Читать книгу Being Davina - Nigel Goodall - Страница 9

Davina McCall was 15 years old when she turned up at school wearing black leather trousers and a T-shirt ripped across the waist. She had dyed her hair aubergine and was wearing Gothic make-up. It was ‘mufti day’ at Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, West London, and, while most girls came dressed like Bananarama wannabes in ra-ra skirts and legwarmers, Davina went punk.

Although in the spring of 1983 – the year Karen Carpenter died of anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder about to plague Davina – punk was probably no longer embraced by the mainstream. Punk dress and music were now considered wild, weird and antisocial, and the people who liked it weren’t much better, but, for Davina, it was essential for the attention she craved. During the same year, she remembers she shaved her head because she was sick of people constantly saying she dyed her hair blonde to make herself look like Princess Diana: ‘I was mortified because I was trying to be trendy and tough.’

It wasn’t the first time that Davina had reinvented herself. Three years earlier, when punk was still in vogue, she was simply horrified when she arrived for her first day at school. ‘I was this prim and proper little thing who turned up on her first day wearing white socks pulled up to her knees, a little A-line skirt, a Pringle haircut and was carrying a briefcase from WH Smith that pulled out like a doctor’s case. And I walked in and saw everybody – there were all these punks and trendy types, it was a nightmare. They all had streaked hair and their socks were round their ankles, and they all had Millets bags with “The Sex Pistols” and “The Clash” written on them. I had never heard of those bands and I just thought, “I am going to die. Ground, eat me up, please!”

‘But actually kids are brilliantly resilient and within three days I too had streaked my hair. And I went and got my bag from Millets – and wrote the names of bands I never heard of before on it – because I wanted desperately to fit in.’ During this time she also recalls that she even changed the way she spoke when she got ‘a bit of hassle’ from some kids in Shepherds Bush on her way to school: ‘So I started talking “loik vat” for survival because I thought I was going to be beaten up.

‘It was like Sandra Dee from Grease turning into a wild Pink Lady! I never looked back really; it was like a rebirth. When my granny next saw me, she was most perturbed. An old school friend came round for dinner recently and we had such a laugh recalling my third day at school. She says she’ll never forget it because I’d changed so dramatically. And since then I’ve been many people, and I like to play different parts of myself – sometimes a foxy minx, sometimes quiet and sensitive, sometimes loud and gregarious – and they’re all me.’ Basically, though, she continues, ‘I am two people and they are incredibly different. There is the little girl who was brought up by my grandmother and who was taught very good morals and manners, and right from wrong. And then there is my French side, which I get from my mum and Paris – and going out and wild parties, and madness and excitement.’

It was after that third day at the school that she started experimenting with her looks – she had to. The easiest way to reinvent yourself, she says, ‘is with your hair. It’s immediate and it’s shocking. I’ve had black hair, orange hair, blonde hair, and you get a lot of attention as a blonde. When I went dark again, I had to suddenly develop a sense of humour to get noticed – I had to work harder for it.’

Having learned from an early age that ‘to get on you have to fit in’ has probably helped Davina become one of Britain’s most loved television presenters without the need for the kind of fame to be found from being crowned ‘Queen of the Celebrity Jungle’. Or being an ex-Atomic Kitten, a member of Girls Aloud or a Sugababe. And fit in she still does, even with the way she talks. She has a sort of middle-class cockney twang to her accent that, according to journalist Paul Bracchi, places her somewhere roughly 30 miles up any motorway heading out of London. But, if the secret of success is an unsettled childhood, Davina was destined for greatness when she was just three years old and was sent off to live with her grandparents. Not because she was difficult or troublesome but because she was, to all intents and purposes, abandoned by her parents when they divorced in 1970.

Davina Lucy Pascale McCall was born on 16 October 1967 in Wimbledon, Southwest London, and was the only child of a French-born mother, Florence, and an English father, Andrew. Florence – who already had a daughter, Caroline, from her first marriage – was also very glamorous. By all accounts, according to Davina (‘Div’ for short), she was ‘a wild sixties person who didn’t have it in her to look after me. She was very young when she had me and I don’t think she could cope with the responsibility of a child.’ So she fled from the Yves St Laurent boutique she managed in Knightsbridge and ended up living in an apartment located in the exclusive 8th arrondissement in Paris, near the Champs Elysées.

What is curious, however, is how, if she couldn’t cope with looking after Davina, she coped with bringing up Caroline, who had arrived in the world five years before. Florence would have been just 18 years old then, and surely having a child so young would have been far more daunting than having one at 23. But then again it was the decade of rebellion: a decade in which free thinking, free love and free drugs were the buzzwords of a generation. The burgeoning counterculture scene of two years earlier was now in full bloom and the entire world, it seemed, felt the need to go to San Francisco and put flowers in their hair. Just six months before Davina was born, Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the US Army to serve his national service as a protest against the war that continued to grind on in Vietnam, and, in the process, was stripped of his World Heavyweight Boxing Championship belt.

More peacefully perhaps, Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu in a secret ceremony in Las Vegas. But even that could not be regarded as completely without hysteria when you consider that at that time the marriage of a pop star – and in this instance the biggest pop star of all – would have brought certain death to a colourful career. Despite a run of less than mediocre movies, Elvis was still clearly a heartthrob. Of course, there was more at stake than just a career. What would the world have thought to discover that Priscilla was barely 14 when plucked from a US Air Force base in Germany to become Elvis’s child bride?

Whatever it was that caused Davina’s mother to flee back to her native France, it would now be up to her father Andrew (who still calls her ‘Divvy Poohs Pops’ – and who Davina, who already had her mother’s Gallic good looks, describes as ‘the love of her life’) to decide what would be best for her. Realising he would probably not cope that well with the emotional demands of bringing up a daughter on his own while trying to hold down his job as a sales rep for fashion house Jaeger, he thought a good option would be for Davina to live with his parents in Bramley, Surrey. At least then she would have some kind of stability in her life and, if nothing else, he could see her at weekends. But Sundays, Davina recalls, ‘were full of dread because he had to leave’.

For Davina, it was perfect. She was, after all, very gung-ho, a bit of a tomboy, always building houses out of tree stumps, riding a lot and, overall, was very outdoorsy. In fact, it was because she was so outdoorsy that she would imagine she was the sixth member of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, the classic series of 21 children’s adventures, published over 20 years from 1943. Even now, it is one of the most popular series of children’s books in England and America, still selling over 2 million copies a year. She remembers, ‘I’d go out with a quiver and arrows I’d made out of kitchen rolls and sticks, sit on the gate and wait for them to come and take me on an adventure.’

Interestingly enough, to this day the stories remain the favourite among the most enjoyed books that adults read as children. And from that point of view it is not difficult to understand why they would have been one of Davina’s favourites as well. Like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Blyton’s Famous Five was about family loyalties, bonding and friendship, something Davina may have thought was perhaps missing from her own early upbringing. And what is the point of reading children’s fiction if not to make the unbelievable believable?

Although not in a book and still a few years away, Davina would soon have other favourites, such as television’s popular sci-fi series Star Trek, the movie versions of which she still watches every Christmas. She also shared an obsession with all British and American girlhood: Starsky and Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser. In fact, so obsessed was she with Glaser that she would never miss a single episode. But perhaps the strangest crush she confesses she had was on comedian Freddie Starr. ‘It started when I was young, but I did fancy Freddie. I used to tell everyone I was going to marry either my dad or Freddie. I thought he was the funniest person ever. He used to do this thing where he walked into the microphone and hit his head. I thought it was absolutely hilarious.’

For the time being, though, and before falling for those who frequented our small screens, despite her parents going their separate ways when Davina was still an infant, ‘it was like all my Christmases had come at once,’ she raves. ‘I was spoiled rotten. I had lovely granny food made for me all the time; she’d bake cakes and delicious treats. I still saw Mum in the holidays. Even though I missed her at first, I just got on with it, really.

‘When you’re that age and your life changes you don’t really understand what’s going on. All I know is that I had a lot of love. I had my grandparents spoiling me during the week, I saw my dad at weekends, and then jetted off to stay with Mum during the holidays.’ At first, she says, ‘my mum was a very exciting woman to be around, an electric personality. There was always a drama happening but she was always funny. She’d do the really embarrassing thing that you would never dare to do. I used to watch Absolutely Fabulous and I sometimes used to think, “Gosh, that’s like me – I’m Saffy and my mum’s Edina.” Not the same kind of fashion preciousness, but that kind of relationship where she made me more square because I was constantly trying to look after my mum and keep her under control.’

But, if you asked her today how embarrassing her mother was, she would probably tell you, ‘Well, I’m thinking of an electric-blue floor-length fake fur that made her look like Cruella De Vil, which she’d waft around in. And she’d go to a café and have a double Ricard before she went to work, and she’d be flirting with somebody, you know, inappropriate, and you’d be thinking, “Oh my God!” and she’d do citizen’s arrests when someone pinched her bottom. Just mad stuff, but funny and fantastic… if you’re not the daughter. My friends would say, “Oh my God, she’s so cool.” But I didn’t tell people a lot of the stuff that happened in France and I especially didn’t tell my English family because I didn’t want to upset them, or for them to stop me going over there because I loved my mother.

‘It was like having three families. For a while, I was the envy of all my friends. The main thing was I was loved. However, I’m sure I was also a bit confused by the unsettling aspects of living with three different sets of people. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I could put it into perspective. I actually realised what it was about, that I was very lucky to have had so much love. It’s a lot worse for other children whose parents split up – I was treated like a goddess. Before then, though, I’d gone a bit wild, not surprisingly.’

In fact, it was only a couple of years ago that ‘my granny and I were talking about memories from childhood and I was remembering how I used to sit at the feet of my great-granny – who also lived with us – and how I would pinch the skin at the top of her hand and watch how long it would take to go back down again; and how she had these little things in her purse – like a pixie in a black cap – which she’d let me play with. And a couple of days later, my granny had gone through the house and found the little pixie and sent it to me in the post, and now I have it in my purse.

‘That was very emotional for me… a memory from 35 years ago and she still had it, and now I’ve got it. And she’s just done the most fantastic book for me, called The Grandparents Book, with all our family’s stories and the treats she was allowed when she was a little girl. And our family tree from way, way before me, and it’s these things that are really important to me, and will be even more so when she goes.’

With so much love, isn’t it surprising that, by the time she was 15, Davina was to struggle with the onslaught of anorexia nervosa? In 1994, it was one of the eating disorders afflicting 8 million sufferers in the United States, and in Britain at least 60,000 people were known to have been affected by it, but the actual figure was probably twice that.

So what exactly is anorexia nervosa? Is it a plain obstinacy in the form of a dieting obsession? Or a craving for the attention gained by a person’s skeletal shape that would attract anyone who saw them? Or is it, as many theorise about sufferers, perhaps a deep-rooted psychological problem that is a blurred signal to a parent with whom there might be a relationship problem. In other words, is it a cry for help, one that can take on all forms of addiction, whether alcohol, drugs or anorexia?

Such addictions or just generally bad behaviour do seem to haunt celebrities when, at some time or another in their career, their public profile falls from grace. It’s always the ones least likely to tarnish their reputations, too. Some would reason that is why Winona Ryder shoplifted thousands of dollars’ worth of designer clothes and accessories from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills in December 2001. At the time, the question on everyone’s lips was why would anyone worth $30 million need to steal what she could easily buy. Many were convinced it was Ryder’s cry for help.

But anorexia is a different story. It was, after all, what killed singer Karen Carpenter, who was the first celebrity to die after battling with the disorder for seven years. What is so strange about Karen’s untimely death, however, is that she had no death wish. It was quite the opposite, in fact. She wanted to go on making music and expand her talent into other fields of entertainment throughout her life. If anything, Karen was a traditional showbusiness trouper. And yet anorexia seems to have been her cry for help. The question is, was it just an ugly and deadly equaliser for attention alongside her older brother, Richard, who was treated as the senior by their mother, and without whom Karen thought she would have no career? Or was it the fact that, because Karen never considered herself truly pretty enough to stand on a stage, starving was aimed at correcting her lack of self-esteem.

Whatever it was, according to Britain’s Concise Medical Dictionary, ‘anorexia nervosa is a psychological illness, most common in female adolescents, in which the patients have no desire to eat; eating may in fact be abhorrent to them. The problem often starts with a simple desire to lose weight, which then becomes an obsession. The result is a severe loss of weight and sometimes starvation. The underlying cause of the illness is complicated – problems in the family and rejection of adult sexuality are often factors involved.’

Of course, Davina’s fight with anorexia was less fateful than Karen Carpenter’s and not so prolonged. It probably started when she felt she needed a hug and to be told she was loved – which sounds strange when you consider all the love she had showered on her from her ‘three families’. But, according to her, it only lasted a couple of months and ‘was a weird mixture of superbly confident and terribly insecure’.

In truth, as she admits herself, ‘I was a troubled adolescent, who needed help and didn’t know how to ask, so I did something radical to get noticed.’ Perhaps more brutally, the reasons behind it may have been the all-too-familiar cocktail of teenage self-loathing and lack of self-worth. Certainly, says Davina, ‘I thought I was ugly and fat. I missed my mum and felt confused, so I stopped eating for attention but more as a cry for help. Adolescence hit me hard. Suddenly, I couldn’t talk to people, couldn’t make myself understood – I was hurting.’

Isn’t that what adolescence is all about, though? During the making of Mermaids in 1989, Winona Ryder would agree. It was a film she liked, ‘because it shows the inconsistencies of being an adolescent – their sudden changes of mood’. That inconsistency is what she related to in her role as Cher’s screen daughter, Charlotte Flax. ‘One day she’ll be obsessed with Catholicism, but the next day she’ll be obsessed with Joe the gardener. And the next day she’ll want to be an American Indian. I had really been going through stuff like that. I would think, “I’m going crazy! I don’t know what I want! I don’t know who I am.” Sure, Charlotte’s role was exaggerated,’ she admits. ‘But things are exaggerated at that age.’ Winona saw Charlotte as ‘the epitome of inconsistent teen angst’. She explains, ‘You reach a point where you stop communicating because you can’t articulate what you’re feeling. You assume your parents can read your mind. You’re confused, they’re confused – it’s a party of confusion.’ And, of course, she was right. Wasn’t that exactly what Davina was feeling and going through herself?

Although she was being treated like a goddess at home, at Bramley’s St Catherine’s Junior School near Guildford in Surrey, it was a different story entirely. That was when her troubles really began. Not that the school was to blame. In fact, there could not have been a better choice. Founded in 1885, by the time Davina enrolled there, the school had enjoyed over a century of tradition and already prided itself on its own very special blend of academic excellence and pastoral care. Certainly, as a girl’s school, St Catherine’s ensured that its students developed in an environment which made the girls believe that, whatever they did, there was nothing they could not achieve. Well, in Davina’s case, that was certainly true…

All the same, ‘I was given quite a hard time because I was so different; I got bullied and taunted about it,’ remembers Davina. ‘These girls sang little songs about me because I lived with my grandparents. And not having any money. It was a difficult time – I was teased mercilessly.’ But overall she says she had a rosy childhood. Any child of her age would probably admit it sounded pretty idyllic, if you think about it – flitting between public school and London, France and holidays at plush ski resorts, such as Verbier, where she was spoiled rotten by her mother. While staying in France during her teens, she lost her virginity to a French boy. She remembers it as being totally unromantic. But having sex in a club’s DJ booth some years later was better – well, sort of. As Davina explains, it happened while she was in charge of the music: ‘I managed to carry on playing the records, though; it was so funny.’

Not so funny, and around the same time, was when she was caught peeing between two cars during a girls’ night out. She was left mortified when one of the car’s headlights came on, revealing her mid-pee. Davina cringed, ‘I’d crouched down and started to pee when one of the cars switched its headlights on and began to move away. I was in mid-flow so I couldn’t stop. It was night-time so at least it was dark, but nevertheless it was extremely embarrassing.’

By the time she returned to live with her father and his new wife Gaby in West London, she had turned 13, and was now enjoying a happy middle-class childhood and about to start a new school. This was when Gaby effectively became her mother and, according to Davina, ‘never made me feel excluded’. She became much closer to her than she was to her own mother, who by October 2005 was on her fourth marriage and living in South Africa. Going home to live with her father, however, was when Davina’s anorexic problems beckoned, and her weight reduced down from nine stone to a skeletal six.

It was only when a close friend spotted the problem and told her parents that ‘they sat me down with a salad and said, “Eat it and let’s talk” that the floodgates opened. They were more than willing to give me the support – I just had to ask. After that, I went back to eating normally. I was lucky because I haven’t been dogged with it.’

In another, more elaborate telling, Davina recalls that, ‘as soon as my dad and my stepmum realised I wasn’t eating, they put a stop to it. They sat me down and had a really good chat. It was like a block; I needed someone to ask if I was all right and for me to tell them. I felt awful and let it all come out, which it did.’ The only downside to it all, as she explains, was that ‘my father worked hard to send me to a posh school, and there was never any money left over’.

That ‘posh school’, as she describes it, was the Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, West London, which was not only academically high achieving but also hip and fashionable. For someone like Davina, who could probably best be described at that time as a sweet country tomboy, it could have seemed quite a pressurised environment in which to be educated. Situated on a four-acre site with its own playing fields, the school was very conveniently placed just a five-minute walk from Hammersmith Broadway tube. Although several additions have been made to the original Victorian building since she attended, including a gymnasium, pottery room, computer suites and a language laboratory, it was then a school for 700 girls aged between 11 and 18.

Built in 1861 as the Godolphin School, a boarding establishment for boys, and set in fields near the River Thames at Hammersmith in 1905, it became an independent day school for girls, associated with the Latymer Foundation and taking the name of Godolphin and Latymer. One year later, it received grants for equipment, library books and buildings from the London County Council and the Board of Education. By 1951, the school had Voluntary Aided Status under the 1944 Education Act, and in 1977, rather than becoming a non-selective school under the state system, it reverted to full independent status.

According to the school’s internet website, it is an excellent place of learning that suffers an unfair comparison with the neighbouring St Paul’s, but if your daughter goes there today she is as good as in university and, at the time of writing, it would cost you £3,490 per term. Today, the school has 707 girls from ages 10 to 19. Just a slight difference to when Davina was there, with such other famous pupils as Kate Beckinsale, Samantha Bond, Sophie Ellis Bextor and one of Davina’s own classmates Nigella Lawson. But perhaps the most distinguished former pupil was Julie Tullis, who became the first British woman to attempt to scale Everest and to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world and arguably the hardest.

Lawson, on the other hand, would probably have been someone Davina knew well. One of the UK’s most influential food writers with a growing international reputation and several bestselling books to her name as well as the Channel 4 series Nigella Bites, she read Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford. She went on to pursue a successful career in journalism, becoming deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times. With a successful freelance career writing for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Times Magazine in Britain, she was equally successful in the States with Gourmet and Bon Appetit.

Her love of cooking and food had begun at home, but soon became part of her working life when she started a restaurant guide in The Spectator and a food column for Vogue magazine. Her first book, How To Eat, was published to critical acclaim in 1998 and established her relaxed attitude to food and eating, won her a wide and dedicated audience, and was, in fact, the basis for her successful Channel 4 series. The second series, interestingly enough, was accompanied by a tie-in book of the same name, which stayed in the bestseller lists for several months and helped to take worldwide book sales past the 1.5 million mark.

In 2000, things got even better when Lawson introduced a whole new generation to the art of baking with another bestseller, ironically titled How To Be A Domestic Goddess, which in turn won her an Author of the Year nomination at the British Book Awards. Eight years earlier, she had married fellow journalist and broadcaster John Diamond, who was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1997 and died in 2001. Today, she lives in London with their two children, Cosima and Bruno, and her second husband, art collector and advertising guru Charles Saatchi.

Kate Beckinsale, of course, was six years younger, so the likelihood of Davina knowing her is remote. Unlike Lawson and Davina, Beckinsale went on to scale the heights of Hollywood. Born on 26 July 1973, to Judy Loe and the late actor Richard Beckinsale, to this day she has spent most of her life in London. In 1991, she made her acting debut in a television World War II drama, One Against the Wind. It was after leaving Oxford University’s New College, where she majored in French and Russian literature, that she knew she wanted to be an actress.

During her first year at Oxford, Beckinsale landed herself a role in Kenneth Branagh’s big-screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993). She subsequently appeared in a few notable but low-profile films, including Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Shooting Fish (1997) and The Last Days of Disco (1998). Although her first major American film, Brokedown Palace, in 1999 almost went unnoticed, it was when she was cast in Pearl Harbor, one of the highest-grossing films of 2001, that Beckinsale found herself placed among FHM’s 100 sexiest women in the world and firmly in the frame for even greater success in such films as Serendipity (2001), Underworld (2003), Van Helsing (2004) and The Aviator (2004).

Even though school may have had its difficulties, remembers Davina, outside, ‘I had so much love from my dad and my stepmum, and my mum and my grandparents, but, when I look back at myself, I’d just try and give myself a little cuddle. I don’t think anything could change the situation; we all make the best of things – I think I was a bit of a lost kid more than anything else.’

Lost or not, not all the tokens of her teen years would be so easy to dispose of. The stylised alien based on the original 1979 movie creature tattooed on her bottom is one of them. It’s not surprising she had it done in the first place when you consider that the film and its creature are still regarded as one of the benchmarks of modern science-fiction horror. In fact, not since the heyday of George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars trilogy had a movie burst so violently into the popular consciousness as Alien had in 1979. Even though the sheer horror of the original movie has long been dissipated by the alien’s own appearance in comic books and toy stores, Davina still wanted it removed: for no other reason than she now simply hated it. Unlike the rose on her wrist that she had done when she was 18 and feeling worse for wear, or the horns engraved on each hip when she was in Los Angeles, the alien tattoo, ‘just frightens the living daylights out of me’.

Perhaps to Davina, it has the same effect as if Frankenstein’s monster had looked in the mirror. Although the creature in the film was clearly a man in a suit, it was still enough to horrify. Based on the monster created by HR Giger for the movie, the tattoo sported a grotesque exterior resembling a cyborg turned inside out and an elongated head that was not so subtly phallic in nature. The double rows of teeth and back protrusions helped complete the sense of dread. In the end, though, Davina decided it would be less painful to leave it where it was, no matter how scary. So she kept it as a reminder of what she calls her misspent youth.