Twiggy at 60: 'It's amazing I didn't go stark raving bonkers'
The face of the 60s is herself turning 60. She talks about fame, fate, fun … and middle-age spread.
19 September 2009
Icons of youth and beauty are not supposed to grow old, let alone grow old gracefully. They are supposed to live fast and die young, or else rage against the dying of the light with fidelity issues and plastic surgery. So it is against the odds, really, that Twiggy turns 60 ­today still beautiful (even if the saucer eyes are now edged by fine lines rather than by the three pairs of false eyelashes she wore when she was the Face of 1966), still a working model, and with little outward sign of the squeamishness that surrounds the issue of ageing in many women in the public eye.
It is a few days shy of her birthday when I arrive to have tea with Twiggy in her London flat. Being a deeply nosy person, I am pleased Twiggy has suggested I meet her at home; surprised, too, because although I have often seen her at catwalk shows and Marks & Spencer events, I have not properly met Twiggy before, and in recent years she has gained a reputation for being a little prickly, so I was expecting to be summoned to a supervised interview in a smart restaurant or an agent's office. The apartment is on an elegant street, with gleaming brass knockers on tasteful black gloss front doors and the kind of expensive, leafy hush that cushions central London's garden squares from the hoi polloi. Twiggy lives here with the actor Leigh Lawson, her husband of 21 years, their children having long since grown up. I am expecting something cheerful and modern inside, wooden floorboards and spot lighting perhaps, but instead it is shabby chic with a faint scent of bohemia, more redolent of Twiggy the 60s icon than of Twiggy the M&S model. There are Turkish rugs and Balinese sculptures, walls covered with an eclectic collection of paintings, lush houseplants, a friendly cat, a piano crowded with photographs in silver frames.
In the flesh, Twiggy at 60 is living proof that good legs and good cheekbones are the gifts bestowed by fairy godmothers with an eye on the long game. Today she is wearing black leggings and a short black silk dress with painterly silver brushstrokes by Stella McCartney – Twiggy's daughter, Carly, works with McCartney as a print designer – and it is still plain to see, from the slender legs, how the childhood nickname Twiggy came about.
As a teenage model, Twiggy weighed just six and a half stone. "Much too thin," she says emphatically. "I had a look – I can see that now – but I don't think I was beautiful." Although she has enough wrinkles to make me believe her when she says she has had no Botox or surgery, her face has sagged only a little. Good bone structure acts as natural scaffolding.
The room has at least five armchairs and sofas, but Twiggy kicks off her shoes and settles herself on to the sofa where I am sitting. The cat joins us. It is very cosy. Frankly, I was expecting her to be something of a madam, but for the hour and a half I am there, nothing could be farther from the truth. When I later play back the tapes, what strikes me is how she never pauses before answering a question – if she is editing her thoughts at all, then she is very fast indeed – and how often the tape is punctuated by her throaty, gravelly laugh. The laughter is louder than the rest of the tape because of her habit, when she laughs, of leaning towards me and grabbing me by the forearm for emphasis. You get the impression she's the kind of woman who, if you were friends, would put her arm through yours when you walked down the street. But you sense, also, a core of steel in that slender frame. As she puts it, "I like to get on with people. I don't go around being nasty, but if someone crosses me, I can be horrible back."
Along with the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, it is the early photographs of Twiggy – a startlingly skinny, freckled and crop-haired child-woman of just 16 – that have crystallised into instant visual shorthand for 60s London. The tale of how it came about is one of fate, or chance, depending on which one you believe in. Early in 1966, having been told that at 5ft 6in she was too short for fashion modelling, Twiggy was having her shoulder-length hair styled in preparation for some test "head shots" at House of Leonard, the chic London salon of the time, when she was noticed by Leonard himself, who was looking for models on whom to try out his new crop haircut. Her hair was duly cut, photos taken, and the next day Twiggy went back to school. The story could have ended there, but for the fact that Deirdre McSharry, fashion editor of the Daily Express, noticed the photo of the gamine girl with the daring haircut in the salon a few days later, asked Leonard for the model's name, called Twiggy and asked to meet her.
McSharry took Twiggy for tea, more pictures were taken, and Twiggy went back home to Neasden. The following morning her dad bought the Express, but nothing appeared. The next day, he scoured the paper again, and the next. Nearly three weeks went past, then one morning he came into Twiggy's bedroom with an open newspaper. Twiggy – The Face Of '66 was the headline. The following month, she did her first shoot for Vogue. By the time she flew to New York to work with Richard Avedon for the first time, a year later, she had appeared in 13 separate fashion shoots in international Vogue editions and was greeted by a pack of paparazzi and fans at JFK. The New Yorker, Life and Newsweek reported on the Twiggy "phenomenon" in 1967, with the New Yorker devoting nearly 100 pages to the subject. By 1970, she had been photographed by Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Norman Parkinson.
Twiggy: A Life In Photographs is the title of a new National Portrait Gallery exhibition and book, a photographic biography in celebration of her birthday. It documents that early starburst of iconic images: Twiggy on a bike by Ronald Traeger; photos from the famous Everyone Wants To Be Twiggy shoot where Melvin Sokolsky solved the problem of gawpers hanging around the location by giving them all Twiggy masks and turning them into extras; a casual portrait of Twiggy in a woolly hat taken by her friend Linda McCartney when Twiggy went to visit Linda a week after her baby Mary was born in 1969. From the 70s and 80s, when Twiggy was working in film and theatre and music rather than fashion, there are fewer – one by Norman Parkinson of Twiggy pregnant, some by Terry O'Neill when Twiggy was promoting her first albums. There are recent portraits by Steven Meisel, who persuaded Twiggy back into modelling when he photographed her for Italian Vogue in 1993, by Annie Leibovitz, by Solve Sundsbo, who shot her with Kate Moss for i-D magazine, and by Bryan Adams, the rock star turned photographer who also photographed her for today's Weekend. Her favourite of the photographs is the one of her pregnant, which is the only one where she has any curves. "The way I looked when I started modelling – I was a skinny schoolgirl, stuffing tissues into my little 32A bra. I wasn't trying to be that thin, I was perfectly healthy, but still – that look is a total impossibility for women over the age of 20. Fashion has a lot to answer for, doesn't it?"
Indeed. Introspection on such topics is not her style, though. Twiggy loves to have fun, she loves banter. The nature of the compliments she doles out reflects this: Kate Moss is "hilarious, such a laugh". Tyra Banks, with whom she worked as a judge on America's Next Top Model, is "so bright, so funny, bloody clever". Agyness Deyn is "not just great looking, really good fun, too". Because we associate Twiggy with a doll-like 60s aesthetic, it is a shock to find that in real life her body language, and the energy that emanates from her, is more rock star than groupie. To hear her tell it, the M&S campaigns sound packed with St Trinian's-esque capers. When they were shooting an ad in Venice, all the models and Twiggy's daughter stayed at the Cipriani, and went out for dinner every night "just us girls, and I swear to God I've never laughed so much in my life. Noemie – you know the beautiful black girl who does the underwear, she's so gorgeous – she was ordering really expensive fish dishes and feeding them to the stray cats. Hilarious! Such a great girl. Happy memories!"
However many times Twiggy is photographed in a flattering longer-length cardigan and sensible mid-heeled boots for M&S, she will always be known as the ingénue in the miniskirt and matchstick eyelashes. "What happened to me in the 60s – I will never be able to eclipse that. I realised that a long time ago, even though I'm much prouder of starring on Broadway." She was nominated for a Tony award for Best Actress in a Musical when she starred in My One And Only in the early 80s. "Eight shows a week is hard work. That's a real achievement, whereas what happened before – that just happened to me." Does it feel strange to have the defining era of your life happen to you when you are so young? She shrugs. "The thing is, when you're 16, you don't feel young. At the time you think you're quite grown up. It wasn't until much later, when I had a daughter and she got to be 16, that I looked at her and thought, 'Oh my God, I was that young when it happened.' It's amazing, really, that I didn't go stark raving bonkers."
So why didn't she? "I was so young that it all went over my head. I was so naive." As a model at the Paris collections in 1968, she scandalised a waiter by turning down an expensive red wine and asking for a Coca-Cola instead. The fashion industry gets a bad press for its treatment of young models, but Twiggy is adamant that she was always well treated. "I was lucky in that everything happened to me so fast that I never had to try to climb up the ladder. When you're trying to make it, that's when you're vulnerable."
Not all of Twiggy's life has been plain sailing. In 1977 she married the US actor Michael Whitney, and in 1978 gave birth to Carly. Whitney's alcoholism destroyed their marriage, and on an outing to celebrate Carly's fifth birthday he collapsed and died. But with her second marriage to Lawson she seems to have created a very happy family unit: this summer, Twiggy, Leigh, Carly and Jason – Lawson's son by an earlier relationship with Hayley Mills – went on holiday together to Ibiza.
Twiggy's life these days sounds privileged but relatively normal. As well as the flat, she has a house in Suffolk, where she and Lawson keep fit by going for long walks in all weathers. She got into Pilates for a while, and when she was in Ibiza she did 20 lengths in the pool most mornings. She wears quite a few bits of Stella McCartney – "I get a very good deal there, as I should" – but says she is "a high street girl really". Celebrities often say that, but you can tell from the way Twiggy talks that she knows her high street stuff: when Matthew Williamson designed a range for H&M, for instance, she bought men's suits there "because I love men's tailoring, and the H&M men's size 36 always fits me perfectly". She cooks a lot ("Jamie Oliver's books are the best. I love Jamie. Bless him!") and, these days, watches her weight. "Middle-aged spread hit me at middle age, in my mid-40s. I eat healthily, I don't eat fried food, and I'm lucky to be married to someone who doesn't like dessert, so I just have a bar of Green & Black's in the fridge for when I need my chocolate hit." For the past decade she has weighed eight and a half stone. ("I'd like to be eight stone, but I like food too much.") She is "very anti-Botox, because I don't like what it looks like, and I do worry about where it goes – after all, it's poison" – but wouldn't rule out a subtle nip and tuck in 10 years' time "if it all starts dropping". She has a facial "a couple of times a year. And I do have my nails wrapped," she says, inspecting them with satisfaction. "That's my treat to myself."
One winter day five years ago, Twiggy and Lawson stopped at a pub in Southwold, Suffolk, after a blustery walk on the beach. It so happened that Steve Sharp, the M&S marketing whiz, was having lunch there with his wife, recognised Twiggy and had the idea of using her in an M&S campaign. "I'm very happy I went to that pub. It's funny, when I think of all the times I've been to meet someone about a job, and worried about what to wear, and got changed a million times. And then there I am that day in Southwold in my woolly hat and anorak, and Steve spots me. It just shows, doesn't it? Who'd have thought something like M&S would come along for me, at the age I was?" She has the easy positivity of someone who has found the fates that govern her life to be generally benign. "Sometimes I can't believe I'm going to be 60. I always say there's no point moaning about getting older, when there's nothing you can do about it. But still, I do find it quite funny. I look at that number, 60, and I think, really? Me?"
• Twiggy: A Life In Photographs opens today at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Twiggy's album, Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance, is out now.
the eyebrows is so early 70s haha, i dislike it though..
