• • • •
THEN, AS IF MY PERSONAL soap opera weren’t sudsy enough, it spilled over into farce when Matthew got arrested for hacking into my computers.
As we’d been working our way toward the sale of Jimmy Choo, he must have worried that I’d be siphoning off cash to numbered accounts in Switzerland or the Caymans. He had Jaws request financial details that we thought were intrusive, so we refused. Not long after, I began to receive e-mails claiming to have “things on your soon-to-be-ex-husband.” I thought this sounded not only sleazy but creepy. I’d also noticed that Matthew seemed to think he had quite a bit of privileged information about our business, even though his information was incorrect.
The Metropolitan Police soon showed up and asked to examine my computer. They explained that the e-mails I’d been receiving were Trojan horse messages containing viruses. If opened, this “malware” could record every keystroke on my keyboard.
As it turned out, Matthew had hired a company called Active Investigation Services to explore any and all electronic transactions. This company was run by a couple of former policemen who were already under surveillance for running a lucrative sideline in illegal wiretapping and computer hacking. To keep Matthew on the hook, they’d even sent him a bogus e-mail, supposedly from my lawyer, alluding to several million I’d supposedly secreted away in Malaysia.
The climax of this series of events occurred when London’s finest raided Matthew’s apartment at six a.m. and took him away in handcuffs.
My husband was charged with criminal conspiracy and faced the possibility of five years in prison. Eventually, I would be subpoenaed to testify. For now, in addition to everything else, I had to deal not only with my daughter’s father being indicted and out on bail but also with the paparazzi and detectives snooping around in the bushes outside my house.
• • • •
ON JANUARY 24, 2005, THE Yeardye family met at the Pelham Hotel in South Kensington for one of the meetings we had several times a year to go over the trusts. My mother was there with my brother Gregory, along with Timothy Gere, a financial adviser, and I could feel the tension immediately when I walked in the room. They were already deep into a tête-à-tête with Raj Patel, the accountant, and Nick Morgan, the trustee from CI Law on the island of Jersey. I wondered what the hell was going on.
When the meeting came to order, Nick began with a celebratory tone, noting the recent surge in the assets under his guardianship and acknowledging my role in helping to create that wealth and to bring it into the family fold. The two trusts collectively were being enriched by roughly £44 million, which, after transaction fees and other expenses, represented our 49 percent share of a company valued at £101 million.
There was discussion about the tax implications of my mother’s move to the United States, and then it came time to review the allocation of the Lion proceeds to the two separate trusts. My mother had taken her half of the £44 million entirely in cash to set her up in retirement. Thus the Marqueta Trust, the one established for her benefit, had received a direct infusion of roughly £22 million in cash.
My situation was a bit more complicated. I had taken my half of the Yeardye holdings partly in cash, but then I’d rolled the rest back into the company. As I mentioned earlier, this large reinvestment of many millions had actually been a requirement of the deal with Lion.
Nick passed around the summary of the accounts, and I saw immediately that, in the Araminta Trust, half the cash was missing. You don’t have to be a financial genius to note a discrepancy of several million pounds.
“What the hell is this?” I said. “You’re only showing half the money I cashed out.”
Nick mumbled for a moment, then explained that, with my divorce still in process, he thought it best to hide some of my money, so he’d decided on his own to transfer half my cash from my trust to my mother’s. He freely admitted that the money was mine—he was just trying to “reduce my exposure.”
So he’d assigned my money to a trust that benefits the one person who had always seemed to question my basic right to exist. He’d handed over my money to the one person I trusted least in the world.
I said, “Nick, you need to put this back.” Then I repeated, with rising emphasis, just below a scream: “Put it back.”
As I investigated further, I saw that the cash left in my trust, the cash that at least had been properly accounted, was not properly invested. People at the time were making a 10 percent return on equities, and I wasn’t even getting the standard bank interest. Even at 5 percent, which was the going bank rate at the time, I was missing out on tens of thousands of pounds in interest every month.
Then, just to top it all off, my mother slid a piece of paper across the table. I was already so angry that I could hardly focus, so it took me a moment to realize that what I was looking at was a list of debits she had been running against me. While I’d been working myself silly trying to build the brand that had just delivered £22 million into her account (not to mention several million more that was not rightly hers), she’d been drawing up a list of my infractions, which included the rent money I’d borrowed from my dad, which, as I was quick to point out, I had already paid back.
And then it got genuinely creepy. She wanted reimbursement for clothing she’d bought for Minty while I was away on business. Thanks to me she’d just come into £22 million, and she wanted me to pay her back for a few hundred pounds I’d asked her to spend on her own granddaughter?
But then I saw the entry that really chilled me because I could already see where it might lead. Back when we were first expanding into North America, Dad had mortgaged their house for £600,000 and loaned the company the money. She now wanted me to pay back the amount in full, even though it was clearly documented—and verified by Nick Morgan the trustee and Raj Patel the accountant—that before my father died he had been fully reimbursed by the company. The most frustrating, and frightening, part of it all was her failure to understand even the most basic arithmetic as it pertained to the business and how it was structured.
It was the American company, half owned by Philip Rogers, that had received the loan. At most, I was half owner of the other half, which was owned by my father, thus obligating me for one-quarter of the loan, which, again, had already been paid back. But in my mother’s eyes, anything that was not as she thought it should be was my responsibility. Thus somehow I needed to pay back the entire amount. It was her lifelong fixation: Anything that was wrong was Tamara’s fault. It had been that way for as long as I could remember. But how can a person incur that kind of wrath and resentment as an infant or a toddler? What had I ever done to deserve this?
Marqueta was making certain distributions of money to banks outside the trust to provide monthly income for my mother. The trust was also buying her a new house in Beverly Hills and arranging for the insurance. But my mother persisted in her tone of injury, complaining about me and saying how sad it was that she was going to be all alone and having to take care of a big house all by herself, at which point I simply lost it.
“I bought you that fucking house!” I screamed.
You might say that after that, our relationship began to deteriorate.
Elsewhere on the domestic front, my divorce was still proceeding to trial. This separate legal matter required a financial hearing to determine all the assets of both parties. By this time, I was both emotionally and physically exhausted, barely able to stay conscious as I sat in the courtroom listening to the judge’s recitation of the facts. Suddenly I was wide awake—given a jolt of adrenaline far stronger, and far less pleasant, than any illegal high I’d ever taken on—as I heard the judge say “. . . primary asset is in the form of 32,000 shares in Jimmy Choo Limited, which is . . . blah blah blah.”
I was apoplectic, but as was my custom at the time, I kept the rage inside. Here, for once, my lifelong predilection for hiding my feelings served me well
, at least in that it allowed me to exit the courtroom before I screamed out, “What the fuck!!!?”
Straightaway I called Nick Morgan.
“What the hell is going on?” I said. “Half my shares are missing.”
He fumbled and mumbled, appearing not to understand.
“I own sixty-four thousand shares in Jimmy Choo,” I went on. “The Araminta Trust shows thirty-two thousand.”
He was useless, so I called Raj Patel, the accountant for the trusts.
“Where are my shares?” I said.
He, too, seemed confused at first, and then evasive, and then as he began what I suppose was meant as an explanation, I remembered a conversation we’d had at the Jimmy Choo offices just after the closing. I’d been going over documents related to the family’s allocations when Raj very casually called me aside and said, “You know, there are some extra shares. How do you want to deal with them, vis-à-vis your mother, I mean? Do you want to split them?”
And I said, “Sure.”
Once again, I was naive. Perhaps evasive. Distracted. Maybe simply stupid. But I thought he was talking about the sweet equity, which was three points, and while that was a serious amount of money, I was willing to be generous. There was no reason we should have split it, but this was still at the time that I was bending over backward to be nice to my mother.
Now it dawned on me that the “extra” shares he’d mentioned so casually weren’t the sweet, and they certainly weren’t “extra.” They were the main course. They were the shares I’d acquired by reinvesting millions of my hard-earned dollars in Jimmy Choo. They were half the wealth I’d built up by nearly killing myself for the better part of a decade.
The trustee and the accountant came to the office on Ixworth Place and we had a face-to-face meeting with my lawyer, Andrew Roberts. Both Nick and Raj were talking double talk, blaming each other for the “mistake,” and at the same time trying to justify the misaccounting according to “my father’s wishes.” “My father’s wishes” according to whom? My father had made his wishes quite explicit in the legal documents setting up the trusts and giving half his equity in Jimmy Choo to me. And yet these two kept referring to my 64,000 shares in Jimmy Choo as “the extra shares” or “the shares that appeared after the sale.”
In a private-equity deal you don’t just “buy” shares. Any investment you make is accounted as a loan. By reinvesting and putting my money at risk, I had “loaned” Jimmy Choo Limited many millions.
As a record of this transaction, I had been given a “deep discount bond,” or loan note, for the amount of money represented by the 64,000 shares. And just to make perfectly clear what that loan was all about—a standard procedure in these deals—the note had been stapled to the document representing the shares, a financial instrument known as an institutional strip.
Nick listened to this remedial lesson in private-equity finance and assured us that everything would be put right, but we still seemed to be talking past each other.
As the meeting was coming to an end, another vague but disturbing recollection filtered up to haunt my consciousness. My father had once described how, when the trusts were first being organized, Raj had come to him and said, “Tom, we can claim a twenty-million-dollar debt for the Araminta Trust to the Marqueta Trust so when the money comes in, Tamara has to pay you.”
Understandably, my father said to him, “You better take that and rip it up and get rid of it.” Why he hadn’t fired Raj on the spot remains a mystery to me. Why I didn’t insist that my father fire him I can understand only in terms of the way I’d always accepted abuse as being part of the natural order.
But, in fact, Raj’s no doubt illegal proposition made absolutely no sense except in the twisted worldview of one person: my mother. I think my father had been happy to work with dopes like Nick and Raj because their weakness ensured that he could retain control. But if these functionaries were amenable to outside control, God knows my mother would find a way to control them. With the old king now gone, all the monsters in the realm had indeed been let loose.
• • • •
I CONTINUED TO FLY ALL over the world, living in a state of perpetual jet lag while trying to appear bright and smiling and cheerful at public events, but as the court date for the divorce drew near, the pressure became so intense that I just couldn’t take it anymore. Matthew and I met for coffee, and I said, “Look, I will give you £1.5M and we won’t go to court.”
He agreed, and so at least one gut-wrenching conflict was downgraded from a crisis to a mere unpleasant set of details.
Even so, I was still juggling a small baby, an impaired ex-husband, and an asshole of a CEO that I couldn’t get rid of. I’d been killing myself to build a global brand, still being paid well below market rate, only to discover that I’d been robbed not only of half my shares but also half the money I’d taken out to live on.
For what exactly, then, was I working so hard? For a while it was so overwhelming, not to mention depressing, that I found it hard to go on.
And then Robert’s true inner monster came to the fore. More and more he seemed to want Jimmy Choo to be his own little fiefdom. It did nothing to help our relationship when, shortly after the sale to Lion, I was featured on the cover of the British edition of Newsweek. Robert hated the attention I received, but until now he could dismiss it as my being a “glamour girl.” Now he had to read the news weekly’s kind words about my business acumen and leadership skills.
I had tried to accept this unpleasant rivalry as the cost of doing business and move on. And then I was astounded to learn that he was running a director’s account on me, keeping tabs on my expenses as if I were a junior sales representative. It was all so mad that even to this day I have no idea how they compiled it, but Robert had hired Alison Egan as the CFO, so it was no surprise that she would do his bidding.
Afterward, I had my own accountants try to work it out line by line, but it was impossible. Robert and Alison had charged me for express shipping of production samples from Italy to London, as if this were a personal expenditure. It was just like the list of the debts my mother said I owed her. Robert had compiled so many bogus debits against my account that my £50,000 Christmas bonus was held back. “You owe the company money,” I was told.
After this, my primal nemesis came back to add one more note to my humiliation, and, I suppose, to the sense of farce. The new bean counters from Lion came in one day and said, “You know, we’ve noticed that your mother’s taking so much stock from the Beverly Hills store that it’s affecting turnover. If she wants to come in and order up front, that’s fine. And if she wants to take something from the store, we can give her a 50 percent discount.”
This new policy brought out the worst in my mother. No sooner had word of the new policy reached the West Coast than she was at the store on a spree, lining up thousands of dollars of product on the counter, ready to go. The manager came over and said, “Mrs. Yeardye, I’m sorry, but you know we’ve been instructed that we have to charge you for these. We’re happy to give you a 50 percent discount.” Apparently, she grabbed all the bags and, in her perfect coif and her Chanel suit, went running down the street toward her Bentley.
The irony of all of Robert’s attempts to hurt me, in ways both significant and ridiculously petty, is that the entire time he was accusing me of nickel-and-dime exploitations of Jimmy Choo’s FedEx accounts, he had a full-time employee on our payroll doing non–Jimmy Choo work. This was Jim Sharp, a former banker from Citigroup who joined Equinox in 2003. He spent his time looking for further acquisitions that Robert could bring to Lion, none of which would benefit Jimmy Choo in the least.
This was the way Bernard Arnault had started out, acquiring Louis Vuitton, then taking it public, then acquiring other brands. Robert had worked for Arnault, had watched what he’d done, and evidently was now trying to follow in those footsteps.
He and Ji
m looked at Holland and Holland, A. Testoni, Stephane Kélian, the French shoemaker, Geoffrey Beene, and Bill Blass, but none of it worked.
Of far more serious concern was the damage Robert’s inadequacies and insecurities were doing to the brand, going behind my back to undermine me with the staff at Jimmy Choo, trying to stir up resentment, and then, worst of all, interfering with the design team to undermine the integrity of the collection.
For Robert, exercising control appeared more important than what was good for the business, but then, the battle between “the suits” and “the creatives” has been going on for as long as there have been suits. There’s a wonderful moment in Mad Men, when a conflict erupts between the account execs and the copywriters and Don Draper, the mysterious and charismatic creative director, deadpans the much deeper truth: “They can’t do what we do and they hate us for it.” And yet with Robert there seemed to be far more to it. With Robert it seemed personal.
In designing, I never think about what women want—just about what looks great. And I can find inspiration almost anywhere, from watching Lauren Hutton in American Gigolo or Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface to seeing African tribal masks in a museum. I might take a notion and start pulling Blondie album covers, or buying coffee-table books on punk rock or vintage bowling shirts from Wisconsin. It’s not an intellectual process that you think through—it’s simply an emotional experience—creating in the moment, on the spot, with “lightbulb” moments. There’s a creative flow and sometimes you work on something and it gets better and better and other times you have to throw it out. But a successful product is when you have an emotional reaction to it—when you walk in a room and think, “I’ve got to have that, it’s amazing!”
So we would go through this back-and-forth process two or three times, with me throwing out ideas, then the team making sketches, and then me editing them. I’d say this is the right direction, this is the wrong direction, this is a good one. We should develop this one more and not that one. Then we’d send the sketches to the factory where the first samples would be made up.
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 14