Memory of muse dealt a cruel blow

Blow by Blow book cover. Photo / Supplied

Isabella Blow, the fashion stylist with a penchant for loony hats and a talent for discovering the Next Big Thing, died on May 7, 2007, at the age of 48, having drunk a quantity of the weedkiller Paraquat. Two days later, on May 9, I was dispatched to her Gloucestershire home, to interview her husband Detmar Blow, with whom I have a passing acquaintance (I used to work with Issie at the Sunday Times; Detmar was a regular visitor to the office). This wasn't an easy encounter - he was tearful and slightly manic - but it would have been unfair of me to have done anything other than give him the benefit of the doubt. He had suffered a terrible loss. In spite of my better instincts, then, I attributed his weirder comments to grief, and made light of the fact that, midway through our conversation, he lunged at me with such force I ended up lying prone on a sofa, his soft bulk flapping, carp-like, on top of me. I even failed to contradict him when he insisted that Issie had died of cancer, though like everyone, I knew that, months before, she had thrown herself off a flyover, smashing her ankles, and condemning herself to a life of (oh, horror!) flat shoes.

Three years on, and I rather wonder why I bothered. The more I read of Blow's new biography of his wife - I use the word loosely; this book is to biography what a jar of Chicken Tonight is to cooking - the more convinced I was that his inappropriate behaviour on that day was not remotely unusual. Blow by Blow could not be more inappropriate if it tried. It's not only that it is so blatant an attempt to cash in, though he was obviously in a tremendous rush to get it out: the thing is so pockmarked with inaccuracies, I failed to be surprised even when he described his wife's eyes as bright blue (I believe he was right the first time, when he told us they were green). No, it's his tone - whining and solipsistic - that is most repulsive.

Detmar is the sort of chap who would once have been described as a milksop; when Issie met him in 1988 he was 25, but so close to his mother he used to shop for her sanitary towels. Given that he found even part-time work exhausting - in his book, he is forever off on holiday to recover from his shifts as a solicitor - you can probably guess how he coped with Issie's mental health problems. In Blow by Blow, he flips between sickly self-pity and a weird kind of pride, as if he has landed the best role in a particularly juicy melodrama. There is, for instance, something perturbingly gelid about the satisfaction with which he describes the jacket he wore to visit his wife on her deathbed ("punk Harris tweed with a Rhodesian flag on the back and an Umbro label on the front", since you ask).

All of which is a terrible shame, because Issie's story is a fabulous one. She was born in 1958, the daughter of Evelyn Delves Broughton, whose father was Jock Delves Broughton of White Mischief fame who was tried for the murder of his wife's lover. Detmar writes of a Delves Broughton curse, which might be overstating it. But still, Jock, having been acquitted of the murder, poisoned himself in the Britannia Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. Issie was fascinated by this. More horrifying, when she was five, her baby brother John drowned in the family pool. The story Issie liked to tell was that her mother had left the children to go and apply her lipstick - which is straight out of A Handful of Dust - but Detmar disputes the veracity of this: Issie, too, could be self-dramatising.

She and Detmar met at a wedding. "I love your hat," he said. By then she was already a minor legend in fashion circles, famous for flashing her breasts and being a friend of Andy Warhol. Detmar proposed 16 days later. Their engagement photograph, in which Issie is dressed like a medieval page, complete with ceremonial axe, and Detmar is sounding some kind of horn, makes me cry with laughter every time I look at it. What did she see in him? Well, for one thing, there was Hilles, his Arts & Crafts house, which stands in 405ha. Her own family having been forced to close up their ancestral home, Doddington Hall, Issie had an obsession with grand houses, a fixation matched only by her preoccupation with money. Her wealthy father had left her only £5000 and she was convinced that she would end up a bag lady. Perhaps she thought Hilles would help clear her overdraft.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Detmar goes on about how broke they were - grand estates being not at all the same thing as capital - but it's hard to sympathise when you find that they could nevertheless afford to snap up a flat in central London. Ultimately, Issie's profligacy grew to be another symptom of her manic depression, but it wasn't so in the beginning. Money simply passed through her fingers like sand. When she worked at Tatler, she submitted the most extravagant expenses claim its owner, Conde Nast, had even seen - for a dilapidated building: £50,000 for "a very small ruin, which really was a must". Her supporters claim she was badly treated by her most famous discovery, Alexander McQueen; when he landed the big job at Givenchy, he could find no paid role for his "muse". But really, what could he do? Erratic doesn't even begin to describe her methods. If she felt like it, she worked from her bed.

Her husband, from whom she was estranged towards the end, takes the reader through her various jobs, at Vogue, Tatler and the Sunday Times. He details her IVF treatments (her failure to conceive may, he speculates, have contributed towards her depression). There are some good anecdotes - Issie once cleared a first-class rail carriage by telling everyone how her "combine harvester" teeth prevented her from giving oral sex - though laziness (his own and his co-writer's) means the best stories are cut short before they even begin. What, for instance, actually happened when she joined the Prince of Wales at a house party? The mind boggles, but he can't be bothered to find out. However, the crime for which he really cannot be forgiven is his total failure to pin Issie to the page, to breathe life into her for the benefit of those who never met her. How did he render one so flashy so dull?

Perhaps I'll have a go myself. In some ways, she was a monster. She was dismissive of anyone she considered to be unimportant or - worse - uninteresting, and her "eccentricity" was more of a put-on than she cared to admit. If you ask me, she never forgot that she had a lobster on her head, or a satellite dish. Then again, in full sail, she was a wonderful sight: Rod Hull's emu as styled by Salvador Dali, a human triffid who smoked Benson & Hedges, who never wore underwear and whose touchstones in life were good jewellery and high birth, and not a lot else. She was filthy and funny and ridiculous. She was born in the wrong time. I cannot quite believe that she really existed, much less that I once shared a desk with her. The desk was grey, but the woman who sometimes deigned to visit it seemed to be permanently aflame, a dazzling heap of feathers and fur and leather. We laughed at her, but a tiny part of us was in awe. No one else was going to earn the Murdoch shilling while wearing a lampshade on their head.

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