From: timesonline.co.uk
Survivor
She had it all: the superstar husband, the celebrity friends, the perfect life. Then it all went horribly wrong. But Sadie Frost is back in business – sober, single and looking better than ever
It’s wrong to make assumptions about people’s private lives. Given Sadie Frost’s penchant for younger men, though, it’s hard not to ask. Who, exactly, is the decorative youth I have just seen in the basement of her house, strumming a guitar next to the tortoise vivarium?
“Oh, you mean, the one who’s just got out of his pyjamas?” jokes Frost huskily, as I follow her pert little bottom upstairs. “Nah, that’s just Pete, an old mate of mine from New York who plays in a band called Paris Trading. But see, look at that: you made me feel all guilty and embarrassed, like I was a naughty schoolgirl hiding something from you.”
It’s Wednesday afternoon, and I have just pitched up at Frost’s gigantic, immaculately kept villa in Primrose Hill. As usual chez Frost, there are lots of people around, all busy doing things. Next to guitar-strumming Pete, in Frost’s glass-enclosed office, is Ania, her PA, sorting out schedules and timetables. “I’m obsessed with pin boards and diaries,” says Frost, 42, who today is dressed in tight little jeans and a tight little tank top. “Everyone in this house has a laminated list of what they’ve got to do, or else my head is all over the place.”
Up on the third floor, her two eldest children, Finlay (by Gary Kemp), 16, and Rafferty (by Jude Law), 10, are in “Raffy’s” room, glued to the PlayStation2 and eating takeaway pizza. Meanwhile, in the vast, sunlit living room, her best friend and business partner, Jemima French – a steely blonde in jeans and flip-flops – and two interior designers are discussing the new FrostFrench boutique, which is being launched in Camden Passage, N1, later this month.
After incurring debts of up to £900,000 and teetering on the brink of financial meltdown, the business, best known for its vanilla-scented panties, catwalk shows with pole-dancers and models such as Kate Moss, Liberty Ross and Helena Christensen, is back. The autumn/winter 2007 collection, a 165-piece range full of red mohair, Poppy Girl prints and velvet ruffles, is entitled In the Wings, a tribute to Frost’s passion for the trapeze.
“I also called it that because I’m interested in what dancers look like when they’re not being watched, when they’re limbering up before they go on stage, when they’re not picture perfect,” says Frost. “We’re all so obsessed with the perfect pout, the perfect this, the perfect that. I myself used to be a chronic perfectionist, used to like looking at beautiful women, beautiful men. But now when I look at beautiful men, for example, I don’t think they are beautiful at all. I think they look like self-indulgent gits who’ve worked out in the gym too much. Perfection, I’ve learnt, doesn’t bring happiness. Perfection is a curse.”
Perfection. If there was one thing Frost rather annoyingly appeared to know all about, way back at the beginning of the millennium, with her perfect husband, her perfect kids and perfect, edgy Primrose Hill life, that was it. And then, half a decade ago, it all imploded. It kicked off in 2002 with the crippling postnatal depression she suffered after the birth of her fourth child, Rudy, and was swiftly followed by having to rush her daughter, Iris, to hospital after she swallowed an ecstasy pill found on the floor of Soho House. Then, as you will know unless you were in a vegetative coma at the time, she was dumped by her husband, the actor Jude Law, for Sienna Miller, his co-star in Alfie. Two years later, in 2004, the story broke that they were engaged (news, so the Sadie‘n’Jude ballad goes, delivered to Frost via her son, Rafferty). Then came the bombshell that Law was having an affair with the kids’ nanny, Daisy Wright.
Suddenly, we weren’t jealous of Frost any more – we were sorry for her. We watched as her string of guitar-strumming toy boys got younger and younger, and as she was photographed falling out of a succession of clubs and dresses. What next, for the woman who had been done so wrong? Where, we pruriently wondered, would it all end?
“Yeah, well, a lot of stuff was exaggerated,” says Frost, in her tentative, glottal way. “But that was a really painful time, and I wasn’t really allowed to heal, with everyone watching. I think anyone would have reacted in a similar way. There was a point when all I wanted to do was hide, but then I said to myself, ‘Hang on, Sadie, you’ve been working since you were four [in a Jelly Tots commercial], you’ve got a business and a strong identity. Yes, that was your lovely life, and one day, you woke up and it wasn’t there any more,but you’re strong, you’re a survivor, you’ve got to reinvent yourself.’”
Frost is very loyal about her childhood, painting it as a chaotic but positive experience. Observers might see it a little differently. Sadie Liza Vaughan (her biological father was the psychedelic pop artist David Vaughan, who was once committed to a mental asylum after a bad LSD trip, and who, for a few years after, lived as a down-and-out) was born in 1965. Her mother, Mary, was only 16. A string of stepfathers followed (her parents clocked up six relationships and 10 children between them), one of whom, a devout follower of the Bhagwan cult, forbade Frost and her sisters to say the words“No” or “Sorry”. At one point, during Vaughan’s colour-therapy phase, he insisted that everybody in the house wear orange, and wouldn’t let them eat anything that was red. “He was probably quite a pioneer, what with E numbers and everything,” says Frost. “But when you’re a kid, bringing friends home with the pair of them swinging pendulums and plucking hairs out of people’s heads and not letting us eat tomatoes, that’s a hard thing to get your head round.”
Perhaps because of the disjointedness of her life, Frost and her four half-sisters were close – “cutting each other’s hair, all of us sleeping in the same bed together, it was like the north London version of Little House on the Prairie” – and she remembers “seeking love from a very early age”. “It’s funny, I see Finlay, who’s 16 and not particularly interested in all that stuff yet, and there I was, not much older, practically married to his father [Gary Kemp, whom she met in 1983 after being cast in a Spandau Ballet video] and wanting kids.”
“Men, being in love, being treated like a princess” – that has always, Frost admits, been “a huge force” in her life, adding that she has been passionately in love from the age of 16 until she split with Jackson Scott in 2005. In other words, being single – her status for more than a year now, save for a teensy bit of dating and a dalliance with the 23-year-old musician Kristian Marr – feels slightly unfamiliar. “God, of course I’d like to be in love again,” she says thoughtfully, squeezing her porcelain arms between her knees. “I miss it like mad. But the way it consumes you, the way you’ll just do anything for them, the pain of it – I just can’t have that in my life now. And not being controlled by a man for the first time in so long feels empowering.
In my opinion,” she continues, a little less tentative, “you cannot hold down a job, have four kids and be in the throes of a grand love affair at the same time. So when I’m lying in bed in the morning and thinking, ‘Oh God, I wish I was starring in, like, a French movie with some amazing man,’ I click my fingers and go, ‘Stupid. You can’t lie in bed eating croissants with your lover. You gotta get to work!’”
Aside from being single, the other big change in her life is that she has stopped, for the moment anyway, drinking alcohol. After all the hard-core partying, she has not touched a drop in more than 12 months – not because she wants to stop drinking, but because of what drink can lead to.
“This friend of mine Mairead [the DJ from Queens of Noize] came to live with me for a bit, and she didn’t drink, so I decided not to either,” Frost says. “Now when I see someone having a glass of white wine or rosé, which were always my drinks, I don’t crave it at all. Someone asked me if I wanted a party for my last birthday, and I couldn’t imagine anything worse – staying up late surrounded by people getting wasted. So instead, I had a nice girlie lunch with my friends Davinia Taylor and Rosemary Ferguson, then a trapeze lesson with Iris, followed by a tea party with birthday cake and proper egg sandwiches at home with the kids.”
Before I leave, I ask Frost to give me a tour of the house. She takes me through, past the shrine on the landing to her beloved father (with the last letter he wrote to her before he died of hepatitis C in 2004), past the children’s floor (the two youngest, Iris and Rudy, are currentlystaying with Law’s “amazing, hands-on” parents,Maggie and Peter), past Ringo, her groomed bichon frise, up to the photo gallery at the top of the stairs. There’s Law, Scott and Kate Moss’s baby, Lila (to whom Frost is godmother); there’s her mum, an extraordinarily glamorous woman, with a striking resemblance to Jean Shrimpton; and there’s Frost herself as a teenager, posing in front of a crucifix outside the Royal College of Art.
“My dad was always doing stuff like that,” she says, glossy head cocked to one side as she contemplates the black and white image.
“I look at him and see someone who never let go of anything, who never really enjoyed their life, and I have to keep remembering that I don’t want to be that person, ever.
“Part of me clings to my eccentric upbringing – all that hippie-dippiness feels familiar to me. But another part of me is a desperate overachiever, always pushing myself to do more, and falling into a panic when I’m suddenly by myself and haven’t got too much to do. Thekids are going away to my visit my mum in Shropshirenext week, and I’m slightly panicking at the thought. But you know what, it’s weird, I think I’m now at the age where I don’t have to beat myself up about it. I’ll have my trapeze; I’ve got the shop opening. Maybe I’ll let myself have a nice time.”
I love Russell Brand! She looks great in her jeans, very cool 
