This is a story of what it's like to interview someone who doesn't want to be interviewed. Some time ago, luxury luggage company Louis Vuitton arranged for Anouska Hempel to visit Hong Kong. Hempel, who is married to businessman Sir Mark Weinberg and is therefore Lady Weinberg in her private life, is a designer. She is famous for many things: she is the woman behind The Hempel, one of London's newest, smartest, most terrifyingly trendy hotels, and she also created Blakes, which is a more idiosyncratic boutique hotel in London much favoured by actors and pop stars. She designs couture clothing with matching hats, shoes and fragrances. She designs homes. And she designs pens - 27 of them for Louis Vuitton.
The company was anxious to introduce these implements to the media. I was, well, not anxious but certainly curious to meet Hempel who, before she became a designer, was an actress. She was a Bond babe in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and although few can recall her role in that work (like the woman herself, it was tiny), I do remember her running around in a television series called Zodiac. That was in the 1970s and, with her long blonde hair, layers of eye make-up and lip-liner, she exactly typified the gorgeousness of the era, a look she has maintained during the interceding 25 years.
And so a tete-a-tete was arranged. Unfortunately, when I turned up at the Ritz-Carlton, it transpired that two other publications were booked in at the same time; in the trade this is known as the exclusive joint interview, and is a scenario to be avoided at all costs. A stand-off ensued, I was parked in a sepulchral ballroom and after some urgent muttering outside, Hempel appeared. It was clear that she did not take kindly to the prospect of discussing herself at such short notice. She is not, as she informed me later, a woman who enjoys interviews. So why Louis Vuitton had been blithely promising in-depth chats I can't imagine.
We sat at a little table, surrounded by gloomy stacks of chairs amid the scent of dead banquets. For a hotelier as famously fastidious and obsessive as Hempel, this setting must surely have resembled the outer ring of hell. At one point she told me she had endless patience and a fine sense of the ridiculous. By that stage, so shrivelled were my innards by the Hempel tongue and basilisk stare, I was tenderly carrying out a mental checklist of my vital signs, but I still asked, feebly, how this trait manifested itself. 'How could I be doing this, at a table with you and a plate of three mouldy biscuits, in a room that's seriously odd without a sense of the ridiculous?' Oh. We'd already discussed the pens. Why did she design them? 'Why not?' she had replied, tartly. She is Australian by birth, and grew up on a sheep station, but the accent is now pure Kensington - that is to say, simultaneously languid and cutting. 'I knew I could do door handles, interiors of cars, planes ... why not pens? They're part of everyday life, luxury goods are part of my life, so why not?' And did she look at other pens for inspiration? Hempel did her Medusa bit and fixed me with her gaze. 'Certainly not. I have an arrogance about what I do. I knew what I wanted and off I went.' This must have sounded a mite cavalier, even to her ears, because she suddenly gave a girlish shrug, smiled wistfully into the distance, and added, 'Sounds so awful ... Louis Vuitton were wonderful, they did all the intricate nonsense when we went to the factory, though, of course, I am an architect and engineer.
By my own training.' That training took place on the site of Blakes, which was originally a group of dilapidated boarding-houses until Hempel purchased them with her then husband, Constantine. Soon afterwards he was killed in a car accident. If she is, shall we say, of a flinty disposition, perhaps that toughness was honed then: she had two children and a huge investment to bring up. Has she changed since those days? She murmured softly: 'I'm exactly the same. Great fantasies about everything, dreams and nonsense, and that life's great fun.' As this sentence might indicate, she fluctuates between sweet fluffiness and truly blood-curdling put-downs, as if she were reading from scripts intended for Shirley Temple and Joan Crawford respectively. I made the grave error of asking her about her habit of eating a little gold-leaf every day and whether she'd done so this morning. There was a terrible, glacial pause. 'Don't cross-examine me,' she thundered. Then, while my heart was still debating whether to go into arrest, she proceeded to describe in the minutest, most helpful detail this odd practice: 'You go into any old artist's shop, buy a book of gold-leaf, put your finger on it and whatever stays on the tip is what you need, it keeps your energy levels high, they say it's an anti-depressant, it's jolly good fun ...' Her energy is, of course, remarkable. A version of Blakes is opening in Amsterdam at the end of the year and she's planning another in Paris. She is also writing a book which will be called Lateral Looking. 'It'll show you how to see things differently. That's all you need to know.' Not quite, I thought, rallying slightly: was she writing it in pen (preferably Louis Vuitton)? 'It depends where I am, I'm happy scribbling away all the time.' Does she keep a diary? 'Yes.' So might there be an autobiography one day? Hempel's brows darkened, I flinched, but she was gathering herself to express earnestness rather than fury. 'I will never, ever write one,' she said solemnly. 'It would be very unseemly of me ... because of the people I know - I'm in touch with the royals - I have my own rules of privacy and, funnily enough, that has given me access in certain areas because I closed my mouth. That's why I don't interview well. I'm very aware of it.' So is this an awful ordeal? 'Terrible. No, no, you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not good at it. Now - how are you going to write this? You can't link this to other pieces about me in newspapers, you know.' I said that I'd write exactly what happened. Then someone appeared to take her away to talk to a group of journalists about the pens. 'Do stay in touch, come and see us when you're over,' she cried. I'm not sure where that gracious line of the script came from but, on reflection (over a trembling coffee in Oliver's afterwards), it seemed the most bizarre moment of a memorable afternoon.