Molly Parkin

Chelsea’s notorious alcoholic fashion editor comes to the Portobello Film Festival

One of this year’s Portobello Film Festival highlights is a film that was screened last year, back again by popular demand. It’s an unusual piece of film, a 60 minute study of one woman, featuring her simply talking to camera about her life. A couple of costume changes provides the only visual action. The woman is Molly Parkin; the life more eventful than most;the film simply titled Moll and made by one of her former fiancées, Malcolm Hart.
Molly Parkin: former hat designer for Biba, fashion editor of 1960s magazine Nova, artist, novelist, famous drinker about town and former boozing buddy of Francis Bacon at the Colony. Her string of lovers includes George Melly, John Mortimer and Louis Armstrong as well as husbands art dealer Michael Parkin and artist Patrick Hughes and friends past and present span Quentin Crisp, Terence Donovan, Paco Rabane, Anita Pallenberg and Divine, all of whom come up in her monologue.
Having lived in Chelsea for much of the 60s, in a grand house in Old Church Street (handy for her beloved Chelsea Arts Club), Parkin, now in her 70s, is back on her patch, though this time in the less salubrious surroundings of the Worlds End Estate.
“I love it here, darling,” says Molly, showing me round the little pink flat that the council provided after her decline into bankruptcy and infirmity. “The ghost of Christine Keeler echoes around this estate – this is where they shoved her, too. The two of us good time girls in the same place! But I feel at home surrounded by refugees from all over the world - I’m a refugee from Wales myself. And everyone knows that in the life of an artist, penury is part of the landsape.” Molly is dressed in a flowing black kaftan with an Indian sequinned print, a black turban, lots of make up and big dangling earrings featuring photographs of herself “in my former glory, when I was a fashion editor”. She shows me proudly around her bathroom, a swirl of pinks and oranges designed by “my gay adopted son” that was, she says, highly praised on a recent visit by “my old friend Barbara Hulanicki”.
Molly launches easily into her story, the story told in the film, about her drinking, her marriages, her abusive father, the loss of her painting muse and its return, her days as a reluctant fashion editor, the orgies in New York, the Stones’ mansion in Cheyne Walk, more drinking, an alcoholic blackout on stage aborting a brief acting career and the eventual descent into the gutter (literally, outside Smithfield market), followed by two decades of AA-aided sobriety. “I haven’t had a drink or a cigarette or slept with a stranger, which I did on a daily basis, for 21 years now,” she calculates.
Molly started out as a painter and was never very comfortable as a fashion editor, though she made her name at Nova and moved on to Harpers and then The Sunday Times. “But I found the world of fashion very cold and superficial,” she says. “I didn’t feel it to be a kind profession and my first instinct was to recoil at the commercialism. I especially loathed Harpers, which was
a Tory publication and I’m extremely left wing, as you’d expect coming from the Welsh valleys with a Romany background. But despite always being a maverick, I was lauded with prizes – I’m not saying I didn’t have fun, because there was a lot of champagne and by that time I’d really got the taste for champagne.”
While she was at The Sunday Times (1969-1972, she guesses) Molly and her second husband Patrick Hughes lived in St Quentin’s Avenue W10, with her two daughters and his three sons, in a vast house which she painted purple outside. Here she used to effortlessly organise dinners for 30 people all the time. “The drink hadn’t started to get in the way yet, it used to give me energy.” Perhaps surprisingly, she loved living near Wormwood Scrubs,
where she used to take the children on Christmas Day “to send a prayer to those inside not having presents. My daughter Sophie still shudders at the thought. She says it’s not normal – but, you see, to a chapel girl like me it is normal.”
It wasn’t until she stopped drinking that Molly returned to painting, which is what she’s occupied with now. These
days she paints all night in her Worlds End flat, with exhibitions scheduled later this year at the CCA Galleries as well as at the Muse in Portobello Road. “I’ve got a
great fondness for Notting Hill and now it’s come back into my life with the film festival and the show,” says Molly.
Welcome back, Molly. l