In My Shoes: A Memoir (12 page)

He grabbed a wad of cash from a drawer and disappeared, and I was incredibly sad for all of us, especially Minty. But I had to follow through for her sake.

I called my dad and said, “Go to my place and get all my things. Just rent something for me and Minty so I can move when I get back.”

“What should I take?” he asked.

“Half,” I said.

Matthew was due in New York for a Harry’s event, and Max Gottschalk, who was an investor in the company, got him there and through all his commitments. Matthew is remarkable in that he always manages to “get through it.” He has a bravado that’s hard to challenge, and a winning smile, and a great sense of humor that seems to compensate for his many sins.

After New York he chartered a plane and flew to Corfu, where he took up with the daughter of a Russian plutocrat. When he came back to London, I got him into a clinic.

To this day I’ve never had any ill feeling toward Matthew. He was never out to deliberately inflict pain the way my mother had. He was just unwell, with a disease that was poisonous for me to be around. Even today, I still feel terrible about what happened between us. In truth, he missed his calling, which was to be a chat show host, most of whom suffer from depression, or mania, or both. He is funny as hell and very bright, but at the time of our marriage he was also a raging addict, and that was just too frightening to be around, for me and for my daughter.

•  •  •  •

WHEN I RETURNED TO LONDON
I moved into a shabby little terrace house on Draycott Avenue. With the Phoenix deal, my salary had risen to £60,000, which was still far below the norm for the kind of
responsibility I had, and woefully inadequate to support the kind of lifestyle I had to maintain as the public face of the company. I had to have a nanny so I could work, so money was tight. It reached the point that I had to ask my father for help with my rent.

Our year had been very profitable, though, so I went to lunch with David Burns and said, “Look, I need to increase my salary.”

“A dollar now will cost you fourteen dollars on exit,” he said, invoking the formula (EBITDA multiplied by 14), which private equity uses to calculate a company’s value.

“That’s all well and good,” I said, “but I still need money to live on.”

So the company agreed to loan me money to be paid back against my shares on exit. Essentially, I was borrowing money from myself so that I could afford to go to work.

That autumn, to ease my frustrations, and to cleanse my palette, I suppose, I began a rather ill-considered affair with Oscar Humphries, the fair-haired boy who had been with us in Spain. In my mind, once I’d said to Matthew, “It’s over!” it was over. I had been through hell, and I considered myself single, and I was determined to bounce back and have some fun, and on my own terms, thank you very much.

Oscar was new and smart and only twenty-two, a boy toy. And even though I was still officially married, I didn’t care who saw us together. Truth be told, being seen was all part of the point. I felt I was pioneering new realms of equality for women, a bit like Demi Moore with Ashton Kutcher. I was a self-made woman, and on my own now, so why shouldn’t I be able to do what I wanted?

Oscar was very bright, and he was passionate about art, and the difference in our ages wasn’t all
that
great. As I was leaving on a business
trip, he asked if I’d mind if he wrote an article about what it was like to have a relationship with an older woman. I must have been very distracted because I said, “Fine.” But it’s also true that in my distanced way, a self-protective residue from childhood, I often agreed to things merely to escape an awkward confrontation. I know I complied many times in business meetings under that duress, as well as in my personal life.

When I returned from my trip his piece was in the
Daily Telegraph
and London was buzzing. The article named no names, but that slender fig leaf only stirred up more of a guessing game. I think the whole business just showed how naive we both were about the prospect of anonymity because of course it came out that his “older woman” was me. Matthew was upset, but I didn’t really care, even when the
Mail
referred to me as “Mrs. Robinson.” After all, Anne Bancroft, who played the part in
The Graduate
, was barely thirty-six when the film came out, six years older than Dustin Hoffman, who played the “boy” she was seducing. (When Oscar and I were together, I was thirty-five.)

Oscar went to Milan with me, but by November our relationship had run its course, and my boy toy went home to Australia. Still, the gossip about the affair and about my fractured marriage all but overshadowed the opening of our boutique on Bond Street. To mark the occasion, we threw a party for the women working in the City, England’s version of Wall Street. This was a more subdued group than the ladies who lunched in Knightsbridge, but they had money, and they spent it on clothing, and they were very much part of the audience I wanted to reach.

Meanwhile, Matthew needed help, so Uncle Jay flew over to take him to rehab at Promises, the refuge for addicted actors and rock stars in Malibu. Matthew insisted on chartering a plane, Jay prevailed on him
to fly commercial, but then Matthew got the last laugh by ditching his uncle when they arrived at LAX.

Somehow my husband surfaced at L’Ermitage, and Nat Rothschild found him and suggested that he go to the Meadows in Arizona. Nat even fronted the money. So the inimitable Mr. Mellon took a limo, doing coke all through the six-hour drive across the desert, and when he arrived he was in such bad shape that they put him on a suicide watch.

When I visited him there for Family Week, he asked for one more chance. In fact, he offered me $2 million if I’d try again, but I couldn’t take the offer seriously. I still cared deeply about him, and I wished him well. In December, I even went with him to a party for Harry’s of London, but I made it very clear: As a couple we were done.

In a typically farcical footnote to the relationship, shortly after our breakup I started getting calls at the office from someone saying that Matthew owed him money. Not only that, the caller said, but Matthew owed some nasty gangsters money and they were going to murder him unless I paid all the debts.

It so happened that a friend of mine was in my office at the time, a friend who, on his mother’s side, has family connections in the world of people who make other people disappear. He took the phone, and he had a very pointed conversation with the would-be debt collector/extortionist on the line.

An hour later the man called back. “I’ve paid off the debts myself,” he said. “You’ll never hear from me again.”

I
f only I could have achieved that kind of closure with Robert Bensoussan.

Our accidental CEO tormented me relentlessly, and yet I could never find the extenuating circumstances that might make me feel more charitable and forgiving about his boorish behavior. He was forever going into rages in the office, directing his wrath toward anyone and everyone up and down the organization chart. His unpredictable behavior reminded me all too much of my mother, which made him doubly exhausting to be around.

I became a particular target not only because I was a rival as a figure of authority but because of my role as the public face of Jimmy Choo. In most private-equity ventures the CEO is the star, but in fashion it’s the creative head that people want to see and hear. Still, Robert should have made his peace with this by now. He’d been in the business a long time.

Especially in the early days, I was unique in being able to speak about everything, from the design of the collection to the nitty-gritty of operations, so of course I did the press interviews. And it was not as if I were trying to hog the limelight. I would have been happy to share the responsibility of living in the media’s glare. In fact, I tried to, but
in Sandra’s first exposure to the press she was quoted as saying that no one could possibly wear our shoes for more than four hours. Another time, when she was asked why we were at the Oscars, her carefully crafted answer was, “I have no idea.”

As the brand grew and the press attention became global, I found myself doing one or two interviews a week, and any time I was to be photographed, it was on me as the representative of a fashion brand to engage fashion industry professionals to assist with hair and makeup.

After a while I was being asked the same questions so many times in so many different languages that I dreamed of being able to give them a recording that addressed the top dozen or so issues that journalists always wanted to ask me about. I tried to find more creative ways to describe what we were doing, if only so that in every interview I wouldn’t have to listen to myself repeat the same tired lines.

Robert just never seemed to accept the fashion industry’s requirement that the person in charge of creating the brand serves as the face of the brand. My father had warned me that by being out front I would become a target, but Robert began to act like an insecure and spiteful child. “I guess she gets the attention because I haven’t got the legs,” he said once.

After a while he decided to bring all Jimmy Choo PR in-house and to hire Tara ffrench-Mullen, who’d worked at Gianfranco Ferré. Not long after, Robert called Caroline Berthet, in charge of marketing in New York, and asked her to take me out of a promotional video. But that was trivial when set against his other spiteful actions that actually did serious damage to our business.

In 2005, we were making our mark in France with the very
successful shop in Paris and opening another in Cannes, so Carine Roitfeld, the editor in chief of French
Vogue
, agreed to host a party with us. Both as an editor and as a former model, Carine is a true fashion icon, someone women all over the world look to as an arbiter of exquisite taste, so this was a real coup, but once again Robert insisted that his name be on the invitation along with mine. Carine said, “No. I do this with Tamara!” Fashion CEOs don’t necessarily attend these kinds of parties, much less plaster their names all over the invitation. You would never have seen Domenico De Sole put his name on an invitation at Gucci when Tom Ford was there. But Robert’s ego simply couldn’t accept that, in the fashion industry, “the suits” stayed in the background. Regardless of how much it could have meant for the brand, Robert canceled the party.

Not long after, the singer Pharrell Williams approached me about doing a collaboration. Pharrell loves fashion, and we agreed that he’d design a shoe, we’d put it in our collection, and we’d split the profits fifty-fifty. Robert went ballistic. Lawyers got involved. Obviously the idea couldn’t go forward with Jimmy Choo, but Pharrell went on to design sunglasses for Louis Vuitton, and to be featured in American
Vogue
.

That was when the penny truly dropped for me regarding the character of this man who now had executive authority over the business my father and I had built. It was also the moment when the full burden of regret descended on me for agreeing to go down this path. In retrospect, the evidence for Robert’s character had been there all along.

Months earlier, when we were opening the store in Beverly Hills on North Canon, my father and I did an interview—a sort of
father-and-daughter relationship piece. Robert didn’t like something my father said, and so he rang him up and screamed at him. That was the first time my father said to me, “This man is no good.”

Not long after, Dad, Robert, and I took a trip to Hong Kong to scout out opportunities. We had taken on a partner called Bluebell to facilitate our expansion into Asia, and as we were visiting a Chinese shopping mall with them we bumped into Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH. LVMH is the home of Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon, Hennessy cognac, and Guerlain, among others. Robert stepped forward to shake Arnault’s hand, and the Frenchman involuntarily recoiled.

I was taken aback by this strange reaction, one that I’d have to describe as disgust.

On the heels of that odd moment, my father told me about an earlier encounter in London, a time when he’d bumped into Joseph Ettedgui, founder of the luxury retailer Joseph. This was just after the Phoenix deal, and just to make conversation, Dad mentioned that Robert Bensoussan was to be our new CEO. Apparently Joseph had the same reaction as Arnault.

Looking back, I really wish I’d had the wherewithal to get rid of Robert before he could do any serious damage. Every time I made a comment that was particularly on point, he greeted it with disdain or rage, which was the same way my mother had treated me all through my childhood. Unfortunately, I followed through with my childhood habit, which was to go along and feign agreement as a way of escaping conflict.

Robert was very effective at opening stores and in bringing in partners, but that skill set was replicable. With a company as profitable and
well regarded as ours, we could have easily found a CEO who truly understood what we were trying to do and whose ego wasn’t constantly getting in the way.

Hope springs eternal, and three or four years is the normal term for a private-equity firm to hold a company they’ve invested in. So by the time I had Robert’s number, we were expecting Phoenix to exit and I thought we could simply wait him out.

Truth be told, my father was ready to cash out himself. He was only seventy-four, but his mind was as keen as ever and he kept very fit, going for an hour walk in the park every day. But he’d begun to talk more and more about liquidating his shares, buying a house in Beverly Hills, and settling in for a nice retirement in the sunshine surrounded by lemon trees.

So with impetus from both sides of the Jimmy Choo ownership equation, “Exit Strategy” became an item for discussion at our monthly board meetings.

For an entrepreneur, this kind of transaction is the moment of truth. You’ve worked like a dog to build something from the ground up, often laboring for years without much compensation because, rather than pay yourself the going rate, you’re pouring every cent back into the business. And no matter how successful the venture, extracting the value of the equity you’ve built up is dependent on multiple factors, most of which are beyond your control: the general state of the economy, the health of your particular industry, the short-term profitability of potential buyers.

In the fashion world, extracting value is trickier still because there has never been a natural fit between fashion and the world of the Dow
and the UK
Financial Times
and Stock Exchange. A successful brand has to juggle art and commerce every day, and Wall Street and the City are interested only in the latter.

In the nineteenth century, when most of the grand old fashion houses were founded—Hermès, Bulgari, Burberry, Louis Vuitton—they were owned by an individual or by a family. The same was true for Chanel, Prada, Gucci, and Fendi in the early twentieth
century, Dior just after the war, and Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, Armani, and Versace more recently. Serious investors paid attention to businesses with smokestacks, and they viewed fashion as something of interest to their wives, a marginal realm of artisans holding pins between their lips, plying their trade in tiny ateliers.

But about the time I was having my first cigarette at Heathfield, the engine of the economy was shifting from heavy industry to high technology. Ideas, protected by copyrights and trademarks, were being valued more highly as assets than big brick buildings and clunky machines. The potential for growth seemed inversely proportional to tangibility.

Eventually, the big financial players took note that luxury goods were embedded with “intellectual property” in the same sense that software and biotechnology were, and thus had some of the same advantages. A luxury brand offered the owner the opportunity to profit from ideas and image, with almost limitless prospects for scaling up through licensing, and through the halo effect of brand image that could travel all around the world, even migrating to other products.

One of the first to see the opportunities here was Bernard Arnault, and it made him the richest man in France. His family had already
made one fortune in construction, developing vacation homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, in 1984, he gained control of Société foncière et financière du groupe Agache-Willot, which owned the Boussac textile group, which in turn owned Christian Dior.

In 1987, Arnault hired Christian Lacroix away from Patou, a couture house, to establish their first brand from scratch. He then acquired Céline, the leather goods company, and bought a controlling interest in LVMH.

Meanwhile, a Bahrain-based private-equity firm called Investcorp bought Tiffany & Co. and took it public. They invested in Saks Fifth Avenue, the watchmakers Ebel and Breguet, and the exclusive jeweler Chaumet. In 1993, they bought Gucci and revitalized it by hiring Dawn Mello as creative director. She, in turn, hired Richard Lambertson, as well as a young fellow named Tom Ford.

By the mid-nineties, Hermès, Tiffany, and LVMH were already publicly traded companies. Then Bulgari did an initial public offering to finance global expansion, and the stock more than doubled within the first year. Morgan Stanley, who had done the public offering for Bulgari, began to encourage Investcorp to put Gucci on the same track. In October 1995, Gucci appeared on the exchanges in New York and Amsterdam, as well as in Milan. The stock doubled in value in only six months.

Suddenly, there was a strong “luxury goods sector” in the world of global finance, with additional IPOs by Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Burberry. Coverage of the fashion world expanded beyond
Women’s Wear Daily
to the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Financial Times.

But as the suits failed to acknowledge to the detriment of all
concerned, fashion is not a “rational” business that can be brought to heel by an MBA wielding a spreadsheet. You don’t necessarily spur success by tightening the supply chain or by cheapening the quality of the materials. Winners and losers are subject to the ineffable forces of creativity, inspiration, and very fickle trends. You can have a $12 billion business, but each decision to purchase each individual item of inventory still depends on the customer’s fantasies, her self-image, and her own awareness of what makes her feel more attractive. Making such an intimate connection with the customer relies on a different set of skills entirely.

Our growth had been stellar, and all indications were that we would continue on that trajectory. We had manufactured 7,300 pairs of shoes in 1997. In 2001 that figure increased to 15,000. In 2004, our number had shot up exponentially to 180,000, which exceeded the volume of Manolo Blahnik. We also expected to sell 23,000 bags in 2004, up from about 1,000 three years earlier. Revenues had nearly doubled from £12 million in 2001 to £22 million in 2003, with £34 million projected for 2004. Profits were on the same track: £3 million in 2001, £4 million in 2003, and £7.5 million projected for the year ahead. In terms of retail outlets, the potential for growth was similarly exponential. Gucci had nearly two hundred stores. We had barely twenty.

Even so, we were probably too small to capture the interest of the big institutional investors. And the mergers and acquisitions craze of the 1990s had already passed us by. In fact, it had recently reversed, with “de-merging” on the rise. So this was the context in which we began to have talks with bankers.

Goldman Sachs sent over an all-female team—each of the women
wearing Jimmy Choos—and they proposed a very public auction. But their valuation came out low—at £60 million.

Rothschild agreed with us that it should be at least £100 million, and they said they could achieve that mark, so we went with them. Their point man, Akeel Sachak, an Indian born in Tanzania and educated at Oxford, pushed for a stealth approach, which he dubbed Project Jewel, a code name to keep the transaction under the radar.

A valuation of £100 million was still comparatively small for Rothschild, but at the same time our public profile was huge. It didn’t hurt that
Legally Blonde
was in the theaters, with multiple plugs for Jimmy Choo, or that Reese Witherspoon, the star, insisted on keeping all the Jimmy Choos she’d worn on-screen. In their prospectus for potential investors, the bankers could include clips not only from that movie but also from
Sex and the City
, as well as song lyrics by Beyoncé, P. Diddy, and Pharrell Williams. Jimmy Choo, though always tasteful, was the embodiment of “bling.”

The Swiss firm Richemont was on an acquiring spree, but their profile was hard luxury (Montblanc, Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, Piaget, Alfred Dunhill) rather than luxury fashion per se. On the other hand, they had owned Chloé since 1985.