When I was younger my life was completely focused on the world of fashion: the people I worked and partied with were models, photographers, designers and retailers. When I met Ronnie, fashion made way for rock ’n’ roll; I gave up my career and drifted out of touch with many of my friends. When my marriage ended and I started again where I’d left off all those years ago, I decided to focus on my passion for fashion.
I’d always loved going to fashion shows, and was really pleased when I was invited to attend the London College of Fashion graduate show and check out the designers of the future: even more so when I arrived to discover I had been seated in the front row. I was looking around, soaking up the pre-show atmosphere and remembering my own catwalk days, when a very dapper gentleman came and sat down next to me.
‘Jo?’
I turned to him. Could it be . . .? ‘Harold! How are you?’
I couldn’t believe it. Talk about a blast from the past! It was Harold Tillman, former friend of my former husband Peter Greene, fashion entrepreneur and now chairman of the British Fashion Council. I’d barely seen him and his girlfriend – now wife – Stephanie, since we’d had those holidays in the South of France while I was married to Peter.
Harold and I went for a drink after the show, and met up a few days later for lunch at Cipriani. Harold was fabulous company and a fashion oracle, but it was wonderful for me to spend time with someone who had known me from my past. When I was talking to him I felt respected for who I was, rather than who I had been married to. Harold and his friends Marshall and Chris have become my buddies (again!) and I often meet up with them at fashion and charity events.
In many ways, my life seemed to be coming full circle. I started to do bits of modelling again, on the catwalk for Vivienne Westwood at London Fashion Week and in a Fashion for Relief charity show alongside Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. Then in 2011 I was asked to style a fashion show at a vintage festival. I dressed the twelve models, each in three changes of outfit, entirely in clothes from my own vintage collection. Ozzie Clark, Biba, Jean Muir, Yves St Laurent – it was such a buzz to see all the gorgeous items I’d collected over the years on the catwalk.
It was at another fashion show, this time for organic and sustainable clothing, that I met Safia Minney, the founder of the Fairtrade fashion label, People Tree. Safia is hugely passionate about her cause and, as we were chatting, she asked if I would like to visit Bangladesh to see Fairtrade fashion in action.
‘Yeah, that would be great!’ I said, caught up in her enthusiasm. ‘When are we going?’
It was only when I got home that I thought, Where the bloody hell is Bangladesh?
The slums of Dhaka are built high on bamboo stilts to keep them out of the floodwaters of the Ganges. A system of ladders and gangplanks links this sky-city of huts, some of which are built several storeys high. As I picked my way across a narrow plank between buildings, stretching to reach over a gap, all I could think of was the baby I had just seen crawling happily along the precarious pathway. The water was a few metres below us, although you couldn’t see it beneath the gently bobbing blanket of rubbish, filth and sewage. What if the baby fell down there?
I had been in Dhaka for two days and was stunned by the conditions in the slums. The stink oozing up from the waters below was so overpowering that I got a headache within minutes of arriving. Seen through my Western eyes, there seemed to be disasters waiting to happen at every turn. Not just those terrifying gangways or the stacked-up corrugated-iron buildings, which looked poised to tumble like a dominoes at any moment, but I spotted numerous bits of makeshift hosepipe connected to the gas mains. In one house I was shown round there were something like 140 people living in a higgledy-piggledy network of rooms. They’d just kept building up and up, linking it all with a series of ladders. The biggest surprise, though, was just how immaculate the whole place was. Each room was swept spotlessly clean; the beds were made; everything was folded neatly. Despite the shocking poverty, the inhabitants were clearly house-proud.
The conditions in the slums were in acute contrast to those in Swallows, a development programme in a village six hours’ drive out of Dhaka in north-west Bangladesh, where local workers produced clothing for People Tree. I’ve never been somewhere so far away from what you might call civilization – although Swallows itself is the very definition of civilized. The village is largely run by women and is self-sufficient, with its own school, a crèche, learning programmes and an organic garden. It was such a fantastic, inspiring place.
I spent four days there, talking with the women, singing and dancing with the children, learning to make chapattis. They also showed me how they made poo sticks, which are basically sticks covered with dried cow dung that are used to light fires, but I passed up the chance to have a go at making some myself. During the trip we also travelled on a boat down the nearby Ganges, where we saw freshwater dolphins, and visited a local market. It was literally like stepping back in time to when Jesus was around: the warren of passageways was lit by lanterns; there were people in long robes; sacks of spices and bunches of herbs; old-fashioned scales on the stalls. It was an amazing trip, and one that opened my eyes to issues I’d known little about.
In the summer of 2010 I went to San Diego with Jamie and his family for a month’s holiday. I met up with Lorraine and we spent a week together at a spa in Palm Springs called We Care – except they didn’t really care at all, because they starved us and sent us out on hikes fuelled by nothing but fresh juices and colonic irrigation.
While I was in California I also went to visit my friend Doris La Frenais, wife of the legendary comedy writer Ian and a brilliant, crazy artist herself, who possibly had an even more hedonistic youth than I did. As a belated birthday present, Doris had booked me on a three-day course with a mystic and spiritual leader called Sadhguru. I was a little sceptical (not least because the course was at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Los Angeles – hardly your typical guru hangout) but off I went.
There were about fifty of us on the course, a mix of Americans, Europeans and Indians. Many were unhappy or had lost their way and were looking to Sadhguru for answers; others, like me, were just curious and open to new ideas. Sadhguru talked to us about how to live a good, positive life and led us in yoga and meditation practice. During one of the group sessions I stuck up my hand and said, ‘Hey, Sadhguru, I’m pretty happy anyway, so what can all this do for me?’ He talked about the importance of yoga and meditation and how, if you do it twice a day, it will bring you to a higher level of consciousness. His philosophy is all about living in the now, rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, because you can do nothing to change what has happened or will happen. It was a great lesson for me. He was an inspiring figure and his charitable Isha Foundation was clearly doing fantastic work in tackling environmental issues in India.
When he spoke about a pilgrimage he was making to India and the sacred Mount Kailash in Tibet later that year, I put my name down for it straight away. A pilgrimage! It sounded just like the sort of thing you should be doing if you were trying to rediscover yourself.
I roped in my right-hand woman, Emily, and off we went for a month. We started at Sadhguru’s ashram in India, where we saw his community projects – including Project GreenHands, which has replanted millions of trees in Tamil Nadu – then travelled on to Nepal and Tibet. It was the most exhilarating, eye-opening journey of my life.
I knew it was going to be quite basic, but I had no idea quite how basic. We drove across miles and miles of Tibetan plain, which looks a lot like the surface of the moon but with herds of yak everywhere, and camped or stayed in local guesthouses along the way. When we got to Mount Kailash we hiked up as far as we could go and watched pilgrims making their way around the mountain, the most devout of them prostrating themselves on the ground and praying at every step. We were told it would take them over a month to circumnavigate the 50-kilometre track.
There were so many fabulous things about Tibet, but the toilets were definitely not one of them. I won’t dwell on the gory details – suffice to say I could never face using them and always went outside behind a rock (there were no bushes at that altitude). And much as I love curry, by the end of the trip I was struggling to eat it three times a day. But a little discomfort was a small price to pay for the incredible sights we saw and the people we met, and it occurred to me that I would probably never have had such an amazing adventure had I still been married to Ronnie. The two of us had had adventures, but they were nearly always in five-star comfort. Nowadays I’d always take an adventure to some far-flung wilderness over lying on a perfectly manicured beach – although I do still enjoy that, too!
All this time, the divorce was dragging on and on. It wasn’t Ronnie’s fault, because anytime I had a problem I could pick up the phone and talk to him. I’d vowed to myself I wouldn’t be bitter about the split, so the first Christmas after he’d left I’d invited him to Christmas Eve drinks and caviar with the family. (He turned up with Jimmy White in tow.) We’d been on speaking terms ever since – although it was always me who made the effort. The reason for the delays was lawyers.
Unsurprisingly, I found the process pretty bruising. I was utterly devastated when, as part of the settlement, I had to put my Organics company into liquidation. It was so precious to me, but there was no way I could afford to finance it without Ronnie as guarantor. I bought back my remaining stock, continued to sell it through my office and started hatching plans for a new company.
By January 2011, after months of negotiation, we were finally nearing an agreement in the divorce. I was on holiday in Miami with Lorraine when she asked what I was going to do with the money from the settlement. ‘Have you thought about investing it in property?’ she asked.
The very next day we went to look at apartments by the beach. I was so taken with one of them, in a seventies block by the seafront, that in a moment of madness I put in a crazy offer, never imagining it would be accepted. It was – and even though my divorce was yet to be finalized, I nervously started the process of buying an apartment.
I finally got the keys in April 2011, just two weeks after our divorce had been agreed. I might have lost a husband, but I had gained an apartment. The place was painted white throughout when I first saw it; it took me two manic weeks, with Lorraine’s help, to transform it into a vintage gem. I was determined not to buy anything new for the place, apart from a bed and a TV; everything else we sourced from second-hand shops and junkyards. With vintage wallpaper throughout – a brown-gold shell design in the main bedroom and a gorgeous pattern of dancing women in the spare room – I indulged all my interior-design fantasies and created a gorgeous retreat that was totally Jo.