In an exclusive extract from his candid new memoirs, Marco Pierre White describes how he embarked on two disastrous early marriages before finally finding the right partner
Audio: interview with Marco Pierre White
I met my first wife at the fishmongers in the summer of 1987, some six months after opening Harveys. I was living with a bloke called Benedict, who was a member of the King’s Road set.
Benedict had been a heroin addict and I moved into his place only after he promised me he’d managed to kick the habit. He hadn’t. I might as well have been living in an opium den.
Benedict was unperturbed by my reluctance to take drugs. As far as he was concerned, I was a dependent just like him. “You’re an addict, Marco,” he once told me, with a junkie’s beam of confidence. “You’re an addict to the warmth,” by which he meant the stove, the cooking, the kitchen, the work.
He was right. It was all those things which took me one morning to Johnny the Fish, who happened to introduce me to his secretary: Alex McArthur. She was blonde, blue-eyed and pretty. In fact, she looked like a beautiful doll. We went to Chinatown, in London’s West End, for late-night noodles after I had finished service at Harveys. After dinner we went back to her flat in Kensington. I did not leave.
Our relationship had been cemented, as they say, in less than 20 hours. She tolerated my addiction to work. We were young and infatuated. I was 25 years old and Alex was 21, and we managed to keep the relationship going for a year, long enough for me to propose.
One day in June 1988 we were married in Chelsea Register Office, the place where rock stars tie the knot. We emerged onto the King’s Road and celebrated at Dino’s café, eating poached eggs on toast.
I had a Michelin star by then but hadn’t considered cooking a sumptuous feast for the occasion. When the meal was finished I did have a speech to deliver: “I’ve got to get back to work.”
When Alex gave birth to a daughter in September 1989, I was delighted at becoming a father, but emotionally I was all over the place. Work had become a form of escapism. Even on paper, we weren’t a good match. I came from a hard, working-class world which, since my mother’s death, had been dominated by men. I hadn’t been encouraged to talk about the burden of grief, and because I was severely underdeveloped when it came to sharing my emotions I mustn’t have been the most communicative husband.
All of a sudden there I was, married to a nice middle-class girl. I couldn’t take it in. It was never going to last with Alex, and a couple of years after marrying we were divorced. Two people need to have the same dream. Mine was winning three Michelin stars, and that ambition came before everything else in my life.
Alex’s dream ... well, I don’t quite know what her dream was. I wasn’t good with women, but that didn’t stop me trying. Between wives, I went out with Nicky Barthorpe, a friend and work colleague of my former wife.
One night, Nicky was stopped by the police when driving me home from Harveys. After accusing her of taking an illegal left turn, they asked if she’d had a drink. Having done a tough night at the stove, I found it all a bit too demanding. I lurched forward when the drugs question came up, most likely looking haggard and sweat-drenched. I refused to back down unless they apologised, and consequently found myself handcuffed and heading for a cell at Battersea nick.
As I was bound over to keep the peace, one of the magistrates said: “We’d like you to sign the book on the way out, Mr White.” I assumed she was referring to White Heat, which had recently been published. “I’m terribly sorry, your honour,” I replied, “but I didn’t bring a copy with me.” “Not your book,” she said impatiently, “our book.” She pointed towards the clerk’s office, where reprobates have to sign various court documents.
My tortured life – with its extremes and conflicts – might have been difficult for me to deal with, but the press couldn’t get enough of it. I was in the papers every day, “the enfant terrible of the culinary world”.
My cooking attracted celebrities. I met Sylvester Stallone. He squeezed my bicep and said: “I don’t usually eat your kind of food, but for you I ate it.” I haven’t got a clue what he’d eaten but he asked me to cook for his wedding feast when he married Jennifer Flavin at Blenheim Palace.
Later, I would open the Titanic restaurant in Soho. Will Smith, the movie star, would be up on stage singing. The Spice Girls would be on podiums, dancing away. On a table over there was Hugh Hefner, the Playboy boss, with dolly birds.
Damien Hirst would be finishing his food and wiping the plate on his stomach and, hang on, now he’s getting his cock out and walking along the bar. Is that David Beckham and Noel Gallagher in the corner? Robbie Williams arrived, with the police in hot pursuit: he had taken a photographer’s car keys and thrown them down a drain.
At the Mirabelle, my Mayfair restaurant, Johnny Depp chased the paparazzi down the street with a plank of wood – he was arrested and later released on condition he autograph the plank for the police.I cooked for Fergie at her friend’s house – but what I really hated at such events was the point at which I was asked to come out of the kitchen and meet the guests.
At Fergie’s, I baled out after the main course, leaving Gordon Ramsay to do the puddings.In 1996, the Prince of Wales asked me to cook for him. It was to be a grand affair, with the violinist Vanessa Mae entertaining Prince Charles’s 200 guests.
The performing seal prospect seemed even more chilling than usual.The heir to the throne gave me a confident handshake and said, “Bonjour Monsieur White...” For three minutes I listened to his monologue, each and every word of it in French. I just nodded along – it would have been rude to interrupt – and he handed me a little collection of books about Highgrove, each inscribed to “Monsieur Pierre White’.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” I said, “but I’m not French. I grew up on a council estate in Leeds...”He looked at his assistant as if to say “You’ve ––––ing done it this time, boy. You’ve made me feel like the biggest prick in history.”
I had my picture taken standing beside a red-faced Prince. A year later I was asked to cook for his ex-wife, Princess Diana. Shortly before the date, she died in Paris. Needless to say, the lunch was cancelled.
I had met a certain Heather Mills some time before, when she dated a friend – in fact we all briefly shared a flat. She has since acquired global fame by becoming the wife – and then estranged wife – of Paul McCartney. I think I am within my rights to give my opinion of Heather and say quite frankly that I did not like her. I tried to avoid her company because I found she had a smothering effect.
On the day of Diana’s death, she phoned my friend. He came off the phone and said: “Heather thinks that she could take Diana’s role on that landmine charity.”
With fame came sex. Encounters with female customers in the ladies’ loos at Harveys, knickers in the post.
My adrenaline addiction dictated that when I’d finished a 17-hour day at Harveys I didn’t particularly want to go home and sleep. I would go to Tramp, the renowned rock star-crammed nightclub just off Piccadilly. I didn’t dance and I didn’t drink, but I liked the place, with its beautiful people.
Tramp was the setting for an encounter with Lisa Butcher, the woman who would become my second wife. We had met two years before – but I didn’t remember her face. She had been at photographer Norman Parkinson’s birthday party at Harveys – an 18-year-old model, dressed glamorously in a sailor’s suit.
I invited her for coffee at Harveys the next afternoon, followed by a walk on Wandsworth Common. It was all quite romantic. The next thing I knew we were partners.
Lisa was undoubtedly one of the most exquisite-looking women in the world. I was enchanted by her beauty, and that was the problem. The mere sight of her was so amazing that I completely forgot to think about her personality. Within three weeks of meeting her at Tramp I had proposed with the line “Do you fancy running off and getting married?”.
What on earth was I playing at? I thought I was happy, but I was lonelier than I had ever been. If I’m honest with myself, I never had any emotions for Lisa. It wasn’t her fault. Apart from having nothing in common, there was also a big age difference – she was 21 and I was 30.
Of course, I didn’t step away from my one true love. I continued to work like a dog at Harveys while Lisa set about organising the wedding, a Catholic number at Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge, followed by a reception for 70 guests at the Hurlingham Club, beside the Thames in Fulham.
The night before the wedding I met a Harveys regular, Rafiq Kachelo. A huge spender, he would order a £2,000 bottle of Petrus ’55 – and that was just as an aperitif. He said: “Never let an illusion turn into a delusion.”
Those words came back to me in the Brompton Oratory, on August 14 1992, as my bride walked down the aisle towards me and my best man, the chef Albert Roux. It was all so showbizzy, the rock star chef marries the upmarket young model. The illusion that I could be as successful in the home as I had been in the kitchen was rapidly turning into a delusion.
I do remember thinking I shouldn’t be there, but there was something inside me which said that rather than cancel the whole thing, it was better to go through with the wedding, let Lisa have her big day and then let it break down naturally afterwards. It seemed like an easier blow, though I accept that many people may be appalled by my rationale.
It didn’t take long for it to break down. A reporter had asked for my opinion of the bride’s dress – a floor-length, backless white dress designed by Bruce Oldfield – and I mumbled something about how she looked like she had dressed to go down the catwalk rather than the aisle, spawning endless newspaper features on my unkind remark.
Even at the reception, as guests chatted over Champagne, I disappeared into the kitchen to check up on the wedding breakfast: terrine of salmon and langoustines in a Sauternes jelly followed by a fillet of scotch beef en croûte with pommes fondants, and the Madeira-based sauce périgueux. Amid the heat, the smells, the noise and the pressure, I felt secure.
I don’t remember blazing rows with Lisa; it just fizzled out. Within 15 weeks we had separated. Let it break down naturally, I had told myself before taking my vows. And it did.
Some months later, Lisa tried to get back together, but I realised I had lost my heart to someone else. I had been flirting with the Spanish bar manager, Mati, at my new restaurant, the Canteen.
Nevertheless, I had promised to spend New Year’s Eve 1992 with my estranged wife, and it was a promise I kept. Mati asked my plans. “That’s nice,” she said sweetly. “You’re going to try and make it work again, then?” I said: “Well, I’m not in love with her. I’m in love with somebody else.” “Who?” asked Mati. I didn’t tell her and she didn’t think I was referring to her.
About eight years ago I was in the Pharmacy, in Notting Hill, with Mati – by then my wife, and the only woman, apart from my mother, I have ever truly loved. A woman walked into the restaurant and all heads turned to observe the apparently striking blonde. I glanced at her but couldn’t see it myself. Then I thought, I know those looks; I’ve seen them before.
A few minutes later she walked towards our table and said: “Hi, Marco.” I realised it was Lisa, my ex-wife. Just like that night in Tramp, I had failed to recognise her. “Do I get a kiss from you, Marco?” she asked, but my immediate reaction was to recoil. My marriage to her had been a mistake and I don’t have many good memories of it.
Lisa just walked back to her table. A couple of minutes later, though, I felt a thud on my chest as I was hit by a missile, an ice cube. In the old days, the days when I did spontaneous things like marrying Lisa, I would have responded rock-star style by charging over to the table with a bucketful of ice.
But then I did nothing. Lisa had finally exacted her revenge.
- Copyright Marco Pierre White and James Steen 2006. Extracted by Zoe Brennan from “White Slave” by Marco Pierre White, published by Orion on 23 August. To order for £18.00 (rrp £20.00) + £1.25 p&p, call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 428 4112
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