Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (21 page)

She speaks from experience. In 2001, deciding that they wanted to buy out Jimmy Choo, the eponymous cobbler of the business whose dream (nice shoes for a few nice women) had diverged from Mellon’s (global domination led by fashion-hungry trend-setters), Mellon and her father began to look for outside investment. They sold a 51 per cent stake of the company to private equity firm Phoenix Equity Partners, who held on to it until 2004, when they sold it to Lion Capital, who held on to it for three years, and then sold it to TowerBrook (Mellon has retained 17 per cent). This makes Jimmy Choo the most successful fashion/private equity story in the industry, not just in the UK but globally: though private equity has had a millennial flirtation with fashion, few funds have been able to make the unpredictable style cycles work with their traditional strategy of holding a company for three to five years. The global private equity firm TPG, for example, held on to the Swiss shoe and leather goods maker Bally for nine years after it struggled to restructure the brand following its purchase in 1999.

‘It’s the numbers,’ Mellon says now. ‘You make your numbers, and they’re happy. So even though the private equity guys might not understand what you’re doing – and what I do is very intangible to them – they start to trust you.’

Still, she admits as the Dover sole appears, it’s exhausting. ‘Just as you get to know one board, they sell you, and you have to start all over again.’ You have to, for example, start again with explaining things such as the importance of ‘hair and make-up’, she says, ‘which they just don’t get’. You have to teach them the danger of underestimating, or making assumptions, about the creative side.

‘I was young, and didn’t really understand what private equity was when we sold the first time,’ she continues. ‘In retrospect, I wish I had been my own private equity firm and just gone to the bank and asked them to lend me the money I needed.’

Today, however, ‘I couldn’t buy the whole company now if I wanted,’ even though she’s worth about £102m, and she does want. Instead, TowerBrook, entering the end of its three-year cycle, is in the midst of a ‘strategic evaluation’, where they are trying to decide what happens next: whether they sell to another private equity firm, or take Jimmy Choo public, or hold on to the brand. Mellon won’t commit to any scenario, though she does say that, having been on the Revlon board since 2008, she has seen at first hand the difficulties being a public company entails. Whatever happens, she hopes the owners will commit to a long-term strategy that she is currently devising.

‘I think it takes 30 years to build a luxury brand,’ she says, eating half her fish and then asking for coffee, ‘so we’re part-way through. And there’s so much I want to do. I think we can become a lifestyle brand, because one thing doing the collaboration last year with [high-street retail chain] H&M showed us was that consumers would accept any product from us: we did men’s wear, we did women’s wear, we did jewellery. And I want to do all of that.’

She means this literally: a perfume will launch next year, followed by men’s shoes, followed by children’s wear, watches, jewellery, homeware, and so on. Perhaps as a security strategy during the next phase of the brand, she is the ‘face’ of the perfume, and will appear in the advertising campaign (clothed) with her head thrown back to expose her neck. It’s not the only self-exposure she is considering.

For, as we walk out, Mellon mentions she would like to write a book. An autobiography. ‘There’s been so much nonsense said about me, I figure I should just get it out,’ she says. All of it? I ask. The naked truth?

‘All of it,’ she smiles. Then she mentions she knows a filmmaker who told her if she ever did tell her story, he’d like to make the movie.

Who?

Before you guess Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn, know this: the answer is Peter Morgan, author of high-minded talk fests
Frost/Nixon
and
The Queen
.

11 OCTOBER 1997

The
FT
found Twiggy to be a model celebrity, despite a life which makes strange reading

By Lucy Kellaway

I am eating lunch with a woman so famous that her picture has been put in a rocket and sent into space, and what are we talking about? We are discussing dressmaking tips, in particular the importance of pressing each seam as you go along.

I had not expected to find Twiggy Lawson, as she is now known, quite so down to earth. For a start, her choice of restaurant was not promising. We were to meet at San Lorenzo’s, which was the favourite lunch place of Diana, Princess of Wales, and is frequented by the super-rich and the super-thin. There was also the matter of the photograph. Twiggy’s PR had warned that she was particular about who took her picture, and the
FT
’s photographer would not be acceptable.

Yet the woman who came down the stairs to meet me showed no signs of being tiresome. Dressed in a simple black trouser suit and ageing white T-shirt, she looked relatively normal against the Di-lookalikes around us. In easy confidential manner, she started telling me about her daughter’s A-levels, about how she had left her purse at home, and wasn’t going to be able to go to Peter Jones after lunch to buy an anniversary present for her husband, Leigh Lawson.

If it hadn’t been for her face – still ridiculously recognizable after three decades – I could almost have been having lunch with the woman next door.

She glanced at the menu, a handwritten sheet bizarrely attached with
Blue Tac to a raffia place-mat. ‘I’ll probably have something light – a spinach and avocado salad. They do a lovely chicken on a griddle with mashed potato, but I couldn’t eat that much at lunch.’

So I ordered the chicken, and she chose the salad, with water to drink.

‘’Ello!’ she suddenly called out, the old Neasden accent still in evidence. A small, stout Italian woman came up to the table and kissed her warmly. ‘This is Mara, who runs this marvellous restaurant.’ Mara picked up the copy of Twiggy’s autobiography from the seat beside me, and stroked the picture on the front cover.

‘When I first met her she was just 16 and sat at that table over there,’ Mara told me. ‘She was wearing a fox.’

‘No, I think it was a raccoon,’ interrupted Twiggy, as if it were essential to get these details right. ‘I got it in Portobello Road. Or was I wearing the Ossie Clark?’

‘I had never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life,’ Mara crooned, while Twiggy gushed back, ‘Oh, you are so sweet.’

‘Mara’s hysterical,’ Twiggy whispered after the patron had gone. ‘If she doesn’t like people she won’t let them in.’ She gave a shriek of laughter, surprisingly loud: ‘Argh! Ha! Ha!’

Twiggy tells me how close Mara was to Princess Diana. ‘She’ll be badly missed. We were on holiday when we heard the news. I only met her once, but we came back because we wanted to be here. For days we just walked around unable to concentrate.’

I muttered something about Twiggy having had her own hounding from the press, but she protested.

‘It was nothing like that. I tasted it a little bit in the 1960s in New York. I was so young and little I thought I would get squashed. I was six and a half stone. Argh! Ha! Ha!’

Why has she suddenly decided to write an autobiography? I asked. ‘I didn’t write it myself,’ she corrected me. ‘I can’t write at all. I sing, I dance, I sew, I act. That’s enough.’ She says this in a funny voice in order to suggest that she is not boasting. ‘Penelope [the ghost writer] and me spent hours and hours talking. I did get sick of me own voice and me life after six months of it.’

Her life makes strange reading. In her version she was happy to be famous, and equally happy to be no longer so. When she visited Los Angeles at the age of 17, Sonny and Cher gave a party for her and
everybody was there, desperate to catch a glimpse of the world’s first supermodel.

Now she is lucky to get parts in TV dramas and minor plays. She has never been remotely self-destructive, never taken any drugs. ‘I think it was because I had a normal background and a normal mum and dad,’ she explained; an odd assertion given that her mum was in and out of mental hospitals throughout her childhood.

‘And maybe because I was so young it went over my head. I don’t spend hours analysing it and thinking about it. I’m a wife, a mum, an actress. I’m talking about the past now because my book is coming out. But otherwise, you get up, make breakfast. I never think, “Wow! That was an amazing life I had.” If you did, there would be something very, very wrong with you.’

But surely there is something very wrong with most celebrities?

‘Two of our best friends are Paul and Linda McCartney. I don’t know if you’ve met him?’ she asked, as if that were likely. ‘But think about what they have lived through. And he is so normal and their kids are so wonderful. We know some famous people who are normal and some famous people who are a pain. But then, I know a lot of ordinary people who are a pain. So in the end, it’s the people, isn’t it? I think. I don’t know. Can’t answer that question.’

She puts a couple of spinach leaves in her mouth and calls for some bread. I had finished mine, which was neither as special as she had promised, nor as large.

Twiggy’s size has been a political issue from the outset: she was the first waif model, the first to be blamed for anorexia. ‘They always come back to me about that,’ she says, sighing.

‘In the end, you have to blame the mags. I didn’t go to them saying, “I am the look of the sixties.” I was the person who happened to be chosen.’ In the old days, she used to eat whatever she liked. ‘All the rubbish. But if I ate that now, I’d be flabby. I don’t like feeling like that. I go to the gym and Leigh and I play tennis.’

We started talking about modern models, the drugs they take and the pressure they are under. ‘Do you know the models today can’t do makeup?’ she asked, as if expecting me to be shocked. ‘My eyes were a work of art, I can tell ya. They took me an hour and a half. You had to be fully
made up by the time you arrived at the studio at eight or nine in the morning, and that meant getting up early.’

A second menu was brought, which she did not even glance at. ‘I’m going to have a decaff cappuccino, but they have wonderful puds if you want one.’ So I ordered a pudding, which she watched me eat, while she talked about clothes.

I ask if the black suit she is wearing is something special. ‘No, it’s Wallis,’ she said, mentioning the middle-of-the-road high-street chain. ‘I love the long jacket. And I love trousers. I always hated my legs because they were so skinny. I do not go and buy expensive designer clothes. I’m the greatest bargain hunter in the world.’

This took us round to dressmaking, and her sewing tips. I found myself happier talking about paper patterns than when the subject shifted to her family. ‘Leigh and I are very much in love and do not like being apart,’ she says.

She tells me that her stepson is ‘gorgeous’, and that she and her daughter are inseparable. ‘She’s lovely. She’s got a much better figure than I ever had!’

I asked for the bill, which, at £50, would have been cheap were it not for the fact that we had had practically nothing to eat or drink. Twiggy reflected that it is wine that bumps up the cost of meals. ‘A nice bottle of Chablis in a supermarket – you are talking £4.99. In a restaurant, you’d pay at least £19.’

On the way out Mara cuddled Twiggy again, and extended a hand towards me. I held out my hand to be shaken, only to find her reaching for my pregnant belly and kissing it. It is not hard to see why Princess Diana, with her ‘touchy-feely’ leanings, loved this place.

Outside, in Beauchamp Place, Twiggy pecked me on the cheek, and headed home to get her wallet.

30 NOVEMBER 1996

The
FT
meets the cook who became a cult figure thanks to the
Two Fat Ladies
TV programme

By Nigel Spivey

One fat lady knew just where she wanted to be taken to lunch. But first, find your fat lady. Her telephone answering service is a resident uncle, ancient and adamantly deaf. I bellowed hard for Jennifer Paterson.

Uncle put up stout resistance. I listened as he finally shuffled off to find his 70-year-old niece and tell her that there was a certain Knife Tidy, or Idle Slithey, in search of her. Then she was there, with the unmistakably abraded diction of the Woodbine addict. ‘Dear boy. How divine. We must go to Marco.’

Some 3.5m devotees in Britain followed the
Two Fat Ladies
cookery programme, which made cult figures out of Jennifer Paterson and her accomplice Clarissa Dickson Wright (whom the uncle knows only as Agrippa). It may or may not comfort them to be told that Jennifer – the one who straddled a 900cc Triumph Thunderbird motorbike – was not acting in that show. She was nothing but herself.

This I realized almost as soon as she stomped into The Restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel where Marco Pierre White is king. Loading a waiter with her crash helmet and other clobber, she called for a vodka on the rocks, and tapped out a Woodbine. ‘Yum yum!’ she declared. ‘I’m going to adore this. Marco is simply the best chef in town. And he knows it, the scamp.’

‘Hallo darling.’ Marco duly bounced out of the kitchen. His aspect of a diabolic cherub seems timeless. Jennifer patted his girth. ‘Look at you. You used to be so thin, it pained me. Have you given up smoking, heavenly boy?’

Another vodka was summoned. I winced. A single vodka is double figures at Marco’s place. Meanwhile Marco, like some playground swaggerer, was boasting about his fishing exploits and his fossil collection. Soon enough he was also boasting that his restaurant was London’s most expensive. Officially. ‘Now, my lovelies,’ he said. ‘What are you going to eat? Do you like pigeon?’ he asked me.