In My Shoes: A Memoir (18 page)

My role was much more ambiguous. I was in and out, going to the Oscars and to meetings with bankers, then coming back to the design room and rubbing elbows. I certainly was not a remote and a fear-inducing authority figure. At times, I appeared to be simply “one of them,” and yet I also got special attention and special privileges—all of which could lead to resentment, which, of course, Robert had encouraged and tried to exploit in his attempt to divide and conquer.

Some of the time, certain people on the team were still deliberately dismissive, as if they were saying, “We’ve got the word on you.” This made trying to come back out from under Robert’s slander campaign like fighting a clique of “mean girls.” Then again, I know that my remoteness, that residue of “vacant” Tamara from my actual school days, can be misinterpreted and perhaps off-putting.

Fortunately, we also had some grown-ups on the team, like Elisabeth Guers, our head shoe designer, an amazing Frenchwoman who never fell for the Robert bullshit. Neither did Alvaro, the bag designer. He told me that Robert had called him once and asked if the company could survive without Tamara. He’d said, “No.”

I also had Charlotte Pilcher, the stylist I’d worked for in the early days, and whom I’d brought on board as my creative right hand during the end of the Robert era, when I really needed a friend. She was also another pair of very experienced and savvy eyes that I trusted completely, and she became a part of all of our design meetings.

During this period, Minty would occasionally sit in as well. She’d
sketch shoes, and then we’d pin her designs up on the wall. Her favorite movie from this era was
The
Devil Wears Prada
,
and it may have gone to her head. She’d come in and collect employees’ phone extensions and write up a list of their names and numbers. Then she’d ring them up and tell them they were fired. Thank God the staff saw the humor in it.

•  •  •  •

IN THE FALL OF 2007,
Amanda Kyme, who was working for us one day a week on celebrity gifting, called to say that there was a man she wanted me to meet. Christian Slater was in town doing a play called
Swimming with Sharks.
She said he didn’t know anyone, and she wanted to introduce us.

I knew the name from the movies
Heathers
and
True Romance
and the like, but I said, “Oh God, Amanda, no actors. No rock stars, please.”

She said, “Oh come on, come on. Just have dinner with him. I think you’ll actually get on.”

I looked at my diary and I said, “I have something every night for the next two weeks. Except Wednesday, I guess. A friend of mine is having a dinner. Matthew Vaughn, he’s a producer. I guess Christian could come to that.”

So I met him at his hotel and he came to the dinner, and actually, we got on really well. And then every night after that, whenever he’d finish rehearsal, he’d kind of show up. We had a few more dinners, he sent me flowers, and the relationship took off from there. He was in London for six months, and we actually ended up spending pretty much every night together.

I don’t know why Amanda thought it would be a match. Another
reformed bad boy, I suppose. He’d done his time with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and now he was clean and sober.

Divorced, he had two kids about the same age as Minty, a boy and a girl. He lived in a house in Brentwood owned by the mother of a guy he met in rehab, so it was all very arrested development, which was a little worrying. They lived in the bedrooms meant for children, which for me had echoes of the basement in Belgravia. The guy whose mother owned the house served as Christian’s assistant/manager/best friend. Also in the house was the guy’s girlfriend from South Carolina, who was even less sophisticated than he, and I think the two of them spent a great deal of time worrying that I was going to take Christian away from them. When I visited L.A., Christian would stay with me at the Peninsula, and we’d watch episodes of
Entourage.
We were in on the joke.

Christian was great for that moment in time, but fundamentally we had very different worldviews, and we wanted different things. He’d grown up in New York, where his father was an actor and his mother was a casting director and producer, and he’d been in the business his whole life. But he had very simple tastes. I went to baseball games with him, trying to be a good sport, but I have to say I was bored out of my mind the whole time. Hot dogs? Cracker Jack? Not for me.

In the middle of our relationship, I was forced to hire Bert Fields and file a civil suit against my mother in California.
We still had not resolved the question of the 32,000 shares allocated to the wrong trust, the millions misallocated supposedly to protect my assets during the divorce, and the completely gratuitous £4 million in cash frozen because of the dispute—all of which led to some
very nasty letters between my mother’s lawyers and mine.

Occasionally, either side would make a proposal. Mine was to put the money at issue in a trust for Minty. Essentially, I told my mother, “You don’t touch it, I don’t touch it. It goes straight to the trust, and then your granddaughter gets the benefit instead of these lawyers.”

But my mother wouldn’t do that. Her response was always, “No, no. If anything ever happens to Tamara, we’ll look after that little girl,” words that filled me with horror.

Their counterproposal was to set up Marqueta II, a separate trust designation for charity. They even proposed the Elton John AIDS Foundation as beneficiary, which showed that they’d done their homework. But the way it was to be set up, they could shift the money back over into my mother’s trust anytime they pleased. So the conversation went nowhere.

The whole affair felt like a chronic illness, with pathogens from my mother trapped in my body. I was so tense that my back was always going out on me. Sometimes it felt as if a giant snake were wrapped around me to keep me from taking a full breath.

•  •  •  •

OUR FIRST HALSTON SHOW WAS
in February 2008, but not even this legendary brand could sustain the burden of all our dreams and anxieties. In setting up the company, the investors had spent $3 million just on legal documents, so they were feeling strained and nervous going in. And then the first reviews were less than stellar.

After the catwalk, and before the buyers came by for closer inspection, Bonnie took it upon herself to redesign the collection. She mixed and matched and moved everything around and it was awful.
Selfridges had been negotiated previously based on the hype, but orders from the show itself were weak.

Pure panic soon set in. I was in the airport on the way back to London when the screaming phone calls began, and no one can scream like Harvey.

The trouble with Mr. Weinstein is that he never trusts the people he hires. He’ll go out and ask everyone what he or she thinks, so he gets a dozen different opinions, often conflicting, and then he blows hot and cold every which way from one notion to the next. So, as if things weren’t bad enough already, his next impulse was to set up an advisory board that, fortunately, never came into being.

On the creative side, all was not sweetness and light. Rachel’s primary job was to shop for vintage Halston in L.A., but an article in
Harper’s Bazaar
London quoted her to the effect that she was the creative director, which clearly upset Marco.

Bonnie was, in fact, driving our designer nuts with contradictory directives, second-guessing, and interventions, her relationship with Rachel was deteriorating, and I must confess I did not have my eye on the ball, too busy with Jimmy Choo, among other matters. I was so exhausted and overloaded that the best I could do was to ask Rachel to back away, which I’ve always felt really bad about because it made her seem the scapegoat.

And that was just the first season. There would be more to come.

I
n the spring of 2008 Christian and I were in New York and, on an impulse, I said, “Let’s just go out and have a look at the market and see what’s out there. See what apartments are selling for.”

I’d been thinking about relocating to New York for some time, but I hadn’t really been ready to buy, and then I fell in love. Edgar Bronfman Jr. was selling the top two floors of a small structure on the Upper East Side. Built in 1913, it had once been a private academy. It reminded me so much of my apartment in London that I bought it on a whim.

With Christian living in L.A., certainly New York had advantages over London as a base for me. But there was more to the idea than that. At the time it just seemed that everything was pushing me toward the city, particularly with regard to Minty. I had no family left in London, and when Matthew and I got divorced, he ended up moving to New York, and I think it is very important for girls to grow up with their dads. I also found it difficult not to have an extended family because when I had to travel for business, there was no one around for Minty but the nanny. If we were living in New York, she’d not only have her dad, she’d have uncles and aunts and cousins. We’d already been going to Rolling Rock each year, the Mellon estate in Pennsylvania where she gets to meet dozens and dozens of other little Mellons. It was important
to me that she would grow up with a sense of belonging to something more than just the two of us.

Given the nature of my business, it didn’t make any difference whether I worked from London or from Manhattan. Then again, relocating to a different city, in a different country, would be incredibly complicated, and it wouldn’t happen overnight.

Back in London, I went to dinner with Josh at Cipriani and I said to him, “How do you feel about moving the operations to Manhattan?”

Josh was from the city originally, and he was intrigued by the idea of coming back himself. He said, “I think it’s a great idea.”

But then he had a conversation with TowerBrook, after which he did a 180-degree turn.

I think TowerBrook objected for the usual reasons: They were afraid of losing control. The most they could abide was my own personal relocation, but they insisted that it not affect EBITDA, that Holy Grail of private-equity exit opportunities.

What they failed to take into account, of course, was that I was already flying across the Atlantic every few weeks and I was burned out. When you go back and forth through so many time zones so often, you’re in a permanent condition of jet lag because you’re never in one place long enough to fully recover. You’re lost in this dopey netherworld, a state in which I realize I’ve probably spent the greater portion of my adult life.

So I stayed in London for the time being, and that summer I rented Tom Cruise’s old house in Beverly Hills. It was a lovely place, English Tudor style on three or four acres off Sunset, with a long winding drive. Christian moved in for the month of August, and things were looking up. He had a new series about to launch, a secret agent thing with a
Bourne Identity
twist called
My Own Worst Enemy
. I was even contacted out of the blue by the luxury goods holding company Labelux, offering £350 million pounds for Jimmy Choo.

At Halston, however, things continued along their dismal path. Just in time for the kickoff of our second season in August, Marco resigned. We still had to present the collection, so I called Charlotte and asked her to come help style the show. She and I flew to New York, and we didn’t do a full fashion show but rather a presentation at the Museum of Modern Art that managed to salvage things, at least for a while. Even Emmanuelle Alt from French
Vogue
picked up on the look we’d created.

Back in London again, I was at a charity event, having dinner with Lord Jonathan Marland, a major shareholder in Hunter, the company that makes the famous Wellington boot. I said, “You know we should do a collaboration. We’ll infuse your Wellies with the DNA of Jimmy Choo.”

I’d seen a stylist at the Oscars the year before wearing Wellies with a denim miniskirt, and I thought it was a great look. Not long after, Kate Moss showed up in Wellies at the Glastonbury Festival, so the boots were definitely coming off the farm and out of the garden and onto the streets.

Eventually we worked out the details and were able to take the traditional Wellie, the green rubber boot, put a faux crocodile print on it, and schedule it for sale in January 2009.

At the end of the summer Josh and I went to Paris to open a new location on rue Saint-Honoré, then we moved Milan to a better location. We were still opening stores in North America, but now with forty locations, we were pretty maxed out. Still, we anticipated sales of over $200 million and EBITDA of $44 million.

Then came September 14, 2008. Lehman Brothers collapsed, the world economy crashed, and the luxury goods business dropped off a cliff. People just stopped buying. It got so bad that even the customers who were spending money asked for plain brown shopping bags so they wouldn’t be seen walking down the street festooned with a luxury logo. Business fell by 30 percent.

TowerBrook saw the same kind of drop-off in all their businesses, so it wasn’t as if they could flog us in particular. But they had saddled Jimmy Choo with
£80 million in debt. The covenant we’d signed obligated us to pay a million a month, so the most important thing was to maintain a highly reliable, steady cash flow.

Not too surprisingly, Labelux stopped calling, though I think they were simply hoping to wait out the economic storm and pick us up at a much lower price than the £350 million they’d initially proposed.

Remarkably, I think the crisis drove a need for quality in the luxury marketplace. Customers were looking all the more for great brands they could rely on and trust. The market was now for investment pieces rather than whimsical purchases.

Eight years earlier it had been the presidential daughters who wore Jimmy Choo to their father’s inauguration. In January 2009, it was First Lady Michelle Obama who attended the swearing-in ceremony in patent leather Jimmy Choo pumps.

Shortly thereafter, the Jimmy Choo Wellie hit the stores, and even though they sold for £250 per pair, the line did fantastically well for us. The boost to the bottom line was a huge factor in seeing us through the economic downturn, and it was a turning point for Hunter, too.

Not long after,
H&M approached us with an even bolder idea.
H&M is the Swedish retailer with two thousand stores selling clothing at a very, very low price point. They wanted to do a collaboration, and with the new mood of austerity—if not global depression—the timing could not have been better. We could broaden our audience while also doing something that was feel-good and fun. But they wanted us to do not just shoes but an entire line of clothing, which I also thought was brilliant. Jan Nord and Jorgen Anderson, their collaborations people, said, “We’d like you to do a full look—all the way to menswear.”

Josh was reluctant, but I loved the challenge of designing for the whole woman, as well as her husband or boyfriend. So I pushed. Ultimately, it would show that collaborations could not only garner attention but also, through the miracle of licensing, drive profits that aren’t accompanied by any increase in cost to us.

I’d just gone on an inspiration trip to Miami with Alvaro, our bag designer, and I’d been absorbing all the bright colors and the art deco design, buying from thrift shops like a madwoman. So it was a very serendipitous thing that I’d just put this rail of clothes together with sequined dresses from the fifties, fringed suede from the seventies, and cardigans from God knows when. I had Charlotte come over and we picked the favorite shoes and bags and we styled the collection with the clothes, and then we presented that to H&M.

We were reimagining these shoes, bags, and dresses from an earlier era, updated to suit the Jimmy Choo woman. Again, H&M would do all the manufacturing and invest the money on the advertising, and we’d simply take a percentage while benefiting from an avalanche of favorable press.

Not long after we set this in motion, Nordstrom gave us the award
for Brand Partner of the Year, and Josh went to Seattle to collect it. As he was going through the store, he came upon some industry people trying on UGGs, and he called me up and said, “What do you think about a collaboration with UGG? Would it hurt our image?”

This one was a little risky, because UGG had become very mass. Then again, they have the virtue of crossing all the barriers. Every woman from every income bracket, provided she has a closet and a charge card, has a pair of UGGs, so I put them in the category of guilty pleasures. I decided this could be really fun.

We began thinking about how we would carry through, and then for whatever reason Sandra arbitrarily decided to do her own designs and send in the sketches without really going over them with me.

Next thing you know, Josh called me in a panic and said, “You have to come in and fix this.” The UGG executives hated what they’d seen.

So I did a set of designs that more effectively captured the Jimmy Choo DNA and sent in the new sketches. Everybody was happy.

To launch the collection, we hired photographer Inez van Lamsweerde to capture Amber Valletta on a motorbike wearing her Jimmy Choo UGGs with cutoff jeans and a vintage leather jacket. Our sales went through the roof that quarter, and £4 million dropped to our bottom line.

The Oscars were by now a regular part of our routine, and we were so well established in Hollywood that we didn’t have to push. Managers and stylists would simply come to our hotel suite and pick their shoes. But we’d always done other celebrity gifting throughout the year. I would sit down and say, “Send this to that person,” but as the business got bigger, we needed someone to track what the women we wanted
associated with our look were up to, and that’s when I brought on Amanda Kyme to help us.

We had a list of targeted actresses, and we would try to match the style of the product to the style of the actresses. Our thought was that if they really liked what they received, they were far more likely to talk about it: who’s having a baby, who’s doing which movie, who’s going off to India, what works best with whose personal style. The same concept applied to gifting fashion editors before they went to the shows, trying to ensure that they’d be photographed carrying our latest bag.

But it was not just the marketing of fashion, but fashion itself that was changing. Shoes were no longer just what you bought to compliment the dress; they became a sexy centerpiece of the look. Then again, it was no longer just Manolo Blahnik competing with us in luxury shoes. Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, and Gucci had caught on. Chanel was repositioning its shoes for the younger woman. Pierre had left Hermès to start his own line, and Diego Della Valle of Tod’s had revived the Roger Vivier brand, to be designed by Bruno Frisoni.

Christian Louboutin was the most powerful of these competitors. He had a dozen or so boutiques, all over the world, including space in Harvey Nichols, which had once been all ours.

Department stores like Saks and Bloomingdale’s were now devoting entire floors to shoes, and Brown’s in London opened an entirely separate store for footwear. More affordable brands like Nine West and Piperlime were also trying to make their presence felt with shoes that were sexy and fun.

Our US business now consisted of twenty-two stores plus the wholesale operation. Brian Henke from Prada was brought in as president of
the North American subsidiary. Josh also hired Lisa Bonfante from Chanel to oversee merchandise planning. Buying would now be organized by region. Each of the regional heads would come to Milan every year to see the new collection.

At Halston, we shot a music video of the spring/summer collection to send out to all of the editors, which was actually rather pioneering. We filmed on an outside lot at Pinewood Studios in London, and with winter coming on, the models were all turning blue. I raced home and collected every fur coat I had and brought them in for the girls. I let them use my apartment, I paid for extra models—I did all I could.

•  •  •  •

THEN RIGHT AROUND VALENTINE’S DAY,
my friend and financial adviser Adrian Harris called to give me the grim news that I had just about enough cash to live on for another six weeks.

Before the financial crisis I’d put almost all my available cash into hedge funds, which were now frozen because the funds had put up firewalls to keep investors from withdrawing their money. The £4 million I’d cashed out during the TowerBrook deal was still frozen because of legal disputes with my mother. I was already paying hefty lawyers’ bills, and I was expecting those to skyrocket as the showdown approached. I’d just bought the apartment in New York, I was still paying rent in London, and in addition I had moving expenses, plus maintenance expenses on the new place.

I wasn’t insolvent, just illiquid, but still, I felt very exposed and uncomfortable with the state of my finances.

What made it all the more galling was that the agent of so much of
my misery was the person who had always seemed to relish making me miserable: my mother. Without her narcissistic scheming, I would have had plenty of cash to weather any storm.

I stepped out of my home office feeling dazed, only to find Christian and Minty having a shouting match through her bedroom door.

I think my daughter had been internalizing all the stress around her because she couldn’t sleep, and she wanted to come out and be with me, but Christian was camped outside her room, insisting that she get back in bed.

Christian had very traditional views and had set himself up as something of an authority on child rearing, having been instructed on the virtues of “tough love” by the South Carolina girlfriend from his entourage back in L.A. She considered herself an expert because she’d done some babysitting in high school. I don’t think his mood was improved by the fact that
My Own Worst Enemy
, his secret agent show, had been canceled in December after nine episodes.