In 1980, there were credible accounts that he was living in a van for a period—broke, addicted, trying to figure out what came next.
He went to England.
And then, in February 1981, he went to Belgium.
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Freddy Cousaert was a concert promoter in Ostend, a port city on the Belgian coast. He had befriended Gaye during a European tour and believed he could help the singer put his life back together. He offered Gaye a place to stay in Ostend—a seafront apartment on the Albert-I Promenade—and Gaye accepted.
The year or so that Gaye spent in Ostend was, by multiple accounts, one of the calmer periods of his adult life. He exercised. He boxed. He attended a local church. He cut back significantly on cocaine. He walked by the sea. He began to write music again.
Curtis Shaw, Gaye’s attorney, would later call the Belgium period “the best thing that ever happened to Marvin.”
There were still complications. Gaye briefly dated Dutch model Eugenie Vis for approximately two years during this period. He was also involved with British socialite Lady Edith Foxwell. His son Bubby was with him in Europe for some of this time—Gaye had taken the boy during his separation from Janis, and Bubby lived with his father in London and then Belgium before eventually being reunited with his mother.
But Ostend was, by Gaye’s own account and the accounts of those around him, a genuine recovery. He moved eventually from the Albert-I Promenade apartment to a 21-room villa outside of Ostend that he called “The White House.”