Glamour shatte red by grief
As a model in the Sixties, Victoria Nixon led a charmed existence. But in a painfully honest memoir, she reveals how a series of tragedies made her rethink her whole life
SoME years ago Victoria Nixon met a young man at an art exhibition. Snorting down vodka he asked her rudely: ‘Tell me, is it true that you Sixties models all s ****** like stoats and married for money?’
Appalled, she gave him her best ‘bright lights smile’ and moved on. But later that evening she went home and opened a locked Louis Vuitton trunk in the attic that contained her past — faded photographs, press cuttings, letters and poems.
Now was the time to tell the truth about what had really happened to her in the Sixties. And she began writing her explosive
new memoir, Head Shot: Glamour, Grief And Getting on With It.
‘My whole former life was in that trunk,’ she says. ‘I thought: You have frozen this for 50 years, and it could be cathartic to face it.’
Tall, blonde, willowy, with a still-killer jawline, it’s no surprise to discover that Nixon, 71, was a top model who posed for David Bailey, Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon.
Looking at images of her in Vogue, Elle and Nova, you think: ‘What a golden girl.’
‘Vikki Nixon’ was 18 when she was spotted in Bond Street, London, by Newton, who photographed her for Vogue. This launched her international modelling career, which led to her being named the Mail’s ‘Face of 1968’.
She appeared in the first-ever pop video on Top of The Pops, and was even the Cadbury’s Flake girl in the Seventies. Though as she laughs today: ‘Swallowing five boxes of overwrinkled brown logs is quite possibly the least erotic thing I’ve ever done in my life.’
It was a gilded life for a young woman from the Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley. She turned down a date with Warren Beatty, and met everyone from Andy Warhol and The Beach Boys to Salvador Dali and the Shah of Iran.
All the fun and hedonism that defined the Sixties — Victoria was at the centre of it. She hung out with Keith Richards on a Nova magazine shoot, and The Beach Boys sang at her 21st birthday. (Her then boyfriend was promoter of their tour.) ‘The coolest few minutes of my life,’ she laughs.
In person, Nixon is charming and self-deprecating. At 71, she is still so beautiful (‘I’ve had neither Botox nor fillers!’), but has little vanity.
She jokes about her Roman nose — ‘a small dog could live in my nostrils’ — and insists she never dieted and still doesn’t. ‘But I’m very aware of what constitutes good food and I couldn’t start the day without a fantastic walk to clear the head.’
Her lifestyle now is gloriously low-maintenance. ‘I still use the cheapest make-up. I never bought into that stuff. Normally I’m in jeans and a shirt. I prefer to walk into a room before my clothes. If you’re assessed on the way you look, well great, if you can make some dosh out of it. But in the end, what the hell?’
Everything in her career, she says, happened by chance. Aged 16, a grammar school girl with big hair, she was spotted by Paul Jones, lead singer of British band Manfred Mann, while at a club in Sheffield.
They spent time together, until she realised Jones was married with two children. But he persuaded her mother that Victoria should move to London to model.
She enrolled at Lucie Clayton to learn about deportment, but failed the course — the first model to do so. She seemed destined to become a typist, but Helmut Newton and a lady from Vogue spied her from a taxi when she was window-shopping — and her career was launched.
VICToRIA was taken on by Eileen Ford’s The Ford Agency in New York aged 22. In comparison to American ultra-groomed models, she felt like a schoolgirl. But Lauren Hutton, then America’s top model, took her out for coffee, and as a gaptoothed model herself, showed her how to make the perfect smile.
Victoria’s modelling era came after Twiggy and before Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and the so-called ‘Supers’. There were no Svengalitype managers then. ‘We were independent courageous girls who travelled the world to see what was out there. It was a fantastic thing to do with a paid-for smile,’ she laughs.
For beyond this seemingly gilded existence, there was extraordinary pain and tragedy. By the age of 24, all of Victoria’s family had died — her father and brother took their own lives. She knew writing the book would involve confronting the ‘psychological agonies’ of those she had loved — and her own guilt.
The pain began when her father, 51, killed himself in his car showroom when she was 13. He had been deep in debt, the Suez oil crisis had stopped people buying cars and he hoped the launch of the new Mini would turn his fortunes around.
But the British Motor Corporation
priced it more cheaply than he had expected, dashing his hopes. Even now, Victoria can’t see a Mini — the emblem of Sixties confidence — without wincing.
Before he died he had taken out a huge life insurance policy for the family, later declared invalid, so they lost the house. ‘The very thought he may have given his life for us to have a better one produced a searing outof-body agony,’ she says today.
Victoria was staying with cousins when her father died. By the time she arrived home, all his possessions had already been taken away.
Suicide was such a taboo then that neighbours didn’t know what to say. To this day she has no idea where her father is buried. She says she wrote her memoir in part to help us talk
more about mental health. Her beautiful, indomitable mother held the family together.
But her elder brother Nick, 19, who had found their father dying, began to suffer from depression. Six months later they were called to his art college in Newcastle, saying he’d been stabbed near his heart. It turned out he’d done it himself. He was taken to a mental hospital.
For a time he recovered, married and had two children, carving out a career designing furniture. But one day, as Victoria was doing a photoshoot with Norman Parkinson, Nick called and threatened to throw himself onto a railway track.
Victoria had to carry on regardless, posing at the helm of a tiny speedboat in Kent, not knowing if he was still alive. You can see the tension in the photo today.
On his release from hospital, Nick joined her in New York (the photographer Richard Avedon wanted to use his furniture in a shoot). Six weeks later, Victoria travelled back to London to spend Christmas with their mother, leaving Nick to stay with a friend who had promised to keep an eye on him. A few days after Christmas he took an overdose aged 30, ten years after their father.
‘The guilt was astonishing,’ she tells me. ‘I didn’t know enough about what he was going through to pick up the danger signs. I thought he was in safe hands, but I shouldn’t have left him in New York.’
Distraught, Victoria threw herself into work. ‘As long as I kept on running there was no space or time for memories.’
She had a failed marriage, ending in divorce after a year, then her mother, her greatest supporter, died of a stroke aged 63. Her entire family had gone. A marriage to one alcoholic and a relationship with another didn’t work out. In retrospect she says she was trying to rescue damaged men because of the guilt she felt about her father and brother.
But, eventually, in her early 40s Victoria did find happiness. She met designer Michael Messenger at a drinks party at the Chelsea Arts Club in 1994. He took her number, then didn’t make contact for a year. ‘I sensed you needed time,’ he told her later. ‘He was right. I did.’
They’ve been married for 25 years. ‘He’s a heart-lifter not a heart-sinker,’ she says simply. Michael had a young daughter and Victoria ‘chose not to go down the panicking-40s path’ of trying to have a late child.
For a few years they lived the high life. Michael designed Formula One vehicles and superyachts, but in 2006, the couple sold everything to found a company which designs and manufactures humanitarian aid products used in disaster areas.
Victoria has known hard times, but unpacking that trunk was a liberation. ‘Every day I wake up and think, “My health is great, I’m happily married.” I dwell on the positives. I’m no longer what happened to me, but what I chose to become.’
HEAD SHOT: Glamour, Grief And Getting On With It — A Memoir Of The ’60s And ’70s: My Wild Life by Victoria Nixon is published by Unbound at £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59 (offer valid until August 16; P&P free on orders over £15), call 0844 571 0640.