‘I was not afraid of Lucy’s darkness’
Friends with Lucy Birley for 40 years, Jessica Berens says that while the socialite was blighted by depression, her capacity for joy was huge
Imet Lucy when we were both 16 and living in Wiltshire. She rode up to the house on a horse to the amazement of my mother, who couldn’t understand how she had circumnavigated some quite busy roundabouts, let alone several miles of urban road, on a steed. The mystery was never solved, but Lucy was mysterious. It was one of the many things that made her attractive – as much as the clothes and the beauty, she was mysterious and funny and subversive, and that is why I liked her, not just because of the clothes.
She maintained the habit of making magical manifestations in my life, appearing, quite often, unannounced. One particularly strange encounter was while I was living on top of a mountain in an obscure village outside Salamanca in Spain. I had been alone for three months, out of choice, to write. I had no telephone and no form of communication, and very few people even knew where I was.
It was very hot, so I had to scrabble for apparel when there was a knock on
She married Bryan Ferry. I was impressed, but also worried she was too young and wild to settle down
the door. Lucy was on the doorstep, having appeared with no advance warning, a vision of swirling cottons and amusing dark glasses. I had not spoken to anyone for a long time and I was thrilled to see not only a lovely and interesting friend, but one with whom I could communicate on a meaningful and truthful level, a skill we managed to maintain throughout our friendship of 40 years.
We both laughed quite easily, which always helps; and we both adored gay men, the most creative and fun ones gathering around her – Rifat Ozbek, Hamish Bowles, Rupert Everett, Jasper Conran, Tom Bell, Joe Mckenna, Manolo Blahnik, Michael Roberts, John Maybury. It was why the parties at her house on Camden Hill Road were always so much fun.
And, of course, she was an excellent purveyor of their visions – looking wonderful in John Galliano and Philip Treacy – always adopting a unique style and worn with slimline grace and confidence that was summed up by American Vogue’s Hamish Bowles in his memory of her: “For a wedding in Havana, she wore a giant Lacroix straw hat with camouflage pants she found at a stall in a local country market and strappy Manolo heels. In the country, she might wear an Inca knitted bonnet conceived by Jones for Galliano. She turned up for a site meeting with a decorator in black silk dungarees and a bowler hat.”
She married Bryan Ferry, rather discreetly, when she was 23. I was living in America at the time, and while being impressed by both their choices, worried that Lucy was too young and wild to be domesticated. Bryan, 14 years older than her, was very involved in his work and he was on tour a lot, but they had a nice time for a while; both of them so visually literate, enjoying their four sons, Otis, Isaac, Tara and Merlin, and leading a privileged life.
She bought a lot of things to make their Sussex house beautiful. Well she enjoyed shopping, of course, and would be the first to admit she had a bit of a problem. This was highlighted on the afternoon that she bought several race horses at an
auction “by mistake”. I was once driving past Harvey Nichols with her (her driving was as terrifying as her politics, which were very Right-wing). “I get aroused when I go into Harvey Nichols,” she said. “I can’t help it.”
To ask why a beautiful, rich woman should commit suicide is to not understand either the nature of clinical depression or the experience of living with suicidal ideation. I understood her darkness, and I was not afraid of it, which is one of the reasons why we could speak to each other honestly and meaningfully. She had seen more than one close friend end their lives, and had watched Isabella Blow’s untreatable misery before she killed herself, so Lucy knew that life was not all shopping and hunting.
We knew we would never judge each other and we both understood that to want to be alone does not mean you are a selfish freak. We had both suffered from the effects of very dysfunctional fathers (hers was Patrick Helmore, an insurance broker and alcoholic who died in a fire in Ireland in 1998) and, having felt abandoned, we straightened out with a 12-step programme that allowed us to identify our emotions and express them.
This all worked for her for a bit. She liked the honesty and structure, and she was spiritual in her awareness. She was actually shocked when once, sitting next to her in church at a wedding, I told her I didn’t believe in God. “Do you think He minds?” I asked her. “I expect He’s got His eye on you,” she smiled from underneath her gigantic hat.
Underneath the beauty and the panache and the country pursuits and all her abilities and competencies, her easy parties, effortless styles, unpretentious glamour, eccentric generosity, there lurked the low self-esteem that so often blights the addict. It rises up with terrible force, triggered by stressors such as isolation, toxic dissatisfaction or loss and anxiety about the unknown future – particularly for those heading towards 60 and trying to dodge the question, “Is the best over?”
Depression sucks the will to live and, though there had been interventions, and Lucy had managed her moods for some 20 years by attending 12-step meetings, stints at clinics and talking to psychiatrists, I think she was finally subsumed by the pointlessness that is the depressive’s unenviable mindset and which makes no sense to so much of the outside world.
The condition of depression can desensitise the victim to everything but their internal horror, made worse when the interventions stop working and one finds oneself facing what is
now being called treatment-resistant depression. She died a classic suicide, alone and final in her brother’s house in Ireland, having planned her end and violently carried it out despite the great love she felt for many, many people. Lucy wasn’t gloomy or depressing; she was the victim of a horrible, complicated medical condition, which tends to arrive episodically and can have great power.
Indeed, she had the ability to feel real happiness, as is revealed in the memory held by her friend Louise Guinness: “She described going out early with the South Shropshire hounds. There were only about three other riders besides her son, Otis, the huntsman. They climbed a steep hill, the sun was just coming up, the hounds looked alert and then she began to speak. She told me that she was overcome with a sense of rapture, a sense that in that moment all the beauty she lived for was visible and being experienced. ‘I could die happy,’ she finished the sentence.”
Underneath the beauty, there lurked the low self-esteem that blights an addict