When Angus got home he was uncharacteristically kind to me; he had sensed that after Dodi’s death I’d started to pull away from him. Always the optimist, I decided to invite him to Paris—it was our last, best hope for peace.
The Highlander set was heaven: horses, history, and mud. If I could just do historical dramas for the rest of my life, I’d die happy.
I’d started collecting knives and swords when I was a kid. My dad had been given some gifts when he opened a bank account, and one of them was a good-quality pocketknife. All of my brothers argued over who should get it, including Patrick, who wanted it for skinning, but when we drew straws I was the winner. There were cries of outrage, but my dad decreed that fair was fair and I got to keep it. When Patrick died I put it on his coffin as they lowered it into the ground, a parting gift. I loved that knife, at first because it was something my brothers wanted but couldn’t have, and later because it became a symbol of the love I held for Patrick. That was where my love of knives started and an interest in swords naturally followed on, but my dad wouldn’t let me start collecting until I turned seventeen.
Now I got to swing a medieval broadsword and be tutored by one of Hollywood’s leading sword masters, F. Braun McAsh. He was a very friendly, barrel-chested guy with a deep voice—a walking encyclopedia of arms and armor.
I wanted to do all my own fight scenes, but I had to convince the producers that I knew what I was doing or they would use a stunt double. One little mistake with a sword and an actress can be left incapacitated for a week.
Things couldn’t have worked out better on that front. After a minor accident on the set the producers had decided to institute a water-only policy, which was counter to the French crew’s traditional three-hour drinking lunches. I don’t think the American producers were aware of the French tendency to strike at the smallest infringements of their conditions, and disrupting the national pastime of eating and drinking was, to the crew’s minds, a catastrophic violation of human rights.
While protracted negotiations took place I got to spend more time with F. Braun learning how to fight. He’d pledged to the producers that every Highlander episode would feature a sword technique that had never been seen on film or television before, so I had lots to learn. He was patient and encouraging and taught me some neat tricks from his theatrical fencing repertoire (how to look good dueling on camera) and knowledge of historical sword fighting (how they really killed people with ruthless efficiency in times of yore).
My character, Katherine, was one of the oldest immortals in the Highlander series. She had even posed for the illustrations in the Kama Sutra, so I had to create a complex character—confident but with enough vulnerability that she could fall in love with a mortal man, who was played by Steven O’Shea.
The crew liked me, and I thought I had a shot at being the new star of the show. But at the end of the day they went with Elizabeth Gracen, who’d been in the original series. Also, she had slept with Bill Clinton, so she was in the news a lot; when it comes to TV ratings any publicity is good publicity. She chopped off her hair, dyed it white, and the new series was a flop.
Angus and I both had films at Cannes that year and decided to go together. It was 1998, I was thirty-three years old, and my biological clock was ticking like a time bomb.
I found out that I was pregnant in the bathroom of the Carlton Hotel. Clutching my pregnancy test, I told Angus the news through tear-stained eyes. We hugged, agreed it was the best thing in the world for both of us, and, right then and there, made a pact to raise the child together.
But because it was Angus, I expected the worst. I secretly hoped that things would work out, but I began to steel myself for the next fight. It never came, though, and by the four-month mark I was proudly sporting a baby bump. Things had changed. I felt secure in this relationship for the first time. I was finally going to be a mother. I just knew that I was going to have a boy with green eyes and dark hair. This was Patrick wanting to come back again.
And then Angus stopped having sex with me. I understood why—he had a Madonna-whore complex. God forbid you have sex with the mother of your child. What I couldn’t deal with was his sudden obsession with virgins. Angus had worked on a film with a blond actress who claimed she was a virgin. He would go on about it all the time: she was angelic, she was a born-again Christian, and she was only eighteen years old. I don’t know what the big deal is with virgins. Terrorists blow themselves up for a paradise filled with virgins. If I were a guy my idea of paradise would be a harem of sexually experienced bombshells, but then that’s just me. Angus was certainly titillated by the idea of going where no man had gone before, and I guess I felt the same sense of injustice that a bald man or a guy with a small dick feels. How do you compete? She’s a virgin, I’m not, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.
Then one day, on his way out the door with a buddy, Angus casually turned back to me and said, as if it were an afterthought, “I’ve changed my mind. Get rid of it.”
The emotional blow was so strong that he might as well have punched me in the belly. He left and I fell to the tile floor and cried so hard that a few hours later the baby spontaneously aborted.
After my failed relationship with Patrick Wachsberger, I had sworn that I’d never again become pregnant by a man who had no real interest in raising a child. Yet here I was, soaked in blood and frightened to death by what my body had just done. I didn’t know if it was the botched abortion in Italy that ruined my chances of having children, but something had made the whole process precarious. I just couldn’t seem to hold on to a child, and the fact that I’d lost one over an emotional outburst just didn’t make sense to me. I was a strong, healthy young woman.
But the next morning, while getting a D&C at my gynecologist’s office, I decided that God had saved me from a horrible future with the wrong man. I’d invested in love and I’d been burned again. The bricks I’d started laying after the losses of Justine and Patrick’s baby had now become a wall, and I decided that I would make it stronger and stronger so that nothing could get in and hurt me like that again. It didn’t occur to me that when you build defenses that strong you reach a point where even good things can’t penetrate anymore.
I came home from the supermarket one morning to find my friend Christine sitting in our kitchen. Lately, Angus had decided that I was drinking too much and got into the habit of lecturing me while he was drinking whatever was his poison of the day. Now he’d taken things to the next level. Christine had flown in from Canada after Angus called her up and told her he thought I had a serious drinking problem. Seriously, the source of all my woes, the pathological, selfish pig who drank like a fish, thought that I was the one with the problem and had staged a half-assed intervention. I drank soda water while Angus sat there looking smug and self-righteous, sipping on tequila mixed with orange juice at ten in the morning. In addition to confronting me about my drinking, Christine admitted that she was attending AA meetings and battling her own demons.
Interventions can work, but a person has to be ready. She has to recognize the problem in herself, and in this case, a pissed Scotsman and a well-meaning friend in the same boat didn’t have the right to preach to me.
It didn’t stop me from drinking. If anything it made things worse. I took it as it was truly meant—yet another attempt by Angus to cut my legs out from under me and keep me weak.
Angus was slated to play Orson Welles in Tim Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock in New York and he had to quit his comfort eating and binge drinking to play a young, svelte Welles.
After he flew to New York I dumped his things in the garage, called him at his hotel, and told him it was over. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. When someone has that sort of power over you, you’re constantly pulled in two directions—one part of you is still chattering away, trying to convince you that it can still all work out, while deep inside, every cell is screaming out to end it.
I felt as if I were stand
ing on a rock in the middle of the ocean, waves crashing all around me. I had to cling to the idea that I was going to leave, so that it wouldn’t be suddenly ripped away from me and lost forever—I was living Dylan Thomas’s hell wind and sea. When he came with his friends to pick up his things, I hid in my bedroom. That’s how rattled I was. I watched him through a gap in the shutters.
As soon as word got out that I’d broken up with Angus I was surrounded by family and friends who couldn’t have been happier at the news. I felt as if I’d been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card. I had my health back. I quit the social smoking and the excess drinking. I was reborn.
Angus went on to shoot Titus in 1999 with Anthony Hopkins. The veteran actor was by then a recovering alcoholic, and I heard that he recognized that Angus had a problem. Hopkins tried to help him stop drinking but failed. Angus was too tormented to stay sober for long. I wish I’d had Tony Hopkins at hand. I’m sure he’d have noticed that I had a problem, too, though I couldn’t see it at the time.
With Angus out of my life, I thought that things would get better. I didn’t realize that I was only just now starting down the road to hell. By joining Angus in his own downward spiral I’d opened a Pandora’s box. Angus had given a voice to my fears and insecurities that I’d previously kept under control. Hell, he’d even discovered new ones. His own inner monster had spoken to the darkness inside me, and now that sought to rear up and displace my previously confident inner voice, the voice that had always served as my guide.
I’d drunk with Angus nearly every night, but had never imbibed during the day. That would change.
I’ve never seen Angus again, except for one occasion years later when I was sitting at a studio waiting to audition for a commercial.
He was chubby and dressed in an old suit and cowboy boots, a faded fedora perched on his head.
He walked right by me. Caught up in whatever shit was going on in his head, he didn’t even notice I was there. I chose not to confront him, because I knew that if I did it would have been as Lord Byron predicted—with silence and tears.
THE MONSTER’S GAMBIT
The day of the Playboy shoot arrived. I was slightly hesitant about being photographed naked, but there were two factors that helped drive me on.
In 1999 I did a film called The Haunting of Hell House, based on a Henry James story, with veteran British actor Michael York. During the shoot his wife Patricia McCallum, a photographer who specializes in nudes of celebrities, asked me if I’d take off my clothes and walk through the fields on Ireland’s Connemara coast. Michael and Pat were a very cool couple, and I didn’t want to seem like a prude, so I ended up standing knee high in grass, a script in hand, wearing nothing but a corset and a pair of boots. In another shot she had a topless wardrobe woman pretending to fit me for a dress. It was all very shocking for the local community, but Pat was a great persuader and managed to convince them not to run us out of town. Her exhibition went on tour, and my photos, along with a host of other celebrities’, ended up on the walls of some of the world’s best galleries. God only knows how many people saw my nether regions, but I figured I was in good company. I knew Playboy would be a different kind of experience but once you’ve taken your clothes off in public and the sky doesn’t fall on your head, it makes it easier to entertain the idea again.
The second factor was much more practical—economic reality. My Babylon 5 residuals were still coming in, but I had a sizable mortgage, had spent a lot of money on renovations, and had my assistant’s wage to pay. The bills were mounting up, and Playboy was offering very decent money.
As a working actress you can’t help but have body issues. It’s not as bad as being a model, but it’s a pitiless industry when it comes to weight.
A few weeks after yet another miscarriage with my then boyfriend (yes, I was on birth control and yes, I wanted to keep it), I got work as the guest lead on a TV series called She Spies. I went to wardrobe for fitting, hoping they could hide some of the pregnancy weight I was still carrying, only to discover that they wanted me to squeeze into a catsuit. I plodded through the mediocre dialogue, ignored the disparaging looks from the thin girls in the show, and went home satisfied that I’d done my best. I later found out that the casting director told my agent that he would never hire me again because I was “chunky.” That’s Hollywood. No one gives a shit about you or your feelings. You’re a product, a storefront mannequin. Ordinarily I’d have been fine with that, but with the pregnancy hormones still raging through my system I was reduced to a sobbing lump.
I heard a whispered voice, coming to me from the darkness.
You’re fat, you’re disgusting, your career is over.
I recognized the voice and wasn’t concerned by it. It was my monster, the little devil that sits on everybody’s shoulder. It had always been there, throwing in its two cents’ worth for as long as I could remember, but since my breakup with Angus it had gotten a little louder. Angus had made me particularly sensitive about my appearance, and the monster was keen to make hay while the sun shone.
I was going to appear nude in a glossy magazine that would be seen by millions of people around the world. I’d been anxious about my butt appearing on a fifty-foot screen in The Hidden, but that was nothing compared to a permanent, published record of my naked form.
What are you worried about? Seriously, you’re prepared. You’ve trained hard, you’re in the best shape of your adult life. Playboy shoot? Bring it on.
Ah, there was my angel, my armor, the strength and confidence that had carried me forward into a successful international acting career. And it was right. I’d done a million lunges, I had buns of steel, I was beautiful, and the next time a casting director called me “chunky,” I’d roll up a copy of my issue of Playboy and use it to smack him upside the head.
The shoot ran over four days, and I can tell you right now that being a nude model isn’t anywhere near as easy as it looks. I’d have to sit in one spot for hours and then climb a steel wall and hang there with the photographer yelling, “Stick your butt out a little more. Suck in your gut!” It’s a surreal experience. In one pose they had my head on the floor and my ass up on a divan, which I suppose looks sexy in the photos but in reality nearly ripped all the muscles in my already-injured neck. The suffering paid off, though. When I saw the Polaroids, I was thrilled.
Wow. Good job, Claudia, you look fantastic. You worked so hard, all that exercise and dieting. You deserve a treat. It’s time to party and let your hair down.
Sometimes the devil on your shoulder has the best ideas, and now I saw no danger in indulging. She was right; it was time to party.
I flew to the UK for work, gave up on sit-ups and lunges and hit the pubs and restaurants with abandon. Beer and chips, wine and desserts, I let myself go and loved every minute of it.
Then Playboy called. The photos weren’t “edgy enough.” They wanted a reshoot. I had to get back on the plane to L.A. and do the shoot within twenty-four hours of landing. I was a blob, completely bloated from flying and living it up. I drank nettle tea and prayed. The shoot they published was disappointing. To me, the original shoot was fresher and far more beautiful. Luckily, I was able to secure the rights to both sets of negatives, but what should have been a naked triumph after all the training I’d done failed to have the curative effect on my self-image that I’d hoped for.
See, I told you. You’re fat. Your career is going down the gurgler. You’d better go on a starvation diet or something. Now that’s going to be tough, so get yourself a good stiff drink.
I waited for those words to bounce off my armor, for my angel to knock the monster down a peg or two with some devastating comeback, but all was quiet on the angelic front. While I was waiting for her to show up, I opened a nice bottle of merlot and poured myself a glass. After the second glass, I’d forgotten that I was waiting for anything.
In the strange way that the mind works, when we’re in a vulnerable place, the voice of our darkness, that little w
hispering monster, is never held accountable. When our confidence, our belief in ourselves is sufficiently silenced, the monster’s voice is all that’s left, and it masquerades as our true self, leads us to believe that its running commentary is true insight. It isn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time, and so I bought it. I didn’t realize it, but I’d opened the door to the world’s most persistent salesman. The monster had planted a foot firmly inside the door and didn’t plan on going anywhere.
I said before that telling Angus to get out of my life was one of the strongest things I’ve ever done, and I wasn’t exaggerating. I wasn’t just rejecting a man, I was rejecting my own shadow, my weakness, and my self-doubt. It was as empowering as it was frightening, but that darkness, that monster is a bitch. Just when you try to reclaim some of the ground you’ve lost, that’s when she digs her teeth in and won’t let go. And she did. Literally.
One night, as I was holding my cocker spaniel Lucy on my lap and petting her, she had a brain seizure and attacked me, mauling my face. I fell backward, but after a struggle managed to get her off and lock her in the kitchen. But by then the damage was done. She’d ripped off part of my lip, the flesh underneath my left eye, and a bit of my cheek.
I was in a panic. I couldn’t just go to an emergency room. What if I got some intern who tried to sew my face back on? Acting career over. I called my best friend Trish.
“My face is a wreck, I’m in big trouble. I need a good plastic surgeon.”
I gently lifted the washcloth I was using to hold my face on and took another peek in the mirror. “Make that a great plastic surgeon.”
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