You Only Get One Life (24 page)

Mattia lay very quietly for a while, then he gently framed my face with his hands and looked straight into my eyes.
‘Gitte, I’m crazy about you too,’ he said, ‘and I think we can have something really wonderful together. However… I can’t live with a woman who smokes like a chimney and drinks far too much.’ I was astonished.

I’d thought at first that he was going to agree without thinking about it or even say that he couldn’t be with an older woman or didn’t want to commit; something like that. But, despite his youth, he had again got right to the heart of things: he’d totally got the measure of me in that short time. What went unsaid about me had not gone unnoticed by him; he had my attention.

I felt very naked and yet it was how I knew he cared about me. If he hadn’t have done, he wouldn’t have mentioned the booze. It was a long time since anyone around me – friends or family – had shown such interest in my well-being that they were willing to stop tip-toeing around and tell it to me like it was.

Love should be unconditional if it is to be real, but Mattia was smart enough to set out the rules before he let himself go. I was a great woman, but I was a woman with problems and more issues than you could ever imagine – and there were likely to be more to come, but he was willing to deal with that if I was, too. Be honest, he was saying. Are you going to fix yourself or not? If you aren’t gonna do it then I can’t follow you. This was my wake-up call and now I had to make it happen.

W
hen Mattia arrived in Milan looking nervous and ill at ease I was immediately on edge. I was very happy with him and I wondered what was about to happen so I asked him what was going on. ‘I’m sick and tired of doing that commute between Switzerland and Italy…’ he began. I was relieved that was all that bothered him. And he was right – he’d been living out of suitcases for months. Our relationship was still new enough for me to feel tingly and jumpy whenever we discussed things and I didn’t know how I would have taken it if he’d have been sick and tired of us together.

‘…so I resigned today. I’m ready to move in with you,’ he went on. ‘If that’s okay with you?’ Of course it was okay! It was more than okay, it was outrageous, wonderful and it was just… fucking great! Ever since then we have been inseparable.

Mattia is my best friend, my lover and he’s a friend to my
kids. I wouldn’t just call him a step-dad. He’s my partner in crime and he manages some of my work for me too, a little bit of everything. Things are completely different now: Mattia won’t have me out doing any old job but makes sure that it works for me as much creatively as it does in the business sense. I’ve found myself turning down things that, without thinking, I might have accepted before – Mattia makes me consider what I’m doing even if it’s loads of money. He’s never pushy, but he guides me in the right direction and it’s worked out much better than I could ever have dreamed. Whether I’m working around the corner or on the other side of the planet he’s more often than not with me and I feel safer for it. He always has his hand out – but to hold mine, not just to grab the cash.

My career began to pick up.
The Mole
had won a huge audience and its success and my honesty on screen hadn’t gone unnoticed in the US, where reality TV was booming. Among the many offers I received was VH1’s
Surreal Life
, which had built a big fan-base and was looking forward to its third series. The show was a little bit like a grander version of
Celebrity Big Brother
. Eight celebrities were picked to live in a luxurious house with a well-stocked bar in the Hollywood Hills. There was the usual assortment of challenges and activities to keep the participants busy but unlike
Big Brother
, there was no obligation to do anything. That sounded just perfect and it was a good excuse for getting back to LA: I might have left the city 20 years earlier but I still felt like we had a long-distance relationship and my love remained. The financial rewards were also attractive as I needed to make up for everything I’d given up in the divorce.

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.

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.