I'll Be You(37)

At eighteen, now in college, I turned to ecstasy and coke, which I consumed at the nightclubs that turned a blind eye to the underage stars who drank themselves into stupors on their dance floors every weekend.

After that, there was some trendy dabbling with hallucinogens—acid and mushrooms, mostly—but these were never my thing. I didn’t like the way they made me turn inward.

I tried heroin only once. Needles scared me, and something about the idea of heroin felt desperate to me. Heroin was the treacherous terrain of addicts and street dwellers; the drug that would end with me dead or living under a bridge, I told myself. As long as I didn’t touch that, I had nothing to worry about. (Irony, rich.)

Instead, in my twenties, as my career started to go into free fall, I turned back to my original love: pills.

This time around, instead of pills that woke me up and made me feel alert, I turned to pills that blunted me and made me feel dreamy. I preferred opioids: Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet. I washed these down with vast quantities of alcohol, a daily roller-coaster ride that began each morning with a wash of euphoric calm, ascended into a giddy high, and then brought me crashing down into total obliteration. Most days I woke up not remembering most of what had happened after ten the previous evening. I didn’t mind that one bit.



* * *



—

My career, you see, had not survived the Great Cleaving. No one had warned me that twins, while a valuable commodity as children, stop being so appealing as grown-ups. (Unless you’re a porn star. There’s no shortage of demand for twincest vids, judging by the producers who approached me.) As adults, acting twins are a freak show, doomed to supporting roles in fantasy films and family comedies. Even when there is a dramatic role for identical twins, they’re usually just played by the same actor, a famous name making a play for that Oscar trophy.

There are even fewer parts for an actress whose main claim to fame is that she was a twin but isn’t anymore. You are essentially half a person.

Harriet took me out to lunch at Barney Greengrass not long after I came back to Los Angeles alone that fall. “I’m not going to lie to you, it’s going to be tough,” she warned me. She picked at her smoked fish, moving it left and right across the plate. “We need to rebrand you. Make everyone forget that Elli ever existed. It’s going to be like your career up until this point didn’t really happen.”

“I can change my name if that helps. I’ll be Samantha instead of Sam.” I looked at her hopefully. If anyone could figure out the situation, it was Harriet, who in her four decades in Hollywood had surely seen it all.

Harriet sighed, pushed her reading glasses back up onto her nose. She’d grown thin, dark circles under her eyes, her signature smoking jacket billowing around her torso. “We need to go deeper than that. Who are you as an actress, if you’re not playing opposite your sister? You can’t play adorable twin anymore. So what’s the story you plan to sell instead? Girl next door? Intellectual smarty-pants? Strong-willed badass?” She eyed me over the rims of her glasses. “Party girl?”

I blushed. The previous weekend, I’d gotten obliterated at a nightclub with a group of young actors and had been papped falling down on a sidewalk in Hollywood, my lace underwear visible under my hiked-up miniskirt. The photos showed up on TMZ, with the caption “Logan Twin Loses It Again.” “That was a one-time thing,” I lied.

“No it wasn’t.” Harriet coughed, an alarming wheeze that escalated into an uncontrollable hack. She pressed a napkin to her lips, and it came away pink. “I’m not your mother, so I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m not even going to get into the addiction question of it all, though I’ll tell you I know what’s at the end of this road you’re going down, and it’s not pretty. But practically speaking, you should know that casting agents pay attention to these things. They read the gossip pages, precisely so they know what they’re up against. Reliability is an asset, Sam. You want me to help you do this, you’re going to have to help yourself.”



* * *



—

I tried to follow her advice, I really did. I went home after that meeting determined to sober up, stop going out, stay straight and focused on my career. I stayed away from nightclubs, buckled down on homework, doubled up on auditions.

Who did I want to be as an actress? Harriet’s question clung to me. A star, of course, but maybe one who did the occasional theater stint. A Scarlett Johansson, or a Natalie Portman—the kind of actress who would open a blockbuster movie and also get an arty black-and-white portrait in The New York Times Magazine Great Performers issue. I signed up for a Shakespeare class and a course about silent-film Hollywood, thinking to myself that Harriet would be impressed with how serious I was becoming.

I never got a chance to tell her. Seven weeks after our lunch, I woke up to a headline in Variety: “Legendary Agent Harriet Sunday Dies of Complications from Lung Cancer.” It had been a fatal pulmonary thromboembolism. She hadn’t even told her clients she was sick.

Elli came down for the funeral and we clung to each other at Harriet’s grave, and then she went back to Santa Barbara to take finals and I completely fell apart. I felt untethered, as if all the responsible eyes on me had vanished, and now that I was unobserved, I didn’t have a clue who I should be anymore.