In My Shoes: A Memoir (3 page)

Meanwhile, to continue my actual therapy, I immersed myself in the world of Narcotics Anonymous. I made new friends, but I also ran into a lot of people I’d known previously, never realizing until now that they, too, struggled with addiction. I still wanted to keep in touch with my old crowd, too, but I remember one night, going out to a club with Tara and Emily, then feeling so uncomfortable once I got there that I burst into tears and ran out.

Given my obsessive nature, being embedded in Jimmy’s world meant spending a fair amount of time just trying to organize and tidy up. The place was always a mess, and as I pushed my broom, I observed Jimmy as he molded lasts in the back with a couple of Malaysian workers or stretched the uppers on the shoes. Meanwhile, his niece,
Sandra—young, skinny, with long dark hair and bangs—sat at the worktable cutting patterns and stitching.

As I was to learn, Sandra was a key player in Jimmy’s operation, and in his psyche. She had been born on the Isle of Wight where her father and mother owned a Chinese restaurant. She’d wanted to go to fashion school but her parents refused, so she went to live with her mother’s sister Rebecca, who was Jimmy’s wife. Sandra spent a year at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, then went to work for her uncle in 1989.

Throughout my trade school time in Hackney, I was turning to my father for a sort of kitchen MBA. I even brought Jimmy over to Chester Row for a business lesson or two. My dad told him, “You should never accept a deal where your share isn’t on par with the investors. Fifty-fifty.” It was solid advice, but in just a few years it would come back to haunt us.

At the outset my dad made it clear that he wasn’t interested in being the investor who owned the other 50 percent. He wanted me to go out and raise the capital myself. So I pitched the idea to my friend Dodi, the son of Mohamed al-Fayed, owner of Harrods, and then to several of my dad’s wealthier friends. I made up a press book with all the clippings from
Vogue
that included credits for Jimmy, but everyone said no. Neither Jimmy nor I had the kind of track record that investors look for.

At the same time I felt a bond growing between my father and me that had never been allowed to flourish during my childhood. He had been very successful as an entrepreneur, and it remained to be seen whether or not I had inherited any of those skills. But I brought other
skills and other talents, as well as knowledge of this particular world, and of the particular generation I wanted to sell to.

After three months down in Hackney, I think I’d demonstrated all the determination that Jimmy—or my father—needed to see, but I still hadn’t raised any outside money. Dad lined up his friends David and Frederick Barclay, owners of the Ritz and the Telegraph newspapers and other prestige properties. They agreed to invest £100,000 and my dad would invest £50,000. Then I think my father reflected for a moment and said, “You know what? For that amount of money, I’m going to do it myself.” So he declined the Barclays’ offer and lined up lawyers to start negotiating a contract. We were going to launch a line of ready-to-wear shoes, as well as a chain of boutiques, organized under the company name Jimmy Choo Limited.

Jimmy’s role was to design the collection, and he would retain his couture business, which stood apart from this agreement. Our role was to provide the start-up money, management, and business expertise. Each party—my father and I being one, Jimmy the other—would own a 50 percent stake. (Jimmy nominally agreed to our suggestion that he give Sandra some shares from his half, but he never did.) Dad would be chairman. I would be managing director in charge of manufacturing, promotion, and marketing.

In May 1996, we all sat in the living room of the Chester Row house and signed the agreement. It was a big, fat booklet with enormously complicated legalese, which only added to Jimmy’s intense anxiety. He looked terrified, as if he could still bolt at any minute. Luckily, he had a lawyer from Schillings in London who kept turning to him to say, “Jimmy, this is a good deal. You should sign this. This is a really good deal.”

My father set up a corporate entity called Thistledown International Limited in the Virgin Islands as the vehicle for his investment. He then engaged a company called CI Law Trustees on the island of Jersey to hold the shares.

I simply assumed that these elaborate financial structures were a good idea—who was I to question my father’s judgment about money? And we both “assumed” that Jimmy Choo, cobbler to the upper crust, would flourish as Jimmy Choo the fashion-forward shoe designer. But as the saying goes, we live and learn.

Unwarranted assumptions in both cases led to unbelievably painful consequences, and yet we not only kept on going—we thrived. Truth be told, if we’d done everything right, if there had never been any sharp reversals and internecine battles, this story would not be nearly so interesting.

•  •  •  •

MANY YEARS LATER, AFTER I’D
launched Jimmy Choo to become a global brand, gone through three private-equity deals, and survived a hostile takeover; made headlines by getting my playboy ex-husband off the hook in a wiretapping case by testifying to his lovable incompetence; then become embroiled in another courtroom drama to keep my own mother from cheating me out of millions, Giles Hattersley wrote in the
Sunday Times
that I seemed “less an actual person than the heroine of some dicey Danielle Steel bonkathon.”

Looking back now, I suppose there’s some small bit of justice in the characterization.

The basic Danielle Steel conceit is to take a plucky heroine, set her
on a quest, then subject her to every villain and viper and pitfall imaginable, which is not an entirely bad summary of my life so far.

The formula came of age in silent movie serials like
The Perils of Pauline
, in which the always imperiled young woman did battle with pirates and rampaging Apaches, with each twelve-minute reel leading to a cliff-hanger. Danielle Steel’s version provides more sophisticated villains who often lurk in boardrooms and wear bespoke suits, and the perils lead more often to financial ruin than to the wheels of an oncoming train. Danielle’s damsel in distress must also have a certain look, her goals must involve the latest trends in business or media, and her environment must be saturated with bold-faced names, fabulous fashions, and other luxury goods. But what’s most essential is that this plucky young woman ultimately makes it through, and so much the better if her beginnings were inauspicious.

To the extent that any of that attaches to me, I have made it through, yet, oddly enough, the vulnerabilities that led to my mistakes, and to my being susceptible to the bullying of certain “villains” along the way, were born of the very same early experiences that fueled the life-and-death determination that allowed me to survive.

I simply never imagined when I started this journey just how many backstabbings, cliff-hangers, and oncoming trains lay ahead.

I
haven’t kept many photographs from my early life, but I did manage to hang on to a watercolor painting I did in primary school when I must have been about seven years old. It’s of a house and two stick figures, and on the back I wrote, “My parents hate me.”

Uncertainty about parental love is, unfortunately, a fact of life for many children. But my mother’s raging lunacy flared up so routinely that it left me in a constant state of bewilderment. I could never understand what I’d done to deserve her wrath.

Her animosity rarely escalated into violence. It was more of a steady drip, drip, drip of psychological assaults and her evident pleasure in hurting me. I was stupid. I was lazy. I was ugly. I was a hypochondriac. These were her endearments.

One Christmas—I was probably four or five—I woke up and walked into my parents’ bedroom, only to have my mother look at me and say, “What are you so excited for? You haven’t got anything.” I went back to my room and cried my eyes out. Later I went downstairs and there were presents after all. So what was the point of the cruelty?

The randomness of the little digs, as well as the raging invectives, left me like a lab mouse pressing the bar, hoping to get the food pellet,
but more often getting the electric shock, until I simply gave up in despair. At a very early age I simply learned to shut down and never show any emotion, either happy or sad.

The older I got, the more fully I internalized the lesson that the way to survive was to be invisible. Any time I showed up on her radar, whether because I was feeling good or feeling bad, I became a target. But the trigger for the most dramatic outbursts was any time my father showed me the least bit of attention. Whenever that happened, my mother would throw an absolute fit.

When I was small we lived in Berkshire, in a Tudor cottage with a swimming pool and tennis court. There were pretty gardens, a well-kept lawn, and six bedrooms, though two of them were the size of cupboards. My father, a big man, had to bend down to get through the door frame built in the era of Henry VIII.

Then we moved to California, and from the time I was about eight, television became the center of my existence.
Three’s Company. The Brady Bunch. Mork and Mindy.
I never identified with any of the images I stared at so aimlessly, hours on end, but it did serve to introduce me to American culture.

We lived on Whittier Drive in Beverly Hills, next door to Nancy Sinatra, as it turned out. My father had come to the States to introduce Vidal Sassoon salons and hair care products as a national brand. This involved a dramatic surge in living standard for us, which was very exciting, especially with the blue skies and bougainvillea and the reflected glow of Hollywood. But despite the insistent sunshine, the move to California is when I remember things getting really bad for me, like a curtain coming down.

Just the other day I was tidying up my own daughter’s room, rummaging through the board games, arts and crafts materials, pens and pencils, helping her organize it all, and I thought back to my childhood bedroom where there wasn’t a desk, there weren’t books, there were no games, certainly nothing for arts and crafts. There was a bed, and a TV, and a set of barren shelves. It was like a cell.

Psychologists say that women who have very narcissistic mothers often take one of two very different paths in life: They either go down the rabbit hole of drug addiction, or they become overachievers. In a way I followed both paths, one after the other. They’ve also discovered that the women who become overachievers usually have a strong connection with their dads. This was always the case, at least in terms of my emotional makeup. But it wasn’t until we began to work together on Jimmy Choo that I began to feel that sense of connection being reciprocated.

•  •  •  •

I GREW UP WITH TWO
brothers—Gregory, three years younger than me, and Daniel, three years younger than he—and the three of us went to El Rodeo School, which was just at the foot of the hill below our house. My father drove us, and my mother would pick us up. It wasn’t long, though, before I was transferred to Marymount, a Catholic girls’ school a few miles away in Brentwood, and my mother began to drive me both ways. Our most memorable trip was the morning she was trying to mask the smell of liquor on her breath with a drop or two of Binaca. She was careening along through this exclusive neighborhood in her red Mercedes convertible, head back, bottle upended, when the
cap came off and about three ounces of breath freshener gushed down her throat. She had to pull over to the side of the road and vomit.

As my mother’s drinking escalated, my father had us go around putting Post-it notes on all the liquor bottles saying, “Please, Mummy, stop drinking.” At other times he’d empty out the vodka and refill the containers with water. All the while we got the clear message that we were not supposed to talk about the drinking or about how crazy she was. The unspoken directive for the three of us children was to Keep the Family Secret and to, above all, Look Good and Act Normal.

The allure of being a “normal” family was so strong that my father once got it into his head that we should rent a recreational vehicle and go camping in Yosemite. So the five of us, plus another English couple, went off into the woods for this very “Ozzie and Harriet” adventure. Of course, my mother got stinking drunk, tripped over a log, and fell on her face, then began to rain long, obscene curses down on me. I think if a meteorite had struck the campsite, she would have similarly blamed me. When we got back to L.A., we had to make up some lie about what had happened to her face.

The joke, of course, was that this woman who devoted so much attention to how she looked went around the house wearing an unkempt dressing gown, no makeup, and her hair as frizzy as a fright wig. In her drunkenness she obsessed about the tiniest of imperfections, like the little fuzz balls that would appear on the carpet. Perhaps the finest moment of my childhood was the day she staggered down from the second floor, raging at me for God knows what, stooped to pick up a ball of lint, then slid headfirst and spread-eagled, all the rest of the way down. Shortly thereafter she was in a car crash, and she must have
really erupted at the other driver, so much so that the man called my father at his office to ask, “Is your wife on drugs?”

Through it all I think my dad was simply overwhelmed, trying to keep the peace and make the best of it with three kids and a crazy wife. I didn’t have to go too far into some Freudian fantasy to believe that getting away from my mom and being alone with my dad would make things better. I always wished they would get divorced and that I could live with him.

Divorce was not a great option from his perspective, though, because in those days, despite my mother’s obvious shortcomings as a caretaker, custody almost certainly would have gone to her. As far as he was concerned, then, the only way it worked was for it to work, however superficially. And in his mind, I think he could rationalize the cruelties he saw visited on me as being merely verbal and emotional. As in, I wasn’t being branded with cigarettes or beaten with coat hangers. (She merely threw them at me à la
Mommie Dearest
.) In other words, I would survive.

My father did the best he could as a typical “man’s man” of his time, someone for whom hugging and expressive conversation were simply not part of the repertoire. And that’s before we factor in the whole matter of English culture, the stiff upper lip and all that. He had his hands full, and he simply wasn’t equipped to cope with the fact that he had a severely depressed daughter.

Only once, and long after I’d grown up, do I remember him coming clean, as least to the extent of saying, “Your mother is the most selfish and self-obsessed woman I’ve ever come across.”

Of course, she was also one of the most beautiful. She’d been a
model when they met—the peak of her career was a print ad for Chanel—and for her, life was still all about how she looked. Her mornings were a lengthy ritual of dressing and applying makeup. Then it would be lunch with a girlfriend, then picking us up from school. She had no particular passion for gardening, or tennis, or charity fund-raisers, or any of the other things that wealthy women sometimes do. For her it was shopping, lunching, drinking. We had a pool, but she couldn’t swim. As far as enjoying the Southern California lifestyle was concerned, we might as well have lived in Glasgow.

•  •  •  •

MY BROTHERS WERE VERY CLOSE,
and they shared a room and had the same friends. They were a team, and they used to go out in the street and play with other kids on the block. As the only girl, I inhabited a different planet, almost as if I were an only child, and definitely home alone.

On those rare occasions when I tried to bring over friends, it was a disaster. My mother would fly off the handle and kick them out of the house for making too much noise, or for some minor infraction like leaving a candy wrapper in the sink. After a while I stopped inviting anyone over, and I retreated to my bedroom, closed the door, and watched TV. There was no one saying, “Got any homework today? Let’s sit down and maybe start into it. Are you hungry? Do you want a snack?”

My mother’s primary form of engagement with me was an ongoing effort to humiliate. To her friends she would make cutting comments or play the victim, making the case that I was a terrible child. Then she
would get these friends to come talk to me. I remember being at home on Whittier Drive when a woman I’d never seen before came up to me and said, “Can’t you be nice to your mother?” Being older and more aware never helped me in understanding these strange psychological games. The more I thought about it, the more bewildered I became.

When I was about thirteen, a girlfriend invited me to go with her to the movies in Westwood. She was a little older, old enough to drive, with a nice family, a nice house in Beverly Hills, and a white VW Rabbit. She drove by and picked me up, we went to the movies, and then she dropped me off back at my house. At which point my mother came out on the lawn tearing her hair in a rage, screaming about how this girl was trying to seduce me into a lesbian relationship. The exact and very charming phrase she used was, I believe, “Get off her, you cunt!”

I never saw my friend again.

During my brief stint at El Rodeo I met two sisters and they were my most consistent social connection. I would go to their house, rather than the other way around, but what I saw there differed very little from what I experienced at home. It confirmed my belief that all the mothers in Beverly Hills were simply out of their minds.

My parents’ own social circle extended into the English contingent in Hollywood. Michael Caine would have us over to his house for Sunday lunch, and I remember meeting Sean Connery once at the Beverly Hills Hotel, shortly before my parents took a trip with him to Morocco.

Because of my father’s extensive business connections, there were long stretches when they would go out to dinner every night, leaving my brothers and me to eat at home with the Mexican housekeeper. In the movies there’s always the nanny or the maid, usually a black woman
but sometimes Hispanic, who gives the lonely child all the love she’s not getting from her distant parents. Unfortunately, our domestic helpers came and went in an endless succession, and I never developed a relationship with any of them. For reasons that may appear obvious by now, none of them chose to stick around our household very long.

One evening I brought along a friend to a restaurant called Jimmy’s, where my parents were having dinner with a group that included Phyllis Diller. My mother kept leaning over to stage-whisper in my ear, “Get that whore out of here.” For an instant I thought she was talking about the comedienne, but then I realized she was talking about my friend. I didn’t know what to do or even where to look. A little later I walked into the bathroom and there was my mother passed out on the floor. I went back to get my dad and he had to carry her out to the car. I remember he seemed very humiliated, even as he drove away in his white Rolls-Royce.

About this time my mother took a flight somewhere by herself and got drunk on the plane. She became so unruly that she had to be taken off and searched and held by the police. In these days before cell phones, she was missing for hours and my father was in a panic because he didn’t know where she was. He was calling the airport frantically, and I remember standing there thinking why on earth would he want to look for this woman, much less find her? I know that a bit more compassion and forgiveness would reflect better on me. I will go so far as to say that I’m still working on it. But certainly those admirable qualities were not available to me as a teenager. At the time, I was barely able to process. And, of course, whenever one of these little dramas occurred, nobody ever said anything, much less offered an
explanation. So all that was available to me was my own sense of shame and humiliation, while my mind struggled to make sense of it. Essentially, I was reduced to the primitive options of fight, flight, or freeze, and I chose the latter, which was to become my default response throughout life to any unexpected act of aggression or any “shocking” situation that defied easy explanation.

•  •  •  •

WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN MY
parents decided that I should go back to England for boarding school. Perhaps my father saw that putting a broad continent and an equally wide blue ocean between me and my mother was the only way I’d survive. Or maybe he thought getting me out of the house would make his wife easier to live with. I wanted to go to Beverly Hills High because one of my friends was going to go there, but as soon as a return to the UK was presented as an option, I saw that as a fine idea. I would have happily shipped off to join the Red Guard if that’s what it took to get away from my mother.

Back when we’d lived in Berkshire, our local doctor also served as resident physician at Heathfield, in Ascot, the sister school to Eton. It’s very English, of course, with lots of girls with titles and double-barreled names, but that wasn’t my background at all. We were nouveau riche
with a capital N. So my father called up his friend the doctor and asked if he could help get me in. The doctor rang up the school and said there’s a girl who needs to come from California, and an interview was arranged.