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Jean Shrimpton
The original super-model/actress -
nicknamed ‘The Shrimp’
Her sister Chrissie was Mick Jagger’s
first post-fame girlfriend - but it ended because she wasn’t Faithfull.
(Marianne that is! The next conquest on Mick’s never-ending belt!).
Jean was once engaged to 60s photographer
David Bailey |
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 Jean
Shrimpton met photographer David Bailey on a shoot for a cornflakes
advertisement. His friend told him she was too posh for him, but Bailey
thought 'we'll see about that!' The couple had a relationship for four
years.
In
1965 she arrived for the Melbourne Cup in Australia and shocked
everybody by wearing a plain white shift dress which ended at least 10
cm above her knees. To make things worse she wore no hat, stockings or
gloves. This was very controversial at the time, but Jean was blissfully
unaware of the riot she caused.
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 HER SWINGIN' '60s
CREDENTIALS:
All legs and arms, lanky Jean was one of the most famous and
influential models of the '60s, a swingin' rival to
Twiggy
for global fashion supremacy.
CATEGORIES OF SWINGIN' CHICK:
Model and Movie Star
BIRTH: Jean was born in 1942, so she was eighteen-28
through the decade. Her exotic birthplace: High Wycombe, England, some 25 miles west of
London.
IMPACT ON THE '60s:
Jean was one of the most internationally famous
models of the decade, and she was one of the first to attain global stardom. She was the
original face of Yardley cosmetics, with whom she had a three-year contract in the
mid-'60s and for whom she did several major publicity tours. She appeared on countless
fashion magazine covers, made the cover of Newsweek on May 10th of '65, was
written up in Esquire, Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, and Good Housekeeping.
Elle dubbed her "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," and Glamour
named her Model of the Year in '63. Some consider her the first true
"supermodel" because she had her own mannequin before Twiggy did, and her ups
and downs were followed in the press, especially her engagement to swingin' photog David
Bailey and her subsequent affair with Bailey's pal, actor Terence Stamp. When we appeared
on the A&E "Top Ten" show about great fashion models, the other models on
that show, including Twiggy, said that Jean was the one they all looked up to. Her
greatest contribution to fashion may have been as one of the "creators" of the
miniskirt. She caused a world-wide scandal when she wore a miniskirt, no stockings, no
gloves and no hat to the opening day of the Melbourne Gold Cup in Australia on November 2,
1965.
 Jean had been contracted to appear in dresses made out of the synthetic material
Orlon, and she'd had some Orlon mini dresses sent to her. Though they showed up a bit
shorter than normal, she didn’t worry because dresses in the U.K. were starting to
come up. Australia had never seen anything like the mini, and as Jean wrote later,
"The day of the races was a hot one, so I didn’t bother to wear any stockings.
My legs were still brown from the summer, and as the dress was short it was hardly formal.
I had no hat or gloves with me, for the very good reason that I owned neither. I went
downstairs cheerfully from my hotel room, all regardless of what was to come."
Apparently, the organizers of the event were waiting for her and were scandalized about
her lack of proper attire, because when she arrived at the races, both the men and women
were pointing and staring -- the men for obvious reasons and the women because of her
fashion gaffe. Jean ended up being on front pages worldwide because of her
"scandalous" attire. Later in her bio she wrote that upon her return
Mary Quant rode on her coattails to create shorter
dresses, which if true would make Jean one of the progenitors of the miniskirt.
 CAREER IN THE '60s: Jean's career began in 1960 when she started at
Lucie Clayton’s Modeling School, she then appeared on Vogue for the first
time in April of '62. She reached her peak as a fashion goddess in the mid-'60s when she
signed a deal with Yardley to advertise their Londonderry hair products on TV and in
magazines, and she continued all decade, though her significance was gradually dwindling
by the end. At the height of her fame, in '65 she wrote a book, My Own Story - The
Truth About Modeling. She did get a role in one movie, the little-seen costume drama Privilege
in '67.
CAREER OUTSIDE THE '60s: Before she embarked on her modeling career, her goal
in the late-'50s was to become a secretary. After the '60s, her modeling career continued
until about '72, at which time she quit until, at the insistence of photographer David
Bailey, she did hair-color ads for a few years starting in the late '80s. It's hard to
believe that her looks may have faded somewhat over the years, but when Terence Stamp saw
her on the street in London over twenty years later he passed by without saying hello
"because she looked so awful and she used to be so lovely." Mainly she has
focused on business opportunities after stardom passed, first running an antiques shop and
currently owning and operating the 300-year-old Abbey Hotel in Penzance, England.
According to a People magazine article on her in August '99, she told David
Bailey "it is nice to be at the end of the world".
 TALENT: As a model she was wonderful, as was Twig, but none of them were major
on-screen successes. As an actress, Jean's one movie, Privilege was a box-office
bust and failed to accelerate her career, stamping her with a rep as a "wooden"
actress. Her consort Terence Stamp made the comment that "Jean trying to act is
rather like me trying to perform complicated brain surgery" (though she always looked
ravishing, of course).
 HER '60s LOOK: She had a unique blend of classic beauty with
distinctive features, though she herself thought she suffered from a fat face, a weak left
profile, small eyes, big feet and bags under her eyes -- "if you take off the makeup,
I’m ugly," she once said. According to a piece he wrote for Vogue in
November '99, here's what David Bailey thought the first time he saw her: "I was up
in the Vogue studios, which lots of photographers used, and I saw this girl being
photographed for some print ad campaign. I just thought she was wonderful, absolutely
compelling. It was Jean Shrimpton .... I don't think there had been anything like Jean,
she was a kind of beauty of the century in a democratic way. She appealed to men, women,
everybody ... one of the things I loved about Jean was that she took modeling with a bit
of dignity. Honestly, I don't think she really cared if she did it or not .... with Jean
you never had to reshoot anything, ever, she was always in perfect sync with the camera.
It's funny, though, in terms of personal style, Jean didn't have any, she just dressed in
any old rags, most of the time she looked like a bag lady." Jean's figure was a
robust 34-23-35, and she weighed in at 120 pounds, standing 5' 9."
LIFESTYLE: Her two major relationships during the 60’s
were with photog David Bailey and actor Terence Stamp. When she first met Bailey she said
"We were instantly attracted to each other." They ended up working together
pretty exclusively from '61-'64 and at one point were engaged; however, supposedly Jean
broke it off when she found herself becoming increasingly attracted to Terence Stamp, one
of Bailey’s mates. Bailey went on to marry
Catherine Deneuve. To this day, Jean and Bailey are good friends and are
mutually indebted to each other. She said of him at the time "I owe everything that I
am as a model to David Bailey." Meanwhile, Stamp, who was in the films Wall
Street, Superman II, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, was someone to whom
she was attracted "because he was so good-looking." Later in her relationship
with him she talked with
Julie Christie
about how his looks were almost intimidating and how it made it hard to be with him
"because he is so beautiful." They had an intense affair from '64 through '66;
interestingly, she says that throughout their relationship he was somewhat cold and
distant and that for a lot of their relationship she was "besotted with him,"
but eventually she got to the point where she didn’t care whether she saw him or not.
Here's what she says in her 1990 autobiography:
 "Terry and I were really only happy together when we were abroad and on
holiday. In London, my life with him was empty. I was bored, and we must have been
exceedingly boring to others. I found life trivial then, and looking back I do not
understand why I stuck with it. We were so vain that we continued to dress ourselves up
and go out to be looked at. Terry always looked amazing, and I had to look good to match,
I was so insecure that I was always fiddling in the bathroom or running to the ladies to
check my appearance. It was pathetic. Here I was, at the height of my fame, behaving like
this. I was just an accessory to this beautiful star, and it was his beauty that I was in
love with and that kept me with him -- not the man himself. I was under a spell, but had
no energy to break it. In his autobiography Double Feature, Terry stresses
constantly how much in love with me he was. I find that hard to believe. Perhaps it was
true, but since he never communicated with me, how could I have known."
In his autobiography, Stamp says his "feelings were intensified, having
tasted the loneliness of life without her. Grounded as I was in insecurity, I hoped I
could, by some superhuman strength, pull it all together, and start anew, but somewhere
deep in me, I knew I’d blown it. The oneness I’d experienced with her began
surely and inexplicably to evaporate. As her independence emerged, so did the sense of
alienation I feared so. The fear deepened the alienation. A vicious circle. Unable to
contemplate life without her, I pushed her away."
Jean married a photographer named Michael Cox on January 12, 1979, and they have one
son, Thaddeus, born in '79.
 EXTRAS: Her nickname: "the Shrimp," a name she disliked ... her younger
sister is Chrissie Shrimpton, herself an actress/model who was also a prominent girlfriend
of Mick Jagger in the early '60s before
Marianne
Faithfull swept him off his feet ... Chrissie was supposedly the subject of Mick's
"19th Nervous Breakdown" and "Under My Thumb" ... there's
no evidence that Jean is related to Kerry Shrimpton, an actress who appeared in 1990's
Strictly Ballroom ... in '65 Jean was paid the then-extravagant sum of $60 an hour
... also in '65 a Washington, D.C. department store held a Jean Shrimpton lookalike
contest sponsored by Yardley -- 160 contestants entered ... in a '67 Vogue
magazine article called "The Changing Face of the Fashion Model," legendary
photographer Cecil Beaton wrote:
 [The] "most coveted" [model of the mid-'60s was] "Jean Shrimpton
who, with her Pekinese features, could well have been tied up in ribbons, placed on a
swing and told to sing 'Swing High, Swing Low' from Veronique. Miss Shrimpton's
appeal is not so much in her baby-boy eyes, cleft underlip and cozy round cheeks but in
the length of her extremities, and the underwater manner in which she wields them. But it
was bright-eyed [young photographer David] Bailey who realized that by wearing Levis and
jackboots, and clothes that militate against her sweet-briar appearance, 'the Shrimp' can
belong to the contemporary scene."
 ... colleagues say that she was always on time, never had to be reminded of
anything, never showed any temper or threw tantrums, seemed immune to fatigue, and was
impulsively generous throughout her career ... she was once the victim of an attempted
kidnapping, and an admirer once sent her diamonds in her bowl of rice ... she rarely makes
big public appearances, though she did some interviews after her 1990 book -- Jean
Shrimpton, An Autobiography -- was published ... the Maysles Brothers -- of Gimme
Shelter fame -- did a documentary about her entitled The Face on The Cover
... she's also mentioned in a 1985 song by the Smithereens, "Behind the Wall of
Sleep": the first line is "She had hair like Jeanie Shrimpton back in
1965," this fact was contributed to us by JS fan JC ... supposedly in her private
life she doesn't like to dress up and in fact she says she existed throughout her whole
career owning only one evening dress, usually she wore skirts she knitted herself, plus
kneesocks, jeans, Mary-Janes, and old sweaters or one of five dresses that she owned ...
said Jean, "I can’t bear being dressed up" ... she's quoted in People
in August '99 as saying "it was great fun becoming famous, but I got tired of
it" ... most of the information on this Jean Shrimpton page comes from San
Francisco's own Tara Pollard Macia, who generously shared her detailed research, photos,
and expert opinions with us (she was seen on the A&E show with us, too).
Jean's long bio and photos are in
the book Swingin' Chicks of the '60s, published by Cedco Publishing:
http://www.cedco.com.
Click on the linkage in the Table o' Contents on the left to select another
Swingin' Chick of the '60s, baby.
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