Secrets behind Jimmy Choos

The most important thing Tommy Yeardye passed on to his daughter was ambition. She was not to disappoint him: today, Tamara Mellon is the president of the exclusive shoe brand Jimmy Choo, whose exquisite and wildly expensive creations are worn by women of a certain monied class.

She also married into one of America's snobbiest of Wasp dynasties, the philanthropic Mellons of New York, and is a sought-after fixture on the London social scene. Even in her private life, Tamara Mellon, 35, displays an impulsiveness typical of her father: when she separated from her husband, Matthew, last year she famously had a Mrs Robinson fling with Oscar Humphries, 13 years her junior and son of Dame Edna's creator, Barry Humphries.

Indeed, much of Tamara's personality and drive comes from her father, who died suddenly last week of a stroke at the age of 73. His death has left his adored daughter understandably distraught.

When Tamara, then a junior editor on British Vogue, first spotted Jimmy Choo - himself an unknown designer working in a cramped workshop in east London - it was her father who gave her the confidence (and his own money) to pursue her ambition of turning Choo into a worldwide brand name. Today, there are 20 Jimmy Choo shops worldwide, and the business has a turnover of £30 million.

All along, it was Tommy who drove his daughter, and who Tamara thanks for her business acumen. It has been written how the father she worshipped made his own fortune in the Seventies from helping to launch Carmen rollers worldwide; how he then went on to become business partners with hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, a partnership which earned him further millions.

But, intriguingly, beneath the surface, Tommy Yeardye was not all that he seemed. In fact, this one-time B-movie actor and stuntman - a muscular 6ft 4in bruiser "with fists like bricks and eyes like emeralds", according to an associate at the time - was, I can reveal, an associate of some of London's most infamous gangland names, including the Krays; a nightclub owner and former companion of Sixties actress Diana Dors, who went on to accuse him of defrauding her of a small fortune; and an often violent and threatening man - by turns described as an enforcer or bodyguard - who wasn't afraid of violence.

Where later he was to use his wallet to such good effect in helping to launch his daughter's reign at Jimmy Choo (whose clientele includes a raft of society women and the Sex and the City cast), he had once used his fists to help control his burgeoning empire.

"Tommy was always hanging about with the faces," a former senior gangland figure told me yesterday, referring to the gangsters of the time. "He was a bit of a poseur, very flash and brash. When he became respectable, we didn't see him again, but you couldn't really forget Tommy."

His story - which will doubtless come as something of an amusing surprise to the Sloane Street milieu in which Tamara now moves - begins in the Fifties in the suburban enclave of Mill Hill, north London, where Tommy lived with his mother, Kathleen, who had moved to Britain from Ireland to raise her family.

"Tommy was part of a little north London gang," a close friend of the time recalled, "based around Mill Hill and Edgware. He was into what we called at the time 'the smudge business', taking pictures of tourists in Leicester Square for a few pennies, while he spent the rest of the time dreaming of becoming an actor."

Yeardye was certainly a fast learner; and his "classroom" was the London nightclub scene. A favourite haunt of his in the Fifties and Sixties was Winston's, a hostess club and gambling den near Bond Street. For Yeardye, the son of Irish peasant farmers, Winston's offered everything he could have hoped for: money, glamour and women.

The entire kaleidoscope of London society flocked to the ground-floor nightclub, with its small stage and a menu consisting of lobster and caviar: actors such as Sean Connery came to watch cabaret featuring Danny La Rue.

But Winston's was also a magnet for the criminal class, awash with money, and Yeardye swiftly found himself consorting with them. Today, gangland associates disagree on the extent to which he hung out with gangsters, but the Krays were certainly part of Yeardye's circle.

A great friend of his, who cannot be named for legal reasons, even came close to being murdered by the east London gangsters. "This chap, who came from Mill Hill with Tommy and wanted to be an actor as well, had beaten up members of the Krays gang outside a nightclub in Finchley," one associate told me. "The Krays sent a message to Tommy's friend that they wanted to see him, and Tommy thought his friend would be killed. But there was no alternative: he had to go and see them.

"Luckily, the Krays just gave Tommy's friend a good hiding and that was the end of it."

The truth, according to another gangland figure, is that the Krays asked Yeardye's friend to put his hands on a table and then broke every bone with a hammer.

Yeardye watched and learned from his friend's run-in with the notoriously unstable Krays. "After that, he didn't really like to hang out with any more criminals," the associate laughed.

On paper, he was simply an actor, although in reality he performed the intermittent role of stunt-double for the likes of Rock Hudson and Victor Mature. And he would would have remained a peripheral, transient figure in the showbusiness world (and his daughter would not now be the social figure she is) were it not for one woman: Diana Dors.

His relationship with Dors - the buxom starlet dubbed "Britain's Marilyn Monroe" and a huge tabloid star at the time - catapulted him into the big league. They had first met (of course) in a London nightclub and Yeardye was variously described as Miss Dors's "manager", "bodyguard" and "companion".

Yeardye ruthlessly exploited his connection with Dors, frequently penning newspaper articles about their relationship; he was, if you like, one of the first tabloid "kiss-and-tell" merchants.

"Diana is like dealing with a problem child," he once wrote of her. "Somehow if you marry Diana Dors you have to share her with 20,000,000 other men - and I wouldn't like that."

She, in turn, came to despise him. Dors, who died in 1984, accused him of taking £11,000 (a fortune at the time) from a safe deposit box she kept in London. Yeardye dismissed the allegations as "a misunderstanding", but in the presence of police he was forced to return the money.

Shortly after, Yeardye was further accused of making enquiries in Zurich about an account - with £6,000 in it - that Dors held in a Swiss bank. Again, he was to dismiss any accusations of wrongdoing.

Dors, whose chaotic personal fortune ultimately led to her sensationally being accused of tax avoidance, was publicly scathing of her former lover. "Why does Yeardye do this to me?" she said at the time. "I have made him what he is today. Everything he owns I bought for him. I gave him £1,000 to go and get lost. Why doesn't he?"

Yeardye's reply was typically arrogant: "Poppycock," he laughed, although he was never quite able to throw off the accusation that he had been Dors's "kept man".

Equally, beneath the surface, violence seemed to follow Yeardye like a faithful dog. In one curious incident, he was assaulted by a gang of hoodlums after leaving a boxing match in Earl's Court featuring a young Henry Cooper. On another occasion he was accused of hitting a policeman while out on the town with Dors.

It was an association with violence that he used to effect: one former associate remembers Yeardye's studied habit of breaking walnuts in his palm. "He was a big man, huge man," a friend said, "and he could get into trouble. I remember at one boxing match we went to in Wembley, he got a bit leery - Irish fighting talk - and he was nearly given one bloody big beating."

At one time he had invested £10,000 into the Condor Club in London's Soho (another gangland hang-out) but within a year had sold it because of threats from the underworld. "Who wants to spend his life looking over his shoulder in case some thug comes behind him with a cosh or razor?" he admitted.

His gangland connections aside, he was also adept at promoting himself: he claimed his Irish family, from the small village of Drumkeerin in the north-west of Ireland, was related to Grace Kelly.

The truth was, literally, rather more suburban: the family home was a small three-bedroomed terrace house in Devonshire Road in Mill Hill, and Yeardye attended a local college. In contrast, he liked to portray himself as an Irish landlord, a monied figure ("I inherited 500 acres," he once said, although the truth is that it was little more than worthless marshland).

Certainly, friends recall a man determined nonetheless to transform himself into a showbusiness and social figure: once he had earned enough money to move out of a small flat in Kensington to an apartment in Hyde Park, Yeardye commented: "Now I mix with a different class of people entirely."

Much of his life remains something of a mystery: he went on to marry Anne, a former face of Chanel No 5, and had three children by her: Tamara, and two sons.

It is said that he first met Vidal Sassoon in London after investing in a wig shop, north of Oxford Street. On earning his fortune through hairdressing, Yeardye moved his family to Beverly Hills, buying a house next door to Nancy Sinatra. Ever the social climber, he sent Tamara to boarding school in England and then Swiss finishing school.

In the last years of his life, he watched with pride as his daughter transformed herself into a society figure: when she married Matthew, by whom she has a young daughter, at Blenheim Palace four years ago, Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley were among the guests.

Yeardye focused on Tamara in the later years. She became the champion of his ambitions: he personally invested £150,000 in Jimmy Choo in 1996, and remained chairman of the company until his death. He is said to have been especially proud that, shortly before he died, Tamara was invited to Buckingham Palace for a ladies' achievement lunch, where she met the Queen.

It is a long way from the suburb of Mill Hill, and her father's nightclub association with the Krays. But the last posthumous word should perhaps go to Diana Dors. In the midst of accusations that Yeardye stole from her safe deposit box, she said of this ambitious and ruthless man: "I have made him what he is today."

How ironic, then, that the Jimmy Choo phenomenon is partly based on Yeardye's time as an enforcer and possible fraudster. The Krays, sartorial perfectionists themselves, would have been proud.