Love, Lipstick and Lies (5 page)

I remembered the first time I had made Alex up, and how accepting I had been of his female persona. I didn’t feel like that now. I was starting to dread him wanting to dress up because I knew what it would mean. And yet I still tried to put on a brave face about it. Just before our wedding blessing we had both appeared on
Alan Carr: Chatty Man
, and I had tried to joke about Alex’s cross-dressing, because I wanted to show that I stood by him, saying, ‘You know what happens in fairytales when the clock strikes twelve, Cinderella disappears and out comes Roxanne.’ But how I wished it wasn’t so …

After Bangkok we left for the tropical island of Koh Phangan. It was a beautiful location and I had hoped that we would have a relaxing time there together. But Alex was in training for a big fight he was due to have at the end of September, and yet again when we were away he didn’t want to interrupt his training. He didn’t want to drink; all he wanted to do was work out and find someone to help him train. I felt quite pissed off. I understood that he needed to train because he had a fight coming up, but surely he could have missed a couple of days on our honeymoon?

There was one funny moment when we went on an elephant ride and some people passed us and shouted out, ‘Oh, look, it’s Peter Andre and Katie Price!’ I think I thought it was funnier than Alex did, and was almost tempted to shout back, ‘No, I’m on to the next one!’

But I was annoyed too because even at this remote location the paps tracked us down and photographed
us sunbathing on our private balcony. Sometimes I felt I could never escape from them. Earlier in the month they had almost wrecked our wedding blessing when they had surrounded the 80s-style A-Team van I’d arrived at the church in. It was supposed to be pap-proof but they started rocking it and ripped off the screens that were covering the back window. One man managed to wrench open the back door and shove his camera in, trying to get a shot. He whacked my PA in the face, not caring that he had hurt her; someone else tried to open the front door. I was in the van under siege for about ten minutes while my security team wrestled the paps away. I remember feeling so overwhelmed with anger and frustration that I cried. They were treating me like an animal; in fact, worse than an animal.

Once again, I don’t want to appear hypocritical. I accept that I have engaged with the press in the past, but does that mean I should have to accept abuse and being put in danger by them? It’s not all of them, of course. The old-school photographers are great and you build a relationship with them over time, but with digital technology any idiot with a camera can be a pap these days and some of them have no scruples.

My security team had put up a screen, between the van and the church, to keep the paps at bay, but as I was hurried in some of them charged at it, ripping it down. Even when we’d managed to make it inside we weren’t safe. Some paps forced open the door, nearly knocking down one of the church wardens.

And now here they were again, on this idyllic island in the middle of nowhere. I fucking hated them! How the hell did they know we were there? Someone must have tipped them off. Now I have a suspicion it might have been Alex.

* * *

Back home again I felt our relationship start to deteriorate and very quickly go downhill. From being pleased that Alex was a professional fighter, I started to see what a selfish, self-absorbed life that was. It seemed to take up his entire time. He went training every single morning, came home, ate – a lot – and took all these different supplements, then wanted to sleep. Hmm, that wasn’t what I had signed up for … I’d started to find him boring, no fun to be with any more. I understood that he had to step up his training when he had a fight coming up, that he had to lose weight and eat properly, and it was bound to take up a lot of time. But he was always obsessed, even when he wasn’t preparing for a fight. I thought he should still have been up for doing fun things, but he wasn’t.

And then my then nanny discovered that Alex had been taking Harvey’s growth-hormone drugs and injecting them into himself. She told me that the doctor had phoned to check because we seemed to be ordering more than usual and he was concerned. With a sinking heart I realised that there was only one person who would do that, and that person was my husband. When
I confronted Alex he admitted it. My nanny Jo was there to witness the scene.

‘Why would you do that!’ I exclaimed, furious that he had been helping himself to my son’s medicine. It was crucial for Harvey’s health.

‘I thought you could just order more supplies, I didn’t realise it was a problem,’ was his reply. He didn’t seem bothered at all. I couldn’t believe his attitude.

Jo and I ended up having to lock the medicine away. I just didn’t trust Alex not to take it again. Really, I think he crossed the line then and I should have told him to get out of my house and out of my life. I felt that he was only ever thinking of himself, in his own selfish world. I am not sure that I felt the same way about him again after that.

And then there was the money thing. Even though he had earned some good money through his involvement with me, Alex hardly paid for anything and that really started to annoy me. I felt he was tight-fisted and it seemed to me that he would only ever spend money on himself. He bought himself a pink sex machine. Without going into details, it had a metal frame that moved which you could put different attachments on and … well, you can guess the rest. The cleaner found it under our bed and moved it into my downstairs gym without realising what it was! It was one of the very few things Alex bought, though he did buy me a diamond necklace that he gave me on the day of our wedding blessing.

I felt as if I was the man in the relationship, going out and earning the money, treating Alex with gifts. I paid for all the holidays, all the meals out, basically everything we did. I started to think, Here we go again … I’d had relationships like this in the past, before I was married to Pete. They had never ended well.

I sometimes feel that because I have money, the men I’ve been involved with have taken advantage and thought, Oh, it’s okay, I can have a lazy day. I don’t have to work. Kate will pay, she’ll sort this out. The same goes for organising things for us to do, having a bit of get up and go. I wanted Alex to say, ‘Right, this weekend I’m taking you and the kids away camping.’ Or to Center Parcs. Anything really, just so long as it wasn’t always about me organising every single thing. He had been great with the kids at the beginning of our relationship, but as the months went by he did less and less with them. I also felt he was becoming lazy around the house. Because I have a housekeeper, Alex seemed to think that he didn’t have to lift a finger.

I’m the kind of girl who falls in love with someone and just wants to be with them – it doesn’t matter what their background is or what they do. But I’ve worked hard for what I’ve got, and when I’d come home tired after work and find Alex crashed out on the sofa, or sitting at the table eating, and he’d say he didn’t want to do anything that night, it would put my back up. And I would think: Well, I don’t want to do anything with you either! And so the rot quickly set in.

I started to feel that he was becoming obsessed with being a celebrity. I was proud of him for winning
Celebrity Big Brother
and I had got him a TV series of his own through my production company, looking at different martial arts. He also had a weekly column in a celebrity magazine – and all those things he only got because of me. But still that didn’t seem to be enough for him. He wanted to do more magazine and press interviews. I was always wary about him doing them because I didn’t want him to talk about our relationship and me. I’d had all that with my first marriage, and look where that ended up … I hated the idea of anyone using my name to get famous because if they did that I would never know if they really loved me for myself, or if they just loved the idea of being with me because of what it brought them.

One of Alex’s friends became his manager and he was someone I did not like. Alex also joined an acting agency, wanting to get back into that line of work. I thought, Hang on. He’s changed from the man I met who was committed only to his sport. Now he wants his own manager, he wants to be in magazines, he wants to be an actor … what’s going on? He seemed to be becoming a completely different person from the man I had first met. He insisted that he needed to change his image so he would be taken more seriously in the acting world, and instead of wearing the trendy clothes that I liked he started wearing trench coats and sleeveless jumpers over shirts, trying to cultivate this preppie image. It was
so not him, and so not how I like a man to dress. I hated it, to be honest, and thought he looked like a bouncer. And, yes, I did tell him that.

But I could have coped with all the training and the difficulties over money, even with his fame obsession. It was his alter ego Roxanne who ultimately destroyed our marriage. I think because I had been initially accepting of what he did, Alex took advantage and pushed it to the very limit. It was like I gave him an inch and he took a mile. Because I was open-minded, he saw that as a green light to go ahead and do whatever he wanted. As far as I am concerned he completely abused my trust. The first time Alex had shown me Roxanne, he hadn’t been like that at all, he had still been himself; otherwise I wouldn’t have wanted to be with him, no question.

After our wedding blessing in July, things took a very sinister turn. I felt as if Roxanne was taking over my husband. It was no longer something he did every now and then, once in a blue moon; it seemed more and more frequent, and was deeply disturbing to me. I came to absolutely dread the whole becoming Roxanne ritual.

‘Please don’t do it,’ I would beg him.
‘Please.’
But it was as if he couldn’t stop. He was driven to do it.

I knew the whole routine by heart. It started with Alex getting that vacant, glazed look in his eyes. He seemed to love the ritual. In fact, he told me that he loved the preparation most of all and took his time, spending over two hours getting ready to be Roxanne. He would begin at night, while I was pottering round the house or
watching TV. I hated it. By now I knew that once he had changed into her, he would be like that all night.

The picture of Alex dressed up in kinky black underwear, which was taken when we were at the BloodLust ball, is a good example of his getting-ready routine. He would always begin by having a bath and shaving his whole body. Next came make up, and he’d want red fake nails, red lipstick, fake lashes, the works. All the time he’d be planning what he was going to wear. He’d always want fishnets and suspenders, plus a tight little dress. He would parade around the room staring into the mirror, change the dress, change the wig, until he had found the combination he liked. He would always put on vibrating nipple clamps, which is why he hasn’t got any nipples left. Awful, I know, but that’s the truth as I mentioned when I went on
The Graham Norton Show
.

And once he was fully transformed into Roxanne he was lost to me. He loved doing all this so much … too much. More than anything else, it seemed, and he didn’t care what I thought or how it made me feel. I felt that I was nothing to him at those times. Alex had retreated into his own little world where no one else could reach him.

‘Alex, Alex! Stop it!’ I would plead with him, but there was no response. I would click my fingers in front of his face and he wouldn’t even register me doing it. It was frightening to see him so withdrawn.

And he wanted me to do more and more extreme
things to him. Think of the most disturbing porn you could imagine, and times that by ten, and only then are you getting close to what I witnessed and what Alex wanted me to join in with. I couldn’t believe some of the things that he wanted me to do to him and, looking back, I can’t believe that I did them. But it had been a gradual progression, a slippery slope, and now I was in a room with a man I didn’t even know, doing things that weren’t normal. This wasn’t role play, this wasn’t experimental, this was sick. I didn’t want this in my life. I felt that what he was making me do, and what I had to see him doing to himself, wasn’t human. It was damaging, shocking, obscene. I know many people reading this will think, Well, why the hell didn’t you get out of that relationship? Chuck Alex out of the house? But it’s never that easy once you are married. Trust me, I tried my best a few months later when I knew I couldn’t go on … and then it took weeks to get him to go.

One night we went to a party my friends Nick and Royston were having at their house. Alex disappeared upstairs for ages and I had no idea what he was up to. But then it all became horribly clear when he reappeared dressed up as Roxanne in a pink wig, a little black dress, fishnet tights and high heels. I was shocked and embarrassed that he was doing this in public, at my friends’ house, surrounded by people we didn’t know. Disgust and anger raged through me as he tottered towards me. Inside I was thinking, What the hell am I doing with him? I can do better than this! And the cheek
of him, doing this out in public! It really was as if he had no respect for me. I felt completely humiliated.

I could see how shocked everyone was by his transformation and finally realised that I had been deceiving myself in thinking that I could handle this. Alex’s behaviour was by now seriously disturbing. When he was out of earshot my friends crowded round me and all said things along the lines of, ‘Kate, what the fuck are you doing with him?’ Yet even though I privately agreed with them, I felt I had no choice but to be the supportive wife, and pretend that I was okay with it, when inside it was eating away at me like poison.

There were these gorgeous waiters at the party, working for Butlers in the Buff, where employees just wear an apron, a bow tie and a smile! Ironically it was something my third husband Kieran used to do … And I thought, Look at them, so sexy and ripped and clean-cut, and look at the state of my husband. Alex was by then fully in Roxanne mode, and had become really shy and quiet as he always did, and wouldn’t talk to anyone except me, so it wasn’t even as if we could have a laugh with him. I felt completely let down. I didn’t see how he could care about my feelings.