She has convictions for assault, a ban from British Airways and called her summons to Charles Taylor's war crimes tribunal 'a big inconvenience'. Now the original super is turning mentor for a TV modelling competition. Is there a softer side to Naomi Campbell?
She's late. Of course she's late. You don't get to be a one-name-only celebrity by deviating from your brand, and Naomi Campbell is always late. It's as much a part of her brand as being absurdly beautiful, and the real-life Campbell does not disappoint on either count. As the hours tick away and a 10-strong shoot crew flick through magazines and direct hopeful glances at the door every time it swings open, I am reminded of the words of Miss Jean Brodie, when summoned to a meeting at 4.15pm: "Four fifteen. Not four, not 4.30, but 4.15. Hmm. She thinks to intimidate me by the use of quarter-hours?"
Today, Campbell intimidates to the tune of two hours, 51 minutes. The door swings open, and suddenly there she is: short, black Azzedine Alaia sundress and Alaia gladiator sandals, diva shades, phone clamped to one ear. The lighting assistants watch her while pretending to do something with gaffer tape; the catering team take their time gathering the coffee pots; the work experience girls simply try not to gawp. She struts across the huge studio, hips swinging in that unmistakable one-two motion that Vogue once described as her "magic runway boom-boom", to the relative quiet of the makeup room. Here she will be styled for our Hitchcock heroines shoot.
When she finishes her phone call, I introduce myself. "Hello how are you nice to meet you," she replies, her monotone dripping with ennui. The tone is that of a cocktail party hostess greeting an uninvited guest whom she would quite like to throw out but has decided to tolerate.
She is all cheekbones and plump lips; high, round bottom and long, lean thigh muscle. It's not just an awesome body for 43, it's an awesome body full stop. Before she has even sat down in the makeup chair, she looks every inch the supermodel.
In fact, Campbell outgrew the supermodel label a long time ago. This is a woman who was teenage roommates with Christy Turlington and is Nelson Mandela's honorary granddaughter, who has appeared in music videos for Bob Marley and George Michael, and whose ex-boyfriends include Robert De Niro and Mike Tyson. Tyson, asked to describe Campbell when they were going out, famously said of her, "She's scared of nothing."
Between 1998 and 2008, Campbell was as much a fixture of the tabloids as she was of the glossies. She admitted assaulting a personal assistant, Georgina Galanis, with a mobile phone; throwing a gem-encrusted BlackBerry at a housekeeper, Ana Scolavino; and assaulting two police officers at Heathrow, in a row over lost luggage that earned her a five-year ban from British Airways. When sentenced to community service and sweeping the streets of New York, Campbell kept a diary for W magazine that was accompanied by photographs by Steven Klein of her reporting for duty wearing a floor-length, silver-sequinned Dolce & Gabbana gown. The message of that image – you can bring me down to earth, but you will never humble me – was repeated in 2010, when she gave her infamous "blood diamonds" testimony at the trial of former African warlord Charles Taylor, dressed in the queenly beehive and sharp lemon pastels of a southern belle, and described her time in the witness box as "a big inconvenience".
Now, a full quarter-century after her first Vogue cover, comes a new chapter in the Campbell story. Not for Campbell the redemption tale, the ceremonial eating of humble pie. Instead, she has used the take-no-prisoners bossiness that for years served as a distraction from her day job to develop a second career.
She is now a presenter and executive producer on The Face, a search-for-a-star TV modelling show in which three mentors – Campbell, Erin O'Connor and Caroline Winburg – pit their talent-spotting, career-nurturing and strategising skills against each other in a bid to back the winner in a race for a Max Factor modelling contract. In other words, the Next Top Model formula has been spiced up with a little of the emotional, team-building spirit of The Voice and a lot of the tough-love, in-it-to-win-it attitude of The Apprentice. Campbell gets to play the Alan Sugar role of lovable villain.
Certainly she likes to run the show. The shoot takes a long time, held up for a while as Campbell has business calls to make, and then because she is less than happy with the aesthetic of the pictures, and has to call in some of her personal team. Eventually she and I sit down, perched at the makeup table, so that Campbell can be restyled for her evening engagements while we talk. I switch on the recording app on my phone. "I've got a better one," she says immediately, pulls two iPhones from her handbag and swipes impatiently across the screens in search of the app. She is being helpful, no doubt about that, but there is an unconscious note of power play – not to mention the sweet irony of my having provoked her into pulling not one but two phones out of her bag within seconds of us sitting down.
I ask her why she said yes to The Face, having turned down TV before, and she says: "I started talking to Liz Murdoch [whose company Shine produces The Face] around 10 years ago and the conversation evolved, and when this came along it felt like it was finally the right thing. I like that I am a mentor on this show, not a judge. I don't want a young woman to feel like her dreams have been blown because of me – I want to help her reach her dreams. I have an opportunity to share what I've learned over 27 years, and that's a powerful thing."
If The Face shows a warmer side of Campbell no one is pretending she has gone soft. She describes herself as a "mother hen" to her "girls", but her idea of nurturing is, in her words, "tough love. I'm straight up, I'm honest. When my girls do something great, I praise them and pamper them. And when they do something wrong, I'm gonna tell them. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, because they're not going to get it sugarcoated in the real world. Everyone makes mistakes but you have to learn from those mistakes if you want to get on."
No one in the industry who knows Campbell will tell you she is a pussycat or a pushover, but many speak highly of her loyalty, her commitment to causes she believes in. The refrain most often repeated about her by people who know her well is that she is a one-off, "there's no one like her". During our time together, the personality she projects is one of old-school, aloof unknowability. Fun and warmth are kept well guarded behind the velvet ropes. But when she chooses to turn it on, she has immense personal magnetism, which has enabled her to forge close and lasting relationships with designers, business moguls and other models – relationships that have done much to shield her from the quicksand into which many models' careers disappear. Her friend Donatella Versace once said of Campbell: "They say she is spoiled and annoying. But she's not. She's very determined and very generous, and these are two qualities that nobody ever talks about."
In the summer of 1985, Campbell was a 15-year-old schoolgirl from Streatham, south London. While window-shopping in Covent Garden, she was spotted by a model agent; before her 16th birthday she was on the cover of British Elle. "I didn't know how to model," she says. "I wasn't spending my pocket money on buying magazines, so I didn't know how models were supposed to look. So I just kind of made it up. Instinctively, I used my dance background to help me, jumping in the air, and the photographers liked it."
A year later, in Paris, she found her own mentor. "I was shooting for French Elle, and for some reason I took my passport and money to work and it kind of disappeared. And a model who was there that day was going to dinner with Azzedine [Alaia] and she took me along, with my mother. So we went, and I couldn't speak French, but my mother could and he [Alaia] spoke to her and said, I'm going to take care of your daughter; she's going to stay with me. He's been that way ever since. I call him Papa."
"As a model," she says, she "learned from the greats. Yves Saint Laurent was very supportive of me. He was very quiet, kind of twinkly-eyed. He didn't talk very much and we were not really supposed to speak to him, but I did. Gianni Versace was incredibly supportive of the models he worked with. When he would get an award or be honoured in some way, he would want his models to be there, to share that moment with him. That was a real bond, and now Donatella and Allegra are like family to me. I trust them, they trust me, we spend vacations together." (Campbell has the hybrid accent and vocabulary specific to those who have spent their adult lives flying back and forth across the Atlantic: she will say "vacation", but in the next sentence pronounce "little" the south London way, with the Ts almost silent, reminding me of the girl whose mum taught her to catwalk in the corridor to a Lionel Richie soundtrack.)
The most extraordinary of all Campbell "greats" has been Nelson Mandela. He is critically ill in hospital on the day of our shoot. "I am so blessed to know him, and I always ask why it was that I was able to meet such a great man. I am in touch on a daily basis. He's a strong man. The whole world is praying."
Campbell believes that the late 80s to mid-90s were not just her own glory days, but the golden age in which to be a model. "In my era, we'd get a phone call from John [Galliano] before the show: this is what the show's about, what do you think? And we'd talk about it; we knew what the inspiration was, we really understood the collection and where the designer was coming from and so knew what kind of vibe to have." As the fashion industry has expanded, the models have been sidelined, she believes. "If we [Christy, Campbell Linda etc] were on a different level to the models now, that's because we had a relationship with the designers, so it was a real collaboration. And the photographers, too – we were so close to Steven Meisel, to Mario [Testino]. When I started, the designers saw you in the castings and chose you. We went for dinner and hung out. Now you've got casting directors, and production. There's more of a gap between the model and the designer, because there are all these other people in the middle."
She is particularly concerned about the marginalisation of black models in the fashion industry. If she and her contemporaries spearheaded an era of progress in which different ethnicities were celebrated on magazine covers and catwalks, the past decade has seen the proportion of non-white faces on a downward trajectory. "I feel very responsible for young models of colour. They come to me and tell me they're not getting jobs, and I do what I can to speak up for them. This year has not been great. It's so disappointing. I feel it very personally. I've given 27 years to this business and things haven't got any better. It is shocking." Along with Iman and Bethann Hardison, an iconic black model of the 1970s who went on to found a model agency, Campbell is working on an initiative that is as yet under wraps. "We have to speak up, because we can."
These days, Campbell models on her own terms. When she takes to the catwalk, she does so as a special guest of the designer: most recently, she took the prestigious opening and closing spots at the Versace haute couture show, in Paris in July. (Backstage, Donatella remarked to me that Campbell was "still perfect. Look at those legs! They are amazing." She spends much of our shoot in hotpants and they are, indeed, amazing.)
For the seven hours she is on the shoot, Campbell never raises her voice or stamps her foot. When she is on set, in front of an audience, she exaggerates her ice queen persona, whether consciously or not: the eyebrows are raised higher, the acid asides delivered in an even more staccato tone. At these moments, she reminds me a little of Cate Blanchett or Tilda Swinton, in their snow queen/white witch roles. This makes me wonder whether her skin colour subconsciously affects the way we perceive Campbell. In the runup to the US presidential election of 2008, I read that Barack Obama worked on exaggerating the calm, unruffled delivery of his public speaking because the merest hint of heated emotion from a black man would be read by the public as a sign of temper, a hint of violence.
Does the colour of Campbell skin make us more likely to interpret her behaviour as intimidating, as difficult, rather than simply as aloof, or withdrawn? I ask her whether she believes the public notion of her character is an accurate one. "Well, everyone has a temper. A temper is an emotion. But do I care what they say? Is that what you're asking? Everyone is entitled to their opinion."
And what about your opinion, I ask? Are you happy with the way you are? "I'm a work in progress. But yes, I'm happy with the way I am now. I'm very observant and very instinctive. In life, you have to have the vulnerability to accept when you are to blame. And I do have that and I am open enough to say it. I've made mistakes. You know all that stuff, I'm not going over it again. And I admit to them, but I don't regret anything. I don't live in regret."
She goes silent for a moment. I am formulating my next question, when she declares: "Am I bossy? Absolutely. I don't like to lose, and if I'm told no then I find another way to get my yes. But I'm a loyal person. And I'm generous and I don't bullshit."
Being a model requires more mental strength than most people realise, she says; that is what she hopes The Face will show people. "You have to be able to take direction, you have to be always watching your composure, your attitude. But you have to be able to hold on to your own personality, too. That's the part you can't teach. On the show I tell my girls: this is a competition. You know what? You don't want to get so comfortable that you forget that, because you need to always be competing. You're not here to make friends."
• The Face is on Sky Living from 30 September.