At 46, Catherine Bailey has lost none of her charms. She talks about her husband, her body and why she loves being naked
A few months ago, I was sitting in a cafe with my mother when we noticed a couple making their way towards us. The man was older, and slightly out of breath. “He’s trying to see if we’re checking him out,” said my mother. “But who’s that?” I said, pointing to the woman, an almond-eyed siren who looked not a day over 35, with an ostentatious maxi-dress and loose, waist-length hair billowing behind her. She was arrestingly good-looking, very much in control, very much the spring chicken. “Well, I think he’s David Bailey,” said my mother.
Catherine Bailey has always been silently striking. Now, at 46, she is in the limelight yet again, this time stripping to her underwear (and less � peephole bras, breast-revealing corsets and thigh-high boots) in a saucy new campaign for Agent Provocateur.
“I don’t really think about my age,” she says spryly, ordering a still water from the bar at the Savoy. “I only think, hang on, how come I’ve got to this age and still feel the same? People’s attitudes to [older models] are changing. Why can’t you be sexual? Why can’t you wear great underwear and be fabulous? Older women shouldn’t disappear. I want to see them wearing that stuff.”
The pictures were shot in a country house outside Oxford; Catherine plays an archly sexy chatelaine in charge of two naughty French maids (one of whom is Pearl Lowe’s daughter, Daisy). Here, she is whipping their bare bottoms; there, she is half nude, being massaged in a bubble bath � “My favourite shot,” she says. “I liked being in control.”
The splendid sight of a 46-year-old woman dressed as a sex object serves only to remind us how infrequently we encounter such images. But older women sell. In 2003, French Elle featured a 40-year-old Emmanuelle Béart frolicking nude in the Mauritian surf on the cover, and it was their biggest-selling issue ever. “Look, I’m 40: this is my body,” the actress said when the issue came out. “These are my curves; I like them and I’m proud of them. I feel better in my body now than when I was 20. Why not?”
Catherine agrees: “I’m much more comfortable in my skin now that I’m older. I feel better physically. I’ve had children; I’ve gone past that phase. It’s nice to be sexy, but it’s not the only thing about you. Not that sex becomes less important. You just get it into the right perspective. You realise it’s just part of life; that all you used to read about sex was bullshit. It’s painful for kids out there � what they think they should or shouldn’t be doing.”
She is not without anxieties, of course. “I’m still self-critical. Aren’t all women? Anxieties change as you get older. At 15, it’s spots; at 20, it’s fat thighs � I was much plumper when I was younger. Now, it’s wrinkles. I love retouching . . .”
Not that she needs it. Spikily thin in a jumper, jeans and boots, with her hair scraped back unforgivingly off her face and no trace of make-up, she isn’t much different in the flesh from how she looks in the pictures. The only signs of ageing are “these � ugh!” she says, touching the smoker’s wrinkles around her eyes.
For Agent Provocateur’s founder, Serena Rees, it was Catherine’s “sexual magnetism” that intrigued her. For her, an older model was never a risk. “We have customers aged from 16 to 81,” she says. “Last time, we used the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who had just had a baby. This time, I wanted to use a woman who was over 40. Don’t they say we have our best sex when we hit 40?”
Even though Catherine is confident in her body � “I don’t have any issues. I’ve accepted my body and walk around nude all the time” � returning to modelling five years ago, at the age of 41, must still have been a shock. “Actually, it was great, because I know what it’s all about now,” she says. “I was full of angst when I was younger. They didn’t book me because my bottom was fat, or this was wrong, that was wrong. But in the end, it’s only a job. If you’re right for the shoot, they will book you; if you aren’t, they won’t. It’s not about how you are as a human being.”
And what did her husband make of the pictures? “He thought they were great.” Bailey is, after all, the one who has always encouraged her to experiment and the man who filmed her giving birth to their third child for broadcast on national television.
“Oh, that was ages ago,” she says, with a laugh. “It was the journey of a woman, what most women go through. It was a huge compliment to me, like a wonderful love story. Other people didn’t see it that way, but I was thrilled with it.”
But wasn’t she mildly irritated, having a video camera shoved . . . ? “Oh, you don’t care if the world walks into the room at the time,” she says. “I was preoccupied with getting our son out, rather than telling Bailey to stop it.”
Twenty-five years with a notoriously cantankerous womaniser have certainly eliminated any self-consciousness. “Do I get embarrassed?” Catherine says. “No. I’ve lived with him for a long time.” She moved to London in her late teens, after growing up in South Africa. By 21, she had met her future husband, who had already been through three marriages (Rosemary Bramble, Catherine Deneuve and Marie Helvin), as well as an affair with the supermodel Jean Shrimpton. At 69, he is 23 years her senior.
“I don’t believe in love at first sight,” she says. The couple met when she was hired to model for an Avon catalogue. “Lust at first sight maybe. You can have a mutual attraction, but love takes longer. At first, I was scared of him. He’s intimidating, because he’s naughty. A tease. He looks to see where he can push someone to make them squirm. Of course he did it to me! But I can look like things aren’t bothering me even when they are.”
Catherine was happy to settle down. “I worked for about six years, then had Paloma and Fenton,” she says. The family moved to Devon. Life has not been without trauma, however. In 1995, two days after giving birth to their third child, Sascha, she endured a nerve-shredding ordeal. “It was probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to me,” she remembers. “I was arrested for having stolen a baby. About the time Sascha was born, a baby girl was snatched from a nearby hospital. I was in the maternity department in John Lewis, buying a pushchair. I felt fabulous: back in my normal clothes and with a lovely newborn baby son. While I was paying, the staff asked me to wait. Then I saw a load of policemen coming up the fire escape. There were lots of women around, so it’s embarrassing for a start, and I thought, I’ve been a right prat � I’ve been pleased with myself [for looking so trim]. That’ll teach me for being smug.
“I said, ‘My name is Catherine Bailey, this is Sascha Bailey and I’m not the person you want. Leave me alone!’ But a policeman grabbed the pushchair with Sascha in it and flung it across the room. They bundled me into a white van. Sascha was making noises, but I wasn’t allowed anywhere near him.”
When she got to the police station, she was “sat on the bench with a lot of undesirables. Every time I asked for my phone call, I was sworn at. When I said I had to feed Sascha, they just said, ‘You’ll do what we tell you.’ I started to bleed heavily � it just gushed out. I said to them, ‘I’m bleeding.’ They said, ‘Shut up and sit down.’ It was horrible � it still gives me the wobbles.” It was two hours before they “checked his nappy and saw he was a boy. Then the police all disappeared, because they had screwed up”, she says.
Catherine put the episode down to experience and soldiered on. Nowadays, she is “constantly busy” with the kids and modelling, a career that both Fenton and Paloma have toyed with. “I didn’t particularly want her to do it,” she says of her daughter. “If you’re insecure, young and not as tall as you should be � though she is pretty enough, I knew it would be difficult for her at that age. Why do you want to be crushed all the time? It becomes too personal, even though it’s not.”
And what did the children think of the Agent Provocateur pictures? “The older two think they are great,” Catherine says. “But when Bailey says, ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’, Sascha just goes, ‘She’s my mother’, which is, well, I suppose so.”
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