At the same time, though I’d forgotten it, I was an addict at heart, now and forever. Feeling pressured and being angry and in denial came with the territory.
It wasn’t just the pain meds that awakened the monster and caused my relapse. My father’s death should have provided closure. Instead, it came bundled with new issues and new anger. First, the secrecy. We were never allowed to talk about his illness. He’d gotten a liver transplant, and the fact that he had been using and drinking ever since he got the new liver was a family secret. Dad was not a stupid man. He was brilliant. But he had chosen this horrible death. How could he think that with someone else’s liver in him he could continue to drink the way he did and not die? Fuck him. I was heartbroken and pissed off. But the official story was that he died of heart failure. Well, sure. We all die of heart failure.
When he was alive, I couldn’t talk about Dad’s illness at recovery meetings, so I’d tapered off my attendance. Now that he was dead, I couldn’t talk about my anger and pain, and holding it in was impossible. So I stopped going altogether. And after a while, it was, Okay, I’m out of the program. I’m already doing OxyContin. Why not do cocaine?
My father’s death also stirred unresolved issues. There was always a component of my sobriety that had to do with my father, an unacknowledged desire to show him that I could live a different life than the one he modeled for me, to prove to him that he too could do it, to save him. Dad never bought it, not for a minute. When he died, although it was far from so, it was almost like I had one less reason to be clean. I’d gotten sober to flip Dad off. Staying sober was a fuck-you to him. Now he was dead and I was using to flip him off again. In a world of logic and perspective, my son Shane is more than enough reason to stay sober, but the loss of my father threw me far and away from reason.
There was more. Someone close to me, let’s call her M., had confided in me before Dad died. Knowing that he had abused me, she told me that he had done similarly inappropriate things to her when she was quite young. The idea that Dad had taken advantage of a teenager was horrifying. What happened between us was something I thought I had processed, but when I imagined the same thing happening to someone I loved, it seemed far worse. It made him into a real monster.
The fact that the same behavior seemed criminal to me when practiced on another was in itself a matter for the self-esteem police, but after Dad died it got even more twisted. M. came to me and said, “I have something I need to talk to you about. My husband has been bugging me to set the record straight. I’m sorry, but all that stuff I said about your father—I made it up.” M. told me that she had lied because she wanted to be closer to me. My jaw hit my chest. He was gone. The man was dead. She had made me see him as a real monster. Now he had died falsely convicted. In my eyes. If she was telling the truth. My world was spinning, full of needs and questions. I played the Stevie Nicks song “I Miss You” over and over.
Well I miss you now
I have so many questions
About love and about pain
About strained relationships
About fame as only he could explain it to me
Seems like yesterday
I think about how much I
Wish that you were here with me now
The invisible girl that was my name
She walks in and walks out
And I’m sorry now
I’m sorry now
Although we’d made our peace, the overarching feeling was that I needed answers that only my father could give, and now he never would.
I was an angry half orphan. I was wrecked, physically and mentally. I didn’t think I had a future. The monster was awake, and it was hungry, and I was fucked.
29
When I went on the road for the thirtieth anniversary production of the musical Annie in 2006, I was still on the Fentanyl Patch, which meant there was a constant stream of narcotic medication running through my body. I was also drinking.
Ten years earlier, soon after I moved to L.A., when I’d played Rizzo in Grease, first on Broadway and then on the road for almost a year, physically I felt very strong, fit, and capable. And being on the road with the cast, I felt the same, longed-for sense of community that I’d felt when I went roller skating with the other kids after the ’71 earthquake. It was a little like what I imagined college might have been: sitting around talking, ordering pizza. I may have felt that in the early days of the Mamas & the Papas, but eventually we were too fucked up to have that idyllic sense of a united purpose and friendship.
When the tour brought Grease to New York, Owen happened to be there. She stayed with me in my tiny apartment on the Upper East Side. I turned her on to Cocoa Puffs and Aqua-fresh toothpaste, and she’s been obsessed with Cocoa Puffs ever since—mandating all the more tooth-brushing with Aquafresh. I loved walking in the city, but Owen was not so big on walking. It was cold. At some point she said, “My legs are killing me and my ears are going to break off.” I called her a pussy, but we jumped in a cab. We just had a blast.
During Grease I became especially close to the conductor of the orchestra, Keith Levenson, a goofy guy with glasses and a beard. We didn’t have a sexual relationship—he had a fiancée—but at that point we certainly had an intellectual love affair.
Now, ten years later, on Annie, I was romantically involved—actually engaged to—and sharing a hotel room with Keith Levenson. But it wasn’t to be the same good times I’d had on Grease. I played Lily St. Regis, the “Easy Street”–singing conwoman who wants to get rich off Annie. The show was two and a half hours of singing and dancing. It played to an audience of three thousand people every night. Between the work and the meds, I was zonked. I slept all day. At night I wanted to stay home and watch movies instead of going out with the cast and crew to restaurants or bars. Keith got fed up. He didn’t know how to live with a drug addict. I was a person who never stopped loving anyone, but with Keith it got nasty at the end. He turned stone cold. I wanted him to love me again. We had huge fights like none I’d ever had before. One day he packed his bag and said, “This is it. I’m out of here.” He walked out the door and, I presume, went to the front desk to switch hotel rooms.
I had gotten very thin, and the patches I was wearing were way too strong for my diminished body weight. Then I missed my entrance cue after a fight with Keith. I ran onstage and picked up the scene as best I could. The producers gave me a leave of absence.
A leave of absence. With my history. This time I didn’t get a haircut and pretend to be better the way I had back on One Day at a Time. This time I went straight from the road to detox. I knew I was in trouble, but even as I entered detox I hid behind the belief that I was using drugs for legitimate pain. Besides that, I was focused on my relationship with Keith. I wanted to win him back, and I thought detoxing was the ticket.
I had been to rehab at a place called Crossroads the year before but it hadn’t taken. It lingered in my memory as a beautiful vacation in Antigua where Bijou, her boyfriend Sean Lennon, and my boyfriend Lee had come for family week and partied. They were yachting, swimming, and snorkeling while I was stuck in rehab. Every night Lee and Sean would go out drinking, then come back in the morning to participate in the family program. During the group sessions, Sean started talking about losing his father. Needless to say, his audience was rapt. I just sat quietly, wondering how exactly this would help me recover. I wanted my loved ones there, but I was tired of having a family so colorful that their presence outshone everything else. Everyone at Crossroads was having family week, but mine had to be spectacular and sensationalized.
After I graduated from the program and Sean and Bijou left, Lee and I rented a little house right above Crossroads. We spent a few days kicking around, dancing on the beach, having a romantic time. And every night Lee would drink. I was one day out of rehab. I’d say “I don’t mind, it’s fine,” but it sucked. I know if I’d said something, Lee would have listened. He was and is one of my dearest friends and had shown his devoti
on by fishing a piece of chicken out of my throat when I was choking to death after overdosing on Soma. Come to think of it, Lee had more than earned those drinks.
Lee and I flew home from Crossroads separately. I arrived at my house knowing with every ounce of my being that there was a Norco, a single Norco, in my closet underneath a sweater. I walked into the house, went straight to the Norco, and took it. I came downstairs and ordered Mexican food with Shane and his friends. It was fun; we all hung out. The next morning I went back to the doctor and got a new prescription for Norco.
This time, when I left Annie, I went to a detox in Florida called Summer House. I wasn’t thinking about sobriety. My physical pain was so great that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to stop opiates, or so the monster told me. But I knew that detox would get my dosage back down so the meds would work better. In most states it’s illegal to help narcotic addicts detox by slowly reducing their dosage. Instead, they give you Librium, which is a nasty detox. You shake and sweat and have hellish diarrhea. You have involuntary leg kicks—which is why it’s called “kicking” the habit. The unbearable illness of withdrawal was a significant barrier to rehab. Narcotic reduction was a much gentler path to sobriety, and Florida was the only state where it was legal.
At Summer House I befriended Wyatt, a gorgeous successful businessman. He was tall—six foot seven—with hair down to his butt. At Summer House they were accustomed to treating chronic pain patients who wanted to bring their dosage down to a manageable level. I left Summer House on a reduced dosage and went back to L.A. before returning to Annie. Wyatt came to town for a convention and we made plans to have lunch. When he parked his red convertible Mustang in front of my house, I ran to him and gave him a big hug. I adored this man.
After lunch we were chatting on my front porch when my phone rang. It was my agent. She said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you won’t be going back on the road with Annie.” I’d been fired, and I knew why.
My now ex-fiancé, Keith, had a long history with Annie. He had brought me on board so that we could be together. Now he wanted nothing to do with me ever again. I knew he was behind this news. I was so pissed off and so hurt when I got that call. Wyatt comforted me until he had to go.
A few weeks later I went to New York to visit my old friend Susan. Wyatt and I went to dinner and afterward came home to his apartment. There was some flirting going on, but I wasn’t sure what to want or expect. He was thirteen years younger than I was. That night he slept on the couch in his living room and I slept in his bed. The bed had excellent sheets. I smelled the pillow. It smelled good. When I went through the living room to the bathroom, I snuck a peek at him sleeping. He was beautiful.
The next morning it was on. And the next time I came to New York to see him, I up and decided to move to New York.
• • •
Moving to New York was an impulsive decision, and drugs were at the heart of it. When I came home from Summer House, my pain had returned. I had to walk with a cane. See? As I’d tried to explain to everyone, my pain was real. Detoxing off the pain pills had caused it to return in full force. I went back on the Patch and pain pills. Then, that second time I went to New York to see Wyatt, he had OxyContin. We took it and started getting high together. I moved to New York because I thought I wanted to be with Wyatt. Only later was it clear that leaving L.A. was my way of running away from all the friends and family who were trying to save me.
Shane was almost twenty years old. He had been talking about moving in with friends, so when I left, he did too, and we rented out our empty house for nine months. I’d found an apartment in Queens, a few blocks from Wyatt. It was a two-bedroom apartment, much smaller than my house. In a frenzy, I gave away my refrigerator, my washer, my dryer, my fax machine. I hired a retired drummer who used to play with Buck-cherry to pack up everything I didn’t give away.
I sent my pugs cross-country by car so they wouldn’t have to endure the plane trip. Wyatt came to L.A. to fly back to New York with me and my cats, Moley and Rupert. We sat in business class with the cats meowing quietly under our seats. The plane landed, and everyone stood up to deplane. Then I heard a voice call out, “Laura!” Whenever I hear that name, I know I’m going to see a face from my past. I looked over and there, directly across the aisle from me, was Peter Asher. He and I practically dove across the aisles to hug each other.
In the airport, Wyatt also ran into someone he recognized, so Peter and I strolled a little by ourselves, catching up. Three years earlier, he had produced a Wilson Phillips album with my sister Chynna. When the band had a big show at the Santa Monica Pier, I had expected to run into Peter, but we never crossed paths. After that I’d called to say hi, but he never responded. Now, as we walked along, I said, “Peter, why didn’t you call me back?”
He said, “Because I’ve never stopped being completely in love with you.” My heart jumped. Two years after I’d left Peter, he married a girl named Wende Worth, who had been my assistant. They had a child, and as far as I knew they were still happily married. But part of me was still in love with him, in love with him and in love with the memory of being in love with him, the same way I was forever in love with everyone I’d ever loved. I craved attachment, and once I found it, I never let go. But he was married, and I wasn’t messing with that. Peter and I made plans to have lunch in the city, but I knew it wouldn’t and shouldn’t happen. How could I imagine how differently I would feel and behave—how fucked up I would be—the next time I ran into Peter?
I lived in New York for almost a year, most of which I spent at Wyatt’s, feeding outrageous amounts of money to my raging addiction to OxyContin. Soon enough, Wyatt and I were ugly and desperate, fighting about money, fighting over drugs.
I flew back to L.A. for a short trip to host a luncheon for the hilarious and charming Motion Picture Mothers, a social group my mother belongs to that does charity work. I’m an honorary member. I wore the expected ladies’ attire at the luncheon—a hat and gloves. Then I went back to my diabetic mom’s, found her syringes, and started shooting coke.
I was supposed to be gone for three days, but I didn’t go back to New York. And suddenly I understood all too well exactly how and why my father and Genevieve had left their children at 414 St. Pierre Road for a weekend trip to New York and then vanished.
Being a junkie again was, well, to tell the truth it was excellent. I called up Josh and Lisa, two dear old friends, lovely people—truly—who happened to be drug dealers. We’d been the best of friends back in the day, but I’d steered clear of them when I was clean. Now I said, “Hey, I haven’t seen you in ages.” As we caught up it came out that they were in a tough spot. The apartment they’d been renting forever was going to be sold, and they had to leave. But they couldn’t pass a credit check for a new apartment. Such are the struggles of career drug dealers. I said, “Why don’t you guys just come and live with me?”
It’s true: I was moving my drug dealers right into the guest bedroom of the dream house I’d bought for me and Shane. But Josh and Lisa aren’t street people. I’ve known them for years. I had and still have a genuine love for them. They are really good people with a really bad problem. Now we lived that bad problem together.
But no matter what needs they had and what reasons I gave, the truth is that I moved the drug dealers into my house so that I could have a constant stream of access without having to leave the house. If I ran out of coke at four a.m., I could just go downstairs and get more.
For a good while it was deceptively fun. We were like a family—it was all almost normal except that they smoked heroin and I shot coke and there was no clock. Time was immaterial. Josh and Lisa had lived that way for a long time, and I fell right into the routine of timelessness. We cooked dinner together—it was five a.m. but the food was delicious. Lisa and I cleaned the house—it was two in the morning and we’d been up for three days straight, but at least the house was clean. We all took the dogs for walks—at midnight, but we all ha
d a nice moonlit stroll. There was no difference between four in the morning and four in the afternoon except that the sun was either up or down.
If you took drugs out of the equation, it was a fantasy life. The three of us were roommates. We cooked, we cleaned, we took care of the animals. And then we cleaned some more. With two women on cocaine, the house was spotless. There was a certain comfort and serenity that I felt knowing that Josh and Lisa were downstairs in the guest room. Sometimes I’d even fall asleep at the foot of their bed like a puppy.
I said being a junkie was excellent because when you first start, the drugs enhance reality, and it’s cool and enlightening and appealing. But over time the drugs take over reality until they create your reality for you. They own you. That’s when you’ve crossed over, and if you’re using needles, it’s guaranteed to happen. Anyone who picks up a needle isn’t a recreational drug user.
My doctor had prescribed Opana, an opiate twice as strong as OxyContin, for my pain. On top of that, I’d started shooting cocaine. Every time I went to my rock doc to get my prescriptions renewed, I worried that he would do labs—drawing blood from me—and he or the nurse would see my junkie arms. But for some deluded reason I didn’t anticipate his reaction when I mentioned in a conversational, “Isn’t he fucked up?” way that my boyfriend Wyatt was back in detox in Florida for OxyContin. The doctor said, “Oh, in that case we’re going to do a urine on you today.” I sat in stunned silence. A urine test for drugs. I had shot cocaine just before I walked in the door. I was done for.
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