Her life has never been hemmed in by convention – an inevitable consequence, perhaps, of being born just three months before two of her sisters who had different mothers from her own.
When her father, Lucian Freud, was asked how this had happened, he famously replied with a question of his own: ‘Don’t you realise I had a bicycle?’
Now 63, Bella Freud – the seventh of the artist’s 14 known offspring – has pedalled back into her past to give a tantalising glimpse of the man who taught her so much.
No, not her father, from whom her mother, Bernadine, separated when Bella and her sister Esther were toddlers, but an Italian she met when 21.
‘I fell madly in love with a man 36 years older than me,’ Bella recalls.
Bella Freud with her much-older lover, Dado Ruspoli, who she described as ‘incredibly nice: kind, noticing, loving, generous and funny’
Bella Freud, now 63, attends the National Portrait Gallery on March 19, 2024
‘He was a Roman prince, infamous for his decadent ways and legendary good looks and charm. I agree, it sounds awful.’
But her lover, Dado Ruspoli, was ‘incredibly nice: kind, noticing, loving, generous and funny,’ adds Bella, explaining that they met at a lunch party given by ‘genius art dealer Robert Fraser’ – an Old Etonian who’d been photographed handcuffed to Mick Jagger when arrested for possession of drugs in the 1960s.
‘We made some polite conversation during lunch and when I left I felt a little deflated at the lack of spark,’ recalls Bella.
Everything changed when she got home. ‘Robert called me to say Dado had asked for my number. I remember that moment was as though a volcano erupted in my heart. Six months later I had moved to Rome.’
Bella enrolled to study fashion. ‘Or to try to. Rome is one of those places where nothing happens. It is designed for pleasure: promenades, lunch in the Villa Borghese gardens, afternoon naps; dinner, always out.’
It was the life that the fabulously rich Ruspoli, by then twice married, had always known, whether at the family palazzo, with its 120-step staircase of antique marble, or at its castle 40 miles north of Rome, or at St Tropez or on Capri.
‘Haven’t you ever worked?’ he was once asked. ‘No,’ replied Ruspoli. ‘I’ve never had time.’
James Fox (left) and Bella Freud on March 3, 2015. The couple married in 2001 and separated in 2017, though remaining on good terms
He also observed: ‘I am a tree still full of fruit’ – and fathered his final child at 73.
That wasn’t with Bella, who in 2001 married White Mischief author, James Fox, from whom she separated in 2017, though remaining on good terms.
‘I learned a lot from Dado,’ she reflects, recalling how she wore clothes of his which no longer fitted him.
‘A yellow satin shirt, the perfect shade that might have been worn by a soigne Maître in a Paris nightclub. I wore that with a rust-coloured, satin, double-breasted jacket with huge lapels.’
Will she now write a book about her Roman romance, perhaps in the way that her sister Esther immortalised their extraordinary childhood in Hideous Kinky, later turned into a film starring Kate Winslet?
Friends have taken to social media pleading with her to do so, while one, Henrietta Channon, simply says: ‘More please’.
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