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She has gone from Ginger to Geri, from a loudmouthed lass to an
ambassador for goodwill. In her first British interview since the split, Geri
Halliwell tells all to ANNA PASTERNAK.
Ginger grows up
I am waiting to meet Ginger Spice in the SoHo Grand, a hip hotel in downtown New York. Surely the girl who injected the verbal fizz into the Spice Girls will bounce up the stairs, a fawning entourage in tow. As I am waiting for An Entrance, I am totally thrown when a demure Geri Halliwell walks forward and introduces herself. Apart from the presence of her personal assistant and a video camera - the award-winning film-maker Molly Dineen is doing a fly-on-the-wall documentary - everything is alarmingly low-key.
Gone is the flaming hair and the aggressive make-up. Her strawberry blonde locks fall simply to her shoulders, her face is virtually free of make-up, and she is wearing a subdued fawn cashmere sweater and black trousers. What strikes me most is how petite, pretty and thin she is. Where is the generous cleavage? What has happened to her bulletproof attitude? It is five months since she unexpectedly quit the Spice Girls, and her metamorphosis has been dramatic: from the feisty, loudmouthed lass who gamely pinched the Prince of Wales on the bottom to the newly anointed United Nations goodwill ambassador who sang at the prince's 50th- birthday party. It appears to have been skilfully executed and, with a multimillion-pound record deal with EMI now in the bag, it's one in the eye for the cynics who wrote her off as history.
Anonymity is not on the agenda for Halliwell, who vehemently denies that there is anyone masterminding her new image - although she has hired Matthew Freud's PR company, and a new manager, Lisa Anderson. "You only had to look at me in the last six months before I left to see that I was changing," she says in her low, throaty voice. "What I wore off stage was completely different. When we started the band I was 21, and when I left I was 26. It's natural that people are going to grow up. There is nothing false or contrived about my look."
The past few months, she says, have been like an incubation period. "It's as if I've just left a marriage. It's normal that anyone who goes from one extreme to another has a period of adjusting."
Halliwell says that she doesn't have second thoughts about her decision to leave the Spice Girls. "I don't regret leaving when I did, but I regret not having the opportunity to appear at Wembley Stadium with them at the end of the tour. That made me feel a bit sad."
She also denies that Chris Evans, with whom she was seen shortly before leaving the band, encouraged her to jump ship. "I went to see him on a purely friendly basis. He had no idea what I was going to do as I had no idea myself. I decided what I was going to do on the day. It was a very spontaneous moment when I left."
The general consensus is that she had fallen out badly with the others. "It's quite hard to say," she sighs. "At the time, I said there were differences between us and there were, but they were personal. There were adult reasons why I left, but our fans are children and I didn't want to shatter their dreams. I wanted to play it low, I didn't want a whole media exposé, which it could have been, so I agreed to take a back seat and give them the space they deserve."
She admits that she hasn't "seen the girls or spoken to them, apart from Victoria, once". She is dismissive of her dinner with Posh Spice and David Beckham, captured by the paparazzi in St Tropez, suggesting it didn't cement the fissures in their friendship.
"It was a lonely time after I left," she concedes. "People didn't realise that I couldn't just go home to my friends and family because, for tax reasons, I had to remain out of Britain for three months. I was being chased by the press around the world until George Michael offered me a sanctuary." Holed up with Michael in his St Tropez and Beverly Hills homes, Halliwell finally had time to reflect. "George has been an angel to me," she says. "We have a mutual rapport, as we have both lost a parent. He has been very giving. He offered me a hand of friendship, love and support when I needed it. It's not a celebrity friendship, it's real."
Far from being ballsy and brash, Halliwell is warm, soft and uncertain. Her hectic schedule keeps her traversing the globe. Having just returned from Uganda for Comic Relief, she is in New York to promote her role as a British representative for the UN's Population Fund, before hopping back to Britain to continue recording her forthcoming album.
She has power - everything she says or does makes headlines - yet you sense she feels weightless. She is roaming the world, searching for something, yet what she is really trying to find is herself. She has read Deepak Chopra and M Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled, and says that she knew a few months before she became famous that "it wasn't going to hit the spot".
"I had been chasing fame since I was 17, but it was as if as soon as I had a tiny mouthful I knew it wasn't going to satisfy me. The amount of money and fame you have is all relative and I appreciate the luxuries, but it doesn't matter how much you have if you're lonely, hurting or feeling insecure. Yet how dare I, the luckiest girl in the world, have the luxury to be depressed? We all get absorbed in our self-pity and I'm no exception." She is worth an estimated £13m, and is now living in a rented cottage on the biggest dairy farm in Hertfordshire while her new house is being renovated. "I totally believe in karma and I've got to give something back. I've realised that I can't just fulfil my own ego and ambition and this year I'm trying to do some good. I think I was meant to be an evangelist in girl power and it's my absolute duty to empower women."
She hasn't always felt in control."Maybe only in the last few weeks," she says, as if surprised by herself. "I was always the spokeswoman and very opinionated in the Spice Girls, but it was the title given to me by the UN that gave me a real feeling of recognition."
She is very different from an Audrey Hepburn, say, and not an obvious candidate for ambassadorial duties. "Professionally, I'm very forthright and outspoken. My thinking cuts through a lot of bureaucracy and red tape. I'm not embarrassed by many things; contraception and reproductive health is controversial to some people, but not to me."
Despite a tendency to motor on about her causes, you can't doubt her passion. Geraldine Estelle Halliwell genuinely wants to make a difference. She says that the book Before I Say Goodbye, Ruth Picardie's diary of her battle with breast cancer, simply changed her life. It is well documented that Halliwell found a lump in her breast when she was 18, but her "wake-up call" didn't come until she read Picardie's book last year. "My accountant gave me the book and I read it overnight on a plane. I was sobbing in front of everyone - it was so tragic that it made me determined to highlight the issues of breast cancer."
That, and her father's death five years ago, appear to have been her biggest catalysts for change. "My father's death put an accelerator on my life. I became almost militant about my life after a dark period of depression." Her father was a car dealer from Liverpool and she admits she was a daddy's girl. "My father believed in me. He was a complete dreamer." Her mother is Spanish and worked as a cleaner. "I never had parents who took me to extra- curricular things like tap-dancing lessons. My mother was too busy trying to pay the rent. Now I totally believe you grow through adversity. You have to share the pain of the past and move on."
The paparazzi photograph with the highest price on its head would be one of Halliwell with a new man. She smiles coyly and shakes her head. "Of course I'd love companionship, a soul mate. I think people sometimes spend more time choosing a house than a partner. The reality is that I just can't go and make the mistakes I've made in the past, as it ends up in the public arena. I feel I have to tread through life lightly at the moment." Still, you sense in her an inner loneliness. For the first time she pauses when I ask what is her biggest fear. "The fundamental, primal thing - everyone wants to be accepted, we want to connect, we want to belong. I sometimes fear failure, but not in a paralysing fashion. The more afraid I am, the more I push through to persecute myself."
The scariest moment will come when she releases that first solo single. "I didn't have to pursue my record deal, it came to me," she says defensively. "As I had a healthy contribution to our lyrics, I'm confident that I have a strong sense of what is good music. I will take pieces of the Spice Girls with me. I was part of it and I'd be stupid to throw it out of the window, but it's natural that I'll be more self-expressive. The songs will be radio-friendly and melodic, but they'll be intelligent."
One of the myths that evolved after her departure from the Spice Girls was that Halliwell, like many of the rich, famous and disillusioned, was considering joining the Church of Scientology. "That was a total wind-up," she laughs. "The press had been following me around LA all day and I wanted to find out how stupid and lazy they sometimes are. So I went to a Scientology church, then a synagogue. They all wrote that I was pursuing a Hollywood career when I was in Los Angeles for a meeting about breast cancer."
The rumour that clearly rankles is that she auditioned for Aaron Spelling's new Charlie's Angels movie, but was turned down because she was too fat. "They must have great spin doctors," she fumes. "As I hadn't met the guy and I didn't want to do anything in Charlie's Angels anyway, it was really unfair."
Halliwell's current vulnerability is in contrast to Ginger Spice's robust persona. Without the buffer of the Spice Girls she seems exposed, yet her courage and drive are not to be underestimated. As we leave she touches me on the arm. "You know what I fear the most?" she says. "I always fear being misunderstood."