Leonie Frieda: I should have died from the overdose that put me in a coma but it wasn't my time to go

Bestselling author Leonie Frieda was pictured this week curtsying to her friend Prince Michael of Kent, but the high life for her once meant serious drug addiction
p35 Leonie Frieda, Swedish former model & now writer⬦. Pic: Alex Lentati p34
Alex Lentati
Richard Godwin23 November 2012

If there were a Michelin Star for rudeness!” calls a posh voice from the stairs. Leonie Frieda, the Swedish-born historian, consort of aristocrats and recovered cocaine addict has kept me waiting for all of 10 minutes at her flat in Belgravia. “Oh here you are!”

The lady of the house enters, her gaunt shoulders jutting from a white dressing gown, her hair in curlers. “I’m so sorry, I was just having my hairpiece taken out,” she says. “Do you want to come up?”

It was really not so bad, nosing at photos of minor royals and tennis players in her living room, but I dutifully follow her into her bathroom, where her hairdresser is steadily removing curls from her head. “Let’s get you a chair, we can’t let you sit on the bog seat!”

Frieda, 58, had worn the hairpiece the night before for the launch party of her entertaining history of the Medici women, The Deadly Sisterhood, the follow-up to her biography of Catherine de Medici. She had made that day’s Evening Standard, curtsying low to Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, her great friends. “What an honour that was. And how nasty that people have to trivialise it and make it cheap,” she says.

But if her guests suggest a life that has soared high, it has also scraped low. The daughter of Swedish aristocrats, Frieda married a “ridiculously rich“ Palestinian-Lebanese millionaire as a troubled 20-year-old and became a junkie at 24. “I was a target for people who were doing a lot of stuff — and I was so innocent, having been an anorexic,” she explains.

She went on to marry the love of her life, the successful music producer Nigel Frieda (brother of hairdresser John Frieda) at 30 and had two children: Elizabeth, now 23, and Jake, 21. At what seemed like a peak of happiness, she developed a cocaine habit — injecting the drug with Botox needles — and ended up in a coma.

Frieda has now been clean since 1999. She published the first Medici book in 2004 — around the time she was dating fellow historian Andrew Roberts — and is now in a relationship with Sir David Davis, a twice-divorced banking millionaire. But the scars are still there: her arms are a mess and she is soon complaining of the hepatitis she contracted in the Eighties.

As her hairdresser fashions her hair into a Thatcher-style swirl, Frieda pings around her life story like a pinball. She has that upper-class habit of assuming you know everyone she does, but even if you can’t follow, it is entertaining.

“My great friend Robin Birley once said: ‘Do you believe anyone who says they don’t eat their own bogeys?’… Did you know Pushkin was black?… Do you know the first lady of Iceland? … Do you remember Stingray?”

One minute she is casually telling you how she used to fiddle with Andrew Roberts’s Wikipedia page to annoy him (changing his address from Belgravia to Belgrade). The next, she is recalling Nigel Frieda’s recording studio, where the reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry would roll the “most enormous stogies I’ve ever seen. And then he’d do these massive U-boats.”

YOU have to be decisive in telling her when you don’t know what she’s talking about. U-boats? “Turds, dear. They needed to be hacked into bits. Oh, we had such fun in those studios!”

Just as casually, however, she will disclose how, during her first marriage, she would drive out of Monte Carlo at 100mph, shutting her eyes, playing Russian roulette with her life. “I wanted to see whether I would live or not.”

I wonder if the chaos is simply deflection. How did she end up marrying her first husband? “Well, I got anorexia in 1972 playing tennis with Sue Barker. I whipped her arse. She never bent her knees! Swedish players always bend their knees. Oh you are sweet putting up with all this.”

It looks as if Frieda has turned a corner. She has been with Sir David for seven years and is a bestselling author — she says her beautiful (if mildly dilapidated) Regency residence was bought with the proceeds from her journalism and Medici book.

And yet she still claims the past seven years have been among the hardest. Her apartment has heaped misery on her. “We lost the roof, three times,” she says — which sounds like carelessness — and has had lengthy legal problems with her builders. Her father died two-and-a-half years ago, leaving her feeling like an orphan, she says. “However old you are, you’re just never ready for it. It was only six months ago that I felt ready to go out again.”

Her ex-husband Nigel had also suffered the loss of his new wife, who committed suicide. “That was one of the saddest days of my life. I mean, I still love him so much.” Meanwhile, Sir David was going through a messy divorce from his second wife — “extremely painful to watch”.

There have also been health problems. Frieda contracted hepatitis C during her first phase of addiction in the mid-Eighties.

She has since seen “so many” friends suffer from drugs, including the German aristocrat Gottfried von Bismarck, whose dead body she discovered in 2007.

She was also struck with gangrene while working on The Deadly Sisterhood — a small lesion on her cheek became infected and she had to have three operations after it spread to her jaw. “My immune system is gone — it’s a bit like having Aids, really,” she says. She is at least hopeful that she will be cured of hepatitis C soon.

The darkest reckoning has been her children. Have they forgiven her chaotic parenting?

“Interestingly, they forgave me at the time. But I always said they were too young to forgive me then.” (Nigel Frieda initially sought sole custody of them, but they wanted to be with her.) “I remember feeling such heartache about my children. Jake walked in while I was chopping out a line of coke and I shouted: ‘JAKE FRIEDA HOW DARE YOU!’ The poor little boy jumped out of his skin.”

That haunted her. “For some reason photographs are your obsession when you are using drugs. I guess it’s because everything’s so fake in your life. You surround yourself with photographs of people you love, as if you were all there together but however stoned you get you can’t stop hating yourself for being such a coward.

“In these past few years there have been times when I didn’t care whether my heart carried on or not. A friend of mine told me that the very thing you reject, you will be given back in spades. For me, life has come back. Now, I am being tortured a million times for being a coward.”

Despite this, her relationships have improved. Elizabeth now works at the private members club Grace (and turned down a role in Made in Chelsea), while Jake is a chef at Trullo in Islington. He phones during the interview and their exchange is sweet.

She still regrets divorcing Nigel in 1997, however. “If I faced up to the issues at the time they happened we would never have got divorced. If I had one thing to say to anybody, it would be to fight for your marriage. If someone does you a wrong, try to find a solution. At my age now, I can begin forgiving. I don’t do H-A-T-E… I can barely say it.”

Did writing the book help her find a way through the chaos? “No. Having finished it has.” She does concede that she feels great kinship with her subjects. “What do the eight women in my book have in common? They all have to survive.” She sets great significance that the date she came out of her coma in 1999 was August 24 — the same day Catherine de Medici organised the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

“I should have died from the overdose that put me in a coma. But I think it wasn’t my time to go.” Now she says, having tried “every religion”, she has found a path that does not belong to any particular faith. “To be connected to you, and to the trees, and to the world. Oh it sounds so hippy, and I don’t mean it to. I have spent my life looking for God and I hadn’t realised he is everywhere and in everything.” She looks at me imploringly. “I suppose this wisdom is not so original, it’s just now, it all seems to be happening. I don’t think you know what a feeling is when you’re 20. You just know happiness and sadness — the grey is not something you understand.”

Does she dare hope for peace, at last? “I’m still alive, and learning every day, and realising how little I know. I’m so grateful to be able to… keep learning. And just be nice to people, it’s all you have to do. Why not? It’s so easy!”

Dangerous Women: A Story of Women, Power and Intrigue in the Italian Renaissance (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) is out now.

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