The Gateways Club in Chelsea approximately 1953

The owner of the Gateways Club Ted Ware sticking out like the proverbial thumb

Gina Ware around the time of her marriage to Ted Ware in 1953

Dancing at the Gateways

I found these wonderful pictures today, all of which feature the famous lesbian Gateways Club in Chelsea.

The updated and fascinating story of The Gateways Club can be found on an earlier post of mine about the club and the film The Killing Of Sister George here

Eartha Kitt – C’est Si Bon

Mickey Deans, Judy Garland and Johnnie Ray at Chelsea Register Office, March 1969

On March 15th 1969 at Chelsea Register Office on the Kings Road, Judy Garland married a gay discotheque manager and part-time jazz pianist called Mickey Devinko better known as Mickey Deans. After the brief ceremony, which was actually her fifth, Garland said;

“This is it. For the first time in my life, I am really happy. Finally, I am loved.”

Not that loved, because despite the long celebrity guest-list, not one of Judy’s famous friends made it to the reception held at Quaglino’s the large and expensive restaurant situated in Bury Street just south of Piccadilly. Several hundred people were invited and only fifty made it to the function.

Mickey, Judy and Johnnie

The glasses of champagne remained largely undrunk and an ostentatious three-tiered cake remained mostly uneaten. “I can’t understand it,” Judy was reported to have said in next day’s Sunday Express, “they all said they’d come”. Even her daughter Liza Minnelli, who had turned 23 just three days before, had called her mother to say “I can’t make it, Mama, but I promise I’ll come to your next one.” Another journalist apparently wrote that the reception was “the saddest and most pathetic party I have ever attended”.

Judy and Mickey on the empty dancefloor at Quaglinos

Actually there was one celebrity guest at the wedding -- Mickey Deans’ best man, Johnnie Ray. Ray had had hits in the fifties such as Cry and The Little White Cloud That Cried and was famous for the mootable ability to cry on stage earning him the moniker ‘the Nabob of Sob’ or occasionally the ‘Prince of Wails’. In reality, Ray was no close friend of Deans or Garland and the only reason that he was a guest at the wedding was that he was due to open for a brief Scandinavian tour Deans had organised for his new wife four days after the wedding.

Johnnie Ray at the reception

Judy told the Sunday Express:

“I don’t know if London still needs me, but I certainly need it! It’s good and kind to me. I feel at home here. The people understand me, and I’m not aware of the cruelty I’ve so often felt in the States. I’ve reached a point in my life where the most precious thing is compassion -- and I get this here.”

Judy and Mickey

4 Cadogan Lane in Chelsea, November 2009

After the wedding Garland and Deans rented a small mews house in a Chelsea cul-de-sac called Cadogan Lane. On Saturday 22 June, just three months after their wedding, Judy and Mickey had been watching a BBC documentary on the Royal family but, not untypically, had started to furiously row. Garland ran into the street shouting and screaming (also not untypically) followed not long after by Deans who ran after her. He was unable to find his wife and returned to the house and soon after went to bed.

At around 10.40am the next morning the phone rang for Garland. Deans, initially unable to find her, found the bathroom door locked. He climbed out on to the roof and looking through the window saw Garland motionless on the toilet with her head slumped forward and her hands on her knees. Climbing into the bathroom he found her skin was discoloured and dried blood had dribbled from her mouth and nose. She had been dead for about eight hours.

The Chelsea Coroner, Gavin Thurston wrote “This is a clear picture of someone who had been habituated to barbiturates in the form of Seconal for a very long period of time, and who on the night of june 22nd/23rd perhaps in a state of confusion from a previous dose (although this is pure speculation) took more barbiturate than her body could tolerate.”

Garland had been taking drugs since she was in her early teens, initially to keep her weight down -- Louis B Mayer the owner of MGM called her ‘that fat kid’ (not to mention ‘my little hunchback’ -- you can understand why she had trouble with self-esteem all her life) and was constantly troubled by what he saw as her weight problem. Studio doctors prescribed the new wonder drug Benzedrine and subsequently the more sophisticated offshoots Dexedrine and Dexamyl. Drugs like these, at the time, seemed like miracles of science and were as common as aspirin.

Judy at sixteen

Louis B Mayer and his 'little hunchback'

Garland had been prescribed Seconal, the drug that killed her, off and on, since the fifties. It is a barbiturate derivative medicine that was becoming widely misused in the sixties. It had nicknames such as ‘reds’, ‘red-devils’ or seccies, but another nickname was ‘dolls’ and thus responsible for the punning title of Jacqueline Susann’s novel ‘Valley of the Dolls’.

Seconal

Jacqueline Susann and Judy Garland at a press conference for Valley of the Dolls in 1967

The character Neely O’Hara in the book, with her undoubted talent blunted by self-destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, was purportedly based on Garland. Judy was actually cast in the film, not as O’Hara but to play the character Helen Lawson but not long into the filming Garland missed several days of rehearsals and was fired in April 1967. She was replaced by Susan Heyward but not before Garland recorded the song ‘I’ll Plant My Own Tree’.

Judy Garland was just 47 years old and $4 million in debt when she died. She was buried in New York and, making an effort this time, guests included Lauren Bacall, James Mason, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner and latterly Frank Sinatra who paid all the funeral expenses and presciently said, “Judy will now have a mystic survival. She was the greatest.”

Judy Garland's body as it arrived back in the States

Ironically, considering the effort she put into keeping her weight down, Garland was probably less than 70 lbs when she died. She was so thin that it was said that to keep the waiting photographers non the wiser, when her body was removed from the Cadogan Lane mews house, covered in only a blanket, she was carried out draped over someone’s arm like a folded coat.

Judy Garland applying makeup before her last ever concert in Denmark 1969

Judy Garland (with Mickey Deans) -- When Sunny Gets Blue -- recorded three days before she died. Mickey is heard on the piano prompting her

Judy Garland -- Broadway Rhythm -- by way of contrast this is Judy performing on MGM radio with Wallace Beery aged just 13 and just after she signed with MGM (she’s wrongly announced as 12)

The author Adam Diment in 1967 with two lovely ladies.

The October 1967 edition of Michael Heseltine’s Town magazine featured an interview with the fashionable twenty-three year old author Adam Diment. In it, he said that he was:

“hoping to move from his Fulham Road flat to trendy King’s Road, where his tight pink trousers and matching floral shirt will be more appreciated.”

In the late sixties moving a few hundred yards from one area of west London to another was like travelling to a different country. Diment knew he had enough money to make the move because after the publication of his first novel The Dolly, Dolly Spy, Diment suddenly became the most talked-about author in town. That year Publishers’ Weekly wrote about the novel:

A kinky, cool mod flare that is outrageously entertaining….If you appreciate clever plotting, plenty of excitement, sex at its most uninhibited, a dollop or two of explicit sadism, Adam Diment is a name to remember.

Except he wasn’t, and Diment is almost totally forgotten about these days. He wrote three more books – The Spying Game and The Dolly, Dolly Birds which were both published in 1968 and a fourth novel Think Inc that was published  in 1971. After which, suddenly, he completely disappeared from public view.

His four novels, although relatively entertaining, are hugely dated these days and are peppered with the era’s casual sexism and racism that occasionally make the James Bond novels appear as if they were written by Andrea Dworkin.

“Despite her lovely body it was her face which had me hooked. I do not belong to that philistine philosophy which propounds the ‘put a sack over their heads and they’re all the same’ nonsense. I like to watch something pretty and interesting when collecting my oats, and her face is certainly that. At present she was doing a languorous chameleon change from perplexed to pout.” - The Bang Bang Birds

“She was wearing her latest acquisition, bought in a boutique in King’s Road which is a cross between an Eastern bazaar and a rugger scrum. It was very short and covered with overlapping blue and yellow flowers. Over her heart, which was almost visible because it was as low at the breast as it was short at the thighs, was a bright pink heart…as she was so brown, she had given up wearing stockings. Veronica was about as naked as you can get these days without being nicked for indecency.” - The Dolly, Dolly Spy

The Bang Bang Birds published in 1968

The Dolly, Dolly Spy published in 1967

The books were all thrillers featuring a reluctant spy called Philip McAlpine. The sex-hungry hero was suspiciously similar in appearance to the writer and Diment, it seems, was very happy for this blurred confusion to continue. Especially, the marijuana smoking and the preponderance of girls. Fleet Street seemed genuinely intrigued with the similarity between hero and author and Atticus in the Sunday Times wrote:

Adam Diment is 23; his hero, Philip McAlpine, is based on himself. That is to say he’s tall, good-looking, with a taste for fast cars, planes, girls and pot.

While the Daily Mirror wrote:

McAlpine is the most modern hero in years. He’s hip, he’s hard, he likes birds and, sometimes, marijuana.

Adam Diment smoking a 'hashish cigarette'.

More hashish with companion Suzie Mandrake in 1967

Adam with the artist Tim Whidborne, Anne McAuley and Victoria Brooke. 1967

Adam "I've got my eyes closed I promise" Diment with Tim Whidbourne presumably pretending to paint Suzie Mandrake.

On the inside cover of my copy of The Bang Bang Birds it says that “At present THE DOLLY DOLLY SPY is being filmed with David Hemmings as Philip McAlpine. A Stanley Canter/Desmond Elliott production for release by United Artists”. It’s worth noting that David Hemmings was at the height of his career at this stage – the premier of Blow Up was in October 1967 and both The Charge of the Light Brigade and Barberella were released in 1968.

However the film came to nothing. Whether filming ever took place or was halted half way through nobody seems to know. Although there are pictures of Adam seen with David Hemmings and one of the producers Desmond Elliott.

Adam with David Hemmings in 1967.

Adam with Desmond Elliott and Suzie Mandrake.

Adam Diment published his final novel Think Inc in 1971 and then he  completely disappeared from public view. I just can’t seem to find any information about him at all after this date. Except for one thing. Last year a few documents relating to Adam Diment (F.A. Diment) were released by the National Archives and amongst them were two anonymous letters written in March 1969 to the department of Exchange Control of the Bank of England.

Both the letters seemed to accuse Adam Diment of some kind of currency swindle involving the export of 2400 dollars which had been paid by the film producer Stanley Canter and one letter even mentions that there were suspicions that it may have been some kind of drug-deal.

Whether the currency swindle was anything to do with the non-completion of the film  of The Dolly Dolly Spy or was the cause of Diment’s disappearance, there seems to be no clue. However one of the letters imparts the important piece of information that Adam Diment, despite telling Town magazine otherwise, never seemed to have made the move to The King’s Road as he was still living in the tight-pink-trousers-fearing Fulham at 28 Tregunter Road.

Adam with Victoria Brooke and a Tiger Moth

Ray Charles – Let’s Go Get Stoned

Muddy Waters – Champagne and Reefer

Ossie Clark in 1971

I updated Ossie Clark, the King Of The Kings Road in Holland Park today with some extra great pictures.

“They had me in bed making love to the girl…close, like baked beans”

Susannah York, Beryl Reid and Coral Brown at The Gateways 1968

The Gateways had been in existence at 239 Kings Road on the corner of Bramerton Street in Chelsea, since the thirties. It became more or less exclusively lesbian during the war when the anonymity and proximity provided by the khaki or blue uniformed women who came to work in London, suddenly meant that a far greater number of women, of a certain persuasion, needed somewhere to go they could call their own.

The once green door in Bramerton Street that led down to The Gateways club

A man called Ted Ware took over the club during the war, purportedly winning it in a poker game (“I raise you my lesbian members-only club…”). Ten years later he married an actress called Gina Cerrato in 1953 and she soon took over the running of the club. She was joined, after a few years, by a butch American woman called Smithy who originally came to England as a member of the American Airforce, but after an arranged marriage in the early sixties, she stayed in England for the rest of her life.

Gina at the Gateways

Gina at her usual place by the door (screen grab from the film)

Smithy behind the bar

The membership fee during the sixties was just ten shillings (50p) and no guests were admitted after ten o’clock to discourage people who had spent their money elsewhere. Maureen Duffy explained that ‘rowdies or troublemakers’ were often banned immediately. To be excluded, at the time, was more than just embarrassing, it was unbelievably inconvenient -- the nearest alternative lesbian club would have been in Brighton, travelling to which would have made a social life far too expensive to afford.

Dining out with a girlfriend, even in the sixties, would have also cost too much for most women (who would have usually been earning far less than men for even comparable jobs in those days). It’s difficult to believe these days but women wearing trousers were often still banned from most restaurants at the time, while pubs were still risky places for women unaccompanied by men. For a lot of women, the Gateways Club was the only relaxing and affordable place they had to go.

The Kings Road in 1968

Boutique shopping on the Kings Road 1968

Regulars of the Gateways at the bar (screen grab from film)

During the eighties the club became quieter probably because other lesbian and gay venues were opening in London, and eventually Gateways only opened at weekends. The local neighbourhood in Chelsea was also becoming more and more upmarket and the club lost its late-licence in 1985 due to complaints about loud music. Not long afterwards the famous green door was subsequently closed for ever.

Between the 9th and 16th of June in 1968 The Gateways club became internationally famous when it appeared as a backdrop to many scenes filmed for The Killing Of Sister George, a movie starring Beryl Reid, Coral Browne and Susannah York. In 1960, York, a starlet at the beginning of her acting career and newly married, lived in a house at World’s End in Chelsea just a few hundred yards from the club but it’s reasonably safe to say that, even if she knew it existed, York wasn’t a regular at the Gateways.

Susannah York at her Kings Road flat in 1960

The Kings Road flat with a rather avant-garde painting 1961

York in 1965

York in 1967

A publicity still from Donald Cammell's film Duffy 1968

Robert Aldrich, the director, whose previous film was the slightly more macho The Dirty Dozen, decided to include actual customers rather than extras when they filmed scenes in the club. Gina, Smithy and the regulars performed stiffly and uncomfortably in front of the camera but when the film was released, for a lot of people, this was the first glimpse of a hidden lesbian sub-culture they had ever seen.

Robert Aldrich celebrating Beryl Reid's birthday during filming

York and Reid dressed for the Gateways fancy dress scene

Beryl Reid in the back of a taxi with nuns scene

When Beryl Reid was first introduced to The Gateways she said;

“If I had been here before I did the play I’d never have done it. I didn’t realise they held each other and went to the gent’s loo.”

Reid, when shown the script for the film, also baulked at the sex scenes (the original play had none, in fact when Robert Aldrich first went to see the play he didn’t realise it was about lesbians at all) and said;

“They had me in bed making love to the girl…close like baked beans…I said ‘No, not on your nelly -- or maybe her nelly’. I just could not do it. The thought made me sick. It may be silly, but that sort of physical contact, starkers, with another woman frightened me to death.”

“Susannah was a bitch to her [Coral Browne] because she [York] simply didn’t want to do the scene.”

Coral Browne, Beryl Reid and Susannah York

The Killing of Sister George can’t be said to be exactly a ‘positive’ view of lesbianism and indeed a critic at the time it was released, suggested that the film ‘dealt with lesbians entirely through the eyes of heterosexual males’. However it was a groundbreaking film in many ways and I think, despite the somewhat cliched dialogue and the stereotypical butch/femme relationships it portrayed, the movie only condemned or criticised the various characters’ foibles and hypocrisies and not really their sexuality. Aldrich said of Beryl Reid’s character;

“Sister George’s loud behavior and individuality . . . are encompassed in her personality, they’re not a product of her lesbianism. . . . She didn’t give a shit about the BBC or the public’s acceptance of her relationships.”

The scenes Aldrich filmed at The Gateways were actually notable for their lack of sensationalism (unlike other films at the time trying to cover similar subject matters) and showed the regulars dancing, drinking and flirting just like any other londoners in any other London club.

Beryl Reid learning to smoke a cigar for her role in the film

Dusty Springfield -- Am I The Same Girl

Lesley Gore -- All Of My Life
Robin Ward -- Wonderful Summer

The Dixie Cups -- People Say

Barbara Lewis -- Hello Stranger

Barbara Lynn -- You’ll Lose A Good Thing

Buy The Killing Of Sister George DVD here

Buy Maureen Duffy’s novel The Microcosm (set largely at the Gateways Club) here

UPDATE: I got a lovely email from Gina Ware, the daughter of Gina and Ted Ware. She wanted me to correct the fact about Ted winning the club in a poker game. It was actually a boxing match in 1943 being shown at The Dorchester! It cost £100 to transfer the licence.

Gina, interestingly, also wrote:

By the way, Gina and Smithy were not a couple in the romantic sense (though in some senses God knows whose business it is other than theirs bless ‘em). I do know the full story and can assure you I am right. But I can say this, I have never known a friendship like it. They were both at my father’s side when he died. Three more interesting, kind-hearted and unique people you will seldom meet.

I found these amazing photos today which are part of the LIFE collection. They are marked just as Chelsea with not even a date but I sent them to Gina and she confirms that they are of the Gateways Club and were taken around 1953/4.

Gina Ware around the time of her marriage in 1953

I received this email from Gina about the photographs confirming that they were indeed of the Gateways Club:

They are fantastic pictures. Lovely one of my old man bless him. And the pictures of the women speak volumes. Jill Gardner and I struggled so hard to try to bring out the particular flavour -- it doesn’t conform with the usual views in so many ways. Her publishers edited out a lot as did the Guardian when they published Mum’s obituary -- hate to say it but they actually were very inclined to politically correct us in a way I found a bit sickening and counterproductive. Some of it I understand but some of it is just about not wanting to admit that these women were not quite as oppressed and in the closet as they would like to believe -- they were not rescued from oblivion and misery by the gay rights movement and academic feminists, they were doing fine themselves -- in fact many of the older women reckon they made things that were heading in the right direction (and were a lot of fun) worse. And this is working class women, not privileged arty sorts.

I have hundreds of postcards written by members back to my Dad at the club from all over the world where they were out exploring to find out what the gay scene might be. I even have one where someone writes to say she and her girlfriend were up Macchu Picchu (I think) in Peru and met another member -- and that was in the 50s! The material I have gives such a unique view, so direct as well.

It’s kind of sad for me looking back at it all -- I so wish I had someone left who would remember exactly who all those people were. Dad wouldn’t be surprised -- he always said it was going to be an incomparable story one day. He used to laugh at the News of the World’s strapline ‘All human life is here’ -- they don’t know they are born he would say!

Good times at the Gateways Club

“Will you marry me? It’s risky, but you’ll get fucked regularly”.

The angry young playwright in Chelsea 1958

“I think the writer is trying to say: ‘Look how unlike Terence Rattigan I am, Ma!”.

Terence Rattigan in 1955

In actuality, after the first night the Guardian wrote: ”The author and actors do not persuade us that they ’speak for’ a new generation.” The London Evening Standard called the play “a self-pitying snivel”.

The next day the director of the play Tony Richardson and Osborne sat in the little coffee shop next to the Royal Court theatre utterly depressed. Richardson broke the silence, and said:

“But what on earth did you expect? You didn’t expect them to like it, did you?”

Although the play was generally initially dismissed by most of the critics, a prescient 39 year old Kenneth Tynan wrote in the Observer -

“All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage … I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.”

Kenneth Tynan with Claire Bloom

Kenneth Haigh and Osborne 1956

Kings Road in 1958

Kenneth Haigh and Mary Ure in the last scene of Look Back In Anger

Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave

‘Anger’, as luvvies are apt to call the play, initially took very little money and the production was seen pretty much as a miserable failure. However, a few weeks into the run, the BBC decided to broadcast a short excerpt of the play one evening. The listeners liked what they heard, decided to go and see the play for themselves and takings immediately doubled at the box office. The effect snowballed and the play eventually transferred to the West End, subsequently to Broadway and was made into a film in 1958 starring Richard Burton. It certainly wasn’t overnight but Osborne had now become a very famous angry young man indeed.

Richard Burton and Claire Bloom during the making of the film

Richard Burton at the opening night of the film 1958

Osborne in 1971

Osborne went on to write successful plays such as The Entertainer (starring Sir Laurence Olivier), Luther and A Patriot For Me. He also won an oscar for his adaptation of Tom Jones in 1963. He occasionally continued acting and his acting role in the 1971 film Get Carter was highly regarded and indeed was a brilliant menacing performance.

By the early seventies, however, depression and alcoholism set in. Bad reviews of his latest unfashionable plays didn’t help and were woundingly taken to heart. For instance the Financial Times’ BA Young’s review of his play Sense of Attachment which was put on in 1972 -- “This must surely be an end to his career in the theatre”.

Writers, and artists in general, are often excused character defects and bad behaviour, for the sake of their art, but the treatment Osborne dealt out to most of the women in his life (and surprisingly, considering his behaviour, there were a lot of them with five wives and numerous affairs) was often extremely vile and misogynistic.

He left his first wife shortly before the opening of Look Back In Anger, and subsequently married Mary Ure the leading actress in the play and the film. They lived in a house in Woodfall Street just off the Kings Road a few hundred yards from The Royal Court Theatre. It was a marriage that would only last five years and his love life was, by the early sixties, extremely complicated. He was on holiday in the South of France with his mistress the beautiful flame-haired dress designer Jocelyn Rickard in 1961, while at home Mary Ure was giving birth to a son (to be fair it probably wasn’t Osborne’s). At the same time, in Italy, the journalist Penelope Gilliatt, and future mother of his daughter, received a charming marriage proposal by letter;

“will you marry me? It’s risky, but you’ll get fucked regularly”.

Osborne and his bride and leading lady Mary Ure, August 1957

Osborne, Mary Ure, Vivien Leigh and Olivier

Osborne, the moustache and Jill Bennett at their wedding in 1968

John Osborne and Jill Bennett in 1969

The letter worked (one day I will understand women) and a year later he married Gilliatt with whom he had a daughter. As usual the marriage was a relatively short-lived affair, and he married the actress Jill Bennett in 1968. Again the marriage soon became unhappy and the couple, both drinking extremely heavily, ended up viciously trying to put each other down. At a party she once shouted;

“Look at him, the poofter can’t even get it up.”

Jill Bennett committed suicide in 1990, two years after their divorce. Osborne decided to add a spiteful extra chapter to his memoirs -- expressing pity that he hadn’t been able to look into her open coffin and “drop a good, large mess in her eye”. Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is?’ was played at her funeral.

When Gilliatt also fell in to irreversible alcoholism, their daughter Nolan, who had been brought up in New York with her mother, came to live with Osborne and his fifth wife Helen, then both living in Kent. It was a chance for him to make amends for his own unhappy childhood (his father died of TB when Osborne was 10, for which, some reason, he always blamed his mother) but after just three years Osborne threw Nolan out of his house, removing her from school for good measure. She was just seventeen. Her only crime seems to have been typical teenage sullen behaviour and a lack of interest in her father’s hard-drinking thespian friends. He once shouted at her;

“There is not one of them who is not worth a dozen low lifes like you.”

She went to stay with the family of a schoolfriend and Osborne never saw her again. “Nolan’s birthday,” he wrote in his diary when she turned 22, “God rot her.”

Likewise when his mother died in 1993, he wrote an article for the Sunday Times which included a first line, ‘A year in which my mother died can’t be all bad.’

Osborne, who by this time had long left Chelsea’s Kings Road and started to act the country gent in Shropshire with his fifth wife Helen, died on Christmas Eve in 1994, 12 days after his 65th birthday. For once their marriage was a relatively devoted and private relationship. The last words that he wrote, found by his wife scrawled on a cigarette pack beside his deathbed in the hospital, were, “Sorry, I have sinned.”

Osborne more sleepy than angry towards the end of his life

Peggy Lee -- Is That All There Is?

The King of the Kings Road

In 1995 Ossie Clark, the iconic sixties and seventies fashion designer known for his flowing dresses and a rather excessive party lifestyle, invited the 27 year old Italian Diego Cogalato to move into his one-bedroomed Holland Park council flat in Penzance Street. Just eighteen months later, Cogalato called 999 and said to the operator ‘I think I’ve killed someone…’.

When the the police broke into the flat they found Ossie Clark on the floor with 37 stab wounds to his body and with his head completely stoved in, apparently by a large terracotta pot.

At the trial Coglato’s defence revealed that at the time of the murder he had been high on a mixture of Prozac and amphetamines – a combination of drugs that caused him to see himself as the New Messiah.  Unfortunately they also caused Coglato to see Ossie Clark as a devil. A devil that needed to be extinguished. Coglato was convicted of murder but given just a six-year sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

By the time he died, Ossie Clark was an unkempt and sad figure often wandering around Holland Park near his flat. He had become a buddhist and apparently prayed everyday in front of a shrine made entirely of empty packets of Sobranie cigarettes. His carpet was just brown cutting paper and his goldfish were kept in vases. He was so poor that he was occasionally seen scouring the streets for dog-ends to smoke and even fished pennies out of the fountain in Holland Park.

Ossie and Peter Morgan at the Royal College of Art in 1965

Ossie at the Royal College of Art 18th June 1965

Just thirty years earlier, and ultimately to become one of Britain’s greatest fashion designers, Ossie Clark was at the beginning of his glittering career. In 1962 Ossie Clark moved to London to enrol at the Fashion Design School at The Royal College of Art. He graduated in June 1965, with a first class degree and a collection inspired by artist Bridget Riley.

Clark was an immediate success and he’d hardly graduated when Vogue magazine wrote about him as a major new talent and photographer David Bailey was hired to take his portrait.

Clark began to sell both his couture and ready-to-wear lines in the Chelsea boutique, Quorum with his friend and business partner Alice Pollock. Incidentally David Gilmore, later of Pink Floyd was a driver for Quorum for a while and later would provide a lot of music for Clark’s innovative fashion shows.

Ossie lighting Judy Guy Johnson's cigarette with Patti Boyd looking on.

Chrissie Shrimpton and Ossie 1965 by David Bailey

Linda Keith, Chrissie Shrimpton, Suki Poitier and Annie Sabroux displaying the Ossie Clark and Alice Pollock winter collection April 1967

Part of the success of Clark’s clothes at the time was due to the extraordinary collaboration with his wife, the textile designer Celia Birtwell. Many of Clark’s more famous garments were designed around her fabrics.

Clark had met Birtwell while they were both students in Manchester and although he was sexually attracted to men they became lovers, marrying in 1969 when she was pregnant with their first child. David Hockney, friend of the couple and sometime lover of Ossie, was the best man.

The marriage only lasted a few years – towards the end of the marriage Birtwell could no longer put up with Clark’s wild-partying, drug-taking and his many affairs with both men and women. She eventually had had enough and started an affair with the artist Adrian George, leaving Ossie for good in 1974.

David Hockney’s famous painting ‘Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy’ was given to the couple as a wedding present. Ossie, later in his life and needing the money, sold it to the Tate Gallery for just seven thousand pounds. It is now one of (if not the) most famous British painting and worth millions. Clark was always, despite his success, a very bad businessman.

Mr and Mrs Clark

Ossie with his hi fi 1970

Ossie, Celia and Percy the cat

Triangle coffee tables, chocolate biscuits, Ossie Clark and his son

During the decade before the separation however, Ossie Clark was the star of British fashion – even describing himself as a “brilliant butterfly”. He was particularly famous for his bias cut dresses and brilliant tailoring.

He had an incredible eye for the female form and thus created incredibly flattering clothes – it was said that he could cut a dress to fit a woman perfectly just be running his hands over her body. Marianne Faithful described trying on one of his dresses for the first time when she was eighteen -

“Ossie wanted everything to be on bare skin, so he said ‘Take it all off’ – and I did – the display was heart-tugging.”

Ossie with Gala Mitchell his favourite model. 'It's all in my brain and fingers' he once said, 'I am a master cutter.'

ossie in 1969

Ossie in his workshop in 1969

By the early seventies Clark was at the height of his fame – his dresses were worn by the the most beautiful and famous women of the era – Patti Boyd, Ali MacGraw, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Elizabeth Tayor and Liza Minelli. He even designed some of Mick Jagger’s stage costumes including the famous white jumpsuit he wore on the 1973 Exile On Main Street tour. If he was visiting New York he would hang out with Andy Warhol, Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote. He probably thought that life couldn’t get much better.

Ossie, no stranger to a convivial night out, and friends

Ali MacGraw 1969

Ali MacGraw

After the separation with Celia, Clark never really recovered emotionally and professionally and although the first entry in his diary in 1974 read:

January 10. Moved into Powis Terrace. Dinner with Mick and Bianca. Took Mo to cheer him up. After, Paul Getty Jr with Nikki Weymouth, Chrissy, Robert Fraser.

When times got tough for Ossie, he found that the famous names, as famous names tend to do, soon disappeared and the diaries become sad and depressing reading. For years, although he had perhaps enjoyed a few too many convivial nights Celia had provided the stability he needed to cope.

In the mid-seventies his fortunes went into a downward spiral, never a good business man, Clark now found his clothes decidedly unfashionable. The Kings Road was now enthralled with the punk revolution and its accompanying home-made fashion.

By 1983 Clark was declared bankrupt after the Inland Revenue claimed 14 years of back tax. He lost his house and had to live with friends until, eventually, the DHSS re-housed him in the small council flat in Penzance Street – the council flat where he was ultimately murdered.

Except for bits and bobs he never really worked properly again.

Ossie at Claridges in1985

Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark with Percy

Nicky Samuel modelling Ossie Clark

Pink Floyd – Let There Be More Light

The Rolling Stones – Torn And Frayed