‘Jerry Hall advised me to stash jewellery from wealthy lovers for my future – I wish I’d listened’: Supermodel Marie Helvin tells KATHRYN KNIGHT why she’s facing up to the prospect of working in a supermarket to make ends meet in her old age
Back in their modelling heyday, when they were so close they were known as the ‘terrible twins’, Jerry Hall would often advise her friend Marie Helvin to amass as much jewellery as she could from her lovers to ‘stash’ for a rainy day.
‘I wasn’t interested in owning jewellery,’ Marie recalls. ‘Jerry never understood that. She loved her jewels. Now I realise she was so much smarter than me. I wish I’d taken her advice, but what can you do?’
Because despite a glittering modelling career, not to mention high-profile romances with the likes of the late Mark Shand, brother of the Duchess of Cornwall, and close friendships with cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan and Dodi Fayed, today 69-year-old Marie finds herself in a somewhat precarious financial position.
Instead of spending her twilight years enjoying the spoils of a rather fabulous life, the model once described as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’ — and who remains drop-dead gorgeous — is contemplating a job behind a supermarket till.
That revelation came in a podcast called Third Act and this week led to something of an uproar.
Despite a glittering modelling career, not to mention high-profile romances with the likes of the late Mark Shand, brother of the Duchess of Cornwall, and close friendships with cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan and Dodi Fayed, today 69-year-old Marie finds herself in a somewhat precarious financial position
While it is unlikely Marie will be donning checkout overalls anytime soon, she is determined to air a topic that impacts many women in later life: money, and how much of it you have to see you into old age.
‘I don’t understand why people were so horrified when I said I might work at a checkout,’ she says, shaking her head with genuine bafflement.
‘I’ve never not worked, so if I’m not working and I need to work, I’ll get a job, whatever it may be.
‘What are you going to do otherwise? Ask for handouts? I don’t do stuff like that. I’ve always been independent and I’ve always been a realist.’
With her 70th birthday a month away — a milestone for anyone, but particularly for a former supermodel — Marie admits she has had to stare down some cold hard facts: with her modelling work at a standstill during the pandemic, and her savings running down, she has had to audit her life and work out what the next years might bring.
She has concluded that retirement back in her native Hawaii beckons. ‘I always felt that I was going to go home to retire, but it was a question of when,’ she says.
‘I guess I’ve just been pushed into it sooner than I expected. The thing that was tying me to London was my job, but if the job doesn’t exist, then I might as well go home, not worry about heating bills and swim in the sea every day.
‘I’ve not used up all my savings but, like a great many people, I relied on them heavily during the pandemic. I have had to confront the fact that work might have come to a complete end, although I do have some irons in the fire. So I will be gone by next year.’
Make no mistake: this is not a pity party. Still strikingly beautiful and enviably slender, Marie is as far from a portrait of an older woman on her uppers as you can imagine.
Back in their modelling heyday, when they were so close they were known as the ‘terrible twins’, Jerry Hall would often advise her friend Marie Helvin to amass as much jewellery as she could from her lovers to ‘stash’ for a rainy day
Nonetheless, her circumstances highlight the precarious financial position single women can find themselves in in their later years — particularly if they have not been canny or do not have the comfort of a marital cushion or large divorce settlement to fall back on.
Marie has neither — not since a £100,000 payout from her only husband, photographer David Bailey, back in 1985 — and admits it can be sobering.
‘I’m not afraid of my 70s, but I think all women, and certainly all women in my age group, if they’re on their own, are thinking ‘what’s going to happen to me five, ten years down the line’,’ she says.
Of course, Marie is luckier than many others in similar positions. We meet at the one-bedroom South London riverside apartment she rents, having last owned a property in 2000.
With a concierge and private gardens, it is quite the des res, and Marie has been happy there, although she is now decluttering in preparation for her big move.
‘I’ve already started getting rid of things,’ she reveals. ‘A lot of my furniture has gone, although I still have a huge library. Every week I give away clothing and kitchen things I never use.’
Also gone are the dazzling couture gowns she was routinely gifted by designers in the heady days of the 1970s and 80s and which would be worth a small fortune now.
‘Yves Saint Laurent gave me a few things in the early days of my work, but I sold all of mine a long time ago as I couldn’t fit into them,’ she laughs. ‘But now I wish I’d kept them.’
Born in Tokyo to an American GI father and Japanese mother, Marie was raised in Hawaii. After being approached by a model scout on a visit to Japan she was signed up as the face of Kanebo cosmetics at the age of 15. She moved to London age 19, where she met David Bailey on a photoshoot for Vogue. The couple married in 1975 and she became his muse.
Together with Jerry Hall, a willowy blonde foil to her own dark looks, Marie was a fixture on the London party scene. ‘We drank champagne like water,’ she laughs.
And unlike the often beady-eyed business sense deployed by the latest generation of models, many of whom have built entire brands by their mid-20s, Marie didn’t plan for the future. ‘It wasn’t about business,’ she says. ‘We just enjoyed the freedom. More fool us, but that’s just how it was.’
She emphasises that while she shared the North London home of the man she always refers to as ‘Bailey’, she never took any money from him. Nor did she keep on top of her own earnings.
‘I had my own money from modelling. I never had a bank account with Bailey. I never had a credit card from him,’ she says. ‘If I needed money for whatever and I didn’t have it, I just asked him and he gave it to me.’
Was she naive? ‘Looking back maybe I was,’ she says. ‘I was just never money-driven.’
When she and Bailey — to whom she remains close — divorced in 1985 after she found out about his affair with model Catherine Dyer (now his wife), she received the £100,000 settlement, with which she bought a London flat. She sold it in 2000.
Meanwhile Jerry, who Marie affectionately calls her ‘compadre’, was cut from a different cloth. ‘She always reminded me of that character Ginger in the film Casino, flashing her jewels. The amount she had must fill a vault,’ she says with a smile.
For many years the duo were thick as thieves, but their paths diverged after Jerry gave birth to Elizabeth, the first of her four children with Mick Jagger in 1984. ‘We had a lot in common, but once Bailey and I split and Jerry became a mother the dynamic changed,’ Marie recalls.
‘She could never understand why I didn’t want kids. I remember once she said to me, ‘but Marie you’ll never be alone if you have a child’. And I thought ‘that’s exactly what I don’t want’.’
They last saw each other eight years ago during a magazine shoot by Bailey.
Now Jerry is in the throes of a divorce from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, which will inevitably end in a generous settlement. Certainly not for Jerry a retail job, one imagines, although Marie insists there should be no shame in it.
‘I’ve worked my entire life and I’ve never had anybody pay for anything for me apart from the ten years I was married and lived in Bailey’s home,’ she says.
‘I’ve always looked after myself, so to me, age is no different. Just because you’ve turned 70 doesn’t mean you stop working.
‘I’m thinking about a bookshop or Whole Foods because, as an American company, they have a much more flexible attitude to employing older people.’
If only the same could be said for the modelling industry.
While for many years Marie worked steadily, fronting campaigns for Marks & Spencer and a lingerie campaign for Agent Provocateur in her late 50s, she says that — bar one campaign in November 2020 for the now defunct label Ralph & Russo — the pandemic played havoc with her career.
‘Unfortunately, because of the pandemic everybody stopped working and while the fashion industry has recovered, unfortunately for me my work has not — or not yet,’ she says. She believes this, in part, is down to the fact the diversity that has extended to other areas of modelling does not apply to older women.
‘Today you can be fuller-figured or thin, you can have tattoos, but if you are an older woman you are expected to have grey hair,’ she says.
‘I think it’s because those in control of the advertising agencies are usually young men, and their idea of a 60-year-old or 70-year-old woman is different from yours or mine. Grey hair is all they’re interested in. The rest of us are just ignored.’
Marie certainly doesn’t look like the average septuagenarian, although she works hard at it, exercising four days a week for more than an hour. She doesn’t drink after giving up alcohol ten years ago, and admits to ‘baby Botox’ twice a year to smooth a frown line between her nose and at the side of her eyes.
She insists she has no regrets, although confesses to sadness at the end of her four-year relationship with conservationist Mark Shand, which she called time on in 1987, fearful of losing her independence.
The couple had never lived together — at Marie’s behest — and Shand wanted more.
‘It was my fault,’ she reveals. ‘He wasn’t asking much, to be honest, because I was in love with him, but it was that bit of me that I just worried I would feel trapped. I always kept my own place and I allowed him to come and stay, but I would never let him leave more than one article of clothing in my closet.
‘I guess I mistakenly thought his love was stronger — that he would wait it out — but then he met his wife Clio at a party and they just clicked and that was that.’
Her relationship with Shand — who died in 2014 after sustaining a freak head injury from a fall outside a New York bar — meant Marie got to know Camilla Parker Bowles well.
‘I liked both Mark’s sisters, but I particularly like Camilla. There’s something so gutsy about her and I liked her honesty. She was very unafraid and strong, and I found her very sexy in a very English way.’ There have been plenty of other lovers since Shand, but Marie confides that she has been single since the pandemic, and now believes it is unlikely she will meet someone.
‘The only way that I’ve ever met anybody is through an introduction through a friend — dates to private dinner parties that seem to have kind of evaporated,’ she says. ‘I would never go on a dating website, it’s just not for me. So where will I ever meet anybody?’
Would she like to? ‘I certainly don’t want to get married again,’ she insists. ‘A companion would be nice, someone to share things with.’
For now, she’s happy as she is. ‘Being alone is not a problem for me,’ she insists. ‘I’m in charge of my own destiny and that is a wonderful thing. I’m excited about the future.’
It means that if Hawaii doesn’t work out then she may just move somewhere else. ‘Maybe California,’ she shrugs.
‘At the moment I have no idea, but it’s a beginning; you have to take that one step before you can take a second step. I do feel I have a lot to look forward to. Whatever happens it’s an exciting adventure for me.’
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