My modeling assignments covered the whole range of the junior category in print—catalogs, newspaper circulars, and all the teen magazines, including Sassy, YM, and Seventeen. I sent all the pictures and magazines to my mother, and called her as often as the scary long-distance phone charges would allow, reassuring her that yes, I was working hard; yes, I was behaving myself; yes, Candy was still keeping an eye on me; and yes, I was putting all my money into the bank. She had her hands full with two little girls, and I’d become very practiced at BS-ing her. I had an agency allowance of seventy-five dollars a week, appointments almost every day, and no homework. Nobody to tell me to go to bed at a reasonable time at night, nobody to suggest I take a look at the salad and vegetable choices at the diner. Probably just as well—I couldn’t have made healthy choices on that budget.
Los Angeles may have had a weather advantage over New York City, but it did not have New York’s public transportation system and it didn’t have an actual city center, either—it sprawled in all directions. I was always late, or heading the wrong way on a bus or in a cab I couldn’t afford. I got to know some of the local models (or “L.A. girls,” as we were called, because we never wanted to leave L.A., even though L.A. modeling options were and still are crap), and sometimes one of them drove me to and from jobs or castings—Cameron Diaz, Amy Smart, Charlize Theron, and Ali Larter were all starting out at the same time I was, and each was kind enough to let me hitch rides with them. But the agency bookers decided I needed someone reliable to pick me up and deliver me. There was this musician guy, they said. He was in some band trying to make it; in the meantime, he needed a day job. They would pay him eight dollars an hour to ferry me around. Wow, my own driver and a limo, I thought. One day I walked into the agency, and there he was.
It was not a limo; it was an old, boat-sized Chrysler with a bad leak on the passenger’s-side floor. I can’t tell you how many of my shoes that car destroyed. The driver was not Prince Charming or Sir Lancelot; he was a quiet, soft-spoken young guy with grin lines radiating from his blue eyes. He wore a white T-shirt, Levi’s, and motorcycle boots. And sometimes a jacket, like something a delivery guy would wear: vintage, faded green, with a 7 Up insignia on the front. I still have that jacket. I won’t give it up. His name was Scott Weiland. I had just turned sixteen; he was twenty-three.
Along with the usual assortment of earthquakes and fires, L.A. was experiencing a series of heat waves that made asphalt melt and the horizon shimmer. Looking at Scott as he spoke, I felt my body sway, as though I’d brought the weather inside with me. I was torn between running back around the corner to my apartment or inching my way closer. It wasn’t something that he did or did not do. There was no special look or exchange between us. What I felt, instantly, was unlike anything I’d experienced before, yet I knew exactly what it was. I was hit, and hit hard, with the immediate knowledge that he was the one. I didn’t question, then or now, whether those feelings were a good idea. They just were. Maybe it was the click that comes when you recognize your soul mate, the click that doomed Romeo and Juliet. Maybe I saw something in his face that asked me to love him. All these years later, I lean more toward the latter.
Every day when I knew Scott was coming to pick me up, I talked to myself: Pull it together, Mary. Try to make yourself look at least eighteen. He’s coming, he’s coming. Flipping my hair, I rehearsed dialogue in the mirror. In the mirror, I was always smart and funny and cool. In the car, I went mute. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t look at him. I’d stare out the window, with my stomach looping up and over. Or I’d have the Thomas Guide: Los Angeles open in my lap as we figured out where my appointments were.
Neither of us had any real money. For lunch, sometimes we went to a little Thai restaurant and split a plate of fried rice for a dollar, drowning it in chili sauce to make it taste like anything other than rice that had been in a pot since the night before.
When you sit across a table from someone and share food, you actually have to look at him and, eventually, say something. We talked about music—the Seattle grunge scene was exploding on mainstream radio, so Nirvana was generally the headliner for our conversations, with Alice in Chains a close second. His band’s name was Mighty Joe Young, and they played anywhere they could around L.A.; this is what he’d always wanted to do, and they were working hard to get noticed, to get a record deal and move up to the next level. From the music talk, we went on to share the personal things—how I got to L.A., how he did, and all about our fractured family trees, both of us with remarried parents, siblings, stepparents, stepsiblings, and half siblings. He had a serious girlfriend, he said. I heard that information, filed it away, and did everything I could not to think about it again. Everything else I committed to memory.
Scott’s parents, Sharon and Kent, were California kids, like mine, but Northern California, near Santa Cruz. They, too, married young and divorced young as well, when Scott was only three. His dad was a surfer, and a little wild and crazy. His mom remarried; his stepfather, Dave (who was the furthest thing from wild and crazy, Scott told me—a Notre Dame graduate who worked for Lockheed Martin), adopted him when he was five, and the family moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, outside of Cleveland. He had three brothers, all younger, and he actually sang in the church choir when he was a kid. A little town named Chagrin Falls and a church choir—it all sounded like something out of a storybook to me.
In the summer, Scott would visit his dad in California, and from the way he smiled at the memories, I don’t think there was much choir practice going on there. Scott credits Kent for being the one who passed on a love for music and singing.
When Scott was fifteen, his stepdad was transferred back to California, and the family moved to Huntington Beach. Scott had played football for his Chagrin Falls school, went west with a strong letter of recommendation from his coach, showed up on the first day of practice all ready to go, and the Huntington Beach coach kind of yawned. As he was talking, I could visualize his first day on that sunny field, suited up for practice, letter in hand, and shot down. Not the most promising beginning.
He played football anyway, kept his stepdad happy, and began to get into the same kind of trouble I did, pulling the “You tell your mom you’re staying at my house and I’ll tell my mom I’m staying at your house” trick. Weekends with his new friends were spent riding bicycles to parties, a fine old California tradition—roll up, the front lawn is covered in bikes, the lights are all on, and the grown-ups are mysteriously someplace else. The other tradition he discovered was beer pimping: break up into pairs and split up, each group hitting a different liquor store. The goal is simple: Get someone who’s old enough to go in and buy you some booze. Scott wasn’t new to drinking, but his new friends took it (and him) to another level. They were also very busy getting to first, second, and the occasional third base with girls. If this had been happening back in Chagrin Falls, Scott told me, nobody had let him in on the secret.
Regardless of how slick they are, teenagers get caught at some point. Scott woke up one morning to find that his friend’s dad had come home early and busted the house full of hungover boys. He made them each call their parents and confess what they’d done. Scott spent the first month of his freshman year, in his new town, on restriction. Not only was Scott naive, but so were his parents.
One of his friends, Corey, invited him to a barbecue one weekend, where the guys were playing in a backyard band. For reasons Scott’s not quite sure of now (and he sends out a “no offense” to his friend Ross, who is Corey’s brother and was the lead singer), he said to himself, I can do this better than he can. I can write it, I can sing it, and I can do it better.
There’s an argument for being stubbornly unrealistic about your dreams. Otherwise they’re not dreams—they’re just ideas you had once and then left behind. Once Scott focused on music, he never changed his mind. He went to Orange Coast College for two years to please his stepdad, and still never changed his mind. When he asked to take the following y
ear off to focus solely on music, Dave said yes, he’d support that—but only if the band was run “as a business, not a stoner side project.” I don’t know if anybody’s ever actually done a statistical study, but I’d guess the Big Book of Rock History is filled with stories of artists who somehow (if messily) managed to do both.
Scott was actually the first person to give me advice about boys. I was pretty much a blank slate in that area. I’d never had a real conversation with my mother about boys and sex (and she never had one with her mother, either, which is how I came into the world when she was eighteen). Luis had explained girl mechanics to me, but nobody ever sat me down and said, “This is how boys work.” In simple language, without freaking me out, Scott did. He was nothing at all like the man people see onstage now, caught up in the music that takes him someplace else—to the casual observer, he was simply my very kind friend. My very kind friend who had me talking to myself in my bathroom mirror.
One morning, Scott was taking me to an appointment, and I was supposed to be a little cleaned up before I got there. There was Chap-stick, lip liner, mascara, and blush buried at the bottom of my school bag. I didn’t have a compact or a mirror; even now, I’m clumsy about putting this stuff on my own face and have always been grateful to the professionals who know what they’re doing. Scott pulled the car into an alley just off Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard, parked it, and waited for me to get out. “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t know how to make any of this work.” I knew that his girlfriend was a professional makeup artist; turning to him, I handed him the lip liner and said, “Can you do it for me?”
Without a word, he took the pencil and spent the next couple of minutes working on my crooked lips while perspiring like a member of a bomb squad. I wanted him to kiss me. Kiss me, kiss me. I closed my eyes while he worked on my face hoping, wishing, and begging God that he would. He didn’t.
Scott drove for other models, too, and one night, he came over to the apartment to pick up one of them. His band was playing a gig just a few blocks from the apartment; he invited her to come hear them. When I heard this, my stomach sank. He was wearing that green jacket. After they left, I flung myself on the couch and sobbed. I wasn’t old enough to get through that front door. That was the last time I ever let my actual age be a barrier between where I was and where I wanted to go.
The modeling agency began talking about sending me overseas—to Paris, London, Italy, Japan. This was a big deal, but because I was still a minor, the logistics were complicated. It was suggested that I go to court and become legally emancipated.
I wondered at first if Mom would be hurt, that she would think I was rejecting her. And she certainly asked a lot of questions. But when Candy Westbrook and I explained what was happening, she was, as in all things, practical: I was all the way across the country, I was supporting myself, and I needed to make decisions quickly about an industry she knew nothing about. “This is your chance,” she said. “I never got mine, and I’m not going to deny you yours. Worst-case scenario, you can always come home.”
My mother came west to go to court with me, and Candy came with us as well. The judge spoke with both of them, wanting to be certain this was a business decision, not a family rift or some kind of fight that would harm me in some way. He asked me a lot of questions, too. When the three of us walked back outside, I was a full-fledged legal adult.
Right around the same period of time, newspapers and tabloids flashed headlines about Drew Barrymore going to court to become legally emancipated. Her reasons were entirely different from mine—a bank account some very tricky people were going after, and a much bigger fight about it in a New York court. When I read the story, I thought, Good for her. (Because my emancipation didn’t get the publicity hers did, few people ever knew I could sign my own contracts. “I’ll make sure my lawyer sees this,” I’d say, and rarely, if ever, signed a thing for the rest of my career.)
One day a few months later, I was sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica, waiting to be called for a casting for YM magazine, when I noticed Drew Barrymore sitting right next to me. I’d never met anyone else who’d been emancipated and neither had she. We talked for a while, and she invited me to her upcoming birthday party, at the Opium Den, a club I would soon know well. There’s not much I remember about that party except that I drank too much. The next morning, even Scott’s arrival to pick me up barely got my death’s-door head off the pillow. As he drove me to and from my castings, I had to lie down in the backseat, hoping that would help. But the smell of his lunch sent my head out the open window.
Scott was my driver for three months, and then one day he said, “Mary, I’m not coming back—I got a record deal.” The band had signed with Atlantic Records. They weren’t Mighty Joe Young anymore; they were Stone Temple Pilots. There would be an actual album—Core—and he would be busy working on it and then touring with it. They’d be gone for a long time. No more driving Miss Mary. It’s temporary, I thought. Don’t panic.
After Scott left, his friend James started as my new driver. Miserable and mopey, I looked for excuses to bring up his name, fishing for anything Scott-related. Scott told me later that he’d taken some of my pictures from the agency and hidden them in his dresser; his girlfriend found them and made him rip them up and flush them down the toilet.
We actually had a weird near miss in the months that followed. Bordeaux hosted a party on the rooftop of West Hollywood’s fabled Chateau Marmont (it had a long history before John Belushi OD’d there in 1982, but that was its primary claim to fame the first time I saw it). I had worked all day and went straight to the party wearing full makeup and hair teased out to there, looking somewhere between barely legal and drag-queen-in-training. It was noisy and crowded, and the bar was wide open. One of the first people I met was comic Pauly Shore, who asked if I’d like to go to the Roxbury, then the hottest club in L.A. “Of course,” I said in my best “Who, me? Underage? Don’t be absurd!” voice, and we headed for the elevator. As we walked out, Scott and his girlfriend Jannina walked in. “Oh, hi,” I said. “How are you?” He half-smiled, and I guessed immediately he had no idea who I was. “Well, good to see you,” I stammered, and fled with Pauly to the Roxbury, where I proceeded to drink. A lot.
When Scott and Jannina got to the party, he ran into someone from the agency and asked if I was there. “She just left with Pauly Shore,” he was told.
I managed to get so drunk at the Roxbury that when Pauly suggested it was time to call it a night, I couldn’t tell him where I lived. Could not remember the address. Did not have a purse; did not have any money. I was pretty certain, though, that I had a major shoot early the next morning, for Italian Vogue for men—L’uomo Vogue. Everyone at the agency had been very excited about it. “I think it’s a big deal,” I slurred. Mr. Shore then proved himself to be a complete gentleman (I think this may come as a shock to some people). He took me to his house, settled me into a room by myself, set the clock, and made me take an aspirin and drink a lot of water. I remember stumbling into the bathroom, seeing my first bidet, and thinking, Well, I know there’s a choice here, but I’m not sure exactly how one makes it….
I was out the door on time the next morning with sufficient cab fare from Pauly to go to the shoot, still wearing my clubbing outfit and a pair of false eyelashes I couldn’t remove with a crowbar. When I got there, I discovered that the theme was Amish. Why L’uomo Vogue had decided this was the direction they wanted to go was beyond me. I was supposed to be the scrubbed-faced, healthy-looking maiden at the center of it all. Which is why there was no hair and makeup on site. I have seen birds’ nests that would’ve been easier to comb out than my morning-after hair. Nevertheless, I pulled it together, cleaned myself up, masked my hangover as best as possible, and got back to my apartment late that afternoon with the sole intention of falling into a coma.
The little light on the answering machine was blinking like the landing field at LAX, and every message was from S
cott. “I didn’t know that was you. I’m sorry. No, really, I’m sorry. Are you okay? This is the third/fourth/fifth time I’ve called. Where are you? Is everything all right? Pick up, Mary. Are you there?” I played the messages over and over and over.
A week or so later, Scott called and asked if I wanted to come down to the Palace, where his band was opening for Ice-T’s Body Count. He had this idea, he said, if I wanted to go along with it, that my girlfriend Reggie, one of the bookers from the agency, and I would dress up and toss condoms with the band’s name on them into the crowd while the band played the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” onstage. We both agreed to do it.
This will be fun, I thought, as Reggie and I went inside that night. And then reality suddenly loomed in the person of the girlfriend—Jannina was there. Scott explained that she was going to put stage makeup on us. I’d thought my leggings, platform boots, and bustier were trashy enough, but evidently not. The whole time she was working on my face, I was thinking how unfortunate it was that she was with my future husband. Lucky for me, she gave no indication that she was psychic.
Moments before Scott and his band came out, I started feeling afraid—what if the love of my life turned out to be awful? And then it started. The man who stepped to the front of the stage with the mic in his hand was not the one who’d been sharing fried rice with me. This man was someone else. But oh my God, he was amazing. Standing on the side of the stage watching Scott, listening to him, I knew he was going to make it. Of course he didn’t want to stick around and be a part-time driver for some twit girl model; he was a professional musician, a real one. What a fool I am, I thought. Even now, after all these years, after all the live performers I’ve been privileged to see, I still think he’s one of the best front men there is. He doesn’t just sing a song, he disappears into it—he simply takes off and goes someplace else.
Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness Page 7