Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness

by Mary Forsberg Weiland;Larkin Warren

  It would be another couple of months before I’d see Scott again. James was driving me to and from my jobs, and coming home from a shoot one day, he said, “We’re going right past Scott’s—you wanna swing by?” I was still wearing my model hair and makeup, so I took a deep breath and said yes.

  Scott and I spent most of that visit looking at each other sideways. I don’t remember much about that house except that it had hardwood floors, which is where I kept aiming my eyes—the hardwood floors and the top of my motorcycle boots. When he asked if I wanted to hear something from the album, of course I did. I sat on the pool table while he fiddled with the tape, winding it forward and back until he found the song he wanted. The music started, and suddenly I heard my name. Something like, “Where did Mary go? Where did Mary go?” It was a song he’d written—“Wet My Bed”—and I was in it. Or somebody named Mary was in it, and it was about her. Or about me. I didn’t know for sure, but my face was on fire. “Did you check the bathroom, the bathtub? / She sleeps there sometimes. / Water cleanses, you know.” He turned around from the tape player and looked at me, and there it was: Oh God. I’m gonna marry him.

  And neither one of us moved. Days later, he was gone.

  Soon after Scott left, I left, too—to Japan, for my first international travel experience. Contracts with Japanese agencies were very strict: be available for work all day, every day, and do not gain one single ounce. This weight challenge was always my personal demon, of course, but in Japan, it finally made sense to me—the sample sizes there are so tiny that the humans in them should probably be the circumference of a clothes hanger. In fact, a clothes hanger might’ve worked out better than I did.

  Modeling in Japan didn’t offer a single ounce of glamour. Once you arrived at Narita Airport in Tokyo, you were taken directly to your first casting; after that, it never stopped. I got up at five, went to one job until noon, to another until four, to another at eight, got home after midnight, and started all over again the next morning. And the food just confused me. I’d go to a job, they’d hand me a pretty little lacquered bento box containing strange items (and no one could ever tell me what, exactly, each one was) and a pair of chopsticks. The Japanese clients laughed at my pitiful attempt to use chopsticks. “Oh, Mary-san, you no can use?” I had no clue. I wanted a donut. I wanted some pizza. I wanted some of my mother’s homemade Mexican food. At night, I had just enough energy for one of two options: wash off the clown makeup, or eat dinner. Not both. Sometimes I just put a towel on my pillow and fell over, asleep before I landed.

  Modeling in New York and Los Angeles, I was always a couple of inches too short; in Japan, unless there was another American model there, I was always the tallest person in the room. People stared. Walking up the stairs from the train, I’d sense someone right behind me, turn around, and sure enough, some guy was trying to get a look under my skirt. And then there was rush hour. There are guys employed by the Japanese train system called “pushers”—their job is to literally push, jam, shove, and cram every last person into every last available inch of space on the train. It was far worse than anything I’d ever experienced on the New York City subways, where, yes, people are packed in tight yet have this weird way of being distant from one another. Like, “Yes, I’m pressed right against your butt, and you’re glued to my hip, but I don’t see you, you don’t see me, we don’t acknowledge it, and we’ll just forget this unfortunate moment ever happened.” That was not my experience in Tokyo. Along with the pushers, there were grabbers—middle-aged businessmen trying to cop a feel and not being subtle about it. The first time it happened, I couldn’t quite believe it; after the second time, I started dealing out swats on their hands, a firm “Hey, quit that shit!” and then I’d carry on with my day.

  The contract was for three months; after six weeks, I was so desperately sad and lonely that I knew I had to find a way to get out. I’ll eat my way out, I decided. Since it was clear that wasn’t going to happen with bento boxes for lunch, I looked for an alternative and found a great one—an Italian restaurant! I started piling on the pasta and within days, every piece of clothing I wore was too tight. By the end of month two, I was back on a plane for L.A.

  It wasn’t the Japanese culture I didn’t like; I never had five minutes to experience that. It was the grind, pure and simple, and a sense that my body was not my own. But to be fair, the payoff was, well, the payoff—I left with thousands of dollars, which certainly helped equalize that first experience and lured me back to Japan again. I brought back home so much money that I duct-taped cash under my clothes. It took going back to Japan on tour with Scott, and a little leisure time to actually look around, before I truly understood the beauty of the culture, its traditions, and its people—and the nutritional wisdom of the bento box.

  Soon after I got back—in June 1993—I was involved in a huge Calvin Klein event at the Hollywood Bowl, a charity gala to benefit AIDS Project Los Angeles. Nearly five thousand people attended. Some of them (the big-ticket donors who sat in the box seats) were treated to special “picnic” dinners complete with white linen tablecloths and rosemary chicken. Tina Turner was the featured entertainment, but first came the fashion show, with a long runway that stretched nearly 150 feet into the middle of the audience. All together there were more than three hundred models in the show—among them Kate Moss, the famously tattooed Asian model Jenny Shimizu, and Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg. Rehearsals went on much of the afternoon, during which a lot of champagne was poured and more than a little pot smoke rose into the air. As the audience began to settle in their seats, everybody backstage was pretty happy.

  Some of the models would be wearing Mr. Klein’s fashions for women, some would be wearing fashion for men. I was one of the few girls who had two looks, which was a great honor for me. For the first walk down the runway, I wore a long dress and tried to hold my own next to Cameron Diaz, who’s taller, blonder, and stops traffic whether she’s on a catwalk or a sidewalk.

  For my next walk, I’d be wearing men’s boxer shorts. Only boxer shorts. I had very long hair—that, and my arms crossed demurely over my barely-theres, comprised the entire top of my ensemble. I don’t know if it was the champagne, the pot, the moon rising into the Hollywood Hills, the flashbulbs, the audience full of famous faces, or the short Brooke Shields video they ran just before the opener, where she once again uttered that famous line about nothing coming between her and her Calvins—but I had a case of galloping bravado, fueled by liquid courage. I was ready to rock my walk.

  Mr. Klein stood just near the runway adjusting each model before we hit the runway. But there wasn’t much adjusting to do when I stepped up—the only thing between me and Calvin were my Calvins. “I’m not sure I need to keep my arms wrapped around myself like this. Are you?” I asked. He smiled, said nothing, then sent me on my way.

  I got maybe twenty-five feet down the runway, took a deep breath, and dropped my arms. Lightning didn’t strike; instead, a slow roll of scattered applause. As I neared the end of the runway, I realized that on either side of the catwalk were two giant video screens focusing closely on each model in the show. Two topless Marys, four naked barely-theres.

  A few moments later, Mark Wahlberg famously dropped his Calvin Klein jeans and grabbed his white-underwear’d crotch (which had been famously displayed on the Times Square Calvin Klein billboard). The Los Angeles Times later called it “the skivvies segment” of the event. People hooted and hollered and applauded. By the time Tina Turner took the stage, they were dancing in the aisles, dancing on the stage, and dancing in the wings.

  The event made all the newspapers and raised a lot of money for AIDS research. Initially, some accounts got me confused with the far more well-known Kate Moss—we were similarly built and had long hair—which then earned me more modeling work. One magazine editor that I still run into tells the story to anyone who’ll listen.

  FIVE

  trouble

  When I first moved to L.A., I spent a lot of ti
me alone in the models’ apartment. Most of the girls were there only for a few days or were looking for a place of their own. Few were my age, and since I wasn’t going to high school, I didn’t do the hanging-out-with-girlfriends thing; mostly, I slept when I didn’t have a job to go to or watched MTV all day and night. In fact, I watched anything that was on, far into the night.

  Living in front of the television set changed soon after I turned seventeen, and Kristen Zang and Ivana Milicevic came into my life.

  Kristen, a model and aspiring actress from Lake Orion, Michigan, came to the models’ apartment the day after my seventeenth birthday—a happy anniversary we still celebrate, seventeen years and counting. I met Ivana (born in Sarajevo but also raised in Michigan) at around the same time, at a callback for a music video, one that required appearing in a swimsuit.

  I didn’t mind wearing a swimsuit or lingerie for an actual job, but I was never comfortable walking around less than half-dressed at a cattle call or an audition, so I’d concocted a strategy for any casting that required it. “Gosh, the agency didn’t tell me about that,” I’d say, wearing my hopeful smile instead. “Should I go home and get one?”—knowing full well that nobody was actually going to tell me to do that. Ivana, I learned, felt the same way—she hadn’t brought a swimsuit, either.

  This time, the casting director was adamant. “No swimsuit, no audition. Sorry.”

  Quickly agreeing that neither one of us could afford to walk away from a potential job, Ivana and I both stripped down to bra and panties (simultaneously). We didn’t get the job, but we walked away laughing, with the beginning of a strong friendship.

  We both pulled that “I forgot my homework” trick for years—in fact, I still do. Recently, I was asked if I was interested in going on a call for a nurses’ uniform catalog (in which “show up in a bathing suit” was never mentioned). Work’s work, so in spite of having a two-baby body now, I gamely went off to the audition and walked into a room full of leggy teenagers in tiny bikinis, standing in a long line hoping for the opportunity to show their books and their assets. I mean, seriously—have you ever met a nurse in a bikini? If you have, you were on the set of a porn flick.

  Ivana, Kristen, and I were soon going to the same castings together and quickly earned a reputation not only for cracking ourselves up, but for turning sessions into comedy routines. “We sort of knew none of you was right for this,” the casting directors often said, “but it’s always fun to see you.”

  Any pretense to being glamorous artistes or disciplined professionals went out the window. We were kids, and we acted like it—stayed out late, got up late, ate junk, had no fitness routine, and one of us (that would be me) sometimes smoked enough pot to give contact highs to the people who handed us our burgers and fries at the drive-thru windows.

  Our first meal of the day was usually at the Sunset Grill on Sunset Boulevard near the Guitar Center. If there was anything on that menu that wasn’t a negative for cardiac health, I don’t know what it was. Even worse, we had to sneak past the modeling agency to get there, whistling the theme song to Mission: Impossible and hoping we wouldn’t run into anyone from the office. We’d put away egg-and-cheese sandwiches, race back home, clean ourselves up, then jump into Kristen’s little white convertible VW Rabbit for our various appointments. In a business full of rejection, we managed to laugh it off when it happened, as though we had nothing better to do that day than hit Burger King. Once back home, we’d watch MTV until it was time to go out for the evening, then begin the nightly ritual of getting ready. We changed outfits at least three times apiece before deciding on the final result, put makeup on, wiped it off, then put it on again, all the while cranking up the volume on the radio or Luis’s boom box—hip-hop was generally the pick: Gang Starr, Nice & Smooth, and 2 Live Crew got plenty of play.

  One night, in an effort to assist me with my ongoing quest not to look like a child, the girls came up with a genius idea for giving me boobs—they balled together a mountain of cotton balls and taped them to my chest; over that, I put on one of Kristen’s bras, and we stuffed it some more. Then we added bronzer down the middle of my chest, basically drawing on cleavage. One look in the mirror and we laughed so hard the tears rolled down our cheeks. That was one look that never left the apartment.

  Once we were ready, we headed for the Roxbury, Saturday Night Fever, or the Formosa. A friend of ours, Brent Bolthouse, then an up-and-coming promoter (and now a major club owner) held a dinner every Thursday night in the restaurant section of the Roxbury, charging us only ten dollars. If you didn’t have the cash, you could go to Brent’s house during the day and stuff promotional material into envelopes to earn it. Dancing was our main exercise (of course, drinking canceled out any health benefits). Odds were good that we might find ourselves dancing next to Prince, or across the floor from Madonna. This was pre-paparazzi, pre-TMZ, pre-tabloid reporters going through your trash. Sometimes a photographer you knew would ask to take a picture and would give you a copy if you asked. It was fun and relaxed—nobody was going to speed down the street when you left, trying to take a picture of your crotch with his cell phone. Big names rarely go out for the fun of it anymore (photographs are either taken at staged events or by playing “gotcha!” at the grocery store), and I feel a lot of compassion for the kids who do. The paparazzi ruined L.A. nightlife.

  One night Kristen was sitting by the open window of the models’ apartment when Nicolas Cage (whose assistant lived across the street) walked by and started a conversation. Nic’s career was already in high gear; Moonstruck had come out five years earlier, and he was working constantly. That chance meeting turned into a long-term relationship for Nic, then twenty-eight, and Kristen, nineteen, and it took the Girlfriend Shenanigans Show bicoastal.

  Since all three of us had modeling agents in New York, when Nic would go there to shoot a film, we would go along ostensibly for our work as well, staying in whatever five-star hotel suite the film project was paying for, sleeping late, ordering room service, and coming up with trouble to get into at night. In L.A., the house that Nic and Kristen lived in together, up near Beachwood Canyon not far from the Hollywood sign, looked like a castle. In the bedroom there were remote control curtains that turned the room pitch black when closed, no matter how much the sun was shining outside. If Nic was out of town working, the three of us went out all night, came back to the castle, piled into the giant bed, hit the blackout shades, and slept half the next day away. “If there was a sleeping event in the Olympics,” Nic said to Kristen once, “I don’t know which one of you would win the gold.” When we finally woke up, we’d intercom downstairs for someone to bring us breakfast—because the house looked like a castle, we’d order Count Chocula cereal (it had a certain logic at the time).

  Nic had a lot of guests at the castle, and one night Jim Carrey was among them. He glanced at a glass-doored cabinet, the top shelf of which held an ornate teapot and next to it a candlestick. “Oh, look!” he exclaimed after less than a second’s thought. “It’s the cast of Beauty and the Beast!”

  Nic was a generous guy, but different from a lot of the other men we knew—intense, edgy, and not much interested in partying all night. He’d grown up inside the business—his grandfather was a famous movie music composer, his uncle was director Francis Ford Coppola, and Nic’s dad was a literature professor. I admired him for dropping Coppola as a last name when he first started and not using it to open doors.

  About my friends’ private lives: L.A. was full of models, musicians, actors, directors, and writers. That’s always been true, and most of the people giving it a shot are kids. From a distance, it can look glamorous (although reality shows are quickly doing what they can to change that perception), but in many ways, it was and is no different from any other workplace or even college campus—young people find one another. You make lifelong friendships with people who have the same goals and the same stresses that you have. You socialize and date and maybe fall in love with the people you m
eet. Relationships begin, they matter, and then, for all the usual reasons, they come to an end.

  I loved going out with my friends, but I wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend—a boyfriend was not part of my Future Mrs. Scott Weiland plan. Sometimes I went on a few dates hoping that something would happen, something to erase my feelings for Scott and the certainty that we’d be together. But I never had much success overriding my own emotions. It wasn’t fair to waste anyone else’s time, and I didn’t want to waste my own. I knew I’d marry him, even when that knowledge had no basis in reality. I simply believed it.

  But that didn’t rule out guy friends, and as time passed, I made some wonderful ones. Eric Dane and Balthazar Getty, for example, came to me as a pair. I was introduced to both of them when we were all out one night, and that was it. Eric and Balt were both getting TV and film work, and Ivana, Kristen, and I were all taking home nice paychecks. I think we found some form of comfort in not needing to put up an adult front. Four or five nights a week, we drank, danced, stayed at clubs until they closed, then we’d wake up the next day, do whatever we had to do for work, meet afterward, and start all over again.

  I first met Guy Oseary (who now manages Madonna) when he was dating Kristen, just before she met Nic. I was going back and forth between California and New York for work, and sometimes stayed with Guy in L.A. He called me “Little Mary,” and used to give me self-help books all the time. One of them was called How to Be an Adult. If he’d ever given me a pop quiz to see if I’d actually read it, I’m not sure I would’ve passed.