Kate Moss: Threesomes, drugs, tears and her wild rise to fame

KATE Moss is one of the world’s most famous models, but her rise to stardom was a rocky road, filled with out of control partying and emotional breakdowns.

WHEN John Galliano cast a very young, very unknown Kate Moss in his spring/summer 1990 show, he was struck by the poignancy of her otherness.

She had come in for fittings in her thrift-store finds and beat-up boots, her long hair hanging in strings, each day surrounded by world-famous warrior models plated in Versace and Chanel who made it quite clear they thought this plain little foundling did not belong.

“We were looking for new girls,” Galliano said, “and wow — I’d found my rough little diamond.”

At the time, Kate considered herself “feral,” but Galliano chose Kate to open the show. She hadn’t eaten all day and was terrified. She’d later say she felt like she “was up there on my own,” and when the show was over, Kate went to the afterparty and guzzled so much whiskey that she missed her flight the next day.

Kate Moss in 2002.

She was hung over and disoriented and intimidated, and she loved it. Her entree into this new world, however long it was meant to last, had already meant a higher class of party with a higher class of people.

She was no longer interested in hanging out at the low-ceilinged local pub, knocking back swarmy, lethal concoctions of cider and lager. Soon, she’d be training her palate at the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz in Paris, where she began drinking fizzy cocktails made of gin and Champagne.

“When I used to come back home and get into our car — which wasn’t air-conditioned — and a house with no pool — I was like, ‘I’m not staying here forever,’” Kate said. “I never had that feeling of, ‘That’s your lot.’”

One photographer in Paris had actually told Kate that she had no chance at all, that she was “just another common bitch.”

Kate Moss, just 15, looked at him with disbelief. And she laughed.

Moss backstage in Paris.

‘The Waif Thing’:

Kate Moss was spotted by a modelling agent at age 14, walking through JFK Airport with her middle-class British parents. But her Polaroid was stuck into the “maybe” drawer until Kate’s mentor, the fashion photographer Corinne Day, plucked it out — launching her career in 1990 with a striking image that made the cover of UK style bible The Face.

“Corinne would make me cry,” Kate said.

That was the point.

“The more I pi** you off,” Corinne would say, “the better pictures I get.”

By 1992, Kate had been picked as the new face of Calvin Klein, and she had to be topless for the campaign. She dreaded it. Early in her career, she had considered getting implants, but she changed her mind once she began getting work. It was another thing that set her apart.

She was teamed with Mark Wahlberg, then known as “Marky Mark,” a hip-hop wannabe with a band called The Funky Bunch and a brother in New Kids on the Block.

Marky Mark’s not impressed.

Smiles all around.

It was not a happy set. Wahlberg spent some downtime tugging his crotch while Kate rolled her eyes. Glenn O’Brien, who wrote the script for the TV spots, says Wahlberg would look at the pages and cross out things he didn’t think sounded like him, “a sort of white South Boston version of Ebonics,” O’Brien says.

Wahlberg also made it clear that Kate was, to him, nothing special. “I wasn’t into the waif thing,” he said later. “She kind of looked like my nephew.”

“It didn’t feel like me at all,” Kate said. “I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks.”

By now, Kate was drinking heavily. She saw a doctor and was prescribed Valium, but her boyfriend’s mother — whom she was staying with in New York — forbade Kate to take it.

“Nobody takes care of you mentally,” Kate said. “I thought I was going to die.”

That campaign saved the house of Calvin Klein and launched Kate’s career.

Vogue Brasil.

Vogue Paris.

“For me, Kate’s body represented closing the door on the excessiveness of the ’80s,” Klein said. “So many women models would come to me where they’ve distorted their bodies by implants in their breasts, changing their hips, changing their knees ... I mean, you just cannot imagine what models were doing to themselves, what women have been doing to themselves. I think something changed dramatically in the ’90s. And I was looking for someone who could represent something that’s more natural.”

The culture at large didn’t see Kate that way: Up against the skyscraper models of the ’80s, their very perfection a comment on American supremacy, a small-boned, flat-chested model like Kate Moss was heresy. Someone like her hadn’t been seen since Twiggy in the ’60s. Suddenly, Kate and Calvin Klein were accused of promoting anorexia, heroin use, child pornography and the downfall of Western civilisation.

She was on the sides of buses, kiosks and pay phones, naked and draped across a velvet sofa in a ramshackle room, “FEED ME,” often scrawled across the ad by protesters.

“I was thin,” Kate said, “but that’s because I was doing shows, working really hard ... You’d get to work in the morning. There was no food. Nobody took you out for lunch when I started.”

Kate spent much of 1993 in tears. This was the same girl who had once been told by her mother that life wasn’t always fun and refused to believe it: “Why the f**k not? Why the f**k can’t I have fun all the time?’ ” Now she was beginning to see.

Moss posed for Roberto Cavalli's spring and summer collection in 2006.

Heartbreak:

By the time Kate met Johnny Depp in 1994, he had been divorced from his first wife and engaged three more times — most recently to Winona Ryder — and had just altered his famous “Winona Forever” tattoo to “Wino Forever.” Depp was deep into booze and drugs, and his LA nightclub, the Viper Room, was his personal clubhouse, a space where celebrities could party with abandon, where it was rumoured Depp and his friends could watch knowing patrons have sex through a one-way mirror.

Kate and Johnny were the chicest, druggiest couple since Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, the epitome of cool in a Trainspotting culture.

But Kate was often on edge with Johnny, afraid of his moods but more afraid he’d leave her. She overlooked a lot, including one night in October 1994, in the presidential suite at New York City’s Mark Hotel.

The cops were called and found Kate sitting amid the wreckage; Depp was arrested for causing nearly $10,000 in damage to a $2,200-a-night room, but even his perp walk was the height of grunge chic: There he was in low-slung blue jeans, a grubby white T-shirt, a brown jacket and a green knit cap pulled over long, lanky hair, sunglasses on.

Johnny Depp being escorted by a police officer after his arrest.

“Johnny invented grunge,” director John Waters said. “He looked good under arrest.”

Not everyone got the appeal. Anna Sui recalls going over to Kate’s apartment in the Village — in the same building as Carolyn Bessette, who worked at Calvin Klein and had lobbied hard for Kate — for a small afterparty. Johnny ignored Kate.

“He was always in the corner, with his guy friends,” Sui says. “I think we were just, like, the fashion people or something.”

Just as she didn’t feel equal to her fellow supermodels, Kate didn’t feel worthy of Depp. She did everything he told her to. Suddenly, the girl who had last read The Celestine Prophecy was reading the Beats and trying to pronounce “Kerouac” to reporters.

“It must make you feel secure if you know what you want to do,” she said. “I want to find something I really love, because I don’t love modelling. I’ve got all these people around who are so passionate about what they do. I envy them ... Fashion’s not satisfying to me at all. You can’t change the world through fashion because the average person doesn’t look at fashion pictures.”

She had no idea how revolutionary she already was — and no sense of how out of control.

Depp, who was beginning to slow the partying down, couldn’t take it. In one sitting, Kate could snort 3 grams of coke and drink a bottle of vodka, which a doctor said was the best liquor for preserving her looks. She put stuff away so hard and fast that her nickname was “The Tank.” A friend says she suspected Depp was cheating on her.

Depp arrives with Kate Moss at the Festival palace in Cannes in 1998.

“She’d phone him all the time, on sets, in hotels,” says the friend. “She never expressed concern about his drug use. She expressed concern about being separated from him on jobs.”

Not long after appearing together at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Kate and Johnny, unravelling for months, broke up for good. They had a massive blow-up at his house in LA. She thought they had been living there together, but he thought she had been crashing.

He had tried living with her in New York, but that lasted less than six months. As wild as Johnny may have been, even he couldn’t take the partying and the clinginess.

According to a friend, he told Kate that she was “a crazy bitch,” that they were done. Kate couldn’t believe it.

“Johnny broke her heart,” says the friend. “She went mad.”

‘A very soulless life’:

Kate threw herself into partying with her movie-star and rock-star friends. The tabloids called the clique “the Primrose Hill set,” after the posh neighbourhood they shared. She was reeling after her split with Johnny.

“Sleeping around, doing more drugs,” a friend says of that time. “It gets back to him that she’s out of control, and he’s not surprised. He did drugs, but he knew how much to take and how much not to, and she just wouldn’t stop.”

Kate Moss in Playboy. Shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.

The British tabloids began reporting Kate’s hook-ups with several of her female friends — including Jude Law’s wife, Sadie Frost, who, this friend says, began to fall in love with Kate.

When Frost told Law, he was excited by it. The three became entangled. Normally, Sadie was wildly possessive of Jude — she claimed to have sent “little death threats” to his newest co-star, a 16-year-old Claire Danes — but Kate was Queen of Primrose Hill, so Sadie kept her mouth shut.

“They all partied together, slept together,” says a colleague. “It was a very soulless life they led.”

“Kate can drink anyone under the table,” says a family friend. “She can drink a litre of vodka in one sitting. She’ll go out on a Thursday and come back on a Sunday.” Anyone who tries to quit or dial it back is a traitor to the cause; Kate’s friends are expected to party at all hours, whether it’s 7pm or 5am.

“She doesn’t like her own company,” says the family friend of that time. “She’s addled by the drugs and doesn’t like to think.”

Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. Picture: Instagram

When Johnny Depp hooked up with French starlet Vanessa Paradis — who became pregnant within weeks — Kate spun out.

She took off for a wild two weeks in Ibiza, and Jason Lake, her island hook-up, spilled all to the press, expressing amazement that this “kinda rough” girl who knocked back vodka and tequila every night was the world’s most famous model.

“I was living fast,” Kate said of that time. “It was, ‘Sleep? Why? Why not go on? There’s too much to do.’”

Adapted from “Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the ’90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion,” by Maureen Callahan, published by Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster. On sale now.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.