(posted 7520 days ago)My Carole Caplin makeover
Kate Figes can understand how Cherie Blair fell under Carole Caplin's spell. After all, when she signed up for one of her fitness courses she found herself swaddled in towels on the charismatic lifestyle guru's bed...Kate Figes
Thursday September 18, 2003The Guardian
Photos of Carole Caplin are splashed across the front pages and each one sends shivers of recognition down my spine. Twelve years ago I signed up for one of her six-week health and fitness courses. I was overweight, working too hard and exhausted after the birth of my first child who, at the age of two, still wasn't sleeping through the night. My nanny had bought Caplin's fitness video and we spent several evenings following her exercise routine on the playroom floor. "You should sign up for one of her courses," said my nanny. So I did. I had never done anything like that before, nor have I since. She was charismatic and persuasive even then.After coughing up in advance a sum I now can't remember but what felt like a huge amount of money, I was ordered to go to her home in Kennington, south London, for a full debrief. I was so late and disorganised that I left home without breakfast or that first essential cup of coffee. I arrived hungry, desperate for caffeine after yet another broken night and shabbily dressed. She opened the door, elegant, thin, made-up, well groomed - everything a harrassed new mother aspires to - and I fell into her pristine white living room.
After an hour and a half of intense grilling on my personality, likes and dislikes, inhibitions, health, eating and exercise habits, she took me into her tiny, immaculate white kitchen and slowly prepared a plate of the foods that I should be eating; mushroom pate on oatcakes, hummous on rye bread, raw fruit and vegetables. I should be cutting out coffee, tea, wheat and dairy products, I wasn't to mix carbohydrates with protein at meals and "definitely no sweeties" she said firmly. I was so ravenous that I agreed to everything and gobbled up every crumb on the plate, every raisin. "You certainly like your food," I remember her saying. I was so relieved to be eating anything that I didn't notice the put-down until later.
"Now its time for your pamper," she said cheerfully.
"My what?" I had eaten and was hoping to escape back to work.
She took me up to her tiny white bathroom, pulled my tousled, unwashed hair off my face and showed me how to cleanse and moisturise my skin. She slapped a "rejuvenating" face mask on - Bharti Vyas products, which I had to buy. She had boxes of them under the sink. "You've got to look after yourself," she said authoritatively as she ran a deep, foaming bath and tossed in a handful of Dead Sea salts. (She advised me to buy those, too.) "I want you to relax in this bath for at least 20 minutes. I'll come and get you when your time's up," she said cheerfully as she left and locked the door.
She had the air of a headmistress about her, one who made me feel utterly child-like, unattractive and inadequate as she drifted confidently around her modern, white purpose-built two-up, two-down. I didn't dare disobey. But as I lay there, locked naked inside a total stranger's bathroom it suddenly dawned on me that this was a little surreal. It was only 10.30 in the morning and what exactly was I doing there? I had work to do, a child I adored and missed like countless other working mothers and it was beginning to get claustrophobically hot and steamy. I was sweating profusely and felt faint from the drop in blood sugar after missing breakfast.
When Caplin finally let me out, she wrapped me in fresh white towels and told me to lie down on her bed to recover. Her bedroom had mirrored wardrobes along one wall, a few scattered white cushions and not much else. It was eerily quiet and at this point I began to wonder whether this wasn't in fact the set for a soft porn movie. Were there cameras ready to roll behind those mirrors? But there was no personal rub down afterwards. I got dressed wearily and went downstairs for my final briefing. I was to attend her exercise classes in King's Cross at least three times a week. I was to follow a strict detox diet and she would ring me once a week to check how I was. I left her house just before lunchtime feeling considerably more tired than I had when I had arrived.
I spent the afternoon shopping for Caplin's recommended foods and dutifully went to her exercise classes three times a week. I cleansed my skin nightly, applied face masks weekly and reassured her when she rang that I was indeed feeling better because I didn't dare tell her otherwise. But you know what? It worked. I did have more energy and lost weight, because after six weeks of detox and workouts you do. It was the sheer charismatic nature of her control over her "clients" which still gives me a creepy feeling 12 years on.
I can remember the slick sound of her voice as she told us how to exercise and encouraged us to push ourselves further. That we could do it. I remember how she once confessed that even she indulged now and then, and had eaten two bars of chocolate earlier that day so it was perfectly all right for us mere mortals to be a little naughty too. I remember how she praised me once in class for having lost weight and I beamed like the teacher's pet, and then how moments later she massaged and comforted another woman who burst into tears because she hadn't been praised. But most of all I remember how she looked. She had the body of a racehorse. She was athletic and fit and every woman in that class longed to be a little more like her. That is her power. She understands women's weaknesses, their desire to feel better about themselves image-wise and their acute need at times for a little pampering when the going gets tough.
She is also extraordinarily bossy - bossier than I am, which is saying something. I can understand how this charismatic and self-assured woman managed to seduce Cherie Booth with her charms. As a busy working mother never out of the public eye, with a complete lack of interest in clothes, she was easy prey, as I was. What I find harder to understand is how such an intelligent woman could have let someone who earns a living feeding off the inadequacies of others anywhere near her home.