In My Shoes: A Memoir (26 page)

At last report, Jimmy Choo was still on Connaught Street and still making shoes.

Sandra Choi is still creative director of the company that bears her uncle’s name, and she’s still my biggest disappoinment. Every time she sees me she breaks down and cries. At Hannah Colman’s wedding in Milan she came up to me in tears and I just looked at her and said, “Well, it didn’t end well, but you know why.” That must have hurt, because she’s big enough to at least acknowledge her role in betraying me. But that doesn’t mean that I have to provide forgiveness.

As for the company itself, it seems they’ve followed a rather Orwellian path in trying to rewrite history. I ran into some old colleagues not long ago who told me to check out the Jimmy Choo Web site. They were horrified to report that the company history provided there does not
mention my name even once. I’d been written out of the script, replaced by Sandra Choi in the creation myth they choose to offer.

As for me, enjoying my new life as much as I am, we have to remember that even Eden had its serpent. Directly in front of my house in the Hamptons there are thirteen acres of land, which were supposed to be conserved and set aside for strictly “agricultural purposes.”

When I was first interested in buying the place, I asked the Realtor, “Can you just make sure what’s going to happen to that land?” It had just been sold to a new owner, so I was curious. “I don’t want to buy the house if someone’s going to put up a big fence or block my view or something.”

So she called the new owner’s lawyer and he assured her, “No, no. I’ve spoken to the landscape architect and they’re going to respect the land and put in an apple orchard.”

This sounded great, so I bought the house. But a while later I got a call from the broker, who said, “Oh my God, Tamara, the guy who bought the reserve—he’s going to build an eight-thousand-square-foot stable. It’s going to be huge, and he’s going to be putting it right in front of your house. There’ll be a monster fence, and horse trailers coming in and out . . . and I’m so sorry.”

She gasped for air, and then to top it all off she said, “You must know this guy. He’s going around saying he owned Jimmy Choo.”

As it turned out, it was Robert Darwent, the bean-counting partner from Lion Capital that Lyndon sent in every month to check the numbers.

Our property lines are adjacent—he looks at my house, and I look at his.

It’s the perfect irony, of course. But after everything I’d been through, and all the lessons I’d learned, you can rest assured there will be no “going along just to get along.” The plot continues, but any issues along our shared boundary will be dealt with openly and with resolve.

If I have a bit of equanimity now, and if I’m better at standing my ground, it’s only because I fought my way through the rites of passage until the monsters that tormented me were slain. It may have seemed that now and then I needed a rescuer, but over time, I learned to rescue myself.

My father, Tom Yeardye, at his desk at the Vidal Sassoon offices in the early eighties. We relocated to California for my father to run the business from the United States.

My mother, father, and I posed in the garden behind our Tudor cottage in Wingfield, Berkshire, where I grew up.

My father and me as a young child.

A friend and me at summer camp on Catalina Island in the seventies.

Here I am sneaking out of the basement boiler room of the chalet at the Institut Alpin Videmanette, in Rougemont, Switzerland, in 1984. Madame Yersin, the headmistress, moved me to her chalet after too many late nights at the neighboring boys’ school.

This is the gorgeous library at Blenheim where our wedding dinner was held with catering by Admirable Crichton, flowers by Kenneth Turner, and a five-foot-tall cake made of profiteroles.

Photograph by Geoffrey Shakerley

After six months of dating, Matthew and I became engaged. We were married at Blenheim Palace, the home of the dukes of Marlborough and the birthplace of Winston Churchill.

Photograph by Geoffrey Shakerley

My mother and father celebrating at my wedding.

Matthew posing for a picture at the wedding reception with our friends Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley.

Matthew holding Minty on his shoulders during our trip to Lyford Cay, Bahamas, in 2004.