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The rise and fall of Caprice

These days, though, Caprice can be found in some less glamorous places: making personal appearances in department stores in South Africa, promoting a mail order catalogue in Germany — and, most recently, at a North London magistrates court.

On Tuesday, demure in a camel trench coat, Caprice suffered probably the most humiliating few hours of her career so far.

Highbury magistrates were told that when Caprice was pulled over for drink-driving, PC Paul Flashman did not recognise the heavily made-up ‘scrawny’ blonde driving the car, but was certain that she had ‘alcohol halitosis’. Even when she said that her name was Caprice, he had not the foggiest idea who she was. ‘Caprice who?’ he asked.

Can Caprice’s star really have fallen so far? Is she in danger of free-falling from one shocking reality show to another towards obscurity?

As she approaches her 35th birthday, what does the future hold for the woman who has for so long traded on her ‘supermodel’ status? In fact, Caprice is as busy and determined as ever to make millions and be famous. A drink-driving conviction and ban would be most inopportune.

When it comes to Caprice, we shall discover that few things are quite as they seem, and that the glossy surfaces are all covered with bewildering amounts of PR spin.

A reasonable point to start from might be that she is famous for being a supermodel, an It-girl and the poster girl for Wonderbra.

Yet Caprice, it emerges, is none of these things. So who is she really? And just what is she doing with her life these days?

Caprice Valerie Bourret was born on October 24, 1971, and raised in a modest three-bedroom bungalow in a suburb of Los Angeles by her mother Valerie.

Her father Dale, who is in real estate, left the family when his daughter was five. Caprice moved to New York, where she was an averagely successful catalogue model, and came to Britain in 1994.

The fame and financial success she craved came two years later when she took up with publicist Ghislain Pascal.

Pascal, who also represented Tamara Beckwith, managed to get Caprice a part in the documentary Filthy Rich: Daddy’s Girls.

Caprice was neither of those things, but made quite an impression anyway. She was filmed surveying a polo field, saying: ‘I was born to this.’

Caprice was, though, being honest on one level. Thanks to liaisons with two successive millionaire property developers, she was, indeed, living the life of a moneyed Chelsea girl.

Her first boyfriend was a short but charming English millionaire named Robert Curtis. After a year, she ditched him and moved on to his stupendously wealthy friend, Robert Tchenguiz.

"She was in with the It-crowd," says a friend from this period, whom she has since ditched.

On the strength of her ‘It girl’ status, Pascal managed to get Caprice some promotional work that October for National Wonderbra Week, which involved some personal appearances in her underwear.

It allowed her — quite inaccurately — to be tagged the ‘Wonderbra girl’. Model Eva Herzigova was the original and only Wonderbra girl.

Neither was Caprice ever a supermodel. Any fashionista will tell you there were just five, anointed because of their ubiquity on the covers of magazines like Vogue: Naomi (Campbell), Linda (Evangelista), Christy (Turlington), Cindy (Crawford) and Claudia (Schiffer).

Nevertheless, Caprice’s semi-fame was parlayed into genuine celebrity after a showstopping appearance at the National Television Awards in late 1996, when, in a sheer black dress, she rendered Sir Trevor MacDonald almost speechless.

From then on she became a fixture in the newly resurgent men’s magazine market, happily posing in the likes of GQ, Maxim and Loaded.

She was also happy to take on a slew of promotional work which, though rather unglamorous, raked in tens of thousands of pounds a pop.

Meanwhile, there were the liaisons with various men which kept her constantly in the tabloid newspapers.

She dated footballer Tony Adams and Rod Stewart, and was even said to have dated Prince Andrew — though it quickly emerged that this story was a fiction. It was all good PR, though.

The model’s thirst for publicity reached its height when she attempted to launch a pop career. She travelled the length of the country, appearing in pubs and on local radio — but all to no avail.

Her single peaked at No 24 in the charts. A lesser wannabe might have decided at that point to call it a day, but Caprice was far too ambitious to let go without a struggle.

She decided that she wanted to be an actress. "It was all straight-to-video stuff," the one-time friend sighs of the dire movies which followed.

An unlikely saviour came into view in the form of Debenhams department store. They wanted her to be the ‘face’ of their lingerie range.

They gave her an extremely lucrative deal whereby she licensed her name to them — and they did everything else.

This worked well until Caprice saw the figures. In an interview, she said it dawned on her that she should be getting 100 per cent of the profits made by trading on her name.

"I thought, if they are making a pair of knickers for 67p and turning it round and selling it for £10, then that’s just crazy and I should be doing this for myself."

Of course, Debenhams had the design expertise, the manufacturing contacts, economies of scale and an established distribution chain which allowed them to turn this kind of profit. But Caprice was undaunted.

It took her three years to set up finance for her own lingerie label, but now she is the director of By Caprice, which is launching internationally.

This is the venture that all her energies are now directed towards. "An entrepeneur is what I am," she declared recently. "My mind is business."

A factory in China produces the lingerie and the business is run from her ‘home office’, a rented apartment in Camden.

Caprice oversees the design and travels the world in order to do all the marketing. Naturally, she models the undies herself.

Last year, she appeared in a celebrity reality VH1 show in America, The Surreal Life, simply to raise her profile because her undies were launching over there.

Hence too, perhaps, the slew of low-rent reality shows in the UK in 2005: Road Raja, Celebrities Under Pressure, Three Celebrities And A Baby, and of course Celebrity Big Brother.

Her range, which she wore constantly on screen in CBB, is available only in Debenhams and is one of the store’s biggest sellers.

Last month, she was to be found in South Africa, tirelessly publicising By Caprice Lingerie. She spent part of July in Germany, where the undies are to be sold via a catalogue.

She has also lent her name to a range of hair products, including a hair dryer and straightening tongs which are on sale in Comet and Asda. Prestigious it ain’t, but presumably it is a nice little earner.

It is just as well that she is earning her own money, though, as she has just let yet another millionaire boyfriend fall through her fingers.

Alex Davis, whose family made a fortune in the oil business, was engaged to Caprice but now says that she lied to him and used him for publicity.

Davis claims that when they met she told him she was 26, when in fact she was 31. He was only 20. In summer 2003 he proposed, but says that he had to tell her in advance so that she could tip off the newspapers.

When the article appeared — complete with a gushing quote from his mother Nancy, which she denies giving — he was embarrassed.

At this point, an article appeared saying that his family thought she was a money-grabber. Caprice demanded that his mother write a letter to the paper, but she refused.

Caprice then came up with a letter purporting to be written by Mrs Davis, complete with a forged signature, denying the allegations.

She used the forged letter to demand an apology and damages from the newspaper, which withdrew the story and paid damages and costs.

Analysis by a handwriting expert proved the document was forged. The paper demanded its money back, plus costs, and Caprice agreed to do this.

Under the terms of the settlement, she insisted that she was not admitting any part in the deception and that she is paying £45,000 simply to avoid a legal battle.

Caprice will shortly be on Sky’s Project Catwalk — another chance to plug the undies — and has made two further appalling-sounding movies.

She has taken on a new agent — her third in two years — who is hopeful that she may be able to find her some further television work.

Being Caprice, there is even a further commercial ambition: she wants to launch her very own perfume a la Britney, J.Lo, the Beckhams at al.

Naturally, she can scent triumph. "I am a brand," she roared in an interview earlier this year. "I have succeeded. I have done it."