Jordan

MODERN PHENOMENON

Former Page Three girl and present-day pin-up for Lads mags Jordan walks into London’s fashionable restaurant, Sugar Reef – the walking, talking, personification of a tabloid freak-show.

Her breasts are so big compared to the rest of her, that when she walks into the room, the rest of her seems to follow several seconds later.

Prettier and more petite than she looks in her more Amazonian glamour shots, Jordan was studying to be a nurse, like her mother, before she went into topless modelling.

In those days she was Kate Price from Brighton – already a victim of various forms of abuse: mental bullying from boyfriends, soft-porn pornography from photographers, various physical attacks and incidents of abuse.

Nowadays Jordan is a regular in the papers and TV magazines – engaged in a seemingly never-ending saga of feuds, flings and friendships in which she is seen dating footballers, snogging soap stars, and wearing next to nothing to film premieres.

Epitomising the fact that she is the ultimate female Modern British Phenomenon, her last two boyfriends were Dane Bowers formerly with boy-band Another Level whom she met at a showbiz after-party, and Ace from Gladiators whom she met in panto. No wonder Martin Amis is fascinated with her.

The torrid breakdown of her relationship with Bowers has inspired a series of colourful incidents, conducted mostly at chucking out time in London night-clubs: Bowers’ fight with Mark Morrison after Morrison threw a drink over her; a public fight or two with Dane himself; allegations against her of stalking and jealousy.

She is – with the possible exception of Meg Matthews – possibly the lowest form of celebrity I can think of: someone with no talent whatsoever (unless that is, you find standing with your legs open staring a perfect Gary Numan pout with your top off entertaining) – someone who generates a volume of publicity in direct contrast to any actual ability she might have. Even Anthea Turner or Vanessa Feltz can read an autocue.

Competition amongst such creatures is intense however, and the pressure to maintain a presence in the auspicious pages of the Daily Star or FHM is fierce.

Only 22 years old, she has just undergone her third breast enlargement operation, despite the fact that she (supposedly) retired from topless modelling three years ago.

“My new toys” or “my new babies,” she will call them, or when she’s “feeling particularly leery” – “the old airbags.”

In case it was remotely possible that anyone had not noticed either herself or them (unlikely, given that half of the buttons of her waistcoat are undone – possibly from the strain), Jordan is constantly – loudly – drawing attention to them herself.

“Whoar, yeah, get yer tits out darling,” she shouts, larking about with the table of men looking over, flashing open her mac.

“Everyone thinks I’m this bimbo who’s had her tits done,” she moans, addressing her principal complaint about the way she is perceived. “But I ain’t. People think I’m this freak who’s ill in the head, having to have all this surgery. They’re not THAT big. Not how big people make out they are.”

Jordan’s burgeoning obsession with surgery borders on dysmorphia raising fears that, like a British version of the tragic, trashy, former porn-star Lolo Ferrari (who had 22 operations until her breasts went from 37D to a world record-breaking, grotesque 54J), she is in danger of becoming a freak-show; marketing her chest to death.

When people heard that I had interviewed her instead of asking “what’s she like ?”, they invariably asked me, “what are THEY like ?”

The answer is that, whilst not quite in the Ferrari league, they are pretty shocking.

Today, sitting across the table for dinner, her famous breasts are wedged uncomfortably into a tiny white waistcoat, looking like two brown basketballs that someone has stuffed into a bag that was never going to be big enough.

Given her surprisingly girlish build, it’s immediately obvious why the surgeon who performed her first two operations refused to do a third unless she put on a stone first. (On the other hand, Jordan sighs, her agent Samantha Bond has told her she needs to lose a stone.)

“The surgeon said, with my frame, the boobs would look stupid,” Jordan smiles, blithely. “He likes to make his patients look natural but I said, it doesn’t matter if I look natural. Everyone knows they’re fake, so why does it matter if they look fake ?”

She continues, as she often does, talking as if she were making a speech of national importance. Like some kind of royalty.
“It would be different if I was a proper glamour model getting them out all the time. I’m happy now. No more surgery now ever. If I get any bigger, I shall look stupid.”

Her lack of irony when she makes statements like this could be regarded as either depressingly dumb or almost admirable, even touching. Either way, it’s rather stupefying.

Now 36DD from the original 32C, her breasts look like a couple of comedy cushions you might see up someone’s jumper in a French & Saunders sketch. Not only are the size and (perfectly round) shape of her breasts ridiculous and unnatural, the shade is equally artificial and absurd. Thick and dark, as if they have been painted with Ronseal, they are, like the rest of her sunbed-blasted flesh on display, the colour of two-day old gravy and about as appealing.

The fact that her face, her eyes, and blinding white smile are so much prettier than her topless calendar shots ever indicate only make the presence of the ridiculous breasts more disheartening.

As it is, I keep getting a picture of all her friends and family – the people who knew her before she had them done – uttering the same sentence, over and over again.
“It’s such a shame. Kate was always such a pretty girl when she was young…”
Now I am one of them.

Despite her protestations that she is “here to talk about
what I’m up to, what I’ve done in my career and that”, at first you’d be forgiven there are, essentially, only two interesting things about Jordan – the left one and the right one. The public have become mildly obsessed with Jordan’s obsession – the way they have walking car-crash celebrities like Daniella Westbrook.

Why would she have her breasts enhanced even though she was already the most popular Page Three Girl in the tabloids since Samantha Fox and Melinda
Messenger ?

Why would she over-rule not only her own surgeon, but the advice of the Silicone Support UK, as well as fellow models like Kathy Lloyd and Melinda Messenger not to mention the example of one of her role models Pamela Anderson, who had her silicone implants removed ? Even readers of The Sun have voted overwhelmingly for her to resist operations in the past.
“My Boobs Are In Your Hands” Jordan told them in a piece of classic tabloid hyperbole. But a year after the poll, she relented, prompting the equally classic Sun headline “Jordan Boobs Again.”

What kind of damage, psychologically, must she have suffered to feel so insecure and inadequate about herself that she needed to have any operations in the first place – considering how attractive she was ?

The most obvious assumption was that the insatiable interest in surgery and her penchant for increasingly risque tattoos (front and back) was a sub-conscious desire to repair some kind of damage, or cover something up.

In Lolo Ferrari’s case, it was suggested in Channel 4’s recent documentary The Dark Side Of Porn, that Ferrari’s dismal, depressing, self-image went back to some kind of transference from her mother’s antipathy towards breast-feeding her as a baby.

“Nah, I didn’t see that programme. But everyone keeps telling me I should ‘ave !!!” Jordan grins brightly/not brightly. “I don’t think I am like that at all. Lolo Ferrari looked ridiculous ! She had a problem. I just wanted to have my boobs bigger.”

The question is why. A psychotherapist could probably make a case for all kinds of theories for her latent insecurity and desire to win (male) approval: her Dad’s departure from the family when her parents split up when she was four; the numerous schools she attended when her family moved nine times before she reached her teens and (presumably) sought the approval of boys; various attacks and abuse when she was young.

Look for any element of Lolo Ferrari’s tragic trauma and time and time again, you will only find Jordan’s irrepressibly perky personality begging to differ – something that only supports the view ‘she protesteth too much.’

Jordan, of course, is not ‘aving it.
“I haven’t got a care in the weld !” she laughs. “Just because I have my boobs done, everyone’s having a go at me. But I never have a problem – I’m always so ‘appy, from the moment I wake up. I’m always taking the piss out of my boobs, ain’t I ? I always say: I am a fake little creature. If I’m drunk, I say, ‘oi mind the airbags. They might burst…’ I’ve got scars on the underneath yeah. You could have them lasered but I don’t care. If I’m sunbathing, you’ll get tourists walking by going, ‘urgh ! Boob job ! Silly-con !”

When one of the suited-and-booted city boys on the next table plucks up the courage to ask for an autograph, she obliges instantly.
“What’s your name ?” she asks, smiling sweetly, adding “And where do you come from ?” like a game show host.
“There you go. See you again – when you’re better dressed !”

Jordan is a strange combination of savage insecurity and inordinate pluck. She’s got the nerve to do topless shots (“looking well dodg’” as she puts it) in Loaded or The Daily Star, flirt with Jerry Springer on his chat show, but not the confidence to walk into a pub on her own, or go out by herself. For today’s interview, she’s bought along her best mate, one of the close family friends now on her payroll.

‘I can’t walk in a pub on my own and I never will. That’s one thing where I do lack confidence. Oooh no. Even if I’m out with my friends, I could never go up to the bar. I give them the money to pay.”

Jordan’s view on the operations is “I had them because I wanted them done. Not for anyone else, just for me” which to her probably qualifies as feminism and thus answers any form of criticism.

“I know a lot of girls who’ve had boob jobs and they’ve gone wrong. They’ve had the silicone go hard or leak/rupture. I’ve seen loads of disasters,” she admits, absolutely unconcerned. “But there’s so many different types of implant you can have, the doctors go through them all with you. But they all recommend silicone, so it can’t be that bad can it ?”

This is the sort of playground logic with which it’s hard to argue and something of a speciality where Jordan’s concerned. The current health scare over silicone, for example, is greeted with the breezy dismissal: “They wouldn’t have it on the market it if it was dangerous would they ?”

On the chance she might change her mind in the future, she says: “I’m young and it’s better doing it now than when I’m older…It’s like a brunette going blonde. You can change them back. You can go smaller. Why do people moan when I have mine done when some people have operations to make them smaller ?”

On the chance of something going wrong during the operation, she argues: “There’s loads of things you can worry about and die from. There’s risk in any operation you have – when you go to the dentist and have your teeth out. I don’t really care if there’s any risks. It’s a risk that I took and I’m ’appy.”

Although the operation required that she stayed in hospital over night, she giggles, she was still on the phone to her friend Sally “asking her if they should have pizza. Then the following night, we went clubbing. Not a good idea,” she admits. “Three days later I was aching.”

She has, she points out in her defence, “always been obsessed with women’s boobs” ever since she was at school.

“When we go out, if I look at a woman, straight away, I say ‘cor she’s got no tits has she ? I actually went to Transform when I was 16 to see if I could have my boobs done. A woman in my eyes should be curvy.”

On some level, she probably wanted to be like her mother, to whom she is both incredibly close and alike.
“She’s got quite big boobs. There are big boobs in the family. My mum always said ‘you don’t need ‘em doing. You’ll get big boobs when you’re older.”

She concedes her family are not particularly pleased.
“What can they say ? It’s my body innit ? My auntie said I was mad doing it and then a year later she’s had hers done ! ”

Finally, she argues, it wasn’t a waste of money because
– having already had a previous boob job sponsored by the Daily Star – this time round, she announces proudly, she didn’t have to pay for the operation. Instead she had it done for free in return for endorsing the private hospital concerned. (Stand up and take a bow, the good people of Transform.)

She snaps back tartly against any suggestion that the constant desire for self-improvement implies that she feels either insecure/inadequate about herself, is looking for attention or tacitly looking for the approval of men. (A ridiculous notion, right ?)

“If I wanted men to look at me, I’d wear mini-skirts, tits out, hair all done. I don’t go out for men to look at me. Though, like any girl I’d probably worry if I went past a building site and didn’t get a whistle.”

Not, I feel obliged to point out, that there’s exactly much danger of THAT happening.

Jordan is in many ways the archetypal modern-day C-list celebrity – someone who generates a volume of publicity directly in reverse proportion to what they actually contribute to the culture.

It is hard to know what people like Jordan actually do – especially since she is forever announcing grandly that she has quit modelling topless for good. One minute she is comparing herself to examples like Linda Lusardi and Samantha Fox (all the greats in the world of topless modelling). The next, she is revelling in her up-and-coming appearance in the pages of American Playboy.

“I can’t wait. I’ve always wanted to do Playboy. Why ? Cos they’re really nice pictures, really tastefully done.”

Eventually she comes up with the notion that she works “in promotion” and it is true you will for the most part see her picture in the papers doing PAs for Swatch, opening a new branch of Sock Shop, or accompanying the winner of a beer competition in Loaded on a flight on Concorde.

Sadly for Jordan, during last year’s Channel 5 series, ‘Young, Talented & Hot’, Jordan admitted (rather unwisely) that being on camera makes her nervous, thus making any aspirations to be the new Wendy Turner on Wheel of Fortune seem rather optimistic.

“I have got one idea in my head,” she hinted seriously during the Channel 5 profile. “I might do a topless poster.”

Her chances of following Samantha Fox into a record career also look fairly slim, if the singing lessons captured (again unwisely) on ‘Young Talented & Hot’ are anything to go by. (Cats being strangled being a fairly lenient comparison.)

Nonetheless, she has a new single planned soon.
“I know they’re all ready to slate me but I can’t wait. I think it will shock people.”

She has also turned to the internet, hoping to following in Pamela Anderson’s more lucrative boob-prints with her own website.

The decision to have a third operation even though she was already gracing the pages of Maxim, Loaded and Front, seems to confirm that she has wised up to the need to keep ahead and stay bigger than the rest of the competition.

The latest operation also coincided her break-up with the man she wanted to marry. Her personal life has been convoluted enough to earn her the tabloid epithet as “Troubled model, Jordan” thanks principally to the break-up with her former boyfriend of 18 months, ex-Another Level singer, Dane Bowers.

The split provoked a series of incidents carried out ingloriously through the pages of the tabloids. He was seen slapping her at China White and having her chucked out of the TV Hits Awards amidst accusations that she was stalking him.

Now, she announces pointedly, she is threatening Bowers with legal action.
“Me and Dane got a car together which he decided to take and he bought me a dog which his mum has decided to keep. If you go out with Dane you have to go out with his mum and dad as well.”

The only time her hard-as-nails bravado drops during the few hours I spend with her is in the car on the way to the restaurant when she starts a ding-dong text-messaging row with Bowers.

The strength of feeling between them is obvious thanks to the sudden, sullen, silence that descends as she sits staring out of the window, pondering what to message him back. Then for the next half an hour, the tapping of keys on her mobile becomes positively frantic.

“Oooh, we can be sarcastic when we get going can’t we ?” she mutters to herself, as much as anyone. “Little git.”

After this her conversation becomes Dane, Dane, Dane.
Dane said he loved me. Dane said he was going to marry me. Dane doesn’t love her. He still really loves me. Dane’s new single is all about me (proudly) – “so I must be on his mind.”

It is, rather plaintively, like listening to a teenager who has had her heart broken at school.

Why did it go wrong ?
“I don’t know why – you’d have to ask Dane,” she sulks.
“For a start, he didn’t like my job. Didn’t like men looking at me, even if we was out, in a club or whatever. He didn’t like the comments and the way men stared at me when I was with him. It wasn’t me ! It was them other things he couldn’t handle.”

She can barely pause for breath.
“To this day, when I say ‘why did we split up ?’ he says,
‘I didn’t like your job’ which I think is a poor excuse cos he knew what I done when he met me. He didn’t like all the old pictures coming up… Dane said if I turned back to Kate, then he’d marry me. I have no idea what he means. I haven’t changed at all.”

Still the onslaught keeps coming.
“Suddenly as soon as he started work with Victoria (Beckham on the Truesteppers’ single You’re Out of Your Mind) it started to go downhill. He thought he was some sort of superstar. He changed towards me. He started treating me like shit. He lost respect for me.”

These problems were something Jordan should have been used to. Her previous long-term boyfriend Ace from Gladiators suffered from the same problem.

Anyone who had seen Channel 5’s Young Talented & Hot documentary on Jordan would have known this already thanks to the moment when Ace opined that Jordan’s fame was “alright if fans just come up and say hello, but when they get their arse out and say ‘Jordan, sign my arse cheeks, then it’s a different ball game.”

“Every boyfriend I’ve gone out with, they always say they like my job at the beginning but when it comes down to it, a few months down the line, the little jibes start coming out. They’re all the same. Towards the end, they’ve all started losing respect for me. They do not like men looking at me. They have all been possessive – not always in a bad way. At least I know they care.”

Jordan can recite her list of tabloid conquests pretty much by rote.
Dwight Yorke: “What about him ? I met him and that’s it.”
Teddy Sheringham: the same.
Michael Greco (Beppe di Marco from EastEnders): “a friend of mine and Dane’s.”
Oliver Skeete: “you’re joking.”
J from 5ive: “no.”
In 2002, when she had her son Harvey, it emerged Yorke was the father. She reneged on her promise/threat to give birth live on the internet.

She will admit to having kissed Formula One driver Ralf Schumacher and Shane from Boyszone but says nothing more happened between either of them. None the less one paper asked IS NO MAN SAFE FROM MAN-MAD MODEL JORDAN ?

“The image people have of me is rubbish. I’m a party-goer and an exhibitionist but I don’t sleep around. I’m not into one-night stands or flings cos I get hurt really easily. I can count the number of men I’ve slept with on one hand. Yeah, one hand. Five fingers or less.”

This seems less improbable when she insists she wasn’t into boys at school (“I was into my swimming and my horses”) and lost her virginity on her 16th birthday – “after an East 17 concert.”

“As I got older I got into flirting. I am a natural flirt. It’s another thing I get off my mum. I was obviously putting off some vibe for men. Some vibe that I didn’t realise.”

This, it turns out, is her way of drawing together a number of incidents from her youth – incidents that, for the most part, she will brusquely brush off as insignificant.

She was 16 when she had her first real boyfriend – who was, like both her Dad and her step-dad, in the building trade and was much older than she was.

“There you go ! You’ll already be saying I wasn’t normal !
He was 27. He had a car. He used to knock me about. My mum used to pick me up when I’d been bashed up” – something that, she says, was not unusual in her other relationships too “to some degree.”

“Cos they were jealous (laughs). I carried on going with them too (snorts). Always went back – when they said
‘I won’t do it again. How many times ? Loads. They’ve always in their own different little ways.”

“I met him at the stables, which was funny because my mum would never let me have a paper round or nothing like that. She was always really protective. But she was quite happy when I was up with the horses on my own.

“Despite what happened,” she laughs plaintively, “I had a really good time. He was probably one of the best people I went out with but only because he liked horses.”

And when she was 13 and modelling for Joe Bloggs, and ended up allowing the photographer to take photographs of her wearing only her underwear.

“The photographer was really good,” she remembers. “The odd thing, although I didn’t know it at the time was, was he would never let anyone watch. I said to my mum, he was definitely weird. Something about him I felt uncomfortable with – which only goes to show parents should always listen to kids when they say something’s wrong. Then we had the Child Protection people banging at the door saying he’d been put away and it turns out that this fella has got a string of convictions for child abuse. When they went round his house there were pictures of me everywhere. He used to drug girls with this drink and you know, do things to them. I was warned that if he contacted me, or send me flowers or anything when he come out, to contact them, but he never.”

Again, talking about this, doesn’t seem her to affect her remotely. There is no hesitation or change in her cocky demeanour at all.

“I do look back at it but then what am I supposed to do ? You can’t change the past. You just gotta make the most of the future. I honestly think that it didn’t have much effect. Even at the time it didn’t really bother me.”

There are other incidents – at least incidents that she is prepared to talk about. Once when she was in the park when she was seven, she says, a man “got me into this bush and sort of fiddled with me.”

Without any hesitation or pause for breath she continues:
“People saw it and he ran, so my mum and dad found out about it that day, straight away. But they couldn’t find him. Did it upset me ? No not really. It was quite serious. I took my knickers to the police station and everything. I suppose if he was trying to rape me, he’d have done it. It wasn’t normal what he was doing anyway. Another time, a man tried to grab me to get me into his car !”

All of these incidents come out as a result of asking if she thinks anything in her life has damaged her, or what is the worst thing that has ever happened to her.

To the second question, initially, she answered that it was “Dane’s mum taking her dog. It’s one of those dogs in that film, Turner & Hooch,” she beamed. “Everyfing seems to be big with me dunnit ?!”

Returning to the question of whether the incident in the park traumatised her at all and she says, “no way, not at all. You think it did, don’t you ! But it don’t bother me to talk about it !!”

She says all of this so brightly, you could be forgiven for taking her at her word, until even she has to concede,
“I suppose when you think about it, all through my childhood, there’s always been that thing with men.”

Somewhere deep down in her psyche, you would assume this must have something to do with her enduring interest in altering her appearance, particularly considering it’s the shape or the size of her breasts for men to ogle over in Page Three.

None of these incidents, she feels, has affected how she feels about men.
“I have been mis-treated by all of them in the end yeah I suppose. That’s why I’m still looking for Mr Right. He’s out there somewhere. God help him !

She feels genuinely untroubled.
“I let men do what they like and they probably don’t think I care. And I’m like, ‘but I DON’T care’. I don’t mind being controlled. I don’t moan about anything. I like them to (take control). That is the key thing for any man I go out with – I need to find a man who puts their foot down with me.”

Still, despite her assurances, the insecurities of the victim mentality are obvious. You could see the plastic surgery and topless modelling as a means of gaining male approval and popularity rather than the bullying and abuse that she has grown more used to.

Maybe they give her some sort of power or just the means to torment them back.

Judging from the reaction to her operations – from her boyfriends and her following of Sun readers – she might just isolate herself further and with no realisation of the damage that ultimately she might do down the line – to her body and her confidence.

The danger is, if she carries on distorting not only her own body but her personality, rather than gain what she sees as their ‘approval’, she will only succeed in repelling them.

But then again perhaps even this is what she wants; the only thing that will make her feel safer.

ENDS