The former What Not to Wear presenter on dating "boob man" Imran Khan, getting sober and wild holidays with royalty.
In the downstairs lavatory of Susannah Constantine's home in West Sussex, a pair of buttocks is propped up on the cistern. Given all the bums she manhandled during her time as a presenter on the makeover show What Not to Wear, it's not that surprising there is one so close to hand. This one is a cast of her own backside. She and Trinny Woodall, her co-presenter, each had them done years ago. The cast is "a bit narrower", she admits ruefully, than her current bum.
It is 15 years since Constantine and Woodall last appeared on our screens, hyperventilating over some poor victim's unfashionable wardrobe. "Cardiac arrest. What is this?" she would ask incredulously, gawping at an innocuous cardigan. And to another participant: "Your dog is better dressed than you are." When they weren't criticising women's clothes, they were "grabbing their tits — so we could feel what cup size they were. If we did that now, we would get clobbered," she says. "It's not something that can translate today."
In 2019 an academic report blamed What Not to Wear for fuelling the rise of rude TV, turning the medium into a place of "anger, humiliation and upset" and paving the way for the likes of The Apprentice and Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. "We never treated anyone without love and respect," Constantine says defiantly.
The Constantine of the Noughties would have conniptions if she came face to face with her 60-year-old self, make-up free and dressed in Ugg slipper shoes, baggy jeans and a navy jumper. Fashion "is not something I think about any more. I don't care about cosmetics and beauty products. It's all a load of hype."
That doesn't mean she is no longer ambitious. The married mother of three has her own podcast, My Wardrobe Malfunction, and after two relatively successful semi-autobiographical novels has written a memoir, Ready for Absolutely Nothing. It came about after she disclosed, in an interview during lockdown, that she was a recovering alcoholic. She was asked to write a book about her recovery but "wasn't far enough into my sobriety to do it justice. But it did get me thinking about my life." And what a life. Born into wealth and privilege, her family split their time between their home in Pelham Place in South Kensington and a rented farmhouse on the grand estate of Belvoir Castle in Lincolnshire. She and her sister, Annette, who is six years older, moved in "rarefied circles"; her best friend was the daughter of the Duke of Rutland.
The book is a rollicking ride from her affluent but bonkers childhood through to the present day. It is peppered with holidays with aristocrats and Elton John, and a few life lessons many of us could live by. Examples: "Don't submerge your décolletage in a hot bath" and "Don't give a blow job to a Swede if you don't think he'll recognise you with your clothes on 10 years later in the queue for drinks at a film premiere". The first she learnt from Princess Margaret; the second she discovered for herself.
The book addresses her drinking, which, at its peak, involved a bottle of wine, sometimes more, every night. "For four years I would wake up in the morning and feel guilt, shame, fear, anxiety," she says. "I'd take the kids to school and on my way back I would pray that a bus or lorry would drive into the car and it would kill me off." But there's barely room for misery because as a "shameless, outspoken starf***er" (her words), the suffering has been eclipsed by an at times outrageous life involving the extraordinary social circle she amassed along the way.
Princess Margaret and her son, David, then Viscount Linley, play an integral part in these adventures. She was introduced to Linley by her school friend Edwina Hicks, his cousin, and they started dating in the early 1980s. Constantine was a frequent overnight guest at Kensington Palace and stayed on Mustique with him and his mother. She and the princess would "go snooping around other people's houses" when they were left unattended. "She was like the Mrs Danvers of the island," Constantine says. "It's almost like she had her own set of keys, and we'd just go into David Bowie's house or Bryan Adams's house and have a snoop."
On a trip to Balmoral with Linley, which coincided with a visit from Margaret and Denis Thatcher, Constantine witnessed a minor tussle between the prime minister and the Queen over a teapot. "There were the two most powerful women in the world fighting over who was going to play mother," she tells me. At the Royal Lodge in Windsor she was dazzled by Elton John, "a wet dream of a guest" who performed for the royals. He flirted with the Queen Mother and Constantine promptly snapped him up as a close friend. She recalls hanging out backstage at Live Aid in 1985 when she was just 23. "It was George Michael, Freddie Mercury and Queen," she says. "There was very much a kind of one-upmanship between him [and them]. It was 'who had the best backstage area', and Elton won hands down with his blow-up paddling pool, a barbecue, his Winnebago. He brought art from his home."
How did she manage to inveigle herself into such exclusive circles? She was quite the willowy beauty but she dismisses the idea that it was her looks. "I literally have no idea, maybe it was my boobs," she says, laughing. "I don't know … being down to earth and unfazed." When she encountered someone famous, "they'd think, 'Thank f***, here's someone who isn't a sycophant, who just likes me for me.' "
After five years with Linley, she was heartbroken when the relationship ended. "It was on, off, on, off … it just petered out," she says. "There wasn't a defining moment that ended it." Now she is relieved to have been extricated from a world that would have suffocated her. Does she empathise with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's decision to step away from the royal family? "It's very different today and it must be extremely hard," she says. "It wouldn't be a question of your photograph being taken and it being up on the internet the next day. It was more genteel and we got to know the paps who were around. You knew they were going to be there and if you didn't want to get photographed, you didn't go."
So what's a girl to do once she has been cast off by the Queen's nephew? Enter Imran Khan, the Test cricketer who would go on to become the prime minister of Pakistan. "My boobs were always whispering 'sex' to the casual observer," she writes, but they must have been serenading Khan the night they met. "Without tooting my own horn, my bosoms were in magnificent condition in 1989 and Khan was a known boob man. There was no faffing around. He jumped straight in. 'You have perfect breasts,' he said. I was absolutely thrilled."
He was, she says, a "handsome, charming and supremely talented sportsman", but the relationship ended abruptly after a year and a half. She managed to overlook his daily hairdryer habit and the smoked-glass mirror behind his bed. She even turned a blind eye to his gambit 'When I was a rising star …' deployed in the company of junior cricketers ("Just hilarious, God bless him," she says). But it was the realisation that she was falling in love, feelings that weren't reciprocated, that caused her to bolt. For Khan, she knew the relationship was a case of no strings attached, and so, in an act of "self-preservation", which came partway through Pakistan's cricket tour of Australia in 1990, she left him a note: "Gone to Melbourne. Speak soon."
The next relationship was more promising. While working for the PR guru Matthew Freud, Constantine met Sten Bertelsen, a Danish investment banker, at a party. She remembers thinking he was the most handsome man she'd ever seen. Thanks to her friends, the models Marie Helvin and Jerry Hall, she managed to orchestrate an impressive first date — backstage at a Lenny Kravitz concert and then dinner with Kravitz and Mick Jagger. Even though Bertelsen had never heard of Kravitz, the date went well enough that, three years later at the age of 32, Constantine "managed to squeeze a kind of proposal out of him", she says. All she'd ever been groomed for was to be someone's wife. "I remember so distinctly, when I could have gone to university, my father saying to me, 'Oh darling, don't be silly. You'll be much better off learning how to make a decent beef wellington.' "
She and Bertelsen, 58, have three children together: Joe, 23, Esme, 21, and Cece, 18. After 27 years of marriage, does she still fancy him? "I do … well, so would you if he walked through the door," she says. "He's an amazing man, a great husband. He's one of the smartest people I know. He has taught me so much, especially in terms of family, because I didn't have much to go on."
Constantine grew up in a "chaotic household". In 1922 her great-grandfather on her father's side had been the fifth wealthiest man in Britain, having made his fortune in shipping. Her father, who imported and exported goods from Russia, lived "an expensive lifestyle" and eventually frittered their money away, which meant she inherited only "some beautiful bits of furniture".
Her parents "were hands-off", so much so that they failed to notice that the nanny was "moonlighting as a prostitute". When they caught her in flagrante with a customer, they were "very reluctant to let her go because the convenience was more important", but she did eventually get the sack after Constantine told them about a Saturday morning she spent in bed between the nanny and her boyfriend.
One anecdote from her school days illuminates her description of her mother as a "fragile but loving woman", suffering from bipolar disorder. When the family's Yorkshire terrier died, Constantine begged her mother to post its body to her exclusive boarding school, St Mary's in Wantage, Oxfordshire, so she could give him "a proper little funeral" and her mother did just that. At the time "a parcel was a rarity" and it was a nice surprise when she unwrapped the tea towel to find him. "There he was, like a contortionist, stiff and dead in the box," she says. "Now I look back, it's insane."
"Then, of course, there were [her mother's] suicide attempts a bit later on," she adds matter-of-factly. During the first, her mother set fire to the bed. A 14-year-old Constantine and the housekeeper "smelt the smoke and had to drag her out. It was terrifying, but also there was quite a lot of anger. It's, like, 'Why are you doing this? What about me?' "
Her mother, like hers before her, was an alcoholic. Constantine says the deterioration in her mother's health partly explains her close relationship with Princess Margaret. "She was in my life at a time when my mum was seriously unravelling." She was "a mother figure, and you still need that, even in your early twenties". To her regret she didn't stay in contact. "I felt it wasn't appropriate when David got engaged to [his now ex-wife] Serena." Yet following Bertelsen's proposal, "I got a call saying, 'Princess Margaret would like to give a dinner for you and Sten to celebrate your engagement.' Part of it was nosiness on her part, but also to make sure that I was going to be in safe hands. And it was lovely. She stirred her wooden spoon in a mischievous way, telling poor Sten how in love David and I had been."
One of the book's many eye-popping revelations is that, after boarding school, Constantine dabbled in petty crime. For two years she and a friend operated a scam that kept them in expensive clothes. The friend would forge Constantine's signature on a cheque and use it to pay for clothes. Then Constantine would call the bank to say her cheque book had been stolen and the bank would reimburse her. "It was a genuine need," she explains now, sheepishly. "There were these yellow pinstripe cord dungarees from Fiorucci and I certainly didn't have enough money [to buy them] and I wanted them." Really? She grows vaguely remorseful. "I'm sorry to National Westminster Bank. Huge apologies for being a thief."
Constantine made it onto the books of the Select model agency but the only job she managed to land was as the "before" foot model for Dr Scholl's corn pads. From there she found her way into fashion PR but it was after she married Sten that her career took off. "Don't think for one minute I'm going to be paying for everything," he had warned her ahead of their wedding. "My natural response to that was, 'OK, f***ing watch me.' That's when I started a career of my own."
Constantine met Woodall in 1994. "She thought I was a snob and I thought she was Eurotrash," she recalls. However, "I think we saw in each other something that was missing in ourselves." They worked on a weekly fashion column for years at The Daily Telegraph and started an online fashion business. The business collapsed but the column was picked up by the BBC and repurposed as What Not to Wear in 2001. The show ran for five series and their books became bestsellers. In 2006 they defected to ITV for £1.2 million but they saw their ratings slump by half and the programme was axed two years later. "They got bored of us," she says. "We got bored of us. People were getting fed up of being told what to do."
Constantine's heavy drinking started in 2008. "It was after my mother died and I don't know if there's a connection," she says. "I don't know what the answer is. I was highly functioning. I was at the height of my career, running a house and [had] three children who were happy, but I was dying inside." Woodall, who herself was an alcoholic in her twenties, never confronted Constantine, as their TV career drifted to the shopping channel QVC in 2012. "She held the show together and I think it was a nightmare for her because I could get up and I could perform, but she didn't know how hungover I was going to be the next day."
In 2013 a reckoning came after a drunken night in Cornwall. "I blacked out, fell over, broke two transverse processes [wing-like bones that jut out from the spine], pissed myself, was carried up to bed by Sten and my brother-in-law, and that's when I knew. I just thought I needed to confront this head on. Then I walked into my first AA meeting. It was like I'd come home. All that loneliness and that feeling of isolation disappeared. It was the greatest relief of my life."
Today, on the shelves in an alcove of her kitchen, there is an impressive collection of booze. "I knew you'd spot that," she says. "I don't even think about it. And I'm very happy with people drinking around me. I love it when we have friends here and everyone's getting pissed and having a good time." She makes sobriety sound effortless. What is her secret? "You've got to have the willingness, and I had the willingness."
Woodall, who is still one of her "dearest, closest friends", has been feverishly building a £180 million (NZ$342m) make-up empire. I wonder whether she feels any envy over her former co-star's success. "She has always had a business head," Constantine says. "I'm more of a home bird, I'm lazier and I'm a more solitary person. I prefer being away from crowds and that intensity. It's not something I would choose for myself but I [have] so much admiration for what she has done."
Constantine's own attempts at reinvention have not played out so well. In 2018 she took part in Strictly Come Dancing, but was the first contestant to be eliminated. "I am so uncoordinated. It was the most humiliating experience of my life," she says between puffs on her vape, though I'm not sure that's quite true. In the book she sets out a stomach-churningly scatological incident with Princess Margaret. During a lunch at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Constantine managed to block a loo, and when she failed to return to the table, the princess went looking for her. "Together we stared into the lavatory pan in awe," she writes. " 'Could we just leave it?' I inquired hopefully. Her answer was a resounding no. Etiquette prevented us from abandoning our post and blaming the fall-out on some unsuspecting civilian." The princess dispatched Constantine to find a knife so they could chop the offending object into manageable pieces. "Like all great generals, she waded into battle herself and took up the fight head-on, attacking it with gusto."
"It's a testament to her. She was practicality personified," Constantine says today, in perhaps the strangest tribute to the late princess ever delivered.
Susannah Constantine is great fun. But she's also a lot happier than she used to be. "I'm not very social at all, but [I have] my good core of friends. And funnily enough, most of my best friends, they're in recovery too, so there's this lovely support network. I've learnt so much more than just not to drink through AA, [I've learnt] how to live life, how to live every moment."
• Ready for Absolutely Nothing by Susannah Constantine is published by Penguin Michael Joseph on Thursday
Written by: Audrey Ward
© The Times of London
