Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(52)
After a night in Park City, we headed to Montreal. On the way to the airport, I discovered all three children had head lice. I got them to Montreal, placed them in the bathtub, and scrubbed their heads with special shampoo while picking out the nits. My youngest daughter, Ella, almost five, still sucked on a pacifier a lot. She was crying, and I looked into her mouth. It was filled with tiny sores. I threw away the pacifier and took her to a doctor, who prescribed some medicine for her. Being the sole parent was not going to be easy.
Moira called us in Montreal. She was sober on the phone, and we had a very frank discussion. I told her she wasn’t going to be able to see the children for a while. I would keep the kids, they would be fine, and all I wanted was for her to focus on getting this thing under control: getting, and staying, sober, once and for all. There would be no more begging or pleading from me. This was it.
She said, “I know. I know.”
Perhaps it was the tough love talking or the hard reality that I had taken the children away from her. I didn’t trust her words fully yet, but I thought maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t simply saying those words this time. Maybe she finally did know that she was powerless over alcohol and needed help.
The next day, she checked into the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs. This time, I didn’t drive her. This time, she got herself there.
The children stayed with me in Montreal, and after shooting wrapped, I took them to Idaho to stay with my parents. They finished out the first half of the school year with their cousins.
Moira didn’t see the children for three months. She went to Betty Ford for twenty-eight days and then to a halfway house in Texas for a while. I encouraged her to do this, fearing the twenty-eight days were not enough, and she agreed to go. It was tough for her there, and after staying for a while and doing their program, she promised me she felt strong and was ready to go home. I supported her decision, but still kept my distance, and stayed in Idaho with my parents and kids for most of that time. Back home in Malibu, for the next ninety days after being released, of her own choice, Moira attended ninety AA meetings. One each day.
During this season, I spent a lot of time in Idaho with the kids and stayed in touch with Moira by phone. She worked hard to attend the meetings and missed all of us. We certainly missed her, but it was important for her to have this time to herself. Plus, the kids were now attending school with their cousins, so it would be hard to uproot them again. One weekend in November I took the kids to see the 20th Century Fox animated feature Anastasia. The music was wonderful, and as it was such a lovely film, we saw it multiple times over the following weeks. It was a beautiful escape during a tough time.
Right before Christmas I brought the kids from Idaho to Palm Springs to the Betty Ford Center where we had all agreed to meet because Moira and I and Sophie were set to attend a family workshop at the clinic. The two youngest were too little to attend the workshop and would stay at the hotel with our housekeeper, Lulu. When Moira saw our kids for the first time again, she smothered them with hugs and kisses, and they gave those hugs and kisses right back to her. It was beautiful to see. Since we had been through rehab once before without a positive outcome, I remained cautious. Like her, I was going to take her newfound sobriety one day at a time. But there was a clarity in her eyes that I had not seen for a long time. She was fighting for her children. She was fighting for her family. She was fighting for us. And she would let nothing—not alcohol, not anything—hurt her precious children. The workshop lasted for four days, and it proved very helpful and informative for what we might face going forward. We then packed up and headed back to our home in Malibu. And when we got home, the kids couldn’t wait for Moira to see Anastasia. She loved it too. As a family, we were at last on the road to real recovery, and I felt hopeful for the first time in years.
It was the end of 1997, and in the twenty-plus years since then, Moira hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol. But there’s more to this story.
Ella had her heart surgery shortly after Moira got sober for good; it seemed like one big thing after another was happening in our family.
I ended up winning an Emmy for my role in George Wallace, which was gratifying, yet much of my life was a blur around then. After Snake Eyes wrapped, within about a two-year period, I was featured in seven other movies—That Championship Season, The Green Mile, It’s the Rage, Bruno (later released on DVD under the title The Dress Code), Impostor, Mission to Mars, and Reindeer Games. With the exception of The Green Mile, none of those movies did very well. Reindeer Games was a costarring role for me with Ben Affleck and Charlize Theron and another chance to work with my friend John Frankenheimer. Mission to Mars and Impostor were both leading roles. All these roles came at me at once—and as an actor, you feel hard-pressed never to turn down work. Sometimes I’d shoot one part for one movie, go to a different location and shoot another part for another movie, then come back to the first location and shoot some more on the first movie. I know I wasn’t home enough. You need to travel as an actor, and acting was my work, but I regret being away from home so much and missing time with my kids when they were young.
Nine months after Moira got sober, she agreed to perform in J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World at Steppenwolf. She took all three kids with her to Chicago to do the play while I went to Wilmington, North Carolina, to shoot the movie Bruno. Synge’s play is set in an Irish tavern, with lots of drinking going on, but Moira stayed dry. During her time performing, she began to get back in touch with the Irish Catholic side of her family. She wasn’t raised in a religious home, but her mother was Catholic by birth and her father was Methodist.