Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow - Tom Sykes

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threatened to be an entirely conventional British upper-middle-class childhood was transformed in 1963, when Nicholas’s father was offered a job as Professor of Medicine at Stanford in California. After some soul-searching, Nicholas’s mother gave up her job at Oxford, and moved the young family – four brothers and a sister – to Palo Alto, in the San Francisco Bay Area of north California.

      The Taylor brothers enthusiastically embraced the entrepreneurial spirit of Californian life. Nick’s elder brother Sebastian became a professional backgammon player, and today both he and the youngest brother, Daniel, are successful financiers.

      Nicholas, however, was more academic than his brothers and headed back to Oxford to complete his studies after school. On his return to England he quickly became bored by his conservative contemporaries. He told his friend Robert Murphy, a scholar at Oxford, that he wanted to meet some ‘more exciting’ new people. Robert knew exactly who to introduce Nick to: his elder brother Antony’s friend Isabella, who was constantly flashing her bosoms and at the centre of an exciting, destructive, law-breaking set with, as he puts it, ‘no sense of modesty, decorum, or respect’.

      Isabella was without a boyfriend following Wolf’s dramatic announcement that he was no longer in love with her, and Robert’s introduction worked well. Nicholas and Isabella soon became an item. Isabella told me that sex with Nicholas was fantastic.

      Flora Fraser, then at Oxford studying for a history degree at Wadham College, knew Nick well because she was living in his parents’ old house in Jericho, which Nick now occupied, renting out spare rooms as student digs. Flora recalls:

      When she and Nick went out, I used to hear she did a fabulous striptease after dinner. It was part of her personality at that time. She had a fabulous figure. Her bosoms were generally on show in some way. We were all quite on top of each other and Nick found it difficult working when Issie was around, so one day he suggested she go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at the Kandinskys. She went back again and again, more excited each time.

      Nick’s brother Sebastian first met Isabella in the King’s Road in London. It was a darker side of Isabella that he encountered: she was chasing the dragon – smoking heroin in tin foil.

      Drugs were a big part of Isabella’s generation, which had been hit from the late 1970s by what her friend Colin Cawdor remembers as a ‘wave of heroin’. Isabella, Wolf and many of their contemporaries were into ‘hard drugs’ – heroin, coke and speed. Isabella was one of the few in her circle not to become addicted, a fact of which she was proud. Issie smoked grass now and then throughout her life, but hated hard drugs.

      The Taylor brothers were very handsome and they became popular members of Isabella’s circle, but tragedy was to strike the family. Nicholas’s eldest brother, Mathew, was killed outright riding a motorbike in London, only a short time after qualifying as a doctor. Also travelling on the motorbike was Mathew and Isabella’s friend Cristina Zilkha, a half-French, Harvard-educated lyricist who had success with the dancefloor anthem ‘Disco Clone’. She survived the crash with barely a scratch on her. Cristina said that her life was saved by the protection afforded her by the fur coat she was wearing.

       CHAPTER FOURTEEN

       The Disposal of Doddington

      Around the same time as Isabella was falling in love with Nicholas Taylor, her father, Evelyn, was reorganising his life. Evelyn decided that the time had come to retire after 35 years of farming. He resolved to sell up and move permanently to London. With a family history of over 600 years as landowners, it was a controversial decision, and his friend Major Ormerod and some other Cheshire landowners were dismayed. They let him know that they felt he was letting the collective side down.

      But, practically, of course, Evelyn’s reasons made sense. Evelyn was 65 and, with one leg, life in the country was increasingly becoming a struggle for him and Rona. He told the Major that moving to London would enable him to see more of his daughters, but the decision to sell was also bound up with his failure to produce a son and heir. Had Johnny survived, Evelyn’s attitude to the future of Doddington Park would have been very different.

      However, when the crunch came, even bottom-line obsessed Evelyn could not bear to cut the ties to Doddington completely. His land agent advised him to retain the profitable farming business and get shot of the big house itself, a liability that was ruinously expensive to maintain. Evelyn, contrary as ever, did the opposite, selling the farmland, the farm units, the 1950s cottages that he had built and the hideous pink house that Isabella had grown up in, for £1.3 million to Malcolm Harrison, who had a successful haulage business in north Staffordshire.

      Evelyn retained the Hall, the lake, the castle, the woods he had planted in the 1950s, and 20 Arts and Crafts cottages in the park. The way Doddington was disposed of was an extraordinary decision by Evelyn and a rare example of Evelyn allowing his heart to rule his head. Without a farm to support it, the Hall, boarded up since the school had left, would never be able to pay its way. Evelyn would certainly never be able to afford to live in it again – a fact he implicitly acknowledged by keeping a small black-and-white home for himself and Rona on the estate.

      In a bizarre twist of fate, Harrison got into financial difficulties in the early 1990s, and, after Evelyn died, Rona bought back the land from Harrison. She runs the estate as a commercial farm today, spending weekends in Cheshire, and is engaged in a project to restore the Hall, which is still boarded up although the exterior is open for viewing by the public.

      Issie’s friend Hugo Guinness told her how lucky she was because now she would be inheriting money instead of property, but for Issie the sale was a cause of great sadness, as the land that she had known and walked over was no longer her family’s. Another root had been cut.

       CHAPTER FIFTEEN

       Texas

      Evelyn also had an offshore family legacy abroad, which needed sorting out. He was vague to the point of secrecy on the details of this money, but he did reveal that the fund had been badly managed. The real estate had been sold and replaced with high-risk, speculative investments that had largely failed. What could have been worth several million stood at under £100,000, and, to receive anything at all, and escape the hated taxman, the beneficiary had to live permanently abroad.

      Isabella, Evelyn decided in typically autocratic fashion, was the most suitable candidate to receive the money. Julia had health problems and Lavinia at 15 was too young, and both of the younger sisters were temperamentally unsuited to exile anyway. And Evelyn made clear that exile was what was involved, warning Issie darkly: ‘I don’t care if you marry a waiter – you have to live abroad. If you return to this country with that money, you will go to prison.’

      For Issie, the timing could not have been more propitious. Nick, on the slender basis of a conversation with a stranger on an aeroplane, had decided that he was going to make his fortune by ‘wildcatting’ for oil in Texas. Wildcatting was a highly speculative enterprise, which involved buying the rights to vast tracts of barren land – the kind of places where only wildcats lived – and then drilling, more in hope than expectation of striking oil. Through his father’s professorship at Stanford, Nicholas had the necessary permits to live and work in America. When he got lucky, Nick would tell Isabella as they hatched their plans in pubs and parties in Oxford and London, he would be able to buy back for her the life into which she had been born – a big house in the country, a townhouse in the city and private education for their children.

      It was a beguiling fantasy, and in 1981 Nicholas, 26, and Isabella, 22, moved to Midland, Texas, the hot and dusty capital of the west Texas oil fields.

      Midland

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