| Red Moon |
26-10-2008 08:39 AM |
The sharks are feeding on Kerry ... I just hope she makes it to dry land
Quote:
The sharks are feeding on Kerry ... I just hope she makes it to dry land Not long ago I spent a day in the company of Kerry Katona. I was on a sofa wondering at her inability to concentrate, at her strangely slurred words, when suddenly she went pale and started to wail: ‘I can’t see! I can’t see! I think I’m going to have another fit.’
It turned out that she was, indeed, having some form of epileptic fit, the third in two weeks. What alarmed me most about my encounter with Kerry – as she told me about her childhood, when she was placed in care after her mother attempted suicide in front of her and later introduced her to drugs – was that it didn’t occur to her that having a fit might mean the end of our meeting.
It was as if she believed the myth that, if you are famous, you are immune from the reality of what is happening to you, impervious to suffering.
And there she was again, on Wednesday morning, on the safe, colourful This Morning sofa, being grilled faux sympathetically by Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton about why she was mumbling and slurring words.
‘Are you an alcoholic?’ asked Fern who, of all the people in the world, having lied about the reason for her dramatic weight loss, must have known she was about to wreck Kerry’s career.
Kerry’s big brown eyes kept darting to her husband in the audience, pleading for help.
he next day the papers were full of comments by her publicist Max Clifford – Kerry trustingly called one of her four children Max – saying that his charge was in danger of losing her Iceland contract. The brand required her to be a happy, capable young mum, not a wreck, although I’d have thought her current state of mind perfect for appealing to those who like to buy everything ready-made and frozen.
Kerry had appeared on This Morning to promote her new TV reality show – what else? – to be screened tonight at 9pm on MTV One, in which she is shown having breast reduction surgery. ‘Youcan see how long my breasts were,’ Kerry commented after the footage was shown. ‘Now I’ve had my breasts reduced I feel young again.’ She’s 28.
Kerry, who described herself to me as ‘a fat chav, a slapper with stubby legs who never could sing a note’, made it as part of the girl band Atomic Kitten.
Before that she earned a living as a pole dancer. Her grandmother had been a prostitute and had tried to sell Kerry’s mum to a group of men when she was 17. ‘I thought life would be different when I became famous,’ Kerry told me, ‘but fame finds any cracks in your life and makes them bigger, takes a hundred photos of them and plasters them all over the front pages.’
She said she was always looking at the ‘I hate Kerry Katona’ websites – ‘There’s loads!’ – and that whenever she was on the red carpet she felt ‘dead unfashionable’. Did she feel her success, her stability, was fleeting? ‘I have always felt that.’
It is as if Kerry is a modern-day Tess of the d’Urbervilles, endlessly taken advantage of by predatory men, and then executed publicly for her dramatic fall from grace. The way young women are celebrated for their beauty and innocence, and then punished viciously, hasn’t changed, it seems, one iota since the 19th Century.
The big brands, the publishers, the celebrity magazines and the chat shows found Kerry’s chaotic persona riveting and marketable for as long as it suited them.
Have you noticed that young women who are vaguely sane, like Leona Lewis, get scant coverage and adulation compared with the likes of Amy Winehouse? I have no doubt that Winehouse’s record company is stacking up ‘all-new tracks’ to release once she turns up her toes and is found on some dirty floor, her naked body resembling a ripe Stilton.
Women, if they want to be famous and ‘successful’, are all pole dancers now, forced to expose every flaw, every orifice, every private disaster.
I recently got cross with the classical singer Katherine Jenkins. She had refused point-blank, with tears in her big blue eyes, to talk about her boyfriend. ‘You shouldn’t expect a career, a No1 record, a magazine cover if you don’t open yourself up a little,’ I almost shouted at her.
‘I don’t want to make a pact with the devil,’ she said, and she was right to stand her ground. I was wrong to berate her for wanting to preserve her dignity.
Phillip and Fern might look cosy but they, like much of the media and showbusiness, are like sharks that feed on the weak and injured. I just hope Kerry Katona makes it to dry land.
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Source: Daily Mail |
