London
After leaving Connecticut, I would not speak to my parents or see them for another seven years. I could hear the parakeet chirping in the kitchen back in old Riverside, Connecticut but I was quite sure London was where I wanted to be, and here I would launch my adult life. I was quite correct. Even at such a young age, I had an instinct about such things.
My uncle Clive found me a room at a hostel near his flat. It was No. 18 Brabham Gardens. It had been an elegant little Victorian house prior to WWII and then it was a boarding house for young women who came to London on war-related work. Eventually, it became a hostel for the “daughters of gentlefolk” whatever that meant, and was managed by a mad Welsh woman, Mrs. Morgan. During my stay at the hostel, we would get into terrible rows. It was as if she was the Shirley in real life I could never fight back and yet here I could and did. I would complain about the recooked sausages for breakfast, about paying rent when we lost heat for four days. Meanwhile, my Uncle Clive would drop by to check up on me. Usually on a Sunday morning when I had just gone to bed an hour before!
He would arrive cigarette in hand, Sunday Express under his arm, wearing his black mink car coat with a white Hermes scarf blowing in the wind behind him, and underneath he wore his Harrods pajamas and on his feet maroon velvet slippers embossed with Howard Capes’ crest. In a Cage au Folle moment, he could be an overly protective mother hen.
Howard and he thought Mrs. Morgan had slept with every American GI from London to the Isle of Wight during WWII. She used to go on about what a beauty she had been pre-WWII. She also used to get very steamed on a Friday night and I would have to listen to her as I was the only one left, everyone else having gone away for the weekend to parents or boyfriends. “You gells. I know what you gells get up to. You can’t fool me. You gells are nothing but sluts.” She would reek of red wine. She was an alcoholic and looking back, a very sad figure.
We all had grotty flats or bedsits. I shared with four other girls who all eventually got pregnant one after the other and left me with the lease. I had the front room which used to be the parlor. Meanwhile, I was seeing Bruce Kennedy who was a friend of my group of friends. Of this group, the only one I have stayed in touch with is Diane Chambers who lives with her husband Albert Rofkahr in Hanover, Germany.
One night I awoke to have someone undoing my pajamas. Another time one of the roommates tried to stab me with a pair of scissors. One of my roommates, Jill White, would become my best friend and we would eventually move out to our own bedsitter in the Earls Court area.
Meanwhile I was making tons of friends and having a great time. It was swinging London. The Beatles were tops; Biba’s boutique (my cousin by marriage) was the rave as was Vidal Sassoon and Twiggy and Dusty Springfield. Alfie was the Great Movie. I had no money. I worked for AMF on Old Burlington Street for an awful man called Arnold Mayard who was half English and half Japanese. He had it in for Americans because of WWII refusing to believe that I was English for whom he had not much more liking.
He was very abusive. Before I moved on to another job, the Beatles played on the roof of EMI next door and I joined a small group of people braving the freezing cold to watch them. That was a thrill till a Bobby came up and said “Move on, move on, ladies and gents.” Standard Bobby speak. But the reason was that traffic had come to a complete standstill in Piccadilly Circus when the word had got out that they were playing, live.
After tolerating Mrs. Morgan and the madwoman with the scissors and three days of no heat and the ceiling caving in on my wardrobe and ruining all my clothes, my roommate at the 18 Brabham Gardens hostel and I found a bedsitter across the way just off Earl’s Court Road. It was in the basement next door to the owner’s elaborate Italian kitchen. He was Cesare Arroni Andersen. His mother was Italian and his father Scottish. His apartment upstairs was done up like an Italian palazzo but his specially equipped, professional kitchen was downstairs next to us and after that was a large bathroom with a bath so huge you could swim in it. I used to sit on the loo smoking a cigarette while Jill washed her hair in the evening. He had big glass jars of things on a shelf. He told me this one jar was full of lamb’s penises. One night there was an unGodly crash as the whole shelf came crashing down to the floor.
We both were waitresses at night at the Deep Hole Bistro, owned by this demoralized young baronet, Nick, whose tobacco-stained fingers and deeply circled eyes did not hide is abiding love of cocaine or other recreational drugs. When that Deep Hole Bistro went south he bought a discotheque in Chelsea and hired me as DJ. This is not before the Spanish chef nearly cut his thumb and bled into the ragout. It was quite the most disgusting place and I certainly never forget to tip waiters and waitresses after having been on the other side as it were.
The disco, Le Boite, was dark and dismal and the bartender was Michel who lived with the beautiful Ann whom he cheated on continually. One night Nick told me I should go home with this American businessman because the next day they were going to meet up with Mandy Rice Davies and go to the flea market. This of course was all lies and disappointed by my lack of cooperation, the businessman and his driver dropped me off in the middle of nowhere in London. I was not familiar with the area and appealed to a bobby for help. He took me home. I look back on this incident and cringe. I was very naïve. And I am lucky I wasn’t sold off into the white slave trade or worse. Needless to say, I never did such a reckless thing again, but I would experience a similar situation many years later in Tokyo with an Arab gentleman who was a client of the bar I managed but that is a story for the Japan section of this book!
During the day, Jill was a cosmetician at Harrods beauty salon. I worked for AMF in Old Burlington Street, next door to EMI who represented the Beatles. My passion of course. One used to see John Lennon tooling around in a black mini with smoked windows (which are no longer allowed). Kings Road was the big deal and my cousin Barbara Hanaluki opened Biba’s which was one of the first boutqiques to hit London. I wore my hair in Vidal Sassoon cut which I did myself by putting a pudding bowl over my head.
Jill was dating a Jonathan Cleese lookalike, Peter and I was dating J. Bruce Kennedy. I had met him through the circle of friends I had made through one American, Gerry Hammond Adler. One of those girls would be Diane Chambers now Rofkhar who lives in Hanover, Germany. Albert and she have two grown children, Obe and Adi. She and I are still in touch forty years on and she came to visit me in South Boston just last year on one of ther last international flights before retiring after thirty years of being a flight attendant.
She and her sister Pam who would later have a daughter Amber and Jenny and Giorgio and Penny and Vispi and Simon Neve and Bruce ________ were part of a circle of about thirty of us who were very good friends. We had scads of parties it seems. Jill was not part of this group. She had her own circle of friends and would eventually dump Peter for Barton a welsh lawyer whom she would eventually marry.
Jill and I had a very volatile relationship. She reminded me a lot of my sister. She was an only child of a very wealthy family from Newcastle. For her 21st they gave her a champagne party accompanied only by smoked salmon and shrimp. She had a weekly allowance and could afford to buy clothes and was very well turned out. I on the other hand lived on a pittance despite working at nights and it was difficult to be so poor when she was so well off.
Our arguments became more and more contemptible until finally it just did not work any more. We had tolerated the housecleaner, Donald, stealing our knickers and returning them weeks later in a brown paper bag; we tolerated the hand reaching through the window to steal our only radio (I slammed the window down nearly breaking his fingers) and we tolerated Cesare’s continual interfering in our private life. But the irritability and arguing that our relationship produced finally became intolerable to us both. We both moved, remained friends, however, and many years later my husband at the time, Bill Laws, went up to Newcastle to their wedding.