They may take our lives, but they’ll never take OUR FREEDOM!”
It was 1996, and Braveheart was the movie of the year. It blazed through the Academy Awards, sweeping up five Oscars, including best picture, and five additional nominations. It was a tragic, historical romance with an epic scope—easily one of my favorite films of all time. I saw the movie with my mom, and when the reluctant hero Robert the Bruce appeared on-screen, I turned to her and said, “God, I wish I could meet a man like that!” Especially as he was played with such smoldering intensity by green-eyed Scottish actor Angus Macfadyen.
A few months later I was having an early lunch with girlfriends on Sunset Plaza Drive when I saw Angus with Justin, an old friend of mine. Angus had a glass of white wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It was noon. He caught me looking at him and started staring back. I was surprised by the intensity of his gaze. His eyes contained all the qualities that attracted me to his character in the film. I’d try to match him, to maintain eye contact, but then I’d get embarrassed and turn away. I rejoined my girlfriends’ conversation, trying to ignore him, but eventually I’d turn and look and our eyes would lock again.
I plucked up my courage and walked over to his table on the pretense of talking to my friend. It was very exciting—a big, heart-pounding moment.
Once I started speaking, cool, confident Claudia resurfaced. This guy was just another actor. I’d left Dodi Fayed, for God’s sake. This guy was small-fry by comparison. The three of us chatted. I flirted with Angus a little. Reassured that I was back in command of my senses, I said my goodbyes and headed back to my friends. Angus came up behind me and touched my arm. Everything else seemed to fade away.
“Claudia. Can I see you again?”
“Sure. Justin’s got my number.”
Cool. Calm. Collected. I walked away trying not to show the prickling of excitement that ran across my skin and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
On the set of Babylon 5, I’d check my phone messages every half hour to see if he’d called. I went crazy waiting for him to call, and after a week I finally rang Justin.
“What’s going on? Why isn’t this guy calling me? I don’t normally have this problem!”
Justin explained that that was just Angus. He’d been holed up in his apartment for the last week drinking like a fish while he completed a series of paintings.
“Paintings? What’s he painting?”
“Oh, it’s depressing stuff. Really macabre. You know, the devil and all that.”
That should have set the warning bells ringing right then. A guy ignores you for a week because he’s too busy getting loaded and painting the devil. But looking at it through eyes dazzled by animal attraction, the image of the tortured artist not only seemed romantic but also bound Angus more tightly in my mind to the character of Robert the Bruce. I’d never met a man like Angus before—dark and brooding—the archetypical Scotsman. This was new and forbidden fruit.
I finally got a call from Angus, probably prompted by Justin, and we went out to dinner. It turned out we had very similar taste in literature, which is worth more to me than a super yacht and a solid-gold sink. He told me that he’d once been engaged to Catherine Zeta-Jones, before she came to America and became famous. Apparently, in her biography she claims that he was the best sex she ever had. I don’t know if I could make the same claim, but what he lacked in technique he made up for in enthusiasm. After making love we stayed up till four in the morning reciting poems from memory.
His favorite was Dylan Thomas’s “A Grief Ago,” which speaks of “hell wind and sea”—a wild, turbulent love.
I often recited Byron’s “When We Two Parted.”
Unfortunately, those poems would serve as the bookends of our entire relationship.
Angus started writing poems for me. He’d leave them in his mailbox, and I’d pick them up on the way to the Babylon 5 set. It was like a high school relationship, intense and disarming. I was utterly smitten.
He moved into my house a few months later, and by the time I’d finished working on Babylon 5, our relationship was in full swing. We’d smoke and drink wine, make love and read poetry. And we’d fight. We’d scream at each other, smash glasses, break furniture, and hurl insults. We had epic, alcohol-fueled battles that ran on into the night.
He’d just finished playing the wild, madly in love Richard Burton in Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story. Our love affair, he said, was as passionate, artistic, and crazy as theirs. It was a love that blinded me to the voices of concern from my friends, who’d started referring to us as Dick and Liz. They thought Angus wasn’t brooding or romantic but just plain rude. My mother once asked him, out of politeness, what he felt about his native country’s history.
“Fuck history. Where’s my fucking chicken?”
And I got up and got him his chicken. My mother was appalled.
Soon, he’d have such a hold over me that my friends would give him another name—the devil.
Angus reveled in all the bad habits that I’d kept in check throughout my career. He was undisciplined, he didn’t care about his body, he drank, he smoked, and he spewed his own inner darkness all over the horrible canvases that were now piling up in my pool house. The fights got worse, and I realized that he took a sadistic pleasure in them. He’d smile if he could make me cry.
I knew it was an unhealthy relationship, and, looking back, I suppose my friends hit the nail on the head. Angus might not have been the devil, but he was certainly my devil.
Snide and Prejudice was a new Philippe Mora movie, and Angus and I were both cast in it. He played Adolf Hitler (I kid you not, this is how weird Hollywood can get), and I was cast as a character representing all the women in Hitler’s life. The whole story was built around inmates in an insane asylum and, to be honest, the movie was a piece of shit, its only saving grace being the other talented cast members that I had the pleasure to meet—Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac (I’d been a fan since I first bought Rumors as a kid) and René Auberjonois from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Things with Angus were as bad as ever, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. I’d become emotionally dependent. And since I couldn’t leave, I found myself drinking more and more to numb myself to the pain of our relationship. It was the first time in my life that I drank to escape. Before that, alcohol had only ever been a lubricant that made a night out more fun or a fine meal even more pleasurable. Now I was using it as an emotional painkiller.
In the summer of 1998 I went out to lunch with my friend Galen Johnson and Alejandro Jodorowsky, the French-Chilean avant-garde filmmaker, comic book writer, and spiritual guru. Jodorowsky was an interesting guy. He talked about how John Lennon had given him a million dollars to make his movie The Holy Mountain, and he’d come close to making what would have been the most interesting and bizarre adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, to have starred Salvador Dalí and Orson Welles with music composed by Pink Floyd and production design by comic-book artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud and surrealist artist H. R. Giger. Galen told me that Jodorowsky was supposed to have psychic powers and had invented his own spiritual healing system called Psychomagic, which sounded more like a Hitchcock pisstake by Mel Brooks than a form of therapy. After lunch Jodorowsky went on his way and Galen told me to sit a while longer. When I’d gone to the bathroom Jodorowsky had given him a message to pass on to me.
“He said that you were going to have a drinking problem, that you’ll struggle with alcohol and your weight when you get older and that you need to watch out now.”
I laughed out loud and Galen joined in. Even with the emotional drinking Angus was driving me to, it seemed ridiculous. I couldn’t see it. I hasten to add that Jodorowsky also predicted that I’d be married and fabulously successful within two years of that lunch, so if he had a psychic flash of me at age thirty-nine as a size fourteen with a glass of champagne in hand, then I must have also been holding an Oscar aloft in the other while I straddled Prince Charming. I should have taken the warning as it was meant. He had nothing to gain, and was just sharing an insight, but I wasn’t able to hear him. My drinking problem was already underway, but it was operating in stealth mode, flying beneath the radar of my conscious mind.
Angus was offered a job in China doing a crap action film, and I encouraged him to take it. I was hoping that while he was gone I’d have time to get back on my feet. Also, I’d been keeping a secret from him. Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy’s West Coast editor, wanted me to pose for her magazine. I knew Angus would go apeshit if I said yes. In the fantasy world that he imagined he ruled (population two), I wasn’t for sharing. I felt better the second he was out of the house. I found that I could make my own choices just fine without someone standing over me whispering disparaging comments in my ear. I agreed to do Playboy and started training with a former ballerina, who had me doing hundreds of lunges every day. By the time she was finished with me I was in the best shape of my life.
Angus invited me to join him in Shanghai, and, feeling empowered by my time alone, I agreed to go. I was myself again—outgoing, funny Claudia. I felt fantastic, I’d stopped drinking, and I’d never looked better. But I underestimated Angus and his need to re-establish a hold over me. He was a master of the devastating one-liner, and when I arrived in China he knocked my legs right out from under me with the first words out of his mouth: “Look at you. This is an improvement. When we first met I thought you looked a little chunky.”
This from a guy with a belly like Winston Churchill’s. When he was offered the role of Peter Lawford in the TV movie The Rat Pack, they only gave it to him with a proviso that he lose thirty pounds. I tried to help him exercise and eat healthy food, but eventually gave up. He was an unapologetic glutton.
In hindsight, I think there were two poisons in our relationship. The first was Angus’s need to project his many inadequacies onto me. The second was that he would keep me bound to him by constantly tugging at the ropes of my own emotional weaknesses. By criticizing me, targeting my fears, and then switching back to false affection, he kept me weak.
It’s hard to enjoy your first visit to China when your travel partner makes it his mission to be rude to every Chinese person you meet. On the set of the movie he got off to not so good a start by insisting that he rewrite his part. He was perfectly correct in saying that they’d written him as a second-rate James Bond villain, but his attempts to inject Taoist philosophy into a character who battled kung-fu kangaroos were equally terrible, and you can imagine how the Chinese might love having a Westerner lecture them on his superior knowledge of their culture.
One night when we walked into the hotel restaurant the hostess asked, “Smoking or not smoking?”
Angus held up his cigarette. “What the fuck do you think?”
Angus wasn’t racist, he was just universally rude. Most Scottish people I’ve met are funny and have a clever, wry wit, but not Angus. He could have held up the cigarette and said something like, “I’d continue this battle of wits with you, but you’re obviously unarmed,” but he lacked the imagination for humor.
I left dinner early and hit the gym. I needed to keep in shape for my upcoming photo shoot. I was watching the TV while running on the treadmill when it was announced that Dodi and Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. It hit me hard. I sat down in the gym and cried. Dodi had been my friend for nearly twenty years, and I deeply regretted not being able to talk to him one last time, especially after leaving him so abruptly.
Dodi’s fears of dying childless had come to pass. He’d started seeing Diana not long after we parted ways, and I wondered, with our last conversation on my mind, if he’d asked her to have the child that I’d refused him.
I went back to my hotel room to learn that I’d booked A Wing and a Prayer. Fortune’s wheel had turned in my favor, though the news was bittersweet. I had an excuse to get out of Shanghai, and I took it. I needed time to myself, time to process the news of Dodi’s death.
Back in L.A. I got a call from producer Bill Panzer. Adrian Paul, the star of the TV show Highlander, had decided to move on, and they were looking for a woman to take over the series. He wanted me to play the part of Katherine in the Highlander episode “Two of Hearts.” This was just the thing I needed to get Dodi off of my mind. Highlander was a dream job—the shoot was in Paris, I’d get to play an eleventh-century immortal and mess around with swords, and there was even the possibility that I’d end up as the star of my own series.
When Angus got home he was uncharacteristically kind to me; he had sensed that after Dodi’s death I’d started to pull away from him. Always the optimist, I decided to invite him to Paris—it was our last, best hope for peace.
The Highlander set was heaven: horses, history, and mud. If I could just do historical dramas for the rest of my life, I’d die happy.
I’d started collecting knives and swords when I was a kid. My dad had been given some gifts when he opened a bank account, and one of them was a good-quality pocketknife. All of my brothers argued over who should get it, including Patrick, who wanted it for skinning, but when we drew straws I was the winner. There were cries of outrage, but my dad decreed that fair was fair and I got to keep it. When Patrick died I put it on his coffin as they lowered it into the ground, a parting gift. I loved that knife, at first because it was something my brothers wanted but couldn’t have, and later because it became a symbol of the love I held for Patrick. That was where my love of knives started and an interest in swords naturally followed on, but my dad wouldn’t let me start collecting until I turned seventeen.
Now I got to swing a medieval broadsword and be tutored by one of Hollywood’s leading sword masters, F. Braun McAsh. He was a very friendly, barrel-chested guy with a deep voice—a walking encyclopedia of arms and armor.
I wanted to do all my own fight scenes, but I had to convince the producers that I knew what I was doing or they would use a stunt double. One little mistake with a sword and an actress can be left incapacitated for a week.
Things couldn’t have worked out better on that front. After a minor accident on the set the producers had decided to institute a water-only policy, which was counter to the French crew’s traditional three-hour drinking lunches. I don’t think the American producers were aware of the French tendency to strike at the smallest infringements of their conditions, and disrupting the national pastime of eating and drinking was, to the crew’s minds, a catastrophic violation of human rights.
While protracted negotiations took place I got to spend more time with F. Braun learning how to fight. He’d pledged to the producers that every Highlander episode would feature a sword technique that had never been seen on film or television before, so I had lots to learn. He was patient and encouraging and taught me some neat tricks from his theatrical fencing repertoire (how to look good dueling on camera) and knowledge of historical sword fighting (how they really killed people with ruthless efficiency in times of yore).
My character, Katherine, was one of the oldest immortals in the Highlander series. She had even posed for the illustrations in the Kama Sutra, so I had to create a complex character—confident but with enough vulnerability that she could fall in love with a mortal man, who was played by Steven O’Shea.
The crew liked me, and I thought I had a shot at being the new star of the show. But at the end of the day they went with Elizabeth Gracen, who’d been in the original series. Also, she had slept with Bill Clinton, so she was in the news a lot; when it comes to TV ratings any publicity is good publicity. She chopped off her hair, dyed it white, and the new series was a flop.
Angus and I both had films at Cannes that year and decided to go together. It was 1998, I was thirty-three years old, and my biological clock was ticking like a time bomb.
I found out that I was pregnant in the bathroom of the Carlton Hotel. Clutching my pregnancy test, I told Angus the news through tear-stained eyes. We hugged, agreed it was the best thing in the world for both of us, and, right then and there, made a pact to raise the child together.
But because it was Angus, I expected the worst. I secretly hoped that things would work out, but I began to steel myself for the next fight. It never came, though, and by the four-month mark I was proudly sporting a baby bump. Things had changed. I felt secure in this relationship for the first time. I was finally going to be a mother. I just knew that I was going to have a boy with green eyes and dark hair. This was Patrick wanting to come back again.
And then Angus stopped having sex with me. I understood why—he had a Madonna-whore complex. God forbid you have sex with the mother of your child. What I couldn’t deal with was his sudden obsession with virgins. Angus had worked on a film with a blond actress who claimed she was a virgin. He would go on about it all the time: she was angelic, she was a born-again Christian, and she was only eighteen years old. I don’t know what the big deal is with virgins. Terrorists blow themselves up for a paradise filled with virgins. If I were a guy my idea of paradise would be a harem of sexually experienced bombshells, but then that’s just me. Angus was certainly titillated by the idea of going where no man had gone before, and I guess I felt the same sense of injustice that a bald man or a guy with a small dick feels. How do you compete? She’s a virgin, I’m not, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.
Then one day, on his way out the door with a buddy, Angus casually turned back to me and said, as if it were an afterthought, “I’ve changed my mind. Get rid of it.”
The emotional blow was so strong that he might as well have punched me in the belly. He left and I fell to the tile floor and cried so hard that a few hours later the baby spontaneously aborted.
After my failed relationship with Patrick Wachsberger, I had sworn that I’d never again become pregnant by a man who had no real interest in raising a child. Yet here I was, soaked in blood and frightened to death by what my body had just done. I didn’t know if it was the botched abortion in Italy that ruined my chances of having children, but something had made the whole process precarious. I just couldn’t seem to hold on to a child, and the fact that I’d lost one over an emotional outburst just didn’t make sense to me. I was a strong, healthy young woman.
But the next morning, while getting a D&C at my gynecologist’s office, I decided that God had saved me from a horrible future with the wrong man. I’d invested in love and I’d been burned again. The bricks I’d started laying after the losses of Justine and Patrick’s baby had now become a wall, and I decided that I would make it stronger and stronger so that nothing could get in and hurt me like that again. It didn’t occur to me that when you build defenses that strong you reach a point where even good things can’t penetrate anymore.
I came home from the supermarket one morning to find my friend Christine sitting in our kitchen. Lately, Angus had decided that I was drinking too much and got into the habit of lecturing me while he was drinking whatever was his poison of the day. Now he’d taken things to the next level. Christine had flown in from Canada after Angus called her up and told her he thought I had a serious drinking problem. Seriously, the source of all my woes, the pathological, selfish pig who drank like a fish, thought that I was the one with the problem and had staged a half-assed intervention. I drank soda water while Angus sat there looking smug and self-righteous, sipping on tequila mixed with orange juice at ten in the morning. In addition to confronting me about my drinking, Christine admitted that she was attending AA meetings and battling her own demons.
Interventions can work, but a person has to be ready. She has to recognize the problem in herself, and in this case, a pissed Scotsman and a well-meaning friend in the same boat didn’t have the right to preach to me.
It didn’t stop me from drinking. If anything it made things worse. I took it as it was truly meant—yet another attempt by Angus to cut my legs out from under me and keep me weak.
Angus was slated to play Orson Welles in Tim Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock in New York and he had to quit his comfort eating and binge drinking to play a young, svelte Welles.
After he flew to New York I dumped his things in the garage, called him at his hotel, and told him it was over. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. When someone has that sort of power over you, you’re constantly pulled in two directions—one part of you is still chattering away, trying to convince you that it can still all work out, while deep inside, every cell is screaming out to end it.
I felt as if I were standing on a rock in the middle of the ocean, waves crashing all around me. I had to cling to the idea that I was going to leave, so that it wouldn’t be suddenly ripped away from me and lost forever—I was living Dylan Thomas’s hell wind and sea. When he came with his friends to pick up his things, I hid in my bedroom. That’s how rattled I was. I watched him through a gap in the shutters.
As soon as word got out that I’d broken up with Angus I was surrounded by family and friends who couldn’t have been happier at the news. I felt as if I’d been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card. I had my health back. I quit the social smoking and the excess drinking. I was reborn.
Angus went on to shoot Titus in 1999 with Anthony Hopkins. The veteran actor was by then a recovering alcoholic, and I heard that he recognized that Angus had a problem. Hopkins tried to help him stop drinking but failed. Angus was too tormented to stay sober for long. I wish I’d had Tony Hopkins at hand. I’m sure he’d have noticed that I had a problem, too, though I couldn’t see it at the time.
With Angus out of my life, I thought that things would get better. I didn’t realize that I was only just now starting down the road to hell. By joining Angus in his own downward spiral I’d opened a Pandora’s box. Angus had given a voice to my fears and insecurities that I’d previously kept under control. Hell, he’d even discovered new ones. His own inner monster had spoken to the darkness inside me, and now that sought to rear up and displace my previously confident inner voice, the voice that had always served as my guide.
I’d drunk with Angus nearly every night, but had never imbibed during the day. That would change.
I’ve never seen Angus again, except for one occasion years later when I was sitting at a studio waiting to audition for a commercial.
He was chubby and dressed in an old suit and cowboy boots, a faded fedora perched on his head.
He walked right by me. Caught up in whatever shit was going on in his head, he didn’t even notice I was there. I chose not to confront him, because I knew that if I did it would have been as Lord Byron predicted—with silence and tears.
The day of the Playboy shoot arrived. I was slightly hesitant about being photographed naked, but there were two factors that helped drive me on.
In 1999 I did a film called The Haunting of Hell House, based on a Henry James story, with veteran British actor Michael York. During the shoot his wife Patricia McCallum, a photographer who specializes in nudes of celebrities, asked me if I’d take off my clothes and walk through the fields on Ireland’s Connemara coast. Michael and Pat were a very cool couple, and I didn’t want to seem like a prude, so I ended up standing knee high in grass, a script in hand, wearing nothing but a corset and a pair of boots. In another shot she had a topless wardrobe woman pretending to fit me for a dress. It was all very shocking for the local community, but Pat was a great persuader and managed to convince them not to run us out of town. Her exhibition went on tour, and my photos, along with a host of other celebrities’, ended up on the walls of some of the world’s best galleries. God only knows how many people saw my nether regions, but I figured I was in good company. I knew Playboy would be a different kind of experience but once you’ve taken your clothes off in public and the sky doesn’t fall on your head, it makes it easier to entertain the idea again.
The second factor was much more practical—economic reality. My Babylon 5 residuals were still coming in, but I had a sizable mortgage, had spent a lot of money on renovations, and had my assistant’s wage to pay. The bills were mounting up, and Playboy was offering very decent money.
As a working actress you can’t help but have body issues. It’s not as bad as being a model, but it’s a pitiless industry when it comes to weight.
A few weeks after yet another miscarriage with my then boyfriend (yes, I was on birth control and yes, I wanted to keep it), I got work as the guest lead on a TV series called She Spies. I went to wardrobe for fitting, hoping they could hide some of the pregnancy weight I was still carrying, only to discover that they wanted me to squeeze into a catsuit. I plodded through the mediocre dialogue, ignored the disparaging looks from the thin girls in the show, and went home satisfied that I’d done my best. I later found out that the casting director told my agent that he would never hire me again because I was “chunky.” That’s Hollywood. No one gives a shit about you or your feelings. You’re a product, a storefront mannequin. Ordinarily I’d have been fine with that, but with the pregnancy hormones still raging through my system I was reduced to a sobbing lump.
I heard a whispered voice, coming to me from the darkness.
You’re fat, you’re disgusting, your career is over.
I recognized the voice and wasn’t concerned by it. It was my monster, the little devil that sits on everybody’s shoulder. It had always been there, throwing in its two cents’ worth for as long as I could remember, but since my breakup with Angus it had gotten a little louder. Angus had made me particularly sensitive about my appearance, and the monster was keen to make hay while the sun shone.
I was going to appear nude in a glossy magazine that would be seen by millions of people around the world. I’d been anxious about my butt appearing on a fifty-foot screen in The Hidden, but that was nothing compared to a permanent, published record of my naked form.
What are you worried about? Seriously, you’re prepared. You’ve trained hard, you’re in the best shape of your adult life. Playboy shoot? Bring it on.
Ah, there was my angel, my armor, the strength and confidence that had carried me forward into a successful international acting career. And it was right. I’d done a million lunges, I had buns of steel, I was beautiful, and the next time a casting director called me “chunky,” I’d roll up a copy of my issue of Playboy and use it to smack him upside the head.
The shoot ran over four days, and I can tell you right now that being a nude model isn’t anywhere near as easy as it looks. I’d have to sit in one spot for hours and then climb a steel wall and hang there with the photographer yelling, “Stick your butt out a little more. Suck in your gut!” It’s a surreal experience. In one pose they had my head on the floor and my ass up on a divan, which I suppose looks sexy in the photos but in reality nearly ripped all the muscles in my already-injured neck. The suffering paid off, though. When I saw the Polaroids, I was thrilled.
Wow. Good job, Claudia, you look fantastic. You worked so hard, all that exercise and dieting. You deserve a treat. It’s time to party and let your hair down.
Sometimes the devil on your shoulder has the best ideas, and now I saw no danger in indulging. She was right; it was time to party.
I flew to the UK for work, gave up on sit-ups and lunges and hit the pubs and restaurants with abandon. Beer and chips, wine and desserts, I let myself go and loved every minute of it.
Then Playboy called. The photos weren’t “edgy enough.” They wanted a reshoot. I had to get back on the plane to L.A. and do the shoot within twenty-four hours of landing. I was a blob, completely bloated from flying and living it up. I drank nettle tea and prayed. The shoot they published was disappointing. To me, the original shoot was fresher and far more beautiful. Luckily, I was able to secure the rights to both sets of negatives, but what should have been a naked triumph after all the training I’d done failed to have the curative effect on my self-image that I’d hoped for.
See, I told you. You’re fat. Your career is going down the gurgler. You’d better go on a starvation diet or something. Now that’s going to be tough, so get yourself a good stiff drink.
I waited for those words to bounce off my armor, for my angel to knock the monster down a peg or two with some devastating comeback, but all was quiet on the angelic front. While I was waiting for her to show up, I opened a nice bottle of merlot and poured myself a glass. After the second glass, I’d forgotten that I was waiting for anything.
In the strange way that the mind works, when we’re in a vulnerable place, the voice of our darkness, that little whispering monster, is never held accountable. When our confidence, our belief in ourselves is sufficiently silenced, the monster’s voice is all that’s left, and it masquerades as our true self, leads us to believe that its running commentary is true insight. It isn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time, and so I bought it. I didn’t realize it, but I’d opened the door to the world’s most persistent salesman. The monster had planted a foot firmly inside the door and didn’t plan on going anywhere.
I said before that telling Angus to get out of my life was one of the strongest things I’ve ever done, and I wasn’t exaggerating. I wasn’t just rejecting a man, I was rejecting my own shadow, my weakness, and my self-doubt. It was as empowering as it was frightening, but that darkness, that monster is a bitch. Just when you try to reclaim some of the ground you’ve lost, that’s when she digs her teeth in and won’t let go. And she did. Literally.
One night, as I was holding my cocker spaniel Lucy on my lap and petting her, she had a brain seizure and attacked me, mauling my face. I fell backward, but after a struggle managed to get her off and lock her in the kitchen. But by then the damage was done. She’d ripped off part of my lip, the flesh underneath my left eye, and a bit of my cheek.
I was in a panic. I couldn’t just go to an emergency room. What if I got some intern who tried to sew my face back on? Acting career over. I called my best friend Trish.
“My face is a wreck, I’m in big trouble. I need a good plastic surgeon.”
I gently lifted the washcloth I was using to hold my face on and took another peek in the mirror. “Make that a great plastic surgeon.”
Trish told me she knew of only one person who’d had really good plastic surgery, and in Hollywood that’s saying something.
So I called up this actress at 11 p.m., and she referred me to Dr. Brent Moelleken, who had been featured in ABC’s Extreme Makeover and Discovery Channel’s Plastic Surgery Before & After.
I figured that a plastic surgeon wouldn’t work at night, so I’d have to wait until the morning to see him. I barely slept, my hand welded to my face. Now and then I’d have to press the skin back on, trying to get it to stick in place.
When I finally got into Dr. Moelleken’s office he took off the towel and frowned.
“I wish you’d have come to me last night. You shouldn’t have waited. Now I’ve got to cut away a lot of dead skin. There’s too much necrotic tissue.”
So I underwent reconstructive surgery, fists clenched, totally fearful of the end result. Because I was missing so much flesh under my eye the doctor had to invent a new procedure to reconstruct my face, the internal cheek lift, so that the eye wouldn’t droop. Then he sewed up the scars to make them look like the existing laugh lines around my eyes. When the surgery was over, he told me that he had high hopes.
“I’ve never really done this procedure on a dog bite, but you should be fine.”
I left with a sore, swollen face and a mind filled with images of Frankenstein’s monster, his face held together by stitches.
Recovering from the surgery meant that I couldn’t work for the next couple of months. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see that my eye was hanging at a funny angle. I’d never been the depressive type but now I felt black clouds rolling in.
Dodi and Princess Di were still much in the news, and constantly hearing about my old lover’s death wasn’t particularly helpful. The coverage had died down after the accident, but now there was some blonde on TV claiming that she was engaged to Dodi during the time I was staying at his Kensington flat. I had no idea if she was telling the truth or not, but I never saw her at Saint-Tropez or Monaco or Paris. There wasn’t even a photo of her in the flat. Perhaps Dodi had put my paratrooper ring to good use.
Lying on my couch, feeling totally adrift, I heard the voice of the monster clearly for the first time. It was a step up from the usual whispering and prodding. The petty compulsions that I’d given in to with Angus had gathered power. My little devil had grown up and was no longer content to sit on my shoulder and be brushed away. She was a fully formed monster and she wanted the starring role. Her voice was commanding, loud, and clear. And since it was the only one ringing inside my head at the time, I mistook it for my own.
You know that you’re deformed.
That voice spoke to my deepest fears, but it seemed to make a lot of sense.
Don’t worry. There are roles for people like you. You can put on prosthetics and play aliens for the rest of your life.
The voice was right. My career was over.
I still hadn’t pulled myself together after Angus, and now with the dog attack and Lucy having to be put down (she tried to bite four other people), I uncorked a bottle of wine, lay down on the couch, and went to town. There were strong emotions brewing, and I needed to wrap myself in the numbness I’d sought when I was with Angus. I needed some emotional medicine.
My angel must have been kicking around in my brain somewhere, though, because as I was sobering up from that first big solo binge good news arrived like Noah’s little white dove. And I thanked God, because it turned out that Dr. Moelleken was a genius after all. The stitches were removed, and when the swelling went down the scars faded and my face regained its former shape. If I looked really, really close in the mirror I could see some small scars in the lines at the corners of my eyes, but the face that looked back at me was my own. Big sigh of relief. My Frankenstein crisis was averted—no need to buy neck bolts.
That good news let some of the light back in. My self-image bounced back. I realized that I had drifted out to sea, that I’d gone far too far, and I reined in my drinking once more. The monster had underestimated the power of hope. It only takes a little light to drive away a lot of darkness, and once I gained some perspective I rushed back to dry land and a survivable lifestyle.
I took a new lover, a young southern guy named Taylor who I met on the set of the film True Rights. I was playing an obnoxious middle-aged reality-TV producer, and I had to wear a wig and a fat suit. Taylor started flirting with me when I was wearing the fat suit. He didn’t know what I really looked like, and at the end of the day when I took it off, he got a pleasant surprise. He got an even bigger surprise when I took him back to my place. Taylor was kind and funny, just what I needed. He had a beautiful body, a great head of hair, and golden skin. Sexually we were a perfect fit.
Despite the bad memories of Angus and Lucy’s attack, I loved the house I was living in. I wasn’t even contemplating a move when my Realtor neighbor asked me if I wanted to double my money and sell up. I’ve always had a good head for business, so I agreed, and he took me to look at a 6,000-square-foot mansion in Los Feliz. It harked back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, built in 1914 and perched on a hill next to a wacky-looking Frank Lloyd Wright house that looked like a Mayan temple with jaws. It was a two-story dwelling with classical revival architecture and a view of Los Angeles. It dripped movie-star quality. It was the kind of place you see in Architectural Digest. It had a large, beautiful foyer, two master suites, four additional bathrooms, four fireplaces, three offices, and a gorgeous designer pool. My Realtor friend advised me to buy it. He thought it was massively undervalued. He needn’t have bothered with the sales pitch. I’d fallen in love with it at first sight, before I’d even set foot inside the front door.
This was the house of my dreams, and for the first time in my life I could afford it. I’d landed a job as the voice of Jaguar cars and was getting paid handsomely to go into a sound booth a few times a week and put on a phony British accent.
I sold my old house to David Boreanaz, the actor from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bones, and moved into my Hollywood dream home.
Los Feliz is a very artsy community, so I settled right in. So did my boyfriend Taylor, who moved in with me and immediately lost his job. Unable to pay anything toward his upkeep, he started doing jobs around the house. This was okay at first—he did his best—but somehow the situation seemed to drain the blood from our relationship. I didn’t like the idea of supporting a man. He was turning out to be a bad influence on me when it came to drinking, as well. He was much younger than I, and when we’d go toe to toe at clubs and parties I’d always come off much worse the next morning.
When it became clear that Taylor wasn’t making any effort to find work I decided that I wasn’t going to keep on supporting his new career as a houseboy and drinking buddy, so I sent him on his way.
I didn’t need a partner, my face was fixed, I had the house of my dreams, and I’d put my darkness behind me. The monster’s power play had failed, and she had been kicked out of the driver’s seat, demoted back to passenger status. What I didn’t realize was that the monster was in it for the long haul. She hadn’t disappeared, only retreated as a tactical gambit. She’d given up the battle with the idea of winning the war. The incident with Lucy had nearly sent me so far under that I hadn’t been able to surface in time, but the good news about my facial reconstruction had been like a life preserver, allowing me to pull myself back up to the surface. But now, with every single sip, neurological pathways were beginning to form, and before long those pathways would become an eight-lane expressway. Alcohol addiction is a learned behavior, and the lesson I’d learned was to turn to the bottle when things got tough.
And so the monster sat, and she waited and watched. She waited for another dark wave, one that would wash over me and send me so far under that I’d never be able to get back up for air in time. She’d be waiting for me, down in the darkness, when my strength ran out.
The monster knew me better than I knew myself. She saw the extreme ebb and flow of my life, the pattern formed by my genetics and my circumstances and my personal choices. She knew she wouldn’t have to wait long.
The White Buffalo was a script I’d written in 1996. My career was then on the rise with Babylon 5, and I was creatively charged. One night I’d read an article about Miracle, the first white buffalo to be born since 1933. When I went to bed, I had very vivid dreams and woke up at 2 a.m. with the whole story worked out in my mind. I’d never written a script before, but I’d worked on them from the other side of the fence for so long that I had some sense of storytelling and knew how to format the thing to make it look right. Inspired, I wrote the story out in under a week in short, intense bursts.
The Lakota have a legend about the White Buffalo Calf Woman. To them, she is a prophet or even a messiah. And they believe that when a white buffalo is born, it’s strong medicine—a sign from Mother Earth and the universe that things will change, that powerful magic is in the air.
And by 2002, that’s exactly what I needed. On some level I could sense that I was walking a tightrope. Beneath me was my monster, constantly probing me for weaknesses and calling out for me to slip. I was wary but not frightened, because I was going to keep putting one foot in front of the other until I reached the other side. Waiting there for me was The White Buffalo. I’d spent seven years working on it, tinkering with the script, schlepping it around trying to drum up interest, and all of a sudden it started gathering momentum. I could see it, just in front of me, beyond my reach but clearly visible—the story closest to my heart completely produced and projected onto a forty-foot screen.
It’s a sweet family movie about a young boy whose parents get divorced. His father goes off with a new partner. His mother travels to India to “find herself,” and dumps the kid on a ranch with an uncle he’s never met. A white buffalo is born, and Native Americans from around the area gather at the ranch. They dance and pray and hang medicine bundles on the fence. The bank is about to foreclose on the ranch, and a conflict arises between the uncle, who wants to sell the buffalo; the kid, who forms a bond with it; the Indians, who want to claim it as a sacred symbol; and some Hollywood investors who want to turn it into a circus attraction.
The project was my baby. I’d been growing it for seven years, and now I knew the time was right. I was going to bring this thing into the world and make it live. The White Buffalo was hope, and it kept me moving forward and positive.
I showed the script to my Hollywood friends, and everyone who read it loved it. I was convinced that it would get made. I just needed backing of some kind to get the ball rolling. You know what they say, ask and ye shall receive. Well I did ask and the money came, but it was in a most disgusting and unexpected way.
I was doing this piece-of-shit movie called Nightmare Boulevard (also released as Quiet Kill), and I’m telling you, it was aptly titled. I was starring with Corbin Bernsen and Ron “Hellboy” Perlman, and the whole thing was financed by this sleazy-looking Chicago car dealer with hair plugs who’d decided he was an actor. I played Corbin’s wife, and the story was that I’d become bored with him and started having an affair with my tennis coach, who was played by (surprise, surprise) the Chicago car dealer.
The nightmare began with the bedroom scene I was in with Mr. L.A. Law. I was wearing pajamas, and he was wearing boxers. It wasn’t a sex scene—the movie didn’t have any. We were just sitting up in bed while the crew set up the lighting, the budget being too tiny for anything as glamorous as stand-ins. Then, right out of the blue and in front of everyone, Corbin leans over and grabs one of my breasts and says, “Oh, they’re real.” Then he reaches under the sheets, into his boxers, and pulls out a hand covered in sticky, white goo and holds it up in front of my face.
“Oh my god!” I reeled back. I was in total shock.
He grinned and said, “See what us stars can get away with?”
So the guy with one of the world’s biggest snow globe collections (yes, you read that right) turns out to be a total, masturbating misogynist.
I jumped out of bed, yelled at Corbin, then at the producers, and then I quit. The producers came running after me as I was leaving the set, my bags in hand. I gritted my teeth, readying myself for a fight. Honestly, what was there to say? There were thirty people on the set when it happened—they didn’t have a leg to stand on. But it turned out they didn’t want a fight.
“What do you want? Just name it. We want to make this up to you. We want to keep you on this movie.”
It turned out that they were almost as mortified as I was about what had happened. They didn’t want word getting around about what had happened on their set. I’ve never had a producer offer me carte blanche before or since, so I didn’t miss a beat in replying.
“You’re going to have to option my next film. It’s called The White Buffalo.”
So I walked out of Nightmare Boulevard with a movie deal and some up-front cash, and if you ever wanted proof that there’s such a thing as instant karma, Corbin Bernsen walked off the set at the end of that day only to discover that his brand-new BMW had been totally vandalized. The windows were smashed in, the hood and side panels dented beyond repair. I was pleasantly surprised. I guess stars can’t get away with as much as they’d like to think they can.
Not long after that, my friend Hilary Saltzman read the script and decided to help produce the movie. I was set to direct it. I’d written the male lead for Sam Elliott and then shown it to Bruce Boxleitner, who’s a big fan of Westerns. We’d done table readings and castings, we’d gone to the Disney ranch to scout locations, and we had a crew. I was still on good terms with John Flinn, my lover during Babylon 5, and he was going to be the director of photography. Treat Williams had read the script and liked it; it was underway.
Hilary was doing a great job. She even found somebody who knew the Native American keeper of the white buffaloes. By that time two more had been born, and these were very special. They neither shed their coats nor changed color as they got older. They were the real deal, and they’d been shipped to a secret location in Santa Ynez so they wouldn’t be killed. While the white buffalo is a sacred symbol of hope to the Lakota, people are people, and for a very few the white buffalo seems a form of medicine so powerful that they’d kill the animal to possess it.
What I’m going to tell you next really happened, I bullshit you not. If I had been alone I’d have had doubts, but there were three of us—myself, Hilary, and Alan, who was one of the other producers.
We drove to Santa Ynez and pulled up at a fenced-in pen. There was a partly Native American guy waiting for us. He had blue eyes and looked a little like Andy Kaufman, but with a braid of dark-brown hair that hung all the way down to his butt. Another guy sat by the back of the pen, a handsome Native American fellow with chiseled features and long hair. He was bare-chested and had brown, weathered skin and looked as if he’d stepped out of an old Edward Curtis photo. The handsome guy didn’t say a word, he just sat there staring at us while the first guy, whose name was Phillip, brought out a long pipe.
“You’ve got to smoke this before you can see the buffalo.”
So we all joined in this ritual. We stood in a circle and Phillip sang a prayer. It turned out that he was a Lakota traditional singer, and he started drumming and singing a high-pitched, wailing song that sent chills up my spine. Then we sat down and smoked some tobacco and sage from the sacred pipe, and I’m telling you right now that was all that was in the pipe, no hallucinogens or anything like that. When the ritual was done, the hot-looking guy pointed to the pen, and when we turned to look, the previously empty pen now had two white buffaloes walking around in it.
There was only one entrance to the pen, right next to us, and it hadn’t been opened. There was no way someone could have let the animals in while we were doing the ritual. We were right there. There weren’t any flashes or smoke or magic curtains. Then Phillip said, “I put a medicine spell on them, to keep them hidden. You smoked the pipe. Your medicine is good. You can see them now.”
We were totally blown away. It was one of the most bizarre, mystical things that’s ever happened to me. We received permission to film and photograph the buffaloes as reference for the CGI4 white buffalo calf we were going to create. It was a huge thing, a great privilege, and we drove out of there feeling really good about the movie’s prospects. I could feel that white-buffalo medicine working its healing magic. I’d almost made it to the end of the tightrope.
That magic took on an additional dimension when I struck up a romance with Phillip, the half-Indian guy, and found out that he was of the elk medicine. I knew that the elk had something to do with sexual energy, but I didn’t understand the significance of that until we went to bed, and then, holy shit, did I get the whole elk thing!
We embarked on a very odd relationship. He was completely broke, never had more than a dollar to his name, but he’d do cleansing rituals at my house and stay there when I traveled. Eventually we stopped seeing each other, but things ended amicably, and we stayed good friends.
Another happy relationship, one more step forward, but I still wasn’t back to my former strength. There were still dents in the armor from my previous relationships that hadn’t been hammered out. They were the places the monster pressed on, but things were looking up.
The White Buffalo movie was rolling along beautifully. It was one of those projects that wants to come into the world. We had investors. We were going to do the whole thing for a million bucks. Things were all lined up. Only a few more steps and I’d be clear—my life, my career, my emotional healing would be complete, and my life would move forward into a new phase of growth and prosperity.
And then there was Kenny.
I’d met Kenny only once, very briefly, before the night my friend Hilary brought him to my house. He was a wannabe producer, which is a nice way of saying he was unemployed, and he was very interested in the projects I was working on. There was a sci-fi time-travel show in development called Hourglass that I was going to star in with Alexandra Tydings, who played Aphrodite on the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess. We were to play two scientists in neoprene catsuits who get sent into the past by accident and have historical adventures. Then there was a reality TV show, Wild Cooking, where people would be given twenty dollars to buy their own ingredients. They’d hike to a remote location, cook a meal in twenty minutes on a camping stove, and be judged by a famous L.A. restaurateur. And of course there was The White Buffalo.
That night we were drinking, and as the night wore on my tendency to make stupid decisions increased proportionally to the amount of red wine I imbibed, and that was a lot.
“Claudia, Kenny was going to stay with me, but I’ve got the kids, and it’s a long way to Agoura Hills. Can he stay here? It’ll only be for a few days.”
“Sure, why not? I’ve got three spare bedrooms.”
I invited Kenny to stay for two nights, and that turned into a week. He started talking about my film and TV projects as if he owned them, and I started hinting, fairly bluntly, that he should go and find his own place. He promised he would, but instead he’d spend every night drinking and cooking. He’d encourage me to join him, and at that time I didn’t need to be asked twice to do either.
The conscious checks I’d put in place, those little reminders to keep an eye on my tendency to overconsume, were banished. I could control myself when I was alone, but now I had an enabler, someone who was actively tempting me on a daily basis. Within a week I found myself in bed with Kenny, things turned romantic, and without asking he decided that his guest status had been upgraded to that of live-in partner.
Kenny had dark hair and brown eyes. Sometimes he looked handsome, and sometimes he looked dorky. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t feel embarrassed about shuffling around the house in novelty slippers and pajamas covered in cartoon moose. But Kenny was insidious, like a creeping vine. He knew exactly how to find the gaps in my armor and the old wounds that lay below it—he just had to keep me eating and drinking. He was an emotional eater, and I got hooked into his trip. I’m usually a salad-and-grilled-fish gal, but with Kenny my intake of red wine increased along with my diet of fatty foods. I was chowing down pizza and going halves on big plates of lasagna, which was totally unlike me.
Kenny wasn’t a dark soul like Angus, but he was a user. He saw a way to live off me and help his career at the same time, and so he moved in, stretched out, and made himself at home.
I’m not saying I was without fault. It takes two to tango. If I’d met a healthy, successful, straightforward guy who drank lightly or not at all, I probably could have held off the disease for a few more years. But I didn’t meet that guy. I believe you attract people at certain points in your life, that you send out signals letting people know what you want, and sometimes what you’re looking for isn’t a good thing. My monster was whispering in my ear, and it wanted to drink bad medicine.
Kenny and I went on holiday to Havana and spent New Year’s Eve in a musty room at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba drinking champagne and making love. If the heroines of Hourglass had appeared suddenly in modern-day Cuba, you’d have forgiven them for thinking they were in the 1950s. The cars were rusted classics, men wore suits and hats, and no one had built anything new in fifty years.
We ate and drank and then drank some more. People opened up their homes so you could go in and have dinner, which was pretty wonderful. An older woman sang soulful songs while we ate yet another variation on chicken and beans. We went to Hemingway’s favorite Havana bar, El Floridita. The daiquiris were mediocre, so we gave up on them and started downing cubanitos, a concoction of rum and tomato juice, and man, did they have a kick! At other times, when I’d consumed too much wine and passed out, I’d wake up at 2 a.m., after the alcohol wore off and the sugar kicked in, but spirits, and those cubanitos in particular, knocked me right out.
Even at that early stage in our relationship Kenny didn’t want to let me out of his sight or do anything on his own. At first I thought his need to be near me all the time was sweet, but by the end of that trip I felt slightly claustrophobic around him.
I came out of that holiday with love handles that had their own zip code and a roll of fat hanging over my jeans. I had Holly book me into a convention straight away. I had to get some distance from Kenny, not just personally but also professionally. He hadn’t just elbowed his way into my life; by then he was also trying to take over any of my projects that looked like they might be going somewhere, especially The White Buffalo.
Kenny’s producing background meant that he could calculate budgets and that seemed reasonable (when you’re pitching a show it helps a lot if you’ve got budgets drawn up), but that benefit came with a much greater liability—Kenny himself.
This was in the day when cell phones had a walkie-talkie feature that could be used by two people in the same vicinity—someone could start talking to you without having to place a call. It got to the point where Kenny was buzzing me every five minutes. It was like having Jim Carrey’s character from The Cable Guy in your life—it was driving me crazy. I’d be driving along and I’d hear his voice coming through the phone.
“Hey, it’s me. Are you there? Are you there? Hello? Hey, it’s me? Answer the phone. I know you’re there. Hello?”
Even worse, Kenny did the same thing to Hilary and Alan and to the movie’s investors, and they didn’t like being badgered, not at all. They called me and asked that Kenny stop bothering them. Instead of backing off, Kenny read this as the signal to pounce. He’d get in their faces, chewing them out like Jack Warner, except that Kenny didn’t actually have any power or innate confidence, so he just ended up offending and annoying people.
As for me, I was in a kind of fugue state. I knew this guy was a walking disaster but the relationship and the bad habits it fed were keeping me from seeing the seriousness of the situation. I’d lost my enthusiasm and energy, and that made it hard to act decisively. Then I discovered that Kenny had been accessing my computer and reading my files. The mild claustrophobia that had started in Cuba was now all but suffocating me. Added to that, my drinking was getting to the point at which other people were starting to recognize that I had a problem.
Hilary and I went out one night and had a couple of glasses of champagne. I never drink and drive. Even the thought of getting a ticket terrifies me, let alone getting into an accident, which is why I did most of my drinking at home. But this night I’d had a few glasses on an empty stomach before Hilary arrived, so my judgment wasn’t what it should have been. I was driving, it was getting dark, and I missed a red light on Sunset Plaza Drive as people were trying to cross the street. I had to slam on the brakes fast to stop from plowing into them. We were thrown forward, but luckily had our seatbelts on. I pulled over. Hilary was visibly upset.
“You almost killed those people! What’s wrong with you?”
I thought she was overreacting at the time. I don’t think that now.
I had some conventions lined up in Europe, and they couldn’t have come at a better time. I desperately needed space to gain some perspective on what was going wrong in my life.
Before I left for Europe I’d managed to strike a deal with the Angola prison in Louisiana related to filming The White Buffalo. The prison maintains a buffalo herd, and was not only going to let us work with the prisoners who managed the buffaloes but also let us film, lodge, and eat there. By this stage we’d done storyboards, casting, and other preproduction. I’d found my lead boy, which was no easy feat, and I had two men willing to play the uncle. While I was in London I took some time to revise the script. You only have to look at the story and themes in that script to see my whole life laid out. On a deep level we know ourselves, know what’s coming, what our life story is, the lessons we have to learn and relearn. It’s nearly impossible to consciously recognize these things ahead of time, and yet they’re so clear when we look back.
In the story, the boy’s parents were alcoholics. In the opening scene the mother has this flask that she’s swigging from and is trying it keep hidden from the kid while she’s speeding without a seatbelt down the highway.
Right there is my sense of abandonment following my parents’ divorce, my looming drinking problem, and my life starting to run away from me at high speed as I head into the unknown.
In a sense, the little boy was Patrick, as well, with his love of Native American culture. The white buffalo calf, as the center of the conflict, being claimed by different parties for their own purposes, was my soul hanging in the balance between light and dark.
If that sounds a little melodramatic it’s because our inner lives are. We experience sweeping emotions, devastating disappointments, and ecstatic highs, but as we mature we learn to regulate the power of those experiences, to keep the sound of them muffled under a layer of manners and self-censorship. Those learned strategies allow us to deal with the complex range of interactions that life throws at us, but in our inner world these forces are still at work, driving us to courses of action, many of which we only consciously rationalize after the fact. In dreams and in art, as we create, our emotions and experiences resurface, and as we express them they make the drama in the average soap opera look about as exciting as eating cardboard.
The climax of the movie comes when the buffalo’s fate is put in the boy’s hands. I think that in a sense I was asking Patrick to help me find a way through my own inner conflict.
One night in London I went out to dinner at Hush with Roger Moore’s kids Geoffrey and Deborah, who I knew through Hilary. When I was alone with Deborah she told me that she was worried about me, that Hilary told her I was on drugs. I was livid. It was highly unprofessional of Hilary to be spreading gossip about me, especially in an industry where reputation is so closely linked to livelihood. As far as I was concerned, you could call me a drunk—the truth is the truth. But I wouldn’t stand for being called a drug addict. I considered that an unforgivable offense. That night I wrote in my diary:
Hello!? Why do people think I do drugs? I think when I drink too much, my personality changes. That must be it because I don’t do coke anymore and I hate pot and have never popped a pill in my life!
I knew what had made up Hilary’s mind—it was the night back in L.A. when I’d almost had the accident. She saw the state I was in and couldn’t believe I was that fucked up just from alcohol.
I was highly defensive, and in the heat of the moment I told Deborah about some personal things that Hilary had said about her. I regretted that almost instantly, but the damage was done, and that led to something of a falling out between Hilary and me.
On the European convention trail I drank far too much—it was hard to say no with fans offering to buy—and found myself laid up in bed with a terrible case of flu. It occurred to me that my immune system was weakening. I was getting sick a lot more often than usual, but I put it down to stress, getting older, and my busy schedule. I still hadn’t made the connection that my drinking was affecting my health. I felt fat. My arms looked like legs of lamb. Lying in bed, sick as a dog, I began to perceive my need for alcohol as something more than a kind of little devil, an irritating prick of a thing that sat on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. It was more as if I had my own internal Kenny. I felt it as a serious, ominous presence, but I still underestimated it. I hadn’t stepped into the arena yet. I didn’t have any sense of the monster I was really up against, but there were signs that I recognized. I had concerns. I started praying, something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl.
“God, drinking is a waste of time and money. It’s a waste of the talent I’ve been given, not to mention that it’s keeping me fat. Please, help me get rid of the desire to drink. I’ve had enough.”
I recovered from the flu and felt much better. What’s more, I didn’t give alcohol a second thought. Not long after that I was dining alone at the restaurant at the Balmoral Hotel when the maître d’ asked me if I wanted to sit in the bar and have a drink or go straight to my table. I replied without a thought, “I don’t drink.” I was very pleased with myself and hoped my newfound temperance would find some staying power.
Heading home I felt empowered. Without alcohol the whole Kenny problem came into sharp focus. Was this the best I could do? Kenny? The thought that I’d be stuck with him forever terrified me. This guy was like a tumor. I was still upset about the business with Hilary but determined to set things right, to take charge of my life. Kenny had to go, and if he wouldn’t leave on his own, then, just like a tumor, he’d have to be cut out.
Within three days of returning to L.A. I was drinking again. Kenny didn’t accept my decision to stop drinking or my insistence that we needed to go our separate ways, starting with my telling him to get the hell out of my house.
“You’re overreacting. There’s nothing wrong. Please, give me a chance. Let’s talk this out.”
And as he was talking he’d top off my glass. My steely resolve melted. He was my enabler. It was as if my internal monster were feeding him his lines, saying just the right things to take the edge off my words, giving Kenny room to turn things around and keep clinging on. Kenny figured he had a winning card, and he just kept on playing it, but I’d been in that place before, with Angus. I hit the point where I realized that if things continued, this guy was going to suffocate me and somehow I’d end up dead.
It came down to a scene in the kitchen with me on my knees crying and begging for him to get out of my life. He saw I meant it, that I was desperate and right on the edge of taking drastic action of some kind. So what did he do? He stole money that had been put into a neighborhood driveway fund and took my LeRoy Neiman painting of the Piazza del Popolo. He used it to decorate his new apartment, which was, I kid you not, exactly fifty feet from my back door. You could throw a stone at his front door from my house.
It was like Fatal Attraction with the sexes switched around. He even took some of the leftover paint I’d used on the walls of my house and painted his apartment the same color. And he ramped up the flood of phone and answering-machine messages to the point that I was getting more than fifty a day.
I was worried enough that I felt I had to take out a restraining order to keep him away from me. When I requested the order, the official took one look at my cell phone record and signed off on it straightaway.
A few weeks later I was due to fly to Louisiana, to meet with a woman associated with the prison and work out the details for shooting The White Buffalo. I boarded the plane in Los Angeles and found Kenny sitting in a seat a few rows behind mine. That’s when I thought, “Holy shit, this guy is really stalking me.” I was done with playing nice. Fear motivated me to find my strength, and I turned to the flight attendant and said, “I need you to remove that man; I have a restraining order against him, and he’s not to be within a hundred feet of me.”
Federal marshals boarded the flight and dragged Kenny out of there, and all of a sudden he wasn’t so pushy and aggressive. When I got back from Louisiana I was seriously worried about what his next move would be, but it seemed that being dragged off the plane and held in custody had flipped a switch in Kenny’s brain. He got the message that it was over and that he’d gone way past what could be considered normal behavior.
And then I got the bad news about the movie. Everyone had been doing their best to ignore Kenny and move forward, but by then he’d already done too much damage. The investors had decided to pull their money and put it into another project. And he didn’t just capsize The White Buffalo. Wild Cooking and Hourglass fell off the table as well, even though we’d pitched Hourglass to Highlander producer Bill Panzer and he’d loved it.
So, though I was finally free of Kenny he had dragged my dreams down with him. My movie had gone the way of the buffalo. And if you want to know exactly what it was that I lost, allow me to share the very last scene with you: They set the white buffalo free with the rest of the herd on protected land. We see an aerial shot of this little speck of white in the brown sea of the brown herd; she’s free, no longer a circus attraction. The white buffalo was Hope—hope that I’d move forward with my life toward a bright and happy future, that my career would take the next step forward and flourish.
My mom saw that clearly. To this day she still asks me when I’m going to make The White Buffalo. She’s convinced that everything in the universe will align for me if I can just make that movie. And I still haven’t given up. The White Buffalo Calf Woman is powerful medicine, and I believe that if the movie is meant to be, then a miracle will appear at the right time, like the birth of a white buffalo.
My relationships with Angus and Kenny were bad medicine in the conventional sense of the word as well as the spiritual, Indian one. Relationships like that can kill you, literally, if you can’t break away from them in time. I couldn’t see it at the time; it seems as though you can only ever see these things with the benefit of hindsight. But I’d heard the monster whispering, and on some level I knew the role Kenny would play in my life. The moment I allowed Kenny to overstay his welcome, I didn’t just fall off the tightrope—I took Kenny’s hand and stepped off, dropping willingly into the darkness below.
So now I was alone, a chubby mess, and my drinking hadn’t let up at all. I was stressed and exhausted. I’d thrown everything into trying to patch up the holes Kenny had made and keep the movie afloat, all to no avail. I’d put on ten or fifteen pounds, and when the auditions for on-camera parts suddenly dried up, friends and colleagues would talk to me as if I were a contestant on The Biggest Loser who needed to go on a starvation diet before their bones and organs failed under the weight of their own body mass. I didn’t care that I wasn’t landing any on-camera acting jobs, because my voiceover career was in full swing. I did computer games, animated movies, commercials, you name it. The White Buffalo might have been dead, but the checks kept rolling in, and that allowed me to bankroll my new creative passion—remodeling my house.
I lost myself in building a relationship with my house. I figured that was one partnership I could count on.
I’ve moved many times in my life because I was always looking for home, a place that was a reflection of the best parts of me, and now I knew that I’d found it. I poured my heart and soul and almost every penny of income I generated into making the house match the idealized picture in my mind. It was my baby. I spared no expense. The place was a hive of busy men in overalls. I’ve always loved redoing homes. My mother is one of the most talented interior designers in the country, and both my brother and stepfather build luxury homes; it’s a family passion.
At the same time that I was throwing every spare dollar into beautifying my home I was investing just as heavily in another project—working at drinking myself to death. Creation and destruction, birth and death, they’re all part of the same cycle.
Cooking and entertaining always come first for me, so the kitchen was the number-one priority. In the mornings I’d counteract my hangover by drinking enough tea to drown an Englishman and then hit the granite shops to pick out materials. By the time I finished, my kitchen was incredible: massive marble bench tops, French-style cupboards finished in seafoam green (a four-layer process that involved painting and aging the wood), and two Sub-Zero refrigerators. I had Wolf ranges that ran along an entire wall with a custom Ann Sacks tile backsplash depicting an idyllic Italian country scene. You could feed a small army out of that kitchen.
My next greatest love, after cooking, is books. I had a two-story library built with hand-carved oak bookshelves. A double-length rail ladder allowed me to slide along the shelves to browse my thousands of volumes. I had brass plates made with the names of the subject categories engraved on them: History, Cooking, Religion, Fiction.
I was pretty fucking pleased with myself. I owned my own mansion, and I’d decked it out just the way I wanted.
Yet something was missing, one more thing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
A wine cellar. You need a really big wine cellar.
The monster was speaking again and once more, it was making what seemed like pretty good sense.
You deserve it. You’ve worked hard to get where you are. You deserve to celebrate in style, and for that you’ll need to fuel the amazing parties you’re throwing.
Something kept me from indulging in that particular fantasy right away. I knew I was drinking more than usual, and it certainly wasn’t like me to drink alone. Maybe a wine cellar wasn’t the best idea. Instead I went shopping for tapestries, created outdoor rooms, and converted one of the extra bedrooms into a huge walk-in closet.
It might have been my dream house, but they say that in dreams a house is a reflection of yourself, your body. I think that putting my house in order was subconsciously an attempt to save myself from the disease that was slowly creeping up on me. I was perfecting my external world while my interior one was steadily crumbling away. Also, throwing myself so completely into my renovation kept me from having to acknowledge my emerging drinking problem. It kept it just below the surface of my awareness.
And then my friend Trish’s husband, Martin “Mutt” Cohen, asked me if I wanted to invest in wine futures. Mutt was a big-name music attorney. He handled groups like Chicago and Boyz II Men, and he was a wine aficionado and head of the L.A. division of the Confrérie de la Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, the world’s oldest and largest food and wine society.
“Two thousand is going to be an excellent year. Buy them up and in ten years you can either drink them or sell them. Either way you’ll come out a winner.”
I was flush—another check had just arrived—and I thought that idea sounded just peachy. Mutt wrote me a list of every single French wine that I should buy: Château La Freynelle, Christian Moreau, Château Ducru Beaucaillou Saint Julien, Château Lafite Rothschild, all the best stuff. My bill was just under fourteen grand. A year later they arrived all at once. By then I’d already completed construction of my ultimate wine cellar, a shrine to Bacchus where I could accord my drinking the status it deserved. Somewhere in the darkness my monster was smiling and sharpening her claws.
My 720-square-foot basement conversion merited an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Den of Festivity.” I hired my friend Michael Weiss, a highly skilled carpenter who builds sets and props for movies and TV shows, to do the work. He was one of the McStaggers, a group of my friends named for their love of drinking and partying. We used to have medieval parties, dressed in period costume. Michael was known as Haggis McStagger. They called me, quite undeservedly, Trouble McStagger. Michael quickly got carried away and didn’t have a hard time convincing me to transform the basement into something spectacular—a party room that looked like a castle dungeon. Michael’s design even dedicated a wall for the display of the cutlery collection that I’d been building since my father gave me that jackknife—it now included knives, swords, and daggers, which added to the medieval ambience. The wine cellar had a sealed, self-closing door and storage capacity of 2,000 bottles.
When the journalist for the Los Angeles Times asked Michael why a house with a single resident needed the space of an average-sized house set aside for wine and its consumption, Michael replied, “Claudia entertains a lot. I’d come back with 20 to 30 cases [of wine], and a few weeks later it would be gone.”
Sure, I partied a lot, just not always with other people. I was falling headfirst into alcoholism. On some level I knew that, but at least, as I consoled myself, I was doing it in style. And I reassured myself that I had it under control. If I had to, I could stay sober for up to six months, and then I’d make up for it by drinking solidly for two weeks.
The dungeon was furnished with benches and lamps of medieval style and a bed in a Moroccan motif that Michael built. The bed was eight feet by ten and stood in an alcove—a nice place for guests to enjoy a private tête-à-tête (or more).
Alexandra Tydings, a newly appointed McStagger, added the final touch—a sign that read, “Welcome to the Dungeon.”
The dungeon was a hit, and I threw some of the best parties I’ve ever attended in my life. We could easily fit twenty people down there at a time, and keeping the wine cellar stocked required constant vigilance. I was drowning in wine, but no one touched my French futures. I had them tucked away, off limits. They were an investment, they were young, and they were the crème de la crème of my collection.
I spent considerable amounts of time and money constructing my own underground temple to addiction, a shrine to the disease that was eating away at me. What can I say? Like all the pleasures of the netherworld, it seemed like a good idea at the time. We even had a sex swing that a friend bought. I never used it. I didn’t like the idea of the woman sitting there doing nothing while the guy spun her around or pushed her like a child at a playground, but I let it hang there. Somehow it seemed to fit the atmosphere.
Around this time, I landed the ultimate voiceover job—a character in a Disney movie. I played Helga, the sexy villainess in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a film that also starred Michael J. Fox, James Garner, and Leonard Nimoy. It was a departure from the Disney musical movies that were popular at the time. It was darker, aimed at an older audience, and was more story-driven. They even got Mike Mignola, creator of the Hellboy comics, to consult on the production sketches.
I was so excited! I was going to be a Happy Meal toy. Babylon 5 was great, but you know you’ve made it when you can buy an action figure of yourself with a hamburger, fries, and a Coke.
I recorded my part in the studio where they made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and shared a recording booth with Demi Moore, who was working on The Hunchback of Notre Dame II.
Atlantis was a blast. And because I had a great job, I was happy and the drinking stopped. I sobered up and began to feel like my old, confident self. I can say now, with the 20/20 vision that hindsight gives us all, that if I had been working on a regular series back then my alcohol addiction would have been postponed. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have caught up with me eventually. You can’t escape genetics, and my brother Jimmy and I share a bad gene, no doubt about it. But when I’m working fourteen hours a day, I come home happy and exhausted, go to bed, get up, and go back to work. There’s no time to drink, no idle mind for the devil to work with.
But the problem with animated films is that there’s a lot of time between studio sessions. Between movies I’d do my Jaguar spots, but they were only a few hours a week, if that.
When I walked out of the Disney studio at the end of Atlantis I cried all the way home. I’d loved working with the team at Disney. I wasn’t used to all the positive feedback I received there. That rarely happens when you’re working as a live-action actress. Occasionally, if you do something extraordinary, the crew responds with spontaneous applause, but those moments are few and far between. Directors rarely give you anything, but these Disney guys laughed and encouraged me. They wrote extra dialogue, asked me to do multiple takes simply to amuse them, and I ate it up. I felt needed and talented and funny and all of those things that fed my soul.
“Yeah, that’s great! Go bigger, go broader! Sexier!”
That enthusiasm buoyed me up. It helped keep me afloat. Atlantis gave me a reason not to drink.
And then my career—just like the mythical Atlantis—vanished overnight. One minute it was there, the next minute it had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. I lost the Jaguar account—they decided that the voice of Jaguar should be a man’s. I’d done the one thing my parents had always told me not to: I’d spent my money, thinking that I’d always make more. I’d poured nearly every penny into my house. But of course the expenses don’t go away. There was still the mortgage, the cost of keeping up a mansion, and I had responsibilities to the people who worked for me. I waited for the next job—it wouldn’t be long coming—maybe my film career would pick up again or I’d land another juicy voiceover gig.
You’re all washed up. Those Hollywood assholes don’t want you anymore. But that’s okay. I’m here for you. Say, I could slay a drink. Anything in the cupboard?
I was sick of waiting, so I took the monster’s advice and relieved the mounting pressure with a Veuve Clicquot, a nice bottle I’d set aside for the party crowd. They’d stopped coming around, anyway. I felt less and less like partying with friends. I was doing fine on my own. I was short on money, short on friends, short on work, but at least I wasn’t short of a good drink.
More time passed, and I began to get desperate. My fan base was still strong, so I started selling my underwear on eBay with a little three-by-five card with a lipstick kiss on it. As pathetic as I felt while shipping them out to their respective buyers, they did sell well—but not well enough to pay my mortgage. So I sold the copies of film and TV scripts I’d saved, memorabilia, artwork, and eventually jewelry and antiques. I sold everything I could sell, short of myself, to save my house. The whole situation was ridiculous, because I only owed half a million on a house worth more than four times that. I only needed one job to hang on to it. One paid job would lead to another, and the ball would start rolling again. I put out the word that I needed a gig, tried to call in old favors, sent out head shots to producers and directors I’d worked with before. The phone was as silent as the grave.
Staring at the phone, drink in hand, it dawned on me that I now spent so much time drinking that it had pretty much become my new career. The realization that I’d gone pro hit home, hand-in-hand with the acceptance that I was an alcoholic.
Before that, I was aware that I’d go on binges, but I’d rationalized to myself, quite convincingly, that they were just reactions to emotional triggers. My mom had remarried, and both she and her new husband used to get on my case about my drinking. They knew that there was something going on. My mom’s father had been a drinker, and she could smell a lie a mile off. She offered to pay for me to go to therapy. I think she was desperate to find a reason for my behavior. No one imagined that it could be a physical disease. Everyone just thought I was being indulgent and self-destructive. I figured that therapy was worth a shot. There was no doubt that I was carrying around a mountain of unresolved shit.
A dear friend recommended a good therapist, and I started seeing her three to four times a week at $200 a pop. I really wanted to fix myself; I was committed. And talking through that stuff with someone who can see the problem with fresh eyes and opinions really does help. Gaining self-awareness and new perspective on your motivations and weaknesses is always good, but it didn’t do a damn thing to fix the physical compulsion that would overcome me when I’d go too long without a drink. Eventually I gave it up. I was tired of talking about being unemployed and my rape experience. The real world was hammering down my door. I needed to concentrate all my efforts on hanging on to my house, along with the sizable emotional and financial investment I’d poured into it.
I couldn’t control my compulsion; I acknowledged that. Internally I was out of control, but at least, I reasoned, I had a home. Not a house, a home. My home. I was in control of that, of my immediate physical surroundings. The house was my anchor. I knew that I’d be lost without it.
Eventually I got down to my last salable asset. I’d even run out of my regular stash of party wine. The cellar was dry but for one last, untouchable holy relic—the French wine futures.
But I did the sensible thing; I called up Mutt’s wine buddies. Some of them hadn’t bought in time to secure the bottles they needed from the 2000 vintage, but I had all of them, every single one worth owning. I’d been storing them for three years by then, and I made them what I thought was a fair and reasonable offer, enough to keep me in my house for another three months. Their counteroffer was such an insulting lowball figure that I told them to go fuck themselves. They knew I was desperate, and thought they’d try to take advantage of my situation.
The next morning I sat and waited for the phone to ring. After an hour I needed a drink. I walked down to my wine cellar.
I gave the sex swing a push as I walked past. It rocked back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch. I sat on the edge of the Moroccan bed and watched it.
You know what would teach those assholes a lesson? If you drank every one of those fucking bottles. That’d show them.
I was a mess, and the monster was taking advantage of that. I could barely think straight. My career was my life. I’d sacrificed all my other dreams—motherhood, a long-term relationship, everything—to be a working actress. And now I’d fucked up. I had nothing but a house, which I was going to lose. And 180 bottles of young French wine.
I’d thought I was indestructible, unstoppable, and now the armor that I’d carefully crafted to protect myself had been ripped away. Imagine you’re a turtle that has the shell ripped from its back. Then you’re kicked upside down so that you’re helpless and can’t get back on your feet. You just lie there, waiting to die. That’s how I felt.
I’d been sucker punched without even realizing I was in a fight. Alcoholism is a sneaky disease; it takes advantage of human weakness, creeps up on you bit by bit, and breaks down your defenses, so that by the time you realize you’re in trouble you’re already up against the ropes watching the knockout punch come hurtling toward you in slow motion. Only you can’t get out of the way. You can only stand there and watch, knowing that there’s going to be pain when you come to.
My career was sinking, and I was going down with it. I was dead broke. The house had to go.
So what? Are you going to sit here and suffer a slow and painful demise? Death by a thousand cuts? That’s not the Claudia I know. You show those assholes. You teach them a lesson.
Fuck it, the monster was right.
I picked up a bottle of gold-labeled Cristal, ripped off the anti-UV cellophane wrapper, unwound the wire cage, and popped the cork. I always liked that sound. It was like the starter’s pistol fired at the beginning of a race, the sound of something new and exciting. Champagne always made me happy. It had been with me through all the good times—maybe it could help pull me out of the bad times.
What the fuck… Why not?
The monster liked the sound of the cork popping, too. It had waited, and its patience was now rewarded. It was the time to celebrate. It had won. Checkmate. Game over.
I raised the bottle to my lips, took a swig, and, for the first but not last time in my life, drank champagne alone for breakfast.
Computer-generated imagery, the technique used by filmmakers to produce lifelike digital animation.