After Andy: Adventures In Warhol Land
Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni
Blue Rider Press £23.99
Andy Warhol names a grand total of 2,809 different people in his voluminous diaries. Oddly enough, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni is not one of them.
No shrinking violet – she describes herself as ‘posh with cleavage’ – she was never going to let a little detail like that prevent her calling her autobiography After Andy: Adventures In Warhol Land and plastering its cover with pictures of him.
She might more accurately have called it After Antonia: Adventures In Fraser Land: early on, she mentions that, in 1975, ‘my mother, the best-selling historian Antonia Fraser, went off with the playwright Harold Pinter’ – a detail she repeats at regular intervals throughout her book.
Natasha Fraser meets Andy Warhol at a party in London in 1980. Natasha didn’t see much more of Andy until 1987, when she was hired as one of a string of posh British dolly-bird assistants at his famous Factory in New York
Whenever she is after fresh employment, either her mother or Harold drops a line to one bigwig or another and – hey presto! – the job is hers. These connections lead to further connections, and those connections lead to more connections, et voila!
When she thinks of moving to Paris, ‘Anna Wintour had faxed Gilles Dufour, Karl Lagerfeld’s right-hand man at the Chanel studio; Loulou de la Falaise at Yves St Laurent and Jean-Jacques Picart at Christian Lacroix… It was unbelievably helpful.’
Natasha Fraser was born in 1963 into a family she describes as ‘Catholic bluebloods’. Her grandfather was Lord Longford, her grandmother the historian Lady Longford, her father the Conservative MP Sir Hugh Fraser and – or did she already mention this? – her mother was the best-selling historian Lady Antonia Fraser.
Natasha claims that, despite such pomp, true wealth was never theirs. ‘Money intrigued because, as a family, we didn’t really have it.’ Yet somehow the Frasers managed to scrape by, what with their large house in London’s Campden Hill Square and a hunting lodge on their own Scottish island, wallpapered in William Morris and carpeted in the Fraser tartan.
At Christmas, ‘Mum… injected her impish sense of humour when filling our red-and-white Santa stocking that came from Bloomingdale’s and had our names written in gold glitter’.
One summer, the Shah of Iran’s daughters came to stay. Even her childhood japes give off an air of grandeur. During a fencing class at her boarding school, ‘I persuaded Princess Elena of Bourbon to step on a stink bomb’.
It’s all a far cry from Skid Row.
As a child, Natasha felt dwarfed by her elder sisters. ‘My sisters made me feel inadequate.’ She was, she says, ‘the non-smart aleck (sic) of the family’. This is clearly not false modesty: in the space of a few pages she calls the Nazi creed not national socialism but ‘social nationalism’, Screaming Lord Sutch’s party not The Official Monster Raving Loony Party but the ‘Go To Hell’ party and the headmistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School ‘Helen’ Brigstocke, not Heather Brigstocke.
Natasha in St Tropez in 1980 with, from left, Dominique Rizzo, Christabel McEwen and Mick Jagger. Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni is the Katie Price of the Upper Crust, the Barbara Windsor of Debrett’s
Her sense of social history can also be a little off-target. She even seems to think that, in the early Seventies, jeans were ‘a rare commodity, they had to be purchased in the United States’. Eh?
Perhaps to compensate for her intellectual shortcomings, ‘among my parents’ acquaintances, I suddenly made it my business to know exactly who had titles, who was wealthy, and who was foreign’.
Her diligence paid off. Her autobiography is liberally peppered with attention from wealthy titled foreigners, most of whom introduce her to yet more wealthy titled foreigners.
For instance, within a year of arriving in Paris ‘I had got my social bearings’. Thus, she made friends with Cristiana Brandolini, Maxime de la Falaise, Florence Grinda, Hélène Rochas, Clara Saint and Sao Schlumberger, before embarking on ‘a series of delicious but ultimately disastrous love affairs’.
Ah, yes: her love affairs. Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni is the Katie Price of the Upper Crust, the Barbara Windsor of Debrett’s. Aged 16, ‘I was starting to catch the attention of older men… Having strong features, I was recognisable and quickly viewed as posh with cleavage’.
Later, she accepts with enthusiasm a wealthy foreigner’s suggestion that she nickname her bosoms Minnie and Mickey. ‘I was out every single night and could be counted on to expose Minnie and Mickey in a snug Rive Gauche top.’
The Herman Munsterish Karl Lagerfeld offers her the benefit of his fashion experience. ‘Wear tops to show off your bosom, Natasha. A bosom is the female equivalent of a grand zizi.’
Just in case her readers aren’t bilingual, Natasha offers a brassy translation of grand zizi: ‘big penis’.
Aged 17, she is on a yacht with Sam Spiegel – the Harvey Weinstein of his day – when Mick Jagger arrives with Jerry Hall. Jerry says, ‘Natasha is so pretty that she should be photographed by Terence (Donovan) or Bailey’.
Mick replies, ‘Well, her tits are big enough.’
‘Talk about uncouth,’ writes Natasha, but her distaste does not stop her going on a date with him the minute she’s back in London, or going back to his place at the end of that first evening.
‘Within minutes he was helping me brush my teeth, and when the lights went out, my cotton sweater, cheap skirt and everything else were swiftly whipped off.’
Their relationship, which carried on for ‘many years’, was, she says, ‘delightful on every level’, though, understandably, Jerry was less than delighted. ‘I thought you were ma friend,’ she says to Natasha, who finds it so funny that she ‘couldn’t resist’ repeating it all over London.
After A-levels (‘a crashing disaster’) she had an affair with ‘a Brazilian-born playboy whose party trick was eating glass’. It was, she says ‘the whiff of money around Shorto that partially attracted me to him’.
When they were introduced, she noticed his Cartier watch, ‘and I knew, within seconds of spotting it, that I was going to own it. I quickly did, and my mother quickly christened it “the watch of shame”.’
Meanwhile, she lets Jack Nicholson put his hand up her skirt while they are both snorting cocaine, and also embarks on a long affair with the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren.
Lady Antonia Fraser with baby Natasha. Natasha Fraser was born in 1963 into a family she describes as ‘Catholic bluebloods’
But she draws the line at Lucian Freud. ‘If I had one rule, it was never sleeping with men I didn’t find attractive.’
She first met Warhol at a party in London in 1980, when she was 16. Coincidentally, I was at that same party, which was also attended by Gary Glitter and Micky Dolenz of The Monkees, to name but two.
I was spending a few days with Warhol for a magazine article. He spent most of his time saying ‘Gee’ or ‘Great’ or ‘Gee, great’. He was the American equivalent of HM the Queen: genial but guarded.
Natasha didn’t see much more of Andy until 1987, when she was hired as one of a string of posh British dolly-bird assistants at his famous Factory in New York, which she calls, Alan Partridge-style, ‘the Big Apple’.
She barely had time to introduce herself to her new boss before, later that same day, Warhol checked into hospital for an operation. He died four days later. ‘This made me the last employee to be hired under Andy,’ she boasts, obscurely.
Perhaps to justify purloining Andy’s name for the title of her book, she then feels duty-bound to write a lot of earnest fifth-form stuff about the legacy of Warhol, ‘a prophet-like artist whose impact continues to surprise and remains omnipresent’.
And for those who may not have heard of Picasso, she helpfully describes him as ‘the fecund and ever-popular Spanish artist’. These dutiful passages make one yearn for the shameless downmarket joie-de-vivre of her nights on the tiles with Minnie and Mickey.
Whatever next? Katie Price on Sir Howard Hodgkin? Tamara Ecclestone on Francis Bacon?