Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (10 page)

Starlets
was supposed to be a French farce taking place during the Cannes Film Festival. They got a bunch of beautiful girls from all over the world and put us up in a gorgeous mansion, and they’d drive us down to the festival to shoot scenes. The problem was that there was no script and they had no permits to shoot at Cannes, so when they ran out of money we had to go in and steal shots.

They told me to put on a beautiful, red-carpet-worthy gown and sent me onto the central stage where Clint Eastwood was receiving an award. I sneaked up behind Clint and pretended that I was there with him while one of the crew hid in the audience and filmed with a camera hidden between someone’s legs. That was the final straw for me. I was having fun on the Riviera, and there are few things cooler than hanging out on the yacht of a James Bond supervillain, but I had to get back to L.A. and get some real work. I had a career to build and I couldn’t afford to lose momentum.

Dodi didn’t quite know what to make of my wish to leave or my insistence on buying my own fare back to America. He was a jealous man, very insecure, but something in him touched me. Dodi had a childlike quality and I was very maternal in those days. I attracted men who wanted to be looked after. We talked intimately after we made love, and we decided that we would stay in touch and stay friends, but for now I needed to be my own person.

It was the last time I’d sail aboard
Nabila
. By the time I saw Dodi again she had been sold to Donald Trump and renamed the
Trump Princess
.

I’ll always be grateful to Dodi. He got me out of L.A. and took me around the world, which was just what I needed at that time. He gave me confidence in my ability to speak foreign languages, saying, “Your French is beautiful,” or “Come on, speak Italian, you can do it.” He never put me down, and he always told me I was smart and beautiful. He treated me as a princess and, because I refused to take anything from him, he also treated me as an equal. I didn’t know it then, but we would remain friends and occasional lovers until his death, more than fourteen years later, beside Princess Diana in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris.

COCAINE BLUES

In the ’80s the white line that ran down the middle of the Hollywood fast lane was painted on with happy dust. Everyone was doing blow, and I was no exception. I was nineteen and enjoying the attentions of a charming thirty-six-year-old Frenchman named Patrick Wachsberger, whose company produced the recent
Twilight
movies. I was 5'9" and a slender size six, but Patrick (pronounced Pat-REEK) was stick-thin; I could barely fit into his jeans.

In New York, they’d taught me that the skinnier you are, the closer you are to ideal beauty. Although I’d accepted the fact that I was incapable of building a career around being a human skeleton, the voices of Eileen Ford and her cronies still echoed in my head. French men like skinny women—I’d convinced myself of that, along with the notion that I had to lose more weight.

Luckily, I discovered that if you snorted cocaine you didn’t need to eat. I was a size two in no time at all. I lived on one meal a day—breakfast. The only downside was swallowing. My throat was raw from a combination of cocaine and ocean saltwater spray, the discerning user’s choice for flushing out encrusted sinuses. Add cigarettes to that and a little red wine to come down and
voila
, you have a gullet that struggles to swallow anything solid. I basically lived on yogurt and smoothies.

Some people take cocaine to feel powerful and confident. It had the opposite effect on me. It made me paranoid. I would become terribly self-conscious. All I wanted to do was lock myself in the bathroom and clean it from top to bottom with a toothbrush or sit down and do my taxes. So I never took cocaine for recreation. I used it as a weight-loss drug. Looking back, I suppose that spending $350 a week on a weight-loss medication might seem a little extravagant (not to mention just plain stupid), but hey, those were the days, my friend. Blow was everywhere, and that white line seemed to never end.

Before things got serious with Patrick I dated a handsome one-legged guy who worked in a shoe shop at the Beverly Center mall, and after him the hunky soap star Hank Cheyne. We went to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands and had a really fun, sexy time. Hank was plagued by the curse that comes from playing a bad guy on TV—he’d walk down the street in New York and random strangers would swear and spit at him.

I had a brief engagement to an Italian prince that didn’t work out. We had a big engagement party at the Ritz hotel in London with Michael Feinstein playing. The prince was a Six Million Dollar Man, which is not to say that he could last forever in bed, but that he’d carry three stamps in his pocket worth $6 million—talk about portable wealth. The relationship had already been in trouble because his family wanted me to give up my career, move to Italy, and churn out babies. But things came to a head when I found out that the Ferrari Testarossa that he’d given me to drive around Switzerland actually belonged to his aristocratic lover, a woman in her midforties. That and he had a fetish for girls in high heels, corsets, and garter belts—the exact outfit worn by the prostitute on his first sexual encounter. It was fun for the first few times, but he insisted that I put on the same getup every time,
which wore thin quickly. At that point in my life, it was just a little too weird.

Then I had a one-night stand with George Clooney. We first met on
Riptide
and then later on
Babytalk
, a TV series that tried to capitalize on the success of the talking-baby movie
Look Who’s Talking
. I played the voice of one of the babies, and George played a guy who was sweet on the single mom. They still haven’t sent me my Emmy for that performance, but I live in hope. George and I hooked up after our first meeting. After shooting our scenes we went back to my place, I did some blow, we had a good time, and then he rode off into the sunset on his bright yellow Harley, mullet cut whipping in the wind. He wasn’t the George Clooney that you see now. Like a good red wine, he seems to have improved with age.

After six months of dating, Patrick and I decided to get serious, and I gave up my apartment and moved into his designer home on Sunset Plaza Drive. It was my first grown-up relationship, and there was an aspect of it that made me more than a little uneasy. Patrick had a two-year-old daughter named Justine. He told me that the child’s mother, Beatrice, lived in Paris and had a boyfriend and that he had been awarded sole custody. Patrick was always busy with movie-related business, and I could tell from the get-go that he was a hands-off parent. My worry was that he was looking for a replacement mom for Justine and had settled on me. It was an unfounded fear. Patrick had hired a nanny to help with Justine. The problem was that I was going through a period in my life in which I was more than a little baby crazy, and Justine was totally adorable. I unofficially adopted her and set my mind to raising her.

Of course, the cocaine had to stop. Two things helped me with that.

The first was that not many people knew I was taking it. I’d kept my habit to myself and never used it in public, unlike
Mike Hammer
star Stacy Keach. I’d starred on that show right before Keach got busted at Heathrow airport trying to smuggle ten grams of cocaine in his assistant’s shaving-cream jar. I’d worked with actors who were so coked up that my lips went numb when I kissed them. I figured I didn’t want to get that kind of reputation.

My second and much more effective aid to stopping coke was fear. I’d had a scare one night when I flushed out my sinuses. I blew my nose and a chunk of flesh and cartilage came out. I found a flashlight and hand mirror, looked up my nose, and I swear that I could see a hole. I shoved a blob of Neosporin up there in the hope of plugging it, popped a couple of Tylenol PMs, and tried to sleep. In the morning I opened the fridge and discovered a slice of the lemon tart I’d made for dinner the previous night. My guests had said it was divine and especially zingy. I took a bite, chewed, and moved it around in my mouth for a full half minute before I realized I’d lost my sense of taste. Another test, conducted with the help of some freshly cut flowers, confirmed that my sense of smell had departed as well. Cooking has always been an important part of my life, so losing my primary culinary senses was truly terrifying.

I stopped my coke habit like Superman stops a runaway train: instantaneously. I crushed it like a tin can. I was young and strong, and my ability to give it up so suddenly without any serious damage to my health gave me a false sense of invulnerability. That unfortunate misconception would catch up with me later in life. Some bad habits you can walk away from scot-free but others are like ivy: they wind their way around you tightly, mixing their tendrils with yours until you don’t know where they end and you begin.

Luckily, about two weeks later my senses returned to normal working order, but after a warning like that I didn’t need to be told twice. For the time being snow season was over.

On the home front, I was doing everything I could to provide a normal, happy environment for Justine. I was young, but I think I did a good job as a makeshift mom. We did craft projects together, dug our fingers into cookie dough, and I stuffed her tiny shoes with little surprises for St. Nicholas Day. I tried to fill her life with fun new experiences. I gave Justine her first party dress, her first Christmas, and her first Easter. I tried to make her life as special as my mother had made mine when I was a little girl. And I loved it. I had a perfect, beautiful little girl who even looked like me, so everyone naturally assumed that she was my daughter. I didn’t contradict them.

Patrick and I threw dinner parties all the time. It was a glamorous life, but the coke parties made it stressful given that I was raising a small child. We would hire an Italian chef named Tono who cooked amazing dinners. It was a gastronomic tragedy, because no one but me ate the food. But, man, was the bartender busy! And you’ve never seen nostrils vacuum up blow so fast. Everyone was doing it. O.J. Simpson would bring his wife Nicole and spend the night flirting with every other woman at the party. Patrick and I had a guest bathroom, and I
was constantly rushing in after guests, wiping neat little lines of white coke off the back of the black toilet and matching sink for fear that Justine’s nanny would see them.