I stopped my coke habit like Superman stops a runaway train: instantaneously. I crushed it like a tin can. I was young and strong, and my ability to give it up so suddenly without any serious damage to my health gave me a false sense of invulnerability. That unfortunate misconception would catch up with me later in life. Some bad habits you can walk away from scot-free but others are like ivy: they wind their way around you tightly, mixing their tendrils with yours until you don’t know where they end and you begin.
Luckily, about two weeks later my senses returned to normal working order, but after a warning like that I didn’t need to be told twice. For the time being snow season was over.
On the home front, I was doing everything I could to provide a normal, happy environment for Justine. I was young, but I think I did a good job as a makeshift mom. We did craft projects together, dug our fingers into cookie dough, and I stuffed her tiny shoes with little surprises for St. Nicholas Day. I tried to fill her life with fun new experiences. I gave Justine her first party dress, her first Christmas, and her first Easter. I tried to make her life as special as my mother had made mine when I was a little girl. And I loved it. I had a perfect, beautiful little girl who even looked like me, so everyone naturally assumed that she was my daughter. I didn’t contradict them.
Patrick and I threw dinner parties all the time. It was a glamorous life, but the coke parties made it stressful given that I was raising a small child. We would hire an Italian chef named Tono who cooked amazing dinners. It was a gastronomic tragedy, because no one but me ate the food. But, man, was the bartender busy! And you’ve never seen nostrils vacuum up blow so fast. Everyone was doing it. O.J. Simpson would bring his wife Nicole and spend the night flirting with every other woman at the party. Patrick and I had a guest bathroom, and I was constantly rushing in after guests, wiping neat little lines of white coke off the back of the black toilet and matching sink for fear that Justine’s nanny would see them.
One day I got a call from my agent. New Line Cinema had just produced the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and they were now planning to make a movie called The Hidden.
“They’re recasting the role of the alien-possessed stripper. It’s the only female role in the movie. It’s light on dialogue, but you get to shoot machine guns.”
I went along to audition but knew I was in trouble when I read that one of Brenda Lee Van Buren’s essential character attributes was that she be “big busted.” At 120 pounds and 5'9", I didn’t have much going on in the chest department, but, never one to give in, I prepared for the audition by stuffing my bra with socks and tissues. I got an immediate callback, although this time they wanted me to come in wearing a bikini. I began to panic, worrying that my chest’s secret identity would be revealed. I rose to the challenge and concocted an ingenious device made of shoulder pads and electrical tape.
I knew that wouldn’t be quite enough, so I set about devising measures to draw attention away from my faux boobs. The next day I strutted into the production offices wearing a khaki dress with snaps down the front. When they asked to see my body I ripped the dress open in one dramatic movement, did a quick spin, thanked them, and left. An hour later I had the job.
I love acting. Aside from being Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend, where else can you start your workday at a police academy shooting Steyrs and AK-47s and end it learning how to pole dance from Janet Jackson’s choreographer? The guns I was good at, but the pole dancing—I had no natural ability in that department. The choreographer did her best, and then threw her hands up in frustration and sent me to some men’s clubs to see experts in action. I took my best friend to the Aladdin, a strip joint on Sunset Boulevard, and came to appreciate just how athletic some of those girls are. I met the dancers after their shift. One of them was a former Olympic skier. Some were clearly drugged up and working to support their habits, but most of them were hardened pros earning serious money and seemed as sharp-minded as any executive I’d encountered in the entertainment industry.
Now it’s bad enough when you have to put on a convincing strip show in front of cameras for the first time, but when I learned that I’d have to do it in a g-string made out of dollar bills my anxiety scaled previously unconquered heights; it’s every actress’s worst nightmare to see her butt fifty feet tall in a movie theater.
I decided that I needed to lose more weight for the role and visited a place called the Lindora clinic where they put me on a 500-calorie-a-day diet and shot me full of a combination of vitamins and a substance that I would later discover to be pregnant-horse urine.
My first day on set I was scheduled to perform the strip scene. The director, Jack Sholder, was not a happy man when he discovered that I’d duped them in regard to my physical attributes. Luckily, I’d already come clean to the wardrobe mistress, who’d set about designing a set of prosthetic breasts that I could wear under a cut-off T-shirt. It was a double win for me, because it meant that I also got to dodge the topless scene that Jack had planned on filming.
Working with Kyle MacLachlan was very exciting. By then he’d starred in the David Lynch movies Blue Velvet and Dune. Both he and Michael Nouri were total gentlemen, a real pleasure to work with, and the rest of the film went without a hitch. Well, mostly.
I was on the roof of a building shooting my final scene, and I mean that literally. I shoot Kyle with a machine gun, Michael Nouri shoots me in the head, and I shoot him back, knocking him over the side of a building. Kyle comes to rescue him, shooting me nine times in the process, rescues his friend, loads a fresh clip in his gun, and shoots me another seven times, and then I escape by jumping through a twenty-foot-high neon sign and fall three stories to my death. Simple, right?
In the movie business they attach little explosives called squibs to your clothes to make it look like you’re being riddled with bullets. One of the squibs exploded close to my face, and a piece of the metallic jacket I was wearing shot into my eye. It burned like a son of a bitch but I kept on until we got the take. But after that, I lost the ability to shoot a gun without blinking. Back then I had the Bruce Willis open-eye stare down perfectly, and now I have this blinking reflex, and I look like a total amateur. I recently found myself at a firing range shooting antique firearms for charity with Joe Pesci and Lou Ferrigno, the original Incredible Hulk. I was determined to show these guys that I knew what I was doing, but the instant my blunderbuss went off, my eyes slammed shut, a reflexive protection against fashion shrapnel.
I attended the premiere of The Hidden and was pleased that my fake boobs looked convincing. Whether the horse piss worked I don’t know, but when my butt had its premiere on the big screen, I breathed a sigh of relief; the nightmare had been averted—my alien-possessed ass looked pretty damn good.
But as one nightmare ended, another began. I was a real movie actress now and, as I would learn the hard way, things change when you appear nearly naked on the big screen. Someone, somewhere out there, is looking at you and thinking that they’d like to get close to you—real close to you.
There was this guy who had seen The Hidden and decided that I was from Venus and had brought the AIDS virus to planet Earth. No kidding, this is what he actually thought. This guy would park outside my place and masturbate, and sometimes tail me in his car. I called the LAPD but their hands were tied, because this was before Rebecca Schaeffer was killed—the event that brought about the anti-stalker laws of the ’90s. I went back and forth with the police until one cop took pity on me and said, “Look, we can’t do anything about him masturbating, but I do think he could be dangerous. Do you own a gun? You’re going to need one. So you wait until he’s out front, put on something nice, and invite him in. Make sure he’s inside the house and then shoot him. When we come over, you say that he broke in. But you make sure he’s deep inside the house. Otherwise you’re the one we’re going to have to arrest.” Really? No thanks. The guy creeped me out but I didn’t want to shoot him.
I drove to a lunch meeting a few weeks after
that and realized the stalker was following me in his car. He was really freaking me out, and as I tried to get away from him I accidentally ran a red light and got hit by a van. My engine blew up, my car was totaled, but all I could think about was my number one fan, who’d climbed out of his car and was now heading toward me. I was convinced he was going to try to kill me. A crowd started to gather, so my stalker vanished, but in the meantime someone saw me trying to start my engine to try and get away. When the police arrived, I was arrested for trying to leave the scene of an accident. I explained about the stalker and why I was trying to leave, but they didn’t believe my story. I ended up having to perform six months of community service at the old Globe Playhouse. I was back, not to perform Shakespeare, but to make cookies for the audience. I lasted three weeks in baking hell (all the while wishing I’d invested in a handgun and a lace teddy like that cop had advised) before I offered to pay to have the theater’s roof repaired in exchange for their filling out my community service book.
The stalker vanished after that. He was the first but he wouldn’t be my last. There would be a dozen other stalkers that would plague me to varying degrees over the years, including one guy who quit his job, sold his house, and tried to move into mine, thinking we were married.
The movie-star world isn’t all champagne and caviar.
Time passed, and I thought that things were going well with Patrick until I learned from a friend that he was cheating on me. Before I had a chance to confront him I had to travel to shoot my next movie. Never on Tuesday was the story of a pretty young lesbian who finds herself stuck in the middle of the desert with two horny young men played by Peter Berg (Chicago Hope) and Andrew Lauer (Caroline in the City). It’s better than it sounds. We shot the movie in Borrego Springs in the California desert. The director was a young guy named Adam Rifkin, who was making his directorial debut. He always dressed in black Converse tennis shoes and a baseball hat. Little did I know that Adam was both talented and driven and that Never on Tuesday would be the first of many projects I would do with him over the course of my career. It was clear in the audition that they wanted a big-name actress for the female lead, but I tried my best to turn on the charm, and Adam fought hard to get me the part. I’d put a little weight back on since giving up cocaine, so when the studio offered me the role it was on the condition that I lose ten pounds and work out with a former Olympic gymnast, who had me running up and down the bleacher steps at UCLA on a diet of one bran muffin a day.
Charlie Sheen was flown in for a cameo role. He’d just come off Wall Street and No Man’s Land, so his star was rapidly ascending. They didn’t have a large budget, so my guess is the studio paid him with drugs and hookers so he’d feel like a total frickin’ rock star from Mars.
Whatever they were paying him with, it worked, because A-list guys started coming out of the woodwork. Nic Cage wore a huge fake nose, playing a crazy man in a red Ferrari. Gilbert Gottfried played a lunatic salesman. Emilio Estevez and Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride, Saw) played hick brothers in a tow truck, gold teeth and all. There was a real party atmosphere, and we’d all hang out and play pool and drink tequila. It wasn’t long before other members of the Brat Pack appeared.
I’d met Rob Lowe before, and, coincidentally, my makeup artist on that movie was Sheryl Berkoff, who would go on to marry Rob. (At the time, though, I think she was seeing Emilio Estevez.) This was just before Rob got into trouble with the first ever celebrity sex-tape scandal.
One night after partying, Rob and I went to a hotel on Sunset Boulevard that is now called the Standard, got drunk, did an eight ball, and ended up in bed together. We were so coked up that the sex was numb and not anyone’s definition of fantastic, but the conversation was great. We bitched about our families and personal problems late into the night. I thought of Patrick and concluded that if you’re going to have revenge sex, you might as well have it with the world’s most beautiful man.
I returned to Patrick feeling much better. I learned from my friend that he’d given up his mistress, so I decided to put the whole business behind me, for Justine’s sake.
It was bumpy at first, but after a while things settled down, and the three of us started to feel like a real family. Patrick and I traveled to Aspen for Thanksgiving and stayed at the Little Nell hotel. One night while we were making love I saw a huge starburst explosion in my head, a great flash of light.
“I think we just made a baby,” I said.
Patrick turned away from me without saying anything, and that was the end of the discussion. An abyss had suddenly opened up between us. I wanted to keep the baby, I wanted to keep us together as a family, but when your partner isn’t even slightly enthusiastic and you’re twenty years old, it’s hard to know what to say. If I pushed the issue and he demanded an abortion, then I’d be faced with a worse dilemma, so I kept quiet. On the way back to L.A. we carried on pretending nothing had happened, but you can’t fool Mother Nature. She keeps the wheels of biology turning, and eventually things have to come to a head.
The morning I had to go for an audition for the sci-fi film Arena, Justine decided to throw the greatest tantrum spectacular of all time. Justine’s nanny was off that day, and Patrick went to work as usual, so I had to take her along with me. She refused to sit in the waiting room, so I went into the audition with her clinging to my leg like a monkey. During the reading I had to get angry and cry and Justine turned her face up to me and said, “Don’t cry Mommy, don’t be sad.” It was adorable but there was no chance I was going to get the part. I bought some pregnancy books on the way home and started taking prenatal vitamins. Then my agent called. The producers thought the scene with Justine was touching and had offered me the part. It meant spending the next two months in Italy.
I went home and sat down with Patrick. It was time to get serious about the pregnancy. I told him about Italy, told him that I wasn’t going to leave America until we worked this out. My doctors were here, and I didn’t want to fly with a baby on the way. He was very nonchalant about the whole thing.
“Don’t worry about it. I have to go to Europe for a film festival anyway, so we’ll both go to Rome. I know a guy there. We’ll find you a doctor and get an abortion.”
So there it was. With one careless comment, he had shattered my illusions about our happy family life. He expected me to fly to Rome and squeeze in an abortion before the film shoot just as if you might say, “Oh, you’re going to the store? Can you take the trash out on your way?” I’d already endured one abortion with Tre’s baby, and I wasn’t interested in repeating the experience, but here I was with a man who clearly did not want a baby or the responsibility that went with one. Given the difference in our ages, I thought that I had to be tough, to put on a brave face, to show Patrick that he couldn’t hurt me, but inside I was cut deeply. We were living together, and I’d proven I was a wonderful mother. He never considered my feelings. There was no discussion about it, no holding me when I was crying. It was a massive rejection.
Before heading to Rome we met up with some of Patrick’s friends in France. Megève is one of the most beautiful ski resorts in the world, the place where Audrey Hepburn meets Cary Grant in Charade. I hated being there. I felt totally alienated. All of Patrick’s friends knew his ex-wife Beatrice, and they didn’t take to me at all. They spoke French too fast for me to keep up, and the ones who spoke English didn’t bother to make the effort. I left the dinner party and walked out into the winter night. The air was crisp. A full moon overhead made the surrounding mountains stand out against the sky. The atmosphere was mystical. I was wearing a long fur coat, and I found a private place, out of sight of the house, and lay down in the snow. I looked up at the moon and asked it if I should have the baby. Since I was pumped up on pregnancy hormones and walking alone in the French Alps, it seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do. I’m sure that Patrick was inside wondering why I was taking so long in the bathroom. I didn’t care; I’d gone outside with another Patrick on my mind—my
brother. I still felt his presence, I thought of him all the time, and I knew with absolute certainty that the baby I was carrying was a boy. Not long after I became pregnant it occurred to me that this baby should be called Patrick, after my brother, and that this might help change the other Patrick’s mind. He was an egotist, so a son named after him might stir his interest, but it hadn’t. Another thought had arisen, one that I hadn’t been able to get out of my mind, that the child I was carrying had my brother’s soul. Pat was trying to come back into the world. As I lay there I had a very clear sense of the child’s life. I saw it like a series of snapshots. I could see his face—he had my brother’s soulful, big blue eyes.
In the morning we’d catch a plane to Italy. This was my last chance to change my mind, to keep the baby and tell Patrick to go to hell. I asked for a sign, something clear and incontrovertible that would leave no doubt as to the course of action I had to take. It was a completely clear night and out of nowhere a huge bank of clouds appeared and covered the moon for a full minute. I began to weep. I’d been trying to act as if Patrick’s indifference didn’t matter, as if things would somehow work out in the end. Lying there in the darkness I knew that there would be no fairy-tale ending. I wasn’t ready to raise a child on my own. My chest felt tight, my heart felt like water-laden cloth, clinging and heavy. I’d made my decision. I would be losing a whole person’s existence, I’d be denying my brother the chance to come back into the world, and I cried and cried because I didn’t know if there would ever be another chance after that, if his soul would ever want to come back to me again.
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