Slam.
I finished getting everything thrown together and called a bellman to help get the bags into the car. I waited in the car in absolute embarrassment and disgust. I was disgusted at her. I was disgusted with myself for being so helpless and bound to this dynamic. When was I going to learn? Mom showed up at the last minute and I was seething inside at how pitiable my life was. We fought and her words were imbued with vitriol. I was an ingrate, she said, and why couldn’t I be as talented an actress elsewhere as I was during the act of fury I was displaying? She said I had a fat ass and I did not appreciate anything.
She had been drinking all morning, either at the hotel bar or at some place nearby. When she had left the room earlier, she must have gone to get a few last-minute nips before the flight. The last few must have hit her while she was on the drive to the airport, and she actually passed out in the car. I can count on one hand the times Mom had ever passed out. She never even took naps. I watched her as the car stopped and the door was opened. She was still not wake. I made a weak attempt to stir her but realized I did not want her to awake at that moment. I got my bags and stormed off to check in. I purposely took her passport with me because I had gotten it from the room safe with the jewelry. I planned on leaving France with it in hand but did not have the guts to keep her ability to exit the country. At the very last second, I ran back to the car where she was still slumped over, and I threw the passport inside the slightly opened window.
“Mademoiselle, what should I do wif yur muzzer?”
“Je ne sais pas. . . . C’est comme tu veux. Merci.” I do not know. It is as you wish. Thank you.
I boarded the Concorde flight to JFK airport. I sobbed the entire flight. The actress Amy Irving was on the same flight and asked if she could help. Ironically her mother, Priscilla Pointer, had been one of the acting coaches hired for me on Just You and Me, Kid. I told Amy that I had just left my mom passed out in a car at departures. She gave me a warm smile. Once again I had the feelings of survival and sadness mixed with a tad of freedom of not having to be on the trip with Mom.
We landed, and while in baggage claim, my new video camera was stolen right from under my nose. Mom managed to show up the next day at 11:00 A.M. at the shower as if nothing had happened. She breezed through the party with grandeur and a wrapped Hermès scarf and began the red wine all over again.
I should have held on to her passport.
• • •
Something had to shift. I could only think of shifting my mother’s behavior, not my life. If I could just get her to stop drinking, my career would pick up again.
Lila and I researched treatment facilities together once again. Auntie Lila had moved away from Teri and from working at our company a few years prior and was now residing in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona. We both knew that it was bad with Mom, and even though I had much less leverage than the first time, we needed to try something. She’d never again fall for meeting us at a location with her bags secretly packed.
I put a call into Betty Ford herself. I explained my situation and she promised that if I could get my mother to go to the Betty Ford Center, she would have a bed ready for me. I would just have to get Mom to commit to going back into treatment. Lila knew an intervention specialist who flew in to places all over the country to help with interventions. We asked him to join Mom, Lila, and me in Haworth, New Jersey.
Mom saw us “interventing” a mile away. She sat on our long, low, floral-upholstered couch and dug in. She said she would never again go to treatment and was insulted and disgusted by us all. She was angry and adamantly refused to go. She attacked me for trying to control her, and even when I was being soft, and loving, and saying this was necessary and good for us both, she just shook her head.
“If I want to stop, I’ll stop.”
I told her about Betty Ford and she blurted out something about not being an addict or in bad enough shape for a place like the Betty Ford clinic. She claimed she did not have a drinking problem. Well, she was right there! My mother never had a problem with her drinking. It was the rest of us who did. I even think she meant this double entendre herself. Another one of her little word manipulations.
“Fuck you. Fuck you both, Lila.” She looked at the intervention specialist and said, “I don’t give a shit who you are, but I want you out of my house.”
“Your daughter asked me to come, Teri, to help her,” he responded.
“Well, great, help her and get the fuck out of my life.”
“But, Mom . . .”
“I began in this world alone, and I’ll end in this world alone. I don’t need you, Brooke, to tell me how to live.”
“But I really love you, Mom, and—”
“Yeah, and Peter really loved Jesus. Where did it get him?”
She had this cocky expression on her face as if she had just won. She would often say to me while I was growing up that one day I “would deny [her] like Peter.” She sat there triumphant, seemingly pleased with the proof that I had denied her just like the apostle Peter did to Jesus when the pressure was on. It was crazy when she chose to pull out the religion card and how hypocritical she remained.
This attempt at an intervention was an abject failure. Money down the drain and a lost hot-commodity bed rejected. I called Mrs. Ford and apologized. I thanked her for the special treatment but said that my mom wouldn’t be coming to the center. She told me that Mom would never get help until she wanted it for herself. I explained that it did not seem as if anything like that was ever going to happen. Mrs. Ford recommended that I never give up hope.
To this day, the ACOA kid in me thinks that if only Betty Ford’s had been available the first time, maybe it would all somehow have been different.
• • •
I walked away in defeat and without any plan. I continued to live in New York City and go to events if asked. Mom proceeded as if nothing had ever transpired, but every now and then would throw the attempt up in my face to reinforce how I had failed and how she would never be outsmarted. She was a true addict.
I shot some interesting photos for Paper magazine and was kind of getting into the creative groups via the magazine. I did readings and performance pieces for fun makeup artists and was asked by the likes of Russell Simmons to join him on a panel to discuss what was in and what was out in our culture these days. I was hoping that maybe through my fabulous community of gay artistic friends I would find a niche and get back on top of things again.
It was during this time that I began to date Liam Neeson. He was a tall Irish actor and a drunk who was thirteen years my senior. He wooed me with his brogue, his poetry, and his shitty choice of cheap pinot grigio wine. I rebelled with him and poured myself into his rhythm. I would take dance classes all morning and then meet up with him at the bar at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park South. We’d drink and talk to Norman, the bartender, and discuss literature and acting. We would daydream about our future. Norman was, and is, a living legend who looked out for me.
During those days, I existed on cheese and crackers and wine and the relationship. I was going to grow up and the Irish drinking actor was the perfect solution. I was so impressed with going out with a real movie star and I was so familiar with what it was like to live with an alcoholic who lived in dreamworlds. Liam and my mom were perfect for me. And, of course she took to him the way she did to all other tall, manly, gruff drunks. She flirted and welcomed him home. It did not get as creepy as it could have, since Liam hungered after any female attention, but none of it was healthy or real. I was struck by how it was somehow familiar. It was such a cliché and I could not see it.
We got serious enough after only three months, and I thought that this would get me away from my mother and earn me the respect I wanted so desperately. He was a real actor, and if he chose me, then I would be exposed to a higher caliber of the entertainment industry. I could finally be serious.
He asked me to marry him but without a ring. I told Mom and she worried she would not be invited. That was her immediate response. Nothing about me, but about where she fit in instead. “Watch: When you get married, you probably won’t even invite me!”
I told her I would always invite her for the rest of my life whether I wanted to or not. I added that even when she did show up for me, she was never really there anyway because she would be drunk. She brushed it off and said, “We’ll see. . . .”
Who knows what she meant by that, but I pretended I was engaged. We spent a Christmas together and Mom suggested that I give Liam a copy of my brilliant book that had been crafted while I was at Princeton. She actually thought it was a clever idea just like her arranging for a Brooke doll to be delivered to John Travolta’s hotel on his birthday. I inscribed the book with some mush about my days being in focus since he came into my life. The blurred handwriting was because of the steady flow of wine. I could not fight my mother’s drinking, so why not throw responsibility away and join the booze brigade?
Everybody was staying slightly buzzed all day long and we were one big happy family. Until I went to Italy for some job.
Liam had to fly to LA that night to check on a basement flood in his home. I told him to phone me when he arrived.
“Oh, it’ll be late, darlin’.”
“Well, I won’t fall asleep until I know you are safe. And you did ask me to marry you, so you can tell me the plane was safe.”
I never heard from him again.
• • •
When I got home I crawled back to Mommy. I was too weak and sad and scared and heartbroken. My mama would let me cry and tell me it would pass. We were living in this old Tudor-style house that was too big for two people and beginning to get run-down, and we had no future plans. The Grey Gardens tenure had actually begun. I was obviously incapable of living in the big world alone.
This time Mom did not try to talk me out of it. She happily let me get right back into some of the old routines. Who was the more pathetic one now? We were holding on to multiple properties and fostering dogs in attempts to find them homes. Strangely, people adopted them because they had been in my custody and because people are crazy. So maybe we differed from Little and Big Edie, in some ways, but the writing was on the wall for us to transform seemingly into a mother and daughter living alone in a festering relationship of enmeshment and fear. I cried a lot and tried to start every day anew.
I wish I only knew you in the mornings, Mama. . . .
It felt like I was back to the beginning. Even though I had gotten an education and I had done a great deal of work on myself to separate from her, I had been defeated yet again. I was right back in the thicket.
Part Four
She says things like how she hates me and then in the next breath like a crazy person says, “I love you more than life.”
—Brooke’s diary
Chapter Thirteen
We Met by Fax
I survived my heartache from my whirlwind three months with the Irishman and a few more random crushes after that, but it was the last time I ran home to Mommy. I slowly and steadily eased back into living by myself in the city and did a lot of soul-searching.
I had gone to California to meet some filmmakers who were looking for an actress who would want to go live in South Africa for three months and film a movie about raising orphaned leopard cubs in the wild. The movie would be called Running Wild. I jumped at the offer. Going to live in a camp in the middle of the bush was just what I needed. Mom and I both traveled there, but after I got settled, Mom went back to America. Her asthma was bad and the dust and wildlife were doing a lot of damage. She was not well and was better off at home.
The movie was very mediocre but the experience was incredible. I lived in a tent on stilts in the jungle and never needed to wear a watch. The experience was somewhat reminiscent of filming The Blue Lagoon because we were so isolated and were dictated primarily by the environment. But this time I was without my mother. We raised two leopard cubs and filmed them all the time. We were on a reserve park in the Eastern Transvaal and only left once in three months. I had very little downtime but I spent all of it writing letters and walking these letters to our makeshift offices, which had various information-transmitting devices.
A friend of mine from Los Angeles (Lyndie G, Kenny G’s wife) had been gently pushing me to meet her friend Andre Agassi. I was in no place to be in a relationship and had kept putting it off. While living in South Africa, I began thinking a lot about my life and what I wanted it to look like. I knew I needed to separate professionally from my mother so as to gain a sense of autonomy and career perspective. I also I wanted to find a relationship with somebody not threatened by my celebrity and secure in his own profession. I still did not feel totally ready for a boyfriend or husband but I wanted to enjoy my solitude in this camp and settle my mind and my heart. I was always open to friendships and was enjoying those friends I had recently acquired on the film.
Lyndie wrote to me and gave me Andre’s fax number, and said I should fax him, the only reliable and fast way to be in touch from the set. With thousands of miles between us, we began to communicate via long rambling faxes about life and God and the strange burden of fame and overpowering parents. Andre’s father was, in my opinion, far worse than my mom ever was. He was the one who pushed his children to be professional tennis players and would throw away Andre’s trophies if they were anything less than first place. My mom kept my Hula-Hoop trophy for twenty years. His dad had managed his career until Andre broke free and hired a manager. Andre and I both understood what it felt like to be famous and to have strong parents who controlled much of our lives.
We were similar in so many ways. Even though he was from Vegas and I was from Manhattan, we both still felt like little kids who had dealt with adult pressures and been given a great deal of responsibility at a young age. We both had begun very young and had been defined by others before developing our own sense of self-awareness. We had grown up in extraordinary circumstances and were desperate to find our place in the world. We were mirrors of one another, and we knew, somewhere deep inside, that we needed each other.
Every day on Running Wild I would wake very early before my call time and I would write my letter. Sometimes I had to finish it on the bumpy Jeep ride out to a far-off location and then give it to the cook to take to the office at base camp. I’d wait for Andre’s faxes to come in and save them to read by myself at my favorite spot near the river. The people in the office would radio the set if a fax came in and everybody eagerly anticipated how happy I seemed when I got one. Let’s just say I was pretty darn happy those three months.
It was like we were living in a different time. This was our carrier-pigeon romance. We poured ourselves into our faxes; they were like diaries in which we were able to explore who we were and who we wanted to be. We got to daydream and hope and cry and believe we could be deeply happy. My mom was nowhere near any of it and this freed my mind and my heart.
Both Andre and I were at a turning point in our lives when we met. He had just had wrist surgery and was not sure he would ever play tennis again, and I was desperately seeking to reclaim my floundering career. And we were falling in love by fax.
• • •
When the film wrapped and I went back to the United States, we began to talk on the phone and arranged to meet the next time I was in LA.
Back in New Jersey, Mom seemed to have settled into a drinking pattern consisting of binge drinking followed by a few days seemingly on the wagon before digging in again. Other times she’d maintain a low but constant hum of drunkenness throughout every day. What was different was that I was not living inside it and enveloped by it. I was preoccupied by it always, but the periodic distances—whether created by my being away on location or just by living in Manhattan and away from the dark Tudor house in Haworth—helped me stay afloat.
Mom seemed to be happy about this kid Andre who was very famous and who, according to her, “obviously had a father worse than even me. Maybe you’ll feel lucky, Brooke.”
Mom and I flew out to LA to film some final city scenes for the movie, and stayed at a little bungalow we had bought a few years after Princeton. Andre came over to take me to dinner. He met Mom while wearing faded light jeans with serious holes in them, Nikes, and a T-shirt. His hair was vintage Andre hair, mostly blond with some brown bits and longer than even mine was at the time. I had no idea that he was wearing taped-on extensions but I would discover it much later, when he would tell me in an emotional and embarrassed admission. He looked like a rock star, complete with Oakley sunglasses and a cool sports car.
As he was walking away to get the door, Mom pointed to a specific hole in his jeans over his top left butt cheek. The hole had frayed and it was obvious he was either not wearing any underwear or wearing a thong. (I would later learn that it was a thong). Mom secretly pointed to it and seemed to motion to me to touch it. Without even considering that this might have been rude and possibly premature, I put my index finger right on the skin peeking out through the material. He jumped and I said I just couldn’t help it. Who the hell knows what he thought of that intro? What type of a mother tells her daughter to do that? And what type of a daughter obeys without considering the possible consequences? But later on he would comment on the fact that after spending some more time with me, he realized he was with a “real woman.” If he thought I was a “real woman,” I can only imagine the level of immaturity he had been used to in dating. The truth was that I was far from being a self-actualized woman. But compared to the way he felt and to those other famous people he had met, I guess it could seem like I had my life together.
There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me Page 23