We’ve both had the misfortune to star in a movie with her ex-husband, Steven Seagal. I played the part of a federal agent in Half Past Dead and discovered firsthand why Kelly had filed for divorce.
It turned out that my teenage fears of an industry filled with misogynistic bastards were unfounded. I’ve worked with only a few assholes over the course of my career, and Steven Seagal was one of them. He was convinced I was a lesbian, because I wouldn’t sleep with him. Instead of reading his line, “Let’s get in the helicopter and kick some ass!” he’d say to me, “Do you like it up the ass?” His other inspired reinterpretations of the script involved wanting to know if I liked pussy, if I fucked my brother, and if I was into threesomes. The definitive action star, Seagal would sit in his trailer, chowing down on pizza and fried chicken. He refused to jog or do stunts or even be around a running fan for the helicopter scenes. His close-ups had to be tightly framed to crop out his double chin and the “hairline” of his obvious toupée.
It was 1984 and I was nearing my nineteenth birthday when Berrenger’s came to an end, and I had the idea that I would do some classical theater in between television jobs. I won the role of Lady Percy in Henry IV at the adorable little Globe Playhouse in West Hollywood, but the instant I went into rehearsals my agent called to tell me I’d been cast as the ingénue in a Bob Hope movie that also starred Don Ameche, Frank Gorshin, and Yvonne De Carlo. I was conflicted. I wanted to do the movie, but I’d already agreed to do the Shakespeare, and I didn’t want to break my word. To my relief, the director of the play, Louis Fantasia, told me, “Take the bloody film. The stage will always be here for you.”
The original title for the movie was A Nice, Quiet, Deadly Weekend in Palm Springs, even though it was entirely shot in Vancouver. Thank God, they changed the title to Masterpiece of Murder. It was Bob Hope’s last movie, and I guess he didn’t want a ridiculous title at the top of his list of screen credits.
I ended up becoming friends with the location manager, Christine, because we were about the same age, and I was the only actor on the set who was under forty. After the movie was finished we decided to use the money we’d made to go to Europe over the summer. People in L.A. were telling us, “You’ve got to call Roman when you get to Paris, you’ve got to call Roman.”
We could only afford to stay in a dumpy little hotel in Neuilly, a suburb just outside the most expensive part of Paris, but we did make the call. On our second day we sat for four hours with Roman Polanski at a fancy restaurant on the Champs-Élysées while he ate pricey shellfish and sipped fine champagne. He finished the bottle, announced that he had to go back to editing, and then hurried out the front door. When the restaurant manager presented us with the bill I told him what Polanski had told me, to put the meal on his tab.
“Mr. Polanski does not have an account here,” the manager replied.
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!
Roman Polanski stiffed us for the bill and wiped out our entire summer budget in one fell swoop.
When I got back from Paris, I booked the TV series Blacke’s Magic, with Hal Linden and Henry Morgan. Still nineteen, I was cast as a character in her late twenties with two stepchildren. Around the same time I started dating John Davis. John’s dad, Marvin Davis, had owned 20th Century Fox before he sold the studio to Rupert Murdoch.
One time I was at a lunch at the Davis mansion. It was the day after Barbara Davis’s annual Carousel Ball. John sat on my left, Henry Kissinger on my right. Opposite Kissinger was Gerald Ford. Kissinger was a funny guy. We were joking around in German, and he was very gracious, considering my German wasn’t really up to scratch. After the meal, Barbara gave the signal for all of the women to adjourn to the other room so that the men could talk about important things that apparently could only be comprehended if you owned a penis. Barbara stood in the doorway and looked my way expectantly. I turned to John and whispered, “Forget it, I’m not leaving.” I mean, when was I ever going to be in a room with Kissinger and Gerald Ford again? It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. I wanted to stay and listen, and I’m glad I did. They discussed the Greek-Turkish crisis—Greece had reported that one of their warships had been fired on by five Turkish destroyers in the Aegean Sea. Greece had responded by placing its armed forces on alert. Although at nineteen I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of global politics, I did appreciate that these were people who had real power and that the conversation that was taking place in my boyfriend’s dining room could very well have a direct effect on the world events they discussed. It was exhilarating.
Not long after that I suggested to John that we go to Paris for a romantic weekend.
“I don’t wanna go to France. I don’t like the food.”
“You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding.” I couldn’t believe him.
“It all tastes like stew. How many types of cheese do you need, anyway?”
When I’d go to John’s parents’ house in Palm Springs, I’d sit down to dinner and the servants would lift the lids of giant silver chafing dishes to reveal miniature hamburgers and French fries; that was their idea of fine cuisine. I was beginning to feel a little culturally starved.
One night we went to Playboy model and former Hugh Hefner girlfriend Barbi Benton’s birthday party at Spago. Sitting across from me was a sweet Egyptian billionaire named Dodi Fayed. He was twenty-nine, ten years older than I, though we were both relatively new to Hollywood. He’d just finished working as a producer on Chariots of Fire, which had won four Oscars including best picture, as well as winning awards at Cannes and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Dodi was suave, spoke several languages, and loved travel and fine dining. Before the night was over I gave him my number. He called the next day—from Monte Carlo.
“It’s for tax reasons. I can’t spend more than thirty days in any country.”
“Oh, okay. Well, I enjoyed meeting you at the party. Give me a call next time you’re in L.A.”
“Actually, I was going to ask if you wanted to join me aboard Nabila. I’m going to sail her to the South of France. I’ve already booked your plane ticket.”
How do you say no to a private cruise on the world’s largest luxury yacht? The whole thing sounded so exciting—a life of international jet-setting. This was just the kind of guy I wanted to be with.
Dodi insisted that I bring some girlfriends, so I’d feel safe, and I invited Tracy Smith, who’d starred in Bachelor Pad and Hot Dog, and arranged to meet a second friend, Lana Clarkson, in the South of France. Lana later starred in Roger Corman’s Barbarian Queen films and was shot dead by record producer Phil Spector in 2003.
Monte Carlo was exciting, an absolute blast. Then we went to Saint-Tropez where Lana and I were to shoot a promo for a movie called Starlets with John Hurt and Tony Curtis. Tony was a friend of Dodi’s, and he joined us aboard the yacht with Highlander star Christopher Lambert. Nabila had been built for Dodi’s uncle, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was at the time one of the world’s richest men, at a cost of $100 million. It was named for his daughter. The ship was 281 feet long, as tall as a three-story building, and carried crew and staff of fifty-two, including armed security. It had a helipad, a Jacuzzi, three elevators, a movie theater, two saunas, a pool, a disco, a billiard room, and eleven suites with hand-carved onyx fixtures and gold-plated doorknobs. The suite I shared with Dodi had a solid gold sink. When you spat out your toothpaste, you knew you were doing it in style.
I met the girl the yacht was named for at a birthday party that Dodi threw for me in conjunction with an Elle magazine event. They gave away a white Rolls Royce, and I got to wine and dine with movie stars. There were even fireworks. Definitely my best birthday ever.
You can see Nabila the yacht any time you want. She starred as Maximilian Largo’s mobile headquarters in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again, along with Sean Connery. She was well cast. The sun deck was surrounded by bulletproof glass. She contained secret passageways, pu
sh-button doors and windows, two luxury speedboats in case a fast getaway were required, and even a three-room hospital. I suppose arms dealers and Bond villains have a lot in common.
I came to love Dodi, but I never felt the kind of attraction that makes you want to stop traffic and do it in the street. As a lover he was courteous, polite, and even a little shy. That uncertainty and hesitation surprised me when I was nineteen, but in the years to come I’d find that quality in a lot of rich men with powerful fathers. The super-rich, luxurious lifestyle Dodi lived took the edge off, too. In certain ways his was an exceptionally passive lifestyle. Everything was done for him. There were men to drive his cars, fly his plane, cook his meals, and fold his clothes. It might have been enviable for most people, but I found it oddly unappealing.
Aboard Nabila I was exposed to the European way of drinking. We’d have long lunches with exquisite wine and food and then go on to restaurants and parties until dawn. The champagne was always flowing, and Dodi paid for everything: the flights, boat trips, clothes, meals. I realized that this was par for the course for Dodi. He would romance beautiful women, shower them with gifts, and fly them around the world. It was dazzling and exciting, but something made me pull back. I insisted that I buy my own clothes and ticket home. No matter how spectacular Dodi’s lifestyle was, I wasn’t ready to swap my newly won independence for it. I wanted to have my own career, my own money, and my own home. Before she had her own career my mother was always looking to the man who controlled the checkbook, and she never wanted me to be a housewife. She wanted me to be powerful, so that no man could control me, and that’s now ingrained in my character. I saw other women around Dodi desperately clinging to his wealth and decided that they were the antithesis of the person I wanted to be.
Around the time that I discovered my need for independence, things started going wrong with Starlets. Tony Curtis was fighting a cocaine habit, and John Hurt was battling alcoholism. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone struggle with alcohol abuse. He was a far cry from the composed, charismatic actor I’d admired on screen. He looked haggard and run down, like a knight on the wrong side of a dragon fight.
Starlets was supposed to be a French farce taking place during the Cannes Film Festival. They got a bunch of beautiful girls from all over the world and put us up in a gorgeous mansion, and they’d drive us down to the festival to shoot scenes. The problem was that there was no script and they had no permits to shoot at Cannes, so when they ran out of money we had to go in and steal shots.
They told me to put on a beautiful, red-carpet-worthy gown and sent me onto the central stage where Clint Eastwood was receiving an award. I sneaked up behind Clint and pretended that I was there with him while one of the crew hid in the audience and filmed with a camera hidden between someone’s legs. That was the final straw for me. I was having fun on the Riviera, and there are few things cooler than hanging out on the yacht of a James Bond supervillain, but I had to get back to L.A. and get some real work. I had a career to build and I couldn’t afford to lose momentum.
Dodi didn’t quite know what to make of my wish to leave or my insistence on buying my own fare back to America. He was a jealous man, very insecure, but something in him touched me. Dodi had a childlike quality and I was very maternal in those days. I attracted men who wanted to be looked after. We talked intimately after we made love, and we decided that we would stay in touch and stay friends, but for now I needed to be my own person.
It was the last time I’d sail aboard Nabila. By the time I saw Dodi again she had been sold to Donald Trump and renamed the Trump Princess.
I’ll always be grateful to Dodi. He got me out of L.A. and took me around the world, which was just what I needed at that time. He gave me confidence in my ability to speak foreign languages, saying, “Your French is beautiful,” or “Come on, speak Italian, you can do it.” He never put me down, and he always told me I was smart and beautiful. He treated me as a princess and, because I refused to take anything from him, he also treated me as an equal. I didn’t know it then, but we would remain friends and occasional lovers until his death, more than fourteen years later, beside Princess Diana in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris.
COCAINE BLUES
In the ’80s the white line that ran down the middle of the Hollywood fast lane was painted on with happy dust. Everyone was doing blow, and I was no exception. I was nineteen and enjoying the attentions of a charming thirty-six-year-old Frenchman named Patrick Wachsberger, whose company produced the recent Twilight movies. I was 5'9" and a slender size six, but Patrick (pronounced Pat-REEK) was stick-thin; I could barely fit into his jeans.
In New York, they’d taught me that the skinnier you are, the closer you are to ideal beauty. Although I’d accepted the fact that I was incapable of building a career around being a human skeleton, the voices of Eileen Ford and her cronies still echoed in my head. French men like skinny women—I’d convinced myself of that, along with the notion that I had to lose more weight.
Luckily, I discovered that if you snorted cocaine you didn’t need to eat. I was a size two in no time at all. I lived on one meal a day—breakfast. The only downside was swallowing. My throat was raw from a combination of cocaine and ocean saltwater spray, the discerning user’s choice for flushing out encrusted sinuses. Add cigarettes to that and a little red wine to come down and voila, you have a gullet that struggles to swallow anything solid. I basically lived on yogurt and smoothies.
Some people take cocaine to feel powerful and confident. It had the opposite effect on me. It made me paranoid. I would become terribly self-conscious. All I wanted to do was lock myself in the bathroom and clean it from top to bottom with a toothbrush or sit down and do my taxes. So I never took cocaine for recreation. I used it as a weight-loss drug. Looking back, I suppose that spending $350 a week on a weight-loss medication might seem a little extravagant (not to mention just plain stupid), but hey, those were the days, my friend. Blow was everywhere, and that white line seemed to never end.
Before things got serious with Patrick I dated a handsome one-legged guy who worked in a shoe shop at the Beverly Center mall, and after him the hunky soap star Hank Cheyne. We went to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands and had a really fun, sexy time. Hank was plagued by the curse that comes from playing a bad guy on TV—he’d walk down the street in New York and random strangers would swear and spit at him.
I had a brief engagement to an Italian prince that didn’t work out. We had a big engagement party at the Ritz hotel in London with Michael Feinstein playing. The prince was a Six Million Dollar Man, which is not to say that he could last forever in bed, but that he’d carry three stamps in his pocket worth $6 million—talk about portable wealth. The relationship had already been in trouble because his family wanted me to give up my career, move to Italy, and churn out babies. But things came to a head when I found out that the Ferrari Testarossa that he’d given me to drive around Switzerland actually belonged to his aristocratic lover, a woman in her midforties. That and he had a fetish for girls in high heels, corsets, and garter belts—the exact outfit worn by the prostitute on his first sexual encounter. It was fun for the first few times, but he insisted that I put on the same getup every time, which wore thin quickly. At that point in my life, it was just a little too weird.
Then I had a one-night stand with George Clooney. We first met on Riptide and then later on Babytalk, a TV series that tried to capitalize on the success of the talking-baby movie Look Who’s Talking. I played the voice of one of the babies, and George played a guy who was sweet on the single mom. They still haven’t sent me my Emmy for that performance, but I live in hope. George and I hooked up after our first meeting. After shooting our scenes we went back to my place, I did some blow, we had a good time, and then he rode off into the sunset on his bright yellow Harley, mullet cut whipping in the wind. He wasn’t the George Clooney that you see now. Like a good red wine, he seems to have improved with age.
After six m
onths of dating, Patrick and I decided to get serious, and I gave up my apartment and moved into his designer home on Sunset Plaza Drive. It was my first grown-up relationship, and there was an aspect of it that made me more than a little uneasy. Patrick had a two-year-old daughter named Justine. He told me that the child’s mother, Beatrice, lived in Paris and had a boyfriend and that he had been awarded sole custody. Patrick was always busy with movie-related business, and I could tell from the get-go that he was a hands-off parent. My worry was that he was looking for a replacement mom for Justine and had settled on me. It was an unfounded fear. Patrick had hired a nanny to help with Justine. The problem was that I was going through a period in my life in which I was more than a little baby crazy, and Justine was totally adorable. I unofficially adopted her and set my mind to raising her.
Of course, the cocaine had to stop. Two things helped me with that.
The first was that not many people knew I was taking it. I’d kept my habit to myself and never used it in public, unlike Mike Hammer star Stacy Keach. I’d starred on that show right before Keach got busted at Heathrow airport trying to smuggle ten grams of cocaine in his assistant’s shaving-cream jar. I’d worked with actors who were so coked up that my lips went numb when I kissed them. I figured I didn’t want to get that kind of reputation.
My second and much more effective aid to stopping coke was fear. I’d had a scare one night when I flushed out my sinuses. I blew my nose and a chunk of flesh and cartilage came out. I found a flashlight and hand mirror, looked up my nose, and I swear that I could see a hole. I shoved a blob of Neosporin up there in the hope of plugging it, popped a couple of Tylenol PMs, and tried to sleep. In the morning I opened the fridge and discovered a slice of the lemon tart I’d made for dinner the previous night. My guests had said it was divine and especially zingy. I took a bite, chewed, and moved it around in my mouth for a full half minute before I realized I’d lost my sense of taste. Another test, conducted with the help of some freshly cut flowers, confirmed that my sense of smell had departed as well. Cooking has always been an important part of my life, so losing my primary culinary senses was truly terrifying.
Babylon Confidential Page 5