You Only Get One Life

by Brigitte Nielsen

  The producer wouldn’t tell me who would be sharing the house but he did encourage me to think of something ‘spectacular’ to mark my arrival. The whole concept of reality TV struck me as being really silly and I wanted to have fun with it. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I would be looked down on for doing that kind of thing and it would affect my chances of getting movie roles. I threw myself into the spirit of the thing and selected the tightest, most fabulous Gianni Versace dress – one that was given to me towards the end of my career as a model – with a pair of high heels. Instead of booking a limo I freaked everyone out by going back to my roots and riding a horse bareback to the house in all my finery.

  I stepped into the house, smiling at the thought of being back in the US, far away from everything I knew again. None of the other seven faces looked remotely familiar to me, but I had been in Europe for a long time and hadn’t really been keeping up with trends in the States. There was a flamboyant Spanish entertained called Charo, stand-up comedian and actor Dave Coulier, Public Enemy rapper Flavor Flav, New Kids on the Block singer Jordan Knight and the beautiful American Idol performer Ryan Starr. Our task over the next couple of weeks was nothing harder than to get to know one another and hang out.

  Flavor Flav took an instant dislike to me. He kept looking me up and down, his every gesture conveying contempt. He was black, he was short and he was very unfriendly. I decided that I wasn’t going to ignore his attitude and straight off said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ This made him angrier and nervous too. I don’t think he expected me to come back so aggressively. He backed out of the room, me following him, until he was right up against a wall. We faced each other, him looking up, me staring down at him from a height accentuated by my heels. There was a silence as we had a stare-out competition to decide who could show they gave less of a shit about the other. He had his gold teeth and jewellery, I had my little evening bag, and when this rude little man’s attitude got too much I slapped him across the face with it.

  He totally lost it. ‘You lanky, skinny, ugly bitch!’ he yelled. ‘No one touches me, no one hits me in my face. You understand that, you motherfucker?’ He was all over the place. Later he would confide in me that as a result of bad experiences he’d had as a child he just couldn’t deal with anyone touching his face, much less hitting him.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said in response to his outburst. ‘I won’t hit you, but you need to start respecting me and just cool that attitude of yours. Just stop with the theatrics, it’s horrible.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll stop that,’ he said. With that we simultaneously collapsed into laughter, sat down together and started talking properly. And that was how I met William Jonathan Drayton Jr, aka Flavor Flav, a man who became as intimate a friend over the next couple of weeks as it was possible to be without me being unfaithful to Mattia.

  Talk about the odd couple. Many people would have said that this rapper was too much caught up in his Public Enemy image, too angry and too anti-white to be friendly with me. The race question was all-consuming for Flavor Flav – or ‘Foofie Foofie’, as I ended up calling him, much to his pretended outrage. Public Enemy were militant in lyrical imagery about their struggle with white people. Foofie saw a towering blonde Caucasian woman enter the house and to him I represented everything this racially-obsessed man hated. Anyone would have said that the chances of the two of us becoming soul mates were zero.

  As time passed, the uptight persona that Foofie presented was softened. ‘Get over it!’ I’d tell him. ‘I’m white – and so what? You might be angry with a lot of white people but right now you’re talking to me. We’re not all the way you think of us.’

  I guess that he came to listen to my point of view and I know that he loved the way I called him William rather than Flavor Flav. His name reminded me of an Italian ad for mattresses featuring an elephant named Foofie Foofie, the nearest translation for his stage name. Our conversations in the house would come to include his time in jail, his relationship with his ex-wife and the many children and lovers that he had. I talked about my marriage to Raoul and everything else that you’ve been reading about in this book. Opposites attract, but the sort of problems we faced and the pain we’ve felt was very similar. It got to the point where the producers had to remind us that there were other people in the house too. There was still a show! Please, mingle! We couldn’t just carry on as if nobody else was there, we would end up stealing the show – which was what happened as things got so intimate the next step would have been sexual. It never happened, although we shared a bed and I couldn’t deny the warm feelings I had for Foofie, but I couldn’t do it because I was so in love with Mattia. And besides, Foofie is one ugly motherfucker.

  Nevertheless, it was still hard for Mattia to watch what was going on. Fortunately, we had a lot of down-time on the show and they let us use the phone. I would spend hours talking to him in Italy and that meant he never felt left out. It was so odd for me to feel my love for Mattia grow at the same time as I was having such a close relationship with Foofie; work had crossed into genuine emotion. Yet Mattia was loyal and showed his love by backing me all the way and understanding that I was impulsive but that I would respect the boundaries. It was, even so, a very tough time.

  The audience couldn’t believe what they were seeing, not least because inter-racial relationships are still contentious in the US. Seeing this platonic love affair on-screen, with me and Foofie rolling around for the cameras, was a real eye-opener. The other contestants became extras with us as the main attraction and when we weren’t centre stage, I would be keeping everyone entertained by taking over bar duties. If I wasn’t fooling with Foofie, talking with Mattia or asleep I would be having an intense relationship with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. My antics ensured I was a big hit with everyone, particularly when I got so drunk I fell off my bar stool. Or I’d be jumping and dancing tipsily around the house on my own. The viewers loved the way I didn’t hide anything but much later when I went into rehab the staff showed me clips of Surreal Life by way of telling me that, yes, I had a good time but look how I behaved.

  Foofie and I worked so well together that VH1 commissioned a special spin-off between the two of us and Mattia. I said it had to be called Strange Love. Over 12 episodes I was to date Flavor – without anything happening between us – and marry Mattia at the end. I lived with Flavor in the Bronx for half of it and then he came and stayed with Mattia and me in Italy. The show was another hit, with VH1 viewers watching the surreal goings-on as we kissed, slept in the same bed and then went to stay with Mattia.

  The producers came back with an offer for Strange Love II. They gave me a blank cheque and told me to name my price. It was just crazy but I’d had enough by then. I felt I’d got to understand so much about what Flavor Flav and other black people had suffered; I could empathise with why he hated the white race so much. But I’d tease him about his own ignorance and had seen the way we were in front of the cameras had stirred up controversy. Now it was time to move on.

  It was good to be back in LA, though, and to have made a hit. We’d earned VH1 a ton of money and the result was that I had even more offers for follow-ups. I had conquered the town all over again, for the first time since the split from Sylvester. Millions of viewers had seen me and it felt good to be in the sort of hit I hadn’t seen since I did the likes of Beverly Hills Cop II and Cobra, some 20 years earlier.

  It might have been that show which brought me to the attention of UK reality TV producers. The makers of Celebrity Big Brother invited me over for what they said would be a fun experience. I didn’t see why not: it was just something I did for the money, it didn’t seem too demanding and you didn’t need any talent to do it. You could use it to present yourself in a certain way if you wanted but I decided just to be me – no bullshit. I wasn’t sure about spending another three weeks away from Mattia but they said there would be a house full of celebrities. As it turned out, everyone knew who I was while I didn’t recognise any faces.
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br />   We got chatting and I got on with everyone apart from John McCririck. Not only did he have cold-sores on his lips, but he used the same handkerchief to dab at them all the time. Disgusting! We all had bunk beds as if we were back in summer camp and John’s nightwear consisted of enormous grubby white underpants, which were frankly frightening. As if that wasn’t gross enough, he farted all the time. It didn’t take me long to realise that John was a real misogynist: his comments and the way he talked to the women in the house were really not at all okay.

  Bez, the dancer from Happy Mondays, was really nice but very sweaty. He was in the bed above me and the sweat would drip through which made for a nice accompaniment to John’s flapping pants. Bez was great, though: he went on to win the show and I was really pleased for him.

  We were without our suitcases for the first 24 hours, which was a new test added to the show that year. I only had the clothes I’d come in wearing and no make-up so that was a scary experience for me that first morning. Aside from the few games that the producers got us to play there was little to do. As with Surreal Life, it was all really about how you got to know each other and how the relationships developed. For the most part the days really seemed to drag on. You weren’t allowed to read or write anything but Mattia had given me a little keepsake with four pictures of the two of us and with the kids on holiday. Behind each one he had inscribed lines of romantic poetry and that was all that kept me going.

  On the third day Big Brother announced that we had to go to the front door and line up. We were dressed as historical servants from a castle at the time. One of us was going to be the ruler. They told us that we were about to get a new housemate, which was exciting when we’d got so used to one another. We faced the door and I saw that there was a gap between the base and the floor; light for the cameras seeped under the door and I could make out a shadow of something coming. It looked rather like a cat and for a moment I wondered if they’d got us a pet.

  The door opened and the light behind made it hard to work out what was there. It was clearly a person, but who? I could make out this tangled mass of hair and I saw that it was red. Then I heard the voice. ‘It’s Jackie!’ I recognised the sound as Jackie Stallone but my mind didn’t quite register that it really was her at first. She shuffled in through the fog and it was indeed Jackie, though to me she looked more like some kind of monster with the Vegas make-up, the strange mouth and the piles of hair. ‘Brigitte!’ she called when I greeted her. She went straight for me and we hugged, though I couldn’t have seen her for more than 15 years. I just remembered how she had disliked me and hadn’t come to the wedding. My legs felt a bit weak but when I really looked at her and saw that she didn’t seem quite right, I felt sorry for her. ‘Oh, you’re going to be helping me out here,’ she continued. ‘I really don’t know anyone.’

  It was a really low blow for the producers to have done this to us – they were probably hoping for a fight. Jackie was made Queen of the Big Brother house and we had to clean up after her. After all the bad feeling the last thing I wanted to do was be her servant but I had to deal with the situation as it was. She had to be about 80 by now, I thought, and our relationship was a long time in the past. She unpacked in the double bedroom she’d been allocated and told me that she needed her Scotch nightcap before bed. I stopped her mid-flow.

  ‘You have to understand, Jackie, there are cameras all around us.’

  ‘Cameras? I can’t see any cameras.’

  ‘No, that’s just it, they’re behind all the mirrors and the fittings.’

  She started to pick away at her hair until the strands of red were everywhere and then she began to get undressed. I tried again. ‘Jackie! Don’t do that here. You’re in front of TV cameras.’ Later on I took it up with Big Brother themselves in the Diary Room, telling them that it wasn’t fair and they weren’t unleashing similar surprises on anyone else. I had debated with myself as to whether or not I should leave, but decided that was childish and I had to deal with it.

  Jackie told me she didn’t know how to cook and that she couldn’t even boil an egg for herself. I ended up taking care of her. We talked about Sylvester and she basically apologised, saying she realised that things had simply never been meant to be between the two of us. We started afresh together.

  She went on to leave the house early – I don’t know if that was part of the game or if she hadn’t got something that she needed, but I felt good that there had been some kind of resolution between the two of us. You can make things better if you forgive people, I realised, and I even went to visit her at her home a couple of times after the show. The production didn’t get the fireworks they might have wished for.

  People at home must have liked me because I ended up staying the whole three weeks and when I did come out, I found that they were really friendly, having seen me at my rawest in there. I’d actually hoped that I would be voted off as it really wasn’t my thing, but I was there on the very last night and I was the third from last out. They did ask me to come back for the final series in the summer of 2010 but I had decided it wasn’t something I wanted to repeat.

  If nothing else, Big Brother meant that I didn’t drink for three weeks and I didn’t really miss it. I did become convinced that Mattia would have decided to move on by the time I got out, though, but he was still there. We were stronger as a couple than ever, but we were going to need to be to face the challenges that lay ahead. My newfound success in reality TV had brought its own set of problems.

  We had to face the fact that in order to capitalise on all the shows I was doing I had to base myself in LA. If I was going to do that then I wasn’t sure I could uproot the kids from Milan and that felt really dreadful: life had been so good in Italy. We had moved into a great house and Mattia was by my side, but you can’t be part-time in LA in the way that you can commute between Italy and London and I didn’t have the physical endurance that I had at 20 to deal with jetlag.

  It was such a hard decision to make and often I had tears in my eyes as I thought through all the options. I couldn’t take the boys out of school and make them start all over again in LA. They would be away from Raoul and would have to learn a new language. Mattia and I knew we would be coming back on a regular basis and although the schools had amazing facilities in the US that made the most of the Californian climate, Los Angeles wasn’t the best city to bring up young kids. Yes, I had friends and connections and could make it comfortable for them, but I thought it was too selfish to yank them out of the lives they had become used to. After all our research and planning I spoke to Douglas and Raoulino, who both had good friends in school they didn’t want to lose. I knew we were doing the right thing.

  In 2007 I got on the plane for the last time as a resident of Italy. We’d had been commuting by air since 2004 without committing to a new life. This was it – we were doing it. Was this to be the beginning of a new life? Perhaps I was returning to what I’d left when I went into exile 20 years ago…

  CHAPTER 24

  DETOX AND REHAB

  I missed my children in LA. The guilt I felt about leaving them behind in Italy made me drink even more, too. Mattia and I had moved into a beautiful home in the Hollywood Hills but my routine had got as bad as it had been in Morcote. Every day the half-drunk and the fresh bottles would come out of their hiding places all over the house. There were no longer any gaps between my sessions and it was beginning to take its toll, but there was a difference between Morcote and here in the Hollywood Hills: Mattia.

  ‘You are destroying yourself,’ he told me. ‘It cuts me up to see you like this. You have to do something before you kill yourself. And if you don’t get help then I am going to leave you.’ It sounded tough, but Mattia’s approach was so much more constructive than Raoul’s. He cared but he let me know that he was serious. I had considered seeing someone back in Lugano but I’d just thrown the contact details away. Now I could see the truth: I was probably more of an alcoholic than I had been when I tried to kill mys
elf.

  ‘Of course, Mattia,’ I said. ‘I promise you I’ll never touch another drop, honestly.’ And I was dry for three weeks. I didn’t even feel like drinking, I was fine, but when he had to go out unexpectedly one morning on an errand I found a bottle from my secret stash and even though I didn’t want to disappoint him, I drank behind his back. There were occasions when I couldn’t manage without it – talking to my mother on the phone or dealing with important stuff for the kids. I believed I could bluff my way through without anyone finding out and I stumbled on for another six months. Sometimes Mattia would find a bottle and then we’d start the whole charade again. I wasn’t fooling anyone: it was an absolute nightmare of a life but nobody could help me – and I certainly couldn’t help myself – until I laid my cards on the table and faced the truth.

  I can’t remember the date when everything finally came to a head, but I can tell you the day was a Thursday. ‘You need professional help,’ said Mattia again. ‘If not, we’re through right now. I can’t live with someone who drinks as much as you.’ I knew that I had lied so much and abused his trust to such a degree that he might never believe me again; I was in despair.