Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (23 page)

Bailey was “moody and upset,” but he quickly recovered and got involved with Sue Murray, an eighteen-year-old green-eyed blonde, whom he photographed for the cover of British
Vogue
six times in the next six months. Murray, he said, “is much more mysterious than Jean Shrimpton.”

Shrimpton’s relationship with Stamp soured within a few months, but nonetheless, in fall 1964 she agreed to accompany him to New York, where he was set to star in a Broadway version of the film
Alfie
. There was always work in America for Shrimpton. Revlon, Max Factor, and Pond’s all were using her, and Eileen Ford called to say that Richard Avedon wanted to book her for a shoot with Steve McQueen. Working with Avedon was one of the model’s few remaining ambitions.

But as 1965 rolled in, Shrimpton was “bloody miserable” with Stamp. “I was withdrawn, more silent than usual. I couldn’t be bothered to make myself up, I never washed my hair unless I was working, and I had become very thin…. I did not want to model. I did not want to do anything much.”

In mid-1966 Shrimpton agreed to costar in
Privilege
, a satirical film about a pop star. “I was terrible,” she later admitted. Though he lingered a bit longer, Stamp was moving out of the picture. (He later described their breakup as “terrifyingly chilly” in
Double Feature
, his autobiography.) Shrimpton hardly missed a step, signing a three-year £70,000 contract with Yardley of London (which, despite its trendy name, was an American company). It required her to model and tour the States twice a year, making personal appearances. When Jordan Kalfus and Mel Sokolsky turned up as the team making the first Yardley commercial, Shrimpton began an affair with Kalfus and moved to New York with him.

Jerry Ford thinks
Privilege
hurt Shrimpton’s career. “All her clients felt she’d gotten too famous and was a distraction from their ads,” he says. But she modeled for another half dozen years, eventually earning $120 an hour. She kept touring for Yardley and shooting with Bailey, Penn, and Avedon. But her personal life was a mess that took years to clean up. She spent the seventies bouncing from man to man, taking up photography, opening shops selling antiques and souvenirs, becoming something of a recluse (“I dread exposure,” she told an interviewer), and undergoing Jungian analysis, before finally marrying photographer Michael Cox (who was married when their affair began) in 1979 and buying The Abbey, a hotel in Penzance.

“I wasn’t involved in my own life,” she told the London
Sunday Times
in the early nineties. To another interviewer she said, “I had a case of arrested devel
opment until I was 25. I just traveled on other people’s ambition, but I’ve got a steely enough streak that enabled me to survive.”

Asked what she thought was important in life, Shrimpton replied, “Nothing.”

It seems clear that Jean Shrimpton’s career had already peaked in 1965, when Richard Avedon shot the April issue of
Harper’s Bazaar
and put her on its cover in a spacesuit, and
Newsweek
magazine followed by putting the twenty-two-year-old on a cover in May, describing her as the “template from which the face of Western beauty will be cast until further notice.” Shrimpton’s face “somehow symbolizes the emergence of London,” the newsmagazine said, “as a new world tastemaker in pop culture.”

Ironically, the moment coincided with the high-water mark of British influence. By 1965 both Beatlemania and Anglophilia were epidemic in the United States. Quant, Stamp, James Bond, Peter O’Toole, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, the Stones, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield, and countless more followed. In America alone, the “youthquake” market was estimated to command spending power of $25 billion a year.

In 1966
Time
magazine “discovered” the new British culture and named it Swinging London. It was one year after Bailey announced that he wanted a new career as a movie director. In line with that desire, he’d decided to marry a twenty-one-year-old French actress he’d photographed named Catherine Deneuve. As a good-bye of sorts to pop fashion and society, Bailey collected and published three dozen of his portraits in a set called
Box of Pinups
. Journalist Frances Wyndham, who wrote the accompanying notes, said that the pictures—of the likes of Shrimpton, Hammond, Sue Murray, the Beatles, the Stones, and their managers—“are illustrations of a certain movement that is possibly over now.”

The last nail in Swinging London’s coffin, says Terence Donovan, was director Michelangelo Antonioni’s brilliant (but pretentious) thriller
Blow-Up
, released in 1966 and starring David Hemmings as a vacuous, sex-crazed London fashion photographer. “
Blow-Up
was in fact an amalgam of my life, Bailey’s life, and a few other people’s lives,” Donovan says. “That film kind of crystallized everybody’s idea of these free young English fashion photographers. I was the first photographer in England ever to drive a Rolls-Royce, and suddenly the Rolls-Royce was in the film! An irritating experience. I never saw the film for twenty years.” But millions of other people did, and a significant fraction of them, watching Hemmings have group sex on crumpled no-seam paper in his studio, decided to become fashion photographers.

Suddenly it was chic to prowl the streets carrying a 35 mm camera. So it was probably inevitable that more and more modeling agencies emerged in London. One of the strangest and most influential opened early in 1967. English Boy was the first model agency based on street fashion and street looks. Its credibility came from its connection to its rebellious times. Its models wore long hair and love beads, not twin sets and pearls. If they appeared threatening to the denizens of the world of
haute
fashion, all the better.

The agency was the creation of Sir Mark Palmer, a twenty-four-year-old fifth baronet whose typical dress was a wide-brimmed green hat, a wide-lapelled green velvet jacket, a satin tie, blue plaid trousers, and elfin green shoes with turned-up toes. As a page to Queen Elizabeth Sir Mark had once borne her train at the opening of Parliament. Educated at Eton, he dropped out of Oxford in the early sixties. Palmer disdained the world of privilege he came from. “I had what’s called a country upbringing and it was never my scene,” he said. “I was waiting for a scene that suited me.”

Palmer was part of a set that included the Honorable Tara Browne, an heir to the Guinness brewing fortune and best friend of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones; antiques dealer Christopher Gibb, the nephew of the governor of Rhodesia; Lord Gormanston, an Irish viscount; and the Honorable Julian Ormsby-Gore, son of Lord Harlech, who’d been Britain’s ambassador to America during the Kennedy administration. In fall 1966 they all were photographed at a party for
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
, which called them evidence that “the peacock mood of young London today is not confined to the sons of working-class blokes what shop on Carnaby Street.”

Drugs were also part of the new mood. In 1966 LSD became the drug of choice in the world inhabited by Palmer, Browne, and their friends in the Rolling Stones. Brian Jones, in particular, was entranced by the hallucinogen. When the Stones recorded their trippy, acid-inspired album
Their Satanic Majesties Request
that year, Jones spent many of the sessions curled on the studio floor, tripping his brains out.

That December Tara Browne was killed in a car crash after he ran a red light, apparently under the influence of drugs. John Lennon of the Beatles later wrote a song, “A Day in the Life,” about the incident. “He blew his mind out in a car,” Lennon crooned. “He didn’t notice that the lights had changed.” In a peculiar twist of fate Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton attempted
suicide that same day, after learning that Jagger was two-timing her with the pop singer Marianne Faithfull.

Two months later Browne’s friend Sir Mark Palmer inherited £12,000 on his twenty-fifth birthday and used some of it to open English Boy Ltd. in a small white room above an iconoclastic boutique called Quorum, near the King’s Road on Radnor Walk in trendy Chelsea. Annoyed that magazines were photographing, but not paying, the style-setting longhairs on London’s streets, Palmer and company had decided to cash in. “They wanted models like us,” says one English Boy. “We didn’t follow fashions; we set them.”

Despite its name, the agency’s books listed ten women, four babies, and several dogs. The women made most of the money, but the two dozen longhaired, foppish male models were English Boy’s calling card. When a photograph of a dozen of them ran in the British press, it was the biggest scandal since the Beatles had returned their MBE honors the year before. Palmer was unfazed. “The English Boys are not just models, but model people,” he said, “models for other people to model themselves on. By our appearance we are indicating our way of life, the way we think, the way we feel. This is our way of getting under the public skin, turning them on to what we believe and like. Our appearance is indicative of our inner scene. It’s an outward manifestation of an inner grace.”

It was quite a lark. When Brian Jones and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg signed up in March 1967, Palmer announced it would cost 100 guineas an hour to photograph them. But Pallenberg “never turned up” for jobs, says the English Boy. “She was too beautiful to get out of bed.” That August Christine Keeler, the centerpiece of the 1963 Profumo sex scandal, which had brought down Britain’s government, signed on as one of English Boy’s girls. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull followed a month later. When Pallenberg left Brian Jones for his band mate Keith Richard, Jones hooked up with another English Boy model, Suki Poitier. Remarkably she’d survived the car crash that killed Tara Browne.

Until then Chelsea had been a little village “with a butcher and a baker,” model Ingrid Boulting recalls. “But it was being taken over by far-out clothing stores. God, the clothes we would wear were wild! Work wasn’t work. The focus was transition and transformation and letting go of old values and pushing for new meaning. It was a fun attempt at something different.”

Within eighteen months, however, Palmer “decided that a flat and the hustling in the gray world that goes with it were really not my scene,” he said,
and dropped out once again to seek New Age enlightenment. He began traveling the British countryside with a tribe of like-minded souls in a hippie caravan of horses and carts, fueled with soft drugs and what Palmer called “holy lunacy.” He remained on the road until 1977, when he married Catherine Tennant, the daughter of Lord Glenconner and the younger sister of Colin Tennant, owner of the Caribbean island of Mustique, and settled down to work as a horse trader in England’s countryside, where he remains to this day.

After Palmer left, control of the agency passed to Quorum’s owner, Alice Pollack, and her partner, the youthquake designer Ossie Clark. They fired their chief booker, Jose Fonseca, and in 1968 she and a friend, April Ducksbury, a photographer’s assistant, opened a new agency, Models One, snatching models Marisa Berenson, Ingrid Boulting, and Sue Murray from English Boy.

They had plenty of competition. As the sixties began, there were about twenty agencies in London. By the end of the decade, says Lucie Clayton’s Kark, there were five dozen. Initially Lucie Clayton had an advantage over them all: a direct line to Ford in New York. “If a girl wanted to go to America, we’d call and say, ‘Here she comes,’” Wynne Gordine-Dalley, Jean Shrimpton’s booker at Lucie Clayton, recalls. “We handled each other’s girls as they came and went. Eileen and Jerry would come and visit. It was all nice and social. We’d talk shop, have dinner at the Karks’ home.” Kark recalls that Ford liked Clayton “because I didn’t want ten percent.”

Unfortunately the trade with America was a one-way street. “It was very much girls leaving London,” says Gordine-Dalley. “Who were we to force a girl who’d seen an opportunity? That was our philosophy. We were kind of dumb, letting all those beauties slip away. Nobody would allow that to happen now.”

Then London sank into an economic decline that lasted for almost a decade and drove longtime agents like Peter Hope Lumley out of business. Though London’s financial district, known as the City, recovered in the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, the lowercased city’s fashions and trends were subsequently easily dismissed as clothes for kids and successive waves of glitter, glam, punk, and new romantic rock stars. London was considered of secondary importance to fashion until a youthquake revival hit in the early 1990s. Lucie Clayton stopped booking models in 1979 and concentrated instead on its charm, secretarial, and nanny schools. “I decided it wasn’t our milieu,” says Leslie Kark. “It was becoming sleazy. And we weren’t doing so well. There were lots of competitors, and they were very much more sharp and clever and successful. The more impressionable girls would leave. There was simply no loyalty. The bitchery between the agents was horrifying. The dislike between the agencies was so great.”

Patti Boyd with her husband, Beatle George Harrison
Patti Boyd and George Harrison, Keystone