There are times when Tamara Mellon seems almost normal. More fragrant than
your average capitalist, of course, but surprisingly low-key, matey and
matter of fact. Then there are the other times. “One trick I do is I have my
closet on my iPhone,” she says, when I ask for a handy work tip for Style’s
readers. As she is quite posh, with a gentle lisp, closet comes out as
“clothet”, only adding to the hilarity of the moment.
“I always have so many events coming up,” she presses on, “so I will take some
time and prepare, say, the next 10. The outfits are all photographed and
uploaded onto my iPhone, so that when I’m travelling and I’m in the office
running late, one of my girls can run over to the hotel and they know — from
the download — what to pull out, and it’s ready to go.” She gives a short,
satisfied laugh. “It’s such a timesaver.”
Behold both the downfall and triumph of Mellon. By every account, she is a
relaxed boss, doting mother and general good egg. Yet the 42-year-old
president of the Jimmy Choo fashion house often seems less an actual person
than the heroine of some dicey Danielle Steel bonkathon. I can practically
see the dust jacket for her boardroom-set romp: “With a head for business
and a body for sin, sultry brunette Tamara breaks hearts and balls in the
must-read new novel, Sin City.” To be fair, I can tell she takes a knowing
pleasure in her ridiculousness when we meet at the caramel-coloured Jimmy
Choo HQ in west London. I find her perched on a chair in a teensy Markus
Lupfer jersey dress, opaque tights and biker boots. Assorted designers and
PRs buzz about as she sits quietly, her face a mask of inscrutable power,
dragging seductively on cigarette after cigarette. It’s quite a spectacle,
and I’m sure not only for show. Being “outrageously fabulous” (as one mutual
friend describes her) has been good for business.
Mellon didn’t merely found Jimmy Choo in 1996, she turned herself into its
ultimate fantasy — a ritzy glamour puss, strutting through life on a
never-ending roll of diamanté-encrusted shagpile. Actually, I doubt it
required her to do much transforming. Her life has always been mythical. Her
late father, Tom Yeardye, was born in Ireland to a family of peasant
farmers, and, after stints as Rock Hudson’s stuntman and Diana Dors’s lover,
made millions when he went into business with Vidal Sassoon. He married Ann,
Tamara’s mother and a former Chanel model, though mother and daughter are
currently on non-speakies, locked in a legal battle over £6m.
Tamara spent her childhood at a prime selection of boarding schools in
England, Beverly Hills and Switzerland. Back in London, she worked in PR and
on the shop floor before landing the gig as accessories editor at Vogue.
“There weren’t great shoes around,” she recalls with a sniff. So she decided
to make them herself. She went into business with the famed Malaysian shoe
designer Jimmy Choo, thanks to a £150,000 loan from daddy. The company was
sold in 2007 for £185m to a private equity firm, and Tamara is now said to
be worth in excess of £100m.
Next addition to the Steel fantasy is, of course, the men. Something of a
party girl in the 1990s, Tamara married Matthew Mellon, scion of an
unfathomably rich American banking family, in 2000. After a rocky few years
(much talk in the tabs of his “crack-cocaine binges”), they called it quits
in 2005. In 2007, it emerged that he’d used a private detective to hack into
her computer in the run-up to their vicious divorce battle. Cheeky. But then
Tamara had already had an affair with Oscar Humphries (twentysomething son
of the satirist Barry), so maybe the rules are different for the
“outrageously fabulous”? Post-marriage, she dated George Clooney and Flavio
Briatore, and she seemed to be going strong with Christian Slater until
their romance fizzled earlier this year. And now you’re single again? “Yes,”
she replies carefully. And on the market? “I’m interviewing,” she says, with
a laugh. “It’s a nice place to be.” Recent sightings of her with the actor
Sean Maguire suggest Mellon is definitely back in the game. She has just
moved to New York full-time with Minty, her seven-year-old daughter with
Mellon, although she returns to the London design studio for a week every
month. “I always seem to choose someone who doesn’t live in the same city,
so we’ll see what happens next time. I’m having fun. It’s just whether
there’s the chemistry or not.”
So there you have it. Mellon’s two dimensions: racy lover, brilliant
businesswoman. But is there a third? Both of her public images render her
somewhat cartoonish, but, like I said, when she’s not iPhoning her wardrobe
or wielding a ciggie like Béatrice Dalle, she’s actually down to earth. As
the assistants melt away, we are left in her meeting room and she visibly
relaxes. For one so coiffed, she is freakishly level-headed. “Parties are
work,” she says of her rigorous socialising, adding that she much prefers
staying home with a box set of Entourage, putting her daughter to bed and
reading a spot of nonfiction. One of her employees later tells me she has
“literally never” heard the boss raise her voice or lose her temper. She
even lets younger staff members wear — fashion gasp! — Converse to the
office.
So, if she isn’t some crazy bitch socialite, how on earth did she pull off her
£100m coup? “I do everything by instinct,” she says. “Every mistake I’ve
made in business, it’s because I’ve gone against my intuition, listening to
someone else’s point of view, because really the company is my creative
vision. The only mistake I can make is not trusting myself. If it doesn’t
work for me, it doesn’t work for the customer.” Pause. “It’s lucky the world
seems to want what I like.”
This includes the Jimmy Choo empire, which has 100 outlets worldwide, and the
Halston label, in which Mellon is an investor. She is also on the board of
directors of Revlon; and, next month, a collaboration between Jimmy Choo and
H&M hits the shops. Apparently, she owes this “instinct” (you might call
it dogged self-belief) to her father. And the glamour gene was courtesy of
mum? She shakes her head.
“I think it’s something that’s intrinsically in you, something you have or
haven’t got.” Perhaps it’s not surprising that she isn’t going overboard on
mummy praise. She recently said: “My mother and I never got along, not even
when I was a child. She wanted to be me, I think, which seems terribly sad.”
The rift is so egregious that the pair will face each other in court, as
Tamara says she’s due money from her father’s estate. “We go to trial in
November,” she tells me wearily. How do you feel? “You try to live a
faith-based life, rather than a fear-based life,” she says, unusually
tentative. “It’s about believing everything will be okay. And you know what?
It always is okay. Things will work out.”
I’m not sure I buy the que sera, sera bit. Once she has set her mind to
something, she’s like a terrier with a bone — and she does love a courtroom.
Plus, with that £100m of hers, this has the whiff of being about principle,
rather than financial need. Again, though, she dispels the bitch tag. “For
me, the ambition always comes from wanting to have my independence, to be in
charge of my own life, to never be dependent on a husband or a father.”
Clearly, with her relationship with her own mother on the skids, she’s
determined it will be different with Minty. “I bring her in, I take her up
to the design room, she sketches shoes and we put them up on the wall. From
a young age, I want her to feel involved.”
It sounds as though things can get carried away. “The Devil Wears Prada is my
daughter’s favourite movie,” Mellon smiles. “She went through a phase of
coming in and collecting people’s extension numbers, writing a list of the
employees’ names and numbers, then she’d ring them up and tell them
they were fired,” she says, laughter ringing. Thank God, staff saw the funny
side.
“But there’s something quite special, as a woman, about passing something onto
my daughter,” she continues, while conceding she has found problems with her
work/life balance dispiriting. She has missed the odd school play for work —
“Something I will never do again” — and says an average day sees her
stressing to change roles, albeit with more pizzazz than most. “The other
day, I had this little dress on for the office, so I put on a blazer and
flats to go to the parent-teacher meeting, then, in the car, I threw off the
jacket and put on some biker boots, because I was going to a U2 concert.
From businesswoman to mum to rock chick — it’s all about the shoes.”
She swears she’s low-maintenance, though. “It takes me 10 minutes to get ready
in the morning. It’s literally jump in the shower, pull on my jeans, a
T-shirt, usually no make-up, just a bit of black eyeliner that I smudge with
my fingers, mascara, and I run out the door.” Hmm, do we believe her? I let
it slide. Has she ever used her sex appeal in a meeting? Apparently not,
though she believes you should never dress like a man to get ahead. “For me,
the boardroom is always a little black dress and killer heels.” You never
butch it up? “No,” she says, unimpressed. “I don’t need to do that.”
Does she think big business is still rife with sexism? “In the finance world,
yes,” she nods. “As a woman, if you look a certain way, people think they
can bully or take advantage. In fact, you have a tougher fight because,
along the line, you always end up having to fight a bully. They take me
seriously now I’ve done three private equity deals and fought off a hostile
takeover. A friend of mine, who’s in the financial world, said to me after I
did the TowerBrook deal [the private equity firm bought a controlling stake
in Jimmy Choo in 2007], ‘You’ve become like a pin-up in the City’ — for all
the right reasons, I hasten to add.” Any of the wrong ones? She rolls her
eyes and laughs, a brief glimpse of normality again. Still, I think Danielle
Steel would be proud.
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