Vanished Years (29 page)

‘Things like what?’

‘Things about my cock. It’s inappropriate.’

‘This is making me really wet,’ squirmed Issie, ecstatically.

‘Oh yeah?’ said Basquiat.

‘Oh yeah,’ she replied, imitating his lethargic black accent. ‘It’s not just the big black cock,’ she said, addressing the rest of the table

‘Oh, isn’t it?’

‘There has to be talent,’ she went on, winking at Andy. ‘I
love
your work. It really gives me a hard-on.’

‘A hard-on, huh?’

‘Yeah.’ (The terrible impersonation again.) ‘A big hard-on.’

‘Awww, Issie.’

Through eyes like cracks, Jean-Michel surveyed Isabella from the feet up, lingering first on the thighs, then the cleavage, before coming to rest on the infamous mouth. That mouth snapped shut like an oyster, aware that it was being scrutinised, either with a ‘tongue sandwich’ (hopefully) in view, or more likely, for reproduction at a later date on canvas. (I’m sure if you sift through the Basquiats of this period, you will find various little monsters with Isabella teeth.) Their two faces were very close. It was a moment of drama, and we all leant in. Was he going to snog her, right here, in front of everyone? Just for a second, she was speechless.

‘Hi,’ was all she could muster, as those lips she had eulogised for months came within suction radius. Her own lips quivered, straining towards the unattainable goal. Andy got his camera out and
flash
, another moment was engraved for posterity.

Clubs are worlds of their own. Shabby black rooms by day, lit by neon, in which a throbbing crowd of third-world cleaners dance to the drone of the vacuum cleaner, clambering over the revellers’ debris, decked out in overalls and rubber gloves, unblocking toilets filled with last night’s various excretions. Little by little the ambience begins to change. Deliveries are made. Bars are stocked. Glasses are polished. Some mafia moll accountant bimbo who knows where the skeletons are buried waddles in with cash and change for the tills. The owner arrives in the afternoon to examine the books. The lights and music are checked, briefly throwing this shanty dwelling into its star-spangled cloak of night.

Finally, as the evening draws in, the busboys, the bouncers and the barmaids arrive, the glitter ball is turned on, and the magic roundabout is off again, empty and ghostly for the time being, but
still magically transformed from the morning’s ugly warehouse, with its damp, peeling walls and threadbare carpets, into a kind of time capsule, a sovereign state, a world of its own with alternative leaders, stars, police, markets and schools; a kingdom where reality is held at bay by the muscular arms of the bouncer and a velvet rope.

If you became a proper clubber, particularly in those final days of the New York Empire, when people went out every night from dinner or a disco nap, that particular peeling warehouse became a part of your identity. It was where you lost yourself, or at least your virginity. Billionaires danced with bent cops. Trannies swapped beauty tips with game hags from Dun & Bradstreet. Stars from the real world left their crowns outside. They were more down to earth in those days. They didn’t arrive in a phalanx of security guards, as they do today, shoved through the crowds like a battering ram, trampling underfoot the fans they pretend to love. (I remember going out one night with Cher, just after she had won the Oscar. Feeling jet-lagged, I wanted to leave. ‘Fine, babe,’ she said, pecking me on the cheek. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ And without a word she swayed off to the dance floor and disappeared into the crowd.)

Movie and rock royalty were still stars inside the disco planet, but no more so than the club stars themselves, that strange array of ‘ordinary’ people whose extreme looks or habits or dance moves set them apart, and without whom a night could not be complete, could never be ‘one of those nights’. These characters were, still are, like the old stars of Vaudeville or the circus, music-hall acts once loved, fêted, on kissing terms with kings, or at least Jackie O, but instantly forgotten. A club scene dwindles, another epoch ends and the clubber, with a reluctant sigh, moves back to the ordinary world, only to be remembered years later in cosy conversations of reminiscence, or because of some terrible misfortune. ‘Do you remember that awful guy John X? Well, you’ll never guess! She was stabbed sixty-eight times by that Moroccan number she forced to go and live with her in the country.’

Area was my club. The invitation to its opening was a pill like an Alka-Seltzer, which when put in water bubbled up into an invitation.

Isabella and I fell out. In her flat one night, I borrowed her diamond brooch. I was a terrible magpie in those days. She gave it to me reluctantly. Poor Isabella, she could never say no. That was a part of her tragedy.

‘I can’t believe I’m giving this to you.’ She laughed, honking and smoking to cover up her anxiety as she handed over the jewel. Of course I lost it. It flew off my lapel onto the dance floor at Area later that night, never to be found. Isabella was furious, but since she was unable to confront – behind the back was the only position from which she dared to fuck you – I never took her very seriously when she asked me to reimburse her, particularly since I was flat broke at the time.

‘Oh God, don’t worry about it, then,’ she said with droopy eyes and a sigh, meaning ‘Give me back my fucking brooch.’ But I wasn’t much of a linguist in those days.

Months later I paid her back, but she never forgot.

She moved back to England. I moved to France. At first she went to work for Michael Roberts at
Tatler
. It was a successful union, but then she landed a job in one of the crustiest institutions in the country. She became fashion editor of the
Sunday Times
and everything took off, exploded in fact. As usual Isabella was in the right place at the wrong time

The
Sunday Times
was no longer a club of brilliant eccentrics harbouring such stately galleons as Violet Wyndham, James Fox, Mark Boxer and Bruce Chatwin. Now it was a snitty, petty, rather common institution, and try as she might, or might not – the energy of her interest waxed and waned with the moon – Isabella was never going to fit in. The
Sunday Times
of the late eighties was a worthy institution of faceless bores, and she was constantly undermined, ‘gaslit by them, actually’, she always said. They all pretended to like
her, but actually they couldn’t stand her.

Pretty soon she was a fully developed fashion freak, complicated, bitchy, treacherous and incredibly funny. She had developed some bad habits in America. The extravagance of Condé Nast was anathema to the penny-pinching world of the
Sunday Times
. What did Isabella care? Wads of fifty-pound notes were crammed into extraordinary bird’s nest clutch bags. Whether they were hers or just petty cash was not of the least interest to Isabella, as she gaily paid for lunch for sixteen, snorting with laughter as she unscrunched the cash from various pockets and purses.

‘There goes the whole budget for this month. God, I’m naughty.’

She developed a talent for talent. She found marvellous photographers, beautiful girls, fey Etonians, Philip Treacy and finally Alexander McQueen, at which point she became extremely grand, which was perhaps a mistake, because even though she was credited with all these discoveries, she was not Christopher Columbus. In fact, she was living in a world that didn’t particularly appreciate her medieval value system or aesthetic. The age of chivalry was over, and so Isabella lived on a knife edge, always homeless, or about to be evicted, always broke but addicted to spending. In the nineteenth century she would have ended her days in a debtors’ prison. In the twenty-first the final act was played out in an asylum.

O
ne beautiful spring afternoon in 2007 I was on my way to visit Issie in a run-down National Health mental institution somewhere in Victoria, the name of which eludes me. (In fact, I went to look for it the other day, and got lost and confused in that maze of identical mansion blocks behind the cathedral, streets of madness, one leading back into another, until I finally gave up the search. Maybe it disappeared with Isabella, a fortress in a myth where the spell had been broken.) It was one of those large ugly hangovers of nineteenth-century health, built in smog-caked yellow brick that reminded one of iron lungs, padded cells, polio and sleepy sickness. If you shut your eyes, you could still hear the screams of the insane as they were pinned down and subjected to those gigantic charges of electricity that Isabella had become partial to. (Now, they give them to you when you are unconscious. Then, it took four people to hold a patient down.)

The hospital overlooked a small park, which was sandwiched between the backs of three streets. It was throbbing with spring that day. Beds of daffodils and red tulips swayed in the breeze on the freshly mown lawn. Builders sprawled on the grass drinking beer, half
naked and paint-splattered. Secretaries ate sandwiches in little neat groups. Mothers sat on benches dozing with an eye half open as their kids played in the sun.

It was the first hot day, and we all looked like ghosts, emerging from another dark wet winter. There is nothing like that first warm afternoon in spring in London. There was a palpable release of tension in the air, as if the earth was yawning and stretching, its grassy breath dusty and metallic perhaps, but elixir to us Londoners, weaned on exhaust fumes and rain. I sat down on a bench and closed my eyes. I had been out all night and was toxic and exhausted. The muted roar of the traffic, the screams of delighted children, and the sun bringing my dead skin back to life, lulled me into a trance from which I suddenly woke to find the park empty.

Hours must have gone by because the shadows had grown long. A girl in high heels stalked across the grass, singing. She held a bouquet of flowers in her arms and disappeared inside the hospital. Perhaps it was Posh Spice visiting La Blow. You never knew with Isabella. I looked up at the dirty Gothic windows of the asylum and couldn’t help smiling at the thought. Somewhere in there, dressed for a beggars’ ball, lipstick smeared across her mouth and teeth, sat Isabella, wondering already if all this was real or an illusion, when suddenly Posh Spice spins into the room.

I girded myself but remained rooted to my bench. Isabella was recovering from another half-hearted suicide attempt. A few weeks ago she had thrown herself from a bridge onto the motorway, breaking both ankles in the process, but still, unfortunately, very much alive.

‘Actually it was a footbridge,’ corrected Nicky Haslam, who always knew about these things. We were having lunch when the news broke. ‘According to Detmar, she held onto the railings as she jumped, so she only slid actually, if you want the real truth. She wouldn’t have broken her feet if she hadn’t been wearing silly heels.’

Nicky never had much time for her. Either way it was not the first time that Isabella had tried to kill herself.

One evening, a year earlier, she had taken a Condé Nast car and ploughed in it through a stormy night with a bemused driver, whom she entertained on the drive with her whole life’s story, including, rather imprudently, its planned grand finale, to Cheshire, in order to drown herself in the lake of her childhood home. (Isabella’s sense of drama was always impeccable. It was in this very lake that her only brother had drowned forty years previously.) Exhausted by the journey, she booked into a hotel, giving the driver enough time to alert the police. So that attempt was thwarted, as she was dragged to a police car and hauled off to another rehab. But the cards were on the table. Isabella wanted to be taken seriously, even if she wasn’t quite serious herself. Everyone was held to ransom.

Then she tried again, but this time she crashed her car into the back of an ambulance and was rushed straight to hospital. It may have been an unlucky throw in Snakes and Ladders, but she got the maximum mileage from it (if not from the car, which was totalled). She had us all eating out of the palm of her hand. She was mesmerising in her madness, sweeter and funnier than she had ever been before, brutally honest or dishonest, depending on the occasion, or on how mad she was feeling.

That madness looked like acting to me. Perhaps I have a warped view, but once you become an actor, a strange thing happens. Everything begins to look like acting. Isabella’s had gone out of control. She had nurtured the mad streak inside herself and now it had swamped her. Life became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t mean that Isabella didn’t have serious issues to combat. She did. She was abandoned by her evil father from beyond the grave, which was a terrible trick, but the drama she made of the calamity, the Chekhovian heroine she delightedly created out of it, corseted, deranged, was sheer theatre. This performance electrified us all, at dinner tables, at fashion week, in taxis, or in a sleepless night ill-advisedly sharing a bed, as she rabbited on until dawn, dressed in couture riddled with cigarette burns, hat fixed askew, mad with boredom.

‘I’m so bored I’m going to shoot myself.’

Bang
. She shot herself in the foot. Time after time. She had a brilliant capacity to describe her condition. ‘I think I turned the colour up too high on the TV and the knob broke.’ The picture flared, blurred and compressed into a kaleidoscope of horrific images, like homelessness, that spiralled slowly into each other, as she watched speechless (some hope) through the eyepiece. Equally, when Alexander McQueen did not invite her to go with him to Givenchy as his official muse, her operatic reaction to the scandal made it impossible for her ever to turn back. Doors slammed behind her as she ran towards her doom, like Caroline Lamb, stalking the ballrooms of Mayfair, cutting her wrists in front of everyone and getting amazing attention from it.

Now she was addicted to electric shock treatment and, for a while, each time she had it she was briefly rendered functional. High and jangly, perhaps, charged, literally, with electricity, but she clattered on, rushing out, organising trips and dinners. The batteries soon wore out, and she broke down again. The bridge came after the latest power cut.