What do four sitting US presidents, 72 Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein, and Katie Price all have in common?
They’ve all spoken as guests of honour at Oxford. But only one of them has been on the cover of Playboy. Guess which one?
Katie Price is as inescapable as cloudy weather and meal deals in the UK, something I learned quickly when I moved here from the US and began working as an entertainment journalist.
I’d never heard of the ‘former glamour model’ before, so when I was assigned my first story about the 46-year-old, I asked my colleagues a simple question: ‘Why is she famous?’
The answers were immediate and confusing.
One person described Katie’s 2004 stint on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (‘So, basically, she gave Peter Andre a back massage in a hammock…’), as another interrupted to show me the video of Katie’s disastrous Eurovision entry (‘It was maybe a bigger deal than the song that got in. Oh and she ran for parliament!’), and one more tried to explain her various perfume lines and other product endorsements (‘She’s also sold like 3million books? Am I making that up? No, it’s true.’).
I eventually cut in: ‘So…she’s like…a media personality?’
There was nodding, though it was clear that no one felt this description entirely covered it.
Already in culture shock from being made to try Twiglets earlier that week, I inwardly categorised Katie as another British eccentricity I would never fully understand.
‘If David Attenborough is a national treasure,’ I thought, ‘Katie Price is a national joke. Got it.’
At first, I couldn’t help but feel pity and distaste for this woman so clearly hell-bent on getting attention at any cost – even if that cost was medically inadvisable plastic surgeries.
But as I covered more and more of Katie’s exploits, whether it was her 17th boob job or her latest romance, I began to think more deeply about a woman who seems to have an almost symbiotic relationship with the British press.
Unlike other celebrities who find the press irritating and invasive, it’s clear that Katie depends on the media’s fixation on her. She feeds us content, and in return, we eagerly serve her the attention she has transformed into a career. It’s honestly kind of…punk?
Most news stories, when they arrive as information in the hands of a journalist, require a level of interpretation and investigation to find the story’s heart. That’s never the case with Katie, who seems to live in tabloid-sized flashes, with each new titillating and salacious line on her feeling designed to be easily transformed into a headline. Almost like she knows exactly what she’s doing.
As Sarah Ditum, the author of Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s, pointed out to Metro: ‘The press has treated her both as an aspirational celebrity and as a hate figure.’
She continues, describing just how deftly Katie has played the game: ‘She’s been very sharp at reinventing herself and moving into new forms – she was very quick to repackage herself for reality TV in the noughties, for example.
‘She was one of the first celebrities to develop a children’s books line. She made the transition to social media, which not many of her page 3 peers managed. And she’s always understood the value of shock – from her private life, from her extreme body modifications. She’s used that very well.’
Arts and entertainment reporter for Sky News, Bethany Minelle, has written about Katie for years. She told Metro: ‘There aren’t many Page 3 girls from the 90s that I can name – Katie Price is a rare example of a glamour model who found success, and more importantly, managed to stay relevant.
‘From coming up with the name Jordan because she thought it was more memorable than Katie, to charming the public with her authenticity in her 2004 winning I’m A Celebrity stint, she’s always been good at reading the public mood, and giving people what they want.’
It’s probably a stretch to say that the legal battle surrounding her second bankruptcy is a publicity stunt, but I think Katie knew exactly the kind of media frenzy she’d set off when she famously said she was aiming to have the ‘biggest breasts in Britain’ or when she posted a photo of herself with two bundles announcing her ‘new babies’ (they turned out to be hairless kittens).
As I delved deeper into the life of this woman, who has endured relentless media scrutiny that would break most people, I began to wonder: Could it be that Katie is not only more in control of her own narrative than she appears, but that she’s also doing something subtly radical by turning the public’s fascination with her to her advantage?
How did Katie Price become Katie Price?
All of her life, Katie’s been valued for her looks, and as any female celebrity will tell you, that can be a pretty powerless position since looks have an expiration date.
Undeniably beautiful, Katie started as a topless glamour model for pg. 3 of The Sun when she was 19 and still recovering from a tumultuous childhood and adolescence.
One of the most consistent themes in the Brighton native’s life has been mistreatment at the hands of men. Her father, Ray Infield, left the family when Katie was just four. And it didn’t take long for things to get even worse.
‘I got raped in a park when I was seven, then I was nearly abducted,’ Katie revealed just this year.
When she began her modeling career at 13 years old, predatory behaviour was a normal part of her life. ‘Then I worked with a photographer, the police knocked on the door, and he used to drug girls with milkshakes, but I never took it,’ she continued on the podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day.
‘One day he said ”I want you to be naked in a white wet shirt” and I said ”no” and then ”yeah,” so my start with men wasn’t good.’
She continued, saying: ‘My first boyfriend beat me up, the next would rip my clothes up and I would have to go ring my mum naked from a telephone box, then the next one cheated on me.’
But none of this stopped Katie from leveraging the trickle of fame she got as a pg. 3 model into a career, appearing on talk shows and snagging brand partnerships throughout the late nineties and early 2000s.
This was true even as she gave birth to her first child, Harvey, who is partially blind, autistic, and has Prader-Willi syndrome, in 2002.
Harvey’s father, former footballer Dwight Yorke, initially denied paternity, leaving Katie to raise a special needs baby alone. Katie’s devotion to her son has been tireless, and she would later go on to campaign for a special law, which she dubbed ‘Harvey’s Law’ in honour of her son, to make online abuse a specific offence and to create a register of offenders.
Even as her family grew and her career blossomed throughout the early 2000s, Katie struggled in the romance department, with Warren Furman, the first notable example, selling stories about her to the press as early as 1997.
After her 2004 stint on I’m a Celebrity cemented her status and introduced her to Peter Andre, who she’d later marry and have two children with, things seemed like they might be getting better for Katie. But the period of peace was short-lived, and after the pair split, Katie was once again stuck in a cycle of dramatic breakups and short-lived affairs.
In 2009, Katie revealed she was raped by another famous man but refused to share his identity.
Engaged eight times in total and married three times, Katie has been cheated on and ridiculed (Charles Drury famously said she was ‘lazy in bed’ after their brief affair) by countless men, and through it all, the press has reported on exploits with thinly veiled glee and very little sympathy.
While it’s not always clear what aspects of Katie’s life are intended to generate publicity and what’s authentic, there’s no question that she’s not had an easy road.
If you give a 19-year-old sudden fame for taking her top off in a national newspaper, she isn’t exactly going to learn the lesson that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
Throughout the early 2000s, Katie was stuck in a vicious cycle of positive and negative attention from the press. But attention, no matter the kind, still has monetary value and still means people are looking at you.
As Ditum put it: ‘She’s been successful partly because she understands that she can’t stop other people from hating her, and that being hated can even be advantageous if it means being talked about.’
As a result, anonymity surely began to feel like a death sentence for Katie. So around the early 2010s, she turned to plastic surgery to maintain her youth.
When asked about all of Katie’s cosmetic procedures, Ditum says: ‘She’s talked about having body dysmorphia, so there’s no question that part of her drive to radical surgery is unhappiness.’
Katie’s ex, Carl Woods, called her relationship to surgical enhancement an obsession, even claiming that she would spend hours googling images of herself as a younger woman.
Can you blame her? When a woman ages, her social capital rapidly wanes in a way a man’s does not. This is especially true if much of that capital is built on sex appeal, as Katie’s was.
The most significant shift in Katie’s story came sometime in the last decade when she began to recognise that no amount of surgeries could make her 19 again. Usually, this is where celebrities stop trying to compete with younger women and decide to age gracefully in public and bitterly in private.
But Katie kept going, getting surgery after surgery until her appearance became so genuinely shocking that she once again had the public’s full attention.
Ditum continues: ‘The other part of it is that it’s part of her job – having extreme surgeries and talking about them (especially talking about them going wrong) gets her attention, and then the remedial work gets her even more attention. She built her career and public profile on that first boob job. Plastic surgery is fundamental to her success. But it’s also an incredible physical ordeal every time she does it.’
On some level, in becoming ‘totally plastic’ (as she herself has put it), Katie has seized control over the thing most women have no control over but are judged for the most harshly anyway: Her appearance.
She’s also taken direct control of the public’s perception of her sexuality, starting an OnlyFans account that earns staggering amounts of money.
Minelle puts it well: ‘Despite rising to fame in a pre-social media world, a queen of self-promotion, she’s embraced the opportunities the platforms offer, from Instagram and TikTok, to X-rated site OnlyFans – which despite her recent cash-flow issues is reported to have previously earned her well-over £1m a month.’
If you read enough about Katie, you’ll start to feel that maybe her monstrous plastic breasts are something of an ‘eff you’ to a culture that celebrated and reviled her with equal relish when she was a young woman – before attempting to discard her the moment she began to age.
In willingly giving us endless scandalous stories about her many facelifts and butt implants and bankruptcies and ex-boyfriends, isn’t she staring boldly back at us as we gawk at her and saying: ‘Here. Is this what you wanted? Do you see what you made me into?’ When she sells naked photos of herself online, isn’t she simply proving that there are plenty of people who will pay for them?
For all their posturing, other celebrities are also well aware that they’re selling the public a commodity and that they – their very personhood – are the product.
Even serious actors and musicians play the game, recognising that being photographed out to dinner with the right people or appearing in headlines thanks to a rumoured romance can be the difference between a piece of work flopping or flying.
To take it a step further, in the age of social media, we’re all engaging in this style of image control on some level, posting selfies of ourselves when we want attention or cryptic song lyrics when going through a breakup.
The only difference between Katie and the rest of us is that she’s willing to admit the lengths she’ll go to for the attention we all crave.
But given that she’s lived a life in which she’s often the victim – of direct interpersonal or more insidious cultural violence – isn’t taking relentless control of both her literal and metaphorical image almost borderline radical? Can’t it be read as a condemnation of the way women are forced out of the spotlight as they grow older? Isn’t it honestly kind of punk that Katie Price has wholly cast off shame and become almost a drag performer of herself to force the world to see the results of their callous treatment of young female celebrities?
On the surface, this sounds like a tragic story: A woman mutilating herself in front of millions so they’ll continue to give her the attention she can’t imagine doing without.
But who does the story of Katie Price really say more about? Her or us?
Now, when I sit down to write a news story about Katie Price (and try to remember to spell ‘recognise’ with an S instead of a Z), I do so with the understanding that Katie Price is a British national treasure – whether anyone likes it or not.
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