Читать книгу Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow - Tom Sykes - Страница 17

In early 1980, Isabella fell in love with Nicholas Edward Taylor, a slightly older, mature student, who was studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Merton College, Oxford. Nick was the incredibly handsome third son of Dr Keith Taylor, a lecturer at Oxford University, and Ann Jones, a Physiology don and later lecturer in Biochemistry at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford. Like many of the offspring of Oxford academics, Nicholas attended the Dragon prep school in Oxford.

What threatened to be an entirely conventional British upper-middle-class childhood was transformed in 1963, when Nicholas’s father was offered a job as Professor of Medicine at Stanford in California. After some soul-searching, Nicholas’s mother gave up her job at Oxford, and moved the young family – four brothers and a sister – to Palo Alto, in the San Francisco Bay Area of north California.

The Taylor brothers enthusiastically embraced the entrepreneurial spirit of Californian life. Nick’s elder brother Sebastian became a professional backgammon player, and today both he and the youngest brother, Daniel, are successful financiers.

Nicholas, however, was more academic than his brothers and headed back to Oxford to complete his studies after school. On his return to England he quickly became bored by his conservative contemporaries. He told his friend Robert Murphy, a scholar at Oxford, that he wanted to meet some ‘more exciting’ new people. Robert knew exactly who to introduce Nick to: his elder brother Antony’s friend Isabella, who was constantly flashing her bosoms and at the centre of an exciting, destructive, law-breaking set with, as he puts it, ‘no sense of modesty, decorum, or respect’.

Isabella was without a boyfriend following Wolf’s dramatic announcement that he was no longer in love with her, and Robert’s introduction worked well. Nicholas and Isabella soon became an item. Isabella told me that sex with Nicholas was fantastic.

Flora Fraser, then at Oxford studying for a history degree at Wadham College, knew Nick well because she was living in his parents’ old house in Jericho, which Nick now occupied, renting out spare rooms as student digs. Flora recalls:

When she and Nick went out, I used to hear she did a fabulous striptease after dinner. It was part of her personality at that time. She had a fabulous figure. Her bosoms were generally on show in some way. We were all quite on top of each other and Nick found it difficult working when Issie was around, so one day he suggested she go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at the Kandinskys. She went back again and again, more excited each time.

Nick’s brother Sebastian first met Isabella in the King’s Road in London. It was a darker side of Isabella that he encountered: she was chasing the dragon – smoking heroin in tin foil.

Drugs were a big part of Isabella’s generation, which had been hit from the late 1970s by what her friend Colin Cawdor remembers as a ‘wave of heroin’. Isabella, Wolf and many of their contemporaries were into ‘hard drugs’ – heroin, coke and speed. Isabella was one of the few in her circle not to become addicted, a fact of which she was proud. Issie smoked grass now and then throughout her life, but hated hard drugs.

The Taylor brothers were very handsome and they became popular members of Isabella’s circle, but tragedy was to strike the family. Nicholas’s eldest brother, Mathew, was killed outright riding a motorbike in London, only a short time after qualifying as a doctor. Also travelling on the motorbike was Mathew and Isabella’s friend Cristina Zilkha, a half-French, Harvard-educated lyricist who had success with the dancefloor anthem ‘Disco Clone’. She survived the crash with barely a scratch on her. Cristina said that her life was saved by the protection afforded her by the fur coat she was wearing.