David Bailey, Marie Helvin’s first and, coincidentally, last husband (you have to wonder whether there’s some connection with what follows) used to poke her in the ribs muttering “mighty meaty matey” when he saw her tucking into something tasty. This alone could be grounds for becoming a screw-up about your looks, even without being 56 in an industry that is just getting its head around the idea that a woman can be attractive in her 40s.
But Helvin, balancing one knee on a red plastic cube while arranging the rest of her angular body with draughtsmanlike precision for the lens and sending her left cheekbone into orbit, is not only a glowing example of 56-year-old womanhood but probably one of the least neurotic beauties of our time (and one of the least worked on — she doesn’t do Botox and get this, she even uses soap and water).
Then again, she’s not short of public affirmation. The Marks & Spencer campaign this season confirmed her commercial appeal, while Stephen Meisel, arguably the most powerful fashion photographer in the world, wants to shoot with her. But since when did public affirmation ever appease the average goddess?
In a way, it’s the Marks & Spencer campaign that has led us to this studio in West London, with its red plastic and bouncy soundtrack. The photographs, for M&S’s Limited Collection, were aimed at the over-35s (we are still in thrall to numbers in the fashion industry) but since Helvin could wear anything — or, let’s face it, nothing — I was curious to know what her own taste is like and whether there were lessons to be learnt by other women of her age.
Turns out there are. For, like many models who have been forced to scrutinise themselves day in and out for years, she has developed a flinty eye for what works and what doesn’t. The formula includes: slim silhouettes; 4in heels (but not higher); pencil skirts that graze the knee (“it’s not that I don’t like my legs, but I would never wear short any more, except on the beach. I like that 1950s, just-below-the-knee length”); tailoring (Antonio Berardi and the Savile Row tailor Edward Sexton are favourites); white shirts (“they make everything look smarter and you can get great ones on the high street); the best trousers she can afford (she used to go to Jane Norman, but their trousers got too short so now she goes to Maria Grachvogel); fitted cocktail dresses and her Rock & Republic drainpipe jeans.
She’d love to cut her hair, but on the two previous occasions when she chopped it off the work dried up and now Karen, her agent, has banned her from going short.
To keep things from looking too strict she knots her shirts and shows well-judged amounts of skin — she likes V-necks and bare legs. She was pioneering the “bare legs in winter” look long before Michael Kors put it on the catwalk and Anna Wintour allegedly decreed it mandatory for her staff. (“Unless you spend a lot of time outside, you only freeze for a few minutes at a time.”).
She would never wear leggings again (“too little girl on the prairie for me”) or high waists, or anything too tight. She’s about to auction off her old Alaia, Ossie Clarke and Anthony Price dresses. “Kate (Moss) will probably snap them up for Topshop. Hah! But you know, I don’t think it’s appropriate to dress too sexily at my age. Anyway, I can’t get into them any more.” Yes, incredibly, there was a time when she was even thinner — by 20lb or 30lb, so God knows what Bailey was on about. She was grateful he kept an eye on her since her body was her professional ticket, and while supermodels in the Seventies didn’t earn the millions they later bagged, she was still getting paid £5,000 a show, which was worth staying thin for.
She has, she says, her share of insecurities, but they don’t appear to overwhelm her. A few years ago she discovered that she had a thyroid problem. “My dentist found this growth on my neck and finally I knew why I hadn’t been able to lose weight for a while, even though I wasn’t eating”. She was whipped into hospital and operated on.
These days she takes thyroxine. “In a strange way, modelling is like an out-of-body experience,” she says. “You become hyper-aware of what you look like, but it’s as though you’re looking at someone else. If there’s a problem, you find the solution.”
Nor is Helvin the irritating type to claim that you can retain a model-like figure and peachy skin in your sixth decade without any effort. But the perma-diet and the running, the vitamin drips and disciplined approach to eating are borne stoically. They go with the job, and she needs the job. Post 9/11, she lost all her money in the stock market crash — “and I mean everything. I even had to move out of my house and stay with friends.”
Being a supermodel, those friends included Salman Rushdie. Even so, it can’t have been pleasant for someone who had been proudly independent since she was 16. Her pragmatism is a legacy of a Hawaiian upbringing in which, she says, the body is on show all the time — school uniform was a pair of shorts and a bikini. Apart from pronouncing Hawaii with four syllables, she sounds uncannily like Marilyn Monroe, which must have been lethal as she developed into a free-spirited teenager with giraffe legs and, as she puts it, “amazing tits”.
Lest that sound like a gratuitous mention of the female breast, I should perhaps mention that she keeps them amazing by moisturising them every day and staying out of the sun, having prodigiously abused it in the past. “When I used to do all those shoots for Vogue, they’d give me one day to get brown.There were no fake bronzers. I used to lie out for ten hours.” She also used to smoke and walk everywhere barefoot, even London.“I could stub cigarettes out on the soles of my feet, that’s how hard the skin was.” Oh, the cavalier approach to skincare of the young.
Looking at pictures of that extraordinary 20-year-old body now fills her not with nostalgia but with wonder. “I don’t keep pictures of myself around the house. That would be like living in a mausoleum.” Meanwhile, she’s been doing the moisturising thing for 20 years. “Whatever I use on my face I take right down there. They’re my best asset. Not that anyone really sees them any more,” she adds, wistfully. “But I do”.
“Free-spirited” is frequently a euphemism for promiscuous, but in Helvin’s case the free spirit seems to have taken the form of a heroic tolerance in the face of Bailey’s priapic infidelity. “Of course he had other women,” she says cheerfully. “What would I expect?”
As befits the photographer who inspired Antonioni’s Blow-up, Bailey kept an unorthodox household, with a carousel of the era’s famous and notorious trooping through their lives, from Bob Marley and the McCartneys to the Krays and Marianne Faithfull, who was living as a down and out when Helvin first met her. Waking up with flu to find Catherine Deneuve, her husband’s previous wife, sitting on her bed, must have seemed par for the course.
In the event, the parrots were worse than the women. Bailey kept about 70 and they flew around the house in Primrose Hill, “shitting here there and everwhere,” Helvin gesticulates effusively. There were free-range rabbits, too. Once, when Helvin caught Bailey canoodling with another woman, she added some droppings to his nightly bowl of peanuts — not that he appeared to notice.
Eventually, however, Helvin learnt to cook properly, and turned Bailey, who like her was already a vegetarian, sort of, relatively health conscious. He lost 30lbs. “Which of course made him ten times more attractive to all the models. As long as they weren’t serious, I was fine about it.” Even when it was serious — after ten years their marriage broke up and Bailey married the English model Catherine Dyer — Helvin was fine.
Miraculously she, Bailey and Catherine became friends. Catherine took over as the chatelaine of Primrose Hill. “I said, don’t be surprised if a snake crawls out from under a sofa and actually you know, a tortoise did appear from somewhere.”
Helvin moved on to a four year relationship with Mark Shand, the travel writer, conservationist and brother of the Duchess of Cornwall. And for a while all four of them lived in the Primrose Hill house.
That she has remained in these chilly climes for almost four decades is down to that plucky tomboy spirit. Hawaii, where she grew up with two sisters, a brother, a Japanese mother and an American GI father who forbade his children from going to church, sounds wonderful. But of course she left, as free-spirited teenagers tend to. She became a top model in Japan, got bored and begged the designer Kansai Yamamoto to bring her to London, where he was putting on a fashion show. Yamamoto was initially unenthusiastic because Helvin was only half Japanese and he needed the real thing for his extravaganza. But she went off to learn the rudiments of Kabuki movement, promised not to open her mouth in front of any journalists and duly touched down at Heathrow in 1971.
She is, she says, still coming to terms with the weather here. “I’m not mad about coats. I hate feeling bundled up.” And as we know, she doesn’t do tights.
When pundits talk about a model’s versatility, they’re usually referring to an ability to wear MaxMara one minute and Martin Margiela the next. But Helvin has turned her hand to a variety of careers. For four years in the Nineties she had her own clothing label, which did well until the craze for Lycra leggings and stretch-wear died. She will probably go on working for ever, although not as a model.
“Please shoot me if I’m doing this in my 80s. Anyway,” she says contentedly, “one day I won’t be able to. My mother always said that Japanese women look youthful for years and then one morning they wake up and they’ve aged like 100 years. And she’s right. It happened to her when she was 79.” She sounds remarkably unfazed by the prospect. “I’ve had an amazing life, done lots of fantastic things. I never wanted children, so that’s not an issue.” She is very clear on this point, having once had an abortion when she lived in Japan. “I think the fact that I never wanted to talk babies was why Jerry (Hall) and I eventually grew apart,” she says.
She probably has enough on her plate keeping an eye on her father, who is currently planning to go on holiday alone with a giant bottle of Viagra. “Let’s not even think about it,” she shrugs, resignedly. Until she does hit 80, she’ll keep on doing the jobs, as long as good jobs come in, still turning her best side to the camera, and still dreaming of returning to Hawaii, wearing baggy clothes and eating pizza.
