NAZIS, SUICIDE AND STALKER SEX: THE DARK PAST OF SWEDEN’S BRIGHTEST STARS!
For every bright light of ABBA’s career there was also a very dark shadow – a mood that much of their music managed to capture.
While Agnetha, Björn and Benny are all Swedes, Frida was born in Norway during World War II when it was under Nazi occupation. Her mother, Synni, was a teenage girl who fell in love with an SS officer (who seduced her with a sack of potatoes). When he was shipped back to Germany before the end of the war, she didn’t tell him she was pregnant. She died of kidney failure two years later and Frida’s grandmother, realising Norway was not a friendly environment to raise a stigmatised Nazi half-child, took her to Sweden where she grew up. This story has a bizarre twist. Frida was always told her father had died but at the height of her fame in 1977, Frida discovered her father was alive. She travelled to Germany to meet him and posed for photos with him.
In 1971, a year before ABBA officially kicked off. Agnetha and Björn were celebrating what should’ve been the happiest day of their lives – their wedding – when they received the call that Björn’s long-time mentor, Bengt Bernhag, had committed suicide.
While Frida and Benny both had children to other partners before they became a couple in 1970, the early part of ABBA’s career was relatively drama-free. The biggest issue was Agnetha’s fear of flying, which stopped them from doing a lot of the promotional work around the world that the other three members, and their manager, Stig Anderson, wanted to do.
Stig himself was a contentious soul and although clever (he wrote the words to many of their early hits like Waterloo, SOS and Mamma Mia) he was, allegedly, a tyrant who ruled the band members with an iron fist. In 1990, Agnetha, Björn and Benny sued Stig for essentially stealing their money and mis-investing the ABBA fortunes in the 1980s. (Frida had wisely pulled out of the company in 1982). A settlement was reached out of court and never disclosed.
In 1979, after some years of difficulties following the birth of their second child, Björn and Agnetha announced they were divorcing but would continue working as part of ABBA. A week after they split, Björn began dating one of Agnetha’s best friends, Lena Kallersjö. They soon married, with Björn becoming a father again twice more. Then, in 1981, Frida and Benny told the world they were divorcing. Benny had fallen in love with, and later married, TV talk show host Mona Nörklit. By 1982, he was also a father again.
The ABBA shadows didn’t end when the band ended. Although life for the two ABBA gents was relatively calm, the same cannot be said
about the love lives of the ABBA ladies.
After dating her bodyguard in the early 1980s, Agnetha married a Swedish surgeon in 1990 but the marriage only lasted three years. Two years later, her mother committed suicide by throwing herself from her sixth-floor apartment. Perhaps still in shock, Agnetha became involved with a Dutch man, Gert van der Graaf who was a huge ABBA fan and who had relentlessly pestered her for a date. After two years of dating her stalker she realised this wasn’t the wisest decision and broke off the relationship. Gert then stalked her constantly, before eventually being deported. When the deportation order ran out he was seen back in front of her house, which may explain why Agnetha spent the better part of the 2000s hiding from the world.
While Agnetha’s lovelife was more SOS than Ring Ring, Frida’s was definitely more Dancing Queen until it became Knowing Me, Knowing You. She moved to Switzerland in 1985 with her partner, Prince Heinrich Ruzzo Reuss Of Plauen. They eventually married in 1992, which meant that the former half-Nazi baby had become a German Princess. Sadly, there were more shadows to bear – in 1998 her daughter from her first marriage, Ann Lise-Lotte Casper, died in a car accident aged just 30, and in 1999 the Prince died of lymphoma.
Agnetha made a successful return to the music industry last year, while Frida is now apparently content to live with her current boyfriend, Henry Smith the fifth Viscount Hambleden (once a Princess always a Princess), who is keen on racing pigeons.
Benny and Björn, meanwhile, continue to rake in money from songwriting royalties and their investment (with Frida) in Mamma Mia! the musical. Even dark shadows sometimes have silver, if not golden linings.
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