Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (13 page)

“How did my house get into a movie? Why was there a picture of us? When did it all happen?”

I just shrugged, smiled, and walked on. In hindsight, it was the act of a twenty-one-year-old striking back at the older man who’d hurt her, but I don’t mind telling you that at the time it was beyond satisfying.

I ran into Patrick again in 2007 at Bill Panzer’s wake. Bill was the producer and creator of the
Highlander
franchise, and I’d starred in one of the episodes of the TV series. The first thing Patrick said to me after twenty years of estrangement: “Why did you take the mirror?”

I’d had a gorgeous outdoor mirror that my mother bought me for my very first apartment. It wasn’t expensive, but it was tall and beautiful with carved corners, and it looked perfect next to Patrick’s swimming pool. Twenty years and that was the first thing he could think to say? Perhaps losing that piece of pretty glass was a reminder that he’d also lost the girl that went with it.

Some good came out of that meeting, though. Patrick told me that Justine was in town, now in her early twenties, and pursuing a career as an actress. That made me smile. Patrick passed my card on to Justine and she agreed to meet me for lunch.

She’d grown up and turned into a beautiful young woman, but the resemblance between us was gone. As we sat down together I was struck by the realization that Justine was older now than I was when I’d played my part in raising her. As we chatted and swapped pleasantries I realized that she didn’t remember a thing, not a single thing.

“Don’t you remember when you had the meltdown at Bloomingdale’s and I bought you the party dresses?”

“Ah, no. Sorry.”

“Don’t you remember the Christmas when we made snow angels?”

“No.”

“But what about the letters I sent, and the gifts?”

She asked me what I was talking about, which confirmed what I’d already suspected. Her mother hadn’t passed on a thing I’d sent her. She’d actively worked to erase my memory from Justine’s mind. Jealousy is a green-eyed monster, and I guess she’d gotten her claws into Beatrice. It was like being trapped in a sci-fi show where someone you love has all their memories wiped out. Memory gains so much of its power in being shared. Justine and I had a bond based on shared experience, but for her those moments were gone. It was devastating.

“So you don’t really remember me at all?”

“Oh, no. I remember the feeling of you, and that you were a good person in my life and that I was happy when we were all together.”

Later I did some reading on child psychology and consoled myself with the thought that, although the memories we shared in her early years were gone, the influence I had on her would have been formative and profound. I gave her love and attention and all the good things I had in me, and today, somewhere in her heart, that love burns on as part of the complex mixture that is grown-up Justine.

BLOOD, DEATH, AND TAXES

It was 1988, I was twenty-three years old, and I’d just landed a role starring in
Clean
and Sober
with Michael Keaton, a movie about a real estate agent with a cocaine addiction. It was my first respectable
big-studio movie. The director was Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of
Moonlighting
, and I also got to work with Morgan Freeman and Tate Donovan, who later starred in
The O.C
. We shot the movie in a real rehab clinic in downtown Pennsylvania. It was gritty and smoke-filled, just what you’d expect a rehab clinic to look like.

Michael Keaton’s performance was particularly good. He took a gutsy departure from his usual comedy roles and proved that he had the chops to cut it as a dramatic actor. The academy totally snubbed him for an Oscar that year.

I played the role of Iris, one of the patients in the rehab center. Iris is in for cocaine addiction as well, and she has an affair with Tate Donovan’s character. Morgan Freeman, who plays the center’s director, accuses Iris of being stoned and kicks her out of rehab.

When my brother Jimmy was in rehab, they made him watch
Clean and Sober
over and over. In one scene I have to wear a dorky leotard, and when Jimmy’s friends found out that I was his sister they used to give him no end of grief.

Years later I ran into Morgan Freeman at a Cirque du Soleil show in Santa Monica. We talked about
Clean and Sober
, and he said to me, “You know, I always thought you’d make it because you’ve got those eyes that tell the story.”

I thought that that was the kindest thing for him to say. It was nice that he’d remembered me and doubly nice that he’d been kind enough to compliment me at the height of his career.

Over the course of my own career I’ve played an addict of every kind of substance except for the one that finally beat me—alcohol. Later in life I would find myself in rehab, having graduated from playing the part of an addict to actually being one.

By the time
Clean and Sober
was released I was twenty-three years old and playing the love interest in
The Heat
, a
CBS Summer Playhouse
movie with Billy Campbell, who would go on to star in
The Rocketeer
. Gary Devore, the writer, was a confident, charismatic man in his late forties who’d walk around the set in jeans and cowboy boots.

Gary was the best man at Tommy Lee Jones’s wedding and was godfather to Peter Strauss’s son. He was buddies with Kurt Russell and had written movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christopher Walken, and Billy Crystal.

We started up a full-blown Hollywood set romance. The sex was exciting, so much so that I couldn’t even really tell you what the show was about.

After filming
The Heat
we said our goodbyes and I went back to Montgomery Clift’s old house, which I was renting in the Hollywood Hills. Monty had been a pain-pill addict and, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, an alcoholic. I didn’t seek out the old haunts of alcoholic actors; that’s just Hollywood. Close your eyes, throw a dart at a map of available rentals, and odds are you’ll find yourself living in the house of a former movie star with a substance abuse problem.

Speaking of which, by that time Lana Clarkson was living with me. The house didn’t have a second bedroom, but it did have a spare bathroom that the owners had at some point turned into makeshift accommodation for their kid. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen an Amazonian blonde sleeping on a single bed balanced precariously on top of a tiny closet.

Gary called me up one night, and I mentioned that I was going to Canada to visit my friend Christine.

“Great! I’ll come with you and we can get hitched.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure.”

Six weeks later we were married. We hadn’t even been on a date.

It was an insane idea but it was charged with spontaneity, and something about that appealed to me. After the difficulties of my painful, drawn-out relationship with Patrick I figured that this would have just as much chance of working out as something that I overthought and overplanned.

At the time, Christine was a location manager, so she threw together a spectacular wedding for me. The only decision I had to make was whether I wanted a yacht or a helicopter. I took the yacht.

My friend Lana and I traveled to Vancouver together. She seemed more excited about the wedding than I was. Gary and I met up and did tequila shots in the limo on the way. Everybody was so fucked up on coke and booze that it was more like a frat party than a wedding. Aboard the yacht Lana swept into my bachelorette party, tears streaming down her face, wailing about how no one would ever want to marry her. I tried to get her to join in the fun but she preferred to make a dramatic exit. She couldn’t handle so much attention being directed toward me on my special day and set about putting the spotlight back where she thought it belonged. Ten minutes later Christine confronted me, outraged that I’d made Lana the maid of honor after all the work she’d done. It turned out that Lana had gone up to the yacht’s captain and signed herself up for the job on the marriage certificate without telling anyone, including me.

It wasn’t what you’d call a traditional wedding. I still wasn’t talking to my parents, so in place of my mother there was a skinny Japanese guy in drag wearing a fluffy hat. I don’t know who he was or where he materialized from, but we were smashed and the wedding seemed to be coming together in its own weird way, so I went along for the ride. Gary had never met his best man, Donnelly Rhodes, who would play my father in an episode of
Murder, She Wrote
. Sci-fi fans will recognize Donnelly as Doc Cottle on the most recent
Battlestar Galactica
series. The piano player had missed the boat so someone’s brother took on that job, and we sailed out to this “sacred” island for the ceremony where everyone’s shoes got muddy. I was wearing a white dress I’d bought in a secondhand store in L.A. and an antique lace coat that kept getting ripped on branches and stained from spilled drinks. It probably wasn’t the most auspicious beginning to a marriage, but it was lots of fun.

Instead of a reception we had a party at Donnelly’s house. A cute friend of Christine’s that I’d always had a crush on was there. Caring for Justine had brought a level of restraint to my drug and alcohol consumption, but now that she was gone the party was back on. So when we ran out of blow, I went for a drive with Christine’s friend to find some more, still wearing my wedding dress. We ended up buying some from a pack of young guys, did some lines with them and then drove back to the house party. When we got back no one had noticed our absence, so we snuck into the bathroom with the blow and started making out.

At the beginning of a marriage you’re filled with hope and optimism, and you can’t see the cards fate will deal you. It turned out that my cards were bad, but Gary got a worse hand. Within ten years he would die in mysterious circumstances, sparking a series of conspiracy theories and investigations that continues to this day.