I was forty-four years old and doing an explicit sex scene for Adam Rifkin’s LOOK. It was six months after he’d called me, nine months since I’d been on The Sinclair Method. I had read the scripts for LOOK, and Adam was right—the part of Stella was absolutely hilarious—but I could see that it was going to be a demanding role. I got to do my own wardrobe for the part and had a chance to really build Stella from the outside in.
True to his calling as an experimental director, Adam made sure that the LOOK experience was unlike anything else I’d worked on, even the movie we did with Charlie Sheen’s freeform poetry. There was no traditional filmmaking; it was all flip cams, nanny cams, closed-circuit cameras, and webcams. LOOK was a comment on how many times we’re photographed and filmed every day without knowing it. It was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, run-around-Beverly-Hills-stealing-shots kind of production. I felt as I did back at the beginning, as an eighteen-year-old in Cannes stealing shots beside Clint Eastwood, a twenty-one-year-old taking revenge on her lover by filming in his house. It felt great. I was happy as a clam, except that it’s never easy shooting fully nude sex scenes in a stranger’s house, let alone at forty-four years of age. That makes for a long day.
We wrapped the last scene of the day, an argument in Stella’s kitchen. There was a bottle of wine on the counter. I thought it was a prop filled with water. My character was an alcoholic, so halfway through the scene I picked it up and took a swig.
Fuck! It’s real! I didn’t take my pill!
It was a scary moment. I couldn’t yell “Cut!” I was in the middle of a scene, and I couldn’t bring myself to spit out red wine all over the place that Adam had borrowed for filming. I wished Jesus were there to do the reverse of his water-to-wine trick, but he wasn’t, so I swallowed. I’d been so fastidious with The Sinclair Method, following the rules to the letter, but what happens now? Would I suddenly go bonkers and turn into my psycho character from Hexed? Would the monster leap out of its cave, right back into the driver’s seat? I dealt with the problem at hand first. I kept my cool and asked them to replace the wine with water on the next take.
I got in the car and drove home. I knew I wasn’t cured yet, that I was still working my way through this thing. I felt the urge to drink. I stopped at a store and bought a big bottle of fancy Belgian beer that I intended to share with David. I took my pill in the car on the way home. I was feeling better by the time I pulled into the driveway. I needed David, needed to tell him about how fate had just rolled me. I needed him to sympathize with the bad end to my day. But relationships by nature are unstable things. Sometimes you’re in perfect harmony; sometimes you’re coexisting in different dimensions.
The second I got through the door I started telling David about my day. I told the story chronologically and didn’t make it to the part about the mix-up with the wine. I’d forgotten that this was the first time he’d heard about the hard-core sex scenes. He went bananas. Fuck, I should have seen that coming, I should have played it smarter. But I’d lost perspective; the world was crumbling around me. I retreated into the bathroom and locked the door, the bottle of beer still in the plastic shopping bag in my hand. I could hear the monster laughing.
I knew we’d get back together. How did you ever think you could get by without me? We were made for each other.
She could talk all the trash she wanted, because I’d taken my pill. I was in a bad place, but once that beer was done it was done. It wasn’t going to lead to anything else, because I wasn’t back in the monster’s cave, just in the shadow-world transit lounge, just passing through.
It took me about a year to unlearn the behaviors associated with drinking. It takes that long to let go of the guilt and anger, to stop being so defensive. The Incident of the Belgian Beer & the Bathroom was a one-off, but it taught me an important lesson. The biological cure starts working straightaway, but the psychological cure takes longer. I mean, it’s all in The Cure for Alcoholism, and I had become friends with Drs. Sinclair and Eskapa, so I knew that I had to learn new behaviors with the help of the breathing space created by the naltrexone. But book smarts and street smarts are two different things. It takes a little longer to learn to literally change your mind.
At Christmas in 2010 I was back in Napa, back on a dusty street in a Sergio Leone Western where Claudia lives or dies depending on her ability to avoid the hail of emotional bullets. The family stands opposite me, they’re all armed, and they have twitchy trigger fingers.
But I’m on it. I’m Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. They’re shooting, but the bullets don’t hit home. I’m untouchable, and all the while I’m in the kitchen cooking food for thirteen people. I’m better than Clint Eastwood; I’m Superwoman.
And then one of my brothers said something that made David feel he had to defend me, and then my sister-in-law weighed in, and the next thing I knew I was screaming and pointing a spatula accusingly. They knew not to mess with me. The kitchen emptied, but it was too late. I realized I was already hit. I saw my kryptonite sitting on the counter right beside me: someone’s half-finished glass of wine. I threw it down my gullet without a second thought. I realized what I’d done, rushed to my handbag, and quickly took my pill. It had some effect, but I could feel the monster stirring.
That slip-up instigated a whole week in which I didn’t take the pill correctly, an hour before drinking. I started popping them after I’d already started drinking, which didn’t make any sense. I knew better, but the monster was still there, whispering in the background. It turned out that it still could subtly pull some strings from the back seat. You haven’t met a Stephen King monster as resilient as mine. Just when you think it’s dead and buried, back it comes, clawing its way up out of the grave.
I drank nonstop for a week. I hid booze and started lying to family and friends. But I didn’t throw up or get alcohol poisoning, and I could feel myself teetering on the edge of the slippery slope. I had learned my lesson and had an important realization. The pill isn’t a weapon. It isn’t something that lets you crush your addiction. The Sinclair Method is an ally, a partner. You have to work with it. After the Christmas fuck-up I took all of January off from drinking and cleaned out my system. I didn’t drink at all. I recreated the same physical and emotional environment as the first time I took naltrexone.
I was back on track and have stayed that way since.
I haven’t made that mistake again, and I’m back to where I was in my twenties in terms of my consumption.
When I was married to Gary I’d go out and buy one bottle of wine on a Saturday night. That one bottle would last Gary (6′1″ and 190 pounds) and me all night long. One-and-a-half glasses for me and three for him, that was our big party night. I never wanted more than that, never gave alcohol a second thought.
So the cure comes with a warning, like the lesson in a fairy tale—you get Prince Charming and the castle, you get what you desire the most, but you have to follow the rule: you have to take the pill every time, one hour before you drink. Then you don’t have the Stephen King experience. Then you can handle the monster like a pussycat, as long as you remember that it still has teeth and claws.
It’s been over three years since I first started on The Sinclair Method. I’ve been back to London to run my own fan convention, which unfortunately took place on the same weekend as the August 2011 London riots. Buildings burned down, cars were destroyed. The restaurant a block from my flat had its windows smashed in and its diners robbed by a mob of thugs. And while all that was going on I was thinking about Amy Winehouse. The coroner’s report has now confirmed what I (and maybe everyone) already suspected, that she died of alcohol poisoning. Her blood alcohol level had been 0.4 percent. Britain’s drunk-driving limit is 0.08 percent. She drank three bottles of vodka after a period of abstinence, and her brain and body overloaded. She passed into a coma. Her breathing stopped. When I heard that, it was impossible not to imagine myself in her situation. It could have been me—it so easily could have been me. I ran my convention successfully, took some guests out to dinner, had a few glasses of wine, and then flew home for my next job. No sweat.
And my career has been going from strength to strength. I had a guest spot on Grimm, a fantasy-crime series that’s part fairy tale, part CSI, and I guest-starred in a comedy pilot produced by John Wells and directed by the very funny Peter Segal. I’ve done voice work on massively popular video games like Halo, Guild Wars, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with Joan Allen, Christopher Plummer, Lynda Carter (the original Wonder Woman), and Max von Sydow. I even caught up with my old Babylon 5 friends at Mira Furlan’s house for a reunion party. Bruce Boxleitner and Bill Mumy were there, and Pat Tallman, with her new man, Joe Straczynski. Joe and I spoke for the first time in a long while, and it was great to recapture some of our old camaraderie.
There’s a happy ending to the story of my mother and me. She’s still the most important person in the world to me, the person I love the most, and I’m forever grateful that we survived the highs and lows. Our relationship has now mellowed into a happy continuum of love and communication.
And I’m single again. David is still very much in my life, we’re still very close friends, but they haven’t invented a pill that lets me keep a relationship together longer than three years. God doesn’t owe me a job or a lover. Being cured is no guarantee of happiness. I had to dig deep to realize that only I could make myself happy. I needed to stand on my own two feet and live my life. I think that you can’t really help others until you’re able to set your own house in order, and in many ways I think my journey, my battle with addiction, was about growing up, about maturing to the point where my sense of self-worth comes not from how I can meet my own needs, but rather from how I can help serve the needs of others.
That sense of purpose has given me the freedom to try again, to rebuild my life. I’ve just bought a new home, a gorgeous 1920s Spanish Revival house in the Hollywood Hills. I’ve poured all my life savings into it, and my mother and father have offered me their love, talents, and even money to help make it a place where I can have a new beginning. I’ve caused them so much pain, yet they keep coming back, giving their love and support in a way that only parents can. The house is a big step, but I’m not even slightly afraid. I know myself, I know the enemy, and I’ve learned that the best way to win a war is not to start one in the first place—to treat the symptoms, to address the first causes. And I’m going to redesign the house just the way I want, but this time without the monster on my back. This place will be a reflection of the new Claudia, a more integrated Claudia. This time I’m finally coming home.
I’ve been blessed to build a career doing something I love. Acting is a vocation. By 2013 it will be thirty years since my first television job, and I’m proud to have been gainfully employed in one of the world’s toughest, most competitive industries for most of that time.
I’m grateful to have inspired people with my portrayals of strong, intelligent women, but now my mission is to help those who have suffered from the same disease that nearly destroyed me. I want to save people the years I spent looking for a way to reclaim my life.
There’s a stigma attached to being an alcoholic, a popular perception that you’re weak or immoral. The simple fact is that it’s a physical addiction, a learned behavior that the brain cannot unlearn on its own. If you treat the addiction, the symptoms of the disease disappear.
When I met with Dr. Eskapa, the author of The Cure for Alcoholism, he looked over my naltrexone diary and concluded that I have a physiological makeup that’s extremely well-suited to The Sinclair Method. Some people will have the same response as I did, while others will take longer. Twenty percent of people won’t get any benefit at all, but a near eighty percent success rate is enough to inspire me to get to work.
I’m meeting with friends and fans who have reached out to me. I’m in discussions with a North American Indian tribe about starting up naltrexone trials. That came about through Phillip, my white buffalo medicine man. He introduced me to a man named Bear who’s now working in partnership with me and believes The Sinclair Method can make a positive difference. And I’m talking with people in the entertainment industry—fellow actors, celebrities, and creative professionals who are drinking to get through tough jobs, drinking out of despair for lack of work, drinking because they’ve forgotten life before they needed to drink. The word is getting out there.
There’s been such a turnaround in my life—it’s nothing short of a miracle. I’d prayed for one that was for sure, I’d asked to be healed, but I didn’t think that God was returning my calls. Now I see that something good has come out of my dark days. With my healing has come a new calling, or rather a way for me to realize an old calling. I’ve become a spokesperson for The Sinclair Method. I’m doing what I always wanted to do—I’m helping people.