The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
‘I DON’T GO OUT THINKING, “I WANT TO CREATE DRAMA.” IT JUST HAPPENS’
The journey from glamour-model Jordan to KATIE PRICE – via three marriages, five children, two stints on I’m a Celebrity and six tell-all autobiographies – has had more than its share of drama and betrayal. But now things are finally back to normal, she t
Katie Price on how her rollercoaster life has finally settled down. Well, sort of...
‘Ifall in love too easy, I marry too quickly. I’m all or nothing, and I’m a fool. I’m a sucker for love, I am always getting hurt.’ So says Katie Price, the glamour model formerly known as Jordan, who has spent 20 years building an empire estimated to be worth £45 million. It started as a brand based on her enormous fake breasts; eight boob jobs to date, the first when she was 18. Then Katie ditched ‘Jordan’, with all her loud and foul-mouthed behaviour in nightclubs, and moved on to ‘writing’ novels (in name, at least), pony books and launching a very successful equestrian line (a lot of pink, all very un-Pony Club).
But a key element of her business remains marketing the drama of her life – and for the past 11 years since marrying Peter Andre (the pair wed in 2005 and divorced in 2009), whom she met on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Outta Here!, it’s been nonstop. There has been
Celebrity Big Brother, which she won last year, and another stint in the jungle. There was a quickie Las Vegas marriage in 2010 to husband number two, Alex Reid, a cage fighter who liked to cross- dress as ‘Roxanne’. This led Katie to dark places that even she couldn’t handle. ‘That whole blip… I don’t know! I was on a different planet,’ she says, laughing in a ‘what am I like?’ manner.
Then, just when you think she might have learnt her lesson – ‘I still haven’t learnt,’ she says – there was an engagement to an Argentinian model called Leandro Penna (she has his name tattooed on her ankle), then a fling with a famous, married ‘Mr X’ (identity not revealed), followed by husband number three Kieran Hayler, then a stripper, whom she married in the Caribbean in January 2013. Soon after, she discovered he was sleeping with two of her best friends while she was pregnant with their second child. (Her eldest child, Harvey, 14, who is disabled, is by the footballer Dwight Yorke; her second and third, Junior, 11, and Princess, nine, are by Peter; and her fourth and fifth, Jett, three, and Bunny, two, are by Kieran).
All of this is told with frankness and gusto in her autobiographies – six so far, with the most recent, Reborn, which deals with Kieran’s betrayal, out this month.
She refers to the drama of her life as though it is a foregone conclusion. Avoidable or not, you simply couldn’t make it up. ‘What you see is what you get,’ she says. ‘I’m not hiding anything. People try to make me something I’m not, like I’ve got some hidden agenda.’
By way of an update and – sorry – a spoiler, Katie, with a lot of digging deep and several big bills for Kieran’s counselling for sex addiction (yes, that too), has come through the drama with her husband. They now live in apparent bucolic bliss in West Sussex, with all five children and multiple livestock, including hand-reared sheep, goats and chickens.
Nearly two and a half years on, Katie hasn’t forgiven Kieran as such, but she has moved on. ‘I will never forgive him for what he has done and never forget it, but I learn to deal with it. That’s the difference. It’s always there, like a piece of paper that you screw up and try to smooth out, but you’ll never get it as smooth as it was. But he’s a different person now. I’ve worked really hard,’ she says.
Today, Katie is sitting in tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt, trainers and ‘no bra, no knickers. I never wear underwear.’ The make-up from the YOU photo shoot has been scrubbed away and the expert posing is over (20 years in the industry and she’s a pro). She is pretty – really pretty – and tanned (not from her usual fake but from her recent holiday in Magaluf – more on that to come). She’s had Botox, and the cartoon breasts – which she had reaugmented fairly recently, ending a brief medical ‘break’ from plastic surgery on doctor’s orders – are so massive they draw attention away from her lovely eyes. ‘I like to have big boobs. They are for me, pfff,’ she says, which I take to mean ‘deal with it!’
There are also a lot of blonde extensions. These are not always evident on Loose Women, on which she is a panellist, although Katie is insistent that if any toning down goes on for daytime TV – apart from her swearing – it is of her own making: ‘Nobody styles me.’ But still, ‘I think I’ve done a circle!’ she says. ‘If you look at a picture of me ten years ago – all right, my face has aged, but [I still have] blonde hair, big boobs. It’s weird. I don’t know why. I actually don’t.’
Her physique, though, is slightly changed. She is more curvy. She doesn’t work out these days (gone is the lollipop skinniness of a few years ago) and ‘eats like a man’. She even admits to wanting ‘to pop a few more children out’, although not quite yet.
The biggest question, though, is why Katie’s personal life is so dramatic. Infidelities and betrayals and men who disrespect her – none of it is particularly unusual, but it is surprising in a woman who is a multimillion-pound self- created brand.
‘It’s always been like that,’ she says. ‘My personal life is always s***, but my business life has always been good. I had a good upbringing. I like to love a lot. That’s why I have so many animals and kids, and I want someone to be like that with me. I am quite needy and insecure, but I think I’m getting better. I want to be protected. I want that man to be my knight in shining armour.’
She has, she admits, a very romantic view of love. ‘Surely if you love someone,’ Katie says, almost to herself, ‘you do everything together. I don’t give myself a break. I jump from one to the other.’
This is all the more ironic since the glamour-model persona of Jordan, at least, played to ideas about sex, not love – and certainly not enduring relationships. ‘What is confusing for people is that they see me [at home] and I’m so normal, and they think, “She’s done this, she’s done that… It doesn’t match.” Nothing I do matches up. I can be feminine, professional, ladylike or intelligent when I need to be, but I’ve got a side where I’m quite a ladette as well – tomboy, filthy banter. But the one thing I do
I will never forgive Kieran for what he has done and never forget it