Over the course of her storied career, which began on Fleet Street when she was 17, Shirley saw beauty evolve from potions and lotions into a business estimated by McKinsey & Company to be worth upwards of $600 billion worldwide. “From a front-row vantage point, I’ve watched the beauty business grow from a cottage industry into an extraordinary monolith,” Shirley said in Vogue in 1994.
“I credit Shirley a lot for moving with the times at Vogue,” says Amy Astley, the Global Editorial Director of Architectural Digest. Amy started at Vogue in 1993, as the associate beauty editor under Shirley. “I was young and green, and my arrival coincided with grunge and waves of change in the beauty and fashion worlds. Shirley was an excellent businesswoman, along with a creative force and a generous mentor.”
Shirley loved her job, and she loved Vogue. I’d met Shirley in the mid-1970s, when we were both houseguests at the Southampton home of the late Margaret and Winston Frost. She and Mrs. Frost were close, and I was a friend of their daughter, the artist Dora Frost. Other than the time when Dora and I went to the opening of a disco in Manhattan and saw Truman Capote (another Frost family friend), seven sheets to the wind, wipe out on the dance floor, Shirley was the first published writer I ever met. I remember seeing her in Southampton between lunches and dinners, balancing her manual typewriter on the bed in her guest room, editing the pages of her second novel. On my first day at Vogue in 1989, I found my way to the beauty department to say hello. Upon entering her lair, I was struck by many pleasant smells.
“It smells so good here, Shirley,” I exclaimed.
“Well, it should,” she scolded me. “It’s the Vogue beauty department.”
Shirley was born Shirley Singer to a working-class East End London family. Leonine, not just in appearance but also in energy and determination, she always knew that she wanted to be a writer. When she was 11, she even wrote herself a note to be opened when she turned 21. “The opening line was, I want to be an author—unfortunately spelt with an ‘er,’” she later recalled. “Because it was the end of the war when I wrote it, living with The Blitz in London, I also, not surprisingly, included my will.”
Despite the misgivings of her family and the exhausting commute from the suburbs to Fleet Street during her first marriage, which resulted in the first of her two beloved sons, Shirley was determined to work. She found her writing voice at the Evening Standard, edited by Charles Wintour, the London newspaper legend and father of Anna Wintour, and remained a lifelong friend of the Wintour parents and children.
While Shirley was interviewing for the Evening Standard, the wealthy entrepreneur Cyril Lord, known as the British “carpet king,” fell in love with her. After they married, home included his castle in Ireland, covered in wall-to-wall carpeting, which was unusual as far as Anglo-Irish castles go, then or now. (Unless, of course, you were the “carpet king.”)
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