Stalkers are a girl's worst enemy
The mystery man dogging Carol Woolton was only after one thing Emily Diane Leatherman was arrested recently outside the house of the actor Tom Cruise for what the Beverly Hills Police Department described as showing 'an unusual interest' in him The majority of lifestyle trends begin with a celebrity endorsement in Hollywood before filtering down to the high street, but I can report that the culture for stalking has moved beyond the preserve of the stars to become a fully fledged fashion.
'You're no one until you've had a stalker,' a member of the Metropolitan Police told me recently when I went to report mine at Savile Row police station. I hadn't realised that receiving nuisance calls and threatening behaviour had reached a level of significance comparable to bagging the new shoulder Birkin by Hermes or Roland Mouret's Moon frock. Not all stalkers suffer from the manifestation called erotomania, involving fantasies of love and affection — many have other motivations. The UK and European chairmen of Sotheby's, James Stourton and Henry Wyndham, shared the same stalker for a while. As both reach an elegant 6ft Sin, swaying around London giving good art-talk to admiring women, I assumed their stalker simply had the same taste in men. 'No,' said Stourton. 'Actually I think it was a job she was after.' My stalker's ulterior motive was to perform a diamond heist on the biggest names in Bond Street using his fictitious relationship with me.
'I didn't know you had a new male assistant,' said a well-known jeweller, alerting me to my problem. Within the next six weeks this man had relentlessly hassled jewellers around the country, inventing shoots using facts about my whereabouts, which were frighteningly accurate at times, and plausiblesounding information about how we work. 'He sounded very Vogue,' said one diamond dealer. He must have been the first to grab the latest issue each month off the newsstand then immediately called every jeweller featured. 'Why is he picking on my pages?' I moaned to my editor, Alexandra Shulman. 'I mean, what's wrong with Harper's Bazaar?'
The police took little notice, this wasn't a case of life or death, they said, and even Carol Woolton in the new Cartier shop at 175-177 New Bond Street when Stephen Webster's wife Assia had him apprehended in their showroom and dialled 999 they failed to respond to the call. When he did eventually succeed in stealing a diamond brooch, I secretly breathed a sigh of relief: finally a crime had been committed so the police would swing into action. 'It does seem to be a personal vendetta,' said the DC at Savile Row, who gave me an alarm to carry and said if I felt threatened, to try my luck dialling 999. 'Having a stalker has become almost like a fashion accessory,' she confided.
If anyone knows about fashions sweeping through London, I knew that Nicky Haslam would. 'Of course I've got a stalker, darling,' he said. 'She's a I7-year-old lesbian who lives in Southend.' I asked him how he knew where she lived. 'I went to her birthday party. Well, she spends so much time standing outside my house, I thought it was the least I could do.' The social historian Geoffrey Munn, from the BBC's Antiques Roadshow, is convinced that television fuels stalking behaviour by giving ordinary people a public persona. 'I was talking about the romance of jewellery on a programme and describing the Doves of Venus on a particular piece,' he says about his own experience. 'Then the mother of all love letters started coming in, highly sexually charged, from this woman who thought I was talking directly to her.' After months of 'bothering' Munn the police called at her house to warn her to stop. 'That worked,' says Munn, 'because she transferred her affections to the police constable who visited her.'
My own television career has reached the humiliating heights of being interviewed by Jimmy Tarbuck (wearing a full fake set of the crown jewels), who introduced me, in retrospect, with the unhelpful statement, 'This is the woman who goes to work with hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of diamonds in her bag.' My 'assistant' was no doubt a chancer whose knowledge about the mechanics of a magazine could have easily been picked up from watching Ugly Betty, the television programme about a fashion magazine in New York. It's a possibility that 'citizens' are being targeted because stalkers can't get near the stars through their ranks of burly bodyguards. Actually, I think to be followed by a guard from Harry Winston or Tiffany would be the height of chic and should immediately become my new fashion addition. Stalkers are so last season.
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