I can’t remember where Peter Greene and I met again after that briefest of encounters in Paris. He was just one of those guys on the London scene who worked in fashion and hung out in the nightclub, Tramp. Peter was 28 and owned a very successful clothing business called She Type, which made cheap knock-offs of all the big designers’ clothes. He was loud and Jewish and totally unlike anyone I’d ever met before.
We had our first date in February 1972. He took me out to dinner, then drove me home to Fulham in his Bentley. We snogged passionately in the car and then said our goodbyes, but as I walked up the path to my flat he wound down the window and called me back.
‘Do you fancy coming on holiday, Jo?’
‘Um … Yeah, I suppose so.’ I know we’d only just met, but I was always up for an adventure.
‘Great. I’ll pick you up next Friday and we’ll go to Tunisia. See ya, doll.’
And with that he spun the Bentley in a tight circle and sped off with a jaunty toot of the horn.
So, a week later I was sitting on a plane to Tunisia next to a guy I barely knew – and had only kissed a couple of times – along with his mate, Tony Harley, and his wife, Maureen. I began to have serious doubts about the whole thing, especially when Peter nudged me midway through the flight and said, with a grin, ‘We’ve got a double room.’
As it turned out, we had a fantastic week. We laughed and laughed. Peter had an endless lust for life and loved showing me new places and introducing me to a succession of fascinating people. By the end of the trip, while I’m not sure I was in love with him, I was certainly pretty smitten.
When we got back to London we went straight to his apartment in Baker Street and I fell for him even harder. The flat was the height of seventies cool, with thick cream shag-pile carpet on the floors, mirrored walls and a spiral staircase leading upstairs. Oh, it was all so fab! Peter had all the latest gadgets, including a big round TV and an eight-track stereo sound system. The guy clearly had style. From then on, I stayed at his apartment most nights.
Soon after we started dating, I took Peter home to the Old Vicarage to meet Mum and Dad: things were moving pretty fast between us. By now he had swapped his Bentley for a Ferrari. (Honestly, Peter changed his car more often than anyone else I knew: a black souped-up Mini with tinted windows one week, a red Jaguar E-type the next.) As we pulled up outside the house, Peter slammed on the brakes, sending a shower of gravel all over the flowerbeds. Not a great start.
‘Promise me you’ll be on your best behaviour,’ I begged, for the umpteenth time, as we got out of the car.
‘I promise, doll,’ he said, dropping a kiss on my forehead. ‘You worry too much.’
My parents hated him on sight, I could tell. He was too loud, too old (there was an 11-year age gap), too flash: everything they didn’t want for their little girl. And any hope that Peter might charm them vanished for ever during lunch.
The conversation had turned to religion. I was instantly on edge: I wasn’t sure if Mum, who was quite a strict Catholic, would have an issue with me dating someone Jewish.
‘Well, of course you know Jo’s Jewish,’ Peter said.
Mum looked at me, then back to him, confused. ‘No, I’m sorry, she isn’t. Josephine went to a convent school.’
Peter grinned. ‘She’s Jewish by injection.’
Oh, God. Mum looked utterly horrified. I didn’t dare risk a glance at Dad. But Peter just cracked up laughing, loving the reaction he’d caused.
Shortly after that disastrous Sunday, Mum phoned to try to talk some sense into me. ‘You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. And, believe me, Josephine, that man is a sow’s ear.’
My reaction was typically teenage: ‘But, Mum, I love him! You don’t understaaaaand! Why can’t you just be happy for meeee?’
In the end, we had to agree to disagree.
It was a few days before my 17th birthday, barely a month after I’d started dating Peter, that he gave me a diamond and sapphire engagement ring. There was no big proposal, certainly no getting down on one knee, he just handed it over: ‘’Ere you are, doll, this is for you. Now you can live with me, all right?’
I think he did it to keep my parents happy, making things legit between us. And Mum and Dad took the news of our impending nuptials pretty well in the circumstances. I think they must have assumed it was just some little madness that I was going through and that it was better to play along and keep quiet until I came to my senses. Mum even made me a stunning dress for the engagement party (also my 17th-birthday bash); a copy of one of Marilyn Monroe’s, it had a sheer black top with sequins covering my boobs and a full tulle skirt. As I glided around our fabulous apartment on the night of the party, pouring champagne for all the fabulous people who had come to celebrate my birthday, I felt like Marilyn herself.
In those early days, Peter and I had such fun. He was exciting and flamboyant, had money and the urge to spend it. I could go into his showroom and pick out whatever I wanted – it was around this time that I really started to get into designer clothes. We were out every night at the coolest places. We’d have dinner at San Lorenzo, then go on to Tramp or Monkberry’s with his friends and their model girlfriends. Every year we would drive to the South of France with Peter’s business partner, Steven, and his girlfriend, Jay, and his friend Harold Tillman and girlfriend Stephanie, with Stevie Wonder blasting on the eight-track. I loved the way he’d do these crazy, impetuous things without a second thought.
One day he came home with a St Bernard puppy he named Amyl – as in amyl nitrate, the chemical name for poppers. (Typical Peter humour.) Of course, Amyl quickly grew from a cute ickle bundle of fluff into a 200-pound dog. One day I came home to find that Amyl had pooed on the cream carpet and left poo pawprints all over the apartment. Trying not to heave, I rang Peter and told him to come home from work to clean it up. To his credit, he did.
A few months after our ‘engagement’, I fell pregnant. We weren’t being that careful so it was hardly a surprise, but I was so young and naïve that it still came as quite a shock. Peter freaked out, so I had an abortion. He took me to a clinic in Harley Street and that was that. At the time, it didn’t feel like such a big deal – as terrible as that sounds now, it just seemed like a quick way out of a tricky situation. Besides, I didn’t want to have a baby either. I was only 17 – and who’d want to book a model with a bump?
I was still working regularly and it was starting to cause problems in my relationship. Peter didn’t like Gavin. There was an obvious conflict of interests: Gavin wanted me to work, Peter wanted me to play. I’d go out all night to Tramp, get completely pissed, then have to be up early the next morning for a shoot. Thankfully, I was young enough not to suffer from hideous hangovers. I was surviving on just a few hours’ sleep a night. All those months of working hard and partying hard would prove brilliant training for what was to come later in my life …
* * *
In the April after my 18th birthday we went on holiday to Los Angeles. In typical style, Peter just turned round one day and said, ‘I’m taking you to America, doll.’ We went with Steven and Jay, Tony Bloomberg – a whole gang of us.
I fell in love with LA almost instantly. To this day, the smell of the place gets me every time: a heady blend of sunshine, hot tarmac and smog. We stayed at the Beverly Hilton and Peter rented