Babylon Confidential

by Christian, Claudia

  At one point Andrew had some difficulties with the actors depicting the more intimate scenes. He asked me if I wanted to direct, and I jumped at the chance. Andrew directed the CGI and more technical scenes in the adjoining studio, and we developed a method for working in tandem that effectively allowed us to complete shooting on the entire first season. It was a great experience for me. I’d act in one scene and then jump over to the set next door to direct another.

  In the storyline, Belinda Blowhard was battling the alien Reptids but failing to maintain control of her impulses, which was great fodder for comedy. By the time Starhyke production was coming to an end I could sense my inner monster was working on her own ultimate weapon. I’d have to do a better job of managing my passions than Belinda did. It was one thing to play a slapstick role and another thing to live it. I would not allow my life to become a farce.

  When my monster did strike again I realized, too late, that I’d been preparing for the wrong kind of battle. I’d been expecting a frontal assault, something I could resist and perhaps overcome. In the meantime, the monster had been tunneling beneath the fortress walls, preparing a sneak attack.

  It started with the affair I was having with one of the show’s executive producers. He was a very nice guy who’d lent me his flat in Bath while we were shooting the show. He was also a wine enthusiast. I figured that we had something in common, although I bet that no matter how much he knew, he wasn’t as enthusiastic about wine as I was. One day he invited me out to dinner, and I accepted, knowing there would be really, really good wine there and that he would offer it to me. That’s when the monster started whispering.

  Claudia, you haven’t touched a drop in four months. You’re not an alcoholic, not even close. And this is an opportunity to prove to yourself that you’re not addicted. Just drink small quantities of the best stuff. Trust me, it’ll be okay.

  I made an attempt to push the voice away, just for form’s sake. It knew it had me. It had already slipped past my defenses. It waited until I was sitting opposite my date and had seen just how good the wine was going to be.

  Claudia. It’d be a shame to let half of a bottle like that go to waste. Have a little drink. You’ll stay on top of it this time.

  And I did. For about a week. By the time you realize you’ve been pushed off the wagon it’s too late. You’re sitting on your ass choking on dust while life trundles off without you. The insidiousness of the disease makes you honestly believe that if you can stay sober for a few months then you are most definitely not an alcoholic and can therefore drink when you want to.

  Sober for six months, drunk for a week, two weeks to recover. Sober for three months, drunk for five days, a week to recover. It’s a repetitive cycle, like that of Sisyphus, in the Greek myth, forever pushing that stupid rock up the hill only to have it roll down once it gets to the top.

  When Starhyke ended I needed to find another job to earn a permanent work permit in the UK, so Andrew Dymond did me a favor and hired me as a receptionist and tea girl at his CG company.

  “Hello, is that Lightworx Media? Can you advise me how to get more renderable data into my texture maps?”

  “I have no bloody clue. I just serve the tea.”

  Needless to say, I wasn’t well suited to the job, so I did us both a favor and quit. I sobered up, moved back to London, and rented a room in a friend’s flat. If I needed to work to stay in the UK, then it would be as an actress. My inner voice, the same one that had given me the confidence to move to L.A. when I was a kid, was back and giving the monster a run for her money.

  Trusting in myself paid off again when I was introduced to a fantastic agent named Roxane Vacca by my friend Hilary Saltzman.

  Roxane entered my life like a shining messenger of the gods, a letter in one hand stating she represented me and in the other a contract for a BBC series called Broken News. I’d booked a great job right out of the gate. I had enough documentation for my work visa, and I could stay in the UK. It felt just like when I landed Joan Green as an agent. Good representation is everything.

  In the meantime, my stepfather had found a buyer for my home in L.A. and made me a million-dollar profit to boot, which made me feel much better about the loss of my house.

  I was winning the battle for my new life. I was happy and confident. So why the fuck was I still stuck in a cycle of binging and detox? I started to see that I didn’t have an off button even when I was happy and my life seemed problem-free. When I was at a party I just wanted to keep on drinking and drinking. At dinners I wanted champagne, then wine, then a glass of port, and then another glass of port. I couldn’t have just one glass of wine, and I certainly never left half a bottle on the counter. I would see half-finished bottles of white wine in people’s fridges and wonder how the heck they did that. I’d find myself staring at people’s home bars, recalling the day when I’d stocked my own bar and never took a drop from it except to make other people’s drinks at parties.

  I realized then that this was more than a matter of will or of emotional highs and lows. I always wanted a drink. I thought about drinking all the time. If I didn’t have a drink in my hand I’d be planning on how long it would be and what I’d have to do in order to be reunited with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. I had a full-blown, full-time addiction. For the first time in five years I was able to see myself clearly; I was able to admit that I was an alcoholic.

  Since I hit the UK I’d been jumping around like a grasshopper, moving more than fourteen times in four years to temporary homes in Bath, Winterbourne Down, the Ladbroke Grove and Westminster areas of London, and many other locations. I was done with moving, but I just couldn’t find the right place to hang my hat. The last time I’d been settled was in my home in L.A. where everything went to hell, so now I figured I’d make myself a hard target.

  Then I had a series of accidents that forced me to slow down. I was walking around the streets of London, property guide in hand, looking for a place to buy with the proceeds from the sale of my L.A. home when I got hit by a guy on a Vespa. No major damage, just a sprained ankle, a chink in the armor so to speak. A few days later I made the mistake of going out in a pair of three-inch heels. The place I was living in had the steepest fucking stairs I’d ever seen in my life, and just as I was about to take the first step down, the injured ankle gave way, turning me around so that I fell backward down the entire flight of stairs, bumping the edge of every step as I went. It was like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, except instead of getting up and brushing myself off while everyone laughed, I found I couldn’t get up and that there was a baseball-sized lump bulging out from the back of my neck. I fished out my cell phone, only to discover that I didn’t know the UK emergency number. I’m dialing 911, and no one’s answering. Eventually one of my roommates found me and took me to the hospital. It turned out that it was a neck fracture. They put me in a neck brace, went over my X-rays, and then sent me on my way.

  Alcoholics always overanalyze every minute detail of an incident in the hope of gleaning some insight that will help in the fight against the enemy. You’re like a military commander staring down at a map, studying the terrain.

  So were the accidents just accidents, or were they my body’s way of slowing me down, of letting me know that I needed to stop moving and put down roots before things got really bad? Or was it the monster knocking me out of commission so that I’d be forced to sit still, grow impatient, and have a drink? My previous home had been a mixed blessing. I’d loved it, but it had also been a place of suffering and misery. Should I be looking for my own place? Would it make things better or worse?

  You see how you can turn into a raving lunatic? You’re at war with yourself, you can’t trust yourself, you second-guess every thought and impulse. In short, life sucks.

  I trusted my instincts and stumbled across the perfect place, a cute little flat in Notting Hill, and when I saw it I thought, “This is it. This is the place where I can make things right.”

&n
bsp; I’d finished work on Broken News, and there was nothing else in the pipeline, but I knew just the trick to deal with the out-of-work blues—remodeling.

  I was back in my element. I could redo the flat and make it look exactly how I wanted. I had some money left over to allow me to live comfortably and fund my pet project. I started building closets and tearing down walls.

  And I had another project that kept me busy—devising systems of alcohol regulation to manage my problem. I lived next to a charming pub and I made a rule that this was the only pub I was permitted to drink in and that I’d only be allowed one drink per visit. I never kept wine in the house, so if I had a dinner party I would make the guests take the half-empty bottles home with them. The wagon might have been teetering along on broken wheels, dragging its load behind it, but at least it was going.

  Those rules helped me, but they also created a whole new series of problems. Social drinking is so common in London that I found myself coming up with a litany of excuses to explain why I couldn’t go out drinking with friends at other pubs. I’d started by saying that I was driving but once people learned that I didn’t have a car I had to come up with something else.

  “I’m on antibiotics. I’m pregnant. I’m allergic.”

  I’d say anything to avoid being conspicuous, and in doing so made myself incredibly conspicuous. Keeping to my self-imposed rules was hard. Having a glass of wine with friends is one of my favorite things in the world. Wine loosens the lips and helps people relax and unwind. You laugh more, you confide secrets, hopes, and dreams. I missed that. Then I’d remind myself that the same stuff can turn you into a screaming bitch or a bona fide whacko, and I didn’t miss that at all.

  I finished the apartment, and as if on cue more roles magically appeared. They were in crappy action films made in Eastern Europe. I was glad to have them, but I just couldn’t seem to land any more parts in the UK. There were about a dozen Americans and Canadians in London—like Gillian Anderson and Elizabeth McGovern—who’d lived there for years and seemed to book all the expat gigs.

  Not allowing myself to drink also made it hard to make friends in England. I had no work or social life and the flat was finished. I tried working on my social life. People were more formal and reserved than in L.A., so I found it hard to strike up conversations with new people. God knows I tried. I would blabber on and smile like an idiot, but even in the grocery store or in elevators people would ignore me.

  I began to feel invisible, a feeling accompanied by a mild paranoia. Was it London or was I going slightly mad from alcohol withdrawal? Self-discipline is all well and good when it comes to drinking, but at the same time life seemed to have lost some of its color. That feeling wasn’t helped by the long, wet London winter. I began having dreams about riding my motorcycle down Sunset Boulevard, the warm L.A. wind rushing over my face carrying the smell of orange blossoms and the beach. I wasn’t sure how much of my depression was me and how much was the weather, so I actually went and got light therapy at a place where they stick you in a little box and zap you with UVA rays.

  I started going stir-crazy. I had to do something, so I jumped on a plane back to L.A. for the family Christmas party.

  During my time in the UK I’d travel back to L.A. every year for pilot season.

  I’d prepare well in advance, getting totally sober and as fit as I could manage. I’d pack my bags and head back to Hollywood with big expectations. I was going to book something. It was comeback time, baby!

  I’d look great and feel great and sit in this Archstone apartment that I was paying $3,000 a month for and wait for the phone to ring. I didn’t get one audition, let alone an actual part. I had a shitty manager who promised me the moon and delivered nothing—not one meeting or audition.

  One year I stayed in L.A. for four months. The apartment complex was filled with people who dreamed of working in Hollywood, wannabes and stage moms, their heads in the clouds, and at one point I realized that I was no different from them. I couldn’t book work, I was back at the beginning, all I had was a dream and an ever-deepening hole in my savings. As I sat by the phone I could feel myself becoming increasingly drawn to the bottle with each passing moment. It would only be a matter of time. I needed to keep moving.

  So I started treating Los Angeles as I treated London. I’d do little day trips. I thought that if I took the pressure off waiting for the phone to ring, it might actually ring. Sometimes it works that way; this time it didn’t. Then I got a call from London. There was a meeting. A producer wanted me to come in and read for a part.

  “I’m in L.A.”

  “I need you here tomorrow.”

  “I can’t. Christmas is coming. I’ve just rented a place. I just can’t.”

  It seemed that I just couldn’t catch a break.

  The year I went back for the family Christmas I was in for a pleasant surprise. It was in Aspen and it was snowing. Everyone made an effort to be nice, there were no fights, and I managed to stay sober. But I was bored, and my dreaded fortieth birthday was bearing down on me like a runaway car. I felt like I’d been possessed by Bridget Jones. I stared out the window at the falling snow. The last five years of my life had rushed by in a blur.

  I was due to fly back to London, and I resolved to do something, anything to shake things up and reclaim a social life. I needed distraction, I needed friends, I needed a sex life. And so, like any modern girl who has trouble meeting people, I dove headfirst into the world of online dating.

  London was a different place from when Dodi was alive. Back then it had been sensuous and classy. My new London was bleak and lonely, so I joined an exclusive dating service for the super rich and those of royal peerage.

  To weed out gold diggers the membership fee was $25,000 U.S., but there was a loophole. If you were attractive, were sane, lived in an upmarket area, and had no criminal record you could join for much less, something close to $50. This ensured that rich old men who paid the full fee wouldn’t be stuck dating rich, ugly women. I sent in one of my Playboy shots, cropped to show me from the shoulders up, and within a few days found myself in the offices of the dating service undergoing a psychological test. They checked my passport to verify my age. I had to sign statutory declarations that I had no criminal convictions. I felt like I was interviewing for a position at Scotland Yard.

  What the fuck am I doing here? Am I this desperate?

  It was a bizarre experience, but still better than inviting my old dinner date, the monster, out for a good time. No, better to keep her locked safely away. I was so desperate to stay out of trouble with her that I didn’t mind stepping into a little trouble when it came to dating real people.

  “Claudia, you’ve passed the initial screening. Now we’d like to conduct a home inspection.”

  “Seriously? You just photocopied my passport. What more do you need?”

  “We like to take every precaution. A member of the nobility has already expressed an interest in you.”

  “After all this, it had better be bloody Prince Charming.”

  The home inspection was carried out by a flamboyant Russian woman who bounced around my flat with the energy of a meth head.

  “Ure antiques are so lubely. Your garten, it is so beautiful. We are soooo embarrassed to intrude but the gentleman is veddy particular.”

  They pored over my things. I felt like a Mongolian mail-order bride being checked for fleas.

  The prospective date called me the next day. He sounded terribly uptight, the kind of guy Basil Fawlty would have dreamed of welcoming in his hotel.

  Fuck it, I’m already in for fifty bucks. I might as well get a free dinner and come out ahead.

  He picked me up on time, which was good, but he had a Herman Munster head, the kind that looked like it had gotten caught in an elevator door. As we left my flat and walked toward his Bentley I warned him that he should be careful parking in my neighborhood, because the parking inspectors were brutal.

  “Those fucking wogs. Give them
an inch and they’ll take a mile.”

  I was not amused. Nor was I amused when he berated the waitress or when he snapped his fingers at the sommelier. Even less amusing was the goodnight kiss, which was delivered with an octopus embrace and a straining erection poking against my leg. I gingerly extracted myself from his tentacles and hurried into the safety of my flat, slamming the door behind me. So much for Prince Charming.

  You’d have had a much better night if you’d gone to the pub next door. It’s still open. Why not drop in for a quick one?

  I told the monster to shut the fuck up.

  The next day I got a polite inquiry from the dating service regarding my status: “Still single?”

  I could sense the bewilderment of the Russian and her business partner. Why hadn’t I fucked the aristocratic pinhead, moved into his castle, and started spending his money?

  My reply read: “Still single. The one guy you sent was a putz, and I haven’t met anyone else in the last twenty-four hours. Next time send a photo and bio first.”

  And they did. None of them was young, spiritual, or sportif, yet they all claimed to be a combo platter of Lance Armstrong, Donald Trump, and the Dalai Lama. All in all I went on a half-dozen lame-ass dates. It seemed that having lost one Dodi Fayed, it wasn’t so easy to find another.

  Then I made the mistake of agreeing to go away with a guy I’d never even met in person. We started emailing and then talked for hours on the phone. He had a northern accent, and I struggled to make out every other word, but he seemed funny and nice.

  I was doing a play at the Edinburgh Festival and he offered to travel to Scotland, see my play, and take me to dinner. It sounded romantic, so I agreed to meet up. That night I made the colossal mistake of falling off the wagon and ended up in the sack with him and in the bathtub with him and on the floor with him and hanging over the balcony with him. I apparently did things to him that no woman had ever done before, and now he wanted to take me to Cyprus.