Full disclosure: the media baron turned convicted felon Conrad Black and his glamorous wife, Barbara Amiel, are friends of mine. Once, I spent an entire week as a houseguest at their ground-floor maisonette at 635 Park Avenue. The apartment was elegantly furnished by David Mlinaric, and full service was at my fingertips. Black and Amiel are archly conservative in their political life, but, shockingly, we get along without discussing our differences.
At the very end of Amiel’s new 608-page memoir, Friends and Enemies, she has compiled lists of both, divided by country. (Buy the book if only to discover whom she has blacklisted in each one.) In the U.S., those on the approved list include Anna Wintour, the late Jayne Wrightsman, Peggy Noonan, Rush Limbaugh, George F. Will, and yours truly. Amiel somehow managed to add an F to my name in the galley: “André F. Leon Talley.” Odd—she is so meticulous about everything in her life.
Finery and Frippery
My friendship with Amiel began in 2002, when I styled her for a center-of-book Vogue profile, photographed by Mario Testino, that was written by my dear friend Julia Reed, who died in August. Before the shoot at their London home, in Kensington, which had a swimming pool in the basement, Reed barked at me on the telephone, “Damn it, man, you’ve got to get into her dressing room to see the 300 pairs of unopened pantyhose by Fogal and Wolford. Don’t you dare miss that!”
(Today, Barbara Amiel writes to me by e-mail from Toronto, where she now lives. “I still have those unopened packs of pantyhose,” she says. “I rarely go out, maybe twice a year.”)
Aside from the hosiery, her closets were full of serious haute couture from Saint Laurent, Gaultier, and Balmain. Everything was organized—furs in cedar-lined cupboards, stilettos (and I mean killer heels) she’d lined up neatly on shelves in an adjacent room. I saw about 12 alligator Hermès Birkin bags in every conceivable color, from elegant anthracite gray to absinthe green. They looked brand-new. Did she order them all at once, or did she pick them out carefully over a period of time? “I am happy to say Conrad does not get the bills for these Hermès bags,” she told me. “I pay for them with my own hard-earned money from my columns.” She wrote regularly for her husband’s Canadian newspapers, and even won awards for her work in The Times of London and The Daily Telegraph.
“I am happy to say Conrad does not get the bills for these Hermès bags.”
We jointly decided that she would wear a silk, floral-print tunic-blouse edged in the finest sable by Carolina Herrera. The sexy blouse was matched with dull plaid wool trousers and some killer weapon-like Manolo Blahnik stilettos. Oh, yes—the ruched, navy, strapless taffeta by Oscar de la Renta was anchored with a sparkling Fred Leighton necklace and formed the climax for a well-rounded glimpse of her style.
That Kensington residence in London was long ago sold off. The house in Palm Beach is gone, too. So is the jet, and even the apartment in New York, where Amiel and Black lived just one building up from Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis. Amiel is now approaching 80 years old, and in Friends and Enemies she really lets it rip. Amiel and Black fought the battle, and lost, when Lord Black was hauled off to prison in 2008 for fraud and obstruction of justice. But in the end they have won, quietly sailing off into the final sunset, punctuated only by the barks of their Kuvasz dog.
Affairs and Affronts
When Amiel and Black wed, in 1992, Lady Thatcher attended the dinner. Already a modern-day Becky Sharp, the arriviste protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Amiel was then anointed into the glossiest social circles in London, Palm Beach, and New York. Even the late (yet highly self-made) Jayne Wrightsman would have her for high tea as well as dinners in her Fifth Avenue mansion, where she proudly displayed Marie Antoinette’s final entry in her diary. The formidable Mrs. Wrightsman, who lived to be nearly 100 years old, once saw Amiel reaching across the table for a piece of bread before dinner. Wrightsman, who was rumored to order exactly one green apple for lunch at the Ritz (I have it on authority from a former concierge), chimed across the table, “Barbara, bread isn’t the staff of life.”
She made another minor infraction when she wore white shoes to a party given by Mercedes Bass, the divorcée who was once married to billionaire Sid Bass. “You don’t ever wear white. It’s for salesgirls, and not the ones at Bergdorf’s,” said Mercedes Bass, and for Amiel, that was her Proustian decimating moment. Such humiliation can leave its scars.
Her Giant Minotaur, Her Dashing James Bond
Amiel rose from humble origins, working at a peach-pitting factory in Canada before she got her start in newspapers. She was married three times before she met Black, who would be her fourth husband. He was then, and is now, her giant Minotaur, her dashing James Bond. Together, both are helplessly and confidently possessed of a smoldering sensuality. They gaze into each other’s eyes and you could literally ignite a fire. Or douse one. I witnessed this as her downfall from the high mount of empty values of society dames—she was a hot volcano that left toxic ash, a living, walking Vesuvius that left everyone gasping for oxygen.
I last saw the couple in Toronto in 2017. They co-hosted a dinner in my honor when the documentary The Gospel According to André made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Blacks’ great brick mansion, in the suburban neighborhood of Bridle Path, is located far from the center of town. So given the late hour, the event was hosted at a different friend’s home in the city. I never had the chance to see the great brick mansion, the home of Black’s late father, which had 11 baths and nine bedrooms.
She was a hot volcano that left toxic ash, a living, walking Vesuvius that left everyone gasping for oxygen.
At the dinner, Amiel showed up as sexy and superbad as usual. Not in a prim, age-appropriate little black dress from Chanel or Oscar de la Renta but in a sexy, hourglass, vintage black suit from Thierry Mugler. Rogue couture. Black was wearing one black eye patch due to a surgery earlier that evening, but he seemed, more than ever, to be a cool, confident, one-woman-only Lothario.
Friends and Enemies reads like a Barbara Cartland romance in raw terminology; Amiel declares that she has always loved sex. It is safe to say that the Blacks have a healthy sex life, even as they approach eight decades on the planet. They look at each other like young lovers in the first throes of bliss.
And yet Amiel writes about her “calculating affair” with the late literary and publishing giant Lord George Weidenfeld. She found it repugnant to kiss him. “There were awkward aesthetic complications,” she wrote to me recently. “Dim lights and nudity were helpful.” And to my amazement, she also writes of once picking up a handsome Black stranger on the sidewalks of New York, going to his apartment, and after sex allowing his big Doberman to lick whipped cream off her warm, smooth body.
An Amateur Marquise
And then there was the fashion. Amiel writes of receiving frenzied faxes from me at the Ritz, during Paris couture weeks. “Steer clear of anything edged in sable at Balmain,” I declared. I remember once seeing her at the concierge desk there during the shows; she was in a vampy Jean Paul Gaultier—not exactly the fail-safe choice for the Wrightsman–Kissinger–de la Renta–Bass set. It was an unspoken rule in that circle of couture swans to wear only Saint Laurent, Chanel, and major orders from their mutual friend—and mine—Oscar de la Renta, who was at that time designing couture for Pierre Balmain.
Amiel and I bonded over fashion and became close, sharing our bouts with depression and my battle royale with weight. At one point, around 2003, she was tired of couture and wanted my advice on something unexpected—downsizing. This was at the beginning of her husband’s legal woes.
I took her to Norma Kamali, one of my favorite unsung American fashion designers, where she bought several sexy, long, tube-like, stretch-velvet evening dresses. She loved them. It was the perfect antidote for showing up for dinner—shocking those social lionesses: “Oh, it’s Omo by Norma Kamali.”
She knew none of them would have the audacity to copy her and go there because they did not have the breasts like perfect ripe honeydew melons and a waist like an athletic teenage girl’s. Sometimes she looks like a Hollywood starlet, and at others she exudes elegant hauteur. She may have looked like an amateur marquise, but she was never stiff or cold. She is void of fakery, except when she often reminds people such as concierges or drivers to refer to her as Lady Black.
She writes how insecure those ladies made her feel, yet she claps back with fabulous revenge. Especially her anecdotes about Nancy Kissinger. After Amiel gave her braided silver bracelets by Angela Cummings as a gift, Kissinger told her that she ultimately handed them down to her nieces. She managed to survive this vacuous world of the billionaire class, using her sexual weaponry and her hundred-plus pairs of Manolo Blahniks (in her London closet alone).
Ups and Downs
Janet Flanner once said, “Genius is immediate, but talent takes time.” Amiel is gifted with genius, time, and patience. Her talents are many. I’ve always said those famished New York society gals, who live to fit into a size-2 dress, were jealous of her voluptuousness.
Even today, when Amiel walks into the room, every bit Ava Gardner, in a corseted torso ball dress and that sparkling English smile, it’s a game changer. The frozen social glares melt. She soaks up all the oxygen.
Friends and Enemies reveals the nightmares and the dreams of social ascension and descent. After three years as a convicted felon for fraud and other crimes, Black was released from prison. In 2018, he published a flattering biography of the man who is currently in the White House. Trump, a longtime friend of Black’s, pardoned him not long after the book’s publication.
She is void of fakery, except when she often reminds people such as concierges or drivers to refer to her as Lady Black.
In Amiel’s coda, which is right up to date, my eyes welled with tears when I read her loving account of the slow, painful demise of Maya, her 12-year-old Kuvasz. Earlier this year, Maya was diagnosed with inoperable tumors. This summer, Amiel had her euthanized in her favorite seat in a van. It was all over in less than a minute. Due to questions about rabies, she had Maya’s head whacked off, opened up, and examined. Amiel finally received her headless pooch and held a private cremation ceremony, just she and beloved Maya. That is her last chapter.
Yet there’s more. A final thought at the end to sum up her gilt life: “I’m going to try to enjoy the remaining time left to me,” she declares. “And bugger off to the whole damn lot of you. We’re still here. You lost.”
André Leon Talley is a writer based in New York. His latest book, The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir, is out now