Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times

Chapter Four

One of the many reasons why it is difficult to make a start as a model is that, although the photographers and fashion houses are crying out for new faces, when it comes to the point none of them want to take the risk of trying out a new girl while she is still green.

Jean Dawnay, Model Girl (1956)

The fashion world recovered more quickly than most industries from the dislocation of the war. In Paris in February 1947 Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ thrilled critics, buyers and public alike. ‘It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian,’ remarked Carmel Snow, reporting for Harper’s Bazaar, at the unveiling of Dior’s dramatic, narrow-waisted, low-cut, very feminine and distinctly nostalgic collection, harking back, some experts said, to the hour-glass silhouette of the 1890s. ‘Your dresses have such a new look. They’re quite wonderful.’

Snow had coined a phrase to emphasise Dior’s break with the drab, austere and utilitarian style of the war years, symbolised by his abundant use of material after a period in which it had been severely rationed. Dior, Snow claimed with some truth, had done more, however, than simply create a style. ‘He has saved Paris as Paris was saved in the Battle of the Marne.’

For there had been doubts expressed about the French capital’s ability to regain its pre-war dominance of the fashion industry, notably with American buyers. Certainly during the war years Paris had lost its crown when Hollywood brought together fashion and film to make New York’s Seventh Avenue the place to be, but the transatlantic clamour that followed the launch of the New Look – Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth were amongst the Hollywood stars who rushed to place orders – ensured that Paris was back at the top of the tree. Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath and Cristobal Balenciaga all contributed to this pre-eminence; by 1950 they had been joined by Pierre Cardin, two years later by Hubert de Givenchy. But it was Dior who reigned supreme.

In so far as Paris entertained any European rivals, they were Rome and Florence, where designers like Capucci, Pucci, Simonetta, Fabiani and Galitzine were admired, if not held in quite such global high esteem as Dior and his near neighbours. In the fashion industry, London remained something of an enigma. It considered itself as good as, if not better than, Paris and certainly looked down on the Italians. Throughout the 1950s the universal penchant amongst Europe’s designers for classically English tailored evening dresses and tweed suits as part of an exaggeratedly aristocratic look contributed to London’s self-assuredness. But the irony was that the driving force behind this English look was Paris, which took the safe lines coming out of London – ‘knights’ wives clothes’, as they were sometimes unkindly labelled – and turned them into something special.

The traffic was, in reality, two-way. London had been touched by the shock waves that issued forth from Paris with the New Look. Like the rest of the fashion world, it followed Dior’s lead. Yet it did so in moderation, sticking to its own particular style and developing its own innovations – like coloured furs. Jean Dawnay, who worked with the top designers on both sides of the English Channel before she retired as a model girl in 1956, sums up the subleties of the battle with an anecdote. While working at Dior, she was sent as one of a small team to show some of the house’s latest designs at the French embassy in London. The clothes had a strongly English look. To acknowledge his design debt to his hosts, Dior decided that his designs should be made up in British tweeds and worsteds. According to Dawnay, the gesture backfired when the flowing dresses she had worn in Paris overnight became stiff and ungainly when made from home-spun cloth. They did not move with her body but stood out in counterpoint to it. Only the most formal suits and evening dresses translated well. ‘The English designers catered almost exclusively for the smart English families,’ says Dawnay. ‘If they were having a ball or a coming-out party, they would go to Hardy Amies for a dress and so on. It was very insular, had its own standards and was rather dismissive of anywhere else.’

The global commercial reality, as Bronwen Pugh embarked on her career as a model girl in 1952, was that London, for all its pride and introspective one-upmanship, remained very much a stopping-off point for American buyers on their way to the main market, Paris. It wasn’t until several years later that Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Greene launched their Bazaar shop on Chelsea’s King’s Road and revolutionised London’s standing. As yet their particular new look was nothing more than the dream of fashion college students.

For a decade and a half after the war the London market was dominated by twelve names who joined forces in the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers. Worth, Norman Hartnell, Charles Creed, Neil ‘Bunny’ Roger, John Cavanagh, Digby Morton, Ronald Patterson and Hardy Amies were among the best – known stars in this galaxy, each putting on two shows a year – in January and July – where they unveiled their couture collections. Below them was a layer of younger designers, the Model House Group, who made their living by adapting last year’s couture house creations from Paris. And then there were the ready-to-wear houses, from smart names like Jaeger through to high street chains like Richards Shops. The days of the big names doing anything other than making individual items to order for a wealthy, predominantly older clientele had not yet dawned.

The timeless, upper-crust English quality of the designs of Amies or Hartnell, their appeal for a female audience looking for sensible suits for a weekend’s shooting in the country or a frock for a presentation at court, chimed well with the era. After the grey years of Labour centralisation of the economy, the election of a Conservative government in 1951 heralded both an end to rationing and a welcome return to some of the pleasures of pre-war days. London was loosening up. Taking their lead from the young Queen Elizabeth II on her accession in 1952, women who followed fashion aspired to a classical simplicity that mirrored the dress codes of the landed classes at play.

This was what the satirist and social historian Christopher Booker has described as ‘the strange Conservative interlude of the fifties’:

By the summer of 1953, the glittering coronation of a new young queen, marked in a suitably imperial gesture by the conquest of Everest, was a symbol that during the years of hardship the old traditions had been merely sleeping. People were once again dressing for dinner and for Ascot … Debutantes once again danced away June nights on the river, to the strains of Tommy Kinsman and the splash of champagne bottles thrown by their braying escorts. Unmistakably British society seemed to be returning from a long dark night to sunnier and more normal times.

It was a time when government and electors alike convinced themselves that Britain was back where it had been in 1939. ‘It’s just like pre-war’ was the phrase on everyone’s lips – before Suez, economic reverses, angry young men, the Lady Chatterley trial and finally the Profumo scandal destroyed the illusion and ushered in the new, brutal and classless world of the 1960s. In this interval a particular sort of upper-class conduct, confidence and style were the dominating social and cultural goals. Harold Macmillan’s governments, containing such a heavy contingent of peers that on paper they seemed like pre-1914 administrations, contributed to the process. The look that Bronwen Pugh came to embody – aristocratic, detached, elegant – reflected the general mood and had an emblematic quality.

The London fashion world did have one up on Paris in that it had adopted the American system of agents for model girls. In the States Eileen Ford, the godmother of model agents, had built up her agency from scratch in 1946, representing two of the most important US models of the decade, Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh. In Paris such innovations were not allowed for fear that they would become little more than glorified escort agencies, but in London they advertised in the phone book and were run by outwardly frightening but often benign men and women who provided the respectability and parental-style security that ushered middle-class girls like first Jean Dawnay and later Bronwen into the profession.

With her teaching career behind her and her heart set on fulfilling the frivolous dream she had shared with Erica, Bronwen went about getting herself on one of the agency’s books. The first name she tried was Pat Larthe. Dawnay, trail-blazer in the new wave of post-war British models, provided an uncomfortable picture in her autobiography of Larthe’s working methods. At the dawn of her career, Dawnay, like Bronwen almost a decade after her, had nervously presented herself at Larthe’s office in London’s Covent Garden only to find ten other hopefuls in the waiting room, clutching their portfolios and fiddling with their hair.

When she was finally summoned into the inner sanctum she was greeted by a tough, theatrical woman, sheltering behind a vast telephone-laden desk. ‘The interview was short and humiliating. I showed Miss Larthe my pictures. She barely seemed to glance at them before telling me I was too ordinary, that modelling was the toughest, most soul-destroying profession in the world, and that girls who had far more than I in the way of looks and figure got nowhere.’ Dawnay was reduced to tears. That appeared to be Larthe’s intention, perhaps – to take the most charitable option – calculating that it was better if it was done by her now rather than by someone else further down the line. Having destroyed the younger woman’s self-confidence, she could then appear her protector. She took Dawnay under her wing, directed her first to favoured photographers, then got her bookings at the less glamorous end of the market – shows at Scarborough hotels – and finally helped her to make the leap to the top London houses.

Bronwen’s first impression of Larthe was equally unfavourable. ‘I just turned up in her office and said, “I want to be a model.” She looked at me and said bluntly, “You’re too tall and you squint.’” Most hopefuls would have turned and walked out. A few months previously so would Bronwen, but in the aftermath of Erica’s death she clung to the idea of modelling as her salvation. She could not afford such dramatic gestures when Larthe potentially held the key to success. ‘Then Pat asked me to walk across the room and I must have done something right. She said she wouldn’t put me on her books, but she’d teach me how to be a model.’

Bronwen accepted this less-than-overwhelming offer without a second thought. She and another hopeful would turn up after hours at Larthe’s office every evening for a week. First they were instructed on walking in the correct way. You had to place one foot exactly in front of the other and swing your hips – ‘but not all that sashaying they do today,’ says Bronwen. ‘We had to be “ladylike but exaggerated”.’ Then there was some good old-fashioned practice with books on the head to improve balance and poise.

Equally important was the correct form for the catwalk-not then usually a raised platform but simply a walkway between rows of chairs ending in what was and remains known as ‘the cheese’ or ‘le fromage’ because of its resemblance to a slab of Camembert. To succeed as models, according to Ginette Spanier, the great Parisian couture house directrice of the 1950s, girls had to ‘swish their bottoms and stretch their legs out straight in front like a race horse, pirouetting at corners as though dancing an old-fashioned waltz.’

Other evening sessions covered make-up – at which Bronwen was a novice. At that time model girls were expected to turn up with their own shoes and do their own hair and make-up. Then there were hints on showing clothes off to best advantage – ‘wearing a jacket off your shoulders, that sort of thing’. And finally, another taste of the outwardly more buttoned-up 1950s, there was the etiquette of taking off and putting on clothes quickly, discreetly and demurely.

As Pat Larthe had spotted, nature had given Bronwen a spectacular walk. The lessons may have given it a little more polish, but it remained highly individual and one of her most devastating assets, something that was to make critics, designers and men sit up and take notice of her. Eugenia Shepherd, fashion doyenne of the New York Herald Tribune, later described her as that ‘husky, Welsh mannequin’ who ‘drags a coat down a runway as if she had just killed it and were taking it to her mate’.

The same openness that had made her a quick learner when Margaret Braund had fashioned St Joan out of a gawky schoolgirl at Dr Williams’ helped her to digest Larthe’s lessons in double-quick time. Despite her progress, at the end of the week Bronwen still found the agent adamant that she would not take her on. Her squint and her height would make her too hard to place. The current vogue was for petite girls with the gamine ‘little boy look’ – Jean Dawnay, its epitome, was five foot five and a half – rather than lanky, bony, long-legged women like Bronwen, who came in at just under six foot.

Yet once again, Bronwen displayed a remarkable single-mindedness. She couldn’t do much about her height, but the squint was easily cured. Raiding her savings, buoyed up by financial assistance from her parents, she went back to the surgeon who had treated her as a child and he operated once more on the lazy muscles behind her left eye. After a couple of weeks’ recuperation she was out knocking on the agents’ doors once more. Her friends marvelled at her perseverance. ‘I remember being full of admiration for her confidence and more so her resilience,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘I just kept thinking I know I couldn’t have done that and that the very first time someone said no, I would have given up. But it was a new Bron. She wasn’t in the mood to be put off.’

Those same attributes also enabled her to ride out her family’s reaction to her decision to throw in teaching and try her hand at modelling. The Pughs were not frivolous people and the news that their daughter wanted to abandon her career in the classroom and spend her money on what must have seemed to them like a hopeless whim cannot have been easy to swallow. First she had refused Oxbridge. Then she had gone to drama school, but just when it finally looked as if she was back on the rails, working as a teacher, here she was giving it all up. They could not understand her motivation and she, still in shock over Erica, could not explain it-to them or even to herself. However, the Pughs were not so heavy-handed as to express their disappointment that she had abandoned what had been her anointed role. Indeed, whatever their misgivings, they helped her pay for her eye operation. They had taught their daughters independence, had deliberately avoided giving them either gender or class stereotypes, and realised that they were now reaping what they had sown. They may even have understood on some unspoken level, that modelling – like dressing-up and acting before it – fitted in with Bronwen’s penchant from earliest days for eye-catching gestures, the ‘look at me’ syndrome that she puts down to feeling insufficiently wanted as a child.

According to Bronwen they were relaxed but qualified any support with the hope that she wouldn’t come to regret her decision. Her future brother-in-law, Ron Barry, soon to marry Gwyneth, felt it went further: ‘I think that they regarded Bron as a bit of a mad-hatter after she turned to modelling. They didn’t understand what made her want to do it, but eventually they were very proud of her. Their only concern, and this was mainly later when her name was in every newspaper, was about all the people who were going mad about her and the endless partying. It was an entirely foreign world to them. They were still doing the quiet Hampstead life.’

Gwyneth was the most enthusiastic, applauding her younger sister’s nerve and, with an instinctive understanding of Bronwen, suspecting the real cause of her crusade. Very tall and skinny, with none of Bronwen’s new-found poise and self-confidence, Gwyneth suffered from poor eyesight and generally bad health as an adult, caused by heart problems; she wore heavy glasses and came to see her own body as a burden. The prospect of her extrovert little sister celebrating hers prompted her to express unselfish pride and encouragement. Gwyneth, her older sister Ann says, had already settled into a pattern where ‘she lived much more of an inward life. Bronwen was a much more open, outgoing sort of person.’ As a judgement from within the family, it shows the extent to which Bronwen kept that other side of her, the inward-looking, contemplative and, she believes, Celtic-influenced melancholy, well-hidden.

Too much can be made of the point since Ann was, of course, overseas with her new husband when she learned of Bronwen’s career change. ‘When I heard, I just laughed. I found it terribly hard to imagine why anyone would want to be a model.’ The oldest and youngest of the Pughs’ daughters had by this stage recognised that they were, despite a strong physical similarity, chalk and cheese. ‘I never felt Ann was envious of me, or me of her. We had both simply chosen very different lines of work and she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do something so unacademic as modelling.’ If her goal since arriving at Dr Williams’ had been to follow a radically different path from her sisters, then Bronwen had finally and flamboyantly succeeded.

The only member of the Pugh clan to express outright disapproval of her boldness was her Goodyear grandmother down in Kent. To this Edwardian matriarch, the whole business of modelling seemed tawdry and she would have preferred her grand-daughter to give it a wide berth. A strict teetotaller, she once remarked to Ann of Bronwen’s career as a model girl: ‘I know that she lives on gin and sandwiches.’ However, she had little influence in such matters, even if it was partly a legacy from her late husband, given to each of his grand-daughters at twenty-one, that was allowing Bronwen to pay for the surgery on her eye and Pat Larthe’s course of lessons as well as to support herself until the hoped-for job offers came rolling in.

At first, on her return from Dorset, Bronwen shared a rented flat at 44 Harley Street with Diana de Wilton. Later she moved into her own place, first a small mews flat, and later in nearby Hyde Park Square, her home until her marriage. ‘I remember noticing,’ Diana de Wilton says, ‘not out of jealousy but curiosity how my room was always tidy and I would emerge from it looking plain. But Bron’s looked like a bomb had hit it, and then she would emerge looking lovely, immaculately dressed.’ She was developing her own style and her own, individual look, emphasising her Celtic eyes with her choice of colours and making the most of the aristocratic bearing her height, poise and strong facial bone structure gave her.

Eventually Bronwen persuaded the agent Peter Hope-Lumley to take her on his books. He was not quite so daunted by her height as Pat Larthe. And he was more successful at persuading his clients to take a chance on this unusual model girl than Jean Bell, the severe headmistress-type who had represented Bronwen for six months but failed to find her a single job. She had suffered numerous rejections; she was either too tall, too inexperienced, too unphotogenic, or not thin enough. ‘She just stood out,’ Hope-Lumley now says. ‘She was very exceptional. It was not only that she was much taller than the other models and had this air of distinction. There was something different in the way she walked. She was very good-looking rather than pretty.’ It is an observation reinforced by the interior designer Nicholas Haslam, then a youngster working on Vogue. ‘When you saw Bron, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, what a pretty girl,” you’d just say, “Wow!”’

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