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Brave

Page 16

by Rose McGowan


  The next blow was the worst of all. RR sold our film to my Monster. Yes, the Monster’s studio was going to release our movie. I can’t tell you what it was like to be sold into the hands of the man who had assaulted me and scarred me for life. I had to do press events with the Monster and see photos of us together, his big fat paw pulling me in to his body. In the end the film was a box office flop, I think largely because they promoted it horribly, but to tell you the truth, I was happy it failed. I was happy these men wouldn’t be making money off me.

  Everything was upside down, backward, and insane. Things that are completely outrageous had become the norm. That’s true of abusive relationships. It’s true for the cult. And it’s true for the cult of Hollywood.

  Being abused by the Hollywood cult breaks you down, as anybody who’s been abused knows. They break you down softly at first, telling you things like “I accept you” in a gentle voice. They whisper words of love and devotion that nobody will ever love you like they love you. And this is exactly the same thing a cult leader tells you. And that is what makes it so dangerous. While my arm was still in a cast, I decided it was a good time to get a sinus surgery I’d put off. I’d had terrible sinus infections since childhood and had horrible trouble breathing out of my right nostril for years. When I went to the ear, nose, and throat surgeon, something went horribly wrong. Somehow going from above my sinus cavity and underneath my right eye, a puncture was made through my skin. I still don’t understand. I was told by the doctor to go home and that under eyes don’t scar. I kept waiting for the hole to heal, but it didn’t. After a week, I went to a plastic surgeon. He immediately performed a surgery to make the hole a thin line.

  I had to get reconstructive surgery on that eye, and then, because the procedure pinched the eye a tiny bit higher, I had to get my other eye slightly done to match it, by one millimeter. I told my publicists what had happened and they said to say it was a car accident. Looking back, I don’t know why it mattered, but I took that advice. And so when I was asked by the press, that became the party line. Early on after the real accident, there was a paparazzi shot taken of me where there was a ropy scar under my eye. It started the plastic surgery rumors. They put me in Star magazine and “Knifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” They had a split picture of what I used to look like and what I looked like now. Perez Hilton would put me on his site with, “How old is she? 65? 75? 85?”

  For the next year I visited a doctor four times a week, a needle in each side of my ropy scar, so they could break up the scar tissue. Lasers burned my flesh to flatten the knotted skin. The trauma was real. The pain was real. The harassment was real.

  One night I crumbled. I was huddled over in a bathtub and I let go. I wailed, I cried. I just wanted it to stop. But then I got out of that bathtub, dried myself off, and marched on.

  I was scared, sad and broken, and lost. A breaking point was coming.

  Ten months after we finished filming on Planet Terror, I found out I’d be on the cover of Rolling Stone, with Rosario Dawson. Even I got excited. A cover shoot for Rolling Stone is the Holy Grail for an actress. It’s a cultural landmark. In reality it was the tipping point that finally snapped me out of the Hollywood brainwashing and got me on my path to being whole.

  I showed up, said hi to the photographer, who had shot me before for the New York Times, when I noticed something was missing. “Where’s the wardrobe?”

  He looked at me sheepishly. “Oh, there isn’t one, but we have a great idea! You’ll be butt to butt with Rosario, with a belt made of ammo around you! How HOT is that? Isn’t that genius??”

  Another man helping to manifest misogyny. I sucked it up, put on that dumb belt, and stood on an apple crate so my butt would perfectly line up with Rosario’s (she is taller than me). They tried to re-create my Cherry Darling look, with the extra-large hair and fake tanner, but no one could ever get me as fake tan as I needed to be to get through this bullshit.

  As I stood there, pursing my lips, touching butts with Rosario, I had a realization.

  I was being photographed by a gay male who was imagining me as what he thinks a straight man wants to fuck, and he was doing so on behalf of a director, a straight male, who was interpreting me with his little boy brain on behalf of the studio, also male, who were interpreting me based on who they want to sell tickets to, which is this invisible horde of boys and men. The male gaze is real, ladies and gentlemen, and it is deep.

  I knew I had to do something about what I’d let my life become. Something kept nagging at me, the wrongness of my life. It felt like an insistent alarm bell in my head, but I couldn’t quite figure out what that alarm bell was trying to tell me. Something needed to change, but I didn’t know how or what.

  Then I saw my Rolling Stone cover on the newsstand. I backed away from it slowly, my eyes wide. The photograph looked nothing like me. This was a moment, meant to mark the epitome of success as an actress, and I couldn’t even recognize my face. The alarm started ringing in my head. Wake up, Rose, wake up, Rose.

  I stared at the magazine, wondering, Who is that person? What have they done to you? This is what it’s come to? All these years of being sexualized, it was crystalized in this one image. There is a difference between being sexual and sexy in and of itself. There is nothing wrong with that. Sexualized is when others have done it to you for their benefit. I had a hand in it. I didn’t say no, but like so many women in cults, I didn’t know I could. I had lost my voice. I had lost myself. But my self was desperately trying to wake me up.

  PART TWO

  ASHES TO ASHES

  Looking back, if there were one thing I could change, it’s this: I wish I had known I was an artist a lot sooner. I would have started directing a lot sooner. I would have started singing and writing a lot sooner. I wish someone had just said one thing to me that made it click, but, you see, there were really no examples to look to. I didn’t see where I could become what I could be, because it didn’t exist. And the cult doesn’t want you to know your value and it certainly doesn’t want you to know you are free.

  So I started with the small stuff. I went back to the business of getting healthy physically. Then I took time to heal mentally. A long road ensued.

  I have something called cyclothymia, which means I am prone to depressions, which I now deal with by taking a mood stabilizer. There is no shame in this. The depression really rocketed off after my assault and became something impossible to manage on my own.

  I’m only talking about this to help others who may also suffer from the mean blues, as I call them. What I know now is that you should not be afraid to seek medical help for mood problems. Try one thing, but if that doesn’t work, try another. It is a needle in a haystack finding the right protocol, but it can be life changing. It’s like the blinds raising on your windows and you can not only see, but also feel the sun in your life.

  I began the process of putting my life back together and turning my back on Hollywood. During this period of healing, I was able to work on my relationship with my father. He had spent some of the previous years reaching out and repairing relationships with my brothers, sisters, and me. He wasn’t perfect at it, and he and I still had a relationship where we were more comfortable talking about anything but emotions. He and I bonded the most discussing politics, the war in the Middle East, Sufis versus the Sunnis, anything but our feelings. We still danced around the past, but we could talk well enough about the now. We laughed a lot, too. He was one of those people who made you feel like a million bucks if you could make him laugh. His mental illness had chilled out at this point and made him much easier to be around.

  It took a lot to love him and have my heart unfreeze, but during my later Hollywood period, he showed me kindness and was one of the few in the world who did. He hated Hollywood men and how they had hurt me. It made me feel good that he cared. We went from a family that was very fractured and damaged to having him really be back at the center, not as the demon, but as the bright beautiful funny
light that we all gravitated around. He had somehow raised eight kids in his own haphazard, fucked-up way, at times magical, at times hell.

  Then he got sick. I was with him at a hospital in L A when the doctor shook his head and said, “I’m so sorry. You have pulmonary fibrosis.” I had no idea what that meant, but quickly learned that pulmonary fibrosis is a death sentence. My dad was given a maximum three years to live. Every time you breathe, your lungs rip apart and scar, and the scar tissue builds up and overtakes the airways. So every breath you take is one step closer to choking all the air out of you.

  It’s a horrible, horrible disease and a terrible way to die. It kills more people than breast cancer each year, and yet people have barely heard of it. That’s because for a long time, it was affecting older people, but now it’s dropping younger and younger and younger. It’s idiopathic, which means they have no idea what causes it. For my father, I think it was from the airbrushes: years of inhaling tiny particles of paint.

  He was fifty-eight when he was diagnosed. It was wild because he was Mister Healthy. Never owned a microwave. Never ate processed sugar. Was on the Mediterranean diet way before it was a diet, ate super organic. He put our cereal in paper bags to avoid the plastic bags.

  Every one of us kids—a few of us who’d plotted to kill him at one point or another—were all lying with him on his hospital bed when we made the choice to end his life by disconnecting him from life support. A beautifully complex star was dead.

  After my dad died, it was like nothing mattered anymore. I went into this haze and all I did was watch classic films and hang out with my dogs. I began the slow climb from a beaten-down individual to being a strong-ass woman, to being somebody who’s not afraid to be herself, to know my own worth. Slowly I realized the healing process was beginning to evolve into a transformation. Mine.

  During the next few years, I worked hard on myself, slowly fusing the many characters I played into one person. A whole person. Me. I was a girl interrupted and when I went back to my regularly scheduled life, I didn’t really know where to be or what to do. I did a few jobs here and there, but in my mind I was getting out of the business. I was still unraveling a lot of the fear and trauma my life had brought on me, healing physically and processing my father’s death. My thirties were kind of a wash. They were just spent in a haze. I wish I got a do over. Maybe that’s what I’m doing now.

  Raised as an outsider, then a runaway, then a captive, then a starlet, then a celebrity, it was finally my turn to be me, just a member of society. A fully fledged human. Fully myself. To get to be me from the beginning of my day until the end of my day. To feel what I want to feel and not what I’m scripted to feel. It had been a long time coming.

  I am no longer willing to be a part of something I wouldn’t want my mind and soul to consume.

  My friend Joshua Miller (the one I corrupted at thirteen), along with his writing partner, M. A. Fortin, came to me during this period and simply said, “It’s time.” Meaning it was time for me to direct my own movie. They wrote a brilliant script for a short film, Dawn. As the director, I set out to make a minimasterpiece. I wanted to explore what happens to girls when we send them out into society trained to be polite and little else. Dawn is set in 1961, but I knew it would speak to current audiences. On the set of Dawn, I kept waiting for my nerves to kick in like how they did when I was acting, but the nerves never came. I was the captain of the ship and I damn well knew how to sail. After working on sets for over fifty-seven thousand hours, I know how to run a crew and set, but more than that, I know what I want to say in a medium I love. Directing for me is as natural as breathing. I truly found something I loved. Finally. It was fitting that the first time I returned to Sundance since my assault was as a director with my own film nominated in 2014. Dawn was nominated for Grand Jury Prize, a huge honor. Since then Dawn has been the little movie that could. Screening at Sundance London and Hong Kong, it was toured around the United States in theaters, screened at the Lincoln Center, and is now on the Criterion Films/TCM platform, FilmStruck. To say I’m proud of everyone involved is an understatement. After directing my first piece, my confidence as an artist and independent thinker grew exponentially. It was time for me to use my voice. But how?

  PHOENIX RISE

  It was Ashton Kutcher, of all people, who got me involved with social media. I have never met him. He said in some interview that Twitter is the only voice an actor can actually have.

  Something clicked for me. I started slowly on Twitter, just easing my way into it and just saying whatever, because isn’t that the point? It amused me. Then one night I was sent a script by my agent at Innovative, a second-tier agency in Los Angeles. I was using them for voice-over work only, but somebody there got the brilliant idea to send me an Adam Sandler script. The role in question was a former model who’s obsessed with Adam Sandler and stalking him. Imagine me, stalking Adam Sandler. Hahahaha. Attached to the script was a wildly demeaning cover letter and helpful instructions for the audition. I took a photo and posted it on Instagram and Twitter. I went to bed, not thinking anything of it.

  I woke up the next morning, checked my phone, and realized my tweet was going viral. My heart started to race. All internet hell broke loose. It was picked up by media in India, China, everywhere. My second, deeper wake-up came when I started reading my Twitter followers’ comments and realized people were rightfully aghast. What’s sad is how normal this was to me. I’d thought it was just an eye roll, a bon mot. One tiny example of infinite indignities suffered in Hollywood by women. But the reaction made me realize it was more than an eye roll. That’s still on me, to pull out the threads of this misogyny, sexism, and the brainwashing of Hollywood and media, to free my own mind.

  I realized it was time I finally start some real conversations with the public. I would no longer be silenced. I had known my activism was going to come out publicly at some point; I’d been an activist for gay rights for years, just not an activist for women specifically. I would never have expected Adam Sandler to be the big reveal. But in retrospect it makes sense. I mean, in what world does Adam Sandler—representing the average American male, naturally—end up with Kate Beckinsale, Salma Hayek, or Jessica Biel? The “silly” movies he’s known for are more dangerous than they appear, because they propagate a sense of entitlement among the millions of dudes who are his primary audience. The message is that they, like he, in his stained T-shirt and sweatpants, and by virtue of possessing a penis, having no discernible mental assets, have a right to an accomplished, amazing woman like a Salma Hayek. And that is communicated not just by the shitty script saying so, but by the casting itself. It’s absurd. The messaging given to men by the media is about entitlement and ownership, following privileged boys’ club rules. And they are the voice of society. There is definitely a parallel between this mind-set and violence and sexual harassment against women.

  I was in New York during the Twitter hurricane that followed. There was a screening of my film Dawn at the Lincoln Center, a huge honor, and I went right from there to film Watch What Happens Live, a show on Bravo hosted by Andy Cohen.

  I walked off set when I was done, thinking what a waste of my life that was, when I got an email from my agent, saying they were firing me.

  For about ten seconds I was gripped with a paralyzing fear. I thought, Oh shit, it’s happening again. I’m going to be blacklisted all over again. I could feel myself shaking. But then I realized—

  The agency honchos thought they could fire me and it would stay private. Big mistake. They thought I was going to protect them, because like I said, Hollywood works like a Mafia.

  I started to think on it. Why should I protect these purveyors of brain smut with my silence? They undersold me, undervalued me, and underwhelmed me. They have never protected me or legions of other girls, women, and young boys. They’ve done nothing to protect the sensibility of society, and they’ve done nothing I can see that’s moving society forward, at least not lately.

/>   Hollywood operates under a veil of secrecy, but I never said I’d be a secret holder. If you don’t keep their secrets: Tsk, tsk, tsk, we know what you are. You’re a loose cannon. You’re never going to get ahead. You, little girl, will be punished. How about this: How about you don’t do disgusting things that you need to keep secret? How about this: How about you treat women who work with you fairly and humanely, the same way you treat the guys? How about you put yourself in their shoes and see what it’s like to experience their lives? The only way to change things is to lift the blanket and shine a light on the darkness. My goal is to expose Hollywood for what it really is. I have a million more stories I could tell in this book, but I don’t have the energy to document all of the dickery. By using a few of my stories as descriptors, I hope it will have a domino effect. More women will rise up, take their power, and say “no more.” And men will stand as allies.

  So I tweeted again about being fired and punished for speaking up.

  It’s a wild sensation when something I write or do goes viral. All I have is a phone in my hand, but it’s a conduit to so much energy. It’s the way to tap into the world outside and inside other people’s thoughts. It’s been a really useful tool for me to speak for myself, to speak out, and to speak up for others, but it’s still a uniquely strange experience when your phone feels like holding a live wire in your hand.

  I finally realized how important it was for me as an artist to claim my strength and my power and my worth. Because there’s something inside of us that they can’t take away, no matter how much they try. I’m electing to try and change societal norms, so it occurred to me that I’m a politician of sorts. Except I can’t be voted out of office. If you’re an artist, no one can take that from you.

 

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