I was seven years old when my family moved from London to New York. It was January 1992 and my mother had just been appointed editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. She was the editor of Fashion in the UK, where both my parents were from. She loved the job, having started as an assistant at the magazine two decades earlier. We had family and friends in London. One of my earliest memories was presenting flowers to Princess Diana. She and our mother had met during her time at Fashion. Looking back on it now, it all seems a little surreal. But even as a child, I had this strong feeling that it must have been a very special opportunity for her and our father to leave all that behind and travel across an ocean and around the world with me and my older brother Rob, who was 11 at the time. The chance to come to the US and have a magazine like Bazaar was one she couldn’t pass up.
It was a big change for all of us. I remember our first two or three months in New York, we lived in a hotel. The food was different. The weather was different. My brother and I had to learn new sports, like baseball and basketball, and make new friends.
Our mother wanted to make sure we stayed connected to our family in England, but at the same time she wanted us to be fully involved in the new family we saw forming around us in New York. The fashion world is a small one, so we were lucky to have people around us like Grace Coddington, our mother’s friend, who she had worked with at British Fashion. Grace herself had moved to the United States after becoming creative director of the American edition. Our mother also knew Patrick Demarchelier, who was one of the first photographers she hired to shoot for Bazaar. He, his wife Mia and their sons Gustaf, Arthur and Victor were incredibly welcoming to all of us, as was the editor-in-chief of Squire at the time Terry McDonell and his family.
Our parents were always very open and honest with us about everything. My brother and I are both adopted, we’ve known that our whole lives. Before our family moved to New York, they talked to us about the idea: why they wanted to do it, what we thought about it, what made us excited or uncomfortable. Even though we were young, they were always very open with us about things that might affect us, and I always felt like they really made an effort to include us in the decisions they were making for us and our family.
That openness and honesty proved especially important when we were told that our mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was December 1993, or just under two years after we had moved. It also came during what should have been a celebratory time for our mother. The reaction to her reinvention of Bazaar was overwhelmingly positive and she had fully adapted to life in the US, even befriending the country’s new first lady, Hillary Clinton, who had moved into the White House just months after our mother released her first song.
At the time, there wasn’t much of an internet connection to speak of – and very little information about ovarian cancer in general. The research that did exist really couldn’t explain what caused it or who was most at risk, although my mother suspected that fertility treatments she had undergone in England in the 1970s – which were ultimately unsuccessful – may have played a role in her developing the disease. Our parents told us that her cancer was stage III, that she would be undergoing treatment, and that there were challenges ahead.
However, most of our understanding of what ovarian cancer was came from what we saw with our own eyes. Over the next five and a half years, we witnessed all the ups and downs of our mother’s battle with the disease. But through it all, our parents never tried to hide how she was feeling. When she was in the hospital, we visited her every day.
Our mother also refused to let her illness define her or stop her from doing things that were important to her. Even when she was in the hospital, she held meetings with the Bazaar team, going through fashion boards and making decisions. Working with people who inspired her, with people she trusted, was one of the things she loved. In a way, I think it kept her going. She fought for us as a family and tried to be there for us, but that job meant so much to her. Not many people get the chance to do something they love, and it always stuck with me how she seemed to understand and appreciate that.
She was also very conscious of her time with us. We always had family dinners on Sundays, which is a very European thing, and she never let her job or her illness get in the way of her parenting. She loved to do things like go on family vacations and have cocktail parties. Obviously there were limitations because of her health, but I don’t remember ever hearing her say, “I can’t do that today.” She would find a way or find the energy to be a part of things – to be there as a leader, as a mother, and for the people in her life.
Our mother realized that as an editor of Bazaar, She had the ability to make a difference in other people’s lives. Not long after she began treatment, she began sharing what she was going through with the magazine’s audience in real time through her letters to the editor and a series of articles on the latest science around ovarian cancer. Bazaar also became a place where she could be open and honest – about what she was going through, the questions she had, the answers she was looking for, the uncertainty she was facing. I can’t speak for my mother, but I think she found that talking about things – even really difficult things, like an illness – helped to create a space for other people to talk about them. It was also a way to let those people know that whatever they were going through, they weren’t alone.
In many ways, that impulse was what led our mother to join the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, now known as the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance, or OCRA. She had heard about the organization from her oncologist, Peter Dottino. At the time, OCRF was primarily focused on funding medical research into ovarian cancer. But my mother, who became OCRF’s president in 1997, saw an even greater opportunity to raise awareness of the disease and help patients like her and families like us who were living with it.
Raising money to find new treatments — and a cure — for ovarian cancer remains OCRA’s core mission. But today, the organization operates on multiple fronts, supporting and advocating on behalf of patients and caregivers and focusing on improving outcomes and prevention.
September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. While our understanding of ovarian cancer has grown in the three decades since our mothers were diagnosed, there is still no cure or reliable way to screen for it. It is often significantly advanced before symptoms even appear. That’s why early detection is crucial. Genetic testing is now more widely available, and OCRA encourages anyone with a first-degree relative, such as a parent or sibling, who has been diagnosed with cancer to get tested. (More information about OCRA’s work, as well as recommendations and resources, can be found at ocrahope.org.)
It’s been 25 years since our mother passed away in April 1999. It’s still so nice to hear from people whose lives have been touched by her or her work, as an editor and as an advocate. I know her determination to talk about her own experience, to educate people about the disease and to raise money for research – and her passion for helping others – had a profound impact. But I think it all comes down to who she was as a person – and that openness and honesty. That, to me, was at the heart of everything she did.
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