by Gary Sinise
In the end, I felt I fully inhabited the character. The movie ended up garnering strong reviews and winning a slew of awards, including an Emmy for Best Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television. I was nominated for an Emmy and won the Golden Globe for Best Actor and the Screen Actors Guild Award. I felt overwhelmed by how my life had changed. Certainly I was grateful for how things were going.
Ron Howard’s next movie was a crime thriller called Ransom starring Mel Gibson, Rene Russo, Liev Schreiber, and Donnie Wahlberg. Ron asked me to play the villain—a detective gone bad named Jimmy Shaker who kidnaps Mel’s young son and holds him for ransom. I read the script and despised this character so much I turned down the part. My children were little at the time; the villain is a psychopath, and I hated the idea of anyone stealing children. He was also written as older than me, so I had trouble seeing myself doing it. I auditioned for a couple of other projects, then started second-guessing myself. Ron Howard specifically asked me to play this part. How could I turn down Ron Howard? But I’d already said no. Was it too late?
In October 1995, I went to the Halloween parade at my children’s school and ran into Brian Grazer, Ron’s producing partner. Brian’s children went to the same school as mine, and I’d worked with Brian on Apollo 13, so I asked how everything was going with Ransom. Brian said Ron hadn’t cast the role of the villain yet, and Brian wondered if I was rethinking my decision. I admitted I was.
When I got home, I called my agents and mentioned I’d run into Brian and we’d discussed Ransom. My agents told me that the role had not been cast yet, but Ron was in discussions with another actor. I indicated that if the part was still available, I’d like to do it. My agents hung up the phone. Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang. It was Ron Howard, who asked, “Now, is this just good agenting, or are you really second-guessing doing this part?” I laughed and said, “Well, Ron, my agents are good, but yes, I’d be interested if the role is still available.” Luckily for me, Ron gave me the part.
I’d played a villain before in Jack the Bear, but the villain in Ransom was creepier. It was a major role, too, with the story arc cutting back and forth between Mel’s character and mine. At first I didn’t like absorbing the thoughts of such a dark character, but after a while I started to really get into it and gave the role my all. Some moments of accidental slapstick during shooting helped me get through it. In one scene, I was supposed to knee Mel in the stomach, but I landed too low. Luckily, Mel had performed these types of scenes before and was prepared: he wore a cup. Later in the week, I had a gift basket with an assortment of pecans, almonds, and pistachios sent to Mel’s room with a note saying, “Sorry about your nuts. Maybe you can use these. Enjoy the basket.”
We shot Ransom in New York City during awards season. On the morning the Oscar nominations were announced, Mel received a nomination for his outstanding work directing Braveheart, but Ron Howard was passed over for his work directing Apollo 13. We were all happy for Mel, but I was disappointed for Ron, because he’d really poured his heart into Apollo 13. The movie received a lot of other nominations, just not for Best Director. There wasn’t exactly tension on the set that morning, but there was definitely a strange vibe. I decided we needed to get the elephant out of the room. That same morning, Ron was directing both Mel and me in a scene, giving both of us instructions, and there was some discussion about what should happen. I stopped Ron cold, pointed at Mel, and said, “Hey, maybe we should listen to the guy who just got the nomination for Best Director.” Everybody laughed, including Ron, and we patted Ron on the back. We all knew how hard Ron had worked on Apollo 13.
In the end, Ransom was a big hit. Critics liked the movie, a very different film for Ron Howard, a tense, suspenseful drama. It ended up earning more than $309 million at the box office.
The SAG awards were held during the filming of Ransom, and I was up for an award for Truman, but I couldn’t fly to the West Coast and back to New York in time to be back on set. When they announced that I’d won, I was watching the show on TV. “Gary Sinise couldn’t be here tonight, so we accept this award on his behalf.” Eating a lonely dinner in my hotel room, I had to chuckle.
So many other things were happening during this time. I was here, there, and everywhere. In addition to the film work, in the fall of 1995 I had directed Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer-winning play Buried Child for Steppenwolf, and in the spring of 1996 we moved it to Broadway. The play was nominated for five Tony Awards, including Best Play. The 1990s were proving to be a very productive period. Overall, I felt tremendously thankful for the opportunities.
But it wasn’t all success.
In 1996, director John Frankenheimer asked me to play the lead role in a made-for-TV movie about controversial Alabama governor George Wallace. Frankenheimer was already legendary by then for directing Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Grand Prix, and French Connection II, and I read the script and liked it. But I’d recently played Truman, so I wanted to do a feature film next, always trying to move from supporting roles into leading roles. When I turned him down, John became emphatic over the phone and said, “No—you can’t do that! Let me come out to your house right now and bring you some material.” He drove out right away, and he showed me books, and we watched a video of George Wallace, and John talked me into it.
I’m so glad I said yes. John was a strong, sure-handed, master director, and playing the lead in this movie was going to be a great challenge. George Wallace was a complex, contentious character who was steeped in controversy throughout his political career. He became sucked into a backdoor allegiance with the Klan and made a series of wrong decisions, famously stating at his inauguration for governor, “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.” He stood in the schoolhouse doorway to block African American students Vivian Malone and James Hood from registering for classes at the University of Alabama. Yet he finally experienced a redemptive moment in real life, shown at the end of the film, where he apologizes to the African American community for all the wrongs he’d done. While I certainly didn’t agree with the bulk of George Wallace’s actions, this was a big movie role, Shakespearean in depth and power, and as challenging as anything I could imagine.
The wonderful Mare Winningham played George Wallace’s first wife, Lurleen, and Angelina Jolie, only twenty-one at the time, played Wallace’s second wife, Cornelia. My old pals from Steppenwolf, Terry Kinney and Francis Guinan, were also in the film, along with a terrific supporting cast. In the end, Angelina won a Golden Globe. I was nominated for a Golden Globe and won an Emmy, a SAG, and a CableACE Award.
So many great things were happening—all these wonderful projects with terrific actors, directors, and writers involved, many awards and accolades, year after year after year. But here’s what wasn’t successful: if you could peer underneath the surface of my life, you’d see a slightly different story.
Bit by bit, our family was facing some very difficult challenges—and they all came to a head during the filming of George Wallace. During this intense, crazy era, some harmful habits caught up with us, and into my family’s life would come more pain than we’d ever known.
CHAPTER 9
Darkness and Light
At four thirty in the morning on January 17, 1994, our home in Encino rattled and shook for what seemed like an eternity. Books tumbled off shelves. Lamps and vases toppled over and crashed onto the floor. Moira and I were both up in a wink. Ella, seventeen months old, was sleeping in a little bed in our bedroom. Moira grabbed her and rushed outside, while I sprinted into Mac’s room. Sophie was staying the night at her grandparents’ house not far away. The power was out, leaving our house totally black, and as I ran to Mac, I stepped on something flat and slick that shattered underneath my bare foot. A glass-framed picture had fallen off the wall. Luckily, my bare foot wasn’t cut, and I kept right on running. The house was still shaking when I grabbed Mac and raced with him outside. Moira and the baby met us on the driveway. Car alarms blared a
ll over the neighborhood. Neighbors shouted. Our house continued to crackle and groan.
A huge earthquake was shaking Los Angeles. Later termed the “Northridge Earthquake,” it registered 6.7 on the Richter scale, killing fifty-seven people and injuring another eighty-seven hundred. Our rental house in Encino was up in the hills of the San Fernando Valley, and as we stood on our driveway in the pitch black of night, we looked across the vastness of the valley and every light was out. A total blackout. All we saw were electrical transformers exploding here and there—just random spots of fire amid the darkness. Normally, the valley at night was awash in color from thousands of streetlights, but this night the valley looked eerie, spooky, like the end of the world was upon us. We didn’t know what to do or where to go, so we huddled in our car, waiting for the sun to come up so we could see better, while listening to news updates on the radio. My parents soon drove over to our house with Sophie, and when the sun came up I went back into the house to examine the damage. The house was livable, fortunately, but the walls were cracked, household items were strewn everywhere, furniture was toppled, and we needed to do a lot of cleaning up.
Even then, I didn’t trust the structure, particularly after two large aftershocks hit that same day, with many smaller ones following. My brother-in-law Jack Treese and my wife’s sister Amy lived not far from us, so we drove over to their house to check on them. Streets looked like war zones. Shattered glass lay everywhere. Gas lines blazed. Commercial buildings were reduced to rubble. A multistory concrete parking lot at one of the malls had pancaked on top of itself. An entire section of Interstate 5—the main north-south freeway along the West Coast—had collapsed. For the next three days, we camped out in my parents’ backyard in tents, afraid to go back into our houses, wondering what the future would hold.
As horrible as that earthquake was, our family thankfully emerged relatively unscathed. Yet something else would shake us even more deeply over the next few years, causing us to wonder at times if we were going to make it.
Back in the mid-1970s, a young, incredibly talented theater student joined us at those early meetings held at Illinois State University to discuss the creation of Steppenwolf. As one of the meetings was winding down, she pulled a fifth of Scotch out of her purse and announced, “C’mon, everybody, let’s go!”
Everybody laughed. We were all into partying. Pot and booze were always available on college campuses, and the fact that this young theater student kept a bottle of whiskey in her purse didn’t seem unusual to any of us.
That student was Moira before I knew her very well, and I drank and partied right along with her and the rest of our friends in those days. Everyone drank, it seemed, yet in the coming years, the challenges with alcohol became more difficult for Moira, to the point where in the mid-1990s, alcohol held a strong grip on her.
Moira was the youngest of five children in the Harris family. Born first was her oldest sister, Lois. Then came two older brothers, Boyd and Arthur. Then came a fraternal twin sister, Amy. Moira was actually the baby of the family because she was the second of the twins. As a young child she loved to be at home with the family. She studied hard in school and for the most part stayed out of trouble. In her high school years in Pontiac, Illinois, the party scene began to unfold, although unlike me—the wild nut in high school, always boozing around with my buddies and skipping school to smoke pot—Moira was the good girl in high school. She attended a few high school parties and had a little taste here and there to fit in, but she never got drunk then. She was smart and pretty and always got good grades. Her freshman and sophomore classes named her homecoming queen, and first runner-up in her junior and senior years.
Moira and Amy, known around their high school as “the Harris twins,” were both popular, yet they were very different in personality. Amy was more confident and adventurous, Moira more reserved. Amy signed up for ROTC in college and after graduation went off to see the world by serving our country in the US Army. Moira stayed closer to home, pursuing theater and acting.
Moira always felt close to her family, and even though Illinois State University was less than an hour’s drive from home, being away was hard for her. In high school, the twins had been together constantly, doing many of the same things together and always looking out for each other. But in college, they slowly started going in different directions, moving in different circles. Moira was never a person to go against the grain, which usually meant she followed someone else’s lead and didn’t rock the boat. When she got to college, she saw that “going with the grain” included a fair amount of partying—and she fell into it right along with all her new friends. It wasn’t necessarily a part of her nature to be wild, nor did she drink all the time, but joining the crowd at those parties became her way of coping. She wanted to fit in. Yet even at the parties, Moira was trying to escape. You wouldn’t have known that if you met her. She was a great theater student. Onstage she was dynamite, a real powerhouse, and at those parties she was always fun. But offstage, inside her soul, she was wrestling with her fears. When she had a drink, the alcohol boosted her confidence, allowed her to feel more a part of things, and helped her to mask that fear. Over the years I have known many wonderful performers who are explosive and funny onstage, but who are shy, fearful, reserved, and even a bit awkward in daily life. Performing gives them confidence and a feeling of self-worth. Sometimes they will add a little alcohol on top of that. And Moira wrestled with self-confidence and fear. Performing and alcohol helped quiet those feelings.
Our paths crossed because of our mutual friends and our love of theater. In the early days of Steppenwolf, Moira and I certainly shared many a party together. But as we began to grow up, I was able to minimize my partying ways, particularly after I became a father. But alcohol gripped Moira tighter and tighter as the years rolled on, and it wouldn’t let go.
A few danger signs were visible early on. One night sometime in the 1980s, we had dinner at a restaurant with some Steppenwolf friends. All of us were drinking wine. When the meal was over, everybody got up to leave, but some half-full glasses of wine still sat on the table. Moira sort of scoffed and said, “Hey, we can’t leave all this good wine here.” Moira emptied everybody’s glass. No one batted an eye. That’s just Moi. Everyone loves wine. She just loves it a little more. This type of thing occurred more than once. Most of our friends from that era seemed to grow out of their partying, although a few didn’t. One college friend’s life shattered from alcohol in the mid-1980s. He went to rehab, quit drinking, and pieced his life back together. But again, the way we all saw Moira—me and others close to her—was to tell ourselves things like, “Well, she just likes her wine. It’s no big deal.”
As time went on, I began to see that it was a big deal, as life with Moira’s drinking got scarier and scarier. At one point, about 1995 or so, I simply stopped drinking with her. I figured if she didn’t have me as her drinking buddy anymore then that would help and maybe she would stop. But that was wishful thinking. Alcohol was consuming Moira by then, and sometimes she would drink so much she’d pass out. As time went on, I had to be careful what I said and how I said it, because when she drank she would react unpredictably and act kind of crazy. She started to hide her drinking from me and the family. I’d get rid of all the booze in the house, but then I’d open a top cabinet and find a bottle tucked far away in the back. I’d even sometimes find a bottle hidden in the tank of the toilet. At times when she came home, she’d reek of perfume and mouthwash, an effort to hide her drinking from me.
By the time I signed on to do George Wallace toward the end of 1996, alcohol had taken control of Moira. It was as if she had two personalities. When she wasn’t drinking, she was her beautiful self, the respectable Dr. Jekyll. But when she drank, she turned into the out-of-control and scary Mr. Hyde. Sophie was about nine years old at the worst of Moira’s drinking, Mac was six, and Ella was five. Moira was always a great mom and tried her best, but because of her drinking, at times I felt afraid f
or our children. Each night Moira would drink. Then each morning she’d feel guilty and apologize. I’d tell her she simply couldn’t keep doing this, and she’d say, “Yes, you’re right, I’ll stop,” but the next night she would do it again. She couldn’t help it. So many good things were happening in my acting career. I had started rehearsing George Wallace with John Frankenheimer, and I was trying to focus on my role. But night after night, when I came home from rehearsals, our home turned into a battlefield.
Of all our children, Sophie knew something was wrong. She often needed to adopt a parental role with her younger brother and sister, which wasn’t fair to her. One night I came home from rehearsal, and Moira had been drinking again. The kids were in the back of the house playing, and Moira and I got in a huge fight in the kitchen. At one point during the argument Sophie came marching in with Mac and Ella, singing and dancing and jumping around in hopes of trying to distract us by making us laugh. They knew trouble was in the air and were trying to help. Sophie especially. Moira and I stopped yelling at each other. I walked them back to play in the bedroom, then came back to the kitchen and after a while was able to calm Moira down. While it hurt to see the kids trying to act as peacemakers, their interruption actually helped to defuse the tension in that moment. But it was only a momentary calm in a gathering storm. We had a wonderful housekeeper, Lulu, who had become part of the family by then, and she always tried to take care of the kids while also helping Moira. Yet every night proved difficult. Finally, it became clear that Moira had no ability to stop her drinking.