JAN MOIR: It’s Twiggy the musical! Not even a dusting of writer Ben Elton’s Leftie politics can dim this rowdy salute to a 60s style icon
Last Monday night, the curtain went up on a brand-new jukebox musical at a tiny fringe theatre in London. In front of a capacity audience of 180 people, it was a humble beginning for Close-Up: The Twiggy Musical, written by Ben Elton and celebrating the life of Lesley Hornby.
Lesley who? As if you didn’t know! She was the tiny scrap of a girl from Neasden who went on to become a supermodel at 16 and a film star by 21. Twiggy was an international sensation, a home-grown phenomenon who also became a Broadway smash, a best-selling recording artist, a TV star and a dame.
Her life has been absolutely astonishing, and it seems fitting that this production puts her in her rightful place, at the beating heart of British popular culture. But at the dawn of her career and in the opening scenes of this play, all everyone is talking about is her weight.
‘I think she’s got a tapeworm,’ says her mother, fussing around the stage. A character based on the agony aunt Claire Rayner bustles on. ‘Men don’t want twigs, men want meat on the bone, boobs and bum,’ she chides. Someone else calls the young model a ‘stick-thin waif’.
Twiggy herself, played by Elena Skye in a mini-skirt and tartan tights, her hair chopped into that unmistakeable pixie crop, talks directly to the audience. ‘I was called androgynous. That’s posh for no tits,’ she says. Then the band strike up and the cast launch into a spirited version of Bony Moronie, the 1950s hit that celebrates a girl who is ‘as skinny as a stick of macaroni’. It is only one of dozens of songs scattered throughout this 135-minute production, the melodic signposts that map out Twiggy’s life in four-beat bars.
Mini-me: Twiggy (left) is played by Elena Skye (right) in the musical Close-Up: The Twiggy Musical
Amazing: Her life has been absolutely astonishing, and it seems fitting that this production puts her in her rightful place, at the beating heart of British popular culture
Twiggy meets Svengali boyfriend Justin de Villeneuve, cue Bend Me, Shape Me by Amen Corner. Twiggy goes out on the town with her mates, cue Downtown by Petula Clark. Twiggy breaks up with husband, cue Without You by Harry Nilsson. Husband has a drink problem, cue Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down by Kris Kristofferson, and so on.
Before long I was feeling very We Gotta Get Out Of This Place by the Animals, but surely only a curmudgeon would complain about there being too many songs in a musical.
Unfortunately, as the Russell Brand scandal continues to dominate the news, Elton and his creative team have picked rather a difficult month to blithely explain that 15-year-old Twiggy left home to love and live with 25-year-old de Villeneuve – cue Young Girl by Gary Puckett & The Union Gap. ‘But you are making it sound so creepy,’ says Justin, trussed up in purple corduroys and played with a delicious Austin Powers swagger by Matt Corner.
‘It was the Sixties,’ shrugs the Twiggy character, as if that explains everything. And, actually, it does.
Twiggy herself was in the audience on Monday night, slipping into her seat after the house lights went down. She sat in the darkness of the theatre watching her own life unfold before her eyes, and her long-dead parents, Norman and Nell, come to life again, via the magic of theatre.
‘I cried through most of it,’ she said, when she was a guest on BBC1’s The One Show the following evening. ‘Five minutes in and I started crying when my mum and dad came on. Every life has wonderful things and sad things. I had moments of wonderment and relationships that didn’t go right. Bring your Kleenex!’
The musical does not gloss over her difficult marriage to Michael Witney (played here by Darren Day), the handsome American actor who was known for playing cowboys in series such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza and Daniel Boone. ‘He had me at howdy,’ says Twiggy in Close-Up.
Writer: Elena Skye (left), with writer of the musical Ben Elton (centre) and the real Twiggy (right)
After meeting on the set of 1974 film W – Twiggy having made her debut as a lead in a movie at the age of 21, when Ken Russell famously took a chance on the saucer-eyed ingenue and cast her in The Boy Friend – the couple married in 1977 and had daughter Carly the following year.
Later, they separated under the strain of Witney’s alcoholism, a problem over which Twiggy has always been gracious and understanding.
By the time she was starring in My One And Only on Broadway in 1983, 52-year-old Witney was on the road to recovery. Tragically, he had a heart attack early one evening when taking five-year-old Carly out for a burger in a New York restaurant. He later died in hospital and Twiggy was not told of his death until the curtain fell on that evening’s performance.
She was once asked how she coped with Witney’s death and having to raise Carly alone, and replied that it was ‘a very sad time’. In the new musical, her character fondly but wryly reflects upon these two men who were so pivotal in her life, explaining how she ‘still can’t bear vodka now, even 40 years on’ because of Witney, and how she hates the word ‘Svengali’ because of de Villeneuve.
Why? So many of the quirks that made her famous – the stylish clothes she designed and made herself, the lower eyelashes she painted onto her face, inspired by a childhood doll – were her ideas, not de Villeneuve’s.
‘She’s got more taste than a packet of Fruit Polos,’ he says, in a rare salute to his girlfriend’s innate sense of style. However, in public, the real de Villeneuve always took all the credit for himself, while busily spending huge chunks of Twiggy’s money.
‘I was with him for three years; it took me four more years to dump him,’ she says onstage.
Friend: Ben Elton, pictured here at the BAFTA award 2023, is a friend of Twiggy’s and has written the musical about her life
In real life, she is not bitter about anything. Amid the clamour of the songs, the glorious swirl of the Pucci-print costumes and cream soda tights, there is a sense here of wrongs being righted and history being corrected, but this is a celebration, not an exercise in revenge.
And as Twiggy herself closely collaborated with Ben Elton on the script and storyline, which ends in the 1980s, before Twiggy meets and marries her second husband, British actor and director Leigh Lawson, there is no doubt that this is an authentic version of events.
Certainly, you can hear her considered, honest voice ringing clear throughout each act. ‘I like to remember how kind and sweet he was,’ she says of Witney, in one scene.
How much control did she have over Close-Up? ‘There were a couple of songs I didn’t like,’ she said on The One Show. ‘But Ben had back-ups. He was fabulous and gracious to me, if I didn’t like anything.’
READ MORE: Twiggy the musical! Play by Ben Elton will chronicle the star’s life, from her working-class roots to her iconic haircut and 60s modelling stardom
They might seem like an unlikely couple, but Ben Elton and Twiggy have been ‘great mates’ for years. Over dinners, she would tell him of the repeated offers that film, theatre and TV people would make to tell the remarkable story of her life. ‘But they were never quite right,’ she said.
Then, one night, about eight years ago, Elton said: ‘Why don’t I do it?’ Twiggy was thrilled. ‘I mean, this is the man who wrote Blackadder,’ she said. ‘I felt honoured.’ By then the multi-talented TV writer, novelist and sometime actor had been involved in four musicals, including a collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber on The Beautiful Game in 2000, and Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom Of The Opera, ten years later.
The true story of Twiggy and her extraordinary life is difficult to resist. Yes, the play has been larded by Ben Elton with a seam of social and political issues and, even today, the former stand-up comic and Leftie cannot resist a little bit of Tory-bashing here and there. ‘What is levelling up anyway?’ asks one character, as the audience cheers.
Elsewhere, we get little lectures on how women are judged by their bodies, how the working classes had a brief, shining reprieve in the 1960s before being horribly oppressed again, the rise of toxic masculinity and how sexism historically held women back – neatly overlooking the irony that nine of the 12 key creative jobs on Close-Up are taken by men.
But it cannot be denied that Dame Twiggy is having a moment. The world’s first supermodel celebrated her 74th birthday this month, and is just as gorgeous, popular and admired today as she was more than 50 years ago.
In an interview she gave in America in 1983, she said: ‘I wonder if I will still be called Twiggy when I am 85.’
The answer to that seems to be yes, for what could stop her now? Dame Twiggy was recently on the red carpet at the launch of Vogue World, a celebration of British culture and fashion; she is currently making a documentary about her life; and she is also recording a new album.
‘I think I’ve been lucky, but I’ve also known when to pursue an opportunity,’ she said back in the 1980s.
Twiggy The Musical might be the greatest accolade of all, but who deserves it more than ‘Twig the wonder kid’, as David Bowie once called her?
She is an icon undimmed, the heroine of her own remarkable life, someone who refused to be capsized by difficulties and who seized her chances when they came along.
Cue Girl On Fire by Alicia Keys. And take a bow, Dame Twiggy.
- Close-Up: The Twiggy Musical is on at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London until November 18.
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