The woman in the jade-green suede biker jacket and tartan trousers sticks out her hand. “’Allo, I’m Twig,” she says. The name still sounds funny after all these years, even for those of us who can’t recall a time when we hadn’t heard it. This perpetually effulgent figure was styled “Sticks” by a friend on account of her skinny legs, only for that to morph into “Twiggy” by the time her picture was splashed across the Daily Express, which named her “the face of 1966” when she was 16. Yet it feels stranger still to think of her as Lesley Hornby, the name inked on to her birth certificate 75 years ago.
Twiggy is not one for looking back, she says, but today there is no avoiding it. For one thing, we are joined by Sadie Frost, who has directed a new life-and-times documentary about her. They met when Frost, 59, was a guest on her podcast. “I liked it that parallel things have happened in our lives: modelling, acting, fashion,” says Twiggy. Frost, who modelled as a teenager before segueing into films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and the joyriding romp Shopping (with her future and now ex-husband Jude Law), adds “raising kids” to the list of shared experiences. Grandchildren, too: Frost has just become a grandmother, while Twiggy has five. “When my granddaughter was six, she walked up to a picture of me in Marks & Spencer and kissed it. Ha ha!”
Frost’s film combines archive footage with modern commentary from Twiggy’s successors and contemporaries (a droll Joanna Lumley nearly steals the show). It’s a familiar tale, peppered here and there with loss and darkened by flashes of sexist and predatory behaviour. For the most part, though, Twiggy the movie is as bright and sunny as Twiggy the woman.
Hers is nothing as dramatic as a rise-and-fall story. What she did instead was rise and stay there. She became an internationally famous model in the second half of the 1960s, moved into acting with a performance in Ken Russell’s zesty 1971 musical The Boy Friend that won her two Golden Globes, then branched out as a singer and Tony-nominated Broadway star. More recently, she has been the face of Marks & Spencer, first in ad campaigns for the then ailing store, then with her own clothing line, including the green suede number she is wearing this morning. “Twiggy Saves M&S!” screamed one front page. And maybe she did.
Another reason for looking back today is our meeting place. We are having breakfast on the ninth floor of a members’ club – rooibos and a pastry for Twiggy, a vegan full English for Frost – with a panoramic view of west London spread out before us: stumpy tower blocks, grids of brick-red streets, the gleaming Wembley arch in the distance. “I grew up over there!” says Twiggy, waving an arm in the general direction of Neasden. “When I was a little girl, I’d be playing in the garden on a Saturday and you could tell when they’d scored because you could hear the roar.”
She was the youngest of three girls. The oldest, 15 years her senior, was “like a second mum”. Her mother, a factory worker, had regular spells in hospital. “She’d be fine for months and then … well, she’d probably be diagnosed as bipolar today. They gave her electric shock treatment. It was the new thing.”
Her father was a stabilising presence. “He was always there,” she says, tilting her head as though leaning against him. He wasn’t thrilled, however, when she started modelling after her headshot, taken by the photographer Barry Lategan, was spotted by a journalist in the hairdresser’s Leonard of Mayfair.
If you know Twiggy, you have seen the picture: she is staring straight ahead, ingenuous eyes lined by the spikes of her pre-Clockwork-Orange lashes, lips slightly parted as though a thought has just occurred to her; she looks, indeed, like the personification of a bright idea. Freckles dance across her nose and the sweep of her side-parted crop is echoed in the curve of her eyebrows, which arch above what Lumley in the film calls “gender-fluid little eyes”. The head rests on the neck like an egg in an egg cup, the patterned blur of her argyle sweater swimming into view. Does she remember being that young woman? “Oh yeah,” she says. “She’s still in there. She’s like my little friend: she never goes away.”
Her father had no illusions about the modelling world. “I know what these photographers are like,” he grumbled. But he was assuaged by the presence of Twiggy’s boyfriend and manager, Justin de Villeneuve, who accompanied her to all the shoots. (Like Twiggy, he had upgraded from his birth name – born Nigel Davies, he had been known briefly as Christian St Forget.)
Twiggy is careful to point out in the film that, while she was 15 when they started dating – a full decade De Villeneuve’s junior – nothing happened between them until she turned 16. But to modern ears, his behaviour sounds problematic. “Well, it does,” she says now. “Looking back, I can see it. Although, at the time, we didn’t know … I don’t want to go down the road of saying: ‘You did this!’ and: ‘You did that!’ Him being there did protect me.” We may have strayed into the realm of rock versus hard place.
De Villeneuve muscled in on every corner of Twiggy’s life. For one chatshow appearance, they even share the limelight, the interviewer exhorting: “Welcome Twiggy and Justin!” De Villeneuve finally met his match in Russell, who refused to allow him on set, making him the boyfriend banned from The Boy Friend. Twiggy was relieved. Soon after, they separated. Would she call his behaviour controlling? “I don’t want to bad‑mouth anyone. But it was definitely time for me to move on.”
Frost agrees: “He probably would have held you back.” Then she turns to me. “Twiggy was trapped a lot of the time, because so much of what happened was on camera. Like when the interviewer asks if they’re engaged. Justin says: ‘Yes!’ and Twiggy says: ‘Sort of,’ through gritted teeth. If she’d said it on telly, she’d be trapped.” In another interview, De Villeneuve speaks entirely on her behalf, claiming she had started diversifying because of fears of “phoniness” as a model. Beside him, Twiggy winces silently. “I’d never seen that clip before,” she says now. “And I look at him like …” She narrows her eyes.
The era’s sexism and bullying was frequently caught on camera: the TV hosts who casually inquired after Twiggy’s measurements, expressed a longing to see her in swimwear or speculated about whether her career could nosedive if she were to gain weight. The term “body-shaming” wasn’t in circulation, but that is what this was. Frost can relate: “Your self-esteem gets affected,” she says. “One modelling agency used to call me and my friend ‘Thunder Thighs’. That was our nickname. I was six and a half stone.”
There was worse to come. On her first US trip, in 1967, Twiggy was quizzed in front of a studio audience by Woody Allen. Sold to her as an interview, it turned out to be an ambush: Allen set out to belittle her by smugly inviting her to name her favourite philosophers. “He was trying to make me look stupid,” she huffs. “My heart sank. I remember looking at him, pleading with my eyes for him to stop.”
Ultimately, it was Allen who ended up with egg on his face when Twiggy asked which philosophers he was referring to. The comic spluttered and stalled for an agonising nine or 10 seconds, failing to name even one.
What we are seeing in that moment looks very much like naked misogyny. “Oh, it’s definitely misogyny,” agrees Frost. “I had it myself from men: ‘What classical composers do you know? What books have you read?’” Twiggy, though, sees Allen’s behaviour mostly as ill-mannered: “If I was the age he was there, in my 30s, I would never have behaved like that towards someone who was only 17.”
Twiggy also recounts a run-in with the producer Phil Spector, who invited her to his house. Fortunately, she brought along her first husband, Michael Witney, but that still didn’t stop Spector from trying to intimidate her. After repeatedly announcing that he wasn’t about to call her “Twiggy”, he began waving a gun around. “I’d never seen a real one before. Only on the telly. My legs went. Michael carried me out of there.”
Frost offers her opinion on the impact of #MeToo. “People will always try to take advantage of other people in whatever way they can. They just might not be doing it so openly now. There were film producers and directors in Hollywood who tried to make a move on me, but I shut it down straight away. That was not a nice position to be in. I don’t know if that affected my career. I’m ambitious, but if I was told: ‘So-and-so wants you to meet them at the Ritz,’ I’d be like: ‘I’ll meet them in an office.’”
No one could claim Twiggy’s upbeat demeanour isn’t consistent, from the earliest footage of her as a teenager to the film’s closing shots of her and her second husband, the actor Leigh Lawson, whom she married in 1988. Several interviewees remark on the fact that she was so often smiling in her photographs. Is there a dark side to her?
“Oh yes, I would think so,” she says. “We all have our moments.” What makes her angry? “Ooh, I’m not going to tell you! I try to get on with everyone, but if anyone crosses me, I can get cross back.” Frost leans over to offer a final note – a warning, perhaps, not to underestimate her: “Twiggy’s no pushover,” she says.
Source: theguardian.com
