When I ran out of tears and my whole body was numb from the cold, I got up, wiped away the smeared mascara, and went back inside. I put on a smile for Patrick and his friends. He was laughing and drinking. He hadn’t missed me at all.
In the morning we traveled on to Rome. We were shooting Arena at the Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica studio near Rome, and I was staying in the city in a beautiful apartment near the Piazza di Spagna. The movie was about an intergalactic fighting competition between the champions of different planets, and they’d created incredible alien suits that the special effects guys would sit inside and operate. It starred soap actor Paul Satterfield and Armin Shimerman, who would go on to be a regular in the various Star Trek TV revivals.
I couldn’t confide in anybody because I didn’t want to appear unprofessional and no one was supposed to know I was pregnant. I was very self-conscious, because all my clothes were tight fighting—think gold lamé jumpsuits—and I was starting to show. It didn’t help that I was sharing wardrobe space with Shari Shattuck, who had a gorgeous figure. Shari and I starred together in the 1990 film Mad About You and the TV series Riptide. She would also appear in Babylon 5, although she’s best known for her long run on The Young and the Restless and her successful career as a mystery writer.
Patrick found me a doctor who looked older than the Coliseum. This was Italy in the ’80s, a conservative, Roman Catholic country where abortion was illegal. You had to have connections to find a doctor who would perform the procedure. That day I learned firsthand how important it is to have both a surgeon and an anesthetist. The guy put me under for what was supposed to be eight minutes, and I regained consciousness after eight hours. He’d over-anesthetized me. It was all a big secret, so the next day I had to don my gold lamé jumpsuit and go back to work, having nearly died and minus one child.
That experience changed me. I started building an emotional wall to protect myself. Watching my parents as I grew up, I knew what I wanted, and it wasn’t what they had. I wanted to have a nice house and perfect little children, one boy and one girl, and a relationship with a smart, handsome guy who respected my need for independence. That was my dream. After the abortion, I knew I couldn’t take that for granted, that in opening yourself up to a partner you were just as likely to be run through with a knife as embraced. Patrick made me wary of love, and after being forced to give up my baby I never wanted to go through something like that again.
Unsurprisingly, after we returned to L.A. things started to unravel with Patrick. The abortion wasn’t the death knell of our relationship though, because I wanted to be there for Justine. That little girl needed me. Out of nowhere Patrick told me he was sending her back to Paris to live with her mother. I was hurt and outraged. I’d lost one baby to this relationship already and now I felt as if I was losing another. Of course I had no legal rights, and no real way to protest what he was doing. By that time I had raised Justine for almost two years, and he didn’t even give me the chance to talk things over. It was done, decision made.
He told Justine to say goodbye to me before he took her to the airport. She cried and clung to me and wouldn’t let go.
“I don’t want to go away. What did I do, Mommy? Why are you making me go?”
She kept on asking that again and again until Patrick pulled her away. I’ve been through a lot of shit in my life, a lot of physical and emotional pain, but that moment was truly heartbreaking. I’ve never experienced anything else like it.
Once Justine was gone I couldn’t eat or sleep because I was so worried for her. I wasn’t given her phone number in Paris, so I sent her letters and presents, little reminders of our life together. I never received a reply.
I’m not sure why he did it. Perhaps he was jealous of the bond I was forming with her, perhaps he thought that Justine was coming between us. If he really thought that, he was stupid, because after he sent her away I left him.
I was due to move out while Patrick was away at another festival in Europe. In the meantime I’d been cast in the Adam Rifkin film Tale of Two Sisters with Valerie Breiman. It was a very low-budget, experimental, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of production. Adam needed a location to shoot the movie and asked if he could use Patrick’s place.
“Absolutely. Mi casa es su casa.”
The crew rolled in. Lawrence Bender of Pulp Fiction fame was the producer, and I was co-starring with Jeff Conaway again. We had a comedic sex scene in the back of a taxi.
It turned out that when Adam said “experimental” he really meant it. I can’t remember there being a script at all, and Charlie Sheen was credited as the writer. He narrated parts of the story in a voiceover and contributed some of his own original poetry to the project. Even then he was developing his unique talent for self-expression. Here’s an example of some of his freeform poetry from the movie:
They used to call me Wheezy
Now they call me Moe
Busted liver, three-pronged freebase device
My chin, she is on fire!
The erosion was fast, the lectures were not
He pondered high atop the mountain of fig newtons . . .
This literary gem is another example:
Black and blue skid mark lunchbox drools pasta prima
Frozen bacon pie suffering from the heat cries out in salted pork.
FREEZE FRAME!
Mom and Dad are trying to think, we hope . . .
Since there was no script, Valerie and I improvised our scenes. I would rant about my asshole husband who’d cheated on me, and Adam would cut to a picture of Patrick and me that was still up on the mantelpiece.
It was amusing enough at the time, but the icing on the cake came a year later when I ran into Patrick at Cannes. He’d just seen a screening of the movie and was totally perplexed.
“How did my house get into a movie? Why was there a picture of us? When did it all happen?”
I just shrugged, smiled, and walked on. In hindsight, it was the act of a twenty-one-year-old striking back at the older man who’d hurt her, but I don’t mind telling you that at the time it was beyond satisfying.
I ran into Patrick again in 2007 at Bill Panzer’s wake. Bill was the producer and creator of the Highlander franchise, and I’d starred in one of the episodes of the TV series. The first thing Patrick said to me after twenty years of estrangement: “Why did you take the mirror?”
I’d had a gorgeous outdoor mirror that my mother bought me for my very first apartment. It wasn’t expensive, but it was tall and beautiful with carved corners, and it looked perfect next to Patrick’s swimming pool. Twenty years and that was the first thing he could think to say? Perhaps losing that piece of pretty glass was a reminder that he’d also lost the girl that went with it.
Some good came out of that meeting, though. Patrick told me that Justine was in town, now in her early twenties, and pursuing a career as an actress. That made me smile. Patrick passed my card on to Justine and she agreed to meet me for lunch.
She’d grown up and turned into a beautiful young woman, but the resemblance between us was gone. As we sat down together I was struck by the realization that Justine was older now than I was when I’d played my part in raising her. As we chatted and swapped pleasantries I realized that she didn’t remember a thing, not a single thing.
“Don’t you remember when you had the meltdown at Bloomingdale’s and I bought you the party dresses?”
“Ah, no. Sorry.”
“Don’t you remember the Christmas when we made snow angels?”
“No.”
“But what about the letters I sent, and the gifts?”
She asked me what I was talking about, which confirmed what I’d already suspected. Her mother hadn’t passed on a thing I’d sent her. She’d actively worked to erase my memory from Justine’s mind. Jealousy is a green-eyed monster, and I guess she’d gotten her claws into Beatrice. It was like being trapped in a sci-fi show where someone you love has all their memories wiped out. Memory gai
ns so much of its power in being shared. Justine and I had a bond based on shared experience, but for her those moments were gone. It was devastating.
“So you don’t really remember me at all?”
“Oh, no. I remember the feeling of you, and that you were a good person in my life and that I was happy when we were all together.”
Later I did some reading on child psychology and consoled myself with the thought that, although the memories we shared in her early years were gone, the influence I had on her would have been formative and profound. I gave her love and attention and all the good things I had in me, and today, somewhere in her heart, that love burns on as part of the complex mixture that is grown-up Justine.
BLOOD, DEATH, AND TAXES
It was 1988, I was twenty-three years old, and I’d just landed a role starring in Clean and Sober with Michael Keaton, a movie about a real estate agent with a cocaine addiction. It was my first respectable big-studio movie. The director was Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of Moonlighting, and I also got to work with Morgan Freeman and Tate Donovan, who later starred in The O.C. We shot the movie in a real rehab clinic in downtown Pennsylvania. It was gritty and smoke-filled, just what you’d expect a rehab clinic to look like.
Michael Keaton’s performance was particularly good. He took a gutsy departure from his usual comedy roles and proved that he had the chops to cut it as a dramatic actor. The academy totally snubbed him for an Oscar that year.
I played the role of Iris, one of the patients in the rehab center. Iris is in for cocaine addiction as well, and she has an affair with Tate Donovan’s character. Morgan Freeman, who plays the center’s director, accuses Iris of being stoned and kicks her out of rehab.
When my brother Jimmy was in rehab, they made him watch Clean and Sober over and over. In one scene I have to wear a dorky leotard, and when Jimmy’s friends found out that I was his sister they used to give him no end of grief.
Years later I ran into Morgan Freeman at a Cirque du Soleil show in Santa Monica. We talked about Clean and Sober, and he said to me, “You know, I always thought you’d make it because you’ve got those eyes that tell the story.”
I thought that that was the kindest thing for him to say. It was nice that he’d remembered me and doubly nice that he’d been kind enough to compliment me at the height of his career.
Over the course of my own career I’ve played an addict of every kind of substance except for the one that finally beat me—alcohol. Later in life I would find myself in rehab, having graduated from playing the part of an addict to actually being one.
By the time Clean and Sober was released I was twenty-three years old and playing the love interest in The Heat, a CBS Summer Playhouse movie with Billy Campbell, who would go on to star in The Rocketeer. Gary Devore, the writer, was a confident, charismatic man in his late forties who’d walk around the set in jeans and cowboy boots.
Gary was the best man at Tommy Lee Jones’s wedding and was godfather to Peter Strauss’s son. He was buddies with Kurt Russell and had written movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christopher Walken, and Billy Crystal.
We started up a full-blown Hollywood set romance. The sex was exciting, so much so that I couldn’t even really tell you what the show was about.
After filming The Heat we said our goodbyes and I went back to Montgomery Clift’s old house, which I was renting in the Hollywood Hills. Monty had been a pain-pill addict and, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, an alcoholic. I didn’t seek out the old haunts of alcoholic actors; that’s just Hollywood. Close your eyes, throw a dart at a map of available rentals, and odds are you’ll find yourself living in the house of a former movie star with a substance abuse problem.
Speaking of which, by that time Lana Clarkson was living with me. The house didn’t have a second bedroom, but it did have a spare bathroom that the owners had at some point turned into makeshift accommodation for their kid. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen an Amazonian blonde sleeping on a single bed balanced precariously on top of a tiny closet.
Gary called me up one night, and I mentioned that I was going to Canada to visit my friend Christine.
“Great! I’ll come with you and we can get hitched.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure.”
Six weeks later we were married. We hadn’t even been on a date.
It was an insane idea but it was charged with spontaneity, and something about that appealed to me. After the difficulties of my painful, drawn-out relationship with Patrick I figured that this would have just as much chance of working out as something that I overthought and overplanned.
At the time, Christine was a location manager, so she threw together a spectacular wedding for me. The only decision I had to make was whether I wanted a yacht or a helicopter. I took the yacht.
My friend Lana and I traveled to Vancouver together. She seemed more excited about the wedding than I was. Gary and I met up and did tequila shots in the limo on the way. Everybody was so fucked up on coke and booze that it was more like a frat party than a wedding. Aboard the yacht Lana swept into my bachelorette party, tears streaming down her face, wailing about how no one would ever want to marry her. I tried to get her to join in the fun but she preferred to make a dramatic exit. She couldn’t handle so much attention being directed toward me on my special day and set about putting the spotlight back where she thought it belonged. Ten minutes later Christine confronted me, outraged that I’d made Lana the maid of honor after all the work she’d done. It turned out that Lana had gone up to the yacht’s captain and signed herself up for the job on the marriage certificate without telling anyone, including me.
It wasn’t what you’d call a traditional wedding. I still wasn’t talking to my parents, so in place of my mother there was a skinny Japanese guy in drag wearing a fluffy hat. I don’t know who he was or where he materialized from, but we were smashed and the wedding seemed to be coming together in its own weird way, so I went along for the ride. Gary had never met his best man, Donnelly Rhodes, who would play my father in an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Sci-fi fans will recognize Donnelly as Doc Cottle on the most recent Battlestar Galactica series. The piano player had missed the boat so someone’s brother took on that job, and we sailed out to this “sacred” island for the ceremony where everyone’s shoes got muddy. I was wearing a white dress I’d bought in a secondhand store in L.A. and an antique lace coat that kept getting ripped on branches and stained from spilled drinks. It probably wasn’t the most auspicious beginning to a marriage, but it was lots of fun.
Instead of a reception we had a party at Donnelly’s house. A cute friend of Christine’s that I’d always had a crush on was there. Caring for Justine had brought a level of restraint to my drug and alcohol consumption, but now that she was gone the party was back on. So when we ran out of blow, I went for a drive with Christine’s friend to find some more, still wearing my wedding dress. We ended up buying some from a pack of young guys, did some lines with them and then drove back to the house party. When we got back no one had noticed our absence, so we snuck into the bathroom with the blow and started making out.
At the beginning of a marriage you’re filled with hope and optimism, and you can’t see the cards fate will deal you. It turned out that my cards were bad, but Gary got a worse hand. Within ten years he would die in mysterious circumstances, sparking a series of conspiracy theories and investigations that continues to this day.
I remember Gary saying to me, “Isn’t it funny that we’re married? You’re not my type at all. I like leggy blondes with big tits.”
Prior to me, Gary had had a long list of lovers including Season Hubley (Kurt Russell’s ex-wife), the producer and notorious cocaine addict Julia Phillips, and Priscilla Barnes, who’d played nurse Terri Alden in Three’s Company.
Gary’s writer’s block started the same day a seven-figure IRS bill arrived in the mail, courtesy of another ex-lover, Maria Cole, Nat King Cole’s widow. When Gary was mar
ried to her he’d made the incredibly stupid decision to cosign some tax papers, which put him on the hook for millions of dollars of tax debt.
The only way for him to clear the debt was by writing more big-budget scripts, but the creativity needed to accomplish that was smothered by the depression that settled over him. He’d stare for hours at a blank monitor, type a few lines, and then delete them in frustration. I’d try to do nice things for him to cheer him up, but when he was in those moods he was an inconsolable asshole. After I got my head bitten off I stopped trying and would just leave him to stew until he came out of it on his own.
I pushed Gary to take antidepressants, but he gave up after a few weeks, claiming that he didn’t want to be addicted to anything. I switched tactics and suggested that we try ecstasy. He got some from Julia Phillips, I think, and it was really high-grade stuff. We made love and talked and cried. It was wonderful. On Monday morning he was back to being an asshole. Unfortunately, you can’t take ecstasy every day of your life.
Despite our money trouble and the stress that came with it, we did have our happy times, especially during our first year together. When the writing was going well and it looked like he might sell a script Gary would revert to the exciting, outgoing guy I’d married.
It was during one of these periods of relative marital calm that other turbulent relationships in my life would come to the fore.
One friend would betray my trust, while another bond that I thought was lost forever would be redeemed.
My relationship with Lana had always been a problematic one. After her performance at my wedding, which had all but ended my relationship with my friend Christine, Lana set her sights on Gary. I don’t know whether it was because she was still bitter about the wedding or whether she just wanted what I had, but when we’d attend the same parties she’d sidle on up to Gary and start flirting. Despite the fact that Lana was the leggy, blond, big-titted type, Gary was a faithful partner and when she didn’t take the repeated hints that he wasn’t interested, he told me.
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