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Would you like to pay a tribute to Katie
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us your stories and memories.
And photographs, if you have any.
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Horseytalk.net Special Interview
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interview by Janice Turner
sourced from The
Times |
Katie Price, aka Jordan,
is a paradox: a surgically enhanced sex kitten whose mostly
female fans adore her for being ‘real’. Janice
Turner wonders at the ‘common sense’ and force
of will that have made her a £30 million fortune
The themes for today are pink and horsey. Lined up on stage,
primped and nervous, are a half-dozen small girls in pink fleeces
appliquéd with sparkly hearts. A pink pitchfork and
shovel, pink bridle and pink rosettes on straw bales dress
the set. Barbie Mucks Out. Meanwhile a number of small, white,
fluffy horses are being wrangled into place, as if life has
been breathed into My Little Pony. |
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The crowd watching this tableau of girlie, pink horsiness
is solidly male. Forty tabloid and agency photographers jostle
stepladders, hoik up bum-exposing jeans, screw on their largest
lens. And suddenly they are off. The fusillade of flashes
makes me blink and look away. The little girls squint and
recoil. The smallest starts to cry and is quickly extracted
from shot. The tiny ponies paw the concrete floor.
But the star, dressed in blue hotpants, polka-dot knee-socks
and silver stilettos, keeps her gaze very wide, turning her
head incrementally left to right, so every snapper gets a
burst of eye contact. A true pro.
Yet still the men bellow and clamour. “Oh, you want
a bit of cleavage,” says Katie Price, reality star,
living brand, the model formally known as Jordan. “I’m
not sure… I’m with kiddies today…” But
she unzips her velour hoodie a further inch anyway.
By now the girls are not loving the photocall at all. The
lights are head-spinning. I pray no one is epileptic. But
Price seems unconcerned. “Smile!” she cries,
her own mouth flicking between cover-girl beam and porn-star
pout. Then, abruptly, the session is over. “Thanks,
fellas,” she says without warmth or, now their shutters
are still, even a smile.
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Later, while I’m pondering Price’s display of
brittle business savvy as she launches her new line in equestrian
fashions, I see the little girls file out of her dressing
room clutching autographs and shiny tote bags from her KP
range. They weren’t models, but the daughters of members
of Price’s online fanclub – fee £2 a month – which
numbers 10,000 people, 80 per cent of whom are women. The
girls are beaming, but the mums are ecstatic. “I just
love everything about Katie,” says Lisa Jones, 30,
mother of six-year-old Maddison. “She’s a good
mum, she works for charity. The way she looks. She’s
so honest, she’s a workaholic like me.” Lisa’s
sister, Emma Whale, chips in, “I have an autistic daughter.
Seeing Katie with Harvey, she shows you can deal with it.”
An hour later, I am introduced to what appears to be a
teenage girl, huddled very close to a radiator, cross-legged,
eating a big bowl of chips lathered in ketchup. The drag-queen
make-up has been wiped off and, encased in a T-shirt, the
spherical boobs she served up for the snappers form a solid,
almost matronly bosom. Her eyes are wide-set and huge like
a fawn’s. The most striking thing about Katie Price
is that for a glamour model, her demeanour is neither vampy
nor even very feminine. She has a tomboyish, sporty mien.
Shaking my hand, she takes a sip from her Diet Coke, politely
surpressing a burp, and, as she starts to tell me about her
childhood passion for horses, I can imagine her straight
away as this tough little kid falling off her mum’s
friend’s frisky grey pony.
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“Whenever we got to a field he would just charge,” she
says.
“Terrifying,” adds Price’s mother, Amy,
who is sitting by the mirror eating a sandwich.
“Then we got a horse on loan, an 18-year-old 14-hand
New Forest pony called Star. He was up the road,” Price
goes on. “Then my mum bought me an ex-racehorse, 16
hands 2in.”
Did she join the Pony Club, enter gymkhanas? “My mum
wasn’t really into all that for me,” she says.
“No,” says Mum. “For one it was too expensive.
And second thing is, it was one of these hierarchies where
it looked like you could only compete if you had a certain
horsebox…”
“I had like this Third World pony, the ugliest, hairiest,
oldest pony.”
Amy continues “…and I didn’t want her
to be snobby. I just wanted her to enjoy riding.”
It must be something of a two-fingered salute to the county
set that Price’s range of blingy riding gear is now
sold in the posh Derby House catalogue. Or that she has performed
dressage at the Horse of the Year Show, now owns several
classy mounts and her own pink, sparkly horsebox. (“It’s ’orrible,” says
Mum.) But Price is too breezy and self-assured to be chippy.
She is still fuming at being barred from the Cartier polo
tournament, even after she’d spent £6,000 on
a table.
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But that wasn’t horse folk – she has since been
invited to Gatcombe Park by Princess Anne – just the
stuck-up jewellery company sponsor. A year ago, she expressed
her intention to compete in dressage at London 2012, but
that has been shelved and when I speculate that if she’d
been a rich child, she might have made the Olympic squad,
she shrugs: she just loved her riding.
Queen of reality TV
I meet Price the day after Jade Goody has died, leaving her
the undisputed queen of reality TV. And Price, who recently
slammed Goody for bad taste in selling her cancer battle
story, is now cautiously commending her for “making
money while she could to make sure her kids are set up”.
She adds that Goody’s cervical cancer has prompted
her to book a smear “because I’ve never had
one”.
“Yes, you have,” says Mum. “But you’re
due one.”
Price and Goody shared a similar strand of fame, but little
else. While Goody grew up in Inner London in the derelict,
drug-addicted, criminal underclass, Price is the product
of a hard-grafting, honest and cheerful working-class family
from just outside Brighton. Her mother – a good-natured,
open woman, who worked in personnel – divorced when
Price was three and it is her stepfather Paul, who runs a
fencing firm, whom she calls Dad.
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The family are clearly close: Amy helps out with Harvey,
Price’s son by footballer Dwight Yorke, who was born
with septo-optic dysplasia, a condition that means he is
autistic and almost blind.
Price’s brother, Dan, who has a business degree, runs
her website and finances: “He tells me how much I can
spend; he won’t let me buy anything on HP.” Since
Price is reportedly worth £30 million, she is unlikely
to need to.
Growing up, Price wanted to be a model or a singer. “I
always knew I wouldn’t be doing a normal job. I knew
I wasn’t normal.” Many 17-year-old girls have
gone topless for Page 3, but none has played the tabloids
so perfectly. Katie became Jordan, the cartoonish chav princess,
loud and lewd with her 32F chest, forever falling out of
nightclubs and tiny tops. She made a fortune as the queen
of glamour, but attempts to parlay her sexual allure into
a broader career failed.
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And then in 2004, she took part in I’m a Celebrity… Get
Me out of Here! where in the Australian rainforest
she proved an utterly fearless and, crucially, non-whingeing
contestant, chomping down bugs, mucking in at camp and
delighting the nation by falling in love with sweet but
washed-up Peter Andre. Almost overnight her fan base, which
had been 80:20 men to women, reversed.
To many feminists Price manifests a mainstream culture
sodden with pornographic values. She has surgically sculpted
her body into the ultimate sex toy. That she is beloved by
working-class women – her PR, Diana, tells me hundreds
queue at her book signings – is baffling. Yet for women
lacking education, whose only routes out of financial struggle
are their bodies, street smarts and force of will, Katie
Price – who admits, “I am thick, but I have common
sense” – is a beacon of possibility.
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Lately, through Facebook, Price contacted kids from her
school, the brainy ones. “And they don’t do nothing!” she
says. “Or they work in Tesco’s.” So won’t
she care whether her own daughter goes to university? “I
still think she should have a good education. Pete wants
her to be a nun. I’m like, ‘She’ll be doing
Page 3.’ I’m only winding him up. She wouldn’t
be allowed. Pete’s family are Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
At this Amy explodes. “She’s repeating everything
we ever said! Good education and all that. We went ballistic
with her when she did glamour. My son disowned her. He said
you’ve ruined the family’s reputation.”
Fans love Price, not for succeeding, but for suffering
along the way. From her books we learn she was sexually abused
as a child by a stranger, beaten by a boyfriend, had an abortion,
a miscarriage, postnatal depression.
Money has not given her airs. To fans she remains one of
them, just richer. And most importantly, she is the most
prominent mother of a disabled child. Amy tells me how hundreds
of desperate parents, having no other source of comfort,
write to her daughter for help.
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Price talks about Harvey with utter straightforwardness,
even amusement in quirks which must be trying to live with. “He’s
not a chore,” she says. “He’s my son.” Aged
almost 7, he weighs around eight stone. “I still reckon
he has Prader-Willi Syndrome [which makes a sufferer eat
compulsively],” says Price. “If you put a loaf
of bread or a chocolate cake in front of him, he’d
eat it all. He doesn’t know when he’s full. Pete
is always telling me off for buying him chocolate muffins.
But I like to do it.” She smiles. “Every time
he gets a cake he sings Happy Birthday to himself.
“And the amount of tellies we’ve gone through.
If he doesn’t like what’s on, he gets angry and
he’ll throw the TV and break it. He’s very strong.
He goes, ‘Oh, broken.’ He doesn’t understand.”
Apart from her mum, when Harvey’s not at his special
school, she and Andre look after him. No staff live in. Harvey
is expected to be 6ft 4in when fully grown and with his tendency
to lash out, they need to get his temper under control. He
has a chill-out tent to calm down in when he feels a tantrum
coming on.
Does his father, Dwight Yorke, ever see him? “No, because
he’s a w*****. Can you put that in The Times?” she
says.
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Is Yorke ashamed of Harvey’s condition? “I think
it is that. He finds it quite hard,” says Amy. “He
has another child now,” says Price. “But Harvey
is such a fun little kid, you just have to know how to deal
with him. I mean, there’s a way you talk to Harvey.
It’s like Harvey language.”
She gives me a lecture on her parenting style: she’s
big on the naughty step, sends her son Junior to the local
village school, regards boarding schools as disgusting, wants
to have “at least four more babies” with Andre
because she loves newborns though loathes being pregnant.
She tells me what she wants to do for Children in Need. “I’m
gonna sing an opera song. Even Pete says I could sing better
in opera than in pop. What’s that famous song?” Er, Nessun
Dorma? “Yeah.”
“Oh, you won’t be able to sing that!” says
Mum.
“Challenge me!” declares Price.
And she will probably do it. Because Price doesn’t
seem to care – as most of us do – about aiming
high and turning out to be rubbish.
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Her last recording performed on Children in Need – a
duet with Andre, which became a cruel YouTube clip in which
the microphone picks up the full horror of Price’s
droning – helped raise a significant amount for charity.
She entered the A Song for Europe contest, performing heavily
pregnant in a pink catsuit with a mesh panel on her bump,
and came second. She also once stood in a General Election,
on a platform of free boob jobs and no parking tickets,
getting 1.8 per cent of the vote.
She has the assurance that people don’t love her
not because she is good at anything, but because she is Katie.
They will watch her and Pete on their reality show – the
latest series of which records their recent sojourn in LA – just
talking about sex; playing with Harvey and their own kids
(Junior, 4, and Princess, almost 2); bickering; shopping;
sacking their nanny; eating breakfast. Pictures of their
wedding sold to OK! for £2 million. At 30,
she has published three autobiographies selling 3.5 million
copies. Her name can flog anything: perfume, haircare, fitness
DVDs, underwear, pony care manuals.
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“I haven’t got an English – whatyoucallit? – literature
degree. So of course I’m not going to write a book.
But I say how I want it, I speak it into a Dictaphone and
then Rebecca [Farnsworth, her ghostwriter] writes it up.
“For example, if I wanted to do a serial killer, I
could say something like, ‘I want there to be this
girl and she ends up cutting up animals from a young age.’ And
she fills in the gaps, for example stuff like, ‘It
was April 16th, the sun was out, the daffodils were starting
to bloom.’ And then I approve each chapter.”
Talking to Price, I find myself thinking that if her hair
wasn’t pulled up so tight in a scrunchie, hardening
her face, she’d be stunning. Middle-class sensibilities
are offended by her attainment of huge riches for no talent,
but also because she violates conventional aesthetics, that
female beauty should be soft, natural and understated.
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Price’s message is if you don’t have it, you
can buy it – and once you’ve bought it, flaunt
it. And her working-class fans adore her maximised, man-made
glamour which, since she wears it knowingly, comes close
to camp.
When I ask why she has had such freakishly large implants – she
recently had them reduced to a 32D – she says simply, “I
just like big boobs. I like how they look in clothes. It’s
not for my job or a sexual thing.” It is almost as
if Price still views what it is to be a woman through the
eyes of a child, a cartoonish exaggeration, all huge hair
and extra-long nails: a human Barbie. Like Price, little
girls are obsessed with sparkly pink, would choose to travel
to her wedding, as she did, in a glass Cinderella coach,
put a pink bridle on her pony, call her daughter Princess.
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Maybe what Price speaks to in other women is not their repressed
vamp, but their inner eight-year-old. How many paradoxes can
be contained in this one slender frame? An artificial creation
loved for her authenticity. A seeming man-toy beloved by women.
And the sex kitten with her eye only on the bottom line. When
I ask her about ageing, she says she won’t have a facelift – “I’ve
seen them in LA, they look like freaks” – but anyway
she isn’t frightened by growing old. “Because by
then I will have so many endorsements, it will be lovely. Yeah,
loadsa things. You get those and you’re laughing. But I’d
still keep busy. I’ll do my signings. You just can’t
sit on your arse and think it’s going to happen.” Suddenly
I understand that cold hardness earlier in front of the cameras,
the pressure of being in a business where the only product you’re
selling is yourself.
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