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RICHARD EDEN: Fashion designer to the stars Bella Freud lifts the lid on early love affair with Roman prince 36 years her senior
RICHARD EDEN: Her life has never been hemmed in by convention - a consequence, perhaps, of being born just three months before two of her sisters who had different mothers from her own.
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. 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. 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?
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