The one who tamed Bailey

When you are invited for coffee at the London home of David and Catherine Bailey, you might expect to be summoned to a Chelsea mews house, furnished with white leather Eileen Gray chairs, sheepskin rugs and populated by dolly birds. But, no. Instead you are called to a former warehouse in King's Cross, whizz up to their penthouse flat in an industrial lift, and knock on the door in a hallway that smells of parrot (the family pet).

The apartment is huge, with 360-degree views of London. The Baileys' eight-year-old son, Sascha, opens the door. The only signs that Bailey (even his wife calls him that) lives here are the black-and-white portraits on the walls of John Lennon, Pablo Picasso and the Krays.

The reason I am here is to interview Catherine Bailey, who has returned to modelling after an 18-year hiatus. "I'm going to be 42 this summer," she says cheerfully (how often do women ever round up their age?). "I think when you get older in your face, you get more interesting; I like people who look a bit weathered - they're textured, you can see the life in them."

Returning to work in an industry that spits out women like pips is brave indeed. She was snapped up by the Premier agency and has already shot an ad campaign for Liz Claiborne. How did she feel in Paris last month, working the Hermès catwalk with a 16-year-old Estonian human stork bringing up the rear?

But Mrs Bailey is having none of that. "I feel so much more confident now than when I started out," she says. "People are more tolerant of shorter girls, fatter girls, odd-looking girls, and I really do think older women look great. Now the children are big enough, I want to work again. Bailey is really supportive of me going back in front of the camera."

And she does look great. She has huge, round, brown eyes, hair scraped back off her face flamenco style ("a natural face-lift," she jokes) and is so tall and willowy I worry about her stepping out on to the balcony in a strong breeze.

She inherited her looks from her mother, who always wanted to be a model but was "the wrong class - only upper-class girls became models in the Fifties. By the Sixties, when Bailey and all those East End boys came along and broke the mould, it was too late for her."

David Bailey famously discovered, and fell in love with, Jean Shrimpton. "She was the girl next door, perfectly ordinary, and Bailey shot her for Vogue and reinvented beauty. They were patronising towards him at Vogue; they would pat him on the head and tell him how cute he was."

Catherine's mother paid for her to do the Lucie Clayton modelling course, but on graduation she was too scared to see any agencies and went back to Winchester to do a secretarial course.

"I did that, then came to London and worked in a fashion house, did it that way. My first job was with Nicky Clarke, for Woman's Own or Family Circle. Then I was packed off to Milan and immediately started working for Italian Vogue."

She met Bailey in 1980 when she was 19; he hired her to shoot an Avon catalogue. "I was just starting out. I didn't have much work in my book, and he liked me because I was different. The look then was 'bob and gob' - blonde women who looked like pretty pigs. I was different."

Wasn't she terrified? "He can be a little bit daunting when you first meet him, but I loved the fact that he made me laugh, he was always teasing me. He always got something out of you; you always had a fab pic." At the time, he was living with Marie Helvin, and Catherine had never had a proper boyfriend.

He had also been married to Catherine Deneuve. Did she worry about following such a long line of beautiful women? "I didn't really give it much thought. I'm me - I can't bear comparisons, I didn't think I had to live up to something because you can't. We've been married for over 20 years. Marie Helvin and I are great friends now."

Do you gang up on him? "No, not really." What about the fact that his job - he has recently been put under contract again by British Vogue - entails gadding about abroad with beautiful girls? "It's what he does. Jealousy is evil, it destroys you. I believe what is going to be will be - enjoy the moment."

Does she ever wish she had known him in the Sixties, when he could still see his feet. "Not really, it was another part of his life and I never wish to be somewhere else. He isn't always talking about the past, he finds it boring. He does miss his cars, though. He got rid of a special Rolls-Royce in the Seventies and recently saw it had been sold in LA for over a million dollars."

She hasn't always been so confident. She was brought up in South Africa - her father is an architect - and moved to England when she was 10 and went to "a ghastly comprehensive. School was hell. I was made to feel like a freak, I was bullied. I didn't understand what was wrong with me - I was called lanky, beanpole, flat-chested. The great thing about modelling was I found my group of people, another bunch of freaks."

Soon after she and Bailey got married, they moved to Devon. "I thought I could carry on working but it was too far, and I had the kids." Did her epic beauty make the local mums as green as their wellies?

"No, they were curious, but really, I don't see a billboard with my picture and think it's me. I know women think, it's not fair that bitch on a cover looks like that, but she doesn't. You can look great if someone does your hair and make-up and then you're airbrushed - it's a lie. But even I get sucked in - I think, I've got to have that face cream so that I can look like that, too."

Does she worry about her oldest daughter, Paloma, who is 17, becoming a model? That some ageing lothario photographer will hit on her? "No. She is streetwise. I was so innocent at that age. She absolutely loves clothes. She's always rifling through my old Azzedine Alaias."

Of course, all the Bailey children - Paloma (named as a homage to Picasso), Fenton, 15, and Sascha - have grown up in front of the camera. Catherine unfolds her long limbs (she is like a particularly well-bred foal) and gallops over to the overstuffed bookshelves to grab a wellthumbed copy of The Lady is a Tramp, Bailey's book of portraits of her - as a model, wife, mother, muse. In most of them she is either heavily made up, Eighties-style (all panda eyes) or naked, legs akimbo.

She plonks the book on a huge, carved wooden crocodile that serves as a coffee table, but which in its former life was a circumcision table Bailey hauled back from Africa. She is clearly fearless when it comes to being photographed. "I know I can trust him, he's not going to use an ugly picture." As a family album, it's rather disconcerting. In one photograph she is grimacing in pain. "What's going on there?" I ask. "Oh, that's my placenta being pulled out."

There are photos of Catherine in labour. And christenings (both Jack Nicholson and Jerry Hall pop up as godparents). What do the children think, seeing photos of themselves being born? "Sascha is fascinated, he always turns to his section first. But, by the age of 12, they get a bit self-conscious."

The Bailey household is obviously very relaxed when it comes to nudity ... "Oh, yes, I think this whole attitude that children shouldn't be hugged and walk around starkers is ridiculous."

Is Bailey a good father? "He won't kick a football with them - he's not the type of man to start exercising or stop smoking - he'd prefer to take them to a museum or play chess with them. And he doesn't do holidays. The last thing he wants to do is jump on another plane."

She stands up to have her picture taken by our photographer. She does that thing the best models always do - lowers her chin and lights a fire behind her eyes. Sascha clops by.

"Do you prefer living in London or in Devon, with all your animals?" I ask him. "London," he says firmly (he's going to see The Ring that evening with his mum). "Doesn't Mummy look gorgeous?" I ask him. "She's awright, I s'pose," he says, turning back to his ice cream.