No Lifeguard on Duty

by Janice Dickinson

  “Please slow down,” I begged.

  “What were you thinking about back there? Do you regret having married me?”

  “No, I do not regret having married you. But I’d like to live long enough to enjoy it.”

  He gunned the engine. We were really whipping around the curves now. My mouth felt dry.

  “Albert, please,” I said. But that was all I said. He lost control of the car around the next curve, and we sailed through a retaining wall and plummeted over the side.

  I’m dead, I thought. Please God don’t let me die. I have two kids who need me.

  We were moving awfully fast, crashing over rocks and through brush and small trees. I could hear glass shattering and one of the tires blowing—loud as a gunshot—and then the windshield popped and everything went dark. When I came to, not long afterward, we were still upright, with the right front side of the car a few feet off the ground and the right tire audibly spinning. I could smell gasoline.

  I should have seen it coming. Third time to the altar, and I can’t even get out of the honeymoon without a car wreck. Story of my life.

  “Albert?” I said. He was moaning. I looked over at him. His face was covered in blood. “Albert, are you okay?” He didn’t answer. I popped my seatbelt. I wiggled my toes. It was probably a silly thing to do, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t paralyzed. I opened my door and got out and went around to Albert’s side and opened his door. “Can you walk?” I asked. He just moaned. I reached in and removed his seatbelt and dragged him out of the car. He was useless. He tried to walk up the pitched hill, with me half-carrying him, but we still had to stop and rest every thirty seconds. Finally, exhausted, we reached the side of the road. It was deathly still. I looked over at Albert’s face. He looked awful. He seemed to be in shock. “You’re fine,” I said. “You’re going to be fine.”

  I heard the distant whine of a motorcycle and got to my feet and stood in the middle of the road. I waved my arms, and the motorcycle slowed down and stopped. The driver cut the engine. He looked wide-eyed and frightened. “Please get help,” I said. “My husband is badly hurt.” He raced off. I went back to the side of the road and sat beside Albert and held him in my arms and tried to comfort him. I think I fell asleep for a while. The sirens woke me. I could barely keep my eyes open en route to the hospital, but all the way there I held Albert’s hand. “You’re going to be fine,” I said. “Everything is going to be fine.”

  It took a hundred stitches to patch him together, and when the doctors were done he looked a little bit like Frankenstein. Then again, as the doctors pointed out, we were both lucky to be alive.

  We stayed in St. Bart’s till Albert was well enough to fly. When we finally got back to L.A., Albert sat around for a week, staring at the walls and feeling sorry for himself. But then he couldn’t take it anymore. He started going out to the club and drinking again, showing off his scars like some returning goddamn war hero.

  IN PARIS.

  But I didn’t go to the clubs with him anymore. I was tired of that scene. Instead, I stayed at his place in Malibu, with Savannah and the nanny, and tried not to think of the mess I’d made of my life. I tried not to think about the failed marriages and the abortions and the ongoing battles with Simon, who was determined to punish me by asking the courts to grant him sole custody of Nathan. Of course, it all gnawed away at me no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, but there’s nothing like a few drinks and bad sitcoms to ease the pain. You feel so much better about yourself as the liquor warms your belly and works its way toward the extremities. And everything on TV sounds so wonderfully witty when you’re drunk. I giggled myself into exhaustion, drank and giggled my way to sleep.

  Late one night, when I was watching Letterman, the phone rang. It was Debbie, calling to tell me that Mom had just passed away. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Debbie got pissed and hung up. I sat there, numb, until I heard cars pulling up outside. Albert was home. He’d brought a bunch of hangers-on from the club—something he did almost every night.

  “My mother died,” I said.

  “Gee,” he said. “I’m sorry, honey.” Then he went to get the door and let his friends in. They went off to the den to drink.

  I flew down for the funeral two days later and flew back that same night. There was nothing for me in Hollywood, Florida, anymore. And it occurs to me now, as I say that, that there had never been anything for me there. Albert didn’t come. When I got home, there was a letter waiting for me on the kitchen table. It was already open. It was from Stephanie Seymour: an engraved invitation to her bridal shower in Paris. She was about to marry Peter Brandt, a successful entrepreneur. Axl was history, of course. But we all had a little history, right?

  “I think we should go,” Albert said. He must have been feeling guilty. “We’ll go and have a good time.”

  I thought about Stephanie and all the others. Friendship is strange, especially in this line of work. You meet on a shoot—for the first time—and you tell each other absolutely everything about your lives. No detail is too intimate. But then the shoot’s over and you go back to your lives, as if you’d shared nothing, nothing at all, and find yourself feeling more alone than ever. I felt horribly alone at that moment. I missed the girls; I missed the sisterhood; I missed modeling….

  So we went to Paris. And we tried to have fun. We went to restaurants and clubs and I drank too much and I did too many drugs. Finally, it was time for Stephanie’s party. I left Albert to his own devices and took a cab to the Bristol Hotel. Donatella Versace and Naomi Campbell, the hosts, had booked the penthouse suite, with its huge deck and lush gardens. Claudia Schiffer and Shalom Harlow and Amber Valetta were there. Donatella and Naomi made little speeches, and there were jokes about second marriages. Stephanie opened her gifts. We kept oohing and aahing over them. Sexy lingerie. Purses. A necklace or two. Stephanie began to cry. “I’m going to make it work this time,” she said. “I need this to work. I really love this guy. It’s not like last time.”

  We went to the Barfly afterward. We piled out of the limo—one girl more beautiful than the next—and into the nightclub. Heads snapped round: The men must have thought they’d died and gone to Party Model Heaven. We stayed in our little girls-only corner and got shit-faced, and I ended up on the table, doing a little bump-and-grind number for everyone in the place. It was an X-rated version of my adolescent dance at the Orange Bowl so many years ago, a lifetime ago. Men started throwing money at us. And the girls were laughing and grabbing the big bills and stuffing them between their tits. But suddenly I wasn’t feeling very good. Naomi helped me off the table and led me to the bathroom, where I promptly threw up. And I realized it had nothing to do with the champagne or the cognac or the cocaine. I was sick over me; I was sick about me; I hated myself at that moment. I had just turned forty, and I’d made a fucking mess of my life.

  “Are you all right?” Stephanie asked me. She’d come into the bathroom to see if she could help. I was still facing the bowl, like a goddamn bulimic.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I just drank too much.”

  On the flight home, I couldn’t even look at Albert. I had decided I was going to tell him everything—we were prisoners on the plane, a captive audience: why not just come clean?—but of course I told him nothing. I practiced, sure. In my head. In my head I told him it was over. In my head I gave him the ring back. In my head I told him we’d made a huge mistake and apologized for my part in it and suggested that we just move on with our lives and pretend it never happened. I explained that I had a great deal of work to do on myself, and that I wanted to get started before it was too late. It was bizarre, like one of those fantasy sequences in a movie. You think it’s really happening until suddenly you hear that voice on the PA system—“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We’re beginning our descent into the Los Angeles area”—and you turn to look at the person next to you and it hits you like a ton of bricks. Jesus. This is me. This is my goddamn life. Th
at’s when Albert turned to face me and smiled his sweet smile and said, “I love you, babe.” And I smiled sweetly back and said, “I love you, too.”

  On the ride home, in the limo, I told myself I’d talk to him in the morning, when both of us were rested. Come clean. But I didn’t talk to him the next morning, or the morning after that. I drank and watched sitcoms for what felt like weeks on end, and one night he came home in a frenzy and asked me who I was fucking.

  “I’m not fucking anyone,” I said.

  “Liar!” he bellowed.

  I asked him to keep his voice down; I was worried he’d wake Savannah. He grabbed my arm and we started pushing each other.

  “Who are you fucking?” he asked again.

  “No one,” I said. I was crying by this time. He was yelling, and scaring the shit out of me. I mean, I’d never seen Albert like this.

  “All right,” he said. His teeth were clenched. His eyes were red with fury. He crossed to his desk and found a pad and paper and returned to my side and threw them at me. The pen fell to the floor.

  “Pick it up,” he said.

  “Albert—”

  “Pick the fucking pen up right fucking now!”

  I reached for the pen. It was shaking in my hand. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “Okay,” he said. “I want you to write down the name of every man you ever fucked.”

  “Albert, that’s crazy.”

  “What’s the matter? Can’t you remember? Are there too many to count, slut?”

  “I can remember,” I said. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. “But I don’t want to remember. I’ve made my share of mistakes. Is that what you want to hear? I’m ashamed. I admit it.”

  “I don’t see you writing,” he said.

  “I’m not doing this, Albert. You’re crazy.” I stood up and tried to leave, but he grabbed me and pulled me onto the couch, then sat next to me.

  “Albert, please…” I started writing. I wrote every male name that popped into my head. I made up names. I wrote down the names of men I’d never slept with. I wrote and wrote and filled two pages with names: Colonel Sanders. Helmut Kohl. Don Knotts.

  “Is that all?” Albert said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t see Warren Beatty,” he said.

  I pointed out Warren Beatty’s name.

  “Where’s Jack Nicholson?” he barked.

  “There,” I said. “A little farther up.”

  He looked. He seemed satisfied. “If I find out you left anyone out…”

  “I didn’t leave anyone out, Albert.”

  “I’m going to study this list carefully,” he said.

  “Can I go to bed now?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. He went over to the desk, with the list, and switched on the Tizio lamp and sat down to read it. I went to bed. I popped two sleeping pills and drifted off, wondering how it had come to this. But I knew how it had come to this. I knew who was to blame. I was to blame. The big question was whether I was going to do anything about it.

  ON MY OWN

  In the morning, Albert acted as if nothing had happened. I found him in the kitchen, staring into his coffee.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I’m leaving you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” I said.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Why? Why? Because you’re fucking insane,” I said. “That’s why.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  My jaw dropped. “You don’t?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  The minute he left the house, I packed what I could into a small bag, grabbed Savannah, and drove us to the Westwood Marquis. I cried as I checked in. I cried in the elevator. I cried when the doorman showed me the view.

  Word got out fast, and people called. Everyone was very concerned about me, at least in principle, but only my gay friends really came through. Every last one of them offered me his home. All the others offered me the usual: “I’m here if you need me.” “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” “Let’s have dinner Tuesday.” It reminded me of that great cartoon in The New Yorker, of some executive standing at his desk, on the phone, saying, “No, Thursday’s out. How’s never? Is never good for you?”

  Sly came by the hotel, unannounced and uninvited. He stood in front of me, shaking his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe it,” he said. I noticed he was staring at the engagement ring. “How many carats is that fucking thing?”

  “Twenty-three,” I said. I looked down at the ring, too. I made a mental note to myself to return it. In due time, of course.

  Savannah woke up and began to cry. Sly looked over at her and suddenly he was in a foul mood. “Call me,” he said. He split; I went off to change a diaper. I would’ve cried, but I was all cried out. I was dehydrated from crying. I remember thinking, That can’t be good for my skin.

  The next day I got a call from Jon Peters, the producer. He had a guest house in Beverly Hills that was bigger than any house I’d ever lived in. He asked me to bring Savannah over and move in. I packed up my things and my little girl and drove over to Jon’s estate.

  Jon Peters was very, very rich. He’d made a few bucks off Batman, and a couple hundred million more when he and his partner, Peter Guber, sold their production company to the Japanese geniuses at Sony Pictures. People said it was payback for Pearl Harbor. They gave them a lot of turkeys. But who hits a home run every time at bat?

  The house—the guest house—was magnificent. The main house—well, I can’t find words to describe it. Robin Leach could’ve lived a thousand lifestyles within those art-drenched walls.

  Albert kept driving up to the forbidding front gates in his jet-black Ferrari, day after day, sometimes two and three times a day. He told the private security guards that I wanted to see him, that he had an appointment. He was insistent and belligerent. Finally, the guards asked him not to show his face again. If he did, they told him, life was going to get unpretty. Of course, the language they used was rather more descriptive.

  So instead, Albert called and called, at all hours of the day and night, and I threatened to go to the police if he kept it up.

  “Would you just tell me what I’ve done?” he wailed.

  “You know what you’ve done,” I said, and I hung up.

  He kept on calling. He’d cry and cry, and even resorted to cursing me. “I was the best thing that ever happened to you,” he said. “You’re nothing without me!”

  Jon Peters was a good friend and a perfect gentleman. Savannah played with his children. He had me over for dinner parties. Barbra Streisand was a frequent guest. I met Kevin Costner there. Will Smith. John Cusack. Mike Ovitz. I met more A-list talent in the next four months than I’d met in all the years prior and all the years since.

  WITH JON PETERS IN 1994. HE HAS ALWAYS PROTECTED ME.

  I took pictures of Jon and of his kids and he flipped over them and asked why I wasn’t cashing in on my talent. So I called Sygma, the photo agency, and told them I wanted to get serious. I went out and took pictures and made money and lived life. And I still got occasional calls for modeling jobs. They were generally jobs for a woman of a “certain age.” I didn’t ask for the jobs, but I took them. I was making ends meet, yes, but I was a long way from summer rentals in Southampton and platinum Rolexes. Still, who needed that? What I needed now was balance, forward movement; peace. Of course I didn’t know where to find those things. I thought, briefly, about opening a small boutique: “Self-esteem? That’ll be on Aisle Three, right next to Self-love.” Ha ha.

  My search led me, finally, to the bookstores. I began to haunt the self-help sections, floating among the shelves like a wounded ghost, always on the lookout for the latest Big Promise. I kept running into the same people over and over again—people who were as lost as I was. We would nod politely as we squeezed past each other in the aisles, too self-conscious to make eye contact. We
were ashamed, I guess. We felt bad for being damaged, for being needy.

  I was voracious. Insatiable. I was reading morning, noon, and night. But I wasn’t finding what I was looking for. All the books told me the same thing. Life is hard, they said. I know life is hard, motherfucker. I’m just looking for a little basic happiness. “Oh? Happiness? Basic happiness? That’s on Aisle Seven, just before Drooling Euphoria.”

  The phone rang one night. Two A.M. It was John Cusack. “I hear you’re rowdy,” he said.

  “You hear wrong,” I said.

  “Come on,” he said. “Come out and party.”

  I hung up on him. Every few weeks he’d call and ask me out and make me laugh. He sounded lonely. He sounded like he’d been drinking. I knew what that was like. Eventually, he stopped calling. But years later I ran into him on a plane en route to New York, and, well—what can I say? Shit happens.

  In late August I found a house in Bel-Air, thanked Jon for his hospitality, and moved into my new digs. I didn’t have a man in my life, but I had gay men in my life—thank God—and plenty of good friends. I discovered something important about friendship: It may be less exciting and less fulfilling than a passionate romance, but it’s also less demanding, and less noisy. You can have a friend and still have a life. I’m sure you can have a man and have a life, too, I just didn’t know how to do it, and I didn’t feel like taking any chances. I felt “cured” of men. I wanted to believe I was cured. And I had my kids to keep me warm.

  So I became a full-time mother. The morning rush to school, the box lunches, the play dates, the PTA meetings, the karate-computer-ballet-music-art classes—my kids consumed me. This was all deliberate, of course: the rapture of losing myself in them, of getting caught up in their little dramas. I’d had enough dramas of my own.