Critical question: how does one “maintain the mystique” on that first romantic
break? In the ensuite bathroom department, that is. The trick, apparently,
is to flush as it falls. That, or to say you need to discuss something with
housekeeping and go down to use the loo in the lobby. Don’t think spraying
perfume after the event will help, either – it will only make it worse.
How to keep the ensuite sweet. How to make your boobs look bigger. How to pull
a rugby team. Those are just a few of the tips you will find in The Naughty
Girl’s Guide to Life, the self-help manual that Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, 35,
and her friend, the Celebrity Fit Club contestant Sharon Marshall, 36,
penned together, right here on the cream leather sofa in Tara’s mad, sky-lit
living room in west London. There’s also a directory with every phone number
you might need in an emergency: one for AA, one for NA, one for Botox, one
for Charbonnel et Walker (to fatten up a roommate who looks better than you
in her underwear). One for Elton John’s fan club, one for Legal Aid,
liposuction and Louboutin (if you have the money. If you don’t, simply paint
the soles of your shoes with red nail varnish). Oh, and I almost forgot, the
website for Help the Aged. See, in Tara’s book, if you’re young and skint,
the best people to befriend are the old, because they will pay for
everything. With luck, they may die, and their generosity will continue.
“Out with the Chloé bag, in with the colostomy bag, is what I say,” she
declares, padding across the floor to decant the Chinese takeaway she’s
ordered for lunch. “Toffee banana balls and chicken-and-sweetcorn soup
okay?” she asks, sprinkling a sachet of what looks like powdered monosodium
glutamate on top. “Don’t you want any? Why not? I’m addicted – it’s the
best!”
Welcome back, TPT. Good to see the old girl on such razor-sharp form. And
looking pretty much the same as when I interviewed her just over a decade
ago, at the height of her It-ness. It was 1997, the beginning of the Blair
years, and how gloriously our poster girl for that dotcom-obsessed,
cocaine-fuelled era chronicled it all in her Sunday Times Style column. And
then, two years later, it all went horribly wrong when she made her
pillow-bitingly infamous appearance on The Frank Skinner Show. Within 48
hours, with a £400-a-day cocaine habit, she had checked herself into The
Meadows in Arizona. And that, seemingly, was the end of Tara – a sad
exemplar of the excess that precedes the crash; our girl doomed to the abyss
of D-list reality TV for ever.
Except that’s not the whole story. Tara is a survivor – a rather talented,
rather witty, rather unusual survivor – and here she is on the cover of
Style again, a manual full of life lessons under her arm. Because there is
nothing we love more than someone who’s been there and back. All right, the
nose is a little different (it was remodelled by a plastic surgeon last
year, after her septum caved in), and the skin, perhaps, isn’t quite as
young and dewy. There is, shall we say, an oldness and wiseness about those
mischievous Latina eyes (her mother, Patti, is an Anglo-Argentine). And
those breasts! Where on earth did she get those? “Oh, these? They’re not
mine,” she says, unzipping her top to show me a heavily padded Ultimo bra.
“I keep meaning to have a boob job, but I’ve never got around to it,
probably because I think it might upset my parents.”
But that extraordinarily sinewy body, that Barbie-doll waist, that tiny,
pea-like bottom? Nothing’s changed there at all. “Oh no! You mean I’m too
thin?” she says, taking a drag on her cigarette and suddenly looking rather
crestfallen. “I hate it when I’m too thin. Everyone immediately assumes I’m
back on drugs. But it’s a family metabolism thing. My parents are the same.
I have to secrete Lion bars around the house, so I keep eating. I’ve never
worked out a day in my life. I hate the gym and yoga and all that.” And
then, with a husky giggle: “Of course, I used to be able to say I worked out
on my back. Sadly, that is not the case any more.”
Being single. Getting dumped. If there is one thing Tara knows about, it is
this, and it’s the reason she decided to write the book. “I’m a good lover,”
she muses, as she takes another puff and dispassionately observes a chipped
nail. “But I guess men don’t perceive me as a good stayer. It’s always the
same thing. They come on strong at the beginning; they say they want kids;
they say they want to save my life.” She pauses. “See, look,” she says,
waving at the photo gallery behind us – Tara with Camilla and Charles, Tara
with Stephen Fry, Tara with Robbie Williams, Tara with Duncan James from
Blue, Tara with James Blunt, Tara and, well, “half of Sharon’s iPod”, as is
the joke between them. “I suppose, on the surface, it’s quite a nice package
– you know, the whole royal thing, the house in the country, and all the
celeb stuff, too. And then they get caught up in it and feel resentful and
emasculated, and it all goes wrong.
“I was brought up by my father to believe that if you are financially
independent and stand on your own two feet, that’s when a man comes along.
Bollocks! That’s when they get shit scared. Then there’s this habit that I
picked up in rehab of discussing my feelings, confronting things, sharing
and airing things. Some people, let’s face it, find that a bore.”
So, back to Tara’s star-studded but ultimately unsuccessful love life. Barring
short flings with the likes of Blunt and Williams (“So cute, and such a
proper person”), the last serious man in her life, was Jamie Hargreaves. In
Hargreaves, the Matalan heir, she’d found her soul mate, and she was
thrilled when he decided, two and a half years ago, to take her to Portofino
on what she secretly hoped would be the “engagement holiday”.
“It was the day before we were supposed to go,” she says sadly. “I was sitting
here on this leather sofa, with real diamonds in my pedicure, thinking that
this was really it. And then he broke the news. I swear, I did not get off
this sofa for the next three weeks. I just sort of sat there, like Miss
Havisham, shrinking into my going-away outfit and picking the diamonds off
my toenails. I was rock bottom, I really was, just like when they found me
unconscious in a pile of my own vomit before I went into rehab. This time,
though, I couldn’t score, could I? So I just drank bottle after bottle of
Benylin cough mixture. I didn’t want to die, exactly; I just didn’t want to
be awake.”
Somehow, though, her survival instinct kicked in, as did the horror of getting
back into drugs. “Alcohol – which, frankly, I can take or leave –
and Benylin are one thing, but cocaine? People have no idea how scared I am
of going back to that: the paranoia, the psychosis, thinking that every
light fixture was a hidden camera. There’s no way I could ever go back there
again.” Three weeks later, she found herself having lunch in San Lorenzo
with Sharon Marshall, whom she had met while the pair were covering I’m a
Celebrity ... Get Me out of Here!.
“She didn’t look great,” Sharon admits later. She’s a straight-talking
Lancashire lass with a passing resemblance to Kylie (“and a passing
resemblance to Princess Fiona [from Shrek] when I was two and a half stone
heavier”). “But at least she had heels on, which was a start. So we sat
there talking about how awful it was to be dumped, and it suddenly occurred
to us that we ought to write a book about it. Next thing I know, Tara’s been
to some party and given an agent an example of what we’d got down. He went
to this book fair and came back with 12 publishing deals to pick from.
“It all started from there. Me coming over every Monday night with my tape
recorder, and the pair of us sitting there, figuring out practical ways to
be vixens, not victims. And me trying to get in the word kebab. I kept
telling her, that’s what normal girls do, go down the pub on a Saturday
night, get drunk and have a kebab to soak it all up, but she wasn’t having
any of it.”
“Uurrrgh,” Tara says, shuddering. “I can’t bear that word. Not in my book.
Never. That’s not to say I don’t know what it’s like to be skint. When you
develop a habit of taking helicopters instead of taxis, you can get very
poor indeed. And unpopular. You should have seen the amount of petals I blew
off people’s roses when I pitched up on their lawns in St Tropez.”
In the end, it is the ring of authenticity that distinguishes this book from
the hundreds of others in the self-help section of Waterstone’s. That
gusset-free, lychee-martini-infused world is one that Tara knows intimately.
After all, what other self-help writer has actually worn light oatmeal in
order to blend in with the interior of a private jet? Or had monthly Amex
Black bills of £45,000 or more? And been able to appear quite this mordant
about it? And how, you can’t help wondering, with her happy, secure, sloaney
background, did she end up lying unconscious in a pool of her own sick?
“I guess I always felt unworthiness,” she says with a shrug, “and I had the
role of naughty person foisted on me. I remember, at the age of seven, a man
offering me a fiver if I’d walk round our tennis court in nothing but a pair
of high heels and my dad’s top hat from Eton.”
Tara is in a good place now. She has made millions from her contracts with
Walkers crisps and Heinz beans, among others. She has a chalet in Klosters
and, as we speak, is having a villa built in Bali, as the face of Karma
resorts. She is presenting a new television series, Dirty Cows, a reality
show that revolves around 10 city girls and one rich farmer from Cornwall,
and is following her passion for composing music (after all, don’t forget
that she won the last series of Comic Relief Does Fame Academy). Having been
obsessed with drugs, she is now obsessed with neatness, with at least five
Ukrainian maids polishing, dusting and hovering around and someone from the
concierge service Practical Princess colour-coding her cashmere sweaters.
As for the man question – what’s the story there? Will she be following
her own advice? “Well, all the stuff in the book, that’s really me writing
from experience,” she says carefully, “and one thing I know for sure is that
I have no desire to go down the aisle tomorrow, not when I see all the
marriages around me disintegrating and all these husbands having secret
affairs, and not even with other women any more, but with other men. Yes,
I’m telling you! It’s this whole trendy thing going down at the moment.
“I’m actually quite a solitary person,” she continues, fondly surveying the
oasis she has created up here, with a baby grand piano, manicured roof
terrace and Philippe Starck-designed kitchenette that never gets used. “But,
I must admit, I am ready to meet someone now. I need that human touch. I’m
like a dog, you know? I need to be stroked now and then.”
You go, girl. We’ve got our fingers crossed for you.
