Free You Only Get One Life by Brigitte Nielsen Page A

the coup, he said dismissively. His only concern was that I should have tried harder to get a message through to them. The fucking phone lines were down! I thought, but he just didn’t get it. What could I do? I got back to work.
    We worked from early morning until 11.30am when the light became too strong and we broke until 4pm: you’d get the best light and finish around 7pm. In the last couple of days of the shoot I became sick – probably as a result of the conditions I’d been held in at the airport. Despite that I still think some of the photos were pretty good. There was one of me draped over a palm tree, the curve of its trunk contrasting with the arch of my body; you wouldn’t know what I’d been through. I look back at that and admire the resilience I had when I was young, or at least how well I was able to disguise the fact that I was about to drop with exhaustion… My fever hit 42 degrees before I was totally laid out.
    I wasn’t recovered by the time we were due to fly back, but the Seychelles government had just declared that you couldn’t travel if you were ill. I had to pretend to be a hundred per cent healthy in the little orange shorts and T-shirt that were the only clothes I’d brought with me. I shivered my way through customs and did my best not to vomit, with the photoshoot crew all the while hissing at me to stand up straight and look relaxed.
    I made it onto the plane which was to go to Frankfurt, where we would change for Milan. It was winter inGermany. Snow fell and nobody offered to help me when we disembarked to board the transfer bus. I shivered uncontrollably waiting for everyone to get on for the short ride. The photographer looked at me contemptuously. ‘You stupid little girl,’ he said. ‘You knew how cold it would be here. Why didn’t you wear something else?’ I cried, silently. I didn’t say anything to him but I promised myself I’d never go back to the Seychelles – and I never have.
    Mum and Dad were waiting for me in Milan. There they were, smiling faces at last! The American Counsel had managed to make contact and the media back home had reported, ‘The Danish hostage has been reported to be okay,’ which was when they knew. My then boyfriend, Luca, was also there to meet me. We celebrated, but I got back to work all too quickly. If something like that happened now I am sure I would be in post-traumatic stress counselling straight away. Who knows, I might not have gone on to develop my problem with noise. I did get over it for a while and it’s only as I get older that I find it’s come back. Perhaps I think about things more these days.
    The modelling agency were happy to see me back, at least superficially. As far as they were concerned I had survived so now I could get on with my job. They never really asked me what had happened; that was the modelling world all over. You’re back! You’re still gorgeous! So now get with the programme… it’s a new day today, baby!

CHAPTER 8
LIFE AT THE TOP
    M y success as a model never fulfilled me, though I grew up fast, got to see some amazing places and became friends with famous people. I’d done more than most girls had by their late teens and I had all the things I’d never been able to afford when I was growing up, but I was beginning to discover that it didn’t compensate for feeling the emptiness of the business I was in. Instead, it actually made it seem worse.
    I wasn’t lonely, there were always people around me, but I was still as solitary as I had been as a child; I couldn’t seem to learn how to reconcile those two parts of me. And that’s because I loved the lifestyle in many ways – I do love having nice things around me, I liked all the trappings and the glamour of being known wherever I went. When I finished a shoot one day, went out to a club and sat next to Robert De Niro it wasn’t an unusual evening. I loved to flirt and to dance and I hardly ever drank. Drugs were never my thing– I tried