by Hogan, Hulk
As for Linda? This was her moment to shine. It’s like she had been waiting twenty years for the cameras to be pointed her way instead of mine. She only wanted to be seen with full-blown makeup and perfect hair—and she put some of that attitude on Brooke as well. “Put on a different dress. Make sure your hair’s blown out!” She was right, in a way. We were trying to build Brooke’s career, and you wanted her to be as appealing as possible.
There were times when I’d give the producers the keys to the house, so they could come in super early in the morning and shoot us in bed while we were still sleeping. I didn’t care if my butt was hanging out or I had drool on my pillow. That was part of the appeal of the show—to let people into the Hogans’ “real life.” Linda didn’t like it. On those days, she would set her alarm really early and get up and brush her hair and her teeth and get some basic makeup on before the camera people ever arrived. Just as I suspected might happen, Linda got bored and fed up with the whole process real quick, but we’d all signed contracts and we had to do this according to their schedules.
There really were schedules, too. They would need to shoot a scene with me from 8:30 till 9:30 a.m., and then they’d need the whole family from 10:00 to 12:45. Then there’s a lunch break. It was pretty regimented. Even if you weren’t filming you couldn’t go running off to the mall or something. If I was cooking breakfast for the kids and happened to cut my thumb off, they’d want to be sure Linda was close by so they could get her reaction and not miss the magic, you know?
But for all the headaches, the show itself worked. When it launched in July 2005, Hogan Knows Best had the biggest debut of any show in VH1 history.
Suddenly, my whole family was living a red-carpet life. They were invited to all the big parties: MTV Awards, the Grammys, not to mention the after-parties. They were getting that big-star treatment. Even Linda seemed really happy for a while. We were all riding high. I loved watching my family get a chance to bask in the glory of that spotlight.
I started working with a top-notch publicist in New York City named Elizabeth Rosenthal, who landed us stories in People magazine and booked the whole family on Larry King Live. We did CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. I appeared on Jay Leno, and we all went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. It was wild!
We had money flowing in. We had offers flowing in. This red-hot record producer, Scott Storch, suddenly showed interest in working to get Brooke’s recording career back on track. VH1 upped us for a second season.
It was all rolling out just the way we’d hoped it would.
In public, we were all having the time of our lives, but that public image only further masked the problems that were growing behind the scenes.
Most of the cracks in my marriage didn’t show up in the first three seasons of that TV show. There were moments where Linda or I rolled our eyes at each other’s behavior, but that was just about the extent of it. There were plenty of times when Linda would lose it and start cussing me out in front of the crew, but no one wanted to see that kind of ugliness on TV. So the producers never aired it. They aired the footage where we hid our true feelings and just pretended to get along like a normal—if somewhat eccentric—couple.
Off-camera, an entirely different story kept unfolding. Linda’s complaining about how miserable she was reached epic proportions. Every day she talked about how much she hated Florida. Every day she talked about how much she hated our neighbors and never wanted to see them. Anything you can think of, she’d find a reason to hate it.
Her drinking also started to affect the family. It seemed like every night she would get into the wine, and before long she’d start cussing everybody out—including Brooke and Nick.
I can’t tell you how many nights I went to bed and the last words I heard before my head hit the pillow were “Fuck you, Terry.” It got so bad, she wouldn’t touch me. We’d go to bed and roll over, and there was no physical contact whatsoever. Just the “Fuck you” ringing in my ears.
At her worst, she said those same words to the kids. If I ever said F-you to one of my kids, I wouldn’t be the same person. It would shake me to my bones. But when she was drunk, she didn’t hesitate to use foul language in front of the kids. I even heard her use the C-word on Brooke.
The next morning we’d wake up, and everything would be fine. She’d act as if nothing happened. I’d try to talk to her about it, the kids would try to talk to her about it, but she just wouldn’t hear us out.
She blamed me for everything. I kept blaming myself, too, thinking I had let her down, thinking I had somehow caused her to be this miserable.
The drinking reached a point where it seemed to affect our social life. After Linda got her second glass of wine in her, people would start to leave. They probably didn’t want to be present for the Jekyll and Hyde act that I had witnessed one time too many.
The night we wrapped filming on the very first season, we held a wrap party at this bar called Shephard’s on Clearwater Beach—the in spot where all the twentysomethings love to party.
Linda was drinking and she refused to leave. When I tried to pull her off the dance floor we got into a huge fight, right in front of everybody. “It’s only three thirty in the morning!” she screamed. “I’ll stay out as late as I fucking want!”
The next morning, Linda got on a plane to California. I called her parents and told them how bad things had become, and even Linda’s mother, Gail, told me she thought Linda needed help. She had received so many phone calls from Linda just complaining and moaning about everything in her life. It was clear to me that she’d crossed the line with her drinking.
So Gail and Joe picked Linda up at the airport that day and drove her straight to the Betty Ford Clinic.
A few days into her stay, Linda started calling me, begging me to let her come home. I didn’t know how to handle it, so I actually called Gail for advice. “No, don’t let her out. Don’t let her out,” Gail begged me. “It’s too soon.”
But Linda begged. Publicly, Linda’s attorney would later say she was only in there for evaluation.
The thing is, Linda had the right to leave whenever she wanted. It wasn’t jail. I think she was too afraid to walk out of there without having one of us give her the okay.
I’m the one with the soft heart. She knows that, and after just ten days, I let her come home, and she swore up and down that she would never drink again. The kids begged her to stay true to her word: “Please, Mom. For us.” She swore to it. “I’ll quit for the kids. I promise.”
Her promise only lasted about three days.
I was so afraid of setting her off, I soon found myself tiptoeing into the house each night. If I had been out wrestling and came home at two in the morning, I would walk in to the stench of alcohol in our bedroom. She reeked of it—that nasty, fermenting smell that oozes from your pores and floats out on your breath.
Her anger came roaring back. And the blame for everything.
And the disappearing. When Brooke went through some surgery in 2005, I coincidentally had to get knee surgery at the exact same time. Neither of us were supposed to get out of bed for a few days. If I ever wanted to wrestle again, it was real important that I let that knee heal. Of course, that was just one of the more memorable times that Linda decided to disappear and let us fend for ourselves.
Not knowing where she was or when she’d be back, I wound up hobbling around trying to take care of Brooke and get Nick everywhere he needed to go. My doctors freaked out when they heard I was walking, but what was I supposed to do? Linda left me with no choice.
Miss Miami
It’s hard to comprehend when I look at it in retrospect, with a clear head, but Linda’s rage and fury was so frequent it just became expected. It was almost routine. Her cussing and swearing and disappearing felt like the new “normal” in our household. In fact, we were bombarded by so many moments of misery that anytime she said something positive it was shocking. And in 2006, she started saying all these really great things—about Miami.
Suddenly she started talking about wanting to move to Miami full-time.
With the properties we owned already, we were stretching ourselves thin. The thing about multimillion-dollar mansions is the maintenance and upkeep can be tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. The gardeners and maintenance crews, cleaning crews, electric costs. Our caretaker, George, worked full-time just for us, and he barely had time to get everything done. It’s an overwhelming amount of money and effort just to keep those places operating. So buying another home in Miami scared me. I was hardly wrestling at all—which meant I was hardly bringing in the millions I once made.
But I was desperate. I was desperate to make Linda happy. So we sold a home we owned in California and started seriously shopping in Miami. We wound up buying a spectacular $12 million property on North Bay Road—right next to the owners of Market America, whose guesthouse regularly played host to people like Jennifer Lopez and Eva Longoria. It was a road where members of the Bee Gees lived. Where Shaq had a home. Just a spectacular spot.
Linda was flying high for a while. She loved it. She felt like we were suddenly living where the action was. It was go, go, go.
There were plenty of problems when we moved in, of course, that were all played out on season three of Hogan Knows Best. The place had some issues, including a lack of garage space for all of our various vehicles, and a lack of space for all of Linda’s dogs. Well, that was the price of living in the big city, right? We’d make the best of it and make it work because Linda was where she wanted to be.
Wouldn’t you know it? Linda’s high wore off after just a few months. Little things set her off like crazy. Her car kept getting towed, and rather than finding a solution to the parking situation, she just kept parking on the street and blaming everyone else for the lousy parking laws in Miami.
She started flipping out and cussing and swearing again. She also started crying for what seemed like no reason at all. Nick and Brooke and I would all try to help. We all asked what was wrong and what we could do to fix it. But she never had any kind of answer.
Then she started disappearing again.
In November of 2006, we were barely settled into this new $12 million house when Linda flew off the handle and took off.
It was the day before Thanksgiving. Linda’s hairdresser, Tracy (and her assistant), came down that morning to do Linda’s hair. According to Tracy, Linda had some wine as she sat in the chair. She always liked to do that. It was relaxing for her. But on this day, for some reason, Linda worked herself into a tizzy about how unhappy she was and she got up and walked out the door. Tracy wasn’t sure what set her off, but at that point in our marriage it could have been anything. And I mean anything. The wind would blow a door shut and she’d yell, “Who slammed the fucking door! I’m sick and tired of doors slamming! I’m leaving!”
Whatever it was, by the time I came home she was gone. I tried calling her, but she never picked up. I went driving all over South Beach that afternoon trying to find my wife, but I never tracked her down. That night I told the kids not to worry. “I’m sure she’ll be back. She’s never missed a holiday,” I assured them.
Linda and I had a triple-king-sized bed in our bedroom, and the kids wound up sleeping in that giant bed with me that night. It didn’t matter what I said. They were worried sick. Their mom was missing. For all we knew, she had crashed her car somewhere and was lying in a ditch on the side of the road.
Thanksgiving morning came, and no Linda. I walked all over the house, opening and closing doors, hoping that she had come home late and just slept in another room. She wasn’t there. I kept thinking that she’d show up by dinnertime, so the kids and I started cooking. I’ve never cooked a turkey in my life, but I put it in the oven and did my best. A few hours later, the three of us sat down and ate Thanksgiving dinner in that house alone. The kids without their mom. Me without my wife.
In my mind, on that Thanksgiving Day, I didn’t have anything left to be thankful for at all.
Two days later, Linda called. She was in California, happy as could be, acting as if nothing was wrong. I tried to get an explanation, and she just said she needed to go to California. “Why?” she asked—as if my asking for an explanation was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. As if her behavior was normal.
I loved her so much and I wanted to help her. I wanted to get to the bottom of why she was acting this way. But I couldn’t. I felt helpless. I felt lost.
Chapter 14
Season of Change
By the time season four of Hogan Knows Best came around, Brooke’s music career was really heating up. It should have been a really happy time, but Brooke had so many problems with her mom that she kept breaking down and crying at the recording studio and before her performances out on the road.
The fact is, Linda’s rage and fury kept crossing into her managerial role. When Brooke was hired to sing the national anthem at the Daytona 500, in front of 125,000 people, Linda made Brooke so upset she barely got through the performance. When she opened for this real hot group, My Chemical Romance, same thing. She would get on her about her clothes and her outfits and how fat she looked, her hairstyle. She’d yell at her for missing notes, not sounding good. It was affecting Brooke’s ability to get the job done, in a real big way.
So the record company tried to keep friends and handlers around Brooke all the time—just to take care of her and make sure she was all right.
One of those handlers the record company brought in was a woman named Christiane Plante. Christiane was so great with Brooke. She did everything she could to look after her, and I loved seeing someone take care of my daughter that way. She was just so positive and caring. She was thirty-four, but she and Brooke became really close. Almost like best friends, in a way.
Linda was disappearing on a regular basis by January and February of 2007. If she wasn’t flying out to California, she was driving all the way back to Tampa. I never knew why, and half the time I didn’t know where she was. The F-yous were just out of control, and now always coupled with her threatening to move to California and file for divorce. It’s like she was taunting me, trying to get me to pull the trigger and leave her first. There was no back and forth anymore. No give and take. I don’t think you can even call it a marriage. It wasn’t a partnership, either. It wasn’t a friendship. It was nothing but awful.
On the first day of filming for season four, Linda just didn’t show up. The production crew was all set up, and the whole staff was there and ready to go, and no Linda. We missed the whole first day. We missed the whole second day. Suddenly the producers and the VH1 guys are threatening to sue me. “Don’t sue me! I’m here! It’s Linda,” I kept telling them.
At first I didn’t know where she was. I was just worried sick. I got real depressed about it. I was worried something had happened to her. When she finally called from California she didn’t even have an excuse. She just kept telling me to have them start without her. I told her she needed to get on a plane, and she refused. It was awful. It took almost two weeks before we got Linda back and actually started shooting. I was just a wreck. The fact that our personal problems were spilling over into Brooke’s career, and now this show? I was embarrassed, and I didn’t know what to do.
None of this is an excuse for what happened next. I just want you to understand the state of my relationship, and how fragile my emotions were.
One day in the middle of all of that, Christiane Plante called. Brooke had broken down
again, and she wanted to ask me what I thought she should do to help her, but as soon as she heard the sound of my voice she said, “Oh my God. What’s wrong?”
She turned that caring attention she had given Brooke on me. So I told her. “I’m just real worried about Linda,” I replied.
Christiane knew what Linda had been pulling. She heard about it all from Brooke, and witnessed plenty of Linda’s behavior firsthand. She knew how much trouble Brooke had been having, and she sympathized with my situation. “I don’t know why she’s doing this to you and Brooke.”
Over the phone that day, Christiane gave me a shoulder to lean on, at least verbally. I can’t tell you how much I needed that.
Maybe a month or so later, Brooke made an appearance up in New York City, and I went along to introduce her from the stage. Christiane was along for that trip, and the three of us—she, Brooke, and I—went out to dinner afterward. Back at the hotel that night, Christiane and I both stopped by Brooke’s room to check on her at the same time. I eventually left the two of them there and went downstairs to my room. A half hour or so later, because I’m always over the top and have to check one more time, I called Brooke’s room again just to make sure she was okay.
Christiane answered the phone. She said Brooke was going to bed and she was just leaving. Then she asked me what I was doing.
“I’m probably gonna drink a glass of wine and just hang out,” I said. Then words came from my mouth that I didn’t expect. “Why don’t you come down and join me?”