R.I.P TPT - She Was a Real Character

OBITUARY

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.

‘It’ Girl of the Nineties who socialised with royalty, took drugs and partied hard but never found contentment in her colourful private life

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was the It Girl of the Nineties, famous for being famous and not much else. Although The Times described her as “everyone’s favourite nobody”, her royal connections, her air of untiring glamour and her outgoing personality that fizzed like the bottles of Bollinger she enjoyed devouring made her an endearing magnet for the gossip columns, along with friends such as Tamara Beckwith, Cosima von Bülow and Emily Oppenheimer.

With a big smile, a direct yet dizzy way of talking and a knowing look that many found irresistible, she became the guest that the glitterati wanted gracing their parties. Blessed with pretty, gamine features and a sassy dress sense, she was on the invitation list of many of the smartest social occasions.

She lived life in the fast lane. Flying to Venice for after-dinner coffee was “like going to Starbucks for me”, she said. Advertisers and modelling agencies adored her, nightclubs threw birthday parties for her, designers sent her clothes, and TV crews sought her views on dating, etiquette and the monarchy. She was given sports cars by manufacturers and became a minor luminary on reality TV shows such as I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, in which she was runner-up, and Cold Turkey, which chronicled her struggle to give up smoking. She also appeared on Top Gear, Blind Date and Top of the Pops.

Palmer-Tomkinson was also the girl who kissed but rarely told. She planted a smacker on the Prince of Wales, her godfather, on the slopes of Klosters in 1995 knowing that the cameras were watching. It was a move that propelled her to new heights, even if that meant parental disapproval when she posed for tabloid newspapers wearing very little. “It could be just a cashflow thing,” explained one helpful friend of her motives. Palmer-Tomkinson would groan at the recollection and declare penitence (“It’s all my fault . . . we all make mistakes,” she said) before committing another similar outrage.

Just as Prince Charles bounced her on his knee when she was a baby, so she later joshed about being the girlfriend of 11-year-old Prince Harry. She became the big sister that he and Prince William never had, skiing with them on the slopes at Klosters, messing around by the river at Balmoral and enlivening royal holidays in the Mediterranean. After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, she provided comfort to the princes, and when Kate Middleton and William briefly broke off their relationship in 2007 she consoled the future Duchess of Cambridge.

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson at a film launch in 2009. She was on the invitation list of many of the smartest social occasions

The Sunday Times engaged her to write Yah!, a popular weekly diary of her frantic, giddy and gilded life, with anonymous help from the journalist Wendy Holden. “She would tell me what she had been doing and I would work it up into a column,” recalled Holden, who based her novel Simply Divine on her experiences of ghostwriting the socialite’s work. When asked if she wrote her own column, Palmer-Tomkinson would reply: “Well, I live it!”

Yet this hedonistic lifestyle was not without its pitfalls, largely resulting from too much champagne and her enthusiastic experimentation with unlicensed chemicals. There were episodes when her upper-middle-class decorum gave way to displays of tiredness and emotion. The paparazzi were often there to record her emerging ashen-faced and tousled from nightclubs, falling in and out of taxis with a different man on her arm each night. It all added to the fascination, but as the years went by it also seemed to point to an uncertain future. Later she turned to writing books although, as in life, there was never anything too serious. In The Naughty Girl’s Guide To Life (2007, with Sharon Marshall), she writes in the chapter entitled Holiday Romance: “Sleeping with the Easyjet pilot is sluttish. The man flying your private plane, however, is more acceptable. Totally acceptable is the owner of the said jet.”

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was born in 1971, the youngest child of Charles and Patricia Palmer-Tomkinson (née Dawson), Hampshire landowners. Her brother James runs a ski company and her sister Santa, who married the writer Simon Sebag Montefiore, became a novelist, and a peacekeeper when Tara’s antics infuriated their parents.

Charles represented Britain in the 1964 Winter Olympics and was a skiing companion of the Prince of Wales. Patti also skied with the prince and was seriously injured in 1988 when their party was caught in an avalanche that killed Major Hugh Lindsay, a former equerry to the Queen.

Tara was brought up on her parents’ 1,200-acre estate. She boarded at Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset, recalling that she “didn’t stop crying for the first three months”. She had piano and viola lessons, passed ten O levels, played tennis and excelled at skiing. Her parents tried to get her to knuckle down, paying her 10p to clean the car, but on one occasion she gave a boy some Immac hair-removal cream telling him that it would make his eyebrows grow. He woke up with none at all.

She was not so much a scholar as an exhibitionist, although she did have a brief flirtation with Cambridge in 1996 when she proposed a motion at the Union that “this house would dress for success”. She arrived 20 minutes late after suffering a wardrobe malfunction with what she described as her “gold condom dress”. After school she did a drama course at the London Studio Centre. She then lasted four months with Rothschild’s in the City. Styling for glossy magazine was her next career move, although she quickly found her true métier as a latter-day bright young thing, starting with a modelling shoot for a tabloid.

When Tatler put her and Normandie Keith, the American oil heiress, on its front cover in 1996 and labelled them “It Girls” she bought ten copies. Even by then her personal life was shambolic, her credit cards having been taken away.

Yet the effects of her early excesses had left her physically frail and her inability to find a husband, despite several engagements, caused her to suffer a lack of self-belief. She had been decidedly generous with her affections and the list of suitors seemed endless, among them Mogens Tholstrup, the owner of Daphne’s restaurant, Robert Hanson, the son of Lord Hanson, and Greg Martin, son of Sir George Martin of Beatles fame.

She achieved further notoriety when The Sunday Times gave her a column in the Stylemagazine, writing ghosted articles about her hectic social life. Jeremy Langmead, her Style editor, recalled being invited to one of her birthday parties: “She clung to my arm for what seemed like hours. Why’s she hanging out with me and not her friends, I wondered. And then it dawned on me that she barely knew anyone there; at her own party. She was lost.” She started calling him to ask for advances on her pay cheque. It may have been no coincidence that she referred to her Christian Dior teddy as “my bi-polar bear”. She went into rehab in 1999 at the $1,000-a-day Meadows Clinic in Arizona to break her drug habit. The following year she signed up for Debtors Anonymous after landing herself £50,000 in the red.

But Palmer-Tomkinson was mellowing. On Red Nose Day in 2007 she won Comic Relief Does Fame Academy, singing These Boots are Made for Walking. She read the classics, claiming to have devoured The Iliad and The Odyssey and appeared in a celebrity capacity at the Royal Albert Hall playing the piano.

She had cosmetic surgery to her septum in 2006, devastated at the damage done to her nose by cocaine. Yet the rumours persisted. “Every time I come out of a loo cubicle people ask, ‘What’s she been doing in there?’ ” she said in 2004. Two years ago she opened her own fashion label, Desiderata, though she suffered a setback last year when she had a brain tumour diagnosed.

Following the example of her elder sister, she turned to writing chick-lit. Inheritance was published in 2010 followed by Infidelity (2012), which carried the breathless blurb: “Beneath the glamour lies the scent of betrayal.” She and her friend Rupert Everett, the actor, would say: “We’re dying to die, so that people can be upset at our funeral . . . they’ll be looking glamorous and black and upset.”

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, socialite and writer, was born on December 23, 1971. She died on February 8, 2017, aged 45