by Ashley Judd
An agency rep finally picked me up at the hotel, and I was popped into a single bed-sitter apartment in a little two-story building filled with other young models, male and female. I would hang around the agency, waiting for my booker to hand me a slip of paper with the details of a look-see or job on which I was being sent. I would ride the subway and take taxis, often on my own, all over Tokyo, doing print (magazines, catalogs) and TV work. Once I was even flown to Kyoto for a job. The atmosphere was very loose, even as work was being done.
I didn’t realize it was anything out of the ordinary when one of the agency bosses singled me out for particular attention. He would seat me beside him at parties and would lie down with me and molest me without ever removing my clothes, on the sofa at his house, while someone on his staff remained present. I guess he was making sure that if it was ever his word against mine, he had someone to corroborate his story that there was no nudity to speak of. I really didn’t mind his attention, although I knew he was being patronizing and condescending, often scorning my best pal and me for our crude teenage manners and southern Americanisms in front of the others at the dinner parties he insisted we attend.
When the boss wasn’t demanding my presence, I was hanging out with the other models at bars that loved having us, as we drew large crowds. I spent many summer nights dancing to David Bowie, drinking sloe gin fizzes. There was a creepy Frenchman who hung out at that bar who offered me a ride home. He was much older and suggested we stop at his apartment first. I vaguely remember that he lived in a Japanese-style apartment he shared with others. I was so young and confused that I had no idea that what followed was rape, because of both my objections and my age, or that there was anything wrong with it, even when it happened again. Later, other models told me he was a scumbag and rumored to have something to do with gangs in Marseilles. Gee, thanks for letting me know. An adult male model who lived above me in my apartment building attempted to force me to perform oral sex on him, and I was able to persuade him to stop and leave me alone.
I think I told the other models about these incidents, and I suspect they passed on the information to the agency, because very soon after, I was abruptly moved out of that building and into a safer one, with an older girl from New Jersey as a roommate. My summer improved after that. She was very protective of me and good fun, and we did things like cook supper together (well, if spaghetti with cottage cheese qualifies as cooking) and dance around to music we liked … but in safety and in private, the way teenagers should. When I started to become homesick and shared that I yearned for the routine of classes, crisp autumn air, and Franklin High School football games, she yelped with joy. She had been fearful of what was going to become of me, and she was relieved when it seemed I would go home to Tennessee and resume school.
Those two months in Japan made me decide that modeling was not for me—at least not as a full-time occupation, although I didn’t have much of an idea of other ways to escape Del Rio and earn money to enable the independence I reckoned I would need. Piper met me at the plane in San Francisco, where I collapsed into the kind of hug I had been dying for all summer. I handed her my purse containing $10,000 cash. I didn’t share the sordid details of my summer, both because at the time I didn’t grasp that there was all that much wrong with what happened and because I was afraid I would be the one to be in trouble. I wasn’t far off. In the spring of the following school year, my mother searched my room, as I think she often did, and found my diary, which I had wrapped up in a sleeping bag deep under my bed. She read it, and unfortunately, her reaction was to sneer at me: “I read all about you and your boyfriend.…” As was so often the case, I was shut down, my own experience and reality invalidated and denied. I was punished once more for having been a vulnerable kid, when what I desperately needed was adult intervention, help, and support. My mom took the money I had earned and spent it on some self-improvements she had been wanting.
Mom and Sister had released their first album in the spring of 1983, and they were already recording their follow-up. By the end of my sophomore year, they had their first gold record and a number one single on the country charts. They were able to lease their own bus and started touring constantly. Recently, I was visiting with Don Potter, the gifted guitarist who helped create the Judds’ signature sound and was on the road with them that first year. He described how when they left Del Rio Pike, I sat on his lap, even though I was fifteen years old, and sobbed, begging them not to go. I have no memory of that.
Tenth grade was a long, lonely, dangerous year for me. I was more alone than I had ever been (which was saying something) because now my sister was gone, too. I mean, she had run away before, but now she was seriously gone. I’d been indoctrinated to believe that I was self-sufficient and it was normal to be alone, but at times I naturally was making some perilous choices. Sick of never having a ride, I began to drive without a license. Sister had been a great one for having fun parties in previous years, when Mom was out chasing Larry around and we were left alone, and the tradition continued, sometimes even when I didn’t want it to. Kids just knew my home was often an empty one, and sometimes they would show up with a case of beer and I couldn’t seem to make them leave. One such night, a boy I had asked to the Sadie Hawkins dance called and asked, “You there alone?” Not knowing any better, I told the truth. He said, “We’re on our way!” and hung up before I could protest. It was a school night, for crying out loud! He brought a friend, and they hung around drinking beer. I had some. Mamaw happened to call while we were drinking. I was mortified, feeling so much shame, as if my precious grandmother could tell through the phone line that I was alone drinking with boys. When Mom came home during one of her rare visits to Del Rio Pike, they were still there. She chased them around the house with a long kitchen knife. Believe it or not, we’re able to look back and laugh about that one.
I was grounded—which was nothing new. I was grounded for breathing, it seemed. Although sometimes I deserved it. When I was only fourteen, I was goofing off in the yard alone one Saturday afternoon when some of Sister’s friends stopped by to see her. She wasn’t home, but Sister’s pal Lance was very friendly and asked me if I wanted to go to Nashville with them to take in the scene while Vanderbilt played a home football game. Mom was on her usual three p.m. to eleven p.m. shift, so I thought, Sure. Why not? But by the time we arrived in Nashville I was already frightened, in over my head, with older, strange high school boys. Plus, I didn’t have any money and couldn’t buy anything to eat. Their plans kept escalating, and I was absorbed into the whirlwind. They party hopped around campus and the stadium, and soon everyone was very drunk, dragging me with them. I was panicked, nagging them to take me home, but no one was in any mood to make a forty-five-minute run each way to the country for some fourteen-year-old. The party landed at the house of one of Lance’s friends. I was stashed in the bedroom of his little sister, who was away at boarding school. I lay down on this strange girl’s bed, sensing I was in great peril, frozen, unable to figure any way out of this awful pickle. I didn’t even know where I was. I knew my poor mother, at work at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville, would be out of her mind when she arrived home to an empty house. I had no idea how to call her at the hospital, and I was far too scared of her to pick up the phone and call home after midnight.
I somehow made it home the next day, and I was grounded forever. My mother even made my sister put all my cheerleader uniforms in a garbage bag and return them to the school principal, saying I was in big trouble at home.
My friend Lisa Cicatelli, on whom I often relied, admitted my mother had asked her parents if I could live with them full-time when I was in tenth grade. They had said no. Realizing there was really no plan in place for me, I decided that, just like when I was seven years old, and I had hung on the back of Dad’s borrowed motorcycle by the strength of my own small arms, it was entirely up to me to save myself. I packed all my things, called Sister’s boyfriend, and asked him to drive me to Lexington. I anno
unced that I was moving in with Dad again to begin the eleventh grade, even though I had not lived with him and had no memories of seeing him since that brief time I spent with him in Florida when I was in eighth grade. I don’t remember telling anyone before I made the decision. I just did it. I had had enough.
At first, Dad seemed happy to have me back in his life. He had begun producing a syndicated cable TV show about horse racing called Starting Gate and was now splitting his time between an apartment in Lexington and the house in Ocala. I had no idea that in the meantime his recreational drug use had progressed into serious addiction, something over which he no longer had any control.
So my move to his apartment in Lexington was the equivalent of jumping from the frying pan directly into the fire. I enrolled in the Sayre School, the private academy where I had also attended fifth grade, in downtown Lexington, which was several miles from Dad’s apartment. He stuck around for the first couple of days, driving me to and from school in his Porsche 911 and nursing a strong cup of coffee as we listened to Morning Edition on National Public Radio. He seemed hung over and distant in the mornings and restless, irritable, and discontented in the afternoons. Soon he made the first of many business trips to Florida, and I barely saw him most of the time. He would put a few dollars in an envelope and leave for weeks at a time. I didn’t tell anyone in my family that I was basically living alone. And I didn’t complain to my father. I simply adjusted to the new installment of “normal.”
My school was populated, or so it seemed, by wealthy, happy kids from safe, nurturing families who lived on horse farms and had two parents at home. My home life, on the other hand, was steeped in shame. The school did not offer transportation, so once again, I never had a ride. It was too far to walk. I dreaded the daily humiliation of calling around to friends who had licenses, trying to be cool while actually begging for someone, anyone, to take me to school.
When one of my friends finally expressed her exasperation at my persistent requests for rides, I was so ashamed that my spirit broke. She had said no, I didn’t have a ride, and I was unable to think of another way to get to school. I stayed home. The next morning I woke up, dressed, and ate, but then the crucial moment came, and I could not bring myself to call someone for a ride after yesterday’s abasement. The moment passed. I watched the clock. Classes would be starting now. Defeated, I took off my clothes and lay on the sofa, watching TV. All that week, day after day at home, my shame mounted. When I finally pulled myself together and went back to school an entire week later, the headmaster passed me in the hall. I coughed, a weak attempt to suggest I had been ill. Mr. Grunwald said to me derisively, “Nice try, Ashley.”
I have a lot of blackouts in my memory of that year, too. I still don’t know how I ever paid for food, much less went to and from the grocery store. I sat in my room alone, day after day, drawing houses so large that I had to tape pieces of paper together to accommodate my sketches, homes that I pretended were mine. I went through a period of obsessively calling posh boarding schools in the Northeast, acting out a long fantasy of pretending I could apply to, be accepted at, and pay for such a school. I remember several occasions when the person on the other end of the line believed I was my own parent. How right they were! Once I admitted that I was actually the student, and the admissions officer was alarmed. But that is as far as I or anyone else ever went to address my sad situation—with one notable and lifesaving exception.
Colleen was one of my next-door neighbors in the apartment complex that year. One day when I was out of clean clothes and trying to figure out how to do laundry without a machine, without a ride to a Laundromat, I gathered my courage to knock on her door and ask if I could do wash. The way Colleen tells the story, she was five years sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. She was recently divorced and felt she was a failure at the “relationships sweepstakes” in life. Brought to her knees by her inability to forge a lasting relationship outside her family of origin, she simply asked, based on her sponsor’s suggestion, her Higher Power to “teach her how to love.” That day, I knocked on her door. She still tells me I am a gift from God in her life, an answer to her prayers. I cry every time she says it.
Colleen let me do my wash in her apartment. She also roasted me a chicken almost every weekend. She took me to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream from time to time, and she gave me the Big Book of AA to read. She said she suspected there was addiction in my family. Addiction was a word I had never heard, and the idea my family might have it was a wholly original observation. I remember feeling a spark of elation, the sense that maybe there was a name for what plagued my family so severely and caused so much dysfunction, and that if it had a name, and someone like Colleen could talk about it so readily and had in fact herself somehow moved past it, then maybe, God willing, there might be hope for a different kind of life for us. When I asked her why she didn’t do something about my dad if she knew what was wrong, she told me there was nothing anyone could do until he hit bottom and asked for help. She taught me that one can carry the message of recovery, but one cannot carry the person. As helpful as this relationship was, I still find it incredibly odd that no one else noticed or intervened on my behalf—to say the least.
Colleen’s friendship made a profoundly lonely and ignominy-filled year endurable. But it was not enough to keep me safe. Although he never used in front of me, it was obvious that my dad’s disease worsened with each passing month. He has since been candid with me about the extent of his addiction while he was home and how obsessed he was with me going to sleep so he could get down to business. While away, he would call me in the middle of the night and rage incoherently; when he was in town, he was by turns paranoid and angry. His thinking grew increasingly distorted, and he began telling me it was in my power to remedy some of our family’s interpersonal ills. He would demand I do something about Mom, complaining about the way she treated him, how she prevented him from seeing Sister, and the Judds, on the road. He was in this mode when he decided that I needed to know the “big family secret.” In the living room of the apartment, he told me that he was not my sister’s biological father. I’d had no idea until that moment.
I took this information stoically. Although it was shocking, it also made sense. I already felt our family was a screwed-up, crazy, irredeemable mess, a family full of hatred, fighting, accusations, manipulation, abandonment, and emotional and physical violence. Disapproval, contempt, manipulation, and demonizing others—this was the major currency of each relationship. This information fit perfectly into the helpless, hopeless container of my broken heart. It made such screwed-up sense that Dad knew this thing that Mom hated him for knowing, this thing that she manically feared he would use against her. I realized it was as if he had a loaded, cocked gun and he just … walked around with it all the time, and she was desperately, creatively scrounging for ways to restrain, control, or trump him. And both of them used us kids in their power struggle. The lie took on ever-greater meaning, proportion, and without being spoken about out loud, it actually dominated our lives mercilessly.
It didn’t occur to me to tell my sister. I had no voice and no power in this family, so why would it? Instead, along with the many other secrets I was well practiced in keeping, this became one more that weighed me down with a crushing sadness that was nearly killing me.
And if that weren’t making me crazy enough, the midnight phone calls grew worse and more frequent. I was so unskilled—I was a child, and it never occurred to me not to answer the phone. I would be lying in bed, alone in my dad’s apartment, the phone would ring, and I would pick it up and brace myself. He would start cursing about Nana and work his way through the family from there. Once, when I was so utterly shattered that I hung up on him, he called back and threatened to kill me.
After many of these nights in a row, for some reason I received a phone call from Ken Stilts, Mom and Sister’s manager. It is possible I called him; I don’t recall. He could hear in my voice that something was wrong. I broke down,
and a staccato description of how I had been living poured out.
My mother, sister, and Nana happened to be together that day in Washington, D.C. Ken told them what I’d shared, and within minutes it was decided that I should go live with Nana. She had gotten remarried to a man named Wib Rideout, and she and my mom had finally repaired their relationship. Nana would be happy to take me. But of all my grandparents, I had spent the least amount of time with her over the years. It had simply never occurred to me that she would want or accept me.
I leaped out of bed, packed up the Honda Accord that by that time my sister had given me for my sixteenth birthday (which arrived too late to be of much help during the actual school year), and drove back and forth to eastern Kentucky twice, moving myself to my ancestral and spiritual home. Avalon, at last!
Dad, to say the least, did not take it well. When I told him over the phone, he started screaming at me for being ungrateful, for leaving him after all he had done for me. He tracked me down at Nana’s and flew into another rage. I don’t remember the details of what happened next, but this is what Dad tells me transpired: It was about ten o’clock at night when I met him in front of the hotel where he was staying on Winchester Avenue, right down the street from Papaw Judd’s filling station. He demanded to know why “I was doing this” to him.
“I did the best I could for you,” he bellowed. “But if it’s not enough, if you don’t accept it, fuck you! I’m out of here.”
I don’t remember if I said anything back to him, if I ran away or stood there and took it. I was obviously not going back with him. He had, to use his own words, publicly “divorced” me. He was saying he was out of my life for good.
Finally moving in with Nana was my redemption. She proceeded to give me what I had had for only brief stints in my entire life: three hot meals a day cooked by a grown-up rather than by me; someone to wash my gym clothes on Fridays; a safe, consistent, and abuse-free home. She listened to me. She supported me. She bought me pearls when I made straight A’s. When I asked her why, shocked at the gift, she said she felt that others did not give me the recognition I deserved. I didn’t really know what she meant.