But it’s misunderstanding her to think she’s just the life of the party. “Cara can create that kind of jealousy because she can make anyone fall in love with her. “I remember feeling so jealous when she and Jourdan first met,” Kloss remembers. Like, how dare I feel that way? So you just attack yourself some more.” you just feel so guilty for those feelings, and it’s this vicious circle. The worst thing was that I knew I was a lucky girl, and the fact that you would rather be dead. “I thought that if I wanted to act, I’d need to finish school, but I got so I couldn’t wake up in the morning. “I smoked a lot of pot as a teenager, but I was completely mental with or without drugs.” She saw an armada of therapists, none especially helpful. She was placed on a cocktail of psychotropics-“stronger stuff than Prozac” is all she recalls. I just wanted to dematerialize and have someone sweep me away.” I never cut, but I’d scratch myself to the point of bleeding. “All of a sudden I was hit with a massive wave of depression and anxiety and self-hatred, where the feelings were so painful that I would slam my head against a tree to try to knock myself out. “This is something I haven’t been open about, but it’s a huge part of who I am,” she says. (Her parents had started her on drum lessons at age ten to help dissipate some of her inexhaustible energy.) But at fifteen, she fell into an emotional morass. “If you had a Chanel bag there, you’d be bullied.” After her sixth-form year, the Delevingnes sent her to Bedales, a posh but arty boarding school. Writing was always hard, exams a nightmare. (Later, at sixteen, she was told she had the reading ability of a nine-year-old.) She suffered from dyspraxia, a problem with coordinating her thoughts and movements. At nine, she was told she had the reading ability of a sixteen-year-old.
She recalls spending an inordinate amount of time in the offices of mental health professionals whom, she admits, she tended to “screw with,” saying the same things again and again, trying to get them so frustrated they’d fire her as a patient. Now 22, Cara was a brooding little girl whose sisters excelled in school. She’s still struggling.” (Pandora is currently working on a memoir-about her battle with addiction and the eighties London scene that formed its backdrop-which Cara says she has mixed feelings about.) I know there are people who have stopped and are fine now, but not in my circumstance.
But it’s not something you get better from, I don’t think. My mother’s an amazingly strong person with a huge heart, and I adore her. “You grow up too quickly because you’re parenting your parents. “It shapes the childhood of every kid whose parent has an addiction,” she believes. I never enjoyed it.” But it was Pandora’s relapsing heroin addiction that may have been the defining fact of Cara’s childhood. “My family was kind of about that whole parties–and–horse racing thing. “I grew up in the upper class, for sure,” says Cara, whose older sister Poppy, 29, is also a model, while Chloe, 30, a scientist by training, has moved to the country to raise her children.
Her mother, Pandora, a London society beauty in her day, is the daughter of the late Sir Jocelyn Stevens, a publishing magnate, and Jane Sheffield, lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret and a charter member of the princess’s Mustique set in the 1960s. Cara’s father, Charles Delevingne, is a property developer, and though he did not grow up rich, his looks and charm got him invited everywhere. The tale begins in the Belgravia neighborhood of London, in whose rows of white stucco houses aristocratic families live in the comforting proximity of families they have known for generations. “I feel this desire to throw away the story I’ve been telling for years,” she says, raising her glass. Perhaps it will ease the passage of all that veritas she seems intent on spilling.
Though DC wants her fit as a fiddle, Cara decides that a glass of red wine can’t hurt.