Later, when the meeting was over and we were walking out of the hotel, my father turned to me with a smile and said, “You know, you and I are going to split our 49 percent right down the middle.”
I had never really given much thought to my father’s share versus my share, but coming from him, this declaration of parity was a welcome acknowledgment of my contribution. Of course it felt good, but the way my mind works, the relief I feel at avoiding failure or abuse is always more pronounced than any real pleasure in achievement or recognition. I knew all along what I’d been contributing. I knew that this split was the way it should be and that it would have been grossly unfair if it had been otherwise. Now it was simply being confirmed.
The more powerful validation, though, came after Phoenix completed their due diligence. After David Burns had spoken to all the staff, he asked my dad to sign a document formally establishing that the Yeardye shares were to be equally divided between the two of us. Clearly what he’d learned was that I was the one making all the day-to-day decisions, and he wanted my ownership stake to be explicit for fear that otherwise I might leave.
It was at this point that Dad set up a couple of trusts in Jersey to hold the family’s 49 percent of Jimmy Choo, with one-half earmarked for me. Matthew pushed me to gain the utmost clarity between what was to benefit me and what was to benefit the rest of the family. He’d met my mother, and he’d heard my stories.
“If anything happens to your dad,” he said, “you’re screwed.”
The upshot was a main family trust to be called Marqueta, and then a second trust to hold my shares called Araminta, which was the name we’d chosen for our baby, who we knew was going to be a little girl. As I reviewed the documents I looked for the word “irrevocable.” Some people view “a mother’s love” as the absolute bedrock of certainty. I did not. And as I would discover a few years later, my mother had been pushing for a split of 70/30 even then.
Although our 49 percent stake represented a sizable asset, it was not terribly liquid. Our ownership stake in the company would be locked up until Phoenix decided to exit. In private equity, this is usually a period of three years.
Robert met with Dad and me at my house for the signing on November 19, 2001. Dad would be chairman of the board of the new company and I would be president. Robert was named CEO, but this was supposed to be an interim arrangement for only six months or so. But then he decided that he liked being the head of a company with our kind of name recognition, especially, I think, among stylish women. So he stayed on.
Even though Phoenix was now the majority partner, none of their money ever went into actual operations. To finance expansion, we arranged a £2 million line of credit with Barclays Bank.
The Holy Grail of private equity is an accounting metric known as EBITDA, which stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.” It would become a daily obsession for us all, because EBITDA multiplied by a certain number—usually around 10–12 in the fashion business—is the basis for valuation upon exit. And in private equity, it’s all about the exit.
Our EBITDA going in was £2.9 million, which was quite a lot for a company with only nine employees. We closed that year with revenues of £12 million, based on fifteen thousand pairs of shoes. So it wasn’t as if Jimmy Choo was a distressed asset that had to be turned around by high-priced financial engineers. We were a household name with a product that was flying out of the stores.
The challenge was to create more stores.
Expanding our retail presence, especially in the United States, had been the impetus for parting ways with Jimmy, which led to the Phoenix deal in the first place. At least with Robert on board he could manage that expansion, which freed me up to work on the collection. More outlets might increase our volume of sales, but to maintain the vitality of the brand, we needed creative vigor and constant innovation.
One of the ideas I pushed through at the time was to have a House Collection, which is to say a selection of basics—a plain pump, a sling-back, a plain boot—that would always be available, year in and year out. They would come in the most basic colors—black, red, and camel—and they would never go on sale. That way, any woman who entered our store, no matter what she was looking for, would always have something to buy. Over the next few years, the House Collection became 30 percent of the Jimmy Choo business.
Between 2001 and 2006 we grew at roughly 30 percent a year overall, opening about forty stores in all the major American cities you might expect, including Miami, Washington, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston. If we went to a prime location or a shopping mall and said we wanted to open a Jimmy Choo store, they’d roll out the red carpet. The path had already been cleared with the brand awareness and the prestige we’d established long before Phoenix ever entered the picture.
To manage this kind of growth, we needed to move beyond the space we’d shared with Vidal Sassoon in Philip Rogers’s offices, so we established our US headquarters in New York at Fifty-Ninth Street and Lexington Avenue. We hired a president of US operations, a head of US public relations, and a manager for the US wholesale business. Finance was overseen from the UK.
We still had Anna Conti as our agent to oversee production in Italy, and of course I was still flying back and forth relentlessly. Dad had a small office at the Ixworth Place location, but he kept in touch mostly by phone, and by having lunch with Robert at the Lowndes Hotel.
Until now we’d been relying on a part-time accountant and an off-the-shelf accounting program for personal computers. Robert hired Deloitte & Touche to bring us up to speed on our systems and record keeping. They sent Alison Egan, head of their retail division, who came in on a three-month contract, but Robert was so impressed that he offered her the position of chief financial officer.
We also had a distribution agreement for international wholesale with Body Lines, a German company that had been an early retail customer of ours. We renegotiated the agreement such that Body Lines would retain Germany and Austria, but we could regain the rest of Europe and deal direct. A couple of years later we brought all rights back in-house.
We were ready to launch our in-store boutiques in places like Saks and Harvey Nichols, but there was also much to be done to continue to build the brand’s visibility well upstream from the point of purchase. I felt that it was important not only to have a collection at press week, but also to do charity projects and collaborations, events that crossed fashion with art and gave us opportunities to reach out to the community and to expand our share of buzz.
I thought that Jimmy Choo as a luxury brand should own an event the way that Cartier owns polo—Cartier sponsors the Cartier International Polo Tournament at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor.
I also felt that the perfect brand fit for us would have something to do with the glamour of film. Charles Finch, formerly with William Morris, had set up his own business linking fashion brands with Hollywood, and in January 2002 we teamed with him to sponsor his first dinner at San Lorenzo to celebrate the British Academy of Film and Television Awards. This was the Saturday night of awards week when all the actors and actresses, even those who live in Australia or California, are in town, and so it was a great way to welcome them back to London. The turnout was extraordinary, but Robert looked at the numbers and canceled our participation.
After more than a decade, this dinner is still one of the hottest invitations in town, and Charles has added a second event in L.A. during the Oscars, and a third at Cannes. Robert’s decision was incredibly foolish, and a wasted opportunity comparable to the loss of exposure we would have suffered had we been too timid to take the risk and make our commitment to outfitting stars on Oscar night. You could chalk it up to a bean counter’s mentality, but he would go on to make similarly disastrous choices that were far more revealing of his character.
Robert is a large, somewhat burly man, with a grizzled beard and a dodgy eye, and, as I was soon
to learn, he is also someone who likes to shout and to throw his weight around.
Each summer the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens gets an artist to come in and build a special pavilion for a party that’s sort of a “circus night” out in the park. Yves Saint Laurent and many other fashion houses had sponsored it with great success in the past, and Jimmy Choo being a British brand and London being our home turf, I thought we should support the event, even though it was expensive, on the order of £100,000. This was a couple of years later, after we had a different private-equity partner, and when Robert saw the invitation I’d commissioned, he took a copy over to the partner’s office in Hyde Park Circle and threw it on his desk.
“What do you see wrong here?”
The partner looked at it and shrugged.
“My name is not on it!” Robert screamed.
He refused to attend.
Being treated like an employee at the company I’d founded took some getting used to. Then again, I would never treat even the lowest-ranking employee as disrespectfully as Robert treated me.
• • • •
AT OSCAR TIME DURING THAT first year of our new relationship with Phoenix I was eight months pregnant, so I didn’t make it to California. Instead, I stayed home at Eaton Place to enjoy a baby shower, the typical afternoon tea and girl talk with Brenda Tafler, Claudia Schiffer, Emily Oppenheimer, Vassi Chamberlain, Jessica de Rothschild, and Daphne Guinness.
Matthew liked his parties a little more revved up, so he went on to the festivities in L.A. alone, taking with him thirty pairs of shoes from his Harry’s of London brand for men. He took a suite next to Jimmy Choo’s in the Peninsula and retained our publicist, Marilyn Heston, to make sure that anyone coming round to see the Jimmy Choos also checked out Harry’s of London. He followed our procedure of giving away shoes to agents, managers—even lawyers—and he managed to put Harry’s shoes on the feet of Sting, Elton John, the ubiquitous Hugh Grant, John Travolta, and Denzel Washington. Ultimately, Robert found the implied co-branding too close for comfort and, at his suggestion, Matthew backed off.
My husband seemed normal enough when he’d left London, but during his stay in California he went on a rampage and disappeared for eight days. I was frantic as I tried to locate him.
It so happened that my parents were also in L.A.—they loved to be there at Oscar time—and also staying at the Peninsula. My mother was actually standing in the lobby one evening, talking to the manager, when she saw Matthew walk by. She knew I was looking for him, and so she said to the manager, “God, that’s my son-in-law! He’s been missing for days.” The manager told her, “No, madam, you must be mistaken. That’s Mr. Goldstein.” Matthew had checked back into the hotel under an assumed name—his standard MO. He’d use his real credit card to book the room, but if anybody wanted to reach him, there was no Mr. Mellon on the guest list. They’d have to know to ask for Mr. Goldstein.
He also changed his cell phone number on a regular basis, but my dad managed to track him down. When my dad told me that he was going to try to speak to Matthew, I said, “Be nice. Just try to get him to come home for the birth.”
Just to be safe, I also called Matthew’s brother, Henry, who got in touch with the limo company Matthew always hired, then tracked down the car. Henry said he found the limo idling at the curb outside a club, opened the door, and slid in. Matthew didn’t bat an eye, Henry told me later. My errant husband said simply, “Hey, bud,” and took another sip of his scotch. Eventually, Henry got him on a plane to London.
Eager as I was to have Matthew home, when he showed up he was more than anything just one more problem to take care of. He hadn’t slept in days, and he’s always very disconnected when he’s been in mania. I’d become accustomed to these limitations, but at this particular moment, his disconnect from the larger agenda was hard to take.
On April 10, I worked through the morning, waddling around in all my enormity, and then I started to have cramps. I went home and lay down for a bit, Matthew and I had lunch, and then he drove me to the Portland Hospital in his Porsche. I knew it was going to be a long evening, especially for me, even more so when the epidural kicked in on only one side. I was sweating profusely by the time they took me to the delivery suite, and Matthew went back up to my room to get some sleep.
At six the next morning, April 11, 2002, I gave birth to a six-pound baby girl, and Matthew was on hand to cut the umbilical cord. He was sufficiently cogent and engaged to send texts all around announcing the baby. But then he started jabbering about buying a Bentley. There I was on my first morning as a mother, blissed-out, a little woozy, with this little baby girl in my arms, and all my errant husband could talk about was a car. Clearly he was still coming off his manic episode.
The name we’d chosen—Araminta—means “collector of thoughts.” I had been doing some research and stumbled upon this cross between Arabella and Aminta, which is all very English. I liked it all the more for being the name of a character in the play The Confederacy, written by the same John Vanbrugh who had been the architect of Blenheim Palace, where Matthew had our wedding. Mostly, I just thought Minty Mellon would be a wonderful name.
I’d always told him I’d leave him immediately if he relapsed, and maybe it was the hormonal rush of motherhood, but I relented. I pressed him to try harder and to do what I’d done, which was to go to the meetings and to find a new group of people to be with. He needed to change the patterns of his life but, maybe by not exercising more tough love, I enabled him.
All I know for sure is that his relapse into drugs only got worse. He was doing coke and alcohol to the point of psychosis, which would lead him to very matter-of-fact statements like, “There’s somebody on the roof. I know they’re coming to get me.”
We had a board meeting at my house a week after I gave birth, and all the while I was worried my husband might be freebasing in the kitchen.
After a few weeks I took some time off, and Matthew and I took little Minty to Capri to visit Uncle Jay and his wife, Vivian.
Robert called while I was there and said, “When are you going to stop vacationing and get back to the office?”
I realized now the full irony of my huge mistake. I had rid myself of the man who had vexed me most—namely Jimmy Choo—only to saddle myself with an insecure CEO whose damaged ego knew no bounds. In addition to which, I now had a bipolar, drug-addicted husband who was spiraling out of control.
I really couldn’t trust Matthew to handle the baby, so in May, I left Minty and the nanny with my parents while I went to Italy for Lineapelle, the leather goods show. The plane was filled with people from the shoe business, and I couldn’t repair to the bathroom to express milk because it was so disgusting, so I simply had a jacket thrown over myself and I was pumping milk like mad. After that, Minty usually went with me on all my business trips until she was old enough to start school. I would do the opening, or the meeting, then go back to the hotel, where she and her nanny would be waiting. Of course, some caretakers were better than others. That summer we rented a house in St. Tropez, and we went down to the beach for lunch with our friends Jonathan and Hayley Sieff.
When we came back we found the nanny out on the lawn covered with blood, screaming, “The baby’s been kidnapped.” I was so terrified that I threw up. We began searching all over, and happily we found Minty asleep in her crib. That’s when we realized that the woman was simply drunk. We were having a party that night, so we had some liquor in the house, and she’d gotten into it, so much so that she fell down and bloodied her face. When Matthew took her outside to try to talk to her, she keeled over on the grass.
As soon as this alcoholic nanny revived, I put her in a cab and shipped her off to the airport, but when I called to report the incident to the agency they said, “Well, there’s always more than one side to every story.” But evidently there was not, because years later this same woman was brought to trial, acc
used of shaking a baby to death, only to get off on a technicality.
These are the kinds of things that terrify a young mother, but I had my own special fears. Once, when Minty was about eight months, I had to leave her with my parents while I went to the office. It was a joy to see my father’s interaction with his granddaughter. He would spend hours drawing with her and teaching her things.
Once when I came back to their flat, Dad was sitting in the drawing room, and I asked him, “Where’s Minty?”
“In the back with your mother,” he said, scarcely looking up. I walked down the hallway to the bedroom, which was fairly dark, and I remember having this utterly creepy feeling that almost made me sick. It was the feeling of fear I’d always associated with my mother, as if she were entirely capable of causing me serious harm. Now I was feeling that sense of menace on behalf of my daughter.
• • • •
THE DEMANDS OF THE BUSINESS didn’t grow any less just because I’d taken on new responsibilities in my personal life, and as I charged through my days I began to feel more and more like a prizefighter. I was lucky to get a few seconds to sit in my corner, but after a splash from the water bucket and some styptic for the cuts, the bell would ring and it was on to the next round. I always seemed to be counterpunching, responding to whatever craziness was being thrown at me. I was desperate to get out ahead, struggling to break into the open air.
In the UK, most department stores lease the space for their shoe departments and let a third party manage it, but Harvey Nichols was different. They ran their own shoe department, but it never had been a great success. Manolo Blahnik still refused to sell through any of the London retailers, so the US brand Joan & David predominated, but then in 2000 they filed for bankruptcy. This left Harvey Nichols with space to fill, and so they gave us 700 square feet in the front of the shoe department to create a Jimmy Choo in-store boutique.
The night before we launched our concession, in September 2002, I held a dinner at San Lorenzo. I had a poem printed on T-shirts to give away to guests:
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 10