Chrissy Iley on Winona Ryder and celebrity shoplifting

Published on Saturday 23 November 2002 00:00

Shoplifting is profoundly middle class. People who are hungry or deprived rob, burgle or beg. People who are bored or sad, or who need to airlift themselves out of the comfort zone, shoplift. It’s the emotional equivalent of having a relationship with a bad boy, except you are your own bad boy.

Millions of bikinis, batteries, chocolates and lipsticks get nicked every year. One boutique owner reported that he considered teenage girls who stole an important marketing tool, because then he really knew what the hot trends were, how much to invest and in what. While Winona Ryder might have encouraged the leader pages which suggested that having it all was not good enough for her, she clearly never thought she did anyway. The likelihood is that if you hit the shops with a pair of scissors, you know what you’re doing and you’ve done it before.

Of course, Winona, who can make 5 million a movie, didn’t need the various socks, hair ornaments and the Gucci dress she took. It was never about need, it was about feeling empowered. It was about doing it because she could. Maybe at some point in her life she had been threatened or pressured and this was an exalted escape route. The panic-driven thrill of trying to get away with it, the joyous of-course-I-can, and then the purging guilt: of course I can’t.

I read that she’d recently given about 50,000 worth of clothes to a children’s charity. How’s that for gorging and purging? Shoplifting and bulimia have so much in common. They usually hit the teenage psyche or the hormonally deranged. They create in the brain a misguided belief that eating or not eating, stealing and getting caught, means you are in control of one aspect of your life - and of course that is the very aspect that controls you.

Shoplifters, like bulimics, are compulsive. And after they have filled up the hole with clothes, trinkets or food, they are left with a pudding of guilt inside them which they must rid themselves of by being sick or, in Winona’s case, either giving it to charity or getting caught.

Tracy Shaw, the Coronation Street actress, was a shoplifter. She stole strawberries and confessed that she had a compulsion to steal that was connected to her anorexia. Lena Zavaroni was charged with stealing jelly the year she died from a slimming disease; her thinking was, bizarrely: ‘If I steal the food it doesn’t count as eating it.’

Shoplifting is just a vehicle, a big old juggernaut, in fact, in which to put bucketloads of celebrity guilt; it is an exorcism. Tennis star Jennifer Capriati was arrested when she was 17 for stealing a cheap silver ring from a shopping mall. Years later she spoke of how she had wanted to kill herself at that time because she felt so ugly and fat. It was as if she didn’t deserve success, so she subconsciously tried to ruin her career.

Often, though, the shoplifting bug comes when the reality is at odds with what people feel they deserve and the hand they have been dealt. It would hardly be fair to say that Winona couldn’t come to terms with her success. She hadn’t had a hit movie in years. It might be fairer to say that, at 32, she came to shoplifting a little late because she missed out on that part of her life when she was a teenager, as she was working so hard and being so successful.

Duncan Campbell, who was at the LA court reporting on how she seemed to be throwing herself so wholeheartedly into her performance, commented that, as far as crimes against humanity go, shoplifting ranked a poor second to her movie Autumn in New York. Which, of course, is true.

The 76-year-old Hedy Lamarr’s career as a purring glamourpuss was well over in 1991 when she was charged with stealing laxatives and eyedrops. She had faced shoplifting charges before, probably because she needed to replace the adrenaline rush she used to get from all the attention.

Television presenter Stuart Hall stole sausages and coffee from Safeway. He told the jury his life had collapsed when the BBC had ended his contract and when a collection of his antique clocks was stolen. Funny, I thought the usual cry for help was attempted suicide - now it’s shoplifting.

This year, former Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut stole food from the humdrum aisles of an Atlanta mall. She also had a strange relationship with food, having been forced into gruelling regimes of diet and 20-hour training days as a teenager. So much repression then, rebellion now.

Tracy Shaw said, "It’s not that you go out to shoplift, it’s just something that happens," apparently agreeing with the assertions of psychologists that shoplifters are suffering from nothing more exotic than an addictive compulsive disorder. Professional criminals, in contrast, commit more professional crimes. It’s not an extension of their own neurosis.

A quarter of shoplifters are teenagers and a lot of the rest are middle-class women suffering from a manipulating consumer culture that has seduced them, mainly because they have not been seduced by any other passion recently.

Victorian middle-class ladies used to stuff their corsets with swag, and hide their booty under their bustles when department stores first came into being. The Victorians called their disorder kleptomania and doctors said it originated in the uterus.

I don’t think that’s such nonsense because I believe it is hormonally driven. You do get male shoplifters, however, which is all the more shocking because it strips them of their machismo. Who can forget that Richard Madeley was charged with stealing champagne from Tesco? He was miraculously cleared after the psychologist told the court that he was more forgetful than 95 per cent of the British population. I would have thought that was much more damning than admitting to being a cheap-thrill seeker. But some people are addicted to the guilt as much as to the excitement and the act of possessing.

The feeling is, it’s there, it’s yours. You feel empowered, elated, slick, cool and cunning. Afterwards the guilt consumes you, fills you up in the same way that the high did, and ultimately transports you out of yourself, giving credence to the theory that the insecure like to cause scandal so they can blame something for their downfall. Not that this will do Winona any harm. It makes her seem more interesting, more edgy than she’s been in years. It has been, in fact, one of her greatest performances.

There isn’t always a happy ending, though. In 1980, Lady Isabel Barnett, who had been a radio and TV panellist in the 1950s and 1960s on programmes like What’s My Line? and Twenty Questions, committed suicide after being fined for stealing a can of tuna and a carton of cream from her village shop. The court refused to believe that the poacher’s pocket sewn into the lining of her coat was intended to carry her purse in case she got mugged.

Two days before her death she admitted she was a compulsive thief. She got into a bath with pills, alcohol and an electric heater, her terrible feelings of remorse bringing about her final drama.