He said, “Oh, no. You didn’t use the eyedrops in the brown bottle, did you?”
Oh yes I did. It turned out that those particular eyedrops were from when one of our houseguests had gonorrhea of the eye, a disease I sincerely hoped wasn’t caused by some sexual act that I couldn’t even conceptualize. My vision was blurry for the rest of the day. I couldn’t see to read the script. I couldn’t work. My rock ’n’ roll lifestyle already made me look like a big enough fuckup at work—the last thing I needed was gonorrhea eyedrops compounding my already compromised reputation at One Day at a Time.
The tide of trouble on the set was slowly creeping toward the flood line, but the dam that held my mother’s life together had already broken. Now that my mom and I were speaking again, I had to face the reality of her situation. She was drinking a lot, taking Quaaludes, and doing coke. I was scoring for her, which wasn’t exactly helpful, but that was the least of my concerns. Lenny, never a lamb, had turned brutal. He called me up one night at Peter’s and said, “Listen to this.” I heard a stomping sound.
He said, “This is the sound of my foot on your mother’s chest and I’m not going to stop until you get here.” Why did he call me? Why did he want to bring me into their domestic strife? Maybe in some way he was trying to stop himself, but all I knew was that he was crazy, my mother needed help, and I’d just taken two Quaaludes and was too fucked up to rescue her.
I called Melanie Griffith, who was a close friend at the time, and asked her to go to my mother’s house. Then I called the police and had them meet Melanie there. But when they all arrived, my mother sent them away.
There were more midnight phone calls, more injuries, more threats, but finally I persuaded her to divorce him. I hired a lawyer for her, she came to live at my house in the canyon, and I moved what belongings I still had in my house to Peter’s place in the Colony.
It was the right thing to do, but my mother went really crazy in that Laurel Canyon house, all alone. The house had large picture windows looking out on the woods of the canyon. Lenny would hide in those woods, watching her through the windows, stalking her. That was enough to freak anyone out, but my mom was more fragile than most. She had been beaten within an inch of her life. The abuse and drugs did a number on her. She tells a story of how she got out of bed in the middle of the night, put on Genevieve’s five-hundred-year-old wedding jacket and cowboy boots, and walked around the house otherwise naked. She came across a giant rat, which she chased around the living room, attacking it with hairspray until it died. Sometimes I’d come home late at night and find her surrounded by candles. She’d call me Mom. She was on the edge of insanity until the divorce was finalized, Lenny moved out and backed off, and she was able to move back into her condo.
I was parenting my mother, I had an adult job, and I had an adult social life. But I still hadn’t finished high school. Most kids remember graduating from high school as a major milestone, one that the whole family notices and celebrates, but my father was off on a drug rampage and my mother had sunk into a boozy depression. Both my parents had spun far away, vague constellations of worry and fear. Then again, when it came to my high school graduation, they didn’t miss much. Actually, they didn’t miss anything.
I’d done well at Hollywood Professional. I worked with a tutor on the set when the show was shooting, so I didn’t spend much time on the campus, but my senior year I was the Bank of America Scholar of the Year and was on the honor roll or something like that. So I expected to graduate with some kind of honors and recognition. But then I did an interview for People magazine. There was a glamorous picture of me sitting on my couch in a strapless black evening gown and beautiful high heels. In the article I said that the Hollywood Professional School was ugly, boring, and a firetrap. I was immediately expelled. Can you be expelled for being an entitled teenage TV star? What did I care? I was like, Well, fine, I don’t need a high school diploma.
The school later offered to give me my diploma for $750, but I declined. Fuck that.
Sacrificing my diploma for an obnoxious quote didn’t faze me, but the People interview wasn’t the only time I got myself in trouble doing press. My appearance later that year on The Tonight Show was an embarrassment that lingered for a long time. David Letterman was guest hosting. I don’t remember why I was invited to be on the show, probably for being Julie, but I was very excited. So excited that I celebrated my appearance in advance by doing a ton of coke. By the time I got on the show I wasn’t in ideal form. My nose was running. I was wearing a low-cut dress that kept flapping open. I got nervous and panicky. David Letterman had been told that I was a good speller, so the first thing he did was give me a little spelling test. I’m not sure what words he gave me, but I got every one wrong. You can misspell words with charm and grace, or you can do it as I did, with overblown enthusiasm and awkward jokes. I was completely off my game.
After the spelling debacle, Letterman and I sat down to chat. I nervously babbled on about being in a relationship with a married man. I was obviously fucked up, I had no media training, I said all the wrong things, and I was a perfect target for Letter-man’s teasing. I can spell “abysmal.” And afterward there was no comfort from Peter. His primary concern was how his wife would react to what I’d said about my relationship with him. He gave me shit about my performance, more like a father lecturing his daughter than a lover comforting his mate. Our age difference wasn’t so spicy that night.
I wasn’t oblivious or self-centered. I completely dug how hard it was for Peter’s wife, Betsy. When the well-known, fast-living, eighteen-year-old star of a hit sitcom starts dating a thirty-four-year-old separated-but-still-married mega music producer, it’s big news. Betsy, a thirty-seven-year-old, had to watch her not-yet-ex-husband conduct a very public relationship with a teenager. I’d seen my mother go through the same thing with Michelle. Plus Peter and Betsy had been together for a very long time, and now I was hanging out with all their musician buddies—people who must have felt to Betsy like part of the marital property they were still dividing. Betsy wanted to attend Linda Ronstadt’s shows, as she always had, and under no circumstances did she want to run into me. But the way Peter handled it showed no care or respect for me. We’d be backstage at a show or at the studio and Peter would get a call from Betsy saying she wanted to come by. He’d dismiss me and I’d leave to wait for him at home alone. Or a distraught Betsy would call and he’d leave me to go to her house. It happened over and over again. I felt confident that he wasn’t having sex with her, but it still made me feel like a piece of furniture, moved out of the way when necessary. I understood it, from all sides, but I didn’t like waiting for my boyfriend in empty houses the way I’d waited for my father for all my childhood.
For all my frustration, I never complained. I had no idea how to stand up for myself. I didn’t like to make a fuss. I was developing a less confrontational method for dealing with my emotions. It worked for my parents, and it would work for me: drugs and disappearance.
12
Our conflicts ran like quiet poisonous subterranean rivers, but Peter and I continued to live the high life. James Taylor was doing a free concert at Sheep Meadow in the middle of Central Park in Manhattan. Peter and I arrived at the gig by helicopter, which itself was more memorable to me than the show—not because I didn’t love James Taylor, but because attending rock concerts had quickly become as common to me as going to the movies.
What happened after the concert doesn’t make sense, except in that cocaine was involved, and the only thing that out-of-control cocaine use consistently guarantees is an irrational, impulse-driven life. Peter and I were staying at the Pierre, a landmark hotel facing Central Park. Back at the hotel, the phone rang. It was Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’s girlfriend who had once greeted me with disdain at their country estate. Anita was staying in a suite a couple floors above us. She invited us upstairs. Peter didn’t want to go—it was late and he was flying to England the next morning to visit his mother�
��but I said, “Come on, let’s go. I haven’t seen Anita in years.”
Anita wasn’t clean yet. A guy named Jeff Sessler was working for Anita and taking care of her son Marlon. I don’t remember the scene Peter and I walked into—I can’t tell whether my memory lapses are the fault of years of drug use or whether they mark memories so painful that I’ve hidden them from myself—all I remember is that Peter whispered, “These people are so bizarre, let’s get out of here.”
I was fucked up on coke, in general and on that night in particular. I was pissed off about all that had been going down with Peter, how he snubbed me for Betsy, how he made me feel incidental. Peter was bright, worldly, well educated. He treated me like a disciple, and I was over it. I was angry, and the antidote was obliteration. I said, “I’m just going to hang out for a little while longer.” So Peter went to bed, and I stayed. And stayed.
Then I noticed an odd light coming through the curtains. It was morning. Oh, fuck. I called down to our suite, but Peter didn’t pick up. I went down in the elevator, the shame shadow starting to cross over me. When I let myself into the suite there was utter silence. It was too quiet. Peter was gone. His suitcase was gone. There was a note on the desk that said, “I’m going to the airport. Where the fuck are you?” Shit. I called the Ambassador’s Club at American Airlines and had Peter paged. When he came on the line he said, “You didn’t come home last night.”
I said, “I know I didn’t and I’m sorry.” I was sorry. I loved Peter and couldn’t bear disappointing him.
But then I missed my plane home. And I stayed in New York with Jeff Sessler for five days without bathing or leaving the hotel. Whereas Peter was professorial and distant (albeit in a loving way), Jeff was silly and irreverent. He was a kindred spirit. We had the same urge to chase fun, consequences be damned.
For all our excesses, Peter and I led a life with a certain domestic rhythm. We both went to work every day. We ate together. We made commitments and kept them. When I cast Peter aside, I also lost the last vestiges of a stable life. Compared to what was about to happen, the life that Peter and I led was about to look downright Puritan.
Jeff and I decided to fly to Florida to see his father. I knew Jeff’s father, Freddy—everyone knew Freddy. He was the drug man for the Rolling Stones. The bag man. Freddy ran a weight-loss clinic in Florida that was actually a speed dispensary. Jeff and I told people we were flying to Florida so I could meet his mother, but we both knew our real reason was to get prescriptions for speed from his father.
In Florida Jeff and I decided to get married. Through his father he had access to pharmaceutical cocaine, which for me was the equivalent of marrying into royalty. Sure, I knew that our five-day-long affair was an unreasonable basis for marriage. In fact, I’d always thought marriage was a bogus institution. Why would you need to be married in order to be with someone? It seemed limiting and formal. But I was almost twenty and took pride in being impetuous. If Jeff and I wanted to get married, what or who could stop us? Nothing and nobody. Jeff’s mother had us over to her house for dinner. After we ate, his mom, Liz, pulled me into the kitchen. She said, “Mack, don’t marry my son. He’s an asshole.” It wasn’t the only time someone had said that I was making a mistake with Jeff. His younger brother also tried to stop me. Jeff was the black sheep of the family. I knew he could be a cocky jerk, but I liked his bad-boy vibe. Besides, he only ever treated me like a princess. At some other point even Betsy Asher—Peter’s ex—called me on the phone. Betsy, the last person with any reason to care what happened to me, said, “Please, don’t do this. Don’t go with Jeff. Go back to my husband.”
I didn’t listen to these people, who had every reason to be telling me the truth. But there was another messenger en route, with a new, nefarious means of voicing his opinion. My father.
Lately my father had been particularly fly-by-night. I referred to him as an area code, because his was different every time I tried to find him. I knew Dad was still shooting up coke. He had come to stay with me in Laurel Canyon. He and Genevieve were to perform a campy, Burns-Allen comedy/musical act at the Roxy. Dad flew in before Genevieve and was staying in my room while I slept in the guest room. I went back into my room for something and found a bag of syringes under the bed. There were needles and spoons. But when I confronted him he cut me off, as he did so well, saying, “Aw, kid, everything’s fine. It’s nothing to worry about, just a little chipping.” What could I do?
Then, months before Jeff and I met, when Peter and I were staying in the penthouse at the Chateau—the same suite where I’d first tried cocaine with my brother—I realized that I hadn’t spoken to my father in months and months, and I suddenly became convinced that Dad was going to die. It was one of those sudden, certain, gut-wrenching convictions—if I didn’t find him, help him, I would lose him forever. I couldn’t get him on the phone; nobody could get him on the phone. He was avoiding everyone. There in the penthouse I started making calls, the calls I always made when I had to track him down—friends, family, known accomplices, dwarves—but this time nobody knew where he was. He had disappeared into the ether.
Finally I called Mick Jagger. Something about him—his wisdom, his status, his power, his money—made it seem like he could find anybody anywhere on earth. Unlike the other friends who just told me they didn’t know where Dad was, Mick said, “Look, I can’t help you because I can’t help John. He’s going to do what he wants to do. You’re not going to pin him down. He’s running away from everyone. I can’t find him for you.”
I said, “But Mick, he’s going to die.”
He said, “You’re going to have to let him die. He’s a grown man. Stop doing this to yourself. Stop it.”
I fell back on the couch and thought, What do I do now? My father was lost.
Now, in Florida, on the eve of my wedding to Jeff Sessler, my elusive father showed up. Dad, who chased my rapist with a shotgun. Dad, the unreliable ghost, seemed to appear whenever I stumbled. Or was he the only person I wanted to catch me? Did he rush to rescue me or did I ignore all other options in favor of his scarred arms of salvation? I never thought about it then. All I knew was that when the dad I longed for emerged from the clouds, I ran to him. I always ran to him.
Dad came to Florida with Bob, an old friend of his, determined to stop the union. They checked into our hotel, staying in a room a few doors down from Jeff and me. The night they arrived, Jeff was sleeping and I went to visit Dad and Bob. Bob was asleep too. I had tons of pills and Dad had tons of everything too. Dad and I got high on downs, and eventually I passed out on Dad’s bed.
Then this: The biggest, worst moments of our lives never announce themselves. A car wreck suddenly changes everything terribly and forever. Words that destroy a relationship spill out unexpectedly but can’t be unsaid. Actions, emotions, missteps, mistakes—no matter who is to blame, there are tiny hints and billowing flags of warning, but we are powerless to wholly predict and self-protect. I loved my father and I still do. But he was not a man with boundaries. He was full of love, and he was sick with drugs. He drew me to him and pushed me away. He wanted to rescue me, to protect me, but he also wanted me to reflect his greatness.
It’s complicated and it’s simple, and neither makes it right, and neither gives it reason, so simple will have to do. I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father. I don’t remember how it started or, thankfully, how it ended. There is only a vague memory of the middle, of waking up to a confusion and horror that I was unable to stop, change, process. Bob was watching from his nearby bed with a face I couldn’t read. Was it the first time? Had this happened before? I didn’t know and I still don’t. All I can say is that it was the first time I was aware of it. For a moment I was in my body, in that horrible truth, and then I slid back into a blackout.
Your father is supposed to protect you.
Your father is supposed to protect you, not fuck you.
• • •
I was the feel
-no-evil monkey, the child whose rape settled quickly into a dispassionate truth. The year before, in my relationship with Peter, I’d miscarried a fetus I didn’t know I was carrying into a toilet. I scooped it out into a cup. It was the size of my fist. A moment passed, the moment in which I realized, I was pregnant; I’ve miscarried; something that I didn’t know was happening is already over. And when I saw that it was over, I boxed it away, poured the contents of the cup back into the toilet, came out of the bathroom, and told Peter, “I need to go to the hospital.” But before I left I stole two grams of cocaine from James Taylor, because even the feel-no-evil monkey needs a little help from her friends.
So my father had sex with me, and when I came to next to Jeff the next morning, I saw nothing, I said nothing, I heard nothing, I felt nothing. I put it aside for the moment and went on. My marriage to Jeff didn’t happen. Dad didn’t stop it. I didn’t take a stand either way. The notion seemed to pass as impulsively as it had appeared. Bob and Dad and Jeff and I flew back to LA. Jeff and I had sex in the lavatory of the first-class section before we even took off, because that was how we rolled.
13
Back in L.A., Peter had moved all of my stuff out of our house and back into my house. It was fucked up, and I was fucked up, and now, at home, the reality of what had happened with my father started to hit me. It was so wrong. I had to do something. I told my mother. But she said, “Are you sure?” My mother had always been in love with my father. She loved me too. She couldn’t process this. I went to Aunt Rosie, who believed me and was furious. We talked about what to do—me, Rosie, Mom, friends—and I wondered if I should press charges. Wasn’t that what you did when somebody wronged you? Shouldn’t he be punished? But Rosie helped me realize that if I took action against him, it would not only ruin my father’s prospects of ever finding success again, it would also taint me. And my family. I would be dragging the family name through the mud. It would destroy us. The general consensus was that yes, it was terrible; no, it shouldn’t have happened, but there was nothing for me to do but let it go.
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