In My Shoes: A Memoir (15 page)

Now it dawned on me that the “extra” shares he’d mentioned so casually weren’t the sweet, and they certainly weren’t “extra.” They were the main course. They were the shares I’d acquired by reinvesting millions of my hard-earned dollars in Jimmy Choo. They were half the wealth I’d built up by nearly killing myself for the better part of a decade.

The trustee and the accountant came to the office on Ixworth Place and we had a face-to-face meeting with my lawyer, Andrew Roberts. Both Nick and Raj were talking double talk, blaming each other for the “mistake,” and at the same time trying to justify the misaccounting according to “my father’s wishes.” “My father’s wishes” according to whom? My father had made his wishes quite explicit in the legal documents setting up the trusts and giving half his equity in Jimmy Choo to me. And yet these two kept referring to my 64,000 shares in Jimmy Choo as “the extra shares” or “the shares that appeared after the sale.”

In a private-equity deal you don’t just “buy” shares. Any investment you make is accounted as a loan. By reinvesting and putting my money at risk, I had “loaned” Jimmy Choo Limited many millions.

As a record of this transaction, I had been given a “deep discount bond,” or loan note, for the amount of money represented by the 64,000 shares. And just to make perfectly clear what that loan was all about—a standard procedure in these deals—the note had been stapled to the document representing the shares, a financial instrument known as an institutional strip.

Nick listened to this remedial lesson in private-equity finance and assured us that everything would be put right, but we still seemed to be talking past each other.

As the meeting was coming to an end, another vague but disturbing recollection filtered up to haunt my consciousness. My father had once described how, when the trusts were first being organized, Raj had come to him and said, “Tom, we can claim a twenty-million-dollar debt for the Araminta Trust to the Marqueta Trust so when the money comes in, Tamara has to pay you.”

Understandably, my father said to him, “You better take that and rip it up and get rid of it.” Why he hadn’t fired Raj on the spot remains a mystery to me. Why I didn’t insist that my father fire him I can understand only in terms of the way I’d always accepted abuse as being part of the natural order.

But, in fact, Raj’s no doubt illegal proposition made absolutely no sense except in the twisted worldview of one person: my mother. I think my father had been happy to work with dopes like Nick and Raj because their weakness ensured that he could retain control. But if these functionaries were amenable to outside control, God knows my mother would find a way to control them. With the old king now gone, all the monsters in the realm had indeed been let loose.

•  •  •  •

I CONTINUED TO FLY ALL
over the world, living in a state of perpetual jet lag while trying to appear bright and smiling and cheerful at public events, but as the court date for the divorce drew near, the pressure became so intense that I just couldn’t take it anymore. Matthew and I
met for coffee, and I said, “Look, I will give you £1.5M and we won’t go to court.”

He agreed, and so at least one gut-wrenching conflict was downgraded from a crisis to a mere unpleasant set of details.

Even so, I was still juggling a small baby, an impaired ex-husband, and an asshole of a CEO that I couldn’t get rid of. I’d been killing myself to build a global brand, still being paid well below market rate, only to discover that I’d been robbed not only of half my shares but also half the money I’d taken out to live on.

For what exactly, then, was I working so hard? For a while it was so overwhelming, not to mention depressing, that I found it hard to go on.

And then Robert’s true inner monster came to the fore. More and more he seemed to want Jimmy Choo to be his own little fiefdom. It did nothing to help our relationship when, shortly after the sale to Lion, I was featured on the cover of the British edition of
Newsweek.
Robert hated the attention I received, but until now he could dismiss it as my being a “glamour girl.” Now he had to read the news weekly’s kind words about my business acumen and leadership skills.

I had tried to accept this unpleasant rivalry as the cost of doing business and move on. And then I was astounded to learn that he was running a director’s account on me, keeping tabs on my expenses as if I were a junior sales representative. It was all so mad that even to this day I have no idea how they compiled it, but Robert had hired Alison Egan as the CFO, so it was no surprise that she would do his bidding.

Afterward, I had my own accountants try to work it out line by line, but it was impossible. Robert and Alison had charged me for express shipping of production samples from Italy to London, as if this were a
personal expenditure. It was just like the list of the debts my mother said I owed her. Robert had compiled so many bogus debits against my account that my £50,000 Christmas bonus was held back. “You owe the company money,” I was told.

After this, my primal nemesis came back to add one more note to my humiliation, and, I suppose, to the sense of farce. The new bean counters from Lion came in one day and said, “You know, we’ve noticed that your mother’s taking so much stock from the Beverly Hills store that it’s affecting turnover. If she wants to come in and order up front, that’s fine. And if she wants to take something from the store, we can give her a 50 percent discount.”

This new policy brought out the worst in my mother. No sooner had word of the new policy reached the West Coast than she was at the store on a spree, lining up thousands of dollars of product on the counter, ready to go. The manager came over and said, “Mrs. Yeardye, I’m sorry, but you know we’ve been instructed that we have to charge you for these. We’re happy to give you a 50 percent discount.” Apparently, she grabbed all the bags and, in her perfect coif and her Chanel suit, went running down the street toward her Bentley.

The irony of all of Robert’s attempts to hurt me, in ways both significant and ridiculously petty, is that the entire time he was accusing me of nickel-and-dime exploitations of Jimmy Choo’s FedEx accounts, he had a full-time employee on our payroll doing non–Jimmy Choo work. This was Jim Sharp, a former banker from Citigroup who joined Equinox in 2003.
He spent his time looking for further acquisitions that Robert could bring to Lion, none of which would benefit Jimmy Choo in the least.

This was the way Bernard Arnault had started out, acquiring Louis Vuitton, then taking it public, then acquiring other brands. Robert had worked for Arnault, had watched what he’d done, and evidently was now trying to follow in those footsteps.

He and Jim looked at Holland and Holland, A. Testoni, Stephane Kélian, the French shoemaker, Geoffrey Beene, and Bill Blass, but none of it worked.

Of far more serious concern was the damage Robert’s inadequacies and insecurities were doing to the brand, going behind my back to undermine me with the staff at Jimmy Choo, trying to stir up resentment, and then, worst of all, interfering with the design team to undermine the integrity of the collection.

For Robert, exercising control appeared more important than what was good for the business, but then, the battle between “the suits” and “the creatives” has been going on for as long as there have been suits. There’s a wonderful moment in
Mad Men
, when a conflict erupts between the account execs and the copywriters and Don Draper, the mysterious and charismatic creative director, deadpans the much deeper truth: “They can’t do what we do and they hate us for it.” And yet with Robert there seemed to be far more to it. With Robert it seemed personal.

In designing, I never think about what women want—just about what looks great. And I can find inspiration almost anywhere, from watching Lauren Hutton in
American Gigolo
or Michelle Pfeiffer in
Scarface
to seeing African tribal masks in a museum. I might take a notion and start pulling Blondie album covers, or buying coffee-table books on punk rock or vintage bowling shirts from Wisconsin. It’s not an
intellectual process that you think through—it’s simply an emotional experience—creating in the moment, on the spot, with “lightbulb” moments. There’s a creative flow and sometimes you work on something and it gets better and better and other times you have to throw it out. But a successful product is when you have an emotional reaction to it—when you walk in a room and think, “I’ve got to have that, it’s amazing!”

So we would go through this back-and-forth process two or three times, with me throwing out ideas, then the team making sketches, and then me editing them. I’d say this is the right direction, this is the wrong direction, this is a good one. We should develop this one more and not that one. Then we’d send the sketches to the factory where the first samples would be made up.

But each year I would also take the team on an inspiration trip, shopping in flea markets and collecting vintage pieces that spoke to me. Then we would come back and put into groups everything we’d picked up.

I took the team once to Jaipur in India, and then to shop in the hippie market in Goa. I also took them to Morocco, and we shopped in the bazaar and stayed in these cute little riads and got inspiration from the lanterns around the courtyards.

Istanbul was next on my list, but no one else wanted to go, which I didn’t understand at all. Later I found out that it was a Robert-inspired mutiny. Be that as it may, I took the trip by myself, absorbing the souk and the rugs, the jewelry and the spice market with its amazing colors. I took hundreds of photographs there, including shots of the architecture with the patterns of the tiles and the paintings on them.

But Robert’s most costly power play came at a very pivotal moment in fashion, when we were poised to capture the next wave.

At the Lineapelle show in Bologna, I’d been sitting with one of the suppliers when I picked some components off the shelf—a very stiletto heel and a platform with a very thick sole—and I said, “I want it just like this.” Right there on the spot I was designing, and actually assembling, a very different kind of shoe, the heavy platform sandal. We and everyone else had been making shoes that were single soled and very strappy, and now I was proposing to increase the volume of the shoe, making it considerably heavier, even clunky, but with a thin heel.

I set this new idea in motion, and then I went on a business trip. When I came back, the shoe I had designed had been taken out of the collection. Sandra and a product developer named Katarina had decided to drop it. I was astounded that they would be so presumptuous. It wasn’t until later that I became aware of the propaganda campaign Robert had launched against me in-house, encouraging the creative team essentially to disregard my input.

To make matters infinitely worse, just at this moment, Christian Louboutin came out with his peep toe platform, and women flocked to him. The platform stiletto became the hot shoe, Louboutin became the hot brand, and for a while our customers transferred their loyalty to him. Then Yves Saint Laurent came out with almost exactly the same design—and that was that. We couldn’t go ahead without looking like copycats.

It may seem absurd to make so much over one missed opportunity. But until that moment, Louboutin had only one platform style, and this new shoe he brought out truly made him a household name. It’s like
that in fashion—make or break on one roll of the dice. It was truly a watershed moment, and not our finest hour.

We continued to grow the business, but only by opening new retail stores. Robert was able to tout this increase in dollar volume, which is certainly better than flat sales or a decline, but the proper measure for the health of a brand should be “like for like” growth in the same universe of stores. That kind of growth would require the continuous creativity I was trying to keep alive, but which my jealous CEO was undercutting at every turn.

My father was dead, my marriage was over, and now with Robert firmly installed, it looked as if I was going to be stuck in a never-ending custody battle over the company that I’d conceived and carried to term. Not only that, but I was still fighting for “custody” of half the shares I’d already earned.

•  •  •  •

THAT NEXT SUMMER I RENTED
a house in Malibu, which was pleasant, but everything shut down at night, and there was only one good restaurant and just this empty stretch of sand and surf, and I felt isolated.

While I was there my friend Diana Jenkins introduced me to her neighbor, Robert Ritchie, also known as Kid Rock, and we all hung out together on the beach. I liked him a lot, and in fact we’re still good friends, but the media made it out to be far more than it was. They did the same with Flavio Briatore, the head of the Renault Formula One racing team, with Pharrell Williams, even George Clooney. Every
friendship I struck up with a well-known bachelor became, in the pages of the tabloids, my next reckless affair. The fact is, I was far too busy, and far too exhausted, to get too worked up about anyone.

I was also still trying to reach out to my mother, so while I was in California I put together a housewarming party for her. Older people don’t get out much, so I gathered my brothers and a bunch of friends and some Hollywood people around a long table outside by the pool.

Later, in an affidavit pertaining to our dispute over the shares, she said I’d thrown a wild party and destroyed her house. My mother made the evening I’d put together for her sound like a major debauch, so much so that she described it as the “defining moment in the breakdown in our relationship.” What I remember most vividly is my wonderful cook from that summer standing in the kitchen in tears because my mother was being so vile to her.

Shortly after the California dinner, Nick Morgan, the trustee, forwarded a handwritten letter my mother had sent to him. It was so degrading to me, and she talked about me in such a disparaging and dismissive way, that I’ve never spoken to her since. But then she’d always had a way of taking any detail of my life experience and making it sound utterly shameful, if not criminal. She seemed to relish using phrases like “she was BROKE!” when, in fact, the financial pinch that had me borrowing money from my dad was the result of the ridiculously low salary I took in order to help grow the company. What hurt most is that I was at her house, with my daughter, when she was putting these thoughts to paper.