Trinny Woodall: the What Not To Wear TV star on her
She got rich telling women what not to wear, then vanished. Now, Trinny Woodall is back – on TV, Instagram and in the gossip columns – thanks to her relationship with Charles Saatchi. The 52-yearold reveals to Julia Llewellyn Smith why she had to reinvent
new life with Nigella Lawson’s ex, Charles Saatchi
“Being a kept woman is so not me ”
Trinny Woodall is charging through her favourite shop, Zara, in the King’s Road, London, a woman possessed. “Now, look at this jumper,” she rasps in her 10 Silk Cut cigarettes-a-day voice, grabbing a hot pink number from a shelf. “Love the colour, but it wouldn’t work for me. I’m long in the body. And if you have big boobs it would give you a uniboob.” She seizes a pleated skirt. “This could be great, but to me it’s ’70s. I think: my mum. Ugh. And look at that colour,” she continues, nodding at an apricot number. “Vomit.”
Trinny’s been making such speeches for the past 20 years. Around the millennium, she and her posh friend Susannah Constantine became household names with their TV show, What Not To Wear, where they mercilessly squeezed love handles and hoiked “tits”.
Their rudeness made them rich: the TV show had five series; their various books sold more than three million copies; spin-offs like their Magic Knickers were sold all over the world.
And then – phht! – they switched TV networks, their ratings halved and their contracts were not renewed. Their 2009 US series, Making Over America With Trinny & Susannah, also bombed.
Then, three years ago, Trinny resurfaced in a new incarnation: glossy girlfriend to art mogul Charles Saatchi, just six weeks after he divorced Nigella Lawson, shortly after he was spotted with his hands encircling Nigella’s throat during a row outside his favourite restaurant.
The assumption was Trinny now had a new career as arm candy, but not so. Earlier this year, she made her comeback in the UK, offering style advice on morning TV to young mums trying to lose baby weight. “Life goes in circles,” she says.
TV aside, Trinny has been busily reinventing herself as a sort of Zoella (a 26-year-old English fashion and beauty video blogger) for the over-40s, with relentless Instagram (189,000 followers) and Facebook feeds that include regular, rather fabulous vlogs (“I hate that word. It’s like ‘moist’. We need to think of a better one”), where we see her having her chin hair threaded or peering out from beneath a facemask.
“I’m not so sure about the over-40s bit,” Trinny says. “What I do is a state of mind, not a stage of
age. I have the energy of a 25-year-old. But there’s an audience who’s grown up with me, who thought I’d died and are rediscovering me.”
Most popular are her “haul” videos from high-street shops (“Sixty per cent of my wardrobe is from them; the other 40 per cent is Prada and Céline”). In them, Trinny (who, on camera, sounds startlingly like Nigella; Saatchi clearly has a thing for posh TV presenters) wanders around, enthusing about her latest finds, sometimes pulling off her top in the middle of the shopfloor (her back to the camera, she never wears a bra) to model a shirt or jumper.
She is a brilliant saleswoman. I’m not in a shopping mood, but still leave Zara with a new green kimono bodysuit (Trinny buys an identical one).
“You are costing me a fortune” is her online followers’ repeated refrain, along with “Love your honesty”. They ply her with questions to which she responds with saintly patience (“Concession in Selfridges”).
“I love social media, but I didn’t anticipate how much it was an animal that needs to be fed,” she says. “I don’t want to be answering messages from followers on my phone when I’m lying in bed with my boyfriend. That’s just s***. But
I have to, to keep in touch.”
Naughtiness at 52
It’s early afternoon and I’ve been with Trinny since 9am, when she burst into the photographer’s studio in West London, in black J.Crew wide-leg trousers and a white COS top (“my uniform”), barking, “God, I need coffee and a cigarette”. It was a very late night, she explains. “Dinner with fun people.” She doesn’t have a hangover? (She is famously a recovered alcoholic.) “I stopped boozing in 1990, but I have a cigarette hangover. Smoking is my drinking. Jeremy Clarkson was there, shoving nicotine gum in his mouth, so I said, ‘Come on, let’s go outside and have a fag’. I love the naughtiness of smoking.”
Trinny is 52, but looks a glamorous 37, with flawless skin and flowing locks. Her conversation may be overwhelmingly girlie, but there’s something rather macho about her long-legged gait (she’s 180cm), gravelly voice and brisk demeanour.
Like many boarding school alumnae
(Trinny was sent away at six), she is terrifyingly open about nudity, blithely stripping to nothing but a G-string in front of the assembled team. She’s equally frank about bodily functions.
“There’s something wrong with my colon.
I’m having to pee all the time,” she tells me.
“I was complaining about it and Charles said, ‘Just go to the bloody doctor’, and now I’m on loads of antibiotics.”
I ask what she thinks of “man repeller” style, high-fashion garments women adore and men hate. “I wear brogues a lot and I’ve pretty much stopped wearing dresses. Sometimes, I wonder if I should be more feminine for Charles, if he will say, ‘I love your stuff, but ...” But he always says, ‘I love it, Trinny.’ Anyway, I am me.”
Telling it straight has always been Trinny’s trademark. She and Susannah accused the Countess of Wessex in Pringle of looking like Nick Faldo. I witnessed it when, to publicise their first book (a flop), I organised a makeover for a group of friends and family, and Trinny told my mum, in an elegant grey suit, “You look like a man”. It didn’t go down well.
Nearly 20 years on, social media has made the world a far meaner place. Yet Trinny, in contrast, comes across as an almost cosy presence, chatting to pensioners on TV about jazzing up their look with “a fun shoe”, without a hint of condescension.
Is she nicer now? A faint smile flickers on those lips. “I think
I have had more of a life and when you have had more of a life you have more empathy,” she says.
She is humbler? “For sure. When you have had really accelerated growth in your career and after 10 years it’s gone, like that, it makes you appreciate what is right here today. I don’t take anything for granted any more. We were very spoilt then.
“Today, we have to work much harder, for less money. One thing I’ve learnt from Charles, among many things, is he will say, ‘Make the most of every single day and be happy’. I might say, ‘Oh, but this, but that ...’ and he’ll say, ‘Be happy’.
“It’s so f***ing simple, but sometimes one fights the most commonsensical advice people give you because you want to revel in your misery. It’s just giving yourself a kick and saying, ‘It’s not bad. Life is really full and rich, and has lots of things in it’.”
Coping with tragedy
Trinny comes from privileged stock (her maternal grandfather was the head of British Steel), but no one could claim she has led an easy life. Her teens were blighted with chronic acne; in her 20s, she was an alcoholic and drug addict. She had 16 rounds of IVF; nine trying to conceive her daughter, Lyla, now aged 13, then seven more unsuccessful attempts for a sibling. Most recently, she has weathered the suicide of her ex-husband and Lyla’s father, Johnny Elichaoff. Her father died last year and her mother has dementia, and is “hanging in there” in a care home. “Recently, she was in hospital and I saw her over a week just regress so much,” Trinny says. “I had to give her a bath and she said, ‘This isn’t very nice, is it?’ I really couldn’t f***ing bear it.”
Friends had told me there were money worries – Trinny may have earned a fortune in her day, but she had huge outgoings, including Lyla’s boarding school fees. Yet, in the past few months, she has downsized, selling off much of her wardrobe (I attended a sale, but left empty-handed because the Prada gilet I fancied was £1500 [$2400]) and letting her townhouse in Notting Hill, North-West London. “I invested so much energy in fighting to get the house I always wanted, but I couldn’t deal with the stress of having to pay the mortgage anymore,” she says.
In recent months, she has moved into a rented cottage in Chelsea, London, which we pop into for a pit-stop. It’s small and pretty, with chintzy furniture. Every surface is covered in silver-framed photos of gorgeous Lyla (“She looks like her dad – that olive skin”), as well as of Johnny Elichaoff and Zak, his 22-year-old son from a former marriage. “Zaky is divine. I’ve known him since he was very little,” she says. “He stayed with us often. There was a time when his dad wasn’t that well, when his mum and I looked after him a lot.”
Trinny’s personal assistant sits typing by the window, while a terrier dashes round our feet. In the bathroom, I’m mesmerised by piles of perspex drawers stuffed with beauty products, neatly labelled “serums”, “blusher”, “peels”.
“Isn’t it fantastic?” Trinny cries from the courtyard garden, where she’s having a quick cigarette. “Weirdly, I think I’m much happier here than in the old place.”
Why doesn’t she just move into Charles’ mansion down the road? After all, the West London rumour is that they’re secretly married. “I spend a lot of time there, it’s sort of like my home, but I like my own space. Independence is
Today, we have to work much harder, for less money.
important. I’ve been self-supporting all my life. It’s important to have a place for me and my daughter, whatever might be going on in my personal life. I work until quite late, then go over to my boyfriend’s at seven and we watch TV or go out.”
Much of her day is spent developing a new make-up line (“It will make the way we buy, apply and carry make-up very different”) and meeting potential investors. “The other day, one asked, ‘Why don’t you just get your boyfriend to put all his money into the business?’ Because I don’t f***ing want him to and I don’t think he would.”
Many have been thinking the same thing, I say. “There’s an assumption, but it’s so obvious. I just find it so hackneyed in this day and age,” Trinny says. “I know the reality and my friends know the reality, so I don’t care what anyone else thinks. Being a kept woman is so not me.
“Everyone who knows me knows I work.
I’ll never stop. It gives me so much energy. It’s freeing, realising you will never be swept off your feet by some man and have all your worries swept away. Some of my girlfriends still believe that.”
Twitter spat with Nigella
She’s discreet about Charles, 73, but clearly hugely loyal. In a blog on her 50th birthday – spent with him in Madrid – she wrote, in an obvious reference to his and Nigella’s notorious row: “It’s great that, at 50, life can still grab you by the throat and shake you up. And it’s even better when you’ve learned to cope with whatever’s thrown at you – so long as it isn’t a bedside lamp.” Nigella responded on Twitter with her recipe of the day, Slut’s Spaghetti, adding, “Do I need to say anything more?”
Does Trinny style her boyfriend? “Charles has his style and it’s fabulous, and I love it,” she says, as her phone rings. “Oh, it’s Lyla. ‘Yes, darling?’
“Every evening, Charles asks, ‘What did you achieve today?’, and I always need that in my life,” she says later. “Charles will tape every This Morning and text me, ‘You were great today’. He’ll look at every post online and say, ‘That was really good; look how many people watched it.’ It’s very nice when someone is your champion. Charles has done so much in his life and I respect him at every single level. He’s the best sounding board ever, he really is.
“If you wanted some real f***ing analysis, it was the same thing with my dad, trying to impress him with what I’d done, but that was at a time when I was s***ty at everything.”
Trinny’s banker father was posted all over Europe, so – as mentioned – she was dispatched to boarding school in England at the age of six. “I didn’t see my parents all term,” she says. “The first school was particularly horrible; my sister ran away three times before my parents realised we should leave. I was probably about 12 by the time I enjoyed boarding school.”
An experience like that makes you incredibly mixed up or very strong. Trinny laughs. “Or a bit of both. You do develop an ability to look after yourself.”
Her teenage years were blighted by the acne. “I felt so f***ing ugly. People talked to my spots,” she recalls. At 16, she moved to a London day school where, living with her sister, she started taking cocaine to boost her confidence. “I didn’t get good A levels. That wasn’t my priority.” Over the next decade, Trinny drank a bottle of vodka a night, mixed with cocaine and pills.
“Every night, I’d tell myself, ‘This is my last time’, and the next day I’d end up using again,” she recalled in a recent speech about addiction. Trinny was 26 when she admitted herself to rehab, where she spent a year.
“I woke up every morning with guilt and shame,” she says now. “But I think if I hadn’t had all that weird time in my early 20s, I wouldn’t have that combination of things that are inside me now. It’s so pat, but if I’d had a predictable, nurtured life, I wouldn’t be raw and bruised in some ways or a go-getter in others.”
Certainly, since then, the go-getting has been unstoppable, keeping her going throughout the
It’s great that, at 50, life can still grab you by the throat.
roller-coaster of her marriage to Johnny “Too Bad” Elichaoff, as her husband was known. Initially a drummer supporting bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and U2, he was later, Trinny says, laughing, a “wheeler dealer”. The pair met when she was 27 and married eight years later. “Johnny was the kindest man I ever met. He would make you feel better,” she says. Like Charles, “He was my biggest supporter when I was trying to find who I was going to be. I owe a lot to him.”
Yet Johnny also had a longstanding addiction to painkillers, which put increasing pressure on their marriage. “You can’t bring it down to one thing, but at some stage, you have to let go of the feeling you have the power to ...” she says, then breaks off. They split in 2009, but remained friends. “I spoke to him every day,” she says, sadly. Then, in 2014, aged 55, Johnny killed himself.
“When Johnny died, he wasn’t in a great place and he’d lost quite a few friends in his life,” Trinny says. “But there was a memorial service after his cremation with thousands of people in the church, saying, ‘What more could I have done?’ He had such a tough time, but he was so loved because he was such a loving person.”
Both during and after the marriage, some in Trinny’s circle muttered disapprovingly about how – after the endless IVF attempts – she immediately “abandoned” her daughter in favour of the Trinny and Susannah travelling circus.
Trinny shrugs, popping some raspberries in her mouth (during five hours together, it’s the only thing I see her eat). “It’s been like that ever since Lyla was small,” she says. “Even when her dad was alive, he was at home more and I was travelling. Now I’ve been through a long time as a single mother and you have to do both things. You’ve just got to.
“Probably once Lyla has said, ‘Oh Mummy, why do you work so much?’ and I said, ‘Because I am the person who earns the money, so I have to. I want you to grow up and want to have a nice, interesting career.’” So no maternal guilt? “No, no, no. You can’t live your life in regret.”
Beating menopause
Trinny has come through menopause with the help of Dr Erika Schwartz, a New York hormone doctor. “I had to save up to see her. It cost me an arm and a leg, but I was so frustrated. You go to the GP here and are just given Premarin piss.” (She means HRT, taken from the urine of pregnant mares.) Now she takes “oestrogen morning and night, progesterone five days a month, testosterone every morning”. She swallows hair supplements and two daily doses of 3000mg vitamin C. Then there’s her skincare regimen involving endless peels, masks and creams.
“I smoke and eat a lot of sugar, which is really bad for you,” she says, “but I’m not going to give that up because I kind of love it, so I use layers and layers of products to counterbalance it.”
Every three weeks, she has her roots done at John Frieda (“My hair’s 90 per cent grey”) and has laser treatments to zap pigmentation. She’s had Botox since she was 35. I’m sure she’s had her “Michelin Man” lips done, but she swears not. “My father, my brother, Lyla, we all have these lips,” she says.
Right now, she’s raving about her recent PRP “vampire” facelift, where your own blood is injected into your skin, stimulating collagen production, as well as hair growth. “It’s unbelievable! The nirvana of treatments. I can’t wait to put the video online,” she says.
Her figure is amazing, although she says she has gained 9kg since menopause, so now weighs 65kg. During her numerous stripteases, you see she really does have the
“big bum and chunky legs”, she just knows how to hide them.
I suspect she’s had a boob job, but she insists menopause has just made them bigger. “I always had a raisin chest, never had to wear a bra, and I’ve always had very prominent nipples,” she says. She’s never dieted – “horrible, I know” – but has done Pilates for 30 years. “I walk everywhere. I can’t bear gyms and I find running the most abhorrent thing.”
I wonder who this maintenance is for. Possibly Charles, possibly her girlfriends (she is buddies with Elizabeth Hurley, which sets the stakes high), then there are Trinny’s followers. “They can’t do everything I do, but I want them to know what’s available,” she says. Yet, in the end, Trinny is pursuing her gruelling regimen for herself. “I don’t want to wake up and look dehydrated and tired. It’s psychosomatic: if I don’t look tired, I’m not tired. Because I can’t be,” she says, eyes sparkling, lips set firm. “There’s so much to do. When I’m 80, I’ll still be working.”
At some stage, you have to let go of the feeling.
If you or someone you know needs emotional support, phone Lifeline on 13 11 14.