Babylon Confidential

by Christian, Claudia

  That night we were drinking, and as the night wore on my tendency to make stupid decisions increased proportionally to the amount of red wine I imbibed, and that was a lot.

  “Claudia, Kenny was going to stay with me, but I’ve got the kids, and it’s a long way to Agoura Hills. Can he stay here? It’ll only be for a few days.”

  “Sure, why not? I’ve got three spare bedrooms.”

  I invited Kenny to stay for two nights, and that turned into a week. He started talking about my film and TV projects as if he owned them, and I started hinting, fairly bluntly, that he should go and find his own place. He promised he would, but instead he’d spend every night drinking and cooking. He’d encourage me to join him, and at that time I didn’t need to be asked twice to do either.

  The conscious checks I’d put in place, those little reminders to keep an eye on my tendency to overconsume, were banished. I could control myself when I was alone, but now I had an enabler, someone who was actively tempting me on a daily basis. Within a week I found myself in bed with Kenny, things turned romantic, and without asking he decided that his guest status had been upgraded to that of live-in partner.

  Kenny had dark hair and brown eyes. Sometimes he looked handsome, and sometimes he looked dorky. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t feel embarrassed about shuffling around the house in novelty slippers and pajamas covered in cartoon moose. But Kenny was insidious, like a creeping vine. He knew exactly how to find the gaps in my armor and the old wounds that lay below it—he just had to keep me eating and drinking. He was an emotional eater, and I got hooked into his trip. I’m usually a salad-and-grilled-fish gal, but with Kenny my intake of red wine increased along with my diet of fatty foods. I was chowing down pizza and going halves on big plates of lasagna, which was totally unlike me.

  Kenny wasn’t a dark soul like Angus, but he was a user. He saw a way to live off me and help his career at the same time, and so he moved in, stretched out, and made himself at home.

  I’m not saying I was without fault. It takes two to tango. If I’d met a healthy, successful, straightforward guy who drank lightly or not at all, I probably could have held off the disease for a few more years. But I didn’t meet that guy. I believe you attract people at certain points in your life, that you send out signals letting people know what you want, and sometimes what you’re looking for isn’t a good thing. My monster was whispering in my ear, and it wanted to drink bad medicine.

  Kenny and I went on holiday to Havana and spent New Year’s Eve in a musty room at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba drinking champagne and making love. If the heroines of Hourglass had appeared suddenly in modern-day Cuba, you’d have forgiven them for thinking they were in the 1950s. The cars were rusted classics, men wore suits and hats, and no one had built anything new in fifty years.

  We ate and drank and then drank some more. People opened up their homes so you could go in and have dinner, which was pretty wonderful. An older woman sang soulful songs while we ate yet another variation on chicken and beans. We went to Hemingway’s favorite Havana bar, El Floridita. The daiquiris were mediocre, so we gave up on them and started downing cubanitos, a concoction of rum and tomato juice, and man, did they have a kick! At other times, when I’d consumed too much wine and passed out, I’d wake up at 2 a.m., after the alcohol wore off and the sugar kicked in, but spirits, and those cubanitos in particular, knocked me right out.

  Even at that early stage in our relationship Kenny didn’t want to let me out of his sight or do anything on his own. At first I thought his need to be near me all the time was sweet, but by the end of that trip I felt slightly claustrophobic around him.

  I came out of that holiday with love handles that had their own zip code and a roll of fat hanging over my jeans. I had Holly book me into a convention straight away. I had to get some distance from Kenny, not just personally but also professionally. He hadn’t just elbowed his way into my life; by then he was also trying to take over any of my projects that looked like they might be going somewhere, especially The White Buffalo.

  Kenny’s producing background meant that he could calculate budgets and that seemed reasonable (when you’re pitching a show it helps a lot if you’ve got budgets drawn up), but that benefit came with a much greater liability—Kenny himself.

  This was in the day when cell phones had a walkie-talkie feature that could be used by two people in the same vicinity—someone could start talking to you without having to place a call. It got to the point where Kenny was buzzing me every five minutes. It was like having Jim Carrey’s character from The Cable Guy in your life—it was driving me crazy. I’d be driving along and I’d hear his voice coming through the phone.

  “Hey, it’s me. Are you there? Are you there? Hello? Hey, it’s me? Answer the phone. I know you’re there. Hello?”

  Even worse, Kenny did the same thing to Hilary and Alan and to the movie’s investors, and they didn’t like being badgered, not at all. They called me and asked that Kenny stop bothering them. Instead of backing off, Kenny read this as the signal to pounce. He’d get in their faces, chewing them out like Jack Warner, except that Kenny didn’t actually have any power or innate confidence, so he just ended up offending and annoying people.

  As for me, I was in a kind of fugue state. I knew this guy was a walking disaster but the relationship and the bad habits it fed were keeping me from seeing the seriousness of the situation. I’d lost my enthusiasm and energy, and that made it hard to act decisively. Then I discovered that Kenny had been accessing my computer and reading my files. The mild claustrophobia that had started in Cuba was now all but suffocating me. Added to that, my drinking was getting to the point at which other people were starting to recognize that I had a problem.

  Hilary and I went out one night and had a couple of glasses of champagne. I never drink and drive. Even the thought of getting a ticket terrifies me, let alone getting into an accident, which is why I did most of my drinking at home. But this night I’d had a few glasses on an empty stomach before Hilary arrived, so my judgment wasn’t what it should have been. I was driving, it was getting dark, and I missed a red light on Sunset Plaza Drive as people were trying to cross the street. I had to slam on the brakes fast to stop from plowing into them. We were thrown forward, but luckily had our seatbelts on. I pulled over. Hilary was visibly upset.

  “You almost killed those people! What’s wrong with you?”

  I thought she was overreacting at the time. I don’t think that now.

  I had some conventions lined up in Europe, and they couldn’t have come at a better time. I desperately needed space to gain some perspective on what was going wrong in my life.

  Before I left for Europe I’d managed to strike a deal with the Angola prison in Louisiana related to filming The White Buffalo. The prison maintains a buffalo herd, and was not only going to let us work with the prisoners who managed the buffaloes but also let us film, lodge, and eat there. By this stage we’d done storyboards, casting, and other preproduction. I’d found my lead boy, which was no easy feat, and I had two men willing to play the uncle. While I was in London I took some time to revise the script. You only have to look at the story and themes in that script to see my whole life laid out. On a deep level we know ourselves, know what’s coming, what our life story is, the lessons we have to learn and relearn. It’s nearly impossible to consciously recognize these things ahead of time, and yet they’re so clear when we look back.

  In the story, the boy’s parents were alcoholics. In the opening scene the mother has this flask that she’s swigging from and is trying it keep hidden from the kid while she’s speeding without a seatbelt down the highway.

  Right there is my sense of abandonment following my parents’ divorce, my looming drinking problem, and my life starting to run away from me at high speed as I head into the unknown.

  In a sense, the little boy was Patrick, as well, with his love of Native American culture. The white buffalo calf, as the center of the conflict, being cla
imed by different parties for their own purposes, was my soul hanging in the balance between light and dark.

  If that sounds a little melodramatic it’s because our inner lives are. We experience sweeping emotions, devastating disappointments, and ecstatic highs, but as we mature we learn to regulate the power of those experiences, to keep the sound of them muffled under a layer of manners and self-censorship. Those learned strategies allow us to deal with the complex range of interactions that life throws at us, but in our inner world these forces are still at work, driving us to courses of action, many of which we only consciously rationalize after the fact. In dreams and in art, as we create, our emotions and experiences resurface, and as we express them they make the drama in the average soap opera look about as exciting as eating cardboard.

  The climax of the movie comes when the buffalo’s fate is put in the boy’s hands. I think that in a sense I was asking Patrick to help me find a way through my own inner conflict.

  One night in London I went out to dinner at Hush with Roger Moore’s kids Geoffrey and Deborah, who I knew through Hilary. When I was alone with Deborah she told me that she was worried about me, that Hilary told her I was on drugs. I was livid. It was highly unprofessional of Hilary to be spreading gossip about me, especially in an industry where reputation is so closely linked to livelihood. As far as I was concerned, you could call me a drunk—the truth is the truth. But I wouldn’t stand for being called a drug addict. I considered that an unforgivable offense. That night I wrote in my diary:

  Hello!? Why do people think I do drugs? I think when I drink too much, my personality changes. That must be it because I don’t do coke anymore and I hate pot and have never popped a pill in my life!

  I knew what had made up Hilary’s mind—it was the night back in L.A. when I’d almost had the accident. She saw the state I was in and couldn’t believe I was that fucked up just from alcohol.

  I was highly defensive, and in the heat of the moment I told Deborah about some personal things that Hilary had said about her. I regretted that almost instantly, but the damage was done, and that led to something of a falling out between Hilary and me.

  On the European convention trail I drank far too much—it was hard to say no with fans offering to buy—and found myself laid up in bed with a terrible case of flu. It occurred to me that my immune system was weakening. I was getting sick a lot more often than usual, but I put it down to stress, getting older, and my busy schedule. I still hadn’t made the connection that my drinking was affecting my health. I felt fat. My arms looked like legs of lamb. Lying in bed, sick as a dog, I began to perceive my need for alcohol as something more than a kind of little devil, an irritating prick of a thing that sat on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. It was more as if I had my own internal Kenny. I felt it as a serious, ominous presence, but I still underestimated it. I hadn’t stepped into the arena yet. I didn’t have any sense of the monster I was really up against, but there were signs that I recognized. I had concerns. I started praying, something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl.

  “God, drinking is a waste of time and money. It’s a waste of the talent I’ve been given, not to mention that it’s keeping me fat. Please, help me get rid of the desire to drink. I’ve had enough.”

  I recovered from the flu and felt much better. What’s more, I didn’t give alcohol a second thought. Not long after that I was dining alone at the restaurant at the Balmoral Hotel when the maître d’ asked me if I wanted to sit in the bar and have a drink or go straight to my table. I replied without a thought, “I don’t drink.” I was very pleased with myself and hoped my newfound temperance would find some staying power.

  Heading home I felt empowered. Without alcohol the whole Kenny problem came into sharp focus. Was this the best I could do? Kenny? The thought that I’d be stuck with him forever terrified me. This guy was like a tumor. I was still upset about the business with Hilary but determined to set things right, to take charge of my life. Kenny had to go, and if he wouldn’t leave on his own, then, just like a tumor, he’d have to be cut out.

  Within three days of returning to L.A. I was drinking again. Kenny didn’t accept my decision to stop drinking or my insistence that we needed to go our separate ways, starting with my telling him to get the hell out of my house.

  “You’re overreacting. There’s nothing wrong. Please, give me a chance. Let’s talk this out.”

  And as he was talking he’d top off my glass. My steely resolve melted. He was my enabler. It was as if my internal monster were feeding him his lines, saying just the right things to take the edge off my words, giving Kenny room to turn things around and keep clinging on. Kenny figured he had a winning card, and he just kept on playing it, but I’d been in that place before, with Angus. I hit the point where I realized that if things continued, this guy was going to suffocate me and somehow I’d end up dead.

  It came down to a scene in the kitchen with me on my knees crying and begging for him to get out of my life. He saw I meant it, that I was desperate and right on the edge of taking drastic action of some kind. So what did he do? He stole money that had been put into a neighborhood driveway fund and took my LeRoy Neiman painting of the Piazza del Popolo. He used it to decorate his new apartment, which was, I kid you not, exactly fifty feet from my back door. You could throw a stone at his front door from my house.

  It was like Fatal Attraction with the sexes switched around. He even took some of the leftover paint I’d used on the walls of my house and painted his apartment the same color. And he ramped up the flood of phone and answering-machine messages to the point that I was getting more than fifty a day.

  I was worried enough that I felt I had to take out a restraining order to keep him away from me. When I requested the order, the official took one look at my cell phone record and signed off on it straightaway.

  A few weeks later I was due to fly to Louisiana, to meet with a woman associated with the prison and work out the details for shooting The White Buffalo. I boarded the plane in Los Angeles and found Kenny sitting in a seat a few rows behind mine. That’s when I thought, “Holy shit, this guy is really stalking me.” I was done with playing nice. Fear motivated me to find my strength, and I turned to the flight attendant and said, “I need you to remove that man; I have a restraining order against him, and he’s not to be within a hundred feet of me.”

  Federal marshals boarded the flight and dragged Kenny out of there, and all of a sudden he wasn’t so pushy and aggressive. When I got back from Louisiana I was seriously worried about what his next move would be, but it seemed that being dragged off the plane and held in custody had flipped a switch in Kenny’s brain. He got the message that it was over and that he’d gone way past what could be considered normal behavior.

  And then I got the bad news about the movie. Everyone had been doing their best to ignore Kenny and move forward, but by then he’d already done too much damage. The investors had decided to pull their money and put it into another project. And he didn’t just capsize The White Buffalo. Wild Cooking and Hourglass fell off the table as well, even though we’d pitched Hourglass to Highlander producer Bill Panzer and he’d loved it.

  So, though I was finally free of Kenny he had dragged my dreams down with him. My movie had gone the way of the buffalo. And if you want to know exactly what it was that I lost, allow me to share the very last scene with you: They set the white buffalo free with the rest of the herd on protected land. We see an aerial shot of this little speck of white in the brown sea of the brown herd; she’s free, no longer a circus attraction. The white buffalo was Hope—hope that I’d move forward with my life toward a bright and happy future, that my career would take the next step forward and flourish.

  My mom saw that clearly. To this day she still asks me when I’m going to make The White Buffalo. She’s convinced that everything in the universe will align for me if I can just make that movie. And I still haven’t given up. The White Buffalo Calf Woman is powerful medicine, and I
believe that if the movie is meant to be, then a miracle will appear at the right time, like the birth of a white buffalo.

  My relationships with Angus and Kenny were bad medicine in the conventional sense of the word as well as the spiritual, Indian one. Relationships like that can kill you, literally, if you can’t break away from them in time. I couldn’t see it at the time; it seems as though you can only ever see these things with the benefit of hindsight. But I’d heard the monster whispering, and on some level I knew the role Kenny would play in my life. The moment I allowed Kenny to overstay his welcome, I didn’t just fall off the tightrope—I took Kenny’s hand and stepped off, dropping willingly into the darkness below.

  So now I was alone, a chubby mess, and my drinking hadn’t let up at all. I was stressed and exhausted. I’d thrown everything into trying to patch up the holes Kenny had made and keep the movie afloat, all to no avail. I’d put on ten or fifteen pounds, and when the auditions for on-camera parts suddenly dried up, friends and colleagues would talk to me as if I were a contestant on The Biggest Loser who needed to go on a starvation diet before their bones and organs failed under the weight of their own body mass. I didn’t care that I wasn’t landing any on-camera acting jobs, because my voiceover career was in full swing. I did computer games, animated movies, commercials, you name it. The White Buffalo might have been dead, but the checks kept rolling in, and that allowed me to bankroll my new creative passion—remodeling my house.