How lawyer who's made millions keeping secrets of stars made me sign a gagging agreement ... on our second dateBy Sarah Oliver
May 29, 2011
£1 agreement: Keith Schilling got Sarah Oliver to sign the confidentiality contract on her second dateIt was only our second date. I was sitting by a coffee table in the Hampstead home of the lawyer they call ‘The Silencer’, Keith Schilling, when he produced a typewritten document.
It was, he said, a confidentiality agreement. After all, he had made his name and his fortune by keeping secrets, and I was a journalist, a senior feature writer on The Mail on Sunday.
He passed me a pen and told me where to sign. Feeling faintly ridiculous and wondering if this was some kind of elaborate joke I wasn’t quite cool enough to get, I scribbled my name with a smile.
Then he paid me £1 to make it legally binding.
Blimey, I’d been injuncted. Let’s hope it wasn’t a super injunction, or I’m going to be in a spot of bother for even beginning this story.
Could there be a clearer illustration of Keith Schilling’s modus operandi? In his world, nothing is taken on trust and nothing is left to chance; the protection of his stellar client list – which today most notoriously includes Ryan Giggs – was his supreme concern. Even to the detriment of any – or, in my case, all – romance.
I met Keith on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend, another high-flying media lawyer, in the late Nineties. My friend and his wife were dining with an old law-school chum (Schilling) at London’s then much-favoured OXO Tower restaurant.
Would I like to make a foursome? Just 30, single, and tied down by no more than a bachelor-girl flat in London’s Notting Hill, I had no reason to decline.
I had been in Edinburgh enjoying August at the Fringe Festival and flew back to London for that first date. I remember precisely the moment I saw him waiting for us all, sitting with his drink in the far recesses of a darkened bar. I remember it because I thought he looked perfectly happy alone.
Shock: Sarah Oliver, pictured here in the 90s, was told by keith Schilling 'my last girlfriend was thinner than you'I was wearing a mismatched pair of hot-pink slip dresses by luxury label Ghost, prob-ably with raspberry crushed-velvet pumps and a statement necklace clasping a piece of dark-red jasper, a favourite outfit back then.
I’m not one to judge my own dinner-party credentials, but I must have passed muster as he volunteered to drive me home.
He had a red Ferrari. And, as we growled through the slumbering summer streets of late-night London, I had one of those moments where you just want to jump for joy: hot date, hot car, hot night. Then we broke down. On The Mall. Right outside Buckingham Palace.
'Regarding me one morning as I dried my hair, he mused: "My last girlfriend was thinner than you ..." I was pretty startled, not least because I was a tidy size 8 and weighed no more than eight-and-a-half stone.'
Keith got out and stuck his head under the bonnet. I lurched between being really impressed he might actually know what he was doing with a Ferrari engine and being really terrified we were going to be arrested as a security threat.
He got his car going again and dropped me off at home. My flat was in the hands of builders so I wouldn’t invite him up for coffee. (I couldn’t: it was a scruffy, dusty horror.) The next day, I returned to Edinburgh where I had another equally alluring date: tickets to see Eighties band Heaven 17.
When I got back, he asked me out again. Would I like to come to his place, a magnificent townhouse near Hampstead Heath?
It had been designed by Conran. Amid its expensive surroundings, he treated me to supper. Cheese on toast.
Did he even know how to cook anything else? No matter: neither did I, and I scoffed it sitting perched on a very expensive kitchen work-top.
That’s when the confidentiality agreement emerged. I look back now and wonder why I didn’t leg it then and there – but I had, and still have, both a fondness and a weakness for self-made people.
It’s easy to succeed when you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth or when new money buys you a whole canteen of cutlery.
Silencing: Keith Schilling, pictured here leaving the High Court in March 2002 while he was acting for Naomi Campbell, treated Sarah Oliver to cheese on toastKeith Schilling’s mum had a job in Sainsbury’s, his dad was often out of work. He left school at 15 and, he told me, knew what it was like to push the tea trolley. All that he had and crucially, all that he was, he had achieved alone. (That word again.)
He was obviously quite brilliant, possessed of the sharpest wits and, when he chose to display it, a dry sense of humour.
He was also in great physical shape, having recently returned from an expedition to Everest base camp. Deeply tanned, he wore his dark blond hair in a small ponytail at the nape of his neck and dark suits with crisp white shirts. I liked his style.
'The most extravagant he got was dispatching his local cab company for emergency supplies: tobacco and fag papers for him, Dairy Milk for me'
I’m not sure he was too smitten with mine, though. Regarding me one morning as I dried my hair, he mused: ‘My last girlfriend was thinner than you ...’ I was pretty startled, not least because I was a tidy size 8 and weighed no more than eight-and-a-half stone.
Fourteen years later, two dress sizes bigger after two sons, the memory of that particular missile still makes my jaw drop.
Despite my written agreement never to compromise Keith or any of his superstar clients with information gained by his side or in his home, his life would remain a closed book, with his work 100 per cent off-limits.
It was evident, even from that second uneasy date, that a man whose profession was keeping other people’s secrets was never going to be a happy match for a woman whose profession was unearthing them.
I’d like to tell you we had a fine old time regardless, that we drank champagne and scoffed great food in London’s best restaurants, went to the theatre or stayed up late dancing.
But the most extravagant he got was dispatching his local cab company for emergency supplies: tobacco and fag papers for him, Dairy Milk for me.
Unsurprisingly, M’Lud, within a very, very few weeks the dates were dead and buried. Him, politely: ‘This isn’t really working, is it?’ Me, understandably cross to have scuppered my chances with a handsome, Ferrari-driving, Hampstead-dwelling millionaire:‘Um, no.’)
I didn’t see Keith again until many years later at a Fleet Street party. His face looked vaguely familiar and I was just about to wander over and say hello when I remembered who he was and why that wouldn’t be such a good idea. He might tell me I was still fatter than his last girlfriend, for one thing.
But the true postscript to those ill-judged days is this: a small white lace dress of mine (another piece by Ghost) had gone astray at his house – I’d left it hanging in a wardrobe.
But the true postscript to those ill-judged days is this: a small white lace dress of mine (another piece by Ghost) had gone astray at his house – I’d left it hanging in a wardrobe.
When it turned up, he called. I said I’d nip over and collect the frock – it’s not as if we had squabbled – but he was adamant he wanted to put it in the post. In the post? Really?
A couple of days later, it turned up in a plain, brown handwritten envelope. The dress slithered out. There was no note.
Of course there wasn’t; his is not the kind of near-absolute power achieved by squandering time or emotional energy where none is strictly necessary.
I can only speak from my own experience, but I’d say that in life, as in the kind of brutal privacy law he has made his own, Keith Schilling is the master of sudden death.
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