Jade Goody: fame and misfortune

Jade Goody speaks to Sophie Morris about cancer, motherhood – and how 15 minutes became seven years

Dressed in a tight dogtooth minidress and patent Gina platforms, and carrying an understated Anya Hindmarch tote, Jade Goody seems far from the slobby, trashy, overweight woman so often pictured in newspapers and magazines. As she paces down a hotel corridor, rushing to make her slot on This Morning, where she will tell the nation that she is looking forward to starting panto next week and hopes the second course of chemotherapy for cervical cancer will not clash with her performances, she chats at lightning speed. And nothing is off limits.

Her publicist had originally suggested I accompany Goody to London's Royal Marsden Hospital while she had a session of chemotherapy, saying that it might sound a little "morbid" (indeed it did), but that Goody always found the four-hour treatment boring. My surprise was naive. This is what Goody does: invite strangers into the most intimate recesses of her private life and pull them closer to get all the juicy details. It is the secret of an undeniable success.

"The thing is, it's not five minutes of fame. It's been seven years," she fires off.

"When you get people saying, 'She's had her five minutes,' I want to say, 'Look, mate, I've had two successful books, I've had two successful perfumes, and all the TV shows. I've made cock-ups along the way, but it's been seven years.'"

It is unlikely she realises that, by misquoting Warhol's evergreen maxim about everyone having 15 minutes of fame she has reduced the shelf-life for modern celebrities by two-thirds. But compared with Goody, the time most reality TV stars get in the public eye is indeed fleeting. If she wasn't already so well known for her linguistic bungles, I might think she was intentionally subverting Warhol's prediction to taunt her less successful colleagues.

It has been seven years since Goody came fourth in series three of Big Brother, and out of all its many contestants, I'd wager she is the one most people remember, even those who have never watched a single episode.

She chats about her personal life as if she were confiding in an old friend. Her every move is fair game for the media. The one mystery there is about Goody is just how she has risen to join the select group of celebrities who are known by first name alone. Astonishingly, she considers herself a "non-celeb". "I am normal and like any normal person," she insists. "I've been on amazing shows and to amazing places, but it's all very fake. I love my job. It's not that I love it for the fame or because I'm in the newspaper. I just love it."

Being the ringleader in the Jade Goody circus sure beats working as a dental nurse, as she was before Big Brother. She sees herself now as a working single mum who's doing her damnedest to give her two sons all the privileges absent from her own upbringing. She became the primary carer to her own mother, Jackiey Budden, aged five, when Budden sustained major injuries in a motorbike accident. Her father, Andrew, was a heroin addict who spent his life in and out of prison, and died from an overdose in 2005, but not before making some money out of his newly famous daughter by selling stories to newspapers. Budden had kicked him out years earlier when she discovered he was hiding guns under Jade's cot, but later stumbled into a crack cocaine addiction herself. "The fact she chose drugs over me was like being kicked in the teeth," says Goody, who only admitted her mother's drug abuse in her recent book Jade: Catch a Falling Star, the 27-year-old's second autobiography, because she was so ashamed of Budden's behaviour.

"I was really hurt and embarrassed. From the age of five all I've ever done is protect my mum and be there for her," she says. "I'd even get all her stolen cheque books and cards and hide them from the police."

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By 2001, Jade was also suffering regular domestic violence, so she applied to appear on Big Brother to escape her mother and her miserable life. "I just wanted to get away from it. It was like a holiday camp. I think I did so well because I wasn't playing a game. I was just being Jade."

Just being Jade hasn't always played to her advantage. Her antics on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007 almost caused an Anglo-Indian cold war, as the force of her fame reached the corridors of Westminster and across the oceans to India. If nothing else, this proved the reach of Big Brother beyond fans and viewers and into society at large. Cultural commentators said it revealed deep-set fears within the British community about race and attitudes to race, racism itself and social cohesion. For Goody, the accusations of racism (which she has always denied, though she has apologised for her behaviour on the show, in particular for calling Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty "Shilpa Poppadom") effected a dramatic fall from grace, which delighted her enemies with an unpredictable intensity. Finally, this ignorant upstart, after five years of raking in money for shooting her mouth off in the red-tops, celebrity rags and on television, had revealed herself to be a cheap, bullying, uncouth racist. For want of a less pejorative word, she was indeed the chav her attack dogs always knew her to be.

On her exit from the house, her plunge from popularity was Luciferan. This was the girl whose face, back in August 2001, had sold 650,000 copies of Heat. It was a breakthrough issue for the magazine and exemplified the type of publication it was to become. "Jade helped define us," says Mark Frith, the former Heat editor and author of The Celeb Diaries, which chronicles his time at the helm and the role Goody played in its success. "She became synonymous with Heat, but was also emblematic of a new era of celebrity," he says. After Goody's second Big Brother performance six years later, Ofcom received 40,000 complaints. Death threats found their way to Goody's doorstep and she retreated to The Priory to seek help for anxiety and depression, before travelling to India to apologise and visit the Railway Children charity, to which she donated the £100,000 rejected by the NSPCC.

Her rehabilitation is perhaps – in certain quarters at least – complete. But there should be few surprises: here is someone whose stock in trade is selling an image of herself as perilously close to the genuine article as anything mediated by newsprint or a television screen can be. She is friendly and smiley and chats away at high speed in her confident south London tones, a pre-op Eliza Doolittle whose USP is her refusal to moderate her behaviour. There is no need to approach the more sensitive questions, such as why she is still with her boyfriend, Jack Tweed, currently serving 18 months for assault, or if she still abuses laxatives, circumspectly. The same goes for questions about her advanced cervical cancer, which doctors say she has only a 50 per cent chance of surviving.

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A film crew has been trailing her for the past month for a follow up to the "observational documentary" Living with Jade Goody, and Jade starts on the television channel Living tomorrow night.

The first few episodes show her semi-naked receiving treatment and in the bath, discussing her illness and its effects on her bowel movements. "Jade will tell you everything. Too much at times," explains Frith. "Since she became famous she's done everything in the public eye. It seems completely normal to her to do that. There's no deficiency in her and I don't see her suffering any negative consequences. There is no cynical manipulative mind behind this. It's just Jade living her life, and it happens to be in the public eye."

Documenting her life is one thing, but preserving on film what could, in the very worst case scenario, result in her death, verges on the macabre. "It wasn't like I'd wake up in hospital and think, 'I need to do a show,'" she insists. "When I first got told I had cancer it was only in a certain area and I was told there was a 95 per cent chance of survival, and the treatment would be over in five weeks. But when they took the womb out they found the cancer had spread and jumped from a stage 1b to a 3+. I'll continue treatment for the next year, and I can't not work for a year. Me being ill and bald is one thing. I can cover that up. But I'm not going to put my children through having to move school or home."

Goody has two young sons, Bobby and Freddy, from a previous relationship, with Jeff Brazier. She makes no secret of her anger about his lack of financial support. "I'm not saying that Jeff isn't a good father, but I find it a little hard to swallow when he tells me he can't afford to give his children money. When you've got three properties, two cars and have several holidays a year, how come you can't afford to give more? If you're asking me if he supports his children, no, he doesn't. If you're asking me if the worst happened to me and I was going to pass away would I worry? Yes, I would."

It seems that Goody's Achilles' heel is her steely ability to cope. A succession of weak and lazy characters and leeches and limpets have clung on to her can-do will-do attitude and benefited from her Mother Goose generosity. First, there was her mother and her mother's friends, then Brazier, and now Tweed whose lack of a job or motivation to find one, jealous and aggressive behaviour and an alleged affair has moved Goody to split up with him several times. At one point, she took her sons and Tweed, Tweed's 16-year-old brother and his girlfriend on a Caribbean holiday. It was only when they arrived at the self-catering villa that she realised she was going to have to wash, cook and clean for five children for the duration.

They are back together at the moment and – ever the rock – Goody has supported Tweed through his trial and commends him for being a devoted stepfather to her children. Her own formative years were ruined by her father's frequent stays in jail, so can Bobby and Freddy look forward to a similarly disruptive upbringing if Tweed continues to clash with the law?

"Jack's no criminal," she says. Her side of the story is that Tweed was set up by local youths who wanted to sell a story to the News of the World. "The boy tried to sell the story before he went to the police, but they didn't buy it. Why would you buy a story saying, 'I've been hit over the head 15 times with a golf club but I'm completely fine?' The doctor's report on this boy said he needed rest and reassurance [sic]. If you got hit over the head with a golf club you'd be told to do more than rest and reassurance.'" Goody takes advice from the publicist Max Clifford. "I said to her that there was no justification for what he [Tweed] did," says Clifford. "And she has to face up to that. But she loves him. That's how she sees it."

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Making fun of Goody's frequent malapropisms is too easy, and anyway, she is well aware that her tenuous grasp of the English language is part of her appeal. "I admit I'm not the brightest educational," she says, but she is no dummy when it comes to her "job" in the celebrity hot seat, and understands the strings attached. "I put myself in the limelight and I like my job. If it wasn't for the paps outside my house, I wouldn't be in a magazine. If it wasn't for someone writing something horrible about me one week, the next week someone wouldn't write something nice. I know it's a circle and they build you up to knock you down, and I'm happy to live with that. I sell newspapers. To put me on the front saying I'm a racist instead of anyone else is going to sell more papers. As I say, it's not been five minutes, it's been seven years. I know how it works and I can deal with it."

She thinks that one slip up – the Celebrity Big Brother debacle – in seven years, isn't bad going, and pulls off her role as the willing star of her very own Truman Show with aplomb: she dives out of the taxi still talking at full throttle, whips up her dress in the lift to replace her Jade mic with the This Morning mic, has a quick joke with Phillip Schofield to reassure him she isn't going to "do a Kerry [Katona]" on air before perching on his sofa to tell the nation she is stronger than any cancer cell.

That Goody has cancer at all is a warning to other young women. Pre-cancerous cells were removed from her womb at 16 and 18. Before flying to India for a three-month stint on Bigg Boss, the Indian Big Brother, where she was to make public amends for Celebrity Big Brother, she spent a week in hospital and was again given the all clear. "For years, I was told I couldn't go to the toilet properly because I'd abused myself with laxatives," she says. "I was palmed off with nothing." She was offered no immediate investigations for cancer.

When Goody first visited India in March 2007 she did not meet Shilpa Shetty, but they are now friends and text and call one another. The detente is courtesy of Max Clifford, who handled Shetty when she won Celebrity Big Brother and picked up Goody in March this year, organising the Bigg Boss job for her, with Shetty playing host.

Clifford says that Goody came asking for his help. "She said, 'You know me well enough to know that I'm not the person everybody believes I am. I've lost everything. Would you be prepared to help me?' Shilpa had said repeatedly, 'She's not a racist, Max. She's not very bright and she opens her mouth and puts her foot in it, but she's been manipulated,' which, of course, I knew. I knew her well enough to know it [her career] could be turned round if the public could see her for what she really is."

So who was manipulating her? Clifford criticises the way Celebrity Big Brother was edited, and says she should never have been on it in the first place. "There were no advantages for her to go on that show, only disadvantages, and I said so at the time. You only go on that show if you're desperate."

The way Goody tells it retrospectively in Catch a Falling Star, she was never keen to take part in Celebrity Big Brother, but her agent at the time, John Noel, and the fact her mother and grandparents and Jack Tweed would each receive £10,000 for also appearing, persuaded her. Noel later refused to manage Goody, and she is still smarting from the split.

"John Noel was the only male authority figure I had in my life and that's what absolutely ripped my heart out when I got dropped. I respected him so much. Why haven't they phoned me? They've watched me grow and they watched me fall, and they know I'm poorly. Why not just write a get-well card?"

If she lives, she will have Max Clifford to thank for rushing her to see his own cancer specialist and thus, finally, getting a diagnosis. "I'll probably always be looking for that dominant male figure in my life but will probably never have it," she smiles. "I need to give up on that, don't I?"

The gravity of Goody's cancer does not seem to have fully sunk in. She has told her boys she has tadpoles in her stomach (just as she told them that Tweed is away in Africa having adventures with Tarzan, rather than behind bars). She is such an expert now in either dodging or turning to her advantage anything life throws at her, she hopes she can do the same with cancer. If this were a movie, then when Goody's hair failed to fall out after months of chemotherapy she would be exposed as a fraud, the press would turn out to be her conspirators, and the British public would be shown to have been cruelly duped in their desperation for an honest story of triumph over adversity, instead of WAGs and silver-spoon-fed It girls. "It's not that I want to be famous," she claims, oddly. "I've never applied for anything in my life other than the first Big Brother, but it is important to me to be loved and it is important to me to be liked, because that was something I lacked as a child."

It is only when pressed on the subject of motherhood that she reveals a glimpse of the fiery, aggressive and thoughtless woman who shocked the nation during Celebrity Big Brother. She even shocked herself when she watched the playbacks of her puce, puffed up face screaming at her housemates, but this time her ire is directed at Karen Matthews and the parents of Baby P.

"It's disgusting," she says. "Ship 'em over to America and execute them. People like that shouldn't be allowed to have children." What about wrongful convictions, which she believed put Tweed behind bars? "I know Jack didn't do it, but the evidence said he was guilty. This woman who has done this to her kid – how can you even say the evidence might not be right? It breaks my heart."

If she beats the cancer, Jade will have to face up to the fact that she will not have any more children. "I wanted a little girl to live my own childhood through," she says. Budden, and not before time, is finally learning some mothering skills, but they haven't come naturally. When the cancer was first diagnosed she told her daughter, "You're strong. You'll be all right." "How much stronger do I have to be?" asked Goody. "I just wanted that cuddle."

She is strong, though, and is busy trying to make the most of her life and get as much money in the bank as possible while she battles the advanced stages of cancer. For every person who thinks she should see out her illness in private, there is another who thinks her story will give strength to empathetic observers, as her other struggles have done for the past seven years.

"I don't think even Jade realises the true extent of how people can be affected by people talking openly about these things," says Mark Frith.

"She is the most incredible life story of the media celebrity age," he adds, "and will always be regarded as such. People who dismiss her do so at their peril."

'Jade', tomorrow at 9pm on Living