Why M&S’S unlikely new pin-up is at war with her family
Foul-mouthed rants at her father. An ugly feud over a will. Tracey Emin’s half-brother reveals...
tHE evening air was warm and jasmine scented; clusters of diners sat at tables around a small outdoor stage where a band played.
Disparate groups of people — locals, holiday-makers, families, friends — had gathered to enjoy food and the convivial atmosphere of the restaurant in Cyprus’s capital, Nicosia.
Suddenly, above the gentle hubbub of chatter, rose a voice strident with accusation.
‘What are you looking at? You know what you f*****g done! You f****d up again,’ raged the woman, jabbing a finger at the old man sitting opposite her. The blizzard of abuse reached a shrill crescendo. Heads swivelled in appalled consternation, but the woman continued her rant, oblivious.
The tirade that persisted, unabated, for almost 20 minutes, issued from the mouth of artist Tracey Emin, who first achieved fame — or notoriety, depending on your viewpoint — with her 1997 installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent embroidered with names, which art collector Charles Saatchi bought for a reputed £40,000.
Two years later, as a Turner Prize short-listed nominee, Emin exhibited My Bed with its squalid detritus of used condoms and soiled underwear. Later, she staggered, apparently intoxicated, from a live televised debate about the prize.
Since then, Ms Emin, 50, has accrued both spectacular wealth and considerable respectability: this year she won a CBE; she is also Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy, and one of her works hangs in 10 Downing Street.
But perhaps the most potent symbol of her graduation from enfant terrible of the art world to emblem of middle- class orthodoxy is her inclusion in the latest ad campaign for Marks & Spencer. Emin, who says she accepted the commission with alacrity, is photographed alongside such luminaries as Dame Helen Mirren, ballerina Darcey Bussell and Olympic medallist Nicola Adams, wearing a selection of eminently sensible clothes from the store’s autumn collection.
Among those who have charted Tracey’s progress from nonentity to celebrity, few have taken a more concerned and assiduous interest in her than her half-brother Coshgun — known as John — Emin. John, 69, a successful businessman, who lives with his wife Barbara, 65, in Balcombe, West Sussex, was sitting next to her at the restaurant in Cyprus on the night, six years ago, when she flew into that uncontrolled rage.
He remembers his abject embarrassment; his vain attempts to calm her — and the unedifying fact that the butt of his half-sister’s rage was their Turkish Cypriot father Enver, then 85.
What had Enver done to provoke this torrent of vitriol? Tracey says her father took money from her to build a luxury house on a plot he owned in Cyprus, but never finished it. John contends the project was abandoned because Tracey had underestimated the high cost of completing it to her exacting specifications.
That night, John says: ‘The argument blew up from nowhere about nothing. The builders had decided one of the doors worked better ergonomically if they moved it. Tracey saw it earlier in the day and she screamed at them for altering the plan.
‘We were having a lovely time at the restaurant — Barbara and I were there with Dad, Tracey and our family lawyer and his wife — and the row started.
‘Tracey rounded on Dad. When she flies into one of her rages she loses control. The veins in her neck stand out. She sweats. She salivates. She stares. It is as if the devil himself has got into her.
‘That evening, the F-words were flowing so thick and fast we were all mortified. I could feel people on surrounding tables watching us. They clearly thought she was mad, and if the owner of the restaurant hadn’t been a cousin, I think we’d have been thrown out.
‘I put an arm round Tracey and said: “Calm down”, but she wouldn’t stop. Then Dad tapped the table. It was a signal to go.
‘We dropped Tracey at her hotel and when she left the car she skipped out, kissed Dad as if nothing had happened, and declared in a childish little voice: “Goodnight Daddy! Love you!” ’
But there is more to this cameo than meets the eye. For behind it lies the extraordinary character of Enver Emin — the father both Tracey and John shared — and the complex story of his relationship with the most famous of his many offspring.
Enver had three children — John and his sisters Sefile and Biray — with his long-suffering wife Sherife, to whom he was married for almost 50 years until her death in 1989. He was, however, a brazen adulterer who also fathered 20 illegitimate children, among them Tracey and her twin brother Paul, with a succession of mistresses.
Enver — roguish, charming and apparently irresistible to women — was also profligate with money.
aLTHOUGH he earned several fortunes through property, he also squandered them, and begged constantly and shamelessly for hand-outs from both John and Tracey — the two most prosperous of his children — to fund a succession of shady or disastrous deals. ‘Dad was lovable rogue,’ says John, wealthy businessman and company director. ‘He could charm the birds out of the trees. You couldn’t help liking him, but if you went into business with him, gosh, you’d have to count your fingers after you shook hands.
‘He would borrow money whenever he could, most of the time with no intention of giving anything back, but he always kept just on the right side of the law.
‘I bailed him out countless times — I’ve given him the equivalent of millions of pounds, allowing for inflation — and I’d guess Tracey has given him a fair bit too.
‘I think she wanted Dad to demonstrate that he loved her unconditionally and it riled her when he always wanted her money. She’d lose control and scream and rant at him.’
Indeed, Tracey recently told an interviewer: ‘ My dad — I could call him at 5am and scream at him and he would still love me.’
John, however, notes that Enver was wounded by these outbursts: ‘ Dad would tell me he hated it when Tracey subjected him to public humiliation, although he never retaliated or showed her that he was hurt. And for a while I’d defend her. I’d say: “Stop asking her for money, Dad, and perhaps she won’t scream at you.” I didn’t really believe how extreme and uncontrolled her behaviour was — until I heard it for myself that evening in Cyprus.’
Even so, John, forgave his half-sister this outburst. Their relationship remained cordial — until, that is, the family fell out over their father’s will.
Five months before he died from cancer in May 2010, aged 89, Enver signed a will making John and Tracey joint executors and joint beneficiaries of his estate.
But why should John object to Tracey — who was, after all, owed a considerable sum of money by their father — sharing equally in Enver’s will?
JOHN, who has three grownup children and 12 grandchildren of his own, explains: ‘Although my sister Biray is dead, my other sister, Sefile, could very much do with the money.’
He feels his father should have included Sefile in the will. The upset over this has resulted in the alienation of Tracey and John, the mild-mannered half-brother who — long before Tracey was famous — was prepared to embrace her as one of the family.
John was 19 when, in 1963, Tracey and her twin Paul were born to his father’s girlfriend Pam, in Croydon Hospital, South London.
‘Pam was, and indeed still is, a lovely lady,’ John remembers. ‘ She was blonde, vivacious and married to a chap, a dynamite expert, who worked away in South Africa.
‘Dad was shameless. He used to drive around in Pam’s husband’s car. When the twins were born he told me with a certain amount of glee: “You have a baby brother and sister.” I said: “Why can’t you just behave yourself?” But he’d just smile and tell me to “shush”.
‘Mum knew all about his many affairs, of course. She and Dad had been forced to flee Cyprus in 1948 because Dad was being pursued by the husband of one of his lovers who was threatening to kill him.
‘But Mum was a saint, really. She’d seen women and money come and go, but she’d say of Tracey and Paul: those children are totally innocent. She even insisted Dad brought them to our family home in London for visits, and she’d fuss over them and look after them.’
Before the twins were even toddlers, Enver, with John — although only just entering his 20s — as his partner, had become a property millionaire.
But while John was prudent, Enver was profligate, and frittered the company profits on a string of injudicious investments. He bought three rambling guest houses in Margate on the Kent coast, installed Pam and the twins in them, and set about turning them into a hotel, which Pam was to manage.
John knew the venture was doomed — ‘Dad knew nothing about running hotels. I knew he’d invite all his friends down from London and treat them all to his open- handed Turkish hospitality, and wouldn’t dream of asking them to pay,’ he says — and John was proved right.
By the time the twins were six, the hotel had been repossessed, Pam and the children were homeless and Enver — typically — had scarpered.
Pam was left, penniless, to raise the children alone in a meagre rented home. Indeed, Enver only resurfaced when Tracey’s twin brother Paul got into trouble with the police in his late teens and Pam, feeling a father’s influence might help him, called for help.
By then it was 1982 and Tracey was graduating from Medway College of Design: Enver, puffed up with paternal pride, invited John to attend the ceremony. Not only did he agree, but he was also both generous and magnanimous to his half-sister.
‘I bought her a “hello” gift, a good luck charm: it was a 22- carat gold necklace from Istanbul and she wore it for years and years,’ he recalls.
By the time John came into Tracey’s life, she’d been raped at 13, then, by her own account, slept with half the men in Margate ‘as revenge’. Pregnancy and a botched abortion ensued.
Now, after an operation for endometriosis, she is incapable of having children and lives alone, with only her beloved cat Docket for company, in Spitalfields, East London.
The catalogue of loss is heartbreaking, and when they first met, John recognised in Tracey an abiding melancholy. ‘I was struck by her sadness,’ he says. ‘There was a Dad-
shaped hole in her life, and when he was around, she glowed. I wanted her to see as much of him as possible.’
Tracey, too, has confirmed how desperately she coveted her father’s love. ‘When I was little I would hang on to my dad’s vest,’ she has said. ‘I wouldn’t let him go. My mum would have to cut the vest and the scrap would become my comfort blanket.’
But Enver remained resolutely unreliable. He popped in and out of Tracey’s life, though, as her wealth accrued, he appeared more often and his demands for money became insistent.
‘Not many years before Dad died, Tracey phoned me in tears, asking why he always asked for cash every time he called or phoned,’ says John. ‘She was upset that he never asked how she was, and that he asked for money every time instead.’
John, who is director of a specialist drainage company that he runs with Barbara, remembers the happy times, too, when Tracey would arrive at their Sussex home with an entourage of friends and a case of Bollinger, to celebrate an art sale or some other milestone.
He recalls: ‘She came once with Dad and announced: “I’ve just spent £1 million on a house!” She was euphoric and I thought it was wonderful.’
SINcE then, of course, John’s pride and pleasure in Tracey has soured. John, who has written a book, Meat On A Stick, featuring his wayward and colourful half- sister and father, has not spoken to Tracey for three years, since, he claims, she has refused to communicate with him after their falling out over Enver’s will.
She has now relinquished her role as executor. Under cypriot law, John points out, Tracey would be entitled to no more than a third of Enver’s estate — the majority two-thirds must go to ‘legitimate’ heirs — making the London will null and void.
Last night, Tracey’s representatives claimed her father’s estate had no money in it, but stressed Tracey had no wish to get involved in any family dispute.
As things stand, Enver’s will remains unresolved.
‘Tracey always said she wanted our Dad’s unconditional love. She is a tortured soul and I feel the misery she exudes rubs off on us all. She has pushed away the people who really care about her.
‘But even now, I hope she will step out into the light and find happiness. It’s here. It’s on offer. She just has to turn up because I still love her.’
John seems bruised; saddened by what he sees as a casual discarding of their kinship. ‘ It’s just the way she has behaved that I deplore,’ he says.