Lucy Tang on top - the highs and lows of a party girl

Sophie Leris10 April 2012

Lucy Tang hates the cold and has a fear of large social gatherings. Odd, then, that she should just have embarked on a week-long endurance race in Antarctica, and is married to the international entrepreneur, founder of luxury fashion brand Shanghai Tang and concert pianist Sir David Tang, who is probably the best-connected man in London. 'I crave the simplicity of these races, it's all such a respite from the bustle of normal daily life.' Normal, for Sir David and Lady Tang, involves starry dinners at his London restaurant China Tang, shooting weekends with Richard Caring or the Duke of Marlborough, holidays with Sir Mark and Lady Weinberg (interior designer Anouska Hempel), Kate Moss, the Duchess of York and Dame Vivien Duffield, and a private audience with the Pope. They know everyone from Mick Jagger to Margaret Thatcher, Kevin Spacey to Stephen Fry, in spite of a T-shirt David owns that reads: 'Fuck off, I've got enough friends.'

We meet a week before the race, at her house on Eaton Terrace where the Tangs spend several months a year. 'David's off killing,' remarks Lucy between posing for photographs dressed in Alexander McQueen creations plucked from her own wardrobe. 'I hate it. It's not like the old days when Daddy had a little shoot, everyone had elevenses with the beaters and if there was a bird around you might shoot it. These days thousands of birds are raised to be shot. It's all so corporate.'

Anecdotes and gossip tumble out as Lucy talks: Prince Andrew doesn't like garlic or other people eating it; Naomi Campbell's rather intimidating boyfriend Vlad is the only one to tame her; once Tracey Emin mistook David's bed for her own on Richard Caring's yacht and climbed in with him. David was confused – Lucy wasn't on board – and shone his luminous watch on her face, at which point they both screamed. He was also alarmed by her large breasts. Tracey got out of bed naked, went to the loo (this is a treasured detail as the Tangs are wildly scatological) and headed off to her own cabin. David, Lucy and Tracey have been close ever since. Lucy has a democratic cross-section of friends. There are people from Burnham-on-Crouch, the Essex town where she grew up in a pretty country house 'full of bantams, ducks, dogs and rabbits'; girls from New Hall, her boarding school near Chelmsford; the glitterati she has met during her 21 years with David; and her co-runners on Racing The Planet 'where I am just Lucy, not Lady Tang, and they haven't heard of David'.

But she also suffers from what amounts to a phobia of groups of strangers. 'I've always had these feelings – I tried to jump off a roof at school and they took me to a psychiatrist. I think it's a chemical imbalance; my father had it, too, because he had Parkinson's aged 35, which was misdiagnosed as either the result of a hunting accident or gout until he was 40, and that inhibits serotonin production.' Lucy's father, Geoffrey Wastnage, a paint manufacturer, died from the disease eight years ago, aged 59, and she has since raised money for Parkinson's charities. 'We were very close and when he died I lost my best friend,' she says. Her father got her expelled from New Hall for drinking. 'He gave me cherry brandy and Cointreau to take back to school for my birthday. He was expelled from four schools, so I knew I could ring his mother and admit.' He was her soulmate, another long-distance runner and a sailor who started an ambitious round-the-buoys race from Burnham to Ostend, called Wanchors.

Following her expulsion, Lucy moved to London and began a career as a 'very bad secretary', first at Harpers & Queen: 'I used to go to sleep under my desk, having been out all night dancing.' She then worked for publisher and rake-about-town Naim Attallah, who'd just been made chairman of jewellers Asprey Garrard Mappin Webb. 'I was awful. I pulled his door down trying to swap his Chairman sign for my PA sign as a joke and I caused a fire with a cigarette. When I met David, who kept clogging his fax machine with messages for me, Naim gave me my own fax line.' Aged 22 and single, Lucy was introduced to 35-year-old David in 1990 by a friend, Tania Foster-Brown (now Philip Green's gatekeeper in chief), then girlfriend of the equerry to the Prince of Wales, Guy Salter. 'David had asked Guy and Tania to dinner. He needed another woman and they brought me. He put me next to him, played with my food, was a terrible flirt, and everyone at the table had raised eyebrows.'

Based in Hong Kong, and in the throes of opening his first private members' club The China Club, David had various business interests that brought him to London. And whenever he was in town over the next 18 months, he invited Lucy to the opera, the ballet, or dinners during which he read her poems by Shakespeare and Brooke. She met his mother and learned something of his family history, not least that his philanthropist grandfather, Sir Shiu-Kin Tang, who was knighted for founding the Kowloon Motor Bus Company, was estranged from David's father, and the young David had to make appointments with his grandfather's secretary if he wanted to see him.

'It was an old-fashioned courtship, with not a snog until a weekend in Madrid, when David kissed me at the airport. It was electric. By this time, he'd told me he was married with children in Hong Kong and I'd written him a letter saying I loved him but that we should stop before we started. He handed me a letter, too, saying how confused he was.' David invited Lucy to LA to 'sort things out. But we just fell deeply in love.' She didn't meet his children, Edward and Victoria, for a year, but once David's divorce from his first wife, Susanna, came through and she'd moved to Hong Kong, Lucy began to see them. 'It was difficult but now they are two of the most wonderful things in my life.' Edward and Victoria are now in their early twenties and both went to art school in London. Victoria is a photographer and Edward works at Phillips de Pury auction house.

Following the success of The China Club, inspired by traditional Chinese tea houses and originally conceived as somewhere to hang his collection of Chinese contemporary art, David opened two more, in Shanghai and Beijing. He then moved into fashion, launching the luxury clothing and interiors shop Shanghai Tang in Hong Kong. He met and befriended Fidel Castro, negotiating the exclusive distribution rights of Cuban cigars in Asia, Canada and Australia; he was also made Hong Kong's Honorary Consul to Cuba. Shanghai Tang opened on Sloane Street in 2001, and in 2005, David opened his restaurant China Tang underneath The Dorchester. Spending more time in London, Lucy became part of the Primrose Hill set. She and David had met Kate Moss at a yoga retreat in India just after she'd split up from Johnny Depp, and Lucy joined her hard-living circle of friends in a bid to occupy herself while David worked. David is a virtual teetotaller and needs nothing more than a spin on the roulette tables at Aspinalls to make his evening; he was unaware of the extent of Lucy's partying.

Until then, Lucy had never been a drinker or taken drugs, but she started combining recreational narcotics and alcohol with fervour after her father died. 'I went into a downward spiral, I was ready for anything.' In Hong Kong, however, 'only the expats drink, our Chinese friends don't, so when I was there, life was much calmer. It became my bolt-hole, an escape from the madness.' Because of their quiet times at home in Hong Kong, the excesses of Lucy's London life were not obvious to David. Meanwhile, the couple's nine-year engagement was the cause of
speculation but, explains Lucy, 'We didn't want children. David already had two and I didn't want to add our own to an already delicate situation. In the end, I got upset with the gossip and David told Daddy on his deathbed that he was going to marry me, so we did it.' They married in 2003. Guests were asked to bring poems, not presents. 'We hate planning, so there were no flowers, just candles and a drink at Annabel's.' Mark Weinberg read a poem he'd written in which he ribbed David for his 'reluctance' to wed this gorgeous woman – David had designed the invitations with pictures of a shotgun and a pressure cooker on the front. Simon Sebag Montefiore and Stephen Fry chatted at the bar and Mick Jagger turned up late, minutes after the happy couple had left for their honeymoon in a gold car they'd won in a raffle.

Lucy's 40th birthday party, in 2008, was a tipping point. Guests recall her looking like an exquisite corpse, so pale and partied-out in her white satin Ossie Clark maxi-dress that she could barely speak and a doctor had to be called to administer vitamin injections. She had been up until the early hours the night before, and was so hungover she couldn't engage with her guests. Something had gone very wrong. David was cross and concerned but, protective and loyal as ever, he blamed the people she'd been spending time with, rather than his wife. Sophie Anderton, Bianca Jagger, Sadie Frost and Sienna Miller sipped champagne but Lucy sat in an armchair and longed for change. 'I went back to Hong Kong and stayed there. A friend got me to go trekking with her on the old governors' trails, it was so beautiful and I began to see some light. I was scared to come back to London, it had all gone too far, and that's when I really got into running.' Having used antidepressants intermittently, Lucy found exercise far more effective in shifting her self-destructive mindset: 'Popping happy pills, retail therapy, alcohol or drugs, you think they're a fix but none of them work. Running – the endless training [up to three hours a day] – isn't easy but you reap the rewards, it is life-changing. I notice my environment, see things I'd never have seen. And you can do so much in your head when you run.'

Another impetus to race was a desire to work for charity, 'But it had to be something real. I wanted it to hurt. I didn't want to sit on committees eating biscuits, or organise ghastly dinners. But I did want to ask David's rich friends for money.' On her first run she raised £100,000. Her ambitions have grown with her confidence: 'I'd like to take groups of women on desert runs, mountain hikes, or training for city marathons. I have friends who've lost confidence through divorce, domestic abuse, whatever, and I want to use sport to motivate them.' David has travelled out to surprise her at the end of every race and brought Edward and Victoria to the finishing line in the Sahara. The strength of their relationship is evident even in David's absence: their pet names for each other, 'Poo' and 'Stinky', are embroidered on two cushions on their bed; a Cocteau print of two heads tenderly pressed together hangs on the wall, a Valentine present from David; an Emin drawing with the words 'No Substitute for Your Love' hangs by it, a birthday present to Lucy from her stepchildren.

David can be brusque and demanding, occasionally using a megaphone to summon his staff, but he has mellowed since beginning to exercise himself over the past year. 'He's lost three and a half stone and doesn't shout so much. He just saw how it helped me and tried it himself.' David's staccato demands are Chinese rather than rude, Lucy points out: 'People say he's more of a banana than a fried egg, because of his rather grand accent, but in fact he's a real fried egg, totally Chinese,' she laughs as I ponder her analogies. White outside, yellow inside These days they spend as much time as possible in Sai Kung, a suburb of Hong Kong, with their four dogs. David plays the piano and reads – currently a life of Debussy – and Lucy runs through the countryside. She'll turn 43 while she's in Antarctica, a very different birthday from her 40th. She'll have faced many demons by the end of the race – the cold, the boat, the people – and harnessed a determination most of us can only dream of. Then she'll return to London for high-octane nights out, sober as a judge. She might even join David on a yacht and take her rightful place beside him in bed. Meanwhile, I really hope she remembered to pack her waterproof socks.

To donate, visit justgiving.com/LadyLucyTang

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