Free Life Worth Living by Lady Colin Campbell Page A

apartment in London Terrace Gardens on West Twenty-Third between Ninth and Tenth – a beautiful, pre-war complex with its own swimming pool, hairdresser and just about everything else.
    My father was also covering my medical bills, which as far as I was concerned were a massive waste of money. Twice a week, every week, I had to take the subway up to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where I was under a psychiatrist. There was absolutely no need for this, for my problem was not psychiatric, as the Jamaican psychiatrist had rightly stated. Ithad become apparent to me within ten minutes of my first visit to Columbia Presbyterian with Mummy that they did not have the facilities or expertise for coping with a medical condition like mine. They had no specific department as Johns Hopkins did. There was a wealth of discussion between various doctors about whether I should be turned over to an internist, an endocrinologist or a psychiatrist. Finally, they settled upon the psychiatrist, using my overdose as a rationale and stating that the most appropriate course to follow would be to have the psychiatrist confirm my mental health before any other course of treatment were considered.
    I complained to Mummy as soon as we were alone. ‘I want to go to Johns Hopkins. They’re only a few hours away from New York and they won’t have to embark upon a long debate as to which department I should be treated in. They have their own department for treating people like me. It’s the gender identification clinic.’
    ‘This hospital had been recommended to Daddy as the finest in New York. He won’t consider anything but the best for you.’
    Knowing from bitter experience that it was impossible to change Daddy’s mind once an idea took root, I resolved to co-operate and try to enlist the help of the psychiatrist, who, I hoped, would refer me to Johns Hopkins when he had given me a clean bill of health. So twice a week, every week, I boarded the ‘A’ train and headed uptown for visits which the psychiatrist later told me were a pleasure.
    In the meantime I thought I would try my hand at writing. I had always loved everything literary, and with writing, even the most tedious subject has intellectual challenge built into it. This choice of career also had the merit of being suitably blue-stockinged for my father, who gave his assent. In those days, one did not go to university to learn to become a writer. One got a typewriter, chose a subject and got started. One evening, on the David Susskind Show on television, I saw a group of male models being interviewed. I decided that would make a fitting subject for an article. It was glamorous and unusual without being too quirky or uncommercial. I hoped to place my piece with one of the women’s magazines such as McCall’s or Cosmopolitan . Instead, I opened up a whole new world for myself.
    The Paul Wagner Agency, where I interviewed the model Nick Cortlandt, had both a male and a female section. When I had finished the interview, Zolie, who ran the agency, asked me if I had ever thought of modelling myself.
    ‘No,’ I replied truthfully.
    ‘If ever you do, give us a call. We could do something with you. You’re a beautiful girl, but more than that, you look like yourself. Most girls look like someone else, which is great for catalogue models, but you have the potential to be another Jean Shrimpton or Twiggy or Penelope Tree. Just look at that nose! I’ve never seen a straighter nose. Look at those eyes. Look at that skin,’ he rhapsodised to his colleagues. ‘And you’re so thin. How much do you weigh? Ninety-eight pounds? A hundred?’
    I actually weighed 104lb. I’d spent all my teenage years trying to put on weight. I used to order various fattening-up formula foods advertised in American magazines, and I ate like a horse. But I gained maybe a pound every six months (ah, for those days now). Yet here I was being compared to the quintessence of contemporary beauty, and for the