The English Dream

In his 32 years, Nigel John Davies has been a builder's laborer, a bodyguard, a fairgrounds boxer, an assistant at a beauty parlor, a bet taker at a London bookmaking shop, a salesman of nudie films, a shorthand typist, a paint stripper, a bric-a-brac salesman at the Chelsea antique market, and an interior decorator. He has also been unemployed. But all that was before he met a pencil-thin 15-year-old named Lesley Hornby and said: "You're like a twig. I'll call you Twiggy."

Davies, who renamed himself Justin de Villeneuve when he was an interior decorator, took his new-found charge to a hairdresser friend and had her shoulder-length blonde tresses snipped to boy's length--or the length that boys used to wear their hair. A photographer was called in, and the rest is pop-cult history--the modeling, the magazine covers, the international celebrity whirl. Twiggy was the image of the decade, and Justin de Villeneuve was something of a miracle maker. "I didn't know anything or anyone in the fashion business," he proudly recalls. "Everybody kept telling me I couldn't do this or that, but I just went ahead and it worked out O.K."

Today Twiggy and Justin are in the movie business. Twiggy is the star of Ken Russell's overblown but engaging film The Boy Friend (TIME, Dec. 20), and she will be the lead in a musical she and Justin want to do about the '30s, entitled Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance. Justin, though credited as "Production Associate," at one point found himself persona non grata on the set of The Boy Friend, and is taking no chances with the new movie they are planning--he will be the coproducer. "We don't talk to agents or read anything sent to us," says Justin about offers made to them by other film companies. "We control our destinies."

It is not an idle boast. On Twig-gy's 98-lb. frame Justin built a mini-conglomerate. Besides Twiggy Good Times Productions, formed last October, there is an umbrella organization known as Twiggy Enterprises. Though Justin and Twiggy are now out of the fashion business, their organizations have in the past rented her name to Twiggy dolls ($1,000,000 profit in royalties) and Twiggy clothes ($300,000), and to Yardley of London cosmetics (around $1,000,000 over five years) for, among other things, eyeliners called "Twiggy Stix." "Deals, deals, deals," says Justin. "We do things as we get interested. That way we always win."

Mr. Svengali. Discoverer, manager and boy friend, Justin denies one further description. "A lot of people have the impression I'm Mr. Svengali," he remarks. "Actually I'm the softest person in the world." Soft or not, he is very much in charge. "Without him, where would she be?" her father once asked. "He is the prop on which she leans." Says the Twig herself: "None of it would have happened if I hadn't met Justin. He listens to everybody's opinion and then makes up his own mind. Fortunately, I listen only to Justin's advice." If they disagree, she adds, "we do it his way." In meetings or with the press, Twiggy says little, demurely holding Justin's hand or just gazing upon him as he chats engagingly about the modeling that "we" used to do, or the film roles that "we" are going to take.

Justin has always vetoed speech lessons, which would alter Twiggy's working-class accent, and has protected her from all the "jiggery-pokery" that might tarnish her image, or what he thinks her image ought to be. When Photographer Bert Stern wanted to use her in a series of pictures illustrating pop fairy tales a few years ago, Justin turned him down flat. "Twiggy has a pure, clean image," he said. "The whole idea of the wolf, the big bad wolf, and Twiggy--it has something erotic about it." He added, quite unnecessarily: "I won't have sexual eroticism connected with Twiggy!"

Still, friends insist that if Twiggy feels strongly about something, she stands up for it. She and Justin have been engaged since July 1968, just a few hours after he obtained a divorce decree from his first wife, but Twiggy, now 22, has steadfastly postponed marriage until she is 24 or 25. After all, she says, "my older sister started at 18 and had two bad ones, and Justin had one go wrong."

Giant Tent. In an age of super-sophistication, the Now Couple of the late '60s is almost square. Twiggy lives with her parents in a London suburb, and Justin has a fashionably exotic pad near Soho, under the offices of Twiggy Enterprises. In his living room he has draped 300 yds. of hand-blocked Indian fabric to form a giant tent. Beneath the tent are something like 100 cushions for visitors and Justin's small menagerie: a huge Afghan hound named Zaradin, two Persian cats called Buttercup and Jemima and a "plain" cat called Pansy. Twiggy stays for dinner perhaps four nights a week, and Franco, Justin's Italian chef, whips up a meatless pasta for her mostly vegetarian diet. She eats fish, but no meat. Most of their friends are in show business, but their notion of a good time is a quiet weekend at George Harrison's estate in Surrey.

A couple of years ago Justin decided that he wanted to be a fashion photographer--if others could make money at taking pictures, why couldn't he? With typical panache he set up a $60,000 studio, and within three months he was a resounding success. "Four magazine covers in a month," he crowed. "No one--but no one--has done that before. And I'm still only a beginner."

Justin's saga is, in short, the American dream with an English accent. "I come from a very poor family," he says. "I've had a hard background. But I always knew that I would do something." What else is left to do? At this point, his dream, which is only half in jest, is purely English. Would you believe Dame Twiggy?

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