Detmar Blow - Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow

BLOW BY BLOW

THE STORY OF ISABELLA BLOW DETMAR BLOW WITH TOM SYKES

Blow by Blow is dedicated
to Isabellas memory

I was at our flat in Eaton Square in London when I got the call. It was Issies devoted younger sister, Lavinia.

Detmar, I have just come home from shopping, Lavinia said frantically, Issie has swallowed some poison. She says not to worry, as she has sicked most of it up. She seems ok. What shall I do?

It was my wife Isabellas seventh suicide attempt in fourteen months, and I felt a surge of anxious nausea as I tried to process Lavinias words.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this time shell succeed.

But poison? Where the hell had she found that? Was it weedkiller, like my father had used? And if it was, then how could she possibly still be alive? Issie was only 52 and weighed 7 stone. My father 61 and 18 stone had drunk a bottle of paraquat in 1977 and it killed him in half an hour as the liquid burned out his insides. Amaury, my curly-haired 12-year-old brother, was there. He said Dadda never cried out, but that his fists were clenched in pain.

The only thing I knew was that if I was to be of any use to Issie at all, I had to remain calm and non-hysterical. Take her to hospital, I told Lavinia. Ill be down as soon as possible.

In a trance I called the milliner Philip Treacy, Issies best friend, who was meant to be picking me up later, because we had already planned to go down to Hilles, our house in the country, that weekend. I told him what had happened and he came round with his boyfriend Stefan and picked me up and we set off in his car for Gloucester Royal Hospital.

How could she still be alive? Maybe, I found myself hoping, as we crawled at an agonizingly slow pace through west London towards the M4, it wasnt weedkiller. But I had a dreadful hunch that it was, because just a couple of months beforehand I had taken delivery of a bottle of paraquat at Hilles, ordered by Isabella.

I had been horrified, furious, and had asked Isabella, What the hell is this? What are you doing? She had just remained silent.

I took it back to the farm shop in Gloucester where she had ordered it and told them, The person who ordered this is trying to kill herself. Never send it again. The poor lady I spoke to was very upset.

I stared out of the car window in a daze as we hit the motorway and finally started picking up some speed. Surely the same farm shop wouldnt have sold her paraquat? Could it be something she had found in the garage from my fathers stack of poison, left there since the seventies, which would be 30 years out of date?

When we finally arrived in Gloucester, we got lost. The Gloucester Royal Hospital is a big 1970s building with a huge chimney. I thought you couldnt miss it, but because of the new housing developments around it the road was obscured.

After driving around the hospital for a while and getting nowhere I said, Lets get out and walk. Philip and I had to scramble over a wall to get into the hospital grounds.

We went to the hospital reception and asked for Isabella, but no one knew where she was. Eventually we found out she was in the Accident and Emergency ward, so we rushed there.

And thats where we found her. My heart went out when I saw her. She was propped up in bed, looking sallow, and wearing a thin white hospital nightgown. She was on a drip, and looked and sounded weak.

Hi Det, she said.

W hy did my wife, Isabella Blow, the fashion icon, the legend, the toast of glossy magazines from London to New York, want to kill herself? To answer that question I would have to go back to the very beginning of Issies life, to her extraordinary childhood, to her relationship with her parents and to the great, central trauma of her life.

On 12 September 1964, her little brother Johnny, aged 2 died in an accident in the garden when he fell into a body of water.

Issie was supposed to be looking after him. She was five years old.

Everything went wrong for the family after the death of that little boy, recalled Issies now 94-year-old godmother Lavinia Cholmondley (pronounced Chumley) when she was interviewed for this book at Cholmondley Castle in 2009.

Confusingly, there are conflicting versions of the events that led to Johnnys death.

Issie had told me about it the first time we met, at a mutual friends wedding in 1988. She told me that Johnny was chasing a ball and followed it into the swimming pool, which had been built by her father to celebrate a good harvest that year. After inhaling water, he vomited up a half-digested baked bean it was nannys day off, Issie said, so dinner had been from a tin and choked on it. She said that she remembered the smell of the honeysuckle, and Johnny stretched out on the lawn. My mother went upstairs to put her lipstick on, she said. That explains my obsession with lipstick.

A local press announcement about the birth of Isabellas baby brother. In the photograph is Helen Broughton with her new son, John Evelyn, Isabella and Julia.

Issie knew this was a pivotal moment in her life, and, with typical disregard for the comfort zones of polite society, she would often describe the events of Johnnys death the swimming pool, the ball, the honeysuckle and, above all, the lipstick to relative strangers. She would even talk about it to newspaper interviewers, prompting her mother, Helen, to retort that the story about the lipstick was, An awful, unfounded lie.

The version of Johnnys death told by Issies stepmother, Rona, whom Evelyn married just under a decade after the accident (he and Helen were divorced in February 1974) is very different. Rona related this account at a meeting in the Sloane Club in London 2009:

Helen went inside to do something, not put on lipstick; that was a very cruel thing for Isabella to say. But she went in to do something, I dont know what. And when she went inside, she said to Issie, Keep an eye on Johnny, or Watch out for Johnny. So Isabella was playing with John, but then somebody who was coming down the lane stopped at the gate and called Issie over to the gate. Issie went over, and while she was over there it happened. He choked on a piece of dry biscuit and suffocated, and then fell in a small pond, not a swimming pool. And then everybody blamed each other.

Had Issie felt responsible for what happened to Johnny?

No, replied Rona. There wouldnt have been anything she could have done anyway. She was five years old.

But such rational reasoning doesnt always stop people, especially small children, from feeling the emotion and burden of guilt, does it?

Rona conceded, She felt blamed.

By who?

She wasnt blamed by her father, was all Rona, now 70, and cautious to the end, would say. By someone else.

Memory, of course, plays tricks us on all, but it is quite extraordinary how Isabellas story and Ronas story (presumably relayed via Evelyn) diverge. Isabella very deliberately painted her mother as self-centred and vain by constantly reiterating the detail about her not being present because she was applying lipstick. When she told me the story of Johnnys death, it was always portrayed as a result of him falling into the swimming pool. Indeed, she added more and more detail to the story how the pool had then been filled in by her grief-stricken father and another built to replace it. I was therefore amazed when, after we were married, Evelyn used to tell me that Issie swam like a fish as a child in the pool.