At the close of 1966, in my last year of high school, I was spotted by photographer Richard Avedon at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in New York. Though I was an insecure, introverted 16-year-old, Avedon and Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland inspired me to come out of my shell. Within months I was modelling for Vogue and other American magazines.
That summer, having graduated from high school, I flew to London to work in a publisher’s office as a reader. I was not a very diligent reader, seeing as I was out every night dancing at Sibylla’s, or queuing for Top of the Pops, where I encountered The Rolling Stones for the first time. In those days, London was a much smaller place; the class system seemed to be dissolving as actors, artists, pop stars, photographers and the fashion crowd mixed freely with establishment figures and aristocrats. The synergy created by these different worlds intersecting for the first time was intoxicating.
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When I first met David Bailey, he was sitting cross legged on the floor of a British Vogue office working on layouts. A few days later we were shooting a story for Vogue at his studio. The energy between us was cartoon-level electric. Nothing happened that day, but nine months later, I was living with Bailey in Primrose Hill. I was 18, he was 30. What could possibly go wrong?
Our first day together in London we went to meet the Kray twins in an East End pub called the Blind Beggar. I was escorted upstairs to the Ladies Lounge to drink shandies with the girls while Bailey talked to Ronnie and Reggie Kray about photographing them for The Sunday Times. As I had never heard of the Kray twins (being American), I had some misguided notion they were just two-bit thieves out of an early Peter Sellers film. When they were arrested a few months later, I freaked out when I read in the papers about their ‘activities’.
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We were happy together for a while. Bailey was magnetic and wherever we went, in nightclubs, on fashion shoots and in restaurants, women threw themselves at him and he did nothing to stop them. Feminism was just coming into its own, but when the most beautiful girls in the world are making a play for your partner, it is rather difficult to embrace the Sisterhood. It’s impossible to imagine what a misogynistic time it was then and how men really had the upper hand.