For me, it was the last straw. I’d taken her to the South of France, let her live in my house rent-free, and loaned her thousands of dollars that she had never repaid. We’d starred in the same kinds of TV shows, we’d started out in our careers together, but Lana’s optimism, her dreams that she would make it as a big-time actress, hadn’t materialized to the point that she was self-sufficient. She was always relying on friends to prop her up. I told her to get lost. We stopped speaking.
The next time I saw Lana was at her funeral.
I’d heard that Lana was struggling. She’d broken both her wrists while entertaining at a children’s party, had been fighting an addiction to booze and painkillers, and was struggling to keep her apartment in Venice Beach. Worst of all, she’d turned forty. As far as Hollywood is concerned, the day a woman turns forty, she is magically transformed into Methuselah and is suddenly unemployable.
On February 3, 2003, after working a shift as a hostess at the House of Blues, Lana went home with Phil Spector, the intense, weasely-looking guy who’d produced records for a host of famous artists and bands: from early R&B groups like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Righteous Brothers to the Beatles, John Lennon, Tina Turner, the Ramones, and Leonard Cohen. In addition to being a total fucking nutcase Spector had a history of drink and drug problems as well as a penchant for guns. He’d previously threatened five women at gunpoint—Lana was the sixth.
He shot Lana with an unregistered blue-steel .38-caliber Colt revolver. When the police carried Lana’s body out of Pyrenees Castle (Spector’s mansion in Alhambra, California), they took with them Spector’s nine other guns, fragments of Lana’s teeth and fingernails, her leopard-print purse, and her false eyelashes.
At the time of arrest Spector was on seven different prescription drugs.
It was a horrible way to go. Even worse, the fame that she had sought in life found her in death, though not in a form that she would have hoped for.
Her name, her clips, and her photos were screened on news and entertainment programs around the world. They referred to her as a B movie actress, and instead of vilifying Spector, they cheapened her. Leaked photos of her dead body appeared on the Internet. HBO began developing a film about Spector’s prosecution that is being filmed at this writing, scripted and directed by David Mamet and starring Al Pacino as Spector and Helen Mirren as the prosecutor.
It’s like Faust, a deal with the devil where you get what you’ve always wanted, your greatest desire, but it comes at a terrible price and in a cruel and twisted form. I wonder how much Spector will get for the movie. I don’t suppose it matters—he won’t have time to enjoy it. Phil Spector was sentenced on May 29, 2009 to nineteen years to life and was incarcerated in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran.
Now for the redemption story.
Not long after I had my falling out with Lana, I was following the Gulf War on TV with Gary when I had a sort of psychic flash. I had an overwhelming urge to go to Hamlet Gardens, the upmarket spinoff of the Hamburger Hamlet restaurant chain.
Gary tagged along with me, somewhat bemused. We stood in the lobby for ten minutes.
“You still haven’t told me what this is all about. Why are we standing around like a couple of chumps? I should be home working on my script.”
“Just stand here with me. Wait with me.”
I could feel that something was going to happen. Spiritual currents run through my family; we’re an intuitive bunch, especially the women on my mother’s side.
After Patrick’s death, my mom and I would sometimes see him hovering above our beds. She’d see him as a little boy, I’d see him at the age he was when he died.
And when I was seventeen and moving up to L.A. for the first time, I had a bad accident, and the family gift reared its head again. I was in the fast lane on the 101 when some Mexican guys in a van pulled up beside me and started catcalling in a mix of Spanish and English. My family had spent a little time at my grandfather’s house in Cuernavaca, Mexico after Patrick’s death, and my brothers and I would go and hang out with the local kids. We learned how to sell iguanas on the roadside to make pocket money, along with the most important words in any language—the rude ones. I was driving this crappy Chevy Citation that my dad had given me. It was about as maneuverable as a Sherman tank and ugly to boot. I was getting nervous, not because they were being rude and offensive, but because I was a new driver and really needed to concentrate, so I flipped them off, hoping they would back off and leave me alone. And they did, but not before ramming me with the side of their van and pushing me into the center divider. I hit it at just the right angle to launch my car into the air. The Chevy flipped over and hit five other cars on its flight to the slow lane. By the time it came to a halt it was completely crumpled and I was trapped. My right leg had come out of its socket and my head was swimming. I looked up and saw a bridge over the freeway where people had gathered, hands over their mouths, horrified expressions on their faces. Luckily an ambulance had been traveling right behind me, and its crew saw the whole thing. They used the Jaws of Life to open up the Citation like the cheap tin can it was. A paramedic knelt down beside me as they cut away my seatbelt.
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t know.”
I couldn’t remember anything.
There’s never a shortage of drama in my life. Sometimes it feels like I’m trapped in a soap opera. (Living in Hollywood can do that to you.) Well, here’s the icing on the cake—I had amnesia. I had to go to memory therapy at UCLA after the accident.
They pulled me out of the car, and the ambulance took me to the Queen of Angels Hospital. As I was being rolled into the ER on a gurney I saw a pay phone and remembered that my mom was working at Saks Fifth Avenue in Costa Mesa, but I couldn’t remember her name. I begged the nurse walking alongside the gurney to help me call her. I got through and I was yelling at her and crying.
“I’ve been in an accident. I’m in the hospital.”
That was the only coherent information I managed to get out before the nurse pulled the phone out of my hand, informed me that the doctors were waiting, and hung it up.
I passed out and when I came around it was to the sound of chanting. I opened my eyes. My hospital bed was surrounded by chanting Koreans.
“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.”
Then I saw a face I recognized: my aunt. Memories came flooding back. She was a Buddhist and had brought her friends along. I remembered that she chanted for money. She’d chanted for a new Volvo and got it. She’d chanted for a real-estate portfolio and it had been granted unto her. I remembered that she was eccentric and funny. Like all the women in our family she had a bent toward the spiritual, albeit tempered by a practical streak.
And then I saw my mom.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I just got in my car and it took me here.”
It might sound strange, but despite the disagreements and feuds that have taken place between us over the years, despite the estrangement and family divides, my mom and I have always shared an invisible, unbreakable bond.
I stood in the Hamlet Gardens lobby and wouldn’t budge, just waiting for something to happen, and Gary was done standing around. He was heading back to the car when all of a sudden my mom came walking out of the dining room, arm in arm with Tre. It was an amazing thing. Somehow I’d been led to her, but if it was a minor miracle it was tarnished by the unavoidable truth that she was still hanging out with my asshole ex-boyfriend.
My mom and dad had split up years before, and I’d just assumed that Tre and my mom had run their course. Now I found myself in an extremely uncomfortable position. We swapped some forced pleasantries, I introduced my new husband, and then we went our separate ways. When I got home, though, I fell to pieces. I was an emotional wreck, and Gary had to hold me the whole night. In the back of my mind, I kept justifying her decision by thinking, “Well, he’s giving her the att
ention my father never did, or else she needs a friend and I left home and I’m not around for her.”
I don’t know what force had led me to her, but I knew I’d been given a choice. I could either reach out and extend an olive branch to her or leave things as they were, a festering wound. I knew all about crossroads; I’d stood at one in the aftermath of my rape. You either let something ruin you or you take action.
I called up my mom, and we started talking again. She explained to me that I’d misinterpreted the incident with Tre’s car—the event that had created a seven-year wall of silence between us. It had been out in front of her house because she’d borrowed it from him—her car was at the mechanic’s—and after that they’d stayed in contact as friends. We talked things over. I put the past behind me. It was such a wonderful feeling to have her back in my life. We had missed each other immensely and had miles of ground to cover.
I called up my dad as well and started rebuilding bridges. I was married, I had a career, and now I was setting right the sins of the past. I was an adult, and finally my parents were actually listening to me. Now all I had to do was turn things around with Gary.
Gary, though, was heavily invested in misery. None of his writing opportunities had panned out, and the IRS bill was a monkey on his back, driving him into ever-longer bouts of depression.
I got a job working on Jon Turteltaub’s first movie, Think Big, starring the “Barbarian Brothers” Peter and David Paul. They were these ridiculously over-steroided body builders who played two mentally impaired truckers transporting toxic waste across the country. The movie earned me enough money to take Gary to Hawaii in the hope that he could shake his writer’s block. We were staying in a condo, and after a few days I ran out of things to read. The condo had a small shelf of bestsellers, all of them by John Grisham and Danielle Steel. I’ve never been a big reader of blockbuster novels, but I’ve always been a bookworm. I was desperate, so I picked a book at random, Steel’s Kaleidoscope, read it from cover to cover, and thought that it would make a great movie.
Not long after we returned to L.A. I learned that the film Kaleidoscope was scheduled for production, and I was cast as Jaclyn Smith’s little sister. Jaclyn arrived on set, right off the plane. She was exhausted, wore no makeup, and was still without a doubt one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in real life.
My character was a gynecologist who couldn’t get pregnant. And as with Clean and Sober, the role I’d play in Kaleidoscope would be a bitter foretelling of a personal tragedy.
After Hawaii I got pregnant, and that seemed to turn around my relationship with Gary. We were both really happy about the news. I felt that I was at a time in my life when I was ready for a family. I started buying pregnancy books. Gary and I started picking out names. We still loved each other, and I hoped, however naively, that the baby would help us forge a working relationship. These were the days before Dr. Phil or even Jerry Springer. We were not yet blessed with the universal talk-show wisdom that keeping a marriage together for the kids seldom works out.
I needn’t have worried. I booked a job with a location shoot in Hoboken, New Jersey, working on Maniac Cop 2. It was the dead of winter. I was three months pregnant and not really showing. I didn’t want to take the job, but we needed the money. We agreed that after the shoot I’d take the rest of the year off to have the baby.
Problems arose with my co-star Robert Davi, the James Bond baddie with the pockmarked face. He was always puffing cigars on set, and one day when I had really bad morning sickness I asked him not to smoke around me because I didn’t want to throw up on his clothes. He told me to fuck off, flat out, just like that.
About two-thirds of the way through the shoot I was doing a stunt scene that involved being handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car. I was outside the car, and it was supposed to appear that I was running alongside it, unable to escape. The techs had built a little platform for me to stand on that I had to share with a camera so they could get some close-ups. It was too dangerous to have the car running on its own steam so they hooked it up to a truck that would pull it along.
On the third take the platform broke and I fell and hit the road at forty miles an hour, still handcuffed to the steering wheel. I hit hard and was dragged for what felt like a hundred feet before they realized what had happened and stopped the truck. The next morning, while I was shooting a scene with Robert Davi a huge gush of blood came running down my legs. I asked them to stop shooting, apologized, and then ran to the bathroom. When one of the producers knocked on the bathroom door to see if I was okay I told him to get me to an emergency room. I was suffering a miscarriage.
I was resting up in the hospital when the producers called and asked me to come back to do some reshoots. They implied that I’d lied about being pregnant and threatened legal action if I didn’t come back and finish the film within their scheduled time frame. So I went back to work, and they started shooting that same scene with Robert Davi. He made a point of lighting up his cigar in front of me.
“Now maybe you won’t be such a hormonally imbalanced bitch.”
What an ass. I couldn’t wait to get done with that film.
The loss of the baby was painful for me, and it turned out to be the end of my marriage. I remember the exact moment the relationship had run its course and I decided to file for divorce.
I’d made Gary a really nice lunch, put it on a platter, put on some sexy new lingerie I’d bought just for the occasion, and went into his office. It was an attempt to recapture the excitement of our early days. Gary turned from his computer, his face flushed with anger.
“Get out! Don’t you ever fucking come in here when I’m working.”
He quickly turned off the monitor, but not before I noticed that the screen was filled with non-English characters. In the moment I’d seen them, the writing looked like Cyrillic. This was weird, because as far as I knew Gary didn’t speak Russian, even though he had a Russian-Jewish background. I was offended and hurt. I dropped the tray and stormed out and that was that. I called a friend, got the name of a divorce attorney, and then closed the door to my heart once again.
With the benefit of hindsight I think my marriage to Gary was a big “fuck you” to my parents. I’d married a man who was exactly like my father. He wasn’t very demonstrative, and he had a short fuse. It’s the older-guy thing—if your relationship with your father doesn’t work out, then you marry a guy just like him and try to make him love you.
While I was filing for divorce with Gary I fell madly in love with graphic designer and restaurateur Rod Dyer.
I met Rod while dining at his restaurant Pane e Vino. We flirted from across the room, and after a while he came over to talk to me. I was wearing a 1930s-style suit, and Rod told me that he loved my tie, which was exactly the right thing to say. I put my hand on his knee, and he asked me to come back the following day and have lunch with him. When I did he presented me with a beautiful wooden box filled with antique ties and a deco-style card that he’d drawn himself. I was floored and immediately smitten. Short of a cheap ring with emerald shards that he bought for me when we got hitched, Gary had never given me anything. Gary loved women but he wasn’t the romantic type.
I used to drive an ’83 Harley-Davidson Sportster. When I wanted to see Rod, I’d tell Gary that I was going to the gym and then ride my bike across town from Mandeville Canyon to Beverly Hills. I’d see the sunrise above Sunset Boulevard as I raced along it, and then Rod and I would spend the morning making love. Rod was in the midst of a divorce as well and was living in the guesthouse of a famous producer friend. An hour or two later I’d get back on my Harley and race home. I guess Gary assumed the sweat was from my workout, and I suppose that, in a way, it was.
I divorced Gary, took my piano and my clothes, and moved into an apartment building on Doheny Drive. On my first day there I opened the paper and saw that my new movie, Hexed, had just been released in theaters.
We’d shot Hexed in Texas during
a baking-hot summer. My co-star was Arye Gross, who has recently been a regular on Castle with Nathan Fillion. Arye played a hotel clerk who pretends he’s someone else to go on a date with my character, a crazy supermodel named Hexina. My character kills people and arranges the evidence to frame the hotel clerk. The director, Alan Spencer, fought hard for me to get the role and allowed me to try just about anything, which made it an incredibly fun shoot.
It was also the first time I’d been back to Texas since my brother died. We’d left him behind when we returned to Connecticut, buried in a Houston cemetery. I had a few margaritas and drove out to visit him. I got lost looking for the grave—my recollection was that it was under a tree next to a fence bordering a paddock with horses. But things had changed. Now a freeway ran alongside his remains, a thin wire fence separating him from the traffic that rushed by. I found the plaque hidden beneath weeds and after clearing the site wiped the dirt off it. I lay down on top of his grave and cried. My marriage was over, but my career was gathering steam. I think I was hoping I’d feel his presence or receive some kind of sign, but there was nothing—Patrick had moved on. If he was watching over me from the other side, then it wasn’t from that place. I stood up and brushed the dust off of my clothes.
As for Gary, he ended up marrying a girl named Wendy, whom I like a lot. She was a nurse at a plastic surgeon’s office, and she had a lot of work done to her. She says to everyone that it made her look like Cher. I think she looks better.
Gary overcame his writer’s block with the help of medication and managed to pay off all his tax debts. He took on a lot of script-doctor work, fixing problems with other writers’ scripts, which pays well but doesn’t earn you screen credits.
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