Man who styled the 60s – and teased JFK about his affair with Marilyn
He created Twiggy and gave The Beatles their moptops. Now a forgotten interview casts hair-curling new light on the ...
SWINGING London. A phrase that conjures images of Britain at its most exciting — psychedelic tunics and miniskirts in Carnaby Street, The Beatles and the Stones blaring from transistor radios, love and sunshine in the parks, Twiggy’s wide-eyed face on every magazine cover.
That whole phenomenon, the glamour and sexual permissiveness that made the Sixties so wild, can be traced to one address ... no.6, Upper grosvenor Street, w1.
The name over the elegant door of this hairdressing salon was Leonard of Mayfair.
As smooth a ladies’ man as ever wielded scissors, Len Lewis was born into a workingclass home in west London in 1938, the son of a wheeler-dealer car salesman and a blind woman. But his saturnine good looks and irrepressible charm enabled Len to reinvent himself utterly.
By his early 20s, he was the favourite hairdresser not only of President John F. Kennedy and wife Jackie, but of Joan Collins, Frank Sinatra and The Beatles as well as models and beauty queens, gangsters, screen legends and multi-millionaires.
Yet his relentless philandering and a selfdestructive passion for alcohol would ruin it all and plunge him back into poverty.
An autobiography, written some 20 years ago, was crammed with details of some of his notorious love affairs — but much was missing. And when Leonard died destitute, aged 78, last year, it seemed he had taken his most scandalous stories to the grave.
But now a remarkable, unpublished interview has surfaced. Running to more than 70 pages, it is the record of a five-day session of storytelling and confession made by Leonard in 1991.
By then bankrupt, divorced, alcoholic and frail, he had retreated to a villa in Marbella, Spain: it was here that his friend and protege, Jacques Alexander, persuaded him to speak with unmatched candour.
OdangerousNE Leonard’s ANECDOTE glamour.skill and epitomisedin 1961, artistry aged hadhis 23, impressed the world’s most photographed woman — Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. So when her husband, the U.S. President, made a private visit to London, he visited the salon.
The notoriously oversexed leader of the free world cast a critical eye about him as he sat down. He looked disappointed. ‘i thought there would be more tasty young women around here,’ he said.
But JFK must have liked his coiffure, because he returned two days later — and Leonard was ready for him. Busty blonde models in low-cut gowns had been hired to drape themselves around the salon and shoot sultry looks at the President as he arrived. Kennedy was thrilled. ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘They’re wonderful.’
Leonard had chosen the girls carefully: he’d heard gossip, from a member of Sinatra’s famous Rat Pack, British actor Peter Lawford — married to one of JFK’s sisters — that the President preferred blondes and was conducting a secret affair with Marilyn Monroe. The hairdresser wickedly pushed his luck almost too far as he set Kennedy’s bouffant quiff and told him: ‘That will be nicer for Marilyn to run her fingers through.’
JFK fixed him with an inquiring glare, but Leonard brazened it out. ‘it’s a very small world,’ he murmured, ‘and we have friends in common.’
His illustrious client list meant Leonard’s reputation eclipsed every other hairdresser in London. He started out as an apprentice to Vidal Sassoon, but the student soon outdazzled the master. His hands were insured for £1 million.
when pop entrepreneur Brian epstein was looking for the image that would define his new act — four young musicians from Liverpool in search of a record deal — he took them to Upper grosvenor Street.
A barber in Hamburg had given them pudding basin fringes, but the style lacked the boyish appeal that epstein sought.
On the spur of the moment, Leonard invented the ‘moptop’ Beatle cut that would sweep the world. Paul McCartney remained a client for decades.
But that wasn’t the only definitive Sixties style Leonard created. equally influential was the bob he gave to a gauche north London 16-year-old named Lesley Hornby.
The neasden schoolgirl was brought to the salon by an old friend of Leonard’s, nigel Davies — a chancer who was now calling himself Justin de Villeneuve.
Davies was convinced this girl was born to be a model, but even he could see that her bleached hair was in terrible condition. The only solution was to cut it short. Davies asked Leonard to do it for free, as a favour to a pal. Leonard saw at once that her huge eyes and jutting bones bestowed on her an urchin flair that was perfect for the gamine look of the era.
The maestro gave her a pixie-cut, known as an eton crop, and handed her over to his colourist Daniel galvin with instructions to work miracles. galvin obliged.
‘The result was better than i had imagined,’ Leonard said. ‘She had been transformed into something quite magical, like some character from a fairy tale, wearing a little cap of gold.’
it was such a dramatic transformation that Leonard phoned a photographer friend, Barry Lategan, to take her portrait, which he framed and mounted on the salon wall — where it was immediately spotted by a client, the fashion editor of a national newspaper. The next day, the girl with the elfin eyes and hair was on every news-stand, under the headline, ‘The Face of 1966’. And so Twiggy was born.
EVERYBODY was flocking to Leonard — all desperate to be among his stellar clients, but wanting to know they were the most special. Liz Taylor would demand that he cancel all engagements and visit her in her hotel room. She was, however, lazy about paying her bill — as was Judy garland.
Lauren Bacall was happy to visit the salon, but expected neat bourbon, not coffee, while she sat under the dryer. A junior would be sent out with a tenner for a bottle — possibly one of Leonard’s proteges such as John Frieda or nicky Clarke, who later became celebrity stylists themselves. On one occasion, Leonard’s quick thinking ensured that he kept Joan Collins as a client. She had arrived resplendent in a floorlength mink coat.
Staff deferentially took the mink while Leonard supervised the stylists — but as her cut was being set, a junior delivered a panicstricken message. Miss Collins’s coat had been hung against a newly decorated door ... and one sleeve was sticky with wet paint.
warning his staff to stall the imperious Miss Collins, Leonard seized his scissors and began to trim the ruined fur tips. Soon, there was no evidence of the incriminating paint.
The other sleeve was as shaggy as ever. So Leonard flipped the coat over and with lightning movements ensured that both sleeves matched.
He could hear Joan’s rising tones, demanding to know why she was
being delayed, and he motioned his staff to let her come through to the foyer — where he was waiting, like a faithful concierge, holding up her gorgeous coat.
The actress beamed as he slipped it onto her shoulders, admired the perfection of her new hairstyle and kissed her on both cheeks.
She was, he said, practically purring as she left the salon.
Less salubrious characters were clients, too. ronnie and reggie Kray were regulars — the brutal East End gangsters ‘liked to have manicures, which looked most bizarre because they had hands like bunches of bananas’. When reggie married a naive young woman named Frances Shea, Leonard was called in to dress the bride’s hair.
This was not easy, since Frances insisted on doing her own makeup, which gave her a brassy look. Celebrity snapper David Bailey was hired to do the wedding pictures, though like Leonard he wisely waived his fee.
Even during the wildest years of the Swinging Sixties, the raffishly handsome Leonard always insisted he was faithful to his wife, model ricci Wade.
They had a son, Dominic, to whom Leonard was devoted, and family was more important to him. He had been an unwanted child himself, whose mother would taunt him that she had tried to terminate the pregnancy by drinking poison. However, he found it hard to control his libido. Leonard had lost his virginity at 12, when a neighbour, a woman in her 30s, seduced him. All his life he was attracted to one-night stands.
Indeed, it was sex that first drew him to hairdressing: he was expected to follow his father John into the used car trade, but aged 14 he saw a French comedy film called An Artist With Ladies, in which a sheep-shearer became a stylist and Lothario. ‘This profession gave the farm-hand access to a constant supply of willing women,’ Leonard explained. ‘I had assumed that all hairdressers were “iron hoofs” [poofs], but this one wasn’t. I wasn’t either, and I knew this was the world I wanted to join.’
By the time he was 21, however, he had married ricci and for years was a devoted husband. But their relationship ended suddenly when he discovered in the early Seventies that his wife had indulged in several flings, most recently with a friend of Prince Andrew.
Devastated, he gave her the house and lived in a bedsit, where he started drinking and womanising with equal energy.
FRIENDS encouraged him to misbehave. Actor and drinking buddy Tony Curtis flew him to Las Vegas to meet Frank Sinatra, where the two stars revealed their surprise for Leonard — a kingsize suite at the Sands Hotel and three showgirls, ‘courtesy of the management’.
‘The girls were told to ensure I had the best possible time,’ he said. Many of his lovers were married, including friend-of-the-royals Lady (Kate) Vestey, who had a flat in Knightsbridge next to broadcaster David Frost.
She was such a vocal lover that, one morning, Frost knocked on the door and asked Leonard to keep the noise down. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep all night,’ Frost complained, ‘for all the shrieking and moaning.’
Leonard was a Miss World judge twice — a task that came with unexpected benefits. Keen to impress him, many of the contestants came to have their hair done before the final.
The contest organisers, Eric and Julia Morley, had a strict rule that, before the contest, none of the girls should be seen out on the town with their boyfriends — but they could go out with escorts. As a judge, Leonard was viewed as above reproach, despite his wicked reputation. He would take the girls to Tramp nightclub, then back to their hotel, the Grosvenor, and ostentatiously bid them all goodnight.
Then it was a quick dash to the back door, where a porter would let him in. The service elevator took him unseen to the girls’ floor, where he could spend the night. Inevitably, this may have affected his impartiality as a Miss World judge.
One of Leonard’s many girlfriends was a Czech model and — so it was alleged — a former Olympic skier, Ivana Zelnickova, who shared his enthusiasm for nightclubs. Leonard was smitten, but knew he could not keep her: ‘She was always an ambitious woman, with few scruples about getting to the top.’
He heard later she had married a property developer named Donald Trump. No longer Ivana’s lover, he continued to be her hairdresser. He cut Trump’s hair, too, sometimes visiting them on their yacht, and at one point he considered opening a franchise in Trump Tower in New York.
His life was branching out in
other ways. He still had celebrity clients, including Mick and Bianca Jagger, and dreadlocked reggae star Bob Marley. But he also opened salons in New York, Antigua and Dubai, and became an adviser on Hollywood films, including Doctor Zhivago, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Flash Gordon and Ragtime.
However, he declined the chance in 1975 to be involved with Warren Beatty on the multi-award-winning Shampoo, about a hairdresser who couldn’t resist sleeping with his clients and falls hard for Julie Christie’s character. It was, he said, ‘simply too close to home’.
By now Leonard had remarried, to heiress Petra Arzberger. They honeymooned on a yacht lent by the world’s richest man, arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. ‘Everywhere we looked, there were chandeliers and kitsch gold fittings,’ Leonard said. ‘It was the most ostentatious gin palace imaginable.’
Now in his 40s, Leonard was drinking a bottle of vodka a day, sluiced down by as many as three bottles of wine. Even so, his charm won him new friends. One was Michael Jackson, who invited Leonard to his Neverland ranch.
After a tour of the theme park and zoo in a moon-buggy, Leonard joined the eccentric singer in a reception room of the mansion prior to dinner. Through a doorway, he glimpsed a dozen figures already seated at a dining table. Once in the room, he realised that these other diners were plastic mannequins, dressed in designer fashionwear.
Leonard started to laugh nervously, but the butler flashed him a warning look.
Throughout the evening, footmen served all the guests, human and dummy alike, plying them with food and drink and then whisking it away before the next course.
Feeling increasingly awkward, Leonard tried to join in with the spirit of the dinner, leaning over to his plastic neighbour and making small talk.
The butler appeared at his shoulder. ‘Please don’t talk to the other guests, sir,’ he whispered.
If this was a test, Leonard passed. When Jackson toured Britain later that year, it was Leonard who styled his hair — as well as the five lookalikes whose job it was to appear as decoys before the paparazzi.
Predictably, his drinking destroyed Leonard’s second marriage. When it fell apart, so did he, throwing his wedding ring and jewellery into the Thames in despair.
After being knocked down by a car, Leonard became so consumed with drunken paranoia that he believed his second wife was trying to kill him. She didn’t need to — he was doing that himself. In the divorce, he lost everything.
Following bankruptcy friends, including Paul McCartney and Tony Curtis, rallied round to help him dry out. After the accident, Leonard was plagued by headaches, and in the late Eighties he underwent surgery for a brain tumour.
After that, he occasionally cut the hair of friends such as Sinatra and Jack Nicholson for old time’s sake, but in reality he was a spent force.
Leonard lived at his sister Rene’s flat for a time, then in a bachelor pad, cared for by a loyal friend, Lena Butler. His staff did not forget him either — with former colleagues, including Vidal Sassoon, John Frieda and Daniel Galvin, helping to meet his bills.
He dreamed constantly of making a comeback, but never resented the fact that his day was gone.
‘I don’t regret anything,’ he said, during that epic five-day interview with Jacques Alexander when his wealth and health were already wrecked. ‘No regrets whatsoever.’
JACQUES ALEXANDER is now writer and producer of a forthcoming film, Holland Park.