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.