Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life. Jane Mulvagh
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time, they told me she was mean, cruel, heartless and even vicious towards them. Nevertheless, with few exceptions they are happy to have worked alongside a truly original talent who could habitually astonish them with her powers of creativity. Her creativity cannot be copied, anticipated, second-guessed. It is inimitable.
In 1993, Vivienne asked me to write her autobiography. I refused. I did not want to be put into the uncomfortable position of being a ghostwriter, particularly to a woman with such a strong personality and an uncompromising point of view. I spent the next year persuading her to cooperate with a biography which I would write. My conditions were that it would be authorised by her, and I would have access to her, but under no circumstances would she be allowed to read the manuscript. In August 1994, she agreed.
Within four months, Vivienne told me she had had second thoughts. When I asked her why, she would not, or could not, offer an explanation. In the meantime, she had approached family members, friends and colleagues, past and present, and requested that they did not speak to me. Apart from the conversations with her family that I had had over the eleven years I had known her, I have had no additional access to them. As a result, comparatively little information has been forthcoming about Vivienne’s father and her first husband, Derek Westwood. Fortunately, I had already managed to reach some of her school and childhood friends. Equally fortunately, most of her associates and friends disregarded her injunction, and agreed to talk to me (of necessity, the identities of some of them have been disguised). Then, curiously, in 1996 various friends and colleagues still close to Vivienne, such as Gene Krell and John Walford, received her permission to cooperate with me. In addition, others who had originally abided by her request changed their minds and spoke to me candidly. To all of them I am indebted.
Why did Vivienne, for no stated reason, decide not to cooperate with the author she had originally asked to write her own autobiography? While I have been researching this book, some possible explanations have suggested themselves. Firstly, and understandably, she is probably apprehensive. To her mind, she has consistently been misrepresented by the media. And even apart from the risk of misrepresentation, nobody likes to have their character and weaknesses laid bare. What will I find out, and what will I write about her? Secondly, I discovered that many years before I set about my task, another publisher commissioned an autobiography from her. To date, they have seen no manuscript. Thirdly, Vivienne’s professional survival is founded on her working relationship with her manager Carlo D’Amario. In return for her complete creative freedom, he runs the business. D’Amario might not wish her to cooperate with a project which did not bring profit to the company nor guarantee favourable coverage. No matter what relationship Vivienne strikes up with an associate, it will ultimately be subjected to the sanction of D’Amario’s approval or disapproval. She remains indebted to him and him alone, as attested by the long line of friends and loyal colleagues who have been discarded or summarily dismissed over the years.
Vivienne is a difficult, exceptionally talented and fascinating woman. Her relentless creativity is irrepressible, and its mainspring is her busy curiosity. Her visual inquisitiveness is unusual in its intensity and its scepticism. She dissents in order to reinvent. Although ours is dubbed a ‘visual age’, with images being instantaneously transmitted around the globe, few today take the time to look and to really see; we consume instead not only soundbites, but vision-bites. What distinguishes Vivienne is that she inspects, questions, dismantles and reassembles – as a teacher she would march her young pupils down to the local fishmonger to study the fish before they drew them. My aim in this biography has been to shine some light on her character, and on the way in which her relentless creativity works.
Jane Mulvagh
London, March 1998
1 THE GIRL FROM THE SNAKE PASS
1941–1965
‘As a child, I was in waiting.’
Vivienne Westwood, 1995
‘She puts her mother on a pedestal.’
Bella Freud, 1997
Just before Christmas 1938, twenty-three-year-old Dora Ball, a flush-cheeked flirt with a determined gait and a passion for ballroom dancing, journeyed from her home village of Tintwistle, on the border between Cheshire and Derbyshire, to the nearby market town of Glossop, to buy material for a new dance dress. Missing the last bus home, she started to walk to another stop on the outskirts of town, passing St Mary’s Dance Hall. There, lolling in the doorway, stood the smooth-faced, dapper Gordon Swire, four years her senior. Dora, wary of his reputation, refused his offer to escort her to the bus stop. He insisted, and they struck up a conversation.
On 19 August 1939, two weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, they married in Tintwistle’s Christ Church, in the county of Cheshire. Gordon was described on the marriage certificate as a fruiterer, living at 96 Market Street, Hollingworth, the son of the late Ernest Swire, a boot and shoe repairer. Dora’s address was 25 West Street, Tintwistle, and she was the daughter of Edward Ball, a labourer. The young couple honeymooned in Scarborough, Yorkshire. Their first marital home was number 6 Millbrook, a two-up-two-down labourer’s stone cottage in a terrace of twelve, between Tintwistle and Hollingworth on the A57, the major road that leads from Sheffield through the Pennine pass to Manchester. Like most humble British homes of the time, the house had an outdoor lavatory in the back yard. The couple washed in a tin bath filled with water warmed on an open fire.
The Swires’ first child, Vivienne Isabel, was born on Tuesday, 8 April 1941. She was a first-born war baby, brought up in the English cotton country; circumstances that were to mark both her character and her interests.
The arrival of a sister, Olga, on 14 January 1944 so infuriated Vivienne that she vowed to ‘dead her and put her in the dustbin’. Vivienne recalled over fifty years later that when Olga arrived home from the hospital, ‘I was outraged. I didn’t know I was going to get her. I was three and from then on I decided I wanted to be grown up as soon as possible.’ Vivienne’s resentment of the interloper went far beyond the sibling jealousy common in young children; indeed, it was so strong that it may have contributed to the competitive suspicion of other women she was to show in later life. As a child she would rarely mention her sister, and few of her friends even realised that Olga existed. Two years later, in 1946, a brother, Gordon, arrived, further thwarting Vivienne’s desire to be the centre of attention.
On the night of Vivienne’s birth London suffered the heaviest air raid of the war to date. The Blitz had escalated, and the German bombers were targeting Britain’s industrial cities as well as its capital. The Swire family would have watched the night skyline during the blackout for the explosions that pockmarked Manchester, ten miles to the west. During the war Vivienne’s father served as a storekeeper in the aircraft manufacturers A.V. Roe at Trafford Park, twelve miles from Manchester. This was an extremely important factory during the war – Lancaster bombers were made there – and the Luftwaffe made several attempts to bomb it. The Dam-Busters’ famous bouncing bomb was tested at the Derwent Dam at the far end of the Snake Pass, where Vivienne would wander as a child. Dora, meanwhile, took employment as a weaver in a local cotton factory of the sort typically requisitioned by the government to supply materials for the war effort: for uniforms, tents, camouflage, webbing, parachutes and balloons.
With both parents in employment and the wartime rations supplemented by Vivienne’s paternal grandmother’s grocery store, the Swires were well fed. Later, Dora and Gordon were to run the store for a time. Gordon could drive the family car – a considerable luxury at the time – to Manchester to stock up on supplies, and would bring home news of the city. Thrift was a pervading feature of Vivienne’s formative years, which were circumscribed not only by the modesty of her working-class background, but by the austerity of wartime and immediate post-war Britain. Rationing was to be in force until October 1951, and the Attlee government demanded self-sacrifice to rebuild the nation,