[Red Moon]

Absolutely ridiculous: PR guru Lynne Franks, the inspiration behind Ab Fab's Edina, is even weirder off screen, says ex-employee

My first day in a new job and I was sitting, hunched in a corner, terrified. A few feet away, my new boss was verbally pulverising one of my colleagues with such ferocity that he seemed in danger of melting into a puddle at her feet.

When she'd finished, she stalked back to her office. Almost immediately, the Tannoy, by which Our Leader communicated with her underlings, crackled into life. "There will now be one minute's silence for World Day of Peace."

Welcome to the mad, mad, mad world of Lynne Franks.

For the past week, viewers of I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! have watched in awed wonder as Lynne, doyenne of the London PR circuit, has sat on rocks meditating, done weird earth mother dancing, offered up sand from an egg timer to the gods, and generally wittered on about her spiritual side.

To those who know only that she is supposed to be the inspiration for Jennifer Saunders' creation Edina in Absolutely Fabulous, Lynne has given every impression of being several logs short of a camp fire.

Well, as someone who worked for Lynne in the mid-Eighties, let me tell you that the real-life Lynne Franks is even stranger than what you see on the TV.

Lynne said of herself before she went into the jungle: "I'm open and enthusiastic and very honest about my life, and people can turn that against you and make out you're nuts."

Not nuts, perhaps, but certainly, when I worked for her, a bit bonkers at times.

If I had to sum up the experience of working for her then, I'd say it was like being employed by Margaret Thatcher and Cat Stevens all rolled into one person.

One minute, she would have been chairing a meeting with senior politicians, and the next you would hear her telling her secretary to call some hippy-dippy therapist to find out what colour we had to channel that day.

She had this incredible energy. "Everyone would be just exhausted by her constant demands," says one ex-employee.

"She was the first person I remember in London having a mobile. When she left the office for a transatlantic flight, you'd breathe a sigh of relief because you'd think that was the last you'd hear from her for a while. But you'd get several more calls on the way to the airport; and then she worked out she could use it on the plane as well."

Actually, as I heard from others, driving anywhere with Lynne at that point was a nightmare, as she'd invariably spend the entire trip directing the driver. (That poor man suffered from terrible eczema, which would miraculously clear up whenever she repaired to her holiday house in Spain.)

Not that staff in her office could completely relax even then. When Lynne went away, her father - a North London butcher - used to "pop in" to the office.

In those days, the 1980s, Lynne ran a hugely successful public relations company, whose clients included Jean Paul Gaultier, Katharine Hamnett, and even the Labour party.

But even then she had leanings towards the whale music hippy philosophies that have so enraged John Burton-Race and Rodney Marsh on I'm A Celebrity.

As well as yoga and meditation, Lynne was also a Buddhist and would often hold chanting sessions in her office, to which she would invite selected employees.

Lynne was one of the first people in London to get into Feng Shui, the oriental art of arranging your home so as maximise positive energy.

When the company moved to West London, Lynne decided that the energy from a nearby canal was very negative, so she had a woman flown in at great expense m the Far East.

"This little woman insisted on putting water features and pictures of flowers everywhere," says one former employee.

"This same woman then came back a few weeks later to check that no one had moved anything."

Then there were the macrobiotic lunches of brown rice and vegetables that Lynne had delivered every day. "This was before anyone had even heard of exotic food like sushi, let alne macrobiotic food," says a rival fashion PR.

Lynne's talent as a fashion PR was a sort of style divination. Appearances were everything. The open-plan mews office near the Edgware Road were decked in achingly trendy furnishings. I recall one spectacularly uncomfortable chair in reception, which no one ever sat on but was there just to be looked at - along with a hip painting by the then trendy artists Boyle Family.

Then there were the outfits. "You deftely had to wear the right clothes," says my fellow ex-employee. Lynne's own outfits, of course, have become legendary. She could spot a trend long before it even entered the fringes of most people's consciousness.

"She was so hip that she could not bear to be out of fashion for a moment, even if it meant wearing wildly inappropriate gear," says a source. "I remember Jasper Conran once came in for a meeting and Lynne was wearing a cap, a hoodie, sweat pants, various medallions and massive, massive trainers. Conran looked her up and down and said: "Who are we today?'"

More often than not, the problem was not so much the style but the size of the clothes Lynne chose to wear. This became one of the hilarious running gags in Ab Fab.

During London Fashion Week, Lynne always turned up to one of her designer's shows wearing their designs. As this had to be a new season garment, it would have to be a sample.

Even 20 years ago, a sample was a size 8 - and Lynne, well, let's just say she definitely wasn't size 8. There were dark rumours of designers putting their heads in their hands and wailing at the vision of Lynne, in their designs, worn a size or three too small.

That said, Lynne Franks was still the Queen of London fashion, and she is credited by some with putting London Fashion Week on the world map.

There were other brilliant PR campaigns, too - for Swatch and for Brylcreem, for example. Indeed, by the mid-Eighties her business was thriving.

Lynne herself has described this time as "crazy", and it certainly felt that way working for her. Even the person on the switchboard appeared to be on turbo, answering calls like gunfire: "Hello, Lynne Franks, can you hold? ... Hello, Lynne Franks, can you hold?"

For someone who left school at 16 and started her PR business on her kitchen table when she was just 21, it was a formidable achievement.

Designers queued up to be represented by Lynne Franks PR. "They knew if they hired her, they'd get the best show and the best after show party," says one former fashion editor. "She was just very, very hip."

Lynne's office - home to about 30 regular employees, with the ranks swelled by fashion students who worked for her over the holidays - was busy because everyone wanted to work with her and for her. This is why I, a fashion student from Newcastle Polytechnic did; and like so many others - for nothing.

As she has described it, life then was "a roller coaster of launches, hype and hysteria". She had Ben from Curiosity Killed The Cat, then one of Britain's biggest pop stars, jump out of a cake for her 40th birthday party in 1988, with all her staff in attendance and dressed in Life Begins At 40 T-shirts.

"She organised every detail, just like everything else," explains one guest.

She married designer Paul Howie at 21 and had two children Joshua, now 31 and a stand-up comedian, and Jessica, now 29 and a mother of two.

Paul was also her business partner, although what he actually did was always a bit of a mystery. According to another ex-employee: "He appeared to spend a lot of time looking glum and sitting with the accountants."

But perhaps he was busy after all. Lynne told a newspaper in 2004: "Early on in our marriage, Paul started having affairs with women in our social circle. I was oblivious because I was working to the point of burnout. Only when he went off with his friend's girlfriend did I learn the extent of his betrayal."

That woman was Chrissie Walsh, a swimwear designer and Lynne Franks PR client. She and Howie are still married, though Franks now describes him, remarkably, as a "friend".

Still, in one week in 1992 she decided to completely overhaul her life. She ended her marriage of 20 years because of Paul's affair with Chrissie, abandoned Buddhism and sold her company, reportedly for &£6 million.

In Lynne's words: "It was a matter of life and death for me to get out before I burned on some kind of PR funeral pyre." She may have been the Queen of Fashion, but she has never been a mistress of understatement.

Franks could have just gone on a diet and got a new haircut: instead, she had a sort of midlife crisis with bells on, and went on a ten-year voyage of personal discovery. "I went though a second puberty, alongside my children," is how Lynne has described it.

Relationships with a poet, a Rastafarian drummer and a 22-year-old fireeater ensued. Franks spent the obligatory stint in California, where she lived with self help writer Tom Blakeslee, for four years. One person who met Blakeslee describes him as "like some bloke you might meet in a California whole food cafe".

As for my relationship with Lynne, I left after six weeks to get a paid job elsewhere. However, we have met over the years. On one memorable occasion, when I had become a fashion editor for a newspaper, I was invited to a dinner that she was hosting for New York designer Donna Karan.

I was sitting next to the most boring man imaginable. He was a chemist who dyed fabric. When Lynne held forth at some length about how calm she had become since turning to Buddhism, I snapped. I waited for her to take a breath and then said: "Remember, I have worked for you. Would you like me to tell everyone here what it's really like working for you?"

It was so rude of me, I'm amazed she didn't chuck her food - macrobiotic or otherwise - over me. But perhaps that would have been bad PR; so instead she gave me a furious look.

I got myself into even more trouble with Lynne a few years on when Absolutely Fabulous hit our screens. I reviewed it for a TV show and was asked if I knew who the character was based on.

I said "Yes", although I refused to name her. In private, though, I was happy to say I thought it was Lynne. (Jennifer Saunders has since denied it was based on Lynne, but I clearly remember her shadowing her during one London Fashion Week.)

Fast forward a few weeks to a fashion party. Lynne spotted me through a sea of fashion black and advanced in full Valkyrie mode. "How dare you say it was me - I don't even drink!" she bellowed.

I tried to persuade her that it might be a good PR opportunity, but she was not amenable to argument.

We have since met once more, about four years ago, on another TV show. She was publicising her book, The Seed Handbook, a guide for female entrepreneurs. (The book and the philosophy are actually a lot less mad than you might think, and The Seed Handbook has evolved into an accredited learning programme backed by the Department for Trade and Industry.)

Lynne and I eyed each other warily. I thought, post Buddhism, she seemed much calmer. I was better behaved and we agreed an unspoken truce. What a shock, then, to see her on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here giving the impression of being more loopy than ever.

For televison producers, Lynne Franks has been TV gold. But then they could have hired almost any fashion designer, glossy magazine editor or PR and they would have all appeared mad. Fashion is full of dizzy old bats.

It's just that normally such people aren't exposed to the harsh Aussie sunlight and unblinking gaze of the camera. They stay with their own kind, where no one bats an eye when they wear sunglasses in December, inside, or think £3,000 is a fair price for a handbag. Once you take someone like Lynne out of this natural habitat, she will naturally appear odd - and never more so than when she did that weird dance last week in the jungle which she claimed would "energise" the group.

Of her jigging about, Lynne says: "I'm a very freestyle dancer. I've been dancing since I was a kid, and I love it. It's a kind of spiritual thing for me. I go into a trance when I dance." Yeah, and the rest of us were pretty stunned, too.

That said, Lynne Franks is definitely not stupid. As her boyfriend, graphic designer John Amy, said this week: "Lynne can look after herself. She's tough." And despite her failings, I have always had a lot of admiration for her. She was, after all, a trailblazer.

Source: Daily Mail