Love, Lipstick and Lies (2 page)

But turning to Alex wasn’t just about the press attention and the negative stories; it was about feeling that someone cared about me and would stick by me no matter what. After the split with Pete I felt that no man would ever want me again after they had read all the terrible lies about me printed by the press. My reputation had been completely trashed. It felt like a huge deal that Alex still wanted to be with me, and didn’t take any notice of what had been written. It felt as if it was the two of us against the rest of the world because as soon as the press found out that I was with Alex, they raked together all the dirt they possibly could on him as well. I felt protected by him, and also protective of him. At the time I believed I was in love with him, but I think I was more like a drowning woman reaching out for help. I desperately needed someone to save me, and Alex was there.

Our relationship very quickly became serious and he moved in. I’m the kind of person who thinks you only live once and that you should live your life the way you want to. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, it’s about being true to yourself. After all, there are no rules that say you have to wait a certain length of time
before you can fall in love with someone else after a marriage ends. There were some people who thought I had moved on too quickly after Pete left me. But he had made it brutally clear that our marriage was over. What was I supposed to do? Sit around and wait for his permission to see someone else?

In Alex I thought that I had found a man I could be happy with. There weren’t the competing egos that there had been in my relationship with Pete when we spent so much time working together. Alex seemed to have many good qualities; he was charming, kind and warm, a big softie really, as well as a gentleman. I liked the fact that he had his own career as a professional fighter, and trained every day. We could also go out together and have fun, because he didn’t have a problem with me having a drink in the way Pete always had. I felt he looked after me; I felt safe in his arms, as if everything was going to be all right; that I could get through it this time. He looked after me in other ways as well, always trying to get me to eat healthily and to train at the gym. Most important of all, he was good with my kids. However, none of these things lasted …

From the start none of my family and friends were happy about my relationship with Alex. They didn’t trust his motives and tried to warn me about him, telling me that they were sure he was only with me because he wanted to be famous and that I shouldn’t trust him. And I’d say, ‘No, you’re all wrong. He genuinely wants to be with
me.
He knows that I don’t want another “Katie and
Peter” relationship. He knows I don’t want our personal life splashed across the papers. He loves
me
.’ I refused to listen to anyone. Now I wish I had … It would have saved me a whole lot of heartache and money.

They say love is blind, don’t they? I certainly was. Alex always said that he wasn’t after fame, but I should have read the signs. Of course he wanted fame! He’d tried to make it as an actor but had failed; he’d tried to be a model without success. He was a thirty-four-year-old man who still lived at home with his parents. He was signing on, teaching kickboxing and working as a personal trainer. He must have thought he was made for life when he met me.

But my friends and family had another big reason to be wary of him. This outwardly masculine cage fighter had an alter ego, Roxanne. In private Alex liked to dress up as a woman. I found out when my personal trainer, Sol, who also knew Alex and had introduced us, asked me if I had seen him dressed up as a woman yet. He said it in such a jokey way that even though I was surprised by the revelation, as anyone would be, I thought it must all be for a laugh.

I immediately asked Alex if this was true and he admitted it straight out. He told me that he had dressed up as a woman for fun. He seemed to underplay the whole thing, as if it wasn’t really that important, nothing serious – and definitely nothing to worry about.

Even with him making light of it like this, everyone else around me was taken aback. But not me. Instead I
was curious to find out more. I am very open-minded and don’t like to be too quick to judge anyone. As long as it was something that was kept well away from my children, I felt I could accept it. After all, Alex had accepted me for myself and had rescued me at a time when I was at rock bottom.

Writing about him now makes me wish I could rewind time and cut Alex Reid out of my life because I had absolutely no idea what I was letting myself in for. By the time we split up, just over a year and a half later, his sleazy, sordid behaviour had left me feeling disturbed, vulnerable and frightened. It would take me a long time to recover from my rebound marriage to a man with such serious issues.

I admit that once I found out about Alex’s secret I was the one who pursued the subject. I wanted to find out more. I was intrigued. When I’m with someone I don’t want there to be any secrets, I want everything out in the open. Once I knew that Alex dressed up as a woman he referred to as Roxanne, I wanted to see what it was all about. It was hard for me to imagine what this very masculine man would look like as a woman. He was a professional cage fighter, and that seemed to be the most macho, aggressive sport where fighters have to be incredibly tough. Cage fighting is a full-contact combat sport where two men fight using Mixed Martial Arts. It is raw and brutal, nothing seems to be banned except biting, and you can kick and punch your opponent pretty much everywhere except in the nuts. I had
watched videos of Alex fighting and I’d seen other cage fights so I knew all about it.

One night when we were on our own, and were getting a little drunk on cocktails of vodka, Malibu and Coke that we later called the Roxanne, I said, ‘Come on then. Show me Roxanne. Let me dress you up and put make up on you.’ Alex refused at first, and seemed taken aback that I would even ask. But I persisted; I am very persuasive when I want to be, and in the end he agreed.

As I went through different outfits in my dressing room, trying to find the right wig, underwear and dress for Roxanne, I had no idea what I was unleashing by allowing Alex to be her with me. If I had I would have stopped there and then. Actually I would have finished with him and run a mile. But I didn’t know. I thought it was a bit of harmless fun, though in time I would learn I could not have been more wrong. So there I was, carefully putting red lipstick on him, checking that I had done his make up how he liked it. And the response I got back from him was overwhelming. He told me that he loved me, that I was the best girl ever, that I was his perfect woman. I don’t think he could believe that I accepted this side of him. But I did then because I had no idea what it really meant.

I wasn’t disturbed that first time by his cross-dressing because I had been the one to initiate it. I was a little shocked by his appearance, as anyone would be seeing their macho boyfriend in lingerie and make up! But because I felt in control, I thought everything was fine.
I felt as if I was sharing something with Alex, and that there was a bond of trust and respect between us. We talked all the time as I helped him get made up, bantering away with each other.

But after that first time, it soon became clear that there was a sexual side to his cross-dressing. He admitted that he dressed up as Roxanne for sexual thrills. From his description it sounded as if he didn’t do it very often. I respected Alex for being honest with me. I was sure a lot of men would have tried to hide something like this. It’s okay, I thought, it’s something he does in private; he’s sexually adventurous, and uninhibited, and so am I. Naively, I didn’t think it could hurt me. What I didn’t know was that by accepting this side of Alex, I had opened up Pandora’s box. We were going to end up with three people in our relationship – me, Alex and Roxanne – and I definitely hadn’t signed up for her. The truth was I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for back then. I had no idea of the extent of Alex’s secret life. I thought it was only a very small part of him. Little did I know that it would take over and ultimately destroy our marriage.

Most couples get up to some role-play in the bedroom, don’t they? That’s what I thought we were doing when Alex dressed up as Roxanne and I joined him in the bedroom. I thought it was something to make our sex life more adventurous, give it a little extra spice, and that it would happen only very occasionally. I’ve always been up for a bit of experimentation. I felt I could handle it;
that I was fully in control, the one saying, ‘If you want to dress up, you can.’ And that if and when I wanted him to stop, he would. I didn’t find out until much later that he wouldn’t. I didn’t know what appalling scenes I would later be confronted with as Alex lost himself in the depraved world of Roxanne and turned my bedroom into a sex dungeon with porn playing, sex toys everywhere, and in the midst of it all a desperate man, with dead eyes, about as far away from the charming, kind Alex I had met as you could possibly imagine.

From the moment we had first got together we’d had a good sex life. I had actually broken my own rule and slept with him on our first date, that’s how strong the attraction had been … or maybe how desperate I was to find a man at that time! And I won’t deny that I enjoyed the first few experiences when he showed me Roxanne. It gave me a kind of weird excitement to be doing something different, to act more like a man in the bedroom. As I’ve already said, I’m up for experimenting, when it feels safe and I can trust my partner. I really didn’t think it would happen very often; I felt as if we were just fooling around role-playing, and that this was all Alex would ever expect me to do. But even so I can remember thinking: This isn’t normal. Do I really want my boyfriend to look like this? To act like this?

I’d say for the first year of our relationship, the Roxanne side didn’t happen very often at all and the rest of the time we had normal sex. But to Alex it must have been like an awakening. As our relationship went
on, he would want me to do more and more extreme things to him … Looking back, I wonder if those first few times with me were enough for him or whether he had to dress up as Roxanne more than he let on.

* * *

I knew it wouldn’t be long before the press found out about Roxanne, and I dropped my own hint that I already knew and didn’t care when I named my newest horse Jordan’s Cross Dresser in August. (He is now called Wallace II.) By October all the tabloids were on to the story. I felt protective of Alex and wanted to show that I stood by him so I arranged for him to do an interview and shoot with
OK!
magazine, and managed to negotiate a nice fat fee for him. In the interview he talked about his cross-dressing and how he felt he had nothing to hide, nothing to prove to anyone, and nothing to be ashamed of. And back then I didn’t think he had anything to be ashamed of either because he still hadn’t revealed the dark, disturbing side of his life.

Then I decided that we could really put on a show to prove to everyone that I knew about Alex’s cross-dressing and it didn’t bother me, with the launch of my style book
Standing Out.
In an eye-catching press call, I was joined by Alex, as well as my brother and my friends Andrew and Phil, dressed in exact copies of four of my most famous outfits. Alex was in a gold swimsuit, like the one I had worn when I dressed up as Xena: Warrior Princess on a trip to Ibiza. It was
our way of saying ‘Up yours!’ to anyone who thought there was something wrong with what Alex did. It was meant to be very tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted. It certainly grabbed the press’s attention and I received great coverage for my new book.

But that day was the first inkling I had that maybe it wasn’t just a bit of fun for Alex. He had been drinking heavily as he prepared for the press call, and by the time we were photographed he was drunk. Afterwards we all went for a meal and then to the theatre, but Alex didn’t seem to want to be there. I suddenly clicked that he wanted to go back to the hotel and dress up again.

That night we had sex with him being Roxanne. We both drank a lot and I remember waking up in the morning and feeling really hungover, with all these images in my head of what we had done. When I look back, it seems that I always had to have a drink in order to deal with him being Roxanne; I was never completely sober during those encounters. I wasn’t at all sure if I liked what had just happened. It was a relief to get up and go out into the world to do the press interviews for my book. I pushed the events of the night to the back of my mind. Maybe it had happened because he was so drunk and stressed about all the press coverage he had been getting, I told myself. Negative press coverage had become a painful fact of life for me, but for Alex it was something new. It must have been tough on him.

A few weeks later we went to the BloodLust Ball at Hampton Court House, just after Hallowe’en. Everyone
dresses outrageously for this event and we were no exception. I went as a very kinky Catwoman in a black PVC corset with red leopard-print stockings and matching gloves, mask and a tail. Alex dressed up as a woman, in a fishnet top, bra, g-string and patent leather boots.

Although by now I had seen him dressed up as Roxanne several times, it was still a shock to see him out in public like that, even at a fancy dress ball. I had to remind myself that underneath all the make up, he was still my boyfriend. But I was starting to see that he didn’t just put on the clothes and make up, he seemed to become a different person too. I would notice it in his eyes first; there would be a different look in them, a vacant expression. The same thing happened when he was preparing to fight, as if he was going into a different zone, turning into Alex the fighter. Here it was like a switch clicking him from Alex to Roxanne, and a complete change would come over him. He spoke in a softer, quieter voice. His whole personality altered, and he was shy and quiet whereas usually he was confident and outgoing. That night it was as if I wasn’t with Alex, I was with Roxanne. It unsettled me; this was something I hadn’t been prepared for. Alex dressing up in lingerie and wearing make up and wanting to have sex like that was one thing, but this whole personality change was creepy. However, I reassured myself that the moment he took off the make up and outfit he would be back to being the Alex I loved. Looking back, I can only say
that I had become very good at convincing myself that everything would be all right because I so wanted things to work out between us.