Bryony Gordon
How Tara lost her way
round six years ago, I met Tara PalmerTomkinson, to interview her on the subject of a novel she had done called Inheritance, about an It Girl with a penchant for bad boys and cocaine.
We had tea at the Dorchester, where Tara was frequently bothered by smooth but sinisterlooking men who claimed to know her. (“They work with supermodels, or something,” she would say dismissively.) She told me that, at the height of her partying back in the Nineties, she would take her phone, lipstick, keys and passport with her on a night out, in case the host decided to fly everyone to Rome in their private jet for espresso – as had happened one evening with Flavio Briatore, the former Formula 1 boss, after he declared the coffee served at dinner was no good.
She joked that her book was “Pulitzer Prize-winning, darling”, but that she obviously hadn’t written it entirely herself. “I can hardly type a text message,” she whooped with delight.
She was constantly sending herself up. The book made reference to that “crack-aswhack Tara Palmer-Tomkinson strutting her stuff in a bikini and snorkel”. “People can say that I am stupid if they want,” she told me. “I know that I am not.”
She wasn’t. Few people are smart enough to manage to make a living working as caricatures of themselves.
This isn’t a piece about the Tara Palmer-Tomkinson I knew. I didn’t, at all. We swapped numbers and occasionally texts, but I would hardly describe it as a friendship; we were barely even acquaintances.
It is, however, a piece about the Tara Palmer-Tomkinson I recognised, a person many of us will recognise: a woman shoved in a box at a young age – a box that she was not allowed to get out of, not by the media, not by the general public and so, in the end, not by herself.
Tara PT was only in her early twenties when she was crowned the queen of the It Girls, a group of young, beautiful socialites who had been brought up to believe that they were to be nothing more than adornments on the arms of rich, successful men, wombs in which to carry these men’s babies. Was it any wonder, then, that a woman as bright as Tara jumped at the chance to escape her fate as a simple side-show on the society pages?
As an It Girl, Tara was the society pages, and so much more. In the misery of her early death, aged 45, perhaps the only light moment was a tabloid listing all the aristocratic men who had fallen for her, proving that, even in death, Tara was turning the old order of things on its head.
The problem was that Tara leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. Cocaine is often glamourised and seen as a fleeting party drug that simply peps people up so they can carry on being the life and soul, but actually it’s a disgusting, pernicious narcotic that sucks away at lives and souls. It never really eases its grip on you. Even when you’re clean, even when you’re supposedly settled and sorted, it still comes to you in dreams and when you’ve had a couple of glasses of wine.
Fame – I imagine that’s the same. They both feed on the same things after all: insecurities, vulnerabilities, cripplingly low self-esteem.
We often hear vapid celebrities talk about being true to themselves. I suppose, in a way, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was the opposite: a classically trained pianist who could recite Shakespeare, going out of her way to be seen as the good-time party girl who was always, always a bit of a laugh.
So she joked to me about not having a mortgage, and how she now kept sewing kits in her Fabergé eggs instead of cocaine. Even after rehab, she could not help herself from painting a comedic picture of a little old woman sipping tea and being boring. The truth, as ever, was probably somewhere in between, yet the societal pressures we put on people to fit moulds meant that she was never really free to explore that.
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was fragile, but strong. That was a comment I saw yesterday, on Facebook, from someone who knew her well, and I thought it was rather lovely. I thought it was probably very, very true. TPT was a set of initials, a reality star, an It Girl who lost her way, but she was more than that, wasn’t she? A sister, a daughter, a friend, who in trying to be the person she thought we all wanted her to be lost the most important person of all.
‘People can say I am stupid if they want. I know I’m not’