the times | Saturday November 14 2020 1GM 83‘I couldn’t imagine
my life without her’
Marriages and engagements
Page 8483The target market was young women
with aspirations to write the Great
American Novel yet with a taste for
glamour and accessible mid-range
fashion. The magazine was the first of
its kind to print the price of clothing.
By the 1950s, while Locke was editing
the fashion pages, the acme of the
Mademoiselle experience for its readers
was winning a place on its summer
guest-editorship programme, a month
of writing, cocktail parties and trips
to the United Nations headquarters,the “thumping boots” of the Nazi sol-
diers marching down her street.
In April 1939 after receiving a visa for
the US, and with the equivalent of only
$5 in her pocket, she travelled by train
to Cherbourg and thence to New York
aboard the Aquitania ocean liner. Set-
tling with relations in Brooklyn, she
attended evening classes to learn
English and get rid of her “atrocious
German accent”. A friend would hold
tissue paper in front of her mouth as
she practised pronouncing words in
English containing “wh” and “th”
sounds: if she said them correctly the
tissue would not move. It worked.
A job at an underwear factory lasted
a day because Locke couldn’t operate
the sewing machines correctly but by
1945 she had talked her way into work-
ing as an assistant in advertising at
Harper’s Bazaar.
A transfer to a short-lived magazine
titled Junior Bazaar saw Locke covering
weekend photoshoots to which no
other editors wanted to travel. In 1947
she joined Abbott Kimball, the fashion
advertising agency, and wrote a regular
newsletter on fashion for its clients.
This caught the eye of Blackwell, the
editor of Mademoiselle, who promptly
offered Locke a job as assistant fashion
editor.
Often Locke was dispatched over-
seas for fashion shoots, including a
memorable occasion involving a model
riding a pregnant camel in the CanaryIslands. While on a shoot in St Croix in
the Virgin Islands she met the travel
agent Ralph Locke, manager of the
Buccaneer Hotel. They married in 1963
and had a daughter, Katie Aviv, a
former fashion PR who is now a pro-
ducer of film trailers.
After leaving Mademoiselle, Locke
presented and produced the Edie
Raymond Locke Show on the USA
network, a half-hour programme
exploring finance for women as well as
interior decor, fashion and beauty. She
also co-hosted and produced a cable
television show called Yo u and inter-
viewed major American designers for
the talk show Attitudes.
In 1994 Locke and her husband
moved to Los Angeles to be closer to
their daughter and her family. Into her
eighties, she would fly to New York to
support Ralph Lauren at his catwalk
collections, describing his work as
“perfection”.
She would advise those seeking an
entrée into fashion journalism to “take
any kind of job, clerical or secretarial, to
get your foot in the door. It won’t take
long for talent to be noticed.”
“Edie always managed to be at one
with whatever generation she was
around. She had the ability to inspire
and encourage all kinds of people irre-
spective of their background and had a
real presence,” said the photographer,
film-maker and writer, Nick Danziger,
who had known Locke through his
family.
As she drew close to her 100th year,
her zest for life was undiminished: as
her hearing failed, Locke mastered the
art of the emoji on her iPhone, and read
books, recommended by her daughter,
exploring racial tensions in America.Edith Raymond Locke, journalist, was
born on August 3 1921. She died on
August 23, 2020, aged 99Jimmy Winston
Founder member and keyboardist with the Small
Faces until forced out for ‘grabbing the spotlight’
Jimmy Winston had just left drama
school with big plans for a career on
stage and screen when one night in
1965 Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane
walked into his parents’ East End pub.
A few beers later Winston had agreed
to form a group. “The three of us got
plastered on ideas,” he recalled. “It was
one of those quantum leaps. One min-
ute you want to be an actor and the next
you’re doing music.”
Kenney Jones was added on drums
and Winston’s girlfriend, Annie, sug-
gested they call themselves the Small
Faces. The diminutive part of the name
came from the fact that Lane and Mar-
riott were both no more than 5ft 6in,
while “face” was the mod term for
someone who was a shaker and mover.
Within weeks they were in the charts
and appearing on Ready Steady Go!
performing their first hit, Whatcha
Gonna Do About It.
Marriott as the lead guitarist and
singer was the group’s frontman but
Winston had other ideas and began
waving his arms ostentatiously from
behind his Vox Continental organ
while Marriott took a guitar solo. His
bandmates were furious at his attempts
to grab the spotlight and he was
bounced out of the group.
In truth there were several other
factors that contributed to his depar-
ture. Although Winston was a compe-
tent guitarist, he couldn’t really play the
organ. “None of us could play, but we
was keen,” Lane recalled. “Jimmy
couldn’t play, and on top of it he had an
ego as if he could play, so he had to go.”
He didn’t fit in a literal sense, either,
for he was anything but small and tow-
ered above his bandmates. When the
group’s notorious manager Don Arden
(obituary July 24, 2007) kitted them all
out in jackets with a 32in chest size,
Winston couldn’t get into his. In some
of the group’s early publicity photos he
can be seen posing jacketless while his
three bandmates look resplendent in
Carnaby Street’s finest threads.
It was not long before Winston fell
out with Arden, who was reputed to
have mafia connections and whose
business methods included robbing his
young charges blind and dangling his
business rivals out of third-storey
windows by their ankles.
“Against all good advice we ended up
signing for him,” Winston recalled. “We
were in his office sitting by his big desk.
He was in a three-piece suit with a cigar
in his mouth and had the look of
success about him. We were young and
gullible and he was Mr Big.”
To Arden’s chagrin, Winston, who
was several years older than his band-
mates, was the only one who ques-
tioned him about the group’s earnings.
Arden also took particular exception to
a deal in which Winston’s older brother,
Derek, was paid 10 per cent of the tak-
ings from live gigs as the Small Faces’
roadie. He suggested that Winston
might want to leave and form another
group. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“I felt very let down. I’d done as much as
anybody else to make the band success-
ful,” Winston said. His only recom-
pense was that with Arden rapaciously
sequestering the Small Faces’ earnings
and putting the group’s members on aShe championed the
young Ralph Lauren
and a shy Donna Karan
[email protected]MARK SHAWmiserly £20 weekly wage, Winston was
no poorer out of the group than he had
been in it. “I missed out on the fame but
I certainly didn’t miss out on any
fortune,” he noted.
James Edward Winston Langwith
was born in 1945 at the Pigeons Hotel,
Stratford, east London, where his
father, Bill Langwith, was the landlord.
By the mid-1950s the family had moved
to the Ruskin Arms in nearby East
Ham, the venue where the Small Faces
were born.
On leaving school he spent three
years at drama school and landed a few
uncredited parts. When Marriott and
Lane walked into the Ruskin Arms he
had completed his course the previous
week and was celebrating by compering
a musical evening in the pub and sing-
ing and playing with the resident band.
His appeal to the Small Faces was
obvious. He owned an organ as well as
a guitar, his brother had transport and
there was an upstairs room in his
father’s pub where the nascent group
could rehearse.After a few warm-up shows at the
Ruskin Arms, the Small Faces’ first paid
gig came at the East Ham youth centre.
They knew only five songs but Winston
recalled that “with different variations
we got away with it”.
The success of the group’s debut
single led to the band appearing in the
1965 teen movie Dateline Diamonds. It
was Winston’s last hurrah with the
group. He formed Jimmy Winston and
the Reflections, which later became
Winston’s Fumbs, whose 1967 psyche-
delic single, Real Crazy Apartment has
since become a cult classic.
He also resurrected his acting career,
appearing on the West End stage in
Hair and on television in the 1970s se-
ries Hazell and in Doctor Who. He went
on to run a successful sound equipment
business from his Essex home and in
later years appeared at Small Faces
fans’ conventions back where it had all
started at the Ruskin Arms.
“I loved those early times,” he said. “It
was great to be on stage performing
something we’d only been doing for
two weeks and getting away with it.”Jimmy Winston, musician and actor,
was born on April 20, 1945. He died of
unknown causes on September 26,
2020, aged 75Winston, second left, and the bandculminating with the “Mademoiselle
Makeover” at Saks department store.
A young Sylvia Plath was asked to in-
terview the novelist Elizabeth Bowen
for Mademoiselle while a guest editor at
the magazine in 1953. She had previous-
ly won the magazine’s fiction contest —
and $500 — for her short story Sunday
at the Mintons. The internship
precipitated a mental health crisis, and
Plath drew on the experience at Made-
moiselle, rendered as the New York
magazine Ladies’ Day in her novel The
Bell Jar (1963).
The vision of the first editor, Betsy
Blackwell, was for a magazine to “nour-
ish young women inside and out,” said
Locke. Yet by 1971, when she became
Mademoiselle’s
editor-in-chief,
Condé Nast exec-
utives wanted to
play down the
magazine’s intel-
lectual content, in
favour of “lighter,
sexier” articles.
Locke refused
point blank:
“Never in a million
years would Made-
moiselle go in the
Cosmopolitan di-
rection. We’re just
not that kind of
magazine,” she said.
Gravelly-voiced,
and avid for new
ideas, she had wide-
ranging cultural
interests including
music, contempo-
rary British painters
and theatre. She
hired Joyce Carol Oates to review
books, Andy Warhol to provide sketch-
es, and Truman Capote to write short
stories, and asked Germaine Greer and
John Updike to write about female
sexuality.
Locke cut a dashing figure, with a
quirky style strong on chunky bracelets
and necklaces that was a far remove
from the pearl-chokered chic of Black-
well. Occasionally she wore a necklace
made of forks from the Crillon Hotel
and bent into shape by her husband.
The counsel she dispensed from the
magazine’s dark green and pink editori-
al conference room was kind but always
practical: “Try it on, sit down, cross
your legs, look in the mirror, be realis-
tic,” she advised women trying on their
first mini-skirt.
In 1980 she was fired by the editorial
director of Condé Nast for refusing to
take Mademoiselle downmarket. It
eventually shut down in 2001. Months
after Locke’s departure the magazine
had printed a guide to vibrators.
The resilient Locke did not look back:
within a year of losing her post as editor,
she was thriving as a producer and co-
host of groundbreaking television
shows with a focus on fashion and
high-profile guests including Calvin
Klein and Oscar de la Renta.
Edith Rosenberg Laub, “Edie”, was
born in Vienna in 1921 to Herman, a
buyer at a department store and Dora
(née Hochberg) a housewife. She mem-
orised reams of Goethe to recite to her
school principal, and was shocked
when the schoolmates she had consid-
ered friends thrust open the windows as
the Nazis invaded Vienna in 1938 to
shout, “it stinks of Jews in here”.
Her father lost his job and Locke had
to leave her school, where she had
tutored her peers in Latin, maths and
German. In an unpublished memoir,
she wrote that she had never forgottenLocke
Greer to write on sex
Locke in front of
Wells Cathedral
in 1952e
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