From the epicentre of Sixties glamour to a double family suicide: how a Vogue model persevered and rebuilt her life in the face of tragedy.
A girl from a Yorkshire mining town is barely thirteen when her father kills himself – her brother
finds him dying. At sixteen she’s spotted by a rock star and becomes an international Vogue
model. Seven years later her brother kills himself in her New York apartment and her mother
dies too. With no family left, her life is now one of extreme choices.
Fifty years later, Victoria confronts her past and takes her readers on an unflinching voyage
through her experiences as a model and beyond. Speaking frankly about loss, love, friendship
and ambition, Head Shot is a book of inspiration and purpose.
Packed with astonishing images by the photographers Victoria worked with, and the defiant
fashions she wore throughout her career, it also bears witness to a time of unparalleled cultural
energy and invention; it’s a story in which bags and shoes can, and do, sit right next to life and
death.
MADE IN
BARNSLEY
June
1964. Huddersfield Road.
The red MG, hood down, cuts cleanly across the
kerb and stops with a jolt beside the school gates. I recognise the
local driver’s face. Everyone does. He’s dating a sixth-form
prefect
– the car a seventeenth-birthday gift from
his father. We all envy the lucky girl whisked away from school each
day. And then he looks my way and smiles.
‘Would you like a lift home?’
‘No thanks, I only live twenty yards away,
and besides . . .’ ‘Can I take you out for a drink then?’
‘No, I’m only just sixteen, and what about
your . . .’ ‘Well,
what
if
I
take
you
to
the
Spencer
Arms
in
Cawthorne
and we order a Babycham for you, and if the
barman serves you I’ll take you to a club to hear some cool
music?’
‘Okay!’
But what about his prefect girlfriend? She
isn’t his girlfriend any more.
He said.
My first ever date is the following evening.
The construction of the big date hair-do takes
two hours. It’s more a hair-don’t, part beehive, part bagel and
uses enough Silvikrin hairspray to massacre an ant colony. I shimmy
into a dove-grey sleeveless frock from Sheffield’s Marshall &
Snelgrove and perform the perfect three-point turn for my mother.
Boy, oh boy . . . Dusty Springfield has nothing on me!
First
date hair-don’t, 1964
‘Well, have a lovely time, darling, and be a
good girl.’ Make your mind up, Mum!
The date’s a success despite the dodgy
barnet; probably
because of it. He can’t stop laughing and
even takes a photo. The jilted prefect pretends she’s
given him the elbow,
and
I’ve acquired my first ever
boyfriend. He’s
bright, handsome, kind – and
keen. His parents are charming, his sister an elegant dental surgeon
married to a naval surgeon, and all is
pinch-myself perfection. My life
has changed in a heartbeat. Dreamboat and I waste no time
experimenting with exciting grown-up things throughout the next year
– most of them at
week-ends, down quiet country
lanes in his red
MG.
‘Don’t kiss me like that!’
‘Sorry, it was just a slip of the tongue.’
‘Actually, I quite like it. Do it again!’
The more he teaches me how to kiss with an open
mouth,
the
more
I
almost
vanish
down
his
throat.
We’re on
a
teenage high in its purest form,
recreational drugs unheard-of and drinking habits tame. The real buzz
is an all-encompassing belief in the power of rhythm and
blues.
Just off the Barnsley Road to Sheffield, a
local self-assured young man named Peter Stringfellow has opened a
new club, the Mojo. Formerly a school of dancing, its bouncy sprung
floor is excellent for leaping around once you’ve paid your two and
six at the door.
The inside space, one huge room,
has matt black walls streaked with pop-art murals but has no licence
to offer alcoholic drinks, just coffee. Peter’s
unique knack of booking
outstanding groups before their first big hit means the Mojo has live
gigs that other UK clubs can only dream
of.
Soon he’s booking the world’s major blues
stars – but persuading the talent to perform in an alcohol-free
zone is
not an easy task. We’re waiting for Sonny Boy
Williamson to blow us away but when he arrives he’s tetchy and
confronts Peter.
‘Where’s the booze, man?’ ‘We don’t
have any, SB.’
‘Man, I don’t go on stage without no
booze!’
Peter looks a tad uneasy. Gossip has it that
Sonny Boy recently set his hotel room on fire while trying to cook a
rabbit
in
a
percolator. The
off-licence
across
the
road
produces an acceptable bottle of
whisky which Sonny Boy knocks
back before his performance
guaranteeing no-hands harmonica playing that tears our teenage souls
apart.
Hours later normality is tardily restored with
the upstairs- tiptoe past my mother’s bedroom door and her
inevitable . . . ‘Is that you, darling? Make sure you double-lock
the
front door.’
Five years earlier,
to everyone’s surprise
including my own,
I’d sailed through the 11-plus
exam, insisting on attending the local all-girls grammar school
rather than being pushed
off to board – the only member
of my family for generations to turn down a fee-paying education. I
wanted to stay close
to my pals. We
were rebels, not play-safers and
to risk losing them was a step too far.
My fate as a non-privately educated Fifties
child was sealed by that 11-plus exam, which had one purpose only for
the grammar schools’ ‘pick of the bunch’ – to channel us, via
intense study, to careers with realistic prospects of academic
success. Barnsley Girls’ High School’s excellent teaching assured us we could be whatever we wanted to be
– except perhaps housewives – and we were just as likely to
achieve our goals as the boys at the grammar school across town.
Victoria Nixon was eighteen when she was discovered by Helmut Newton, who photographed her for Vogue . This launched her international modelling career, which led to her being named the Daily Mail’s ‘Face of 1968’. After modelling, she went on to become an award-winning advertising copywriter, television producer and magazine editor. In the 1990s she opened the first deli in the UK to ban plastic packaging, and in 2002 her first book, Supermodels’ Beauty Secrets , was published, followed by Supermodels’ Diet Secrets in 2004. She is cofounder and managing director of a company which designs and manufactures humanitarian aid products used worldwide.
