No one envies the Domestic Goddess now
Nigella Lawson is going to struggle to bake her way out of this latest scandal, writes Allison Pearson
WHEN the now notorious photograph of Charles Saatchi with his hand around Nigella Lawson’s throat was made public and Lawson failed to give a statement confirming Saatchi’s contention that it was nothing more than “a playful tiff”, an unnamed friend of the art collector said something puzzling. Lawson, he claimed, had made a promise to Saatchi upon their marriage, and she had failed to keep it.
What promise? My mind gnawed away at the tiny hint. I was convinced the “promise” was important, that it had something to do with that appalling row outside Scott’s restaurant in London, but I could not figure out what it was. On Tuesday, as a court released “bad character” statements about Lawson’s drug-taking from two of her closest aides, I began to think the promise might relate to these new allegations.
Lawson and Saatchi first became close when her husband, John Diamond, was dying from throat cancer. It was a hellish time for her: she had two small children to worry about as well as the man she loved. Almost out of thin air, she cooked up the Domestic Goddess, a persona as delicious and feather-light as the author’s personal circumstances were dark and wrenching. How To Be a Domestic Goddesswas named book of the year at the British Book Awards in 2000. When a critic said Lawson had only won because her husband was terminally ill, she replied with splendid forthrightness: “I am not against pity, but I have no desire to be tragic.”
Fate, cruelly, had other ideas. Diamond died the following March, during the filming of Nigella Bites. His widow took only a fortnight away from the camera, but suffered a bout of depression. She was 41 years old and she had already lost her mother and younger sister to cancer at 48 and 32, respectively, and now her husband, at 47. If Lawson did turn to painkillers or drugs at this point, all one can say is that she had an awful lot of pain to kill.
Was this the promise Lawson made to Saatchi, who is known to be vehemently anti-drugs? Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo, two of Nigella’s “kitchen confidantes”, have claim that, for years, she has been a habitual user of cocaine and other drugs. They said Lawson tacitly allowed them to use her husband’s credit card to make sure they kept her “guilty secret” from him. In their statements, the Grillo sisters, who are charged with defrauding Saatchi of more than £300 000 (about R5-million) to spend on holidays and designer clothes, paint a devastating and seedy picture of family life behind the glossy front door of Lawson’s Chelsea mansion. If there is any grain of truth in them, and these are still only allegations, then I
Twitter is full of jokes about her generous use of ’icing sugar’. Her recipe for ham in Coke now bears a less innocent interpretation
am not surprised Saatchi angrily accused his wife of being “off her head” and “trashing” her 19-year-old daughter Mimi’s life by allowing her to take drugs.
In the next fortnight, Lawson may appear at the trial of the Grillo sisters to be cross-questioned over the allegations of drug-taking and posh-boho parenting gone mad. If she chooses not to, evidence from the accused could still prove deeply embarrassing. Attempts to preserve the hugely valuable global Nigella Lawson brand, the potency of which went into overdrive after Saatchi was pictured with his hand round her throat, seem to be unravelling. Twitter is full of jokes about “Higella” and her generous use of “icing sugar”. Lawson’s recipe for ham in Coke now bears a less in- nocent interpretation. But this is no laughing matter. There are children involved. Fans will be hoping that Lawson, the most admired and envied woman of my generation, has an explanation for the grim allegations made by the Grillo sisters.
If the Grillo sisters turn out to be telling the truth, then Charles Saatchi is the victim of an injustice.
What if this villain of the piece was actually trying to save his destructive wife from herself? What if Saatchi lamely excusing the fight outside Scott’s as “a playful tiff” was not trying to protect his own reputation, but Lawson’s? Physical violence is never excusable, but what if a frustrated Saatchi was shaking his wife and saying: “Wake up, woman! Look what you’re doing to yourself and our family”? What if that tweak on her nose was not aggressive and patronising, but a dig at her cocaine habit? What if Lawson’s tears, as she fled the restaurant, were not of fear but guilt?
The allegations are murky, and grow darker. Millions bought How To Be a Domestic Goddess because it was a fantasy — a beautiful, vanilla-infused lie. It told a generation of working mothers driven halfmad by stress that we could waft about in a pinafore on a cloud of Victoria sponge and play housewife — infinitely preferable to worrying about what our long absences and permanent irritability might be doing to our offspring. We were our fathers with ovaries, successes who woke at 3am fretting that we were failures. The statistics show that more mothers turned to alcohol and prescription drugs as we strove to hold down a career and family.
It would be desperately sad if the original Domestic Goddess wound up a major casualty of the Having It All generation, but it would make a certain bitter sense. Nigella Lawson would be hardly the only fiftysomething woman who has acted a part to perfection while living a lie.
This week she cheerily tweeted: “Holiday Hotcake: the perfect recipe to show thanks for all your support & to those who hashtag #teamNigella.” It was an unappetising and rather desperate attempt to shore up support amid the most damaging allegations.
Lawson cannot bake her way out of this particular nightmare. If there is any truth in the allegation that she and her daugh- ter were involved in drugs, then her burgeoning US career on The Taste will be over. No British audience would be able to watch her new TV series, due in January, with anything other than morbid curiosity and sniggers every time she measures out her grams of flour.
Heaven knows what the Nigella Lawson of the John Diamond years would make of the woman and mother she is said to have become.
Such is the sadness and strangeness of this story over time. It has already suffered so many twists and turns that there is no way of knowing where it will go next, let alone how it will end. For all her talent, wealth and beauty, one thing is certain: no woman envies Nigella now. —