Is it all over for Katie Price?
As TV personality Katie Price narrowly avoids bankruptcy, Mark Frith charts how a celebrity he helped make famous tumbled out of favour
Katie Price has a catchphrase: “Never underestimate the Pricey.” She’s had to use it a lot in the last few months. If one of her television series gets cancelled or an errant partner or former friend angers her, out it comes. Time after time, it’s been a precursor to another reinvention, a new product range or even a new TV show. It screams confidence, assertiveness, that she’s living her best life. But increasingly, that best life, like so much in Price’s world, is looking more than a little shaky.
Yesterday, she avoided bankruptcy after a High Court hearing was adjourned to give her three months to pay off debts reportedly totalling more than £250,000, nearly a tenth of which is tax debt.
Once said to be worth £45million, the 40-year-old TV personality will almost certainly have to sell her “sprawling” mansion – the family home in West Sussex believed to be worth £2million, but destined to raise considerably less due to its state of disrepair, and the housing market.
The business of being Katie Price works fine when you’re on the up, less well on the way down. Hers is the defining story of the modern celebrity age. Glamour model who dated a pop star (Dane Bowers of Another Level) starts getting her picture in the paper. It’s the late Nineties and demand is far outstripping supply. Newspapers have celeb spreads every day, publications such as Heat, the celebrity magazine I launched in 1999, had 100+ pages to fill every week. Brad and
Jen and Madonna and J-LO simply weren’t enough. We needed some home-grown stars, “real” celebs who were relatable.
She wasn’t known as Katie Price then, she was “Jordan”, the party girl who would go out and get drunk then tell us all about it. Readers would live vicariously through her and marvel at her confidence and crazy life. And it built and built. She bought (or probably was given) a pink Jeep and went everywhere in it. You couldn’t miss her. Literally. Endorsements came in – she would plug the cheaper make-up ranges, the ones for the ordinary girl who couldn’t afford Chanel. You too could lead the assured, partying lifestyle if you wore what Jordan wore. That was her pitch, her thing. That was the business of being Jordan.
Then, in 2004, the first of many reinventions. She signs up for fledgling ITV show
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here… and is dispatched to the Outback. Who doesn’t want to see how the party girl copes with log-collecting deep in the jungle?
Then the oddest thing happens. She meets out-of-favour Australian pop star Peter André. The two fall in love in front of 11 million people, and she returns home a new woman. She’s “Katie Price” now, if you don’t mind. The endorsements are couply and family-based. She plugs products for parents and all the photo shoots are with her new husband and, over time, the two children they have, too. TV producers sign her up for fly-on-the-wall series with huge amounts attached, and viewers can’t get enough. What will she get up to next? She’s the ordinary girl living the extraordinary life, but with enough down-to-earth smarts that the viewer always feels she’s one of them. “How would I deal with suddenly having all this money? Would I buy a pool or a gym? And just look at that ridiculous sofa.” We got entertainment, a few life lessons and the reassurance that money couldn’t buy taste. She got cash – lots of it – and the fame that she so desperately craved.
Then, in 2009, the marriage ended, the earnings reduced – but the outlay did not. Katie spends a rumoured £22,000 a month on her mortgage, staff and upkeep on the property, and seems unable to downscale. How could she? What is Katie Price without the bling? What is she without the carefully created tabloid persona? Celebrity works when you’re doing well, but downscaling to a threebedroom house and practical runaround car is unthinkable. Indeed, it so rarely happens: virtually all celebrities put something away for the rainy day that will surely come. However, Katie Price didn’t. She just kept spending. Previous money blips could be handled by a swiftly negotiated celebrity magazine deal – a million for renewing your wedding vows, half that for a christening – but those magazines don’t pay that amount any more. So, tabloid-watchers have this summer witnessed the unedifying spectacle (even for her) of Price simulating sex in the sea with her new boyfriend, Kris, a personal trainer, for the paparazzi. The fee for that would have been a thousand or two at most. “Never underestimate the Pricey,” she will no doubt say yet again of her financial stay of execution. But this isn’t about underestimating anyone any longer. For her now, this is real life. And Katie Price just can’t handle it.
Her assured, partying lifestyle was her pitch, her thing