Marie Helvin interview

Published on Thursday 25 September 2008 16:48

MARIE HELVIN may be just four years off celebrating her 60th birthday (and, boy, will that be a party), but you could still slice mangoes on those cheekbones.

Here is a model whose face has graced magazine covers through every decade since the 1970s. She was married to one of the most famous photographers of our time, and has been seduced by the likes of Jack Nicholson, Marco Pierre White, Eric Clapton and Peter Gabriel (though she famously turned down Warren Beatty – in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, no less). She partied with the Beatles, the Stones and Andy Warhol, was dressed by the likes of Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent (it was into one of his gorgeous velvet clutch bags that she vomited in the World Trade Centre lift in front of Jackie Onassis) and gave secret dinner parties for Salman Rushdie at the height of the fatwa.

A charmed life, surely, for the little girl from Honolulu? "I suppose it would be arrogant of me to say no," says Helvin through the beginnings of a cold ("This London weather! One minute it's sunny, the next it's raining…"). "But when you're living the life, you're living it.

"Having said that, I am still very much the country girl from Hawaii, and when I go back home I'm nobody. I can go grocery shopping barefoot and blend in. Nobody knows who I am.

"So, yes, my life has been charmed in the sense that I've met some extraordinary people. But at the end of the day, when you go home and you go to bed, and if you're on your own, you never think of yourself in that way. I'm sure not even people like Angelina Jolie think like that.

"Or maybe you get used to the trappings of the kind of lifestyle you have. But, hey, I'm not in Jolie's bracket, you know. I still have to work my butt off, and I'm 56. I thought I'd be retired by now!"

Helvin is still beautiful, and still modelling, though she insists that butt is "practically on the floor – but I try not to look these days". Her favourite fashion period was the late 1970s – "They were really sexy. I loved the Lycra! All that stretch-look and skin-tight and high heels. I couldn't imagine wearing anything like that now but I sure liked it then. And, of course, I was young, I had a boyfriend and I wanted to look great for him. It was a fun time."

Which brings us neatly to the men – those she has loved and left. David Bailey, of course, she was married to for ten years. He was never faithful but, as a child of the 1960s, she accepted his flings. "I didn't believe men expressed their love through monogamy," she says in her autobiography. "Of course he slept around – he was David Bailey. He never flaunted it in front of me, so it didn't hurt me."

But the final straw was discovering intimate photographs of a model (Catherine, now Bailey's wife) in his darkroom. She confronted her husband and their marriage was over. Still, she has somehow managed to stay close to both him and the woman who took her place.

Her other big love affair was with Mark Shand, action-man brother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, whom she was with for four years but whose proposal she refused. "I loved them all," she says, "I really did. Apart from Eric Clapton – I definitely didn't love him! I loved Bailey. I loved Marco – it was a very brief relationship, if you can even call it that. In fact, Marco's still a friend of mine, and he's throwing me a party for the launch of my paperback, which is so sweet of him.

"I was in love with Mark, definitely. I almost married him; everybody wanted me to. But I was in a marriage for ten years – why would I want to get married again? The pressure from his parents and his family… it's just not me. I didn't want to go there. Now he's very happily married and, my goodness, look what happened to his sister: she's married to Prince Charles. I don't think I would have fitted in with that family.

"Funnily enough," she adds, "I saw Prince Charles a couple of weeks ago. He looks really great. Camilla has done something with his clothes – he looked fantastic."

Still, it's not in this hippy chick's nature to look back with regret or what-ifs. "I'm not that kind of person. I don't do a lot of looking back, I tend to look ahead. Particularly now, at my age, and since my mother died, I don't want to look backwards. I try to be as positive as I can because I truly believe I am my feelings, and if I'm sad, if I have regrets, they will show up as illnesses, they will show up as cancers… I don't want that.

"Maybe I'm a bit like that because I've had some bad things happen in my life. So when you've been touched by sadness and grief, it makes you vulnerable. And because I am vulnerable, I try to be positive. And when I say try, I really do mean try, because it's an effort."

She was exceptionally close to her mother, who died last year from a brain tumour, and she still cries every night over the loss. But even more painful was the sudden death of her younger sister, Suzon, in 1978. Irrationally, perhaps, she felt responsible, and still blames herself for not being able to protect her. "I should have done something. I don't know what. But how could I have let this happen? She was my baby sister.

"I think I'm always going to have trouble coming to terms with Suzon's death, mainly because I was the eldest. Although I had nothing, obviously, to do with her death – she died in a foreign country, she lived in Jamaica with her boyfriend – I feel responsible. That's just the way I was brought up.

"I was made to feel almost like a parent to my younger brothers and sisters. When I was only 12 or 13, my parents would leave me in charge of my siblings when they would go off to Las Vegas for the weekend to see Elvis or something. Not that it happened all the time, but I was in charge. So I guess that was always instilled in me that I had this responsibility. I feel guilt. With my mother, I don't feel that at all, I just feel, 'I wish I'd said this, I wish I'd done that.'"

The events, she says, have changed the way she views the world, giving her a strength through the vulnerability of grief. "I'm a very independent woman but it has made me feel even more in control of my life. If I don't want to do it, if I don't want to see someone, if I don't want to go there, I just won't. I've become very strong in that sense, whereas before I would be coerced, led this way or that.

"In another sense, it kind of makes you – a strange thing to admit – very unafraid of what can happen to you. So I get hit by a car, I get run over by a bus, I'm just not afraid. I used to be scared of flying – which is a terrible thing for a model, and for years I'd take all kinds of protection, wear amulets, say prayers – and I don't think like that any more."

But she admits that the loss of two people who meant so much to her could also be at the root of her relationship problems with men. "Perhaps it makes me afraid to get close to people," she ventures. "Perhaps that's part of my problem, in so much as I certainly don't ever want to get married; I don't want to be in a relationship. I would love to be in love, but I don't want to be in a relationship where I would have to see that person every day – I guess that's every woman's dream."

Helvin spent much of last year writing her autobiography, in which she is disarmingly frank about her life, loves and recreational drug habit. Those looking for dirt to be dished will be disappointed, however. An exercise in revenge it is not. "I was brought up during the hippy period, and those kinds of hippy values are very much a part of who I am today," she says. "I've always been taught that what goes around comes around, and though I may think nasty things – I'm only human – I'm certainly not going to put any of them in print.

"And anyway, whose business is it? People's secrets are their secrets, whether they're Mick Jagger's or Jerry Hall's or Bailey's or whoever's. That's their story; it's not my story to tell."

Besides, she managed to bypass many of the pitfalls of the notoriously cut-throat modelling industry, thanks to the man whose camera was a natural extension of his right arm. "I was very lucky because I got married very young so I always had that protection, whether or not he was with me. Even before we were married, I was Bailey's girl."

There was one, almost laughable, occasion when, as a teenager, she was approached by a designer with clearly one thing on his mind. "When I first came to London with one designer, he came knocking on my hotel door," she remembers. "I was really young – I think I was 17 or something – and he said this ridiculous thing, 'I want to be near you, skin to skin.' I'd never heard anybody say anything like that to me in my life! But it was harmless. I said, 'Don't be silly,' he left and everything was fine the following day.

"So, of course, that kind of stuff existed, the drugs, all of that, but I was with somebody who was very anti-drugs. Every time I wanted to smoke – because that was my thing; I liked smoking dope – oh my gosh, would I be given grief by Bailey. It kept me on the straight and narrow. On the other hand, the minute he was out of town, I couldn't wait to have a smoke! I've never done anything else, but smoking dope just seemed okay. Not that I do it any more because these days it's very different; marijuana is a serious drug – God knows what's in that stuff. I wouldn't go near it if you paid me."

Anyway, now she'd rather curl up with a good book than hit the clubs. "I don't have children, and my goddaughters are all grown up. To be honest, I can't think of anything I'd rather do less than hang out with them. I don't go to nightclubs, I don't like the music, I've become a real old bore. I'd much rather be with my friends or riding a horse, reading a book or travelling, or being with a man I'm having great sex with. I'm not interested in youth culture – thank God I have no kids!"

The closest she came to starting a family was with Bailey in the late-1970s, when Jerry Hall thought it would be fun for the two of them – by this stage known in the industry as 'the terrible twins' – to have babies at the same time. "I decided to put the matter in the hands of fate, and came off the pill for six months, strictly no more and no less," she says in her book. Hall went on to have Elizabeth Scarlett, now a model in her own right and Helvin's goddaughter, but (despite one false alarm) Helvin went back on the pill with no regrets. "When the six months were up, I was, truth be told, tremendously relieved that I hadn't become pregnant. I worry about the safety and welfare of those close to me, and if I had kids my worry-o-meter would have gone off the scale."

Her focus now is on health and well-being. She admits she is a "total health fanatic". "I really believe that to look good you have to look after yourself inside. So I start the morning with a revolting shot glass of a drink that gives you your five a day. It's black and looks disgusting. Then I take about 20 food supplements – I'm a great believer in it. Touch wood, I'm in perfect health. I don't want to look 20, I don't want to look 30, but I would like to look the best I can. For me that means my face is not tight like Joan Rivers' but what a 60-year-old woman's face is like. Having said that, my skin is, I think, really healthy – it looks good. Everybody comments that it glows. I have lines, like every other woman, but I think I have them in the right places: where I smile, where I frown. You can't get rid of stuff like that."

And that face has seen neither knife nor needle. "I have nothing against it," she says, "but it's not something that I'm interested in; certainly not at the moment. I'd rather have beautiful skin. I don't want to have tight skin – I don't understand why that's considered a great look. But one day maybe I'll decide I can't take it any more and want a J-Lo bottom. I'm not going to say never. Who knows.

"I don't even like Botox or fillers. I'm a vegetarian so I don't want animal products injected into me anyway."

But before you hate her for her restraint, this girl has her weaknesses. "I do naughty things too. Sometimes I like a drink. Sometimes I'll go out and have a little too much. I'm not perfect, but I think balance is the key. At 56, I don't go out every night, and I certainly don't drink every day, but once in a while, boy, I do like my champagne."

Her next project is developing a range of skincare and food supplements with her doctor, based on her own regime. "I'm very interested in going into the health area, the anti-ageing – and I don't mean the concern is on your face and your looks; the concern is on taking care of your body, because once you get to your 50s all kinds of illnesses and diseases can happen."

Meanwhile, there's the small matter of staying positive. "It's tough. I cry every night about my mom, but when I wake up in the morning I know I've got to get through my day. I have no choice, otherwise I might as well crawl into a corner and cry until I die. But I'm not going to do that for my sake; I'm not going to do it for my mom's sake; I'm not going to do it for Suzon's sake.

"I don't want to live forever, but while I am alive I want to be as healthy as I can and as optimistic as I can." r

Marie Helvin: The Autobiography (8.99, Phoenix) is out now Emerging intact from life as one of the first supermodels, Marie Helvin these days has swapped

hedonism for health – and, at 56, is the embodiment of natural living and the power of positive thinking