In My Shoes: A Memoir (19 page)

I thought Minty needed cuddling, not isolation, but Christian told me I was being too lenient. I told him to back off and that I had much bigger issues at the moment. That’s when I told him what I’d just heard about my finances, which led to a huge fight that I truly didn’t need. What I needed was someone to hold me and tell me that it was going to be okay.

The upshot of all this was Christian’s announcement that he had to be on his own. His declaration of independence did not, however, stop him from using my car and driver to get to the airport to fly back to L.A.

This was one of the worst moments in my life, and this was the moment Christian chose to walk out on me. I know he resented the long
hours I put in at Jimmy Choo, but given the guilt already surrounding the enterprise, you just don’t criticize a single mom’s mothering. Ultimately, he simply never understood my life, and I suppose I never understood his. But I think the only way it ever works with an actor is to be his nanny.

To make matters worse, the ugly letters from my mother’s lawyers did not abate just because the other crises in my life were piling up. In fact, the letters were becoming increasingly vile, with more and more intense bullying and threats. “You’ll be on the stand for five days,” her lawyer wrote. “Don’t think this will be easy.”

Given the circus my life had become, it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other and keep plodding on. For months I would wake up in the middle of the night and have to change my pajamas because they were soaked with sweat. I was in a very dark and dangerous place, and I’m sure the only thing that saved me was Minty. I was actually kneeling by my bed to pray each night . . . and I’m an atheist.

But at least I had enough sense to reach out for help. For the past couple of years I’d been seeing a therapist named Martin Freeman, who specializes in addictive behaviors. Matthew and I had gone to him back when we were first married. Now I began talking to Martin every day. When we met face-to-face I could see him really taking on all that I was going through, so much so that I worried that I would cause him to have an empathic panic attack. But my sessions with Martin helped me enormously to process and to sort and to gain perspective.

I kept going to work, and I attended all the meetings, and I kept coming up with creative ideas in the design process, and this is where the mask I’d developed so early in life served me well. No one knew just how vulnerable I was—or how much I was dying inside.

Before the six weeks were up I took an advance on the rest of that year’s salary, borrowing £100,000 from the company to stay afloat.

I also went to see Richard Pegum, very successful in hedge funds, for a bit of financial advice. He reminded me that I was accruing interest on the millions I’d reinvested in Jimmy Choo and that all that interest was simply rolling over. I should be able to access that, he said.

So I swallowed my pride and I went in and asked Ramez for a loan based on some of my accrued interest. He said no. He said he didn’t want Robert to know.

I went back to Richard, who told me to go back to Ramez. “He has to do it. You’re his partner. He needs your head in the game. It’s the logical thing to do.”

So I tried again. With the lawsuit coming up, as well as the move, and not knowing how long the hedge funds would be frozen or how long until TowerBrook made their exit, I asked for £3 million.

Ramez said, “Okay. We’ll loan it to you at 20 percent.”

My face must have drained of all color, and he must have noticed, because he then tried to laugh off the absurdity of the interest rate.

“My money is expensive,” he said.

But he knew full well how much my shares were worth, which was a huge multiple of what I was asking for.

“I’ve got to justify it to my investors,” he told me.

Eventually, we negotiated the rate down to 13.2 percent. We set up a credit line so there would be no interest on any money until I took it out, but still I would be paying $50,000 a month in finance charges. Bottom line: I was loaning the company money at 11 percent and borrowing it back for 13.2.

In the midst of all this, my “glamorous” life representing Jimmy Choo had to go on, which included attending the Oscars. I was in L.A., hosting a lunch at Cecconi’s with Valentino and Elton and a bunch of actresses when a FedEx package arrived containing affidavits from Daniel and Gregory. Just when I thought the whole thing couldn’t go any lower, my two brothers were basically selling me down the river to please my mother.

My brothers were being led, but there was also a kind of willful naïveté, or wishful—even magical—thinking. As in, “Dad always said everything should be split evenly, so we should get half of whatever Tamara has.” But the 64,000 shares at issue had not just “turned up” in my trust. I had put millions at risk to earn those shares, and I’d also signed on to work like a dog. Of course they shouldn’t get half of that. They’d already got their half.

Everything they were saying was such gibberish. I kept thinking, all they have to do is explain to my mother how it really works. But no one ever did.

We even sent a memorandum of the Lion deal to Joshua Rubenstein, my mother’s lawyer in New York, and he acknowledged that I was right, that my cash, plus the shares attached and stapled to the bond, equaled what my mother cashed out, so the split was fifty-fifty, just as it should have been. But then he changed his story.

It appeared to me that for the right hourly rate, lawyers and financial advisers were more than happy to sign on and ride even a dead horse for as long as it would last.

That’s when I knew I had to go ahead and get out of London. I simply needed a change.

Before the move to New York could happen, we needed to transfer my employment contract to Jimmy Choo USA. So I had a meeting with Josh in my office in London and we were discussing how this was all going to work. Are we going to have one assistant in London? One in New York? How would we go back and forth?

I had already planned to stay at a friend’s house in St. Bart’s over Easter, so even though I was broke, Minty and I went to the islands. She was changing schools, which meant that we were able to spend the whole month together, which was so needed after all the stress and travel and long hours. I still well up with tears when I think about her being at home with no one but a nanny during all this time.

And yet that month in St. Bart’s was not pleasant. I had Ramez dangling the loan and meanwhile extorting concessions, I’d run out of money with a court case looming, and I was stressed out of my mind. The only thing that saved me was Minty.

No island is really an island in the age of global communication, and Bonnie called and asked if she could fly out to see me. Nothing had improved with the creative team at Halston, our next “look book” for the fashion editors was terrible, and her relationship with the rest of the staff had started to fray. But ultimately, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it. Every day I was on the phone to my lawyers in the case against my mother, telling them to just get rid of it. Settle. Whatever. I just didn’t care anymore.

Then another FedEx package arrived, this time with a document from TowerBrook. Instead of just transferring the language of my previous employment contract to the American company, they’d revised
the agreement to include details from my conversation with Josh, now codified before me in fine legalese.

My lawyer, Andrew Roberts, looked it over and said, “Did you know there were going to be all these changes?”

None of the alterations was earthshaking; it was the process that upset me. It was that everything I said was instantly reported back—almost as if my phones were bugged—and then the changes made official without any actual discussion with me. There seemed to be a complete absence of goodwill, and certainly no trust.

I called Ramez and said, “When I was talking with Josh about logistics, I didn’t realize I was negotiating a new contract. I’m not signing this.”

He responded in typical Ramez fashion: “I’m not sending you the money you want to borrow unless you sign that contract.” Ramez was now in a position to make me painfully aware of who was in charge, and he seemed to enjoy doing it in the crudest and most bullying way.

So I was forced to sign an agreement I didn’t want to sign in order to take out a loan at an exorbitant rate of interest. Remind you of anyone? I felt like I was in an episode of
The Sopranos
, lucky not to be left in the trunk of a car parked at Newark airport.

•  •  •  •

IT WAS MAY 2 WHEN
Minty and I arrived in New York, the day before the Costume Institute’s benefit gala at the Metropolitan Museum. People call this “the fashion Oscars,” because you have the entire fashion world as well as the younger and more glamorous reaches of Hollywood.

My furniture had arrived, but the apartment was so much bigger, and all the empty space around me seemed to reflect the sense of isolation, of devastation, really, that I felt. I had no network, no support from the office, and I felt a bit like a castaway, clinging to the flotsam and jetsam.

But the show must go on, so the next night I was looking my best and smiling into the cameras as I walked up the red carpet to enter the museum. Thank God my London nanny was there to take care of Minty, and my new assistant came over to help set up the place, guided by my great friend Elika Gibbs, who’d founded a company called Practical Princess to address just this kind of organizational challenge.

Eventually, I was able to extract a bit of money from the hedge funds, and Société Générale used some of it to pay off my loan, but they did it at a terrible exchange rate. This wound up costing me dearly and did nothing to counter my suspicion that, in many areas of banking, finance, and fiduciary stewardship, basic competence is inversely proportional to the rate of pay.

By this time, the completely incompetent Nick Morgan was no longer in the picture. My mother had moved the Marqueta Trust from CI Law to RBC Wealth Management, also in Jersey, where she began to work with a new trustee named Mike de Figueiredo. I’d moved Araminta to a different firm, Ogier, where Simon Willing was my trustee.

Martin and I met with de Figueiredo at Claridge’s in an attempt to settle, and for a moment I thought we’d have a deal, but he was just as bullying in person as he had been in his lawyer’s letters. I had to assume that this was all bluster and that they would capitulate because they were so clearly wrong. But facts had never done much to overcome my
mother’s profound narcissism and sense of entitlement. I offered to give them half a million simply to get them to go away. They countered with a demand for three of the four million that had been frozen. That I could not abide.

Much of the case would turn on what was said at the shareholders’ meeting in November 2004, when we had met in the Jimmy Choo conference room and decided to accept the offer from Lion Capital.

We assembled affidavits from various players, including David Burns, who’d been there, who could be explicit about what had been said, how the deal structure had been explained, and how the proceeds to Marqueta and to Araminta would be equal, the only difference being that Marqueta was taking £22 million in cash, while Araminta was taking an equivalent amount divided between cash and equity. There were no further debts to be settled, no “extra” shares. I also got a statement from Lyndon and from Ramez (though I had to twist his arm), who could speak to what the norms are in such dealings.

As CEO, Robert had, of course, led that November meeting, and my lawyer said to me, “It would be really helpful, you know, if you could get an affidavit from him.”

“Oh God.” I cringed. “That’s going to be
really
difficult.”

But I swallowed my pride and I called Robert and we, too, met at Claridge’s, and I said, “Listen, I need you to give an affidavit to the court.”

He gave me the strangest look, and I said, “All I’m asking you to do is tell the truth.”

He took a sip of his champagne. “I’ll do that for you,” he said, “if you buy my shares for £4 million.”

I did not leap to accept his generous offer.

“You know,” he said, “this could go the other way. I could give an affidavit for your mother.”

I said, “Are you blackmailing me?”

He said, “Call it what you want. That’s the deal.”

In truth, I would have loved to have bought his shares because I knew they were going to go up in value, but I didn’t have the money.

On June 13, 2009, I sent him an e-mail:

Having reflected on our meeting I have to say I’m really disappointed that you were unwilling to help me in telling the truth, without wanting something in return—maybe it was naive of me to have thought otherwise. However, in principle, I have no problem increasing my stake in the business at a commercially acceptable price, but I cannot respond to your request immediately for a variety of practical reasons, especially the shortage in the amount of meeting time. My deadline for your statement, which we didn’t really want to ask you for but my lawyers said would be useful, is this week, Thursday the 2nd of July. If this deadline passes without your cooperation it’s hard to see why I should have any motivation in helping to meet your request. So, Robert, I feel that it’s really your call as to whether any goodwill can exist between us, to move things forward.

He responded with an e-mail complaining that I’d “trashed” his name and reputation in various interviews. He summed up our relationship this way: “Although there is nothing you can say that can hurt me in the industry, you can understand that all of this hasn’t disposed me very favorably toward you.”

That summer we did another collaboration with Elton called the PEP Project, an effort to increase awareness of “post exposure prophylactic drugs,” that reduce your chance of infection, even after being
exposed to the HIV virus. We designed a funky print that had Elton and me on it, the British flag and the American flag, and we put it on shoes, flip-flops, and bags. We raised about £150,000 with that print, but we sold out so quickly, I think we actually underestimated the demand. I wish we could have sold more.