Inside Out(20)
It was a delicious few months. I had made a lifelong friend in Zezé—we’re still close to this day. We hung out with Peter and Zezé’s friend Paolo, a beautiful Brazilian boy, all the time, partying at our apartment, going to the beach, and exploring the city. It was easy to forget I was married—to the point that one night Peter and I ended up in bed. (We both recognized it was a mistake right away; it only happened that once.) I was having an adventure. I was gaining momentum in my career. And I had never felt so free.
All that freedom—combined with my youth, not to mention the extra boost of bravado and heedlessness that cocaine gives you—led me to push the envelope. My character was supposed to hang glide in the movie, but because of an insurance issue the producers were insisting on a stunt double. But Peter was the second unit director, and I told him, “Come on, just let me do it.”
It could have cost him his job; it could have put the movie at risk. It was an idea borne of drug-fueled recklessness, but it happened to work out. I slipped on the harness and ran right off the edge of a cliff over the Atlantic Ocean. The view was unbelievable.
Chapter 9
Even as I was acting out in Brazil, I was having a kind of epiphany about honesty. The person I wanted to be didn’t lie. When I got back from Rio, I was determined to be completely truthful with Freddy, to take responsibility for what I’d done and what I wanted. I came clean with my husband about what had happened with Peter and told him I thought our marriage wasn’t working.
He was angry. And I understood. I had failed him in our marriage; I wanted to do the right thing in our divorce, so I agreed to pay him alimony for a year. He wasn’t alone for long, though. Early in our relationship, he’d given guitar lessons to make extra money, and one of his students was a friend’s fourteen-year-old sister. I noticed right away that Freddy and Renee had a connection—despite his being more than twice her age—and one afternoon I told them, “If anything ever happened to Freddy and me, I bet you two would get together.” Renee was embarrassed, and he was furious with me for upsetting her at the time, but as soon as Freddy and I broke up, they got together, and they’re still a couple to this day.
The divorce had been my idea, but I still felt adrift after we split. A friend lent me his apartment in Marina del Rey until I found a place of my own, and that’s where I camped out. I turned twenty-one in that apartment, alone.
I wasn’t really close with anyone from General Hospital, where I’d returned to work off the remainder of my contract after I got back from Brazil. I took a second leave from my job there to do another movie, but it fell through. By then, General Hospital had already written me out of the upcoming story line. Suddenly, I didn’t have anything to distract me from myself.
I started drinking again. It was a really dark time for me. The self I presented to the world was the same it had always been—upbeat, confident, daring. I bought a Kawasaki motorcycle and sped around Los Angeles without a helmet. I didn’t even have a license for the bike.
My appetite for cocaine had escalated into a dependency, and though I would never have called myself an addict, that’s what I had become. I got some of my cocaine from a dentist, so it was really good stuff, and when that was unavailable, I got my coke through my business manager. It seems incredible to me now that the person advising me on my finances never once drew my attention to all the money I was spending on drugs, but then again, he was using them, too. I got out of that arrangement with him eventually, but not before I’d blown through most my money.
Fortunately, I landed a lead part in No Small Affair, a romantic teen comedy Columbia Pictures was distributing. I played a young nightclub singer, and Jon Cryer played the nineteen-year-old photographer who falls in love with her, in his first movie role. Jon fell for me in real life, too, and lost his virginity to me while we were making that movie. It pains me to think of how callous I was with his feelings—that I stole what could have been such an important and beautiful moment from him. I was sort of losing it right then, and I was definitely not in a place to take care of someone else’s feelings. I started to do some seriously self-destructive things during that period—I remember waking up not knowing where I was, thinking, Am I supposed to be at work in an hour?, and then having to call someone and ask to be picked up. It’s all a blur.
Craig Baumgarten, a studio executive at Columbia, took me under his wing while we were making No Small Affair. He was going away for a while, and he offered to let me stay in his house. I was very wary when he invited me to come see the place, but in a great step forward for me, I didn’t sleep with him, and he didn’t push me to. I think he was genuinely fond of me, but he was crazy to let me stay in his very grown-up house in Beverly Hills in my state, and even crazier to give me the keys to his wife’s Jaguar. “Use the car,” he said. “It’s just sitting there.” And so I did, excited to be cruising around Los Angeles in style. Somehow, I didn’t wreck it, thank God.
I went hunting for my own place. Moving from house to house in rapid succession had felt familiar in the worst way, and I wanted a real home. I found the perfect tiny two-bedroom on Willoughby with a black-and-white linoleum floor in the kitchen. The front of the house was completely hidden by a fence covered with winding vines, so it was very private, and the inside was immaculate. I loved it there. I never got a couch for the living room, and the second bedroom had just a mattress on the floor, but the house gave me something to put my energy into, as well as a sense of independence and grounding. It was the first place I ever owned.