Ali Hewson

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Ali Hewson: The Sweetest Thing
Pilates in Sandycove and a quiet lunch in Cavistons


Saturday April 18 2009

When Ali Hewson steps off a plane at Dublin airport tomorrow, she will be a woman with a mission. Flying in from the States to promote National Chernobyl Week with her close friend and Chernobyl Children's Project International (CCPI) founder, Adi Roche, it will be action stations the minute her plane touches down.

"That's Ali -- she's coming in especially, as she did for our board meeting recently," says Adi. "She is based in America at the moment with the (U2) tour coming up. But, she has made the project a huge part of her life. She's always at the end of a phone call or email, always in contact."

Ali's husband Paul, who likes to go by the name Bono and plays in a promising Dublin band called U2, is known for multitasking his talents across music and political activism. Ali, though, has been quietly carving out her own version of a life less ordinary. At 48, she now wears many hats: mother, campaigner, fundraiser, style icon and ethical fashion trendsetter.

It was not a life that Ali Stewart might have envisaged when, as an olive-skinned, doe-eyed 15-year-old, she first caught a young Bono's eye in Mount Temple secondary school. They started going out in November 1976, the same time Bono joined the teen band formed by Larry Mullen Jr that would become U2. That month was one that he has acknowledged shaped the rest of his life and, by extension, Ali's.

While he clambered aboard the rocket to stardom, she was to be a quiet powerhouse of support at home. As Eamon Dunphy once said: "The best thing about Bono is Ali," describing her as "calm and rational". She worked for a brief time after school in Sun Alliance insurance company on Dawson Street, where a former work colleague remembers her as "friendly and unassuming". But when the couple married in 1982, she devoted herself full-time to keeping the home fires burning.

Hard-working

Protestant stock

Even four years into their marriage, she was still toying with the idea of becoming a nurse, but realised that the years of live-in training required would have been "too much on the relationship".

Ali came from hard-working Protestant stock, her mum Joy a housewife, her dad Terry an electrical contractor in north Dublin. Not for her the spending habits of the super-rich, or the farcical mis-behaviour of a diva rock wife.

Neighbours in the affluent south Dublin village of Killiney, where she and Bono live, speak warmly of a woman who is as happy to do the school run as she is to hang out with the couple's supermodel pals Helena Christensen, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell.

Her friends are not just those whose stardust she has rubbed against since Bono's ascension to fame; she has been close friends with Larry Mullen's partner, Ann Acheson, since school.

There is no personal trainer for the house on the hill -- Ali prefers to roll out her mat in a public Pilates class in nearby Sandycove, grabbing a bite of lunch with Bono in Cavistons café afterwards. They might own one of the most expensive houses in Ireland -- the gated Temple Hill on Vico Road, where the views are akin to Capri -- but for years she continued to run her local errands not in an SUV, the favourite of local yummy mummies, but in a battered old Volkswagen Golf which drew many smiles of admiration.

Naturally, the Hewsons do indulge in some perks. A family rule has always been to give their four children -- Jordan (19), Eve (17), Elijah (nine) and John (seven) -- as much structure and normality as is reasonably possible when your dad fronts a global supergroup and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The children attend local schools and Ali insisted there would be no nanny for the night shifts when they were young.

But, when school is out, the luxury holiday pads get an airing. The family jet down to the 20-room villa in Eze-sur-Mer (rough translation: Posh-on-Sea) in the south of France that they have shared with Edge and his family since 1993.

No to Madonna

Now that daughter Jordan is in college in America, studying politics and history, Ali has found herself doing the transatlantic jaunt to their New York base more frequently. The family bought their 3,500 sq ft apartment for $15m from Apple founder Steve Jobs in 2003. If you're a fan of jaw-dropping trivia about rich people's cribs, feast on this: the panoramic bedroom windows alone cost $79,000 apiece.

Evidently, this is no modest bolthole. It is the penthouse dwelling in the north tower of the coveted Thirties San Remo building overlooking Central Park, a block up from the famous Dakota building. Its prestigious reputation is so heavily guarded that while Ali and Bono's neighbours number Steven Spielberg, Steve Martin and Bruce Willis, the building's board rejected Madonna when she tried to buy a pad there in the mid-80s.

Considering that grandeur, the ease with which Ali walks unobtrusively through her native Dublin is all the more remarkable. She and Bono have been pictured strolling down the beach at Killiney hand in hand -- an earthy mirror image to the shots of them with Helena Christensen on an Easter break with their two boys in the Caribbean recently -- and at the St Stephen's Day races in Leopardstown. Perhaps it's partly the healthy Irish disrespect for standing on ceremony with celebrities; mostly, though, it's the standard of normality Ali has set. She's not flashy: the trademark palette of black clothes and wedgy sandals or boots -- a million miles from the designer handbag squad -- have made her a subtle style icon with those who appreciate simplicity and also underline her unwillingness to make herself a star.

Adi Roche is quick to appreciate the enormous effect that Ali's contribution to the issue of Chernobyl and its suffering children has had on her life. "She gave up her privacy for it, and I will never forget that," says Adi. "It was a huge sacrifice when she had a young family to come to Belarus to see for herself what was happening."

Ali is no lady who lunches then signs a blank cheque for whatever is the cause du jour. Never a mouthpiece for what she doesn't understand -- a claim that also applies to Bono, no matter what your views on the man -- she spent three weeks in Belarus to explore the after-effects of the 1986 nuclear disaster so that she could narrate the 1993 documentary Black Wind, White Land.

In 1996, another trip to Belarus ended with Ali and the aid convoy she was with fleeing in retreat from a wild fire that ripped through five villages and released deadly radioactive gases into the air. "We got a speeding ticket on our way out," she told reporters when she got home. "Had the wind caught up with us, we would have been at high risk." She has been back numerous times since, narrating another documentary, Chernobyl Heart, in 2003. It won an Academy Award for best documentary short, an event that caused Ali to observe wryly to her gong-laden husband: "Wait a minute, does this mean I won an Oscar before you?"

The intricacies of their marriage can never be fully understood by anyone other than Bono and Ali, of course, but her independence is probably one key to keeping the relationship vital and interesting. "When I first met Bono," she said some years ago, "the deal was that I looked after the children and the home and he did the talking."

Bono, however, has remarked that what he deeply respects in his wife is that "she won't let me wear her like a brooch". Ali's great talent is to mix the personal with the political with aplomb.

Bono forgets her birthday and writes The Sweetest Thing for her, and she smiles forgivingly but insists the royalties go to the CCPI. She launches a fashion line, EDUN, as any good rock wife might be expected to, but makes it an ethically and socially aware business.

She takes her campaign against Sellafield to Downing Street for the protection of all children, but she also makes room in her heart for a Belarusian godchild, Anna, who lives with her Irish adoptive parents in Bandon, Co Cork.

'Motherhood is my most important role'

This generosity of spirit on all levels means that Ali is never still for a moment, acknowledging once that she and Bono have "a very nice life, but it's also a very fast life".

She is adopting an even more demanding role in her Chernobyl work by abdicating her role as patron of CCPI to novelist Cathy Kelly and advancing to the board of the charity, making decisions and strategising for its future. But never for one second do you doubt that a woman who deliberately lists 'Mother' as her occupation on her passport has anything but her four children as her main priority.

"It is my most important role," she once told an interviewer. "Whatever about the clothing business or whatever else, it is the one area I don't want to fail in." Essentially a single parent whenever Bono has to take off on an extensive tour, her fortitude is not in doubt. Not that it's been easy. She gave birth to their first daughter, Jordan, two weeks before she sat her final exams in a politics and sociology degree she took in UCD. The final day of those exams, she remembers having had no sleep and having to express her milk in the car before the exam.

Now that life is on more of an even keel, with second daughter Eve finishing school and the younger boys growing up, it will be exciting to see what Ali does next. In 1993, when she first came to the fore with her charity work, she expressed a dislike for being known simply as Bono's wife.

Will it be long before Bono is labouring under the moniker, Mr Ali Hewson? We can but hope.



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:aeee: Grande reportagem

Edun...
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sorry se já postaram...

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Edun vídeo

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Bono-fied Friends Helena Christensen and Ali Hewson

They were supermodel and campaigning supermom, respectively, and then Helena Christensen and Ali Hewson inspired each other to even greater things

Helena Christensen was vacationing with her father in the south of France when Ali Hewson first invited them to stay at her place. It was the summer of 1991. Hewson had just had her second child, and her husband, Paul (whom she and nearly everyone else refer to by his stage name, Bono), was taking a break from recording “Achtung Baby” in Berlin. “I used to do my homework to loud U2 music,” Christensen says. “But Ali meant as much to me as Bono did because I already knew he must be inspired by a woman.”

Things have changed since then — Christensen has turned from supermodel to photographer, Bono has become nearly as famous for his diplomacy as for his music, and Hewson has started tinkering with her approach to the family’s second business — global relief. Through it all (including the births of Hewson’s third and fourth children and Christensen’s first), the two women have remained close, and their collaboration on the Hewsons’ latest project, the eco-fashion line Edun, has seen Christensen acting as unofficial brand ambassador, photographer and model. But perhaps most important of all, Edun is a new outlet for the two of them to inspire each other.

At first glance, the business plan for Edun, an organic-cotton fashion line connected to a beautifully photographed celebrity-ad campaign, looks suspiciously like the mission statement of a charitable operation. The business, with manufacturing operations in a constellation of developing nations that currently include Kenya, Mauritius, Peru, Tunisia and India, did grow directly out of Bono’s agitation on behalf of Africa. But the whole point of the Edun endeavor, Hewson says, is to make a profit — not because the executive board needs the money but to demonstrate to other entrepreneurs that it’s possible to do so in developing countries, paying fair wages and relying on local raw material entirely processed and manufactured by local labor, from start to finish. “We’re a tiny company, but we punch above our weight,” Hewson says. “And we don’t let Bono near the clothes.”

Hewson has been throwing herself into relief efforts around the world for years — she has been especially active in the Chernobyl Children’s Project International. She also is a founder and partner with Bryan Meehan in an organic skin-care line based on community-trade principles. (Even the brand name, Nude‚ has something in common with Edun.) At Edun Hewson finds herself arranging presentations of the collections one day and meeting with sub-Saharan NGOs the next. The schedule astounds Christensen, who is no stranger to such shuttling. She’s been very active in her friend’s relief efforts — running a charitable auction in New York or donating the proceeds from her recent photo exhibit at the Dactyl gallery, in SoHo, to the Chernobyl project; appearing in Edun fashion shows in Dublin and Cork; and modeling the line in Harper’s Bazaar. But to a great extent, she’s proudest to simply offer an oasis in Hewson’s schedule, inviting her over whenever she’s in town.

At 20, Christensen’s high cheekbones and wide-set, unearthly blue eyes helped her become one of the original “supermodels”; at 40, the features have mellowed into a distinctive wryness. She’s a talker first, funny, opinionated; her high-ceilinged West Village apartment, with its long dinner table and tall stools arranged around a kitchen island, seems designed as a series of stages for casual conversation. But lately, she has turned to photography in earnest, and it was her photos of actors such as Sean Penn, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck that launched Edun’s “One” campaign, a sale of T-shirts funding AIDS relief to Lesotho, Africa.

Ali Hewson
The “One” campaign — that was a complicated shoot — with so many celebrities to fit in on a single day, one after the other. But it turned out to be a breeze, because Helena makes it all so easy. That’s what friendship is about in many ways. You become friends with someone because you see something in them that you admire. Apart from the fact that she’s just a 10 anyway, what’s great about Helena is her sense of style. Anytime you see her dressed, even casually, she’s got her own great understanding of fashion. And so when she wears Edun, it’s like a double compliment, because she wouldn’t wear it unless she liked it, and because with her strong sense of aesthetic, that approval has real value.

One of the reasons I like coming to New York is because I get to come to Helena’s after work at 6 o’clock, and I get a cup of tea, I get fed, I get talked to. She’s a one-woman show. She doesn’t even have a nanny. She’s able to organize her child, her private life, her business life — I think in the last week, she went to Frankfurt, she went to Milan.

She’ll always hit the funny side of any situation, and you can’t put her off. She just has unbelievable stamina. That’s Viking energy. You watch her, and you realize why the Vikings were so successful and how they conquered Ireland.
Helena Christensen

Yes. We took all the tall blondes and left the stubby-legged ones — and the brains. Sure, I may do what I do in my own little world, but Ali does her stuff on a global level. She doesn’t have that many people around her. It’s a tight group of people who all go at it with such enthusiasm and high spirits that I don’t feel I have. They take care of each other in a way I’ve never seen in any other line of work. I look at the world and go, “Oh, God, no!” and roll over. Ali gets out of bed and she does it!

The word “muse” sounds like something on a pedestal that’s close to perfection. It’s fine to have role models, but you also need people you know so well you see every single side of them. And I see her at other times, when she’s stressed out, which she actually never seems to be, but when she should be—when she’s jet-lagged and coming in for meetings, when she has gone to Peru to visit a factory or she’s coming in from Africa and at the same time she’s like, “How do you manage to cook a dinner at the same time that you’re getting your son ready for bed?” I’m like, “What are you talking about? Think about what you’re doing, you crazy woman!”

So it’s funny but maybe they can only deal with global things. And not the claptrappery. But Ali and Bono have taught me to look beyond that, to kick myself in the butt and go do something. They are muses for me, and I might be one for them. They look up to me — but that’s because I’m taller than them!

Zooropa escreveu:[Tens de ter uma conta e sessão iniciada para poderes visualizar esta imagem]

Lindonas elas.

Reparem nas unhas das mãos da Helena...

Adri escreveu:

Zooropa escreveu:[Tens de ter uma conta e sessão iniciada para poderes visualizar esta imagem]

Lindonas elas.

{2} :aeee:

Ahhhhhhhhh agora entendi porque alguém queria pintar uma unha de cada cor hoje. :: Pagando pau pra Helena :nãooo: :rollll:

MG escreveu:Ahhhhhhhhh agora entendi porque alguém queria pintar uma unha de cada cor hoje. :: Pagando pau pra Helena :nãooo: :rollll:

Quem foi a doida? :vergonhoso:

Adri escreveu:

MG escreveu:Ahhhhhhhhh agora entendi porque alguém queria pintar uma unha de cada cor hoje. :: Pagando pau pra Helena :nãooo: :rollll:

Quem foi a doida? :vergonhoso:

Ixi essa tá doida mesmo :rollll: Duas evidências claras em menos de 1 hora :rollll:

:

Adri escreveu::

É bom estar ligando para a ambulância

Eu sou mesmo fã da Ali Ela merece o marido que tem.

Zooropa escreveu:Eu sou mesmo fã da Ali Ela merece o marido que tem.

Pois é...eu tbm...ta ai uma mulher que eu admiro mtooo :aeee:

Ju escreveu:

Zooropa escreveu:Eu sou mesmo fã da Ali Ela merece o marido que tem.

Pois é...eu tbm...ta ai uma mulher que eu admiro mtooo :aeee:

[3]

MG escreveu:

Ju escreveu:

Zooropa escreveu:Eu sou mesmo fã da Ali Ela merece o marido que tem.

Pois é...eu tbm...ta ai uma mulher que eu admiro mtooo :aeee:

[3]

também concordo! acho que isso é unanimidade por aqui, todas sabemos a importancia dela na vida dele, sem ela ele seria um perdido talvez, ela é o porto seguro dele, sem ela talvez ele não soubesse lidar com toda essa loucura da fama, :apaix:

Mas temos que concordar que ela tem algo em troca vai :: Ô se tem!

Zooropa escreveu:Mas temos que concordar que ela tem algo em troca vai :: Ô se tem!

totalmente, o mulher sortuda, como ela se diverte viu. ::

ritaloveu2 escreveu:

Zooropa escreveu:Mas temos que concordar que ela tem algo em troca vai :: Ô se tem!

totalmente, o mulher sortuda, como ela se diverte viu. ::

Claro..é a única possuidora dessa "preciosidade"! ::

A Ali é uma pessoa que eu admiro profundamente,sim sou mais uma na lista das que rasgam seda por ela Além de ativista,mãe e ainda aguenta o Bono,pq lembremos apesar de todas as partes boas que o Bono tem (e vocês fazem questão de ressaltar isso inúmeras vezes por post) ele é um tanto meio que...um...louco????!

Mas o que você acha que atrai a Ali? (assim como nós?) O lado louco claro! Se fosse muito normal perderia o encanto.
Aliás eu sou adepta a caras insanos tenho que admitir :00:

Mas dá trabalho e a pessoa tem que ser bem centrada pra lidar com o lado louco das pessoas,eu por exemplo não sei se conseguiria lidar com um Bono da vida até pq a quantidade de mulher atrás ia me irritar profundamente

Beterraba escreveu:Mas dá trabalho e a pessoa tem que ser bem centrada pra lidar com o lado louco das pessoas,eu por exemplo não sei se conseguiria lidar com um Bono da vida até pq a quantidade de mulher atrás ia me irritar profundamente

Essa é uma das razões que me faz admirar essa mulher.

Zooropa escreveu:Mas o que você acha que atrai a Ali? (assim como nós?) O lado louco claro! Se fosse muito normal perderia o encanto.
Aliás eu sou adepta a caras insanos tenho que admitir :00:

[2] ::

A Ali justifica o que tem em casa.