who sold scrap metal to the Nazis.
Her TV show was all about her eating what she wanted—half of what she wanted—and staying skinny. Wicked self-denial. She’d cook (or pretend to cook) small portions of exquisite food while the audience watched, and then she’d eat half of it. Very, very slowly. High-end portion control.
Off camera she drank like crazy, so she had to go on these awful fasts and cleanses. Sometimes drugs killed her appetite, which helped. When she did eat, her routine (or so she told the magazines) was to fast all day, then eat half of whatever she cooked. Then a glass of lemon water at bedtime. She left out the marshmallow peanuts in bed, then the puke. She left out the eat, puke, repeat.
So what was the low point? The night she sent me, in a cab, to deepest Brownsville because someone told her a dealer there had the best coke in the city. Why couldn’t she pay him to make a house call? Maybe part of the fun was having me step over passed-out crackheads. Or maybe it was when she made me call Jimmy Choo and ask them to deliver their entire fall line in sizes 9, 9?, and 10. When they asked where to send the invoice, Frieda—listening in on the landline—started screaming. Didn’t they know who she was?
I knew who she was. I knew how much of her story was true.
I found a letter from Princeton saying they couldn’t find the baroness in their alumni records, but being a Princeton graduate stayed part of her story. She could hardly spell! What did she learn at Princeton?
One afternoon she made me come with her and her kids, Angus and Marlene, to a celebrity’s kid’s super-crunchy birthday party in Tribeca. All around the loft were trestle tables groaning with nutritious nut-free snacks, raw vegetables, candy for those lucky kids whose moms allowed it.
A bouncy castle had been blown up in the great room, and the Baroness Frieda’s kids were flopping around, unaware that Mom had gone out for a smoke and not returned. It was my job to smile and stay chill as the other moms jumped ship, my job to reassure the hostess until Frieda finally answered my texts and left the young man she’d been chatting with at the bar on the corner.
On the sidewalk outside the birthday boy’s high-rise, she screamed at me. She made me go back upstairs to get the swag bags that her children had left behind. Angus and Marlene were sobbing! Those poor kids were right to fear and distrust her—she had cameras and monitors and nanny cams all over the apartment.
She fired me when scandal finally drove the stake through the vampire corpse of her name-only marriage to the gay Norwegian baron. You couldn’t go to the supermarket without seeing fuzzy shots of her in St. Barts, belly to belly with the hunky personal trainer. As the phone calls flew between New York and Oslo, the baroness—while talking to the Norwegian queen mother—mouthed the words “Handle this, Ruth! Make it go the fuck away!”
My mistake was asking her what I should say. She shouted, “That’s what I pay you to know!”
After that, she was pure meanness. She accused me of being a fraud, of lying about my past. In fact I’m the most truthful person ever. She was talking about herself.
I don’t know why I kept quiet. Maybe I hoped for a reference, which she refused to write. She swore that if I ever disclosed any personal information about her or tried to sell an unauthorized photo, she would personally make sure I never worked in this town—this universe—again. It wasn’t until I met Rocco that I could begin to hold up my head and quit apologizing to everyone I bumped into on the sidewalk.
If I still have credit issues, I can thank the baroness, who was always forgetting her purse and borrowing my card. At first she was careful to pay me back. But she started forgetting that I’d paid the terrifying bill at the restaurant or at the clothing store that refused to comp her, no matter what level tantrum she threw.
By the time I canceled my card, she’d run up $6,000 of debt. She accused me of piling up the charges myself. She said, “Call my lawyer if you’re confused.”
Rocco and I had been dating for a while before I told him. I must have trusted him. You are always taking a risk with a