Trish told me she knew of only one person who’d had really good plastic surgery, and in Hollywood that’s saying something.
So I called up this actress at 11 p.m., and she referred me to Dr. Brent Moelleken, who had been featured in ABC’s Extreme Makeover and Discovery Channel’s Plastic Surgery Before & After.
I figured that a plastic surgeon wouldn’t work at night, so I’d have to wait until the morning to see him. I barely slept, my hand welded to my face. Now and then I’d have to press the skin back on, trying to get it to stick in place.
When I finally got into Dr. Moelleken’s office he took off the towel and frowned.
“I wish you’d have come to me last night. You shouldn’t have waited. Now I’ve got to cut away a lot of dead skin. There’s too much necrotic tissue.”
So I underwent reconstructive surgery, fists clenched, totally fearful of the end result. Because I was missing so much flesh under my eye the doctor had to invent a new procedure to reconstruct my face, the internal cheek lift, so that the eye wouldn’t droop. Then he sewed up the scars to make them look like the existing laugh lines around my eyes. When the surgery was over, he told me that he had high hopes.
“I’ve never really done this procedure on a dog bite, but you should be fine.”
I left with a sore, swollen face and a mind filled with images of Frankenstein’s monster, his face held together by stitches.
Recovering from the surgery meant that I couldn’t work for the next couple of months. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see that my eye was hanging at a funny angle. I’d never been the depressive type but now I felt black clouds rolling in.
Dodi and Princess Di were still much in the news, and constantly hearing about my old lover’s death wasn’t particularly helpful. The coverage had died down after the accident, but now there was some blonde on TV claiming that she was engaged to Dodi during the time I was staying at his Kensington flat. I had no idea if she was telling the truth or not, but I never saw her at Saint-Tropez or Monaco or Paris. There wasn’t even a photo of her in the flat. Perhaps Dodi had put my paratrooper ring to good use.
Lying on my couch, feeling totally adrift, I heard the voice of the monster clearly for the first time. It was a step up from the usual whispering and prodding. The petty compulsions that I’d given in to with Angus had gathered power. My little devil had grown up and was no longer content to sit on my shoulder and be brushed away. She was a fully formed monster and she wanted the starring role. Her voice was commanding, loud, and clear. And since it was the only one ringing inside my head at the time, I mistook it for my own.
You know that you’re deformed.
That voice spoke to my deepest fears, but it seemed to make a lot of sense.
Don’t worry. There are roles for people like you. You can put on prosthetics and play aliens for the rest of your life.
The voice was right. My career was over.
I still hadn’t pulled myself together after Angus, and now with the dog attack and Lucy having to be put down (she tried to bite four other people), I uncorked a bottle of wine, lay down on the couch, and went to town. There were strong emotions brewing, and I needed to wrap myself in the numbness I’d sought when I was with Angus. I needed some emotional medicine.
My angel must have been kicking around in my brain somewhere, though, because as I was sobering up from that first big solo binge good news arrived like Noah’s little white dove. And I thanked God, because it turned out that Dr. Moelleken was a genius after all. The stitches were removed, and when the swelling went down the scars faded and my face regained its former shape. If I looked really, really close in the mirror I could see some small scars in the lines at the corners of my eyes, but the face that looked back at me was my own. Big sigh of relief. My Frankenstein crisis was averted—no need to buy neck bolts.
That good news let some of the light back in. My self-image bounced back. I realized that I had drifted out to sea, that I’d gone far too far, and I reined in my drinking once more. The monster had underestimated the power of hope. It only takes a little light to drive away a lot of darkness, and once I gained some perspective I rushed back to dry land and a survivable lifestyle.
I took a new lover, a young southern guy named Taylor who I met on the set of the film True Rights. I was playing an obnoxious middle-aged reality-TV producer, and I had to wear a wig and a fat suit. Taylor started flirting with me when I was wearing the fat suit. He didn’t know what I really looked like, and at the end of the day when I took it off, he got a pleasant surprise. He got an even bigger surprise when I took him back to my place. Taylor was kind and funny, just what I needed. He had a beautiful body, a great head of hair, and golden skin. Sexually we were a perfect fit.
Despite the bad memories of Angus and Lucy’s attack, I loved the house I was living in. I wasn’t even contemplating a move when my Realtor neighbor asked me if I wanted to double my money and sell up. I’ve always had a good head for business, so I agreed, and he took me to look at a 6,000-square-foot mansion in Los Feliz. It harked back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, built in 1914 and perched on a hill next to a wacky-looking Frank Lloyd Wright house that looked like a Mayan temple with jaws. It was a two-story dwelling with classical revival architecture and a view of Los Angeles. It dripped movie-star quality. It was the kind of place you see in Architectural Digest. It had a large, beautiful foyer, two master suites, four additional bathrooms, four fireplaces, three offices, and a gorgeous designer pool. My Realtor friend advised me to buy it. He thought it was massively undervalued. He needn’t have bothered with the sales pitch. I’d fallen in love with it at first sight, before I’d even set foot inside the front door.
This was the house of my dreams, and for the first time in my life I could afford it. I’d landed a job as the voice of Jaguar cars and was getting paid handsomely to go into a sound booth a few times a week and put on a phony British accent.
I sold my old house to David Boreanaz, the actor from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bones, and moved into my Hollywood dream home.
Los Feliz is a very artsy community, so I settled right in. So did my boyfriend Taylor, who moved in with me and immediately lost his job. Unable to pay anything toward his upkeep, he started doing jobs around the house. This was okay at first—he did his best—but somehow the situation seemed to drain the blood from our relationship. I didn’t like the idea of supporting a man. He was turning out to be a bad influence on me when it came to drinking, as well. He was much younger than I, and when we’d go toe to toe at clubs and parties I’d always come off much worse the next morning.
When it became clear that Taylor wasn’t making any effort to find work I decided that I wasn’t going to keep on supporting his new career as a houseboy and drinking buddy, so I sent him on his way.
I didn’t need a partner, my face was fixed, I had the house of my dreams, and I’d put my darkness behind me. The monster’s power play had failed, and she had been kicked out of the driver’s seat, demoted back to passenger status. What I didn’t realize was that the monster was in it for the long haul. She hadn’t disappeared, only retreated as a tactical gambit. She’d given up the battle with the idea of winning the war. The incident with Lucy had nearly sent me so far under that I hadn’t been able to surface in time, but the good news about my facial reconstruction had been like a life preserver, allowing me to pull myself back up to the surface. But now, with every single sip, neurological pathways were beginning to form, and before long those pathways would become an eight-lane expressway. Alcohol addiction is a learned behavior, and the lesson I’d learned was to turn to the bottle when things got tough.
And so the monster sat, and she waited and watched. She waited for another dark wave, one that would wash over me and send me so far under that I’d never be able to get back up for air in time. She’d be waiting for me, down in the darkness, when my strength ran out.
The monster knew me better than I knew myself. She saw the extreme e
bb and flow of my life, the pattern formed by my genetics and my circumstances and my personal choices. She knew she wouldn’t have to wait long.
WHITE BUFFALO MEDICINE
The White Buffalo was a script I’d written in 1996. My career was then on the rise with Babylon 5, and I was creatively charged. One night I’d read an article about Miracle, the first white buffalo to be born since 1933. When I went to bed, I had very vivid dreams and woke up at 2 a.m. with the whole story worked out in my mind. I’d never written a script before, but I’d worked on them from the other side of the fence for so long that I had some sense of storytelling and knew how to format the thing to make it look right. Inspired, I wrote the story out in under a week in short, intense bursts.
The Lakota have a legend about the White Buffalo Calf Woman. To them, she is a prophet or even a messiah. And they believe that when a white buffalo is born, it’s strong medicine—a sign from Mother Earth and the universe that things will change, that powerful magic is in the air.
And by 2002, that’s exactly what I needed. On some level I could sense that I was walking a tightrope. Beneath me was my monster, constantly probing me for weaknesses and calling out for me to slip. I was wary but not frightened, because I was going to keep putting one foot in front of the other until I reached the other side. Waiting there for me was The White Buffalo. I’d spent seven years working on it, tinkering with the script, schlepping it around trying to drum up interest, and all of a sudden it started gathering momentum. I could see it, just in front of me, beyond my reach but clearly visible—the story closest to my heart completely produced and projected onto a forty-foot screen.
It’s a sweet family movie about a young boy whose parents get divorced. His father goes off with a new partner. His mother travels to India to “find herself,” and dumps the kid on a ranch with an uncle he’s never met. A white buffalo is born, and Native Americans from around the area gather at the ranch. They dance and pray and hang medicine bundles on the fence. The bank is about to foreclose on the ranch, and a conflict arises between the uncle, who wants to sell the buffalo; the kid, who forms a bond with it; the Indians, who want to claim it as a sacred symbol; and some Hollywood investors who want to turn it into a circus attraction.
The project was my baby. I’d been growing it for seven years, and now I knew the time was right. I was going to bring this thing into the world and make it live. The White Buffalo was hope, and it kept me moving forward and positive.
I showed the script to my Hollywood friends, and everyone who read it loved it. I was convinced that it would get made. I just needed backing of some kind to get the ball rolling. You know what they say, ask and ye shall receive. Well I did ask and the money came, but it was in a most disgusting and unexpected way.
I was doing this piece-of-shit movie called Nightmare Boulevard (also released as Quiet Kill), and I’m telling you, it was aptly titled. I was starring with Corbin Bernsen and Ron “Hellboy” Perlman, and the whole thing was financed by this sleazy-looking Chicago car dealer with hair plugs who’d decided he was an actor. I played Corbin’s wife, and the story was that I’d become bored with him and started having an affair with my tennis coach, who was played by (surprise, surprise) the Chicago car dealer.
The nightmare began with the bedroom scene I was in with Mr. L.A. Law. I was wearing pajamas, and he was wearing boxers. It wasn’t a sex scene—the movie didn’t have any. We were just sitting up in bed while the crew set up the lighting, the budget being too tiny for anything as glamorous as stand-ins. Then, right out of the blue and in front of everyone, Corbin leans over and grabs one of my breasts and says, “Oh, they’re real.” Then he reaches under the sheets, into his boxers, and pulls out a hand covered in sticky, white goo and holds it up in front of my face.
“Oh my god!” I reeled back. I was in total shock.
He grinned and said, “See what us stars can get away with?”
So the guy with one of the world’s biggest snow globe collections (yes, you read that right) turns out to be a total, masturbating misogynist.
I jumped out of bed, yelled at Corbin, then at the producers, and then I quit. The producers came running after me as I was leaving the set, my bags in hand. I gritted my teeth, readying myself for a fight. Honestly, what was there to say? There were thirty people on the set when it happened—they didn’t have a leg to stand on. But it turned out they didn’t want a fight.
“What do you want? Just name it. We want to make this up to you. We want to keep you on this movie.”
It turned out that they were almost as mortified as I was about what had happened. They didn’t want word getting around about what had happened on their set. I’ve never had a producer offer me carte blanche before or since, so I didn’t miss a beat in replying.
“You’re going to have to option my next film. It’s called The White Buffalo.”
So I walked out of Nightmare Boulevard with a movie deal and some up-front cash, and if you ever wanted proof that there’s such a thing as instant karma, Corbin Bernsen walked off the set at the end of that day only to discover that his brand-new BMW had been totally vandalized. The windows were smashed in, the hood and side panels dented beyond repair. I was pleasantly surprised. I guess stars can’t get away with as much as they’d like to think they can.
Not long after that, my friend Hilary Saltzman read the script and decided to help produce the movie. I was set to direct it. I’d written the male lead for Sam Elliott and then shown it to Bruce Boxleitner, who’s a big fan of Westerns. We’d done table readings and castings, we’d gone to the Disney ranch to scout locations, and we had a crew. I was still on good terms with John Flinn, my lover during Babylon 5, and he was going to be the director of photography. Treat Williams had read the script and liked it; it was underway.
Hilary was doing a great job. She even found somebody who knew the Native American keeper of the white buffaloes. By that time two more had been born, and these were very special. They neither shed their coats nor changed color as they got older. They were the real deal, and they’d been shipped to a secret location in Santa Ynez so they wouldn’t be killed. While the white buffalo is a sacred symbol of hope to the Lakota, people are people, and for a very few the white buffalo seems a form of medicine so powerful that they’d kill the animal to possess it.
What I’m going to tell you next really happened, I bullshit you not. If I had been alone I’d have had doubts, but there were three of us—myself, Hilary, and Alan, who was one of the other producers.
We drove to Santa Ynez and pulled up at a fenced-in pen. There was a partly Native American guy waiting for us. He had blue eyes and looked a little like Andy Kaufman, but with a braid of dark-brown hair that hung all the way down to his butt. Another guy sat by the back of the pen, a handsome Native American fellow with chiseled features and long hair. He was bare-chested and had brown, weathered skin and looked as if he’d stepped out of an old Edward Curtis photo. The handsome guy didn’t say a word, he just sat there staring at us while the first guy, whose name was Phillip, brought out a long pipe.
“You’ve got to smoke this before you can see the buffalo.”
So we all joined in this ritual. We stood in a circle and Phillip sang a prayer. It turned out that he was a Lakota traditional singer, and he started drumming and singing a high-pitched, wailing song that sent chills up my spine. Then we sat down and smoked some tobacco and sage from the sacred pipe, and I’m telling you right now that was all that was in the pipe, no hallucinogens or anything like that. When the ritual was done, the hot-looking guy pointed to the pen, and when we turned to look, the previously empty pen now had two white buffaloes walking around in it.
There was only one entrance to the pen, right next to us, and it hadn’t been opened. There was no way someone could have let the animals in while we were doing the ritual. We were right there. There weren’t any flashes or smoke or magic curtains. Then Phillip said, “I put a medicine spell on them, to keep them hidden. Y
ou smoked the pipe. Your medicine is good. You can see them now.”
We were totally blown away. It was one of the most bizarre, mystical things that’s ever happened to me. We received permission to film and photograph the buffaloes as reference for the CGI4 white buffalo calf we were going to create. It was a huge thing, a great privilege, and we drove out of there feeling really good about the movie’s prospects. I could feel that white-buffalo medicine working its healing magic. I’d almost made it to the end of the tightrope.
That magic took on an additional dimension when I struck up a romance with Phillip, the half-Indian guy, and found out that he was of the elk medicine. I knew that the elk had something to do with sexual energy, but I didn’t understand the significance of that until we went to bed, and then, holy shit, did I get the whole elk thing!
We embarked on a very odd relationship. He was completely broke, never had more than a dollar to his name, but he’d do cleansing rituals at my house and stay there when I traveled. Eventually we stopped seeing each other, but things ended amicably, and we stayed good friends.
Another happy relationship, one more step forward, but I still wasn’t back to my former strength. There were still dents in the armor from my previous relationships that hadn’t been hammered out. They were the places the monster pressed on, but things were looking up.
The White Buffalo movie was rolling along beautifully. It was one of those projects that wants to come into the world. We had investors. We were going to do the whole thing for a million bucks. Things were all lined up. Only a few more steps and I’d be clear—my life, my career, my emotional healing would be complete, and my life would move forward into a new phase of growth and prosperity.
And then there was Kenny.
I’d met Kenny only once, very briefly, before the night my friend Hilary brought him to my house. He was a wannabe producer, which is a nice way of saying he was unemployed, and he was very interested in the projects I was working on. There was a sci-fi time-travel show in development called Hourglass that I was going to star in with Alexandra Tydings, who played Aphrodite on the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess. We were to play two scientists in neoprene catsuits who get sent into the past by accident and have historical adventures. Then there was a reality TV show, Wild Cooking, where people would be given twenty dollars to buy their own ingredients. They’d hike to a remote location, cook a meal in twenty minutes on a camping stove, and be judged by a famous L.A. restaurateur. And of course there was The White Buffalo.
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