Deep Pencil - the musings of Morgan Bell

In the early seventies, however, Lagerfeld fell in love with a witty and mischievous French aristocrat named Jacques de Bascher. Lagerfeld supported him financially, but they never lived together, and friends say that the union was—as Lagerfeld has always insisted—platonic, based on shared affinities for literature, clothing, and style. (De Bascher once told a journalist that Lagerfeld’s sole loves were Coca-Cola and chocolate cake.) When de Bascher died of AIDS, in 1989, Lagerfeld was inconsolable; he sobbed when discussing him with a reporter for Vanity Fair in 1992. In his diet book, he says that his weight gain, which began in the late nineteen-eighties, was due to his despair over de Bascher’s illness and death. Today, however, Lagerfeld insists that he is above such attachments, adopting the attitude he expressed in a conversation with Interview in 1975, in which he said, “I never fall in love. I am just in love with my job.” In this way, Lagerfeld seems to be modelling himself on another prolific creator with a sense of the Zeitgeist, Andy Warhol.

By his own account, Cliff has got drunk three times in his life and had sex twice (in 1960). The man who once told an interviewer he would remain single until he was '25 at least', has had a series of close female friends – notably Una Stubbs, Olivia Newton-John and Sue Barker – but never married. 'I'm aware of the rumours, but I am not gay,' he stated in a 1996 interview for the Daily Mail. Apparently happy with his Bachelor Boy image, he added, 'There is no room in my life for drugs, fights, divorce, adultery, sadism, unnecessary fuss and sex.'