Interview: Nicky Haslam, interior designer

Published on Sunday 1 November 2009 14:06

INTERIOR designer Nicky Haslam has been the toast of society for DECADES. Now the OLD ETONIAN whose friends included cole porter and Wallis Simpson has written his memoirs – AND THEY'RE AS COLOURFUL AS THE man himself

Nicholas – Nicky – Haslam wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth – more like an entire canteen's worth. On his father's side he's descended from a Lancashire family grown rich from cotton spinning and the invention of Aertex. On his mother's side he is a Ponsonby. His great uncle was the eighth Earl of Bessborough, and other notable relations include Caroline Lamb and Princess Diana. Queen Victoria was his mother's godmother.

Once described as "a living link not only with what he calls 'post-war faggotry' but also pre-First World War grandeur", Haslam, born just weeks after England declared war on Germany, in 1939, has always been more than the sum of his bloodlines. Best known as a socialite and interior designer to the stars, he has a special talent for friendship that undoubtedly owes much to a potent mixture of charm and curiosity.

He's drawn to people who have something to teach him. "I have a thirst – it's an awful word, but I'm thirsty for knowledge. I like knowing things, the odder the better, the more obtuse the better," he explains. And what a wealth of detail he's accumulated. His well- worn little black book has, at various points, contained numbers for Wallis Simpson, Cole Porter, Cecil Beaton, a clutch of Rothschilds, Mick Jagger, Bryan Ferry, and Tallulah Bankhead.

"I think what I have is straightforwardness, unabashedness rather than charm. I'm afraid of people, in a way. I don't feel I have to charm somebody, I feel I want to know them, it's a different thing." At the same time, he's keen to know what they know? "Exactly. You've got it in one."

Of course, Haslam's fans want to know what he knows, and have been impatiently awaiting his autobiography. Thankfully, Redeeming Features proves that good things do come to those who wait.

It teems with dropped names and juicy gossip. How many memoirs contain lines such as: "As I walked up Duncannon Street, named after my mother's family ..."? In the main, it's an intelligent, substantial chronicle of what it's like living at the epicentre of high society and high culture (with a bit of the lower sort thrown in for good measure).

When we catch up at his offices near Sloane Square, he's wearing grey jeans tucked into argyle socks tucked into lace-up boots. There's a jewel-encrusted something on his right wrist, but whether it's a watch or bracelet is hard to tell. He dons a grey and black striped jumper to ward off a chill, but judging by his frequent, juicy cough, it's already crept into his bones. He has an endearing stutter, and an idiosyncratic way with pronunciation: chameleon becomes "shameeleon", for example.

I joke that virtually every paragraph in his book holds enough plot lines to power a dozen novels. For instance (and this is abridged): "… At Longleat, lanky Henry Bath, still extremely handsome despite a deep attachment to the bottle, had recently handed over the running of the estate … to his heir, the almost more handsome but even then somewhat wacky Alexander Weymouth …"

Haslam's laugh rings out in the small space, hung with watercolours depicting rooms he's decorated, and a cork board bearing recent pictures of Queen Elizabeth II and the salvaged newspaper headline: "Elton takes David up the aisle."

Conversations and scenes are recalled in detail, making me wonder if he kept a diary in order, as Mae West recommended, that it would keep him? It turns out he'd start diaries all the time and promptly forget to update them. Those that survive are scandalous, he promises.

Claims of a dalliance with Anthony Armstrong-Jones (before the latter's marriage to Princess Margaret) have already prompted denials. Conquests – Haslam's youthful good looks were legendary – have included dancer Larry Kert, actor Helmut Berger, architect Philip Johnson, choreographer Jerome Robbins, fashion designer Bill Blass and the actress Tuesday Weld.

Despite these admirers, Haslam admits he's never been happy with what he sees in the mirror. He raised eyebrows – among those who could still move them – by going public about his facelift some ten years ago. At the same time he began dying his white hair ever darker, until it was Elvis-black, and wearing clothes emulating his sartorial idol du jour, Liam Gallagher.

But Haslam's earliest style icons were 1950s-era preppy Americans. The fascination sprang from having an older half-sister, from his mother's first marriage, who grew up in the United States. His mother thus visited the US often, always returning with stacks of albums from Broadway shows. During the three years of Haslam's convalescence from polio – he was immobilised in a cast for 18 months and had to relearn how to walk when he was ten – these LPs were his chief solace. It explains his devotion to Ethel Merman. When Kirsty Young made him narrow his picks to just one Desert Island song he went with Merman, "because I owe her so much".

Diana Ponsonby Haslam brought her youngest son – and new Etonian – to New York in the summer of the coronation. "It all seemed so … they were so sort of polished, those American boys. They didn't wear blue jeans, it was chinos and penny loafers and their little hair-dos – not crew cuts, en brosse – and they always had funny little bottoms, Americans, little tip-tilted bottoms." Haslam sketches one in the air and we both pause to admire it.

Are more transformations in the pipeline? "I don't think so. But people do owe it to one another to look their best. I think vanity is when people think they look wonderful as they are: 'I don't need a facelift; this is me; I have a lived-in face.' That's real vanity. I (always] wished I was tall and dark instead of dumpy and blond. I always wanted to be a lanky dark boy."

He managed the dark, I say. "It didn't make me lanky, though," he retorts, laughing. "My hair turned white when I was 30, partly because I used to put lemon juice in it when I lived in Arizona. I thought, 'I cannot have white hair for the next 40 years of my life, I'm going to go bananas.' People say, 'You look so wonderful, why did you ever dye it dark?' And I go, 'Well, if I'd had it that way for 30 years you'd be saying, 'Here's boring old Nicky Haslam with his boring old white hair.' And I think I have a point there. Who hasn't wanted to be Elvis? Who hasn't wanted to be a cowboy?"

That's another box Haslam ticked by moving to Arizona with his wealthy lover, Jimmy Davison, whose family's vast holdings included a working quarter horse ranch there. The couple modelled its interiors after Willa Cather's descriptions in Death Comes for the Archbishop, and confected costumes consisting of heavily decorated chaps, spurs and Stetsons.

Before that, Haslam was enjoying being "the only English boy in New York", having arrived in 1962 with David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton. He met Bailey when they were working in John French's photography studio. "We had this extraordinary bond. I was this toff from Eton and he was this oik from the East End, but we just adored each other from the minute we met. In a way, I was more of an influence on him than the other way around. I introduced him to quite a lot of people and got him his first jobs away from John French's, and also in New York. When I was on Vogue and Mrs Vreeland arrived, I talked him up. Mrs Vreeland, of course, thought he was sexy and attractive, so she adored him."

Bailey once said that The Beatles were just a northern boy band, and that he, Haslam, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine and Shrimpton were responsible for starting the Sixties swinging. If so, why go to America just as things were kicking off?

"Because he means that we started the Sixties swinging in 1958 and 59, and then went to America four years later. In a funny way it was more fun to take the swingingness to New York. The Swinging Sixties was very limited here; it was all English. I was seeing the world in New York."

And, of course, the world came to see him. Wherever Haslam lived, he entertained non-stop, and visitors included everyone from his parents – separately, as they'd split up – to Cecil Beaton. "He was an influence on me, yes. I admired his decor when I was young and that Edwardian look was the prevailing look of the moment. He introduced me to lots of funny people in Hollywood. Cecil always had an original turn of phrase, an original turn of mind."

Redeeming Features boasts more names per page than your average phone book, but one recurs with great frequency: Diana Cooper. She was the socialite and actress who, during her marriage to Duff Cooper, was chatelaine of the ultra-chic British Embassy in France, and inspired both Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford to base characters on her.

It seems that at every crisis point, Haslam takes solace in a remembered bit of wisdom dispensed by his glamorous friend. "Diana was the one who said, 'Go to parties, you can always leave. You don't have to stay if you don't like it.' And her incredible knowledge. An uneducated woman, never went to school, but she knew every Greek legend, every Shakespeare play, every bit of poetry you can think of, every great speech, every marriage of anybody interesting in history."

Haslam met Diana, born in 1892, while still a teenage schoolboy. "You never felt the age difference," he insists. "There was that time when the windscreen of a car shattered on her. 'That was fun!' she said, brushing glass out of her face. And when (one of my boyfriends] went off with someone else, Diana said that the reason she stayed married was because she made friends with all of Duff's mistresses. I was extraordinarily blessed to know Diana. If there had been nobody else in the world, if I hadn't met Cole Porter or anyone else, it was Diana I would have wanted to be with."

He seems so upbeat, so happy. Is he fundamentally optimistic? "I think il faut etre optimistic. One can't not be. However awful things are, certain things are better. Yes, there's a lot of violence in the world, but in the 18th century you couldn't cross Hyde Park without highwaymen descending on you. But what I do feel is that the sense of shame has disappeared from the world. Nobody's ashamed of what they look like, what they say, what they do, what they don't know, what porn they like to Google. I think it's terrifying that the standard of shame has slipped."

How, I inquire, can he criticise the current celebrity culture, when he's always moved among celebrities of one stripe or another? "The difference is that the celebrity of the time, when I was young, was like 400 people and they all knew each other. It's the world Cole Porter was writing his songs for. Another difference is that celebrities then were older."

I am relieved to report that Haslam shows no signs of slowing down at work or at play, and remains at the heart of all that's fascinating. When we go to his nearby shop for photographs he changes into a shiny Top Shop suit, accessorised with a massive embossed gold-coloured bangle.

"It was two dollars at Corfu airport but it looks so much better," he says, acknowledging my compliment. "I bought it on the way back from my last holiday. You know," he giggles and rolls his eyes, "when I was off running the country with Peter Mandelson!"

Redeeming Features: a memoir by Nicholas Haslam is published by Jonathan Cape, priced 25. Hi Society: The Wonderful World of Nicky Haslam will be broadcast on 16 November on Storyville, BBC4, 10pm.

This article was first published in The Scotsman on October 31, 2009