Let me tell you a secret. Justin Timberlake didn’t bring sexy back. I did.

Something came over me in the late summer of 1985. I went a little wild. My parents think I went wild when I left Geneva for Canada and then, almost immediately, for America. But I wasn’t in charge of those trips; my wannabe rockstar boyfriend Blaze made all the decisions. Which according to my funky logic makes him the one who went wild, even if he was already pretty wild to start with. I simply went along with his decisions. And while I resented him for some of the things he did and for some of the ways in which he behaved, over the years I’ve realized that I was more angry at myself for allowing him to behave towards me the way he did. Why had I been such a pushover? Why did it take me so long to decide that enough was enough?

It was when I returned to Geneva without him that I went a little wild. For the first time in my life, at the age of 23, I felt totally free. It was intoxicating, exhilarating, empowering. Where had I been all my life? Who was this flirtatious, sexy seductress? What should she do with all these gorgeous guys falling at her stiletto-clad, size 41 feet?

Excuse me while I deal with a nostalgic attack of eyelash arrythmia!

Now, allow me to back up a little. In the space of a few years, I’d had two polar opposite relationships. My first long-term boyfriend, a Bryan Ferry lookalike whom I met while I was still in high-school and with whom I lived for a while, expected me to do the washing and the ironing and the cooking and the cleaning, while he sat around watching TV. When I left him, I jumped straight into a turbulent relationship with Blaze (not his real name), the lead singer and songwriter of the most popular rock band of the Geneva area at that time. I wrote in more detail about how I pinballed from one extreme to the other in the first part of this series, From Trad Wife to Rock Chick.

While I was with Blaze, his erratic behaviour made me feel terribly insecure. He’d want to be with me, then no longer want to be with me, then he’d write me a love song, be all sweet for about five and a half minutes, and then he’d be a jerk again. I never knew where I stood, never knew when I’d see him, and how he’d behave towards me when I did see him. I did an awful lot of hanging around, waiting for him to call, or show up.

I suppose I was simply going through that “attraction to bad boys” phase that so many young women seem to go through. How can we be such gluttons for punishment? It’s strange, don’t you think? I’ve heard it so many times.

Anyway, I followed Blaze’s dream of becoming a superstar, initially flying with him to Montreal in the depths of the winter where we blew all our money on a flat, only for him to realize within a couple of weeks that Montreal wasn’t “the” place where he’d become famous. So we boarded a Greyhound bus and travelled to Santa-Cruz, California, arriving with twenty dollars between us, and the phone number of a woman called Shandy (not her real name) whom I didn’t know, but that Blaze had apparently met at a club in Geneva (read the account of my initial American adventure in The Adventures of a Rock Chick in America).

By August,1985, Blaze and I literally had no money. We had tourist visas and so couldn’t work legally in America, and the few odd jobs we’d managed to get weren’t exactly raking in the big bucks. And so far, unless we’d been out shopping for Alka-Seltzer when opportunity knocked, there was still no sign of a hotshot record producer in Miami Vice pastels banging on Shandy’s door, eager to deliver a lucrative recording contract to the cocky Swiss musician living with his girlfriend on the tiny mezzanine above the living room.

Something had to give.

Before going to America, I’d temped as a secretary in a law firm for several months and, as weird as it may sound, it had been a fun working environment. Everyone was friendly, and the atmosphere was pretty laid back.

In late August, I flew back to Geneva and stopped by the law firm to see if they might hire me again. They agreed, and I started a few days later. This time I worked for a team of young legal interns, most of whom I’d met before. But there were a couple of new recruits.

Patrick - whom I already knew - a lovely, fun, sporty guy a year or two older than me, took me to meet the newbies. He knocked on a door.

“Come in,” said a male voice.

So, we did. “This is Cedric. Cedric Bossert,” said Patrick, as my heart began doing a series of crazy circus tricks at the sight of this gorgeous young guy with thick, wiry, jet black hair and navy-blue eyes. But it wasn’t his good looks that particularly affected me. It was his quiet, kind, grounded energy. Oblivious, Patrick continued, “Cedric, this is Francesca. She’s going to be working with us. Just so you know; she tends to be late for work, and doesn’t always show up on Mondays because she says she’s sick, but she’s too tired or in London. Oh, and she likes to leave early most days. But she’s really nice, and her English is perfect, so we put up with her.”

I’m pretty sure Patrick said something along those lines, and all of it was true. Nevertheless, although I wasn’t the most reliable secretary in the firm, I was the only one who was perfectly bilingual, with English mother-tongue, which meant I could correct all the lawyers’ grammatical and spelling mistakes. Back then most letters were still typed on those IBM typewriters with the funny spinny-ball thing, and we had to use that horrible slimy carbon paper that turned our fingers black to make copies. There were a few word-processors available, but they tended to be reserved for typing out multi-paged legal briefs. We still used telex, too!

Anyway, Cedric says his heart also got funky when he saw me, but at the time he was in a long term-relationship and living with his girlfriend. Also, – officially at least - I was still with Blaze. Nevertheless, Cedric and I made plenty of slinky, sideways eye contact at the coffee machine, and somehow his stuff always got typed first, much to Patrick’s frustration, particularly when I overslept one morning and rocked up circa nine-thirty, having promised to come in early to deal with an emergency something-or-other that needed to be typed and filed in court before nine a.m.. Which probably wouldn’t have happened if Cedric had been the one who’d asked me!

My head was all over the place. Sure, I needed to make money to pay my rent, and buy food, and new clothes, etc. But I also suddenly discovered I’d brought sexy back from America! I was stealing hearts all over town.

I literally couldn’t keep up with myself!

I was having so much fun! I’d never been particularly popular at high school, had never considered myself particularly pretty, so when suddenly my ego became supercharged I got a little high on my powers of seduction! On Saturday nights you’d find me and my girlfriends dancing to Wang Chung’s ‘Dance Hall Days’, and Billy Idol’s ‘Rebel Yell’, and Chaka Khan’s ‘Ain’t Nobody’ over at the Moulin à Danses in Carouge, Geneva’s trendy. Or we might be at the Graffiti, sipping champagne and working up a sweat to Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex’, or Cock Robin’s ‘The Promise You Made’. On Thursday nights we’d probably be dancing at Midnight Rambler in Geneva old town, or at trendy bar, sipping vodka tonics and flicking our hair. Basically, I was always out.

I dated other boys, including one of Blaze’s good friends for whom I fell pretty hard during those tumultuous months. Seriously, it’s all a bit of a romantic, hot and steamy blur. I remember it as a time of heightened senses, of sensuality, of self-discovery, of fabulousness, of giggling with girlfriends as we got ready to go out. It was a time of sampling different versions of myself to discover which version suited me best.

I wish I could say I immediately became confident enough to break-up with Blaze, because it would have saved me a lot of heartache and confusion. It would also have spared my parents a lot of anxiety. But Blaze kept on writing and sending me cassette tapes with romantic songs he’d composed. And then Isaak, the guitar player of the band Blaze played with in Geneva, flew out to play a couple of gigs with him, and I suppose I began to feel like I might be about to miss out on something. So, in the early spring of 1986, I flew back to California.

Blaze and his friend Isaak had rented a small, hellhole of an apartment in the San Francisco Tenderloin, an area where I never felt safe. I still saw Shandy occasionally, but she was busy with her real estate business in San José. Once again, I felt anxious and insecure. Deep down I knew I didn’t belong there.

One day, while riding the bus to go for a walk on the beach, a middle-aged man approached me and asked whether I was a model. He was English, he told me he was a photographer, and asked whether I’d be interested in doing a photoshoot for a brand of English knitwear, because one of the models that had been booked had just dropped out, and I’d be perfect for the brief. He said I looked like a mix between Lauren Bacall and Charlotte Rampling, and he gave me his card. The shoot would be taking place the following weekend, with the designer, a makeup artist, a hairdresser, and a stylist.

I was flattered, but a little wary, too. He gave me the name and phone number of the designer and the other model and encouraged me to call them. The shoot wouldn’t pay much, but I’d get copies of the photographs, and one of the outfits.

I called the designer and everything checked out, so I accepted, and a few days later I was whisked off to a beautiful hotel up in Napa Valley surrounded by vineyards, where I had my hair and makeup done, and spent the day having photos taken with a beautiful Chinese model who had loads of experience and who was signed to one of the bigger modeling agencies in the Bay Area. I floated through the day as though in a dream. Everyone was friendly, everyone was encouraging.

The photos were great, the designer was thrilled, and the photographer, a real gentleman, suggested we do a test shoot together so that I could approach modelling agencies with a wider range of photos. A few days later I went to his apartment with some clothes and makeup and spent several hours playing supermodel in front of his camera.

Once again, the photos were good. But the little money I’d saved while working at the law firm was disappearing fast, so having several photos printed was an issue. I couldn’t just take them to a corner photoprint shop; they’d been shot  on fancy, high-resolution film, so needed to be developed in a high-end photo lab, and they would need retouching, and it all cost a lot of money that I didn’t really have. Nevertheless, I splurged and had a few of them developed. Then I looked up the main San Francisco modelling agencies and tried my luck.

Well, I was too old, and too fat. “But we love your look, so lose a little weight and come back to see us,” one of the bigger agencies said.

I was 24, and most of the girls in their books were between 16 and 22. Fair enough. But too fat?! Since arriving in San Francisco, I’d been living on avocados and tomatoes. My shoulder blades stuck out like coat hangers, my ribs and hip bones were scary-looking, and my arms and legs resembled sticks. But maybe quitting avocadoes might further enhance my cheekbones?

I didn’t quit avocadoes. I ended up signing with a smaller agency, where everyone was lovely but nobody was very professional. Nevertheless, they were a fun team, and held classes once or twice a week where they taught that haughty model walk, so I went along to practise walking and stopping and turning and looking bored and snooty. Apparently, I was a little too swingy-hipped (I’m hypermobile!) so they made me snooty-walk over and over to George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’ with a gorgeous black guy who always told hysterical jokes every time we sat down, and then the lady in charge would give us the evil eye for not paying proper attention. Anyway, although I went to a few model “go-sees” as they called them, I didn’t book much work, but I really enjoyed going to those classes. I met a good group of people, and it gave me something to do for a couple of hours a week. Now, decades later, I sometimes do the snooty walk-pose-turn-pose just for fun on those long, flat, moving walkways in airports!

Meanwhile, all was depressingly quiet on the rockstar front. Blaze went off to Marin County for days on end to do construction work, and Isaak sat sulking in our cruddy flat playing guitar, eating pizza and fending off rats. One day he said, “Merde.” He got up, packed his bag and his guitar, and flew back to Switzerland, never to be seen again.

When the mothers of some the younger models at the agency found out that I was now living mostly alone in an awful flat in the Tenderloin, they were horrified. One of the mothers, Nessy, who lived in an old house in the Mission district, said she had a two-roomed ground-floor apartment that Blaze and I were welcome to rent for a small amount of money, as long as we took care of its tiny back garden. We could move in immediately.

Nessy was a wonderful, salt-of-the-earth sort of person. I told Blaze about her offer, and he said he didn’t care one way of another, that he wouldn’t be back for a while, and that it was up to me.

So, I moved our stuff into Nessy’s flat. It was a funny little place, with vaulted, roughcast ceilings painted with gold sparkly paint. An archway divided the main room from the kitchen that led onto a pocket-sized nettle and bramble infested back garden that I never even began to take care of. While I felt far safer there than I ever had in the Tenderloin, the police did once stop me on my way back from the small Mexican grocery a few blocks away with my tomatoes, avocadoes and small loaf of bread. What are you doing out here? they wanted to know. I explained that I lived close by, and they were shocked and insisted on giving me a ride back to the flat, saying this area wasn’t safe for a young white girl to be wandering the streets. And that was the only time I ever rode in a police car!

In July my younger sister Lisa flew to San Francisco to spend the summer with me. Lisa’s flight was scheduled to land quite late at night, so Nessy offered to drive me to the airport to pick her up after the evening modelling class.

Well, my rude, naughty little sister nearly fell over laughing when she saw me! She said I looked like Barbie in my white dress and white high heels, my hair all teased and poufy, and a full-face of makeup. Frankly, I still believe her judgment was clouded; she’d flown over sitting next to a musician who’d just performed at the Montreux Jazz festival with David Sanborn and had shared what he’d called his “magic cookies”. Clearly, she was hallucinating because I looked absolutely fabulous.

My sister and I had the best time together that summer. When Top Gun came out, we went to see it two nights running, which is where Lisa developed her lifelong obsession with Tom Cruise. Me? I just wanted the same hairstyle as Kelly McGillis, which was clearly meant to be when the following morning we spotted an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle for 50% off perms at Macys hair salon in Union Square. There was no time to waste; we immediately rushed over to the salon and booked me in.

Well, it was the best perm ever! I walked out with big, bouncy curls and felt ever so glamorous. However, it did go a little wild and woolly when Lisa and I drove down to Big Sur with Shandy a couple of days later. I initially found this a little disconcerting, but all our lovely hippy friends thought it looked mega groovy, and besides, after a couple of margaritas and magic cigarettes my wild and woolly hair totally matched my attitude to life, so I just let it do its thing.

Meanwhile, life with Blaze was becoming more and more complicated. Soon after I moved into Nessy’s flat, Blaze’s friend from Geneva – the one with whom I’d had fallen for while in Geneva – flew over to visit. I don’t know whether he came over to see me or Blaze, but whichever it was, he certainly wasn’t put off by my Barbie/Kelly McGillis makeover. Bien au contraire: our chemistry was off the charts, and before we knew it one thing led to another all over again, landing us in tumultuous soap-opera style territory.

My sister was still around, too, merrily causing heart-havoc of her own. Brandon, the son of one of Shandy’s neighbours, thought she was the most gorgeous thing he’d ever laid eyes on in all his 17 years. One day, Lisa, Brandon and I went to a big garage sale with Shandy to pick up some cheap kitchen utensils. We came across someone selling puppies out of a big cardboard box. It was terribly hot, and there was no shade at all. My sister turned to Brandon and said, “You must take one of these poor little puppies! Please! At least take one!”  Unable to resist her big, beautiful, imploring blue eyes, Brandon did as he was told and returned home with a mixed-breed female puppy. We never found out how his parents reacted, but at least he convinced them to let him keep it. I wonder if he called it Lisa…

As August came to an end and my sister’s flight back to Geneva approached, it became obvious to me that my relationship with Blaze was over. Also, I no longer wanted to live on the edge of poverty; I wanted to go home. Blaze and I gave up Norma’s flat, and moved our few belongings back to Shandy’s house with the help of one of her friends who had a pick-up truck. There was no room for Lisa and I in the cockpit, so we travelled sprawled out in the back of the truck on our grotty old mattress, concealed beneath a huge, silver-white faux-fur bedcover I’d picked up at a flea-market somewhere. Thank goodness the police didn’t pull us over!

Soon, Lisa and I flew back to Switzerland together. My amazing parents somehow managed to get hold of an apartment for me in the same building as where I’d lived previously, and it was wonderful to have a clean, properly furnished, comfortable place of my own again.

I ended my relationship with Blaze by letter, which wasn’t the most courageous or elegant way of going about it, but I still felt oddly vulnerable to him, and didn’t want to risk hearing his voice and being talked back into the same old drama. He continued to write to me for a while, and to write gooey songs which I tried hard not to listen to. I stayed away from his sexy friend with whom I’d had crazy chemistry, and steered clear of the whole Geneva underground music scene.

As it turned out, my friend Victoria needed a place to stay, so she moved in with me! My new apartment had two good sized rooms as well as a big kitchen, so she took one room and I took the other. We put a TV and a big sofa-bed in the kitchen and went back to watching our beloved Goldie Hawn movies, and doobie-dooing, and having a grand old time. A few months later Victoria met François, the love of her life, a doctor who worked for the World Health Organization and soon moved in with him.

Within days of returning to Geneva I’d gone back to the law firm to see if they’d hire me for the third time, and once again I fell on my feet. They put me to work for the same group of young interns, and I continued to arrive late, leave early, and often call in sick on Mondays. Cedric (the gorgeous young intern with the lovely, kind, grounded energy) and I resumed our slinky, sideways glances, but he was still with his girlfriend, and I didn’t hang around, waiting for him to sort himself out. Once again, I’d brought sexy back from America, and over the next few months went out with a couple of lovely guys.

In March 1987, the law firm held a weekend ski outing for its employees, and the sideways glances between Cedric and I dissolved into a steamy slow dance at an alpine disco on the Saturday night. I was head over heels with him, and turned into a complete airhead, incapable of typing a single sentence without making a million mistakes.

Soon afterwards, early one morning, my doorbell rang. I peeked through the peep hole and nearly had a heart attack. It was Cedric! I told him to hang on a second, and quickly went to brush my teeth! When I opened the door, I saw he held a bag of croissants, and a small bag of clothes containing the bare necessities; he’d had a row with his girlfriend, and their relationship was over.

I nearly fainted with happiness!

That day, I don’t think I was late for work, but I doubt I got anything done. I probably just sat at my desk with a racing heart and a goofy grin on my face!

We tried to hide our romance at the office, but it was hopeless. I spoke with the person in charge of HR, who kindly found me a job working for a lawyer in a different building, but even that felt weird, because Cedric and I kept running into each other, and I couldn’t keep my hands off him, so I eventually found a job somewhere else.

Cedric and I were married two years later, on March 31, 1989. He left the firm soon after passing the Geneva bar exam, when he was head-hunted to work for the legal department of an international luxury goods group. We have two grown up children, Olivia, a fashion photographer, and Greg, a film maker.

As for Victoria, she married François, the doctor at WHO, the day after our wedding! They’re still married, live in Ibiza, and have a gorgeous son, Emile, who is a photographer.

I am grateful to all the wonderful people who were there for me during those turbulent few years. Shandy is one of the kindest, most generous people I’ve ever met, and although she always said I helped her get through her own rough patch, I’ll never forget everything she did for me. And while I know my parents certainly didn’t approve of my choices, they just waited for me to gather my neurones again, and helped me put my life back together.

I’m proud of having been brave enough to step quite far out of my comfort zone; I experienced a lot in a short time, although it must have felt like forever to my poor parents!

A part of me will always be a bit of a rock chick. But although I went rogue and brought sexy back, I soon tucked it into bed with someone wonderful.