Model Lucy Helmore, who has died aged 58, was never noted for drawing attention to herself. A quiet woman, whose friends remember her as ‘serene’ but said she was happiest alone with her dogs
Her friends were glamorous and often outrageous — troubled titans of the fashion set such as Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen, aristocrats including Lady Amanda Harlech and, of course, musicians like her first husband, the pop star Bryan Ferry.
But model Lucy Helmore, who has died aged 58, was never noted for drawing attention to herself. A quiet woman, whose friends remember her as ‘serene and elegant’, she married Bryan Ferry and then nightclub boss Robin Birley, but said she was happiest alone with her dogs. She told an interviewer: ‘I’m definitely somebody who needs a lot of time to reflect and digest life.’
For the past four years she had been living quietly in a large farmhouse in Shropshire, hunting most weekends, and raising rare breed pigs while her second husband Birley remained in London running the exclusive 5 Hertford Street club.
She is survived by her four sons by Bryan Ferry: Otis, Isaac, Tara and Merlin.
In a statement, her family said that she had died while on holiday in Ireland ‘surrounded by her beloved dogs, Daisy, Peg and Daphne’.
The cause of her death remains unclear, but former husband Bryan Ferry declared himself ‘shocked and saddened’ by the ‘tragic news’.
One friend, who saw her a fortnight ago, noted that she had looked ‘very unwell’, but was surprised she had gone to Ireland.
Her late father, a Lloyd’s underwriter and an alcoholic, had connections to the Galway area. Lucy had emerged from her marriage to Ferry having needed treatment for drug and alcohol dependency, and never drank again.
She was, though, an enthusiastic smoker and was said to puff up to 60 Marlboro Lights a day.
For the past four years she had been living quietly in a large farmhouse in Shropshire, hunting most weekends, and raising rare breed pigs while her second husband Robin Birley remained in London running the exclusive 5 Hertford Street club
Raised in a Kensington townhouse (courtesy of the millions her father made in the City) and educated at convent school, she had a successful modelling career, posing for renowned photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Steven Meisel. They captured her sometimes sardonic gaze, and the unsettling perfection of her bone china face.
She said: ‘The thing I remember about Robert Mapplethorpe is that he was incredibly quick and he knew exactly what he was trying to get; when he felt he’d got the photograph, we just lounged around in his loft and smoked a lot of joints.’
Through the fashion world she met Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry. He was trying to get over being dumped by Texan supermodel Jerry Hall, to whom he’d been engaged, but who left him for Rolling Stones lothario Mick Jagger. Lucy, who when they met was 18 to Ferry’s 32, said: ‘I was very surprised when I met Bryan that he was interested in going out with me. It seemed slightly surreal I suppose.’
She married Bryan Ferry and then nightclub boss Robin Birley, but said she was happiest alone with her dog
She posed as the cover model for the Roxy Music album Avalon — but with her back to the camera, a pose which Ferry felt was typical of her intriguing reserve.
He once told an interviewer that she had a touch of Greta Garbo and was ‘a Virgo . . . not easy’. And that was when they were still married. They were wed a month after the album was released in 1982, and set themselves up in a landed gentry lifestyle in West Sussex.
Ferry, whose father looked after pit ponies in Durham, was enchanted by his effortlessly upper-class bride whose family was linked to two baronetcies, and who favoured sofas covered in dog hair and mismatched cushions, and avenues of pleached limes.Lucy said of marriage to a celebrity: ‘I didn’t want to be put in the spotlight. My family’s attitude to the Press and publicity was very much that it was frowned upon.
‘You only appeared in papers if you were born, married or had died. That affected me when I got married to Bryan.’
But if theirs appeared to be an idyllic lifestyle, it was not long before fissures began to appear.
A friend of the pair said this week: ‘Boredom set in pretty early on in the marriage, Roxy Music were touring and touring, which did not help. I saw them together in 1983 and they were an amazingly glamorous couple, and then by 1985 it was obvious that there were some drink-related problems on her side.
‘Bryan was so self-absorbed, and I think that was a problem. He spent all his energies trying to project the image of a perfect English gentleman.’
In an interview, she was rather kinder about the way things had panned out for them. She said: ‘I learned a lot from Bryan and met a lot of other artists I probably never would have met otherwise.
‘I hope when I was married to Bryan I was helpful creatively to him, but it’s very consuming being with an artist because the whole focus is their creativity . . . there isn’t a lot of space to develop your own.’
A friend of the pair said this week: ‘Boredom set in pretty early on in the marriage, Roxy Music were touring and touring, which did not help. I saw them together in 1983 and they were an amazingly glamorous couple, and then by 1985 it was obvious that there were some drink-related problems on her side
She also raised their four boys, whom she described as ‘extremely energetic’, and needing to be ‘engaged in physical tasks at all times’.
The domestic whirl seems to have overcome her. In 1993, she spent nine weeks detoxing at Farm Place clinic, near Ockley in Surrey, and was teetotal afterwards. She regularly attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings after that.
She said: ‘I know I have an addictive personality. I grew up with alcoholism. My father was an alcoholic. It’s genetic, partly.’
When it came, as perhaps it inevitably did, the end of their marriage was painful. Lucy herself once said simply that ‘we drifted apart’, but she also acknowledged that ‘the whole feeling of failure around being divorced was something I felt very strongly’.
Ferry was notably generous in their 2003 divorce, paying her a reported £10 million.
Friends say he also bought her the house in Kensington where she had grown up, and report that she sold it again fairly recently in order to provide each of their boys with a handsome nest egg.
As the boys grew up, she revived an interest in photography and her works were exhibited. They included pictures of friends including the artist Damien Hirst and the late aristocratic magazine editor Isabella Blow, probably her closest friend, who killed herself in 2007. Another member of their London set, which included Kate Moss, was the outre designer Alexander McQueen who took his own life in 2010.
Lucy’s death in Ireland has come less than two weeks after her friend Annabelle Neilson — former wife of financier Nat Rothschild — collapsed and died aged 49 in Chelsea.
It is an elevated social circle which has now lost four members in a decade.
Although Lucy’s greatest interests were country pursuits, she was ‘never out of Tatler magazine’, and was often spotted going to art exhibitions and first nights, and parties with friends such as Bunter Worcester, the 12th Duke of Beaufort.
And there were always her boys to look out for.
In 2004, her eldest son Otis stormed the chamber of the House of Commons at the age of 22 to protest against the fox-hunting ban.
Four years later, he was briefly jailed after assaulting a hunt protester. She said at the time: ‘I am worried sick about him being in prison without any clean shirts or socks. For someone who loves the outdoors so much, it’s very difficult to be in a cell without any windows or fresh air.’ Although as the years passed, she grew to like early nights and would retire with a pot of tea before 10pm, she remained sociable.
A chum said: ‘She was not gossipy or opinionated. She was a very loyal friend.’
Twelve years ago Lucy married again, to Robin Birley, son of Annabel’s nightclub owner Mark Birley. Befitting the place of the Birley dynasty at the heart of London society, their wedding was attended by stars such as actor Hugh Grant, who was then dating Robin Birley’s half-sister Jemima Goldsmith (their mother is Annabel Goldsmith), plus musician Jools Holland and the Marquess of Londonderry.
Robin, who was famously cut out of his father’s will following a bitter family feud, had been left permanently disfigured after being mauled by a tigress as a boy when he was on a private visit to the zoo of John Aspinall, owner of the Clermont Club, the casino above the old Annabel’s.
Today, Robin runs the private club, 5 Hertford Street and lives above it.
But Lucy apparently disliked his late-night lifestyle, and instead more or less lived in the kitchen of her Shropshire farmhouse with her dogs.
Her great hobby was riding and fox-hunting; she had been doing both since 12.
‘She was a very, very talented rider,’ said a friend. ‘She retained the elegance she had as a human on the horse, almost an Edwardian elegance.’
She liked to look chic in the field, too, with riding boots by Maxwells of Jermyn Street.
Lucy herself once said: ‘I suppose I do spend as much time as I can with horses and dogs. I can’t understand people who don’t like to be alone.’
Now, the solitary life she loved has been cut short — but the grace and beauty that bewitched a rock star will live in the memories of those who encountered this very singular woman.