reviews_and_ramblings | Pat Booth (?

Pat Booth was an icon of the Sixties. She appeared on the covers of Vogue and Harpers & Queen, was a muse to photographers such as Norman Parkinson and David Bailey and she opened a pair of boutiques on the Kings Road in Chelsea in the 1960s.

She was the daughter of an East End boxer and a woman of great determination who in the 1970s decided to give up modelling and become a photographer herself. She photographed such well-known figures as David Bowie and Bianca Jagger, as well as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Some of her photographs have been displayed in the National Portrait Gallery. Her photojournalism appeared in The Sunday Times and Cosmopolitan and she published a book, Master Photographers.

In the 1980s she turned her hand to what proved to be her most lucrative career: writing novels about “sex and shopping”. The personalities of many of the heroines in her string of racy novels were not dissimilar to her own. They were headstrong women, often models, who got what they wanted. Her books, which included The Lady and the Champ, Palm Beach, Beverly Hills and The Sisters (thought by some to based on the lives of Joan and Jackie Collins), sold millions of copies.

In her novel Malibu she wrote of one character: “God, he was extraordinary. He was an eagle, and a lion, the strong brow racing down the proud aquiline nose to a sensuous, knowing mouth.”

After publishing novels in Britain she negotiated a lucrative deal with the American publisher Crown, which paid her an advance equal to that paid to her more famous peer, Judith Krantz. Booth never claimed that her mildly erotic novels were great works of prose, but they were generally well received as good reading for the beach.

Booth was romantically linked in the gossip columns with several celebrities, including the actor Timothy Dalton, the boxer John Conteh, the photographer James Wedge and the baronet Sir William Pigott-Brown before getting married in 1976 to Garth Wood (died in 2001), a merchant banker who, with her encouragement, retrained as a psychiatrist.

His book, The Myth of Neurosis, which argues that psychiatrists should confine themselves to “real” mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and manic depression, caused a stir when it was published. The couple had two children and lived a jetset lifestyle with homes in London, New York and Palm Beach.

When her husband died, Booth started a new life with her children, buying a penthouse in the Montevetro tower in Battersea, which they moved into with just one suitcase each.

In 2008 she was married to Sir Frank Lowe, the advertising executive, in an impromptu ceremony in Barbados, attended only by her fellow Sixties model Pattie Boyd, the former wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton, and Sir Cliff Richard.

Booth was always reluctant to reveal her exact date of birth. She was brought up in the East End where her mother and sister ran jellied eel stalls. Her father was a dockworker and bare-knuckle boxer at fairgrounds. She was often present at his fights as the towel girl. She left school at 15 to work in a department store by day and as a waitress by night. Her father did not believe she could make it as a model, but she was determined to prove him wrong. Despite being too short to become a catwalk model, Booth’s perseverance eventually paid off. Equally, it was her first husband’s disbelief that she could write a book that she said spurred her on to become a successful novelist.

“I’ve achieved everything I set out to achieve,” she once said. “My expectations are never too high and I continue until I’ve succeeded.”

Booth was a devout Roman Catholic and a regular church-goer, and she provided help to women who became pregnant but were not able to support a child. In one case she adopted the baby of one such mother.

Booth is survived by her second husband, Sir Frank Lowe, and her son and daughter from her first marriage.

Pat Booth, model, photographer and author, died of cancer on May 11, 2009. She is believed to have been in her sixties

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6282137.ece