You Only Get One Life (25 page)

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…

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 myself.

‘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.

Desperately, I called him all the names under the sun and screamed, ‘Let me fucking drink! You can’t stop me. I’m going to fucking drink and if you can’t fucking handle it, why don’t you just fuck off?’ Inside, of course, I didn’t want him to go – I wanted him to save me – and that’s what he
did. He got me to admit that I was about to throw everything away.

In my head I never thought of drinking as being so damaging; I had always thought of it as something I did rather than something I was. An actual alcoholic, I believed, was someone else. They were smelly, shaky, forgetful and they would throw up after their sessions, but now I realised that I
was
an alcoholic. That was me. And Mattia had the right to call me that. This was my last chance.

When he went out to the shops I thought to myself,
This is it – it’s now or never
. I turned on the computer and nervously opened up a browser window. I got to a search engine and as I began to cry, I typed in ‘rehab’ and ‘Los Angeles’, then I gazed at the results and decided on one because of its name. I’m not going to say what the name of the place was because it’s important to preserve confidentiality in respect of other patients and their treatment, but it was the name that attracted me. That sounds so banal, but through my tears and my feelings of helplessness there seemed no better way of doing things.

Feeling alone and scared, I dialled the number as I panicked about what sort of thing you should say in this kind of situation: ‘Hello, my name is Gitte and I’m an alcoholic’. No – stupid. Perhaps I should make up a name. I couldn’t deal with it so I hung up and went straight out of the house to the nearest shop and bought the first bottle of vodka I could find – I didn’t care what kind or how much it was. I finished half the bottle before going back to the phone and dialling the number again as the vodka hit my system and I began to feel a little lighter and safer.

‘Hello. Who am I speaking with and how can I help you?’ The voice was female, friendly but steady. Oh God, so I did have to say who I was. I’ll hang up – it’ll get into the press. I can’t do it. The receiver stayed pressed against my ear.

‘It’s Brigitte,’ I whispered. ‘I drink too much.’ I sounded incoherent through my tears.

‘Sorry, Brigitte?’ she asked. ‘Is that your full name?’

‘No. It’s Brigitte Nielsen.’

‘Okay. I can hear you’re very, very sad. How do you feel?’ Now I really started crying – it was as if someone had just that moment hit me hard. It was a release and my defences collapsed. ‘Calm down, Brigitte, it’s okay. Take your time… do you live with anyone?’

‘My boyfriend.’

‘Great! That’s really good. You’re happy together?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but he hates the fact that I drink.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s why you called the right people. I’m glad you did. Pack a bag right now and tomorrow morning you are going to drive here with your boyfriend and check-in.’ The decision had been made and although I felt a spasm of terror at what might happen next, it did seem as if it might be all right. As I continued crying she went on, ‘So you think you drink too much. Do you think you are an alcoholic?’ Her voice never sounded any less friendly.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I have become an alcoholic.’

‘You
think
that’s what you’ve become?’ She continued in a measured tone which gave me time to recover my composure, ‘Don’t be afraid and most of all, don’t be embarrassed – there are so many people like you with us and even more out there who haven’t yet called us. We
won’t do anything difficult tomorrow: we’ll have a chat with you and your boyfriend and just find out how we might be able to help you.’ I wasn’t made to feel guilty or sneaky and worthless: I was just another person who needed help.

Mattia and I were both in tears as we set off for the clinic – I was anxious about going, while he was happy that I was finally doing something about my condition. This was the last bit of the baggage I had been carrying from my marriage to Raoul.

The woman who spoke to me on the phone greeted us, we signed off on some paperwork and that was it – I was in that Friday. I wasn’t allowed any outside contact for the first two weeks of my stay. It felt as if I had been sent to prison – and that wasn’t so far from the truth. My random choice of rehab wasn’t one of the fancy clinics with relaxed, spa-like regimes, good views and discreet staff to wait on you. It was more commonly used as the place of last resort for women who would otherwise be in a real prison. Often they were there for anything from six to 18 months – it was meant for those with heavy duty problems.

The reception area had been a welcoming area like a private hospital with flowers and comfortable seating. Then I was led away on my own through what was probably part of the residential area to a serious-looking set of doors which locked shut behind us. Through those doors the building looked somewhere between a medical facility and a secure institution. Was this really the right place for me? Perhaps they’d misunderstood me – I was a drinker, not a murderer! But while glamorous rehabs might have been
more luxurious, they also had a far higher rate of clients going back to their addiction. I later found out that I had picked the strictest centre in all of California and it had the greatest success in getting people off drugs.

The first five days were incredibly hard. To begin with I was happy: I wanted to get myself free of alcohol with every fibre of my body. They gave me Valium to relax and the toxins began to be released; they told me not to try and keep to a routine for the next couple of days but just to let myself go with the process. Meanwhile, they looked after me and kept a constant medical check on how my organs were functioning. I was encouraged to eat as much as I could to build up my strength for the treatments which lay ahead, all of which sounded rather ominous.

I wasn’t in too bad shape. My body hadn’t been as poisoned as it might have been and I didn’t suffer any physical withdrawal effects: the effect on me was all psychological. Around me was the constant screaming of the narcos, the girls who were coming off heroin and other hardcore drugs. It was a section of society which I’d never encountered before and frequently very frightening. However bad things were for me I knew that I was still lucky not to be like them.

I should say that in writing this I don’t want to scare anyone off from going into rehab: I didn’t know how tough the regime was going to be and later I got some respectful nods from top doctors when they found out that I had done so voluntarily. Reading about it may seem daunting, but if you’re suffering from addiction I can promise you their programme is nothing worse than where you are coming
from. There’s nothing to be afraid of, but I do want to give an idea of what it was like in there.