No Holding Back

by Amanda Holden

  I blushed and replied jokily, ‘Oh, bog off! This place is full of models!’

  I already knew a bit about Chris through Les. As well as being Les’s agent, Chris’s father Mike Hughes was one of the biggest light entertainment manager/agents and concert promoters during the Seventies and Eighties. Mike had many other clients, including Russ Abbot, Freddie Starr, Joe Longthorne, Tom O’Connor and the late Dustin Gee.

  Chris’s parents had divorced when he was very young and he was sent to boarding school when he was ten (he says now he was way too young to be sent away from home). He also said that boarding school was like a long prison sentence and that time of his life wasn’t easy for him. Chris went to live with his father Mike in Kensington, London, at the age of twelve. At seventeen, and against Mike’s wishes, Chris said he wanted to leave school mid-A levels and work in the entertainment business. Mike let Chris leave school but made it very clear that going into his business wasn’t an option and that Chris would have to make his own way.

  Within five weeks of leaving school Chris landed a job with a sports insurance broker, and was handling the insurance interests of the Premier League, the Football League and The Football Association. He did this for six years before he and another colleague helped move all the business to another broking firm. During this time Chris’s company was sponsoring a young racing driver called David Coulthard and they became close friends – they still are today.

  Chris then branched out into the music business, managing recording artists, producers and songwriters. He also had a production company and made records for Simply Red and Fleetwood Mac, to name a few. (He has never, I hasten to add, been the drummer with Adam and The Ants, despite numerous incorrect press reports linking me with that Chris Hughes, fifty-eight.) Our paths had barely crossed and I’d never thought of him as anything other than Mike’s son.

  I already had an outfit lined up for the Elle Style Awards but that afternoon, as Jodie Kidd walked down the catwalk in a designer dress, I fell in love with it immediately. The problem was, it wasn’t even available to buy at that point – but Chris very sweetly offered to talk to the designer and ask if I could borrow it for the evening. He promised to have it waiting for me at his hotel and we agreed that I’d pick it up before the awards.

  On the way home I said casually to Jane, ‘Chris Hughes is lovely, isn’t he? So easy to get on with.’ (She wasn’t fooled. She told me later that, even though I was playing it cool, she could tell ‘all those hot and bothered chemicals were having a PARTY’. She knew I was interested in him. We instantly clicked.)

  She was right. I couldn’t wait to see him again, and at home I quickly got ready, put on a little pink tracksuit and got a taxi to his hotel. He’d got the dress ready and waiting for me, as promised, and I asked if I could change in his bathroom. On Jodie Kidd the dress had been knee length, but on an Oompa Loompa me it practically came down to my ankles. I didn’t care – I came out of the bathroom feeling like a million dollars. I felt brave, so I told Chris I had a spare ticket and asked if he wanted to come to the awards with me. He quickly freshened up and changed into a crisp white shirt. He looked great – and smelled divine.

  He was the perfect date, and sat down at the table chatting easily with my girlfriends. Halfway through the evening, I leaned over and told him quietly, ‘I think you’re incredible.’ He was fairly taken aback. Even I was shocked I actually said it out loud! I found him breathtakingly handsome and had honestly never fancied anyone so much in my life, Even though I can be a loud cow, I never thought I’d be able to speak to him properly because he was so good-looking. But there was this connection, and I actually found I could string a sentence together.

  I cherished my new secret. Right from the start, it all seemed so romantic and exciting. We saw each other secretly whenever we could – at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, his flat in Chelsea or in my apartment. Sometimes we escaped to a place in the Cotswolds. We texted constantly.

  We did have secret, snatched conversations of course, and even Jess didn’t know who I was talking to, despite our spending so much time together at work and in our spare time. It drove her crazy as she loves a gossip. After discussing it with the cast and crew of Cutting It, it was decided that I was DEFINITELY seeing someone new, and it must have been an actor in Cutting It. An unofficial investigation was launched, and when I wasn’t looking DCI Jess Taylor lifted my mobile phone out of my handbag, pressed last number redial and watched across the room to see if an actor answered his phone. Apparently her face was a picture when one didn’t ring!

  My feelings for Chris ran very deep from early on. I decided he was The One, and I told him so (although I was too scared to say it outright, in case it frightened him away. So I said, ‘I could fall in love with someone like you.’) Children hadn’t even come into my head until then, but I knew I wanted them with him. Chris sparked something primitive in me – I had to be with him. That was the challenge. But he was still so wary of the publicity that went with being involved with someone in the public eye. He had seen some of what that was like with his best friend David Coulthard, and he despised that kind of media attention. The indecision and uncertainty was killing me, and I threw myself into work with Cutting It.

  Bizarrely, the one person I did tell about Chris was Les. He needed to know I’d found someone new, and I wanted him to hear it from me first. ‘It’s Chris Hughes – Mike’s son,’ I said finally. He was really sweet about it on the phone to me, but I found out later that he rang Mike about it – in Les’s autobiography he talks about driving past Mike’s house and seeing Mike playing in the window with his young son, and how he never would have imagined that one day that young boy would be married to his ex-wife (me). Chris says this could never have happened – for a start, their house had no windows that could have been seen from the road, and besides, his dad never played with him when he was younger!)

  In the middle of all this, I was offered a six-episode show for the BBC called Mad About Alice. It was a show written for me, in which I played a mother of two, divorced from a man I couldn’t get out of my system. I was involved in casting and we saw some brilliant people, but when Jamie Theakston appeared I knew he’d be perfect. He was like a Labrador, all bouncy and daft and full of energy. He never seemed to get used to his height. I became very fond of Jamie and still am – he’s really intelligent and well-travelled, and a brilliant photographer. The tabloids were all over us, claiming Jamie and I were an item. It would have made the perfect showbiz story, but there was nothing in it.

  One night during filming, Chris rang me– there had been a van parked outside his house for three days. He can be a bit of a worrier but I knew straight away that it would be a press photographer. I felt helpless. All I could do was apologise, but I knew the writing was on the wall for us. He had made it perfectly clear that he’d always been an intensely private man who cherished his personal life, and the last thing he wanted was to be linked to a celebrity. Once he realised he was being followed, I sensed him begin to back away from me.

  A few weeks later, Vodafone called Chris to tell him that his ‘wife’ had been asking for his telephone bills. He told them that he didn’t have a wife and that somebody must be trying to access his calls, in order to see if he was dialling my number – therefore proving our relationship. The media interest didn’t end, of course. Like me, he was followed and his every move was scrutinised; he even had empty packages delivered to him just to see if he was in. I was used to constantly being in the camera lens as the press waited to see who I’d date next, but Chris wasn’t, and he felt under siege. He said it made him feel like he’d done something wrong, and gave him a permanent guilty conscience.

  At this critical point of trying to convince him that we could have a private life, I was invited to a Formula 1 ball at Stowe School. It was a glittering gala of a night, so I got my mum and dad tickets too. I borrowed a dress from a designer and had my hair and make-up done specially. Chris snuck over to see
me as I got ready in the hotel. Then Sarah Parish rang and said that Neil Morrissey had been invited to the ball too. This would be the first time we’d been seen together in public since our weekend away in Somerset three years earlier. There was no way round it – it would definitely hit the headlines.

  Chris was concerned and kept asking me, ‘Did you know Neil was going?’ I felt sick for Chris and sick that the shadow of Neil and I still loomed over me. I would always be a marriage-wrecker when Neil’s name was mentioned. Chris knew that and didn’t want anyone reminded of it. He didn’t want me to go to the ball and tried to convince me not to, and I would totally have cancelled if my mum and dad hadn’t been so excited about it. I couldn’t let them down.

  One of the first people I saw at the ball was Simon Cowell, who came straight over and introduced himself. He chatted to my mum and was really lovely with her, telling her how close he was to his own mother after his father had died. Neil and I spotted each other across the room but stayed in opposite corners until the dinner, when he suddenly came over and said quietly, ‘Shall we just get this out of the way?’ He grabbed a chair and sat next to me as all the photographers crowded around and took their fill of photographs. Neil said hello to my parents and they were brilliant with him. We were remarkably relaxed, considering.

  I looked at Neil and thought, ‘I am so over you.’ He was with someone new by then and I suspect he felt the same way. He and I were both in a very different place to where we’d been before. (He told me I was ‘a changed woman’ from the one he’d fallen for on Happy Birthday Shakespeare.) The photographs of us appeared on every tabloid front cover the next day, and my body language spoke volumes. I was sitting with my back turned away from Neil and my legs firmly crossed. Everybody picked up on the way I was sitting and could tell there was absolutely nothing between us. Chris was really upset that the whole thing had been dragged up again, though. That episode finally did it for Chris, and he ended it with me, saying, ‘I love you but this is not what I want my life to be about.’

  I was utterly heartbroken that my actions three years before were still affecting my life. No one was letting me move on. I certainly didn’t want to let him go, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Miserable, I went to visit my parents and had a heart-to-heart with my mum. I lay in bed in my pyjamas and she, of course, told me to fight for him.

  So, a few days later, I wrote Chris a heartfelt letter about how he had to get the tabloid nonsense out of his head. ‘You know who I am,’ I wrote. ‘You deserve to be loved and cherished properly – something you have never had in your life. I know you love me and for once you must let your heart rule your head. Let me love you.’ I even used Julia Roberts’ line from Notting Hill: ‘I’m just a girl, standing before a boy, asking him to love her.’ I was not Julia Roberts, of course. But equally, I was not the Amanda Holden who was in the newspapers. I was just me, and I knew that he loved me and I loved him.

  I was convinced that really was the end, but still didn’t give up! He texted that he still had my pink tracksuit and said we should fix a date for me to collect it. I sensed it was time to play it cool, so I told him to keep it. I even turned my phone off, but there was always a text waiting when I turned it back on again. Sometimes he would just send a kiss and I would analyse and analyse that single letter, wondering what it really meant. But eventually, he sent the tracksuit back to me, which I took as a sign it was over once and for all. Chris went on holiday to Ibiza with David Coulthard. I was devastated and went to Norfolk on my own, believing that I had lost him.

  It was then that my agent Sue Latimer asked if I’d like to fly to New York to audition for the lead in a forthcoming British version of the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. The show was already a Broadway hit and had won all sorts of awards. The producers planned to open it at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London with a new Millie, and someone had suggested me. My audition was to be in front of everyone who had anything to do with the show and I was the only Brit they were planning to see.

  I could hardly believe my ears. It would be my West End dream come true! Papa had always said he wouldn’t believe I had made it until he saw my name in lights. That hadn’t happened yet, no matter how much I secretly wished for it – but now, I hoped it might while he was still aware enough to enjoy the moment. I flew across the Atlantic wanting that job almost as badly as I wanted Chris. I remember staring out of the plane window, hoping that both wishes might come true.

  At the audition, all the other candidates turned up in sweat-pants – it was like being back in my Musical Theatre class. (I, however, arrived all done in my false lashes!) When it came to my turn, I found my spot centre stage and sang the three songs they’d sent me from the score. Then I acted out a short scene, adapted from the original. I thought I did okay – not amazing, but okay.

  I looked at the panel, headed up by Tony-award winning arranger and composer Jeanine Tesori, and tried to read their reaction. My heart was thumping. My mouth was dry. Finally, Jeanine spoke.

  ‘Honey that’s great. But tell me, where are your shoes from?’ (They were Kurt Geigers, black, with big shiny bows on the front, since you ask.) A couple of weeks later, I was offered the part and my extensive shoe collection became a standing joke amongst them.

  The hard work started straight away. I booked ballet lessons, tap lessons, I even had tennis lessons to get my general fitness levels up. I took it all very seriously and started to rearrange my schedule around it. I still had a major role in Cutting It but I usually only ever do three series of anything (apart from Britain’s Got Talent – eight series in, I still love it!) and for me, the show was slightly running out of steam. Unless you’re in America, where you have to sign up for about seven series, three series of one show always feels about right to me. It’s at that point the writing often starts to take a dive, or the plotlines become less credible. I told the producers that I wanted to leave and they were very sweet about it. We agreed that I’d take time out of Millie rehearsals to film a few final scenes, and they even rewrote the script so that I could come back if I wanted to. In the storyline I went a bit mad and was put into a mental institution – which wasn’t that far from the truth at that point!

  Chris was one of the first people I told that I’d got the part of Millie Dillmount (of course he was – I was still crazy about him!) and he was genuinely pleased for me. I hoped the new show would keep me busy and help me forget my heartbreak. (Who was I kidding? I was gutted.) Then, just as I thought I couldn’t be any more miserable about him, I received a text from him from Monaco. It said, ‘I still love you. Is that wrong?’ I was stunned.

  A few minutes later, he called me and told me that he had just bought a penthouse on the river in Richmond, Surrey. ‘I really want to make this work. I want to be with you, so we’ve got to be strong. Let’s just move in together and do this!’

  I couldn’t believe it. He had gone from one extreme to the other. ‘Are you sure?’ I texted back. ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind?’

  ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ he replied.

  Poor Chris was still wary, though, because he knew he’d have to open up his entire life to public scrutiny. Up until that point he’d led the lifestyle without any of the negative consequences. Compared to him, I am chaste – but the difference to being male would have been if his life had been in the papers, he would have been applauded for it as a ‘playboy’!

  I understood his reluctance, and I was overwhelmed that he was prepared to risk all that for me. I didn’t think he loved me enough to be with me but I was wrong. So, on 31 August 2003, I moved in with Chris P. Hughes, the day after he flew home from Ibiza. I have never left!

  Chapter 13

  Diamonds on the Soles of My Shoes

  A front-page tabloid headline ‘Holden Onto Her Nipple’, with a picture of my right nipple peeking out of a designer evening dress, maybe wasn’t the ideal way for my relationship with Chris to go public. Nor was it the way I had im
agined my long-awaited West End debut would be reported! The first show of Thoroughly Modern Millie, though, couldn’t have gone better. Virtually the entire chorus were watching from the wings on the opening night, giving me the thumbs up or mouthing, ‘Break a leg!’ Out in the packed house of the Shaftesbury Theatre sat Chris, Mum and Dad, Nana and Papa, Jane, Jess, Jason, Debbie and almost all those nearest and dearest to me.

  Before the show started that October night I took Papa to the front of the theatre and pointed up to the illuminated marquee. Alzheimer’s had been held at bay by drugs but I was slowly losing my Papa by then, but he was aware enough to appreciate what I was showing him. ‘Look, Papa! You always wanted to see my name in lights in the West End. Well, there it is!’ He looked at me with watery eyes and smiled, and I hoped I’d made him proud.

  In the opening scene, I stood with my back to the audience – a small-town girl with two battered suitcases, one gripped tightly in each hand – for the entire duration of the overture until the curtains swung open and the spotlight found me. Turning, wide-eyed, I’d stare incredulously at the skyscrapers of New York.

  The overture came to an end and, on cue, I turned. Facing my first West End audience in the spotlight, suitcases in my hands, was one of the greatest moments of my life. I had finally made it to the place I had always dreamed that I would be and, even better, Chris was watching me. I was the girl on the plate!

  The rest of that night went by in a blur, apart from remembering to blow a kiss to Chris from the stage as I took my final bows. For many people – including friends and family! – it was the first time they even knew that he and I were dating, let alone living together.