HARD TO BELIEVE BUT WE'VE BEEN watching the Croydon waif for 20 years now. And the scary thing about Moss is that she never speaks – inspiring whole theses to be written about her. After all, this is the woman who met Mandela and Fidel Castro. Eve
ryone from Lucian Freud to Tracey Emin has immortalised her. Her 30th birthday party – subtitled The Beautiful and the Damned – has gone down in myth as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah.
Mail on Sunday reporter Laura Collins sneaked into the party at Claridges and witnessed, well, who knows … scenes of depravity? Certainly the full story has never been told – Moss is devastatingly litigious. But it was enough to nail Collins a book deal.
But if you think you're going to find out anything new in this unauthorised biography, forget it. Although she claims candid conversations with Moss's inner circle, Collins is forced to rely on old clippings. She alludes tantalisingly to the drink and drugs and Moss's intimate friendships with women. But there are few direct quotes. The lawyers have made sure of that.
Collins pads out the book with rambling anecdotes about Britpop. At times it feels like the worst sort of purple prose, as she fantasises about Moss's first day at school, how she lost her virginity. One can't help feeling Moss – a genuine cultural icon – deserves better.
Collins implies that she, of all people, truly understands Kate. Seeing her that night at Claridges, she felt impelled to tell her story (yeah, yeah). Part-schoolteacher, part-hack, Collins alternates between compassion (Kate works too hard; Kate suffers terribly over Johnny Depp) and prim disapproval.
There are nuggets. We find out Moss reads: Lewis Carroll, Cocteau, Scott Fitzgerald. I love the story of her dissolving into laughter when a French photographer calls her "just another common bitch". And we learn that Moss, an inveterate chatterbox, was schooled to be silent by her steely agent, Sarah Doukas.
But finally – defiantly – Moss eludes us. Either because she is deeply extraordinary, or just deeply ordinary. A great democratic beauty (with wonky teeth and bandy legs), what she does embody is that greedy, voracious, postmodern spirit. Early on she observed: "Why the f*** can't I have fun all the time?" I can't help loving her even more for defeating a second-rate biographer.
