After that first job, he began to book me two or three times a week. The second shoot we did was - quelle surprise - in his own bedroom. Photographers are cheeky generally, but Bailey had outrageous nerve - one of the things I came to love about him. His house in Primrose Hill, North London, had the high drama of the late Sixties. Outside, it was painted sky-blue and over-run by ivy. Inside, there were black walls, the obligatory 'purple room', a spare bedroom with handpainted pink minarets, even a den-like room stuffed with velvet sofas that had six TVs mounted on one wall. A huge aeroplane propeller hung in the hall (a detail that Antonioni stole for his fictional photographer's studio in Blow-Up).
Upstairs in Bailey's bedroom, I reclined across the black satin sheets on his Jacobean four-poster, wearing long black satin evening gloves, stockings with a suspender belt and black patent high heels. In one of the pictures, I'm caressing one of the heels - very Bailey, that idea. He was so different from anyone I'd ever met: constantly teasing, flirting, then being gruff - so you never quite knew where you were with him. And that was very sexy to me. I knew we were creating erotically-charged photos that were, for their day, very risque.
In one of them, I'm biting the tip of the evening glove; in another a nipple is exposed. But I was ready to push boundaries. I needed Bailey - and if I can be bold enough to say it, he needed me. Shortly after that shoot, he asked me out on a double-date.
Whenever we were alone for just a moment, we started kissing and fumbling. I was ecstatic inside with lust, lust and more lust. "She wears red feathers and a hulahula skirt. She lives on just coconuts and fish from the sea, a rose in her hair, a gleam in her eyes and love in her heart for me..." Bailey would put his arm round me and sing this little ditty. "What is that song? I've never heard it before!" I'd protest. I thought he'd made it up - until I heard it one day on TV.
We slept together really quickly, but I held back in other ways. I wouldn't consider moving in with him, nor would I even stay the night at his house. The mysterious and unwanted girlfriend had by now moved out of his home, but I felt the bed was still warm. Something made me refuse to slot pliantly into his life. Bailey and I would work together in the daytime and then spend our evenings in restaurants - San Lorenzo or Mr Chow's - bantering about the idiocies of the fashion world and taking the mickey out of people we knew.
Nobody was spared. I also began to see his closely-guarded softer side, to realise that the swaggering, bullish photographer was a public caricature. My friends warned me that I'd become just another name on his infamously long list of conquests, but I knew it was more than that. And when Bailey invited me for a weekend away in Paris, what could I say?
"I see you got her first." It was a familiar voice, that London drawl. I turned around and realised it was Mick Jagger, in a fur Parka and shades, verbally slapping Bailey on the back. We were in the lobby of L'Hotel in Paris, where Bailey and I were staying in a suite. Mick, being Mick, had the penthouse. They were major players, those men: kingpins, cocks-of-the-walk. They'd drunk deeply from the heady Sixties brew of new social freedoms, and women were throwing themselves at their feet.
Naturally, Bailey and Mick saw sex as a free-for-all, not a thing of many colours and consequences, as women do. That Mick and Bailey should banter about me in my presence like that enrages the feminist in me now. At the time, it was habitual, this careless arrogance. Men often spoke about women as if they weren't there. But back then, I just stood there like a sour lemon while Bailey grinned at Mick and put his arm round me, saying: "Yeah, tough luck."
That night, we went to La Coupole, where the fashionable crowd were drinking champagne, pushing food round plates, waving at each other across the banquettes. Bailey pointed at a table where a gaggle of models were sitting. "See her? The dark one? I've had her. And the blonde as well. And f*** me, the brunette, too. Had her against a wall, actually." He spoke not boastfully but with mock-surprise at his own success. I couldn't help laughing. If anything, I found this openness about his conquests refreshing, even reassuring. They weren't a sordid secret - this was just how it was for him.
Back in London, Bailey helped develop my look. He insisted on stockings, and high heels: if he saw I was wearing flat shoes when he came to collect me in the evening, he'd sulk in the car until I put heels on. "Flats make you look like Minnie Mouse!" he'd holler. When we knew each other better, he'd sometimes tease me about my figure, saying: "You're getting mighty meaty, matey!"
Even at the peak of my modelling career, when I was 27, five feet nine and a size eight, he'd clamp down on me whenever I ate even a little of what I fancied. I called him the "food police". Of course it upset me when he prodded my hips, making critical noises. But I was also grateful - I needed to watch my weight because my face and body were my career. In fact, I found a certain pleasure in being told what to do. "That's it," he said, shortly after we returned from a working trip to Italy, "You're moving in with me." He didn't give me any say - typical Bailey.
People thought that I suffered under some kind of tyranny, that he was a Svengali, but the truth is that I was a product of my happy childhood in Hawaii - a laid-back island girl. I enjoyed being passive and submitting to his will. I could enjoy the inverse power of being cosseted, and I could be blissfully lazy. And there was certainly an element of sexual power-play involved, too. We were also bound together by his camera, which he had with him at all times, ready for action, from the moment he woke up. It wasn't so much that he wanted to photograph me in the throes of passion (for that, we used Polaroids - didn't everyone?); rather, he would get separation anxiety if he was far from a camera for long. I might be shaving my legs in the bath and he'd be there snapping away - which would annoy anyone. But I realised that the creative artist never switches off - and, by extension, neither can his model and partner. He didn't even need to speak when he was photographing me: all it would take was a look, a hand motion - rather like a conductor to a first violinist.
We were in San Lorenzo when Bailey proposed - egged on by Mara, the owner of the restaurant, who stood over our table and said she wouldn't leave until he'd written 'Mrs Bailey' in my passport. This he finally did - in pencil. I was only 19, but never doubted then that I was doing the right thing. The wedding itself was a small, private civil ceremony at St Pancras register office on November 3, 1975 and, a few weeks later, we flew off to Honolulu, where my mother had arranged a wedding party .
Paul and Linda McCartney joined us for a week on their way to Australia, and I got high and happy with them. Bailey always hated me smoking grass - but, for once, I could do it with impunity. After all, he could hardly tell the McCartneys to desist. Back in London, we settled into a kind of routine. Every Friday, Bailey and I would be invited for dinner by the then Vogue editor, Beatrix Miller.
You could always predict who'd be there: Bailey and royal photographer Tony Snowdon would be looking daggers at one another (there wasn't much love lost between them) and I was often seated next to the great comedian Peter Sellers, whom I found a gloomy, intense presence. "Am I going to be next to Peter Sellers again?" I'd complain to Bailey in the car. He was quick to chide me. "Marie, there are thousands who'd love to sit next to that man." So I persevered, and eventually we found some common ground to discuss: hallucinogenic drugs. Perhaps Peter got something else out of our conversations, too - there's a silly photo in which I'm beaming at him and he's ogling my cleavage.
At home, there was a constant stream of famous visitors coming to be photographed by Bailey. One Saturday morning, it was Harrison Ford. After he'd left in a taxi - on his way to film the first Indiana Jones movie - Bailey and I began planning what we'd do with our day. Then the doorbell rang. It was Harrison on the doorstep. "Uh, I'm sorry. I got halfway to the airport and then I, uh, realised I forgot my s***." We went up to the dressing room to look for his dope: no sign. In the studio, we searched on hands and knees: no sign. Finally, Harrison leapt up. "I got it!" He was holding a little brown lump he'd found behind the door. "Great," I said, thinking to myself: that looks familiar... I had to say something. "Harrison, are you sure? We have a lot of dogs, you know. It looks like a piece of dog doo-doo..." He shrugged and said with a handsome grin: "Well, I'll find out when I smoke it."
Most of the time, Bailey and I just craved time alone together - not easy when you live in a madhouse. Friends and acquaintances were always coming over uninvited. The doorbell would ring, the 70 parrots Bailey kept in the basement would squawk, and we'd often resort to turning all the lights off and hiding behind the heavy purple velvet curtains in the drawing room. Even in those early days, though, there were problems that I did my best to ignore.
Sweet and generous in his own way, Bailey hardly ever gave me any jewellery, and I never had a credit card or a joint account. Rarely was I ever paid for any of the work I did with him, either; if I needed money, I had to ask for it. Then there was his jealousy, which at times could make him harsh and frightening. The angriest he's ever been with me was after my sister, Naomi, and I went out with Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall in Paris. We'd dined at La Coupole and then piled back to Jerry and Mick's room at the George V for a few drinks. Then Naomi and I went chastely back to our hotel.
Some time after midnight, the phone rang. It was Bailey, in a rage. Where had I been? What had I been doing with Mick? Was I fooling around with him? No matter how many times I explained that Jerry had been with us, too, he couldn't be pacified. Around 3am, I hung up; he rang back; I hung up. When he rang again, Naomi hissed "Don't answer it!" but I did. I desperately wanted to placate my husband. When Naomi and I flew back to London the next morning, my eyes were puffed up from crying. The strange thing was that Bailey had nothing to worry about from Mick. He never made a move on me, and I wouldn't have fooled around with him for the world.
The man Bailey should have really worried about was another of his best friends: the movie star Jack Nicholson. I was always surprised by the way he pursued me, because I assumed that loyalty would prevent a man from making a play for his best friend's partner. Evidently not. Jack would raise the stakes a little when Bailey was away, taking me out for dinner a deux at Langan's, San Lorenzo or Mr Chow's. He was an incorrigible flirt, and I found his attention flattering. Round at the home of mutual friends, he would tell everyone at the dinner table: "You have no idea how crazy I am about Marie!" Everyone would just laugh, but he'd croon: "Ab-so-lute-ly craaazy!" Perhaps he was just doing it for dramatic effect; perhaps the fact that he knew I'd never go behind Bailey's back meant I was perfect material for a flirtation.
When Jack started filming The Shining, I used to go and visit him on set at Elstree. As they shot one particular scene in the huge lobby of the hotel, I was standing silently behind the director Stanley Kubrick, trying not even to breathe. The next day, Jack persuaded me to take a screen test for the film. I leant against the ghostly hotel bar and exchanged some lines of dialogue with Kubrick. Bearded, inscrutable and totally absorbed in looking into the camera, Kubrick simply nodded and said: "Thank you." I didn't get the job - and when I saw the film, I noticed that there was no part that corresponded with the one for which I'd been auditioning.
Jack would throw fabulous dinners in his temporary house on the Embankment for guests including theatre producer Michael White (The Rocky Horror Show), Michael Crichton (far too handsome to be a writer) and tall, cold Sigourney Weaver (brimming with tales about some horror film called Alien). All the prettiest girls in London would come, and sometimes the prettiest girls in Paris, too. But, at the same time, Jack was desperately trying to get back with Anjelica Huston, with whom he'd had a long affair. "Why won't Toots come over?" he'd complain (he always called her Toots). I'd retort: "You don't think it could possibly be because she knows what's going on here?!"
At the time, I must admit that I fantasised about having a fling with Jack - but Bailey was still the one and only man in my life. It was a different story after my marriage ended. Back in London again, Jack was filming Batman and pursuing me with renewed vigour, taking me to lunch at San Lorenzo and dinner at Le Caprice in the course of one day. But now that I was finally attainable, the element of suspense had gone and our flirtation felt flat. We went back to my flat together with a sense of heavy-heartedness. The spark had gone - we had simply waited too long. When he finally left, I didn't care if I never heard from him again. It was too depressing, this feeling of: "Is that it?" What's more, I'm sure the feeling was mutual. In the morning, I received a dozen red roses, and I changed my telephone number. Typical of me, just to run away.
That was how I always dealt with any problems - by leaving the room, leaving the party, leaving the country. Or, indeed, pretending to be asleep.
I will try to contribute.
Vogue Australia October 2024 : Kate Winslet by Annemarieke van Drimmelen (1 Viewer)