Sunday Dec 9 2007

'WE were a segment of her life, it is important to let people know this, but that's all I want to say about it," says John O'Shea of the aid organisation GOAL and its association with the model Katy French, who died tragically last Friday.

He did not want her journey to Calcutta to work briefly with his organisation to go unmarked amid the pages of publicity that accompanied her very public passing.

Hers was a life of many segments; a socialite who turned into a strong woman; a model who "left the pack", as one observer put it, and carved a lucrative career for herself; a woman who succeeded in transcending the social scene to become a "grand girl" to many ordinary people who never met her, but felt they knew this bright intelligent girl from her chat show appearances and feisty performance in a reality television show.

Ultimately, she was a tragic figure who lived life to the full and died at the young age of 24 in blaze of publicity.

There are plenty of people who would like to pigeon-hole her as tabloid-fodder. But even the Irish Times marked her passing on Friday with a front page article which dealt with the events surrounding her death and noting John O'Shea's comment that she had made an "indelible impression" on him.

What was it about Katy that seemed to capture the public imagination?

There are plenty of beautiful girls out there. The social scene, the nightclubs and the magazine features are filled with glamorous young women. But something special set her apart.

It all exploded last January, when Katy French ended her engagement to restaurant-owner Marcus Sweeney, who she was to marry in Rome two months later. On the surface, it would seem rather innocuous, such things happen. But when he began to send her a series of toxic text messages in which he described her as a "f***ing sick tramp" and threatened her, matters escalated to another level. But far from wilting under this barrage, Katy French made the texts public, she even took the advice of friends and went to the gardai about it.

Suddenly, she left the pack behind -- she became the most "in demand" model in Dublin. "If you want to be different, there are always a lot of people who won't like you for it, they'll try to make your life miserable," said a friend.

While some commentators might have sneered, it was all business for Katy; her life and her career moved to another level, something that brought its own resentments in a bitchy world.

It also brought its own demands. Everyone wanted a piece of the action. After she gave an interview to Hot Press saying she did not take drugs, her mother, Janet, who would never condone such behaviour, but fearing that the untruth would be unmasked, asked her: "Why did you lie?"

She had, as she would later admit, taken cocaine as a 19-year-old student. She had also left hostages to fortune by hanging around with the likes of Gavin Lambe-Murphy who, within hours of her death, wrote an article for the Irish Daily Mail which was tasteless, barely believable in parts and which claimed they "dated".

"How dare he have the gall to write about a relationship that lasted 15 seconds," said a "disgusted" Derek Daniels, co-director of Assets Modelling Agency in Dublin where both of them worked.

Appearances on the Late Late Show, Celebrities Go Wild and Ryan Tubridy revealed another side to the much publicised model -- she was funny, self-deprecating and brutally honest about why she stayed in the limelight. It was all part of a career-building path for when her looks would not be as fresh and the calls would become less frequent.

Katy French's fame was not to everybody's liking. "The lines between model and moral authority have become dangerously blurred," observed Claire Byrne in a column for the Sunday Tribune. "Katy is everywhere, most product launches want her as their public face because her picture gets in the paper."

But then she went on: "The use of Katy French by Goal to garner some cheap publicity could be seen as compromising and it does devalue the real and valid work of the organisation."

It was an honestly held opinion, but the public didn't seem to agree. They were intelligent enough to see the girl behind the glamour and, for many people, what emerged was a revelation. They took to her, not as a celebrity or a socialite, but as someone who was simply trying to carve out a career and using all the tools at her disposal, a feisty, funny girl with goodness in her heart that any parent would be proud of.

She had made her mistakes of course, and she tried to deal with the cocaine issue just a couple of weeks ago by admitting to the Star on Sunday that she had taken the drug. Coming in the wake of the book and documentary High Society, it didn't provoke as much attention as might be expected.

With cocaine apparently extensively used at all levels in Irish society, the revelation that another celebrity had admitted taking the drug hardly caused a ripple.

But then came an opportunity to cut Katy French down to size. Her much heralded 24th birthday was the perfect opportunity for some to bring all the strands together and forensically carve up the French Phenomenon.

That's where Patrice Harrington of the Daily Mail comes in. She's the reporter who took a scalpel to Katy French and her birthday party one day and then, when tragedy befell the young model, tried to make out that Katy would have understood it.

Her employers the Daily Mail have imported a cruel kind of cynical double standard that even the most hard-bitten must find slightly nauseating.

"She's a cheap, glamour model, isn't she? Or a lapdancer. I can't wait to meet her. She should be intellectually stimulating," she wrote last Saturday week in the Irish Daily Mail, quoting Seany, some non-entity who apparently was in Big Brother 7, as he entered Krystle nightclub to attend the party.

This gratuitous and insulting quote was included simply to hurt Katy French. There can be no other reason for it.

Then Ms Harrington added her own bit of bile. "Imagine inviting someone to your birthday party who is that bitchy about you? It seems rather sad and a high price to pay to have a 'famous' face at your event."

Yet last Wednesday, as Katy French lay dying in Navan Hospital, in the same newspaper the same Ms Harrington observed: "I also found it sad that she invited people like that fool Seany from Big Brother 7 who did not know her but who had the nerve to call her insulting names outside the venue."

Well, Ms Harrington, he was the "fool" you decided to quote; his were the insulting words you picked to fill the agenda of your newspaper; he was the "fool" you used to suggest that Katy French, a professional model, was somehow involved in the tawdry underworld of the sex industry.

The piece in the Daily Mail was filled with innuendo, as the writer used every trick to demean the event.

Katy "bragged" about who would be there and was mocked because she invited Snow Patrol and Bono. "Very conspicuous" by their absence were other models because Katy French was "unpopular" and her "attention-seeking antics" had "alienated" them, it claimed.

Then she went on to make a big deal about the "best friend", a doctor who didn't want to be photographed with Ms French and who left the party after 55 minutes.

The fact is that several of Katy's friends were working at another event, the doctor about whose short stay was made so much of was not feeling well on the night and Katy's family and many of her friends were at the event.

Miss Harrington proceeded to give us her view that the beautiful young model "must have the skin of a rhinoceros" to live her life so publicly.

Then she picked up on the presence of Michael Healy-Rae, who had been with Katy on Celebrities Go Wild and become her friend. But no, it was not because he was there, but to emphasise that he left at 11.30pm and point out that two other contestants, Victoria Mary Clarke and Alan O'Neill, "failed to show."

It went on like that, cleverly written, paragraph after paragraph dripping with bile, almost every sentenced weighted to make the party seem like a nightmare.

"So," she asked rhetorically of Kathy's father, John, "is he mortified, proud, delighted or does he cringe at some of his daughter's antics?"

But last Wednesday's Daily Mail was a different story, with Patrice Harrington back with another two page special, this time singing from a very different hymn sheet.

Of course by now Katy French was dangerously ill in a coma in Navan hospital. All the vitriol of a few days earlier was just part of a "good professional relationship" between the two of them.

Oh, she did have a twinge of conscience about it? "Then came the rush of guilt at my initial insouciance. This was followed by a sick feeling in my stomach that the feature I wrote in Saturday's newspaper might have upset or annoyed her in any way. I think it's unlikely -- we have a good professional relationship and we each understand the other has a job to do -- but I will be the first to admit that Katy French and I have had our moments."

The "professional relationship" it seems is that she could slag off Katy French and suggest that she's was an unpopular airhead, that people only turned up for the free drink and that at least one of the "guests" thought she was a lapdancer.

What made her think that Saturday's two pages of constant Katy-bashing in the low-circulation Daily Mail hadn't "upset or annoyed her" -- surely that was the purpose of the exercise.

Some of Katy French's friends are convinced that she was deeply upset about the piece.

"Yes, she was upset about some of the things that were said about her in the press," said her friend, the public relations executive Tara O'Connor, who last spoke to the model on Saturday.

But, by Wednesday, the woman Patrice Harrington had attacked so viciously was a very different target from the person who had been publicly mocked by her and the Mail just days earlier.

Now she was "the girl who threw her head back in a raucous laugh", she was someone who had been "full of surprises, full of chutzpah, full of life". The contrast between the two articles by the same journalist could not have been more stark.

The quote where she had said "I am no Max Clifford" and which had made Patrice Harrington "grin" on Wednesday was repeated, but without the deflating reference.

A quote she had failed to include in her piece on the birthday party now made its way into the self-justifying piece she was writing. "'I see this as a media event, not just my birthday party,' she explained unapologetically" she said, quoting Katy French.

The woman who had been mercilessly pilloried as an "attention-seeker" whose guests hardly knew her or had merely come for the free tequila was "extraordinary", and Patrice Harrington admitted to spending a "memorable" afternoon drinking champagne in the Radisson Hotel with her on a previous occasion.

So who was the real "Katykins" remembered by her family.

She certainly wasn't the one commemorated in that series of articles in the Daily Mail by Patrice Harrington and Gavin Lambe-Murphy.

To her family, she was a much loved daughter and sister; to her friends she was a charming and funny and intelligent girl; and to the rest of us who barely knew her or only knew her through her public appearances she was "a grand girl."

That such a person should pass on aged just 24 is such a tragedy and waste.

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