I arrived in L.A. in 1982 ready to share my talent with the world. Start the drum roll, get that red carpet rolling, polish those award statues until they gleam; Claudia’s in town.
But then Joan told me that she couldn’t get me paid work with the Screen Actors Guild until I turned eighteen. (I looked too old for the kids’ roles that suited my age.) In the short term, that meant no income for almost three months. In the longer term, I’d be out of contention for the coming year’s Oscars and Emmys. You think that way when you’re seventeen. Still, I was upbeat. This was a small hitch. I could wait it out.
The new apartment was another unwelcome surprise. My bedroom window was right next to the building’s cluster of garbage cans. In summer it stank like hell. To add to the ambiance, Michael was a chain-smoker extraordinaire, using the last ember on one cigarette to start up the next. He’d have a cigarette going in the shower, on the toilet, in bed, and sometimes there was so much smoke in the apartment that I considered camping out by the 405 freeway because there would have been less pollution.
I knew Michael was gay before I moved in with him, but I didn’t know he had a bondage fetish. Our couches were wrapped in thick black leather belts, and a creepy studded leather mask was the central feature of the coffee table. It was like the S&M Mona Lisa; its hollow eyes followed you wherever you sat.
My room was like a different dimension. You opened the door from the smoke-filled bondage universe and stepped through the portal into Teen Girl World. I couldn’t afford new things, so I’d decorated with various odds and ends brought from home: a frilly pink duvet with ’70s rainbow sheets, a boom box, an oversize Led Zeppelin poster with the hermit from the tarot deck on it, and a small shelf with my favorite books. The only things I had that were definitively adult were the clothes that my mom had bought me—classy, expensive items—and the beginnings of an edged-weapon collection that my dad had encouraged.
Michael was a young, handsome guy, so he developed a thriving social life in no time at all, but I didn’t know anyone in L.A. I’d sit in my room trying to ignore the smell of garbage and the sound of the guys in the next room slapping the crap out of each other in the throes of passion and wonder what on earth I’d gotten myself into. Then I started getting sick in the mornings. When I took a home pregnancy test, the strip turned blue.
The pregnancy came as a shock. I’d been on the pill. My mom always insisted that every time she’d been knocked up, three boys and one girl, she’d been using birth control. My mom is given to hyperbole, so I’d taken that with a pinch of salt. Now I knew better. I also knew I had to get an abortion. I was far too young to have a child, and at that time I felt as though Charles Manson would have been a better candidate for fatherhood than Tre. I went to a clinic in downtown L.A. and found myself sitting silently with a half-dozen miserable women, waiting for a bed. It was like a production line. They put me under for six minutes, scraped me out, and gave me a glass of orange juice when I woke up. A nurse took the empty glass from my hand and tapped her clipboard impatiently.
“You’re all done. We need the bed for the next girl.”
I walked out of there feeling miserable and alone, but I was determined to hold it all together. I went back to the apartment, sat down, and worked out my expenses. The abortion had eaten into my already meager savings; I couldn’t make next month’s rent. What if I lost my room? Where the hell do you go when you can’t afford to live in a smoke-filled bondage den? If they’d given me an Academy Award right then and there, I’d have hocked it for fifty bucks.
I needed to stave off homelessness long enough to keep my dream alive, so I went down to a Mexican restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard and told the manager that I was a twenty-one-year-old Canadian (to explain why I didn’t have any ID). I don’t know if he believed me, but I got a job as a cocktail waitress. I had to wear this black leotard with fishnet stockings, high heels, and a little black bow tie. At the end of the shift I collected my tips—a grand total of twelve dollars. I went back to the apartment, locked myself in my room, and burst into tears. Stop the fucking world, I want to get off.
I was down to two choices: endure that shitty job or run back home with my tail between my legs. I convinced myself that something was going to happen. It just had to, because those two options were no options at all.
The next day I got a call. Joan had booked me for a five-line-or-under job on Dallas, which was enough to get me my union card. The clouds parted, and within a week I went from failed cocktail waitress to working actress on one of the most popular TV series of all time. It totally blew my mind to see Victoria Principal and Linda Grey walking around in person. It was only a small part, but it meant the world to me. I was an actress—a proper, working, Hollywood actress—and that little taste was all I needed to whet my appetite for success and dispel all doubt.
The episode was called “Some Do… Some Don’t,” and I was performing with Christopher Atkins (of The Blue Lagoon fame) in a storyline in which he was having an affair with Linda Grey’s character. Larry Hagman was directing, and he showed up on set wearing lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a feather. He was a very nice, very funny guy. I learned later that he was drinking up to four bottles of champagne a day while working on Dallas. That didn’t surprise me. It was a crazy successful show, and everything was laid on for the cast and crew. They put on steak and lobster for lunch. Everyone had his or her own private trailer. It felt very sexy.
Before I knew it I had another job, this time on Falcon Crest. Jane Wyman was a hard-ass pro, so all my scenes with her were very short and to the point. She was an old-school actress who commanded respect. Cliff Robertson was also in that series, and he was a complete asshole. I was running lines with Cliff when one of the assistant directors asked me if I could see my mark. I turned away for a second and told the assistant director that yes, thank you, I could see the mark just fine. Next thing I knew Robertson grabbed me by the throat and pushed me up against a wall.
“If you ever turn away from me when we’re running lines, I will fucking destroy you!”
I thought he was out of his mind. It was my first experience working with someone who was so volatile, and no one came to help me out or put a leash on Cliff.
Next I worked on T.J. Hooker with Heather Locklear and William Shatner. Shatner was hitting on anything with two legs. He invited me into his dressing room at lunch to run lines and started turning on the charm while finishing up a plate of Thai food. I wasn’t interested, but that didn’t seem to faze him. He moved in for a kiss, and a wave of garlic breath hit me in the face. He couldn’t have repelled a vampire any more effectively.
I began to wonder if this was how women were treated in the industry, if Robertson and Shatner were only the tip of a great, misogynistic iceberg.
I thank God to this day that I booked Dallas first, because that job bolstered my confidence just enough to allow me to shrug off those negative experiences. If I’d worked on those other shows first, faced with the idea of enduring a whole career of men like that, I might have considered donning the black leotard and heading back to the Mexican joint.
That year I went on to appear in The Calendar Girl Murders with Sharon Stone and Tom Skerrit and the action series Riptide. Joan got me so much work that by the end of 1983 my tax return showed $200,000 in income. I sent it home to my parents. I like to think of it as my “fuck you W2.”
I went on to book my first regular role on a series in Berrenger’s, playing Melody Hughes. Berrenger’s was exciting, because we were on a big stage, the Lorimar NBC set, and we had a lot of stars in the show, including Cesar Romero, Jack Scalia, and Yvette Mimieux. And for the first time in my career, I was cast in a role that was much older than my actual age (in this case thirty at eighteen). This would become a recurring event.
When I knew we’d been picked up for thirteen episodes I fled my room in the S&M den and moved into a beautiful, spacious apartment on Hayworth Avenue where the Golden Age gossip columnist Sheilah Graham had once lived with her lover, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The great novelist had been in poor health, in part due to alcoholism. After he suffered a heart attack, his doctor advised him to avoid exertion, so he moved in with Graham to avoid climbing the two flights of stairs at his Laurel Avenue apartment. Fitzgerald died in Graham’s apartment soon after.
Jeff Conaway, who I’d later star with in Babylon 5, played my lover on Berrenger’s, and Anita Morris, who was a big-name Broadway star, played my southern mother. She was a very sexy redhead with an incredible body, and in the show we were both having a relationship with Jeff’s character. For the first time in my life, if someone asked me what I did for work, I could honestly proclaim, “I’m an actress. I’m on NBC every Wednesday night at nine.” I started buying beautiful things to furnish my apartment. No more leather straps and masks! I was living alone, I had a career, I was making money. It was heaven. Now I felt that I’d arrived in Hollywood. I was living the life I’d always dreamed of.
I’d hang out at Spago and Nipper’s in Beverly Hills and Helena’s in Silver Lake. One night I went out to a club called Tramp at the Beverly Center and found myself at a table drinking with Rod Stewart and nightclub entrepreneur Victor Drai, who would come in and out of my life. I met his wife when I was coming out of the bathroom that night. I recognized her immediately as Kelly LeBrock, one of the most beautiful women in the world. She was on the cover of Vogue, had starred in The Woman in Red with Gene Wilder, and was about to start shooting Weird Science. She pushed me back into the bathroom stall as I was exiting, locked the door, pinned me up against the wall, and kissed me on the mouth. It was the first time I’d been kissed by a woman, and it was one of the sexiest moments of my life. We went back and sat with Victor and Rod and carried on as if nothing had happened. It was our little secret. My heart was pounding as Kelly smiled seductively at me across the table.
Kelly and I are still friends to this day. I made pot brownies for her brother when he was dying of lung cancer and went to his memorial service at her home. Kelly is a strong, beautiful woman and a survivor.
We’ve both had the misfortune to star in a movie with her ex-husband, Steven Seagal. I played the part of a federal agent in Half Past Dead and discovered firsthand why Kelly had filed for divorce.
It turned out that my teenage fears of an industry filled with misogynistic bastards were unfounded. I’ve worked with only a few assholes over the course of my career, and Steven Seagal was one of them. He was convinced I was a lesbian, because I wouldn’t sleep with him. Instead of reading his line, “Let’s get in the helicopter and kick some ass!” he’d say to me, “Do you like it up the ass?” His other inspired reinterpretations of the script involved wanting to know if I liked pussy, if I fucked my brother, and if I was into threesomes. The definitive action star, Seagal would sit in his trailer, chowing down on pizza and fried chicken. He refused to jog or do stunts or even be around a running fan for the helicopter scenes. His close-ups had to be tightly framed to crop out his double chin and the “hairline” of his obvious toupée.
It was 1984 and I was nearing my nineteenth birthday when Berrenger’s came to an end, and I had the idea that I would do some classical theater in between television jobs. I won the role of Lady Percy in Henry IV at the adorable little Globe Playhouse in West Hollywood, but the instant I went into rehearsals my agent called to tell me I’d been cast as the ingénue in a Bob Hope movie that also starred Don Ameche, Frank Gorshin, and Yvonne De Carlo. I was conflicted. I wanted to do the movie, but I’d already agreed to do the Shakespeare, and I didn’t want to break my word. To my relief, the director of the play, Louis Fantasia, told me, “Take the bloody film. The stage will always be here for you.”
The original title for the movie was A Nice, Quiet, Deadly Weekend in Palm Springs, even though it was entirely shot in Vancouver. Thank God, they changed the title to Masterpiece of Murder. It was Bob Hope’s last movie, and I guess he didn’t want a ridiculous title at the top of his list of screen credits.
I ended up becoming friends with the location manager, Christine, because we were about the same age, and I was the only actor on the set who was under forty. After the movie was finished we decided to use the money we’d made to go to Europe over the summer. People in L.A. were telling us, “You’ve got to call Roman when you get to Paris, you’ve got to call Roman.”
We could only afford to stay in a dumpy little hotel in Neuilly, a suburb just outside the most expensive part of Paris, but we did make the call. On our second day we sat for four hours with Roman Polanski at a fancy restaurant on the Champs-Élysées while he ate pricey shellfish and sipped fine champagne. He finished the bottle, announced that he had to go back to editing, and then hurried out the front door. When the restaurant manager presented us with the bill I told him what Polanski had told me, to put the meal on his tab.
“Mr. Polanski does not have an account here,” the manager replied.
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!
Roman Polanski stiffed us for the bill and wiped out our entire summer budget in one fell swoop.
When I got back from Paris, I booked the TV series Blacke’s Magic, with Hal Linden and Henry Morgan. Still nineteen, I was cast as a character in her late twenties with two stepchildren. Around the same time I started dating John Davis. John’s dad, Marvin Davis, had owned 20th Century Fox before he sold the studio to Rupert Murdoch.
One time I was at a lunch at the Davis mansion. It was the day after Barbara Davis’s annual Carousel Ball. John sat on my left, Henry Kissinger on my right. Opposite Kissinger was Gerald Ford. Kissinger was a funny guy. We were joking around in German, and he was very gracious, considering my German wasn’t really up to scratch. After the meal, Barbara gave the signal for all of the women to adjourn to the other room so that the men could talk about important things that apparently could only be comprehended if you owned a penis. Barbara stood in the doorway and looked my way expectantly. I turned to John and whispered, “Forget it, I’m not leaving.” I mean, when was I ever going to be in a room with Kissinger and Gerald Ford again? It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. I wanted to stay and listen, and I’m glad I did. They discussed the Greek-Turkish crisis—Greece had reported that one of their warships had been fired on by five Turkish destroyers in the Aegean Sea. Greece had responded by placing its armed forces on alert. Although at nineteen I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of global politics, I did appreciate that these were people who had real power and that the conversation that was taking place in my boyfriend’s dining room could very well have a direct effect on the world events they discussed. It was exhilarating.
Not long after that I suggested to John that we go to Paris for a romantic weekend.
“I don’t wanna go to France. I don’t like the food.”
“You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding.” I couldn’t believe him.
“It all tastes like stew. How many types of cheese do you need, anyway?”
When I’d go to John’s parents’ house in Palm Springs, I’d sit down to dinner and the servants would lift the lids of giant silver chafing dishes to reveal miniature hamburgers and French fries; that was their idea of fine cuisine. I was beginning to feel a little culturally starved.
One night we went to Playboy model and former Hugh Hefner girlfriend Barbi Benton’s birthday party at Spago. Sitting across from me was a sweet Egyptian billionaire named Dodi Fayed. He was twenty-nine, ten years older than I, though we were both relatively new to Hollywood. He’d just finished working as a producer on Chariots of Fire, which had won four Oscars including best picture, as well as winning awards at Cannes and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Dodi was suave, spoke several languages, and loved travel and fine dining. Before the night was over I gave him my number. He called the next day—from Monte Carlo.
“It’s for tax reasons. I can’t spend more than thirty days in any country.”
“Oh, okay. Well, I enjoyed meeting you at the party. Give me a call next time you’re in L.A.”
“Actually, I was going to ask if you wanted to join me aboard Nabila. I’m going to sail her to the South of France. I’ve already booked your plane ticket.”
How do you say no to a private cruise on the world’s largest luxury yacht? The whole thing sounded so exciting—a life of international jet-setting. This was just the kind of guy I wanted to be with.
Dodi insisted that I bring some girlfriends, so I’d feel safe, and I invited Tracy Smith, who’d starred in Bachelor Pad and Hot Dog, and arranged to meet a second friend, Lana Clarkson, in the South of France. Lana later starred in Roger Corman’s Barbarian Queen films and was shot dead by record producer Phil Spector in 2003.
Monte Carlo was exciting, an absolute blast. Then we went to Saint-Tropez where Lana and I were to shoot a promo for a movie called Starlets with John Hurt and Tony Curtis. Tony was a friend of Dodi’s, and he joined us aboard the yacht with Highlander star Christopher Lambert. Nabila had been built for Dodi’s uncle, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who was at the time one of the world’s richest men, at a cost of $100 million. It was named for his daughter. The ship was 281 feet long, as tall as a three-story building, and carried crew and staff of fifty-two, including armed security. It had a helipad, a Jacuzzi, three elevators, a movie theater, two saunas, a pool, a disco, a billiard room, and eleven suites with hand-carved onyx fixtures and gold-plated doorknobs. The suite I shared with Dodi had a solid gold sink. When you spat out your toothpaste, you knew you were doing it in style.
I met the girl the yacht was named for at a birthday party that Dodi threw for me in conjunction with an Elle magazine event. They gave away a white Rolls Royce, and I got to wine and dine with movie stars. There were even fireworks. Definitely my best birthday ever.
You can see Nabila the yacht any time you want. She starred as Maximilian Largo’s mobile headquarters in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again, along with Sean Connery. She was well cast. The sun deck was surrounded by bulletproof glass. She contained secret passageways, push-button doors and windows, two luxury speedboats in case a fast getaway were required, and even a three-room hospital. I suppose arms dealers and Bond villains have a lot in common.
I came to love Dodi, but I never felt the kind of attraction that makes you want to stop traffic and do it in the street. As a lover he was courteous, polite, and even a little shy. That uncertainty and hesitation surprised me when I was nineteen, but in the years to come I’d find that quality in a lot of rich men with powerful fathers. The super-rich, luxurious lifestyle Dodi lived took the edge off, too. In certain ways his was an exceptionally passive lifestyle. Everything was done for him. There were men to drive his cars, fly his plane, cook his meals, and fold his clothes. It might have been enviable for most people, but I found it oddly unappealing.
Aboard Nabila I was exposed to the European way of drinking. We’d have long lunches with exquisite wine and food and then go on to restaurants and parties until dawn. The champagne was always flowing, and Dodi paid for everything: the flights, boat trips, clothes, meals. I realized that this was par for the course for Dodi. He would romance beautiful women, shower them with gifts, and fly them around the world. It was dazzling and exciting, but something made me pull back. I insisted that I buy my own clothes and ticket home. No matter how spectacular Dodi’s lifestyle was, I wasn’t ready to swap my newly won independence for it. I wanted to have my own career, my own money, and my own home. Before she had her own career my mother was always looking to the man who controlled the checkbook, and she never wanted me to be a housewife. She wanted me to be powerful, so that no man could control me, and that’s now ingrained in my character. I saw other women around Dodi desperately clinging to his wealth and decided that they were the antithesis of the person I wanted to be.
Around the time that I discovered my need for independence, things started going wrong with Starlets. Tony Curtis was fighting a cocaine habit, and John Hurt was battling alcoholism. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone struggle with alcohol abuse. He was a far cry from the composed, charismatic actor I’d admired on screen. He looked haggard and run down, like a knight on the wrong side of a dragon fight.
Starlets was supposed to be a French farce taking place during the Cannes Film Festival. They got a bunch of beautiful girls from all over the world and put us up in a gorgeous mansion, and they’d drive us down to the festival to shoot scenes. The problem was that there was no script and they had no permits to shoot at Cannes, so when they ran out of money we had to go in and steal shots.
They told me to put on a beautiful, red-carpet-worthy gown and sent me onto the central stage where Clint Eastwood was receiving an award. I sneaked up behind Clint and pretended that I was there with him while one of the crew hid in the audience and filmed with a camera hidden between someone’s legs. That was the final straw for me. I was having fun on the Riviera, and there are few things cooler than hanging out on the yacht of a James Bond supervillain, but I had to get back to L.A. and get some real work. I had a career to build and I couldn’t afford to lose momentum.
Dodi didn’t quite know what to make of my wish to leave or my insistence on buying my own fare back to America. He was a jealous man, very insecure, but something in him touched me. Dodi had a childlike quality and I was very maternal in those days. I attracted men who wanted to be looked after. We talked intimately after we made love, and we decided that we would stay in touch and stay friends, but for now I needed to be my own person.
It was the last time I’d sail aboard Nabila. By the time I saw Dodi again she had been sold to Donald Trump and renamed the Trump Princess.
I’ll always be grateful to Dodi. He got me out of L.A. and took me around the world, which was just what I needed at that time. He gave me confidence in my ability to speak foreign languages, saying, “Your French is beautiful,” or “Come on, speak Italian, you can do it.” He never put me down, and he always told me I was smart and beautiful. He treated me as a princess and, because I refused to take anything from him, he also treated me as an equal. I didn’t know it then, but we would remain friends and occasional lovers until his death, more than fourteen years later, beside Princess Diana in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris.
In the ’80s the white line that ran down the middle of the Hollywood fast lane was painted on with happy dust. Everyone was doing blow, and I was no exception. I was nineteen and enjoying the attentions of a charming thirty-six-year-old Frenchman named Patrick Wachsberger, whose company produced the recent Twilight movies. I was 5′9″ and a slender size six, but Patrick (pronounced Pat-REEK) was stick-thin; I could barely fit into his jeans.
In New York, they’d taught me that the skinnier you are, the closer you are to ideal beauty. Although I’d accepted the fact that I was incapable of building a career around being a human skeleton, the voices of Eileen Ford and her cronies still echoed in my head. French men like skinny women—I’d convinced myself of that, along with the notion that I had to lose more weight.
Luckily, I discovered that if you snorted cocaine you didn’t need to eat. I was a size two in no time at all. I lived on one meal a day—breakfast. The only downside was swallowing. My throat was raw from a combination of cocaine and ocean saltwater spray, the discerning user’s choice for flushing out encrusted sinuses. Add cigarettes to that and a little red wine to come down and voila, you have a gullet that struggles to swallow anything solid. I basically lived on yogurt and smoothies.
Some people take cocaine to feel powerful and confident. It had the opposite effect on me. It made me paranoid. I would become terribly self-conscious. All I wanted to do was lock myself in the bathroom and clean it from top to bottom with a toothbrush or sit down and do my taxes. So I never took cocaine for recreation. I used it as a weight-loss drug. Looking back, I suppose that spending $350 a week on a weight-loss medication might seem a little extravagant (not to mention just plain stupid), but hey, those were the days, my friend. Blow was everywhere, and that white line seemed to never end.
Before things got serious with Patrick I dated a handsome one-legged guy who worked in a shoe shop at the Beverly Center mall, and after him the hunky soap star Hank Cheyne. We went to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands and had a really fun, sexy time. Hank was plagued by the curse that comes from playing a bad guy on TV—he’d walk down the street in New York and random strangers would swear and spit at him.
I had a brief engagement to an Italian prince that didn’t work out. We had a big engagement party at the Ritz hotel in London with Michael Feinstein playing. The prince was a Six Million Dollar Man, which is not to say that he could last forever in bed, but that he’d carry three stamps in his pocket worth $6 million—talk about portable wealth. The relationship had already been in trouble because his family wanted me to give up my career, move to Italy, and churn out babies. But things came to a head when I found out that the Ferrari Testarossa that he’d given me to drive around Switzerland actually belonged to his aristocratic lover, a woman in her midforties. That and he had a fetish for girls in high heels, corsets, and garter belts—the exact outfit worn by the prostitute on his first sexual encounter. It was fun for the first few times, but he insisted that I put on the same getup every time, which wore thin quickly. At that point in my life, it was just a little too weird.
Then I had a one-night stand with George Clooney. We first met on Riptide and then later on Babytalk, a TV series that tried to capitalize on the success of the talking-baby movie Look Who’s Talking. I played the voice of one of the babies, and George played a guy who was sweet on the single mom. They still haven’t sent me my Emmy for that performance, but I live in hope. George and I hooked up after our first meeting. After shooting our scenes we went back to my place, I did some blow, we had a good time, and then he rode off into the sunset on his bright yellow Harley, mullet cut whipping in the wind. He wasn’t the George Clooney that you see now. Like a good red wine, he seems to have improved with age.
After six months of dating, Patrick and I decided to get serious, and I gave up my apartment and moved into his designer home on Sunset Plaza Drive. It was my first grown-up relationship, and there was an aspect of it that made me more than a little uneasy. Patrick had a two-year-old daughter named Justine. He told me that the child’s mother, Beatrice, lived in Paris and had a boyfriend and that he had been awarded sole custody. Patrick was always busy with movie-related business, and I could tell from the get-go that he was a hands-off parent. My worry was that he was looking for a replacement mom for Justine and had settled on me. It was an unfounded fear. Patrick had hired a nanny to help with Justine. The problem was that I was going through a period in my life in which I was more than a little baby crazy, and Justine was totally adorable. I unofficially adopted her and set my mind to raising her.
Of course, the cocaine had to stop. Two things helped me with that.
The first was that not many people knew I was taking it. I’d kept my habit to myself and never used it in public, unlike Mike Hammer star Stacy Keach. I’d starred on that show right before Keach got busted at Heathrow airport trying to smuggle ten grams of cocaine in his assistant’s shaving-cream jar. I’d worked with actors who were so coked up that my lips went numb when I kissed them. I figured I didn’t want to get that kind of reputation.
My second and much more effective aid to stopping coke was fear. I’d had a scare one night when I flushed out my sinuses. I blew my nose and a chunk of flesh and cartilage came out. I found a flashlight and hand mirror, looked up my nose, and I swear that I could see a hole. I shoved a blob of Neosporin up there in the hope of plugging it, popped a couple of Tylenol PMs, and tried to sleep. In the morning I opened the fridge and discovered a slice of the lemon tart I’d made for dinner the previous night. My guests had said it was divine and especially zingy. I took a bite, chewed, and moved it around in my mouth for a full half minute before I realized I’d lost my sense of taste. Another test, conducted with the help of some freshly cut flowers, confirmed that my sense of smell had departed as well. Cooking has always been an important part of my life, so losing my primary culinary senses was truly terrifying.
I stopped my coke habit like Superman stops a runaway train: instantaneously. I crushed it like a tin can. I was young and strong, and my ability to give it up so suddenly without any serious damage to my health gave me a false sense of invulnerability. That unfortunate misconception would catch up with me later in life. Some bad habits you can walk away from scot-free but others are like ivy: they wind their way around you tightly, mixing their tendrils with yours until you don’t know where they end and you begin.
Luckily, about two weeks later my senses returned to normal working order, but after a warning like that I didn’t need to be told twice. For the time being snow season was over.
On the home front, I was doing everything I could to provide a normal, happy environment for Justine. I was young, but I think I did a good job as a makeshift mom. We did craft projects together, dug our fingers into cookie dough, and I stuffed her tiny shoes with little surprises for St. Nicholas Day. I tried to fill her life with fun new experiences. I gave Justine her first party dress, her first Christmas, and her first Easter. I tried to make her life as special as my mother had made mine when I was a little girl. And I loved it. I had a perfect, beautiful little girl who even looked like me, so everyone naturally assumed that she was my daughter. I didn’t contradict them.
Patrick and I threw dinner parties all the time. It was a glamorous life, but the coke parties made it stressful given that I was raising a small child. We would hire an Italian chef named Tono who cooked amazing dinners. It was a gastronomic tragedy, because no one but me ate the food. But, man, was the bartender busy! And you’ve never seen nostrils vacuum up blow so fast. Everyone was doing it. O.J. Simpson would bring his wife Nicole and spend the night flirting with every other woman at the party. Patrick and I had a guest bathroom, and I was constantly rushing in after guests, wiping neat little lines of white coke off the back of the black toilet and matching sink for fear that Justine’s nanny would see them.
One day I got a call from my agent. New Line Cinema had just produced the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and they were now planning to make a movie called The Hidden.
“They’re recasting the role of the alien-possessed stripper. It’s the only female role in the movie. It’s light on dialogue, but you get to shoot machine guns.”
I went along to audition but knew I was in trouble when I read that one of Brenda Lee Van Buren’s essential character attributes was that she be “big busted.” At 120 pounds and 5′9″, I didn’t have much going on in the chest department, but, never one to give in, I prepared for the audition by stuffing my bra with socks and tissues. I got an immediate callback, although this time they wanted me to come in wearing a bikini. I began to panic, worrying that my chest’s secret identity would be revealed. I rose to the challenge and concocted an ingenious device made of shoulder pads and electrical tape.
I knew that wouldn’t be quite enough, so I set about devising measures to draw attention away from my faux boobs. The next day I strutted into the production offices wearing a khaki dress with snaps down the front. When they asked to see my body I ripped the dress open in one dramatic movement, did a quick spin, thanked them, and left. An hour later I had the job.
I love acting. Aside from being Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend, where else can you start your workday at a police academy shooting Steyrs and AK-47s and end it learning how to pole dance from Janet Jackson’s choreographer? The guns I was good at, but the pole dancing—I had no natural ability in that department. The choreographer did her best, and then threw her hands up in frustration and sent me to some men’s clubs to see experts in action. I took my best friend to the Aladdin, a strip joint on Sunset Boulevard, and came to appreciate just how athletic some of those girls are. I met the dancers after their shift. One of them was a former Olympic skier. Some were clearly drugged up and working to support their habits, but most of them were hardened pros earning serious money and seemed as sharp-minded as any executive I’d encountered in the entertainment industry.
Now it’s bad enough when you have to put on a convincing strip show in front of cameras for the first time, but when I learned that I’d have to do it in a g-string made out of dollar bills my anxiety scaled previously unconquered heights; it’s every actress’s worst nightmare to see her butt fifty feet tall in a movie theater.
I decided that I needed to lose more weight for the role and visited a place called the Lindora clinic where they put me on a 500-calorie-a-day diet and shot me full of a combination of vitamins and a substance that I would later discover to be pregnant-horse urine.
My first day on set I was scheduled to perform the strip scene. The director, Jack Sholder, was not a happy man when he discovered that I’d duped them in regard to my physical attributes. Luckily, I’d already come clean to the wardrobe mistress, who’d set about designing a set of prosthetic breasts that I could wear under a cut-off T-shirt. It was a double win for me, because it meant that I also got to dodge the topless scene that Jack had planned on filming.
Working with Kyle MacLachlan was very exciting. By then he’d starred in the David Lynch movies Blue Velvet and Dune. Both he and Michael Nouri were total gentlemen, a real pleasure to work with, and the rest of the film went without a hitch. Well, mostly.
I was on the roof of a building shooting my final scene, and I mean that literally. I shoot Kyle with a machine gun, Michael Nouri shoots me in the head, and I shoot him back, knocking him over the side of a building. Kyle comes to rescue him, shooting me nine times in the process, rescues his friend, loads a fresh clip in his gun, and shoots me another seven times, and then I escape by jumping through a twenty-foot-high neon sign and fall three stories to my death. Simple, right?
In the movie business they attach little explosives called squibs to your clothes to make it look like you’re being riddled with bullets. One of the squibs exploded close to my face, and a piece of the metallic jacket I was wearing shot into my eye. It burned like a son of a bitch but I kept on until we got the take. But after that, I lost the ability to shoot a gun without blinking. Back then I had the Bruce Willis open-eye stare down perfectly, and now I have this blinking reflex, and I look like a total amateur. I recently found myself at a firing range shooting antique firearms for charity with Joe Pesci and Lou Ferrigno, the original Incredible Hulk. I was determined to show these guys that I knew what I was doing, but the instant my blunderbuss went off, my eyes slammed shut, a reflexive protection against fashion shrapnel.
I attended the premiere of The Hidden and was pleased that my fake boobs looked convincing. Whether the horse piss worked I don’t know, but when my butt had its premiere on the big screen, I breathed a sigh of relief; the nightmare had been averted—my alien-possessed ass looked pretty damn good.
But as one nightmare ended, another began. I was a real movie actress now and, as I would learn the hard way, things change when you appear nearly naked on the big screen. Someone, somewhere out there, is looking at you and thinking that they’d like to get close to you—real close to you.
There was this guy who had seen The Hidden and decided that I was from Venus and had brought the AIDS virus to planet Earth. No kidding, this is what he actually thought. This guy would park outside my place and masturbate, and sometimes tail me in his car. I called the LAPD but their hands were tied, because this was before Rebecca Schaeffer was killed—the event that brought about the anti-stalker laws of the ’90s. I went back and forth with the police until one cop took pity on me and said, “Look, we can’t do anything about him masturbating, but I do think he could be dangerous. Do you own a gun? You’re going to need one. So you wait until he’s out front, put on something nice, and invite him in. Make sure he’s inside the house and then shoot him. When we come over, you say that he broke in. But you make sure he’s deep inside the house. Otherwise you’re the one we’re going to have to arrest.” Really? No thanks. The guy creeped me out but I didn’t want to shoot him.
I drove to a lunch meeting a few weeks after that and realized the stalker was following me in his car. He was really freaking me out, and as I tried to get away from him I accidentally ran a red light and got hit by a van. My engine blew up, my car was totaled, but all I could think about was my number one fan, who’d climbed out of his car and was now heading toward me. I was convinced he was going to try to kill me. A crowd started to gather, so my stalker vanished, but in the meantime someone saw me trying to start my engine to try and get away. When the police arrived, I was arrested for trying to leave the scene of an accident. I explained about the stalker and why I was trying to leave, but they didn’t believe my story. I ended up having to perform six months of community service at the old Globe Playhouse. I was back, not to perform Shakespeare, but to make cookies for the audience. I lasted three weeks in baking hell (all the while wishing I’d invested in a handgun and a lace teddy like that cop had advised) before I offered to pay to have the theater’s roof repaired in exchange for their filling out my community service book.
The stalker vanished after that. He was the first but he wouldn’t be my last. There would be a dozen other stalkers that would plague me to varying degrees over the years, including one guy who quit his job, sold his house, and tried to move into mine, thinking we were married.
The movie-star world isn’t all champagne and caviar.
Time passed, and I thought that things were going well with Patrick until I learned from a friend that he was cheating on me. Before I had a chance to confront him I had to travel to shoot my next movie. Never on Tuesday was the story of a pretty young lesbian who finds herself stuck in the middle of the desert with two horny young men played by Peter Berg (Chicago Hope) and Andrew Lauer (Caroline in the City). It’s better than it sounds. We shot the movie in Borrego Springs in the California desert. The director was a young guy named Adam Rifkin, who was making his directorial debut. He always dressed in black Converse tennis shoes and a baseball hat. Little did I know that Adam was both talented and driven and that Never on Tuesday would be the first of many projects I would do with him over the course of my career. It was clear in the audition that they wanted a big-name actress for the female lead, but I tried my best to turn on the charm, and Adam fought hard to get me the part. I’d put a little weight back on since giving up cocaine, so when the studio offered me the role it was on the condition that I lose ten pounds and work out with a former Olympic gymnast, who had me running up and down the bleacher steps at UCLA on a diet of one bran muffin a day.
Charlie Sheen was flown in for a cameo role. He’d just come off Wall Street and No Man’s Land, so his star was rapidly ascending. They didn’t have a large budget, so my guess is the studio paid him with drugs and hookers so he’d feel like a total frickin’ rock star from Mars.
Whatever they were paying him with, it worked, because A-list guys started coming out of the woodwork. Nic Cage wore a huge fake nose, playing a crazy man in a red Ferrari. Gilbert Gottfried played a lunatic salesman. Emilio Estevez and Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride, Saw) played hick brothers in a tow truck, gold teeth and all. There was a real party atmosphere, and we’d all hang out and play pool and drink tequila. It wasn’t long before other members of the Brat Pack appeared.
I’d met Rob Lowe before, and, coincidentally, my makeup artist on that movie was Sheryl Berkoff, who would go on to marry Rob. (At the time, though, I think she was seeing Emilio Estevez.) This was just before Rob got into trouble with the first ever celebrity sex-tape scandal.
One night after partying, Rob and I went to a hotel on Sunset Boulevard that is now called the Standard, got drunk, did an eight ball, and ended up in bed together. We were so coked up that the sex was numb and not anyone’s definition of fantastic, but the conversation was great. We bitched about our families and personal problems late into the night. I thought of Patrick and concluded that if you’re going to have revenge sex, you might as well have it with the world’s most beautiful man.
I returned to Patrick feeling much better. I learned from my friend that he’d given up his mistress, so I decided to put the whole business behind me, for Justine’s sake.
It was bumpy at first, but after a while things settled down, and the three of us started to feel like a real family. Patrick and I traveled to Aspen for Thanksgiving and stayed at the Little Nell hotel. One night while we were making love I saw a huge starburst explosion in my head, a great flash of light.
“I think we just made a baby,” I said.
Patrick turned away from me without saying anything, and that was the end of the discussion. An abyss had suddenly opened up between us. I wanted to keep the baby, I wanted to keep us together as a family, but when your partner isn’t even slightly enthusiastic and you’re twenty years old, it’s hard to know what to say. If I pushed the issue and he demanded an abortion, then I’d be faced with a worse dilemma, so I kept quiet. On the way back to L.A. we carried on pretending nothing had happened, but you can’t fool Mother Nature. She keeps the wheels of biology turning, and eventually things have to come to a head.
The morning I had to go for an audition for the sci-fi film Arena, Justine decided to throw the greatest tantrum spectacular of all time. Justine’s nanny was off that day, and Patrick went to work as usual, so I had to take her along with me. She refused to sit in the waiting room, so I went into the audition with her clinging to my leg like a monkey. During the reading I had to get angry and cry and Justine turned her face up to me and said, “Don’t cry Mommy, don’t be sad.” It was adorable but there was no chance I was going to get the part. I bought some pregnancy books on the way home and started taking prenatal vitamins. Then my agent called. The producers thought the scene with Justine was touching and had offered me the part. It meant spending the next two months in Italy.
I went home and sat down with Patrick. It was time to get serious about the pregnancy. I told him about Italy, told him that I wasn’t going to leave America until we worked this out. My doctors were here, and I didn’t want to fly with a baby on the way. He was very nonchalant about the whole thing.
“Don’t worry about it. I have to go to Europe for a film festival anyway, so we’ll both go to Rome. I know a guy there. We’ll find you a doctor and get an abortion.”
So there it was. With one careless comment, he had shattered my illusions about our happy family life. He expected me to fly to Rome and squeeze in an abortion before the film shoot just as if you might say, “Oh, you’re going to the store? Can you take the trash out on your way?” I’d already endured one abortion with Tre’s baby, and I wasn’t interested in repeating the experience, but here I was with a man who clearly did not want a baby or the responsibility that went with one. Given the difference in our ages, I thought that I had to be tough, to put on a brave face, to show Patrick that he couldn’t hurt me, but inside I was cut deeply. We were living together, and I’d proven I was a wonderful mother. He never considered my feelings. There was no discussion about it, no holding me when I was crying. It was a massive rejection.
Before heading to Rome we met up with some of Patrick’s friends in France. Megève is one of the most beautiful ski resorts in the world, the place where Audrey Hepburn meets Cary Grant in Charade. I hated being there. I felt totally alienated. All of Patrick’s friends knew his ex-wife Beatrice, and they didn’t take to me at all. They spoke French too fast for me to keep up, and the ones who spoke English didn’t bother to make the effort. I left the dinner party and walked out into the winter night. The air was crisp. A full moon overhead made the surrounding mountains stand out against the sky. The atmosphere was mystical. I was wearing a long fur coat, and I found a private place, out of sight of the house, and lay down in the snow. I looked up at the moon and asked it if I should have the baby. Since I was pumped up on pregnancy hormones and walking alone in the French Alps, it seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do. I’m sure that Patrick was inside wondering why I was taking so long in the bathroom. I didn’t care; I’d gone outside with another Patrick on my mind—my brother. I still felt his presence, I thought of him all the time, and I knew with absolute certainty that the baby I was carrying was a boy. Not long after I became pregnant it occurred to me that this baby should be called Patrick, after my brother, and that this might help change the other Patrick’s mind. He was an egotist, so a son named after him might stir his interest, but it hadn’t. Another thought had arisen, one that I hadn’t been able to get out of my mind, that the child I was carrying had my brother’s soul. Pat was trying to come back into the world. As I lay there I had a very clear sense of the child’s life. I saw it like a series of snapshots. I could see his face—he had my brother’s soulful, big blue eyes.
In the morning we’d catch a plane to Italy. This was my last chance to change my mind, to keep the baby and tell Patrick to go to hell. I asked for a sign, something clear and incontrovertible that would leave no doubt as to the course of action I had to take. It was a completely clear night and out of nowhere a huge bank of clouds appeared and covered the moon for a full minute. I began to weep. I’d been trying to act as if Patrick’s indifference didn’t matter, as if things would somehow work out in the end. Lying there in the darkness I knew that there would be no fairy-tale ending. I wasn’t ready to raise a child on my own. My chest felt tight, my heart felt like water-laden cloth, clinging and heavy. I’d made my decision. I would be losing a whole person’s existence, I’d be denying my brother the chance to come back into the world, and I cried and cried because I didn’t know if there would ever be another chance after that, if his soul would ever want to come back to me again.
When I ran out of tears and my whole body was numb from the cold, I got up, wiped away the smeared mascara, and went back inside. I put on a smile for Patrick and his friends. He was laughing and drinking. He hadn’t missed me at all.
In the morning we traveled on to Rome. We were shooting Arena at the Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica studio near Rome, and I was staying in the city in a beautiful apartment near the Piazza di Spagna. The movie was about an intergalactic fighting competition between the champions of different planets, and they’d created incredible alien suits that the special effects guys would sit inside and operate. It starred soap actor Paul Satterfield and Armin Shimerman, who would go on to be a regular in the various Star Trek TV revivals.
I couldn’t confide in anybody because I didn’t want to appear unprofessional and no one was supposed to know I was pregnant. I was very self-conscious, because all my clothes were tight fighting—think gold lamé jumpsuits—and I was starting to show. It didn’t help that I was sharing wardrobe space with Shari Shattuck, who had a gorgeous figure. Shari and I starred together in the 1990 film Mad About You and the TV series Riptide. She would also appear in Babylon 5, although she’s best known for her long run on The Young and the Restless and her successful career as a mystery writer.
Patrick found me a doctor who looked older than the Coliseum. This was Italy in the ’80s, a conservative, Roman Catholic country where abortion was illegal. You had to have connections to find a doctor who would perform the procedure. That day I learned firsthand how important it is to have both a surgeon and an anesthetist. The guy put me under for what was supposed to be eight minutes, and I regained consciousness after eight hours. He’d over-anesthetized me. It was all a big secret, so the next day I had to don my gold lamé jumpsuit and go back to work, having nearly died and minus one child.
That experience changed me. I started building an emotional wall to protect myself. Watching my parents as I grew up, I knew what I wanted, and it wasn’t what they had. I wanted to have a nice house and perfect little children, one boy and one girl, and a relationship with a smart, handsome guy who respected my need for independence. That was my dream. After the abortion, I knew I couldn’t take that for granted, that in opening yourself up to a partner you were just as likely to be run through with a knife as embraced. Patrick made me wary of love, and after being forced to give up my baby I never wanted to go through something like that again.
Unsurprisingly, after we returned to L.A. things started to unravel with Patrick. The abortion wasn’t the death knell of our relationship though, because I wanted to be there for Justine. That little girl needed me. Out of nowhere Patrick told me he was sending her back to Paris to live with her mother. I was hurt and outraged. I’d lost one baby to this relationship already and now I felt as if I was losing another. Of course I had no legal rights, and no real way to protest what he was doing. By that time I had raised Justine for almost two years, and he didn’t even give me the chance to talk things over. It was done, decision made.
He told Justine to say goodbye to me before he took her to the airport. She cried and clung to me and wouldn’t let go.
“I don’t want to go away. What did I do, Mommy? Why are you making me go?”
She kept on asking that again and again until Patrick pulled her away. I’ve been through a lot of shit in my life, a lot of physical and emotional pain, but that moment was truly heartbreaking. I’ve never experienced anything else like it.
Once Justine was gone I couldn’t eat or sleep because I was so worried for her. I wasn’t given her phone number in Paris, so I sent her letters and presents, little reminders of our life together. I never received a reply.
I’m not sure why he did it. Perhaps he was jealous of the bond I was forming with her, perhaps he thought that Justine was coming between us. If he really thought that, he was stupid, because after he sent her away I left him.
I was due to move out while Patrick was away at another festival in Europe. In the meantime I’d been cast in the Adam Rifkin film Tale of Two Sisters with Valerie Breiman. It was a very low-budget, experimental, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of production. Adam needed a location to shoot the movie and asked if he could use Patrick’s place.
“Absolutely. Mi casa es su casa.”
The crew rolled in. Lawrence Bender of Pulp Fiction fame was the producer, and I was co-starring with Jeff Conaway again. We had a comedic sex scene in the back of a taxi.
It turned out that when Adam said “experimental” he really meant it. I can’t remember there being a script at all, and Charlie Sheen was credited as the writer. He narrated parts of the story in a voiceover and contributed some of his own original poetry to the project. Even then he was developing his unique talent for self-expression. Here’s an example of some of his freeform poetry from the movie:
Since there was no script, Valerie and I improvised our scenes. I would rant about my asshole husband who’d cheated on me, and Adam would cut to a picture of Patrick and me that was still up on the mantelpiece.
It was amusing enough at the time, but the icing on the cake came a year later when I ran into Patrick at Cannes. He’d just seen a screening of the movie and was totally perplexed.
“How did my house get into a movie? Why was there a picture of us? When did it all happen?”
I just shrugged, smiled, and walked on. In hindsight, it was the act of a twenty-one-year-old striking back at the older man who’d hurt her, but I don’t mind telling you that at the time it was beyond satisfying.
I ran into Patrick again in 2007 at Bill Panzer’s wake. Bill was the producer and creator of the Highlander franchise, and I’d starred in one of the episodes of the TV series. The first thing Patrick said to me after twenty years of estrangement: “Why did you take the mirror?”
I’d had a gorgeous outdoor mirror that my mother bought me for my very first apartment. It wasn’t expensive, but it was tall and beautiful with carved corners, and it looked perfect next to Patrick’s swimming pool. Twenty years and that was the first thing he could think to say? Perhaps losing that piece of pretty glass was a reminder that he’d also lost the girl that went with it.
Some good came out of that meeting, though. Patrick told me that Justine was in town, now in her early twenties, and pursuing a career as an actress. That made me smile. Patrick passed my card on to Justine and she agreed to meet me for lunch.
She’d grown up and turned into a beautiful young woman, but the resemblance between us was gone. As we sat down together I was struck by the realization that Justine was older now than I was when I’d played my part in raising her. As we chatted and swapped pleasantries I realized that she didn’t remember a thing, not a single thing.
“Don’t you remember when you had the meltdown at Bloomingdale’s and I bought you the party dresses?”
“Ah, no. Sorry.”
“Don’t you remember the Christmas when we made snow angels?”
“No.”
“But what about the letters I sent, and the gifts?”
She asked me what I was talking about, which confirmed what I’d already suspected. Her mother hadn’t passed on a thing I’d sent her. She’d actively worked to erase my memory from Justine’s mind. Jealousy is a green-eyed monster, and I guess she’d gotten her claws into Beatrice. It was like being trapped in a sci-fi show where someone you love has all their memories wiped out. Memory gains so much of its power in being shared. Justine and I had a bond based on shared experience, but for her those moments were gone. It was devastating.
“So you don’t really remember me at all?”
“Oh, no. I remember the feeling of you, and that you were a good person in my life and that I was happy when we were all together.”
Later I did some reading on child psychology and consoled myself with the thought that, although the memories we shared in her early years were gone, the influence I had on her would have been formative and profound. I gave her love and attention and all the good things I had in me, and today, somewhere in her heart, that love burns on as part of the complex mixture that is grown-up Justine.
It was 1988, I was twenty-three years old, and I’d just landed a role starring in Clean and Sober with Michael Keaton, a movie about a real estate agent with a cocaine addiction. It was my first respectablebig-studio movie. The director was Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of Moonlighting, and I also got to work with Morgan Freeman and Tate Donovan, who later starred in The O.C. We shot the movie in a real rehab clinic in downtown Pennsylvania. It was gritty and smoke-filled, just what you’d expect a rehab clinic to look like.
Michael Keaton’s performance was particularly good. He took a gutsy departure from his usual comedy roles and proved that he had the chops to cut it as a dramatic actor. The academy totally snubbed him for an Oscar that year.
I played the role of Iris, one of the patients in the rehab center. Iris is in for cocaine addiction as well, and she has an affair with Tate Donovan’s character. Morgan Freeman, who plays the center’s director, accuses Iris of being stoned and kicks her out of rehab.
When my brother Jimmy was in rehab, they made him watch Clean and Sober over and over. In one scene I have to wear a dorky leotard, and when Jimmy’s friends found out that I was his sister they used to give him no end of grief.
Years later I ran into Morgan Freeman at a Cirque du Soleil show in Santa Monica. We talked about Clean and Sober, and he said to me, “You know, I always thought you’d make it because you’ve got those eyes that tell the story.”
I thought that that was the kindest thing for him to say. It was nice that he’d remembered me and doubly nice that he’d been kind enough to compliment me at the height of his career.
Over the course of my own career I’ve played an addict of every kind of substance except for the one that finally beat me—alcohol. Later in life I would find myself in rehab, having graduated from playing the part of an addict to actually being one.
By the time Clean and Sober was released I was twenty-three years old and playing the love interest in The Heat, a CBS Summer Playhouse movie with Billy Campbell, who would go on to star in The Rocketeer. Gary Devore, the writer, was a confident, charismatic man in his late forties who’d walk around the set in jeans and cowboy boots.
Gary was the best man at Tommy Lee Jones’s wedding and was godfather to Peter Strauss’s son. He was buddies with Kurt Russell and had written movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christopher Walken, and Billy Crystal.
We started up a full-blown Hollywood set romance. The sex was exciting, so much so that I couldn’t even really tell you what the show was about.
After filming The Heat we said our goodbyes and I went back to Montgomery Clift’s old house, which I was renting in the Hollywood Hills. Monty had been a pain-pill addict and, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, an alcoholic. I didn’t seek out the old haunts of alcoholic actors; that’s just Hollywood. Close your eyes, throw a dart at a map of available rentals, and odds are you’ll find yourself living in the house of a former movie star with a substance abuse problem.
Speaking of which, by that time Lana Clarkson was living with me. The house didn’t have a second bedroom, but it did have a spare bathroom that the owners had at some point turned into makeshift accommodation for their kid. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen an Amazonian blonde sleeping on a single bed balanced precariously on top of a tiny closet.
Gary called me up one night, and I mentioned that I was going to Canada to visit my friend Christine.
“Great! I’ll come with you and we can get hitched.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure.”
Six weeks later we were married. We hadn’t even been on a date.
It was an insane idea but it was charged with spontaneity, and something about that appealed to me. After the difficulties of my painful, drawn-out relationship with Patrick I figured that this would have just as much chance of working out as something that I overthought and overplanned.
At the time, Christine was a location manager, so she threw together a spectacular wedding for me. The only decision I had to make was whether I wanted a yacht or a helicopter. I took the yacht.
My friend Lana and I traveled to Vancouver together. She seemed more excited about the wedding than I was. Gary and I met up and did tequila shots in the limo on the way. Everybody was so fucked up on coke and booze that it was more like a frat party than a wedding. Aboard the yacht Lana swept into my bachelorette party, tears streaming down her face, wailing about how no one would ever want to marry her. I tried to get her to join in the fun but she preferred to make a dramatic exit. She couldn’t handle so much attention being directed toward me on my special day and set about putting the spotlight back where she thought it belonged. Ten minutes later Christine confronted me, outraged that I’d made Lana the maid of honor after all the work she’d done. It turned out that Lana had gone up to the yacht’s captain and signed herself up for the job on the marriage certificate without telling anyone, including me.
It wasn’t what you’d call a traditional wedding. I still wasn’t talking to my parents, so in place of my mother there was a skinny Japanese guy in drag wearing a fluffy hat. I don’t know who he was or where he materialized from, but we were smashed and the wedding seemed to be coming together in its own weird way, so I went along for the ride. Gary had never met his best man, Donnelly Rhodes, who would play my father in an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Sci-fi fans will recognize Donnelly as Doc Cottle on the most recent Battlestar Galactica series. The piano player had missed the boat so someone’s brother took on that job, and we sailed out to this “sacred” island for the ceremony where everyone’s shoes got muddy. I was wearing a white dress I’d bought in a secondhand store in L.A. and an antique lace coat that kept getting ripped on branches and stained from spilled drinks. It probably wasn’t the most auspicious beginning to a marriage, but it was lots of fun.
Instead of a reception we had a party at Donnelly’s house. A cute friend of Christine’s that I’d always had a crush on was there. Caring for Justine had brought a level of restraint to my drug and alcohol consumption, but now that she was gone the party was back on. So when we ran out of blow, I went for a drive with Christine’s friend to find some more, still wearing my wedding dress. We ended up buying some from a pack of young guys, did some lines with them and then drove back to the house party. When we got back no one had noticed our absence, so we snuck into the bathroom with the blow and started making out.
At the beginning of a marriage you’re filled with hope and optimism, and you can’t see the cards fate will deal you. It turned out that my cards were bad, but Gary got a worse hand. Within ten years he would die in mysterious circumstances, sparking a series of conspiracy theories and investigations that continues to this day.
I remember Gary saying to me, “Isn’t it funny that we’re married? You’re not my type at all. I like leggy blondes with big tits.”
Prior to me, Gary had had a long list of lovers including Season Hubley (Kurt Russell’s ex-wife), the producer and notorious cocaine addict Julia Phillips, and Priscilla Barnes, who’d played nurse Terri Alden in Three’s Company.
Gary’s writer’s block started the same day a seven-figure IRS bill arrived in the mail, courtesy of another ex-lover, Maria Cole, Nat King Cole’s widow. When Gary was married to her he’d made the incredibly stupid decision to cosign some tax papers, which put him on the hook for millions of dollars of tax debt.
The only way for him to clear the debt was by writing more big-budget scripts, but the creativity needed to accomplish that was smothered by the depression that settled over him. He’d stare for hours at a blank monitor, type a few lines, and then delete them in frustration. I’d try to do nice things for him to cheer him up, but when he was in those moods he was an inconsolable asshole. After I got my head bitten off I stopped trying and would just leave him to stew until he came out of it on his own.
I pushed Gary to take antidepressants, but he gave up after a few weeks, claiming that he didn’t want to be addicted to anything. I switched tactics and suggested that we try ecstasy. He got some from Julia Phillips, I think, and it was really high-grade stuff. We made love and talked and cried. It was wonderful. On Monday morning he was back to being an asshole. Unfortunately, you can’t take ecstasy every day of your life.
Despite our money trouble and the stress that came with it, we did have our happy times, especially during our first year together. When the writing was going well and it looked like he might sell a script Gary would revert to the exciting, outgoing guy I’d married.
It was during one of these periods of relative marital calm that other turbulent relationships in my life would come to the fore.
One friend would betray my trust, while another bond that I thought was lost forever would be redeemed.
My relationship with Lana had always been a problematic one. After her performance at my wedding, which had all but ended my relationship with my friend Christine, Lana set her sights on Gary. I don’t know whether it was because she was still bitter about the wedding or whether she just wanted what I had, but when we’d attend the same parties she’d sidle on up to Gary and start flirting. Despite the fact that Lana was the leggy, blond, big-titted type, Gary was a faithful partner and when she didn’t take the repeated hints that he wasn’t interested, he told me.
For me, it was the last straw. I’d taken her to the South of France, let her live in my house rent-free, and loaned her thousands of dollars that she had never repaid. We’d starred in the same kinds of TV shows, we’d started out in our careers together, but Lana’s optimism, her dreams that she would make it as a big-time actress, hadn’t materialized to the point that she was self-sufficient. She was always relying on friends to prop her up. I told her to get lost. We stopped speaking.
The next time I saw Lana was at her funeral.
I’d heard that Lana was struggling. She’d broken both her wrists while entertaining at a children’s party, had been fighting an addiction to booze and painkillers, and was struggling to keep her apartment in Venice Beach. Worst of all, she’d turned forty. As far as Hollywood is concerned, the day a woman turns forty, she is magically transformed into Methuselah and is suddenly unemployable.
On February 3, 2003, after working a shift as a hostess at the House of Blues, Lana went home with Phil Spector, the intense, weasely-looking guy who’d produced records for a host of famous artists and bands: from early R&B groups like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Righteous Brothers to the Beatles, John Lennon, Tina Turner, the Ramones, and Leonard Cohen. In addition to being a total fucking nutcase Spector had a history of drink and drug problems as well as a penchant for guns. He’d previously threatened five women at gunpoint—Lana was the sixth.
He shot Lana with an unregistered blue-steel .38-caliber Colt revolver. When the police carried Lana’s body out of Pyrenees Castle (Spector’s mansion in Alhambra, California), they took with them Spector’s nine other guns, fragments of Lana’s teeth and fingernails, her leopard-print purse, and her false eyelashes.
At the time of arrest Spector was on seven different prescription drugs.
It was a horrible way to go. Even worse, the fame that she had sought in life found her in death, though not in a form that she would have hoped for.
Her name, her clips, and her photos were screened on news and entertainment programs around the world. They referred to her as a B movie actress, and instead of vilifying Spector, they cheapened her. Leaked photos of her dead body appeared on the Internet. HBO began developing a film about Spector’s prosecution that is being filmed at this writing, scripted and directed by David Mamet and starring Al Pacino as Spector and Helen Mirren as the prosecutor.
It’s like Faust, a deal with the devil where you get what you’ve always wanted, your greatest desire, but it comes at a terrible price and in a cruel and twisted form. I wonder how much Spector will get for the movie. I don’t suppose it matters—he won’t have time to enjoy it. Phil Spector was sentenced on May 29, 2009 to nineteen years to life and was incarcerated in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran.
Now for the redemption story.
Not long after I had my falling out with Lana, I was following the Gulf War on TV with Gary when I had a sort of psychic flash. I had an overwhelming urge to go to Hamlet Gardens, the upmarket spinoff of the Hamburger Hamlet restaurant chain.
Gary tagged along with me, somewhat bemused. We stood in the lobby for ten minutes.
“You still haven’t told me what this is all about. Why are we standing around like a couple of chumps? I should be home working on my script.”
“Just stand here with me. Wait with me.”
I could feel that something was going to happen. Spiritual currents run through my family; we’re an intuitive bunch, especially the women on my mother’s side.
After Patrick’s death, my mom and I would sometimes see him hovering above our beds. She’d see him as a little boy, I’d see him at the age he was when he died.
And when I was seventeen and moving up to L.A. for the first time, I had a bad accident, and the family gift reared its head again. I was in the fast lane on the 101 when some Mexican guys in a van pulled up beside me and started catcalling in a mix of Spanish and English. My family had spent a little time at my grandfather’s house in Cuernavaca, Mexico after Patrick’s death, and my brothers and I would go and hang out with the local kids. We learned how to sell iguanas on the roadside to make pocket money, along with the most important words in any language—the rude ones. I was driving this crappy Chevy Citation that my dad had given me. It was about as maneuverable as a Sherman tank and ugly to boot. I was getting nervous, not because they were being rude and offensive, but because I was a new driver and really needed to concentrate, so I flipped them off, hoping they would back off and leave me alone. And they did, but not before ramming me with the side of their van and pushing me into the center divider. I hit it at just the right angle to launch my car into the air. The Chevy flipped over and hit five other cars on its flight to the slow lane. By the time it came to a halt it was completely crumpled and I was trapped. My right leg had come out of its socket and my head was swimming. I looked up and saw a bridge over the freeway where people had gathered, hands over their mouths, horrified expressions on their faces. Luckily an ambulance had been traveling right behind me, and its crew saw the whole thing. They used the Jaws of Life to open up the Citation like the cheap tin can it was. A paramedic knelt down beside me as they cut away my seatbelt.
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t know.”
I couldn’t remember anything.
There’s never a shortage of drama in my life. Sometimes it feels like I’m trapped in a soap opera. (Living in Hollywood can do that to you.) Well, here’s the icing on the cake—I had amnesia. I had to go to memory therapy at UCLA after the accident.
They pulled me out of the car, and the ambulance took me to the Queen of Angels Hospital. As I was being rolled into the ER on a gurney I saw a pay phone and remembered that my mom was working at Saks Fifth Avenue in Costa Mesa, but I couldn’t remember her name. I begged the nurse walking alongside the gurney to help me call her. I got through and I was yelling at her and crying.
“I’ve been in an accident. I’m in the hospital.”
That was the only coherent information I managed to get out before the nurse pulled the phone out of my hand, informed me that the doctors were waiting, and hung it up.
I passed out and when I came around it was to the sound of chanting. I opened my eyes. My hospital bed was surrounded by chanting Koreans.
“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.”
Then I saw a face I recognized: my aunt. Memories came flooding back. She was a Buddhist and had brought her friends along. I remembered that she chanted for money. She’d chanted for a new Volvo and got it. She’d chanted for a real-estate portfolio and it had been granted unto her. I remembered that she was eccentric and funny. Like all the women in our family she had a bent toward the spiritual, albeit tempered by a practical streak.
And then I saw my mom.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I just got in my car and it took me here.”
It might sound strange, but despite the disagreements and feuds that have taken place between us over the years, despite the estrangement and family divides, my mom and I have always shared an invisible, unbreakable bond.
I stood in the Hamlet Gardens lobby and wouldn’t budge, just waiting for something to happen, and Gary was done standing around. He was heading back to the car when all of a sudden my mom came walking out of the dining room, arm in arm with Tre. It was an amazing thing. Somehow I’d been led to her, but if it was a minor miracle it was tarnished by the unavoidable truth that she was still hanging out with my asshole ex-boyfriend.
My mom and dad had split up years before, and I’d just assumed that Tre and my mom had run their course. Now I found myself in an extremely uncomfortable position. We swapped some forced pleasantries, I introduced my new husband, and then we went our separate ways. When I got home, though, I fell to pieces. I was an emotional wreck, and Gary had to hold me the whole night. In the back of my mind, I kept justifying her decision by thinking, “Well, he’s giving her the attention my father never did, or else she needs a friend and I left home and I’m not around for her.”
I don’t know what force had led me to her, but I knew I’d been given a choice. I could either reach out and extend an olive branch to her or leave things as they were, a festering wound. I knew all about crossroads; I’d stood at one in the aftermath of my rape. You either let something ruin you or you take action.
I called up my mom, and we started talking again. She explained to me that I’d misinterpreted the incident with Tre’s car—the event that had created a seven-year wall of silence between us. It had been out in front of her house because she’d borrowed it from him—her car was at the mechanic’s—and after that they’d stayed in contact as friends. We talked things over. I put the past behind me. It was such a wonderful feeling to have her back in my life. We had missed each other immensely and had miles of ground to cover.
I called up my dad as well and started rebuilding bridges. I was married, I had a career, and now I was setting right the sins of the past. I was an adult, and finally my parents were actually listening to me. Now all I had to do was turn things around with Gary.
Gary, though, was heavily invested in misery. None of his writing opportunities had panned out, and the IRS bill was a monkey on his back, driving him into ever-longer bouts of depression.
I got a job working on Jon Turteltaub’s first movie, Think Big, starring the “Barbarian Brothers” Peter and David Paul. They were these ridiculously over-steroided body builders who played two mentally impaired truckers transporting toxic waste across the country. The movie earned me enough money to take Gary to Hawaii in the hope that he could shake his writer’s block. We were staying in a condo, and after a few days I ran out of things to read. The condo had a small shelf of bestsellers, all of them by John Grisham and Danielle Steel. I’ve never been a big reader of blockbuster novels, but I’ve always been a bookworm. I was desperate, so I picked a book at random, Steel’s Kaleidoscope, read it from cover to cover, and thought that it would make a great movie.
Not long after we returned to L.A. I learned that the film Kaleidoscope was scheduled for production, and I was cast as Jaclyn Smith’s little sister. Jaclyn arrived on set, right off the plane. She was exhausted, wore no makeup, and was still without a doubt one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in real life.
My character was a gynecologist who couldn’t get pregnant. And as with Clean and Sober, the role I’d play in Kaleidoscope would be a bitter foretelling of a personal tragedy.
After Hawaii I got pregnant, and that seemed to turn around my relationship with Gary. We were both really happy about the news. I felt that I was at a time in my life when I was ready for a family. I started buying pregnancy books. Gary and I started picking out names. We still loved each other, and I hoped, however naively, that the baby would help us forge a working relationship. These were the days before Dr. Phil or even Jerry Springer. We were not yet blessed with the universal talk-show wisdom that keeping a marriage together for the kids seldom works out.
I needn’t have worried. I booked a job with a location shoot in Hoboken, New Jersey, working on Maniac Cop 2. It was the dead of winter. I was three months pregnant and not really showing. I didn’t want to take the job, but we needed the money. We agreed that after the shoot I’d take the rest of the year off to have the baby.
Problems arose with my co-star Robert Davi, the James Bond baddie with the pockmarked face. He was always puffing cigars on set, and one day when I had really bad morning sickness I asked him not to smoke around me because I didn’t want to throw up on his clothes. He told me to fuck off, flat out, just like that.
About two-thirds of the way through the shoot I was doing a stunt scene that involved being handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car. I was outside the car, and it was supposed to appear that I was running alongside it, unable to escape. The techs had built a little platform for me to stand on that I had to share with a camera so they could get some close-ups. It was too dangerous to have the car running on its own steam so they hooked it up to a truck that would pull it along.
On the third take the platform broke and I fell and hit the road at forty miles an hour, still handcuffed to the steering wheel. I hit hard and was dragged for what felt like a hundred feet before they realized what had happened and stopped the truck. The next morning, while I was shooting a scene with Robert Davi a huge gush of blood came running down my legs. I asked them to stop shooting, apologized, and then ran to the bathroom. When one of the producers knocked on the bathroom door to see if I was okay I told him to get me to an emergency room. I was suffering a miscarriage.
I was resting up in the hospital when the producers called and asked me to come back to do some reshoots. They implied that I’d lied about being pregnant and threatened legal action if I didn’t come back and finish the film within their scheduled time frame. So I went back to work, and they started shooting that same scene with Robert Davi. He made a point of lighting up his cigar in front of me.
“Now maybe you won’t be such a hormonally imbalanced bitch.”
What an ass. I couldn’t wait to get done with that film.
The loss of the baby was painful for me, and it turned out to be the end of my marriage. I remember the exact moment the relationship had run its course and I decided to file for divorce.
I’d made Gary a really nice lunch, put it on a platter, put on some sexy new lingerie I’d bought just for the occasion, and went into his office. It was an attempt to recapture the excitement of our early days. Gary turned from his computer, his face flushed with anger.
“Get out! Don’t you ever fucking come in here when I’m working.”
He quickly turned off the monitor, but not before I noticed that the screen was filled with non-English characters. In the moment I’d seen them, the writing looked like Cyrillic. This was weird, because as far as I knew Gary didn’t speak Russian, even though he had a Russian-Jewish background. I was offended and hurt. I dropped the tray and stormed out and that was that. I called a friend, got the name of a divorce attorney, and then closed the door to my heart once again.
With the benefit of hindsight I think my marriage to Gary was a big “fuck you” to my parents. I’d married a man who was exactly like my father. He wasn’t very demonstrative, and he had a short fuse. It’s the older-guy thing—if your relationship with your father doesn’t work out, then you marry a guy just like him and try to make him love you.
While I was filing for divorce with Gary I fell madly in love with graphic designer and restaurateur Rod Dyer.
I met Rod while dining at his restaurant Pane e Vino. We flirted from across the room, and after a while he came over to talk to me. I was wearing a 1930s-style suit, and Rod told me that he loved my tie, which was exactly the right thing to say. I put my hand on his knee, and he asked me to come back the following day and have lunch with him. When I did he presented me with a beautiful wooden box filled with antique ties and a deco-style card that he’d drawn himself. I was floored and immediately smitten. Short of a cheap ring with emerald shards that he bought for me when we got hitched, Gary had never given me anything. Gary loved women but he wasn’t the romantic type.
I used to drive an ’83 Harley-Davidson Sportster. When I wanted to see Rod, I’d tell Gary that I was going to the gym and then ride my bike across town from Mandeville Canyon to Beverly Hills. I’d see the sunrise above Sunset Boulevard as I raced along it, and then Rod and I would spend the morning making love. Rod was in the midst of a divorce as well and was living in the guesthouse of a famous producer friend. An hour or two later I’d get back on my Harley and race home. I guess Gary assumed the sweat was from my workout, and I suppose that, in a way, it was.
I divorced Gary, took my piano and my clothes, and moved into an apartment building on Doheny Drive. On my first day there I opened the paper and saw that my new movie, Hexed, had just been released in theaters.
We’d shot Hexed in Texas during a baking-hot summer. My co-star was Arye Gross, who has recently been a regular on Castle with Nathan Fillion. Arye played a hotel clerk who pretends he’s someone else to go on a date with my character, a crazy supermodel named Hexina. My character kills people and arranges the evidence to frame the hotel clerk. The director, Alan Spencer, fought hard for me to get the role and allowed me to try just about anything, which made it an incredibly fun shoot.
It was also the first time I’d been back to Texas since my brother died. We’d left him behind when we returned to Connecticut, buried in a Houston cemetery. I had a few margaritas and drove out to visit him. I got lost looking for the grave—my recollection was that it was under a tree next to a fence bordering a paddock with horses. But things had changed. Now a freeway ran alongside his remains, a thin wire fence separating him from the traffic that rushed by. I found the plaque hidden beneath weeds and after clearing the site wiped the dirt off it. I lay down on top of his grave and cried. My marriage was over, but my career was gathering steam. I think I was hoping I’d feel his presence or receive some kind of sign, but there was nothing—Patrick had moved on. If he was watching over me from the other side, then it wasn’t from that place. I stood up and brushed the dust off of my clothes.
As for Gary, he ended up marrying a girl named Wendy, whom I like a lot. She was a nurse at a plastic surgeon’s office, and she had a lot of work done to her. She says to everyone that it made her look like Cher. I think she looks better.
Gary overcame his writer’s block with the help of medication and managed to pay off all his tax debts. He took on a lot of script-doctor work, fixing problems with other writers’ scripts, which pays well but doesn’t earn you screen credits.
As for Gary’s death, there are too many theories to cover them all here. It was reported in the media, private investigators were hired, conspiracy theories started up, and to this day it remains one of the most mysterious deaths in Hollywood history. I’ve been asked to do interviews about it at least a dozen times, and it still crops up in the news and in online reports from time to time. No one knows exactly what happened, but here’s what I do know.
In June 1997 Gary spent a week working with actress Marsha Mason on a remake of the 1949 movie The Big Steal, which is about a man who fakes his own death. The movie was going to be his directorial debut. He was driving his Ford Explorer back to his home in Santa Monica when he vanished. His publicist believed he was acting out the life of The Big Steal’s main character. Wendy offered a $100,000 reward, and when the story hit the media all sorts of strange folk came out of the woodwork. There was a psychic on Leeza Gibbons’s show who claimed Gary was working in an Alabama Kmart. There were stories of a CIA assassination. Apparently Gary had uncovered secrets about the US Army’s conducting tests on live subjects in Panama using prohibited weapons. There were stories of black unregistered helicopters patrolling the California aqueduct near where he vanished. Wendy was even approached by men in black suits with mirrored sunglasses who advised her to drop her investigation into Gary’s disappearance.
A year later his body was found in his Ford Explorer, submerged in the California aqueduct close to the town of Barstow. That closed the official police investigation, but the autopsy and subsequent private investigation opened doors to more unanswered questions.
I’m normally one for accepting the simplest explanation for things, Occam’s Razor and all that, but there were some odd facts that made it difficult for me to accept that Gary fell asleep at the wheel and drove his SUV off the road into a body of water.
First, it was unlikely that this was an accident at all, given that there was a lot of ground between the road and the aqueduct. Also, Gary was an experienced long-distance driver. He’d grown up in a trucking family, and when we were married he’d go for long drives just to clear his head and resolve script problems. And I mean long drives, thousands of miles. He’d be stuck on a script and then just up and say, “I’m off to Tennessee. I’ll see you when I’ve got this story nailed.”
Also, it was strange that Gary was found in the aqueduct at all, considering that I’d already looked. After his disappearance I’d enlisted the help of a friend who was an ex-marine. He assembled a team of divers and they went down into the aqueduct with infrared equipment and swept the area around Barstow from top to bottom. There was no sign of a car or a body. A year later, in the same area, after the police received a tip from an anonymous caller, the car and body miraculously appeared.
And then there was the Cyrillic I’d seen on his computer monitor. Wendy also reported seeing strange symbols on his computer screen, and when she asked him what they were, Gary had answered “encryption codes.” I don’t know what the ramifications of that are, but it’s certainly added fuel to the stories about the CIA, and since those Russian sleeper agents were found in New Jersey in 2010, I’m sure it won’t be long before someone is talking about Gary’s death being connected to some foreign spy network. Who knows?
Last, Gary had a deformed pinky. It had been broken in a football accident, and he hadn’t had it reset properly. Wendy put a photo of it in the reward notice she posted, as it was the simplest, surefire way of immediately identifying his body. When they pulled what was supposed to be Gary’s body out of the aqueduct, the gun that he always carried with him was missing, along with both of his hands. After Wendy and his family pressed the police about the missing hands, another search of the car was conducted and some finger bones were found in the back seat. Wendy pushed to have them analyzed and the police coroner reported that no deformed pinky was found and that the bones were likely around 200 years old.
Whatever the truth, whatever happened that night on the highway, Gary’s death shook me and brought my own life into sharp focus.
After the funeral, I went to Gary’s beach house and met Wendy in person for the first time. We got to know each other and ended up talking through the night. I had a headache, and Wendy told me to get some aspirin in her bathroom cabinet. It was filled with more pills than there are flakes in a snow globe. I asked Wendy about them and she explained:
“Well, I finally got Gary on antidepressants, and that really helped his mood. He was prone to depression.”
I admired her persistence. I wish he’d taken pills with me, because it might have saved our marriage.
When I left the next morning, Wendy gave me a box of Gary’s unproduced scripts. There was some great material in there, his best work. Schwarzenegger scripts sell, Kurt Russell action scripts sell, but sometimes they sell at the expense of scripts like Come As You Are, a story about a female photojournalist. That script did the rounds in Hollywood for years, and came close to being made, first with Kathleen Turner and then Michelle Pfeiffer. But in the end it never got over the line.
Maybe if Gary had lived and made it as a director he would’ve had the influence to push it through. It was a great script, Academy Award material, and it’s a tragedy that it’s just sitting in a box in my attic gathering dust.
Up until Gary’s death, I’d always believed that I would eventually find my Prince Charming to settle down with and raise a few talented, gorgeous children. But after his funeral, when I looked back on the life I’d led since leaving home, on the decisions I’d made, my path seemed clear. If there had been any ambiguity about the meaning of the sign the moon had given me that night in Megève, there wasn’t now. I got it. Family life wasn’t for me.
I had always known that I couldn’t be the kind of dependent woman Dodi had wanted me to be. Losing Justine was unbearably difficult, and she wasn’t even my biological child. After the accident when I’d lost Gary’s baby, after Gary’s death, all I could think about was what if I went and had a child of my own? What if I raised it and loved it and then that bitch fate swept in and things turned to shit again? I couldn’t bear to think about that.
I’d been shaped by my early life. I was made to stand on my own two feet and I was at my weakest whenever I relied on another person for reassurance and validation. I was convinced that I had the answer. I was my own woman. I would enjoy men, but I didn’t need them. This realization was like donning a suit of armor, a power that I’d accumulated through my own efforts, and I would set about making it stronger.
That inner voice continued to drive me forward. It told me that I could reach a larger audience and touch people’s lives. I would be immune to criticism, self-doubt, and fear. I was going to be a film actress, the next Katharine Hepburn.
When I got a call from my agent telling me that I’d landed a role on a sci-fi show that Warner Brothers was producing, I said to her, “You know I’m working on my movie career. Are you sure I should be committing to a TV series and a five-year contract?”
My agent laughed.
“Honey, there’s never been a sci-fi series that wasn’t a Star Trek spin-off that ran more than a couple of years. Trust me, you’ll be lucky to last for one.”
It turned out that my agent couldn’t have been more wrong. And it was lucky for me that she was.
It’s January 19, 1994, and a massive aftershock from the Northridge earthquake hits. Everyone on the set starts screaming and running out of the studio, and I’m left on my own, strapped into the cockpit of a Star Fury combat fighter, helpless to escape. I’m locked into a Michelin Man spacesuit, and the helmet I’m wearing is all fogged up, so I have to keep pressing this button in my hand to operate the fan. The plastic visor clears up for a few seconds. I wait. It’s hot inside the suit, and the sound of the fan is getting on my nerves. Soon the aftershocks will subside, and then I’m going to give them a piece of my mind. They’re going to see firsthand just how much Claudia and Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova have in common.
Babylon 5 was something new to television—a science fiction novel in episodes. It wasn’t a space Western like Star Trek. There were no cute kids or robots. Joe Straczynski set out to write a novel for television, an adult-oriented series. The result was a richly textured story fueled by politics, diplomacy, philosophy, religion, history, and science.
A five-mile-long diplomatic space station in a distant galaxy, Babylon 5 had become “the last, best hope for peace” between intergalactic species. The characters schemed, clashed, struggled with their demons, betrayed one another and themselves, and sometimes fell in love. Conflicts weren’t neatly resolved at the end of every episode. They were allowed to fester and build to a crescendo.
In the midst of it all, running the station and its crew as a well-oiled machine, was Lieutenant Commander Susan Ivanova.
A good cast and crew have a lot in common with a well-run space station. When you work on an established show like Dallas or Columbo everything runs smoothly, but Babylon 5 was a new show being shot in an old warehouse in Sun Valley. It was Warner Brothers’ first stab at sci-fi TV, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d hidden the show away far from their Hollywood studio lot, just in case it turned out to be a massive embarrassment.
Babylonian Productions was a rabbit warren of corridors and offices. There were auditions taking place at the front of the building and actors walking around in alien prosthetics and Earth Force uniforms. Guys from the prop department would walk past carrying body armor and plasma rifles. John Copeland, the producer, would work as budget enforcer, railroad fob watch in hand, ensuring that the directors didn’t run into overtime. In the office closest to the sets, keyboard eternally clacking away, was Joe Straczynski, the show’s creator, executive producer, and lead writer.
I went in on my first day not knowing what to expect. I knew that I was replacing Tamlyn Tomita (The Karate Kid Part II, The Joy Luck Club). They’d decided she was too short and didn’t have enough of a commanding presence to act beside the two male leads. The rest of the cast and crew, with the exception of Richard Biggs (Dr. Stephen Franklin), had already shot the pilot, so I was the new kid on the block. Michael O’Hare, the male lead, was all too happy to remind me of this. He wasn’t what you would call a generous actor. When we’d enter the set together, he would intentionally broaden his shoulders to try to dominate the shot. The problem was that the Babylon 5 doors would pull away from the bottom and up into the side of a plywood set, meaning that I’d catch the last part of it with my shoulder and make the whole wall shake. After several takes, I’d eventually have to follow a few inches behind him to avoid a clash, which I guess was his plan all along.
I think the role of male lead went to his head just a little. He propositioned some of the female cast members and was officious with the crew. In between takes he would unashamedly shuffle his junk, moving it around with his hand through the fabric of his uniform. When he caught me looking at him in disbelief he explained, “I have an average-sized penis but enormous testicles.”
Great, thanks for sharing.
I ran into some familiar faces on set: Jeff Conaway (Security Officer Zack Allen), with whom I’d starred in Berrenger’s and Tale of Two Sisters, and John Flinn, the director of photography, with whom I’d worked on Jake and the Fatman. I had a crush on John back then, but knew he was married, so I didn’t make a move.
I hit it off right away with Jerry Doyle, who played Security Chief Michael Garibaldi. Jerry could do great Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd impersonations, which was especially funny since his character was also a Looney Tunes fan. We were always razzing each other, especially over the sci-fi technobabble, which doesn’t easily roll off the tongue. Our dialogue was peppered with phrases like “Bolozian freighters, Minbari war cruisers, and tachyon emissions.” The long speeches with tech-talk could be challenging but they also provided great fodder for the blooper reels.
There was a positive energy amongst the cast and crew. Everyone was really enjoying themselves, and any awkwardness with my male lead was forgotten by the time we wrapped my first episode, “Midnight on the Firing Line.”
I was beginning to sense that not only was this going to be a fun job, but Susan Ivanova had the potential to be a rewarding, complex character.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2230, Ivanova had a passionate, fiercely loyal temperament, combined with a sardonic wit and cynicism that is as much a part of Russian life as vodka and borscht.
If nothing else I was glad to have a chance to wear less makeup, pull back my hair, and kick some ass. Finally, my height and authoritative demeanor were working for me. I’ve always been a tomboy at heart and this was the first time I hadn’t been told to soften my style for a part:
Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander. Daughter of Andre and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth, sweetheart. I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me.2
When the second season started up we discovered that the studio had replaced Michael O’Hare. There’d been too many conflicts between our male lead and the cast and crew. Bruce Boxleitner was our new commander, and I couldn’t have been happier. Bruce and I got on like the best of friends. He’s a great guy, very genuine and caring, not unlike John Sheridan, the character he played. And I’d started settling into the character of Ivanova. In the first season she was extremely uptight, she had a pole up her butt, but by the second season there was more Claudia in her. She developed a sense of humor and started developing relationships. The steel was still there, but now it was wrapped in velvet.
And we do have a lot in common, Ivanova and I.
She had lost a brother and a mother (although I’d been fortunate enough to get my own mother back). I used to wear one earring in memory of my brother Patrick, and when I discussed this with Joe he was happy to allow Ivanova to do the same. Like me, she’d built a wall to deal with the loss she’d endured, her family tragedies, and the conflict she faced between love and career. Those were strong themes in my own life, and that energy, those past personal experiences, seemed to shine through in Ivanova and I think the audience responded very strongly to that.
There are even similarities between our sex lives. One time, when I passed on some character notes to Joe, I inadvertently turned Ivanova bisexual.
Andrea Thompson played the ship’s resident telepath, Talia Winters, my lesbian lover on the show. Andrea is one of the most amazing women I’ve ever met. Aside from starring in Babylon 5 she’s been a CNN reporter, the star of multiple TV series, a high-end real estate investor, and a jewel trader. And if that weren’t enough she’s beautiful, a gourmet chef, and a single mother with two kids. I should be insanely envious, but she’s also absolutely lovely, and we have the same sense of humor.
Joe had written an episode in which a sleazy ex-boyfriend of Ivanova’s visits the station, and that just didn’t sit well with me. Having worked in television for over a decade, I suspected that if there was one ex-boyfriend then others would follow, and I couldn’t see Ivanova banging her way across the galaxy while forging her military career. She was driven, and I didn’t think that she had time for relationships. I objected, and in a throw-away line, told Joe that if it came down to it I’d rather be with an alien or a woman.
Andrea and I both thought it was funny when Joe started up the whole lesbian thing, but I didn’t mind. Ivanova’s sexual confusion—her love for Talia despite her hatred for the Psi Corps, the evil agency that Talia was bound to—added another layer of complexity to the character and also reflected my own sexual attitudes. I don’t really differentiate between a man or a woman when it comes to love. Physically I tend to prefer men—that’s what makes me heterosexual—but I’ve certainly had my flings with women. I’ve never thought of myself as gay or even bisexual; I prefer omnisexual. Love is part of life, and, man or woman, we’re all stuck playing the same game.
So while my character was having an affair with the station’s resident telepath I was having one with the show’s director of photography, John Flinn.
Things were starting to fade with Rod by then. We were heading in different directions, and I had almost no spare time outside of filming the show. I still had a major crush on John, but he was very careful not to start anything until after his divorce. It was hard to wait. But we did. And once he was available we were free to do as we pleased. Sex with John gave me something to look forward to at the end of the day. When shooting was over and everybody went home we had fun in my trailer. I’d keep a six-pack handy, and sometimes we’d have a couple of beers. Then I’d have to get home and start learning lines for the next day.
Dating a man I’d had a crush on for so long was exciting in itself. Dating the director of photography when you’re the female lead comes with certain perks. After all, the director of photography is the one who makes you look good, and a man in love is certain to take care of his lady. John was a complete professional to all of the actors on the set, but looking back at old episodes I do notice that I’m particularly well lit.
Despite the occasional near-death experience, like the aforementioned earthquake incident, Babylon 5 was a career highlight.
Every day it was fun to go to work, because everybody was always in a good mood. I think it had a lot to do with John and his crew. The director of photography and the director set the tone of the set and we had very nice, very competent directors the majority of the time. Except for this one Italian guy who didn’t have a clue what Babylon 5 was about. He kept telling me, “You have to be more sexxxy. Be more sexxxy.”
“Have you ever watched the show? Ivanova doesn’t do sexxxy.”
Years later, at conventions, I’d hear from actors on other sci-fi shows about personality differences between cast members. That didn’t happen on Babylon 5. We didn’t want anyone to spoil our fun. Joe Straczynski would listen to the cast and crew and keep his finger on the pulse of the production. If you were a prima donna, your character got reassigned or killed off, the preferred method being getting sucked out of an airlock. At the end of the day we had a group of people who meshed together extremely well, and I think that shows in the final result.
Every actress hopes to be famous one day. If nothing else, you land better roles, and you don’t have to worry about where your next paycheck is coming from. When Babylon 5 came along I already had a certain level of recognition because of my eleven years in TV and movies, but being on Babylon 5 took my career to a completely different level. For the first time, I had loyal fans who knew me by name. It wasn’t stardom of the same wattage as Julia Roberts’s or Tom Cruise’s, but it was (and still is) a constant pleasure to be recognized and acknowledged for my work. Even when I went overseas to the UK, France, or Germany, people on the street would call out, “Ivanova!”
We all knew we were onto something good, but no one had any idea that Babylon 5 would become such a phenomenon. It would last five seasons and spawn six films, countless novels, short stories, comic books, and a spin-off series. It won two Emmy Awards, Hugo Awards, and dozens of others. Today, eighteen years after we started, Babylon 5 is still going strong, racking up more than $500 million in DVD sales and gaining fresh momentum on digital platforms. During my years on the show, from 1994 to 1997, SFX magazine voted me “the sexiest woman in sci-fi,” and I was named one of “The 25 Women Who Shook Sci-Fi,” as covered by the Los Angeles Times.
When the show went on hiatus for a few months at the end of season two the producers flew me to London to do some television ads for Babylon 5 Uncut. So I called my old friend Dodi Fayed to let him know I was coming to town.
We’d kept in touch over the years. At one point I heard his mother had died suddenly of a heart attack, and I remembered how he used to call her every day. I found an antique silver cigar case with his initials on it and had it delivered with a note of condolence; even while he was in mourning he wrote back expressing his gratitude. He said that very few people had reached out to him after her passing, and that it meant a lot to him. He would later say to me, “If it meant giving up everything I have—cars, wealth, and women—I would do it to bring my mother back.”
Dodi was glad to hear from me and invited me to stay with him in his Kensington apartment. Things were going well with John, but he was my on-set lover, a part of the show, and after two years of hard work I needed to get away from it all and let off some steam. As I flew into London I thought back to the pleasant times I’d had with Dodi when we last traveled around Europe and breathed a sigh of relief. This was just the thing I needed, a well-deserved break.
I had no idea he was going to ask me to have his baby.
Dodi and I laughed and loved our way across London. He’d just finished working as executive producer on The Scarlet Letter with Gary Oldman and Demi Moore. I told him about my adventures on Babylon 5 and learned that he’d already enjoyed some episodes with European friends who were fans of the show. We always seemed to meet when things were going especially well for us.
Despite starring in a sci-fi series and having worked on two sci-fi movies I was woefully ignorant of the genre. Dodi set out to educate me and ran screening nights with movies like Blade Runner and Alien.
We had such a good time that he invited me to stay for a few months until Babylon 5 started filming again.
When Dodi and I first started dating years before, he gave me a big gold ring with an amethyst set in it. The inner band was engraved with his name.
“They gave this to me after I completed my service in the Egyptian paratroopers.”
It was a heartfelt gift, one that I’d cherished for more than a decade, but now it was time to return it. I was going through a period of returning keepsakes to old lovers. I’d sent one guy back his high school football ring and another his grandfather’s wedding ring. It seemed like the right thing to do.
So one night while we were drinking champagne after making love I fished the ring out of my purse and pressed it into his palm.
“You should hang on to this. One day, when you settle down, you can give it to someone you really love.”
He looked at the ring with a slightly confused expression. Then he looked back at me, then back to the ring, and then he burst out laughing. In that same instant I got the joke.
“You made these rings up, didn’t you? There’s a whole host of women out there with these things!”
He looked embarrassed for a moment and then it was my turn to laugh.
“And I schlepped it all the way back here so that you could give it to someone else!”
I have to admit, in that environment even the air seemed better, more luxurious. When I remember Dodi, I always think of wonderful smells: the deep, musky tendrils of smoke from his Cuban cigars; the crisp, clean fragrance of his cologne; the sensual undertones from the exquisite leather seats in his private jets and cars. I loved the ambiance.
But there were downsides. An entourage of staff and armed security formed a protective perimeter around us 24/7. It always used to amaze me that Dodi could live like that. He told me that he’d been kidnapped as a child and that as a result he had grown up used to having a serious security presence. Having a battery of armed guards clear the way for him was second nature.
The idea of hiring men to lay their lives on the line for my safety made me a little uneasy. Even when I have security at sci-fi conventions I always go out of my way to make friends with them. Some of Dodi’s guards were treated okay, but others would be swapped out and replaced like his girlfriends. For Dodi, they were so completely integrated into his life that they were invisible.
A billionaire lives in a rarefied world. Everywhere he goes the red carpet is (often literally) rolled out before him. Elegant cars with courteous, uniformed drivers picked us up at the door. When we ate out it was at the best tables in Michelin-starred restaurants. The chefs would come out to greet Dodi as an old friend, inquiring whether the food was satisfactory.
Dodi lived in another world that just happened to intersect with mine. You don’t need to travel to an alien planet if you want to see another form of sentient life. You don’t need an interdimensional transporter to visit a parallel reality. You just need a few billion dollars and the whole world changes around you.
When I got back to L.A. I fell in love with a house in the Hollywood Hills but was $25,000 short of the amount needed to settle. I signed the contract anyway, not knowing where I’d find the money. The next day I opened the mail to find a residual check for a little over $25,000—my cut from the sales of Ivanova merchandising. Everything seemed to be going my way.
Back on set John was waiting for me with open arms. Neither of us asked any questions or offered any answers. We just started up where we’d left off.
Dodi and I talked on the phone as often as we could. Whenever I had a break from Babylon 5 he flew me (first class, naturally) to meet him. During the production hiatus Dodi and I had been able to drink and dine with abandon, but while I was shooting the series I maintained a healthy diet and drank lightly or not at all. The one time I did drink too much, while at a friend’s birthday dinner, John noticed it immediately the following morning when he was lighting me for a scene.
“What did you do last night, baby? Your eyes are all puffy.”
I was so embarrassed I never did it again.
For all the fooling around we did, in the trailers and on the set, John and I always took the job seriously and maintained our professionalism. I didn’t drink much at all in those years, even when I wanted to, because I had respect for the gift I’d been given. I was on a hit show, working with so many people I loved. The very thought that I could let my colleagues down and disappoint the fans by indulging myself with a drinking spree in my off hours was unthinkable. My drinking was still at the point where I could control it.
In 1995 I celebrated my thirtieth birthday with a party attended by the Babylon 5 regulars. I noticed throughout the night that Jeff Conaway was acting a bit off. By the end of the party he was completely wasted and holed up in the bathroom doing lines. A mutual friend told me that Jeff was having a bad night—his wife was about to leave him because she couldn’t handle his addictions anymore.
“Addictions? What addictions?”
“Cocaine, alcohol, painkillers, you name it.”
I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t seen any sign of that, because on set Jeff was a consummate professional. He was always on time, he’d have his dialogue down, and he was always friendly and sober. The only behavior that had ever stuck in my mind as being unusual was that he used to carry around supersized bottles of vitamins. I thought it was pretty cool that he had all of these pills, potions, and unguents in his trailer, so one day after an exhausting shooting schedule I asked him what I should take.
“Here, take a niacin tablet. That’ll pick you up.”
I brought it home and tried it. My skin turned bright red and started burning. I rushed into the shower and turned the cold tap on full force. That stopped the burning, but when I tried to get out of the shower I was hit by a dizzy spell and ended up lying on the floor feeling as if I’d just been through the spin cycle in a washing machine. The next day I went into work and tracked him down.
“What the hell were you thinking giving me that stuff?”
“Oh. You can’t take the whole niacin pill. You have to build up a tolerance, so you should just take a little bit. I guess I should have told you that.”
A few years ago I saw Jeff on TV. He was in a reality show called Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. It broke my heart watching that. He looked like a frail old man, not the handsome, talented guy I knew.
He had a girlfriend who was bringing him drugs during the show, which ended up getting him kicked off, and then he’d come back and then get kicked off again. They were getting him to talk about his past, his tortured childhood, trying to get him to confront the fact that he was an addict, but it always puzzled me that no one did anything to treat his biological addiction. The more you drink or take drugs, the more the neuro-pathways of addiction and compulsion in the brain are strengthened. Why weren’t the doctors on the show treating this instead of just the psychological component? Addicts attract other addicts, for comfort, for mutual justification, or, as in this case, just to help feed the addiction. I thought it was sad that there seemed to be no one there for Jeff. Maybe he’d burned through his friends and family, broken one promise too many. Most addicts do. I know I did.
Jeff, like many people I know, was an opiate addict. He had an accident early on in his career on the set of the movie Grease, while shooting the “Greased Lightning” scene, that left him with chronic neck and back pain. Most opiate addicts start their addiction after going to a doctor and complaining about back or neck pain; some of the painkillers that they’re prescribed are derived from the same source as heroin.
Jeff had multiple surgeries to try to rid himself of the pain, but by then he was addicted to painkillers. One addiction led to another until they finally claimed his life at age sixty in May 2011. It was a tremendous tragedy that Jeff died so young, battling his demons to the end until his body wore out and couldn’t take it anymore. In the aftermath I got the impression that the media were very blasé about his death. They even left him out of the Emmy memorial photo montage.
Jeff was fifteen years older than me. At the time, the news of his addiction was tragic, but I didn’t see that it had any relevance to my own life. I had no inkling that before long the same monster that haunted Jeff would come knocking on my door, and I’d be designing my own detox-vitamin program. I was too busy living the life I’d always dreamed of.
These were the halcyon days. I was developing a strong fan base (and boy, are sci-fi fans loyal—I’d never seen anything like it). I was in constant demand at conventions, so I hired an assistant named Holly Evans to help manage the bookings. Holly is ex-military, loyal to the bone, and has stuck with me through all of the highs and lows. She’s one of the best and brightest angels in my life.
When the Los Angeles Times ran an article asking people to choose the next host of the Oscars, Holly took up the challenge and contacted my fans, letting them know where to vote. From the Los Angeles Times, December 13, 2000:
And you thought the presidential election results were confusing? In the wake of Billy Crystal taking himself out of consideration to host the next Academy Awards, we asked readers to nominate their candidates to replace him—and the wide range of responses made the margin of victory in Florida, whatever it might be and for whomever, look like a landslide…. The biggest draw, thanks to an apparent write-in campaign by her fans, was Claudia Christian of Babylon 5.
I got over 6,000 votes and left Jim Carrey and Steve Martin for dead. I’ve got my dress picked out in case the Academy decides to call. It doesn’t matter if they don’t—fifteen years after my last appearance on Babylon 5, I’m still in demand at conventions around the world, and Holly is still making the bookings. You can’t beat loyalty like that.
Unfortunately, there is a point at which loyalty crosses the line and becomes obsession.
I’d been receiving crazy-colored, hand-knitted items from a fan who claimed to be a postal worker. He would send me packages containing homemade tea cozies and doilies that he’d knitted himself, and I sent back thank-you notes. Then he wrote to say that he was finally going to meet me at a convention in upstate New York. He had a gift he wanted to give me.
I was sitting at my table signing things for folks and having a pleasant time when I saw something large and furry out of the corner of my eye. I looked up to see a giant tribble (a furry alien creature from Star Trek) waddling toward me. The tribble stopped at the table, identified itself as my postal worker fan, and held up an enormous black plastic garbage bag. From out of it, he drew a hot-pink, lime-green, and purple afghan large enough to cover a California-king-size bed. If it were the ’60s and I were on acid and living in a commune, I’d have appreciated it. But since I hadn’t eaten a trunkload of magic mushrooms that morning, I had to draw on decades of acting experience to conjure up convincing superlatives.
“It’s… um… beautiful. Colorful. Handmade.”
“I made it myself. For you.”
“And I appreciate that. It must have taken some finesse to create such a work of art. Thank you, thank you so much.”
I could tell the giant tribble was pleased. I could hear him purring inside the suit. He waddled off, but not before promising to deliver another gift later in the day.
I was expecting a Day-glo cloak the size of Rhode Island or a scarf long enough to span the English Channel, so was I in for a surprise when, about an hour later, another giant tribble came lumbering toward me. It was the same guy, but the costume had been modified. Wires stuck out of its head, and dozens of strong red lights flashed around its furry body. This was clearly a scary tribble, a tribble with unfinished business.
“I am a morphed tribble. Now you will be morphed, too.”
And then a gun emerged from the mass of fur and he shot me. I felt the bullet hit me in the ribs, and I fell back, clutching my side. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but the next day’s headline did—“Death by Irony! Babylon 5 Star Shot by Sci-fi Alien.” I was supposed to die a dignified death in bed in my Tuscan villa at ninety, clutching my Oscar in one hand and my Screen Actors Guild award in the other. Instead, I was lying on the ground clutching my ribs as my security guys wrestled a giant tribble to the ground.
I pulled up my shirt to reveal a reddening, nasty-looking bruise and a fat, rapidly rising welt. There was no blood. I wasn’t going to die. The gun was real but the bullets were blanks—the same caliber that killed Jon-Erik Hexum and was involved in Brandon Lee’s death. If the blank’s paper seal had hit flesh instead of bone it could have damaged an internal organ or, on an unlucky day, killed me. I was pissed off. I got up and scanned the room for the guy—I wanted a piece of him. But he was already being dragged away by security, and my friends were gathering around, shepherding me back toward the green room. Later on in the day I received yet another black garbage bag. This one had two hand-knitted pillows in it, in the same headache-inducing neon color scheme. I tried to piece together his thought process in my mind. This was actually meant to be the second gift, but somehow he’d been taken over by the morphed tribble, decided to shoot me instead, and then came around without any memory of what had happened, threw the pillows into the bag, and had them sent to me from jail. Maybe one of the pillows was meant to be from the relatively harmless tribble and another from the totally fucking crazy tribble? Who can say?
The same guy approached me at a convention ten years later, I kid you not, and opened with, “I bet you don’t remember me.”
I looked at him, completely amazed.
“Oh, I remember you alright. You shot me.”
On the previous occasion, after the security guards had ripped the head off his costume, I’d gotten a good look at him. That face was burned into my brain. He had unkempt hair and wore a pair of bedroom slippers. He looked stunned, scratched his head as if trying to recall what I was talking about, and then finally brightened up.
“Oh yeah! I shot you!”
Join me for a moment in trying to imagine a life so rich and varied that you cannot remember shooting an actress at a sci-fi convention while wearing a tribble costume and then being wrestled to the ground by a security team.
Then there was the guy at a Las Vegas convention in ’97. He’d been sending flowers and love letters to my Hollywood P.O. box. He’d written of his plan to sell his house, quit his job, and move to L.A. so that we could be together. In the world he’d created in his mind we were already married. His sister wrote to me shortly after, stating that she was concerned about his mental health. Apparently he had indeed quit his job and sold his house, and his sister and family had no idea where he was. That worried me. I didn’t even go to pick up my mail, because I was frightened that he’d be there, waiting. Then another letter arrived notifying me that he was coming to pick me up from my next convention in Las Vegas. In his fantasy world I’d left my wedding ring on the sink of our kitchen prior to flying to Vegas, and he was simply being a good husband in returning it to me.
All of this led to my sitting at the police station while a bunch of cops circulated the photo the stalker had conveniently sent me for my bedside table. I went to the convention accompanied by my friend Damon and a team of policemen who looked as if they’d just come out of the armory in The Matrix. They wore fancy-looking headgear, walkie-talkies, and guns. They set up checkpoints and started patrolling while I signed things and talked with the fans. A few hours passed, and then this nice Aussie girl who had been staying at Damon’s came up and pointed to a guy who was circling the table.
“Hey mate, isn’t that your stalker?”
She’d seen the photo two days ago at Damon’s apartment and somehow memorized the face.
“Yes, it is the stalker, mate, and thank you so much.”
Apparently he’d been circling the table for about an hour, and she had thought that the armed escorts had been hanging back with some grand plan in mind when in fact they just hadn’t spotted him at all.
I urgently gesticulated in the direction of the stalker and finally my S.W.A.T. team rolled into action. Walkie-talkies screeched, bodies tumbled, and the cops ran in and handcuffed the guy before dragging him away. After Gary I’ve never married again, but whenever I contemplate the prospect, the image that instantly springs to mind is that stalker with a stack of policemen piling on top of him, desperately trying to fish a wedding band out of his pocket and yelling at me as if we were long lost lovers.
“Claudia! You left your ring back at the house! Quick, take it. People will think you’re available!”
That always helps bring me to my senses.
But this definitely wasn’t the last crazy person I would run into at a convention.
People have tattooed my signature on their bodies and legally changed their names to Susan Ivanova. I can list at least a dozen other stalkers through the years—both male and female—and I have the restraining orders to prove it. I wish I was making this stuff up.
I’m generally open and sharing with my fans, but there is a line, and if you stay on the right side of that—and don’t stalk me or try to kill me—then we’re all good.
I had a break from Babylon 5 at the end of the third season and headed off to spend time with Dodi again. I began to remember why I’d broken things off with him back when I was a teenager. Dodi was a good companion, well-versed in navigating his upper-class domain, but he had a jealous streak a mile wide.
Whenever I was visiting his world, Dodi liked to know where I was at all times. He gave me keys to his apartments in London and Paris but still insisted I sign in and out with security using a codename. Sometimes I was Black Swan, other times I was Red Hawk. It’s very cool at first—you feel like you’re in a James Bond movie. But the luster quickly wears off, and then it becomes just plain irritating.
“I’m Black Hawk.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have a Black Hawk on the list.”
“Um… Red Hawk?”
“Sorry. That was yesterday’s code name.”
“What about Black Eye and Bloody Nose if you don’t let me into the building?”
I went to use his flat in Paris while he went away for business, inviting my cousin Kati to join me. She’s ten years my junior and has always been like a little sister to me. We were excited at the prospect of hitting Les Bains Douches and some of the other hot nightclubs in town.
Always exceptionally generous, Dodi had a meal sent over from the Ritz and then called to tell me that we had a curfew. If we weren’t home by 11 p.m. every night, the guard had orders not to let us back in. The whole situation was all the more ridiculous because I knew the guard. He was this gorgeous guy I used to work out with at a gym in West Hollywood. He’d worked as an actor and bodyguard, and now he was dressed in a butler suit telling me when I had to be home for bed. He was really embarrassed but explained that there were people watching him and that he’d be fired if he didn’t toe the line.
My cousin rolled her eyes. That little disappointment was the beginning of the end for me. I enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle but never had much patience for the drama and control that went with it. The rich man’s entourage—the housemen, security guards, and attendants at every turn—was starting to get on my nerves. I liked my privacy and the freedom to come and go as I pleased.
When Dodi returned we sat down and had a heart-to-heart. I expressed my doubts about his lifestyle, that it wasn’t for me. I told him that I needed to get back to L.A. to prepare for the upcoming season. Instead, Dodi convinced me that we should cruise the Atlantic for a few days on his yacht Jonikal. The weather was welcoming, and my mood cleared as well. It had been more than a decade since Dodi and I had traveled at sea, and I was looking forward to reliving the experience.
At sea there was less interference from others. Dodi and I had enough privacy to enjoy each other and reconnect. As we relaxed together all the tensions and petty annoyances that had been building up between us drifted away.
After we made love on the gently rocking boat one night a sweet intimacy settled over us. We started talking about our lives. Dodi poignantly confessed his fear of dying without becoming a father. His father Mohamed was overbearing and had never spent much time with him as he was growing up. Dodi dreamed of having kids who could be “normal.” Kids he could take to the park or the movies without having to mobilize a private army. The whole issue had been weighing on his mind. At the time, I assumed it was because he’d recently turned forty and was having a midlife crisis. Question: What does the man who has everything regret missing out on when he hits middle age? Answer: A normal life. In retrospect, though, I can’t help but wonder if he had a premonition of his own death, much as my mother had of Patrick’s.
While I lay with my head on his arm he asked if I’d consider having a child with him. I was totally caught off guard. Dodi and I had dated on and off for more than a decade, but I had always considered us to be ships passing in the night.
I was certainly touched. Dodi trusted me because I didn’t want or need anything from him. I had my own money, my own home, and my own career—in contrast to the flock of hungry seagulls who usually hovered around him.
“I’ve known you for a long time now. We have a strong friendship. We would be good parents.”
I was hit by a powerful wave of emotion. My heart lit up as I entertained the possibility that it might just work.
I told him I’d think about it, that I needed time.
We had voyaged southward and entered the Mediterranean. Now we anchored at Monte Carlo. He was going away for a few days on business, and I could sense he was going to press the issue when he got back. We held each other for a long time, and when we let go and looked into each other’s tear-filled eyes, we kissed and hugged and said our goodbyes.
Back at his Kensington flat I sat surrounded by photos of Brooke Shields and other models and actresses he’d dated. I had promised Dodi that I’d think it over seriously, and I did. I knew one thing for certain—I didn’t love him. I mean, I felt a kind of love, a tender, maternal affection, but it wasn’t a mature, soulful love, the kind I’d felt with Rod and John Flinn, the kind you build a lifetime partnership on. And what kind of partnership would it be, anyway? He’d asked me to have his children, but he didn’t ask me to marry him, and that didn’t sit well with me. Wasn’t I good enough? Would Dodi’s other girlfriends keep coming around and competing with our children for his attention while I raised the kids? Screw that.
Then there was his family. Dodi treated me with respect, but his family existed in a different culture. I’d seen his father’s relationship with the mother of his youngest children, so I knew that if I had Dodi’s child—with or without marriage—I’d have to spend more time in that household. Women have to eat in a separate room, apart from the men. I was a young, successful, independent Western woman. I didn’t tolerate that kind of thing when I was at the Davises’ dinner with Kissinger, I didn’t let Dodi get away with it, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to sign up for a lifetime of it. And even if I somehow managed to avoid the family, I knew I would probably lose control of the child if anything ever happened to Dodi.
Still, I rang my mother and asked her for advice. It was a big decision, and I wanted to make sure I was being objective.
“Hi mom. Dodi asked me to have his baby. I was wondering… ”
“Do it!”
Was that what she thought of me? That I needed to cash in and settle for a second-rate relationship? In hindsight, I’m sure she meant well. All parents want their kids to settle down, but right then and there my mother’s enthusiasm to see me knocked up and “taken care of” was the deciding factor. I was and still am a very stubborn person. I got up early the next day, wrote Dodi a note, and caught the next flight back to L.A.
I love you Dodi, I always will, but even though you think I’m the most mature girl you know, I’m still a girl. I want my life and I want to see how it plays out. I’m sorry to leave without saying goodbye… but we had our beautiful goodbye in Monte Carlo after an incredible weekend. Please call me when you come to Los Angeles, I miss you already. CC
I knew it would make him angry, and later I heard from mutual friends that it had. Dodi had never spent much time around independent women, and he certainly was not used to being turned down. It felt like the coward’s way out, but I also saw it as a way for him to save face. From Dodi’s point of view, he had honored me with the ultimate request—to have his child—and I simply wasn’t ready for it. It seemed kinder just to go.
My relationship with John Flinn was quickly approaching its end, too. We were coming up to the two-year mark, and I’d never had a relationship that lasted more than three. He was very understanding about the whole thing and very forgiving. I was still relatively young, and he could see that I was restless and in need of a change.
As fate would have it I met another man who would light a fire in me I’d never felt before. There was something combustible between us. We both felt it, a little foretaste of an earth-shaking encounter, and it wasn’t long before we fell headlong into the flames of a tumultuous affair.
Toward the end of season four Joe Straczynski started calling me into his office for private conversations. He didn’t do that with many cast members, but I felt that it was a natural progression of the friendship that had been growing over the course of the series. It was common knowledge that I’d broken up with John, but I hadn’t advertised the fact that I had started seeing a new paramour. One day Joe asked me if I’d like to go and see a show with him. I agreed, and never gave it a second thought. We were all pretty buddy-buddy on the set and the cast and crew would often socialize after work, though Joe had never asked me to go anywhere with him before.
I suddenly knew I’d made a mistake in accepting his invitation when the next day a dozen red roses appeared at my front door.
Shit, this is a date!
But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Joe was just being nice. I went out to meet him, and when I saw the black stretch limo pull up any doubts I’d harbored were washed away.
Fuck, this is definitely a date!
I was more than a little freaked out. I’m not normally thrown off guard by men, but it does make a difference when your boss, the guy who puts the words in the mouth of your character, who can kill or dishonor your character, asks you out on a date. It’s not entirely inappropriate; this was Hollywood after all, and things like that do happen. But that night it totally threw me for a loop. I wondered what people would think. Here I am, I’ve just come off a long relationship with the director of photography, and now I’m climbing into a limo with the show’s creator. And then I started to worry about Joe’s expectations. I’d said yes to seeing the show, I’d accepted the roses, and then I climbed into the limo with him. How do you give back roses without causing offense? In hindsight, I should have made a joke about the whole thing: Roses? You know, I don’t date writers, Joe. I married the last writer I dated, and they’re still searching for his body.
We went to the show, and I endured some awkward conversation. It was clearly an uncomfortable evening for both of us. When he dropped me off back at home I quickly thanked him and closed the door to the limo before he had time to move in for anything physical.
It was a small thing, really, just a miscommunication between friends. But these things do change relationships. They change how people act toward one another. After that night I don’t think we ever recaptured the trust and friendship that we’d previously enjoyed.
Back on set Joe stopped calling me into his office, and I’d stay in my trailer on breaks and head home straight after work. We’d shot the last episode of the series, “Sleeping in Light,” and were preparing to shoot two Babylon 5 TV movies. Everyone had already started auditioning for other jobs. I’d even read for the character Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, a role that ended up going to Jeri Ryan.
I really thought that any discomfort between Joe and me would vanish once the show was over. But sadly for both me and Susan Ivanova, that wouldn’t happen.
Joe had originally intended Babylon 5 to run five years. Every season our ratings got better. Internationally, our popularity was higher than ever. Under ordinary circumstances we would have been able to complete the five-year story arc without a hitch. But in the fourth season the network—Warner’s Prime Time Entertainment Network—started having financial trouble, and it looked as if we weren’t going to have the money to do a fifth. Just to be safe Joe shortened the story arc so that by the end of season four all the loose ends had been tied up. The story was over. We filmed what was supposed to be the last episode, and my manager signed me to star in a TV movie on the USA cable network called A Wing and a Prayer. It was the first time I was the star of a Movie of the Week. I’d been a co-star, guest star, and everything in between, but never “the star,” and it was a big opportunity to take a leap forward in my career.
Then we learned that TNT and Warner Brothers had come through with the money for a fifth season.
That’s when the problems started. I couldn’t sign up for twenty-two episodes because I needed the first few episodes off to do the Movie of the Week. Joe promised that he would write me out for those episodes. He’d done the same thing for some of the other cast members. I was happy with that, but the cable network wasn’t prepared to take me on if I was double booked, because it would affect their ability to get insurance. I pressed my manager, because I was committed to continuing with the show, and he got USA to agree that everything would be okay if I got a guarantee in writing from Babylonian Productions stating that I would be released for those episodes that would be shot while A Wing and a Prayer was shooting.
Joe told me that he was unable to do that. If he renegotiated in writing for me then it would open the door for the rest of the cast to do the same, and that would affect the budget and scheduling and jeopardize the entire fifth season. TNT wanted all the lead actors, which included me, committed to all twenty-two episodes.
They set a deadline for me to sign the contract. I was caught between a rock and a hard place and hoped that Joe and the producers could find some way to work around it.
Joe and the key cast members attended a sci-fi convention in the UK, and some of the studio guys were there, too. They plied us with wine and good scotch, and we went to bed at the hotel completely bombed. At 3 a.m. someone knocked on my door. It was a producer with a contract in hand. He started blabbering, pressuring me to sign. I found out later that they tried the same thing on some other cast members who still hadn’t signed on for the new season. I rang my manager in L.A. to ask him for advice.
“Claudia, no fucking way are you signing anything at 3 a.m. in a foreign country when I haven’t even seen the contract. I’ve been asking these guys to fax me something all week, and they haven’t sent me a goddamn thing!”
I packed my bags and left the UK. The deadline passed, and by the time I got home there was a fax waiting for me telling me that I was fired from the show. My manager contacted them to see if we could salvage the situation. The producer’s reply was that we were a “a day late and a dollar short.”
That’s show business. They had to move on with their production schedule. Joe had scripts to write and he needed to know if the female lead was part of the story. I understand that. I was upset that I couldn’t continue with the show, and I really felt that things could have been worked out. But at the end of the day it was something that often happens in the entertainment business—two parties who can’t reconcile due to scheduling conflicts.
What I don’t think any of us were expecting was the explosive reaction of the fans when they learned negotiations had broken down and I wouldn’t be coming back. Joe had dumped a male lead and numerous other cast members, so I don’t think he or the producers anticipated there would be much of an issue in replacing me. Instead, the blogs and forums started filling up with questions from fans demanding answers. Joe started receiving death threats. I got my share of hate mail as well. There were even fans asking questions about the technicalities of contractual agreements, show-business law, and what could be done to get me back. Sci-fi fans really are a loyal bunch.
Ultimately, losing Ivanova meant that Joe had to make substantial changes to the development of season five. An episode entitled “The Very Long Night of Susan Ivanova” was renamed “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari” and given a completely different storyline. Even now, when I attend conventions fans often complain that my character should have had a better send-off, and I tend to agree. Writer Harlan Ellison wrote something into an episode implying that my character left for more money. I think it was a personal jab at me, and I think it was in poor taste. Ivanova and I have one more thing in common: neither of us is so career-oriented that we would choose wealth and advancement over personal loyalties.
Eventually things did die down. I shot my movie, the fifth season of Babylon 5 went ahead, and I literally traded places with Tracy Scoggins. I appeared on the Highlander series as the immortal swordswoman Katherine, while Tracy left Highlander to play Babylon 5’s Captain Lochley.
Ironically (and maybe a little irritatingly), they were able to book her initially on an eight-episode contract.
I valued my friendship with Joe, and it was sad for me that things ended the way they did. I still think of him fondly and can’t thank him enough for creating a character of such dignity and integrity that she would continue to resonate so strongly with our audience.
Below are some excerpts from a live AOL chat between Joe and me from happier times, when the series was just starting to gather a large following. It’s moments like these that I enjoy remembering and talking over with fans:3
QUESTION: Claudia, what do you see in Ivanova’s future?
CLAUDIAB5: Lots of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll and the Captaincy.
JMS AT B5: (stunned silence)
CLAUDIAB5: You told me to express my humor, Joe.
JMS AT B5: (Current needs: glass rum, gun, two bullets.)
CLAUDIAB5: On my way.
…
JMS AT B5: What most folks don’t know, btw, is that Claudia (not kidding here) has a genius IQ, and reads a massive number of books per week.
CLAUDIAB5: Here’s your fifty bucks, Joe.
JMS AT B5: I live to serve.
…
QUESTION: jms and cc: what is the general mood of the show taping? Is there a lot of joking, etc. or does everyone pretty much take things seriously?
CLAUDIAB5: We have a ball making B5. At least I do.
JMS AT B5: Simple answer to the question: as you walk down the halls of the B5 production office… the one sound you hear the most is laughter. And every day, everybody eats lunch together behind the stage, writers, actors, producers, directors, crew, everybody. People have fun, have birthdays, hang out after work… it’s a great, fun environment… and a lot of practical jokes.
And Joe was right. Babylon 5 was great fun, a ball to work on, one of the highlights of my career, and I never tire of sharing the joy we had making it with the fans who continue to watch and support it.
Despite my regrettable exit, after four years on a high-rating sci-fi series there was no shortage of work for me. Checks came in the mail every day, and life was good.
But, as we’ve all learned from the daytime soaps, when things are going well for too long disaster is bound to be lurking right around the corner, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
This time, disaster had a name and a face.
Before I met him, if you’d told me that the devil had a Scottish accent I’d have thought you were pulling my chain.
Now I know better.
Babylon 5, Season 4, Episode 19, “Between the Darkness and the Light.”
EXTRA Online’s live interview with J. Michael Straczynski, executive producer and creator of Babylon 5, and actress Claudia Christian, who plays Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova on the show. Copyright 1995 America Online, Inc., all rights reserved.