How has Nigella Lawson’s crown slipped? Family values
Damian Whitworth looks at the ups and downs in the life of Britain’s celebrity cook
When Nigella Lawson agreed to be the guest editor of a special edition of Stylist magazine, she made a clear statement that she was back in town and ready to play.
Up popped a photograph of her on Twitter looking businesslike as she chose pictures for the pages. And then there was a preview of a shoot in which she stars, wearing a zebra-stripe top and looking immaculately coiffured as she goofs for the camera.
Normal Nigella service appeared to have been resumed after a terrible year in which her 10-year marriage to Charles Saatchi ended, after photographs were published of him gripping her neck in a restaurant.
Then came reports from Isleworth Crown Court in the UK of a “guilty secret”. Her two long-standing assistants, sisters Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo, who are defending themselves against charges of defrauding Saatchi, claim that she was an habitual cocaine user. Lawson, 53, denies the allegations.
Nigella has been the mistress of reinvention, both in her career, where she transformed herself from a newspaper columnist into TV’s most glamorous chef, and in her private life, where she built a new marriage after the death of her first husband.
No sensible person would ever assume that her jolly, saucy TV persona was exactly the real Nigella. But how different is it from reality? The case at Isleworth may offer clues to the real torment that has been hidden all these years behind the TV make-up and the heavy front door of a rich husband’s mansion.
Her marriage to Charles Saatchi, the former advertising boss and powerful champion of Damien Hirst and many other modern artists, ended in July. She moved out of their home after photographs emerged of them eating at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair where, as well as the grip on her neck, he appeared to tweak her nose. He dismissed the incident as a “playful tiff” but accepted a police caution. Nigella was named after her father, Nigel Lawson, a journalist who went on to be Chancellor under former British Prime Minister the late Margaret Thatcher. He is now Lord Lawson of Blaby – a peer in the House of Lords – and heavily engaged in the intellectual battle over climate change science.
Her mother was Vanessa Salmon, an heiress to the Lyons catering fortune. She had a fraught relationship with Nigella because of Vanessa’s mood swings. There was a rapprochement later.
Her older brother, Dominic, is a journalist who edited The Sunday Telegraph..
Nigella was educated at Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, West London, and at the University of Oxford, where she read languages and worked as a waitress.
She wrote book reviews and restaurant criticism for The Spectator and worked on the books pages of The Sunday Times. She also wrote a column for The Times. It was her first husband, John Diamond, another Times columnist, who suggested that she should write about food.
According to Simon Schama, who knows Nigella and has interviewed her, she certainly created her own TV genre: high-camp cooking. The finger-licking, eyebrow-arching domestic diva was born.
Diamond was diagnosed with cancer in 1997 and died in 2001, after documenting every twist and turn of his illness in warm and witty columns in The Times and in a best-selling book.
Saatchi, who had been married twice before, supported Lawson while Diamond was dying, and she moved in with him after he died. They married in 2003.
In interviews Lawson has offered glimpses of their life: Saatchi watching horror films in bed while she read a book about the greatest cheesecakes of all time. Saatchi doesn’t “really like proper food – he prefers a bowl of cereal”.
The couple moved from his house in Eaton Square to a huge converted brewery in Chelsea, close to the Saatchi Gallery. The house was crammed with many of the artworks that Saatchi has collected; one visitor said it was “just like an art gallery”.
Behind the scenes
Nigella’s TV career went from strength to strength as viewers lapped up the scenes of her domestic life. The reality was the kitchen that appeared to be in her home was actually in a TV studio and her real domestic life was in another identical kitchen in a house with a man who guarded his privacy so jealously that he didn’t turn up at his own parties.
She said that the larky mealtimes we saw on TV weren’t quite what was happening at home. “You get older,” she said in a Times interview a few years ago. “It’s less studenty than it was. The gang always hanging around the kitchen
table is a continuation of your student days. There’s a bit less of that.”
During happier times in her marriage she said that Saatchi was “a very cosy person. He doesn’t want me to become a different sort of person. He likes my independence and that I work and I’m focused. You know, I’ve never had those fashionable things – ‘commitment issues’. I’ve always been happy to be completely dependent on a man emotionally and physically.
“But maybe it’s because I’m a product of divorce, I have a strange neurosis about being financially dependent. I wouldn’t want to be a leech. Friends of mine often tease me and say I’m a geisha because I want to make people happy, but I’m not someone who can disappear herself, so to speak. I fear reliance.”
It would be understandable if Lawson had what therapists like to call “abandonment issues”. As well as Diamond, her mother and her sister Thomasina both died of cancer, at 48 and 32 respectively.
She wrote her first cookbook, How To Eat, to memorialise the cooking of her mother and sister. “So many of my conversations with them hinged on what we were cooking and How to Eat was a means of continuing the conversation,” she said in an interview.
A bleak outlook
In earlier interviews Lawson spoke of the darkness that sometimes engulfed her. “I feel so bitter about the world that I don’t think I can do anything to improve it,” she once said. “As long as my children don’t die before me and I don’t die when they are young, then I will be happy.”
On another occasion she said, “I’m good in a crisis, but I get rather beaten down by things. I can be very strong but sometimes I need to be covered up in a duvet.”
She told The Times last year that she was “very, very conflict averse. I never want authority or power over people. I can only ever shout at the children. I don’t really lose my temper anyway. I’m more of an unhealthy, festering type. I go a bit ice maiden. I withdraw.”
Since their split, Saatchi has been seen back in Scott’s frequently, sometimes in the company of Trinny Woodall, best known for the TV show WhatNot ToWear.
Nigella reportedly relocated to a Los Angeles hotel in June this year, two months earlier than planned, to film the second series of her US show The Taste and to escape the media spotlight.
The competitive cooking programme on ABC has launched her into the American consciousness, pulling in 6.1 million viewers and inspiring one critic to rhapsodise about her “passionate, telegenic star power”.
Originally she planned to leave for LA in August with her children Cosima, 19, and Bruno, 17, to ready herself for four months of filming beginning in September.
She tweeted a photo of some of the contents of her suitcase: three tubes of Colman’s mustard, two packets of Twinings Lady Grey and a box of 160 Typhoo teabags, “Vital
‘Maybe it’s because I’m a product of divorce, I have a strange neurosis about being financially dependent. I wouldn’t want to be a leech’
unpacking in LA (though my Maldon salt) for the moment eludes me.”
Allegedly she also invited the art tycoon’s daughter, Phoebe, 19, to join her children in California, but Saatchi’s daughter denied this, telling the Daily Mail, “Nigella has not spoken to me since she left our house on that Sunday when the newspaper story appeared. She’s behaved in a very cold-hearted way. She has been my mother since I was seven or eight and has just abandoned me.”
Before the allegations arising out of legal claims against her ex assistants, Nigella was busy tweeting a New York chef that a recipe of his was “yumtastic” and proclaiming that chicken nuggets are the “perfect kidult food”.