There was Caterine Milinaire, whose mother, a producer, had been my parents’ first friend in Paris. I had known her since I was four and she was ten; Caterine was my glamorous role model. When her mother married the Duke of Bedford, Caterine and her siblings moved into Woburn Abbey, where I spent most weekends, assiduously selling full-color guidebooks to visitors. Caterine was now at VOGUE, and here she was, sulky and gorgeous in the Queen Victoria Bedroom at Woburn Abbey, photographed with her shoulders slouched in a slipper chair, her hips and legs braced across the void, her feet on a silk footstool. She wore Gypsy clothes: a golden vest from Apple, the Beatles’ store; a satin shirt and pants from Quorum. I had the same shirt. I was almost her.
Through someone at British VOGUE I was introduced to an editor at Glamour who liked me. The fact that my father had a production company with Peter O’Toole, the most famous movie star of the day, was not lost on her. Nor on me. By the end of June I had a job as her assistant, and another job replacing the book reviewer. Harold Hayes at Esquire had commissioned me to write an exposé of Sarah Lawrence, but there was no way to do it without causing pain. It seemed safer to forgo that explosive glory to play with clothes and live life as a charaderie.
When I went to Sarah Lawrence, I rode up from New York with Penelope Tree in something called a Larchmont Limousine
Condé Nast was then in the Graybar Building, at 420 Lexington Avenue, above Grand Central; I stayed two blocks away, at my uncle’s apartment. New York summer heat was a shock. On the first morning, I walked to work, done up for the King’s Road. By the time I arrived, my pale-blue silk shirt from Deborah and Clare was a wet mess; my wool miniskirt was concrete; and the snakeskin scales were curling away from my Quorum waistcoat. They gave me a desk anyway, and a rotary phone with big square Lucite extension buttons on it.
The floor outside the elevator was black inlaid with gold brass stars. The technical smell of copier fluid pervaded the hallways. Condé Nast was a bastion of propriety. Glamour’s editor in chief, Ruth Whitney, had the kind of hair later immortalized by Margaret Thatcher. We were enjoined to “think of Peoria.” At first I thought it was an acronym—Propriety, Education, Order, Rules, Integrity, Action, perhaps—until I learned that it was a place in the Midwest, where Glamour’s readers were said to live.
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