It appeared to me that for the right hourly rate, lawyers and financial advisers were more than happy to sign on and ride even a dead horse for as long as it would last.
That’s when I knew I had to go ahead and get out of London. I simply needed a change.
Before the move to New York could happen, we needed to transfer my employment contract to Jimmy Choo USA. So I had a meeting with Josh in my office in London and we were discussing how this was all going to work. Are we going to have one assistant in London? One in New York? How would we go back and forth?
I had already planned to stay at a friend’s house in St. Bart’s over Easter, so even though I was broke, Minty and I went to the islands. She was changing schools, which meant that we were able to spend the whole month together, which was so needed after all the stress and travel and long hours. I still well up with tears when I think about her being at home with no one but a nanny during all this time.
And yet that month in St. Bart’s was not pleasant. I had Ramez dangling the loan and meanwhile extorting concessions, I’d run out of money with a court case looming, and I was stressed out of my mind. The only thing that saved me was Minty.
No island is really an island in the age of global communication, and Bonnie called and asked if she could fly out to see me. Nothing had improved with the creative team at Halston, our next “look book” for the fashion editors was terrible, and her relationship with the rest of the staff had started to fray. But ultimately, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it. Every day I was on the phone to my lawyers in the case against my mother, telling them to just get rid of it. Settle. Whatever. I just didn’t care anymore.
Then another FedEx package arrived, this time with a document from TowerBrook. Instead of just transferring the language of my previous employment contract to the American company, they’d revised the agreement to include details from my conversation with Josh, now codified before me in fine legalese.
My lawyer, Andrew Roberts, looked it over and said, “Did you know there were going to be all these changes?”
None of the alterations was earthshaking; it was the process that upset me. It was that everything I said was instantly reported back—almost as if my phones were bugged—and then the changes made official without any actual discussion with me. There seemed to be a complete absence of goodwill, and certainly no trust.
I called Ramez and said, “When I was talking with Josh about logistics, I didn’t realize I was negotiating a new contract. I’m not signing this.”
He responded in typical Ramez fashion: “I’m not sending you the money you want to borrow unless you sign that contract.” Ramez was now in a position to make me painfully aware of who was in charge, and he seemed to enjoy doing it in the crudest and most bullying way.
So I was forced to sign an agreement I didn’t want to sign in order to take out a loan at an exorbitant rate of interest. Remind you of anyone? I felt like I was in an episode of The Sopranos, lucky not to be left in the trunk of a car parked at Newark airport.
• • • •
IT WAS MAY 2 WHEN Minty and I arrived in New York, the day before the Costume Institute’s benefit gala at the Metropolitan Museum. People call this “the fashion Oscars,” because you have the entire fashion world as well as the younger and more glamorous reaches of Hollywood.
My furniture had arrived, but the apartment was so much bigger, and all the empty space around me seemed to reflect the sense of isolation, of devastation, really, that I felt. I had no network, no support from the office, and I felt a bit like a castaway, clinging to the flotsam and jetsam.
But the show must go on, so the next night I was looking my best and smiling into the cameras as I walked up the red carpet to enter the museum. Thank God my London nanny was there to take care of Minty, and my new assistant came over to help set up the place, guided by my great friend Elika Gibbs, who’d founded a company called Practical Princess to address just this kind of organizational challenge.
Eventually, I was able to extract a bit of money from the hedge funds, and Société Générale used some of it to pay off my loan, but they did it at a terrible exchange rate. This wound up costing me dearly and did nothing to counter my suspicion that, in many areas of banking, finance, and fiduciary stewardship, basic competence is inversely proportional to the rate of pay.
By this time, the completely incompetent Nick Morgan was no longer in the picture. My mother had moved the Marqueta Trust from CI Law to RBC Wealth Management, also in Jersey, where she began to work with a new trustee named Mike de Figueiredo. I’d moved Araminta to a different firm, Ogier, where Simon Willing was my trustee.
Martin and I met with de Figueiredo at Claridge’s in an attempt to settle, and for a moment I thought we’d have a deal, but he was just as bullying in person as he had been in his lawyer’s letters. I had to assume that this was all bluster and that they would capitulate because they were so clearly wrong. But facts had never done much to overcome my mother’s profound narcissism and sense of entitlement. I offered to give them half a million simply to get them to go away. They countered with a demand for three of the four million that had been frozen. That I could not abide.
Much of the case would turn on what was said at the shareholders’ meeting in November 2004, when we had met in the Jimmy Choo conference room and decided to accept the offer from Lion Capital.
We assembled affidavits from various players, including David Burns, who’d been there, who could be explicit about what had been said, how the deal structure had been explained, and how the proceeds to Marqueta and to Araminta would be equal, the only difference being that Marqueta was taking £22 million in cash, while Araminta was taking an equivalent amount divided between cash and equity. There were no further debts to be settled, no “extra” shares. I also got a statement from Lyndon and from Ramez (though I had to twist his arm), who could speak to what the norms are in such dealings.
As CEO, Robert had, of course, led that November meeting, and my lawyer said to me, “It would be really helpful, you know, if you could get an affidavit from him.”
“Oh God.” I cringed. “That’s going to be really difficult.”
But I swallowed my pride and I called Robert and we, too, met at Claridge’s, and I said, “Listen, I need you to give an affidavit to the court.”
He gave me the strangest look, and I said, “All I’m asking you to do is tell the truth.”
He took a sip of his champagne. “I’ll do that for you,” he said, “if you buy my shares for £4 million.”
I did not leap to accept his generous offer.
“You know,” he said, “this could go the other way. I could give an affidavit for your mother.”
I said, “Are you blackmailing me?”
He said, “Call it what you want. That’s the deal.”
In truth, I would have loved to have bought his shares because I knew they were going to go up in value, but I didn’t have the money.
On June 13, 2009, I sent him an e-mail:
Having reflected on our meeting I have to say I’m really disappointed that you were unwilling to help me in telling the truth, without wanting something in return—maybe it was naive of me to have thought otherwise. However, in principle, I have no problem increasing my stake in the business at a commercially acceptable price, but I cannot respond to your request immediately for a variety of practical reasons, especially the shortage in the amount of meeting time. My deadline for your statement, which we didn’t really want to ask you for but my lawyers said would be useful, is this week, Thursday the 2nd of July. If this deadline passes without your cooperation it’s hard to see why I should have any motivation in helping to meet your request. So, Robert, I feel that it’s really your call as to whether any goodwill can exist between us, to move things forward.
He responded with an e-mail complaining that I’d “trashed” h
is name and reputation in various interviews. He summed up our relationship this way: “Although there is nothing you can say that can hurt me in the industry, you can understand that all of this hasn’t disposed me very favorably toward you.”
That summer we did another collaboration with Elton called the PEP Project, an effort to increase awareness of “post exposure prophylactic drugs,” that reduce your chance of infection, even after being exposed to the HIV virus. We designed a funky print that had Elton and me on it, the British flag and the American flag, and we put it on shoes, flip-flops, and bags. We raised about £150,000 with that print, but we sold out so quickly, I think we actually underestimated the demand. I wish we could have sold more.
In August Minty and I went to L.A. for a vacation. Tamara Beckwith, who is Minty’s godmother, was going to be there and I thought it would be fun to go to Disneyland and be tourists with our kids. One day we were sitting by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I was playing in the water with Minty. When I looked up, there was my mother sitting in the café not thirty feet away. She was with a friend, their chairs turned toward me, looking like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on a stakeout. This was no accident. She’d heard that I was in town. But rather than call up and say, “Please bring Minty by,” she chose to spy on me. I ignored her, and she sat there for an hour, and then she went away.
I found it all so terribly sad. She had not seen her granddaughter in six years. Was she secretly hoping that I’d bring Minty over and let her say hello? But then she’d never engaged with Minty any more than she’d engaged with me.
The traffic in e-mails, the discussion of witnesses and affidavits had been consistent for a couple of years, but now it had ramped up, relentlessly.
We ultimately booked court time, and soon the case would proceed to trial.
• • • •12• • • •
My mother comes from St. Albans, which is a very middle-class suburb of London, comfortable but not rich, where her father had run a construction business. When my mother was still quite young, her mother developed breast cancer and went through a radical mastectomy. I don’t know exactly how that affected my mother’s early life, but I think it’s safe to say that Ann Davis did not have a carefree childhood. I try to take that into consideration, and I know that I’ll never be free until I’m able to forgive her for how she treated me, but, as I said at the outset, I’m still working on it. I think my mother was simply born a narcissist whose extraordinary beauty only made her solipsism that much worse. But how solipsism turned to sadism toward me remains a mystery.
It would have been so much simpler to have taken the bad deal that we’d discussed with de Figueiredo, but the feud had cost me too much, not just in terms of lawyers’ fees but in terms of lost sleep and ruined health. And now, with the booking of court time and all the attendant costs of preparation, the stakes were escalating into serious money. I felt like a character on the lam in a Western or a gangster film. I had to stop running. It was time for the final showdown.
The proceedings on the island of Jersey were to begin on Monday, the eighth of November, and I flew over from Gatwick the day before. Technically, the case was between RBC, the company that managed my mother’s trust, and Ogier, which managed mine.
There was no certainty I’d be allowed into the court—ordinarily those likely to testify are not permitted to listen in until they’ve made their statement—but I felt compelled to witness every moment of this spectacle. Even though it was very difficult to be away from Minty, I wanted Nick Morgan, the feckless (perhaps criminal) trustee, to see me in court. I wanted to see my mother’s face as she tried to justify her claims. And mostly, I wanted to get to the bottom of this. What the hell had been going on with these trusts and my money? Somehow, I think I knew that finding the answer might offer some insight into what had been going on my whole life.
Jersey is like a dreary old people’s home, and the weather was grim and blustery as I arrived and checked into the island’s only five-star hotel, Longueville Manor, which, despite its pedigree, reminded me far too much of Fawlty Towers.
The weather did not improve during the nearly four weeks I was there, so after breakfast each day a car would pick me up and take me to the rather medieval town square where the high court was located. Happily, the opposing lawyer, Beverley Lacey, an advocate from St. Helier, agreed to let me observe, but otherwise she gave me a very chilly reception.
To offset that lack of warmth, on the first day the usher leaned toward me, extending a small piece of paper. “Ms. Mellon, I wonder if you’d mind signing this for my niece. . . .” It was the receipt for her first pair of Jimmy Choos.
The legal system in Jersey is medieval French. You don’t have a jury but rather two upstanding citizens known as jurats, who serve the function of jury, though they decide only on matters of fact, not matters of law.
As I sat and listened to the opening remarks of my lawyer, Anthony Robinson, also from St. Helier, I was impressed by the clarity with which he laid out the issues. This case would revolve around what was discussed at two meetings—the first held to approve the sale of the Phoenix shares to Lion, and the second at the Pelham Hotel to review how the proceeds of that sale were to be distributed between the two family trusts. Also central would be the validity of a certain document, a “declaration of trust” my mother’s side claimed gave her clear title to the 32,000 shares misappropriated to her. Once a declaration of trust is signed and stamped by the trustee, it is considered irrevocable.
On our side, we were counting on the elucidation of the financial technicalities and terms of art that were at the heart of the case: the shares, the “deep discount bond” or loan, and the “institutional strip” that represents the shares and was stapled to the loan note. The eight-hundred-pound evidentiary gorilla in the room was the fact that the shares and the loan notes in these transactions were always stapled together because one was a marker for the other. This single bit of evidence showed without question that the shares had everything to do with me and my reinvestment in Jimmy Choo, and nothing at all to do with my mother.
In contrast to Tony’s mastery of detail, it sounded to me as if my mother’s lawyer had no understanding of any of this. She seemed hardly prepared, which made we wonder: Was this some kind of sham to exploit my mother’s delusions? A Potemkin village of a case, taken on just for the fees? Which might have helped to explain all the blustering and bullying—they knew all along that they had nothing.
I had asked my therapist, Martin Freeman, to come along with me for the trial, and I think we were both surprised by just how similar the whole experience was to rehab. When you’re trying to free yourself from narcotics or alcohol, they regiment the day to help you overcome the chaos of your life. Rehab helps you regain a routine that respects day and night. It forces you to take time for meals and other rituals that provide structure.
On Jersey, the court proceedings were virtually identical from one day to the next. Then each afternoon, after adjournment, Martin and I would go back to the hotel, have a pot of tea, nibble at the shortbread biscuits and smoked salmon that seemed to be the only decent thing on the menu, and spend an hour or two processing both the facts and the feelings. Then I’d have a workout and go to bed.
My mother was the one suing me, so after two days of opening statements and submissions, her witnesses would go first. This is what I wanted to hear: how this elaborate fantasy had been construed, and how my mother had drawn so many other people, including professionals who should have known better, into it.
Raj Patel, the accountant for the trusts, was the first to take the stand. Asking questions from a dozen different angles, Tony Robinson began to scrape away like an archaeologist with a dental pick, gradually revealing each of the artifacts of truth he was looking for. Through that tedious process, he was able to isolate and demonstrate where the lies and the false assumptions were hidden, and to make the solid fac
ts emerge, incontrovertibly, on our side.
Eason Rajah, senior counsel from London, sat behind Tony, slipping him notes from time to time. At the end of proceedings each afternoon, they’d get together to read the transcripts of the testimony so far and to work out the questions for the next day.
It shouldn’t be surprising to hear someone speak the truth under oath in a court of law, but right from the start, Raj’s admissions were so damaging that I was blown back in my chair. When Tony asked him directly, “Did you make false accounts?” his answer was, “Yes.” When Tony asked, “Are these sham accounts?” again, the answer was, “Yes.”
My immediate thought was that we should push for criminal prosecution, but Eason advised me not to. “Raj will hide behind Nick,” he said.
I could only speculate about how my mother must have worked over Raj, who was not exactly the pick of the litter when it came to accountants, but I can well imagine it all starting with his saying, “Do you realize how much these shares are worth?”
Their greed, or ignorance, willful or otherwise, was then compounded by my mother’s delusions, as well as her ability to either charm or intimidate others into accepting her highly idiosyncratic, and egocentric, view of the world. Madness, combined with stunning beauty, gave her an air of certainty and rectitude that certain men had always found difficult to withstand.
“I’m Tom’s wife!” I can hear her saying. “You know how much Tom wanted to provide for me.”
On Monday, the sixteenth, the next witness to appear was Timothy Gere, who managed investments for us. He had been at both meetings after the Lion deal, but he hid behind confidentiality agreements and revealed very little.
But then on the seventeenth, Nick Morgan took the stand and was grilled for three and a half days.
He managed to maintain a modicum of credibilty, at least for a while. The heart of his testimony dealt with the declaration of trust that assigned the shares to Marqueta. Supposedly this document had been executed on September 5, 2005, but then Tony was able to demonstrate that it had been written much later and backdated. “Oh,” Nick said. “The original got lost.”
In My Shoes: A Memoir Page 19