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I always left men-but now I'm secure; She was Britain's first supermodel. But fame appalled Jean Shrimpton and she gave it all up. Here she talks of her marriage, her feelings now for David Bailey and Terence Stamp and how she hates getting old
The Daily Mail (London, England); 7/14/2001; Lee-Potter, Lynda
Byline: LYNDA LEE-POTTER
WHEN I rang Jean Shrimpton to ask if I could interview her, she said: 'Oh I'm so glad it's you. I didn't want the Daily Mail to send some fresh-faced young girl.' Unbelievably, she's 59, but her haunting beauty remains. In the Sixties, with her tumbling hair, wide mouth and exquisite face, she was the most famous model in the world.
She still has long hair, though it's streaked with grey and her husband Michael cuts it for her. 'He just takes off a chunk across the back,' she says, 'It only takes a minute.' She has no interest in having a facelift, though she hates getting older. 'I mind the wrinkles, and the body crumbles.
I lie in bed sometimes and think "ugh". ' Despite what she says, her star quality remains, and when she's in the room her husband can't take his eyes off her. 'He is pretty keen on me,' she admits.
She's wearing a long orange silk skirt which she bought for [pound]6 in Slough, and a black jumper with the sleeves pushed up. Her graceful body still has the leggy slenderness of a highly strung racehorse.
She's lived for 22 years in Penzance in Cornwall, where she and her husband run the Abbey Hotel, overlooking the harbour.
They married at Penzance register office when she was four months pregnant, and had a wedding breakfast of champagne and fish and chips at the Abbey. The dining room was full of retired old ladies who lived at the hotel on full board for [pound]17 a week.
Michael and Jean were running an antiques shop and, a year later when they heard that the hotel was for sale, they bought it. She's turned it into a bewitching, beautiful place full of antiques, paintings, wild flowers and a drawing room overlooking a secret walled garden.
The bedrooms have pure cotton sheets and patchwork bedspreads, glossy magazines, and shelves full of books.
Jean Shrimpton is beguiling and approachable, but one feels that other people don't really impinge on her. 'I'm cynical,' she says, 'and ruthless.'
There is something wild about her and she's a rare amalgam of bluntness and remoteness.
She possesses a tangible sense of isolation and has always been the one to walk away from love affairs.
'I don't have many friends. I'm no good at that. I've always been in a relationship, which is a real weakness. It's a sort of dependency because when you're famous you get an undue amount of attention for the wrong reasons.
'You need the buffer of somebody with you, even if it's the wrong person.
Fame is very hard to cope with, especially when you're appalled by it and have no respect for it or what it brings you.' She says her convent education has left her full of guilt but almost always, when she's been drawn to a man, she's been the one who boldly made the first approach.
AT 18, she seduced a boy who lived near her father's farm in Buckinghamshire. A few months later she was living with married photographer David Bailey, and Jean was cited in his divorce.
'My father told me he wouldn't speak to me again for a year. He had a strong moral code and I was a selfish little hussy. He just thought, "What is my bloody daughter doing?'' But you're self-centred when you're young, so I didn't worry much.
'Mum was in a terrible state. I used to go to see her when Dad wasn't there.
He wouldn't speak to Bailey either for a year, but he liked shrewd East End boys, so when he finally met him they got on very well.' Jean's father ran a building business, but he really wanted to be a farmer.
Finally, he bought a farm with 60 acres in Buckinghamshire, and it's where Jean and her sister Chrissie, who used to be Mick Jagger's girlfriend, grew up.
'My father's workaholicism made him very rich. He always wanted a farm but he had to have a building business to finance it. He was shrewd and he worked like mad.
'He had an obsessive need to conquer and to make money, which made his vision narrow. He was a remote figure in our lives, but he was wonderful with animals. The thing I remember him always saying was: "Don't talk so bloody daft.'' ' In the early Eighties, Jean's father became ill with a debilitating sickness which doctors were unable to diagnose. 'I think it was probably CJD, which sounds melodramatic, but he had a lot of the symptoms.
'It started with depression and in the end he couldn't walk, feed himself, or get out what he wanted to say, which was terrifying.' She helped her mother and sister to nurse him and she is thankful about that. 'My mother did most of it, but I nursed him enough to absolve any problems later for me, though I didn't do it with that intention. I'm hopeless at the physical level, I'm a very isolated person, but if you've got to dress somebody or clear up the mess, you do it. I was glad I could.
'And there wasn't any embarrassment. I'm amazed because I hate the human functions, I hate my own functions. It's such a contradiction in life that when it actually comes to the nitty gritty, quite often you behave the opposite to how you think would.' She and Bailey are still friends, and in their heyday they were the ritziest couple in London. He lives in Tavistock, Devon, and they see each other occasionally.
HE RANG the other day, though he doesn't ring very often because he's too selfish to bother. I tell him he's done all right out of me, and he just laughs. He doesn't give a damn.
'He's done all those bloody books, full of pictures of me, and he never even sends me a copy. He keeps bringing out more and more and I said: "You could have sent my mum one, Bailey." He said: "I didn't think you cared." I said: "Well I don't really, but it's a courtesy."
Courtesy means nothing to Bailey.' The Cockney photographer was her first great love, and when she deserted him for movie star Terence Stamp, he was anguished.
She was bewitched by the egocentric actor and he later said she was everything he'd ever dreamed of. He planned to ask her to marry him, but he waited too long. In the end, she became alienated by what she perceived to be his detachment and narcissism.
Three years after their passionate affair began, she walked out.
He was close to despair with a grief which never seems to have totally deserted him. Many years later, he wrote in his autobiography of their passion and it reads like a powerful, private love letter.
However, his emotive words left her unmoved. 'I'm a realistic sort of person,' she says. 'I put up with quite a lot, but then I just walk away. I don't think he was in love with me at all, and if he was, he had a funny way of showing it.
'He was incredibly beautiful and I was in love with his looks. I was infatuated and in awe of him, but I wasn't in love with him.' She and her husband, Michael Cox, have a son, Thaddeus, who is now 21 and has just completed a design course. The three of them have always been a tight-knit trio, and now that Thaddeus has left home it seemed to be time to change their lives.
'I'm nearly 60,' she says, 'and I just thought: "Sod it. Let's have another go, let's do something new." ' This week they exchanged contracts to sell their magical house, Tremelling Barn, which is approached down a winding track in the hills behind St Erth.
It was a house they virtually built and it was a refuge from the hotel and possibly from the rest of the world. However, Jean wanted a new challenge.
They needed the money because they've bought the nightclub next door to the hotel and have turned it into the hugely stylish Abbey restaurant, which again has glorious views over the harbour.
'People are aghast at how we carry on, and I can see we're not financially sensible, but until you're in the gutter you don't worry about that, though it has been a bit stressful seeing how money can just go.' THE restaurant opened in June, and in two weeks they will leave the barn and find somewhere to rent in Penzance.
'Leaving the barn doesn't worry me,' she says. 'It's empty without Thaddeus. He's a very sentimental boy, much more home-loving than me or Michael.' When people grow older they either become much bolder or filled with fear and caution. The Coxes are adventurers at heart and have risked everything on their new project, which ultimately will also include a cinema.
'I don't think there's much to be said for growing older,' says Jean.
'It's no fun. Your body feels like damp flour, it's like dough. You suddenly realise your flesh feels so peculiar and it's got no elasticity.
'I felt very redundant, and this has been good because it's made us feel less so. I was bored, and being menopausal and bored, you are horrible. I was a pain in the neck.
'I was moody, and my menopause has gone on for bloody ages, so that doesn't help. It makes you so impatient.
'At certain levels Michael is gentle and tranquil but at other levels he's quite dark. He's a totally honourable man, but he isn't like he looks. He puts up with me because I make his life quite interesting, even though I'm difficult and I'm prepared to admit it.
'I think women can get monstrous, I see a lot of it, but they're so self-absorbed they have no concept of the fact that they're difficult at all.' Many disparate men have loved or worshipped her and made her unhappy.
So it seems a miracle that in her mid-30s she should have met the unusual man she calls her soulmate in the wilds of Cornwall.
MICHAEL had a strange, isolated childhood,' she says. 'He was an only child and he didn't go to school till quite late, and his parents led a very reclusive life.
'They're self-contained like Michael, they're not people who'd react in normal ways. They've never really had a parent-child relationship. They were just three people who lived in a house, so it has formed him differently.
There was no disapproval, whatever he did.
He didn't get a lot of food, so he's now obsessed with it. At home he does the cooking, I do the cleaning.' Neither of them yearned for children and Jean says she's not maternal, but the three of them palpably adore each other. When she was expecting Thaddeus she was terribly ill with a rare disease called hyperemesis gravidarum and was sick for months on end.
'I had the most appalling pregnancy; being a woman hasn't suited me at all well. I threw up the whole time. I was just a vomiting slug. In the old days, I'd have died.
'I was always being taken into hospital and put on a drip because I couldn't keep food down and I was so dehydrated. I remember once there was a lot of running around and I knew it was serious.
'At one time they couldn't even get the blood out of my arm. It was quite surprising that I didn't miscarry and that Thaddeus didn't get brain damage.'
NOW, of course, their beloved son has left to make his own life, and the sadness they have felt about his departure has surprised them both.
'The last two years he's been fairly absent, and it's been quite physically painful. Everything felt empty and it's so predictable, for God's sake. I just thought, "Oh wake up. Do something." So we've opened a restaurant instead.
'To some extent it's thrown all the cards in the air, it's revitalised my relationship with Michael and it's revitalised him.
'My husband is very clever, he has no ego whatsoever, and therefore doesn't have the need to be ambitious. He doesn't suffer from normal emotions.
'He has no jealousy at all of Thaddeus, he's thrilled at our relationship and has a very good one with him. I'm horribly human. I suffer from everything. I do have vestiges of ego and it gets in the way.' When Thaddeus was born she initially thought "What have I done? I don't know how to look after him." ' He looks very like her and she says: 'There is nothing going on his life that I don't know about.' Mothers are often mistaken when they think this, but later Thaddeus confirms it. 'I tell my mum everything,' he says.
'If I was going through a tough time with a girlfriend I'd tell Mum. She isn't shocked by anything.
'A lot of my mates think "wow" about my mum, but she's very normal and down to earth and a good laugh.
'They see all the books about her and they expect her to be like Joanna Lumley's character in Absolutely Fabulous, always obsessed with her appearance, and she's not like that at all.
'My dad is too nice and everybody says I'm like him. Mum can be quite cutting and cold.' The downside of a completely loving and long marriage is the knowledge that one day one of them will be left without the other.
They talk about it a lot and predictably make jokes about it. 'I have to admit,' says Michael, 'that Jean has got the best deal, because I would have no problem looking after Jean, whereas, unfortunately, I don't think she'd be too keen on looking after me.
'I'm just more generous and tolerant in certain areas. If I ended up in a wheelchair, I think I'd be taken for a walk one day and pushed over the cliff.' None of us know how things are going to turn out but I don't think he need worry. 'I'm very loyal,' says Jean to her husband. 'I wouldn't like it, but I'd look after you.'
COPYRIGHT 2001 Solo Syndication Limited