You're going to die, so you might as well live

Danniella Westbrook's disfigured nose is being held up as a warning to cocaine users. But Julie Burchill, who has 'put enough up her nostrils to stun the entire Colombian armed forces', has no regrets about her powder-fuelled years. Here she explains the drug's powerful allure
Drugs in Britain: special report

Tuesday June 6, 2000
The Guardian

In an episode of the Simpsons, Homer - trying to express his delight at a particularly tasty meal - once put it thus: "It's like there's a party in my mouth, and everyone's invited!" Looking at the recent newspaper photographs of Danniella Westbrook's face, you could be forgiven for thinking that the poor kid had had a riot in her nose, and everyone turned up in their steel-capped DMs.

I must admit that my first reaction had a tinge of, if not admiration, then awe, about it. How can you do that much coke in five years? She's only 26, for the love of Mike! It took Stevie Nicks well into her 40s to see that much active service. Danniella was reportedly spending £300 a day on the stuff - that's six grammes! Any drug-taker, no matter how reformed, cannot help but gasp at the sheer physical stamina and determination demonstrated by such a young person.

One's next reaction has to be a healthy twinge of scepticism. Westbrook just happens to have broken her nose two years ago in a car crash, had reconstructive surgery - and here she is with part of it missing. As a cursory glimpse at Michael Jackson will confirm, the butchery of plastic surgeons has ruined more noses in a year than cocaine could in a lifetime.

To hold Westbrook up as an example of what will invariably happen to a moderate recreational user of cocaine - or any drug - is as silly, deceitful and alarmist as pointing to a homeless dipsomaniac lying in a pool of his own vomit - don't point at me like that, you! - and claiming that that's where a couple of pre-dinner Camparis will inevitably get you, given time. Still, even if we are to believe what we read - at the height of her earning power, allegedly blowing £100,000 a year on the stuff - I just don't know how she did it. Between 1986 and 1996, I must have put enough toot up my admittedly sizeable snout to stun the entire Colombian armed forces, and still it sits there, Romanesque and proud, all too bloody solid actually, unmistakably my father's nose. (That was the only aspect of taking coke that ever used to freak me out; "Wooah! I'm putting coke up my father's nose!" I'd think around 3am.)

But unlike my wussy compadres, who used to get teary and bleary as the sun came up, I never found cocaine a problem; as one who suffered chronically from both shyness and a low boredom threshold, I simply can't imagine that I could have ever had any kind of social life without it, let alone have reigned as Queen of the Groucho Club for a good part of the 80s and 90s. I don't regret my years as a cokehead, and, in fact, look back on them with affection; a whole decade went by in a blur, like some crazy Aerosmith video. But gee, it was laffs.

There is a certain sort of milieu in which the people are so self-obsessed and yet deeply dull that if you don't do drugs, you'll end up wanting to kill yourself with the boredom of it all. Fashion is one such scene, and so was my branch - stylish, show-offy - of the print media. Let us not forget that cocaine is first and foremost an anaesthetic, and therefore particularly handy for medicating the tricky condition called human. But I still maintain that what you pay for with coke is what you don't get as much as what you do; you don't get the slavering addiction, bone-shivering debilitation and detox horrors of the other Class As, not if you sniff it. (Crack is another matter.) The main danger of powdered cocaine is its subtle, insinuating reliability; it becomes both the problem and the solution to a far greater degree than other, ruder drugs, which start acting up right after the honeymoon period.

I've been lucky enough to come out the other end of my Cocaine Nightmare with no greater damage to my health than a bit of RSI, from working twice as hard as I otherwise might have - hardly the worst way to spend your 20s and 30s, especially considering the amount of fun I was having at the same time. I don't take it now for the simple reason that for the first time in my life since I was 17 (and started ingesting huge quantities of bathtub sulphate) I am not surrounded by bores day and night; I have no need to make my life more interesting, more bearable to myself any more. But if I had spent 10 years smoking dope, I would have been robbed of my ambition, and if I had spent 10 years doing heroin, I would have robbed other people of everything. I still maintain that cocaine is the best fun you can have while being ripped off left, right and centre.

Anyway, Danniella's only young still, and she's got a rich boyfriend; without meaning to be callous, she can always have a new bit stuck on. There seems to be something rather illogical about making such a fuss about an actress being in need of a bit of facial reshaping when the likes of Elizabeth Hurley, say, are practically unrecognisable as the faces they had a decade ago, and have been richly rewarded for each new mutation. But Liz, of course, pumped up those lips and whittled down those hips in pursuit of her career, not her own pleasure. For a woman to risk her all-important looks in pursuit of her own pleasure, though, is a cardinal crime, female beauty existing only to aid and facilitate the pleasure of men as opposed to the woman herself. Hence Brigitte Bardot's sun-seeking, wine-drinking life has left her a mess, according to received wisdom - while the turnip-headed man-mountain that is Jack Nicholson is still sold to us as an attractive prospect. And, similarly, whereas the cocaine high-jinks of Ronnie Wood (who snorted so much that he could eventually see through his nose) and Francis Rossi (whose party trick involving a piece of string going up one nostril and come out of the other) are knowingly, twinklingly tut-tutted over as part of rock's rich tapestry, Danniella's nose must serve as a dreadful warning to all. Naughty old Ronnie, hell-raising old Ross! - tragic, troubled Danniella.

But consider. Though I have no desire to lose my nose, I will always believe that youth and beauty are, to a great extent, fuel to be burned in pursuit of pleasure rather than fruit to be preserved at all costs for a rainy day. When you're on your deathbed, it's the fun you didn't have that you'll think back on, not the perfect health and/or youthful beauty you maintained, because now you're going to die anyway. That's the bottom line; you're going to die, so you might as well live. And if your idea of living it up isn't altering your consciousness in some way - hey, I'm sure you're a great all-round human being, but don't ask me to any house parties, will you?

People will continue to take cocaine for the same reason they will continue to drink; not because we are intrinsically self-destructive beings, but, on the contrary, because we are, for the most part, logical beasts with sound judgment and a tendency to believe the evidence in front of our own eyes rather than the scare stories in a newspaper. We know that tobacco and alcohol kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that cocaine kills, on average, three. Three people.

For every Danniella Westbrook, there are a thousand recreational cocaine users living perfectly full and useful lives who consider a bit of sniffing and a few palpitations now and then a pretty low price to pay for a life less slow, less lumpen, less ordinary - a life more shiny.

Girl, interrupted

Ex-EastEnder Danniella Westbrook has been coked up, detoxed and rehabbed so often it's hard to keep up. Now she's keeping the famous nose clean for ever - and having it fixed to celebrate

Geraldine Bedell
Sunday May 5, 2002
The Observer

Even before we meet, I am seriously irritated by Danniella Westbrook. Half the press stories about her begin something like this: 'Danniella Westbrook looks fantastic in short shorts and a midriff-skimming top, lightly tanned by the Spanish sun. It is hard to believe that a few months ago she was wrecked by drugs and hell-bent on suicide.' (The Daily Express, 8 June 1995.) The other half are more like this (News of the World, 1998): ' EastEnders star Danniella Westbrook is leading a sickening double life - as a death-dealing drug baron's moll.'

It's hard to keep up. Clean or cokehead? Fresh out of rehab or spending £400 a day on drugs? She has agreed to be interviewed today because she is the subject of a Channel 4 documentary in which she claims... well, that she's come out of rehab, found love and is about to have her nose repaired. For four years, her nose has been a tabloid obsession. She is missing what everyone always describes as her septum, but she insists is actually her colonna.

For two of those years she continued in EastEnders. Cast and crew had to perform around the missing nose - avoiding, for example, filming from below. But in June 2000 she was snapped by a paparazzo leaving an awards ceremony and the missing septum/colonna was suddenly public knowledge. At the end of that year, in a television interview with Martin Bashir, she promised the resulting picture had shocked her into cleaning up. Six weeks later, on television again in The Priory, she appeared drawn, hyperactive and distracted.

The team behind the new Channel 4 film appear to have set out to follow her as she underwent surgery to repair her nose and prepared to marry her boyfriend of four years, Kevin Jenkins. The wedding, last December, made it into the film, but not the op. 'Yeah, it was supposed to be done in January, wasn't it?' Westbrook admits at the end of shooting. 'Now it's planned for the end of February.' To me she says: 'I've just finished seeing the surgeon, and I'm going to start the first part in two weeks' time.'

Westbrook says her motivation in making the documentary wasn't particularly to cover the operation - 'I wanted to do a piece about what it's like to live as an addict, about what I was like as a using addict and what I'm like now.' She says she's been clean since 15 March last year; and, certainly - at the risk of sounding like the Daily Express - her hair is glossy, and her cornflower-blue eyes are bright. You can't really see that part of her nose is missing without staring rudely (she has developed a slight Princess Di tilt, to avoid displaying it). And she is prettier than she seems in photographs because she's a chatterbox and likes a laugh, is self-deprecating and vivid.

She's not stupid, either, although recovery has given her a story which she has dutifully internalised in order to make enough sense of her life to move on. So you sometimes feel as though you're getting the authorised, therapy-speak version. 'I didn't come from a dysfunctional family. I made my family dysfunctional with the way I acted... I want people to understand that addiction is a disease that tells me that I haven't got anything wrong with me, when that's just not the case.'

But, though Daniella is smart, there remain inconsistencies. She talks at one point about how she now speaks to every member of her family every day. Her younger brother, she says, has forgiven her 'for what I done to him, though I can't forgive myself'. This is probably true, but not perhaps the complete story. 'I've hated her and detested her,' Jason says in the film. 'I've gone through every emotion, I think. I don't know whether I've got any left.'

Then there's the issue of how she got into detox. To me, talking about her dreadful appearance on The Priory , she says that by then she had already asked her mother to take care of her son. 'I'd given Kai to my mum before that. I told her, "I'm really not well and I need to go on this home detox." ' But her manager, Cheryl Barrymore, claims that following the appearance on The Priory , 'she overdosed in my house. Kai kept kissing the top of her head. She turned blue and her feet turned purple. I actually thought she was dying.'

Barrymore says she put Westbrook into a car, took her to a flat and organised a two-week home detox. But Danniella tells me: 'I just couldn't cope any more and I went to my doctor and he said, "Look, I'll give you two weeks to live if you carry on using coke. But you can start today and do a home detox programme. I'll come to your house this evening with the medication." And that's what he did.'

None of this is exactly contradictory: she collapsed, saw a doctor and started a home detox. But it doesn't quite fit together either. Of course, a lot of the time, Danniella was probably too far out of it to know precisely what was going on. But I think there's another reason for the inconsistencies. As a pretty, young, drug-addicted soap star, Danniella Westbrook has always been a tabloid story. And in that smoke and mirrors world, the nature of the story didn't matter, so long as it was a new angle and had superficial coherence. She's clean, she's not clean - who cares? All that cynical journalists really want, she has learnt, is something that hangs together.

She said in the documentary, and it was also reported in the press, that when she gets her nose fixed, she's going to take the opportunity to get her breasts enlarged. To me, she confirms that she's intending to have her implants changed 'because I've got a lot of pain with this - it's soya oil, and they can't screen for breast cancer; they can't see behind the bag. But no, I'm not having great big knockers. They're going to be exactly the same.'

In spite of this, though, I find I want to believe in this recovery. There may be superficial flaws, but Danniella's story has an underlying emotional coherence. She is, I think, genuinely besotted with her husband Kevin, a self-made millionaire who owns the courier service Premier Despatch and appears to have stood by her with great stoicism. She clearly adores her kids. And she is disarmingly emotionally articulate.

Westbrook was born in Walthamstow 28 years ago, and grew up in Loughton. Her father was a cab driver, later a carpet contractor; her mother worked in a shop. 'I came from a very loving family - you know, 2.4 children with a Volvo - and I was very horsey. I used to ride every weekend. But I always wanted to be famous. My mum and dad thought I'd grow out of it, but I didn't.' She went to Sylvia Young Theatre School on Saturdays from the age of eight and, when she was 12, her parents agreed that she could attend full time.

She had her first line of coke at 14, in a nightclub. 'I always thought drugs'd kill you; I had this image in my brain that it was only pimps and prostitutes. And I was out somewhere, and I took it, like someone would take their first cigarette. I think in the beginning it made me more confident, and then it got to the point where I thought I couldn't go out clubbing or whatever without it. And then towards the middle and end of my using it was the loneliest thing I've ever had in my life, paying to be in pain, to sit on my own in a room and be paranoid.'

Shortly before her sixteenth birthday, Danniella was cast as Sam Mitchell in EastEnders . 'From then it was all fast cars, flash clothes, flash blokes, lovely flat - I had a popstar boyfriend [Brian Harvey of East 17] and it was all good for a short while. But I was always in clubs and everyone was doing coke and it was glamorous - except obviously, it wasn't at all. I was just very young, very stupid and very easily led. The original dumb blonde.' She laughs. 'Well, it's true, isn't it?'

Being in recovery is all about taking responsibility for your own addiction; so it's significant that she goes as far as she does: 'I think there should be someone at EastEnders to say to young people when they come in, "Look, your life is about to change, you're going to be invited to things, and you'll be offered drugs." Someone who can tell them what sort of people are about, and what sort of papers, and how quickly what you've worked for all those years can be gone.'

By the age of 21, she was spending £400 a day on cocaine. 'But a lot of that, I was so paranoid, I'd put it down the toilet. I thought the police were going to come to my door.' At the worst time, she remembers sitting in a room alone and thinking that she'd already seen Richard and Judy that morning, only to realise that she'd been there for 24 hours. In 1994 she attempted suicide. Her relationship with Brian Harvey fell apart. In 1996 she gave birth to Kai, her son by Robert Fernandez, later the subject of a News of the World sting for dealing drugs.

In 1998 she married Ben Morgan, a van driver, eight weeks after she'd met him at a petrol station. 'It was a really bad thing and to me it's really embarrassing,' she says now. 'I knew he was the wrong person, I knew I didn't want to marry him, but I was so anxious for Kai, and desperate to get away from the people I was mixing with.' They tried to start afresh in Australia but it didn't work out. Ben and his mother subsequently sold their story to the News of the World, where it appeared under the headline 'Danniella pawns hoover to buy cocaine'.

She took coke throughout her pregnancy with Kai, and for the first two and a half months that she was expecting Jodie, who will be a year old in September. 'When you're an addict you're an addict.' She shrugs. 'I've just been really lucky that they're both fine.' Perhaps there is only so much pain one can bear to parade in public.

It was, she says, the prospect of losing her children that finally made her clean up; if it had been threatened sooner, it might have been a good thing: 'If I'd had a nine-to-five job, I know I wouldn't have kept my son. Somebody would have stepped in sooner. He was never in danger. But for me, personally, it would have been the only thing that would have broken me.'

After the home detox, she spent four weeks in a clinic in Tucson, Arizona, and six weeks as an outpatient in Florida. Kevin, a recovering alcoholic, stuck by her throughout. The couple have recently bought a West End restaurant, named it after their daughter, and plan that it will open on her birthday in September. 'I know that if I even pick up a phone to a dealer, that's it. I haven't got a relapse left in me. And I just look at what I've done this year. I've been a proper mum to my kids, I'm awake with them in the morning. We make cakes and we play in the garden and we ride bikes. I love being a mum. And the only thing that makes me different from any other mum is my nose.'

The proposed operation will entail the insertion of a latex bag into Danniella's forehead. 'They'll fill it with water twice a week for a few weeks and it sort of comes out, but only slightly, because I said I didn't want to look like a Klingon.' A pocket of flesh forms around it, 'and then they go in from the scalp and use the spare flesh to rebuild the lining. It's the only way they can do it without giving me a great big scar, taking a flap from somewhere on my face.' Once the repair has settled, the last phase of surgery resculpts the nostrils.

Another actress now plays Sam in EastEnders, but Danniella is hoping to return to acting. She says she was offered possible parts in the next series of Footballers' Wives and Bad Girls, but she'll still be in the middle of her nose job when they start filming. 'I do sometimes worry about life being boring,' she says. 'I get up and I think, "Shall I go shopping in Bluewater again today?" - so I go out and play with the dogs. And then I think, "I'm a bit bored; shall I go and have lunch somewhere?" '

Clearly, she could do with some work. But if she had returned to EastEnders, 'I would have been doing it to be famous, and I realise that's part of my addiction.' Once the documentary has appeared, she intends not to talk about cocaine any more. 'I wanted to do this to shut the door on everything. It's my way of finishing with it. And I'm going to get my nose done, because I hate it so much, and it's going to stay like that for ever.' I sincerely hope that every single bit of this is true.

Danniella Westbrook will be broadcast on 22 May on Channel 4

Danniella Westbrook could be heading back to EastEnders.

Danniella, who played Sam Mitchell in the soap, was replaced by Kim Medcalf in the soap.

Danniella left the soap in 2000 after admitting she had a cocaine addiction - she is now drug free after rehab.

Kim is leaving the soap in December leaving the door open for Danniella to return reports The Sun.

A source said: "Now Danniella is looking so great it would make sense for her to go back once kim leaves."