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

by Mary Forsberg Weiland;Larkin Warren

  Unfortunately, my attorney was with the same firm as one of the lawyers involved in the endless Kim Basinger–Alec Baldwin custody battle—whenever Baldwin and Basinger showed up in court, the newly spawned tabloid cameras followed them and usually caught Scott and me and our relatively tame little drama in their wake.

  On October 27, on Scott’s thirty-sixth birthday, long after midnight, he hit a parked car somewhere in Hollywood. He was arrested again. The judge from the May case sent him to detox again and residential rehab, with four hours a day allowed out to finish working with VR on the band’s first album, Contraband. Once again, the holidays came and went without the storybook picture of the young couple and their babies under the Christmas tree. Daddy was in lockdown again. The divorce went on; the lawyers piled up the billable hours.

  For years, Scott and I spent a lot of money getting into trouble, and even more money than that trying to get out. Rehab back then cost anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 for thirty days (and you didn’t get a refund if you left early, which I did every single time until the last one). Nowadays, it’s upward of $100,000 a month. We were sporadic about insurance, and in any case, when we were covered, it was only for a portion of the cost. I had a Screen Actors Guild membership from my limited adventures in acting, and Scott had his AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) coverage—but add lawyers (many of them) for Scott’s divorce from Jannina, then for every arrest, every court appearance, the hotel-hopping (especially with the paranoia of the Chaos Tour), room service, bar tabs, staff, business managers, assistants, and the list went on for pages and pages. The bills piled up; the money disappeared. Worse, when we were high, we shopped. A good run, on the days we could get ourselves out of the house, would find us on Rodeo Drive in a delusional spending spree, collecting an inventory of clothing that mostly found its way to the closet floor. We ran through millions. I did a little bit of modeling while I was pregnant with Noah, and a little bit more with Lucy, but it was clear I was going to have to take a page out of my mother’s book and figure out some other way to get crafty.

  I met Dave Kushner’s wife, Christine, at Lucy’s first birthday party, and as she reminds me, I was hugging the wall that day. I didn’t know who to trust anymore or who to talk to. Christine and I hit it off immediately. We are alike in many ways; most important, we have the same sense of humor.

  We developed our business, Double Platinum, as we began going to award shows and events together. Nearly every event featured either a gift bag or a “gifting suite”—an insane concept. You walk into a room that’s been converted to a free shopping mecca for celebrities. Different companies line up tables and display their products—designer jeans, jewelry, watches, spa products, imported food, leather goods, sound systems. The intention is to put a product into a celebrity’s hand and benefit from whatever press comes with that exposure. The results are seen in everything from the answers to the red-carpet question “Who are you wearing?” to the detailed captions in magazines in a celebrity photo shoot.

  Christine and I were both seasoned shoppers; we decided that with our experience and the people we knew, we might be able to create the ultimate gift bag. For our first big job, we were hired by the Diamond Information Center in 2005 to create a gift bag for an Oscar Week event in Los Angeles. The DIC created a hideaway where celebs could hang out, get their nails and hair done if they wanted, get a camera-friendly spray tan, and walk away with everything from Converse shoes to diamonds. It was a success, and it led to others—the Grammys’ MusiCares event, the Boys and Girls Club Christmas Gala. The charity events were the most gratifying, because each of them was about more than taking home a suitcase full of stuff you didn’t need, wouldn’t use, and would likely regift. We then moved into product branding—attaching a particular artist to a particular product. One of the most fun was pairing an upscale robe company with Ozzy Osbourne. The robe, a leopard print, was the official aftershow robe for Ozzfest. Stranger matches have happened in show business, I guess.

  As much fun as the challenge of putting Double Platinum together was for me, what I loved was working with Christine and seeing our efforts actually pay off. I liked making money, of course. And I really liked discovering that maybe, just maybe, I would be able to take care of the kids and myself.

  Something happened to Scott in the last court-ordered rehab stint in 2003: He finally kicked heroin. I don’t know how or why, and I certainly hadn’t put any bets on a positive outcome. If anything, I’d have bet in the other direction. Maybe it was just his time. Maybe it was working and creating with a band of guys who’d gone down that same road and learned how to finally stop the Groundhog Day effect. Whatever it was, the run that had begun the day after Noah was born was finally, officially over. And so, we decided, was our second try at divorce. Maybe we hadn’t yet mastered being together as a married couple, but we agreed we were pathetic at being apart. Scott was filled with resolve, and we had two little children to raise. We’d been through our parents’ divorces—didn’t we have an obligation to our kids to do better, to get it right? And God knows we weren’t out of love.

  We sold the house in Coronado to pay the lawyers’ bills for the divorce that didn’t happen, and once again, I went house hunting. We found the perfect little Ozzie and Harriet house near Toluca Lake: a simple, white, ranch-style house with black shutters. It was not a childhood fantasy; it was a real house, in a real neighborhood. Of course, we’d barely moved into our new home when it was time for me and the kids to hit the road with Daddy. Velvet Revolver’s first release, Contraband, had a great reception—ultimately, the first single, “Slither,” would go on to win a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2005—and the band was going out on tour to support it. I really wanted us all to go—Noah and Lucy weren’t in school yet, and we knew there’d be a time when we wouldn’t be able to do this with them. Even more important, Scott didn’t want to be separated from them. And I didn’t want to be separated from him.

  Before the VR tour—while Scott began working with the guys putting together the new album—I had been so occupied with Noah and Lucy, as well as with Scott’s and my personal issues, that it really didn’t hit me that when Stone Temple Pilots hit the rocks, I lost part of my family. I knew them before they were Them, and we’d all been through a lot together. Because of the old connections to Guns N’ Roses, the Velvet Revolver guys had relationships with one another that went as far back as STP’s did. They had their own personalities, their own way of working and touring. It wasn’t a matter of better or worse. It was just different. Once I became aware of that difference, I realized that I wasn’t quite convinced that Scott and STP were finished with each other.

  This tour wasn’t the old days; it was the new days. Some days Scott wasn’t obligated to do anything besides a sound check at the venue or an interview with a local radio station or newspaper, so after a late breakfast, he was free to hang out with us—maybe a swim in a hotel pool, maybe a museum or renting a movie. It was an easy yet regulated life—the kids were tucked in early at night, the trusted nanny was with them, and I would go off to the gig with Scott. Six weeks out, a couple of weeks home, then back out again. We’d fall asleep in one city, and the buses would drive all through the night to the next. The trek to Australia was too long for the kids, but we did take them on the European leg of the tour and to Japan as well. Tokyo and Osaka looked and felt far different to me than when Model Mary was living there. Noah and Lucy traveled well on the ground, not so well in the air. Lucy’s midnight rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in the first-class section of the airplane only minutes after she’d thrown up didn’t charm the other passengers as it did me; the flight attendant on American Airlines, a grumpy crab cake of a woman, sternly requested that I make her stop singing. You cannot make Lucy stop singing.

  Scott actually wrote the song “Fall to Pieces” the day after he was arrested, after STP had fallen apart, after I’d filed for divorce the first time. I ag
reed to be in the Velvet Revolver video because once again, we’d put it all back together. I trusted both him and the director, Kevin Kerslake—it was their creation. I never even read the storyboard, because I didn’t want any additional anxiety over what I would have to do. I was flattered that Scott asked me to be in it, even more so that the band was okay with it. Christine and Susan played the band girlfriends, which made that day so much easier than it might otherwise have been.

  For weeks before, I sweated the two-babies-all-carbs weight gain, training like a marathoner. One morning I was on the treadmill running (okay, walking fast) next to Dave Navarro, who was fit and lean and barely breathing hard. “I am as big as a house,” I gasped. “The camera adds ten pounds. What’s my excuse for the rest of them?”

  “It’ll happen,” he said. “Nobody sees themselves honestly—I think you look just fine.” And then he gave me a tip. Before filming each of his own videos, he said, he always worked out like crazy, promising himself that once the shoot wrapped, all the food he loved and had been craving would be right there and ready for him to eat. (I may have overdone it after the “Fall” shoot was over; I pigged out so enormously that my stomach protested for two days.)

  Once on the set, I remembered: Mary, you can’t act. You never wanted to act. But I had to act in that video (and I was supposed to be playing myself). What did come surprisingly easy were my scenes with Scott. We had fun together, reliving the time when he was my driver. There was only one scene that he struggled with. We were in a bedroom, supposed to be having a big blowout of a fight. He just could not yell at me. I suggested that we each pick a word and continuously repeat it with an upset expression. We chose the words black and white and said them over and over. Weirdly, it worked, raising the intensity between us.

  What I still like most about that video is Scott’s honesty. He never hid his struggles, not only with drugs but with me as well. Unlike most videos (in my opinion, anyway), this one was genuine and authentic. That said, the drug scenes, the overdose scenes, were horrific. The love between us was there, but the memories those scenes were based on were so sad. The video itself lifts into some kind of redemption for the central character at the end, but the opening guitar riff in that song still tears at my heart: “I’ve been alone here / I’ve grown old….”

  Full disclosure: I’ve never been much amused by the Grammy Awards. Aside from the live music, it’s basically a giant clusterfuck. Watching in comfort at home, it’s all lights and excitement, but when you’re actually there, it’s more reminiscent of a high school assembly. Half the audience is students hired as chair fillers; during every commercial break, a wave of artists run for the exit. Next time you watch, carefully scan the audience at the beginning and then again at the end of the show—the only talent left are the ones in the front row, which the camera catches every single time, and those whose awards haven’t been given out yet. Noah was only a few months old the first time I attended with Scott. I painted on a black Rick Owens dress and tried hiding much of the night. My experience the second time around was not much better, in spite of Scott and VR being nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance, Best Rock Song, and Best Album. We’d flown in from Japan the day before, and I landed in L.A. with a massive ear infection. My head felt like it was going to blow off my shoulders—the doctor actually had to stick a crazy long needle in my ear and pop my eardrum to relieve the pressure. It didn’t work. I was in so much pain that most of the night was spent lying on the floor between awards, holding my head and missing Vicodin.

  At some point, some of the guys went out for a smoke; about two minutes later, their category was up and they won. When Scott finally strolled back in, I whimpered, “Congratulations, honey, you won—can we go home now?”

  Somewhere between the VR tour, potty training the kids, and trying to settle into the little ranch house, I came up with the idea of a reality show and actually pitched it to VH-1. It would be about a rock star’s family, the life on the road, the life at home—former model makes sugar cookies, crazy reformed drug dad drives kids to preschool; Lucy sings, Noah wants to wear his Spider-Man costume to bed and to school and to Grandma’s. Riveting stuff, no?

  To tell the truth, I was mad at the media’s depiction of addiction—my husband’s in particular—and wanted us to be able to tell our side of the story. At the end of every year, a local FM station hosted a segment called the “Dead List,” where they predict who will die in the next year. Scott was on the list every damn year. One time, Lucy overheard it before I could dive for the Off button, and I explained to her that it was the Red List—the names of everybody who had red hair that year, which at the time, Scott did.

  It galled me that no one seemed to understand the seriousness of the disease we were both fighting and that addiction was fodder for a constant running joke. We had our own jokes, thanks—there’s often a lot of laughter around our house and in a twelve-step meeting as well. And addicts are far better at laughing at themselves than anybody else is—but would you laugh at someone with cancer? Or heart disease? Seriously?

  I thought that we had a chance to change some people’s minds. In the years since, of course, I’ve seen what reality TV has done to families—and to addicts—but I believed, in those first few months of Scott’s new success with VR and with our renewed life together, that maybe we could shine a light on addiction. And I was thinking, too, of the addicted man or woman sitting in a dark room somewhere, needing to see somebody’s victory. Maybe Scott, in his stage clothes, joking with the kids and taking out the garbage, would do it. I wanted to call it Irreconcilable Differences.

  To my surprise, VH-1 was actually interested. They did a short pilot, following us around with cameras. But it turned out that the network didn’t want to go on the road with a rock band; they wanted more domestic conflict. They wanted us to fight. I think they even wanted Scott to have a slip or two.

  I learned a lot about how a TV program works, and my old bosses at UTA would’ve been impressed at my negotiations—I worked for a long time on that contract, and fortunately I wrote myself a very tight out clause so that we could control content (or take a walk if we couldn’t). I wasn’t going to volunteer for putting my family in any further jeopardy. The Weiland Project didn’t go forward.

  Years ago, Scott renamed May “Mary Month” because my birthday, Mother’s Day, and our anniversary all came within days of one another. Most of my birthday celebrations have been dinner with my closest girlfriends, but in 2005 we decided that my thirtieth was going to be different. I was going to throw a prom. I’d never gone to a high school senior prom; I didn’t have a Sweet Sixteen party. Now I would have both, only bigger. My thirtieth birthday was a Pretty in Pink–themed prom, at Sportsman’s Lodge on Ventura Boulevard, in Studio City.

  I chose Sportsman’s Lodge over something fancy because it’s a legendary old place, and the ballroom had a high school vibe. My friends Brent Bolthouse and Jen Rosero, along with their team, helped me pull it together. The invitations were pink and over-the-top fancy; the requested attire was eighties’ formal wear. I chose a pink frilly dress with a Molly Ringwald feel to it, and Scott wore a tacky tux. I was a vision in green eyeliner, but when Scott walked in, I nearly fell off my chair. He had added bleach-blond extensions, and had new-wave bangs that would’ve impressed Jon Cryer’s Duckie. When we walked into the ballroom, Pretty in Pink was being projected onto the walls, and the room was so pink it felt like we were in a big bubble-gum bubble that expanded as more people came in the room. Anthony Kiedis was there in a red Thriller-type jacket; Slash came as Slash, which worked. Steve Jones wore an eighties’ Adidas track suit that was very Run-DMC. All my girlfriends—Ivana, Kristen, Charlize, Jody—came, along with Ione Skye, her brother Donovan Leitch and his wife, Kirsty Hume, Justine Bateman, and Tony Kanal and Adrian Young from No Doubt. Everywhere I looked, I saw old friends dressed as though it were sophomore year in Coronado and somebody was going to stick us with a math test on Monday. Over in the cor
ner, a photographer was taking prom-style pictures, and everybody went right into character, making lame I’m-an-awkward-teenager poses. We had big cans of Aqua Net hair spray in the bathrooms and lots of eyeliner for anybody who felt the need for more.

  Scott and Donovan Leitch got up and sang with the band; Scott sang Modern English’s “I Melt with You” (and because I overdid it in the vodka department, I don’t know for sure what Dono sang; I think it was either Berlin’s “The Metro” or B-Movie’s “Nowhere Girl”). My mom took home videos that I wish didn’t exist. In a serious lapse of judgment, I took the stage and broke into “Like a Virgin”—even worse, I reenacted Madonna’s MTV performance, rolling around the floor in my pink lace dress.

  As the party wound down, Scott told me he had a surprise for me. We went back to our room and he put in a DVD he’d made of home videos and old family snapshots—it was called This Is Our Life. He’d been working on it for weeks, and all of our friends and family were in on it. It opened with a series of pictures of me and my girlfriends before Scott and I were together, then our time before we got married, our wedding, Noah’s birth, and then Lucy’s. Nothing was missing: touring as a family, every Christmas and birthday, every moment that anyone had been carrying a camera. I cried like a baby—and so has everyone who’s ever seen it.

  In July 2006 after six years of marriage, we renewed our wedding vows. I was working against the old waves of sadness, and objectively, when I looked around and counted my obvious blessings, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Scott was restless and tired, and staying sober—for both of us—was becoming difficult. To be perfectly honest, we’d hit some kind of emotional wall. Between therapy sessions, marriage counselors, twelve-step meetings, and the endless family groups through outpatient rehab, we were just tired of talking. You turn your mind and will over to sobriety, over and over and over, and you sometimes wonder what of “you” really remains. Maybe all we needed was just a simple promise to be better at it this time, to do better, to do it right. Maybe without work, without the band, the babies, the cast of hundreds who were in and out of our lives all the time, maybe we could get it back to just the two of us. Some couples take the flowers-and-candy route, some might use a weekend away or a sweet gift—at one point or another, Scott had given me all these things. But addiction is always accompanied with grandiosity; for us, nothing would do but the big gesture. So we flew off to Bali for ten days to renew our vows and start over. Again. Sunshine, sand—like Marbella, like Maui before we were married. We kept believing that peace was to be found in a place. Always another place.