Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(48)
So many great things were happening—all these wonderful projects with terrific actors, directors, and writers involved, many awards and accolades, year after year after year. But here’s what wasn’t successful: if you could peer underneath the surface of my life, you’d see a slightly different story.
Bit by bit, our family was facing some very difficult challenges—and they all came to a head during the filming of George Wallace. During this intense, crazy era, some harmful habits caught up with us, and into my family’s life would come more pain than we’d ever known.
CHAPTER 9
Darkness and Light
At four thirty in the morning on January 17, 1994, our home in Encino rattled and shook for what seemed like an eternity. Books tumbled off shelves. Lamps and vases toppled over and crashed onto the floor. Moira and I were both up in a wink. Ella, seventeen months old, was sleeping in a little bed in our bedroom. Moira grabbed her and rushed outside, while I sprinted into Mac’s room. Sophie was staying the night at her grandparents’ house not far away. The power was out, leaving our house totally black, and as I ran to Mac, I stepped on something flat and slick that shattered underneath my bare foot. A glass-framed picture had fallen off the wall. Luckily, my bare foot wasn’t cut, and I kept right on running. The house was still shaking when I grabbed Mac and raced with him outside. Moira and the baby met us on the driveway. Car alarms blared all over the neighborhood. Neighbors shouted. Our house continued to crackle and groan.
A huge earthquake was shaking Los Angeles. Later termed the “Northridge Earthquake,” it registered 6.7 on the Richter scale, killing fifty-seven people and injuring another eighty-seven hundred. Our rental house in Encino was up in the hills of the San Fernando Valley, and as we stood on our driveway in the pitch black of night, we looked across the vastness of the valley and every light was out. A total blackout. All we saw were electrical transformers exploding here and there—just random spots of fire amid the darkness. Normally, the valley at night was awash in color from thousands of streetlights, but this night the valley looked eerie, spooky, like the end of the world was upon us. We didn’t know what to do or where to go, so we huddled in our car, waiting for the sun to come up so we could see better, while listening to news updates on the radio. My parents soon drove over to our house with Sophie, and when the sun came up I went back into the house to examine the damage. The house was livable, fortunately, but the walls were cracked, household items were strewn everywhere, furniture was toppled, and we needed to do a lot of cleaning up.
Even then, I didn’t trust the structure, particularly after two large aftershocks hit that same day, with many smaller ones following. My brother-in-law Jack Treese and my wife’s sister Amy lived not far from us, so we drove over to their house to check on them. Streets looked like war zones. Shattered glass lay everywhere. Gas lines blazed. Commercial buildings were reduced to rubble. A multistory concrete parking lot at one of the malls had pancaked on top of itself. An entire section of Interstate 5—the main north-south freeway along the West Coast—had collapsed. For the next three days, we camped out in my parents’ backyard in tents, afraid to go back into our houses, wondering what the future would hold.
As horrible as that earthquake was, our family thankfully emerged relatively unscathed. Yet something else would shake us even more deeply over the next few years, causing us to wonder at times if we were going to make it.
Back in the mid-1970s, a young, incredibly talented theater student joined us at those early meetings held at Illinois State University to discuss the creation of Steppenwolf. As one of the meetings was winding down, she pulled a fifth of Scotch out of her purse and announced, “C’mon, everybody, let’s go!”
Everybody laughed. We were all into partying. Pot and booze were always available on college campuses, and the fact that this young theater student kept a bottle of whiskey in her purse didn’t seem unusual to any of us.
That student was Moira before I knew her very well, and I drank and partied right along with her and the rest of our friends in those days. Everyone drank, it seemed, yet in the coming years, the challenges with alcohol became more difficult for Moira, to the point where in the mid-1990s, alcohol held a strong grip on her.
Moira was the youngest of five children in the Harris family. Born first was her oldest sister, Lois. Then came two older brothers, Boyd and Arthur. Then came a fraternal twin sister, Amy. Moira was actually the baby of the family because she was the second of the twins. As a young child she loved to be at home with the family. She studied hard in school and for the most part stayed out of trouble. In her high school years in Pontiac, Illinois, the party scene began to unfold, although unlike me—the wild nut in high school, always boozing around with my buddies and skipping school to smoke pot—Moira was the good girl in high school. She attended a few high school parties and had a little taste here and there to fit in, but she never got drunk then. She was smart and pretty and always got good grades. Her freshman and sophomore classes named her homecoming queen, and first runner-up in her junior and senior years.
Moira and Amy, known around their high school as “the Harris twins,” were both popular, yet they were very different in personality. Amy was more confident and adventurous, Moira more reserved. Amy signed up for ROTC in college and after graduation went off to see the world by serving our country in the US Army. Moira stayed closer to home, pursuing theater and acting.