ECCENTRICS AT PLAY

When California artist PETER SCHLESINGER joined his consort, painter David Hockney, in London in 1968. he gained entry to a fabulously lunatic world of art and aristocracy, young and old, gay and straight, that gathered at Hockney's Notting Hill flat. This fall Schlesinger's private photographs of that kaleidoscopic time will be published as the book Checkered Cast. In his introduction, eminent shoe designer MANOLO BLAHNIK relives the day he met Schlesinger, and became part of a circle that included Cecil Beaton, W. H. Auden, Bryan Ferry, Tina Chow, and Rudolph Nureyev

The truth is, pictures are incredibly important to me. I have lived my whole life vicariously through images, both still and moving. The reality of life can often seem rather sordid to me, and I have preferred to live in an imaginary world made up of images that somehow make it more interesting, more perfect. Some of these pictures are of my own invention, like recurring fantasies that have become traveling companions. But most satisfying are the films and photographs by people I admire, because they have the power to surprise and delight. It has frustrated me over the years that I have been unable to create either of these myself, something I have seriously considered. We do what we can, and I make shoes.

One day in 1971, I met the young artist Peter Schlesinger at a dinner with friends at London's Mr. Chow. He was making beautiful paintings, and also working nonstop with his camera. Peter was a California beauty, and California seemed glamorous when you lived in London, which had such opposite qualities, culturally and meteorologically. He had come to England three years earlier with David Hockney, whom he'd met while taking a drawing class David taught at U.C.L.A. They were living together. Peter had this romantic determination to live the life of an artist in Europe, and David had introduced him to a colorful circle of artists and photographers, musicians and dancers, actors and members of British society. Many in this bohemian set became his subjects: W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Amanda Lear, Rudolf Nureyev, and Bryan Ferry. After four years at the Slade School of Art, he carried on painting in a small studio he rented from a friend of David's, and many of his paintings were based on his photographs.

Excerpted from Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the 60s and 70s, by Peter Schlesinger, to be published in October by Vendome Press/Abrams; © 2003 by Peter Schlesinger. Foreword © 2003 by Manolo Blahnik.

That night at Mr. Chow, Peter joined my friend the photographer Eric Boman and me as we waited for more than an hour for Paloma Picasso and Andy Warhol's manager, Fred Hughes, to see Visconti's Death in Venice. Peter arrived wearing a long camel-hair coat designed by his friend Ossie Clark, for whom I had just made some of my first women's shoes. We soon realized we had lots of friends in common. And I found that Peter knew a lot about movies, something without which I can't seem to form any true human bond. That hour spent chatting and drinking vodka and orange juice often comes back to me in flashes. It was the foundation of an enduring friendship among the three of us. We were all foreigners from very different backgrounds—Peter an American, Eric Swedish, and myself from the Canary Islands—who had been attracted to life in London.

The three of us started spending a lot of time together. All in our 20s, we were truly exuberant and expressive people, and we somehow managed to make an event out of nothing, laughing all the time. It is impossible for me to separate those incredible years in London from this relationship.

Peter and Eric were now together, and Peter had moved to a house in Notting Hill's Colville Terrace. I had to find a new place to live, and the top two floors (a duplex!) in his building were available. I lived there for many years, running into Peter daily and following his work, often seeing the photographs even before they were glued into his albums. They provided a continuing eyeopener to a fresh vision of a wonderful time in my life, all as it was unfolding.

PORTFOLIO CONTINUES OVERLEAF

We were truly exuberant and expressive people, and managed to make an event out of nothing, laughing all the time.