Naomi: the naked truth

I took a book to read while I waited, and a vague hope that if she did throw it at me I could at least sue for damages.

But here she is, a mere 35 minutes behind schedule, and so polite, I’m almost disappointed. And who’s this Amazonian woman she’s brought with her? Not a PR or an assistant. Surely not a bodyguard?

“This is my mum, Valerie,” says Naomi Campbell, 45. “She’s hanging out with me today.”

Valerie is in her mid-sixties and has better cheekbones than her daughter. She used to be a dancer, leaving the young Naomi to live with her grandmother while she travelled the world on tour. I know this from Campbell’s new book, which she is here to promote. Actually, it’s one of two limited-edition books that Taschen are publishing as a joint package — yours for just £1,250. Volume one is full of luxuriant pictures and short quotes from Campbell’s colleagues on her fabulousness. Volume two is more photos, plus Campbell’s airbrushed account of her life from stage-school cub to fashion panther.

She flew in this morning for London fashion week. It comes hot on the heels of New York fashion week, where she hit the catwalk for her friend Kanye West (as well as making music and deranged comments about his own genius, West also has his own clothing line, Yeezy).

How is he, I ask, because to the outside world it looks as though he’s going completely mad…

“Oh, he’s eccentric, but he’s a very smart guy. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He has a plan and he’s on schedule for his plan,” she laughs uproariously.

She was pushed through the airport in a wheelchair — and not for the first time — leading to speculation that she had hip surgery while in New York, but she says not and her people have previously described her as suffering from a “light foot injury”. Anyway, she seems to be walking fine again now.

She and her mother make themselves comfortable. Valerie seems incredibly sweet: taciturn and softly spoken with a smile for everyone. She is dressed in jeans and is beautiful but unassuming. Campbell Jr came in wearing an electric-blue and black fur coat and is a force of raucous nature: loud, forthright, inexhaustible. The week before she went to New York, she took a plane every day: “New York, London; London, Austria; Austria, London, LA. I love being in the air. I feel like I’m present but I’m not present. I can catch up with my reading, catch up with myself. I’m reading a book about nutrition at the moment called Clean Gut, because I’m a real believer about keeping your colon clean.”

She looks sensational, of course. Full lips, cat features, glossy hair with a heavy fringe and eyes that shimmer somewhere between blue and green — presumably the result of contact lenses worn over her God-given brown. Underneath the coat she wears a demure black poloneck and cardie.

After 30 years in the fashion business, she can’t pick a favourite photo from the book. But “I love the memories of being with my girls, travelling together from city to city, doing the shows. It was a lot of fun, like a dormitory.”

She means the 1990s supermodels. “Linda, Christy, Cindy, Tatjana, Stephanie, Claudia…”

Single minded: a year 3 school photo from 1978. Campbell went to stage school full-time from the age of five

Long before Taylor Swift coined the term as her own, the supers were the original girl #squad. Campbell was its only non-white member, the first black model to make the cover of French Vogue and Time magazine. It was only because the other girls were willing to stick their necks on the line for her, she thinks, that any of it was possible.

“Let me put it this way: these designers didn’t book any girl of colour. I don’t think it was intentional, but they didn’t think about being diverse at that time. So my girls went in and said if you want us in the show, you have to take Naomi.”

She says that her mother didn’t raise her to use racism as an excuse not to succeed at something. “I’d find other ways to get what I wanted. I’m not afraid of challenges, I’ve had many in my career and I’ve dealt with them as they came.”

One was never landing a contract to become the face of one of the big beauty brands due — she can only assume — to the colour of her skin. “Quite early on in my career I understood that as a model of colour I would have to make money in other ways,” she writes in the book. Other ways included acting, television presenting, launching her own fragrance and setting up her own branding and events company, NC Connect. She is now worth an estimated £34m.

She still keeps in touch with the other supers — especially Kate Moss, who arrived on the scene later, at the tender age of 17, and with whom Campbell (who is three years her senior) adopted a big sister-like role.

Campbell was engaged to U2’s Adam Clayton in the 1990s, so they all spent a lot of time together in Ireland, where Bono’s wife nicknamed them “the wagons”. “Kate was little wagon, Christy [Turlington] was the original wagon and I was black wagon.”

Why “wagon”? Because you were constantly falling off them?

“No! It’s because… we’re wagons. Because we’re naughty, we enjoy our life, we laugh, just girls having fun.”

Campbell is at pains to remind me how many old friends and business associates she remains close to after all this time. The subtext presumably being: I can’t be that bad if they still want to hang out with me.

She knows her reputation precedes her. In 2010 she was called to the Hague to give evidence in the war crimes trial of the former Liberian president Charles Taylor. He had allegedly given her uncut “blood diamonds” after a function for Nelson Mandela’s Children’s Fund in 1997 — although Campbell says she had no idea what the “dirty-looking” stones were and gave them away. She initially refused to testify, but was subpoenaed, telling the court that it was “a big inconvenience” for her to be there. Taylor was sentenced to 50 years for aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, but it was Campbell’s petulance that dominated the headlines.

“It was disgraceful, ” she says of the media circus. “Absolutely disgraceful. I felt, like, you need a fashion model to come and tell you that this man is not a good guy? Please. Come on. That’s ridiculous.”

Do you feel…

“A scapegoat,” she interrupts, before I can finish the question.

…that you wished you’d said certain things differently?

“No, I can’t take it back now. I only wish maybe I said ‘your honour’, because I forgot, apparently — and she was a very nice lady, the judge. You know, it was a good eye-opener to see who was who in my life,” she adds, darkly.

She won’t say who she means, but I wonder if it’s her former modelling agent Carole White, who gave evidence that cast doubt on Naomi’s version of events.

It wasn’t the first time Campbell had fallen out with an agency. She was fired from the Elite modelling agency in 1993, on the grounds that “no amount of money or prestige could further justify the abuse [she inflicted on staff and clients]”. Six months later the agency rehired her.

Campbell went to rehab for cocaine and alcohol addiction in 1999 and has been in a recovery programme ever since, “working” on herself for “an hour every day”. She is vague about what this entails, although it seems to be yoga, Pilates or “a walk in the park”, plus her programme meetings. She says the process has made her “more mellow”. If by that she means more even-tempered, then on today’s evidence I can only agree.

Girl power: with Kate Moss at a party thrown by the Elite modelling agency in 1993. They remain friends. “We’re naughty, we enjoy our life, we laugh, just girls having fun”

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“My behaviour at certain points in my life…” she begins and I can tell it’s a speech she’s had to make time and time again. “I was growing up, just learning how to live, and I had to do it in front of the world. But that was my sacrifice and I have no complaints about it. I made some big mistakes and I made amends for them. I can’t beat myself up about it to this day, but I don’t forget. I hope that I’m forgiven, as I forgive those who have hurt me too.”

But where did all her anger come from? She made a fleeting reference to “abandonment issues” in a previous interview I read. What did she mean?

“Well, there’s always abandonment issues, because I left my mother at…” She stops and changes tack. “My mother had to [make a] sacrifice to send me to the school I wanted to go to. She had to go to work, but unfortunately it wasn’t in this country. So, she did what she thought was best for me. There were times when I wanted to see my mum and she couldn’t be with me, but she’s a single parent and she was working to keep me in a great school.”

I look over at Valerie. That must have been hard for you too, I say.

“Oh yes, of course,” says Valerie. “Sometimes if the child isn’t well and you can’t be there because you’ve got to work. But you try to give the best as a single parent that you can. I always used to take her to… remember we used to always go for high tea?”

“Oh, custard tarts!” Campbell shrieks. “You really told me off once when I got my knife and fork mixed up. I don’t know where we were, but you let me have it.”

I can’t imagine Valerie letting anyone have it, but both say she could be strict in her own way.

Campbell was born in Streatham, south London. Her father had already left, taking off soon after Valerie became pregnant. Mother and daughter moved to Italy together until Campbell was nearly three years old. When Valerie relocated to Switzerland, Campbell came back to south London and spent time living with her grandmother and another woman she calls “Nanny”. She would fly out to see her mum for holidays. “Or, if I got a few days off, I’d come back to see her,” says Valerie. At five, Campbell was enrolled in the Barbara Speake Stage School in Acton, taking a bus and two trains across London every day.

Was it Naomi’s decision to go to stage school?

Valerie: “Yes, yes, yes.”

At five?

Naomi: “I told her I wanted to go, before I was five! Everyone was looking at her, going, ‘Don’t listen to a three-year-old! Are you mad?’ And you were like, ‘Nope, I think she knows what she wants.’ Ma, why did you believe me?”

Valerie: “You was always posing and dancing.”

Naomi: “I wasn’t posing.”

Valerie: “Yes, she was. I’ve got that photo of you posing in the pink jumper and jeans, and you’re all like that [Valerie flings her arms out in an extravagant pose; Naomi looks embarrassed]. Don’t you remember?”

Naomi: “No, Ma, I don’t remember.”

Campbell was spotted by a modelling scout when she was 15, while shopping in Covent Garden after school. She remembers being surprised that she was chosen over the two blonde friends she was with. Valerie, now back in London, taught her daughter how to walk like a model in the hallway of their home: “I said, ‘You can’t try and copy somebody else. You have to own the stage but have your own style.’ ” And lo, the “magic runway boom-boom”, as Vogue memorably described Campbell’s unmistakable hip-swinging strut, was born.

She says she was always shy about her body — even in the years when you couldn’t open a magazine with out seeing her lounging half-naked across its pages.

Family values: with her mum, Valerie, at a ball hosted by Elton John in 2003

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“I used to feel very uncomfortable doing bathing suit and lingerie shoots when I was younger. Now, at 45, I think I’m finally comfortable enough in my own skin to feel comfortable to do a picture in lingerie.”

Not that, she says, she was ever pressured into doing them: “No, I was very much the person to say what I was and wasn’t going to do.”

On her mother’s wishes, she has never tried to meet her father. However, as soon as she left home, she began searching for surrogate figures to plug the hole. The French designer Azzedine Alaïa became one. She called him “Papa” and would stay with him whenever she was working in Paris. The music producer Quincy Jones was another; he still refers to her as his seventh daughter. But perhaps her most famous familial relationship was with Nelson Mandela, whom she met in 1994 in South Africa. He called her his “honorary granddaughter”. She, in return, called him “Grandad” and raised huge sums for his Children’s Fund.

There has been some internet chatter in the weeks leading up to our interview that she is romantically involved with the actor Idris Elba, who played Mandela in the 2013 film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. They were spotted together on a night out in New York. Days later, the news broke that Elba had left his long-term girlfriend and mother of his 22-month-old child. I know enough about Campbell to know she won’t appreciate me raising it, so I attempt a side ambush, which she sees coming a mile off.

Does she think her friend Idris Elba would make a good Bond?

“Well, how do you know I’m friendly with Idris Elba? Because of what the papers are writing, which is complete crap,” she says, turning fiery for the first time. “I’ve known Idris for years and he’s been so supportive of my [charity] Fashion for Relief, especially what I do for ebola. It makes me laugh reading all of this stuff. It’s so inaccurate and so wrong.”

Me: *innocent face* “What is? The speculation that you’re a couple?”

Naomi: “Yes. It’s like, would you have said that four years ago? Why didn’t you? I’ve had pictures with him before. All of a sudden it’s this whole story… It’s ridiculous. But would he be a good Bond? Hmmm, of course he’d be a good Bond, but I don’t know if he wants to be a good Bond.”

“I think he’d be a good Bond,” Valerie pipes up.

Do you know him too, then?

“No, no, no.”

Naomi wrestles back control of the conversation. “I think Bonds should be diverse. I find it kind of strange when I know that Ian Fleming wrote them in Jamaica. I’ve sat at his desk, I’ve slept in his bedroom! Yeah, in Goldeneye. So, I’m like, hold on a minute, he must have got some influence from Jamaica.”

We talk about current racial tensions in the United States and I ask if she is engaged with Black Lives Matter, the American activist movement that campaigns against police brutality and racial injustice in the criminal justice system — which reached a wider audience last month when Beyoncé made references to it during her performance at the Super Bowl.

“I don’t think it’s [morally] correct that people have died unjustly by being shot by police. That’s absolutely wrong — and that has to be cleaned up, otherwise they’re going to have their cities rioting,” she says. “I don’t know much about it and maybe I need to go online and read about it. But yeah, black lives do matter, white lives matter, everyone’s lives matter.” She sighs loudly.

Early in her career she signed up to fashion’s Black Girls’ Coalition, a lobbying group set up by the American fashion agent Bethann Hardison and the model Iman, the wife of David Bowie. To this day, Hardison keeps a tally of the number of women of colour used on the catwalks each season and she and Campbell have written letters to designers reminding them of their duty to represent diversity if the numbers fall.

“Some people honestly did say that they’d forgotten! It wasn’t as though we were trying to out anybody, it was just about ‘be conscious, be aware of what you’re putting out [on the catwalks]’ and remember that the world is such a melting pot of cultures right now that your customer is not just one colour.”

Through Iman, she met and got to know Bowie. She doesn’t want to talk about his death “because it’s private. But my heart for [Iman] — to lose your partner — is just very sad and I feel for her. And she’s someone I respect very much. She’s always been very straightforward to me and told me what is what. I don’t like bullshit people in my life. I’ve no time for enablers.”

In 2011, she was instrumental in packing one friend, the designer John Galliano, off to rehab, following his arrest for an anti-Jewish outburst at a restaurant in Paris. It later emerged that he had been caught on video doing much the same in the same bar a couple of months previously.

Campbell dedicates an entire mini-chapter in her book to their friendship. I was going to ask if she felt comfortable sticking up for him, given his comments and her background as a high-profile advocate of racial equality, but she jumps in before I get to the end of my question: “I didn’t have any problem at all. Your friend is not well and they need help, you pick up the phone, you call. Someone’s life is at stake here, that’s how serious that is.”

So what did she do?

Grandfather figure: embracing Nelson Mandela, then president of South Africa, in 1998. They were so close she called him “Grandad”

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“I just did what had to be done and secured the place. The single most important thing was getting him there and getting him well. Everybody played their role. Anna Wintour was incredible and is also very protective of John. Because he’s an artist and, I mean… you have a drink and someone’s videoing and you don’t know it, it’s awful. I don’t like videos, I think they’re awful myself.”

Hmm. I’m not sure the fact Galliano was being videoed during his anti-semitic tirade is necessarily what the rest of the world will remember as awful, but still.

She has been linked to a slew of powerful men — Adam Clayton, Mike Tyson, Robert De Niro, the Russian billionaire Vladimir Doronin, the former Formula One team boss Flavio Briatore. None of the relationships lasted.

I wonder if the trouble with being with Naomi Campbell is that men can’t see past that fact. They want her as a trophy rather than a living, breathing, full-time commitment. She cuts me off: “OK, I’m going to answer this by ‘watch this space’.” She laughs, then checks herself. “No, I’m joking. Oh God, who knows? I’m an old romantic, traditional person. I love to love to love, so that’s it.”

Or is it? I get the impression that she isn’t joking, that she may have met someone ready to settle down with her for the long haul — not Elba, but someone else? There’s something else she says near the end of the interview that also makes me think there could be another big announcement soon. We are discussing her longevity in the business. Those in the know speak of her strong work ethic, but also of the fact that she is the only one of the original supers not to have taken time out to have children — and I wonder if this has anything to do with her prolonged supremacy.

Again, she cuts me off before I can fully get the question out. “Well, I’m not saying I won’t have children. I could have children. I just don’t know which way I’ll have children. But I think I’ll have children, everyone thinks I’ll be a good mother. I’ve always considered it. I’ll just do it when I’m ready. I’m not rushing to anyone’s drumbeat, I’m going to my own.”

Even if there isn’t a man in her life, she has her mother, who raised her single- handed, for inspiration. I mention this.

“Absolutely. Totally. That’s not been a fear of mine. As I said, it’s just timing, grounding, foundation. Where are you living? Where are you raising?”

What does she see as the ideal opportunity to have kids?

“Well, you want to come back home for something like that, I think. I really don’t know. I couldn’t answer this until this really was in the happening.”

What about Valerie? Does she like the idea of being a grandmother?

“Yes, yes, I do,” Valerie smiles. “But I don’t want to force…”

I’m not sure that she could if she wanted to.

Naomi Campbell (Taschen £1,250) by Naomi Campbell and Josh Baker is published in the spring in a limited-edition run of 1,000 signed copies. It is available from taschen.com