'Fame doesn't make you happy': The tragedy of Caroline Flack

“I have the rest of my life to be old, don’t I?” It was just a quip. The kind of happy-go-lucky one-liner that summed up everything people loved about Caroline Flack. But it’s the hardest part of an old interview I did with the late Love Island presenter to listen back to – the cackle of laughter she follows it up with, now unbearably poignant.

Because on February 15 the 40-year-old must have decided that she didn’t want to live another day, let alone the rest of her life, despite all the joys it held in store – joys that would have far outweighed that immediate pain. Not that it will have been that rational or coherent. Suicide never is, and a verdict of suicide was inevitably what the coroner came back with on Thursday, at the end of a two-day inquest into Flack’s death.

“I find the reason for her taking her life was she now knew she was being prosecuted for certainty,” said Mary Hassell, in reference to the CPS’s decision to charge the TV presenter with the assault of her boyfriend Lewis Burton, “and she knew she would face the media, press, publicity...” Citing her “fluctuating mental ill health,” and past “struggles” as contributing factors, Hassell concluded that “the more famous she got, the more [they] increased.”

Flack herself admitted, “Fame doesn’t make you happy,” after her 2014 Strictly Come Dancing win.

It certainly isn’t for the faint-hearted. I don’t believe it’s for the normal-hearted, either: for anyone with even the smallest vulnerabilities or the most deeply buried insecurities. In fact, of the hundreds of famous people I’ve met and interviewed over the years, only a handful have had the constitutions necessary to withstand the pressures of fame – and those people were in no way ‘normal’.

J-Lo immediately comes to mind: “Whenever I feel like I can’t do all the things that I’ve taken on, I just say to myself ‘yes you can’,” she told me when I asked her about those pressures. Rita Ora was another: “If you want to do this, you have to suck it up,” she said when I asked her how she dealt with the public scrutiny, “because it goes hand in hand with what you’re doing.” And I’ll always remember the advice Dame Helen Mirren offered up to younger women in her industry in an interview we did: advice she’d clearly lived by herself. “The only way we can help them get through it is to remind them that life continues, and you will be many things in that time.” Rhino-skinned and ambitious to a point that was awe-inspiring, those who ‘won’ at fame, seemed to feed off their own failures, using them to energise, motivate and push themselves ever forward.

Flack didn’t have the freakish self-belief necessary to navigate her level of fame, let alone the kind of show trial Johnny Depp and Amber Heard almost seemed to have enjoyed taking part in, last month. Well before Flack attacked her 27-year-old boyfriend in a fit of insecurity over another woman in December 2019, it was obvious that the TV presenter had fragilities: chinks in her armour.

I didn’t pick up on them, the first few times I met Flack socially. Like everyone else, I bought into the smoky-voiced ladette persona the Enfield-born daughter of a Coca-Cola sales representative honed on shows like Bo’ Selecta!, I’m A Celebrity and The X Factor. Because at parties and on screen, Flack was the “cool girl”, as described in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: “a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer… and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth … while somehow maintaining a size 2 [figure].”

But over a long lunch in May 2013 I noticed that in between the laughter and the self-deprecating jokes on everything from dating Harry Styles when he was just 17 – and turning down a million pounds to be the image of the dating website, CougarLife.com – to the two-day hangovers she had started to suffer from after turning 30, there were definite chinks in her confidence; moments when the bravado fell away. Flack told me she’d started putting on make-up to leave the house, for example, “because I would get so much criticism about the way I looked, so I had to start doing that. It’s about always being compared to other women: one minute you’re thin, one minute you’re fat. You never see the headline: ‘Oh look: she’s perfectly normal’.”

Yet Flack had one of the best relationships with the media I’ve come across. She counted a number of journalists as close friends, was good at interviews and obviously enjoyed them, unlike some of her counterparts. Because of that relationship I believe the press treated Flack fairly after news of Burton’s bloody assault was leaked, which is more than can be said of the way she was treated on social media, always quick to condemn.

I suspect it was what she described to me in 2013 as the “constant negativity” of Twitter and her trial by social media that turned Flack’s insecurities into demons and finally caused her to unravel. In the last few years of her life she may have started to judge herself through the public’s eyes. “That front page,” George Best once told me, “becomes a barometer of how well you’re doing. Then you start to perform for them, provoke them, like a kid.” Only now that it’s no longer front pages acting as that barometer, but social media, and hundreds of thousands of perfect strangers weighing in on your imperfections directly to your phone, the pressure is infinitely stronger – and 24/7.

Some, who are propelled to superstardom too quickly by a single project, will crumple more easily than others under that pressure. Emma Watson told me that her Harry Potter uber-celebrity “has been the hardest part of what I do,” while Friends star David Schwimmer admitted that “it made me want to hide – to run away and hide.”

But even when fame and attention has been actively sought in the way Flack seemed to have, it doesn’t mean that a person will be able to predict or deal with its consequences. When I interviewed Barbra Streisand, she was refreshingly honest about how badly she wanted fame – at first. “It started with fame,” the actress and singer told me, “wanting to be noticed. And once I got famous I thought: ‘this is it? This is fame?’ The paparazzi trying to get pictures of me and my manager getting hit in the eye by cameras trying to shield me from them? Or the paparazzi overrunning the movie theatre when you’re trying to watch a film in Paris? Or putting a camera in the car in London, and Princess Diana dying from fleeing these guys – from fame? No, I don’t particularly like fame anymore.”

It was only at the peak of her celebrity that Cheryl Cole told me she fully “realised what would be asked of me. I hadn’t realised that it wasn’t something I could switch on and off. So many times I’ve said to my team: ‘that’s it – I’m out.’” Yet still she stayed in the game, like so many others who have repeatedly vowed the same thing. Why? Because as well as being brutal and painful, fame is addictive. So you feel imprisoned by the public scrutiny, and then imprisoned again by your own desires.

On February 15 Flack may genuinely have wanted “out.” Indeed, one of the most telling testimonies in Flack’s inquest came from a paramedic who was called to the presenter’s flat earlier that day after friends suspected she had taken an overdose. Denying she had tried to kill herself, Flack swore that the pills she’d taken were merely “an attempt to sleep and escape.” She got her escape, but what a loss that was for her family, friends and fans.