps are horrible pink things that get their heads pulled off,” she said.

The pressures of being the most beautiful of the beautiful began to take their toll. Charming off the set, Bailey could be brutal on it. He hated fashion editors and stylists, rarely let them on his sets, and sometimes reduced them to tears. He did the same to Shrimpton. “Sexless ratbag!” he screamed at her. “You should never have come down from the treetops.” Years later he proudly admitted that he was awful to everyone. “I pioneered badness. I did diabolical things. Awful. Terrible. I had this compulsion to push forward all the time…. I was trying to create a mood and see the whole image and I had to cope with these women with no visual sense, getting hysterical about some amusin’ little seam.”

Bailey, at least, had something to aim for. At twenty-one Shrimpton was as good as she was ever going to get and was bored. Although Bailey encouraged her to work with other photographers—at least with those he approved of—she started to feel that their relationship was limiting her career.

Nonetheless, early in 1964 Bailey and Shrimpton announced their engagement. The wedding was to be held after another trip to New York. But feeling she needed time to herself, Shrimpton flew ahead alone. When Bailey arrived two weeks later, Shrimpton found herself avoiding him. Then a peripheral member of their crowd, the movie star Terence Stamp, turned up in New York. Discovering she was attracted not only to him but also to a
Bazaar
photographer she was working with, named Mel Sokolsky,
and
to Sokolsky’s partner, Jordan Kalfus, who was then living with their assistant, Ali MacGraw (who later became a model, a movie star, and Mrs. Steve McQueen), Shrimpton decided to break up with Bailey. So when Stamp asked her to visit him on a film set in Los Angeles, she said, “shabby or not, I was going.” Within days she was madly in love, informed Eileen Ford she was “booking out,” and moved in with Stamp in L.A.