In My Shoes: A Memoir (17 page)

We got together in the coffee bar of the little hotel next to our offices on Ixworth Place.

“You’ve done your financial due diligence,” I said. “You’ve examined the books and appraised the real estate. But now you need to do your creative due diligence. You need to go ask around. Talk to management beyond Robert’s little clique. Talk to the design team. Find out who’s really creating the value.”

I guess I was convincing because he continued to listen. As my parting shot I said, “Buying this company without me would be like buying the
Titanic
.”

Ramez was still being coy. “Don’t you have issues with your mother’s shares?” he said.

Clearly, Robert had filled him in on every detail that might undermine my position or sully my image.

Then he took a more philosophical tack. “Are you more interested in making money,” he asked, “or in being a celebrity?” This was a line straight out of Robert’s phrase book. Robert had tried to paint me as the Devil Diva, a spend-thrift glamour queen who contributed nothing, waltzing from store opening to celebrity gala to board meeting with no concern but to garner all the credit and to feather her own nest. All in all, it was a lovely package.

I will give Ramez considerable credit that he went back in and he interviewed a wider circle beyond the people like Jim Sharp and Alison Egan. He talked to Hannah, and to Bonnie, and to the design room.

A couple of hours went by, and I was in a state, but then he called me at home.

“Okay, Tamara. We’re not doing this deal without you.”

I could breathe again. After I’d inhaled, the first words out of my mouth were, “Then Robert has to go.”

This was a big concession for them, not only because Robert had engineered the sale in the first place but because he knew the financial side of things inside and out, and the CFO was in his pocket. But they accepted my terms.

TowerBrook’s lawyers were located at 30 St. Mary Axe, the forty-one-story tower in the City also known as the Gherkin, so called because of its resemblance to a curved-glass-and-steel pickle. We met there to sign on Sunday, February 4, 2007.

I had just flown back from New York, and I had the flu, but damned if I’d let them see me worn down. I pulled out all the stops in a black velvet pencil skirt and a leopard print fur jacket, and when I entered you could cut the atmosphere with a knife.

We had six different conference rooms for six different teams, and looking out through the glass walls to the sofas beyond, I could see the different factions waiting separately. Alison looked particularly nervous, and for good reason. Robert and I avoided eye contact. I did not want to speak to him. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at him.

Ramez said to me, “You’ve won. You can let it go. You’ve won.”

My victory lay in the fact that Ramez had accepted my assessment of my value to the company rather than Robert’s. Moreover, my employment contract going forward would stipulate that if Robert came back to active management at Jimmy Choo in any way, they would have to buy my shares at a predetermined price, and I would be able to walk within twenty-four hours.

Even so, Ramez continued to admonish me like a teenager. “You
know,” he said, “you’re not allowed to throw parties at home and charge it against the company.”

I had never, ever thrown a private party and charged it to Jimmy Choo. Quite the opposite, I often did Jimmy Choo entertaining at my home and paid for it myself. I’d also made my home available for innumerable photo shoots, but obviously Robert’s image of me had sunk in.

The sale, valued at £185 million, made the front page of the
Financial Times
. TowerBrook paid £170 million right away, with £15 million due if we met our targets for the year ahead. This was a multiple of 2.2 times sales, and nearly 10 times profits. Lion Capital had doubled their money in little more than two years. Of course, to finance the acquisition, TowerBrook was encumbering Jimmy Choo with another £80 million in debt, underwritten by UBS.

TowerBrook was acquiring a 60 percent stake, but as the second-largest shareholder, I continued as president. To save face, and to give us time to find a replacement, Ramez allowed Robert to stay on as CEO for six months. You’d think he wouldn’t have wanted to hang around, pretending that he hadn’t been pushed out, but he did. Robert was also allowed to keep his sweet equity, a little skin in the game to keep him from doing or saying anything more to damage the business. As another face-saving gesture, Ramez kept him on the board, but then, of course, TowerBrook cut back on board meetings, making them quarterly rather than monthly.

Once TowerBrook was able to do more forensics on the accounts, they found that it was actually Robert who had stretched the limits of corporate expenses. He’d spent £30,000 in Jimmy Choo funds at a
charity auction in Paris to buy a table that had nothing to do with Jimmy Choo. (The fact that it was at a Jewish charity must have truly made this a memorable detail for Ramez, who is Palestinian.)

Hannah and Maggie White, head of store development, put together a big party for Robert at Home House, a private club on Portman Square, and everyone wore masks of his face. They also gave him a gift of a giant red pair of Jimmy Choos in his size. I did not attend.

Once again, TowerBrook had wooed us with talk of long-term horizons, as in, “We’re not like the other guys—we have a real interest in the company.” Then at our very first board meeting, they were already talking about their exit. The goal they set forth was £50 million in EBITDA in 2009. So, in fact, they were thinking only two years out.

As the dust settled, Lyndon was furious to discover that Alison Egan had made an error that underplayed the EBITDA, which resulted in a lower purchase of the company. Lyndon said he’d lost £10 million. But he was gone now, and I was still around.

Alison came into my office, trying to mend fences. “I really wasn’t a part of all that,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going on. I just gave them the numbers. I was just doing my job.”

Obviously, I didn’t believe a word she was saying, but her betrayal was small potatoes. I did mention to her something Robert had said that I thought was very revealing of his character: “The only reason we sold the company was because your father died.” I asked her, “How can you think that anyone who would say that is a decent human being?” She left a few months later.

I fired Tara ffrench-Mullen
,
the publicity person, who was another Robert hire. I knew her lack of loyalty was going to be damaging going
forward, but mostly I thought we could do a lot better in the press department.

I didn’t have the energy to pursue a more thorough housecleaning. I had been in the ring for a decade now, and my legs were getting wobbly.

For her part, Sandra tried to act like nothing had happened, but she overcompensated, saying such things as “You’re like my big sister.”

I just looked at her and thought, “What planet are you on?”

Jimmy Choo was the only real job she’d ever had, so she was still such an innocent, and I think she simply hadn’t been strong enough to stand up to Robert. Getting rid of her would have made TowerBrook nervous because she’d been part of the design team from the beginning. But she was finished as far as I was concerned, and it was a big disappointment because we’d worked so closely together for so many years.

If she’d only stepped up and been open and direct and apologized for her disloyalty, I think I could have gotten over it. And in terms of our design work going forward, the rift between us became terribly awkward because, with my faith and trust in her destroyed, she really wasn’t able to contribute. I’m sure I dismissed her ideas, not on purpose but because I was connecting so much more with other contributors. So I wound up just going through the motions and then working around her, which was not at all optimal, and all very sad.

What didn’t become apparent to me until later was just how much Robert’s bad-mouthing and undermining had trickled down to affect the other members of the team.

I still had faith in what we were doing, so I wanted to let my investment ride. I cashed out as little as possible, which was £4 million, but
then I couldn’t put my hands on it. Owing to the legal dispute with my mother and her claims on my assets, the money was immediately frozen.

At least the new pay package they were offering was £500,000, but in exchange for the raise I would have to give up many of the perks that are standard in the fashion industry, and necessary for the kind of public appearances I was doing. I would have to provide my own hair and makeup for events, lose my clothing allowance, and also forfeit my car and driver. So I said, “I’ll take £290,000 as a salary, and you pay for hair, makeup, clothes, and the driver directly.”

Andrew Rolfe from TowerBrook took the lead in finding a new CEO, and he put us in touch with Joshua Schulman, then the president of Kenneth Cole. The two of them had worked together at the Gap, where Josh had been vice president for merchandising in Japan and senior vice president of international strategic alliances. He’d also done merchandising for Gucci during the Tom Ford years, and been executive vice president of worldwide merchandising and distribution for Yves Saint Laurent.

Three days after the sale was announced we met in London, and I thought he was a good fit. He knew fashion, and I didn’t sense any of the ego competition that was so transparent with Robert. He seemed not only happy with my being the public face of the brand, he knew how to leverage it. Oddly enough, he’d grown up partly in Beverly Hills, and even gone to El Rodeo School! It felt like a breath of fresh air, the beginning of a new chapter.

W
ith the TowerBrook drama fresh in my memory, it wasn’t as if I was looking for new adventures or for more work to add to my list. But one day I was on the phone with Harvey Weinstein, who was then dating the woman he would later marry, Georgina Chapman of Marchesa.

Harvey knew about all the Sturm und Drang I’d just been through and he asked me, “So, what do you want to do in the next five years?”

Out of the blue I said, “I want to bring back Halston. I think it’s the biggest missed opportunity in the luxury business. The designs he did in the seventies are still relevant today. All you need to do is put some modern proportions on them.”

Harvey said, “Oh my God, you’re right! What a great idea!”

I was incredibly busy and I didn’t think anything more about our conversation until a month or so later, when I was at the Oscars and one of Harvey’s colleagues came up to me and said, “This is so great about Halston. We’re closing in a week!”

Once again I was stunned. Utterly speechless.

“Of course we want you in on it,” he said.

Of course.

By now you might think that I’d no longer be taken aback by a
friend stealing my idea and running with it. Maybe I had been hopelessly naive to speak so openly. Or was there some cumulative effect to all I’d been through that marked me as an easy target for the next betrayal or stab in the back?

These kinds of negotiations take weeks, so Harvey must have made a call to the investment bankers the moment he got off the phone with me.

I said, “Send me the terms of the deal.”

They were working with Hilco Equity Partners and with Financo to buy the Halston license from the current owner, James Ammeen of Neema Clothing. They were offering me 1.5 percent sweet equity to be on the board and to be a creative consultant.

I responded with, “That’s beyond insulting. Good luck with . . .” Then they panicked.

I’m sure Harvey had been tossing my name around from day one as he’d tried to put the financing together. It turned out that he’d already negotiated himself 10 percent sweet equity for his genius in coming up with the idea and for having access to fashion insiders. Now one of the names he’d dropped was walking away.

But they kept calling me back, and I should have just kept going, but I was like a dog with a bone, infuriated that Harvey had stolen my idea and now was presenting himself as the prime mover in all of this. It’s also true that I really loved Halston, and if they did this deal, that would be it for a while. I didn’t want to miss the boat, even though I knew instinctively that everything about this setup was all wrong.

To try to make it right, or at least better, I called my friend Rachel Zoe, the Hollywood stylist, and told her what was going on. More than
a year earlier, she and I had talked over lunch about reviving the brand. She had a huge collection of vintage Halston, and in her work she took much of her inspiration from him.

I told her, “This deal is moving. You should come on board.”

Then it was time to talk to Harvey. I told him he’d have to give up 1 percent of his sweet equity for each of us. And I also told him I wanted to invest $2 million. This became a fight because they’d already closed the deal, and letting anyone else in meant having to dilute their shares.

The purchase price was $27 million, with Hilco owning a majority stake. Harvey had put in $1 million, his brother Bob had put in a million, and their company had put in a million. Jim Ammeen, the seller, came back in and reinvested some of his proceeds.

To announce the acquisition Harvey sent around a draft of a press release that was supposed to list me as an investor, but it didn’t. Upon my complaint he changed it to say that he’d brought me on as a consultant. He still referred to himself as the buyer, even when he’d put in half of what I was trying to invest and ultimately was a very minor shareholder.

Still, my love for the brand was unabated.

Halston’s greatest innovation had been the one-shoulder jersey dress, cut from one piece, which was so easy to wear. I wanted to bring it back in spirit, recast for today. And God knows you didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, especially not when the history of the brand is so glamorous, and with such a great story to tell, from Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat to Studio 54. All you have to do is summon up that iconic image of Bianca Jagger drifting through the door on a white horse in a
white Halston dress, and the whole scene with Andy Warhol, and Halston’s Paul Rudolph–designed apartment on East Sixty-Third, where the boys wore Liza Minnelli’s dresses at the drag parties and dinner consisted of caviar, a baked potato, and cocaine.

A lot of people take inspiration from previous decades. The kids everywhere are wearing vintage clothing now, but there’s a difference between retro and renewal. That’s part of the creative process. You go vintage shopping and it’s the hunt for the one great piece that inspires you, and then you come back and you turn it into something modern. It may not even look like that original piece, but it’s what the original piece inspires.

Raf Simons did this beautifully when he went into the archives at Dior and put a modern twist on it. So did Diane von Furstenberg, who relaunched her business with the wrap dress, only with modern proportions. She made the collar smaller and the width not so A-line.

For Halston, it would be no great stretch of the imagination to take the Bianca Jagger white trouser suit and re-create it with modern proportions. Before Halston, everything was very tight and fitted coming out of the sixties. It was very difficult to buy something off the rack, so women of means often had their clothes made. With jersey, the loose fabric he used, you could roll up the dress and put it in your suitcase, get somewhere, hang it up, and it was fine. His clothes were modern, sporty, easy, and convenient. If we brought back the asymmetrical jersey dress, I knew that every woman vacationing on the Med or in the Hamptons would buy them in multiple colors.

At my recommendation we hired Bonnie Takhar as CEO, and it didn’t take long before she and I came to the same conclusion that
Hilco’s people were all wrong. They were debt collectors, not fashion people, and most of all they weren’t treating us right.

Bonnie and I met at the Mercer Hotel and I suggested that we push for a management buyout. So we spoke to D. E. Shaw, the hedge fund managers, about getting help with the financing. Then I went back to London and set up a conference call with Harvey and Bonnie.

“Harvey, I want you to know that we’re not happy,” I said. “I have a backing in D. E. Shaw, and the whole management team is going to walk in twenty-four hours if we don’t get what we want.”

He went ballistic. “I will destroy you,” he started screaming. “I’ll go on a PR campaign and I’ll destroy you!

I said, “Good luck with that, Harvey. You’re in my industry now.”

•  •  •  •

IN APRIL, JIMMY CHOO ANNOUNCED
that Josh Schulman was our choice for CEO.

The same month I received a subpoena to testify at Matthew’s trial. I knew the press would be all over this, so I asked Mark Bolland, a major figure in UK public relations, to go with me.

The proceedings were at Southwark Crown Court, a clinical-looking, contemporary brick building near Tower Bridge, just south of the river. The trial was a huge affair, with a total of eighteen defendants, and I appeared on May 3, the seventh day of testimony.

The issue, at least insofar as
Matthew was concerned, was whether or not he should be held criminally responsible for authorizing the illegal hacking of my computer during our divorce. There was no question that he’d given the indicted investigators £12,000 and that he’d
signed the contract and authorization they had asked him to sign. But that still left the issue of
criminal
responsibility, as in knowing what was going on, knowing that it was illegal, and then doing it anyway.

When I saw him on trial, my heart went out to him. I thought, “Oh boy. You’re really in over your head this time.” In fact, he was facing five years.

As the victim of Matthew’s supposed crime, I was actually called as a witness for the prosecution. The prosecutor had me relate all that had happened, including the appearance of the Trojan horse e-mail on my computer, the one that promised to provide me with “things on your soon-to-be ex-husband.”

But then when Matthew’s defense counsel, Nicholas Purnell, began to question me, the discussion took a marked detour into Matthew’s habits of mind. This was no time to gild the lily, so I simply told the truth. I said that being married to Matthew was like having another child. I said that he couldn’t keep up with his bills or bank accounts and that he missed planes the way other people miss buses. When Purnell asked about Matthew’s reading habits and powers of concentration, I simply said that my husband couldn’t manage a comic book, much less a legal document.

The courtroom erupted.

I left the building mobbed by paparazzi
,
and the next day, the story was on page one of literally every newspaper in London, most of them quoting my comment about Matthew’s inability to cope with a comic book.

The whole trial took six weeks, with the jury deliberating for five days. Two of the detectives were convicted, but happily Matthew was not.

Josh began work as Jimmy Choo CEO in June. In one of our first
conversations I told him, “My title is president. But clearly I’m leading the creative process, so I think it’s misleading and confusing for the industry.” So we changed my title to chief creative officer. I liked what I saw of Josh at our first board meeting. Given all the delays, I was still working on the collaboration with Richard Phillips, appropriating one of his images for a “magazine” clutch bag, and the board was still uncertain about it. They asked Josh, “Is this a good thing?”

He said, “This is brilliant. This is the kind of thing we should put money behind.”

And so we did, launching the line at Art Basel Miami in 2007. The Phillips bags were among our top ten best sellers, and now you see everyone doing this kind of collaboration with artists.

Josh also “got” the inspiration trips. He understood how important it was for the design team to be together and do these trips together to create the right kind of flow. When you’re traveling and seeing things, you don’t know what you’re looking for until it hits you. Then, if you’re lucky, the floodgates open.

For the first time since the initial Phoenix deal, it looked like we were going to have someone in charge who understood the business.

I took Josh on a tour of the stores and we talked about market niches where I saw the greatest untapped potential. One of these was ballet flats, which were a big business, and we weren’t doing them well enough at all. I’d also wanted to do a biker boot for years, and a moccasin boot with fringe. I met with huge resistance on the biker boot—mostly from Sandra, oddly enough, who kept telling me we couldn’t afford it—but at last I prevailed, and it became our third-best seller ever, moving five hundred thousand units.

Josh was also keen on orchestrating product, PR, advertising, and marketing. Raul Martinez, founder and chief creative officer of the ad agency AR, as well as creative consultant to American
Vogue
, was brought in to help shape the look of each campaign. He hired Terry Richardson to do the shoot at the Plaza, and it was Charlotte Pilcher’s inspiration to have Angela Lindvall in the boots.

Ed Filipowski of the PR firm KCD was brought in to help with global strategy, even as we were opening stores in Cannes, Barcelona, Rome, São Paulo, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo.

On June 25, Josh and I went to L.A. to open a new store on Rodeo Drive. We threw a bash that was such a great success that the fire marshal showed up and shut us down. Luckily, we’d already planned to segue to a dinner for a selected few at the home of Wendi Murdoch.

Meanwhile, Halston’s board ratified enough of our demands that Bonnie and I stayed on. She invested half a million, and I put in two.

After we’d reached our agreement and comity returned, one of the Hilco guys turned to me and said, “So now. . . . are you girls going to behave?”

Here was another moment when I should have simply walked out. In certain circles, it appears the only options for dealing with a woman are either to control her or to belittle her. But I still hadn’t found my voice.

Halston needed the right designer, so we went on an extensive search. We talked to Peter Dundas, who’s now at Pucci, and to Hedi Slimane, who’s now at Yves Saint Laurent. He’d only designed menswear, but I thought he’d be great. Even though I had concerns about how well he could work with the investors, I would have given up huge equity to have him.

American
Vogue
recommended Marco Zanini, who at the time was working directly with Donatella Versace. We met up in London and he showed me his sketches, and then he invited me to his last show for them in Milan, which was very Halston inspired. “I just wanted you to see this. I did this for you,” he said.

We hired him and set up offices downtown.

•  •  •  •

IN FEBRUARY 2007, WE MOVED
the Jimmy Choo offices from Ixworth Place to Lancer Square. We went from 3,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet of office space, and, as in the stores, the design was all very clean, with the same beige and lilac. Our back office was much larger now, with a much bigger PR department, finance department, and merchandising department.

Despite my role in representing the brand to the public, my focus was still very much on the product. We were hiring more designers and more assistants, but we were also introducing more collections—fall/winter and spring/summer, and now also a Cruise or Resort Collection, which hit the stores in November, and a pre-fall, which appeared in June.
Considering the amount of work we were doing, it was still a very small design team.

Even a small team requires management, though, and we all know the well-worn descriptor for managing creatives: herding cats.

The hoariest management cliché, though, is that it’s lonely at the top, which persists because the typical CEO manages through fear, remaining a distant authority figure, capable of screaming and throwing
fits, firing you in a heartbeat, or bestowing undreamed-of privileges. It’s very clear that you’re not working
with
him; you’re working
for
him.