Inside Out(18)
MY DAD DIED in October. I turned eighteen in November. I got married to Freddy the following February. It was obviously a confusing and fraught time, and our wedding reflected the scattershot nature of the decision. DeAnna and George were the only members of my family who came. I wore a vintage dress, with flowers tucked behind my veil. It was at some little Spanish church in L.A. I can’t remember where.
Part II
Success
Chapter 8
As my family was disintegrating, my career was picking up. A bunch of breaks came my way in rapid succession. First, John Casablancas, the legendary owner of Elite, picked me to go with a handful of other girls to New York City. It was incredibly exciting. They flew me there and put me up, paid for new headshots geared toward New York’s high fashion market, and sent me on “go-sees”: interviews with potential clients. The city was overwhelming—and intimidating. And it smelled! I still remember the first time I saw steam billowing up from a manhole in Manhattan—it was like there was an underworld of fire just below the city’s surface, burning night and day.
Freddy came with me, and I had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I would have been anxious about going to Manhattan for the first time by myself, but on the other, I worried his band couldn’t keep going without him, and sure enough, once he told the rest of The Kats of his plan to spend some time in New York, they all got other gigs. I was nervous that Freddy was putting all his eggs in my basket. I, meanwhile, was beyond driven—hell-bent on getting out of the dysfunctional place I’d come from and into the bright world of success, where I imagined people lived happy, normal lives. (Ha.) Freddy and I were going in different directions, and I began to pull away from him.
I was in New York for several months. I got cast in a commercial, and Freddy and I moved into a tiny little apartment on the Upper West Side. On the last day of shooting, I felt that familiar tightness in my body that signaled a kidney flare-up, but I told myself it was just the hot lights.
We were scheduled to return to Los Angeles the next day. By the time we landed, I had blown up like a balloon; I was swollen from head to toe. Freddy had no idea what to do, but fortunately I had called DeAnna, who was waiting for us at the airport and took me straight to the emergency room at UCLA. I was retaining so much fluid at that point, I still have stretch marks up and down my legs.
This attack was different. By now, a lot more was known about the disease—they didn’t have to keep me at the hospital for months; once I was stabilized they sent me home on a high dose of Prednisone.
There was another difference. In the past, my flare-ups had always followed one of my dad’s infidelities. This time, the infidelity was mine. I had tried to repress it, but my body wouldn’t let me.
The night before we got married, instead of working on my vows, I was calling a guy I’d met on a movie set. I snuck out of my own bachelorette party and went to his apartment.
Why did I do that? Why didn’t I go and see the man I was committing to spend the rest of my life with to express my doubts? Because I couldn’t face the fact that I was getting married to distract myself from grieving the death of my father. Because I felt there was no room to question what I’d already put in motion. I couldn’t get out of the marriage, but I could sabotage it.
Only it’s not much of a sabotage when it’s a secret. You just end up sabotaging yourself.
A FEW MONTHS later, I got my second big break: an audition for General Hospital. I’d never watched a soap opera, but I knew this was a huge deal. For one thing, it was the number one show on daytime television. For another, GH was in the press a lot right then, because the actress Genie Francis, who played Laura Spencer—of the famous Luke and Laura—was retiring, and no less a celebrity than Elizabeth Taylor was doing a kind of extended cameo on the show. I was extremely nervous when I went in to read for this classic soap, which had been on the air for two decades. But I tried to picture myself back by the swimming pool on Kings Road, reading scripts to Nastassja. That helped get me through it. Also, I loved the part: Jackie Templeton, a sharp, no-nonsense, plucky young reporter. They wanted a “Margot Kidder type,” someone like the actress who played Lois Lane in Superman, which had been wildly popular in theaters a few years earlier. I had Kidder’s dark hair and green eyes, and we had something else in common: a husky voice. There’s something about that slight rasp that people find compelling—I guess because it suggests toughness and vulnerability at the same time. I got the part.
It was intoxicating and terrifying. Jackie Templeton turned out to be a really big role. And in general, soaps are just hard work—different from other television, and definitely different from film; there is no other medium where an actor is given thirty pages to memorize and film in a day. We’d get a script maybe a couple of days in advance, but there was a limit to how much dialogue one could really manage beyond the day ahead. On the weekend you might get a couple scripts at once so you could see where the story was going, but the daily thrust was always: here are your scenes; deal with them!
The rewards of this scramble were huge. For the first time in my life, I was in control of whether I could make rent, eat, afford new clothes, pay the utility bill. When I started the show, I was so embarrassed by my beat-up Volkswagen that I wouldn’t drive onto the studio lot; I’d park it on the street and then walk in the gate. I remember feeling mortified one day when one of the guards said, “You know you can park on the lot, right?,” and I realized he’d seen me in the car. The first thing I bought when I saved up enough money was a brand-new silver Honda Accord. I was so proud as I drove it past the guards and into my reserved parking spot.