Sunday Mar 7 2010

She drove into London from the farm in Gloucestershire in her Land Rover -- "the Chelsea Tractor", as she calls it. Sitting in a suite in Blakes in South Ken, Elizabeth Hurley doesn't look anything like a farmer (albeit a chichi organic farmer).

For starters, there are the legs straight out of a Helmut Newton picture. OK, she had a bacon sandwich for breakfast. "But it was my own bacon," she smiles. "I eat like a pig, to be honest." She adds that she loves her pigs on the farm. They have a lot of piglets which are, she almost swoons, "divine". Two got squashed last week by their mummies, she adds, her eyes a touch misty suddenly.

She Who Eats Like A Pig is wearing a black skirt and designery top with tights and heels that, she jokes, surprisingly don't give her nosebleeds when she wears them: she is 5ft 8in, and well over 6ft in those heels.

"It must be horrifying for men that women wear such high heels now," she muses, ordering a decaf skinny cappuccino ("I know that sounds queeny!") and a pot of coffee for me from room service. When it arrives, Queen Elizabeth pours me a coffee and asks coquettishly will she be mummy and add milk and sugar. Now seems as good a time as any to ask about the spanking . . .

In April 1997, an article revealed that Hurley was apparently a member of an exclusive group of somewhat libertine English toff expats nicknamed The Viles, who would on occasion play spanking games at parties. "Of an evening, when they're all premiered out, The Viles," we learned, "apparently go round to each other's houses and take turns to bend over a sofa, baring their glutei maximi to the others. The object of the game is for the spankee to guess the identity of the spanker. You can imagine the fun they have. Come Christmas, The Viles all return en masse to England and regroup for their annual party, hosted by Hurley's big pal Henry Dent-Brocklehurst, at Sudeley Castle. And, of course, this bash would be incomplete without an obligatory round of the spanking game."

"Silly and naughty," is how Hurley described it in the article.

"For people who don't take themselves too seriously," said Dent-Brocklehurst.

"That was a myth," says Hurley now, in that voice of hers.

It's not true?

"What?"

These spanking games at upper-class parties?

"No, I was never part of any set. I have never been a member of any set, club or gang in my life. I don't like that."

There was a revealing picture of her bending over suggestively on this magazine cover, to illustrate an article about spanking and The Viles. "But that was so unfair," she coos, and she looks like she is going to cry.

"I fell out with the magazine for 10 years because of that," she says with a laugh. "That was really unfair. That wouldn't happen today. The wind-machine blew my skirt up. It was ridiculous. I was very hurt by that."

So it wasn't a fetish?

"No! Not remotely," she smiles, showing the brightest teeth I've ever seen. "The thought of being a member of a club called The Viles is beyond embarrassing. Ridiculous. Absolute rubbish. I don't normally refute anything, but I can refute that to you. It is absolute bollocks.

"It sounds very immature to me! It sounds completely ludicrous," she adds.

It seems equally ludicrous that the beautiful woman on the sofa beside me says she washed her hair last night and went to bed with it sopping wet. She didn't have time to dry it. Her seven-year-old son, Damian, was nestled between her and husband, Arun. There were also three Labradors and the new spaniel all on the bed competing for space. Sleep, when it came for Hurley, was fleeting.

In fact, she says, she had "the worst night's sleep of my life last night". She woke at 4.15am to look at a text "some nincompoop had sent", and to find herself "boxed in, literally like a little foetus".

She implored Arun this morning to make the Labradors sleep out of the room tonight. "He said no!" she chortles in that screamingly grand voice of hers.

Her fingernails are decidedly un-grand. She holds them out for me to examine. "They look crappy," she says with some accuracy. "They are hideous."

The jet-setting international icon of glamour and beauty adds that she doesn't have her highlights done "often enough. I don't have my hair trimmed. I don't have time for any of that and I don't really care, to be honest".

It is almost two decades since this same woman first wore that Versace dress -- or, as the London Times put it, "rather, an approximation of a dress" -- to the premiere of then boyfriend Hugh Grant's 1994 movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral. That dress on Hurley has been voted the greatest red-carpet gown of all time.

At last year's Milan Fashion Week, Vogue features director Harriet Quick heralded the return internationally of the Versace safety-pin look pioneered by my coffee companion today. It all seems so long ago now.

Hurley still has the power to enthrall.

She is dotty and witty, and not altogether what I had been expecting. "I'm ancient," she laughs, "I'm 44!"

I ask Elizabeth Hurley, as you do, if she thinks much about ageing and death.

"I don't really think about that, but I do think that my mother was 25 when she had me and 22 when she had my sister. We had a long chat about that last night."

The unspeakably gorgeous 44-year-old then ponders aloud that if she is ever to be a grandmother herself then young Damian will need to "start early and knock up someone when he is 16". Please note that Elizabeth Hurley says this ever so sweetly: "I have told him that."

And when Damian gets older, what will she say to him about his biological father? Damian's father, playboy Steve Bing, somewhat unchivalrously, if not downright caddishly, doubted he was Damian's father, and needed a DNA test to convince him.

"Damian was only six months when Arun came to live with us, so he knows Arun," says Hurley. "And he knows Arun is not his blood father. He calls him Dad and he is his dad for all intents and purposes. But no, he knows everything."

I know the feeling. Elizabeth Hurley has a face that you know as well as your own. This sense of familiarity is because, whether we want to or not, we appear to know almost everything about her. We know, from her, what Hugh Grant was like between the sheets ("Hugh Grant is fantastic in bed. He always has been," she told a magazine in 2007, denying a rumour that her sex life with Grant was rubbish).

Her every whim is news, her every utterance a front page in the Mail. Not an OK! nor a Vogue goes past without some mention of The Hurl. We know that her blinging engagement ring, which she wore to wed Arun Nayar in March 2007 at Sudeley Castle near Cheltenham, is a 15.09 carat diamond set in white gold. We know what she fears most: weight gain. "I'd kill myself if I was as fat as Marilyn Monroe," she once said. Or was quoted as saying.

"I never did say that," Elizabeth says today. "I can remember exactly what I said. I said how stressful it is to be how we are now and to feel such a pressure to be slim . . . I said that I loved Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. I said something like I couldn't be as fat as her now because I'd never work again."

And did you actually say it was your job to go to bed hungry?

"Not at all!" she says. "I put on a lot of weight when I was pregnant: my mother said the only way she lost weight after having me was to cry herself to sleep because she was so hungry. So yeah, I was hungry when I went to sleep after I had Damian." There were no tears before bedtime: "I had self-discipline, which is gradually disappearing as I get older."

Were there many tears for you when Hugh was arrested on Sunset Boulevard in June 1995 with Ms Divine Brown?

"It is a long time ago, but, yeah, I'm a bit of a crybaby. I cry a lot."

Did you cry a lot then?

"Probably. I can't really remember much."

But you got through it, because you stayed together for another six years.

"We are having dinner tonight," she says. "We live next door to each other. We see each other all the time. He has his own room in our house."

The sweetly conservative Ms Hurley bought a £2.7m Gloucestershire estate in 2003, "just after Damian was born". Prior to buying this pile in the countryside, Hurley felt like a never-ending visitor to all her friends who had country houses.

"I was trying my hardest to get out of London all the time. Every weekend I would go and stay with someone. It just got to the stage where I thought we," she says -- referring to herself and then-baby Damian -- "just needed one of our own. We got followed an awful lot" by journalists and paparazzi. "I just thought, 'This isn't very healthy.'"

"I hope," she told David Furnish in a GQ interview when she first made the big break to the shires, "the local farmers attack the paparazzi with their pitchforks".

"Luckily, there aren't so many paparazzi," she says. "We are lucky because we have a farm in the middle of a bit of land." This bit of land is 400 acres.

The farm would eventually become famously organic but that was, she says, completely by accident.

All she wanted at the outset was a house. But, in order to get a house with enough privacy that photographers couldn't stand on a public road with long lenses, "by definition you had to have land around it, and most places with land around it in that area tend to be farmland".

She was staying locally with a friend on a perfect English summer's day -- "which, as you know, we have three of a year, and this was one of them" -- and she rang up an estate agent to ask was there anything of interest. She took a few friends to look at it, among them her then new boyfriend Arun, her ex, Hugh Grant, and her mother.

There was a contract farmer on the land when she bought it. "Gradually, as I was there, I would see them putting on these extraordinary outfits and going out to spray the crops on the farm constantly with chemicals," she recalls.

"I didn't know what they were. Off they would go on the tractors in their costumes. I thought: 'What are they doing?' I would pay my bill for these huge chemicals and I thought, 'This is insane. We don't eat anything which isn't organic in our house and I'm growing this bizarre stuff!'"

She feels the biggest misconception about herself is that she is Liz Do Little and that she sits around all day doing nothing but painting her nails. Obviously not.

"I have to work like a dog to earn my honest crust. We are opening four shops in the next month" -- one of which will be given pride of place in the wonderful Kildare Village -- "which is driving us literally demented. This is a big move for us to get this together.

"My biggest stress is that I don't have any childcare," she continues. "I have never left Damian for a night unless my mum can be there."

She adds that she stopped doing movies so that she could be with Damian. In a way, it was because of having Damian that she turned to organic farming; because she didn't think it right to be making food that wouldn't be good for her young son or others like him in the world.

"I like to be really busy and it is nice to have a challenge. We are very challenged at the moment because we didn't really plan to go into organic food production."

Elizabeth Hurley as organic farmer doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. When in September 2008 she launched her organic farm produce, with prime pork sausages among them, The Sun newspaper excelled itself with the headline: 'Think Liz and you think -- nice bangers!'

The organic bar she gives me to taste features a cartoon image of Bizzy Lizzy in a mini skirt and pink wellies.

Yet she talks a good talk about wanting to ban any more mass-market supermarket expansion, believing there are enough already. "I am not really against anything. But I'm very for people choosing to be supportive of local stuff -- whether it is people in Ireland being supportive of Irish farmers or people in Gloucestershire.

"I'm very supportive of that. I prefer people to make good choices than ever to have choices thrust upon them. I'm not too bossy about that.

"Since moving to the country, we have had such an about-turn," she continues, "and I think you are absolutely right, once I had Damian it was the first time I thought, 'They are so pure and so little'; you just think, 'There is no way I am giving him something with hydrogenated fat in it. Not going to happen. I'm not going to give him milk which could have extra hormones in it and right now start pumping him with too much oestrogen.'"

Especially if he has got to get a girl pregnant when he is 16 to make you a granny, I say.

"Exactly. He has got to be ready for it at 16!" she laughs. "So I said: 'No way.' And that's when I really learnt what I wanted to do and that's when we went into the organic conversion."

Coinciding with the fresh-air healthiness in the country, Hurley gave up coffee, and wine, because she read it bloats women as they get older. "You get fatter as you older!" she belly-laughs, even though she had no belly to speak of. She weighs, she says, "quite a hefty nine and a quarter stone or something." She has switched to vodka.

"Yes, I did switch to vodka," she says. "I have one a day, if I feel like it. It was too boring to drink nothing. I decided that since I moved to the country: for the first time in my life, I started to crave stone-cold champagne. I used to think about it and then wait until it was six o'clock and then have some.

"Then," she continues, "I thought, actually, the hair shirt in me thinks I shouldn't do that because I want to. So then I started to give up wine and champagne and switched to vodka, which I didn't really like. But I have to say I quite like it now. It's quite nice. I have it with soda. It is supposedly very few calories, especially if you have it with soda."

Elizabeth tried vodka with fizzy water and found it "frankly disgusting" then someone made vodka with soda and "it is the nicest drink, literally, in the world". She adds she has a weak disposition for alcohol and does not drink that much.

"The pathetic thing is I'm like a schoolgirl; I can't really drink that much without throwing up. So I couldn't be an alcoholic even if I wanted to because I physically can't drink. If I have half a glass of wine more than I should, I just have to go and be sick. It's like being sick at the end of a party when you're 15. Pathetic."

Up close and cerebral, Elizabeth Hurley is an engaging presence to spend an hour or so with it. She possesses her own brand of self-contained tenacity. She possibly has had to. Some columnists said she milked Hugh Grant's disgrace to further her career in America, doing the Barbara Walters Show; others plain despised her no matter what she did.

Piers Morgan said: "Liz Hurley's hypocrisy is breathtaking -- bleating about her privacy day in, day out for the last 10 years, then selling her wedding for £2m. It's hypocrisy on an unbelievably large scale."

Caitlin Moran wrote that Hurley's field was that "vital, internationally important field of looking good in a dress. And who can blame her? After all, it's not her fault that hers is the sort of talent that makes women famous these days, as opposed to writing the great feminist novel, flying solo across the Atlantic or campaigning for civil rights. She's just going with market forces".

Samantha Morton recently said of Hurley: "She's not an actress. I wouldn't think she'd do street theatre in Poland, would you? Do

you really think she loves her craft? No."

"I don't really do many interviews, to be honest," Hurley says.

"But I'd be pretty surprised if anyone who says anything mean about me has ever met me." I would, too. She is honest enough to admit that she can be "quite irritable" and "has a fast fuse. And it is over-fast too. I am quick-tempered. I laugh but within 20 seconds I can flare up and be cross".

Long of leg and short of temper, Elizabeth says she "can't stand laid-back. I like a lot of energy". She denies the perception that she was manipulative and able to twist men around her finger.

"Not at all. I should have practised it more. I'm useless. I often hear of people who are passive-aggressive and get what they want by just quietly sticking to their agenda. I'm completely useless at that. I will say immediately: 'This is what I need and want.' If that doesn't work, then let's not go any further because it is not going to work."

Elizabeth Hurley is an inscrutable being, whether intentionally or not. She told an interviewer in 1997 something that revealed her more as sphinx than minx.

"I've never been very good at wearing my heart on my sleeve and I know Hugh says, after nine years of knowing me, that he doesn't have the faintest idea what I'm thinking at any given moment," she said.

"Hugh still says that now, actually," Hurley says 13 years later, "and he probably knows me better than anyone else."

Yet, he didn't know what his partner of almost a decade was thinking.

"Oh, I don't know," she tut-tuts. "Boys aren't necessarily that perceptive anyway.

"I think actually having Damian has made me speak out a bit more than I used to," she adds. " I don't know if it has taken the lid off my inner monologue so now I can control my speech. Now I'm much, much, much more likely to spit out." And what precisely was your inner monologue back then?

"Don't know. Don't know. Don't know whether it's a combination of sloth and just self-consciousness. Of course I was craving privacy. And if you, for better or for worse, get into the public eye, when you lose a great deal of your privacy, you become extremely defensive of what you've got left."

She also said in the same 1997 interview that she "quite likes other people keeping themselves private, and there are certain things I don't ever want to know about them." Hugh Grant's fellatio faux pas with hooker Divine Brown in Los Angeles in 1995 was possibly one of them, in hindsight.

In an interview with Tatler, years ago, Hurley said that there is less sex in the city than in the countryside. The secret was revealed not so subliminally in the interior design, we were told.

"Next time you go to someone's house in the country, be sure to check out if they have warm, possibly fluffy, rugs in front of their fire," she smiled.

"No prizes for guessing why they're there." Later, Hurley ever-so-cheekily added: "I can also shyly confess to having two sheepskin rugs in front of all my fireplaces". "Oh, I was being silly!" She laughs now as I look crestfallen. I was expecting it to be like a scene from Ken Russell's Women in Love with Hugh and Arun wrestling naked in front of the roaring fireplace instead of Oliver Reed and Alan Bates.

"There is no naked wrestling in our cold house!" she hoots. "You know what, it is interesting being there. It is so different. I have never lived in the real countryside before.

"I grew up in suburbia and then moved to London. So it is the first time that I have ever lived in the country-country where you can be snowed in and be ploughed out with a tractor, which is what happened to us at the beginning of this year. We couldn't move. It was a violent culture shock to me. I was just cooking non-stop. I was like, 'What happened?' We cook everything. I am cooking 21 times a week. I can't stand it. What has happened to my life? It is unbearable!" she laughs.

I ask her, prior to marrying Arun did she have wifelust -- a fetish for the nouvelle romanticism of domesticity? "Hardly!" she hoots. "I didn't get married until I was 41. Far from it! I was a very old first-time bride!"

Elizabeth says her late father, Roy, an army captain with Irish roots, would have adored his daughter's house in the country too. "He would have loved the fact that I produce meat because he was a big cook -- not a chef.

"He did all the cooking at home. The fact that we do this market stall now in Oxford with my brother Michael, my dad would have been there in a heartbeat. He would have been labelling the meat. He'd have been selling it. He'd have loved it."

She is a bit sketchy on her father's precise Irish connections. "I think all his grandparents are Irish," she says. "I think Cork but I'm not really sure." She relates her earliest childhood memory as being in the woods picking blackberries with her grandmother when she was three and getting stung by a bee. "I got stung really badly.

"I always remember having my big sister with me. She is still with me, actually," she says of Katy. In her teens, she was a goth and allegedly had a boyfriend called Septic. She loved The Cure and Joy Division -- she mimes to me a Joy Division bassline she played on a bass in her bedroom one time -- but her favourite was Siouxsie and the Banshees. She found her old Siouxsie albums on vinyl the other day. She sounds like a little girl again as the memories flood back.

Asked does she wanted any more children, she answers: "To be quite honest, I am actually happy with one.

"Sorry to keep talking about children when you don't have them -- it must be a crashing bore."

Such a thing might prove impossible in her company. We go back to talking about death and growing old in a world obsessed with youth. "It makes me laugh that we're all so old now," she says later. "I'm going to fall apart at any moment!"

She hasn't had anything done but doesn't rule it out in the future: "But if you look kind of OK, it is a bit more scary getting something done." Let's just say Elizabeth Hurley looks more than OK.

The great truth she has learned in her haggish 44 years is, she says, "you can't get too excited when things are going well, but you can't get too depressed when they are going badly. I have quite a lot of ups and downs. What I know for sure is that it is cyclical and it will keep going," she says. "You go up. You go down. It is just the way it is. So you have to be able to roll with the punches."

Such a time was Hurley being photographed walking into the house in Los Angeles shortly after the Divine Brown incident -- after another mattress had been delivered, presumably for Hugh to sleep on. Was she able then to apply the wisdom of 'it will pass'?

"Er, er . . . well, I was much younger then, wasn't I? I don't know. Because my dad died soon after that. So then nothing else really . . . you know, showbizzy stuff didn't really mean very much when something real happens. Does it?"

Elizabeth Hurley will open her new boutique at noon on Thursday, and will donate 100 per cent of the proceeds of every pink June bikini sold on the day to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, see www.elizabethhurley.com

Kildare Village Outlet Shopping, Exit 13, M7, or see www.kildarevillage.com

Originally published in

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