Look Sharp

Noelle Campbell-Sharp is part of a grizzled, glamorous generation that no longer exists. Outspoken, vital and enormously creative, she comes from the mythical era of a bygone time, when Dublin bristled with imagination and artistic talent. I heard about Campbell-Sharp before I met her. I was told a story by a mutual friend, a classic-car dealer who used to drive around London with a monkey on his shoulder. One day he stopped at some traffic lights on the Kings Road. Suddenly, the car door opened and a woman jumped in, bought the car on the spot, and when the lights turned green, drove off. Now in her seventies, Campbell-Sharp has lost none of her single-minded spontaneity. Once the powerful editor of a host of glossy magazines, she is now the proprietor of Dublin’s Origin Gallery. Her greatest achievement, however, has been the creation of Cill Rialaig, a wild and remote artist’s retreat that overlooks the shores of Kerry. Artists from all corners of the world have made the pilgrimage to this wild and sequestered corner of Ireland, where the view of the Atlantic and the stark, sweeping landscape holds a powerful creative resonance.

Campbell-Sharp began her career in Dublin as a woman in a man’s world. One day, to the horror of her boss, she came into work wearing a trouser suit. “They didn’t like their ladies wearing trousers,” Campbell-Sharp recalled, “My boss told me ‘either the trousers go or we won’t be able to keep you on.’” She chose the trousers, and her second job found her working in PR at the Gaiety Theatre, where, upon arrival she was introduced to her first client, Peter O’Toole. “He looked at me with piercing eyes,” she recounts, “and growled, ‘What the fuck would I want with a PRO?’ I was shattered.” Not one to be defeated, Campbell-Sharpe was determined to soften him up. “I just had to break down his resistance,” she explained. She went out on her lunch break and brought a small, ceramic leprechaun. “Mr O’Toole,” she said to him, holding out her hand, “I think you may need a little luck.” He stared at her, and suddenly he grabbed the leprechaun from her outstretched palm and smiled.

Soon she met and married the fashion photographer, Neil Campbell-Sharp, and began to write fashion pieces to accompany his pictures. Her career in fashion journalism began to rapidly accelerate. She took over the staid society magazine, Irish Tatler, shortened the name to IT, and regenerated it into a modern, extraordinarily successful magazine.  Campbell-Sharp looks back on her opulent, hedonistic lifestyle at the time with hilarity. “I was very flashy,” she explains, “because it helped with the PR. I was always in the papers or on TV and I used to drive a Bentley Flying Spur. It was all about the way I lived my life.” A regular at the Shelbourne, Campbell-Sharp also used to haunt Barbarella’s —  the Krystle of its time — as well as Elizabeth’s on Leeson Street and Joy’s on Baggot Street. It was at this time that she formed her tempestuous friendship with Terry Keane, the notorious socialite and mistress of the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey. Soon they began to travel the world together. Campbell-Sharp had formed links with Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and an array of other international couture houses, and so they used to go to all the shows. Her resemblance to Vivienne Westwood proved to be particularly useful. “We were at a Jean Paul Gautier show,” she laughs, “and we forged a note to Gautier from Westwood. He was completely fooled and made a huge fuss of us. I began to get front row seats at all the shows.”

“My boss told me ‘either the trousers go or we won’t be able to keep you on.’” She chose the trousers.

She remembers one show particularly clearly.  She arrived early to view the John Bates collection and, as usual, made her way to the front row, where she found all the seats to be reserved. There was a man who was already seated and, surreptitiously, he removed the name card on the seat next to him, which belonged to the editor of American Vogue, and beckoned to Campbell-Sharp to sit next to him. “I asked him what he did, and he told me that he was a fashion photographer,” she recounts, “I told him he should have his equipment because this was a very famous designer, who was using very famous models.” She begins to cackle, “He told me I seemed very knowledgeable, and I told him that my husband was a fashion designer. ‘You could say he is the David Bailey of Ireland,’ I quipped. ‘That’s funny,’ he replied, ‘Because I’m the David Bailey of England.’”

Encouraged to look for foreign investment for her magazine empire, Campbell-Sharp struck a deal with the Czechoslovakian business mogul Robert Maxwell, a move that was to signal the end of her lucrative career in publishing. Over the years, Maxwell had accrued enormous debts, and when he was found dead in the Atlantic sea having fallen overboard his yacht, Campbell-Sharp faced financial ruin. “I lost something in the region of 10 million,” she shrugs, “I was probably the first person in Ireland to lose 10 million. A lot of males when they lose money become very uptight — they feel emasculated. I don’t think that women think about money in the same way. I was able to go to my house in the country, look around me and say, what am I going to do now?”

She did not have to wait long to find a new vocation, a passion that was to consume her entirely. She heard of local plans to build a ring-road through the middle of a local, crumbling hamlet that had been deserted in the famine and remained, hauntingly beautiful, balanced upon a cliff-face. “They were going to be destroying the last really beautifully preserved road on the Western European Coast,” Campbell-Sharp protests, “I said to the people, there’s no point complaining about this, we’ve got to buy that old village.” And that is precisely what she did. And, now that she possessed an ancient part of the community, she wanted to give something back to that community. She asked herself who she wanted living there and, a firm believer in the reciprocal power of art, the answer seemed clear — artists, poets, composers, those who could draw inspiration from the striking beauty of the surrounding landscape. She built an artists centre in a nearby village and artists in residency began teaching workshops and imparting their artisan skills to the wider community. “We unleashed this incredible latent talent,” she recalled. Campbell-Sharp is a patron of the Irish arts who really cares. A great talent herself, she has dedicated her life to fostering the talent in others, to diversifying and enriching the cultural life of her nation. Bold, flamboyant and strikingly unafraid, she is apprehensive about the artistic future of Ireland, the country that she has put so much of her self into. “I am worried,” she concluded, “about people who are in charge of vision who don’t have a vision themselves. Seeing is believing. You need to see it, and no one is willing to.”

Illustration by Alice Wilson.

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