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

by Mary Forsberg Weiland;Larkin Warren

  I don’t know how I actually drove home; when I got there, I ran through the front door and threw myself on the bed sobbing so hard I got dizzy. I cried for hours, I cried for months, I cried for nearly a year.

  Longtime Stone Temple Pilots fans, Velvet Revolver fans, Scott fans—there is an infinite Internet world out there that knows the date of every appearance, every performance, every song the bands performed, every date they were late for, how big the crowds were or were not. They know when and where Scott and Dean and Robert DeLeo met; they know when it seemed as though smoke billowed out of Eric Kretz’s drums, or what Axl Rose and Slash said, and what Scott said, and the song list of every CD. They’re pretty sure they know what each song and every lyric mean. There are online links to every interview, every press release, every fragment of gossip or truth (and who’s to decide which is which?). I know that even as I write, those fans are turning out to support the STP reunion tour.

  I respect this kind of loyalty and knowledge (and I’m grateful for the kind of life it ultimately gave my family), but this was never the way I cataloged what went on between Scott and me. I didn’t monitor the Billboard charts, I tried not to listen to the phone calls from management people or to worry when the guys were fighting or making up or creating something new. I simply fell in love when I was sixteen and stayed there for a very long time, while Scott pursued his dreams and I tried to pursue mine. I knew when we were happy, I knew when we weren’t. I know now when we were healthy, when we were in trouble, or when we were doing the best we could, together or separately. And I understood, once he’d married Jannina, that I had to stop rating my life in terms of where he was or how we were. There was no we. People coped with bigger hells than that every day. I had to get myself out of dream world and find a way to keep on moving.

  I was determined to bury my sadness in work. Send me anyplace, dress me in anything, rearrange my body and hair anyway you like, put me in clown makeup, hang me upside down off the side of a building. It didn’t matter, as long as I was moving and didn’t have to think. With every assignment, I started out strong: get to a new city, meet a new photographer or clients, have great ambitions to show up on time, light up the room, and in general change my attitude—act as though I actually liked what I was doing. And then, three or four days, or maybe a week later, it would all slide out from under me. The black cloud moved in, the windows needed to be shuttered, I needed silence and darkness.

  No, what I needed was some kind of help. I started asking my girlfriends—what do you guys think about this? Someone suggested a Chinese herbalist, who gave me a bunch of berries. Berries don’t seem to work well for mood disorders. Mental illness plus berries just equals a snack.

  The first real prescription I ever got for how crushingly sad I felt was for Zoloft. A girlfriend was going through a rough time, too—we both went to the same psychiatrist, who diagnosed depression and prescribed Zoloft. I’d been on it for a couple of days when I booked a bridal shoot. That wasn’t my favorite kind of job to do—bridal shoots are all about the dress, and you stand for hours while they take the ripples out of the satin or move a fold so that the light hits it and the shadow doesn’t, and all the while, you’re frozen from the waist down. But I knew the photographer, and the money was good.

  Just before I left for the shoot, I got a phone call from my Zoloft-taking friend. “Dude, you have to stop taking that medicine,” she said. “I was in the living room having a conversation with a friend and all of a sudden, I sharted in my leather pants!” Well, that’s disturbing, I thought.

  An hour into the shoot, I started feeling dizzy. And I suddenly knew I was going to be sick. “Get me out of this dress!” I pleaded, which was no easy task, since there were maybe fifty buttons up the back, with hooks and snaps and pins to make it fit. “Hurry, hurry, get me out of this dress!”

  They did it with seconds to spare. I ran to the bathroom in my panties and bra and vomited. I splashed cold water on my face and tottered back to the shoot. “Are you sure you’re okay to finish this today?” the photographer asked. They were on a deadline, it was all set up—I really didn’t want to leave any more people stuck. So I stayed, nauseated, and did my best to not move, worried about what my tortured digestive system might potentially do to the white satin dress.

  Had the doctor told us to expect these side effects? I’m not sure I asked. Nobody was Googling side effects (or much of anything else) back then; you just went to a doctor and got medicine for whatever was wrong. As it turns out, yes, vomiting and diarrhea were just two of the side effects; so were dizziness, confusion, vision problems, and a whole list of others. “I don’t think you’ve been taking it long enough,” the doctor told me when I protested. “Take it a little longer to get your body used to it. You may even be able to tolerate a bigger dose.” I could probably tolerate being shot in the foot, too, but I was damned sure I wasn’t going to volunteer for it. No more Zoloft.

  The next step in finding a solution was a sleep clinic. Maybe the reason I couldn’t get out of bed was some kind of sleep disorder. That was an odder experience than adventures in Zoloft, and almost as uncomfortable. I went in, they took me into a little room, and they put electrodes all over my body—my head, on the ends of my fingers. There were wires everywhere; it was like watching the cable guy hook up a new television. “Now go to sleep,” I was told, “and we’ll monitor your brain waves.”

  Sleeping was the one thing I knew for sure how to do, but in that environment, sleeping was not happening. I was awake the entire night, I didn’t close my eyes or even doze for one single minute. How can anybody figure out a sleep disorder if the subject attached to the electrodes can’t actually go to sleep?

  Finally, a doctor prescribed Prozac. This time, I stayed with it for a while, and it actually began to work. I felt stable, I felt somewhat relaxed. But I didn’t want to do much. I didn’t want to go out, I didn’t want to dance, I didn’t want to drink, and I had trouble being interested in anybody’s conversation. On a scale of one to ten, I’d hit five, and I stayed at five. I didn’t feel sick, I didn’t feel sad—I didn’t feel much of anything. In the middle of my own twenty-first birthday party, I found myself looking around the room and thinking, Well, this is pretty damn boring. So I stopped taking the drug.

  It came as a nasty surprise to me a few years later, when I learned that antidepressants, when mistakenly prescribed for someone with bipolar disorder (which no one had yet mentioned to me as a possibility), not only do not help with the depression half of the problem, they can often trigger mania.

  Bipolar disorder is a cyclical mental condition produced by chemical imbalances in the brain that alter the function or structure of neurotransmitters—which are, for lack of a better description, the little guys that carry the cognitive messages back and forth. And when, for whatever reason, those alterations happen, the message doesn’t come through, or it comes through wildly wrong. Think of a landline with static; think of a cell tower that gets hit by lightning and can’t pick up a satellite signal. Think of the way the picture on your TV breaks into fragments when something goes haywire with the cable.

  Bipolar disorder’s mood swings can happen in different patterns and at various rates of frequency for different people—some rapid-cycle in and out many times a week, or even in a twenty-four-hour period. Some may only have one or two episodes a year. Some may not even remember the mania or qualify what they did as manic. Cut off your hair, drive 90 mph across the desert one night, stay up through the entire weekend cleaning your closet—how is any of that crazy versus just being really energetic? You dance on a table and get mad when everybody else wants to go home; you buy a house you didn’t know you were shopping for. Hey, maybe it was a great party, or it was just a great house and/or a good deal—how do we judge the behavior, and who does the judging? In any case, there’s an inexplicable mess there and sometimes you don’t remember making it. All you know is you’ve crashed down the other side. There’s shame attached to
that; maybe people have been hurt by you, maybe something or someone is beyond repair. That’s why, when life goes out of control and it is time to figure out a diagnosis, it’s the depression that registers; the wild highs or erratic behavior often don’t. So the depression is what gets treated.

  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of textbooks that explain bipolar disorder in all its various complexities, but put simply, it comes in two distinct types: Bipolar I and Bipolar II. Bipolar I is what most people think of when they envision manic-depressive illness: big, obvious mood swings, from manic peaks to depression valleys and back again. Bipolar II involves what’s called “hypomanic” episodes—heightened creativity, lack of sleep, bursts of energy. That’s not what people go to doctors for, of course, since it feels good to be that person who’s working into the night, who makes beautiful things or thinks beautiful thoughts—that’s not, in most circumstances, identifiable as “crazy” behavior. But serious, even crippling depression follows hypomania, and that’s what happened to me. It’s a complicated business, and everything can affect it—weight, stress, drugs, booze, hormone fluctuations, erratic sleep. Treatment varies and usually includes a combination of prescription meds and talk therapy. But first there’s got to be a correct diagnosis (and there’s no sure-thing diagnostic test for bipolar disorder as there is for cancer, diabetes, or high blood pressure).

  And then, in addition to meds and therapy, a primary ingredient in treatment is consistency, something that had always been in very short supply in my life. Of course, I didn’t know any of this then, but when the day finally came to figure it all out, it was obvious that both Scott and I had been walking a tightrope for a very long time.

  When I left high school in the tenth grade in exchange for a life that seemed like more fun than Intro to Chemistry or British Writers of the Nineteenth Century, I didn’t give it much thought—I just jumped. Now I was making amazing money and leading what I’m sure looked like a glamorous life, but the question nagged at me: How long can you look at pictures of yourself? How much of your real life can you justify looking in the mirror and worrying about the size of your pores? Plus, no matter the size of the paycheck, I battled sadness as much as I ever had, and my constant criticism and nitpicking at my physical person just made that worse.

  I thought I was smart enough to do something else, and Jeff Kolsrud had been on me for a long time to think about a Plan B in which the size of my pores might not matter so much. “There’s a time stamp on modeling, Mary,” he warned me. I knew I didn’t want to be an actress, so I started looking around at what other people did for work and asking them questions. How did they get there, what was their job about, what did they like about it? Often, the question was turned back on me: What did I like?

  I liked books. Ever since I first mastered Dick and Jane and their dog, Spot, I always had a stack of books on my bedside table; hiding in one saved me many times when I was traveling. A Farewell to Arms, The Basketball Diaries, A Room of One’s Own, The Great Gatsby, Danielle Steel paperbacks grabbed while running through an airport. Once I borrowed a Dean Koontz book from my dad and ended up reading at least a dozen of them. Books—what could I do that was about books?

  I enrolled in courses at Santa Monica College. I didn’t have a high school diploma yet, of course—I hadn’t ever really settled into my correspondence courses (ultimately, that wouldn’t happen until I was pregnant with my first child and panicked about not being a high school graduate). But nobody asked me for a diploma. It was just sign up and show up. I started light: Freshman English. Pre-algebra. Because I’d left school early, I was conscious of not knowing much, so I was always asking questions. To me, there is no stupid question, and in a classroom, that’s actually an advantage. I didn’t make a fool of myself with my course work—I showed up, I got the work done. I drank coffee all night long when term papers were due or when an exam was scheduled the next day. I actually did well, I got good grades, and it felt good. I remembered the notes from my teachers when I was a kid, all a variation on the same theme: “Mary is a delight to have in class, but she would do so much better if she could pay attention and stop fooling around.”

  The only plodding I ever had to do with a book was with Moby-Dick. God, I hated that book. When I neared the end, it occurred to me that the only reason I was reading it was because it’s a “classic.” I could not care less about what people think, I’m fairly certain I’ll never be on Jeopardy!, and I just didn’t care about Ahab and his damn white whale. So I put it down for good. (And for the record, War and Peace should be called War and You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me.)

  I liked school; I liked being responsible. Maybe this was what normal life was like. Maybe modeling itself had somehow contributed to my depression. I decided it might be a good idea to just quit modeling entirely and find something else to do.

  Charlize had moved from modeling to acting, and her career almost immediately took off. She was represented by United Talent Agency (UTA), one of the three big agencies at the time. I knew a couple of her agents, and I’d heard about UTA’s training program. I thought, I’m a fan of wheeling and dealing—I’ve been doing it since I was a child. I know how to talk people into and out of things, I know how to read a contract, and I’d been managing myself since I’d been emancipated; maybe I could learn how to actually negotiate one for somebody else.

  Charlize arranged an interview for me, and I quickly began work on my “résumé.” This was a tricky business, since my previous experience and education were somewhat lacking. So far, I’d taken only eight college credits—I had to pad that out a little. And then there was actual work history. Flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets seemed to qualify me only for more of the same, and I wasn’t sure what modeling qualified me for. Moreover, my wardrobe of slips and baby doll dresses was inappropriate interview wear. I wanted this job. I thought it would bring me purpose and happiness. So I borrowed an Armani suit from Charlize and tried not to look nervous as I took the elevator up to the UTA offices. My generous friend was taller than me, and her grayish blue suit was too long in the sleeves and too long in the legs. I didn’t look like a grown-up, I looked like I was dressing up as one.

  While I sat in the lobby waiting for my interview, I picked up a copy of Marie Claire magazine that opened to a photo of me in a series of bathing suits, which I’d shot a few months before. I remembered the day I shot those pictures; I’d taken a handful of Vicodin beforehand. Vicodin gives you a feeling of comfort and warmth, it was just what I needed to get through a day when I was supposed to be basking on a beach. I put the magazine back on the table as though it were on fire. How would anyone take me seriously?

  When I was called into the office for my interview, I thought fondly of that Vicodin. I had no doubt that the majority of people working there had walked through the same door with experience and education I couldn’t hope to match. I was stunned when I was hired on the spot for UTA’s training program—aka the dreaded mail room. It was a Friday; they wanted me back on Monday. Maybe all that moving around as a kid gave me social skills I didn’t know I had. Maybe the years of auditions and photo shoots, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, added something to the picture. Or maybe it was because Charlize was their client, and they were doing her a favor. I’m going with the latter. Whatever, my cosmic bluff had been called: I had an actual job.

  When I left the UTA offices, I sat in my car for at least ten minutes. What had I just done? Okay, maybe I could fake my way through “Mr. So-and-So’s office, may I help you?” or calling the Ivy to make someone’s dinner reservation, but real office skills? I didn’t have any. I drove off, making a shopping list of everything I needed to learn in the next two days.

  My first stop was Circuit City to buy a computer. I had never used one and couldn’t type at all, let alone at the speed required. I called my friend Jody Britt and begged her to help me. She arrived on a mission of mercy. It turns out I’m computer-disabled—just figuring out how to turn the damn t
hing on was a challenge. Reading the manual was no help, and every time a program window popped up on the screen and said, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” the only thing I really wanted to do was punch it.

  I’d like to thank the creators of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, a CD-ROM typing tutorial. I typed until I couldn’t feel my fingers, then I took a flying trip to the mall to buy a wardrobe that screamed, “I know what I’m doing and I belong here!” Then I went back and typed some more, cursing like a trucker at Mavis Beacon. It probably wasn’t Mavis’s intention that her students learn the whole damn thing in forty-eight hours.

  On Monday, I started in the UTA mail room. The list of powerful people who’ve started in a Hollywood agency’s mail room reads like a menu of Who’s in Charge Around Here: Michael Ovitz, Bryan Lourd, Barry Diller, Jeffrey Katzenberg. People with master’s degrees in business start in the mail room; people with advanced creative writing degrees start in the mail room. Lawyers start in the mail room. And it literally was a mail room (although e-mail and Black-Berry messaging have probably changed things since I was there). You sorted the mail, you delivered it, you learned who everybody was and how an agency works. You might even be asked to read a script and write a breakdown or summary of scenes and characters.

  I was all fired up the first day I walked in there; within a few weeks, the black cloud was accompanying me to work. I had a close friend at CAA, another agency, and we were seen together at lunch. Someone told me there was a little buzz of gossip circulating: Was I spying inside one agency for another? I had a friend who was a film producer—he took me out, too, and half of UTA was at that restaurant. It was awkward, sitting a table away from my bosses. Someone asked about my friendship with Charlize, someone else asked why I wasn’t modeling anymore. They were long days, every one like the day before, and at minimum wage. How did people actually live on this money? I wondered. Within three months, it was Japan all over again—I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, and I couldn’t wait to get out of that job.