Filed: 07/06/2005
Arts Telegraph
What exactly is Jodie Marsh famous for?, I ask. It is, perhaps, a sign of the times that even Jodie Marsh herself - curled up next to me on a chintzy sofa in her parents' Essex home - cannot come up with a quick answer. "I don't know, I wouldn't say there's just one thing," she laughs, her feline eyes glinting from behind a lavish rimming of kohl. After musing for a little longer, she concludes: "I think the reason I'm famous is because I've got so much personality."
Marsh is one of a handful of girls - the others include Jordan and John Leslie's ex-girlfriend, Abi Titmuss - who embody a peculiarly modern kind of fame, which combines sexual notoriety with money-spinning mainstream success. The expansive word "celebrity" covers a multitude of 27-year-old Marsh's identities: glamour model, reality-TV contestant, party girl, charity fundraiser and sex columnist for the men's weekly magazine Zoo.
Marsh, a former lap-dancer in Stringfellows nightclub, first snared the public's attention in a reality show called Essex Wives - a kind of home-grown The Osbournes that also featured her mother, father and younger brother, Jordan, who is an aspiring pop star.
Thereafter, in the tabloid press - and the plethora of weekly celebrity magazines with questing, urgent names such as Heat, Now, New and Closer - her personality made ever more frequent appearances, most famously clad in an outfit simply composed of two narrow combat belts strategically crisscrossing her impressive chest.
Perhaps the most frequently used definition of Marsh, however, is "Jordan's rival". The glamour phenomenon that is Jordan (real name Katie Price ) has long ruled the gossip magazines with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a giant pair of surgically expanded 32FF breasts. When Marsh made her tabloid début, on page three of the Star, she was quoted as saying: "I want to be as big as Jordan, not in boob size but namewise!" Jordan took this as a hostile challenge rather than sincere homage. She rejoined that Marsh had "a nose like a builder's elbow", while Marsh stoked the antipathy by appearing with the word "REAL" pointedly written across her chest in marker pen. The feud shows no sign of abating, not least because the tabloids continue to enjoy the alliterative quality of Jordan versus Jodie, and the suggestion of a topless catfight that it entails.
Jodie's career, however, has taken a new turn, which is the reason why I am at the sprawling, oak-beamed mansion that she shares with her brother, mother and father, a scaffolding contractor, in the leafy countryside near Brentwood, Essex: she has just written an autobiography, entitled Keeping It Real, a breathless recounting of the knocks and triumphs on the rocky road to fame. The title can be read both as an assertion of Jodie's own down-to-earth nature and a renewed swipe at Jordan's outsized implants. Since Marsh has been out with a couple of Jordan's ex-boyfriends, it is perhaps inevitable that the two women should also share a publisher: Jordan's autobiography, Being Jordan, has sold 500,000 copies and reportedly earned the model £1 million.
