AN AUDIENCE WITH POLLY DEVLIN:
The writer’s top encounters...
PRINCESS MARGARET
In the early days of her relationship with Andy Garnett, he invited Devlin to join him for dinner at his flat with his good friend Anthony ArmstrongJones and his wife, who just so happened to be Princess Margaret. The evening, Devlin remembers, “was an unmitigated disaster”. Devlin didn’t know she was “supposed to curtsey”, so had a “black mark” against her straight away. Her Highness “ate very little, smoked a lot and was fairly rude about everything and everybody,” Devlin remembers. “Though after dinner was over, she did grab the Fairy Liquid and got straight into the washing up”.
JOHN LENNON AND YOKO ONO
When Devlin arrived to their sprawling mansion, she found the superstar and his wife “doing something with a hearse and a helicopter”. “Being in love isn’t exactly an equal thing,” Yoko told her, while John played his new composition, Imagine on a white piano in the background. Yoko worried, she told Devlin, about “which of us will die first, because that’s the one thing we can’t control”.
ANDY WARHOL
Devlin’s first interview with Warhol was her most difficult. When she met him in the 60s at the start of his career, she thought him “a freak”. “All this art is finished,” he told her, “Squares on the wall. Shapes on the floor. Emptiness, empty rooms.” Twenty years later they met again and Devlin had changed her view. “By then I revered him as a genius,” she writes, “one of the hinges in art, like James Joyce of Duchamp, who make the doors of perception spring open.”
DIANA VREELAND
The Vogue of the 60s was Vreeland’s creation, writes Devlin, “Eclecticism, freakishness, style, hysteria, erudition, invention — and narrow to the bone”. Vreeland head-hunted her to join the team “coming into my life like a genie” after she read a profile of John Osborne Devlin had written for British Vogue. The young writer was initially terrified as she offered up editorial ideas during their weekly lunch meeting, but the fear soon wore off. “I knew that this woman, whose style was in the cut of her vision, who was also ridiculous and often unintentionally funny, could miss the point by a mile and still arrive on target. She was
also a fashion genius.”