“Next Wednesday? Three o’clock? Sure I can get up to L.A.”
Of course, I couldn’t get up to L.A. on a bus or in a taxi, so I stole my mother’s car. Up until that point I’d been allowed to borrow it to drive down the hill to school and back, and occasionally to the beach. So on the appointed Wednesday I skipped school and drove to Los Angeles. Halfway there I hit something on the freeway and it ripped up the entire underside of the car and totally wrecked it. I had no money to get the car towed. The police ended up taking me to a pay phone so I could call my mom. She took the fall for me, telling my dad that she was behind the wheel. But my luck held out; I was able to set up another meeting with Joan Green.
The next time I played it smarter and convinced my brother Vincent, who already lived in L.A., to take me up there, and I crashed on his couch.
Joan was totally professional but high-strung and slightly neurotic. She weighed me on a scale in her office, decided she liked the way I looked, and asked if I would come back and do a scene for her. “No problem,” I replied and then walked out of her office wondering where on earth I was going to find a scene. I didn’t know there was an actor’s bookstore called Samuel French; I didn’t know anything. I’d done plays like Oliver and Annie, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to do a scene from either of those oldies, so I wrote a monologue about an eighteenth-century female musician who wasn’t allowed to play the violin because she was expected to get married and just shut up. I brought my violin along and played a few notes and then launched into this monologue about a girl whose father didn’t understand her passion for music and who was forcing her to marry against her will, and I cried and beat the violin and did the whole bit. Joan must have seen something in me because she signed me on for a three-year management contract right there. I went back to Laguna Beach and started packing.
With the extra credits I received from working at Cappuccino and two other jobs, which involved selling surf wear and shots of tequila on the beach, my guidance counselor managed to cobble together enough credits for me to graduate from high school at the age of sixteen and a half. I wasn’t cut out for school, and I knew it.
I’d arranged to split a little apartment in L.A. with my gay friend Michael, who was moving up there to be a makeup artist for Christian Dior. I’d saved enough to allow me to pay rent and bills for three months. It was time to stand on my own two feet.
By then Tre had already commenced his kamikaze dive and I knew it was time to move on. For a grown man, he didn’t take rejection well. “If you try to leave me I’ll take from you the person that you love the most.” I believed him. I didn’t count on him being quite so calculatingly vindictive, but I believed him. We both knew he was talking about my mom. She and I had the same sense of humor, the same practical way of looking at the world. My dad had been absent for a lot of my childhood. My mom was my rock; I relied on her for support and encouragement. Tre’s cheap threat didn’t stop me from leaving him. I was done with men trying to pin me down. I went to my mother and warned her that Tre would come knocking on her door. She laughed it off. I felt better about the whole thing. I knew Tre was a smooth talker and that he was determined, but I trusted my mom. Problem solved. But that wasn’t the end of Tre’s run.
Shortly after that, my parents moved into separate places and started divorce proceedings. I was sad about the split and put it down to Patrick’s death finally taking its toll. One day I drove out to Santa Monica, to my mom’s new house. It was early in the morning; I was planning to surprise her. Parked out in front of her house was Tre’s Porsche. There was no mistaking it for anyone else’s car; the corny vanity plate read AAWILDERIII.
Was my mom having an affair with Tre? Was Tre the reason for the divorce? She knew I was trying to get him out of my life, and she’d still chosen him. I imagined him wining and dining her, helping her through the split from my dad. I was livid. My mom was the most important thing in the world to me. I’d assumed that the feeling was reciprocal, and yet there was the Porsche, proof that I didn’t matter as much as I thought I did.
It was the latest model, a 911 Carrera that he’d bought just before I left him. It was his baby. I walked over to it and without a second thought keyed the shit out of it. I scarred it right across one side, both panels, in long, unbroken lines, like a bad Matisse painting. If art is an expression of emotion then this was the ugliest fucking piece of art you’ve ever seen—but, by that definition, art it was. Then I took out the notebook from my purse, wrote a note to my mom, and stuck it to her door.
How could you? Don’t call me. I don’t want to ever speak to you again.
I ran into Tre about ten years after we’d broken up. He came up to me at the pool of a swanky hotel.
“Claudia. I’m so sorry about what happened. Can you ever forgive me?”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I replied. “I will never forgive you.”
The way I saw it, he stole my mother away from me and engineered my parents’ divorce, and he did it deliberately and with malicious intent, just because seventeen-year-old Claudia didn’t want to see him anymore. My family fell apart, and I wouldn’t talk to my parents for another seven years; they didn’t even attend my wedding. It was the event that would close the door on my old life, on my childhood world, and there was no going back.
If I had stayed at home and dumped Tre when my dad told me to, who knows what would have happened? I ran into my friend Kara years later. We were so alike at school; we’d both dreamed of becoming actresses, encouraged each other to go for it, but there she was, wearing a hippie dress, gorgeous as ever, and pushing a baby stroller, a swarm of kids buzzing around her. She’d married a mountain man and moved to a small town in Colorado, so I guess it’s true, we are shaped by our choices.
Looking back on those traumas, they stand out as fairly grim landmarks in that formative part of my life, but there was something positive that grew out of them. Patrick’s death, my rape, and my troubled relationships taught me that no matter how tough the world gets, you can’t give up on yourself; you just have to keep taking that next step. That lesson manifested itself as a voice in my head, driving me forward, and it was stronger than self-doubt or fear or the pain of betrayal. At the worst times in my life I would cling to it like a piece of driftwood after a shipwreck. But back then, at the start of my new life in L.A., I felt as if I’d left all the difficulties of the past behind me. I was buoyed with enthusiasm. I’d trusted that inner voice, had faith that I could be an actress, and it had paid off. Now, as it carried me up to L.A., I felt unstoppable, unsinkable. But then, they said the same thing about the Titanic.
My school photo, 1970
With my mom in Glendale, California, 1967
With Jimmy and Vincent at Monarch Bay, California, 1967
With my playhouse in Westport, Connecticut, 1968
My family minus one. Westport, Connecticut, 1973, after Patrick’s death.
Fifteen years old, before prom, in Laguna Beach
One of the photos displayed at the Festival of the Arts, 1980
Clutching my modeling portfolio on the streets of NYC, 1981
BASTARDS AND BILLIONAIRES
I arrived in L.A. in 1982 ready to share my talent with the world. Start the drum roll, get that red carpet rolling, polish those award statues until they gleam; Claudia’s in town.
But then Joan told me that she couldn’t get me paid work with the Screen Actors Guild until I turned eighteen. (I looked too old for the kids’ roles that suited my age.) In the short term, that meant no income for almost three months. In the longer term, I’d be out of contention for the coming year’s Oscars and Emmys. You think that way when you’re seventeen. Still, I was upbeat. This was a small hitch. I could wait it out.
The new apartment was another unwelcome surprise. My bedroom window was right next to the building’s cluster of garbage cans. In summer it stank like hell. To add to the ambiance, Michael was a chain-smoker extraordinaire, using the last ember o
n one cigarette to start up the next. He’d have a cigarette going in the shower, on the toilet, in bed, and sometimes there was so much smoke in the apartment that I considered camping out by the 405 freeway because there would have been less pollution.
I knew Michael was gay before I moved in with him, but I didn’t know he had a bondage fetish. Our couches were wrapped in thick black leather belts, and a creepy studded leather mask was the central feature of the coffee table. It was like the S&M Mona Lisa; its hollow eyes followed you wherever you sat.
My room was like a different dimension. You opened the door from the smoke-filled bondage universe and stepped through the portal into Teen Girl World. I couldn’t afford new things, so I’d decorated with various odds and ends brought from home: a frilly pink duvet with ’70s rainbow sheets, a boom box, an oversize Led Zeppelin poster with the hermit from the tarot deck on it, and a small shelf with my favorite books. The only things I had that were definitively adult were the clothes that my mom had bought me—classy, expensive items—and the beginnings of an edged-weapon collection that my dad had encouraged.
Michael was a young, handsome guy, so he developed a thriving social life in no time at all, but I didn’t know anyone in L.A. I’d sit in my room trying to ignore the smell of garbage and the sound of the guys in the next room slapping the crap out of each other in the throes of passion and wonder what on earth I’d gotten myself into. Then I started getting sick in the mornings. When I took a home pregnancy test, the strip turned blue.
The pregnancy came as a shock. I’d been on the pill. My mom always insisted that every time she’d been knocked up, three boys and one girl, she’d been using birth control. My mom is given to hyperbole, so I’d taken that with a pinch of salt. Now I knew better. I also knew I had to get an abortion. I was far too young to have a child, and at that time I felt as though Charles Manson would have been a better candidate for fatherhood than Tre. I went to a clinic in downtown L.A. and found myself sitting silently with a half-dozen miserable women, waiting for a bed. It was like a production line. They put me under for six minutes, scraped me out, and gave me a glass of orange juice when I woke up. A nurse took the empty glass from my hand and tapped her clipboard impatiently.
“You’re all done. We need the bed for the next girl.”
I walked out of there feeling miserable and alone, but I was determined to hold it all together. I went back to the apartment, sat down, and worked out my expenses. The abortion had eaten into my already meager savings; I couldn’t make next month’s rent. What if I lost my room? Where the hell do you go when you can’t afford to live in a smoke-filled bondage den? If they’d given me an Academy Award right then and there, I’d have hocked it for fifty bucks.
I needed to stave off homelessness long enough to keep my dream alive, so I went down to a Mexican restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard and told the manager that I was a twenty-one-year-old Canadian (to explain why I didn’t have any ID). I don’t know if he believed me, but I got a job as a cocktail waitress. I had to wear this black leotard with fishnet stockings, high heels, and a little black bow tie. At the end of the shift I collected my tips—a grand total of twelve dollars. I went back to the apartment, locked myself in my room, and burst into tears. Stop the fucking world, I want to get off.
I was down to two choices: endure that shitty job or run back home with my tail between my legs. I convinced myself that something was going to happen. It just had to, because those two options were no options at all.
The next day I got a call. Joan had booked me for a five-line-or-under job on Dallas, which was enough to get me my union card. The clouds parted, and within a week I went from failed cocktail waitress to working actress on one of the most popular TV series of all time. It totally blew my mind to see Victoria Principal and Linda Grey walking around in person. It was only a small part, but it meant the world to me. I was an actress—a proper, working, Hollywood actress—and that little taste was all I needed to whet my appetite for success and dispel all doubt.
The episode was called “Some Do . . . Some Don’t,” and I was performing with Christopher Atkins (of The Blue Lagoon fame) in a storyline in which he was having an affair with Linda Grey’s character. Larry Hagman was directing, and he showed up on set wearing lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a feather. He was a very nice, very funny guy. I learned later that he was drinking up to four bottles of champagne a day while working on Dallas. That didn’t surprise me. It was a crazy successful show, and everything was laid on for the cast and crew. They put on steak and lobster for lunch. Everyone had his or her own private trailer. It felt very sexy.
Before I knew it I had another job, this time on Falcon Crest. Jane Wyman was a hard-ass pro, so all my scenes with her were very short and to the point. She was an old-school actress who commanded respect. Cliff Robertson was also in that series, and he was a complete asshole. I was running lines with Cliff when one of the assistant directors asked me if I could see my mark. I turned away for a second and told the assistant director that yes, thank you, I could see the mark just fine. Next thing I knew Robertson grabbed me by the throat and pushed me up against a wall.
“If you ever turn away from me when we’re running lines, I will fucking destroy you!”
I thought he was out of his mind. It was my first experience working with someone who was so volatile, and no one came to help me out or put a leash on Cliff.
Next I worked on T.J. Hooker with Heather Locklear and William Shatner. Shatner was hitting on anything with two legs. He invited me into his dressing room at lunch to run lines and started turning on the charm while finishing up a plate of Thai food. I wasn’t interested, but that didn’t seem to faze him. He moved in for a kiss, and a wave of garlic breath hit me in the face. He couldn’t have repelled a vampire any more effectively.
I began to wonder if this was how women were treated in the industry, if Robertson and Shatner were only the tip of a great, misogynistic iceberg.
I thank God to this day that I booked Dallas first, because that job bolstered my confidence just enough to allow me to shrug off those negative experiences. If I’d worked on those other shows first, faced with the idea of enduring a whole career of men like that, I might have considered donning the black leotard and heading back to the Mexican joint.
That year I went on to appear in The Calendar Girl Murders with Sharon Stone and Tom Skerrit and the action series Riptide. Joan got me so much work that by the end of 1983 my tax return showed $200,000 in income. I sent it home to my parents. I like to think of it as my “fuck you W2.”
I went on to book my first regular role on a series in Berrenger’s, playing Melody Hughes. Berrenger’s was exciting, because we were on a big stage, the Lorimar NBC set, and we had a lot of stars in the show, including Cesar Romero, Jack Scalia, and Yvette Mimieux. And for the first time in my career, I was cast in a role that was much older than my actual age (in this case thirty at eighteen). This would become a recurring event.
When I knew we’d been picked up for thirteen episodes I fled my room in the S&M den and moved into a beautiful, spacious apartment on Hayworth Avenue where the Golden Age gossip columnist Sheilah Graham had once lived with her lover, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The great novelist had been in poor health, in part due to alcoholism. After he suffered a heart attack, his doctor advised him to avoid exertion, so he moved in with Graham to avoid climbing the two flights of stairs at his Laurel Avenue apartment. Fitzgerald died in Graham’s apartment soon after.
Jeff Conaway, who I’d later star with in Babylon 5, played my lover on Berrenger’s, and Anita Morris, who was a big-name Broadway star, played my southern mother. She was a very sexy redhead with an incredible body, and in the show we were both having a relationship with Jeff’s character. For the first time in my life, if someone asked me what I did for work, I could honestly proclaim, “I’m an actress. I’m on NBC every Wednesday night at nine.” I started buying beautiful things to furnish my apartment. No more leather straps
and masks! I was living alone, I had a career, I was making money. It was heaven. Now I felt that I’d arrived in Hollywood. I was living the life I’d always dreamed of.
I’d hang out at Spago and Nipper’s in Beverly Hills and Helena’s in Silver Lake. One night I went out to a club called Tramp at the Beverly Center and found myself at a table drinking with Rod Stewart and nightclub entrepreneur Victor Drai, who would come in and out of my life. I met his wife when I was coming out of the bathroom that night. I recognized her immediately as Kelly LeBrock, one of the most beautiful women in the world. She was on the cover of Vogue, had starred in The Woman in Red with Gene Wilder, and was about to start shooting Weird Science. She pushed me back into the bathroom stall as I was exiting, locked the door, pinned me up against the wall, and kissed me on the mouth. It was the first time I’d been kissed by a woman, and it was one of the sexiest moments of my life. We went back and sat with Victor and Rod and carried on as if nothing had happened. It was our little secret. My heart was pounding as Kelly smiled seductively at me across the table.
Kelly and I are still friends to this day. I made pot brownies for her brother when he was dying of lung cancer and went to his memorial service at her home. Kelly is a strong, beautiful woman and a survivor.
Babylon Confidential Page 4