KEY POINTS:
My boss, who doesn't get out much and who most emphatically does not read the society pages, didn't think Paula Ryan was a real person. He thought she was made up, a brand. Like Betty Crocker, he said.
Well, no, not at all like Betty Crocker, dear, but I know what he means.
She has always seemed not quite real somehow; like a creation. And she was really. She's been one of those odd creatures known as a fashion personality since 1969 when, in blond ringlets and lashings of eye liner, she won the NZ Rose of Tralee. In the 80s, when fashion went mad and bad, she was the editor of Fashion Quarterly, the magazine she set up with her first husband, Don Hope. She appeared in the Listener wearing a sailor suit and a very peculiar, perky straw hat. "I was really hooked up in the whole thing. Over-dressed, over-made up, shoulders over-done, over everything."
Then she got divorced and really did get over everything, which meant reinventing herself as Simply You, which is her clothing line of essentials (it is not fashion, she says) and Simply You Living, which is advice, and lots of glossy ads on how to live, and eat and so on. And now the website: www.simplyyou.co.nz. This is Ryan's clothes and things like how to arrange flowers, how to redecorate your house after a divorce and a few mildly risque jokes she's swiped from Diana Vreeland. A sample: Old is when your partner says, "Let's go upstairs and make love," and you answer, "Honey, I can't do both."
That was a bit vulgar, I thought, for Ryan who, having been a brand for her entire adult life, must, I thought, be one of those rather grand, aloof fashion ladies. These days she only ever wears black or white or beige. She says she does have one purple top; it is hard to imagine her in it.
Her house is beige and white, "except the bedrooms are gold and black and rich colours and have a sort of French feeling about them. I'm monochromatic. My life is monochromatic." She likes white flowers, particularly phalaenopsis orchids, which are the ones much loved by formidable society ladies in Dominick Dunne novels.
These days she has an immaculate blond bob, and minimal, tasteful eye makeup. She looks a bit like Martha Stewart, whom she greatly admires and emulates to a point, but who, she says, she would not like to be stuck in a lift with because she doesn't think she'd be very much fun.
I am glad to hear this because Ryan's office is scarily like what you might imagine its owner is like: a white, echoey expanse with see-through chairs and white chairs and white walls and floors. If Ryan had been having one of her all-white days it would have been hard to spot her in here. Somebody asked me to ask her how she manages to keep all that white so, well, white and she says, "Well, you wash it, don't you!"
You can't imagine her with a beetroot stain down her front though. She looks so very clean that you think she might squeak if you touched her and she says she is tidy, although not as tidy as her husband, Rob Dallimore, who is "the tidiest man in the world". Between them, they must be hell - but she says they don't expect other people to live up to their standards. "I had a white carpet once and had whole bottles of red wine spilt on it. I couldn't give a continental. You just get the cleaners in."
She and Rob married in 2005, in the Cook Islands, and did she really tell her guests what they had to wear? "Yeah, totally. I told them all they had to wear simply white." All the guests obeyed. "Yeah, they did. Have you seen the pictures?"
She leaps from her (white) chair and runs off to get, I assume, the wedding photo album. What she returns with is the first issue of Simply You Living. She's in her own magazine! "I'm not stupid." What a relentless self-publicist she is. Of course. If you want to sell lots of copies of your first issue, here is a cover line: Paula Ryan's Tropical Wedding. But she is not, to my feigned disbelief, the cover story. "I don't go that far!"
Rob also wore white for his wedding; the bride, as much to confound expectation as anything, I suspect, wore green. Rob doesn't wear colour much either. "No. He used to. He used to wear patterns more than he does now. He wears a lot of black and white. Funny that."
I give her a look which clearly says: "I bet he wears what he gets told to wear." This makes her shriek with laughter: "I can see the headline. Bossy Cow Inc."
I think she can be pretty bossy all right, but despite all that white, she is not a cool character at all. The bad jokes might have been a clue. She is a perfectionist but she takes a badly wobbly coffee table and a faulty strap on the (black) dress she's trying out for her summer range in her stride - which means with more great shrieks of laughter. "That's a good look, isn't it?"
She has never thought she looked very good and she certainly, still, doesn't think she looks better than other mere mortals. At 58 she looks wonderful and almost all of her is real. She used to think she'd have some work done, "but the older I get, the less inclined I am to go under the knife. You know, unless you really have a hang up, and I've had friends who have had breast reductions in terms of trying to pursue youth, to me that's just insane." She has had collagen in her lips and botox and her perfect white teeth are capped and she keeps them whitened (of course). Which is the pursuit of? "To me, that's just restoration." And vanity? "Totally!"
Her whole life, you might assume, has been about looking at herself in a mirror, but she says these days she just does "a five-minute wonder in the morning. I used to retouch my photos every time I was photographed, now I couldn't give a continental." This is her favourite expression; I couldn't imagine her using a really rude word, but who knows? She is a surprising character in many ways. I'm pretty sure she has an iron will but she says she needs her personal trainer to make her get to the gym three times a week. She is the sort of thin and tiny you'd imagine came naturally but she says she was "a big girl. I had [two] 11-pound babies." When she was much younger she went travelling in Europe and came unstuck in Denmark on pastries. "I was a size 14 and I was heading towards a 16." She enjoyed the process of getting fat but not the outcome. She likes being fit and toned now but she's never been in love with the way she looks. And at her age, she says, "when I put a swimsuit on my lips don't get stuck to the mirror".
Her nutritionist tells her to stop having more than one glass of wine a night, but "that's not going to change". She says she sometimes, about once a month, will "happily drink a bottle and a half of wine and have a hangover the next day and go and have a hamburger". I would very much like to see this and she knows I don't believe it, that I think she's a goody goody, "but it's true".
She obviously has a good business brain and she learned how to run a business by "throwing myself in the deep end". I don't know how much money she's got because she says she couldn't tell me, meaning, presumably, that she has decided to profess not to know. I don't believe this because she was ripped off some years ago by a conman who stole almost $300,000 from her. She was devastated by this because she had taken the con artist into her life as a member of the family and was about to change her will to leave him a bequest of some art works. I have asked whether she has any men working for her and she says, "no" and when I ask why not she says, "Well, we had one!"
Anyway, she says she's not as trusting now, which is obviously upsetting, "and people say it was a lot of money. Well, it wasn't the money that really damaged me. It's sad, it's really sad and who knows? They say if, long term, I can be a friend of his, that's huge personal growth." Who says that? "Well, you know. Probably the Dalai Lama." He's coming in June, I say, so she can ask him. "I know! I'm going to see him."
She's a bit dotty really, which makes her very likeable. I wasn't sure she would be because, honestly, some of the twaddle on the website: "Without developing a brand you can make yourself look insincere, unconfident and unprofessional." And, "On every level women need to make conscious lifestyle choices that can range from personal stationery to their wardrobe, what they eat, how they exercise, and even the car they drive."
I go on the bus, so what brand does that make me? That, she says, makes me "fabulous. You're the best brand there is."
Oh, look, I didn't mean twaddle. I meant what a wonderful, discerning woman that Paula Ryan is. I enjoyed every minute of her although I'd still like to see her eat a burger in one of her all-white ensembles.
