I took on a lawyer and prepared for the typically drawn-out Italian case, but the verdict came down just two months later: I was defeated. Stunned, but not prepared to give up, I got my team to bring the case again, and once more we lost. To me that wasn’t justice. One day, I resolved, I would show the press coverage to Douglas in case he ever decided to become a lawyer.
Douglas’s birth was a turning point. The dream I had of my new life was now tinged with shadows but it made me all the more determined that nothing would stand in the way of my happiness and my family. I didn’t realise that I was beginning to compromise my sense of what I needed for myself in my rigid determination to maintain the relationship with Raoul at all costs. Had I been watching for it, I might have noticed he was gradually becoming less thoughtful and caring than he had been when we first met, but I was so confident I even told my mum that I would be just like her and Dad. I was staying put.
The year after Douglas was born Raoul and I were married in a registry office. It wasn’t a big wedding, but my parents, brother and Eva were there on my side and Raoul’s family also came. Even then I wasn’t entirely sure about us. It was just a certainty that I had to make this thing work out. Not long after that I discovered that I was pregnant once more.
I couldn’t bear to go through all that I had with Douglas again. What if this one was also premature? But there was never any doubt that I would have the child. And this time, with Raoulino, everything was perfect. The pregnancy was easy and he arrived just 10 days before the due date, not long after we had been watching the race in which Formula One legend Ayrton Senna was killed. He had become a friend and I admired the work he did for children in his country. I decided it would be fitting to give Raoulino the middle name of Ayrton in his honour.
With two young children and a good lifestyle to support I felt under pressure to get with the programme as soon as possible and not breastfeed Raoulino for long. Raoul had become my business manager, handling contracts and controlling deals, and that was fine with me: I ran around so much that I needed someone to look after me behind the scenes.
I was the main breadwinner in the family. I didn’t get much of a chance to celebrate the joy of motherhood but Raoul’s driving career cost a fortune and one of the ways we covered some of the costs was for me to be the face of one or other of his sponsors.
At the end of my working day I played with the kids and took care of them. I helped them to put up the tent in the back garden and then I would go to them at three in the morning because they were scared. Reading them goodnight stories and telling them I loved them kept me sane. My own mother used to draw a heart on me with her finger, very quickly, almost like a caress. It was an ‘I love you’ for me and I often did that to the boys. Even when I was worn out I would always make time for them. We had a nanny too but I wanted to be fully involved with their upbringing. Being with them never failed to boost my energy levels.
Raoul’s passion was for his racing and I supported him in doing whatever he wanted. At home we weren’t so much a two-car as a ten-car family and we had amazing vacations. Raoul taught the boys to ski brilliantly – even Killian, who wasn’t his own boy and who I felt was never his favourite. I’d never learned to ski and Raoul had the patience to show the children how to do it properly. He was equally good about getting them to play football and took them to see Inter Milan play in their home stadium. Sport was the aspect of their lives he was most interested in. Now all the boys are excellent skiers and of course they got into go-karting; Ayrton Senna’s kids had go-karts so we did too.
The boys were very happy but in truth they wouldn’t have had any less fun if they’d been on rented skis. It wasn’t good to let them have everything and it was part of what began to make me terribly miserable. Raoul and I should have made those quiet moments that two people need to have when they’ve got a baby between them. I began to believe that things weren’t working but if I wasn’t going to break my pledge, what could I do?
There was often a lot of ready cash around and Raoul was efficient in getting payment for me. Minutes before I was due to go on one Danish talk show, he warned the producers that if they didn’t get the cash out I wasn’t going to do the show.
I would suggest that he might consider taking on more work himself. Maybe he could do something in the motor-racing world. I was quite worried about what we would do if something happened to me. He said everything would be all right, but I had this nagging fear about the kids. They were all at private schools in Switzerland; everything felt such a burden so I grabbed whatever job paid the most. But still I didn’t want to leave.
Talking about where we were going in our relationship didn’t seem to change anything. Things were getting too much to deal with and it is hard to explain what was happening because it wasn’t something that took place in a certain number of weeks or months. An insistent voice in my head told me that this was my last chance to make a family and I owed it to my children, my parents and everyone around me not to give up: I had to keep going. I just made up all these reasons for continuing as things were. Just get through these hard times, I thought, and it will all be perfect. It was perfect already, I told myself: I had a beautiful house, I lived in a wonderful country, I had healthy kids – what was there to bitch about? I found my own way of dealing with my unhappiness.
We usually had a glass or two of wine over dinner. Wine relaxed me and I enjoyed drinking. And of course, when we were at openings or dinner parties we always had cocktails. However, over those years my intake of alcohol increased in proportion to the pressure of work and the guilt I felt about how I was acting as a mother. I could justify my drinking in terms of the accepted culture in our corner of Europe, but then it’s hard to say at exactly what point you become an alcoholic: you might not even realise you have a problem for years. Over time one glass of wine became two or three; one cocktail became two. It was a gradual process. And alcohol worked for me: I was angry, furious that Raoul and I were even in the same house. A doctor might have suggested better medication for my frustration but this was my way out.
I’ve since heard from other alcoholics and people who have lived with them that it’s not uncommon to take years to graduate from a glass of wine at dinner to a bottle. So if you have a teenager who drinks a couple of bottles on a weekend with their friends, be careful: that’s not okay, watch for those red flags at an early age. I was unusual in developing alcoholism in my mid-30s. Up until then I’d been pretty healthy and watched what I consumed: food as well as drink. But you never know when the devil is waiting around the corner to get you. I told myself that an alcoholic is someone who wakes up with the shakes that don’t go away until they’ve had their first drink of the day and they don’t stop swigging until they pass out in the evening. That wasn’t me.
I could go anything from a week to a month without a drink but when I did, I would make up for lost time. When I started rehab many years later I learned that it’s binging which is really dangerous. The classic alcoholic might be someone who drinks every single day but for a new generation binge-drinking is where it’s at. In Europe alcoholism is still taboo. Everybody drinks, but few would say they are alcoholic.
I evolved my own system of drinking. On some occasions it would even be as long as two months before I got together with a friend and we might, for example, enjoy a post-work glass of wine and we would finish with a bottle. Then another bottle. And then I would feel sick and not have anything for the next few weeks.
At work I was totally professional. I never drank – I wouldn’t have been able to remember my lines if I had, there was no question about it, but the minute I was out of that studio door, I was ready to boogie. For me, as with many alcoholics, there was always something to celebrate or to commemorate. Toasting special occasions is perfectly acceptable and that’s what makes it so deadly for the alcoholic looking for an excuse. I was becoming so sad, and the monkey on my back was the booze: It had the answer to all my worries. It was always there
to make me feel better as the relationship with Raoul fractured. I might have gone that way later or perhaps it might never have happened, but I was giving up.
There’s something particularly degrading about a woman – a mother – who finds herself lying on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon. She’s not drunk as such, but she’s getting there and she doesn’t feel like doing anything. I’d always been that busy bee, full of energy, unstoppable. I don’t know how I did it to myself. Saying I had become a couch potato would be making light of it – I was a slave to my own misery.
I didn’t have the energy to do anything and that made me feel even worse. I was weak and I was embarrassed by my lack of motivation. The sort of tiredness that overwhelmed me defies description. It almost made me frightened, as if I might put so much effort into standing up that I would drop dead.
When I wasn’t working I increasingly confined myself to the house. That meant not doing anything for the boys that didn’t involve meals for them, putting them to bed or doing puzzles with them. Raoul or the nanny had to deal with everything else. Ironically, I probably did need some time to myself but the way I was carrying on was doing me no good at all.
By the time the marriage had virtually broken down I had resorted to hiding the extent of my drinking. I concealed bottles around the villa but then I would forget where the stash was. As an alcoholic you become so primitive – it’s all so obvious and it was disgusting. I wonder now how it was possible for me as a mother to become such a ridiculous figure. Raoul knew what was happening and was furious.
I would deny it all. ‘No, no, I don’t drink,’ I’d say in a little voice, after he’d seen me hastily move a bottle out of sight. It was unbearable that he could now take the moral high ground over me. If I was already drunk when he started having a go at me I would become a different person and swear at him. I was not a nice person to live with, but he certainly didn’t reach out.
I was nothing more than a burden to him and to the children as well. I was a fool, I thought, a joke to everybody. It would be better if I wasn’t there. On one occasion we had an argument and I lost my balance and fell down the stone stairs to the kitchen. I lay in front of the kids thinking that I’d really hurt myself. It wasn’t good news. The following day I was due to begin a chat show in Denmark – Gitte and Friends (Gittes Venner, as it was known in Denmark). The idea was I would have a relaxed, two-hour chat with a guest and I needed to be totally fit but I could feel that I’d banged my foot up. It wasn’t broken, but it had a wound that went down to the bone.
When Raoul left to go racing, I wrapped up the damage as best I could and thank God, was able to escape to Denmark for a while. A friend spotted something wrong when I got to the studio and I tried to hide it, worried about what the production team might think.
‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Show me the foot.’ I waited until we’d wrapped for the day and he and I drove to my parents’ place. We got the shoe and dressing off to see pus oozing out of the battered foot. It was a mess, but I insisted that I was fine.
‘You cannot go on with the series like that,’ he said. ‘Things may not be okay, but you have to deal with the situation.’ He was right. I was extremely proud of the show I’d got and was looking forward to showing Copenhagen to the famous friends and contacts I’d built up who were to include Joan Collins, John Cleese, David Hasselhoff, Jeremy Irons and Catherine Deneuve. We were to shoot in Hotel d’Angleterre, where I’d once been with Sylvester. I was in Denmark with a great programme ready to go and there I was, I thought, turning alcoholic with one mangled foot and a fucked-up marriage. I hid behind huge sunglasses turning over all the options in my mind.
I told the Nordisk Films producers that I’d fallen over while out running about with the kids. They got a private doctor who cleaned up my foot, gave me painkilling injections and a couple of stitches and said I’d be okay. And I was. The foot throbbed as it healed but I even felt a sort of cleansing, as if there was pus deeper inside me which had been wiped away. The production team and I enjoyed a lovely dinner and finally, I felt ready to rock. I ended up back at my hotel with my friend and the mini-bar. There, I polished off all the little bottles and he had a glass of champagne. I was still drinking but it was the first time in a long while that it was accompanied by positive thoughts.
We had a safe in the house where we kept all the income from the cash jobs. Raoul didn’t want me to get money for alcohol so he changed the combination on that. I was reduced to tears by the safe, uselessly spinning the wheel to guess the new code, but then I guessed it and my first thought was That’s it! I’m taking the money and I’m going back home to Denmark to live with my parents. I opened the door and stopped, looking at the pile of money. Who was I fooling? This was my money, this was my house: I wasn’t stealing from him, I was stealing from myself. And I realised that my drinking was stealing everything from myself – my zest for life, my sense of humour, my intelligence, my straightforwardness. I was losing everything. I would take what was mine and go home and the kids would have to live with the nanny.
I was overwhelmed with the alcoholic’s miserable sense of guilt and embarrassment at my behaviour. I had to sneak into my own safe to get money to buy a ticket to see my mum. How low had I sunk? I was devastated. I didn’t go back to Denmark, of course. The drinking just got worse and I became more afraid of the world. I couldn’t speak on the phone and I needed a drink before I was able to face anyone. My self-esteem was zero and I was constantly in tears. The simplest things terrified me – even saying ‘Hello’ to a friend on the street made me think I was going to end up looking stupid in some way.
The worst times of all were those occasions – fortunately not many – when I would call my mum to hear her patiently interrupt my stories with, ‘Darling… Gitte… this is the fourth time you’ve called today and you’re telling me exactly the same story.’
Out of everything, I’m most ashamed that I stopped going to parent meetings at school: I didn’t show up for student shows or their sports days and I never went to social events. I felt like I might as well lie down and die – I had no connection with anyone. I’d given up on life, on myself, on everything, and I had been such an outgoing person.
I carried on working but when Raoulino was diagnosed with a brain tumour I wasn’t there for him. I betrayed him for the bottle. Today, I look back at that time as being a big, black hole. I wasn’t there in those months when Raoulino was in hospital and the doctors tried desperately to save him. Yet I loved him more than anything, as paradoxical as that sounds. I had drowned my personality and my sense of self-preservation.
After undergoing numerous therapies and following different methods for overcoming the sense of shame and guilt over the years, I have had to face up to those three months when I was absent as a mother. It was impossibly difficult to do but that was a crucial part of my eventual recovery. I had to go through all that to win back the love and respect of Raoulino and a day did come when he was able to say, ‘Mum, come on! You didn’t drink that much.’
‘Yes, I did,’ I said.
‘You know what? Maybe you did,’ he told me, ‘but you were always there for me anyway.’
It would take us a long time to reach that point when he could forgive me, but from then on, our relationship would be stronger than ever.
It’s one of the toughest things you do as a recovering alcoholic, learning to live with the things you can’t change. There were so many things that I would have loved to have done differently in those years. Most of all, I should have left Raoul, but I’d got to the point where I didn’t care about life itself any more.
CHAPTER 19
‘THE SHOW MUST GO ON’
In 1998 I was hired to do some big variety television shows in Spain, where I was more known as a singer than an actress. I’ve always found the country to be really relaxed and I’ve had so many great times there. I was excited to have a reason to go back and particularly looked forward to being able to spend three day
s in Madrid. My luggage was packed ahead of time and I was ready to give all I had to the shows and to renew the friendships I had over there.
My companion was my bodyguard, Rodolfo. He had been my faithful shadow for years and had become a friend to our whole family. Killian and he had become best friends and it was Rodolfo who taught him kickboxing and other martial arts. We were joined in Madrid by the two other bodyguards, who took us to our hotel. I collapsed into a chair in my room and had a glass of the champagne that was provided for me whenever I visited. It was such a relief to be welcomed and to be looking forward to a job.
I started going over the songs in my head and began humming to myself. It was the start of a long haul. The Spanish have this crazy tradition of shows that run from 8pm and only finish in the early hours – and they were live. I went on at 9pm, came back halfway through and finished up around 1.30am. I was tired but really happy and when I was done saying goodbyes, I only wanted to head straight back to the hotel. There, I ran a bath and washed off all the sweat but my mouth still ached from the formal kisses – it was three kisses goodbye, the Spanish and Italian way. When I was done Rodolfo was still on duty.
‘Well done!’ he said. ‘Great show.’ I called home the next morning to find out how the kids were doing. They were fine but Raoul wasn’t around, which was great as I didn’t really want to go through him to get to talk to the boys.
I worked my ass off for the rest of the day and the show followed that evening. Afterwards, I called Raoul and we agreed to meet in Rome for the next big show. There was no affection between us at all by then, but when I arrived he looked even less happy to see me than usual.
We got to the car and he leaned over the bonnet. ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said. I could see in his eyes that something was badly wrong as he looked away and down. ‘Your dad is dead.’
You Only Get One Life Page 16