Like some great Renaissance artist, Susannah Constantine’s life may be divided into three distinct eras. Early Constantine was high Sloane; she dated David Linley, the son of Princess Margaret, and went to Balmoral, where she witnessed Mrs Thatcher battling with the Queen for control of a Brown Betty teapot. Middle period Constantine is mostly all about her television career, when she and her friend Trinny Woodall made a living out of telling women what not to wear (in this capacity, she once explained to me that I had “saddlebags” and should immediately burn the coat I was wearing). Finally, there is the current epoch: late Constantine. At 60, her focus is on her family, on her “exceptional” home in the West Sussex countryside, and on her writing. This memoir is her third book; she has also written two novels. “A modern-day Nancy Mitford,” says Elton John encouragingly.
She and John, of course, have known one another for eons. She first met him in the early 1980s, at the Queen Mother’s home, Royal Lodge, in Windsor, where he performed at the piano after dinner in a ringmaster’s tailcoat, balloon trousers, bejewelled spectacles and a cap accessorised with a sapphire brooch the size of a baked potato. And yes, he exaggerates wildly. Constantine is no Mitford. But this isn’t to say she can’t write. Ready for Absolutely Nothing is often haphazard and sometimes borderline deranged; possibly because its author is academically insecure, it also comes, for no reason I can fathom, with occasional footnotes (one quotes from a cultural history of menstruation). But it’s also pretty funny. Never forget: Sloanes are intensely scatological creatures. Constantine does her class proud with her lavatory-related anecdotes. One stars Jerry Hall. The other involves Princess Margaret, a cubicle at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich and a purloined cake slice.
Her memoir will also be of immeasurable use to the more specialised social historians of the future. Constantine’s descriptions of her childhood, teenage years and early 20s are astonishingly detailed. She professes now to loathe the snobbishness she knew growing up, and I think I believe her; only someone appalled by the more recherché aspects of social class could delineate them so minutely. But perhaps such expertise is also connected to the fact that she was the daughter of a very rich but distinctly non-aristocratic man – he was in property and shipping – whose aspirations had led him to rent his country home near Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire from the estate of the Duke of Rutland.
Constantine inhabited a similar realm to her contemporary Diana, Princess of Wales. There were nannies – one, Linda, turned out to be moonlighting as a prostitute; Constantine remembers sitting on a toadstool in Biba while she perused the racks of hip clothes; and then there was boarding school (St Mary’s in Wantage, Oxfordshire, “well known for accepting any old thicky … I don’t remember any student going on to university unless they had detoured via a London crammer”). For a while, her best friend was Theresa Manners, the 10th Duke of Rutland’s daughter and a future favourite of Tatler’s party pages. But while all this might (it did!) have seemed like Constantine’s birthright, her parents were socially anxious and frequently unhappy; her mother was a depressive and an alcoholic (the latter a problem she inherited, though she’s in recovery now).
The bulk of her memoir is devoted to all this. Here is early period Constantine in all its dubious glory. Woodall, now a makeup magnate, gets hardly a mention, and I suppose that Constantine’s late period – into which she has been accompanied by her husband, Sten Bertelsen (who looks like Morten Harket of A-ha) – is too domestic and thus too boring to make for good copy (though she does, at some point, become BFs with Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters). But never mind. Early Constantine, for those of us of a certain age and disposition, is where it’s at: dancing to Desmond Dekker with Princess Margaret; posing for Patrick Lichfield on Mustique; hanging out at Tramp and Annabel’s.
When she and Linley split after several years – he just won’t propose – she has a fling with the cricketer and future prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, whose chat-up line is: “You have perfect breasts!” Khan is not a keeper – a smoked-glass mirror hangs beside the bed in his flat – but they do trek together through the Himalayas, where she displeases him greatly by producing a tin of Heinz baked beans 1,500ft up (she was starving, having been willing only to eat naan bread in the villages they travelled through). Constantine has an intrepid side; little fazes her, not even the fact she’s apt to faint when going to the loo.
It’s amazing to think she built a whole career around advising women how they might look more stylish (What Not to Wear began on the BBC in 2001). In her royal days, after all, she sported a look that was “somewhere between Victoria Wood and Fergie” (polka dots, plentiful ruching). But I don’t know, for all that it must have been lucrative, that it made her happy, even if it was only after it ended that her boozing began in earnest (she once appeared drunk on QVC). Somehow, though, she got through this bad patch. A turn as Anton Du Beke’s worst ever partner on Strictly Come Dancing would, indeed, one day be hers (in 2018), and it surely says something about her charmed life that, in the small hours, it’s Ann Widdecombe of whom she thinks enviously, the former politician having somehow made it to week 10 of that redoubtable, long-running talent show.
Ready for Absolutely Nothing by Susannah Constantine is published by Michael Joseph (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
