What to Look for in Winter (20 page)

Our editor, Miss Beatrix Miller, was to me like a far less specious version of the headmistress of Sherborne. It may seem crass to compare a fashion magazine with that excellent girls' school and the Church Missionary Society to which Dame Diana dedicated her life, but Beatrix Miller was an individual who was utterly committed to seeing and getting the best in and from everyone she worked with and who worked under her. Her leadership was generous; she was not an icon but an inspiration No liberties were to be taken yet her thoughtfulness was boundless, her private kindness silently conducted. Her office door was guarded by the magnificent Ingrid Bleischroder who was delivered to work in her father's Rolls. Miss Miller, which was what we called her, seemed to live on fizzy Redoxon tablets. She had good hands and pencilled the underside of each nail in white crayon. Everything was in the detail.

Having acquitted myself hopelessly in the area of layout, since I vomited every time the Cow Gum was used, I was shuffled magnanimously into Features via Copy. At the time,
Vogue
had such writers working for it as James Fenton, Charles Maclean and Lesley Blanch. Polly Devlin, Antonia Williams and Georgina Howell were staff writers. The standard was high. I was allowed to start with writing captions. This isn't an easy matter. You have to consider the ego of the photographer, the needs of the manufacturer of any garments depicted, who may be an advertiser, the size of the page, the demands of the font, and of course the story. I spent days thinking up the words ‘Double cream layers'. The photographer was Eric Boman, the model Beska and the lingerie was made by Janet Reger and Courtenay of Bond Street. The story was ‘Girl alone in bathroom in Grand Hotel with
many diamonds and very few clothes. What, this side of decency, does she get up to?'

My particular incapacity was to remember to ask what the price of the garment was, so that sometimes a page might go to press with a pound sign followed by a hopeful row of zeros waiting for the real price to come through. The practicalities of working co-operatively on a magazine are similar to those of working on a film and require many of the same adaptive qualities. You need to be practical, quick-witted, resourceful, outgoing, good at working with other people, unflappable, not remotely touchy, able to cope in extreme temperature conditions and capable of soothing persons spoilt to the point of psychopathy. Miss Miller and her team did all this, and more, and evidently loved every minute. I was as bad at working on a magazine as I was later to prove duff at writing a film, though that film work did bring me two invaluable things; an attachment to Stanley Kubrick, who had asked me to write a film for him, and the startlingly prophetic words for my affliction, blepharospasm, which is indeed Eyes Wide Shut, the name of that film about my failure to write which Stanley was wryly graceful.

I came into work on my bike and left it in the
Vogue
car park underground. I worked out a uniform that would keep me unnoticed at first which was a pair of Amschel's jeans, my school beige V-neck and a fox-fur scarf I had got for ten pounds (a lot of money) in a junk shop. I gave up eating, following a regime larcenously entitled ‘the doctor's diet'. I ate a boiled egg and four prawns per day, but I did feel I was starting to fit in a bit more. I was moved from Copy, where my boss had been a pretty grey-haired lady who was fond of bird-watching and possessed unaccountably right-wing views, on to Features, where my boss was Joan Juliet Buck, Hollywood name to conjure with, playmate of the stars and later to be editor of French
Vogue
. At this point in her life she wore only the colour purple. It was to do with something Karl Lagerfeld, a close friend, had told her. Her eyes were purple, deep purple all around the iris's edge. Her skin was white.

Joan was precisely the sort of person who is unique in style and therefore frustrates those legions who emulate her; that is part of being truly chic. I thought I might take up this monochrome business and I chose as my colour, probably because I am so chromatically indecisive, pure white. Between Joan and me was the admirably sane Lucy Hughes-Hallett. One day it was Lucy's twenty-seventh birthday. ‘Oh my God you are so young,' drawled perfectly
maquillé
Joan between taking calls and reading the celebrity bulletin to see who was in town that day. Her furs were good, and embroidered, as proper furs should be, with their owner's name on the silk lining. Joan was interesting, kind and clever and I wanted to do something to please her. She was off out to lunch. Would I take her messages? Of course I would. Joan was engaged at the time. In a density of tailored yet clinging mauve, her black hair cut so perfectly that it had a ring of light around the top, Joan set forth for lunch, I just happened to know, with Donald Sutherland.

Joan knew all the stars, so I wasn't surprised and I sat close to her phone to be really helpful and take messages in case it rang.

In due course Joan's telephone did ring.

I picked it up.

‘May I speak to Joan?'

‘No, I'm sorry.'

‘Who is this?'

Although I had won the
Vogue
Talent Contest in my natal name, Candia McWilliam, I was very confused about names and many people knew me by my nickname Claude and the surname Howard, so, more often than not, I got into great knots of explanation. I can't remember the name that I gave to my interlocutor but he did turn it on me. Let us say that he said, ‘Well, Claude Howard, where is Joan?'

‘Oh that's easy,' I chirruped, ‘she's out at lunch.'

Forms of breathing that I should have had the instinct to recognise were audible. This was a powerful individual, changing into another conversational gear entirely.

With horrible adult lightness this man asked me with whom Joan was having lunch. The part of my brain that knew that Joan was engaged to someone ceased to function. The thought that this man might be that someone did not proffer itself. I just remembered the interesting bit and walked into the dragon's mouth as I smiled daffily into that cupping receiver, ‘Oh, she's having lunch with Donald Sutherland.' There was a tremendous roar and a slam.

Joan, who arrived back at the office after coffee and petits fours, was sweet about it. I was so lucky in her and the other features writers that I did what I can do when things seem to be going rather well. I sabotaged them.

In the interests of this fascinatingly changing, daily thinner everyday me, I had forsworn alcohol. But it is perfectly possible for an alcoholic to be drunk on mood, tension or state of mind.

I was being courted by a number of countervalent men, at least three of them alarming on account of age, force, tastes or marital status. They took me at what was increasingly my face value, or rather decreasingly my face value, a skinny babe (that word was not yet coined with reference to people older than two) who worked at
Vogue
. I had no idea how to transmit to them that I was a trapped bookish fatty who was no good at working at
Vogue.

I don't know when I stopped going into the office, but I do remember, and I thank her for it, that Miss Miller sent me telegram after telegram asking me if I was all right when I imagine she could have sued or sacked me. I wrote her letters that I never sent and some, years later, that I did send, and do not even know where she is or if she is alive today, but I must be one of the most disappointing outright winners of the
Vogue
Talent Contest ever. I was just too scared to go back into that office. Having turned myself into a caricature of what I saw, I behaved like someone with an empty head. I froze like a thin white woman with a head full of snow.

It's not a secret that
Vogue
in those days ran on the labour of gently
reared girls with private income, so that, for example, it was possible to find Lady Jane Spencer in the Beauty Room, and a descendant of Pushkin and the Wernher mining family, who later became a virtuosic mime artist, in the administration department. It would be unfair on Condé Nast though to ascribe my defection simply to my not being able to afford to work there.

Addicted to magazines as I am, I could not bear seeing behind their pages. I was like the opposite of a conjuror who likes to make magic from his practical skills. I could not bear the bright light shed upon my dreams. I had grown ill within the very breeding ground of consumption.

There was a bad period of hiding and pretending to be going to work, but the 50ps ran out and even when I had pawned my mother's jewellery box for eight pounds (it was ebony, silver, mother-of-pearl, had crystal phials and a box of mercury powder for wigs, was made in the eighteenth century and contained its bill of sale, handwritten; she had given it to me for my fifth Easter), even when I'd saved up cider bottles and taken them back to the off-licence to redeem the 10p on each one, even then I knew that the only sort of work I could do, with any honesty, was writing. I had dropped a stitch somewhere by not applying for a doctorate, by lazily, unthinkingly, slipping into my prize job at
Vogue.

Happy outcomes from my time at
Vogue
were friendships. Two friends I had made just before
Vogue
, one the little sister of Alexandra Shulman, who went on to edit
Vogue.
Alex and I were friends but I was, I felt, too impractical for her; I remain devoted to her and impressed and rather intimidated by her. Her little sister Nicola became a friend of the heart. Beauty is an impossible characteristic. Women want to have affairs with men who have had affairs with beauties, as if it will up the octane of their own looks. Nicky is shrewd and innocent, a real writer, scholarly and kind. It just so happens that the capsule her soul is contained in is a beautiful one.

At school at St Paul's with Alexandra were the famously terrifying
Fraser girls. The Frasers lived in Camden Hill Square. Notoriously, a neighbour of theirs had been killed by an IRA bomb intended for their father Hugh Fraser. Hugh Fraser was an example to me of everything a man might be. He looked like an eagle, he took mustard on his smoked salmon, he sang to his dog, he was upright, noble and all the Alan Breck virtues.

Flora Fraser possesses that smile to be found on some ancient sculptures, referred to as the archaic smile. It is the sad smile, the smile of an all-knowing Clio, muse of history. When first we met, Flora was reading Greats at Wadham and I was at Girton–no, it goes further back. I remember a sixteenth birthday party at Camden Hill Square and precisely what I wore, footless tights in strong pink and a knitted transparent pink lamé nightgown together with my, at the time, candy pink and hot pink striped hair all twisted up in a bun. Flora married very young her peer in intellect and in love. She was still at university. Her husband Robert Powell-Jones had read Russian and Chinese. His intelligent beauty shook with the tension and pitch of his mind. He danced on a high wire in that head.

They learned Turkish and Italian together, living on love and carrot sticks. Their daughter Stella was born to them one glorious May the 15th. But Robert carried in him what I carry too and he did not escape it. They tried everything but in the end he died before Christmas 1997. He had just completed his translation of Pushkin's
The Bronze Horseman
. It might almost be as though Robert's own subtlety, that was compromised by the harm drink did him, has after death joined itself in posthumous conjunction with Flora's own subtlety. I could not have managed my life without this strong friendship that she has thrown to me when I thought there was no one in the sea but sharks and minnows.

So somehow I ended up after
Vogue
working first in a joke shop and then for a decorous old-style pornographer on Old Street, which was not the fashionable area it is now. In addition to packing tired copies of
Fanny Hill
and trying to get off the ground a rather
interesting-sounding book about the Blunt family and equine blood-lines, I ended up, thinner yet this time, and attired in white, but in rather the same situation I had found myself in at the very beginning of
Vogue
, ineptly laying out a magazine with scalpel, cardboard and Cow Gum, though now in a small room in Old Street with one man instead of Vogue House with all its varied and often congenial wildlife.

This time it was the AA membership magazine that I was laying out badly, the AA being a large organisation that comes to the rescue of motorists in distress and whose headquarters are in Basingstoke. My new boss, the Old Street one, who regularly paid me in cash on a Friday morning and borrowed much of it back on Friday afternoons, took me on a trip to Basingstoke. We underwent a lunch with the bigwigs from the Automobile Association in their local hostelry. Mention was made of my having worked on
Vogue.
This to demonstrate experience with layout. I deprecated loudly but no one was reading my body language. The AA headquarters was, at that time, one of the tallest buildings in Basingstoke and from its boardroom might be viewed the Wiggins Teape building, known locally as the Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke. I laughed, then saw that my reaction was not the right one and sucked in the laugh.

I knew that I was acting and that I shouldn't have been given the part, should never have auditioned for it. Anyone in their right mind would have sent me away as had the kind lady at Konrad Furs in South Molton Street, who simply said, when I went in there and asked for a job, ‘Do you really think you're suitable, dear? Aren't you a bit over-qualified? How much do you know about selecting pelts?'

Out beyond the edges of Basingstoke, a town that grew almost as one watched it, were roundabouts, aspin with vehicles, their owners very likely members themselves of the AA. Our presentation having been accepted, we were appointed designers to the Automobile Association of their monthly magazine. Going down in the lift, my
boss said, ‘Seems a pity all that land being built on around Basingstoke. Still, you've got to put people somewhere and it's as good a place as any.' And so I got the layout job for the AA. The prefiguring of my being practically laid out before I got to the other kind of AA is not too neat to be true.