EXCLUSIVE Tara’s final hours, by last man to see her alive
From two of her close friends, a heartbreaking insight into socialite’s final hours and troubled party heyday
THE last person known to have seen Tara Palmer-Tomkinson alive says the tragic socialite was in ‘good spirits’ despite complaining of crippling pain from a rare autoimmune disease which left her a virtual prisoner in her flat.
American film producer Joe Simon, 50, spent the Friday night before Tara’s death last week eating a Chinese takeaway with her at her £4.4million London penthouse – and received a ‘thank you’ text from her the following morning.
Former It Girl Tara, a close friend of Princes Charles, William and Harry, was found dead in bed by her cleaner at the Kensington property last Wednesday. She was 45.
Simon, an art connoisseur, had been close friends with Prince Charles’s goddaughter since meeting her in Los Angeles more than two decades ago.
‘She was in great spirits, despite being in tremendous pain,’ Simon told a friend last night.
‘I believe I was the last person to see her alive and we had a lovely evening. We spent last Friday night together at her flat and ordered Chinese takeaway – Peking duck, which was her favourite.
‘It was something we’d done on Friday nights for months because she was no longer going out. She played the piano and was in good spirits. She had some alcohol but there was no sign she was on drugs.
‘Her main complaint was that she was in constant pain from the autoimmune disorder and had turned into a virtual recluse because she was scared of going out and catching something. She had no immune system left.’
Simon, who produced the 1995 film Richard III starring Sir Ian McKellen and Annette Bening, is a British art world habitué who was a friend of pop artist Andy Warhol.
He says that, while Tara had been diagnosed with a benign brain tumour last year, it was the autoimmune disease which devastated her health and made her despair.
‘She was in constant pain from the autoimmune disease which attacks the body like AIDS,’ he told a friend, Tara’s ex-PR representative Sean Borg.
‘She rarely went out because she had no resistance to illness. If I had a cold, I couldn’t visit her. If she caught a bug, she’d be sick in bed for a week. Her joints were constantly hurting as the disease left her fatigued and suffering from anaemia.
‘The brain tumour didn’t bother her. It was the autoimmune disease she was struggling with. She lived in constant pain. She couldn’t go out and enjoy herself any more so I would go to her.’
His account contradicts multiple reports since her death that the former I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! star, who struggled with cocaine and alcohol addictions, may have lain dead for up to a week after builders heard a loud crash at her flat seven days before her body was discovered by her Portuguese cleaner.
Another friend, gay rights advocate Ivan Massow, said on ITV’s This Morning that the socialite was ‘in a dark place’ when she died.
‘She was facing a lot of problems,’ Massow claimed. ‘It was very hard for her to stay off the drinking and things. I hadn’t seen her for over a month and it’s been hard to reach her.’
But film producer Simon said he saw no obvious signs of a drugs relapse. ‘She was in good spirits and even sent me a text last Saturday morning saying what a lovely evening she’d had.
‘She was sweet and funny. She was complaining about the noise from builders working downstairs driving her nuts. She lived in pain and was very frail by the end but her spirit never wavered.’
Sean Borg, who cast Tara in a £2million Puff Daddy video in 1998 and then helped her land her role in I’m A Celebrity in 2002, says Simon may be the ‘mystery man’ spotted by Tara’s side in recent weeks.
Barmen at the socialite’s local pub The Bottlery claimed she had been spotted with an older man in his 50s with silver-grey hair.
Borg, who also represented It Girls Tamara Beckwith and Lady Victoria Hervey, said: ‘Joe is convinced that was him. Unless someone else comes forward, Joe was the last friend, and possibly the last person, Tara saw.’
Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall were among the first to pay tribute, saying they were ‘deeply saddened’ by her death.
Charles has been a long-time friend of Ms Palmer-Tomkinson’s landowner parents Charles and Patty. Tara comforted William and Harry after the death of Princess Diana.
On Friday, her writer sister Santa and brother-in-law Simon Sebag Montefiore were spotted cleaning Ms Palmer-Tomkinson’s home.
Sister Santa posted a tribute on Twitter, writing ‘My darling sister. I miss you.’
A private funeral service is expected to be held soon.
WE HAD so much in common – two society girls thrown together by background, boyfriends and the whirlwind of excess that was London in the 1990s. Tara’s parents? Best friends with Prince Charles. My father was the 6th Marquess of Bristol. But the staid world of the debutante was not for us. We helped change all that.
The It Girl life was glamorous and fun – I did a decade of it, but then I had to leave London to save my sanity. Tara, though, stayed close to the old crowd – and that wasn’t the healthiest thing for her. I wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t remained there.
She pretended not to care what people thought about her but all she ever wanted was to be loved. She had an emotional fragility that would ultimately be her undoing. There was a sweetness to her, a vulnerability. I used to say she was like a labrador puppy wanting everyone to love her. She didn’t have the toughness you needed to survive.
Our relationship changed over the years. It started badly – we were rivals in love and that quickly became competition in the It Girl stakes. She was used to being the queen bee and then I came along, a younger girl.
But as we matured, so did our relationship. You had to get to know Tara well to get beneath that public image; to realise what a sweet, kind, vulnerable girl she was. In the end, I grew to love her and her death has left me reeling. I feel like a part of me, too, has died.
Ours was certainly not an auspicious first meeting. It was 1995. I was 19 and fresh out of school and newly arrived in London to start a gap year. Almost immediately, I fell in love with Mogens Tholstrup, a dashing restaurateur 15 years my senior who owned several of the hot places back then.
I’d heard of Tara, of course – everyone knew her. She had a reputation for speaking freely, for telling it as it is, for not giving a damn. But my first experience of her was as Mogens’s crazy exgirlfriend. She’d been deeply in love with him and, when she moved out of his flat, I pretty much moved straight in. Of course, looking back, I can see how that would drive any woman crazy.
Tara would turn up in the middle of the night and ring the doorbell for hours, screaming for him to come down. I can’t pretend I wasn’t