In My Shoes: A Memoir (16 page)

Our book of celebrity photographs to raise money for Elton’s AIDS
Foundation continued to occupy a great deal of my time, and our list of models was pretty amazing: Christina Aguilera, Rebecca Banks, Tony Briar, Rachel Hunter, Lara Flynn Boyle, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Jodie Kidd, Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss, Macy Gray, Paris Hilton, Geri Halliwell, Serena Williams, Minnie and Kate Driver, Elle Macpherson, Sophie Dahl, Anne Heche, Mimi Rogers, Pamela Anderson, Yasmin Le Bon, Sarah Ferguson, among others. Of course I had to take a turn as well, lying on my belly on a bar with a huge Cartier diamond, my feet in the air.

A friend of mine, Beatrice Vincenzini, agreed to publish the volume. Her family owns newspapers, cable TV channels in Spain, the Italian national lottery, as well as the book company De Agostini. We called our photo collection “4 Inches.” The innuendo in the title did cross my mind, but the fact is that “4 inches” was the maximum height for stilettos at the time. Now, of course, heels have gone on and up through the roof.

The book sold for $75, and it brought in a ton of publicity, and then we did an auction of photographs at Christie’s in London, in New York, and in L.A. All in all we raised $3.5 million, which at the time was the single largest donation ever to the Elton John charity. We built rape shelters across South Africa that could provide every service that a woman would need under one roof: medical treatment, legal advice, and counseling. It’s said that the money provided treatment for more than five hundred thousand women.

W
hen Phoenix acquired us in 2001, we had only three stores; by the time Lion Capital came on the scene in 2004, we had nineteen. Now we were adding new stores on Bond Street and on Sloane Street, and on Via San Pietro all’Orto in Milan. Rents were going up all over Europe, which meant that you could pay millions for a top location, which also required a lump-sum payment to buy out the lease held by the old tenant.

In Paris the shopping mecca is Avenue Montaigne, and Robert found a space there that had been the concierge’s flat for an apartment building. It was empty, and next to an alley, so the rent was cheap, but it took two years in court to gain permission from the prefecture. It was only 538 square feet, but it had 14 feet of window looking out on the avenue. I will give credit (even to Robert) where credit is due—this tiny location racked up nearly $3.7 million the first year.

On the product front, after shoes and bags, fragrance was our next objective. We talked to Clarins, to Procter and Gamble, and then to Interparfum. Primarily a distribution company, Interparfum had launched the fragrance brand for Agent Provocateur, as well as the fragrance for John Galliano. They were doing about $190 million a year,
but with nine international subsidiaries, their global reach matched that of billion-dollar companies.

We also did an eyewear deal with Safilo, the huge Italian company that manufactured and distributed for Armani and all the Gucci Group brands. They had the capacity to merge plastic and metal, which seemed essential for capturing our design aesthetic.

I began to push our boundaries in other ways. In 2006, I initiated our first collaboration with an artist, Richard Phillips. He does large, hyperrealistic paintings that recall the pictorial style of fashion magazines from the fifties and sixties. We began working to reappropriate his images and put them on bags. Robert never understood what I was doing, and the board dithered over whether or not this was a good investment of resources, so the whole process dragged on and on.

I met the same kind of resistance when it came time to create a Web presence for us. Back in 2000, I had been one of the first to support Natalie Massenet when she founded the fashion site Net-A-Porter. Natalie didn’t have the cash to pay up front for the shoes she wanted to sell, so I let her have them on consignment. As a result of that early boost to her business, Natalie and I had always enjoyed a great relationship. So when I wanted to launch a Web site for Jimmy Choo, I called her and asked her to run the back office—the bookkeeping and order fulfillment. It wasn’t part of her business model to offer these kinds of services to outside clients, but for us, she said yes.

Robert’s response was to tell people that she was going out of business. In fact, Robert had an investment in a competing company he wanted us to bring in. Bottom line: Net-a-Porter is still thriving. In 2010, Natalie did a deal that valued her company at £350 million.

By 2006, we were selling shoes and bags in over forty Saks outlets, and even Neiman Marcus was selling our bags (Manolo doesn’t make bags). We followed the Tulita with the Tahula, with round handles inspired by the hula hoop. Bags were now 40 percent of sales, and bags deliver profit margins roughly 10 percent higher than those of shoes.

The general economy was soaring, fully recovered from the dot-com bust of 2000, and we still had immense room for growth, especially in Asia. We were opening stores in Mumbai, Dubai, and Kuwait, as well as in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan, and our revenues were approaching $120 million. With a growth rate of 45 percent, Jimmy Choo had already exceeded Lion’s financial goals for the acquisition. So it seemed natural enough that we would begin to talk about an exit.

Even so, I was more than a little taken aback in November when Lyndon called me quite out of the blue and asked me to drop by his house in South Kensington. I went over and we sat down, and he said, “I have an offer for the company at £185M, and we’re closing the deal in two weeks.”

I thought, “My God, I’m being squeezed out. They’re selling my company out from under me.”

He said, “Here’s the deal. You’re going to cash out. You can retain 3 percent, and you can stay on as a sort of ambassador, but with no executive position.”

I was still trying to absorb the implications, too stunned to say anything. You don’t reach this point in a transaction overnight. This whole thing must have been going on behind my back for months, and it was no great challenge to figure out who would have been at the heart of it.

Robert’s guerrilla campaign against me finally came into perspective. For whatever animosity or jealously he may have felt toward me, his ultimate goal was to have complete control of the company. In his mind, this meant that the company’s founder could no longer be tolerated on the premises.

Apparently, Lyndon had been testing the waters with potential buyers when Robert asked flat-out what it would cost for him to acquire the company. Lyndon had come back with a price of £185 million. Robert then brought in Ramez Sousou from TowerBrook Capital Partners, who’d worked for George Soros and been the “underbidder” during the sale to Lion. A Palestinian with a Harvard MBA, Ramez had also worked for Goldman Sachs in New York and London, even headed the Goldman Mezzanine Partners fund. When Soros retired, Ramez and his partners bought the private-equity division of Soros Fund Management and created TowerBrook. Soros remained a significant investor, and lots of other family funds and institutional investors came on board.

TowerBrook were quite flush, with $2.5 billion to work with, all aimed at acquisitions. They were also making money hand over fist, even winning the European Fund of the Year by the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association—none of which bode well for my chances of coming up with a more promising backer to team with in making a counteroffer.

With TowerBrook’s bid on the table, Ramez and his colleagues would have exclusive access to our data and staff for their due diligence over the next four weeks, and during that time Lyndon had agreed not to solicit any other offers.

I called Lyndon and proposed a lunch at Harry’s Bar. As soon as I
sat down across from him I said, “I’ll bring you £200M in two weeks. If I do, will you take it?”

He said he would.

In fact, he had nothing to lose. My offer, should I be able to deliver, would be a bump up of £15 million. But then, I’m also sure he never thought I’d be able to deliver.

I started talking to other private-equity funds, as well as to people who knew people, and one of my friends put me in touch with the Kuwaiti billionaire Maan Al-Sanea. We had a meeting and Maan expressed interest. He hired Lazard to begin putting together the deal, and another friend of mine, Ricardo Pavoncelli, to prepare the due diligence.

Things were looking up, but I couldn’t let it get around that I was trying to raise money, so now, on top of everything else, I was forced to run a cloak-and-dagger operation à la John Le Carré.

The holidays were coming on, and I was at Matthew Freud’s Christmas party when one of his partners, Kris Thykier, came up to me and said, “I know what’s going on. Seems you’re alone in this.” Then he pointed to Bonnie Takhar, Robert’s right-hand person who negotiated all the licensing deals. “Why don’t you get Bonnie on your side.”

I went over and spoke to her, and she was immediately receptive. From that moment on she became my well-placed eyes and ears, with her office directly next door to Robert’s.

I’d already rented a house in St. Bart’s for the holidays, and I’d even sent Minty ahead with the nanny to stay with my friends Vassi Chamberlain and Adrian Harris. I told the office that I was away on vacation when in fact I was in London, working from home. My
assistant could tell from my e-mails that I hadn’t really left, and so she called Sandra to see what was going on. This assistant also happened to be dating Sandra’s boyfriend’s brother, so it was all getting a bit too close for comfort.

It was also getting down to the wire, and I was not without anxiety as I waited in my lawyer’s office on the evening of December 17, the day after TowerBrook’s exclusivity expired. Then, at about ten p.m., my new friend from Kuwait, Maan Al-Sanea, came through with a nonbinding offer at the level I’d requested: £200 million.

Robert’s deal was to be signed at nine the next morning, so I called Lyndon and I said, “Don’t sign with Ramez. I have a firm bid of £200 million. You can call Lazard to verify it.”

He said to me, “Okay, Tamara, I’m a greedy capitalist. I’ll take your deal.” But then he said, “You better call Ramez.”

Lyndon wanted me to dampen Ramez’s ardor until he’d had time to speak with Robert.

So I called Ramez and I told him, “I’m not in favor of this deal. If you sign tomorrow, I promise you I won’t publicly support this. And I will damage all your future acquisitions.”

He was furious, and he knew that Lyndon had said he would not sell without my support.

But then with a touch of braggadocio that would become all too familiar, he said, “You know what, Tamara? I’m going to sign, and then I’m going to sign you up post-deal.”

In other words, he didn’t care what I thought. And he knew that I was captive to whoever owned a majority stake in Jimmy Choo.

By the next morning Lyndon had told Robert the whole story,
including the fact that I was the one who’d topped his offer, and when he got to the office he was throwing thunderbolts.

His deadline had passed without closure, but nothing had been signed for my deal, either, and he was not about to give up so easily.

He quickly banged out a letter for everyone in management to sign, saying that they all wanted to go with his deal. In Star Chamber fashion, he then set himself up in the conference room and had all the senior executives come in one by one for their individual dose of intimidation. But none of them would sign. Except Sandra.

Years before, my father had warned me, “Watch out for her. She’ll stab you in the back.” I don’t know how he’d had this intuition, except for the old adage, “Beware the rabbit in a rage.”

But rabbit or conniving, sly fox, she was literally by Robert’s side the whole time. She had never expressed to me that she was unhappy with her position, but then again, everyone wants to be recognized, and just because someone doesn’t assert her ego doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it. But mostly, Robert had worked her over, fueling the idea that she should have been recognized more and that I had been the one unjustly blocking her path. If I could be gotten out of the way, her path to recognition would be cleared. During TowerBrook’s due diligence, Ramez had asked her what would happen if I left. Later, he told me she’d said, “I’m a big girl now. I can handle Tamara’s job.”

Robert’s palace revolt failed, but now the problem was that the Kuwaitis were stalling. They weren’t signing, and they had a Muslim holiday and they weren’t contactable. So everyone was getting really nervous, especially me.

Lyndon had gone skiing in Whistler, but he agreed to fly to New
York to talk. We met at Soho House in the Meatpacking District, and we discussed the situation, but in the end there wasn’t all that much to say.
He told me, “If the Kuwaitis don’t sign within a couple of days, I’m going back to TowerBrook.”

With that he walked out, and I was left sitting at the bar in tears. Private-equity deals include a provision for “drag along, tag along,” meaning that minority owners can’t withhold their shares to obstruct a sale. So unless something rather miraculous turned up, this was the end of my career at Jimmy Choo. That’s when it occurred to me that this was Christmas Eve. If Danielle Steel had written the scene, I think her editor might have asked for a change. “Danielle, darling . . . a bit over the top, don’t you think?”

The best I could do was to go on to St. Bart’s as planned and be with Minty and wait, but I couldn’t book a flight. The Kuwaitis said, “Don’t worry. We’ll pay for you to charter.” I called Nat Rothschild, and his plane was available, so I took it. The expense was $40,000, for which, by the way, I was never paid back, but at least I was able to get to the islands.

•  •  •  •

FOR THE NEXT WEEK I
was in this beautiful vacation spot with my daughter, but it was the most stressful seven days of my life. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t do anything. It was just awful. I sat inside, working the phone, trying to get Maan and his people to come through. They kept saying they couldn’t take any calls because of their holiday. But that didn’t affect Lyndon. He was on the phone day in and day out, warning me that time was up and that he was going to sell to TowerBrook.

Ron Perelman from Revlon was on the island, as well as Harvey Weinstein from Miramax, and they tried to provide some moral support. Later, Harvey actually got on the phone with Ramez and said to him, “If you lose Tamara Mellon, I’m going to invest with her and we’ll set up shop and eat your lunch.”

At the end of the week, Minty and I flew back to London, and immediately upon my arrival I received a text from Maan saying they were backing out. A text?! That’s how eighth graders break up with their girlfriends.

“It’s all over and that’s that,” I thought. “I’ve lost my business.”

I was too exhausted and too numb to feel the weight of it. But then it occurred to me that if I weren’t going to be there to shape the collection, then it was good that they were forcing me to cash out. The same sort of palace intrigues had befallen Helmut Lang and Jil Sander, and both brands had suffered and plummeted in value.

Then again, there was a bolt left in my quiver. What if I could find some way to go back to Ramez, reengage with him, and win him over to my side?

The one thing Maan had done for me was to buy time—and, perhaps, to cast confusion among my enemies.

As a last-ditch effort, and with help from Adrian Harris, who by now was not only a friend but my financial adviser, I wrote an e-mail to Ramez explaining the design process and explaining all that Robert had done to undermine me and to interfere with my efforts to steer the brand creatively. I had to make him see my side of it and not Robert’s. Essentially, I had to make him see that I’d been slandered and that he’d been gamed.