Noelle Reno's grand designs

In happier days, Young fixed such deals as Boris Berezovsky's acquisition of Wentworth Park, the £20 million country estate in Surrey. But following his separation from his wife Michelle in 2006, and the credit crunch, his £400 million fortune apparently evaporated. His wife, who is fighting for a multi-million-pound pay-off in addition to the £27,500-a-month maintenance she has already been awarded, insists Young's millions are not missing but are simply in hiding; and he does still manage frequent visits to Cipriani for a bowl of London's most expensive tagliatelle. It's Noelle, though, who picks up the tab. I don't think the money is under the bed,' she says. We joke that I've got more than him.'

Noelle, 27, is a 5ft 10in blonde whose scraped-back hair and casual jeans are in marked contrast to her usual night-time uniform of red lipstick, tiny black dresses and cascading curls. She was brought up in Mercer Island, a wealthy enclave of Seattle. Her father was a lawyer and a federal prosecutor, and her mother an accountant. She was, she says, the poor kid' on the block, but her genetic inheritance ensured a successful modelling career which began when she was 13. She recalls cheerleaders at school ripping out pages of Teen magazine that featured her and went to college a year early to get away from their bitchy asides. She describes her parents' divorce when she was 17 as nasty, but then all divorce is nasty'.

Her father was very anti' her modelling career. Her mother, who moved to California following the divorce, was more supportive, and would chaperone her on shoots. Nonetheless, Noelle had to travel alone a great deal, and spent her holidays working in Japan and Europe, which gave her an independent, no-nonsense approach.

Noelle met Matthew Mellon when she was 21 and living in LA, combining modelling and college. They met over drinks in Hollywood, having been introduced by mutual friends in the film business. Noelle, who'd only ever dated boys her own age, recalls not paying him much romantic attention because, at 40, he just seemed a lot older'. But she does say that they got on with each other incredibly well from the outset and soon were like best friends'.

Matthew Mellon, lest we forget, is the tall, dark and troubled millionaire who was once married to Tamara Mellon, the Jimmy Choo CEO, and is most notorious as an on-off drug addict. The great-great-grandnephew of Andrew W Mellon, one of the heads of the Mellon Bank as well as a big name in oil, shipbuilding, steel and construction, he spent much of his childhood aboard his father Karl's 80ft yacht, The Caribou. Karl, who was bipolar, committed suicide in 1983, a tragedy that coloured Matthew's life. At 21 he learned for the first time from his mother (herself descended from two of America's grandest families, the Drexels and the Biddles) that he had a total of 13 trust funds; the first, for £14 million, was given to him at his 21st birthday party. A sybaritic Los Angeles life of debauchery ensued, followed by a stint in rehab. Not long after this he met Tamara, having worked through his first trust fund. The couple married in 2000 and had a daughter, Araminta, in 2002. By 2003 the marriage had started to dis-integrate when Matthew had a narcotic relapse in Ibiza. They divorced in 2005, and in 2007 it was alleged that Matthew had employed a private detective to hack into Tamara's com-puter in the run-up to their divorce. After a two-month criminal trial, he was found not guilty (Tamara was a witness and testified that Matthew was an incompetent, childlike character who was unable to send an email).

Noelle and Matthew's meeting coincided with his divorce, and although he was sober at the time, it was not to last. Noelle admits that she was rather naive. I had never been around drugs. I mean, I'd been around marijuana but not hard drugs. I am not a saint but the kind of drug use I saw... Well, some people's addictions are like a huge force of nature, and one has to feel sorry for them. I just didn't have a concept of that kind of addiction.'

Noelle moved to England, where she and Matthew lived in a luxurious apartment in Belgravia. Their life revolved around the higher echelons of the London social scene. I initially met her, clad in head-to-toe Pucci, on the couple's first public outing at Tim Jefferies' Hamiltons Gallery. Sunday lunches were with Tamara and Minty, there was a trip to Rajasthan for Elizabeth Hurley and Arun Nayar's wedding, jaunts to the Oscars and, to top it all, a whirlwind engagement, dangling in a helicopter over the Eiffel Tower.

During this time Noelle was also trying to fit in a BA in communications at the British American College of London, and there were moments when she wished she was just leading a normal university life with dorm parties'. Inevitably, things quickly started to unravel. Matthew had a couple of years of sobriety when we first met. He was still very hurt about the divorce, and publicly admitted it was because of his drug use. In those first years he said and acted as though he wanted to stay sober for the rest of his life. He had lost everything and he never wanted to let that happen again.'

But the wheels started to come off in 2007. First, their wedding was delayed. It was even reported that Matthew signed a legal agreement to the effect that every time he got so high that he was unable to function for a day or more, he would pay the fashion label, Degrees of Freedom, that they had founded together, a fee of $1 million and give Noelle operational control of the company. As extraordinary as this sounds, Noelle says this actually did happen, although the terms were never honoured.