Another article from Timesonline.co.uk:
Fashion victim
Models, designers, editors — Isabella Blow had them all under her sartorial spell. So what drove the queen of style to end her life with weedkiller?
Haluk Akakce, modern artist, was a casual dresser whose art was all invested in his videos and his paintings and drawings. He had initially been taken unawares by the living theatre of Isabella’s existence, meeting her for the first time at the London restaurant Baltic, where she had turned up in a white headdress and an extravagant outfit. The entire restaurant had stopped to gawp at her. She went straight up to Haluk. “You must be Haluk,” she said. “Can you zip up my dress?” There was no zip, just hooks, and he had obliged.
It was 2003, and Haluk was about to begin renting a house in Theed Street, Waterloo, owned by Isabella’s husband Detmar Blow, the gallery owner. Isabella and Detmar had recently separated. Detmar had told Haluk they were getting a divorce, so the house would be empty for a few months. At the last moment, Isabella had decided she would live there too, with Haluk, and had proposed getting together at Baltic.
With her dress now securely hooked up, they had sat down at the table and Isabella had said, shall we have caviar? The caviar was still on the table when Isabella’s estranged husband, Detmar, arrived. “You f***ing c***s,” said Detmar.
“Who’s ordered the caviar? Who’s paying for it? I’m not paying for it.” He and Isabella had begun shouting in the restaurant. Haluk, who was Turkish and unencumbered by English anxieties over polite behaviour, took the view that there was nothing wrong with a bit of drama, which was just as well, as the next few years of his life with Isabella and Detmar would be full of it. He flew to New York the next day for work, and arrived back to begin his tenancy at Theed Street at 2.30am, with Isabella playing the Sex Pistols so loud you could hear it for miles.
Isabella was then the fashion director at Tatler, arranging and styling photo shoots and spreads. She did not like the Theed Street house, and called it the NCP car park on account of its narrow, multiple floors. Taxis never knew it, and she would spell out the street name when ordering cabs to take her around town or up to Vogue House in Hanover Square: “Yes, Theed Street, that’s T for t*ts, H for horny, E for erection…” She would try to vary it each time:
“T for testicles…” Isabella had an earthy turn of phrase and gave the impression she thought a lot about sex. Her mobile-phone number ended with the digits 69, which were rendered like a seductive come-on in her voice-mail recording.
Haluk and Isabella became close friends and spent a great deal of time together. She had not long since left the Priory, where she was treated for depression, but Haluk adored her, thought she was absolutely amazing, and learnt to live with the ups and downs, never knowing which of the two Isabellas he would meet today. Would it be the supremely confident Isabella who could go anywhere, do anything, be the Queen of England, or the worthless Isabella who would say: “I’m nothing, I’ve no talent… Philip can make hats, you are an artist. What can I do? Nothing.”
In these last years of her life, Isabella was increasingly troubled by her past. According to Detmar, she had always been “highly strung”. Her aristocratic, well-connected life of glamour and fantasy was beginning to look more like an unsuccessful attempt to flee reality. She had demons, as Detmar called them, that she could not overcome. Isabella had been on the front row of the catwalk shows for years, and had been influential and highly regarded as a talent spotter, as well as a muse and inspiration for young designers, stylists, photographers and models. She was now in her mid-forties and fashion was for the young. Still, it was hard to believe someone so vivid and seemingly full of life could be so unhappy. Many thought her depression was part of her “performance” and didn’t take it seriously.
On his own account, Haluk was barely domesticated, but Isabella looked after him like a mother. Not that he could have told her that – “Oh, Issie, you’re like a mother to me” – as she would have killed him. He had upset her once, trying to describe her appearance, telling her she was not beautiful in the popular sense; meaning her beauty was in her character (not to mention her near-perfect figure and much admired, often displayed breasts). She misunderstood: “You’re just saying I’m ugly!” It was one of her themes, her “ugly” appearance and her fading looks. She sometimes said Philip Treacy’s hats, the surreal, spectacular creations she nearly always wore, were her alternative to plastic surgery, covering her eyes. She had considered plastic surgery, canvassing friends for their views. She decided she’d do it and then changed her mind.
One day in 2004, when Haluk came home from the studio, Issie told him, you’re coming with me to Paris next week, you’ll photograph couture, 22 pages for Tatler. Issie loved Haluk’s video work, but this was different. Haluk had never taken a still photograph in his life. “I can’t do it,” he told her. “You can do it,” she said, in her breathy, resonant, utterly posh tones. “Darling, your work’s a fantasy, couture is fantasy. I need something really beautiful and I can’t just take anyone.” That was typical. With Issie it was always either the very best or a total unknown, a new discovery. “I’m like a pig snuffling out truffles,” she would say. Her discoveries had made her famous – though not as famous as the discoveries themselves, nor nearly as rich, which had become a constant source of tension for her.
Though she remained close to Treacy, whom she had championed from her first encounter with one of his hats, something in green felt cut like teeth, at Tatler in 1989, she often complained she had made a lot of money for unnamed others among her “discoveries” and rarely got anything back. I was told that her cousin, the aristocratic model Honor Fraser, once presented her with a cheque as a thank-you. Issie had also famously helped Sophie Dahl become a highly paid model, defending her at the first shoot during a furious argument with the editor of Italian Vogue: “But she’s too fat!” Issie: “I don’t care – she’s beautiful.” And of course, in addition to the designer Hussein Chalayan, there was Alexander McQueen, the rough diamond who was described to me by one of Issie’s assistants as being like a pig at fittings for her in his studio, snorting and sweating as he moved around Issie, pinning and adjusting the clothes in an animalistic way she found exciting. Issie had bought everything in McQueen’s first collection and promoted him tirelessly. Of course, having a reputation for finding talent was part of Issie’s status as a fashion icon, so she got something from it, but her discoveries always seemed to get the better deal.
She idolised McQueen, but they did not see each other so much latterly, and her assistant said his press-office staff were patient with her and suffered – “a lot!” – on McQueen’s behalf, with Issie’s demands for clothes and her complaints that he was not paying his dues to her.
Issie ought to have been rich, and indeed lived more or less as though she was. But she wasn’t.
Her family’s principal estate in Cheshire could be traced back nearly 700 years, and at the turn of the last century still occupied nearly 35,000 acres, with the substantial country house Doddington Hall at its centre. But Issie’s grandfather Sir Henry Delves Broughton, known to all as Jock, had indulged himself so much that he had been forced to start liquidating assets, selling off land in sizable chunks to finance his horses, his gambling, his estates in Ceylon, his travels in East Africa and elsewhere, and his idle life of bridge, croquet and extravagant weekend house parties, when he hired a band to entertain guests on the train up from Paddington. The parties were sometimes written up in Tatler. In those days the family appeared in Tatler rather than worked for it.
Jock was said to have raised and spent £1.5m, a colossal sum in the days before the second world war. By 1939 there were less than 4,000 acres left. Jock’s wife, Vera, went off with Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, and they travelled together around southeast Asia, the Pacific islands and the frozen north. Lord Moyne produced two books, with photographs by Vera Broughton – Walkabout and Atlantic Circle – before he became a government minister, and in 1944 he was assassinated in Cairo by Zionist extremists.
Jock and Vera had two children: a daughter, Rosamund, and a son, Evelyn, who would become Issie’s father. With Vera gone, Jock met and married an aspirant blonde socialite, Diana, who was younger than his own son, and together they went to start a new life in Kenya, joining the dissolute white aristocratic settlers known as the Happy Valley set, who drank, took drugs and swapped partners for sex, apparently oblivious to the fact the Nazis had begun a world war and the old days of empire were all but over. Within three weeks of Jock and Diana’s arrival in Kenya in late 1940, she had begun an affair with Lord Erroll. Less than two months later, on January 24, 1941, Lord Erroll was shot and killed in his car.
Jock was tried and acquitted of the murder and returned home to England. His son, Evelyn, confronted him about his excessive spending, which was effectively cheating Evelyn out of his inheritance. Jock was said to have chased his son out of his study with a riding crop. Jock was now also suspected of two insurance frauds, arranging for the theft of pearls and paintings he owned and claiming for them on recently enhanced insurance. He must have been desperately broke.
Jock killed himself just before Christmas in 1942, overdosing on the barbiturate medinal at the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool, where he had evidently gone to commit suicide, asking not to be disturbed in his room. The writers Cyril Connolly and James Fox wrote about the murder of Lord Erroll in this magazine in 1969. Connolly referred to medinal as oblivion’s boarding card. Fox went on to publish an account of the case, White Mischief, which became a film with Charles Dance and Greta Scacchi, and Joss Ackland playing Issie’s grandfather Jock.
Issie was said to be bored with the whole thing, that tedious White Mischief mystery, but Fox’s book carried an intriguing thread, describing how Jock was said to have suffered “headaches and an excitable mental condition” from a young age. He nursed a “lifelong sense of injury and disadvantage” because his own father kept him short of money. He can never have stopped to think he might pass on this unhappy legacy, as his own son, Evelyn, Issie’s father, complained that he and his father were strangers by the time he was a teenager, Jock having visited him only once at Eton during his whole time at the public school, and never once during his years at prep.
Evelyn, too, had a taste for the good life in his early days. Even though his inheritance was much denuded, it was still substantial, with a house in London and numerous properties on the land around the hall, which became a school, while Evelyn went to live in one of the staff cottages, where Issie was born and brought up, until she too was packed off to boarding school. Issie won the “cheerfulness prize” three times during her six years at Heathfield school, Ascot.
Evelyn had married Issie’s mother, Helen Shore, a young barrister, after a brief earlier marriage that produced no children. Helen gave birth to Issie in 1958, followed by Julia in 1961, John in 1962, and Lavinia in 1965. John died in a freak accident in 1964 at the age of two, which Issie always described as a drowning but, according to the records, was actually a result of choking on food. Somehow the boy fell in some shallow water – possibly fresh rainwater in an otherwise empty pool – in the garden of his house on the estate, while his parents were elsewhere. The water caused him to regurgitate his lunch of baked beans, and one or more beans lodged in his throat so that he choked to death.