In My Shoes: A Memoir

by Tamara Mellon

  This obvious gap in credibility would all be sorted out later, Beverley Lacey said, by a lawyer who had actually witnessed the signing. I waited eagerly for this bit of testimony.

  Adding to the incongruities of Nick’s posture was the fact that, at the very beginning, he had been very open about the mistake. Sitting in my lawyer Andrew Roberts’s office years before, he’d freely admitted how he’d called my mother to say there’s been a mistake and that he was going to have to put the 32,000 shares at issue back in Araminta. We can only imagine her response. “Do that and I’ll sue you,” is my best guess.

  Nick had other problems in that he had to rectify the millions in cash he had “hidden” during my divorce. It is not unreasonable to think that the declaration of trust was the quid pro quo my mother demanded for her compliance. It was on the third day of Nick’s testimony that my mother and brothers flew in to give theirs. Though the weather had been grim all along, I couldn’t help but notice that just as my mother’s plane passed overhead, the skies turned absolutely black and the clouds assembled to disgorge wind and rain. It was like the Wicked Witch appearing in The Wizard of Oz.

  We had been warned that my mother had made reservations at the Longueville Manor, so we thought, “Well, that’s going to be awkward.” Beverley Lacey, my mother’s advocate, suggested that we move. My response was, “No fucking way. Let my mother get her own hotel.”

  As a precaution, we did arrange to seal off a lounge as a private sitting room.

  The manager said, “That’s going to be expensive.”

  I said, “We can handle it.”

  Ultimately, my mother chose to stay at another hotel, the Atlantic, so we’d won the first round.

  On that first blustery morning after they’d arrived, I was walking across the cobblestone square from Tony’s office, he in his long black robes a bit like Harry Potter, when we came upon my mother and brothers in her black Mercedes. I saw the three of them ducking down behind the tinted windows, trying to avoid being seen.

  Arriving on the same plane with my mother was Joshua Rubenstein, the trust lawyer from Katten Munchin Rosenman in New York, who had set up Marqueta II to reduce my mother’s tax liability during her move to the United States. He was the first witness that next day, and he was presented as the kind of expert on trusts who speaks at all sorts of international conferences.

  Again, Mr. Rubenstein had reviewed all the documents early on and told my mother she had no case. But then it seems he’d changed his tune. I can’t believe that such a prestigious expert would be so hungry for billable hours, but in agreeing to appear, he appeared to support the premise that even the maddest delusions have a right to expensive, expert representation.

  There’s an old lawyer’s adage that says, “When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither the facts nor the law are on your side, attack the other person.” Unfortunately, that’s the tack that my mother, by way of Mr. Rubenstein, chose to take with me.

  He had written an affidavit that was so demeaning to me personally—busloads of men I’d slept with, wild parties I’d attended—that the judge refused to allow it to be read in court. Of course, it was all rubbish provided by my mother. She was utterly shameless about trying to shame me, presenting me to the world as evil, conniving, and utterly immoral. And how lovely it is to have your own mother portraying you as a slut in a public dispute.

  With character assassination disallowed on the stand, the main line of argument in Rubenstein’s testimony shifted to my supposed instability. Fortunately, Tony was brilliant in cross-examination: Exactly how many times have you met with Ms. Mellon? For how long? And how do you come to this assessment of instability? Is that a judgment based on some professional qualification?

  Rubenstein kept dodging the “how do you know this?” questions by saying, “It’s my opinion.” Tony responded brilliantly: “Given that you are not privy to the sort of factual background,” he admonished, “do you not feel uncomfortable in having sworn an affidavit in this court advancing these theories? You are a professional man. You are a lawyer, Mr. Rubenstein. All the court requires of you is for you to express in a neutral fashion your understanding of the facts. Not venture your opinion based on hearsay information from Mr. Morgan or Mrs. Yeardye, which may have got twisted in the telling. Do you still feel comfortable with this?”

  Rubenstein replied, “I feel comfortable that that is my opinion as to what happened.”

  My mother had brought Daniel and Gregory to testify against me, but when they took the stand she repaired to a café across the street. It was a bit like throwing her sons to the wolves.

  As I listened to Daniel answer the advocate’s questions, I couldn’t help thinking about all the times I’d paid for him to go to rehab and how I’d bought him a car when he first moved to L.A. And then I thought about the time when he’d relapsed and kicked my mother out of her own house, refusing to let her back in, so that she had to go stay with a friend for three or four days.

  And then there was the image of Gregory, having to share a room with her for six months at the Peninsula because she was too cheap to pay for an extra, and he was too much of a weakling to move out. He’d had a date one night, and when he got back she threw a fit, screaming and flinging all the wooden coat hangers at him, Mommie Dearest style.

  Why they’d never found the wherewithal to escape from her clutches and live their own lives, I don’t know. They were both big guys, well over six feet, and here they were in the thirties, still clinging to their mother’s skirts.

  I remember Daniel saying much earlier, “It’s so unfair. It was my turn next when he died,” by which he meant that it was his turn next for Dad to “make him successful.” What they’ve never understood is that someone can invest money in your idea and give you some guidance, but you still have to come up with the idea, and then you have to get off your ass and execute it. This means years of hard work that no one, neither your mother nor your father, can ever do for you.

  My brothers’ testimony harped on the fact that my father wished for the investment income from Jimmy Choo to be split fifty-fifty. Tony’s counter was: Right. No one is disputing a fifty-fifty split. The issue is what constitutes fifty-fifty? You’ve already got your fifty! Remember that £22 million that showed up in the account?

  But then they kept repeating the mantra of “extra” shares, as if someone had found a few pennies under the sofa cushions. Against all evidence, they could never quite comprehend that the shares they were calling “extra” had indeed appeared after the sale but not because they had been overlooked. They appeared after the sale because they emerged as the result of a new transaction that had absolutely nothing to do with Phoenix, or with my mother, or with them. I had reinvested my money in the new company being set up by Lion. The 64,000 shares at issue represented that new and entirely separate investment.

  It was just not that difficult to understand, unless there was a demonic intelligence at work trying to make if difficult.

  I was too exhausted to fly home for the weekend, but my pal Elika Gibbs came over to lend moral support and also to see the fireworks and the freak show.

  The big event was to come on Monday when my mother would be the first witness on the stand. But having heard how her sons had fared none too well, she seemed to falter in her commitment to her delusions.

  Elika and I were sitting in the courtroom, waiting for the trial to resume, when Rob Gardner, a vital part of our Jersey legal team, came out and said, “Can we have a word?”

  I nodded, waiting to hear what he had to say.

  “They’d like a conference. They want to give it one more try to settle.”

  Tony and I agreed, so then the lawyers began trying to find a room with a big enough table for all of us to crowd around.

  A few minutes later both teams were assembled in full. On one si
de were my lawyers and trustees, Martin, and myself. On the other were Beverley Lacey, Mike de Figueiredo, Gregory (Daniel was disallowed for some reason), and, at long last, looking exquisite in a Chanel suit of black-and-white boucle wool—my mother.

  I hadn’t seen her up close in four years, and she looked amazing. Everyone ages, so God knows what she’d been doing to retard the process. Then again, that’s how she spends all her time.

  Everyone held their breath through a long silence, waiting for her to speak, but somehow she couldn’t even look at me. She sat with arms and legs crossed defensively, lips pursed, almost pouting as she looked away. She appeared profoundly uncomfortable because this was a situation in which she had no control. I studied her face, but once again I don’t know what I was looking for. From my earliest moments I’d always looked for some sign of love, or even acceptance, but I had never received anything from this woman but pain.

  Ms. Lacey started off the meeting with a rather saccharine introduction, talking about herself and her children. Obviously my mother had worked her over with the usual “my ungrateful child,” and “my daughter’s so terrible.” Martin said, “Don’t go there. This is not family therapy.”

  But actually the confrontation was far better than therapy. I’m sure, to everyone else, my mother seemed perfectly composed, but I had a visceral sense of her rage, and yet I wasn’t turning back. I was facing down my most profound demon, and it was not through anodyne transference or by reconstructing childhood memories on the artificial stage of a therapist’s consulting room. I was actually confronting the real person, here and now.

  Right off the bat Gregory said, “Can we stop? I want to talk to Tamara.”

  Certainly I was open to that, so he and I stepped outside the building and we each lit a cigarette.

  There was an awkward moment, the two of us standing on the courthouse steps in a bleak November drizzle. I broke the ice by saying, “I understand the monster you’re dealing with.”

  I could see his eyes well up. He’d written his affidavit in February, and now it was November, and seeing me seemed to soften his stance. “This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t want this. I don’t care about the money.”

  He looked down and then shook his head. “What a cunt,” he said.

  I had to laugh. Neither of us ever used this word, but it was the only one that would do. “Yeh,” I said. “What a fucking cunt.”

  It was a moment of sharing, a verbal bond like our use of “the House of Pain” to refer to wherever she was living.

  We went back in and Gregory said, “I don’t want to talk anymore. Let Tamara have everything.”

  But that was a bit further than Ms. Lacey was willing to go.

  We hemmed and hawed a bit, and then de Figueiredo made his offer: Drop the suit and use the £4 million that had been frozen to cover everyone’s legal fees.

  Our side went into another room to discuss this new proposal. But it took all of about thirty seconds for us to come to “This is nonsense. Let’s get on with it.” Our case was going well, and this offer was a step backward. Why should we stop now?

  As we left that meeting, Martin turned to me and said, “This is the first time I’ve really understood what you’ve been dealing with. My God, Tamara. I think your mother is a sociopath.”

  My eyes widened as I took a deep breath.

  Laypeople throw around psychological labels all too freely, but in this moment Martin was speaking quite literally, and as a professional.

  I returned to my seat in the courtroom beside Elika, and once again we waited for the proceedings to resume. Then my mother walked in and was immediately called to the stand.

  “She does look good,” Elika said. “I hope these old dogs aren’t going to be fooled by this.”

  The fundamental issue of my mother’s testimony dealt with whether or not all the details of the sale from Phoenix to Lion had been properly explained to her when we met in November 2004 to approve the transaction. She was claiming that she’d been left in the dark and that if she’d understood matters more fully, she might have made a different choice between cashing out and reinvesting. In reality, of course, she was never offered that choice—not because I had concealed anything, but because Lion wanted to clean house.

  Tony presented into evidence a copy of Nick’s agenda for that November meeting, and on it were the trustee’s copious notes, showing in excruciating detail just how carefully all the points had been explained.

  Tony also introduced the fax I’d sent to my mother in California setting out all the options, such as they were, including the fact that rolling over her equity was probably not going to be possible.

  As she was walked through this evidence page by page, she seemed dismayed by the law’s insistence that what mattered were the facts, and that neither her wishes nor her grudges nor her beauty held any sway. She kept saying, “I’m the chairman’s wife,” as if that explained everything, and that this prestige position entitled her to allocate the spoils as she saw fit.

  When it came time for her comments about me, she pivoted to what she thought the judge would want to hear, what would be expected of a “good mother.” In so doing she went off script, saying, “I’m proud of my daughter. She’s worked hard for what she has.” She didn’t seem to understand how praising me undermined her case, and certainly contradicted all the slander she’d tried to introduce by way of Joshua Rubenstein.

  In truth she seemed utterly bewildered. She was looking to others to confirm the voices in her head, meanwhile playing the part of elderly, vulnerable, victimized, but always loving mother. In a context she can control, my mother can come off rather well, even when she doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. But here she had run the fantasy of injustice into the ground.

  Normal people are confined by the independent reality of the other individuals around them, which is very useful. A normal concern for others narrows the boundaries of your imagination and reins in any lurking pathology.

  In her affidavit my mother had said I was a hypochondriac. She had always said that I was the one who was crazy, that I was imagining things, and that all the awful things I attributed to her were simply a reflection of my own immaturity. But here an actual judge in a court of law was seeing my mother looking so perfectly put together while at the same time being completely out of it. It was like Gloria Swanson at the end of Sunset Boulevard, perfectly groomed and staring into the police lights, saying, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.” It was the madwoman revealed, and the perfect cliché climax for a courtroom battle.

  After my mother left the stand there was little more to say, but then, as if merely to complete the farce, Ms. Lacey produced the solicitor, previously announced, who was said to have witnessed the signing of the declaration of trust. Only he looked like he’d been dragged out of a hedge. This man, too, had been disbarred, and he was clearly an alcoholic, and as he sat before the court, a large portion of his suit jacket was actually ripped off at the shoulder and hanging down. This lawyer from the hedge maintained that he’d witnessed the signing, but then on cross examination he admitted that, technically, he’d “witnessed” it without actually being present.

  If it hadn’t been costing me millions of dollars, the farce would have been quite entertaining. But I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  I was physically and emotionally exhausted, but so far, we’d heard only my mother’s witnesses. Tony would begin to present our case in the morning.

  My mother and brothers took a flight back to London, and Martin and I repaired to the Longueville Manor for our usual session of “facts and feelings” in our private sitting room.

  At around five p.m. Mike de Figueiredo called and asked if he could come over. We got Tony’s approval, and it was around seven when Mike showed up. I will admit we kept him waiting a bit. Martin added another note of censure by refusing to shake his hand.<
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  We sat down and the trustee tried to put a brave face on it, never admitting how he’d made a real dog’s dinner out of it. He approached our discussion with a combination of bluster and evident fear that I was going to press on to the bitter end.

  He said, “It’s not over yet, you know. You’ll still be in the witness stand for days.”

  I said, “I’m fine with that.”

  He was grasping for face-saving straws, all the while hinting at what he’d really come to say.

  “Can’t you give me anything? What if you leave some money in trust for Minty?”

  “That’s where I started years ago,” I said.

  Finally, he came to the point: They were folding. “We’re going to withdraw,” he said. “You take the money that’s owed you, and each side will cover our own legal fees.”

  I didn’t leap to accept. I could still fight on in the hope of getting a judgment against them that would require them to pay my fees. But I was just sick of the whole thing. Accepting this offer would spare me another ten days in Jersey, and my £4 million would be released without claim. And given all the absurdities so far, there was no guarantee that, if we pressed on, we’d prevail.

  Tony advised us to accept, and we agreed to sign an agreement the next morning.

  That evening, Martin and I looked up the definition of “sociopath,” and as I read all the characteristics of the diagnosis, my mother ticked every box. For added clarity, Martin rang up his friend Dr. Marco Procopio, a consultant psychiatrist, and asked him to comment. What he had to say rang all too true: “A sociopathic personality disorder is the only personality disorder in which the individual with it experiences no suffering. Instead, all the suffering is experienced by those around them.”