As Anna Wintour observed, it is hard to imagine Issie in ‘unfashionable’ Midland, Texas. Issie, who hated being idle, found a job at Guy La Roche in Midland, but oil-rich Midlanders preferred to fly to Paris in their private jets to do their clothes shopping. Issie decided to put the time she had on her hands while minding the empty shop to good use, reading, among many other classics, War and Peace, Les Liaisions Dangereuses, books by the feminist Simone de Beauvoir and the Beatnik poets. In literature, as in all her creative inspirations, Isabella’s enthusiasm for the progressive and the new was balanced and set in context by her knowledge and understanding of what had gone before.
One night, Nicholas telephoned her from an arid corner of Texas, and warned her that unless they got married she was going to be deported. And so, on 22 April 1981, Issie, wearing a T-shirt and Fiorucci jeans, went to the town hall with Nicholas and were married by the sheriff. The sheriff tried to kiss Isabella. She slapped him and went home, got drunk on champagne and telephoned home to tell her parents what she had done. Her furious mother told her ‘Isabella you were a pain when you were born and you are a pain now.’
Evelyn was kinder. He bought Isabella a pair of aquamarine and diamond earrings and noted her marriage in Debrett’s and Who’s Who. When we were getting married eight years later, Issie criticised her father for making these entries without her permission.
It was far removed from the romantic church wedding she had dreamed of and expected for marriage.
Isabella always insisted that she had not been married ‘in the eyes of God’, and that it was a ‘visa wedding’, but she was clearly in love with Nicholas. Thanks to his fantastic appearance and physique, Issie also regarded him as good genetic stock for children, which she wanted desperately.
But they were not ready. Isabella told me that she had one abortion when she was with Nick and that a second time she became pregnant the foetus aborted naturally. But to her old friend Emily Dashwood in England, who she would call out of the blue from Texas, sometimes in tears, she said she had 10 abortions. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Later in England, working at Tatler, she would confide in her friend the writer Mary Killen, a doctor’s daughter, her sadness and regret about her abortions. When Issie and I became engaged, Issie had herself checked out and told me everything was OK. But she didn’t go into details and I always sensed a niggling doubt about her own fertility, despite the beautiful baby clothes she bought and stored in cupboards in readiness for the happy day that would never come. By another coincidence a cousin of mine had a cottage in Sussex next door to Nicholas’s father, Dr Keith Taylor. Dr Taylor told my cousin that Isabella could never have children.
I suspect Dr Taylor formed this opinion because while in Texas, Isabella had a serious case of Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the intestines. She was operated on and had 18 inches of her perforated intestines removed. From then on, her friend Natasha Grenfell remembered, her famous stripteases involved carefully shrouding with material the 18-inch scar on her stomach.
But away from the sadness of the abortions, there was a glamorous, petrodollar-fuelled side to Texan life that Issie enjoyed immensely. While Nick went off for weeks on end, covering vast expanses of Texan desert in his hunt for oil, Isabella visited places like the enormous King Ranch, the largest ranch in America, which extended to a million acres. She had Uncle Shimi to thank for her introduction to King Ranch, and she also had contacts from her friend Lucy’s father Patrick Helmore, who insured racehorses for a number of Texan owners. Soon Isabella was flying around Texas on private jets visiting the homes of wealthy Texans, pretending to admire their collections of crystal animals and having her nails and hair done by manicurists and hairdressers who were drafted into these opulent and unrestrained homes by the day.
The wealth generated by the American oil boom in America in the eighties was staggering and Issie and Nick wanted a slice of it.
But it was not to be.
‘All Nick ever found was few rusty old coke tins,’ Issie said.
By March 1983, the love affair with Texas, which she had taken to describing as a ‘den of doom’, was definitely over. She and Nick made plans to head to New York and Issie was ‘over the moon’.
She would need some new armour for New York, however. She asked a friend back home to send over her ‘Piero de Monzi skirt’ and ‘insure it for £150,000’.
In the end, Issie – along with her Piero de Monzi skirt – made the trek to New York on her own. Issie may have given up on striking oil, but Nicholas was not so easily discouraged. He decided to stay in Midland, looking for luck. Issie was sad to leave Nicholas, but the blow was softened by the fact that they had not spent much time together anyway, as Nicholas had spent most of their time in Texas on the road – or in the air – hunting for that elusive ‘gusher’. Although she had done her best to make the most of the state, she eventually accepted that for her own sanity she had to escape Texas and its desperate millionaire housewives measuring out their days with mani-pedis. Issie knew her future lay not in the South but on the East Coast.
Issie had formed a plan to use her family legacy to go to Columbia University in New York, but as for any other new arrival in the city, there were practicalities to organise first. Issie’s first priority on landing in New York was to find somewhere to stay. She found a room in a flat in the Midtown area of New York, sharing with Catherine Oxenberg, daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, then working as a model but soon to find fame playing Joan Collins’s glamorous daughter in Dynasty.
Issie’s decision to go to Columbia had not been made lightly. Although Issie had not been particularly bothered about her A-level results at the time, a few years out in the world had left Isabella conscious of her lack of a formal higher education. Her father had refused to send her to study art in Florence, but the family legacy she received by living abroad now made it possible for her to pay for her higher education herself.
Money was only half the battle, however. To get into an American university, there was the small matter of Issie’s A-level grades, which needed improving. The improvement was achieved with the aid of a photocopying machine and Tippex. Her deceit paid off – she was accepted to do a degree in Chinese Art at Columbia.
Issie enjoyed the Chinese Art course, studying ancient Sui and Tang pottery and, as she said, ‘looking for hours at the Buddha’s ear lobe’.
After a year, however, Issie decided to drop out. Her decision, she told me, was precipitated by a fellow student being stabbed to death on campus. In the early eighties, New York City was a dangerous and lawless place recovering from its bankruptcy in the 1970s. It was also, however, a seething cauldron of creativity. Issie’s interest in fashion and the individual way she dressed may have protected her – she attributed the fact that she was never mugged or attacked to the wild way she looked and behaved.
She continued her practice of flashing her bosoms. At Nicola’s, a homely restaurant popular with authors on the Upper East Side, her friend Michael Zilkha, the Oxford-educated, Lebanese heir to Mother-care, recalls that she volunteered to the owner Nick that she would expose her breasts in return for a bottle of champagne. The transaction was ‘duly consummated’.
Flashing her breasts became Issie’s calling card. The artist Hugo Guinness recalls:
Issie was incredibly attention seeking and demanding of attention and an exhibitionist – but that was what was fun. She was a performer,