So, Lisa B, model, actress, singer and professional yummy-mummy, has released
a lifestyle manual. She hopes the book, Lifestyle Essentials, and the
website launched concurrently, will “help you take stock of all aspects of
your life”. It provides advice on how to give yourself an overhaul – from
emotional wellbeing to career ambitions, appearance, relationships,
entertaining and personal etiquette – and all in less than 300 pages. That’s
quite an ambition. The book looks very pretty, peppered with swirly, girlie
illustrations, as well as photos of Lisa looking lovely as she applies a
face mask, giggling on the telephone, preparing a healthy vegetable snack,
looking studious in her office and contemplative in the morning mist. This
is my life, she is saying. Here is the organised me, the stylish me, the
healthy me, the aspirational me. Read my book and you, too, might be like
me. Your life can also be this sunny, and just look how easy I make it all
seem.
It is not exactly new territory – Lisa is just one in a line of celebrities to
jump on the lifestyle wagon. Browse the lifestyle/ motherhood shelves of
Borders and you will find a clutch of lovely, gorgeous, rich women who feel
compelled to impart to the general public their precious little nuggets of
wisdom on how to lead a better and more stylish life. Jools Oliver tried
hard to convince us she was just a regular girl in Minus Nine to One: The
Diary of an Honest Mum, and Myleene Klass has written My Bump and Me. Those
girls. I don’t know how they do it. I really don’t. They just make it look
so easy.
And Lisa really is living the dream.
A hard-working girl from Brooklyn, she arrived in London at 17 and now
embodies the vaultingly high lifestyle that most people can only dream of.
In her Notting Hill home, she has a handsome property-developer husband,
Anton Bilton, and a couple of utterly gorgeous sons. She is also chatelaine
of a huge palladian pile in the country where she entertains her Alist
friends. She already has several careers as a model, singer and actress
under her belt, does a huge amount for charity and is a great cook and loyal
friend. Oh, and did I tell you she is sponsored by Audi?
She is also generous and sweet; her megawatt smile dazzles as she opens her
front door to me: “Come in. Please, come in.” In her basement kitchen, she
bends around the hard angles of the breakfast bar like a beautiful bean pod,
all elegant wrists and jutting cheekbones. Her little boys, both still
toddlers, gurgle with delight as she smothers them in glossy kisses,
chatting to them in Spanish as the nanny helps feed them scrambled eggs. In
many ways, it’s a familiar scene: yummy mummy gives her children breakfast
and enjoys some quality time before the buzz of the day. Daddy isn’t there,
of course. He’s already at work. “He’s usually gone by 7.30,” says Lisa with
a sigh, popping a morsel of dried mango into her mouth. Even though she
threatens her elder son with the naughty step, I don’t think she really
means it. She’s just too sweet and too beautiful for that.
Breakfast over, she gives her elder son a piggyback to nursery, clopping off
in high-heeled leather boots through the sunny streets of Notting Hill, a
mane of long, shiny dark hair falling on her narrow shoulders. There is a
still, unreal quality to her school route: no litter, no fumes, no graffiti,
no kids in nylon comprehensive blazers. Halfway down the road, a red balloon
drifts in the faintest spring breeze.
Afterwards, she shows me round the house she and Anton are redecorating.
There’s bad feng shui in their bedroom, so they are going to run mirrored
cupboards down one wall, and replace another with floor-to-ceiling sliding
doors. Then, when Anton gets up early, he can shut off the bedroom and leave
Lisa to sleep. It’s work in progress, but there is a box on the floor with
“Anton’s gems” written on it in thick permanent marker. Maybe it has a mini
Lisa in it.
She shows me the “lifestyle protocols” she is setting up on her website. The
idea is that it will help users to organise all the information in their
lives, which they can then store on a personalised version of the site.
“It’s for every woman: married, single, with kids or a younger girl with a
career. I see it as being used by anybody from 22 to 62 who has a career, a
family, or both, and is trying to balance the competing demands of these
things. Gosh, even people who live in the country might use it,” she says.
She rattles off a list of examples of how these protocols will help women to
become as fabulous and lovely as her. “I use them to organise all aspects of
my life, such as menus for when we are entertaining. Or if you were planning
a trip away, you could e-mail a protocol to the hotel with your specific
room preferences, such as you don’t want to sleep on the third floor or to
be near the lift, or you are allergic to goose-down pillows.” She smiles at
me sweetly, but I think I must look a bit blank, so she gallops on. “Anton
and I went to Brazil for carnival and it meant I had all the information
that I needed to hand.”
On her to-do list, I spy “Make gift photo album for the people we stayed with
in Brazil”, and I think of the several years of disorganised, unprinted
photos on my computer. I write a note – “Catalogue photos” – in my pad and
underline it. It makes me feel a bit better and in control.
That evening, Lisa is attending a celebrity event, the Mayfair Personality of
the Year awards. Anton is away again, so a close girlfriend is accompanying
her. The two women are easy and affectionate with each other. They are, Lisa
tells me, old partners in crime, and have “shared everything, literally
everything”. As she bathes the boys, their chat involves names that need no
surname: Normandie, Yasmin, Anya.
Lisa compliments her friend on her dress, then turns to me: “Guess how old she
is.” It turns out she is in her forties, but looks a good 20 years younger,
and she has a 26-year-old daughter. Incredible: I don’t know how they manage
it, these scrummy, yummy mummies. We’re not just talking a Boden dress and
expensive highlights. No, these girls are the real thing. They’re not made
from the same substance as I am, or any of my friends, my friends’ friends
or any of the mothers I know from the school gate. They are taller, thinner,
buffer and lusher than anybody I have ever seen.
Lisa slips into a vivid purple frock. Her Audi arrives and we’re whisked
through a sparkling, twinkling version of London, where paparazzi bulbs
flash into action as she steps from her car and smiles and smiles. Inside,
there are a lot of jewels and acres of satin on show.
At dinner, Lisa giggles with her friends. One, a hedge-fund manager, is not
afraid to make a fool of himself, telling me about the time he offered to DJ
for Pete Tong at one of Lisa’s famous house parties. His wife is a peach,
all long blonde hair and smooth, smooth skin. She wears a glittering diamond
watch on her delicate wrist, which, for the first time today, creates a
cross little pebble of jealousy deep inside me. Even though I felt a bit
like a pigeon in a hothouse, surrounded by the chatter of jewel-coloured
parrots, Lisa was really kind to me and very well mannered, making an effort
to include me in all her conversations.
Her good fortune is no accident: she’s a regular girl from the hood who grew
up with her dad growing tomato plants in the garden and a wayward brother
who did a spell in prison. “There’s more than a dose of The Sopranos in my
background,” she says. She supported herself through school by working in a
hosiery shop and baby-sitting; summer holidays were spent camping in the
Appalachian mountains with a hippie aunt.
And now? Where does she holiday now? “We’re really lucky because we go to
Mustique. Some of our friends rent houses there, so the kids play together
and we can hang out.” She pauses. “I’m lucky. I realise I’m really lucky.”
Does she ever wish for anything different? “No, not really. I guess,
sometimes, on holiday, I can feel like I’m going a touch crazy, because it
can get a bit like groundhog day. We travel round the island in golf carts.
Sometimes I feel, get me out of here, because even five-star luxury can be
claustrophobic.”
Later, I can’t help wondering what it is about success and good fortune that
makes people feel that they need to use them to instruct normal people in
the way they live. Lisa is a lovely girl, who does a lot for charity, but
it’s not as if anybody needs yet another lifestyle manual. And even though
she wrote the book for “the modern woman who multitasks a lot”, which
describes my life, I don’t see how any of Lisa’s gems – “Having a gym at
home is incredibly convenient”, or “Charity work is the elixir of my soul”,
or “If your expenditure exceeds your income you will eventually find
yourself in debt” – will actually improve any aspect of my chaotic,
difficult, messed-up, confusing, exhausting, brilliant life.
So, books like this could make me feel bad, and they’re dishonest. Do you
really think that Lisa, Myleene or Jools, with their armies of housekeepers
and nannies and drivers and trainers and beauticians and depilatory experts
and butlers, are anything, anything, like you or me?
There is also a much more sinister voice, telling me that this proliferation
of lifestyle manuals might just be undoing half a century of gender equality
and a woman’s right to pursue a serious intellectual or artistic path. After
all, lifestyle manuals suggest that a woman will be judged on how she lays
the table or applies blusher, not on what she might say or think.
As the awards ceremony rumbles on, the beautiful hedge-fund manager’s wife
leans forward, putting her cool diamond wrist on Lisa’s shoulder. “Babe,”
she mock-whispers. “What are we doing here?” It’s a very good question.
Lifestyle Essentials is on sale now, priced £12.99 (Icon Books) www.lifestyle-essentials.com
When cometh the revolution?
Anne Glen, Durham City, England
Perfect. No jealousy here, just hard-core common-sense. The life-style question, which has to include the increasing fascination of soap-operas and realities , has indeed become dangerous.. Compulsive preoccupation with how others live and how they think we should live has rid so many of us of our individuality and self-confidence. This writer has touched on a subject that is central to how many live their lives today - both those who would attempt to lead and, sadly, those who follow.
karen, cambs, uk
never heard of any of the peopl in this article. This is a bit too frivolous to deserve column space inThe Times
V. Jones, London, UK
maybe the article should start with-Lifestyle Essentials is on sale now, priced £12.99 (Icon Books) www.lifestyle-essentials.com -
then you can make the informed choice to read or not read knowing its just another disguised advert
paul, london,
I've never heard of her either.
Paul, Southampton, UK
The journalist comes accross as a little bitter and jealous. Good on Lisa for going for it, and coming accross well.
Cathy, London,
Never 'eard ov 'er.
Bob Grundy, London,
A really well written interview. Lisa B is fortunate. I too believe that lifestyle manuals undermine so many core beliefs in women's individuality and create an obstacle to women's right to pursue a serious life path without recourse to perfection
Miranda Twiss, London,