Welcome to My World

Since we moved house I have my own big walk-in wardrobe, so I’m lucky enough to have the space to store all the special dresses that have made it into the news. I’ll never throw them away. They are my collection of memories, and in years to come they’ll be the best reminder a girl can have of some great times.

chapter five a very strange relationship (#ulink_9019aa63-a77e-5b33-8abd-63617ea07e85)

I’ve had to learn to live my life knowing that around every corner there could be a man, and they are mostly men, with a camera, waiting to leap out and take a photograph of me. Over time, you get used to it and the paparazzi become a part of your day-to-day life. It’s a complicated and quite strange relationship, and I would be the first to admit that, in some ways, you could say the paparazzi made me. All those pictures of me out shopping and with my mates brought me to the public’s attention. So it could be said that they allowed me to carve out a lucrative career for myself, enabling me to have contracts with the likes of Asda, Closer magazine and LG mobile phones. That’s been the up-side of the relationship and, in that respect, I’ve been lucky. But at the same time I’ve never been someone who’s courted publicity. And while I say you get used to being constantly followed by the paparazzi, that doesn’t mean you enjoy it. Sometimes I think it’s crazy. Do people really want to see another picture of me carting a load of shopping bags about town?

Each morning I wake up knowing there’ll probably be paparazzi waiting in their cars outside the house. They don’t tend to follow Wayne as much because they know all he’s going to do is leave home, drive off to training at Manchester United and then make the same journey back a few hours later. Whereas they don’t know what I’m up to, so they’ll follow me just in case I’m doing anything interesting. Most of the time I’m really not doing anything very interesting, believe me, but that doesn’t stop them. In fact, some of the photographers are under contracts to capture as many as ten pictures of me per day, so their job is to grab those photos no matter what.

There was one paparazzo who kept on following me all the time. Everywhere I went he was there, trailing me, jumping red lights to keep on my tail and generally acting like a real idiot. One day, when I was with Wayne, he followed us onto the motorway. Wayne is more likely to lose his temper at that kind of thing than I am, so he pulled the car over onto the hard shoulder. The photographer slowed and pulled up behind us. Wayne drove off and the man started following us again.

By now Wayne had had enough, so he pulled up alongside the photographer’s car, asked him what he was playing at, and the two of them started arguing. The photographer just didn’t care. All he kept repeating was that he was just doing his job! Unbelievable!

And there’s nothing you can do to stop them. On another occasion we even drove to a police station and the photographer followed us there. That didn’t make any difference. As long as there’s a camera in the car the police can’t do a thing to help you. As far as the law is concerned the camera means he’s a photographer and not a stalker. How crazy is that?

Sometimes the situation is downright ridiculous. I was in one of the card shops in Liverpool city centre, just before Valentine’s Day, and my mate and I were engrossed in looking through the rows of cards. The next minute, we turn round and the whole shop window is full of people peering in at us. There was a crowd of shoppers, three to four deep, craning their necks to see who was inside Clinton’s card shop. At the front of the pack there were three paparazzi taking pictures of us, while everyone else had just stopped to see what the fuss was all about. Me and my mate just burst out laughing, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, please, I hope I haven’t picked up any dirty cards or anything!’ People had their camera phones out and everything. It was really embarrassing! I felt ashamed to walk out of the shop. ‘You know what,’ I said to my mate, ‘I’m gonna walk out and people will be expecting someone really big to be in here, like Elton John or something, and then I’ll walk out and it’s just me!’ The next moment, a security guard asked if we wanted to leave via a back route, so we ended up going down some stairs and coming out of Boots next door. Outside I bumped into an old mate I used to go dancing with in Liverpool. She said, ‘Coleen! I’ve just been standing outside that shop wondering, “Who’s in there?” Then I looked and it was you!’ I told her I felt embarrassed. Stuff like that just makes you think, ‘That’s so ridiculous!’ It’s madness. What most people don’t realize is that there are now literally thousands of untrained guys out there with cameras calling themselves paparazzi. Many of them have never even sold a picture, but they keep on trying to make money by stalking celebrities 24 hours a day, hoping something will happen that will make their fortune. A lot of them are good guys, but some are really intrusive and even try to wind us up just to get a picture and story showing Wayne or me getting cross. Which anyone would if they were wound up like some of these guys can do.

When we were in Germany the press stalked us everywhere. We’d step outside the hotel to go to buy lunch or just to go for a walk and they’d be with us all the time. In the end, I used to ask them, ‘Aren’t you bored? Aren’t people in England bored of us? It’s ridiculous.’ Believe it or not, there are even times when I feel sorry for them and I think they’re just doing their job. But then in other situations, like when we’re on holiday, I wish they would go away, leave us in peace and give us a bit of privacy.

We’ve been sitting on beaches in Dubai and Barbados and we can see the paparazzi there, twenty or thirty metres away, just waiting to get a shot of us. It’s a public beach so there’s nothing we can do. I try not to let it affect me but I’m totally aware of the kinds of shots they’re after and, like any girl, it does make me feel self-conscious about my body. I find myself breathing in a bit when I stand up so I end up sitting down on the lounger all day. Otherwise, I take a walk down the length of the beach and there will be a load of them following me. It just means I’m on my guard all day. However hard I try, sometimes I can’t avoid giving them the shot they’re looking for.

I’d rather just go on holiday and be myself and not care what everyone thinks.

We were on a beach in Barbados once, with a few friends, and I stood up to remove my shorts because I had my bikini on underneath. As I was taking them off I accidentally pulled the string of my bikini and they came down a bit. I just panicked thinking that was the picture that would be in the newspapers the next day.

The alternative to all this is to agree to do a ‘set up’ with the photographers. If we agree then they promise to leave us alone for the rest of the day. Celebrities do this all the time. The picture will appear in the newspaper and readers think it’s a genuine paparazzi shot, but in reality it’s all been posed and agreed on. More often than not the photographic agencies will pay money for the picture and often split the proceeds with the celebrity. You can always spot the beach set-ups in the newspapers. They’re the ones with the soap stars looking all beautiful and toned, or splashing about in the sea. They’re not the ones of them sitting on their sun-loungers eating a burger, or where they have a few rolls of flesh on display. I couldn’t pose for one of those photographs. I’d rather just go on holiday and be myself and not care what everyone thinks.