Читать книгу Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow - Tom Sykes - Страница 19

Evelyn also had an offshore family legacy abroad, which needed sorting out. He was vague to the point of secrecy on the details of this money, but he did reveal that the fund had been badly managed. The real estate had been sold and replaced with high-risk, speculative investments that had largely failed. What could have been worth several million stood at under £100,000, and, to receive anything at all, and escape the hated taxman, the beneficiary had to live permanently abroad.

Isabella, Evelyn decided in typically autocratic fashion, was the most suitable candidate to receive the money. Julia had health problems and Lavinia at 15 was too young, and both of the younger sisters were temperamentally unsuited to exile anyway. And Evelyn made clear that exile was what was involved, warning Issie darkly: ‘I don’t care if you marry a waiter – you have to live abroad. If you return to this country with that money, you will go to prison.’

For Issie, the timing could not have been more propitious. Nick, on the slender basis of a conversation with a stranger on an aeroplane, had decided that he was going to make his fortune by ‘wildcatting’ for oil in Texas. Wildcatting was a highly speculative enterprise, which involved buying the rights to vast tracts of barren land – the kind of places where only wildcats lived – and then drilling, more in hope than expectation of striking oil. Through his father’s professorship at Stanford, Nicholas had the necessary permits to live and work in America. When he got lucky, Nick would tell Isabella as they hatched their plans in pubs and parties in Oxford and London, he would be able to buy back for her the life into which she had been born – a big house in the country, a townhouse in the city and private education for their children.

It was a beguiling fantasy, and in 1981 Nicholas, 26, and Isabella, 22, moved to Midland, Texas, the hot and dusty capital of the west Texas oil fields.

Midland had started as an oil town in the 1920s and still supplies one-fifth of the total oil and gas for the United States. Isabella and Nicholas would have their breakfast at the counter at the local diner next to George W. Bush, who was then running his father’s oil company Arbusto – which means ‘bush’ in Spanish. They rented an apartment in a condo on what Issie described to me as ‘a road with oil juggernauts roaring past, leaving the taste of dust in your mouth’.

As Anna Wintour observed, it is hard to imagine Issie in ‘unfashionable’ Midland, Texas. Issie, who hated being idle, found a job at Guy La Roche in Midland, but oil-rich Midlanders preferred to fly to Paris in their private jets to do their clothes shopping. Issie decided to put the time she had on her hands while minding the empty shop to good use, reading, among many other classics, War and Peace, Les Liaisions Dangereuses, books by the feminist Simone de Beauvoir and the Beatnik poets. In literature, as in all her creative inspirations, Isabella’s enthusiasm for the progressive and the new was balanced and set in context by her knowledge and understanding of what had gone before.

One night, Nicholas telephoned her from an arid corner of Texas, and warned her that unless they got married she was going to be deported. And so, on 22 April 1981, Issie, wearing a T-shirt and Fiorucci jeans, went to the town hall with Nicholas and were married by the sheriff. The sheriff tried to kiss Isabella. She slapped him and went home, got drunk on champagne and telephoned home to tell her parents what she had done. Her furious mother told her ‘Isabella you were a pain when you were born and you are a pain now.’

Evelyn was kinder. He bought Isabella a pair of aquamarine and diamond earrings and noted her marriage in Debrett’s and Who’s Who. When we were getting married eight years later, Issie criticised her father for making these entries without her permission.

It was far removed from the romantic church wedding she had dreamed of and expected for marriage.

Isabella always insisted that she had not been married ‘in the eyes of God’, and that it was a ‘visa wedding’, but she was clearly in love with Nicholas. Thanks to his fantastic appearance and physique, Issie also regarded him as good genetic stock for children, which she wanted desperately.

But they were not ready. Isabella told me that she had one abortion when she was with Nick and that a second time she became pregnant the foetus aborted naturally. But to her old friend Emily Dashwood in England, who she would call out of the blue from Texas, sometimes in tears, she said she had 10 abortions. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Later in England, working at Tatler, she would confide in her friend the writer Mary Killen, a doctor’s daughter, her sadness and regret about her abortions. When Issie and I became engaged, Issie had herself checked out and told me everything was OK. But she didn’t go into details and I always sensed a niggling doubt about her own fertility, despite the beautiful baby clothes she bought and stored in cupboards in readiness for the happy day that would never come. By another coincidence a cousin of mine had a cottage in Sussex next door to Nicholas’s father, Dr Keith Taylor. Dr Taylor told my cousin that Isabella could never have children.

I suspect Dr Taylor formed this opinion because while in Texas, Isabella had a serious case of Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the intestines. She was operated on and had 18 inches of her perforated intestines removed. From then on, her friend Natasha Grenfell remembered, her famous stripteases involved carefully shrouding with material the 18-inch scar on her stomach.

But away from the sadness of the abortions, there was a glamorous, petrodollar-fuelled side to Texan life that Issie enjoyed immensely. While Nick went off for weeks on end, covering vast expanses of Texan desert in his hunt for oil, Isabella visited places like the enormous King Ranch, the largest ranch in America, which extended to a million acres. She had Uncle Shimi to thank for her introduction to King Ranch, and she also had contacts from her friend Lucy’s father Patrick Helmore, who insured racehorses for a number of Texan owners. Soon Isabella was flying around Texas on private jets visiting the homes of wealthy Texans, pretending to admire their collections of crystal animals and having her nails and hair done by manicurists and hairdressers who were drafted into these opulent and unrestrained homes by the day.

The wealth generated by the American oil boom in America in the eighties was staggering and Issie and Nick wanted a slice of it.

But it was not to be.

‘All Nick ever found was few rusty old coke tins,’ Issie said.

By March 1983, the love affair with Texas, which she had taken to describing as a ‘den of doom’, was definitely over. She and Nick made plans to head to New York and Issie was ‘over the moon’.

She would need some new armour for New York, however. She asked a friend back home to send over her ‘Piero de Monzi skirt’ and ‘insure it for £150,000’.