The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
'I'm going to do what makes me happy'
There aren’t many women who would immerse themselves in the finer points of breastfeeding within 10 minutes of you placing your tape recorder on their Calacatta-marble kitchen counter, but Tamara Ecclestone and I have met before – and the Formula 1 heiress is in the curious position of being a sort of breastfeeding torchbearer. In fact, if it were a sport, she’d be Olympic-gold standard, having continued to breastfeed her daughter Sophia – ‘Fifi’ – for four and a half years, despite the controversy it prompted.
‘From the start, I was so surprised by people’s reactions,’ maintains the 34-year-old daughter of racing mogul Bernie Ecclestone over the spluttering of her Nespresso machine. ‘It’s when they start on your children that I can’t believe it. Who does that? One woman on Instagram called Fifi “chubby” when she was still a tiny baby.’
Despite the feeling that staff are hovering in every shadowy recess of her £70 million mansion, ready to cater to any whim, Ecclestone has insisted on making my coffee herself, and potters contentedly around the Gavin Brodin-designed kitchen in a pair of taupe Victoria’s Secret pyjamas and slippers.
Autumn is her ‘homebody’ period, she says, although quite how cosy one can ever feel in a 57-room Grade Ii-listed house overlooking Kensington Palace, I’m not sure. I only found my way to the kitchen by way of the bowling alley, an artdeco Claridge’s-inspired downstairs bar stocked with methuselahs of vintage Krug, a Disneyland-sized playroom complete with giant pink ‘soft-play’ castle, miniature Chanel surfboard and £10,000 Snow White silkscreen by LA artist Mr Brainwash – and endless black-painted corridors hung with works by the graffiti artist Alec Monopoly and wildlife photography by David Yarrow. I can’t wait to get lost on my way out.
‘The first time I ever posted a picture of me feeding Fifi, she must have been about one,’ Ecclestone tells me. Jay Rutland – her businessman husband of five years – had taken the picture on a family holiday in the Bahamas. It was met with a barrage of criticism. ‘I don’t get this picture being put on for millions to see,’ read one comment. ‘It’s a beautiful but personal (in my opinion) picture!!’
‘I only posted it because we both thought it was a beautiful photo,’ says Ecclestone today. ‘I had no idea I’d get that kind of response at all.’ But after that, and as Sophia got older, she must have realised what a curiously hot-button issue breastfeeding is – from whether or not you do it, to where and how long for? ‘I did, but at that point I’d decided it was also something I felt really passionate about. But there are still so many mums who come up to me in the street and message me to say, “Thank you for normalising breastfeeding.” So I decided I wasn’t going to worry, and I’m just grateful for the wonderful journey we’ve had, because at the end of the summer, Fifi did finally stop breastfeeding.’ She exhales deeply and makes a panto sad face. ‘She’d started to cut down anyway, and then after a couple of weeks I realised it was definitely over. And that was always how I wanted it to end – naturally. Had I been forced to stop her, I would have been an emotional wreck. But now she just lies on my chest at story time and falls asleep.’
She wonders briefly whether it’s ‘the special bond it creates that makes it so hard for other people to deal with’, before giving up on trying to understand other people’s ‘crazy’ reactions to seemingly each and every child-raising issue. ‘Parenting brings out such strong opinions. And it’s understandable in a way, because parents are passionate about what they believe, but at the same time I wouldn’t get involved in other people’s marriages or children: whatever works for you.’ We touch on the furore that erupted after David Beckham posted a photo of himself kissing his daughter, Harper, on the lips on Instagram, and Ecclestone shakes her glossy mane. ‘I don’t get the problem with that at all. There is no love like that a parent feels for a child – so it was just a beautiful moment captured, and if you read anything else into it then you’re the one who’s strange. I mean, Fifi still co-sleeps with us,’ she admits. ‘It’s just easy and it works, and when I ask her whether she wants her own bed, she says, “No, I just want to sleep with Mummy and Daddy.” But when she wants her own bed, we’ll get her one.
‘And I’m lucky, because Jay has the same values as me. Watching how he is with her has brought us even closer together, so it’s not like he’s dying for us two to go away and leave her.’ In the end, the criticism is only a projection of people’s own insecurities, she thinks. ‘What Susie says about Sally is more about Susie than Sally.’ Gazing out of the window towards the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s house, she frowns. ‘Did I get that right? I always get the names mixed up.’
Meeting a woman before and after she becomes a mother is always strange. After all, it is – we both agree – the closest one comes to a personality transplant. Tamara doesn’t look any different to the bouncy-haired, impeccably made-up brunette I met six years ago, a woman who was tired of constantly defending herself against accusations that she was ‘just lucky sperm’ and flailing a little, as she tried to work out how to make the best of her ‘sweet-shop’ life. But something seismic has changed. She’d tried presenting on Sky Sports, glamour modelling and becoming a reality TV star with her Channel 5 documentary, Billion $$ Girl, but the brand of humour viewers had lapped up with Paris Hilton’s The Simple Life no longer worked on recession-hit Brits. And although she
‘One woman on Instagram called Fifi “chubby” when she was still a tiny baby. Who does that?’
told me then ‘that you only live once, so I’m going to do what makes me happy’, I left unconvinced she knew what that was.
Six years on, the anxiety has gone from her eyes, the hesitance from her speech – and every mention of Rutland or Sophia prompts the involuntary smile. Motherhood hasn’t just made her happy but inspired a new professional venture: her natural baby-care range, Fifi & Friends. ‘I couldn’t find any products that weren’t filled with toxic nasties when Fifi was little, and I was constantly looking for honest products without parabens and sulphates that you could carry on using as they got older.’ With her hero product Rescue Cream up for a Little London Award, and Fifi & Friends now on sale in Dubai, she talks of the project with passion and confidence – a confidence born of the knowledge she has acquired as a parent and the fact that as a mum she is needed, useful.
Tamara has always been fiercely defensive of her family, but the Ecclestones have been through a lot over the past year. There was her 29-year-old sister Petra’s £5 billion divorce from James Stunt, which descended into acrimony when he publicly branded Petra ‘a horrible human being’, her father ‘an evil dwarf ’ and her mother, Slavica, ‘Lady Macbeth’. And although the entrepreneur later apologised for this, it was claimed that he ‘made gun gestures’ at his 87-year-old father-in-law at the court hearing last June, and was seen apparently rubbing cocaine into his gums in court – a claim he denied. ‘It’s been really hard watching Petra remain silent,’ sighs Tamara, who is understandably cautious in her wording here. ‘She wanted to remain silent anyway because at the end of the day James is still the father of her children, but as a woman she got a lot of shit for no reason.’ Although she admires her sister ‘for doing everything on her own’ she wishes Petra would move back to London from LA, where she still lives in the Holmby Hills mansion she bought for $85 million from the widow of the late television producer Aaron Spelling in 2011. ‘She does want to sell it, but she’s happy in LA: she sees it as somewhere she can have a fresh start.’
If the fallout from her sister’s divorce wasn’t enough, Ecclestone reveals that she, her father and Petra have also recently been cyberstalked. ‘It was about six months ago when this lunatic started sending me death threats on Instagram. It was awful – really terrifying. Because he was targeting my whole family, my dad and my sister included, and he was even saying things about Sophia.’
She tried blocking him, she says, ‘but he would create different accounts and reach me that way.
And even though I reported it to the police, they weren’t able to help as he was German and living in Germany.’ Although thankfully her cyberstalker never turned up in real life – and he’d certainly have a tough job getting anywhere near a house that sits beside the heavily guarded Israeli embassy – Ecclestone admits that she was dismayed to find nothing could be done. ‘Cyberstalking is terrifying – and it needs to be taken much more seriously than it is, because the threat feels very real.’
Maybe it’s because of the strength she has needed to get through this difficult period – as well as that newfound maternal confidence – that Ecclestone seems more relaxed in general. Last time we spoke, she wore a Stella Mccartney mini-dress and four-inch Giuseppe Zanotti heels to the interview. This time, it’s those PJS… because her priorities have shifted? Because she has less to prove? She throws me an expensive smile: ‘I certainly don’t care about other people’s opinions as much as I did. And oh dear: my poor husband,’ she laughs, ‘because I don’t want to be a slob, but time is so precious and you really have to decide whether you want to spend an hour on a blow-dry or something more important.’ A lot of time and energy was wasted worrying about how she looked before, she realises. ‘But now I feel that I’m the person I always should have been.’ They have a chef who cooks healthy meals, ‘but since having Fifi, I’ve not even thought about weighing myself. In fact, I won’t have scales in the house and I’ve banned the D-word,’ she says of diets. ‘Weirdly, I was at my thinnest immediately after giving birth, partly because of the breastfeeding, but at every other point in my life being thin probably meant I wasn’t happy. And I do think the “fat” word is the worst. I never want my daughter to hear me saying things like, “Mummy wants to lose five pounds.” Being healthy and strong is what’s important, and I’m going to try and embrace ageing. My mum is 60 and she really hasn’t had anything done.’
In any case, she hopes the pressure to look a certain way will have lessened by the time Sophia is old enough to be on social media, ‘because enough with the filters, the Photoshopping, the surgery and the quest for perfection. Women need to be more positive about themselves and each other.’
My time is up, but before I leave, I’m curious to know whether Ecclestone thinks of herself as a feminist. ‘I guess so. I feel women should do whatever it is that they want to do.’ In her case, that’s simply ‘continuing to be as happy as I am now’, and watching Fifi grow, along with the brand.
‘But, you know, I actually think things would have been a lot more difficult for me if I was a boy,’ she points out. ‘My dad always said he would have been much harder on a boy, because he would have expected him to follow in his footsteps. But I’ve just been allowed to follow my own path – and I’m so grateful for that.’ fifiandfriends.co.uk
‘About six months ago, this lunatic started sending me death threats on Instagram. It was awful – really terrifying’