The next time Parsons asked, though, Bailey agreed. His first small piece appeared in the magazine in September 1960, followed by full-page work the next month and, in February ‘61, his first cover. The Bailey legend was about to be made.
Bailey’s arrival at deluxe fashion magazines couldn’t have come at a more perfect time to suit his ambitions. The media business, so long a stolid presence in English life, had grown increasingly itchy in the preceding years. English magazine culture was in the throes of an invigorating shake-up that had begun in the least likely of places. The Queen, a 100-year-old society magazine, had undergone a radical change at the hands of its new owner/ editor, Jocelyn Stevens, who transformed it from a dry lifestyle report for the upper classes and those with a passion for following their lives (Stevens sniffed that the old Queen was all about how to ‘knit your own royal family’), into the most vital publication in the country, with fresh concepts in photography and layout and a wry new attitude toward its putative subject: British tradition. Queen began branching out into areas that had never before been within the purview of a society magazine: articles about the Cuban revolution, a four-issue photo essay about Red China by Henri Cartier-Bresson (who was then hired by Stevens to cover the annual Queen Charlotte’s débutante ball ‘like a war’) and a series of articles and features that tried to capture the changing mood of Britain. In one, a parody of the Eton College Chronicle (Stevens had attended the school), the establishment of the day, insofar as The Queen saw it, was ridiculed as a bunch of schoolboys. In ‘59, an entire issue was dedicated to the ‘Boom … Boom … BOOM’—the new decorators, dress designers, cars, art treasures and overall lavish living (When did you last hear the word austerity,’ the lead article asked, and then went on to chronicle England’s rise as a producer of advertising, a consumer of champagne and a piler-up of consumer debt); surveys were published on the New Thinkers (including fashion designer Mary Quant, satirist Jonathan Miller and interior designer Terence Conran), the Challengers (including actor Terence Stamp) and New Faces; charts of ‘Who Revolves Around Who’ were run. Within three years, the magazine had nearly tripled in size to accommodate all the advertising its heat had drawn.
Queen encouraged an upsurge of native British talent, including, of course, photographers, none of whom would become more spectacularly famous than Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who had parlayed an admirable career as a photojournalist and society portraitist into the most amazing coup of all: marriage to the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, in one of the most celebrated matches of the time.
The wedding between the commoner (who took the name Lord Snowdon) and the princess was held up as a principal exhibit for the claim that England in the early ‘60s was becoming a ‘classless’ society in which wealth and breeding didn’t matter as they had done only a few years before. Promulgators of the theory pointed to the appearance of members of the upper class in such formerly outré professions as show business, fashion boutique and nightclub ownership, as well as the vogue for lower-class accents among the upper classes and the initiation of new styles in clothes and dances not by the aristocracy but by working-class youth. ‘There was a jolly collision,’ remembered Mary Quant. ‘People came together, and they tended to be rather one extreme or the other. Both were smart; the boring thing was to be anything in the middle.’
The effect, especially on the upsurgent lower classes, was miraculous, utterly transformatory. ‘In France,’ reflected Terence Stamp, ‘they have that saying, nostalgie de la boue, which refers to aristocratic men who like to shag washerwomen. In the ‘60s, amongst ourselves, our age group, there was an absolute coming together. And what made the coming together was basically music and dancing. In a way it was a new aristocracy. But the main thing was that there was suddenly access between the classes. Had the ‘60s not happened, I would never have been able to spend the night with a young countess because I would never have met her. And as the great Mike Caine once said to me, “You can’t shag anyone you don’t meet.” Rather Aristotelian logic!’
For the upper classes, the idea that a centuries-old stasis was coming unsettled could be either exhilarating or alarming. Young people from moneyed, privileged families felt impelled to change with the times—and as many seemed to greet the situation with a sense of liberation as with desperate entrenchment in old ways. ‘People with country houses either assimilated or vanished,’ remembered David Puttnam. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number who got in. They were quite few, and you knew who they were, and they assimilated, quite successfully in some cases.’
Of course, the idea that England’s centuries-old traditions of class prejudice had suddenly vanished was a canard that effectively couched the stifling reality in a country where birth still trumped ability in virtually every case. As the ‘60s emerged, proponents of the theory of classlessness could point to the likes of Quant and Stamp and the Beatles and a dozen other exceptions – people who’d broken into a new class where talent and the wealth that followed success mattered more than who your parents were. But it was inarguably the case that this meritocracy – with its members-only restaurants and nightclubs – was just as exclusive as the old upper class of money and birthright; you might no longer have needed to be born to position but earning it was, probably, a harder and rarer feat. And, entrance to the new world only lasted as long as the traditional elite chose to allow it. “The rich people let us play in their back garden for a few years,’ said tailor Doug Hayward, ‘and then they said, “Right, lads, very nice, you’ve all had a good time, now let’s get back to it.”’
Still, there was a loosening, and it was accompanied by another shift that made the rise of the Baileys and Quants and Stamps possible. English society, the British were more and more frequently being told at the dawn of the ‘60s, was becoming more permissive – and if the reality was only that England was loosening up as much as the Continent and the States already had, it was nevertheless more true than thinking that the Royal Family were happy to fit in with the mob. There was the evidence of teenage promiscuity: more talked-about if not more practised than in previous generations. There was the soon-to-be-available birth control pill, a boon to sexual adventurers the world over and finally available to Britons at the start of ‘61. And there was the embarrassing blow to censors in the ‘60 prosecution of Penguin Books on obscenity charges for the publication of a paperback edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel written by D. H. Lawrence in ‘28 but banned in Britain ever since. It was a ludicrous, last-century business, with the prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asking jurors in his opening statement: ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ and debating the novelist’s use of such words as ‘womb’ and ‘bowels’ with literary critics who had been called as witnesses for the defence. After a five-day trial and several days of adjournment, during which jurors read the novel, a three-hour deliberation led to Penguin’s acquittal; a week later, a new edition of the novel, dedicated to the jury, sold more than 200,000 copies in twenty-four hours – and five times that during the coming year.
And while Griffith-Jones was making an ass of himself in an Old Bailey courtroom, Englishmen of his stripe were being openly mocked on West End stages: satire, a brand of hipster comedy initially practised by Americans like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl but alchemised into a vital, all-encompassing movement by young Brits, was the rage. Four well-bred young men – comedian Peter Cook, polymath physician Jonathan Miller, history teacher Alan Bennett and the Oxford-educated pianist Dudley Moore – were goring every sacred cow of British life in their smash-hit stage show, Beyond the Fringe. A revue that spared neither the Crown, nor the Prime Minister, nor Shakespeare, nor memories of the war, nor sexual mores, nor Britain’s geopolitical role, it liberated and legitimised years of anti-establishment grumbling and inspired a pan-cultural explosion of new venues for acid commentary: Cook’s Establishment Club in Soho, where an even more scabrous review was held; the wicked magazine Private Eye, and