How Mary Quant helped me mend my broken heart
As a new film about the iconic 1960s designer hits cinemas, her best friend of 70 years paints a vibrant picture of what they REALLY got up to back in the day
FOUR weeks overdue with my youngest son, I was propped up in bed, gloomy and enormous, when a parcel arrived. It was a huge hat box and inside was the hat every woman longed for: a sable version of a guardsman’s tall bearskin cap. The accompanying card read simply, ‘X M’.
It was just before Christmas in 1959 and for the rest of the day, I sat in bed with that glamorous hat on my head feeling much more cheerful. Once again, my best friend Mary Quant had known just how to perk me up.
We were so close that Mary would often guess when I felt gloomy and send me a surprise: something extravagant from her latest fashion collection, a bottle of scent she was about to launch or a jar of rum-flavoured marmalade from Fortnum & Mason.
Long before email, ‘marmalade’ became our secret codeword after I queried Mary signing off as ‘M’ — ‘How do I know who it is, it could be M for marmalade?’
From then on we both took to signing off private messages to each other as Marmalade. When Mary felt the pressure, Marmalade sent her a Gloom Bag — a tote filled with inexpensive gifts, handmade cards, jokes to make her laugh.
I was reminded of these happy, hardworking days when I watched a new film, Quant, which tells how Mary became one of the biggest fashion icons of the 20th century. She was, with model Twiggy, the face of the Swinging Sixties.
At first I felt anxious to see the film — how could it possibly capture the inimitable Sixties’ spirit? And what about Mary herself — I’m sure they’d convey her public persona just fine, but what about the much-loved private person?
Today, neither Mary nor I are in the best of health, but watching it was like travelling back to our heydey.
I was 22 when Mary and I met in 1954 in London’s boho Chelsea, before it became fashionable. Our soon-to-be husbands had been friends at school and all four of us had been to art college.
OF COURSE, we had no idea that Mary — backed by her husband Alexander Plunket Greene — would become the most influential fashion designer since Coco Chanel. Or that my husband, Terence Conran, would be knighted for services to design. Or that my first novel, Lace, would break the European record for a debut with a $1million advance (including film rights).
In the early days we slouched through life wearing black from top to boots and arguing about the merits of the Bauhaus or Russian painters. Our parents despaired, especially the Quants, who were schoolteachers. Even when their daughter shot to international stardom, Mary would tell me they were still urging her to get a steady job with a pension.
As the film showed, Chelsea was a vibrant, exciting place where you’d bump into people such as photographers David Bailey and Tony Armstrong-Jones in the pub. I remember Mary’s bedsitter above a shop on the King’s Road — a warehouse-cum-workshop with the bed piled with rolls of fabric. Mary bought a sewing machine and went to evening classes to learn how to cut. I went to learn how to weave.
In 1955, when Terence and I started Conran Fabrics Ltd, which I ran, Mary bought my striped upholstery fabrics to make skirts, and later my workshop made her bedroom and sitting room curtains out of Army surplus cream silk.
Mary’s first shop, Bazaar, was an instant success — so was their Italian restaurant in the basement called Alexander’s. Shrewd Alexander wanted to attract more men because, in those days, it was men who had the money; girls tugged their husbands and boyfriends along after eating in the restaurant. At 5pm there were free cocktails in the shop — to lure yet more men — so the entire business turned into a non-stop party. As there was only one curtained changing area, about the size of a basic lavatory, women stripped off in the middle of the shop, clearly visible to passers-by on the King’s Road. This attracted even more attention. And so small, unassuming Mary took fashion by the neck and shook it. She dumped the Dior corseted, wasp-waisted, fashion silhouette in favour of clothes you could turn cartwheels in. Mary’s work was fast and original, influenced by no other designer. I always thought Mary beautiful — she had wonderful, shiny, chestnut hair. I remember in 1958 when we drove to Bryanston School in Dorset (where Alexander and Terence met) for my brother’s entry interview, Mary looked her prettiest in a demure, pale-blue, checked dress with her hair cut in a bell shape at shoulder level. Our young husbands drove up to the school far too fast in their new sports cars and screeched to a stop at the enormous front door. Rows of schoolboys hung out of the stately windows, ogling Mary.
I thought it a pity when she got her famous boyish five-point Vidal Sassoon cut two years later. She told me long hair took up too much time. I was awed by this example of efficiency. She lost her adorable prettiness, but became as elegantly sophisticated on the outside as she was inside.
I was grateful to have her to tell me what to wear — from when I was pregnant with my youngest son Jasper, whose godmother is Mary, or for appearances.
Once the maternity bump showed, Mary looked at me and muttered: ‘You still have good arms.’ So everything was sleeveless. A white, armless, cotton sheath; a cream muslin, high-waisted Empress Josephine long dress for summer evenings.
Mary took my 13-year-old Christian Dior triple-pleated, black taffeta skirt, removed the waistband and attached the skirt to a new, black taffeta gym-slip top. How I wish I still had it, but it was handed on to my pregnant sister, who passed it on to some other swollen woman.
In the film they touched on Mary’s shyness and emphasised how tall, witty Alexander was her perfect foil. His family moved in what was then called Society, so he was good at putting people at their ease. This was important because Mary was modest, diffident and would sometimes lock herself in the toilet, so frightened was she of meeting people.
Such was her stage-fright before business meetings that
she eventually went to the head of the psychiatric unit at
St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Dr Jonathan Gould. He did not completely cure her shyness but together they worked out a way to deal with it.
When Mary was voted Britain’s Woman of the Year in 1963 and she had to make an acceptance speech, she and Dr Gould wrote a series of jokes in large letters on postcards. While the audience was laughing at a joke, Mary would quickly look down at the next card for the next joke.
In those sexually unequal days,
When Mary learnt I mixed my own pink lipstick, she produced a factory version for me, Q5. I felt so proud
the wife was a second-class citizen, so in a way it was humiliating for Alexander to be addressed as Mr Quant and take second place to Mary. Once, in my sitting room, he grabbed my address book. I said: ‘It’s OK. You’re under P not Q.’
Surrounded by gorgeous women all day, Alexander was an ostentatious flirt and bottompatter, but personally I doubt he cheated on Mary. He drank heavily, had very little free time and enjoyed being with her more than anyone else. All mouth and no pants, as they say in Texas. (Terence turned out to be the opposite.)
At one point the four of us nearly started a fashion boutique together with the working title ‘Plunket’s Proposition’. Sadly, Terence and I had too many projects and couldn’t raise the money. Instead, Mary and Alexander opened a second larger Bazaar in Knightsbridge, designed by Terence.
The following year when the Mail interviewed me for the role of design consultant, I was advised: ‘Borrow a hat from Mary.’ I turned up at the Ritz in a little ginger bowler hat, got the job and started to learn how to be a journalist. And so my writing career began.
In 1966 Mary launched her ground-breaking make-up range. It was a triumph of new ideas perfectly packaged in sculpted containers. As they say in the film, she invented the make-up palette we still use to this day. When Mary discovered I had taken to mixing my own bright pink lipstick with a little paint brush, she produced a factory version for me — Q5. Goodness, I felt proud.
Mary was naturally in advance of the zeitgeist: she knew when women were about to dump stockings for tights and had a range of colours and patterns waiting. When women wanted to ditch high heels for smart, low shoes, Mary had a terrific range waiting. She seemed to know just what women wanted.
Mary even helped me find a boyfriend when my second marriage shattered fast in 1968 — Terence and I had divorced six years earlier. She and Alexander invited me to dinner every Friday. I chose the fifth candidate, a handsome, charming Old Etonian ITN news producer called Antony Rouse. Mary seemed a little wistful.
Two years later, Mary had her son Orlando, having had a stillborn baby shortly before. My 14-year-old Sebastian became his godfather.
‘Why did you wait so long to have a baby?’ I asked Mary, who was 41 by then.
‘Because you told me you lost your imaginative ability both times you were pregnant,’ she sighed. ‘You said you were as creative as a cow. I couldn’t risk that when I had to produce 22 collections a year and had a workforce dependent on me.’
Mary was a devoted mother. Orlando and his young nanny always accompanied her on business trips; so he was an international traveller by the age of five. He watched his mother sketch designs in airport lounges and aeroplanes, smile for the cameras at airports, nap whenever she could. I thought she was doing too much.
Although she was the perfect example of what a woman can achieve if she is adequately supported and allowed to get on with it, she was publicly disparaging about the women’s movement, famously saying: ‘I don’t have time to wait for Women’s Lib.’
I was heavily involved and instrumental in the Equal Pay Act of 1970. But Alexander didn’t want to risk getting bad publicity by associating Mary with feminism. Secretly, though, she financed it — giving me £50 in cash (a large sum in those days) whenever I asked, which was often. I never mentioned it to Alexander.
I always knew Mary had two sides: the terrified shyness and the strong but silent determination. One day I was at her fabric stockroom when two arrogant middle-aged businessmen challenged her assertion that they’d failed to keep their commitments. I watched in awe as quietly and relentlessly, Mary minced their arguments one by one.
She asked questions. She produced evidence. There were meaningful silences. Slowly, she herded the two men into a verbal sheep’s pen. Then she demanded retribution from the sheep; gradually, the two men were reduced to quivering agreement.
Years passed and after contracting ME/CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), I left the Mail. These were tough times and Mary helped by persuading me to see Dr Gould.
I went on to establish my career in non-fiction with Superwoman, a book that re-thought and minimised housework, for which Mary wrote the introduction. This was followed by a series of bestselling novels. Mary always got the first advance copy and I carefully considered the notes from M for Marmalade.
In 1990, when Alexander died aged 57, Mary was shattered. After Alexander’s funeral, I said to my sons I’d counted five contenders longing to console, like greyhounds straining in the slips. ‘Six,’ said Jasper. ‘Seven,’ said Sebastian. ‘Don’t forget Antony Rouse.’ Antony was the same friend Mary had set me up with years before — it had only lasted two years.
Six weeks later I got a postcard from the Italian Riviera which said: ‘I am happy with A.R. X M.’
Antony made her happy after the love of her life vanished, and lived with Mary until he died, more than 20 years later.
Alexander had left Mary £1 million in cash. Mary is a modest person; she never wants to overspend. But when she came to visit my 16th-century farmhouse in unfashionable
After my marriage shattered, she invited me to dinner every Friday to find a boyfriend. I chose the fifth candidate
Our friendship weathered birth, divorce, bereavement, public triumphs and hidden difficulties
south-western France, she liked it so much she spent part of her inheritance on her own farmhouse a few miles away.
We had some wonderful times together in France, shopping at my local town’s market, browsing the dump where Jasper found many discarded treasures from the 1930s. We spent days sightseeing from a hired open-top car, picnicking by the river, walking through the forest, or swimming in the nearby lake.
Did I ever feel jealous of Mary? Of course.
She was determined to remain thin as a pin and sadly I did not. And I felt a pang of envy when she wrote her second autobiography in three summer months in the country, when a book takes me two years to write.
And I also felt sorry that we had never worked together. Our friendship weathered birth, divorce, bereavement, public triumphs and carefully hidden difficulties.
These days, Marmalade still sends carefully chosen gifts to Mary, and Sebastian, now 65, can drive me to Mary’s country house, where Orlando, now 51, cooks a superb lunch, as taught by his mother.
Afterwards, we sit in the soft sun of Mary’s garden, surrounded by green hills, where I remember how exciting it was to be the trailblazers of the Swinging Sixties. My strong, quiet, modest friend and me.
Quant is in cinemas on October 29.