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Being Davina. Nigel Goodall
Читать онлайн.Название Being Davina
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781843586845
Автор произведения Nigel Goodall
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Such addictions or just generally bad behaviour do seem to haunt celebrities when, at some time or another in their career, their public profile falls from grace. It’s always the ones least likely to tarnish their reputations, too. Some would reason that is why Winona Ryder shoplifted thousands of dollars’ worth of designer clothes and accessories from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills in December 2001. At the time, the question on everyone’s lips was why would anyone worth $30 million need to steal what she could easily buy. Many were convinced it was Ryder’s cry for help.
But anorexia is a different story. It was, after all, what killed singer Karen Carpenter, who was the first celebrity to die after battling with the disorder for seven years. What is so strange about Karen’s untimely death, however, is that she had no death wish. It was quite the opposite, in fact. She wanted to go on making music and expand her talent into other fields of entertainment throughout her life. If anything, Karen was a traditional showbusiness trouper. And yet anorexia seems to have been her cry for help. The question is, was it just an ugly and deadly equaliser for attention alongside her older brother, Richard, who was treated as the senior by their mother, and without whom Karen thought she would have no career? Or was it the fact that, because Karen never considered herself truly pretty enough to stand on a stage, starving was aimed at correcting her lack of self-esteem.
Whatever it was, according to Britain’s Concise Medical Dictionary, ‘anorexia nervosa is a psychological illness, most common in female adolescents, in which the patients have no desire to eat; eating may in fact be abhorrent to them. The problem often starts with a simple desire to lose weight, which then becomes an obsession. The result is a severe loss of weight and sometimes starvation. The underlying cause of the illness is complicated – problems in the family and rejection of adult sexuality are often factors involved.’
Of course, Davina’s fight with anorexia was less fateful than Karen Carpenter’s and not so prolonged. It probably started when she felt she needed a hug and to be told she was loved – which sounds strange when you consider all the love she had showered on her from her ‘three families’. But, according to her, it only lasted a couple of months and ‘was a weird mixture of superbly confident and terribly insecure’.
In truth, as she admits herself, ‘I was a troubled adolescent, who needed help and didn’t know how to ask, so I did something radical to get noticed.’ Perhaps more brutally, the reasons behind it may have been the all-too-familiar cocktail of teenage self-loathing and lack of self-worth. Certainly, says Davina, ‘I thought I was ugly and fat. I missed my mum and felt confused, so I stopped eating for attention but more as a cry for help. Adolescence hit me hard. Suddenly, I couldn’t talk to people, couldn’t make myself understood – I was hurting.’
Isn’t that what adolescence is all about, though? During the making of Mermaids in 1989, Winona Ryder would agree. It was a film she liked, ‘because it shows the inconsistencies of being an adolescent – their sudden changes of mood’. That inconsistency is what she related to in her role as Cher’s screen daughter, Charlotte Flax. ‘One day she’ll be obsessed with Catholicism, but the next day she’ll be obsessed with Joe the gardener. And the next day she’ll want to be an American Indian. I had really been going through stuff like that. I would think, “I’m going crazy! I don’t know what I want! I don’t know who I am.” Sure, Charlotte’s role was exaggerated,’ she admits. ‘But things are exaggerated at that age.’ Winona saw Charlotte as ‘the epitome of inconsistent teen angst’. She explains, ‘You reach a point where you stop communicating because you can’t articulate what you’re feeling. You assume your parents can read your mind. You’re confused, they’re confused – it’s a party of confusion.’ And, of course, she was right. Wasn’t that exactly what Davina was feeling and going through herself?
Although she was being treated like a goddess at home, at Bramley’s St Catherine’s Junior School near Guildford in Surrey, it was a different story entirely. That was when her troubles really began. Not that the school was to blame. In fact, there could not have been a better choice. Founded in 1885, by the time Davina enrolled there, the school had enjoyed over a century of tradition and already prided itself on its own very special blend of academic excellence and pastoral care. Certainly, as a girl’s school, St Catherine’s ensured that its students developed in an environment which made the girls believe that, whatever they did, there was nothing they could not achieve. Well, in Davina’s case, that was certainly true…
All the same, ‘I was given quite a hard time because I was so different; I got bullied and taunted about it,’ remembers Davina. ‘These girls sang little songs about me because I lived with my grandparents. And not having any money. It was a difficult time – I was teased mercilessly.’ But overall she says she had a rosy childhood. Any child of her age would probably admit it sounded pretty idyllic, if you think about it – flitting between public school and London, France and holidays at plush ski resorts, such as Verbier, where she was spoiled rotten by her mother. While staying in France during her teens, she lost her virginity to a French boy. She remembers it as being totally unromantic. But having sex in a club’s DJ booth some years later was better – well, sort of. As Davina explains, it happened while she was in charge of the music: ‘I managed to carry on playing the records, though; it was so funny.’
Not so funny, and around the same time, was when she was caught peeing between two cars during a girls’ night out. She was left mortified when one of the car’s headlights came on, revealing her mid-pee. Davina cringed, ‘I’d crouched down and started to pee when one of the cars switched its headlights on and began to move away. I was in mid-flow so I couldn’t stop. It was night-time so at least it was dark, but nevertheless it was extremely embarrassing.’
By the time she returned to live with her father and his new wife Gaby in West London, she had turned 13, and was now enjoying a happy middle-class childhood and about to start a new school. This was when Gaby effectively became her mother and, according to Davina, ‘never made me feel excluded’. She became much closer to her than she was to her own mother, who by October 2005 was on her fourth marriage and living in South Africa. Going home to live with her father, however, was when Davina’s anorexic problems beckoned, and her weight reduced down from nine stone to a skeletal six.
It was only when a close friend spotted the problem and told her parents that ‘they sat me down with a salad and said, “Eat it and let’s talk” that the floodgates opened. They were more than willing to give me the support – I just had to ask. After that, I went back to eating normally. I was lucky because I haven’t been dogged with it.’
In another, more elaborate telling, Davina recalls that, ‘as soon as my dad and my stepmum realised I wasn’t eating, they put a stop to it. They sat me down and had a really good chat. It was like a block; I needed someone to ask if I was all right and for me to tell them. I felt awful and let it all come out, which it did.’ The only downside to it all, as she explains, was that ‘my father worked hard to send me to a posh school, and there was never any money left over’.
That ‘posh school’, as she describes it, was the Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, West London, which was not only academically high achieving but also hip and fashionable. For someone like Davina, who could probably best be described at that time as a sweet country tomboy, it could have seemed quite a pressurised environment in which to be educated. Situated on a four-acre site with its own playing fields, the school was very conveniently placed just a five-minute walk from Hammersmith Broadway tube. Although several additions have been made to the original Victorian building since she attended, including a gymnasium, pottery room, computer suites and a language laboratory, it was then a school for 700 girls aged between 11 and 18.
Built in 1861 as the Godolphin School, a boarding establishment for boys, and set in fields near the River Thames at Hammersmith in 1905,