Grace Coddington on publishing her long-awaited memoirs

Grace Coddington's cat Pumpkin has become something of a celebrity, not unlike her owner. Along with Karl Lagerfeld's pampered cat, Choupette, Pumpkin has a high profile to live up to, not to mention a Balenciaga bag named after her. 'Pumpkin, she's so famous! Well, she's getting a little spoilt; she's like, "Do we have to drive in that car? Couldn't we have a limousine?"' laughs Coddington, a cat obsessive and author of the 2006 book The Catwalk Cats . She even bought her cat a pumpkin costume for Hallowe'en.

Coddington, the creative director of American Vogue , has a very British sense of humour. We saw it displayed when she unwittingly stole the limelight from her boss, Anna Wintour, in the 2007 documentary The September Issue , about American Vogue 's biggest issue ever, all 840 pages of it. She had fought against appearing in the film, slamming doors in the director's face and swearing whenever a camera was in her vicinity so they would have to edit her out.

READ: Grace Coddington collaborates with Balenciaga

'For pretty much all my years at British Vogue , [she started there in 1968] I, like all the other fashion editors, was pretty anonymous - and that was fine. We were under this great editor, Beatrix Miller. She was fabulous. It was a different time and she did not approve of any kind of publicity. You just didn't do it and you didn't want to do it - not like now, when everybody wants to have a story about them. I don't, except I know it's going to sell the book.'

She wants to publicise her memoirs (for which she is rumoured to have been paid $1.2 million), which she has been working on for the past two and a half years, since being approached by a publisher after The September Issue . She is not a writer, so she collaborated on the book with her long-term friend Michael Roberts, who is the fashion and style director at Vanity Fair . 'Nothing these days is a one-man show,' she says, adding, 'But the stories are mine.'

Grace Coddington in Mary Quant's minidress and shorts set with the designer in 1966, photographed by Eric Swayne

She likes to keep a low profile. 'It's a nightmare at fashion shows - it's all about celebrities walking in and being filmed and having their moment. A lot of people in the front row are there to be seen; they are not there to see the clothes. People don't take notes any more. I hate that. Every season when it comes to collection time, you have to take a deep breath and try and ignore all that crazy stuff going around. I find it distracting. I just want to see the clothes.'

READ: Behind the scenes on The September Issue

But Coddington was not allowed to dodge the cameras for the documentary. Wintour insisted that the crew follow her on one of her fashion shoots, and Coddington cleverly turned the situation to her advantage when she used the cameraman, Bob, (Robert Richman) as the subject of one of her shoots. Wintour loved the pictures but bluntly suggested that Bob's stomach be slimmed down in the retouching, which resulted in another great on-screen eye-rolling moment from Coddington. 'But he's since lost weight. I think [the weight gain] was because he was hanging around us and living the grand life and being in Paris and having good meals.' And were the final pictures retouched? 'No,' smiles Coddington. 'I think I won that battle.'

Coddington's role in The September Issue has made her a national treasure, both in Britain and America. 'I live in Chelsea and all the gay boys love me. They all dress up as me at Hallowe'en, me and Anna,' she says with another of her knowing smiles.

Coddington's office on the 12th floor of the Condé Nast building in Manhattan has a window looking out on to Times Square, and two desks facing each other - one is hers; the other belongs to her assistant, who busies herself at her computer while Coddington allows herself to be interviewed, sipping from a paper cup of what I imagine must be the lukewarm dregs of a coffee. A youthful 70, she is wearing a nondescript black top and trousers and dark red lipstick on an otherwise make-up-free face. With her cloud of bright red hair (the celebrity hairdresser Leonard, who opened his House of Leonard salon in London in the 1960s, and his colourist, Daniel Galvin, first coloured and permed it in 1971, and she now dyes it using henna every three weeks) and her milky white skin, Grace Coddington has become something of a star, recognised wherever she goes - particularly on the subway, which she rides to and from her office every day. 'I'm having fun being recognised. It's not as though I'm a rock star where people are very aggressive. I guess I'm too old to lead a really exciting life; they are not trying to catch me out with a new boyfriend or something. It's mostly all the kids, which is funny.'

Behind her are shelves filled with back issues of Vogue and numerous cat ornaments. 'I have every cat book that has ever been printed - even in Japanese,' she says. People send them to her. The office is very modern, black desk and shelves with bright white walls. She has a computer but doesn't like to sit in front of a screen all day, so her assistant prints out emails for Coddington to go through. She apologises for the clutter ('it follows me, I mean just look at it!'). Behind her sits a copy of her memoirs from the publisher, with different treatments for the cover.

Coddington models the famous five-point bob, by Vidal Sassoon

I am sitting on a small leather sofa. At one point Hamish Bowles, Vogue 's international editor at large, also British, breezes in with one of Vogue 's recent coffee-table books. 'Grace, darling, can I leave this with you to sign? It's for Dries Van Noten, OK?'

Coddington's book, called simply Grace: A Memoir , tells the tale of a young girl growing up in the hotel that her family ran in Anglesey. The hotel was only really open for the summer, when the weather was fine, and would then be filled with visiting friends. She had a sister, Rosemary, who was five years older than her, and a cousin, Michael, who lived nearby and was like a brother to her.

It was an idyllic childhood. Coddington had a sailing boat she would go out in for hours on end, and a supply of instant playmates when the hotel was open. When she was 11, however, her father died quite suddenly, after being diagnosed with lung cancer. 'My mother did pretty well; she was a strong woman. I think she probably made most of the decisions even when my father was around. She managed. She wasn't young, she had me fairly late, in her 40s so by the time I was 10 or 11 she was in her 50s.'

Her mother was extremely frugal and wouldn't throw anything away, particularly string and paper bags. 'In the winter she brought all the plants in so they were all over the windowsills. Geraniums. I hate geraniums, but she brought them in so they wouldn't die from the cold.' She also collected jam jars, which she couldn't throw away. Coddington recalls being embarrassed by her mother's clutter and didn't like to bring friends home to see it.

Her mother was, she says, 'always knitting'. She made jumpers and cardigans for the girls, and even a swimsuit, and did a lot of tapestry. 'She taught me to knit, but I found it was kind of monotonous.' Instead, Coddington learnt to sew. She bought out-of-date Vogue magazines from nearby Holyhead, and was transported by the fashion stories - particularly those by Norman Parkinson, whom she was later to work with, both as a model and as a fashion editor. She also bought Vogue dressmaking patterns and made versions of the clothes she saw in the magazine. 'When I was old enough, I made suits. There were no fashion shops there.'

Although Coddington says they had very little money, she attended a private convent school as a day girl. The other girls in her village thought she was a bit of a snob in her posh school uniform. 'They were all rude and pushy and rough and we weren't,' she tells me. At school she was shy but had a friend, Angela. As soon as they were old enough, about 18, they moved to London together, to a flat in Notting Hill. It was 1959.

Coddington, who was 5ft 9in with a 33in bust and hips and an 18in waist, had seen an ad for the Cherry Marshall Modelling School, so to save up for the fees she got a job as a waitress in the Stockpot in Knightsbridge (along with all the other debutantes and aspiring models and actresses). 'It was a little nerve-racking if you were shy. You met a lot of people there. It set me up one way and another.' It was there she met Tinker Patterson, a painter who happened to model for Norman Parkinson. She recalls going to spend the night with him and when it was time to go to bed, she found a condom laid out on the pillow. He was her first affair. Patterson introduced Coddington to Parkinson and she did her first shoot with him as a model at his farm in the countryside, running through the woods with no clothes on. 'It didn't really occur to me if it was right or wrong. Maybe I was incredibly thick,' she laughs. 'I knew that he was a really good photographer because I'd seen all his pictures before. I sort of idolised him. So I wasn't scared he would jump on me - anyway he was much older than me.' She doesn't recall telling her mother about the pictures and says they were probably published only in a trade magazine that her mother wouldn't have seen.

Coddington's first 'model card', which piqued Vogue's interest

Coddington went on to win the Young Idea category in a Vogue model competition in 1959 and started working regularly with Parkinson, Terence Donovan and Barry Lategan. In 1963 Vidal Sassoon cut her hair into the famous five-point bob, which she recalls had an enormous impact at the time. 'It was radical because it totally changed hair. You just shook your head and it was perfect, you could run your fingers through it - before, you'd have it all backcombed up and it would last a week.'

The same year, as her modelling career was taking off, disaster struck. The car Coddington was in with her then boyfriend, James Gilbert, an account executive and amateur aviator who took her flying across the Channel at weekends, crashed, and she ended up with the wing mirror in her eye. Her eyelid was virtually sliced off (she says they managed to save her eyelashes). She went through several operations and plastic surgery but was left badly scarred, and had to wear sunglasses - something she says she has hated doing ever since. She didn't work again for two years, apart from with her friend Terence Donovan, who photographed her carefully from one side.

Despite her accident, Coddington continued to be in the middle of the fashion universe, which - with Yves Saint Laurent opening his own house in 1961 - happened to be in Paris. With the help of healthy applications of eyeliner to disguise her scar, she became popular with the more avant-garde fashion set and started to work more in Paris, regularly flying there for shoots for French Elle . She started to go out with a photographer's agent, Albert Koski (who was often mistaken for Warren Beatty), and hung out in St Tropez with Catherine Deneuve and David Bailey, at La Coupole in Paris, and back in London at clubs such as the Ad Lib with Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Marianne Faithfull and the Stones and the Beatles. The couple were together for several years and he had offices in Mayfair, so they commuted between London and Paris. She still kept her small rented flat in west London Studios next to Chelsea's football ground. Coddington became pregnant with Koski's child - the only time she ever conceived, she writes - but had a stillbirth at seven months after her Mini, with her inside, was overturned by some aggressive football fans.

READ: Grace Coddington bags a seven figure deal for her memoirs

In 1967 Coddington and Koski were engaged and sharing a pied-à-terre in Kensington. Although she writes that she thought the relationship had a future, she discovered he was also seeing Catherine Deneuve's sister Françoise Dorléac. Coddington and Koski were in bed together one morning when Koski received a telephone call telling him that Dorléac had died in a car crash (she was 25). So at that point, his relationship with Coddington ended, too.

Now in her late 20s, Coddington realised she wanted more than a career as a model and secured an interview with the editor of British Vogue , Beatrix Miller. She started as a junior fashion editor there in 1968 and stayed for 19 years, working her way up to fashion director, researching ideas at the Chelsea Antiques Market, where she would find inspiration in everything from 1920s posters to 1930s cocktail shakers or a First World War army greatcoat, and working with photographers including Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Bailey, Donovan, Lategan and Parkinson, with whom she went on her first shoot on location, to Jamaica in 1970.

Coddington always had a boyfriend in tow, usually with a glamorous car. It was a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud in the case of the fashionable restaurateur Michael Chow, whom she married - briefly - in 1969 before falling in love with a penniless Vietnamese photographer, Duc, who had assisted Guy Bourdin. She met him on one of her frequent trips to Paris. 'I guess you'd call it a bohemian life if being poor means bohemian, but it was nice. We always ate well. Paris is such a beautiful, romantic city.' Duc taught her how to make a Vietnamese soup, which she still occasionally makes when she has the time to go to Chinatown to buy the ingredients.

Coddington at her wedding party with Willie Christie in London, 1976

Coddington and Chow divorced in 1973 but remained friends. In 1976 she married Willie Christie, another photographer (another ill-fated relationship), and during the short-lived marriage she was able to adopt her nephew, Tristan, following the death of her sister, Rosemary. In 1962 Rosemary had left her husband and had come to live with Coddington in London. She had fallen in with a druggy crowd and ended up having two sons and moving back to Holyhead. She had taken an overdose of Valium and was taken to hospital, where her was stomach pumped. Something went wrong and her lungs collapsed. She died on Christmas Day 1972. When she was recording her book for the audio version recently, Coddington found herself in tears at this recollection. 'I was shocked; I didn't expect it to be so emotional,' she says. Rosemary's younger son, Finn, was 18 months old when she died, and was taken into the care of his father's mother, while Tristan, who was seven, was fostered by a friend of Rosemary's. He boarded at a prep school near the hotel where Coddington grew up and she tried - unsuccessfully at first because she wasn't married - to adopt him. When she married Christie, Tristan was finally allowed to live with her. She looked after him and paid his school fees until he left.

IN PICTURES: Grace Coddington's early years, by Willie Christie

That same year, Coddington left Vogue , having witnessed the whirlwind of change that Wintour brought with her when she arrived in 1985. She was hired as the design director at Calvin Klein in New York (she was given a bodyguard to accompany her to the bank to deposit her first month's wages, which was more than a year's salary at Vogue). But her time there was short-lived, and when Wintour was made editor of US Vogue in 1988, Coddington called and asked if she could work with her again.

Coddington and Wintour started at American Vogue on the same day. Wintour had taken over from Grace Mirabella. Coddington recalls wearing a white shirt and a pair of trousers with a cardigan tied around her waist to make her look 'less fat'. She continues to work with a range of photographers in the magazine each month, from Steven Klein to Arthur Elgort, with whom she produced the typically tongue-in-cheek story in this year's November issue with the model Karlie Kloss cast as a fashion-crazed housewife. It is her humour, her sense of adventure (she transports her readers to far-flung locations just as she was transported as a child reading Vogue back in Anglesey) and her innate fashion sense that make her pictures so special.

I ask if Coddington gave the manuscript of her memoirs to Wintour to read, which she did. 'Oh my God, I was nervous, of course I was. Because she and I are very entwined - and I was nervous that I had said too much about her, from her point of view. But I was also nervous that she would think it wasn't well written or not well laid out. But she wrote me a really long letter saying she loved it and that was a big relief. She trusts me. I don't have anything horrible to say about her anyway, and I know everyone out there is probably hoping I get really nasty about her. A) I wouldn't, and B) I don't have anything bad to say. She's my boss and you have to respect that she makes the magazine what it is, and we all contribute. Ultimately it's her show.'

Coddington with Dider Malige in 1981, before they began dating, photographed by Barry Lategan

Coddington was 48 when she moved to New York, which meant she could spend more time with her boyfriend, the hairdresser Didier Malige, whom she met on a shoot in the early 1980s. Did she move in with him? 'No, he moved in with me.' She found a 'really pretty' apartment in Greenwich Village with an outdoor space and they continued to live there until four years ago, when they moved to a smaller apartment in Chelsea with an outdoor terrace. 'I have a duplex. It sounds huge; it's not, it's tiny. But you can open all the windows and the terrace kind of extends your apartment somehow. Also, the cats like it.' Coddington has a second Persian cat, called Bart.

Coddington and Malige also have a house in the Hamptons. They go there every weekend, loading the cats into the car, much to Pumpkin's discomfort. Pumpkin hated the journeys so much that Coddington took her to see a cat psychic called Christine Agro, whom she met through the photographer Bruce Weber. 'She was much better this weekend,' Coddington says. Even though the rest of the New York fashion world seems to decamp to the Hamptons at the weekend, Coddington says once she's there, she doesn't go out. She and Malige, who likes fly fishing and who built Coddington a sailing boat, which he enjoys going out in more than she does, are private and keep to themselves. 'We seldom entertain and seldom leave the house. Once you get outside it's a nightmare in the Hamptons; so many people. You can't cross the highway without being run over.' They have a swimming-pool, which she says is something she never thought she would have the luxury of owning. So in the summer she swims, goes for bike rides, potters in the garden and relaxes. 'I really enjoy doing nothing,' she says.

'Grace: A Memoir' by Grace Coddington (Chatto & Windus) is available for £23 plus £1.35 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk )

Via: Grace Coddington on publishing her long-awaited memoirs