In My Shoes: A Memoir (5 page)

My life as a courier in and out of editorial offices allowed me to see how the magazine business worked firsthand, and after about a year I felt ready to take another leap. Through Phyllis I learned that Rupert Murdoch was about to launch a UK version of
Mirabella
, the very smart, upscale women’s magazine named after Grace Mirabella, the former editor of
Vogue
. I thought this would be just the place for me, and I approached getting a job there with a studiousness I had never applied back in school. I read everything about their vision, their ethos, and who they saw as their prospective reader.

Fashion magazines encompass two very different worlds: fashion and features. In London, the girls who work in features—the long, sometimes very substantive articles—have liberal arts degrees. The fashion department, which oversees the lavish and creative presentation of the clothing itself, hired girls like me who were less studious, perhaps, but more visually oriented. At
Mirabella
, the fashion director was Caroline Baker, already a legend in the industry for the radical shoots she’d done for
Nova
, and
The Face
, and
i-D
starting out in the sixties.
Mirabella
was more mainstream, but Caroline was still considered quite edgy. I was thrilled when she accepted me as her assistant.

Certainly I was now on a proper flight path, having left the duvet in the basement and the guacamole and the TV seemingly forever. But then came the financial crash of 1989–1990, Murdoch pulled the plug, and all hands at
Mirabella
were made redundant.

•  •  •  •

DURING MY BRIEF TENURE IN
the magazine world I’d become friends with a junior fashion editor named Charlotte Pilcher, who
began to freelance as a stylist, with me freelancing as her assistant. Having gotten my foot in the door, I was not going to allow myself to be pushed back out so easily. Charlotte lived in Shepherd’s Bush, and I was living in my Belgravia basement, and I would show up at her house most mornings with coffee and say, “Come on. Get dressed. Let’s go.” I was still not feeling well—I had sleep problems, and problems with lethargy and depression—but fear was a great motivator. To have any chance of staying in the game, we had to stay in the loop, which meant being out and about.

Press officers in London would have “open days” when they’d show their clients’ new collections and invite the editors from the fashion magazines to come in to browse. The press officers hoped the editors would want to do a shoot featuring some part of their collection, and the editors like Charlotte hoped to be selected to style the shoot.

Charlotte happened to be friends with Jane Pickering, who knew Sarajane Hoare, another legend in the industry who was then fashion director at
Vogue.
Sarajane was looking for an assistant and in 1990, with a good word from Jane Pickering, I got the job. Sarajane had a well-deserved reputation for amazing photo shoots and always worked with the best photographers. Herb Ritts, Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Limbergh—these were her main collaborators. To give the fashions the right look, we would go to incredible lengths, setting up on a mountaintop in Nepal one season and on the beaches of Malibu the next.

On the downside, working this new job had many aspects of
The Devil Wears Prada
—with Sarajane in the Meryl Streep role—only with tunnel vision, night blindness, and a speech impediment added to her characterization of the “Devil.” Sarajane’s mother had suffered measles
when she was pregnant, which left her daughter always sounding like she had a mouthful of cotton. But this did not mean that she wasn’t capable of screaming at me at high decibels from dawn to dusk. Then I’d go home to be yelled at by my mother. It was not a happy time.

I remember once, trekking up the side of a mountain in the Himalayas with Sarajane, Sherpas bringing up the rear with trunk after trunk of clothing and cameras and lighting equipment, and my boss going on about her boyfriend problems the entire time, all the way up and all the way down, for a solid seven hours. I was ready to shove her off a cliff. But we actually became friends, and she was instrumental in inculcating my attention to detail.

Once we were on a shoot in Central Park, and I’d run out of pins to gather in the dresses. Sarajane threw a red-faced screaming hissy fit every bit as good as anything my mother could have managed. I said I’d run back to the truck for more, but that wasn’t good enough. She continued to berate me, and then with Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista standing by like statues, she screamed, “You better run, Tamara! RUN!” I got to the point where I had everything provided in triplicate, sitting out, well ordered, and ready to go before she could even think about screaming. Years later after I’d started Jimmy Choo we ran into each other in New York. We got on very well, and she apologized for her behavior back when I worked for her.

Working at
Vogue
was a long way from hanging out with the club kids at Crazy Larry’s, but biochemically it was very much the same. During the day I was focused on building a career, trying to get somewhere in a glamorous and highly competitive field. At night it was all
about self-medication for anxiety and depression, with verbal abuse as the constant drumbeat. To make matters worse, I was still living at home and under my mother’s thumb and hating myself for doing it.

In prison they talk about EDR—the earliest date of release. For me there was no certain release date. I was going to have to earn my freedom from my family, and from the uncertainties of working for someone else. Having grown up subject to relentless, emotional manipulation, I didn’t want anyone ever to have control over me, so marrying well was never an appealing option. A husband’s wealth might provide you luxury, but at best that would be a gilded cage. I knew it was going to be up to me to attain the life I wanted to have.

And after all those years of being told that I was useless, a dunce, and a thoroughly worthless human being, I had a desperate need to express myself. That’s when the penny dropped: Jimmy Choo. I’d done my time in retail, in public relations, and in the fashion press. I had a father to advise me who’d succeeded in a similar business. I was also the customer I wanted to reach. I lived the life our prospective client lived. I had an emotional connection to her tastes and dreams because I shared her tastes and dreams.

In September 1996, less than a year after I went into rehab,
Tatler
ran the first story on me as an entrepreneur. Written by Vassi Chamberlain, it was all about the launch of Jimmy Choo and our plans for building a global brand. It even featured a picture of Jimmy and me. The hellion of Tramp and L’Equipée Anglaise had cleaned up her act and was finally trying to do something with her life.

E
ven after all my time at Brown’s, at Phyllis Walters’s, and at
Vogue
, working on the shop floor, in PR, and for a magazine, I had no idea just how much I knew about the business until I dug in and started applying what I had learned. I also had strong instincts, a certain entrepreneurial skill, and an incredible work ethic, some of which I inherited from my father.

No doubt my father also played a role in creating the drive—both by his unavailability and by the warmth and love that I always felt from him nonetheless, even when he could have been more demonstrative, or perhaps done more to “rescue” me from my mother. At least I always felt that he genuinely cared about me and loved me, so it was natural that I wanted to follow in his footsteps, even if only to prove my worth to him. There was the residual neediness that made me willing to do anything to prove myself worthy of love in his eyes. And there was the desperate drive to prove my mother wrong.

According to the cliché, all little girls have a sort of love affair with Dad, in which the daughter is Dad’s little princess and Dad is, at least in her eyes, the big, strong hero, as handsome and rugged as a movie star. In my case, Dad really was heroically big and strong, and handsome enough to have a brief stint in the movies. Especially when you
factor in where he came from, he was also sufficiently successful to be considered heroic by almost anyone’s standards.

Owing nothing to Danielle Steel’s sense of melodrama, my father, Tom Yeardye, was born in the Salvation Army home in Mill Hill, in the north of London. His mother was seventeen, unmarried, pregnant, and driven out of Ireland by the shame of it. She came to the capital to find better prospects, and she became a house cleaner. My father was put in a foster home, but after a few years my grandmother wanted him back, so she married George Yeardye, nineteen at the time, to round out the required nuclear family. Per the usual sad tale, this stepfather was an alcoholic who beat my father mercilessly, a pattern that stopped only when, at fourteen, my father grew big enough to fight back. My dad remained a fighter ever after.

Young Tom couldn’t afford to go to university, and instead he did a two-year stint in the navy. Then in the early fifties, when he was in his early twenties, a film producer spotted him in a London club. Standing six foot four, and with a forty-seven-inch chest, he was pegged to be the stand-in for Rock Hudson in a film being shot in Ireland. It was a costume drama called
Captain Lightfoot
, about Irish rebels, set in Clogherhead during the Napoleonic era. The producers’ problem was that their star didn’t know how to ride a horse. The solution was to hire my father, who did.

Dad went on to appear in
Richard III
,
The Adventures of Robin Hood
, and then in 1957 he was the stand-in for Victor Mature during the torture scenes in
The Long Haul.
This is how he met Diana Dors, then being touted as the English Marilyn Monroe.

Diana and my father developed a thing, but inconveniently, she was
already married to her manager, Dennis Hamilton Gittins. In an incident that was a tabloid editor’s dream, the glamour girl and my dad went out for a drive, and when they got back, the irate husband was at the house. While Dad waited in the car, Diana went in alone to talk to Gittins. Dad waited, and waited, and then he heard screams. He rushed past the husband’s two goons at the door, found Diana on the floor bleeding, with Gittins standing over her, holding a gun. As the story goes, my dad wrestled the gun out of Gittins’s hand, pummeled him a bit, and left him whimpering on the floor. He rushed Diana to a doctor, and then brought her home to my grandmother’s little house in Mill Hill. For the next several months my father was a fixture in the tabloids, known to every waitress and taxi driver in London as “Mr. Muscles.”

He and Diana retired to an estate in Sussex that she’d purchased, and for a while she and my father raised horses. They formed a company, called Juliet Holdings, that allowed them to dabble in both agricultural and entertainment ventures. One of these was a touring cabaret show, written by the comedian Richard Dawson, who later found fame on
Hogan’s Heroes
, and who more immediately found his way into Diana’s heart, thereby displacing my father.

This was 1959, more or less. Swinging London was just around the corner, and my dad returned to the city to open a restaurant called the Paint Box. No one ever said much about the food, but no matter. The pièce de résistance was models who posed for the customers to sketch while they dined. “I’m bringing art to the common man,” my father told reporters.

The Paint Box was a success, and a few months later my dad took what had once been a stuffy private club in the West End and turned
it into a cabaret called Le Condor. He still carried the glamour of having been Diana Dors’s boyfriend, not to mention her rescuer in a notorious scandal. But glamour attracted unwanted attention, and soon he had dodgy characters asking him to pay “insurance” on the club, as well as protection against “personal injury.” A pretty tough guy himself, Dad refused. Soon after, a waiter was accosted by a man wielding a gun. My father was almost run down on the street, albeit by a Jaguar. Then the manager was attacked by a thug with a crowbar. My father decided to redirect his energies toward businesses less likely to attract that kind of attention.

He didn’t retreat from glamour entirely, though, because he bought and subsequently lived in an apartment building in Kensington where most of the tenants where fashion models. He dated the B movie actress Sabrina Sykes—the English Jayne Mansfield—famous for her seventeen-inch waist and near forty-inch bust. He also dated Shirley Anne Field, who was truly beautiful in a more sophisticated way, and a serious actress who appeared opposite Laurence Olivier in
The Entertainer.

Back in his Le Condor days, he’d met a model named Ann Davis who’d done commercials on TV and a print ad for Chanel. She’d been dating a buddy of his, a male model, whom she actually married, after which the bride and groom left the church through separate doors. The marriage was annulled by the time my dad met Ann Davis again. In 1965, they married at the registrar’s office in Westminster. Two years later they had their first child—yours truly.

The young couple bought a house in Holland Park, near Notting Hill, and my father continued to make money renting out flats in Kensington. Then, through my mother’s obsession with beauty, he became
aware of a new product from Denmark called Carmen Rollers. This was an electric hair styling set that came in a red vanity case with a mirror. Despite the fact that the device sold for about sixteen pounds—half a week’s wages at the time—all the models loved this “high tech” approach to hair care, which was perfect for creating the heavily lacquered bouffant styles that were de rigueur at the time for London’s fashionable “birds.”

My dad had a half sister, Jane Trent, who was a flight attendant, and she worked the London to New York route. He asked her to see if this contraption was available in the States. She reported back that it was not, so my dad went to speak with the man who had the UK rights. This fellow had no interest in expanding to North America himself, but he introduced Dad to the inventor of Carmen Rollers, Arne Bybjerg Pedersen. Dad bought the license, as well as five hundred roller kits, and with that he took off for New York.

Launching a new and expensive beauty device in the world capital of hustle was a daunting prospect, but then my father was the man whose greatest claim to fame was swatting away an angry husband’s gun. Calling on the department stores proved more expensive and time-consuming than fending off angry rivals, but he scored with Saks and with Bonwit Teller, and the new venture was a success. In little more than a year he sold his North American concession to Clairol for $3 million, and he and my mother came back to England on a nice cushion of cash.

During his time in New York, my dad had pitched Carmen Rollers to the Glemby Company, which ran a string of hair salons. Now one of Glemby’s owners, Seymour Finkelstein came to London with a pitch
of his own. Glemby wanted to expand into the UK, and Finkelstein saw my father as just the man who could build them a business—which he did, starting at the department store J. J. Allen in Bournemouth.

A friend of my father’s who ran his own salon on Bond Street noticed Glemby’s sudden rise. His name was Vidal Sassoon. He was already a fixture in the world of fashion, but his small operation was not generating all that much money. So he looked at Glemby and said to my dad, “Can you do that for me?”

My dad invested £250,000 to come in as a partner while also helping Vidal buy out his existing partner, Charles of the Ritz. Suddenly, Vidal Sassoon was on its way to becoming a global brand. (The irony was that Vidal’s greatest innovation, of course, was the five-point cut that made hair curlers—my father’s previous venture—obsolete.)

Although one was Jewish and the other Irish, Vidal Sassoon and Tom Yeardye were cut from the same tattered cloth. Born in 1928 in the East End, then put into an orphanage when his father abandoned his mother, Vidal apprenticed as a hairdresser at fourteen, served in the Israeli army during the 1948 war to create a Jewish state, then came back to London to make his fortune. Nothing if not ambitious, he even went so far as to take elocution lessons to erase the cockney accent that was a nearly impenetrable class barrier in England those days. Suitably reborn and socially upgraded, he opened his first salon in 1954, on New Bond Street. Then in 1958, just as London was about to start “swinging,” he moved to Old Bond Street, on the ground floor, just across from Cartier. Peter O’Toole had to have his hair trimmed in the basement to hide from the crowds who’d gather to watch. Roman Polanski filmed Catherine Deneuve from the salon’s balcony for a scene
in
Repulsion
. The glamour even followed Vidal home, where he shared a flat with Terence Stamp and Michael Caine.

Much like Vidal, my father always maintained an understated elegance. He always flew first class, wore bespoke suits, and had his shirts made by Frank Foster. In the late sixties, he was part of a group that included Roger Moore, Michael Caine, and Sean Connery, who frequented Doug Hayward’s tailor shop on Savile Row, turning it into a kind of men’s club, lounging about telling stories. And as was the case with those film stars, you could feel my father’s presence the moment he walked into a room—he was that charismatic. When I was in my early teens and I went to some of the salons with him, the employees responded as if God had dropped by to say hello.

Vidal already had an office in L.A., but after my father came in, North American profits doubled in two years. Back in the UK the company expanded to Manchester and Leeds. Then they moved on to Germany and Hong Kong and built up a wig business and hair care products. When he saw how Japanese apprentices wanted to fly to London to observe Vidal cut hair, my dad suggested setting up a school.

After my dad moved to California to run the American operation, his vision expanded even further. He wanted to create a franchising system whereby individual entrepreneurs could pay for use of the Vidal name, get the appropriate training, and set up shop. But others on the management team argued that the brand name should be kept more exclusive, like Estée Lauder. Ultimately, the board took a vote and my dad lost. (Years later, Vidal told me that not following up on my dad’s idea was the biggest mistake he ever made.)

In April 1983, while I was floating through Heathfield in a daze, the
company was sold to Richardson-Vicks for £72 million, so my father did very well.

By then Dad was ready to shift into a lower gear, so he bought a small newspaper called
Beverly Hills People
, and he invested with Vidal in another very “L.A.” product, MicroCool, which is a misting system for helping people stay comfortable outdoors in the heat. He was also on the board of Illingworth, Morris, an English textiles brand owned by the widow of actor James Mason.

Lucky for me, Dad’s semiretirement left him available to become the elder statesman and spirit guide—not to mention investor—in my new venture. As chairman, he contributed enormously to the birth of Jimmy Choo. The legwork, however, was left to me.

•  •  •  •

THE FIRST THING I SET
out doing was to find space for a shop in my preferred habitat, a location convenient to Knightsbridge and to Mayfair, near where the ladies who lunch at Harry’s Bar and San Lorenzo do their shopping. I had observed that Manolo Blahnik, our only real competition at the time, was on Old Church Street in a residential area in Chelsea, twenty minutes from the nearest tube station. God forbid that a customer has an actual job in an office and wants to pop over at lunchtime.

I wanted us to be more accessible, and I found the perfect spot on Motcomb Street, near Harvey Nichols, at the top of Sloane Street, between Belgrave Square and Harrods. If these points were the stations of the cross for a certain kind of woman, we were in the hot burning center.

The space was small, only 540 square feet, but I put down cream-colored carpet, and I found a furniture store somewhere in the Strand where I bought a sofa and had it covered in purple velvet. I installed some glass shelves, then went to an auction house on Lots Road and bought a cream marble table that I put in the back of the store with some flowers on it. It was all very basic, but it had the right look.

Behind the scenes we were even more frugal. We set up an office with two desks in the basement alongside the stockroom, and for quite a while that’s where I worked, with no windows, and certainly no frills. When we started out I didn’t even have a proper computer.

Jimmy’s only concern was to have a famous feng shui master bless the enterprise. So we paid to fly this guy over from Malaysia and put him up in a smart hotel. Then we went with him to the shop at midnight and sat in a circle and went through some sort of chanting ritual. He put a Chinese symbol on the mirror, rearranged the cash register so that the money wouldn’t “fly out of the store,” and that was that.