KEY POINTS:
One of the most perceptive things written about Barbara Amiel, journalist, hostess and shopaholic, appeared six years ago in Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail.
"Only a few hundred women in the world can afford to dress like Mrs Black," columnist Margaret Wente observed, "and Mrs Black may not be among them."
The lifestyle and shopping habits, arrogance and personal insecurity of the former Miss Amiel, now Lady Black, was a constant sub plot of the complex story that ended with her husband's conviction for fraud.
Lady Black must now live with the thought that her extravagance contributed to the family's ruin.
According to Black's biographer, Tom Bower, "Black wanted to appear as a billionaire, and Amiel was an eager accomplice to his desire. Amiel could have discovered that her husband's income was insufficient to finance their ambitions, but she preferred not to investigate."
She has a collection of Herme Birkin and Renaud Pellegrino handbags (one cost $42,870) and 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes.
In 2002 a Vogue reporter was invited to the Kensington townhouse that Black bought for her, and noticed "a fur closet, a sweater closet, a closet for shirts and T-shirts and a closet so crammed with evening gowns that the overflow has to be kept in yet more closets downstairs."
The Manhattan apartment in which the couple lived rent-free, the lease paid by Hollinger, cost $4 million to decorate. Amiel ran a household of about 17 butlers, cooks, chauffeurs and cleaners.
Once, when Amiel's flight from Heathrow was delayed, she tried to ring the chairman of British Airways, Lord King, to vent her fury. Unable to reach him, she contacted a Daily Telegraph employee to announce that she would never use British Airways, or public transport, again. Her husband humoured her by leasing a Gulfstream IV jet, and charging it to Hollinger.
Amiel then supervised the improvements she thought necessary. They cost $250,000.
She attributed her need for ostentatious wealth to a humiliation she endured as a child. She was born in Watford, England, but emigrated at age 8 to Canada with her mother after her father left the family for another woman. He later committed suicide.
Her mother remarried, but her stepfather had trouble finding a job, and from the age of 14 she supported herself in low-paid jobs while at school. In her teens, she went out with a boy whose mother ridiculed her outfit.
"I sort of never forgot it. And now I have an extravagance that knows no bounds," she wrote.
- Independent
