Caroline Phillips

Journalism

Caroline Phillips
“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”

Caroline Phillips

Journalism

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The observer’s guide to life

Evening Standard | 3 Mar 1994

Annie Leibovitz is the star who photographs the stars. Yet she doesn’t come out from behind her lens happily, CAROLINE PHILLIPS discovers.

ANNIE Leibovitz has fixed the look of American popular culture for two decades. She is reputed to earn £1million a year. Annie finds it hard to talk, struggles with her work, worries she’s lost her touch and nearly cried when she walked into her exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Annie, 44, has shot heavily pregnant Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk, John Cleese hanging upside down in a tree pretending to be a bat and Joan Collins, who pushed her cleavage up with gaffer tape. For magazines from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair, she’s spent the past two decades on the road with Mick Jagger, at the White House for Richard Nixon’s departure and with John Lennon, pictured curled foetally round Yoko, hours before he was murdered. Recently, she left Sarajevo to shoot Sylvester Stallone in Los Angeles.

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Why did my Stephen kill himself 19 days after we married?

Evening Standard | 1 Mar 1994

A BRIDE GROOM who killed himself 19 days after his wedding attempted suicide with his former lover hours before he ended his life. An inquest on 16 February heard how Stephen Hartwell, 46, had an emotional reunion with his ex-lover Nicola Cordrey, 22, when she discovered he’d remarried. In a bizarre suicide pact, they put a hose from the exhaust into his car. Nicola said she’d never intended them to die and pulled him, semi-conscious, on to the passenger seat. Shortly after, he drove her home. Then Stephen, a divorced father of two with a printing business, drove off, re-attached the hosepipe and killed himself. The inquest, attended by his first and second wives and ex-lover, heard how he’d split up with Nicola last year just a month before meeting Rosemary King, 45, whom he married three months later.

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Mannequin’s best friend

Evening Standard | 23 Feb 1994

Jay Alexander is black, about 10 feet tall and three inches wide, wears tighter than skin jodhpurs or a chiffon skirt and high glittery shoes, hair scraped into a weeny bun and has lips that confuse UFO spotters. He’s the Terry Venables of the modelling world: the man who teaches the top models how to walk, sniff but not eat pain au chocolat, move their hips and carry double-faced sticky tape to attach to their stockinged feet to save slipping on high-heeled mules.


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Brutality that hides behind suburbia’s closed doors

Evening Standard | 22 Feb 1994

THESE are true stories of everyday happenings in the genteel suburbs. An obsessive woman looked after a multiple sclerosis sufferer for years and every day scrubbed him in the bath with a Brillo pad. A bearded man attacked his wife brutally and then confided to the police he was a practising transvestite. ‘I’m trying to give it up,’ he explained. ‘As you may appreciate, a beard and dress don’t go well together.’

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Radical results for jail drug treatment

Evening Standard | 16 Feb 1994

A PIONEERING charity is claiming success against the spiralling problem of drug crime by treating prison inmates for drug and alcohol abuse. The Addictive Diseases Trust rehabilitation programme is the first to establish itself full-time in a British penal institution, Downview Prison, Surrey, and has rehabilitated a third of the people it has treated. The work comes at a time of growing public concern about the links between crime and drugs. Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair said drug-related crime cost £2 billion a year, half of all property crime was drug related and the number of notified addicts had risen five fold since 1982. The ADT programme began in 1991. It is modelled on 200 such programmes in American prisons, most of which now have drugs-free wings. The reoffending rate among ‘graduates’ of one course in Arkansas is down from 65 per cent to 20 per cent.

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Taking the smoke to the country

Evening Standard | 16 Feb 1994

TOMORROW Romaine Hart, the woman behind London’s most successful independent cinemas, goes to the palace to collect her OBE for services to the British film industry. For the past two decades she has enticed discerning cinemagoers to her picture houses all over London and the Home Counties, from the hip Screen on the Green, Islington, to the modish Screen on the Hill, Hampstead.

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A fine romance – after the divorce

Evening Standard | 14 Feb 1994

TODAY, Valentine’s Day, divorcée Richard Fleet will propose to divorcée Gina, just as he has every day for the last six months. He’ll arrive from work and say: ‘Hullo love, marry me.’ If she says no and starts arguing, he’ll call and propose later. Sometimes he proposes on one knee, often he begs her, and other times tears of supplication splash down his cheeks.

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A marchioness who would be more at home in a grass hut

Evening Standard | 8 Feb 1994

THE Marchioness of Worcester, former actress Tracy Ward, is a woman obsessed. She lives on the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton House estate and believes in organic farms fertilised with human manure. She cycles around the countryside wearing a Rajisthani skirt and fiddles with Ladakh prayer beads. To save water, she doesn’t flush the loo after she pees. Her life makes gossip columnists gleeful. She was expelled from school after smacking the deputy headmistress, did a sexy cabaret act, stripping to black camisole, in rough London pubs, posed nude for Norman Parkinson and dated heroin-addicted Etonians. Tracy’s sister is the actress Rachel, her mother is married to Lord ‘call girl’ Lambton and Tracy married Harry ‘Bunter’ Worcester, heir to the Duke of Beaufort’s fortune. Phew! In the past few years, Tracy has metamorphosed. She’s now Mother Tracy, the tireless charity worker and Green person. She’s a trustee of Friends of the Earth, The Gaia Foundation (works with indigenous people in forest areas), Transport 2000 (to reverse the Government’s £23 billion road programme, improve public transport and cut down pollution) and the Schumacher Society (lectures by eminent environmentalists).

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Sex appeal in a bottle isn’t heaven scent

Evening Standard | 14 Jan 1994

THE secret of human sexual attraction has been solved and scientists have found a way to bottle sex appeal. Professor George Dodd of Warwick University has developed The Pheromone Factor, a synthetic version of the chemicals (pheromones) secreted by the body to attract others. Your pheromone-enhanced smell, he claims, will hook a sexual partner by acting on his subconscious.

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Flaring up with Floyd

Evening Standard | 31 Dec 1993

KEITH FLOYD is about to dine in his arch rival’s establishment. He thinks that eating, drinking and sex go together. But he’d like the sex first, he announces loudly to the genteel clientele talking in whispers as they do in nice country hotels.

We’re in Gidleigh Park, Devon, an impeccable hotel set in Dartmoor National Park and a contrast to Floyd’s humble pub. Floyd hasn’t eaten here for four years – his protest vote at the no smoking rule in the dining room.

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The head girl who jollies up the kids at ITV

Evening Standard | 15 Dec 1993

DAWN Airey, network controller of children’s television at ITV, likes her job. It was, she told a Sunday paper, the best thing she could do with her clothes on.

She also remarked that she thought children should come home from school, put their feet on the table, stuff their faces with crisps and relax for an hour or two. In a stroke, she confirmed what all right-thinking parents had always suspected about children’s TV bosses: that all they want to do is turn their kids into couch potatoes and stuff their heads with the audiovisual equivalent of junk food.

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Anything Lynda can do…

Evening Standard | 7 Dec 1993

RICHARD La Plante, former rock star and psychiatric counsellor, martial arts expert, screenwriter, actor, novelist and husband of the first lady of screenwriting, Lynda La Plante, has written a thriller, Leopard. It is, according to the blurb, about ‘nature’s perfect killing machine’. But turn the pages of Richard’s own life to discover nature’s most unbelievable living machine – a tale of sex, drugs and a woman who was once paid to talk to him.

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