Читать книгу Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow - Tom Sykes - Страница 20

In the end, Issie – along with her Piero de Monzi skirt – made the trek to New York on her own. Issie may have given up on striking oil, but Nicholas was not so easily discouraged. He decided to stay in Midland, looking for luck. Issie was sad to leave Nicholas, but the blow was softened by the fact that they had not spent much time together anyway, as Nicholas had spent most of their time in Texas on the road – or in the air – hunting for that elusive ‘gusher’. Although she had done her best to make the most of the state, she eventually accepted that for her own sanity she had to escape Texas and its desperate millionaire housewives measuring out their days with mani-pedis. Issie knew her future lay not in the South but on the East Coast.

Issie had formed a plan to use her family legacy to go to Columbia University in New York, but as for any other new arrival in the city, there were practicalities to organise first. Issie’s first priority on landing in New York was to find somewhere to stay. She found a room in a flat in the Midtown area of New York, sharing with Catherine Oxenberg, daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, then working as a model but soon to find fame playing Joan Collins’s glamorous daughter in Dynasty.

Issie’s decision to go to Columbia had not been made lightly. Although Issie had not been particularly bothered about her A-level results at the time, a few years out in the world had left Isabella conscious of her lack of a formal higher education. Her father had refused to send her to study art in Florence, but the family legacy she received by living abroad now made it possible for her to pay for her higher education herself.

Money was only half the battle, however. To get into an American university, there was the small matter of Issie’s A-level grades, which needed improving. The improvement was achieved with the aid of a photocopying machine and Tippex. Her deceit paid off – she was accepted to do a degree in Chinese Art at Columbia.

Issie enjoyed the Chinese Art course, studying ancient Sui and Tang pottery and, as she said, ‘looking for hours at the Buddha’s ear lobe’.

After a year, however, Issie decided to drop out. Her decision, she told me, was precipitated by a fellow student being stabbed to death on campus. In the early eighties, New York City was a dangerous and lawless place recovering from its bankruptcy in the 1970s. It was also, however, a seething cauldron of creativity. Issie’s interest in fashion and the individual way she dressed may have protected her – she attributed the fact that she was never mugged or attacked to the wild way she looked and behaved.

She continued her practice of flashing her bosoms. At Nicola’s, a homely restaurant popular with authors on the Upper East Side, her friend Michael Zilkha, the Oxford-educated, Lebanese heir to Mother-care, recalls that she volunteered to the owner Nick that she would expose her breasts in return for a bottle of champagne. The transaction was ‘duly consummated’.

Flashing her breasts became Issie’s calling card. The artist Hugo Guinness recalls:

Issie was incredibly attention seeking and demanding of attention and an exhibitionist – but that was what was fun. She was a performer, she was this eccentric, crazy girl who, basically, if anyone wasn’t paying attention to her, she would flash her boobs. That was what she did. That was her party turn. That was her thing. If you were not interested in talking to her, woop! Out they’d come. She’d play with them, she’d squeeze them, that was what she used to get attention – her boobs. It was pretty radical.

That’s why she’d be invited everywhere. We’d all be waiting to see till she did that. And she wouldn’t have to be pissed to do it. Her boobs were her secret weapon from the age of 17 to 27. That is what I remember most about Issie. The boob flashing.

Another reason for dropping out of Columbia was simply that Issie found being tied down – to a desk, an employer or a course – stifled her creativity. It helped as Issie herself admitted that at the time it was fashionable to ‘drop out’.

By the time Issie left Columbia, Nicholas had finally had enough of his fruitless quest for oil in Midland and came to join Isabella in New York, where he swiftly landed a job at the investment bankers Salomon Brothers. Financially savvy Nicholas told Issie that they needed to use the capital of her legacy in order to buy a flat in New York.

The flat Issie bought was a first-floor walk-up on the corner of Charles Street and West 4th in Greenwich Village. It had two bedrooms, but Issie knocked them together to create a big bedroom. In the kitchen she put down industrial rubber, which was then unheard of. Vogue’s André Leon Talley, who visited the apartment, remembered:

It was a beautiful flat, very neat and fastidiously clean. She had one big painting on the wall by some fantastic artist she had discovered. It was huge. I don’t recall who the artist was, but I remember she told me that the painting cost £700 – and £700 was a fortune then.

André also remembered that the flat was dominated by ‘a big wrought iron bed’. There was no central heating in the flat, so when visitors – such as her cousin Aeneas Mackay, who was at Brown University in Rhode Island – came in the winter, they would sleep with Issie in the bed with all their clothes on to keep warm.

New York was kinder to Nicholas than Midland had been. The bond market was booming and he started to make some serious money. But Issie was not getting to the one place she wanted to be in fashion: Vogue magazine.

Issie had applied to personnel at American Vogue but been turned down by the then fashion director Polly Mellen. So Issie was again working odd jobs. One of them was at a coffee shop called La Manga on 57th Street. ‘I dressed and looked so unusual that they would not let me serve the customers, and kept me downstairs working the cappuccino machine,’ Issie said. Out of pride, she would have her lunchtime sandwiches delivered to her there – from another sandwich shop.

She also worked the coat check in an Ian Schrager club. Aeneas remembers that at this time Issie was frustrated in her career and was increasingly tempted to ignore her father’s dire warning about the tax implications of the legacy and return to England.

Then, at a stroke, Issie’s luck changed. Her old friend Lucy Helmore had married Bryan Ferry, who was one of the hottest and most celebrated rock stars in the world at that moment, effortlessly straddling the worlds of art, fashion and music. Bryan and Lucy came to New York and rented Anna Wintour’s brownstone in Greenwich Village. Issie hung out with the glamorous pair constantly. It was a triangular friendship that would endure over the years. Hugo Guinness explains:

Issie was the one friend of Lucy’s that Bryan actually liked. Lots of relationships have someone in the middle and for them it was Issie. Issie would always try and make peace between them so they could carry on. Bryan – who is a creative, talented person – loved Issie’s energy and style. Issie was absolutely incredible. She was a real upper, she was the person who made the party fun.

Issie told me that Bryan could not believe that she worked in a coffee shop and came to check it out. He told her, ‘Issie, this is ridiculous, you love clothes – you should be working at Vogue.’ (Bryan says he has no recollection of telling Issie this.)

Bryan was able to arrange for Issie to have an interview with Anna Wintour, then creative director of American Vogue. Independently, Anna had heard from her friend, the British restaurateur Brian McNally, about ‘a fabulously eccentric creature who worked as the coat check girl in one of Ian Schrager’s nightclubs’.

Issie’s foot was in the door of Vogue. Her interview in 1984 with Anna at the old Condé Nast office at 350 Madison Avenue was to change her life. In February 1984, Issie wrote excitedly to her friend Liza Campbell in England saying she had ‘lied like the devil’ and falsely claimed to have attended London University.

But Issie’s qualifications didn’t really impress Anna – her literary tastes did. Anna recalls:

Issie was transfixed by the copy of Vita Sackville-West’s biography that was on my desk. She said to me, ‘I’ve cried each of the three times that I’ve read it.’ ‘Issie,’ I told her, ‘There’s nothing to cry about.’

Issie’s reference for her job was Michael Zilkha. Anna asked Zilkha about Issie. ‘Well, Anna, I can recommend Issie for making the best roast potatoes,’ he replied.

Issie got the job as one of Anna’s two assistants. It was the break she needed. Ever after, Issie would say, ‘I owe everything to Anna.’