Oliver, Julian, dad, father... they’re interchangeable

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10 April 2012

At 23, Celeste Tobias has the good humour to admit that the twist her young life has taken might easily come from the plot of an implausible romantic novel.

Raised as the daughter of a ruggedly handsome movie star, her childhood holidays spent on busy film sets and at Swiss ski resorts, she discovered at the age of 19 that her biological father was in fact a high-profile businessman with a global retail chain and a fortune of
£50 million. What's more, the news, delivered by her mother Camilla Ravenshear — often described as a "society beauty" — came not only as a "complete shock" to Celeste but to both of the men in question: Oliver Tobias, the former heart-throb best known for starring in The Stud with Joan Collins, and Julian Metcalfe, co-founder of the sandwich empire Pret A Manger and now co-owner of the sushi bar chain Itsu.

Celeste has "no idea" why her mother waited until she was 19 to tell her — and clearly believes that she should have known much earlier — but does not disagree with the suggestion that Camilla wanted her to know her real parentage as she finally flew the nest and embarked upon adult life.

"Madness, isn't it?" says Celeste, smiling a little grimly. "I was told just before I went to university in Bristol. I think my mother believed that I'd always known I wasn't Oliver's, but of course I didn't. How can you know something like that? I had no idea."

She doesn't look much like the dark-browed Heathcliff-esque Oliver Tobias, certainly. We meet in The Butterfly Bar, the chic cocktail and wine bar above Itsu in Notting Hill, which Celeste is cautiously remodelling as an ideal hangout for professional twentysomethings and the local yummy mummy sorority.

A ringer for actress Emma Watson — she is blonde and pretty and dressed in the west London uniform of skinny jeans, slouchy T-shirt and high heels — she took up the position as marketing manager of Itsu six weeks ago. But not before she had spent a year as an accountancy trainee in the City, proving "to myself as much as anyone that I didn't need to join the family business". Celeste is very firm on this point. Every so often, beneath the poised Charterhouse-educated surface, you catch a glimpse of the havoc wreaked on her life at the age of 19.

"I think I've spent the past four years proving myself constantly," she muses. "Lots of people expected me to go off the rails completely and momentarily maybe I did. But ironically, rather than thinking, You lot have ruined my life', my way of rebelling was to knuckle down and prove that I could be completely independent. I think life is massively unpredictable. Who knows what's around the corner?"

It was, of course, a hell of a secret for her mother to keep for almost 20 years — the clearly inconvenient fact of a brief affair in 1986 with Metcalfe which, unknown to him, resulted nine months later in Celeste. Camilla did not see or speak to Metcalfe for the next 19 years, and though she and Tobias divorced when Celeste was three, Oliver was a "fairly hands-on" dad to the two daughters who apparently came out of the marriage. Camilla and her girls lived in a flat in Wandsworth and Oliver bought a place nearby.

"It was a complete shock," admits Celeste. "It shatters your entire world. I was just leaving home and everything was completely new and, yeah, it seemed to blow everything I'd ever known away." It felt, she says, as though her very identity was at stake — and she was furious with her mother for withholding the truth for so long.

"We were the best of friends so it seemed even worse. I told my schoolfriends I was never going to speak to her again and I really meant it at the time." In her first year at university she barely saw her mother and returned home just once, for her sister's birthday. At Bristol, with an entrepreneurial spirit perhaps inherited from Metcalfe, she started a successful club night called Electra to make money and pay her
own way.

How did Oliver Tobias feel? "Very shaken too, I think," she replies after a pause. "But I still see him all the time and he's very much doing his own thing, running around after his two little boys who are mad and fun and lovely." Now aged 63, Tobias has recently become father to five-year-old Luke and two-year-old Felix by his second wife, Arabella Zamoyska.

And then there is Metcalfe. He and Celeste met for the first time at the Soho House offshoot Babington House, a private members' club set in acres of Somerset countryside. Was it very strange? "Yes. I think we were both completely confused and baffled by the whole thing. We had a few vodka tonics and that broke the ice but to be honest I didn't really know what to do or to say. I mean, what do you say in that situation?

"I think the most difficult thing for me was this idea that I had a new family — I had two new half-brothers [Metcalfe's sons Billy and Meisha by his former wife Melanie]. I'd always wanted brothers but there was this desperate worry: will they like me, are they going to be happy about this, will they want me to be part of their family?

"I don't think I recognised myself in him immediately but over time we began to remind ourselves of each other in certain ways. It's a running joke in the Itsu head office — the things that I do that are just like Julian."

She is perhaps a natural business-woman: "When I was little, I was always the one outside selling bits of tat or organising discos or making things to sell. It's always been there somewhere...

"Now I think it's great. I have three separate family units and they're all doing their own thing and I'm part of each one in a different way. I have so many siblings to take care of — steps, halves, it's all going on. I see Oliver's boys and I see Julian's boys and of course I spend lots of time with my sisters [her older half-sister Anjelika and younger half-sister Dahlia] and my mum. I couldn't stay angry with her and we're back on track now, after that first crazy year. I speak to her every day."

Meanwhile, she and Metcalfe are forging an intense relationship based largely around work. After a year in the City, Celeste decided that endless spreadsheets and exams were stifling her creative streak, and Metcalfe stepped in with his offer of a job. She spent two weeks in the kitchen learning how to make sushi (she has also made sandwiches at Pret), but The Butterfly Bar is now very much her project: "Julian admits he doesn't go to bars any more and doesn't know what young people are attracted by," she laughs. The bar is stuffed with cosy sofas and covered in butterfly-themed contemporary art (Metcalfe, whose partner Brooke de Ocampo works at the auctioneer Phillips, is passionate about art).

"The idea is that you can get your boxes of sushi and your drinks and settle in for the night here, almost as though you were at home," says Celeste.

"It's for people who don't want a mad Mahiki night until 3am but don't like the pub either. I think it's younger and more relaxed than the private members' clubs. A lot of my friends have said it's the perfect place for a date. You can be quite private, it's relaxed, and I have banned all thoughts of a big-screen TV."

She is briefly, but deeply, offended by the suggestion that The Butterfly Bar is a hangout for Sloanes. "Ugh. I suppose my friends and I might be described as Sloanes but it's definitely not something to aspire to. I do know some girls who just want dinner parties and pearls but honestly I think that's awful. My girlfriends are incredibly driven and career-minded. Much more so than the boys."

Downstairs at Itsu the emphasis is on tasty, healthy food. There's amusing irony in the fact that many of Celeste's friends, a generation of exceptionally health-conscious young people, won't eat bread and are therefore off their lunchtime sandwich. "Half of them claim they're wheat intolerant," says Celeste. "I'm not entirely convinced but in any case they don't eat any bread at all. It's all about yoga and the gym and healthy eating. Itsu is bang on trend for that."

In public, Metcalfe has expressed his delight at discovering his daughter but I wonder whether he feels cheated at missing out on her childhood.

"Maybe," says Celeste wistfully. "But doing this together is a huge opportunity for us to catch up, to see each other and understand each other and work out where we're both coming from. Itsu is so much a part of his life — it's his ultimate passion and dream and to be a part of that is wonderful."

And who, nowadays, does she call Dad? "Oh, it's interchangeable." She grins. "Oliver, Julian, dad, father. People get very confused. At first they seemed to find it quite awkward but now they see that I'm OK with it, they are too. And I really am."

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