Scott Fitzgerald had a theory about the very rich. “They are,” he wrote, “different from you and me.” Trudie Styler, thanks to her husband, a musician called Sting, is very rich indeed. The Sunday Times Rich List estimates his wealth at £180 million. But rich wives must think her different from them, too.
Although, no doubt, she programmes in leisure enough to soak up the privileges her marriage has brought — she has a choice of homes from Tuscany to Malibu in which to do so — she is not among the idle rich. She has kept such faith with her original profession, acting, that she is taking a play about Dr Johnson’s friend, Mrs Thrale, to the Edinburgh Fringe in August. She runs an artistically credible film company and 21 years ago she and her husband founded the Rainforest Foundation.
Its newsletter lies unread before us this morning as we talk in the sunny garden of Lake House, their Jacobean mansion in Wiltshire. For today she is not attending to the planet. She has Lake House Table, a range of “natural, locally sourced” meals, to sell. Although I protest that my bung-it-in-microwave bachelordom is past, she thinks I am the perfect candidate for her simple-to-sauté fare, what with my high-pressure job and my coming home tired. “It’s about ten minutes from opening the food to getting it on the table.”
So is food now her main interest? The famously flamboyant dresser is, after all, dressed down today, practically in gardening gear, presumably to aid the association between her and the almost-ready meals. Her Botoxed and laser-smoothed face affects horror, as if I understand nothing about her 57 years on this earth. “I don’t have interests, Andrew,” she scolds in a lush voice that she later explains was created at drama school, where they corrected the explosive consonants of her native West Midlands. “I have passions.”
Passions, I repeat. “Yes, I think it is passion. I’m very passionate. I don’t really have to do anything, I suppose, if I don’t want to. So what motivates me is when I get very lively about something and I feel I connect to it, then I sort of get switched on and know no bounds until I can make it happen.”
Advertisement
Her passions, entrepreneurial, charitable, political, have impressed the press and public remarkably little over the years. It is true that we are rarely frightfully enthusiastic about our rock stars’ other halves, and if they have bust up our idols’ pre-existing marriages, as she did Sting’s 30 years ago, we are even less enamoured. But perhaps our real grudge is that Styler’s marriage has endured for so long and with such public emphasis on its “physical side”. She and Sting, she will tell me in due course, still have a lovely time in bed.
Or it could be old-fashioned English wealth envy. Styler takes a high-risk strategy today, getting her assistant to give me a tour of her 60 acres, with their swimming pool, maze, orchard and model farm with such a variety of beasts that I feel as if, in the absence of their master, who is in America working on a musical about the Tyneside of his boyhood, Dr Dolittle should pop up and sing to us.
The estate is in impeccable order, particularly given that the family is now based in New York, where the youngest child, Giacomo, goes to school, and two of the three older children live. I later spot the other, Coco, the 21-year-old frontwoman of I Blame Coco, wandering Pan-like through the garden.
Does Styler ever feel guilt about being so rich? She recalls her first visit as a Unicef ambassador to Ecuador. “We visited 15 dump sites and saw kids who’d been born in shacks actually on these garbage sites. Seeing such abject poverty, I had feelings of ‘I’ve got far too much’. But I also do practical things. We did a fundraising concert and built 60 schools for kids, and not all those children I met are on that dump site any more.”
Her background was respectably working class. Harry Styler had been a farmer in Hanbury, the village that inspired Ambridge, before becoming a factory worker in Bromsgrove. Her mother, Pauline, was a school dinner lady, and an overweight one, but she cooked fresh farm produce at home. Bringing up her own children, Trudie resisted the blandishments of Wimpy and Burger King in Salisbury (where they attended private schools) and became an early advocate of healthy, organic food.
Advertisement
“Having an obese mum, I think, made me feel that I didn’t want to be like her. She was very pretty, my mum. I was always very proud of how radiant she was in her face, but her body let her down because she couldn’t move as fast as we could. She couldn’t join in with any of our games. She couldn’t keep up with us. I’m pretty sure that in my head I vowed that I wouldn’t ever become a fat person. To me, as little Trudie, it troubled me that mum was so big.”
Her slimness — she bridles when I call her “thin” — will not have harmed her early career as an actress. After graduating from the Bristol Old Vic she worked at the RSC and in television, including a three-episode stint in Poldark. But after Sting left his first wife Frances Tomelty, with whom he had two children, Styler’s acting career declined.
“I think it wasn’t so much that I was a scarlet woman. I think I was perceived as a bit of a jet-setter. ‘She’s with Sting. She’s jetting around.’ I did travel much more, but there was a lot of negative press about that whole thing and the offers weren’t coming as thick and fast as they had been.”
She had two children within 16 months and took them on tour with Sting. The realisation that she would need to take control of her career, if she were to have one, came later when she nearly drowned in the Xingu River in Brazil in 1989. “I thought, ‘If I get to the other side, everything has got to be different. I can’t wait for phone calls.’ ”
Saved by a branch, she phoned David Puttnam, who advised her on setting up in film production. Among Xingu Films’ credits are Boys from Brazil, Moon and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, whose director Guy Ritchie she introduced to his future, and now former, wife Madonna.
Advertisement
It is Styler’s association with polemical documentaries that stands out on her CV, however, from Moving the Mountain, about the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, to Crude, about the legal action taken by Ecuadorians against the contamination of the Amazon by the oil company Chevron. She is currently campaigning on behalf of Gary McKinnon, the Scottish Asperger’s syndrome sufferer who is wanted by the US for hacking into its defence computers. She is, to say the least, well connected, being able to bend Sarah Brown’s ear on the subject of McKinnon. Barack Obama, “a decent man and a good, warm human being” might also prove useful: he told her husband that he was on his iPod. Yet the Left does not always count Styler as an ally, often mocking her as if wealth of itself precluded sympathy for the oppressed. (“She isn’t a fan, is she?” Styler says brightly of one tormentor on The Guardian.) The stick most often used to beat her is the case brought by her former chef here in Wiltshire, Jane Martin, who in 2007 successfully sued for unfair dismissal and sexual discrimination after losing her job when she was pregnant. “I have a deep wound from that time because I thought the judgment was nothing to do with the truth,” Styler says, insisting that she runs happy households whose staff stay. “I don’t suffer fools gladly and I say what I think, but I love the people I work with.”
Easily ridiculed, too, is her spiritual life, which we have heard quite a bit about, not least when she has yoga videos to promote. “Oh, Sting and me have terrible fights about the Creator. I was seen to fling Andrew Dawkins out of our bedroom.” Richard Dawkins? “Richard Dawkins, sorry. Oh good! I’m glad I can’t remember his name! He’s horrible. Anybody who says that they know for sure that God doesn’t exist is a plonker.”
I check in case Sting has quietly converted to militant atheism, but it seems all he said was that Dawkins wrote well. It is, naturally, pleasing to discover that this perfect couple have rows in which books are thrown. “Of course, we’ve had some bad times in 30 years. We’ve needed to have tough talks — those talks that couples don’t have often enough. Rock’n’roll couples are meant to behave very badly and there has been some bad behaviour. But there’s also been some great levelling and some ‘All right, we’ll make things work by this new agreement’.”
Can I infer from “bad behaviour” that there has been infidelity? “Not specifically, just behaviour that we’ve agreed now should be different, that we should honour and value each other more. One assumes infidelity. One assumes that’s the obvious thing. But couples hurt each other in myriad ways.”
I begin to see how Styler can be viewed as a villain or heroine. For some she is a marriage-breaker, social climber and hypocrite nouveau. But she might also be a marriage-keeper, a worker who is not afraid to look foolish by speaking up for what she believes. Does she think she is a good person? “I believe I’m a good person. I think I’ve made lots of mistakes in my life. I certainly don’t think falling in love with Sting was a mistake. We just fell deeply in love, passionately in love. I’m still as in love with him today as I ever was. Even more.”
Advertisement
Did it not come with guilt? “There were a lot of sad feelings of remorse around that time,” she admits.
Can anyone really stay “in love” for 30 years? It just turns into love after a while, doesn’t it?
“What can I say? We love each other madly and I don’t know what the formula for it is. There’s certainly no secret. It just seems to work.”
So, I want to know, when will she next spend a fantastic sum on some fabulous dress that will get her talked about? “Oh Andrew, you are a one, aren’t you? When are you going to buy your wife a lovely one? I feel that I need to meet your wife one day!” Life, I try to explain to her, exists for some of us within a budget. Reprimanded, she says: “I don’t spend as much on clothes as I used to. I used to be a devil. I used to be really mad. In the Eighties I would buy a lot of clothes. I think now, you know, I’m 57, I’m enjoying more seeing my girls dress up.”
Styler invites me to lunch. Andrew, her chef for 15 years, is told to serve it by the donkeys. A look of almost imperceptible resistance briefly crosses his face before he accedes. And so we sit by the donkeys, at a beautifully laid table, eating the ham and chicken that not long ago were themselves enjoying Styler’s hospitality. She clinks my glass of elderflower cordial. Cheers, I say. “Look into my eyes when you say that,” she counters, “or it’s seven years’ bad sex.”
Advertisement
I assume, I say, that Sting regrets his boast about how they enjoyed five-hour sessions of tantric sex.
“Is the Pope a Catholic?” she replies. It was a fisherman’s tale that he elaborated over a drinking session with Bob Geldof, she explains. “But,” and here it comes, “Sting and I do have a lovely time in bed.”
OK, it is an irritating boast and, writing this piece, I had to turn over a glossy magazine that carried a picture of Styler and Sting licking each other’s tongues. But there is an innocence to their antics, too. Having Sting’s love, I don’t think Trudie Styler needs ours, but she is puzzled that we withhold it. Look out for Lake House Table meals at your local Waitrose but don’t expect to see her face on them. Styler may be a little grand and a little vain, a little different from us. She is not stupid.