The first half of Katie Price's career was spent inviting not only the lust but the contempt of a hypocritical public, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
THE CHRISTMAS books are arriving now and we are never short of people to tell us which of them we should be reading (yawn). But this week I will mostly be reading Standing Outby Katie Price, the artist formerly known as Jordan. And a rattling good read it is too. In fact it would make an excellent gift for any adult woman, and is on sale at the moment at the special price of €15.99.
Here is Katie Price on why she will never be a goth: “Perhaps it’s because I never went to university, as most people seem to go through a grungy stage when they’re studying, but I like to be fresh and pretty looking. I’m obsessed with being clean and smelling nice.”
Here she is on the subject of her disabled son, Harvey: “I buy a lot of DG and Topman for Harvey. I think it’s so unfair when you see disabled kids dressed in vile clothes, so I try to dress him as trendily as I can.
Everyone laughs, because I’ll make sure he’s always got his Calvin Klein boxers over his nappies!”
You don't have to buy the book to have the Katie Price experience because she is a multi-media phenomenon. Last night the new series of I'm A Celebritybegan on UTV, and Katie has allegedly been paid five times what the other contestants are receiving to reprise her 2004 appearance on the same programme. It was on the 2004 I'm A Celebritythat she met her husband, Peter Andre, from whom she has just divorced.
It is interesting that one of the other contestants in this year’s show is Sam Fox, at 43 Sam is 12 years older than Katie Price, but from the pre-history of the glamour model, and consequently that much poorer. (Katie Price’s brother Danny manages her finances. “He has a degree in business,” she says. One can only hope for the best.)
It is to her great credit – and also, perhaps, to Danny’s – that she is a woman of means, with no mortgage and no debt. Her career as a glamour model may have been influenced, as she says herself, “by all the men who’d treated me badly in my life; the abusive boyfriend, the paedophile photographer, the pervert who assaulted me in the park when I was a little girl.”
In fact the first half of Katie Price’s career was spent inviting not only the lust but the contempt of a hypocritical public; she didn’t have long to wait for either. This combination of reactions, so feared by respectable women, seems to be a joke to her, which of course it is. Even her girlfriends beg her not to wear certain outfits. “Later that evening we’ll be walking into the Sanderson Hotel for cocktails and I’ll look like a cheap hooker in my slutty white dress. Love it!”
Yet she is very censorious of women whom she considers forward. “I do sometimes look at girls in nightclubs and think God, what a tart, but then I’ll think, Kate, you’re wearing the exact same thing. The crucial difference is, however, that I don’t actually ever behave like a slut!”
She is a professional. In fact the most impressive thing about this book – which is a style guide after all, her autobiography has already been published – is how hard she works and always has.
There she is, vomiting out the back of her limousine on her way to doing glamour shots in the early weeks of her pregnancies. Getting $8,500 worth of hair extensions in America a couple of times a year. Giving up on her teeth, having spent a fortune on veneers: “I paid an extortionate amount of money to get them re-done in America – and I have had problems with them ever since.
For months afterwards it felt like electricity was shooting down my teeth, then the other day one of them fell out while I was eating a hamburger and now my bite isn’t even” (page 203).
The slogan of this book is My Look, My Style, My Life. But it could just as easily be: “I’ve Had The Plastic Surgery So That You Don’t Have To.” Not that Katie has had a huge amount of plastic surgery by the standards of the day – five boob jobs and a nose job, actually. It’s just that she’s pretty honest about the mistakes – “I wanted them to look like bullets.” – and the pain.
So when Katie Price tells you that getting filler injected into your face is painful you certainly believe her. It is worth noting that she gets filler injected into her cheeks in order to plump up her face – “as I am so slim that I can look a bit gaunt.”
In fact she is a size 8; a tiny little thing attached to enormous breasts which could topple her at any moment. It is a sad fact of life that Katie Price sleeps in a sports bra – she has to look after them, because they have cost her so much money – and interesting that she announces it publicly.
This is probably the final series of I'm A Celebrity. It may decide if Katie Price goes on to become the Vintage British Pin Up, loved by all as Diana Dors once was, or implodes in outrageousness. One can't help wishing her well.