What I don’t think any of us were expecting was the explosive reaction of the fans when they learned negotiations had broken down and I wouldn’t be coming back. Joe had dumped a male lead and numerous other cast members, so I don’t think he or the producers anticipated there would be much of an issue in replacing me. Instead, the blogs and forums started filling up with questions from fans demanding answers. Joe started receiving death threats. I got my share of hate mail as well. There were even fans asking questions about the technicalities of contractual agreements, show-business law, and what could be done to get me back. Sci-fi fans really are a loyal bunch.
Ultimately, losing Ivanova meant that Joe had to make substantial changes to the development of season five. An episode entitled “The Very Long Night of Susan Ivanova” was renamed “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari” and given a completely different storyline. Even now, when I attend conventions fans often complain that my character should have had a better send-off, and I tend to agree. Writer Harlan Ellison wrote something into an episode implying that my character left for more money. I think it was a personal jab at me, and I think it was in poor taste. Ivanova and I have one more thing in common: neither of us is so career-oriented that we would choose wealth and advancement over personal loyalties.
Eventually things did die down. I shot my movie, the fifth season of Babylon 5 went ahead, and I literally traded places with Tracy Scoggins. I appeared on the Highlander series as the immortal swordswoman Katherine, while Tracy left Highlander to play Babylon 5’s Captain Lochley.
Ironically (and maybe a little irritatingly), they were able to book her initially on an eight-episode contract.
I valued my friendship with Joe, and it was sad for me that things ended the way they did. I still think of him fondly and can’t thank him enough for creating a character of such dignity and integrity that she would continue to resonate so strongly with our audience.
Below are some excerpts from a live AOL chat between Joe and me from happier times, when the series was just starting to gather a large following. It’s moments like these that I enjoy remembering and talking over with fans:3
QUESTION: Claudia, what do you see in Ivanova’s future?
CLAUDIAB5: Lots of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll and the Captaincy.
JMS AT B5: (stunned silence)
CLAUDIAB5: You told me to express my humor, Joe.
JMS AT B5: (Current needs: glass rum, gun, two bullets.)
CLAUDIAB5: On my way.
. . .
JMS AT B5: What most folks don’t know, btw, is that Claudia (not kidding here) has a genius IQ, and reads a massive number of books per week.
CLAUDIAB5: Here’s your fifty bucks, Joe.
JMS AT B5: I live to serve.
. . .
QUESTION: jms and cc: what is the general mood of the show taping? Is there a lot of joking, etc. or does everyone pretty much take things seriously?
CLAUDIAB5: We have a ball making B5. At least I do.
JMS AT B5: Simple answer to the question: as you walk down the halls of the B5 production office . . . the one sound you hear the most is laughter. And every day, everybody eats lunch together behind the stage, writers, actors, producers, directors, crew, everybody. People have fun, have birthdays, hang out after work . . . it’s a great, fun environment . . . and a lot of practical jokes.
And Joe was right. Babylon 5 was great fun, a ball to work on, one of the highlights of my career, and I never tire of sharing the joy we had making it with the fans who continue to watch and support it.
Despite my regrettable exit, after four years on a high-rating sci-fi series there was no shortage of work for me. Checks came in the mail every day, and life was good.
But, as we’ve all learned from the daytime soaps, when things are going well for too long disaster is bound to be lurking right around the corner, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
This time, disaster had a name and a face.
Before I met him, if you’d told me that the devil had a Scottish accent I’d have thought you were pulling my chain.
Now I know better.
Standing in line with Andreas, Peter, and Mira. Season one of Babylon 5.
The dreaded “Michelin Man” suit on the set of Babylon 5
Fooling around with Jeff Conaway in the human makeup trailer
With John Flinn at a party
Sunbathing on one of Dodi’s yachts
With Dodi. This was taken on the trip where he asked me to have his baby.
One of the zillions of conventions I’ve attended!
With my buddy, practical joker Jerry Doyle, on the set of Babylon 5
Soaked in fake blood for “Between the Darkness and the Light,” the episode where my character, Susan Ivanova, is critically injured.
With my sweet friend Pat Tallman. I’m grateful to have met her on Babylon 5.
HIGHLAND FLING
They may take our lives, but they’ll never take OUR FREEDOM!”
It was 1996, and Braveheart was the movie of the year. It blazed through the Academy Awards, sweeping up five Oscars, including best picture, and five additional nominations. It was a tragic, historical romance with an epic scope—easily one of my favorite films of all time. I saw the movie with my mom, and when the reluctant hero Robert the Bruce appeared on-screen, I turned to her and said, “God, I wish I could meet a man like that!” Especially as he was played with such smoldering intensity by green-eyed Scottish actor Angus Macfadyen.
A few months later I was having an early lunch with girlfriends on Sunset Plaza Drive when I saw Angus with Justin, an old friend of mine. Angus had a glass of white wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It was noon. He caught me looking at him and started staring back. I was surprised by the intensity of his gaze. His eyes contained all the qualities that attracted me to his character in the film. I’d try to match him, to maintain eye contact, but then I’d get embarrassed and turn away. I rejoined my girlfriends’ conversation, trying to ignore him, but eventually I’d turn and look and our eyes would lock again.
I plucked up my courage and walked over to his table on the pretense of talking to my friend. It was very exciting—a big, heart-pounding moment.
Once I started speaking, cool, confident Claudia resurfaced. This guy was just another actor. I’d left Dodi Fayed, for God’s sake. This guy was small-fry by comparison. The three of us chatted. I flirted with Angus a little. Reassured that I was back in command of my senses, I said my goodbyes and headed back to my friends. Angus came up behind me and touched my arm. Everything else seemed to fade away.
“Claudia. Can I see you again?”
“Sure. Justin’s got my number.”
Cool. Calm. Collected. I walked away trying not to show the prickling of excitement that ran across my skin and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
On the set of Babylon 5, I’d check my phone messages every half hour to see if he’d called. I went crazy waiting for him to call, and after a week I finally rang Justin.
“What’s going on? Why isn’t this guy calling me? I don’t normally have this problem!”
Justin explained that that was just Angus. He’d been holed up in his apartment for the last week drinking like a fish while he completed a series of paintings.
“Paintings? What’s he painting?”
“Oh, it’s depressing stuff. Really macabre. You know, the devil and all that.”
That should have set the warning bells ringing right then. A guy ignores you for a week because he’s too busy getting loaded and painting the devil. But looking at it through eyes dazzled by animal attraction, the image of the tortured artist not only seemed romantic but also bound Angus more tightly in my mind to the character of Robert the Bruce. I’d never met a man like Angus before—dark and brooding—the archetypical Scotsman. This was new and forbidden fruit.
I finally got a call from Angus, probably prompted by Justin, and we went out to dinner. It turned
out we had very similar taste in literature, which is worth more to me than a super yacht and a solid-gold sink. He told me that he’d once been engaged to Catherine Zeta-Jones, before she came to America and became famous. Apparently, in her biography she claims that he was the best sex she ever had. I don’t know if I could make the same claim, but what he lacked in technique he made up for in enthusiasm. After making love we stayed up till four in the morning reciting poems from memory.
His favorite was Dylan Thomas’s “A Grief Ago,” which speaks of “hell wind and sea”—a wild, turbulent love.
I often recited Byron’s “When We Two Parted.”
In secret we met—
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?—
With silence and tears.
Unfortunately, those poems would serve as the bookends of our entire relationship.
Angus started writing poems for me. He’d leave them in his mailbox, and I’d pick them up on the way to the Babylon 5 set. It was like a high school relationship, intense and disarming. I was utterly smitten.
He moved into my house a few months later, and by the time I’d finished working on Babylon 5, our relationship was in full swing. We’d smoke and drink wine, make love and read poetry. And we’d fight. We’d scream at each other, smash glasses, break furniture, and hurl insults. We had epic, alcohol-fueled battles that ran on into the night.
He’d just finished playing the wild, madly in love Richard Burton in Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story. Our love affair, he said, was as passionate, artistic, and crazy as theirs. It was a love that blinded me to the voices of concern from my friends, who’d started referring to us as Dick and Liz. They thought Angus wasn’t brooding or romantic but just plain rude. My mother once asked him, out of politeness, what he felt about his native country’s history.
“Fuck history. Where’s my fucking chicken?”
And I got up and got him his chicken. My mother was appalled.
Soon, he’d have such a hold over me that my friends would give him another name—the devil.
Angus reveled in all the bad habits that I’d kept in check throughout my career. He was undisciplined, he didn’t care about his body, he drank, he smoked, and he spewed his own inner darkness all over the horrible canvases that were now piling up in my pool house. The fights got worse, and I realized that he took a sadistic pleasure in them. He’d smile if he could make me cry.
I knew it was an unhealthy relationship, and, looking back, I suppose my friends hit the nail on the head. Angus might not have been the devil, but he was certainly my devil.
Snide and Prejudice was a new Philippe Mora movie, and Angus and I were both cast in it. He played Adolf Hitler (I kid you not, this is how weird Hollywood can get), and I was cast as a character representing all the women in Hitler’s life. The whole story was built around inmates in an insane asylum and, to be honest, the movie was a piece of shit, its only saving grace being the other talented cast members that I had the pleasure to meet—Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac (I’d been a fan since I first bought Rumors as a kid) and René Auberjonois from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Things with Angus were as bad as ever, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. I’d become emotionally dependent. And since I couldn’t leave, I found myself drinking more and more to numb myself to the pain of our relationship. It was the first time in my life that I drank to escape. Before that, alcohol had only ever been a lubricant that made a night out more fun or a fine meal even more pleasurable. Now I was using it as an emotional painkiller.
In the summer of 1998 I went out to lunch with my friend Galen Johnson and Alejandro Jodorowsky, the French-Chilean avant-garde filmmaker, comic book writer, and spiritual guru. Jodorowsky was an interesting guy. He talked about how John Lennon had given him a million dollars to make his movie The Holy Mountain, and he’d come close to making what would have been the most interesting and bizarre adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, to have starred Salvador Dalí and Orson Welles with music composed by Pink Floyd and production design by comic-book artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud and surrealist artist H. R. Giger. Galen told me that Jodorowsky was supposed to have psychic powers and had invented his own spiritual healing system called Psychomagic, which sounded more like a Hitchcock pisstake by Mel Brooks than a form of therapy. After lunch Jodorowsky went on his way and Galen told me to sit a while longer. When I’d gone to the bathroom Jodorowsky had given him a message to pass on to me.
“He said that you were going to have a drinking problem, that you’ll struggle with alcohol and your weight when you get older and that you need to watch out now.”
I laughed out loud and Galen joined in. Even with the emotional drinking Angus was driving me to, it seemed ridiculous. I couldn’t see it. I hasten to add that Jodorowsky also predicted that I’d be married and fabulously successful within two years of that lunch, so if he had a psychic flash of me at age thirty-nine as a size fourteen with a glass of champagne in hand, then I must have also been holding an Oscar aloft in the other while I straddled Prince Charming. I should have taken the warning as it was meant. He had nothing to gain, and was just sharing an insight, but I wasn’t able to hear him. My drinking problem was already underway, but it was operating in stealth mode, flying beneath the radar of my conscious mind.
Angus was offered a job in China doing a crap action film, and I encouraged him to take it. I was hoping that while he was gone I’d have time to get back on my feet. Also, I’d been keeping a secret from him. Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy’s West Coast editor, wanted me to pose for her magazine. I knew Angus would go apeshit if I said yes. In the fantasy world that he imagined he ruled (population two), I wasn’t for sharing. I felt better the second he was out of the house. I found that I could make my own choices just fine without someone standing over me whispering disparaging comments in my ear. I agreed to do Playboy and started training with a former ballerina, who had me doing hundreds of lunges every day. By the time she was finished with me I was in the best shape of my life.
Angus invited me to join him in Shanghai, and, feeling empowered by my time alone, I agreed to go. I was myself again—outgoing, funny Claudia. I felt fantastic, I’d stopped drinking, and I’d never looked better. But I underestimated Angus and his need to re-establish a hold over me. He was a master of the devastating one-liner, and when I arrived in China he knocked my legs right out from under me with the first words out of his mouth: “Look at you. This is an improvement. When we first met I thought you looked a little chunky.”
This from a guy with a belly like Winston Churchill’s. When he was offered the role of Peter Lawford in the TV movie The Rat Pack, they only gave it to him with a proviso that he lose thirty pounds. I tried to help him exercise and eat healthy food, but eventually gave up. He was an unapologetic glutton.
In hindsight, I think there were two poisons in our relationship. The first was Angus’s need to project his many inadequacies onto me. The second was that he would keep me bound to him by constantly tugging at the ropes of my own emotional weaknesses. By criticizing me, targeting my fears, and then switching back to false affection, he kept me weak.
It’s hard to enjoy your first visit to China when your travel partner makes it his mission to be rude to every Chinese person you meet. On the set of the movie he got off to not so good a start by insisting that he rewrite his part. He was perfectly correct in saying that they’d written him as a second-rate James Bond villain, but his attempts to inject Taoist philosophy into a character who battled kung-fu kangaroos were equally terrible, and you can imagine how the Chinese might love having a Westerner lecture them on his superior knowledge of their culture.
One night when we walked into the hotel restaurant the hostess asked, “Smoking or not smoking?”
Angus held up his cigarette. �
��What the fuck do you think?”
Angus wasn’t racist, he was just universally rude. Most Scottish people I’ve met are funny and have a clever, wry wit, but not Angus. He could have held up the cigarette and said something like, “I’d continue this battle of wits with you, but you’re obviously unarmed,” but he lacked the imagination for humor.
I left dinner early and hit the gym. I needed to keep in shape for my upcoming photo shoot. I was watching the TV while running on the treadmill when it was announced that Dodi and Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. It hit me hard. I sat down in the gym and cried. Dodi had been my friend for nearly twenty years, and I deeply regretted not being able to talk to him one last time, especially after leaving him so abruptly.
Dodi’s fears of dying childless had come to pass. He’d started seeing Diana not long after we parted ways, and I wondered, with our last conversation on my mind, if he’d asked her to have the child that I’d refused him.
I went back to my hotel room to learn that I’d booked A Wing and a Prayer. Fortune’s wheel had turned in my favor, though the news was bittersweet. I had an excuse to get out of Shanghai, and I took it. I needed time to myself, time to process the news of Dodi’s death.
Back in L.A. I got a call from producer Bill Panzer. Adrian Paul, the star of the TV show Highlander, had decided to move on, and they were looking for a woman to take over the series. He wanted me to play the part of Katherine in the Highlander episode “Two of Hearts.” This was just the thing I needed to get Dodi off of my mind. Highlander was a dream job—the shoot was in Paris, I’d get to play an eleventh-century immortal and mess around with swords, and there was even the possibility that I’d end up as the star of my own series.
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