The reality TV star and clothing designer has a new memoir about her drug-fueled partying days.
“Oh my God, this is insane,” said Leah McSweeney, the reality TV star. “I might die. You might have to call. …” Her voice cut off as her head slipped below the water. It bobbed back up a second later as Ms. McSweeney fled the frigid plunge pool and reached for a towel. “I was honestly afraid you would have to call an ambulance.”
This was on a recent afternoon at Wall Street Bath, a Russian bathhouse behind scaffolding, in a basement, on the fringes of the financial district in Manhattan. Ms. McSweeney, 39, a star of the latter seasons of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” has been a regular patron for nearly a decade, enjoying the sauna, the shvitz, the treatments. In the 12th season of “RHONY,” she brought her moneyed co-stars to the spa. Ramona Singer called it “rustic.”
But, as Ms. McSweeney told the camera, “This is my oasis for relaxation and detoxing.”
Now that Ms. McSweeney is sober, she has fewer toxins to dispose of, but on this breezy spring afternoon, a few weeks after the publication of her first book, “Chaos Theory: Finding Meaning in the Madness, One Bad Decision at a Time,” she returned to steam, sweat and calm herself down.
“It’s so nice to be able to disconnect,” she said. “It’s probably good to work that part of your brain.”
After signing a waiver, she made her way down to a no-frills locker room, which smelled worryingly of feet. Trading her jeans and black bodysuit for a coral string bikini, she slid into lavender slides and a matching robe from her sleepwear line, Happy Place.
She began downstairs, in a hot tub next to a large pool. “Moby used to have ragers here,” she said with a twinge of nostalgia. “My daughter learned how to swim here.”
Gingerly, she lowered herself into the hot tub; the water looked less than crystalline. “Me and my sister joke that you can probably get pregnant if you go in here,” Ms. McSweeney said. An employee turned on the bubbles. A mosaic mermaid cavorted above.
After a 10-minute warm-up, she entered the shvitz, a wet sauna, deserted except for a middle-age man, his skin the pink of a cooked lobster. Ms. McSweeney arranged herself on the bench and began to sweat.
“I like the way I feel after I sweat,” she said. “I don’t enjoy sweating itself.” After a few minutes, she got up and doused herself with a bucket of cold water. She shvitzed again. And doused again. More men entered. One told her to smile more. Her studs had begun to burn her ears, as did the chai necklace on her chest, which she bought to celebrate her conversion to Judaism. She left.
Next up was the infrared sauna, though it smelled of something worse than feet. “Is that cedar or some really stinky guy?” she said. She left less than a minute later, entering the dry sauna, with a temperature set to 190 degrees. Two men were already in there, beating each other with oak leaves. Ms. McSweeney sat atop her towel, her skin peaching and pinking.
“There’s something about this experience that’s uncomfortable,” she said. “You push yourself to the limit. How high up in the sauna can you go?”
Joining a famously contentious reality show is a way of testing limits, too. She was surprised that the Bravo producers were interested in her. She lived downtown. She was a generation younger than most of the other cast members. She lacked their financial resources. Still, she couldn’t refuse. “I’m a sensation seeker, an adventure seeker,” she said. “There was no way I was saying no.”
She mostly enjoyed her first season, even if it included a drunken episode involving tiki torches and some gossip at her expense that prompted her indelible declaration, “Don’t talk about my vagina and don’t talk about my mental health!” Yet she made friends — Dorinda Medley and Tinsley Mortimer, chiefly.
The publicity for her femme street wear line, Married to the Mob, didn’t hurt either.
But her second season, which aired in last year, felt different. And not only because she had quit drinking, a decision motivated by how she saw herself onscreen. “The show is a good mirror,” she said.
Returning sober and, in the middle of the pandemic, with her grandmother dying, she struggled to deliver. “The producers were like, ‘Leah, lighten up,’” she said. “I just couldn’t. I’m so new to it. The other women are good at compartmentalizing. I can’t turn that part of myself off.”
She persevered and when the season finished, with the fate of “RHONY” undetermined, she began to write her book, which details her mental health struggles and a history of substance abuse. The first version was exceptionally raw. And even after working with an editor, the book remains raw.
“I can’t believe I’m just telling people that I had a crystal meth addiction,” Ms. McSweeney said, describing a period in her teenage years when she went in and out of rehab. “This is not something that I talk about openly. It happened a long time ago. It’s kind of a world away. To open up about it was scary.”
Scary, but also apparently healing. “I think it just got me in touch with myself,” she said. “I had kind of lost myself.”
Ms. McSweeney had no problem finding herself at the spa. After maxing out at 10 minutes in the sauna, she threw herself into the ice-cold plunge pool, then recovered with a warm shower, which left her feeling serene, floaty. “You’re aligning your body mind and soul,” she said.
In the brightly lit restaurant, back in her robe, she relaxed with a ginger juice and a bowl of vegetarian borscht. Hurricane Leah, a nickname that became the title of a “RHONY” episode, had been downgraded to a light drizzle. Wall Street Bath had done its work.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
