Tamara Mellon - In My Shoes: A Memoir

I had just dragged myself to my desk at Vogue, yet again two hours late, when Anna Harvey, the deputy editor, appeared ominously at my shoulder.

I need to speak to you, she whispered.

Anna had been at Cond Nast forever and was very old school. Short dark hair. Wool suit and pearls. Cream Chanel blouse.

Eleven a.m. had become all too customary for my arrival, so I wasnt entirely surprised to find a senior person wanting to have a chat. A day of reckoning had long been in the cards, and now I was just so very, very tired.

I got to my feet and walked with just the slightest hint of effort down the long corridor that led to her office. To my right, the open room where we editors sat. To my left, the glass boxes all in a row for the higher-ups. The decor was gleaming white, and everything around me had such a clean, bright look that it could have been a hospital. Or maybe it just seemed that way because I felt so ill. Nauseous and a little gauzy, as if I were jet-lagged. In fact, Id been up all night at Tramp consuming prodigious quantities of cocaine and vodka. Then again, it could have been LEquipe Anglaise. After enough drugs and drink the clubs do tend to blur.

Id been at Vogue for five years at this point, and despite my after-hours indiscretions, Id always worked very hard. Id started off as the assistant to Sarajane Hoare, the fashion director, but when she decamped for Harpers Bazaar in New York, I went to work for Jane Pickering. Eventually, I became accessories editor, a job that included putting together a page on belts and bags and shoes called Last Look.

The feature was called Last Look because it came last in the book, but lots of people told me it was the page that they looked for first. It wasnt a fashion shoot with a model, but rather a collection with a theme. One month, it was Christmas gifts. Another, it would be everythings going metallic silver. But now it appeared very likely that Last Look was going to be my last stand.

I followed Anna into her office and sat down across from her, confronting a woman with the exasperated mien of a schoolmistress pushed to the limit. I think what must have frustrated her most is that she could see that I had talent, but that talent alone was not going to save me.

We think youve outgrown your job, she began.

At Vogue they never said, Youre fired. They came up with encouraging euphemisms framed in the language of personal development.

I nodded and let out a great sigh of relief. It was all very polite. We exchanged a moment of warm and well-meaning eye contact, and then, leaving my things to pack up another day, I went home and slept all afternoon.

Introspection and self-awareness were not my strong suits in those days, and as I trundled home I did not fully appreciate the huge favor Anna was doing me. She was setting me up to mend my ways. She was also setting forces in motion that, in time, would lead to success far beyond anything I could ever have imagined. But if my subsequent history came as a surprise to me, it must have been absolutely mystifying to those who knew me at this and at earlier stages of my development. Trust me. No one ever would have voted Tamara Yeardye Most Likely to Succeed.

VOGUE HOUSE IS IN HANOVER Square, near Oxford Circus, which is just across Hyde Park from Chester Square where, in 1995, I lived in the basement of my parents house. London real estate, especially in Belgravia, is ridiculously expensive, and the large houses usually have staff apartments that the older generation makes available to their less affluent adult children. My rather dodgy quarters had a separate entrance with a door that connected to the main house, which I always tried to keep locked.

This modest attempt at privacy drove my mother nuts. Then again, my mother was unwell, which is a polite way of saying that she had severe emotional problems exacerbated by alcoholism, and though she was sober at this point, she was still not getting the help she needed. Then again, it may be that my mother was and still remains beyond help. Certainly she has always been the most painful warp in the loom of my life. My very first memory is, in fact, of her throwing me across the bed and my hitting my head on a radiator. Had I spilled something? Made too much noise? All I remember is being so stunned that the pain took a moment to register, and then her loving words: Youre not hurt. You didnt even start crying until I came over.

My mothers alcoholic rants, deliberate cruelties, and all-around raging lunacy was the bane of my childhood. But during the period of the Belgravia basement, her greatest perversity was in watching me follow the same path of chemical dependency and never saying a word.

For several years Id been what you could call a functioning addict. When I wasnt going out to clubs, I was falling asleep at eight p.m., but it wasnt like ordinary sleep. What I did each night at home was a variation on passing out. Then the next morning Id get up and drag myself in to work. If my child were living like that, I think I might have had something to say.

And it wasnt as if my mother was completely indifferent to my existence. Whenever I was out she would go down to my room and search through my things, then make inappropriate comments to others about whatever she had found. I was with my boyfriends family once at their house in France and his father said to me, Is it true that your mother has to go down and tidy up your underwear drawer?

Cedric Middleton, the boyfriend, worked in finance, but that aside, he wasnt the typically pale and priggish English public school boy. Cedric had gone to school in Switzerland, which is where the people who can afford it go when they cant quite navigate a place like Eton or Harrow. He had an edge to him.

Cedric came from a lower aristocratic family and lived just around the corneralso in the basement of his parents home. It really was quite the fashion. A few years younger than I, he was handsome and tall with floppy brown hair, and he was really a lot of fun. We hung around with a crowd that was similarly favored by genealogy: Lucas White, Lord Whites son; Emily Oppenheimer, whose family once owned most of the diamonds in South Africa; Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, goddaughter to Prince Charles; and all-purpose It girl Tamara Beckwith, now a fixture in the British tabloids.