In My Shoes: A Memoir (8 page)

Then on July 5, 1998, we made our first appearance on
Sex and the City
and our visibility skyrocketed. The script had Carrie Bradshaw running for the Staten Island Ferry when she stumbles and screams out, “I lost my Choo!” The “Choo” she lost was in fact a style with tiny feathers we called the “Marlene.”

That one mention helped turn us into a household name. Suddenly
women who’d never heard of us, women who lived in small towns in the American heartland, thought about us in the same heady company as the other luxury brands being mentioned, brand names like Prada and Gucci and, admittedly, Manolo Blahnik. But the most amazing aspect of this turn of events was that, while manufacturers of everything from diapers to diet drinks pay fortunes for product placement in movies and TV, we got this huge call-out entirely for free. Years later I spoke with Candace Bushnell, the show’s creator, and she said she put the reference in the script because she’d been in London and stopped by the store on Motcomb Street and fell in love with the product. Ultimately, Jimmy Choo would be mentioned on the show thirty-four times.

In London, when we did our first sale at our little shop, there was a line around the block. Women were literally fighting each other to get in, and I had to put my brother at the door to serve as bouncer, letting in just a few customers at a time. The shoes were sexy. They were fun. They had interesting detail and color, and our factories were producing real quality at a price point between £250 and £400.

Three thousand miles away in Manhattan, we found retail space in Olympic Tower, on Fifty-First just off Fifth Avenue. St. Patrick’s Cathedral faces the entrance across Fifty-First, Saks is one block south, and all the luxury boutiques are clustered right there along the avenue, so Olympic Tower allowed us to be in the center of Manhattan’s most exclusive retail district without having to pay for a Fifth Avenue address.

To run the new store, we brought in Michael Stachowski, who had been the Giorgio’s buyer and the first (and only) one to buy off our sketches at that first, wretched FFANY. To launch our new East Coast
location, we hired Harrison and Shriftman to do PR, and we threw a huge party hosted by Lucy Sykes, the fashion editor of
Marie Claire
,
and her twin sister Plum from American
Vogue
,
who’d been a features assistant alongside me at British
Vogue.

Our plan for North American conquest did not initially include Las Vegas, but an unsolicited offer came in from the developers of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. They were creating a 500,000-square-foot shopping destination called the Grand Canal Shoppes, and supposedly Neiman Marcus was going to be their anchor. That never happened, and the other brands they said would be coming in never materialized. But we signed on and the location did okay, and then after a while we moved on to a spot inside Caesars Palace.

So now we had three North American stores—L.A., New York, and Las Vegas—and eight employees. I did all the buying for the US stores—the London company sold to the US subsidiary at 25 percent off wholesale—and Philip’s people did all the billing, shipping, and accounting. Even so, it seemed that I was constantly shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, and across the four North American time zones. Jet lag was to become a permanent condition.

•  •  •  •

FOR THE 1999 ACADEMY AWARDS
ceremony, Sandra and I flew to L.A. with sixty pairs of shoes in half a dozen different styles, but only in black and white. At that time, fashion was still all about matching, and my idea was to dye the shoes to match the dress. This was the servicing of celebrities at a whole new level, light-years beyond the gift bag.

We took a suite at L’Ermitage Beverly Hills on Burton Way and, to
save money, shared it with Nadja Swarovski, a longtime purveyor of fine crystal. Marilyn arranged a tea, and we sent word to all the stylists, the agents, and the managers, inviting them to come to the suite. We showed them what we had to offer—shoes in every size and style—but all in white satin. Then we explained how we would go the extra mile, dying any pair on-site to match the color of any dress.

We flew over a woman from London who knew about dyes, but even so we were up all night, mixing the colors in the hotel bathtub, struggling to get the shades exactly right, then applying the color to the satin with a sponge. Julianne Moore changed her dress at the last minute, which meant that we had to re-dye her shoes, which meant that she went out on the red carpet with wet feet.

Phillip Bloch, who dressed stars like Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry, and Sandra Bullock, came to the tea and asked that we send over a box of shoes and bags for Salma Hayek. The fashion director of the awards themselves, L’Wren Scott, ordered shoes for all the pretty young things who would be assisting the stars on and offstage. The list of actresses who wore Jimmy Choo that year included Geena Davis, Rachel Griffiths, Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lopez, Minnie Driver, Julianne Moore, Hilary Swank, and Uma Thurman.

Cate Blanchett was up for Best Actress for
Elizabeth
, and her stylist, Jessica Paster, asked us to make her a pair of Jimmy Choos covered in diamonds. We contacted Craig Drake, a jeweler in Philadelphia, and asked him to make a diamond bracelet that could become the ankle strap of a shoe. Of course, once we’d arranged to apply forty carats of diamonds to Cate’s eggplant-colored heels, her stylist called to say the shoes were too small.

Marilyn began phoning all over L.A., trying to find a store that carried our label where we could find a replacement for Cate. Saks in West Hollywood had a pair, but they were a half size too small and the wrong color—black. Marilyn drove over and bought them anyway. Then she called shoemaker Jack Zatikian. We drove over to his house in Los Feliz, near Griffith Park, and we stayed up all night as he rebuilt the shoe, then covered it in white satin so it could be dyed. Marilyn showed up the next morning with the diamonds. “Sew them on,” she said.

The story attracted such massive worldwide coverage that the red carpet was almost beside the point. As it turned out, Cate never wore the shoes for fear of being upstaged by her feet. But after the ceremony she auctioned her Jimmy Choos—sans diamonds—as well as her dress, to raise money for the American AIDS Foundation. The outfit went for $15,000. The diamonds were returned to Craig Drake.

We’d been the first brand to set up shop in the L’Ermitage, but by the next year the hotel had become this sort of Moroccan bazaar with shoe designers from high end to Hush Puppies, as well as jewelry designers, makeup and hair products, and designers pushing racks of dresses through the corridors as if they were on Seventh Avenue.

I maintained my aversion to being part of the crowd, so I moved our suite to the Peninsula Beverly Hills on Santa Monica, just off Wilshire. But Jack Zatikian remained a regular component of our Oscar strategy, dying the shoes, fixing the straps, and even adding more of a platform—whatever it took to get it right.

The following year, Nadja Swarovski and I collaborated on a special collection, creating seven distinctive shoes embedded with her
company’s crystal. These “one of a kind” shoes were prototypes for our next fall line.

•  •  •  •

MAYBE IT WAS THE HOLLYWOOD
influence, but back in London I started getting a little splashier in how we presented the brand. When Ian Shrager opened one of his first hotels, I did a press day in his restaurant. I took the fish off the ice in his display cases in the main dining room and arranged the shoes there. Visitors got to see not only this glam new venue in London, but how many shoes could be displayed on a bed of ice.

This was also about the time we began working on our first Cruise Collection, resort wear meant to be sold in December, just in time for winter vacations. Sandra’s inspiration was “nautical,” an idea that left me underwhelmed. That’s when I came up with the idea of glitter—in all colors. Pink. Yellow. Blue. And it was a huge hit.

In keeping with our edgier and more exclusive image, we asked Jimmy to move his shop from the dungeon in Hackney to a town house on Connaught Street in Bayswater. This space provided a workshop in the basement, a showroom for his couture clients on the ground floor, and living quarters for his family upstairs. At about the same time we moved our offices to Pont Street, above Jeroboams, the wine shop. I’d received a small bump in salary by now. I hired an assistant, Katherine Drummond, who comes from the Redgrave acting family. In addition, we acquired an actual computer for processing our orders, and I hired a friend, Adrian Harris, to write the code. Even so, it was still Sandra and I who were up all hours entering the orders into the system.

Around this time we also started producing shoes for men. My father wanted to put my brother Daniel in charge of this new line, because he thought Daniel needed a focus. But my brother’s real passion is music, which did not translate so well to working in the fashion industry. So for a while I wound up managing the men’s line in addition to everything else I was doing. Daniel would show up very dutifully at the shop—mostly to please my father—but he would be so hungover that he would go and lock himself in the bathroom to take a nap. Hannah, his girlfriend who sold for us, often had to get a ruler and poke him under the door to wake him up.

I’m afraid neither of my brothers inherited my father’s drive. In the Yeardye family, as in so many others, the sons’ level of worldly success seems inversely proportional to the father’s. History shows that inherited wealth has rarely been the spur of great ambition or character development, but sometimes it can help generate extraordinarily colorful eccentricities. As I was about to discover, those eccentricities can sometimes be wonderfully entertaining, at least for a while.

I
n May 1998, I attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in London, where I ran into a bunch of old friends who were all going out for dinner afterward. The ringleader was Henry Dent-Brocklehurst, who’d booked a table at La Famiglia. I knew Henry only slightly, and he was very gracious but also full of regret. “I’m so sorry,” he said to me, “but I don’t think there’s any more room.”

I left it at that, and after the meeting I simply went home. Shortly thereafter, someone rang my bell. I opened the door, and there on my threshold I found a young man who looked as if he had taken the proverbial step out of the pages of
GQ.
He’d been at the NA meeting, where I’d quickly noted that, along with being incredibly handsome, he was an American, and very funny. His name was Matthew Mellon.

“You have to come,” he said. “To the restaurant. We’ll make room. I don’t think you’ll take up all that much room, will you?”

I liked the look of him, and I thought it was very chivalrous that he’d made this special effort to include me, and so I went. The restaurant was around the corner on Elizabeth Street, and as we walked over Matthew was talking a mile a minute, and I must have been laughing the whole time. Even so, there was nothing terribly romantic or “like a
first date” about this encounter. It was a perfectly nice evening, and when we were done I simply walked home by myself.

But then a few weeks later, Henry Dent-Brocklehurst provided a second opportunity for Matthew and me to get together by getting married in grand style to a Hawaiian fashion model with the unlikely name of Lili Maltese. The ceremony was to take place at the Dent-Brocklehursts’ family seat, Sudeley Castle, in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, and with a guest list that included many of the well known, such as Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, as well as many of the wellborn, which included the aforementioned Matthew Mellon.

Henry, as his double-barreled moniker (and the castle) might suggest, comes from a terribly aristocratic family, and he’d just come home from L.A. to help with the family estate. His mother is Lady Ashcombe, and his godmother is Camilla Parker Bowles. As a wedding venue, Sudeley dates back to the twelfth
century, and though the current structure goes back only to the fifteenth, it is the burial place of Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII, which is not too shabby.

All of us stayed in the village, and the next morning there was a convoy of cars to take us the two-hour ride back to London. It turned out that Matthew and I were staying at the same small hotel, but when it came time to leave, we were being ushered toward two different vehicles. When he saw what was about to happen, he jumped out of his and ran back and got into mine, and that sort of sealed the deal.

At this time, Matthew was living in L.A. and I was incredibly busy with Jimmy Choo in London, but we began to date, after a fashion, with
him flying back and forth across the Atlantic, staying with me whenever he was in the UK.

•  •  •  •

MATTHEW CAME FROM THE HIGHER
echelons of America’s own version of aristocracy. In the nineteenth century, his great-great-great-grandfather, Judge Thomas Mellon, had placed shrewd bets on industrial expansion and thereby built a fortune to rival the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. He first founded Mellon Bank, then expanded into other enterprises, and when he died, he left one of these businesses to each of his five sons. Mellons turned a new process for making aluminum into Alcoa. They were also instrumental in building General Motors, U.S. Steel, and Heinz. Their investment in oil, the Spindletop field in Texas, became Gulf Oil, and that’s the line from which Matthew is descended.

His mother, meanwhile, came from a long line of Drexels and Biddles, again very much to the American manor born. As a slightly darker distinction, Matthew claimed to have been the model for Julian, the drug-addicted rich boy in Bret Easton Ellis’s
Less Than Zero.

Matthew’s parents had divorced when he was young, and he’d spent a large share of his earliest years sailing with his father out of Northeast Harbor in Maine, and in the Caribbean. But then when Matthew was five, Karl, his father, dropped out of sight, reappearing eleven years later with long hair, a beard, and rather lame apologies, as well as promises of being more of a father in the years to come. Unfortunately, Karl was seriously bipolar and in 1983, at the age of forty-five, he killed himself. As is usually the case, this parental suicide did nothing to make the teenage son a happier and more stable person.

Matthew grew up with his mother in Palm Beach and, according to the tale she told her son, he could not expect to inherit anything from his father’s family but the Mellon name. He enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania and along the way had rather un-Mellonish summer jobs working as a ditchdigger, and in the kitchen of Danny’s Seafood Connection in Boca Raton.

Then on his twenty-first birthday, he was summoned to Pittsburgh. His uncle Jay had served as something of a surrogate father, and now the older man brought his nephew into the boardroom of Mellon Bank and gave him the good news. Having reached his majority—surprise!—he would have access to thirteen expansive trust funds. As Matthew told the press, he immediately rang up the
Wall Street Journal
to start a subscription. He also bought the first BMW M5 in the United States.

Matthew was already a member of St. Anthony Hall, the Mellon family’s traditional fraternity at Penn, but he bought a ten-bedroom mansion just a few blocks away as his own private Animal House. He did his first stint in rehab while still in college.

God knows how he managed to graduate, but thereupon he took a job with New York’s then mayor Rudolf Giuliani, doing “opposition research” and writing what he called “mudslinging” press releases. The Ford modeling agency had approached him, but his family would have rather he join the Sandinistas than have him appear in advertisements. By the same token, they were none too pleased when he began to spend his evenings in downtown clubs, and at an uptown place called Au Bar, often dancing wildly without a partner (and without shoes), even entering break-dancing contests and—God forbid—winning. He used to hire limos with the drivers rotating shifts as, coked out of his mind, he
kept the party going around the clock. Unfortunately, these binges represented more than high spirits and youthful energy. Matthew had inherited his father’s bipolar illness.

Matthew Mellon was utterly beautiful and utterly goofy, which was a very endearing combination. He was also damaged goods, wounded and struggling, and that, I think, is where we made the real connection. My mistake was in assuming that, because I’d overcome my addictions, he could, too.

•  •  •  •

IN 1993, MATTHEW MOVED TO
L.A. to produce rap music for Grindstone. He then moved on to film, trying to put together a documentary, which, as I recall, had something to do with nuns. He collected Ferraris, leased one house in Beverly Hills and another on the beach in Malibu. But crack was becoming the era’s drug of choice, and the smart set and gangland began to overlap, which added too many guns to the mix. Then in 1994 he overdosed, and a friend took him to his first 12-step meeting. He went on to a Malibu rehab center called Promises, where people with agents and managers are regulars. When he got out, he moved in with Henry, the two of them adrift without drugs, floating in their pool, waiting for their next NA meeting. He was still in that state of post-addictive limbo when we met.

After about six months of our peculiar, transatlantic romance, Matthew invited me to come to a charity dinner in Pittsburgh. He picked me up in a limousine strewn with rose petals, blindfolded me, took me to a waiting helicopter, recited a bit of verse he’d written, and proposed while circling the Mellon Bank building. It was a sweet poem, with “I want to
marry you” expressed very lyrically. It all seemed rather sudden, but like the always plucky fictional character I’m supposed to resemble, perhaps I had “a special radar for inappropriate men.” Of course I said yes.

Matthew moved to London to be with me on a live-in basis, and my brother Gregory, who was an estate agent at the time, working for a company called Foxtons, scoured Belgravia to find us a house, eventually locating a duplex on Eaton Place, not far from Chester Row. Matthew bought it, and I paid for the decorating, which led to a photo spread in
W.

Matthew didn’t take to London at first. Our famously English weather was a problem, as was the somewhat arcane and highly structured social system, which is difficult for anyone from the outside to navigate. Certainly the people aren’t quite as gregarious as they are in L.A. But Henry had moved back as well, so at least Matthew had one close friend, and he did his best to acclimate.

•  •  •  •

THE NEXT BIG SCENE IN
our script was, of course, a wedding, and, initially, we thought we’d get married in Venice, just because it seemed the most romantic place on earth. We actually took a trip there with my parents to look at churches. My mother was sober at the time, and she behaved, and over a three-day period we must have looked at fifty possible venues. The wrinkle, of course, was that all the beautiful and atmospheric chapels in Italy are Catholic, and we were not, and the priests there take this matter of religious affiliation very seriously. For a while we thought about converting. We even went to see the priest at a Catholic church in Knightsbridge, but he declined the assignment, expressing doubts about our religious fervor.

My father had his own doubts, not just about having a Catholic wedding in Venice, but about having a wedding anywhere with Matthew Mellon as the groom. According to tradition, it’s the bride’s father who pays for the wedding feast, and that led to some discussion about just how grand a ceremony we were going to have. Dad offered a budget of £100,000. Anything beyond that was up to us.

Even during this prenuptial phase of high romance and heavy distraction, I still had a business to run, and I still had the same troublesome business partner. In April, I received an unwanted wedding present from Jimmy in the form of an article published in the
Mail on Sunday.
He had spoken all too openly with the reporter, going on about the growing rift between us. He even went so far as to say that we were harming him by using his name (for which, you may recall, he was being compensated with half ownership in a company that was going to make him rich). As for the fact that Sandra and I were, in fact, designing the collection, he responded, “Anyone can sketch a shoe.”

The father of the bride, who was also chairman of the company, stepped in and wrote him a cease and desist letter. Jimmy responded by saying that I was the one who should be restricted from speaking to the press. We offered to buy him out. He refused.

Matthew and I continued our path to the altar, but to get married in England you have to fill out forms and sign documents in front of the superintendent registrar within the village or town where you reside, so we actually took care of the formalities with a simple civil ceremony at the registry office on Kings Road. We were still planning the “big church wedding,” of course, and we were so focused on that larger event that the moment of officially becoming man and wife really
was not a big deal for us. We had a few friends along as witnesses, and then my dad took us to lunch at La Famiglia. Afterward, we had tea at Claridge’s.

By this time we had settled on the perfect setting for a proper English wedding: Blenheim Palace, the home of the dukes of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill. It’s a gorgeous example of English baroque set in a two-thousand-acre park to the west of London, and
Vogue
wanted to do a feature. But of course that meant that the dress had to be perfect.

Six weeks before the big day I still didn’t know what I was going to wear. Matthew and I were out at the Oscars when I ran into Carlos Sousa, head of PR worldwide for Valentino. He said, “Darling, you must come to us. Don’t worry! We will work it out for you.”

Trouble is, at that time I really didn’t have any money. My salary from Jimmy Choo was still not much beyond £15,000 a year, which just happened to be the cost of a couture dress from Valentino.

Matthew’s brother, Henry, graciously stepped in to loan me the money, so when we got back to London I set up an appointment and booked a ticket to Rome, whereupon Valentino himself did three sketches for me to choose from.
Vogue
covered the story, with photographs of me being fitted. It was the only couture clothing I’ve ever had made, and it was amazing. But the lasting value-added was that Valentino and I became great friends. He began to call whenever he was in London, and later he would invite us to spend time with him on his boat.

At this point, it was still unclear how the rather grand scale of this event was going to be financed. My mother was back to being her normal, difficult self, and so for a while my parents weren’t going to come
at all, and then they were going to come and were inviting ten friends, and then they ended up bringing thirty guests. Every step of the way was fraught with the kind of family drama I’d known all my life, with my mother continually causing scenes behind the scenes. As per usual with my mother, you could never anticipate what nonsensical thing was going to set her off, and thus you could not avoid the trip wires. Harry Winston was loaning me a fifty-carat diamond to wear, and when I went to Paris to pick it up, I took my mother with me, hoping that letting her borrow something really lovely, too, might placate her, but to no avail. I was the bride but, as usual, our interaction wound up being all about her.

Adding to the stress was the persistent question of who was footing the ever-growing bill. The invitations said “Mr. and Mrs. Yeardye invite you . . .” but, as it turned out, Matthew kicked in $400,000 in addition to my father’s £100,000, and then when I received my first large cash proceeds from Jimmy Choo, I reimbursed him. This slightly unusual arrangement added a huge element of friction I really didn’t need because Matthew’s uncle Jay, the kind of multimillionaire who always flies coach, was sensitive about the Mellons being taken advantage of for their wealth. I think he also had an inflated sense of just how much money my father had. (He also had no idea how much my father was spending on the face-lift that my mother insisted on undergoing before she’d deign to show up.)