AN EXCESS-ALL-AREAS ROMANCE
After years spent clubbing and womanising it seems notorious playboy Spencer Matthews is ready to leave his louche life behind and settle down with Vogue
‘I was only given £150 a month when I was 12’
HE was born into a wealthy landowning family, surrounded by financiers and artists, but Vogue Williams’s fiancé has lived a life marked by reality shows and sexual liaisons with at least 1,000 women, or so he has claimed.
While his brother took a serious job as a hedge fund manager and found a suitable match in Kate Middleton’ sister Pippa, Spencer Matthews has revelled in his reputation for womanising and TV excess.
Spencer George Matthews is the third son of landowner David Matthews, from his second marriage to Jane Spencer Parker, a Zimbabwean artist.
David was a successful racing driver who first married fellow racer Anita Taylor in 1966. They had a daughter, Nina before divorcing in 1969. David’s life on the track came to end in 1973 when he was forced to retire following several serious crashes. However he used his motoring expertise to turn his second-hand car dealership, Kirkby Central Group, into one of Britain’s biggest and it was later sold for €9.7million.
He then married Jane and they moved into his 30-acre home, Caunton Manor. They had three sons, James, Michael and Spencer. But tragedy struck in 1999, when Spencer was just 10 years old. Michael, then a 23-yearold financier, was killed in an accident on Everest, just hours after becoming the youngest Briton to climb the mountain. He is believed to have fallen down a ravine close to their camp and his body was never recovered. His father later sued the trekking company and they settled out of court.
Like his brothers, Spencer attended Eton and showed early promise in business. He says that he was not spoiled, despite the family money.
‘Money was never thrown at me. I was only given £150 a month between the age of 12 and 15,’ he once told the Daily Mail.
Upon retirement his father David bought the Eden Rock Hotel on the Caribbean island of St Barths. Spencer and his mother helped to restructure and rebrand the place turning it into one of the world’s most luxurious hotels – the presidential suite costs $25,000 a night. Spencer spent much of his teenage years on the island and it became his party refuge – at aged 16 he spent the entire summer experimenting with cocaine and trying out the island’s nightclubs.
The lure of clubs, drugs and woman proved too much and he flitted between jobs and college.
He studied cinema and television in the University of Southern California for a year before dropping out. He drifted between public relations jobs and acting as a foreign exchange trader at a currency brokers.
In his autobiography, Confessions Of A Chelsea Boy, he reveals that his life was getting more and more hedonistic.
He later experimented with a double dose of LSD at a country rave.
‘I don’t condone drugs and am uncomfortable about appearing to glamorise them,’ he said. ‘But I need to tackle the subject with total honesty.’
However his real interest was women and he spent months going to nightclubs on daily basis in search of different conquests.
By age 27, just before he met Vogue, he claims to have slept with over 1,000 women.
Clubbing every night came with its risks as he discovered in a nightclub in St Barths, when he was almost raped by an older man.
‘I noticed a strange figure whose gaze seemed fixed on me. He was a skinny, much older man with bleached white hair, gold earrings and a sleeveless denim jacket,’ he recalls in his autobiography.
‘As my vodka went down, I started to feel unusually lightheaded. I saw the man’s cold gaze turn into a suggestive smile. It was then that I suspected he might have spiked my drink.’ The man tried to drag him into a car but he struggled and Spencer’s friend rushed to save him.
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever been so happy. The relief was so great, I passed out immediately,’ he wrote.
Despite the non-stop partying, he said that he always worked and that he learned the value of money.
‘I made money through hard work and graft. I worked in a hotel as a waiter and as a nightclub promoter so now I have a firm understanding of money,’ he told the Mail.
But he left his jobs as a nightclub PR and a city broker behind once he found his true calling – reality TV.
He came to public attention in Made In Chelsea, an E4 show about young, privileged, wealthy people
living in west London. The storylines around Spencer focused on his womanising and partying and his relationships with several female cast members. Viewers seemed to enjoy his excesses and he was kept on for several seasons.
In 2012, he starred in The Bachelor reality show, in which women had to vie for his attention.
In 2015, he took part in I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, but left two days later after it was discovered that he was taking ‘steroidbased medication’ to bulk up for a charity boxing match.
He said later that he took the steroids ‘completely out of vanity’ because he wanted to ‘look good in the shower’.
In March of last year, he won the fourth series of the Channel 4 reality series The Jump. It was on the set of the reality ski show that he met fellow contestant Vogue, who could not compete due to an injury.
Despite his life of excess and the image of a playboy that he has been happy to project he has complained that he has been stereotyped and that ‘people think I sit around sipping champagne and s***’.
Meanwhile his eminently sensible brother, James, 41, built his fortune steadily and founded Eden Rock Capital Management in 2011 before marrying Pippa in May last year. But it seems Spencer may have found the woman to tame him in Vogue and is finally ready to settle down.