And if we don’t care for the antics of naughty Jordan, we are also deeply suspicious of her and her type. When I read in the News of the World of an uncovered plot to kidnap her two children, my first thought was that this was some sort of ruse to keep the names of a publicity-crazed couple – Jordan and her husband, Peter Andre – in the headlines. It had all the hallmarks of a public-relations coup, after all: drama, vulnerable kiddies, the sympathy vote. Actually I was wrong. The threat was real, with Scotland Yard investigating, and as with all of life’s trials, from her son’s disability to her disastrous relationships with men before she married, the model was putting a brave face on things.
But then Katie Price – her real name – is not quite the vacuous strumpet some love to hate.
How disapproving can you be of a woman whose suggestion for an outing is a trip to collect horse feed in her brand-new customised (pink seats, hearts and glitter) horse lorry? Outside her East Sussex home sits a gleaming Ferrari and a Range Rover, but it is the lorry and its matching pink VW Beetle – the car a gift from her sponsor and friend, Richard Desmond, proprietor of the Daily Express and her regular haunt, OK! magazine – that she loves best. She had been inspired by the kitsch Barbiemobile in Toys R Us, and set about issuing specifications for her perfect pink. “People say I’m nuts,” she laughs. “I’ve got all these flash cars, but all I want to do is drive a pink transit lorry with glitter all over it. I love it.”
The link between our saucy pin-up and the real Katie Price is much examined: in the flesh she is a strange hybrid of childlike mischief and hard-core maturity, swearing like a trooper with a middle finger jabbed up to the prudes, but also promising there’s nothing she doesn’t tell her mum. The kidnap threat has ruined our plan to meet at home, so we meet at the Grand hotel in Brighton, bombed by the IRA during the 1984 Conservative conference. “When I was a kid,” she recalls, “we all used to run around looking at the hole in the side. Dunno what that was about.”
On a blustery Friday morning there is no prima-donna preening from the star, no wariness or distance, just an ordinary enough girl, 28 in a few days’ time, who has done well for herself.
She perches on the sofa next to me, showing me two of her pink tattoos, which are all bows and ribbons, on her ankle and her back; the third is a heart, “You know… where your brazilian is.”
Apparently she had been worried about being judged harshly by a posh newspaper, so she is trying hard. Whatever you want to know, she’ll tell you (favourite sexual position? Best vibrator? She’s heard it all). This willingness is instantly cheering, having interviewed so many cagey stars. But then generosity with herself has become a habit, and not just with her body. With her books, reality-TV appearances and continuing documentary series, including When Jordan Met Peter, she has fed us a feast of personal history from the first abusive relationship to her OK!-sponsored wedding in September, a rhapsody in marshmallow pink with bridal throne, helicopters whirring overhead and her beloved nan miffed at being seated at the back, collateral damage when you are selling your life as your living.
Today the long dark hair looks a mess (but that might be just fashionably tousled); she wears a carapace of biscuit-coloured foundation with sweeping lashes (“all my own”) framing beautiful sea-green eyes; no lipstick “because I’ve got three cold sores”. She is delicate, with thin brown legs (though she has put on a few pounds and is back up to 8 stone), and so twiggy you want to make her a sandwich. In her fluffy, loose-knit jumper, her chest is an ill-defined bumpy outcrop; more than a sex siren, she looks like a schoolgirl with a cushion up her jumper. “How are your puppies?” asks her publicist without a hint of innuendo, and you feel we might easily descend into farce, but nobody so much as smiles. Katie (after five minutes it is impossible to think of her as “Jordan”) has two new dalmatian siblings, acquired after one of her beloved staffordshire terriers was found dead in a neighbour’s pool. “We was devastated,” she frowns.
She arrives with her regular crowd, not an entourage in the ego-boosting showbiz sense, but her protectors: her manager, Claire, a straight-talking northerner; Gary, a sweet hairdresser, and a rough-diamond security geezer called Ricky who later disappears to pick up Katie’s four-year-old son, Harvey, from nursery. Normally I’d huff and puff about being made to interview in front of a crowd, but I can feel my subject needs them here to relax her. Not that she lets them get a word in edgeways, refusing to be checked on her bluntness about herself and others, which is almost thrilling in an insincere kissy-kissy world. “I don’t think I’m good-looking,” she declares.
“I can scrub up well. I eat like a pig. I breathe in and know what to wear. A model doesn’t have to be good-looking: any girl with the right lighting and make-up can look okay. Nowadays they can make your legs longer, do anything to transform you. It’s a shame in a way – when I look at my old pictures, I can see the twist in my knickers. Now everything is so perfectly done.”
We’re not here to talk knickers or the mascara she would like to develop because she can’t stand the fakery of the ads where the models are obviously wearing false lashes. No, we are here to discuss something much more fake: her debut novel, Angel. The story of a tomboy turned glamour model who inhabits a demimonde of soap stars and boy bands, strays into cocaine addiction, but wins the footballer of her dreams in the end, it was published under Price’s own name rather than that of her alter ego. The book – like Naomi Campbell’s Swan – was written by a ghostwriter, the same one who penned her two autobiographies of 2005 and 2006 that have dominated the bestseller lists. The two women apparently had a meeting and swapped a few ideas; why bother lying? “Angel is nothing about me and my life,” she says emphatically.
Without doubt the book is full of Katie and her life, notwithstanding the drugs and an adoption story line; it draws on a destructive relationship with a pop star (like her own with Dane Bowers), the overdose she took when they parted, the threesomes, the sex home movies, the invitation from Hugh Hefner to shoot a cover for Playboy. She shrugs. “Yeah, but it’s not me, I didn’t turn into a beautiful swan like her.I don’t know anything about rehab. Drugs have never been my thing.” (“Drink is enough for you,” her manager chimes with a laugh. “You should see her when she’s had a drink!” And, of course, we have.) Now she is with Andre, she says, the opportunities for the wild, bleary-eyed partying are long gone. “It’s not that he’s clean-living, or maybe he is. He has one brandy and that’s it.”
