Glittering fairytale

Miss Aluminium named after a modelling gig Susanna Moore got at a trade show, is a detailed account of her life as she moves from being a model to bit roles in films to reading scripts for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson.

Brought up in the 1950s and early 60s Susanna navigates a new era of free love. Hollywood is in transition between the old  James Stewart era and the new one epitomised by Jack Nicholson.

Moore focuses on her childhood, piecing together stories about her mother, who had spells of depression, as well as her father’s neglect and stepmother’s cruelty. Moore’s father visits his wife in hospital and promises to stop an affair. “My mother was happy for the first time in a long while and when he left, she went to the window to watch him walk across the parking lot of the hospital and there sitting in his car was the girl”. As a bereaved child, she writes no one made any connection between her mother’s sudden death and her wild behaviour at school.

Clothes were transformational as they became “objects of fetishistic importance to my mother as if some sleight of hand, well made, suits and evening dresses by Balenciaga and Dior transformed my mum from a shanty Irish girl into a beautifully dressed and well-behaved debutante”.

At seventeen Susanna Moore left her home in Hawaii, with no money, no belongings and no prospects, but in Philadelphia an unexpected gift of four trunks of beautiful clothes allowed her to assume the first of many disguises.  Her journey from New York to Los Angeles where she becomes a model and meets Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn, and works as a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and is given a screen test by Mike Nichols.

In her journey to Hollywood Moore is assaulted by  Oleg Cassini, a seemingly sophisticated fashion designer, and mentally removes herself from the event, imagining herself to be “crouched in a corner of the ceiling, my bare feet balanced on the moulding as I watched from above”, later she is beaten up by her first husband.

Moore’s time with Audrey Hepburn, who inexplicably confides: “There is something that I have been meaning to tell you. It will make all the difference in your life, I promise you. You must always wear shoes the same colour as your hose … It has been my secret for years”.

 

In Los Angeles, she falls in with Connie Wald, widow of film producer Jerry Wald, who invites Moore to her starry dinner parties alongside actors Natalie Wood, James Stewart and Deborah Kerr.

Moore falls in love with production designer Dick Sylbert, who becomes chief of production at Paramount Studios, just as their passion dwindles, she suggests they marry.

“For some time, it has seemed to me that people decide to marry or to have a child or to buy a house at the moment that their relationship is coming to an end, in part an attempt to save it, and because they do not know what else to do. I was no exception”.

 

Miss Aluminium by Susanna Moore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson £9.99, 288 pages.