Please Let It Stop (20 page)

We lasted about a month before I was feeling the need for space again. I was having enough trouble looking after myself and I just couldn’t cope with Dan’s constant negativity, which was draining me and was too much of a burden. I decided to escape once more and this time I went to Dubai, taking Dan’s younger sister Charlotte with me for company.

Even if our relationship could be fixed I wasn’t sure that he was committed enough. I also questioned whether we’d put ourselves into roles that we just couldn’t change. The
subject came up in greater detail a few months later when Dan left for a third time – his choice. This time I decided that we should have no contact for at least a few months so I could move on. After two months he started sending emails. One of these was asking my advice on what he should do to make things between us right. My reply to him in September 2004 went like this:

I expect my man to look after me rather than the other way around. I don’t want to be put on a pedestal. I want to be loved for who I am as a person, cherished and looked after unconditionally. I want my man to be my equal but most importantly to be a real man. A man wouldn’t run when things went wrong. He would face the issues and deal with them. I have never felt so abandoned and discarded in my life … I don’t want to replace anyone’s mother. I am a woman who wants to feel sexy and confident with the right man, to support him in times of need, but not to make every decision … It’s hard for me to advise you because firstly I am not sure how I feel and also because I just don’t want to play that role any more – it’s draining and unsexy!

While we were apart I was making a strong effort to get on with my life. I’d been away with Sandie and Vanessa for a girlie weekend in Marbella. I’d also spent a few days in Bordeaux with Carole at Sid Owen’s house. I had originally met Sid through Carole after I split up from Ben. We got on
really well. Since then it seems that every time I break up with someone I go and stay at Sid’s house and he has become a good friend. What I like about him is what you see is what you get. What you saw on
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here
in 2005 is exactly how he is in real life, minus the jungle gear. He is a great host, and an excellent cook who produces wonderful breakfasts and a great Sunday roast. He’s very well adjusted and not at all pretentious, as some actors are. He has a lovely home in Bordeaux and also owns a restaurant. When we’re there it’s very relaxed. We watch TV, go shopping and sit in cafés drinking delicious hot chocolates and munching croissants. On this occasion I’d decided to take him an Ann Summers goody bag containing, among other things, a pair of handcuffs covered in leopard print fake fur. He was beaten to them by security at Gatwick airport, who promptly confiscated them.

There were other moments of happiness as well. My friend Carole asked me to be godmother to her son, Ben. I was overjoyed and in August 2004 attended his christening. There I met Joanna, whom I would describe as a cross between Glynis Barber and Meg Ryan, and we became immediate friends. She was both womanly and girlie, with her own highly developed sense of style, often favouring vintage clothes. When I met her she was fifty-one years of age, yet had the most amazing, sexy figure that younger women envied. She also had a brilliant, quirky sense of humour. Joanna would invite us all to dinner and nothing
would be prepared. Instead we would be bundled into the kitchen, given loads of champagne and told to cook ‘as creatively as possible’. Of course, we would be totally drunk by the time we ate but Joanna pointed out that everything tasted better that way. I called her ‘my lucky star’. We had many sunny afternoons in my garden, drinking rosé and eating cake that she’d baked and brought with her. I also appreciated the fact that Joanna had a different perspective from my other friends. When she met Dan, she immediately understood why I had fallen for him. When things between Dan and me went downhill she even offered to talk to him.

At about the same time as I met Joanna, Dan started really begging me to come back. He said he couldn’t live without me and he wanted to make a go of it. We would have more IVF and if that didn’t work he was willing to investigate other options, even adoption. It had suddenly occurred to him that not having children was not the end of the world, a view I’d always held and still do. I was not convinced of his sudden positive outlook. I wondered whether these were real feelings or simply a consequence of his inability to cope without me. He’d once admitted in an email that the age gap had bothered him – I still had no idea if he’d ever resolved that. Could I cope with the insecurity of being with him again? Would the pain of missing me while we were apart soon pass, only to be replaced once again by the issues that drove him away the last time? I think that, deep down, I knew it probably wouldn’t work,
and that it had stopped working a while ago – but there was a hopeful part of me that wanted to believe in him.

As we all know, with relationships it’s not over until it’s over, which means that even when there is just the merest sliver of hope it’s tempting to cling to it. I’d actually been doing all right without him. The therapy was going well and I was feeling much stronger. I had a great circle of friends, a full social calendar and a job I was passionate about. My brain said ‘no’ but my heart said ‘yes’. Well, I listened to my heart and Dan came back, full of promises and the mention of marriage. It sounded too good to be true, and it was. But we’d never fixed the things that had undermined our relationship from the start – Dan’s negativity, his need for me to take care of things and of him, our differing views on the part children would play in our lives – so we really didn’t have a secure basis for going forward. It’s a common mistake that lots of people make. Getting back together takes far more effort than getting together at the start, and maybe we didn’t have it in us any more. But we had time, something my friend Joanna didn’t.

The things that shine brightest often burn out the quickest, and that’s what happened to Joanna. In 2005 she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. This was a woman who, just before I’d met her, had survived early breast cancer. She’d come through a lot. She’d run a very successful IT company and owned a beautiful house in Sussex. Her boyfriend had not only cheated on her, but had also embezzled
£100,000. After that she became depressed, but she had tried to be positive about things. You would expect nothing less of Joanna. She was an example to all of us.

Joanna was a fighter but her cancer was far too advanced for her to get through it so the emphasis was on extending her quality of life. She handled it all with humour, grace, deep spirituality and her customary sexiness! I remember she had a crush on her oncologist, Bob, and one day when I went to see her in hospital there she was sitting up in bed, hair up like Pebbles from
The Flintstones
, wearing a short nightie and surgical stockings – she could even make those particular garments look sexy!

Sadly, or perhaps mercifully, the end was relatively quick. When she was diagnosed in June 2005 I decided to arrange a photo shoot with my close girlfriends. I’d been wanting to do it for a while but when the severity of Joanna’s illness was known I decided to do it as quickly as possible. All the girls were there – Val, Sandie, Carole, my sister Vanessa and Joanna. I had Chris Harding take the photographs and brought in my own make-up artist, Virginia, whom I knew very well. Joanna was very poorly but nevertheless came to the shoot, and we made her feel special. She was sick from the chemotherapy she’d undergone that morning, but once Virginia had transformed her she turned it on for the camera like she always could.

In November 2005, five months after her diagnosis, Joanna went home to New Zealand to die with her family
around her. We sent one of the pictures taken on that day and they put it in her coffin. She meant a lot to us and I think of her often. Once we went to this charity auction where I had my eye on a signed book by Salvador Dali and Joanna helped me bid. There was also a hideous painting of a Buddha that she insisted I had to have, and she made me go for it. Now it’s in my study at home and reminds me of a beautiful friend who is no longer with me.

It was a period of contrasts. A woman who lived emphatically for the moment, and squeezed everything out of it, had suddenly left us while, not far away, Dan was still trying to work out what mattered in life.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I’d been in therapy for over a year now and in that time had worked through all of the problems associated with my past. I had finished the medication I had been prescribed and my therapy sessions were coming to an end. I was no longer anxious or despairing and felt much more like the old Jacqueline again. With that new-found strength, though, came the fear that my world might capsize again if things went wrong. I asked my doctor if I could ever get this low again. She said that it was highly unlikely. She told me that I was an extraordinarily strong woman who had survived things that would break most people. It had been waiting to happen for well over thirty years – and now it was over.

While Dan was still waiting for life to happen to him, I was launching myself into it, both socially and professionally. In the past five years or so I’ve had quite a lot of interest from the media – not just with articles being written about me or our business, but I’ve also appeared on a number of
television programmes, including
Back to the Floor
on BBC2, where various bosses return to the status of employee for a week, the premise being that they will learn more about their businesses. It was a huge learning curve for me and, as a result, I have introduced a Back to the Floor ethos into Ann Summers. Our busiest times of the year are Christmas and Valentine’s Day. Every year I ensure that each one of our directors works in an Ann Summers store so that they can really experience what the customer experiences and appreciate the problems that staff might encounter at our most hectic times. As I write this book I am currently involved in filming for two new programmes,
Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway
for ITV and
The Verdict
for BBC2, both of which I’m very excited about. I recognise that my involvement in the media can be good for my business; it is also a new challenge for me.

In addition to television work I write articles on business issues for various publications and speak at conferences and events. I have spoken in front of a diverse range of audiences, everything from a webcast for a small group of people to a speech in front of seven hundred and fifty. In March 2005 I was invited to speak in Shanghai. There was to be an awards night for businesswomen and they wanted an inspirational woman to speak so the organisers kindly asked me. The occasion was very glamorous – I was even loaned some very expensive jewellery to wear. The British girl who was producing the event in Shanghai was stressing
me and a fair few others out. The day before I was due to be on stage, she demanded to see the text of my speech. Normally, I would never give details of my speech to anyone in advance, but since we were in a foreign country I thought I may as well show it to her, if only to pacify her. Glancing through it, she spotted a particular story that happened to have the word ‘orgasm’ in it. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you can’t put that story in. It’s too risqué. You’d better take it out.’ ‘Fine,’ I said. When I got up to give my speech I just ignored her, went with my instinct and related the story. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure how the audience understood all the nuances, but they seemed to, and the story, along with the rest of the speech, went down very well.

Speaking gives me a great sense of satisfaction. It has been a great addition to my career and enabled me to network with people I might not otherwise have been able to. At about the same time I was invited to be on the panel of judges for Retailer of the Year Awards. The awards are sponsored by
Retail Week
, one of the publications for which I write a column.

For me each of these activities is an extension of my business and while they might mean putting in extra time, it’s something I really enjoy. At the same time they are a recognition of what I’ve achieved, something that has been many years in coming. I’m talking about the right sort of recognition, since running Ann Summers has over the years resulted in a great deal of spurious, sensational and
frankly nonsensical attention. Back in 1993 a member of my staff nominated me for a ‘Women Mean Business’ award being run by
Options
magazine. I remember very clearly the first interview, sitting there in front of this panel of judges who seemed to be smirking at me throughout and not really taking me seriously. Looking back, I think it was quite inappropriate that I was being judged by the editor of a magazine, a PR person and some marketing director, none of whom had achieved what I’d achieved. It would have made more sense to be judged by other
businesspeople
. At that time people who wrote about me would often use phrases like the ‘sex industry queen’, which made me sound like I was running a whorehouse in Arizona instead of a multimillion-pound retail business. This sort of attitude was really common and mostly I ignored it. My business was successful, my customers were happy and I was doing very well, thank you. Occasionally, though, it really made me angry, such as when the
Express
referred to my father and Ralph as the ‘Sultans of Sleaze’.

Still, there were people who understood what we’d achieved and what we were about. In February 1995 I was thrilled to be named one of the ‘40 under-40’ businesspeople chosen by
Business Age
magazine. This was a highly prestigious award that in previous years had gone to some real high-flyers, including Richard Branson. The award recognised people whom they thought would still be successful in ten years’ time. And now here I was ten years later with a
business going stronger than ever! In fact, in 2005 I received an even greater accolade when I was included in Debrett’s
People of Today
for my ‘Contribution to British Society’. And who would have thought that in 2007 I would have received my first invitation to the palace to attend a reception hosted by the Queen in recognition for my achievements and contribution to business and industry.