Well, I definitely wouldn’t mind being Maia Norman. Down a long, manicured
drive in Devon, the pint-sized girlfriend of Damien Hirst lives in lo-fi
bucolic splendour, along with their three boys, Connor, 13, Cassius, 8, and
Cyrus, 3, an assortment of plump stray cats, three mucky dogs, a bunch of
chickens, ponies and 22 — yes, 22 — surfboards. “For different conditions,”
titters the sinewy 46-year-old. Er, how many different conditions are there?
“Only about four!”
It’s 11am, but there’s already a small disco going on in the kitchen. The Tom
Tom Club is blasting out from behind a Giacometti as Norman speaks
simultaneously to the housekeeper about lunch — a roast is being whipped up
— and two gardeners about the enormous vegetable patch behind the house.
Halfway up the hill, Hirst, covered in paint and soot, is grimly toiling
away (and remains away until it’s all over). Cyrus, a blond Hirst Mini-Me,
punctuates the proceedings with a word that sounds like “f***!”. Norman
remains serene. “We’ve got a nanny,” she says, “and a housekeeper, and then
we’ve got a woodworker, a general manager and a gardener. And then a kind of
. . . a leaf-blower guy. Then we’ve got two tree men who manage the forest.
I think that’s all. Oh, and a driver who does the school run, too.
Delegation is just so cool, isn’t it?”
It’s certainly cool if you can afford it, and with the coffers swelled with a
sweet £95m from Hirst’s record-breaking solo auction at Sotheby’s in
September, no wonder, among other things, the barn-sized building next door
is being converted into a huge master bedroom. And that Norman’s got a
beautiful large ruby on one hand and a big diamond on the other. “I do have
to be careful now because people just go, ‘Moneybags is walking in!’ ” she
admits with a laugh. “Damien and I are both really generous, so I’m easy to
take for a ride. But I still refuse to get rid of my thrifty side.
I still keep all my cotton pads in a Stella Artois can that I cut in half.”
Half human, half red-hot chilli pepper, Maia Norman is Sheryl Crow from the
neck up and, well, kind of Iggy Pop from the waist down. A rockabilly tomboy
with a slash of blonde hair and a salty Californian accent, today she’s
tough and sexy and toned in a mint-green top, and denims from Mother of
Pearl, the fashion line she’s relaunching this month. She wants the new
clothes “to be capable of sports, but not for sports”, says the motocross
rider and self-confessed surfaholic. Now it’s all water-resistant silk
jackets and butch shift dresses with covered zips. “It was getting too
feminine — not tough or flexible enough.” She travels to London once a week
to oversee things, but, otherwise, home is this converted inn she has shared
with Hirst for more than 10 years, now a lavish complex with over 100 acres
of woodland, an indoor swimming pool and a breathtaking run down to the sea,
where Norman hangs ten — or tries to — nearly every day. At the bottom of
the garden lives Mary Brennan, Hirst’s mother, her own cottage a haven of
pastel shades, in contrast with Norman’s chic Mexican rugs, spangly skulls,
plain walls and black-and-white photos — although, sadly, I note, none of
Hirst’s fabled willy shots.
Art, too, of course: a Jeff Koons bust (“Not sure I’m into it,” giggles
Norman. “Interpretation can be taxing for a little blonde brain like
mine!”), plus, outside, a breathtaking Angus Fairhurst gorilla. The couple
also own a houseboat in Chelsea, where she stays in London — although, when
they’re together, Hirst insists on Claridge’s all the way. (“And I’ve just
bought a powerboat too, with a white leather interior,” coos Norman.) Not to
mention the property in Mexico, next to the sea, where shark attacks have
recently taken place that, says Norman, eyes widening, “Damien thinks are
personal”. And who could forget the barmy white elephant of Toddington
Manor, a sprawling former boys’ school with 60 bedrooms, which Hirst is
gradually turning into a gallery space? “I took some friends last week, I
got so lost,” says Norman.
Sixty bloody bedrooms. It wasn’t always so. It certainly wasn’t so in the late
1980s, when Norman met Hirst, she an aspiring jewellery designer from Orange
County, too poor to go to art school, he just another etiolated Yorkshire
lad with big ideas. At the time she was dating Hirst’s good friend, the art
dealer Jay Jopling. “I used to help Damien before he was my boyfriend,” says
Norman, who, in her capacity as his assistant, was actually responsible for
painting his first 10 spots. “We went to the maggot farm together, and
derelict hospitals to get old medical supplies. It was so sexy! He could
make me laugh, and still can. I was entranced with the fact that he could
bake bread, that he could cook. Like me, he’s someone who brought himself
up. I recognise that sense of self-sufficiency.” Her relationship with
Jopling soon foundered.
“I think Jay and I had already outlasted our relationship, realised we weren’t
going to have babies together. When Damien came along, it was painful, and
sudden” — and inconvenient, dammit. “When I realised I was in love with
Damien, I had to move out, and I didn’t have a place or a job. I ended up
living with \ Daniel Chadwick and Marc Quinn.”
But can love survive Brit Art? Jopling has just split from his wife, Sam
Taylor-Wood. “I know,” she sighs. “We’re all very sad. I guess it’s a sign
of the times. You get to that age and you’ve just had enough of each other
after 10 years. Unless you can do it for 20!”
And beyond. So what’s her secret? “Marry your best friend,” she says.
“Although we haven’t even got married! Because we both come from divorces,
it’s not an institution we were quick to run to.” She says she would marry
him — “Of course!” — if he asked, but one gets the impression that Hirst is
calling the shots (literally, in fact: word comes just before the photoshoot
that he has sanctioned a picture, but just the one inside the house).
However, “there’s a side of him that’s really scared of me”, she giggles. “I
punched him in the dark once! We were on mushrooms. He was being really
horrible and difficult, and then he said, ‘I’m gonna leave you.’ I popped
him one! He was devastated. He had a split lip and then he had to sleep in
the coal shed because he couldn’t face me.” Hirst apparently also calls the
shots when it comes to the children. “He’s more . . . thorough. I’m totally
a fun mom, sometimes irresponsible. But he’s definitely listening to me when
I say I’m worried about the work ethic. Kids growing up with money:
disaster. We did go through a period of indulging them, which is what
parents do when they’ve been brought up poor.”
After all, as the runt of a broken family back in 1970s California, she
probably never dreamt that she might one day be able to snap up an entire
department store of lightsabers with a single sweep of plastic. “Absolutely
not!” she squeals. “It’s hilarious. I think that I have come out very, very
normal considering my upbringing. I’ve done an amazing job recovering from
total psychotic abuse.” Like Hirst, Norman never knew her biological father,
who died when she was 16. Instead, she grew up in a feral, bohemian
household with her mother and stepfather, who managed rock bands. From a
very early age, “we had bands living with us”, she says. “So \ smoking weed
at the age of 10, consistently until the age of 14. I kept the house clean,
did chores. I had a bonkers family, really bad. Violence and sexual abuse —
continually,” she says. Her stepfather would beat her mother until “all the
furniture was in a pile . . . my mother shivering in tears with a bust
cheek”. And the sex abuse? “Oh, that was him again. But, in a way, the
violence was way worse because I couldn’t protect the people around
me. The sexual abuse was something just terribly shameful and humiliating
that went on for about three years. I would really pity someone who ever
picked a fight. I’ve got pent-up anger that could definitely kill someone.”
I have to say I’m rather astonished that our interview has suddenly taken such
a dark turn. Norman is so sunny, so up, so totally-have-dealt, it’s kind of
weird to hear it all spilling out. It’s almost like we’re talking about a
vague mutual acquaintance, especially as she tells it all in an omigod,
gossipy kind of way.
But maybe that’s part of her recovery. She continues: “I had to confront my
aggressor, and I did. Yeah! When I was in my mid-twenties, I realised I
couldn’t live with it any more. So I started to befriend my father on the
phone, and then it just came out of me. I said, do you remember? And do you
apologise? And he said yes. All of a sudden I had the power. I worked it
from there back to when he died last year and told him I’d forgiven him.”
Far from blaming her mother for exposing her to such troubles, “I adore her”,
says Norman. “She instilled confidence in me. If it weren’t for her, I’d be
a mess.”
In the past, she has also thanked her mother-in-law for looking after the
children while she and Damien got wasted on drink and drugs. Does she miss
the partying? She screws up her face up into a cheeky grin. “Yeah, I do
occasionally,” she says, before admitting to the occasional glass. Damien,
however, “has had to stop entirely. In a funny way, I wasn’t very supportive
initially — almost a hindrance. ‘It’s boring!’ I said. ‘You’re not really
going to give it all up, are you?’ Also, he was the first of all our
friends. It was a way of ostracising us. But I am so glad that he did”.
So it’s all happy families now, down on the farm — whatever anyone might say.
“The slanders? The naysayers?” she says, smiling. “Oh, of course I feel
hurt, and how dare you? But then I get the bravado back on and it’s like,
who’s laughing now?” She pauses. “And, he’s always like, ‘F*** ’em.’ ”
Mother of Pearl will be available from February, 2009. For stockists, call
020 7729 388; motherofpearl.co.uk
