As for Gary’s death, there are too many theories to cover them all here. It was reported in the media, private investigators were hired, conspiracy theories started up, and to this day it remains one of the most mysterious deaths in Hollywood history. I’ve been asked to do interviews about it at least a dozen times, and it still crops up in the news and in online reports from time to time. No one knows exactly what happened, but here’s what I do know.
In June 1997 Gary spent a week working with actress Marsha Mason on a remake of the 1949 movie The Big Steal, which is about a man who fakes his own death. The movie was going to be his directorial debut. He was driving his Ford Explorer back to his home in Santa Monica when he vanished. His publicist believed he was acting out the life of The Big Steal’s main character. Wendy offered a $100,000 reward, and when the story hit the media all sorts of strange folk came out of the woodwork. There was a psychic on Leeza Gibbons’s show who claimed Gary was working in an Alabama Kmart. There were stories of a CIA assassination. Apparently Gary had uncovered secrets about the US Army’s conducting tests on live subjects in Panama using prohibited weapons. There were stories of black unregistered helicopters patrolling the California aqueduct near where he vanished. Wendy was even approached by men in black suits with mirrored sunglasses who advised her to drop her investigation into Gary’s disappearance.
A year later his body was found in his Ford Explorer, submerged in the California aqueduct close to the town of Barstow. That closed the official police investigation, but the autopsy and subsequent private investigation opened doors to more unanswered questions.
I’m normally one for accepting the simplest explanation for things, Occam’s Razor and all that, but there were some odd facts that made it difficult for me to accept that Gary fell asleep at the wheel and drove his SUV off the road into a body of water.
First, it was unlikely that this was an accident at all, given that there was a lot of ground between the road and the aqueduct. Also, Gary was an experienced long-distance driver. He’d grown up in a trucking family, and when we were married he’d go for long drives just to clear his head and resolve script problems. And I mean long drives, thousands of miles. He’d be stuck on a script and then just up and say, “I’m off to Tennessee. I’ll see you when I’ve got this story nailed.”
Also, it was strange that Gary was found in the aqueduct at all, considering that I’d already looked. After his disappearance I’d enlisted the help of a friend who was an ex-marine. He assembled a team of divers and they went down into the aqueduct with infrared equipment and swept the area around Barstow from top to bottom. There was no sign of a car or a body. A year later, in the same area, after the police received a tip from an anonymous caller, the car and body miraculously appeared.
And then there was the Cyrillic I’d seen on his computer monitor. Wendy also reported seeing strange symbols on his computer screen, and when she asked him what they were, Gary had answered “encryption codes.” I don’t know what the ramifications of that are, but it’s certainly added fuel to the stories about the CIA, and since those Russian sleeper agents were found in New Jersey in 2010, I’m sure it won’t be long before someone is talking about Gary’s death being connected to some foreign spy network. Who knows?
Last, Gary had a deformed pinky. It had been broken in a football accident, and he hadn’t had it reset properly. Wendy put a photo of it in the reward notice she posted, as it was the simplest, surefire way of immediately identifying his body. When they pulled what was supposed to be Gary’s body out of the aqueduct, the gun that he always carried with him was missing, along with both of his hands. After Wendy and his family pressed the police about the missing hands, another search of the car was conducted and some finger bones were found in the back seat. Wendy pushed to have them analyzed and the police coroner reported that no deformed pinky was found and that the bones were likely around 200 years old.
Whatever the truth, whatever happened that night on the highway, Gary’s death shook me and brought my own life into sharp focus.
After the funeral, I went to Gary’s beach house and met Wendy in person for the first time. We got to know each other and ended up talking through the night. I had a headache, and Wendy told me to get some aspirin in her bathroom cabinet. It was filled with more pills than there are flakes in a snow globe. I asked Wendy about them and she explained:
“Well, I finally got Gary on antidepressants, and that really helped his mood. He was prone to depression.”
I admired her persistence. I wish he’d taken pills with me, because it might have saved our marriage.
When I left the next morning, Wendy gave me a box of Gary’s unproduced scripts. There was some great material in there, his best work. Schwarzenegger scripts sell, Kurt Russell action scripts sell, but sometimes they sell at the expense of scripts like Come As You Are, a story about a female photojournalist. That script did the rounds in Hollywood for years, and came close to being made, first with Kathleen Turner and then Michelle Pfeiffer. But in the end it never got over the line.
Maybe if Gary had lived and made it as a director he would’ve had the influence to push it through. It was a great script, Academy Award material, and it’s a tragedy that it’s just sitting in a box in my attic gathering dust.
Up until Gary’s death, I’d always believed that I would eventually find my Prince Charming to settle down with and raise a few talented, gorgeous children. But after his funeral, when I looked back on the life I’d led since leaving home, on the decisions I’d made, my path seemed clear. If there had been any ambiguity about the meaning of the sign the moon had given me that night in Megève, there wasn’t now. I got it. Family life wasn’t for me.
I had always known that I couldn’t be the kind of dependent woman Dodi had wanted me to be. Losing Justine was unbearably difficult, and she wasn’t even my biological child. After the accident when I’d lost Gary’s baby, after Gary’s death, all I could think about was what if I went and had a child of my own? What if I raised it and loved it and then that bitch fate swept in and things turned to shit again? I couldn’t bear to think about that.
I’d been shaped by my early life. I was made to stand on my own two feet and I was at my weakest whenever I relied on another person for reassurance and validation. I was convinced that I had the answer. I was my own woman. I would enjoy men, but I didn’t need them. This realization was like donning a suit of armor, a power that I’d accumulated through my own efforts, and I would set about making it stronger.
That inner voice continued to drive me forward. It told me that I could reach a larger audience and touch people’s lives. I would be immune to criticism, self-doubt, and fear. I was going to be a film actress, the next Katharine Hepburn.
When I got a call from my agent telling me that I’d landed a role on a sci-fi show that Warner Brothers was producing, I said to her, “You know I’m working on my movie career. Are you sure I should be committing to a TV series and a five-year contract?”
My agent laughed.
“Honey, there’s never been a sci-fi series that wasn’t a Star Trek spin-off that ran more than a couple of years. Trust me, you’ll be lucky to last for one.”
It turned out that my agent couldn’t have been more wrong. And it was lucky for me that she was.
The photo I used for my Variety ad announcing my role in Berrenger’s
With Don Ameche and Bob Hope on the set of A Master Piece of Murder in Vancouver, Canada, 1984
At the Carousel Ball with John Davis, 1984
Lunch on the Sakara with Dodi, 1984
Pregnant with Patrick in Megeve
As the alien-possessed stripper Brenda Lee Van Buren in The Hidden, 1987
With Shari Shattuck on the set of the 1990 bomb Mad About You
With Gary when we first met on the set of The Heat, 1988
My wedding, 1988, Lana Clarkson on the right, Donnelly Rhodes in the background
With Jaclyn Smith and Patricia Kale
mber on the set of Kaleidoscope, 1990
With my big love, Rod Dyer, 1992
Hexed, Texas, 1993. I played a crazy model whose billboard gets defaced at the end of the movie.
THE RIGHT HAND OF VENGEANCE
It’s January 19, 1994, and a massive aftershock from the Northridge earthquake hits. Everyone on the set starts screaming and running out of the studio, and I’m left on my own, strapped into the cockpit of a Star Fury combat fighter, helpless to escape. I’m locked into a Michelin Man spacesuit, and the helmet I’m wearing is all fogged up, so I have to keep pressing this button in my hand to operate the fan. The plastic visor clears up for a few seconds. I wait. It’s hot inside the suit, and the sound of the fan is getting on my nerves. Soon the aftershocks will subside, and then I’m going to give them a piece of my mind. They’re going to see firsthand just how much Claudia and Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova have in common.
Babylon 5 was something new to television—a science fiction novel in episodes. It wasn’t a space Western like Star Trek. There were no cute kids or robots. Joe Straczynski set out to write a novel for television, an adult-oriented series. The result was a richly textured story fueled by politics, diplomacy, philosophy, religion, history, and science.
A five-mile-long diplomatic space station in a distant galaxy, Babylon 5 had become “the last, best hope for peace” between intergalactic species. The characters schemed, clashed, struggled with their demons, betrayed one another and themselves, and sometimes fell in love. Conflicts weren’t neatly resolved at the end of every episode. They were allowed to fester and build to a crescendo.
In the midst of it all, running the station and its crew as a well-oiled machine, was Lieutenant Commander Susan Ivanova.
A good cast and crew have a lot in common with a well-run space station. When you work on an established show like Dallas or Columbo everything runs smoothly, but Babylon 5 was a new show being shot in an old warehouse in Sun Valley. It was Warner Brothers’ first stab at sci-fi TV, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d hidden the show away far from their Hollywood studio lot, just in case it turned out to be a massive embarrassment.
Babylonian Productions was a rabbit warren of corridors and offices. There were auditions taking place at the front of the building and actors walking around in alien prosthetics and Earth Force uniforms. Guys from the prop department would walk past carrying body armor and plasma rifles. John Copeland, the producer, would work as budget enforcer, railroad fob watch in hand, ensuring that the directors didn’t run into overtime. In the office closest to the sets, keyboard eternally clacking away, was Joe Straczynski, the show’s creator, executive producer, and lead writer.
I went in on my first day not knowing what to expect. I knew that I was replacing Tamlyn Tomita (The Karate Kid Part II, The Joy Luck Club). They’d decided she was too short and didn’t have enough of a commanding presence to act beside the two male leads. The rest of the cast and crew, with the exception of Richard Biggs (Dr. Stephen Franklin), had already shot the pilot, so I was the new kid on the block. Michael O’Hare, the male lead, was all too happy to remind me of this. He wasn’t what you would call a generous actor. When we’d enter the set together, he would intentionally broaden his shoulders to try to dominate the shot. The problem was that the Babylon 5 doors would pull away from the bottom and up into the side of a plywood set, meaning that I’d catch the last part of it with my shoulder and make the whole wall shake. After several takes, I’d eventually have to follow a few inches behind him to avoid a clash, which I guess was his plan all along.
I think the role of male lead went to his head just a little. He propositioned some of the female cast members and was officious with the crew. In between takes he would unashamedly shuffle his junk, moving it around with his hand through the fabric of his uniform. When he caught me looking at him in disbelief he explained, “I have an average-sized penis but enormous testicles.”
Great, thanks for sharing.
I ran into some familiar faces on set: Jeff Conaway (Security Officer Zack Allen), with whom I’d starred in Berrenger’s and Tale of Two Sisters, and John Flinn, the director of photography, with whom I’d worked on Jake and the Fatman. I had a crush on John back then, but knew he was married, so I didn’t make a move.
I hit it off right away with Jerry Doyle, who played Security Chief Michael Garibaldi. Jerry could do great Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd impersonations, which was especially funny since his character was also a Looney Tunes fan. We were always razzing each other, especially over the sci-fi technobabble, which doesn’t easily roll off the tongue. Our dialogue was peppered with phrases like “Bolozian freighters, Minbari war cruisers, and tachyon emissions.” The long speeches with tech-talk could be challenging but they also provided great fodder for the blooper reels.
There was a positive energy amongst the cast and crew. Everyone was really enjoying themselves, and any awkwardness with my male lead was forgotten by the time we wrapped my first episode, “Midnight on the Firing Line.”
I was beginning to sense that not only was this going to be a fun job, but Susan Ivanova had the potential to be a rewarding, complex character.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2230, Ivanova had a passionate, fiercely loyal temperament, combined with a sardonic wit and cynicism that is as much a part of Russian life as vodka and borscht.
If nothing else I was glad to have a chance to wear less makeup, pull back my hair, and kick some ass. Finally, my height and authoritative demeanor were working for me. I’ve always been a tomboy at heart and this was the first time I hadn’t been told to soften my style for a part:
Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander. Daughter of Andre and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart. I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me.2
When the second season started up we discovered that the studio had replaced Michael O’Hare. There’d been too many conflicts between our male lead and the cast and crew. Bruce Boxleitner was our new commander, and I couldn’t have been happier. Bruce and I got on like the best of friends. He’s a great guy, very genuine and caring, not unlike John Sheridan, the character he played. And I’d started settling into the character of Ivanova. In the first season she was extremely uptight, she had a pole up her butt, but by the second season there was more Claudia in her. She developed a sense of humor and started developing relationships. The steel was still there, but now it was wrapped in velvet.
And we do have a lot in common, Ivanova and I.
She had lost a brother and a mother (although I’d been fortunate enough to get my own mother back). I used to wear one earring in memory of my brother Patrick, and when I discussed this with Joe he was happy to allow Ivanova to do the same. Like me, she’d built a wall to deal with the loss she’d endured, her family tragedies, and the conflict she faced between love and career. Those were strong themes in my own life, and that energy, those past personal experiences, seemed to shine through in Ivanova and I think the audience responded very strongly to that.
There are even similarities between our sex lives. One time, when I passed on some character notes to Joe, I inadvertently turned Ivanova bisexual.
Andrea Thompson played the ship’s resident telepath, Talia Winters, my lesbian lover on the show. Andrea is one of the most amazing women I’ve ever met. Aside from starring in Babylon 5 she’s been a CNN reporter, the star of multiple TV series, a high-end real estate investor, and a jewel trader. And if that weren’t enough she’s beautiful, a gourmet chef, and a single mother with two kids. I should be insanely envious, but she’s also absolutely lovely, and we have the same sense of humor.
Joe had written an episode in which a sleazy ex-boyfriend of Ivanova’s visits the station, and that just didn’t sit well with me. Having worked in television for over a decade, I suspected that if there was one ex-boyfriend then others would follow,
and I couldn’t see Ivanova banging her way across the galaxy while forging her military career. She was driven, and I didn’t think that she had time for relationships. I objected, and in a throw-away line, told Joe that if it came down to it I’d rather be with an alien or a woman.
Andrea and I both thought it was funny when Joe started up the whole lesbian thing, but I didn’t mind. Ivanova’s sexual confusion—her love for Talia despite her hatred for the Psi Corps, the evil agency that Talia was bound to—added another layer of complexity to the character and also reflected my own sexual attitudes. I don’t really differentiate between a man or a woman when it comes to love. Physically I tend to prefer men—that’s what makes me heterosexual—but I’ve certainly had my flings with women. I’ve never thought of myself as gay or even bisexual; I prefer omnisexual. Love is part of life, and, man or woman, we’re all stuck playing the same game.
So while my character was having an affair with the station’s resident telepath I was having one with the show’s director of photography, John Flinn.
Things were starting to fade with Rod by then. We were heading in different directions, and I had almost no spare time outside of filming the show. I still had a major crush on John, but he was very careful not to start anything until after his divorce. It was hard to wait. But we did. And once he was available we were free to do as we pleased. Sex with John gave me something to look forward to at the end of the day. When shooting was over and everybody went home we had fun in my trailer. I’d keep a six-pack handy, and sometimes we’d have a couple of beers. Then I’d have to get home and start learning lines for the next day.
Dating a man I’d had a crush on for so long was exciting in itself. Dating the director of photography when you’re the female lead comes with certain perks. After all, the director of photography is the one who makes you look good, and a man in love is certain to take care of his lady. John was a complete professional to all of the actors on the set, but looking back at old episodes I do notice that I’m particularly well lit.
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