She grew up with the very rich and most famous of famous, yet designer Stella McCartney is surprisingly level-headed. She talks to Mariella Frostrup about juggling home, work and the spotlight.
We all know Stella McCartney, right? The fashion designer daughter of ex-Beatle Paul, whose celebrity blueblood makes her the perfect pal for Kate and Gwyneth, Madonna and Claudia. The strawberry blonde with the glacial blue eyes, perfect pout and eye-catching outfits. On first name terms with the likes of David
Bowie as a child, doing work experience with Christian Lacroix at 15, hers is the gilded story of a golden girl. The loss of her mother Linda in 1998 to breast cancer was the solitary dark cloud on an otherwise clear horizon.
So who's this imposter, this earthy charmer, who rolls up at London restaurant Clarke's and is already mid-sentence before she's sat down?
Slinging her hessian bag with sparkly detail down behind her seat, she greets Lucian Freud, who is reigning over the small room from his perfectly framed position in front of a large window with a backdrop of summer foliage.
Dressed in a simple cream shift, dotted with silvery sparkles, the bump of her fourth baby a vague outline, McCartney looks chic, as you'd expect, and freshly scrubbed.
But like Dracula, she's rarely photographed in daylight, so it feels like an anthropological exercise to be examining her up close in this sunny room.
The discreet atmosphere of Clarke's, in Kensington Church St, with its white monogrammed tablecloths and dainty pot plants, is a far cry from the fashion circuit habitat.
For 20 years Sally Clarke has been serving up simple, delicious British food to the intelligentsia and, judging by the warmth of her welcome, McCartney is a regular. I decide to join her on a veggie menu to see if I can survive a whole meal without meat.
"It's so unusual in London to find food that tastes like it's come fresh from a garden, that's why I love this place," she tells me, spooning her summer minestrone between sentences.
"We always had our own vegetables growing up and now I'm doing it with my kids at our house in the country. I've added some cutting flowers, too, and we spent all weekend picking strawberries, though my gooseberries are very late."
McCartney was reared with a kitchen garden in West Sussex and in an environment at odds with today's celebrity lifestyle.
"It sounds ridiculous but I grew up in two-bedroom houses with six people and one toilet, which is not what you think for an international rock star situation," she says.
"My dad still prefers cosy places and my mum would have preferred if we could all have slept in one room."
Famously, the McCartneys also opted for a state education for their children. I wonder how much she credits her lack of visible dysfunction to the schooling she received?
"Going to the normal local comprehensive was one of the best things that could have happened to me," she acknowledges.
"You didn't boast about stuff, otherwise you'd get beaten up. It was healthy to see how most people in the world live. That's why I freak out that my kids aren't doing that."
Her two younger children with husband Alasdhair Willis attend private nurseries and the eldest is at a private school in West London. Claudia Schiffer and Elle Macpherson are fellow mums. The school also happens to be 45m from McCartney's front door. I mention an interview from 2003 where she said by the time she had kids she hoped she'd be living in the country and sending them to similarly "normal" schools.
"Completely didn't work out. It's one of my biggest internal struggles - the whole schooling system in London and the fact that my kids are going to a posh school. It freaks me out. But it's not realistic to live in the country at this stage, I've got a business in London. I beat myself up about it all the time. If at any stage it looks like they're becoming total jerks and saying, 'hello Mummy' in posh voices instead of running in and just being their awful selves, then you have to knock it on the head."
She's clearly still conflicted, believing the values she had instilled in her as a child saved her from a directionless life.
"I didn't want to be 30-something and not know what I was going to do. I was quite afraid of that, there were quite a lot of aimless kids around, in that 'other' side of my life, who didn't really know what to do because they always had a bank balance to fall back on and they were quite lost."
The "other" side of her life is the affluent one. Besides her father's pop fortune, Linda was from a well-to-do east coast American family.
"I'm very much two different kinds of people," says.
"There's just these total opposites all the time. My mum came from a self-made society family and we used to go to Long Island every summer. It was huge houses and beach parties and the other side was spending New Year with my Liverpool family in Birkenhead and going to the local comp in Sussex."
By now we're swapping plates and waxing lyrical about the homemade elderflower lemonade.
So what can have inspired McCartney to become a fashion designer?
"I think it was films," she says. "I loved all those Doris Day visuals of her being a tomboy and then changing into this gorgeous girl in a ballgown."
Obviously it was also not what her parents did. Was that part of the attraction, too?
"I didn't want to go into what my parents did because that would have been a story and people would have talked about it. Also, I liked fashion. I used to get embarrassed about the fact I liked fashion. I still get a bit cringy. I'd sit at dinner parties and people would say to me, 'so what do you do?' and I'd be like, 'oh, design'. When I fill passport forms I put 'design'. I don't say fashion. But don't get me wrong, I love my job."
She's not unaware of what her privileged background has made possible.
"I wouldn't be as stupid as to sit and say that having the parents I've had and meeting the people I've met hasn't helped my career. For instance, not doing leather and fur in my industry is unheard of. I've been able to do that from day one because in the back of my mind, if someone goes, 'you're fired', I could say 'okay Mum, lend us a fiver'."
She also credits her parents taking them on tour as children for widening her horizons.
"That was when I felt I looked beyond my limitations and thought there actually is an outside world with all these different things going on. I think travel is one of the greatest gifts we can give our kids, not mini-Vespas."
Far from being on the celebrity party circuit, she claims to live a calmer life: work, kids, home, country.
"There was a moment when I had just come up to London and I was younger and partying a lot. That was my moment of being in the public eye."
Nowadays the showbiz friends "only call me when they're bored. I haven't got the energy anymore and most of my close friends are coping with work and kids, too. It ain't what it used to be".
The restaurant has filled and emptied in the time we've been talking and in these techno-compulsive times I note that McCartney has left her phone in her bag throughout.
She does appear to be the real thing, a grounded, sensible working mother - only with millions of pounds to fall back on. Is she happy?
"Yes, this is a good period. You feel like everyone hates you if you've got a good life, now I feel maybe it's allowed because I've had my share of sadness. My mum passing away was a big change in my happy little life and I was unhappy for a long time after that. But she always used to say health is wealth, and I really try to remember that because you can get so self-indulgent, can't you?"
And with that she's off, sliding into the waiting black Prius, her bag swinging behind her.
- OBSERVER
