Like the mini-skirt she is known for inventing, 40-year fashion veteran Tiel bares it all on sex, love and Elizabeth Taylor.
“Life itself is the party” in the author’s debut—and what a delicious romp it is. Her memoir reads like all of the juiciest bits of your favorite gossip magazine, pushing back the curtains of an over-the-top life among the who’s who of the ’60s-’80s, including the original Hollywood power couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Readers will frolic along with Tiel as a 17-year-old sassy Greenwich Village “it-girl” who called herself “Peaches LaTour.” Later, as a French couture designer, Tiel summoned the gall to tell legendary designer Coco Chanel with a smile, “I am you—when you were young.” Much like the red-leather catsuits and hot-pink caftans for which she is known, Tiel’s tour through the past is fun, flirty, flattering and, above all, revealing without being sleazy. She recalls, with great affection, Taylor and Burton’s “private, intense love and eternal interest in each other,” Miles Davis’ “preference for Jewish girls as lovers” and her father’s sage advice to never “marry for security,” and that “if you make your own money, you never have to eat shit from a man.” The author rounds it out with additional tidbits, such as Sophia Loren’s pasta recipe and Edith Head’s life lessons. An enjoyable confection.