Lucy Birley
Sadness at the heart of the gilded set
The death of Lucy Birley is the latest tragedy to befall a glittering generation of lost souls,
The death of society beauty, photographer and countrywoman Lucy Birley, aged 58, marks not merely a tragedy for her family, but has the feel of the end of an era. Born Lucy Helmore, she found fame as Mrs Bryan Ferry in the Eighties and Nineties, more recently as wife of nightclub owner Robin Birley. Her death this week came while on holiday in Ireland, surrounded by her beloved dogs. Her brother, journalist Ed Helmore, remarked: “Lucy fought a long battle with depression, a battle that she lost on Monday.” Birley’s death came less than two weeks after her friend, model and fellow socialite Annabelle Neilson, was found dead of an apparent heart attack at her parents’ Chelsea home, aged 49. It Girl Neilson is said never to have recovered from the suicide of her “gay husband”, designer Alexander Mcqueen, in 2010; he, in turn, was left devastated by their friend, fashion diva Isabella Blow, taking her own life in 2007. For all the surface glamour of this gilded, glittering set, misery was never far from the surface; a vein of darkness running through it that would prove too much for several of its key players. Lucy Birley’s life seemed different. Always a tad bemused by the celebrity that surrounded her, she was happiest in her quiet, Shropshire farmhouse, breeding pigs, riding, and hunting. Raised in a Kensington town house, educated in a convent, she modelled for luminaries such as Steve Meisel and Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she smoked joints, post-shoot. At 18, she met Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry – recently rejected by Jerry Hall in favour of Mick Jagger – and the two became the era’s golden couple, never out of glossy magazines, flitting between openings, exhibitions and first nights. He the son of a County Durham pit-pony handler, she the scion of a City millionaire.
They married in 1982, two months after the album Avalon was released, featuring Lucy with her back to the camera, a pose he regarded as typically remote. In 1993, she was treated for drug and alcohol dependency, after which she never drank again, but remained a 60 Marlboro Lights-a-day woman. The couple divorced in 2003, having produced four sons.
In 2006, she married Robin Birley – son of Annabel’s founder Mark, and owner of 5 Hertford Street – a pairing she described as “very happy”. Despite this union putting her once again at the heart of London society, she chose to spend most of her time in the country, where she was known for retiring with a pot of tea before 10pm. And yet, still, it appears ultimate happiness eluded her.
It was a state of mind that Annabelle Neilson would have recognised. While less of a household name than her friend, Neilson was ubiquitous on the Nineties’ social scene, when Britpop made London the centre of the creative universe. As writer Laura Craik noted in these pages: “If you worked in fashion in the mid-nineties, it was impossible not to know Annabelle Neilson. You might not know her, but you would certainly ‘know’ her. How could you not? Like champagne, she was everywhere. Like champagne, she
‘Lucy fought a long battle with depression, a battle she lost on Monday’
was effervescent.” Even the most fashion phobic will recognise her picture: dancing on tables, knocking back cocktails, disporting herself in a gauzily transparent dress.
The classic poor little rich girl, Neilson’s net worth was estimated to be around £20million thanks to family money – her grandmother was a second cousin of the Queen Mother – and a brief marriage to a member of the Rothschild dynasty. Her life certainly contained misery: childhood bullying, a vicious attack in her teens, heroin addiction. However, it was the suicide of “my brother, my boyfriend, my soulmate” Alexander Mcqueen that many felt destroyed her, followed by a riding accident after which she suffered constant pain.
Blow and Mcqueen – the blue blood and the hot blood – are the most notorious characters in this story. In her book Champagne Supernovas
(named after Noel Gallagher’s Britpop home and party venue), Maureen Callahan charts the relationship between cab driver’s son Lee Mcqueen (Alexander was his “more regal” middle name, preferred by Blow), and his patroness-cum-muse. It is a tale of extraordinary talent and extraordinary decadence, of art and madness, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
Theirs was a partnership of profound love and festering resentment, in which both participants could be brilliant and awful, frequently at the same time. Blow declared fashion “a vampiric thing”, and so it proved, both she and her protégé struggling with its ultimately untenable combination of surface vivacity and self-loathing.
Neilson was a sworn ally, hosting drug-fuelled parties for Mcqueen in her cavernous Notting Hill flat, and co-organising his wedding along with supermodel Kate Moss. Said nuptials were celebrated on a yacht loaded with £30,000 of champagne, and a cast list including actors Sadie Frost, Jude Law, Patsy Kensit, and Noel Gallagher’s then wife, Meg Matthews – key players in the notoriously hard-partying posse known as “the Primrose Hill set”.
George Forsyth, the young documentary maker Mcqueen married, later observed: “The fashion world is the loneliest place on the face of the planet. It’s a shallow world full of party people and party ‘friends’.” He added: “It was a very incestuous, cliquey world. They were hard-core – staying up for days, either drinking or taking drugs, in some cases both… People had a lot of money so they never had to stop.”
He recalled a night involving drinks in Paris, dinner in Spain, and dancing in Amsterdam, before Mcqueen decided that Africa would be preferable, setting off 48 hours later for a trip that would last only as long.
In a recent Desert Island Discs appearance, fellow Blow discovery, milliner Philip Treacy, described both she and Mcqueen as being “full of life”, meaning that a trip to Tesco could be as dazzling as a night at the opera. That said, he also conceded that they were adrenaline junkies, addicted to “manic creativity”, always living for the next fix. “It’s hard to come off it,” he mused, “which is why I understand in a way what happened.” Real life never proved as fulfilling as the fantasy.
Following psychiatric treatment, Blow endeavoured to kill herself three times in as many months. A fourth effort – swallowing weed killer – succeeded. When she arrived in hospital, she was appalled to find the nurses didn’t recognise her, demanding: “Google me!” Then she sat and waited to die. Mcqueen did not visit. Three years later, he decided on the same fatal course, overdosing on cocaine and sleeping pills, slashing his wrists, and hanging himself. Neither was an attempt designed to fail.
There is part of us – we bores, or “civilians”, as Elizabeth Hurley famously put it – that thrills to the drama of these narratives; a grotesque, gossipy, envious part. They reassure us in the choices we have made to live humdrum, quotidian lives. The beautiful people burn bright, but they burn out. “Hubris,” we think, shaking our priggish heads.
One thinks of that other Nineties “It” girl, the force of nature that was Tara Palmer-tomkinson. One minute she was celebrating her 27th birthday in a white bikini and fur coat, all coke and chaos; the next, dying alone, aged 45, from a perforated ulcer and peritonitis. “For great highs,” the moralisers mutter, “there must be great lows.”
In fact, often there doesn’t seem much to divide the survivors from the sufferers other than plain, dumb luck. In his Desert Island Discs episode, Treacy referred to his “humble background”. Perhaps he – and those of the Primrose Hill set with more modest origins – benefited by being more grounded, having to get up, go out, and earn their crust? (Not that this saved Lee Mcqueen.)
More important, perhaps, is the ability to evolve, when attention moves on. Meg Matthews and Sadie Frost have put hedonism behind them, embracing middle-age as lifestyle gurus. Even Kate Moss appears to have calmed down, recently raving about a self-help book that instructs readers to not have “too many late nights”. Birley had reinvented herself as an admired photographer, from images of rural horse fairs to portraits of Blow and Damien Hirst, yet seemingly still wrestled with her demons.
People who enthuse about Gatsby glamour rarely seem to consider how the novel ends, when the confection is revealed to be a beautiful sham, masking only misery. Drugs, alcohol addiction, and plain wretchedness – these are the things that remain after the party’s moved on.
The beautiful people burn bright, but they burn out