In My Shoes: A Memoir (4 page)

My parents were planning to stay on in Beverly Hills, but we all flew over for the admissions interview with the headmistress, Mrs. Parry,
and on the drive out from London, my mother hid a bottle under her seat, but not very well. I had no doubt that the clear liquid peeking out from inside the plastic bag was vodka.

We stopped first to see their friend the doctor, all three of us, and as my parents chatted in his drawing room, I went back outside, snatched the bottle from under the car seat, and hid it.

Later, all through our rather formal encounter with the rather formidable Mrs. Parry (her husband was a housemaster at Eton), I had the pleasure of watching my mother squirm and fidget, deprived of her tranquilizer. She went absolutely mad with twitching, after which she threw a raging fit, but she really couldn’t go into why she was having the fit because she couldn’t admit to having brought along the booze.

Heathfield was very adept at producing Sloane Rangers, the perfectly coifed, usually blond young women you see coming and going from the luxury shops near London’s Sloane Square. It was incredibly snobby, but I was this sort of funny, alien thing from Beverly Hills, so I got a pass. If it hadn’t been for my exotic American accent, I’m sure I would have been given the frostiest of cold shoulders.

I was also exotic because I arrived with hair curling combs and Calvin Klein underwear, which was an endless source of fascination to these daughters of the aristocracy still forced to wear granny pants under their pleated, navy skirts, white shirts, green ties, and navy V-neck sweaters.

The culture shock went both ways, of course, especially when they played sports like “netball,” which I’d never even heard of. I missed my friends, and the L.A. lifestyle, but at least I’d escaped the insanity at home. Then again, I hadn’t escaped at all. The damage had already been done.

E
ven though I was out of the house, and out from under my parents’ direct control, I was by this time thoroughly embedded behind a wall of glass, the detached observer, emotionally flat. I felt that the girls liked me, but I also remember them teasing me with, “Hi, Tamara. Anybody there?” The only way I overcame the numbness and came to life was with the help of a chemical stimulant.

On my very first day the girls took me with them to the bushes, pulled out their cigarettes, and lit up. So I began smoking, too. As everyone who’s ever done it knows all too well, the first cigarette is revolting, but you carry on because you want to be part of the group.

At night we broke out the wine, which was far more agreeable. There was a shop up the road where they’d sell us anything we wanted, and we’d go out into the woods and jam the cork down into the bottle with a stick. Why we never thought to buy a corkscrew, I don’t know, because I’m sure they would have sold that to us quite happily as well.

With the exception of these brief moments devoted to sin, the days at Heathfield were nothing if not well organized. We’d get up in the morning, have breakfast (at least we were supposed to—I never made it), sit through chapel, do classes, then sports, then dinner, and
more studies, until nine p.m., when it was time for bed. Each of us had her own room with a single bed, a desk, and a cupboard. What little time I had for introspection was spent in there daydreaming, staring into the mirror at a face that my mother had convinced me was quite ugly.

I survived, though, because outside of class I could have fun and act the clown and be silly. But at the same time, I was just so very dark inside. I dragged through all my courses, half asleep, which earned me the nickname “Vacant.” There was absolutely nothing that spoke to me, no moment of great awakening in a literature class or a chemistry lab where I said, “Ah ha, this is what I want my life to be about.” I had been dropped into this somewhat alien educational system with no real preparation, and having been told by my mother all my life that I was stupid, lazy, and unattractive, my self-confidence and sense of self-worth were not exactly rock solid.

Unfortunately, my record at Heathfield did nothing to counter my mother’s assessment. I failed at everything, and still no one seemed to notice. No one ever called me aside or contacted my parents—not that my mother or father would have risen to the occasion. In England, in the seventies and early eighties, there still was the assumption that the primary purpose of educating girls was to prepare them for marriage, so why make a fuss?

I also think that all concerned readily assumed that I was indeed simply dumb, so maybe this was all that could be expected of me. What never seemed to occur to anyone—my teachers, my parents, or me—was that I was profoundly, clinically depressed.

  •  •  •

IN THE ENGLISH SCHOOL SYSTEM
the first separation of the sheep from the goats occurs when you’re about sixteen and you take your “O”-level exams. The testing goes on for days and covers every subject. If you pass, you stick around for another two years to prepare for university in what’s called Sixth Form, which is all about studying for your “A” levels in the hope of getting into Oxford or Cambridge. If you flunk those first tests at sixteen, of course, that’s it. It’s off to trade school with you, or the army, or a job as a waitress. That is, of course, unless you come from a family with money.

I failed all my “O” levels with flying colors, and thus I left school with no qualifications. But several of the girls in my set were also not going on to university. There was Arabella Johnson, as well as Lady Isabella Stanhope, daughter of the Eleventh Earl of Harrington, who later married Colin Campbell, the Seventh Earl of Cawdor, to become Countess of Cawdor, along with a few others whose names I can’t remember. For reasons of their own, they were all going off to a Swiss finishing school, which is how the idea came up that I would do the same.

“Fine, dear,” my parents said. I think I could have said I was going to join the trapeze act and it would have been, “Fine, dear.” They really had no plan for me, certainly no expectations.

The school in question was the Institut Alpin Videmanette, in Rougemont, Switzerland. Going to one of these places was a little like being sent away to a convent, except that here the standard objective was not to avoid men, but to prepare yourself to meet and marry one who
was proper and available. The assumption was that you were a dunce and that the only hope for you was to attach yourself to what was known as a “good provider.” I didn’t know or care, but Princess Diana had “finished” at Rougemont just a few years before, and she’d married Prince Charles. This dubious detail may have added a certain cachet as far as my parents were concerned.

L’Institut
was a lingering anachronism even in my time, and by the mid-nineties it had closed for good. The curriculum, such as it was, included French, but was mostly centered on sewing, cooking, and otherwise learning how to be the lady of the house. We mastered the demands of etiquette, including how to curtsy in front of the Queen, should the need ever arise.

At the Institut
the girls were treated much more as adults than we’d been at Heathfield. We had a smoking room, for instance, and we didn’t have to go out into the bushes to drink, especially when there were such far more agreeable venues just a few miles down the winding Swiss roads.

The main attraction of Rougemont had always been its proximity to the ski resort of Gstaad, and in the winter we took lessons every afternoon. The ski instructor was dragooned into serving as our cooking instructor as well, which meant that our time in the kitchen was a bit of a joke. We would bake a cake and then eat it. That was the extent of the instruction.

The versatile young man who guided us in the kitchen as well as on the slopes had a habit of seducing his young charges, but he studiously avoided me. Maybe I just wasn’t his type, but years later I learned that he’d also received a word to the wise from a most unlikely source—the actor Roger Moore, who was that era’s James Bond and who lived
nearby. Moore’s son and this young man were mates, and supposedly Roger said to him one day, “You better give Tamara Yeardye a wide berth. I know her father and he’ll break your legs.”

Also nearby was the winter campus of Le Rosey
,
perhaps the most exclusive secondary school in the world. Several generations of Hohenzollerns, Rothschilds, Metternichs, and Borgheses have doodled in their textbooks there. Aga Khan IV is an alum, as is Prince Ranier III of Monaco, and various other monarchs. This is where Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon, and Diana Ross sent their kids.

The boys from Le Rosey were entirely too
foreign
to be considered good husband material, but we girls weren’t thinking in those terms anyway. These pampered boys had their uses, though, which included picking us up in their Ferraris after we’d jumped off the balcony into piles of snow. We’d drive down to our favorite Gstaad nightclub called the Gringo, located at the Palace Hotel, and then the Rosey boys would drop us off in the morning. On Saturday afternoons we’d simply hitchhike in to have hot chocolate at a tearoom called Charly’s.

There were only sixty girls in the school, and when Madame Yersin, the headmistress, figured out that I was the ringleader for these escapades, she moved me to the chalet where she lived. I quickly found a new escape route through the basement boiler room and out a window. But for whatever reason, and despite my refusal to follow her rules, Madame and I seemed to get on. At a wedding years later, I ran into one of my partners in crime who told me she’d been back to see our former headmistress. Apparently Madame had said, “You two girls were some of the naughtiest I’ve ever had, but you were so endearing, I couldn’t kick you out.”

In 1984, with Madame’s forbearance, I completed finishing school and was done with my formal education. I was seventeen, and I had no earthly idea what to do with myself.

•  •  •  •

BY THIS TIME MY PARENTS
had left California and established residence in Monaco. They also bought a country house in Wentworth and a mews house in Belgravia. My father’s company, Vidal Sassoon, had just been sold for a tidy sum, and a fair portion of the proceeds went to my dad. He invested in London real estate, buying and selling properties, and working out of an office at his home, which is where I began to live camped out in the basement, anxious and insecure, and for a while indeed wrapped in the duvet, eating chips and guacamole, watching TV.

In Switzerland I’d begun to get high-tension headaches on a daily basis, and I was old enough now to know that I wasn’t imagining things and that this wasn’t normal. So when I came back to London I started seeing doctors to try to account for my symptoms. They checked me for anemia, and they did brain scans, but no one seemed at all curious about a link to depression and stress. My mother insisted that it was “all in my head,” and men, even learned physicians, had a habit of accepting my mother’s assessments without too much analysis.

All I knew was that I didn’t feel well at all and that if I couldn’t cure the problem, I needed to find a way to mask it.

The approach I took was to start hanging out with the kids at Crazy Larry’s, just off Kings Road, which had a well-earned reputation for catering to dysfunctional Chelsea girls and South London black guys.
This was a much more music-oriented crowd than the Sloane Square types I’d known at school, and infinitely more creative. It felt “underground” to be with them, and very cool. There were people like Kay Montano, who was later to become the fashion industry’s über makeup artist, the singer Neneh Cherry, Gavin Rossdale of the rock band Bush, and Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul, who were breaking through at the time. I loved what these club kids were wearing, which was a very rough, street-chic, gangster look, which stylist Ray Petri began to market as Buffalo. He was the guiding force, style-wise, along with the model Nick Kamen. The idea was to create a smart and functional look that was nonfashion with a hard attitude. It paid tribute to rude boys, mods, blacks, punk whites, East Indians, ragamuffin Jamaicans, New Romantics à la Boy George, and bruised boxers. This was fashion up from the streets and from outside the fashion industry, which then infiltrated pretty much everything, from ad campaigns to magazines like
The Face
,
i-D
, and
Arena
. Buffalo made Petri a “fashion stylist” long before it became a coveted job description.

I loved the music that was emerging at the time, which included rap. Acid house music also became popular after it was essentially launched in a dungeon-like basement in the East End called Shoom. There were fog machines and strobe lights and the fashion was to wear Pumas and aviators. The music pulsed and people danced and blew whistles as if they were leading a procession at the Carnival in Rio. The smiley face was the symbol for this whole scene.

One night I met a guy called Barnzley who was from a council estate in Manchester or Leeds—somewhere up north. His real name was Simon Armitage, and he was friends with Nellee Hooper, and with all of
his working-class grit he was definitely a go-getter, very trendy and cool, and we started dating. One day Barnzley said, “Let’s set up a stall in the market on Portobello Road,” and I agreed, so we began to make T-shirts with the yellow smiley face. I also began to sell my old clothes, along with things I’d pick up in thrift shops. It was fun, and I made a few pounds, but I was also just desperate for something to do, desperate for some way to break away from my parents.

An unintended consequence of the stall was that it stirred up a latent interest in fashion, and soon thereafter I started taking classes at the American University in London, which included courses in pattern cutting and other aspects of design.

My father thought that selling by hand was the way to learn retail, and he noted with approval that the entrepreneurial gene may have been passed on to me. He and I began to bat the ball back and forth, talking about business whenever we were together, and soon enough he encouraged me to move on.

“If you get a real job,” he said, “I’ll match what you earn.”

A few days later we were walking down South Molton Street together and we bumped into Sidney Burstein, a friend of my father’s from his days at Vidal Sassoon.

Sidney looked at the wastrel daughter and said, “What are you doing now?”

My father said, “She’s studying fashion. Taking courses at American University.”

Sidney said, “That’s nonsense. You should come and work for me.”

Sidney and his wife, Joan, owned Brown’s, the legendary boutique that had been introducing the great designers to London since 1970.
Within the week I was selling Azzedine Alaia at their shop at 24 South Molton Street. I was much younger than the other girls, still a bit of a club kid, and occasionally I would show up wearing bike shorts, but of course made by Alaia. I also established the pattern of working all day, then staying up pretty much all night clubbing with Davina McCall and Samantha Robinson. Unfortunately, I also established a pattern of heavy dependence on the era’s drugs of choice: cocaine and Ecstasy.

I was at Brown’s through most of 1987, and it was a great education in retail. I worked the stockroom as well as the floor, I set up displays, and I manned the cash register. Of course, I also loved the clothes, and by the time I left the job I think I’d rung up a significant trade imbalance in Sidney and Joan’s favor.

It was clear that I’d found my métier, and soon enough I was desperate to get off the selling floor and expand my horizons. Occasionally I’d have the chance to help a bit on the public relations side for Brown’s, which led to my obtaining an interview with Phyllis Walters, who did PR for them as well as for many designers like Versace. In 1988, Phyllis hired me as her office runner, which meant that I would drop things off at fashion magazines—clothes or samples, whatever they wanted—then pick them up later. The fun part of the job was learning that a magazine was doing something with the theme of “spring roses,” say, or “hothouse flowers,” then rummaging through our clients’ collections to find items that might be included. You could really use your own initiative to find just the right thing, then send it in for the shoot. Eventually, I graduated to working on a few accounts myself, including Marks and Spencer, Georges Rech, and Molton Brown, co-owned by Sidney and Joan’s daughter.