I told him he was crazy. “Why would I want to be abused?” I said. “I want to be loved.”
“But you don’t think you’re lovable,” he said.
“I don’t?”
“No,” he said. “You see yourself as your father saw you. You see yourself as hateful and worthless.”
“But these men love me!” I protested. “Simon loves me.”
“That may well be,” he said. “But you don’t believe it. Not deep down. So you test their love. You misbehave. You push and push until they explode at you, the same way your father did.”
“Why would I want to make them do a thing like that?” I asked.
“Because it’s what you know. It’s familiar.”
“I don’t understand this at all.”
“It’s really quite simple,” he went on. “Once you’ve turned Simon into your father, you try to win him back. In winning him back, you think you’re undoing the damage that was done to you as a child. You’re saying, ‘See, Dad? You were wrong! I’m not worthless. I’m good and wonderful and lovable.’ Only Simon and these other men aren’t your father. The damage you suffered has nothing to do with them. The damage is inside you. Only you can fix it. Not them.”
My head was spinning. I left his office with a brutal migraine and a prescription for Ativan, some kind of antianxiety medication. I drove home and tried to think about what he had told me, but it made me anxious. I’d been a lot happier in denial.
Then I got the prescription filled, and I instantly was less anxious. It was great. I didn’t feel like thinking anymore.
I went back for a few more sessions, but I wasn’t there to explore my sordid history. I was there for the drugs. I asked for stronger drugs, and he gave them to me. He even threw a little Lithium in for good measure.
I began smiling again. It was one of those Hare Krishna smiles. I was walking on a cushion of air.
“What’s going on, Janice?” Simon asked me one night. We were on our way to a party. He was concerned about my odd behavior.
“Nothing,” I said, smiling broadly. If I were Simon, I would’ve slapped me. Then again, I must say, in my defense, that the medications were partly to blame.
“Do you realize we haven’t had sex in six months?” he said.
“No,” I said. “Is that a fact?”
At the party that night, I ran into Greg Gorman, a very happening celebrity photographer. He couldn’t believe how good I looked. He thought I was positively glowing. He asked me to come by his studio: He was doing a book of celebrity nudes and wanted me in it.
I showed up at Greg’s studio a few days later, dressed like a fuck machine. Liam Neeson was there, half-naked. My Little Flower tingled. No, it didn’t tingle. It fucking rocked. Suddenly I realized that I was missing sex, too. Just not with my husband.
“I’ve been a big fan of yours for years,” Liam said. That accent! I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. He mentioned some of my spreads: Penn, Avedon, Hurrell, Horst. Either he’d done his homework or he really was a fan.
THE IRRESISTIBLE LIAM NEESON.
“Thank you,” I said. I tried to smile demurely. I didn’t want him to know how much I wanted him.
“I hear you’re quite a photographer yourself,” Liam said.
“I can’t deny it,” I said.
“When are you going to take my picture?”
“What are you doing Saturday?” I said.
We went out to Malibu the following weekend. We walked to the end of a deserted pier and climbed down into the rocks. He took off his shirt and I snapped a few pictures and told him to keep going. He didn’t bat an eye. He peeled off his pants and an Evian bottle popped out. I mean, Jesus—the man was hung like a donkey.
“Well, I—uh, I’m speechless,” I stammered.
Liam laughed. He put on a little Speedo he’d brought along, and I took a few family-friendly photographs.
“When can I see you again?” he asked, looking at me like I was lunch.
“You can’t,” I said.
I went home and took a shower and put on a little makeup and dressed provocatively and hugged my son and made a spectacular pasta primavera for Simon. He didn’t even notice.
“Why don’t you come to bed?” I said, trying to sound sultry.
“I have things to do,” he said.
“You were right,” I said. “We haven’t had sex in six months. Let’s do something about it.”
“I can’t just jump back into it, Janice.”
“You think this is easy for me?” I said. “Come on, Simon. Let’s give it the old college try.”
“I’ve got to get back to the editing room,” he said. And he left. Bastard. Fat lot of good it did me, trying to seduce him. After looking in on Nathan and the nanny, I went over to visit my friends Evi and Randy Quaid. Randy opened the door and took one look at my skintight dress and his eyes bugged out of his head. “Now here’s a walking argument for infidelity,” he said, laughing. I went inside and hugged Evi while Randy went off to make me a drink. I told them that Simon had lost interest in me: We were in the last stage of married sex, where you pass each other in the hallway and say “Fuck you.”
I took a sip of my drink. It was a pepper vodka. It was good. I drank it down like water. Suddenly, everything started blurring. It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten all day. Well, I mean, aside from the Ativan, the Lithium, and those two hits of Valium.
The next thing I know, I’m waking up at Cedar’s Sinai. Simon is standing next to my hospital bed.
“Holy shit,” I said. “What happened?”
“You need to go into rehab,” Simon said.
He took me home, still talking about rehab. I would clean myself up, he said. Stop with the pills. Stop with the booze. He and the nanny could handle Nathan until I got out. Everything was going to be fine. He was trying to be nice but I could sense his frustration. We were finished and we both knew it.
I stayed in bed for the next three days, numb. I called my Beverly Hills shrink, who had the pharmacy ship out some Klonopin. He said I’d love it. I set the phone down and it rang. Liam Neeson was on the other end, missing me and wanting me. I told him I’d be right over. I got up and brushed my teeth and ate a little something and showered and went over. He fucked my lights out. I thanked him, though God knows why: I felt like I needed an episiotomy.
Simon was waiting for me when I got home. “Where’ve you been?” he said.
“What do you care?” I said.
He slammed the front door on his way out, which woke Nathan. I went into his room and held him close and tight. I had Nathan. No one could ever take him away from me. He was mine, and my love for him was clean and pure and true.
Liam called again two days later. He was on his way to New York. Would I meet him there? I left on the red-eye that night. He was staying at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South. He was just waking up when I walked in. He ordered breakfast for both of us, and we spent the day in bed.
The phone rang late in the afternoon. It was Simon. To this day I don’t know how he found me.
“Who is this?” Liam said, acting dumb. “You’re looking for whom?”
But I’d had enough lies for a while. I took the phone.
“What the fuck are you doing, Janice?” Simon asked.
“I’m taking pictures of Liam Neeson for Movieline. What the fuck do you care?”
“I care. Please come home.”
“What?” I said. “Now you want me? Now? Now that it’s over, you’re asking me to come home!” I hung up. The phone rang again, but I told Liam not to answer it. “Let’s go to dinner,” I said.
We went to dinner and Liam talked nonstop about Julia Roberts. Julia had dumped him, broken his heart. The only other woman he’d ever loved as intensely was Helen Mirren. He talked about her for a while, too. His voice cracked. I swear to God, I thought he was going to cry into his soup. When we got home, he went into the bathroom. When he came out he was drying his hands with a
well-worn, ripped-to-shreds, hand towel with her initials monogrammed in royal blue: J.R.
What the fuck are you doing here? I asked myself.
I took one look at that towel and I knew instantly what it was good for.
I douched with it.
Sorry, Julia.
I flew back to L.A. the next morning. Liam didn’t understand. He was going to Cairo to make a movie, and he wanted me to go with him.
“I’m still married,” I said.
“I know what you think,” I said when I saw Simon. “But nothing happened.”
He didn’t believe me but he wanted to believe me because neither of us wanted it to end. We had Nathan to think about, and we were both madly in love with Nathan. We were going to make it work for Nathan.
I kept popping pills, looking for the magic formula that would make everything all right—the self-help cocktail that would keep me happy for life. I came close. For a while I regained equilibrium. I was back on my cushion of air, smiling my Hare Krishna smile. Until one morning, that is, when I looked in the mirror and found my mother’s face staring back at me. I knew I should stop right then and there, but I couldn’t. I loved my little pills. They came in all colors, shapes, and sizes, like Nathan’s toys. Two little red pills got me out of bed in the morning, the green and pink ones kept me on my feet all day, and the blue ones made for cozy slumber.
Then Simon’s niece came to visit from Windsor. She couldn’t have come at a worse time. And she brought a little friend with her. They were eighteen and desperate to meet celebrities, so I took them drinking on Sunset Boulevard. We ended up at Club Rubber. Mickey Rourke owned the place, and he was there. My niece and her little friend were beside themselves with joy. Mickey kept flirting and plying them with alcohol. I was pretty gone myself. At one point, I think he suggested that we all go to the back office and take off our clothes. I knew it was time to leave. I drove the girls home in a drunken stupor. They were sick for two days. On the third day, Simon put them on a plane home. When he got back from the airport, he told me, again, that I needed to go into rehab.
“Fuck you,” I said. Then I called a friend to get the name of a female attorney.
“Go into rehab,” the attorney said. “This could get ugly.”
DIVORCE WARS
I checked into St. John’s Hospital, in Santa Monica. They had a twenty-eight-day program that was supposed to be among the best in the country. That’s what they’d said about St. Mary’s, of course; that’s what they said about all of them. Still, I knew I didn’t have much choice, so I tried to put a positive spin on it. I decided to think of it as a vacation from Simon. Yeah, I said to myself. That’s it! Time off. I’ll have fun. I’ll make friends. Good friends. Friends that’ll be there forever. That’s the ticket!
When I got out of the hospital, Simon filed for divorce. I counterfiled, and—as predicted—it got ugly. He wanted sole custody. In the papers, he claimed I was an unfit mother. I wept for days. Then I pulled myself together and fought back. In my response I said I knew I wasn’t perfect, but that I loved Nathan more than life itself. I said Nathan knew it, and Simon knew it, and that by and large I’d been a good mother. I also said there was no way in hell I was giving up custody of my son.
After I got out of rehab, I found a small house in Nichols Canyon. I lived for the nights that Nathan slept over and ached for him when he was at Simon’s. The divorce got nasty over the usual issues—money, property, charges of infidelity. Simon and I were so full of rage that we couldn’t risk seeing each other, so the nanny became the go-between. She brought Nathan over when it was my turn to have him and came to pick him up when it was time to take him back to his father’s. I dreaded Nathan’s going more than anything I’d dreaded in my life. When I heard her car pulling up out front, I thought I’d fall apart. I would take Nathan in my arms and hold him close, telling him I loved him more than he could imagine. “More than all the stars in the universe,” I said. I would cry and ask for a few more minutes, until I couldn’t ask for more and she had to take him from me. The anguish was so intense I didn’t know how I’d survive it.
On one such unhappy occasion, as I was strapping him into his booster seat, Nathan told me, “I love you more than all the grains of sand in the world.”
“Is that all?” I said, doing battle with the lump in my throat.
“No,” he said, his little face crinkling up with mischief. “I love you more than all the atoms and molecules in the universe.”
Jesus! Where’d he learn to talk that way? I thought of my father. He had produced an angry, fucked-up girl. I had produced a poet.
One night, shortly after the nanny had driven off with Nathan, I found myself at my wit’s end. I couldn’t sit still. I was tired of crying. I was having trouble breathing. I tried breathing into a paper bag, but that didn’t work, either. So I showered, jumped into my car, and met my gay friends at this run-of-the-mill drinking hole over on Melrose. It was nice for a minute not to be gacked out of my gourd in some Motel 6, living the dream. Still, all I wanted was a drink. Then this handsome stud walked right by me, and I was awestruck. I was paralyzed. I fumbled with words, and got Drew Barrymore’s mother Jade to ask him to come over. God knows I was too shy. He looked devilishly good in his suit. He walked up and sat next to me and introduced himself. His name was Michael Birnbaum. He worked for Aaron Spelling, the TV producer. We talked for three hours. I was smitten. Every word out of his mouth sounded like poetry.
He called the next day. And the day after that. And on Friday he took me to dinner. Two nights later, on Sunday, we went out again. We ended up dating for almost a year, and despite myself I fell in love with him. He was a nice guy, Michael. Too nice. I started thinking about some of the things that first shrink had told me, back in New York. How I was replaying ancient history, re-creating the old hurts in an effort to magically undo the damage—to “fix” it this time around. I thought about what Belushi had said on that crazy drive to Atlantic City: that I always went for guys who made me feel like I didn’t amount to anything, because I felt like I didn’t amount to anything—and because I wanted so much to be told that I was wrong, that I was really wonderful and amazing and incredibly lovable. And I thought about what my Beverly Hills shrink had told me: that I saw myself as my father had seen me, as hateful and worthless, and that as a result I looked for men who made me feel as hateful and worthless and awful as he’d made me feel—as awful as I thought I deserved to feel.
It was so complicated. Why was it so complicated? I just wanted to be wanted. Sure, maybe it had something to do with my father. He had never wanted me. But he was dead now. When would I get off the train?
The nanny was on her way over with Nathan. I was taking him to Chuck E. Cheese for lunch, and then we were going to the zoo, which he loved. He was the center of the universe, my little Nathan. It was Nathan who got me through the days and weeks and months.
Michael stepped out of the shower. “God, you look good,” he said.
“Yeah, right, I know—I’m a sexy bitch.”
WITH MICHAEL BIRNBAUM. A GENTLEMAN AND QUITE A STUD.
Michael laughed. He started getting dressed. “You want me to go to the zoo with you guys?” he asked.
“No,” I said. He was a good guy, my Michael. Too good. Too nice. What was I doing with him? I liked trouble.
A few nights later I went out for dinner with Bette Midler and her husband, Martin von Haselberg. They told me they wanted to set me up with a close friend of Martin’s, an abstract artist who taught at UCLA. He sounded like trouble. I went out with him and we ended up in bed, and I felt awful about it. Nothing to do with the artist, of course. It was this wanting-to-be-wanted bullshit again.
When I got back to my place, Michael was waiting outside with flowers.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked.
“I want you to come to Cannes with me,” he said. So we went.
He’d booked us on business class. I was disappointed. I wanted
better. That’s what I told myself, but it wasn’t really about that at all. It was much simpler. I was fed up with Michael for being so goddamn nice. How was I going to replay ancient history with someone who insisted on being so good to me?
I felt the presence of that familiar, lurking demon. I’d been married and divorced twice. I’d been in and out of rehab twice. I’d had two abortions. I had a son, but his father and I couldn’t even be in the same room together without trying to claw each other’s eyes out. I was sitting on a plane next to a man who seemed to love me, but I couldn’t love him in return. I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. Christ! What is this? I wondered. I’m too young for a midlife crisis.
We checked into the Hotel du Cap, then went upstairs and showered and dressed for lunch. I kept looking at Michael, this kind, wonderful, loving man, and I realized that he wasn’t the problem; I was. We passed through the lobby, en route to lunch, and when the elevator doors opened I thought I saw someone I knew near the front desk.
“Give me a minute,” I told Michael. “I have to say hello.”
It was Sly Stallone, perched on a pair of cowboy boots with three-inch heels and blue jeans so tight it was a wonder he could breathe.
“Hello, Mr. Stallone,” I said. He turned to face me. His assistant, Kevin, looked like he was ready to intervene.
“Yo, Janice!” Sly said. He’s such a goofball in real life that it’s hard to believe he became what he became (well, for a little while, anyway). “What are you doing here?” He looked across the lobby and saw Michael, who half-waved from the distance. “Geez, you’re still with him?” Sly said.
“Get me the fuck out of here,” I said. “I’m going out of my mind.”
“Can it wait till tonight?” he asked.
“If it must,” I said.
“My plane leaves at ten. Kevin here will set everything up.” Then he gave me a kind of stage handshake, to show Michael that it was all on the up-and-up, and clacked across the lobby in his high heels.
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