/ 18 August 2006

Nelson and Naomi

Naomi Campbell refers to Nelson Mandela, as is the custom among famous young women who have met him at least twice, as ''granddad''. Emma Brockes talks to Ms Campbell, currently in South Africa for the birthday of an old friend.

She is not wearing make-up. Her hair hangs loose in strands around a face the shape of an Edvard Munch. For the past 90 minutes, Naomi Campbell has buttressed calls with the promise ‘I’m two minutes away,” still faithful, age 34, to the logic that by saying something out loud one increases the chances of it being true.

When she finally arrives at the Berkeley hotel in London, she is alone, tall enough for scaffolding and walking with the mechanical deliberation of one whose job it is to break down movement and reassemble it after polishing all the parts.

‘First of all,” she says, ‘sorry that I’m late.” She winches her legs up on to the chair. ‘I’ve had a really busy day.”

The week before our meeting has been typical for Campbell, which is to say she has spent no more than 48 hours in any one place. ‘I was in Brazil, in Sao Paulo, then here for one night, Athens, Athens-here for two nights, then to Paris, Paris-Hamburg, Milan in one day, then Milan-Brazil, Brazil-New York for one day, back to Brazil, Brazil-here for one day, back to Brazil. Then, I think, back to New York.”

Somehow, between modelling and first-class flights, Campbell found the time to mount a personal campaign for privacy that culminated in May with a ruling against the London Daily Mirror newspaper. She had been embroiled in a legal war with the paper since it published photographs of her leaving her Narcotics Anonymous group. But though she eventually won the case on appeal it will be a while before she lives down the judge’s description of her as ‘lacking in frankness and veracity with the media, and manipulative and selective in what she has chosen to reveal about herself”.

At first she denied her drug use (‘I wasn’t ready to tell the world”) but Campbell’s approach these days is to emphasise its status as an illness, not a lifestyle choice; ‘Disease does not discriminate,” she says. ‘I’m not a spokesperson for meetings, I’m not a martyr, but I know so many people who didn’t go back to those meetings because [of the London Daily Mirror] … it’s called anonymous and it’s a medical issue and it’s a disease and we have the right to be in recovery.”

Campbell talks without punctuation, random thoughts horizontally organised. Her formal education ended at 15 when she was spotted by a model agency on a London street and since then she has lived a life in which most of the basic responsibilities of adulthood have been delegated to others. For 20 years she has been celebrated not for doing but simply for being. She continues: ‘I think with me working into my 19th year [in modelling] it’s cos I like what I do and … ” — for a second I think she’s going to say, ‘because I’m good at my job.” But instead, she says, ‘because it makes me happy,” and I get the feeling she’s been told that it might be wise, given her reputation, to police all expressions of ego.

The aspect of the case most upsetting to Campbell was a reference to her in Sue Carroll’s column as a ‘chocolate soldier”, a term, Carroll later explained, coined during World War I for cowards who melt in the face of action. Carroll denied that it referred to Campbell’s race. Campbell argued otherwise.

‘I don’t think people accept me as being British. And it hurts sometimes. But I am from here, I’m proud of being from here, and I always get overlooked.”

What in? ‘I get overlooked in so many things, like if they’re thinking about doing something with British women, they forget me. Which is fine. I do live in America, I don’t live here. It’s just something that I feel now to say to you, to remind people that I do come from here … So, it’s very nice for me last night to come back and do this Alexander McQueen show … but besides that, I was doing an event in Barcelona for Mr [Nelson] Mandela’s children’s fund, with Bono and Wyclef [Jean], and I’d asked other big designers, not in England, to contribute and at first they were, like, ‘No’. But when they heard that I’d got Alexander McQueen they were, like, ‘Oh we wanna do it now’.

‘And Lee [McQueen’s nickname] was just the easiest to work with and then there were all these obstacles, the promoter was ripping us off … it was really dodgy, and I said to Harvey Goldsmith, ‘Harvey’,” she is inexplicably shouting, ‘You did Live Aid, you didn’t need this guy, you are an amazing man at doing these things, you could do this on your own …

‘So he was, like, ‘You’re right,’ and he came. I said, we need you there, you’ve been supportive to me in the beginning, and like Lee, when it was coming at us left right and centre, he was, like, ‘Don’t give in, it’s going to happen, I’m here.’ I will never forget that.”

Campbell’s relationship with Mandela is one she is proud of. She refers to him, as is the custom among famous young women who have met him at least twice, as ‘granddad”.

They met 10 years ago when she gave the proceeds of a shoot to the African National Congress. Then in 1998 she called in her peers to do a show in South Africa. ‘And I tell you, everyone broke down. Christy [Turlington], Kate [Moss], no one could keep it together once they got in front of his face …”

I have visions of Mandela surrounded by wailing supermodels. ‘Poor bloke,” I say. Campbell blinks. ‘No, but there was a tea party and he would walk around and remember everybody’s names.”

Campbell will be at Mandela’s 86th birthday on July 18 and while she’s there, she says, she will ‘do a bit of service” which means, ‘like, going into the hospitals”.

‘I don’t do this for public adulation. I don’t let camera crews and people follow me to these things. I do it because I want to. It’s not about that.”

Her attempts at modesty backfire so outrageously as to be almost endearing. To be so visible in the culture and at the same time so estranged from any sense of how one comes across is, I suppose, the paradox of the super-celebrity. But Campbell is eccentric, even by the industry standards.

I am interested in what it means never to live fully in one time zone and wonder if it has something to do with her pathological lateness. Even her accent is unrooted, slipping between American and South London.

Campbell tells me how the first thing she does when she lands in a new city is find out where the nearest Narcotics Anonymous meeting is. Her friends in Narcotics Anonymous seem to be her most permanent social group; I ask who her other friends are and they all seem to be famous and come with a charitable anecdote attached.

One of the things she likes most, she says, is to be alone on an aeroplane, which she finds ‘very quiet and very calming. No one can reach you. You can read. You know what I mean? You’re up in the air, you’re somewhere but you’re nowhere at the same time.”

I ask her whether she thinks that, if she goes to enough meetings, she might be able to arrive at an appointment on time. ‘That is the thing I am working on,” she says.

Thing is, I say, your lateness makes you seem unprofessional. (The people she works with say she may arrive two hours late, but when she gets there she faffs around less than most models, so the nett result is the same.)

‘Absolutely. I don’t like to be late, it’s disrespectful. But I don’t ever lie about why I was late … but you know what, I’m moving forward with my goals and my dreams and that’s what’s the most important thing.”

Unexpectedly, one of her goals is to persuade young people to vote. She is from a Labour-voting background, her mother, also a model, and her grandmother, whom she looks on as her role model. It’s important not to waste the vote, she says.

Has she always voted?

‘Um, no, I haven’t always voted because I haven’t been in the country to vote.”

She is not sure whether Britain is less racist now than when she started out. There is at least one British designer (she won’t say who) who she won’t work for on account of his racism. She would like to see more black models on the covers of magazines.

She is thinking of going into acting. Her book, Swan, a much derided ghost-written novel, didn’t do well, she says, because, ‘it was too early” (in other words ahead of its time).

I ask if she’s frightened of being old and not pretty any more. ‘I’m not. I look at my grandmother who is 76 and who has no wrinkles. And I don’t think of myself as pretty, I just think of myself as me.”

For some reason I wonder aloud if she has ever been offered money for sex. ‘Never. Never,” she says. ‘But I’ve had people call up, like singers, and ask, ‘Oh will Naomi be my date?’ Oh, please, I’m not doing that shit. I would rather walk in alone than walk in with someone just because it looks good.”

What is she proudest of? ‘I’m proud of working with Mr Mandela. I’m proud to know someone like him. I’m proud he took me in. And he’s always told me to hold my head up high and use who you are to help others.”

And most ashamed of? ‘Nothing,” she says. ‘Nothing.” —