FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (25 page)

For others,
Nova
was/is iconic: to this day when I tell people of a certain age that I worked there, they look at me with new respect – even reverence – and issues of ‘vintage'
Nova
s can now fetch eighty quid on eBay, not a bad return on 3
s
6
d
or 4
s
a copy, which was what it cost.

I could never imagine why Dennis Hackett was on a women's magazine at all – he was a newspaperman, originally from Yorkshire, charismatic and plain-speaking – but he was the best editor ever. We all wanted to please him so we racked our brains for good ideas, and if he liked them he would back you to the hilt. He gave me such a wide brief: one moment I was interviewing Madame Binh, the Vietcong negotiator at the Paris peace talks in 1968, next I was in Rome spending a few days with the Italian socialite Princess Pignatelli who had just been nominated the Best-Dressed Woman in the World for the second time, in order to find out what went into achieving that title. (I discovered the princess was so dedicated to the cause that she even plucked the hairs out of her legs individually with tweezers.)

Dennis spent a fortune on another of our stories: ‘What Paris could do for the Queen' (i.e., what the Queen would look like if she dressed in Paris). This was so complicated that it is difficult to explain here, but it involved finding out the Queen's vital statistics (I got them at Madame Tussauds); booking a model with the same measurements; commissioning André Courrèges, the Paris couturier, to design and make a suit for Her Majesty; and then photographing this on the model. In the meantime Carita, the leading cosmetics firm in Paris, and Alexandre, the world's top hairdresser then, redesigned her make-up and hair. After that, all the different images were sent off to some state-of-the-art retouching place in the US to be put on to a real photograph of the Queen – producing an (almost) authentic-looking picture of Queen Elizabeth as she would appear if her clothes and hair and make-up were done in Paris.

The only problem was that the retouching people in the States didn't understand that they should have lengthened the skirt of the suit (Courrèges, the pioneer of short skirts, had refused to make it any longer), so that when the pictures arrived at the British Customs and were opened, they showed the Queen in a miniskirt, and were confiscated. Dennis had to ask permission from the Palace to have them released.

The feature caused a big stir – it was bought by magazines all around the world – and it was reported back to Dennis that the Queen was quite amused by her revamped self: she thought we'd made her look like Queen Farah Diba of Iran.

Putting it all together took weeks, plus several trips to Paris, not to mention the costs – the suit, the photographs, the retouching – but it was enormous fun to do and added to
Nova
's fame. It makes me sad to think that nowadays, with Photoshop, it could all have been achieved in about one and a half minutes.

Then Dennis sent me to India with
Nova
's star funny writer John Sandilands (sadly he died a few years ago) to do a story on the Nizam of Hyderabad, the richest of all the Indian princes. I was so scared of the flight that I booked an appointment with a hypnotist in Harley Street to see if he could help, but I never found out because when I got there he asked me to take off my bra and, as I couldn't really see what that had to do with fear of flying, I left.

For economy's sake, the Nizam story was to be combined with a couple of fashion shoots in Rajasthan, so we also had the photographer, Harri Peccinotti, and the gorgeous model Greta Norris with us (she became a lifelong friend). At one point during the fashion photography, Greta and I were shown around a princely palace in Rajasthan. We climbed all the way up to a viewpoint on some high turret and looked down into the courtyard below, where, to our horror, we could clearly see an elephant with five legs, one of them badly withered. ‘Oh my God,' I said to Greta, ‘look at that crippled elephant. Only in India would they keep an animal with a leg like that alive and not do something about it.' Full of concern, we both turned to our guide to see what he had to say – but he waggled his head and seemed embarrassed, and it suddenly dawned on us that we were not looking at a deformed elephant, but an elephant WITH AN ERECTION. I have never got over it.

In Hyderabad, John had a rather scary time – the Nizam demanded he wore a specially made military uniform and set him various challenges: e.g., to jump across a very deep and rather wide crevice in the hills near the city. One evening, in the dark, John was told to fill up a huge tin trunk with stones, which he and the Nizam (with help from the staff) then heaved on to the balcony above the palace swimming pool, and into the water. The object of all this was to make an enormous splash and give Greta, me and Princess Esra, the Nizam's wife, who were sitting chatting around the other end of the pool, the fright of our lives. It succeeded.

Harri Peccinotti did our fashion pictures in India, but another photographer, Greta's husband, Tony Norris, came out to do the Nizam story (he and Greta knew him already) and pictured the prince with his 200-piece solid-gold dinner service; in his 1916 custom-built yellow Rolls-Royce which had a crown on the top and a throne inside; and with boxes and boxes of stuff – crockery, toy trains, soap, tablecloths, linen, picture frames, furniture, you name it – that his grandfather (the richest man in the world) had bought from the Army and Navy Stores in Bombay.

Apparently, the old Nizam had paid a visit to the department store back in the Thirties, and its British manager had of course personally shown him round. At the end of the tour, the Nizam had not commented or bought a thing, so the manager said, ‘Is there absolutely nothing in our shop that pleases you, Your Exalted Highness?' and the Nizam replied something along the lines of: ‘You don't understand, I would like
everything
in the shop.' And so lorryloads of crates and packages were delivered to Hyderabad where they remained, mostly unopened, in one of the Nizam's many buildings.

We did more pictures in the grand old state palace, Falaknuma, a vast place which had a beautiful big silver mango tree in the hall with gold mangoes on it (I don't know what happened to the mango tree, but the building is now a luxury hotel run by the Taj group). Seeing all these treasures somehow infected John and me with greed – we went round the palaces praising everything: ‘Oh, that's nice', ‘That's REALLY pretty', ‘That's beautiful', ‘Look at that, it's gorgeous', vaguely hoping, I suppose, that the Nizam might give an object to us. We'd got into the habit of doing this, and one day John looked at a hideous life-size Victorian statue of a shepherdess and said, ‘That's nice,' and the Nizam said, ‘I'd like you to have it, John.' John was appalled but there was nothing he could do, and he had all the trouble and expense of getting it back to his home in England.

One evening the Nizam took us to a circus in Hyderabad. We sat in special seats – the rather rickety equivalent of the Royal Box – and at one stage the ringmaster tried to coax the biggest elephant to approach the Nizam and bow, but it all went wrong: the elephant came up nicely, and then turned round, slowly backed up to the Nizam and did the most enormous poo. It reminded me of being taken to the circus in India when Tessa and I were small. Before the big-cats act began, they put up a kind of wobbly cage of bars around the circus ring, but just as the lions and tigers entered the arena, the cage fell down and most of the audience, including us, got up and ran.

John had a curious experience in Hyderabad: one day three of us went out to explore the dry scrubby land beyond the palace, and, as we walked along, John lobbed his empty cigarette lighter far into the bushes. We were not aware that anyone had followed, or was watching us, but that evening John found the lighter placed ostentatiously on the desk in his room. It was quite creepy.

Christmas was coming and I had promised my parents to get home in time to be with them, so when the Nizam invited us all to stay on and celebrate with him and Princess Esra, I had to refuse. He was upset because he was planning all kinds of fun, but I had to stick to my plan and not disappoint the family. A few days later he invited John, Tony and Greta to go into his jewel vault and choose a Christmas present (they chose diamond watches); I was not included because I was not going to be there on Christmas Day. Then, as I sat on the veranda waiting for a car to take me back to my hotel and wishing I could have chosen a jewel, the prince himself suddenly appeared and threw a tiny package into my lap. ‘Have this,' he said, smiling a little, ‘I believe it is unlucky.' I undid the parcel and inside was a beautiful opal ring. Opals are supposed to bring bad luck, but happily not for Scorpios – my sign.

Later, the Nizam did something extremely kind for me. Uncle George, the relative we'd stayed with in the Nilgiri Hills when Tessa and I were children, had died; his lawyer in India described his papers as ‘fascinating', but no one could think how to get them back to the UK. Then the Nizam, who had yet another palace in the Nilgiri Hills, offered to have a suitcase of them collected and sent to my parents. Actually, it might have been better if he hadn't – when Mum and Dad went through the case it was full of IOUs: old Uncle George seemed to have become a moneylender. But in amongst them were two fat Victorian letters which, looked at very briefly, seemed to be an account by an English woman of her capture, escape, recapture and further escape, from mutineers/freedom fighters in the Indian Mutiny/First War of Independence. The letters were written and overwritten, and very hard to decipher, so Dad put them to one side and took all the other papers out into the garden to burn on a bonfire. We never knew how it happened, but when we settled down to read the historic letters, they had disappeared – somehow they had been put on to the bonfire too, and gone up in flames. We were devastated; we hadn't read them, we didn't know the story and we had no idea who they were written by – had she been our ancestor? It was all gone for ever.

The night before I left my hotel in Hyderabad to begin my journey back to London, I sorted out all the stuff I'd been carrying around on my travels in India and threw the things I no longer needed into the wastepaper basket, including a half-empty Tampax box.

I thought no more about this until, just as my taxi was pulling away from the kerb and into the traffic to head for the airport, a man came running out of the hotel waving my Tampax box – but it was too late, we were already en route. That wasn't the end of it, though: just after I'd gone through Departures I heard someone calling and turned around, and there at the end of the hall was the man from the hotel still waving the Tampax box. They wouldn't let me go back, so I tried to mime that it didn't matter, not to worry, but he was still sadly waving the box when I took a last look. As the plane started its race down the runway, I had a horrible fear that I might see him running alongside, still waving the box.

The fashion shoot we'd done in India went into the magazine, and a short piece by John about the old Nizam's purchases, still in their boxes from the Army and Navy Stores, did too (photographs by Tony), but Dennis never used our Nizam piece in
Nova
, I am not sure why. I think perhaps he felt it was a bit remote and meaningless to our readers, and he was probably right, but I am glad I had the adventure.

18

One of the stories I was responsible for at
Nova
was Nostradamus. At that time very few people, apart from some academics, had heard of the medieval seer, but I went to a dinner party and met a young woman Erika Cheetham, who had studied him at university, and she had me spellbound all evening with stories about his prophecies. I rushed into
Nova
next day to tell Dennis about it, and asked if we could commission Erika to write a piece about him. ‘If he is so darned clever,' said Dennis, ‘why can't he write the piece himself?' (I had forgotten to mention that Nostradamus had lived 450 years before.) I thought this was so funny that I told the story to
Private Eye
at one of their lunches – I was always so grateful to be invited that I felt I had to pay my way somehow – and they put it in the magazine. Dennis was furious and was about to fire someone he suspected of the leak, so I had to step forward and admit it was me – which I found hard, because you never wanted Dennis to think badly of you. He forgave me because I'd confessed. Once I was leaning over Dennis's desk, going through the typescript of a piece I had done, when he suddenly turned and said, ‘If you think that's the way to get your work published you are very much mistaken.' I didn't know what he was talking about but then I looked down and realised my blouse was half undone, revealing my cleavage – I was utterly mortified to think that Dennis might imagine I'd done it on purpose, and rushed to button it up again.

In the spring of 1970 Brigitte Bardot, our early-Sixties idol, whose hair and clothes we copied so enthusiastically, was thirty-five. THIRTY-FIVE! It seemed so
old.
I thought it would be a great coup if I could interview her for the magazine – and it looked as if I had struck lucky when I found a photographer friend of hers, Ghislain Dussart, who said he would approach her on our behalf. She agreed, as long as the photograph was taken by him, and so I went to Paris to talk to her, but at the last minute, in the studio, she decided she did not want to meet me face to face, and I had to write out my questions – which were passed to her in the next room, where she wrote the replies. ‘Who does your hair?' was one of my queries. ‘My right hand,' she responded. There were several pages of my questions and her slightly flip answers and I took them back to London and used them to write my piece, after which they disappeared from my desk: someone obviously thought they might be worth something one day. I was upset because they were such a wonderful souvenir of the great star.