With a flamboyant, billionaire husband and a place at the top table of London society, Heather Bird has lived a life few could even imagine.
As the wife of property tycoon Robert Tchenguiz, her world was built around glitzy premieres, private jets and lazy summers aboard her husband’s yacht, My Little Violet, in the South of France – a world from her strait-laced Mormon upbringing in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Their friends included fast-living businessmen such as Bernie Ecclestone and Sir Philip Green, billionaires who made fortunes in the booming London of the 1980s and 90s, a crowd happy to spend money unhindered by mere considerations of taste or decorum.
Heather Bird and Robert Tchenguiz in 2006. Her world was built around glitzy premieres, private jets and lazy summers aboard her husband’s yacht
Indeed, Heather herself would regularly host lavish parties in the ballroom of their £20 million townhouse overlooking the Royal Albert Hall. Their home was famous in its own right because of its regular appearance in the ITV drama Mr Selfridge.
One event alone, a Sun King-themed soiree for 500 guests, turned the house into a miniature replica of Louis XIV’s Versailles, complete with staff in liveried costumes and wigs, a nine-piece musical ensemble and acrobats from the Cirque du Soleil.
Today, however, that four-storey house is little more than a gilded cage for Heather who admits that she cries herself to sleep at night.
Despite splitting from her husband a full ten years ago, she says she finds herself in a quite extraordinary – not to say uncomfortable – position: of living under the same roof as both 57-year-old Robert and his glamorous, if much younger, 27-year-old Polish girlfriend, Julia.
‘It’s a difficult situation to be in, but I don’t really have any choice,’ she says. ‘Robert and his girlfriend are up on the 4th floor and I am downstairs with the kids. It’s heartbreaking to have to share the family home with his girlfriend – particularly one who is undeniably sexy.
‘She’s the model type, the sort who Instagrams a lot.
‘Meanwhile I’m no longer a size eight or even a ten. I’m not fat, but I have put on weight – sometimes I drink red wine to deaden my feelings.’ Today, as she lays bare her very unusual ménage à trois, she explains that she is making do with an outfit from Sainsbury’s while Julia enjoys Chanel – a poignant illustration of their respective places in Tchenguiz’s life.
Perhaps it is little wonder then that, as she reveals in a rare and touching interview, Heather, 48, is finally to seek a divorce from Mr Tchenguiz, a move which should at least bring some emotional relief and which draws to a close her association with one of the most colourful families in the country.
Robert Tchenguiz’s and his 27-year-old Polish girlfriend, Julia live up on the 4th floor and while Heather is downstairs with the kids
The Tchenguiz brothers, Robert and Vincent, first came to public notice in the 1980s as two of the West End’s biggest landlords.
Iranian-born, American educated, they were classic outsiders whose ostentatious lifestyle soon brought them to prominence. A succession of ever more lucrative property and business deals gave them, at their peak, a portfolio of more than 600 buildings said to have been worth £4.5 billion, (though calculating their true wealth was always fraught with difficulty because so much of their capital was borrowed).
Heather and Robert married in 2005, but things started to unravel just three years later: what had been a brief but happy marriage came under pressure and, at the same time, Robert’s fortune evaporated in the credit crunch. He became known as the man who lost £1.6 billion in the Icelandic banking crisis.
Then Mr Tchenguiz was sensationally arrested by the Serious Fraud Office in connection with the failure of Iceland’s Kaupthing bank – only to be completely cleared when the investigation into him collapsed. It was Heather who initiated the split with Robert, saying she could no longer tolerate her husband’s ‘party’ lifestyle.
‘I can’t take it any more,’ she said. Last summer, for example, he was photographed spraying champagne around a nightclub on the Greek island of Mykonos with his long-time friend Sir Philip Green.
‘Robert has had a lot of girlfriends,’ she says today. ‘I want to get on with him, but I don’t agree with his partying lifestyle – drinking, swearing and cavorting.
‘I have very strict standards and worry. That fast international crowd thinks that sort of life is normal when it is not.
‘I have to put up and shut up so much about Robert’s behaviour. He is not a bad person, really, we are just different.’ In the wake of their split, it was decided they would lead separate lives, but mindful of her own conservative upbringing, she agreed to remain married for the sake of their two children.
Heather says when she meets Julia in the lift, where she poses for Instagram pictures, she is always civil to her
Moreover, life for Robert was increasingly tough.
‘After he got raided, everything went crazy. I tried not to kick the man when he’s down by suing him for divorce.
‘I agreed to let things go – to separate as husband and wife, but to hang fire with any divorce. I went to stay with his mother in Battersea. The deal was that he got to see the children every day and I adhered to that.
‘We have drifted on like that for years, going on family holidays together and things like that.’
Then a few months ago Robert asked her to move back into her former family home. And, still dependent upon him financially, Heather agreed to go along with this uncomfortable request.
‘He wanted me to move back in with him and his girlfriend near the Albert Hall, the house where we had lived as man and wife.
‘I wasn’t happy about it but what can I do? I don’t have much money of my own and am still dependent on him.’ And so she found herself living cheek by jowl with the other woman.
Soon after they had split up, in an attempt to gain at least a modicum of independence, Heather started a clinic specialising in beauty and anti-ageing treatments based in fashionable Beauchamp Place, a stone’s throw from Harrods. Although well-regarded, it is not, however, particularly profitable.
Even there, she couldn’t escape her rival. ‘When I see Julia in the lift – she poses for Instagram pictures in there – I am always civil to her. She even comes to my clinic sometimes,’ says Heather, a pretty blonde.
‘I still have feelings for Robert, who is the father of my children. But I cry at night.
‘For example, I’ve just got back from Courchevel, where we went on a family skiing holiday – the girlfriend came too and I had to put up with it. It’s not that I don’t like her, but how would you feel?
Robert Tchenguiz (left) and his brother Vincent. Robert and Vincent are still hugely wealthy, with Robert’s fortune estimated at around £800 million
‘But now, things have changed. We are going to get divorced and it should all be over within the next six months. This is a big step and there is no going back.’
The decision has taken a long time in coming and no doubt there are many reasons behind it, including a new relationship of her own.
But her current living arrangements, with Mr Tchenguiz and Julia Dybowska, can hardly have helped. There is even talk of Julia becoming the next Mrs Tchenguiz.
‘He’s had lots of women, but I think he might marry this one,’ comments Heather.
Whatever the outcome, Heather is aware that her life is due to change radically.
Robert and Vincent are still hugely wealthy, with Robert’s fortune estimated at around £800 million. And of course they continue to live life to the full.
‘It’s strange that though I’m not cash rich I’m still caught up in a jet set lifestyle because that is how Robert lives his life,’ she reflects. And that, she promises, will change. ‘Life is not all about private jets, champagne and luxury holiday villas. I know I’m not going to get a big settlement in the divorce because I refuse to chase money that isn’t there.
‘I have to accept I’m not going to have a lot, despite the fact he was a multi-millionaire.
‘I used to wear all the top designer garments. Now I buy my clothes in Sainsbury’s – the jacket cost £40 and the top just £12, though I don’t think anybody has noticed. I’m not bitter because I came from nothing and now I’m back with virtually nothing. I had a humble background in America but they were good people with traditional values.
‘Robert and I drifted apart as we had differing views and I wanted to stand by proper values not just about wanting material things.
‘I took the children to see my mother in America recently. She lives in a basement flat on her own and I made them learn how to cook, how to clean up and do basic household jobs themselves.
‘They need to know that their life is not normal and they need to learn how to be grounded so they can cope with what life hits them with.
‘It breaks my heart that they don’t know the real world.
‘While we were in Utah, I filmed them having the simple pleasure of a snowball fight – that is what life is really about.
‘All that counts in life is honesty, and love. For Robert, money is his God and I sometimes fear for him that he seeks so much hedonistic pleasure. At some point we all have to sit down and face who we are and where we’re going but fundamentally we differ in this way, I’m back where I started.
‘Finally with the divorce I can try to start a new life – all the time you are living with your husband it is hard to move on and I have actually been through hell although on the outside it looks like I’m having a glamorous time.’
Despite her straitened circumstances, Heather is still a fixture at various society events and last week was at the launch of her friend Nina Naustdal’s latest fashion collection in Mayfair.
‘People still think I’ve got it all because of the people I hang out with but it’s not like that,’ she explains.
‘Until this mess is sorted out I shall have to continue bumping into Robert’s beautiful girlfriend.
‘I might have lost my figure but at least I haven’t lost my sense of humour.’