First Lady Read online

  Twiggy had what I would describe as an awful East End accent, and was quite unkempt, with chewed fingernails. We’d always have to put false ones on her for the shoots. But they were all very lovely to deal with. There was the slightly older one, Suzie Parker who was in her thirties at least, and Verushka, who was enormously tall. The film star Natalie Wood used to come to us also. She was a tiny little thing, and she had something very special about her. I saw her in Bond Street outside the salon one day, all in white, fur hat and coat, white boots. Everyone was staring at her as she walked past, although they wouldn’t have been able to tell who she was with the hat pulled down over her face.

  Make-up at the time was having a bit of revolutionary moment; there were a lot of creative leaps being made. On a shoot Pauline and I did for David Bailey we glued daisy petals to the model’s eyes in place of eyelashes. The result was beautiful, and the black and white photo became an iconic image of the Sixties. Having a bit of aptitude and dexterity helped me learn the trade, and by the end of the year I was pretty confident.

  It was 1968 and I’d been in London four years, working my behind off mostly. I was friendly with another Kiwi, a milliner called Liz Mandler who introduced me to the Lloyd family, part of the same extended family as the wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George. They had a clothes shop on the Fulham Road, which did a roaring trade in tweed and Welsh flannels.

  I did a lot of work for them; they would take me up to Wales for fashion parades, and every six months we would go to Paris, where I would renew my British visa. This last time when we tried to cross back into England I was held up at Customs.

  ‘You can’t come in,’ the officer told me.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We can’t extend your visa any longer.’

  ‘But I’m a British citizen!’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re a Commonwealth citizen. You’ve been here four and half years, that’s all your passport allows.’

  Bizarrely, he told me that if I was ‘coloured’ things would be different. There were many people coming from India and Pakistan by the boatload at night in that era, and he said they couldn’t make an issue of it if you were coloured, but they were happy to refuse white people.

  I was thunderstruck.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, we’ll take you back to wherever you live and you can pack some cases, and then we’ll send you home.’

  ‘I can’t afford it, I have no money.’

  At the time I was being treated like a celebrity at the boutiques on the Kings Road, thanks to the amount of money I was spending. They’d say, here he comes for another couple of suits for the week, and all my wages would be in their tills.

  The Customs officers took me home where I packed two cases, then I was carted straight off to Brixton Prison. They held deportees there as a stop-gap measure, before an official court appearance and deportation. I was beside myself with panic, and I suppose the only way to describe what happened next is that I cracked up completely. I recall seeing a doctor who put me on heavy medication, telling the warders I was a risk to myself and they’d better try to keep me safe. Thus I ended up in an isolation cell until the Magistrates Court hearing that would finalise the deal.

  Even that was terrifying; I suffer from claustrophobia quite severely so being locked up in the little cubicles underneath the courthouse was the stuff of nightmares. I can still remember walking up those stairs, from the dungeon-like basement into the courtroom itself, just like they do in the British crime programmes. I didn’t hear what the judge said, I didn’t hear anything, the blood was pounding so loudly in my ears. The judge’s decision was entirely predictable; they took me back to Brixton Prison and there I stayed for two days until they came for me, told me to get dressed, and drove me to Heathrow for a BOAC flight.

  Although I’d been on a couple of short hops around New Zealand, I’d never flown internationally before, and thank goodness I didn’t really know what to expect or I would have thrown a fit on the tarmac and refused to board the plane. The flight took seven days, via France, Germany, Italy, India, Hong Kong and Australia.

  I had no money at all, but was told I’d be alright as I’d be fed on the plane. It seemed as though everywhere we landed, the plane broke down and we would wait. I recall the journey in flashes of incidents, one seemingly worse than the last, strung together by the long stretches in the air and, once we’d landed, the endless waiting. I was wearing a woollen suit (all other clothing was in my cases in the hold) and was in agony at a stopover in New Delhi, sunburned from here to there and there to here. The terminal was a tiny tin shed and the snack they’d served us on the tarmac with warm Coca-Cola gave everyone Delhi Belly for the remainder of the trip. I do recall being inspired by the clothing of the people working at the airport — cream robes and turbans — and resolved to work it into a collection once we finally got home.

  In Hong Kong the heat was so overwhelming as soon as I took a step onto the gangway, it was as though someone had thrown a wet blanket over me. I was desperate to find somewhere to get cleaned up, and got locked in the airport toilet cubicle — just another mishap in what felt like a nightmare without end.

  The next stop was South Australia, in the middle of the night. We were given a cup of tea with tinned milk and told not to stray, as the plane had landed at the Woomera rocket range. In Sydney there was another delay and we spent seven hours on the tarmac, unable to leave the plane. By the time we landed in Auckland it was one in the morning and there was no connecting flight, but they were bound to repatriate me to my home town of Christchurch, so it was up to them to pay for a motel for the night. I still remember one of the officials opening my suitcase for me to retrieve what I needed, and coming across my wigs and make-up. He gave me a very strange look.

  A final flight to Christchurch the next morning put me back with my mother and father, after four long years. Of course, during those years I had made some changes — pretty significant changes. I knew my father would not readily welcome ‘Liz’ back into his home in place of Garry, so I strapped down my growing bust, and got back into men’s clothes whenever I was with them. As wonderful as it was to be back with my mother, by then I had been living almost entirely as a woman. The sense of living a double life was even more acute than ever.

  I spent about a year back in Christchurch and quickly scored a bit of a coup with Beaths department store. I’d supplied gowns for them before of course, years ago, and was able to show them the press clippings from my short-lived designing triumph in London. Once again I found myself designing a collection, this time exclusively for Beaths, with a show at the Russley Hotel. I had set up a workroom at my mother’s house, made the samples, and had the models come to the house for fittings.

  The show was a success and more work came my way, but there was, as always seemed to be the case, unforeseen drama as a result. Right next door to the house was a little group of shops including a fruit shop run by the girlfriend of a Christchurch detective. As the models came and went from my parents’ front door for their fittings before the show, someone was plainly putting two and two together and making nine. I suppose it was inevitable — turns out two of the models were on the game, and in due course the police arrived.

  ‘You’ve been running a whorehouse!’ a ghastly little officer spat at me on the front doorstep. My mother was horrified but at first did not disbelieve him.

  ‘It must have been when I’m not here!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Mum, it’s the girls coming and going for fittings,’ I explained.

  ‘Yes, they’re in and out of here all the time!’ the cop insisted. He assumed my sainted mother’s house was being used as a brothel. It was crazy of course, but not at all unusual. The police knew about my history and every few months they’d turn up with some claim or other. Needless to say I couldn’t have lasted too long at home with my parents.
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  TIM, ROUND ONE

  Most people automatically assume my love life has been some kind of rainbow bacchanal. Far from it. It’s by no means as interesting as many would like to imagine, and that was a deliberate tactic right from the start — I liked to keep my personal life just that.

  I never had intercourse as a gay man. You may scoff, but it’s the truth — it simply wasn’t important to me. I did all the other things of course, the fooling around, but until I went to have the surgery that kind of sex was something I wanted to avoid.

  I certainly saw a lot of it around me. When I worked as a steward on the ferries it was rampant, and while all the queens were at it, I was always sitting in the dining room sewing beads onto an outfit for one of my clients!

  I held the fantasy in my mind, of course, the secret knowledge that one day, when I was a woman, it would happen and it would be wonderful. I hung on to that fantasy for years. But eventually you find out that, no, it’s not really that wonderful.

  I was far too busy working anyhow to worry about boyfriends, but in London I came close to love for the first, and probably the final, time.

  His name was Ian Wood. We were introduced by Norman of Cable and Carr ‘fame’, and of course Norman was a little miffed when he learned of our romantic liaison, as he always was by any tryst that didn’t include him.

  Ian was in his late twenties, tall, with silvery blond hair, and mismatched blue eyes — one light, the other dark. He looked very much like the movie star Troy Donahue, and many people would stop him in the street or a club, keen to see if a little Hollywood glamour would rub off on them.

  He taught defensive driving for the police force, exciting things like high-speed chase techniques for catching criminals. I was living partly as a boy and partly as a girl at the time, and Ian would take me out to clubs and to balls. Eventually it became a little bit like a love relationship. He was a truly wonderful young man, and probably one of the closest things I’ve ever had to a real partner.

  Ian’s father was the director of a well known oil company, and they lived in a grand house in Kent. Ian, after a dignified amount of time, invited me home for dinner with his parents. When I arrived, the door was opened by a butler, who took my coat, Ian took my arm, and in we went.

  His mother was frightfully posh, and I had to listen very carefully when she spoke, watching her face and wondering how many marbles she was holding in her mouth. His father was a brusquer version:

  ‘Eh hello there, how are you? Nice to meet you, colonial gal.’

  We were settled for dinner in the opulent dining room, making small talk, when the phone rang. The butler brought it through to the mother at the table, and she chatted for a bit then excused herself. After a time she came back to the table, looking a little brown around the edges.

  ‘That GAL is really a BOY,’ she said through pursed lips, and pointed at me. ‘And unfortunately I can’t finish dinner sitting at the same table as him. Ian, I suggest you both leave, and you return when you have dropped him off at his flat.’

  I just wanted to curl up in the corner and die, but Ian did as he was told and took me straight home. I never found out who made that phone call, but I can only assume it was someone in our social circle who didn’t want to see our relationship flourish.

  I didn’t ever see his family again, but Ian and I continued to go out together for quite a time, until he was transferred to Scotland. Sadly, after that, we didn’t have much contact apart from the odd letter or phone call. He later married a black beauty queen. As you can well imagine, his mother and father were uncomfortable with anything that didn’t fit their narrow view of the world; so I guess in his own way, Ian had won.

  I had little liaisons after that, but they weren’t great sexual things. I just really enjoyed being in the company of good-looking people, and I knew an awful lot of them in London.

  It was after my return to New Zealand and a move to Wellington that I met my husband, and in retrospect a great misfortune that would turn out to be.

  I went out in drag one Saturday night with a friend, to a bar called the Royal Oak. It was a well known meeting place for drag queens, lesbians and a sprinkling of straight men in search of ladies ‘like us’. As we walked into the bar a woman we knew, Jeanette, was at our side telling us how well we complemented each other. Two soda lime and bitters later, another one, Tess, sidled up and told me the friend she was with wanted to meet me.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not into gay ladies.’

  ‘You misunderstand, this is not a lesbian I’m talking about.’

  Tim was tall, dark, and very handsome, part Polish on his mother’s side, and in great shape. What’s more, he had a good business as a glazier — very different to other men of his type who were often ‘kept’ by their female partners’ work in prostitution.

  We talked, danced and hit it off that night, and so the relationship began. We took the ferry down to Christchurch for Christmas at the invitation of mother; as soon as we’d alighted from the ferry I let my little dog out for a wee on the wharf and I heard my father say, ‘Oh I don’t like him!’ He’d taken a massive dislike to Tim on sight. Not something I wanted to hear at the time, young and supposedly in love, but in retrospect, one time I should have listened to my father.

  It was only some months later that Tim told me he’d once been involved with a person like me, someone called Nicky, and from there the story unfolded trickle by trickle. They had been living together, but not long before Tim and I met, Nicky had told him she was going to Australia for a holiday. In fact she never returned, taking all her clothes from their closet (most of which he had paid for with extra work on the weekends) and simply disappearing.

  In the early part of our romance, Tim would always arrive with a huge parcel of fish and chips, not a meal in which I had much interest. I learned that Nicky could not cook, and never had, but I did. We moved in together and after some weeks of home-cooked meals each night he gave up on his usual greasy fare and began to eat properly.

  One strange night, Tim asked me why I never got pregnant. I laughed a copious amount at this, but he was adamant it was a serious question.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ I said.

  ‘Yes it is. When Nicky was with me, she got pregnant several times. Her stomach would blow up and all, but she always lost the baby.’

  She certainly had him blinded. I didn’t have the heart to tell him why, but suddenly I knew just how naive he was. Nevertheless, it was early in our relationship, he seemed a nice guy and I suppose I thought I loved him. What’s more, he knew about my plans for sex-change surgery and seemed unfazed by the prospect, supportive even. He often told me he would marry me once it was done.

  There were signs of disaster knitted right through the relationship from the start; although, of course, you see them as a pattern only much, much later. There was a part of Tim that I didn’t recognise — I’ve never understood jealousy, but I’ve had plenty of chances to see it do its dirty work. Tim was particularly susceptible. He would demand we leave parties immediately if he saw me talking to other men, and I would suffer through the ride home in the car as he hollered abuse at me.

  I’m not the first person to imagine that great change and upheaval will set one’s life back on track when it looks like careering off the rails, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. Once the surgery was done, my birth certificate showed I was finally female, and Tim had always told me he would marry me then; we packed up and took Tabitha the little terrier to Sydney to forge a new life away from New Zealand.

  Settled in a flat in Sydney’s Potts Point, I started looking for work, and an ad I answered in the newspaper led to an interview at a hairdressing salon in Burwood. This was the sixties — no human resources teams to impress or hoops to jump through — I started the very next day. That first week the telephone never once rang; I had only a single client and wa
s bored almost to tears for much of the time, all on my own, wondering where everyone was. Oddly, even the woman who’d interviewed me and given me the job seemed to have disappeared.

  Then one day she popped her head in. ‘I’ve set up a salon two doors down,’ she said in a whisper, ‘and taken all the clients with me. Would you come and work there, too?’

  I couldn’t leave without telling the owner and, besides, I hadn’t yet been paid and there was not a penny in the till. I made the call and he suggested I come to his house to sort things out.

  I took Tim with me that night, to the very posh Sydney suburb of Vaucluse. The owner told us his wife had run the salon but had died some weeks before, and he had left it in the hands of the woman who’d taken his clients. He seemed oddly composed about his recent bereavement as he asked me to come upstairs to his office to collect my wages. Should have known! Once inside the room I was suddenly in the clutches of a very unattractive, but very randy, middle-aged man who seemed determined to stick his tongue down my throat.

  Well, darling, not this girl.

  I grabbed my money and fled the room, followed by the man with his hand up my mini-dress.

  ‘Keep calm, will you Lizzie,’ I thought.

  I was already down the stairs and hauling Tim from the couch, where he’d been watching television with the man’s children.

  I broke the news to him in the car on the way home to our flat, and he reacted with a furious promise to ‘sort him out right now’. No, I said, I can handle it.