The ego has landed

Naomi Campbell is principally famous for three things: being beautiful, being angry and being late. Aware of her reputation for extreme tardiness, ES has taken every precaution to ensure her prompt arrival at our photo shoot.

We have booked a suite at Claridge's for the pictures and interview, and she's been staying at the hotel since Kate Moss's now notorious 30th birthday party (The Beautiful and Damned) the preceding Friday, at which she partied all night in a curly wig and borrowed jewellery while some of the other guests indulged in an orgy.

All she has to do, therefore, is totter down a flight of stairs. She doesn't even have to change out of her dressing gown.

Anyway, we've been told that the reason she wants to do the pictures and interview is because her court case against the Daily Mirror, for publishing a photograph of her leaving a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, has now gone as far as the House of Lords.

She originally won minor damages against the paper, then lost the following year on appeal. This is the last chance she has to rehabilitate her reputation and win back her costs, estimated to be in the region of £750,000, and clearly, there is an urgent need for her to paint herself in a good light, as far as the media goes.

So at nine o'clock, the mood is confident. It's already less so at 11am, when a harassed press officer for Naomi's model agency, Premier, pops her head around the door to announce that she's been asked to go out to buy Naomi a pair of pyjamas and a book (I think I overhear muttering about it being the latest Paulo Coelho, but the PR would rather I didn't mention it in case Naomi is cross).

Poor Naomi isn't feeling well, apparently, and a doctor has been called; but we are not to go because she will be down eventually.

There isn't much choice. So while Naomi snuggles down with her book, the photographer, his assistant, the assistant's assistant, the fashion editor and her deputy, the make-up artist, the hair extensions that we've had flown in from LA, the hairdresser, Ellin La Var, who has been doing Naomi's hair since she was 16 and has had to be specially flown in from Chicago, and I hang about.

Three of us are heavily pregnant, and by four o'clock, are feeling so exhausted that we have to lie down for a nap.

By the time Naomi makes an appearance, at half past seven that evening, most of the team has been in situ for nine-and-a-half hours and I, personally, am barely able to speak for indignation. A grovelling apology is the least I expect.

'I'm not feeling vewy well,' is her opening sally, delivered in a baby voice, head down, hand over her face, refusing to look anyone in the eye. And it is true that her eyes, with their strange, slate blue lenses, are running, as is her nose.

'What's wrong with her?' I ask her press officer, who launches into an explanation of hotel air-con and its noxious effects on the delicate supermodel system. (Earlier, we'd been told she had period pains, which we had all assumed was PR-speak for a heavy night spent doing God knows what.)

She is introduced to us all, but her blank eyes slide away, uninterested. Clearly we are not important enough to merit eye contact; she's much more interested in the texts that keep flashing up on her mobile phone (you wonder idly if it is the one with which she once assaulted her personal assistant).

Only the photographer is properly acknowledged, when Naomi remembers that he used to go out with her fellow supermodel Linda Evangelista. 'OmiGod! You used to have a blond pudding-bowl!' she says, probably at the mere thought that someone physically imperfect could have dated Evangelista.

It must be said that she doesn't look all that great herself today. She's wearing dirty black tracksuit bottoms, a white sweatshirt and scuffed pale blue Ugg boots.

Physically, I was expecting an Amazon, but in the flesh, she's surprisingly slight, her arms and legs unsettlingly, almost spiderishly skinny.

Her ego, on the other hand, is absolutely enormous. Now that she's actually here, she wastes no time in throwing around her eight stone or whatever it is.

She won't wear several of the dresses (wrong label, wrong colour) or any of the jewellery (wrong jeweller), and sends the head of her agency, whom she treats like a housemaid, up to her room to fetch one of her own frocks.

Finally, though, she is persuaded out of her tracky bottoms and into a yellow dress, but she's still in a strop, if the soupspoon jut of her lower lip is to be taken seriously. Still, she takes the first pose, the photographer's finger trembles on the button - and then Naomi's phone rings.

'Hiiii!' she breathes, coiling herself up on the floor and embarking on a tenminute conversation without the slightest embarrassment. From her expression, and the fact that she immediately relapses into baby talk, we later deduce that her interlocutor is probably a man.

She yaks away about a projected trip to LA, oblivious to ticking clocks and drumming fingers. But the conversation suddenly turns sour. It seems that the actress Naomi Harris may be joining them at some social event. 'Well, I'm not coming in that case,' she snaps, ending the call.

By now, the lower lip looks positively dangerous. 'Who's Naomi Harris?' she demands the room at large in her strange LA crossed with South London drawl. 'What's she look like?'

Nobody dares reply, in case the truth (that she's a pretty black actress) sends Naomi back to bed in a terminal strop.

For all her indignation about the prevalence of racism in the modelling industry, La Campbell can be distinctly territorial; she had a spectacular falling-out with Tyra Banks, the black American supermodel, refusing to take part in a Chanel catwalk show until Karl Lagerfeld had dropped Banks from it, and reportedly described her nose as 'a horror'.

It's a very weird experience, hanging out with Naomi: rather like a cross between attending a levee of Louis XIV, and dealing with a giant toddler. Hard to imagine that she was ever a Streatham schoolgirl and is now a self-made multi-millionairess of 33.

Strangely, despite her shenanigans, her career shows no sign of flagging: perhaps she behaves more professionally when there's money at stake. She is the face of make-up company Nars, and has just done campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Valentino and H&M.

She has her own perfume, Mystery, which apparently captures the ' intensely feminine' aspects of her personality; her own branding company, NC Connect (though you'd think she ought to be buffing her own image before she tries to improve anyone else's); and will be seen in a cameo role in the forthcoming Fat Slags film. Naomi plays a shop assistant who denies the Slags entry on the basis that they are too overweight for her shop.

As they leave, she metamorphoses into a fatty herself. It's a role doubtless calculated to make us all believe that Naomi is actually a self-mocking, ironical woman underneath, but sadly, I rather doubt that this is true.

Back at the interminable shoot, it swiftly becomes clear that, while Naomi is prepared to make a token effort with the photos, the interview is a different story. After the first shot is in the bag, I am escorted to the ante-chamber, where she is sitting, clad in a white dressing gown. Her face crumples into an expression of discontent at the sight of me, and she collapses cross-legged on the floor.

'Do I have to do this talk now?' she whines. 'I'm really not feeling good.'

'She needs a good spanking,' observes La Var severely.

The real problem is, I am now informed, that Naomi doesn't want to do an interview because she thinks that having kept me waiting for so long, I will be annoyed with her.

'She was really cross when she heard you'd been kept waiting so long,' her PR tells me, a comment which leaves me speechless.

What kind of bizarre justification is that for her own behaviour? It actually has the unexpected effect of making me feel sorry for the inept supermodel. A proper diva would simply have cancelled the shoot on the day if she didn't feel like doing it.

Naomi doesn't quite have the face to do that; instead, her course of action is to put off the evil moment until even she's too embarrassed not to turn up.

Anyway, she promises she will speak to me in the next couple of days. 'I'm really good at interviews,' she promises, smiling charmingly. There is nothing for it but to take my leave.

Surprise! The promised talk doesn't materialise. Then, Naomi is apparently told by an obliging doctor that she's much too ill for a chat on the telephone and must rest. A couple of days later, despite her sufferings, she's on a plane to Rio.

Tentative plans are made to talk to her there, then in Atlanta where she goes next to attend an awards ceremony. She comes back to London for a brief visit, but we can't catch her then either, because she's flying out to Milan the same day.

The following morning, we ring the PR company, pointing out that Naomi in fact stayed in London for the evening and could easily have chatted on the phone.

'How did you know she was here?' the PR wails. It was actually a fairly simple deduction since pictures of her attending a London performance of Cirque du Soleil wearing white Valentino appeared in all the papers.

I must reluctantly conclude that by now, she is probably so ashamed of her lateness that she will never turn up. But then, frankly, I've already decided what I think of Naomi Campbell anyway.