Mellon bares her sole

Tamara Mellon arrives on Sunday morning at her brand new Jimmy Choo store in New Bond Street, teetering on her own-design pink shoes, steering her 20-month-old daughter, Araminta, also bedecked in pink accessories, in front of her.

Tamara is wearing a very non-PC real fur coat by Prada, which she shrugs off to reveal her teeny tiny body.

"I'm on the Atkins," she says, swinging her expensively ironed hair.

"Plus!" she squeaks, rescuing an exquisite, bejewelled lime slingback from her daughter's starfish fingers, "I have a personal trainer who comes every morning and puts me through the mill. He's a real bully."

This is a woman for whom I feel mere yoga or Pilates would not be enough of a stretch. While waiting for her to arrive, I have been flicking through The Sunday Times, and have found yet another article speculating about the state of her three-year marriage.

"Oh gawd," she says, grabbing a copy. She then asks one of the blonde and very beautiful shop assistants if they would pop out to get her a coffee and a muffin. "I think I need carbs," she says, sitting down on one of the banquettes (also blonde) and letting out a huge laugh.

She says that most of the stuff written about her just makes her shrug her narrow shoulders, but when one tabloid described her as middle-aged, moneyed and married, a "Mrs Robinson figure who foots the bill for her toy boy", putting her age at 37, she became really, really annoyed.

"I'm 35 years old!" she wails. "All my girlfriends rang me up and said, Tamara, have you been lying to us? And I'm like, no! They made me older to sensationalise the story."

The story, of course, unless you have been rowing solo across the Atlantic, is that Tamara had an affair with Oscar Humphries, the 22-year old son of Barry Humphries, after her husband fell off the wagon.

The whole great big mess has been the subject of many column inches in publications as far afield as W magazine and the New York Post. Tamara says she is surprised to have inspired such headings as "Four beddings and a funeral", an unsubtle reference to the fact that Matthew Mellon's father committed suicide when Matthew was 18.

I tell her she shouldn't be surprised. Her life story is like an episode of The Colbys, only with smaller shoulder pads. The daughter of Tommy Yeardye, the co-founder of the Vidal Sassoon empire, and Ann Davies, a former model, Tamara was brought up between London and Beverly Hills ("I bought my first pair of cowboy boots aged four").

She was educated at Heathfield School in Ascot, and started work, aged 17, as a shop assistant in the Azzedine Alaia department of Browns, the boutique on South Molton Street - "When I left, I owed them more money than I'd earned".

Tamara then got a job as assistant to the legendary fashion editor Caroline Baker on the short-lived Mirabella magazine, before going to work as an accessories editor at Vogue. It was there that she fell in love with shoes and bags ("Such an easy way to update an outfit!") and decided that she could do better.

Tamara took over Jimmy Choo, then a small label making bespoke designs for private clients, in 1996 with a £150,000 loan from her father (it took her six months, and many spreadsheets, to convince him she could do the job) and made the brand a household name, with 18 stores worldwide and an impressive annual turnover of $50 million.

She is rightly proud of her achievement, buying out Jimmy Choo in 2001 and today retaining 50 per cent control of the company. "I think it is a great British success story," she says. "We didn't just resurrect a brand, we started it from scratch."

Her husband, Matthew, comes from an American family who made their wealth in oil; he inherited the first of his 13 trust funds - $25million - at the age of 21. They met at the wedding of Henry Dent Brocklehurst in 1998. He wooed Tamara by reciting his own poetry before proposing to her in the back of a limo ("That's absolutely true," Tamara insists).

After their wedding (she wore Valentino couture), they held a white-tie ball at Blenheim Palace attended by close friends Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant.

Araminta, or Minty, was born, and they settled down to life in Belgravia, Tamara commuting between Milan, New York, LA and London to oversee her empire.

And then it all started to go wrong. They were on holiday in Ibiza last summer when Matthew, 39, went out clubbing and bumped into his old fixer, and asked her for cocaine. He ended up in a clinic in Arizona suffering from a breakdown.

Did Tamara know about his problems before they got married? "Of course," she says. "If you live in LA and you haven't been to rehab, you're just not cool. He was five years sober when we got married. It's not a big deal, people suffer from illnesses; If he had cancer I would be there to support him."

Were you vigilant, were you constantly on the lookout for signs of a relapse? "It's difficult. When somebody wants to do something, you are pretty powerless to stop them."

Perhaps the problems started because she was always working, often 12 hours a day? " No, Matthew likes independent, intelligent women, academic types," she says, a barbed reference, possibly, to Katia Moulari, the Russian woman Matthew supposedly had an affair with - keep up at the back there - earlier this year.

"He has two rules in life: he says he would never date an actress or a singer. When Matthew and I first started dating, we wanted to spend all our time together, so he would come with me to the leather factories in Italy, and he would get really bored," she says.

"That was when he came up with the idea of designing his own line of men's shoes, Harry's of London. At first I thought, oh dear. But his shoes are genius."

Tamara accompanied her husband to the launch of his collection at Harvey Nichols last week, fuelling much speculation that the two were back together.

"No, we are not together, but he's still my best friend," she says. "We have never fought, everything has always been amicable." Matthew is indeed very protective towards Tamara, wanting to make it clear that the marriage breakdown was his fault, not hers.

"He is in America at the moment, but he calls every day to talk to Minty, and when he is in London, he comes over each day to the house I'm renting in Chelsea and does bathtime.

"We have no plans for divorce, but that doesn't mean we will be together as a married couple. But I will always be there for him."

And what of Oscar Humphries? You can see that Tamara, for all her Frenchpolished poise, is annoyed that he wrote the articles about being a toy boy, with her thinly disguised as a 40-year-old divorced mother of two boys. "He is a sweet boy, very bright and articulate, but I think he made mistakes in the subjects he has written about," she says crisply.

Can she put the record straight, once and for all, about their affair? "Well, everybody knows now, don't they," she says, laughing. "Yes, we had a relationship. But he has left the country, he is back in Australia now."

Hiding? Nursing a broken heart? "He just wanted to get away," she says.

Anyway, she says she is far too busy at the moment to have a man in her life, what with preparing for the opening of the new store, her second in London, a temple to toes snuggled in between Armani and Burberry.

She says she feels as if she has Tom Ford's job - she not only designs the shoes and bags with her creative director, 30-year-old Sandra Choi, she comes up with the concept for the stores and is not above getting the duster out to polish the cabinets.

She has a nanny and a housekeeper, but says: "It's difficult, making sure I have an hour with Minty in the morning, and am there to put her to bed at 7.30 every night. Whatever I do, I'm constantly feeling guilty." When she goes to oversee production in Florence, she arrives late at night, gets up at 6am the next day, visits three factories, and gets to bed at 1am. She concedes that designing very feminine shoes with four-inch stilettos might seem a frivolous career choice, but firmly believes she is doing her bit for womankind.

"I feel so empowered when I put on a pair of heels. I like to be taller, to look a guy in the eye.

"It's hard for women to be taken seriously in business, I found it so chauvinistic. That's why I feel for Stella McCartney," she says, referring-to the recent sniping in the industry over the modest sales of Stella's fashion label.

"Stella is trying to make women feel good about themselves, but like me she has been put on a pedestal, only to be knocked down at the first opportunity."

So what separates a Jimmy Choo from other shoes?

"They are younger and funkier than a Blahnik," she says, citing Halle Berry and Kiera Knightley as fans.

I duly try on a black pointy pair that are so cushiony they almost make me want to forget the fact I don't wear leather, or indeed don't have £350.

I think Tamara Mellon will do anything she sets her mind to. She will be spending the holiday season in St Barts, soaking up the sun with her daughter and her friends.

First, though, she is off to the premiere of Cold Mountain. "Not that I have time for a social life," she says, "I will spend the whole evening studying people's feet..."

Jimmy Choo, 27 New Bond Street, London W1 (020 7493 5858).