[Red Moon]

Naughty girls do it in hotels

e archetypal 'It' girl Tara Palmer-Tomkinson says she has put her cocaine-snorting days behind her, but Barry Egan watched as she downed Bloody Marys at lunchtime before stripping off in a hotel room in front of him. That didn't stop her talking, though. She speaks candidly about her former celebrity lover Robbie Williams and reveals how she hid from police after throwing a brick through another former lover's window. She also admits she harboured secret dreams of marrying Lorraine Keane's husband

Tara! Tara! Tara! She could rewrite the book on hyper. Or nervous energy. Or the consequences of cocaine abuse. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson twitches all the time, enigmatically, for 90 minutes, in that chair across the table from me in the Clarence; angst-in-her-pants, Agent Provocateur possibly.

Certainly not your average pukka gal from the shires (she grew up on her parents' estate in Hampshire, the 1,200-acre Dummer Grange).

Most south Kent posh totty tend not to lose the septum nasi separating their two nostrils from excessive use of the class-A nose-powder. But hey, most aristo gels haven't had the caves where bin Laden was supposed to be hiding in in Afghanistan -- Tora Bora -- renamed "Tora Bora Tomkinson" by British Special Forces in 2001 trying to smoke out the evil mastermind behind 9/11.

And besides, TPT, as she is known in the tabloids and Vogue alike, spent £8,000 (411,780) on cosmetic surgery to have her septum nasi rebuilt. Very pretty it is too.

Septum nasi notwithstanding, TPT's face has a million expressions, most of them off-kilter and edginess personified.

Her feet are constantly on the move. Her hands are restless too. Twitching in her seat, she pulls her red Dolce jumper out of shape, by putting her long manicured fingers inside the sleeves and twisting and turning the fabric from within, until this expensive designer item is virtually shapeless. This woman simply can't sit still and quiet for a second.

It doesn't take a Master's in psychology to realise that stillness and quiet would be singularly alien concepts to TPT's mind.

"I had some of my wildest nights here at the Clarence. I used to come and stay at the penthouse here and dance in my rhinestone bikini for the river," she says, pointing down at the Liffey.

She has just stopped singing and dancing along to her own CD. It's far from the X-Factor schlock I expected. It is Marianne Faithfull in Three Colours Blue style.

Like an ab fab and size-zero Bessie Bunter on LSD, Tara wolfs down a ham-and-cheese panini before just as quickly ordering another one ("They are amazingly naughty," she exclaims, like Bessie Bunter in the throes of a food orgasm). Like an ab fab Sue Ellen Ewing in YSL shoulderpads, TPT lorries back a Bloody Mary before just as quickly ordering another one.

The show is only beginning. When it is time to leave for the airport, she wants to change her clothes. The PR girl tells her to change in the other room. Tara decides to change in front of me. She strips down to her bra and knickers and puts on jeans and a top.

She takes a bite out of a chocolate dessert, decides it's "yummy" before eating another piece in one go, and then another. I joke that they are, in fact, hash cakes. "I'd never been more ill than I was on a hash cake," she remembers. "I had one when I was about 18. I was just so ill. But they are very good, these. I eat a lot! That's another misconception. People think I don't eat. But I really want to get a big juicy bum!"

She pauses for breath -- and more scrummy choccie caca milis to assist in the pursuit of the aforementioned big juicy arse.

"Fantastic! You are going to hear a bit of munching now on your tape recorder! Fantastic! C'mon! Tuck in, girls, c'mon," she says to her friend Renee, PR girl Megan and Clarence Hotel manager Clara, from Sweden, who waste not a millisecond in following Tara's edict to tuck in.

You couldn't make TPT up. But the red tops are happy to make it up for her anyway. She says the "biggest misconception" about her is that she still uses drugs. "I am blood- tested most of the year anyway for the shows that I do. I am kind of eccentric by nature and people misinterpret that." There is, admittedly, a lot to misinterpret (the constant twitching of hands, legs, feet and facial muscles, for instance.)

Her party crown was placed firmly on her aristocratic head in the mid-Nineties when she wrote a column for The Sunday Times outlining her nocturnal exploits with various knobs and snobs in London, New York and Gstaad. TPT grew up at gymkhanas and weekend shoots with various royals; her father Charles, the High Sheriff of Hampshire, is a former British Olympic skier and he instructed none other than the Prince of Wales. So, she was well-versed in high society, so to speak.

One letter to the paper remarked succinctly: "I note Tara Palmer-Tomkinson is on holiday: this is as opposed to what, exactly?"

Another story that added to the TPT mythology was when she was told of the late Sir James Goldsmith's plans for a Referendum Party, she replied, "Which party is that? I think I'm supposed to be going." It acquired her something of an image as a poor little rich girl that has stuck to this day. "One misconception of me is of the poor little rich girl who still hasn't gone down the aisle and hasn't worn my big white wedding dress yet," she says convincingly.

And do you want that?

"No, not at all," she says, rather less convincingly.

When did you give up on that?

"I never gave up on it. I still want it. I just don't want it today," she says, chomping through her sambo, before adding: "A lot of the marriages I saw of people who got married younger have completely disintegrated. And also, I get the other side of it. I get the married men when their wives aren't there, trying to crack on to single girls. Or having affairs, not necessarily with women." This is one of the more intriguing claims in her new book The Naughty Girl's Guide To Life: married men in London are playing offside with other men. "It is all the rage at the moment."

The wives have no inkling of their husband's sexuality?

"I wouldn't say it is every marriage, but I have heard it in some cases," she says, before

returning to her own search for love.

"I think I spent six years in nightclubs. So I kind of think I've got six years' grace." She adds that she thinks she will be ready in a few years: "I love children, I love families, I believe in marriage, I believe in monogamy. I would like all of that." The words fall out of her mouth in a breathless tumble. "And I'm not going to bother unless I found the right man to actually spend the rest of my life with."

This life-partner should have, in no particular order, "a good brain, a sense of humour and an ability to say, without prompting, 'Yes, dahling. You're always right.'" On this subject, she also told the London Independent last year: "It takes a lot for me to like somebody. Maybe the woodcutter in Lady Chatterley's Lover. You'd probably get more than you bargained for. I don't mind a bit of rough." (But not as rough, it seems, as Colin Farrell. Asked to choose between Jude Law and Farrell, she said: "Jude Law. Colin Farrell looks dirty, as if he's got muck underneath his nails.")

Meeting such a man -- woodcutter or otherwise -- wasn't an easy ask given Tara's condition for much of the Nineties. The gel who was educated at Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset, and who was on first-name terms with family friend Prince Charles, eventually found herself moving in quite a different high society to that in which she had been brought up. "Cocaine comes round with the canapes at a lot of the parties in London," she once said.

Rumours that the daughter of the future King of England's ski instructor was doing more white stuff than you could find on the Alpine slopes were painfully confirmed in April 1999. Tara's appearance on the BBC's Frank Skinner Show led to her going to rehab in America.

Within the month, she was safely ensconced for her own good at the Meadows rehab clinic in Arizona. "Having being rehabbed, I am very good at being accountable for my actions," she says, "I can own my own ****."

Being rehabbed was, she says, "good, if you don't preach it to everyone else. I don't preach it, because I was rehabbed and then I stopped everything for three years. And then I started drinking again because drink was neither here nor there to me. I could take it or leave it," she laughs, adding that her friend Renee, who is sitting to her left, had to put her to bed last night in the Four Seasons after "one Bloody Mary too many and playing the piano".

It is not yet 1.45pm and TPT has already had two Bloody Marys.

Tara describes the lowest point in her life as the day they put her in solitary confinement in rehab, "and I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone for 30 days. It was the most horrifying, lonely place I could ever be. I was so far away from home. I had to wear a sign that said 'No One Can Talk To Me.'"

You're making that up, Tara.

"I'm not. It was awful. I will never forget the way I cried that day. I just couldn't believe that I was here in this place in America. 'I haven't got any drugs! And now I can't talk to anyone!' It was awful." The only person she could to talk to was, she says, her therapist, because they said that Tara was telling all the other patients about the paparazzi and her high-flying exploits among the world's glitterati. They told Tara that she was "not here to entertain people".

"Being rehabbed is quite good," she adds, taking a slug out of her Bloody Mary, "because you do learn about people's behaviour patterns."

What did you learn about your own behaviour patterns?

"That I possibly grew up feeling unworthy and that the reason I was doing what I was doing was to escape. Which is probably why most people take drugs," she says ". . . to escape something or other; or to feel better about themselves.

"But rehab helps you deal with things. In the old days, I might have had a screaming argument with someone and become incredibly volatile. Now, I would actually address that person differently and confront them in a different way. It made me comfortable in my own skin."

Or, it gave Tara the tools to learn to become comfortable in her own skin. It was eight years ago that she started the process in Arizona, but she admits that, in the last three years, she has been really happy with how things have gone. "It takes a while to get used to," she says. "You come back from Arizona like a five-week-old baby. You don't know how to eat. You don't know how to sleep. You don't know how to function without all the things you were taking before.

"But anyway," she laughs, "I'm left with all the fidgeting. I always fidget." Indeed she does.

What advice would you give Amy Winehouse? "That if she wants to stay alive -- clean up. That the party probably is over. But the thing is, unless you want rehab, there is no point having it. So, if Amy Winehouse doesn't want rehab, then don't go. She should be careful, because with the amount of stuff she's taking, she'll either end up six feet under or in jail. And I don't know which one's worse."

How Tara Palmer-Tomkinson put the pieces of her life back together was a combination of hard-won self-belief and "a good therapist".

"It was really hard work. So when people say, 'Oh, she was out last night and she was off her head' -- I'm like, 'No, actually, I wasn't'."

"You can only be yourself in life," she says. "That's the only way I can be. I can't sort of pretend to be somebody else."

She says that when she is on TV, and gets overexcited, she has an invisible microphone that she "picks up and starts talking into. That is hugely embarrassing. I did that on Fame Academy." Perhaps her most embarrassing moment was when she drank her finger-dipping bowl at Balmoral Castle, thinking it was soup. That wouldn't have been so bad had she not turned to Prince Charles and said: "What fantastic soup. You must let me have the recipe." The Prince of Wales, recalls Tara, "just let me drink the whole thing. He thought it was really funny. My mother was in hospital with two broken legs. She had fallen down in an avalanche," Tara says, referring to the tragic incident in 1988 when her mother Patti was seriously injured in a avalanche which killed the royal equerry, Major Hugh Lindsay.

"So, I was up there in Balmoral on my school holidays. Y'know, my mother had always told me to just work from the outside and move in, and I still had a spoon left. So I thought, 'Well, this simply must be soup'. I was only 16." This is, lest we forget, the terribly, terribly smart English gel who, upon being introduced to an officer in the Lifeguards -- one of Britain's most high-brow army corps -- thought for a second, before replying, "Which beach?"

Healthily philosophical about her status as a B-list It Girl, Tara doesn't believe in celebrity whiners. She says if you are going to have dinner in the Ivy and "then whinge about press intrusion, then you're an idiot. I have a private life."

Yes, I say, but you always give too much of yourself away on TV and in print. You need to hold a little bit back for yourself.

"I lied so much when I was a junkie," she says. "They lie to themselves and they lie to everyone else. They lie where their money is going. They lie about why they are sick. They lie about everything. I spent six years of my life lying to the people I love most in the world. So the game's up. I'm honest now! But I'd rather be too honest than the other one -- being a liar. I hate liars."

When was the last time you said "I love you" and didn't mean it?

"Oh, I've done that. I was with a man for two years. I didn't love him. I just thought it was time to settle down with a property developer. But I never loved him, no. I don't want to name him, but," she laughs, wolfing up more choccie cake, "don't worry, he'll know! I never loved him, but I was desperate to try and do something normal.

"I mean, my parents have kind of had it with me and men, but I just wanted to give them something. I had a very public fall from grace. I had gone to rehab. Then, I got married to some Rastafarian on a boat!" she says, vaguely, about some drugged-up incident where the captain of a ship apparently performed the duties during the Gumball Rally.

"It doesn't go down as a proper marriage. I didn't have to get divorced. Pity! I'd love to!"

But back to the property developer whom TPT didn't love but she was living with. She says that he irritated her so much that she used to put cotton wool in her ears at breakfast to block out the sound of him crunching muesli through "his thin-skinned cheeks".

When they eventually broke up, Tara snuck up to his house in Knightsbridge at 2.37am and threw a brick through his window. TPT wasn't quite expecting the noise when the window pane shattered, nor the fact that he would call the police. TPT had to hide under a car for two hours until she could make good her escape.

"My getaway driver didn't show up, so I had to stay under this car listening to all the commotion until 4.37am. I remember the time precisely."

As frank as she can be about some of her affairs, Tara has always resisted spilling the beans about her time with Robbie Williams, and then James Blunt last year. "I've probably been out with half your iPod," she laughs. "But you probably have a weird iPod. But I have remained friends with all of them," she says, seeming to contradict the entertaining report that she re-christened James Blunt, James **** after he ended the relationship. Last year, she had a six-month relationship with Robbie Williams. He even wrote the song Life Thru a Lens for her:

"She's looking real drab just out of rehab

I'm talking football she's talking ab fab

Your clothes are very kitsch

Just because your daddy is rich

You sound so funny with your voice all plummy

Now your cheque's just bounced better run to your mummy

And you know it's a class act she'll never ask for it back

Just because I ain't double barrelled

Don't mean I haven't travelled well

Can't you tell!

Mix with the local gentry and don't crash Tarquin's Bentley

I'll take the bends with our life thru a lens ... "

I ask her how she bonded with Robbie Williams -- a man with a similar list of

personal and psychological problems. Unfortunately, she mishears the question ...

"How did I bum Robbie Williams?"

Bond. But if you want to tell me how you bummed Robbie Williams, fire away . . .

"I have known Robbie for a long time and, yes, he wrote that song for me. I wouldn't go out with him then. But that's because he was off his rocker.

"And then I was with James Blunt in New York on St Patrick's Day and me, James and Robbie ended up playing pool together. I was really happy with James, and it was nice to see Rob again," she says, zig-zagging all over the place.

TPT doesn't do cocaine anymore, nor does she do linear conversation of any description.

"And then we just hooked up again," she says referring to, as I found out eventually, Robbie. "He had just come off a massive tour of South Africa and came straight to my house from the airport."

He seems -- like you -- to be a lovable but deeply flawed human being.

"That's what I love about him. I love deeply flawed people. I love people who have been through the mill. He gave me lots of advice but I don't really discuss my Robbie thing, if you don't mind," she says, smiling and scoffing at the same time.

"We had a lot in common. He is a very smart cookie. He has a very good brain. He is pretty down to earth, he is interesting. Robbie and I had lots of good times and we managed to keep it private."

Keeping their relationship under wraps was more difficult than could have been imagined, however. Tara remembers that they would sneak out in the middle of the night "wearing hats and hoodies, going separate ways, like little elves, and then meeting in a fire exit somewhere.

"It would be 2am and me and Robbie would be running around the place like cat burglars!"

Speaking of pop stars, 10 years ago, Tara was also romantically linked to one Peter Devlin of our very own Devlins. Peter is, of course, happily married to TV3's icon Lorraine Keane.

TPT is honest enough to admit, "I wanted to marry him. I think I was really quite serious about him, because he seemed like a really nice, down-to-earth guy and his family were really nice."

He went straight from you to marrying Lorraine Keane. "Well," she says, almost forlornly, "he definitely got the better deal. He wouldn't want to be with me now."

Do you actually believe that?

"I totally do. He was with me at a time in my life when I was incredibly ill. He was never the druggy type. And I was always hiding it from him. But when I was with him, I never really used."

TPT has hardly got the sentence out of her before there is another slice of scrummy choccie cake going in.

"Yum! Yum! Yum!"

Tara! Tara! Tara!

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was in town to launch Vodafone's Mobile Internet, which makes popular websites such as eBay, Google, MySpace and YouTube accessible on your mobile phone.

Source: Irish Independent