In My Shoes: A Memoir (13 page)

Gucci Group would have been a natural partner, but they’d been thrown for a loop by their purchase by Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, and now Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole were leaving. Moreover, they had just run up a long string of acquisitions—not just Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney, but also Yves Saint Laurent, and a direct competitor in the market for luxury women’s shoes, Sergio Rossi. So Gucci passed.

LVMH seemed a logical player because they did not have a luxury brand of women’s shoes. Berluti was part of their portfolio, but they made footwear only for men. Still, LVMH was under pressure to develop the strength of their existing brands, rather than to grow by acquiring new ones.

For months we went through pitch meetings and intense discussions with strategic buyers, and with millions of dollars riding on the outcome, it was all incredibly stressful and disruptive for everyone in the organization. Anytime there’s a merger or an acquisition, everyone wonders how it will affect him or her personally, that is, will they still have a job? At times the stress is palpable. Tempers flare.

•  •  •  •

MEANWHILE, MY OWN PERSONAL LIFE
was not exactly an island of serenity, with de-merging on the agenda there as well.

I’d been living apart from Matthew, still not ready to face the added stress of a divorce, but my father told me that staying in marital limbo was madness, and after a while I was ready to make the break official. He called around on my behalf, and on his recommendation I engaged Sandra Davis, the divorce attorney who had worked for Princess Diana and Jerry Hall.

Even thusly armed, however, I was still far more interested in mediation than confrontation. I told Matthew, “I don’t want anything from you. I’ll look after Minty, and you can set something aside for her when she turns twenty-one.”

I was offering to take full responsibility for her life, health, and happiness, and I asked for nothing in return. In my naïveté I imagined
that Matthew would say, “That’s great. Thanks,” and we’d split amicably.

Instead, my husband responded by suing me for £10 million, claiming that his name and money had been instrumental in building Jimmy Choo.

For his lawyer, Matthew hired Raymond Tooth, also known as “Jaws,” the man who had represented Sadie Frost against Jude Law, and Pattie Boyd against Eric Clapton. Before Irina Abramovich settled out of court for a pedestrian £155 million, Jaws had been on his way to the largest divorce settlement in history, with Roman Abramovich’s £18 billion fortune in the crosshairs.

Suing me was bad enough, but their line of argument was especially galling, primarily because I’d changed my name to Mellon only at Matthew’s insistence. I had been Tamara Yeardye at work, and that’s what I continued calling myself until Matthew actually got very, very upset, saying, “We’re married! You should be using my name.”

On April 19, 2004, I was at my London home in South Kensington when I got a call from my girlfriend Elika Gibbs at about two in the morning. My father was ill, and my mother had called Elika because her boyfriend was a doctor. Elika had listened briefly and told my mother to call an ambulance. Then Elika called me.

I went over immediately, arriving just as the emergency medics got to my parents’ house. My father was being carried out on a stretcher and my mother was in a state. She was so agitated that she couldn’t go in the ambulance, so I climbed in and I rode with my dad to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Fulham Road.

When we arrived at the ER, they looked him over and their
assessment was devastating. They said he’d suffered an aneurysm and that the hemorrhage on the brain was so big that they couldn’t do anything about it. They said flatly that he wouldn’t last very long and that I should simply sit with him and talk with him. They said he probably wouldn’t be able to respond but that he’d be able to hear me all the same.

I was in shock, of course. I couldn’t believe this was happening, and I was utterly torn apart. He was my dad, and I loved him, but he was also my mentor and my business partner. He was the one solid rock I’d ever known in my life, and now he was leaving me behind. I held him and tried to say good-bye, and he was so strong that it took him eighteen hours to die. I don’t think I stopped crying once the whole time. All the while my mother was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, not crying, not touching him, not responding in any way. I have no idea what she was or was not feeling. All I know for certain is that she kept her Botox appointment later that week.

Hannah Colman, who had started working for us on the shop floor on Motcomb Street when she was only seventeen and was now head of all European sales, came around to help us call people and make the arrangements. Robert, overflowing with humanity, rang up and said, “What are you doing over there?”

She said, “They need my help.”

He said, “We need you in the office. You need to get back here.”

She wasn’t even scheduled to be working—she was supposed to be on holiday.

We held the funeral in a church in Knightsbridge, on a bright, sunny day. I was the only one who spoke. My mother was too stunned,
and my brothers deferred to me. After the service, we went back to my mother’s apartment in Eaton Place for a tea with a small group of friends.

This was the end of an era. My father had been such a force in my life—my primary emotional attachment, as well as my partner and guide in business. His passing left a power vacuum like the death of an ancient king. From now on I was going to have to fend for myself, without his protection or advice, and it remained to be seen if I was up for the challenge.

•  •  •  •

MY PARENTS HAD BEEN PLANNING
to move back to California, so after Dad’s death my mother flew out to L.A., checked into the Peninsula, and began looking for a house in Beverly Hills. My brothers went with her, and my work took me out there often enough, so I would check in on her from time to time.

Minty and the nanny traveled with me, and while in L.A. we stayed at the Peninsula as well, and I tried very hard to set aside my anger toward my mother and help her get through this difficult transition. Matthew was gone, and I wanted Minty to have a grandmother, and I thought that maybe in the midst of our grief or some such we could all bond as a family. I was a grown-up now, and no matter how much she’d hurt me as a child, I knew that I should at least try to forgive her, if only for Minty’s sake. For a couple of weeks I even left Minty and her nanny at the Peninsula with my mother. For reasons I’ve never understood, my mother soon fired the young woman, who wrote to me to complain. She said all my mother did was take Minty to coffee shops with my
brothers and sit around and, as she described it, bad-mouth me in front of my little girl.

Apparently, my efforts at reconciliation faced an uphill battle. It hurts to have anyone belittle you and speak against you. But when it’s your own mother . . . I may have been an adult, but the pain and the anger were still very real. Mothers just aren’t supposed to hate their children.

Meanwhile, I was the one working, continuing to build the engine of wealth that my mother and brothers were living on.

The business that kept me coming to L.A. that season was something I’d set in motion months before with the Elton John AIDS Foundation, a project aimed at raising money to build rape shelters across South Africa.

I’d met Elton and his husband, David Furnish, at the event they do in Windsor every year to raise money for the foundation. Theirs is one of the most highly regarded charities because it’s very efficiently run, with the money going to help, not to pay inflated administrative costs. I went up to David and I told him about this horrific article I’d read in the
Times
about a three-year-old girl who had been raped in Africa. This kind of thing happens all the time because the men there believe they can rid themselves of AIDS by sleeping with virgins.

I said, “If I raise money, can we put it through your charity? Can we set it apart for rape shelters?”

He said, “Absolutely.”

I didn’t want to do a predictable fund-raiser, just another black-tie dinner. So I rang up Pilar Boxford, the head of all regional brands at Cartier, and I proposed that they go in with us on a book of
photographs of women, by women, for women. But we had to make it fun, and we had to offer a chance to be creative, because the people you want associated with your project get a lot of requests from charities.

Then it occurred to us: With jewelry and shoes sponsoring, why have anything else in the pictures? Why give press to brands that weren’t contributing? So let’s have everyone pose in the nude.

Each celebrity model would be wearing nothing but her Cartier jewelry and her Jimmy Choos. The creative part was that she could be as covered or as uncovered as she cared to be. She could stand behind a door with her foot and her hand sticking out with a ring on it, or she could be in bed with a sheet covering everything but her hand and her foot, or she could be stark naked—it was entirely up to her.

The whole affair turned out to be an enormous administrative chore, so eventually I asked Arabella Bodie to manage the project, riding herd on our celebrities, arranging schedules for photographers like Mary McCartney, Pamela Hanson, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Ellen von Unwerth, and organizing hair and makeup.

•  •  •  •

MEANWHILE, I WAS FLYING BACK
and forth between L.A. and London, continuing to attend secretive pitch meetings for Project Jewel as Akeel tried to drum up interest from among his select group of potential buyers. We would do presentations at Rothschild’s conference room with lots of bullet points and pie charts, and with Robert, the CFO, and me all trying to create the illusion of one big happy family—just like during my childhood. Robert would speak to the financial issues, and
I would speak to the creative, which didn’t interest them all that much, though they did like hearing about the celebrities.

My father’s death had added new impetus to the idea of a sale because his equity needed to be sorted out for the benefit of my mother. So all during this period I sent her faxes to keep her abreast of the situation and to explain her options. If she were allowed to leave money in, it would very likely increase in value. On the other hand, continued investment most likely would not be an option because new owners usually want nonactive partners to cash out, just to simplify decision making. This seemed to be a nonissue as far as my mother was concerned because she made it quite clear that she wanted to receive her ownership stake entirely in cash that could be reinvested to generate monthly income.

On October 31, 2004, the
Mail on Sunday
blew the cover on Project Jewel by announcing we were for sale. They got it wrong, of course, saying that Burberry was the leading contender, which was all a bit awkward, given that Akeel had just introduced us to Lyndon Lea, a thirty-four-year-old financial whiz known as the “boy banker.” The head of European operations for Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, a private-equity firm based in Texas, he was in the process of leaving to set up his own firm, to be called Lion Capital.

Lyndon was very charming and obviously a driven, self-made man. His mother had been a hairdresser, and now he was a devoted polo player with a private jet. When we had our first conference with him at Rothschild, I liked what he had to say because he seemed to have a strategic vision for the brand. He seemed to be interested in more than
the typical private-equity game plan of leveraging, pumping up the EBITDA for three years, and then getting out. Then again, I was still new to this game.

We continued our discussion over dinner at Harry’s Bar, and during the cocktail chatter I actually heard Robert say that when he came into the business “it was like being given the keys to a Ferrari.” This was the one time he ever acknowledged—at least in my hearing—the value of what my father and I had created.

Ultimately we had three offers. Lambert Howarth, a huge shoe company that supplied Marks and Spencer, wanted to do a reverse takeover, meaning that they would buy a controlling interest, rename the entire entity Jimmy Choo, then take it public. Soros Private Equity Partners also made a proposal, but one that left them with wiggle room for an extended period of due diligence. Given his head start, Lyndon was able to make us an offer within a week, with no contingencies.

It was in November 2004 when the owners of Jimmy Choo sat down in the conference room at Ixworth Place to decide which offer to take. Representing Phoenix were David Burns and Robert. On the family’s side were myself; my mother; Nick Morgan, who managed the trusts in Jersey; the accountant for the trusts, Raj Patel; and Timothy Gere, who managed the trusts’ investments.

Lambert Howarth’s valuation was £125 million, but part of their offer was in stock rather than cash. Lyndon’s offer for Lion Capital was based on a value of £101 million, all cash. We decided to go with Lion, which was a very good thing because Lambert Howarth soon went into bankruptcy.

As anticipated, Lion didn’t want any extraneous shareholders
hanging around to complicate decision making, but again, my mother was happy to cash out, taking her relatively illiquid private-equity shares and reinvesting elsewhere.

I was doubly delighted. Not only would this deal rid me of Robert, it would rid me of my mother. For all my efforts to please her, take care of her, and reconcile with her, I was coming to the conclusion that the best I could hope for was to remove myself from her in order to protect myself.

But just as my mother needed investments that were more liquid, I, too, needed to generate a monthly income to live on. So I cashed out roughly half of my half of the family’s share. The rest I reinvested in Jimmy Choo, in return for which I received 64,000 shares of stock in this entity that I would partly own in partnership with Lyndon’s Lion Capital.

At last my dream of financial independence was being realized. But no sooner had we given Lion the good news than it seemed as if the gods wanted to have a laugh at my expense.

Concerned about continuity in management, Lyndon announced that he wanted Robert to stay on. In fact, he insisted that both Robert and I be contractually locked in. He actually went so far as to demand assurances that my nemesis and I would be able to continue working together “harmoniously.”