Katy French's extraordinary story has become a morality tale for the dying days of the Celtic Tiger, writes Quentin Fottrell.
If this had been a fairytale, she would have woken up. For one long week, she was a modern-day sleeping beauty. But, for once, we didn't need photographs to imagine Katy French lying motionless in her hospital bed, in a coma, or a deep sleep, her family standing over her, praying that she would wake up.
But this wasn't a fairytale. One week to the day after she arrived at her 24th birthday bash at Dublin's Krystle nightclub in a Rolls Royce, wearing a gold-sequinned dress from Chica and Gucci shoes, she died at Our Lady's Hospital in Navan in the arms of her sister.
Those labels are part of her story. She was a model, after all. What began as an extraordinary rise to fame, in a blaze of flashbulbs and photo opportunities, has become a morality tale for the dying days of the Celtic Tiger. She wanted to live her life in front of a camera lens, amid a ravenous photographic rat-pack largely made up of middle-aged men.
This was a career forged by a brass neck, luck and chutzpah, with a little help from Corporate Ireland. Even her tributes mention the labels she was wearing on the night she celebrated her birthday. "She lay across the bar in her gold dress like a mermaid for the photographers," one guest recalled. "This girl knew what she was doing. She had a game plan. She wanted to be a TV presenter. She saw herself as a brand."
Beauty . . . and the beast, a vast corporate machine, prying eyes lying in the long grass that she was, perhaps, not so wary of. Newspapers, clothing companies, magazines, drinks companies, TV stations, even the nightclub itself. Everybody had a product to sell and Katy French was It. Her birthday party reportedly cost €50,000. If that is true, which I doubt, she probably didn't pay for it.
SHE KNEW WHAT she was doing. On Celebrities Go Wild and The Podge & Rodge Show, where she spoke about her spat with her former fiance, restaurateur Marcus Sweeney, who broke up with her after he walked in on her modelling lingerie in his restaurant, she denied it was a stage-managed publicity stunt. Still, the abusive text messages he allegedly sent to her made it into a Sunday newspaper. Before her appearance on Podge & Rodge, the show's co-presenter, Lucy Kennedy, did a vox pop item, "Who is Katy French?" Members of the public probably enjoyed pretending they didn't know who she was. They answered, "A C-list celeb?" and "I'd say she don't work on the roads" and, finally, "Is she a model?"
"Is she a clever minx or just a sphinx without a secret?" Kennedy asked. "Please welcome controversy-hungry model Katy French . . . whoever she is!" The studio audience cheered. They weren't at home alone in front of their computers, writing anonymous comments on message boards now. Those who get audience tickets for Podge & Rodge comprise a large, revolving peanut gallery who desperately yearn to see their least favourite celebrities humiliated and/or publicly flogged.
She also made appearances on The Late Late Show and Tubridy Tonight, where she told Ryan Tubridy she would like a job like his. She was no longer a model in St Stephen's Green, advertising lager or tequila. She had ambition. That threatens the peanut gallery.
The Podge & Rodge clip has been watched nearly 40,000 times on YouTube (and counting). Some online comments say RIP, others are profane, cruel even, making lewd remarks about whether she died from a drug overdose.
The inevitable sentimental tabloid editorials made the cringeworthy comparisons to her being our own Princess Diana. But Diana was fleeing the media when she died. Katy French was, at the pinnacle of a new phase in her career, chasing it. Her birthday bash was supposed to be part of Diary of a Model, to be screened on TV3.
She was a candidate to host another documentary, So You Want To Be Famous, to be screened on RTÉ 1 in January. It is a tongue-in-cheek show. She would have been a participant and a topic. I was supposed to film a talking head piece to camera with her yesterday. I didn't know her, I told the producers, but it still didn't feel right. She was the poster girl for the fame game, after all.
The producers held a meeting and decided to continue with the documentary and "not refer to her at all during the series". By airbrushing her out, I said, it doesn't remove her presence. That's ironic, considering the title of the programme - and the fickle nature of the beast. They were making the wrong programme about fame, I said. But the producers were adamant - they were too far into filming and friends of Katy were happy to go ahead. If they were "friends", I'm not sure they were the kind of friends she needed.
SHE WOULD HAVE been aghast at the media frenzy: a top story on RTÉ 1's Nine O'Clock News, front-page coverage on newsstands all week, even a questionable Prime Time tie-in about cocaine with another "friend".
The shy, gifted actor Tom Murphy, who died earlier this year, didn't receive this kind of tribute. Nor did Kevin Doyle, the 21-year-old Waterford man who died of a cocaine overdose earlier this week. This was the kind of fame she probably only dreamed of. And yet she never got to experience it.
Katy French didn't have a message. But she searched for one. She joked about vibrators, spoke earnestly about her past cocaine use and travelled to India as a goodwill ambassador for Goal. With her death, the girl who grew up in the sleepy town of Enniskerry became the message. About the perils of fame and, perhaps, other darker forces. She paid a very high price for that. But, as a powerful lesson to young people everywhere, this could be her greatest gift of all.