Not me

I met a woman who told me I reminded her of another woman, a famous woman, a sixties icon. I told friends, lots of friends, about this albeit brief but for me momentous conversation. Anyone prepared to listen got to hear about it because I was absurdly pleased. It was almost the greatest compliment anyone could have paid me. I said, each time I told the story, ‘If, when I was twelve, someone had told me that one day more than 50 years later someone would say that I reminded them of (insert name of sixties icon), I would have thought that my life had reached a culmination in which all my wishes had been granted, in which all my other successes paled into insignificance because,  in my twelve-year-old eyes, it would have seemed that I had achieved my true purpose in life, almost being someone I aspired to being, almost not being me.’  I didn’t generally share the last part of that about not wanting to be me but that was what it was about really. It was about a profound dissatisfaction with being me.

Of course, whatever similarities the woman saw between me and the sixties icon are certainly few.  Others would not have seen them. Aside from the fact that my face and the sixties icon’s face, like all aging faces, are in some ways the same, we are very different.  But there are some features in common beyond just being the faces of older women. I’ve examined the contemporary photos carefully, forensically even. There’s a certain set of the mouth when our faces are in repose, the distance between upper lip and nose, the shape of the nose, the wispy fringe, the pale hair, the slightness. But none of this would ever add up to a case of mistaken identity.

No one would have thought us alike when I was twelve and the sixties icon was seventeen and famous. She was tall and thin with huge eyes made up to look even larger, with painted lower lashes, staring out almost defiantly at the photographer boyfriend, another sixties icon, from the pages of Vogue or Nova or Harper’s Queen or Tatler.  My mother borrowed the magazines from a library, and I studied them and strove to imitate the look with my Mary Quant make-up kit and clumsy hands. I didn’t achieve it. It made me sad that looking like my idol was unachievable.  It made me doubt my worth in a sixties version of what today’s twelve-year-olds experience with unremitting intensity thanks to phones and social media.

The sixties icon has written a book, a novel, according to the publisher’s catalogue, the reviews and interviews she’s done with the press. Someone told me that most first novels are autobiographical, and this is no exception, though there are also fictional elements I suspect. And that too is unexceptional. All the stories we tell about our lives are partially works of fiction. We exaggerate, we expurgate, expunge and embellish. Try sticking to the facts and you quickly realize that you can’t resist the temptation to add and subtract. In much the same way that when we try to draw what is in front of us, we’re quickly seduced by our desire to make a pleasing image, by wanting to get it right. We want viewers to say, ‘You really captured that chair’. The object becomes illusive and illusory in the same way that the factual account slides into fiction.

Thanks to the novel, I know about some other commonalities between myself and the sixties icon. We share a period when we both had poor skin. We both had a parent who was always off travelling, distant both physically and emotionally, engrossed in their own life of success and power. We both loved those glorious sixties boys with their guitars and cameras. My mother let me go and see Antonioni’s Blow-up when I was twelve (what was she thinking?). It left its mark on my pubescent psyche, and I fantasized about running away to London and being discovered by whoever David Hemmings was supposed to be in the film. I now know he was supposed to be the sixties icon’s photographer boyfriend.

I longed to be a model like the sixties icon, gazing out steadily from the pages of those glossy magazines. I studied the minimum height and maximum weight of these perfect girls and saw that I would never measure up or weigh in. I’d reached my adult height of a measly five foot three at 13 and was already worried by the lack of a thigh gap and that the bathroom scales refused to stay at six and a half stone. Too short and insufficiently willowy, I was also gauche and awkward in front of cameras, not like the sixties icon who writes that she, despite her shyness, knew instinctively how to move freely, effortlessly finding just the right tilt of the chin or thrust of the hip.

Much later I did get to be a model but not for fashion photographers. I modelled for art students. First in Canterbury and then in London. I started life modelling because a friend asked me to step in at the last moment when her usual model had let her down. It was an adult evening class. My friend explained the protocol. I wasn’t to undress in front of the students. I was to bring a dressing gown and remove it just before stepping out from behind a screen to take up the pose, in this case sitting on a not uncomfortable chair. I don’t remember much else but my friend said that I was good at sitting still. Not everyone can do that, apparently.

My friend told me about a full-time post at the art college. It sounded better than continuing with the work gang of apple pickers I’d joined in late August. They were about to move on to the potatoes which were to be followed by the sprouts and then, horror of horrors, the turkey plucking. Sitting still in front of a bar heater, albeit without my clothes on, sounded a lot better so I went with my friend to the art college to meet the head of studies.  He gave me the job on the spot.  It turned out that I was not just good at sitting still, I was good at lying and standing still as well.

Once a sculpture student asked to work with me on her own. She took photos of me wielding a shovel as I walked around the studio. In the tea break with the tutors, I told them about it. One of them said I shouldn’t have agreed to do it, that photographic modelling was a much higher hourly rate and that I might live to regret it. ‘Imagine if you become prime minister one day and the photos come out in the press’. This seemed unlikely to me at the time. I wonder if the photos still exist. I think they were polaroids.

Not long after the photo incident, I moved to London. The Canterbury tutors put me in touch with an art college in Kensington and wrote me a very good reference. They took me on as they were short of models like me who were good at sitting, standing or lying still without having tantrums or engaging in exhibitionism as some of the others did. One of them had gone out to the pub with the students at the end of the day and after one too many pints, took off all her clothes in the pub toilet.

The most popular models were large Rubenesque women with interesting folds of flesh and large pendulous breasts. I was small and slim but even so some students chose me as the model for their final painting, a painting that would determine whether they got into a master’s programme at another more prestigious art school. I was to stand for seven hours a day leaning naked against a wooden shelf. For ten weeks. The set-up was non-negotiable. In other studios, there’d always been some discussion about what was sustainable over days or weeks. In this case, there was none. They’d already hung some flowery wallpaper on the backdrop and positioned the wooden shelf.

I was leaning against a partition that divided what had once been a single studio into two. On the other side of the partition was another studio with students painting another model, a German boy, from Berlin, in a reclining pose, his whole body resting against the partition. The clock was on his side of the studio, so he marked the time for me. When we were coming close to the break (there was a ten-minute break every hour), he would take a long deep in-breath and then slowly exhale. My wooden shelf would gently lift me ever so slightly and just as gently lower me to tell me that my time in the very uncomfortable pose was almost up, that I would soon be released to put on my dressing gown and roll a cigarette, to stretch and breathe.

In the breaks, I talked to the other model and rubbed my aching back. The students barely and rarely spoke to me, spending their break time peering worriedly at their canvases. They were not unkind. They were just so engaged in observing me that they could not allow for the intrusion of a personality that would distract or even worse condition their way of seeing me. They needed me to remain a form.

The way they painted involved taking very careful measurements, of the distance between the tip of my nose and the edge of the backdrop, from my belly to my arm, from my kneecap to the wall, which they marked with tiny crosses on their canvases. The idea was to somehow recognize their subjectivity, to acknowledge that they couldn’t rely on guesswork, on concepts of what I looked like, that they couldn’t really see me. This meant that they were aware of every small change in the pose. If my thumb was even a millimetre further back on the shelf, if my legs were crossed at my ankles at an even slightly sharper ankle, if a little more of my back was resting on the backdrop, they could tell. If I ate lunch the distance between my belly and my arm would change and they would comment on it amongst themselves. They were irritated and I felt blamed. I stopped eating lunch.

The sixties icon writes in her novel about a photo shoot in Nepal. The photographer boyfriend is losing interest in her, perhaps losing faith and finding fault with the way she poses while constantly praising the other model. One day, she tries to find the right pose and he tells her to pull her stomach in. She is mortified, humiliated and shamed. I was not having to rely on being beautiful to avoid this kind of castigation. I just had to remain the same, to not make it apparent that I, like everything else, was in a state of flux. For ten weeks I was held in stasis.

I sometimes wonder what happened to these paintings, all very similar though offering different angles on the same subject, some in profile, some front on, my shins and thighs and belly rendered as stark plains of colour, greys and pinks and browns, my form marked out by the crosses like tiny wounds. Paintings in the same vein by the students’ guru, Euan Uglow, can be seen online but unlike the images of the sixties icon invoked so easily through Google images, these careful studied depictions of a me, if they exist at all, are probably in attics and lofts, dusty and discarded. It would be strange to see them again, to see if they are a me I once was or a me I’d still like to be. I somehow doubt that they would be, but it would be good to be able to check, good to know.