You Only Get One Life (21 page)

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.

I
n 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 days 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.'

‘Whaddya mean?' I muttered nonsense, thinking that whatever he had to tell me couldn't possibly be what he seemed to have said. Everything started to move quickly. I yelled and screamed in reaction to the shock. Somehow, I found myself in the passenger seat of the car, then I was weeping and perhaps I felt I could somehow shake the news
out of my head, but I was banging my head again and again on the dashboard. I knew it was true.

The man had been my rock: he had supported me and guided me through every decision I'd ever made about my life; played badminton with me as a child and always counted the number of times we could volley the shuttlecock over the net – the record was 143, I remembered that. The strictness of his rules was more than matched by the deep and profound love he had for his children.

It had freaked me out when I was young and he told me, ‘Gitte, you don't need to worry about anything.' We had never discussed my unhappiness about school but I'm sure that's what he meant. ‘You're not from here.'

‘What do you mean, Dad?' I asked. He surprised me so much my eyes were wide.

‘You're from far away, from up in the skies, from a different planet.' Now this was bizarre. ‘You're completely your own, you're very special,
Gitte-mus
,' he said, the Danish for ‘little Gitte-mouse'. With that he gave me a big hug. He knew in some way that I was not like everyone else and he wanted me to celebrate that. I never forgot his imaginative and encouraging vision. He worked tirelessly to provide everything for his family.

Saturdays as a child had meant that me and my brother would go to the store where I could indulge my love for liquorice. Dad liked his sugar-free peppermint gum and would buy a brand of salty liquorice called Piratos which he left on the table, open, telling us that they were his and we couldn't have them. He knew, of course, that my brother and I would never resist taking some while trying to make
it look as if the packet was undisturbed, but that was okay, he only meant to tease us.

And my mother… my God, they had been together 36 years! The thought pulled me back into myself and the car. Mum had tried to get hold of me in Spain without success and had called Raoul. She told him it was urgent and that she had to get hold of me immediately. I felt myself becoming hysterical. If we hadn't have been driving already I'd have got out of the car at once. I couldn't breathe properly. Again I banged my head repeatedly on the dashboard. There was no way I would be able to do the show. ‘I want to go to Denmark now!' I was screaming again but the contract with the television company was watertight.

The producers had told us that the show, as they say, must go on. They had to fix my make-up. My tears had smudged my mascara and my eyes were red and puffy. I remember nothing about the show itself apart from it finishing about half past midnight but I'll never forget the aching sense of loss. We still had to get back.

It was 650 kilometres from Rome to Lugano and I had done the journey countless times. I knew it meant going 18 hours without much in the way of rest. Now that familiar trip and the passing hours became unbearable. I spent the entire ride on the phone to my mother, crying and talking, talking and crying.

Back at the villa, despite my lack of sleep I paced around worrying about how I was going to tell the boys that their grandfather was dead. I had to get some rest and lay down on the sofa in the living room but I couldn't shut my mind off. There was another programme to do that night, a dance
show, and I had a contract for 16 episodes. I'd be interviewing the dancers between numbers, but it had to be light and funny. The contract with this one meant that it too couldn't be cancelled so I was to record my part and then fly straight on to Denmark the following morning to be at my mother's side for the funeral.

After the service at the church my father was laid to rest in a beautiful part of the grounds. I wandered around aimlessly, trying to remember the names of those family members I hadn't seen in years. My brother Jan looked like he had been crying as much as I had and my brave, strong mother looked unbelievable. Dad had been her first boyfriend – she was 16, he was 18. Now she was organising the food for everyone back at the house they had shared. I held onto her and cried. I didn't want to tell her that I couldn't stay, that I had to fly back first thing the next morning for yet another show.

I flew back with an unfamiliar feeling beginning to lodge itself in my heart. It was hatred: I hated my life. I hated myself even more for not being able to break out of my situation and my addiction to alcohol. Even with my father's death I wasn't able to get up and walk away.

I began to see things very clearly. I knew there was something terribly wrong and I knew that I was too weak to do anything about it. When I looked at myself in the mirror I was overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. I was totally paralysed, nobody could help me. I began to feel that there might only be one way out. I imagined what it would be like to be at peace, no longer to have to endure the pain of daily life. These thoughts came to me with
increasing regularity – and after a while they would be there even when I wasn't drinking.