Inside Out(22)

He must have gotten me home because I ended up on the bathroom floor, where Zezé found me drunk and writhing like a crazy person. “There’s a demon inside me, and I have to get it out!” I told her. Zezé managed to talk me down and get me safely into bed, but she must have been terrified.

When I woke up the next morning, I remembered the appointment. Without even thinking, I went straight to look for whatever cocaine was left, and that’s what I had for breakfast. My assistant picked me up and took me to the address in Redondo Beach, which turned out to be a hospital. I clearly remember going up in the elevator and walking down a long corridor toward a sign that read: ALCOHOL REHABILITATION CENTER.

My gut reaction was, “No. That’s for my mom. I’m a drug addict.” But I’d been ordered to report to rehab unless I was dying, and though I might have wanted to be at that moment, what I wanted even more was to protect my career.


REHAB WAS STILL very fringe in 1984. The Betty Ford clinic, in many ways the prototype for the industry, had opened only two years before. Many of the people in my rehab in Redondo Beach had been drinking their whole lives and had decades of horror stories to share. I didn’t have that long a track record: I was only twenty-one, and had been wrestling with alcohol issues off and on for three years, and with cocaine for maybe two. That didn’t mean my dependency was minor, though. When the head of admission told me their program lasted thirty days I was aghast. Thirty days! That was just impossible.

“We’re starting to shoot a movie in sixteen days,” I said.

She asked me, “What’s more important? The film or your life?”

“The film!” I told her, and I meant it.

“There is no film if you have no life,” she pointed out. “I’d like to put you in a bed right now.” I felt like I might jump out of my skin. I told her I had to go to the bathroom. Inside the stall, I rummaged through my pockets for a used vial of coke to scavenge one last hit. Then I went back to the counselor’s office and told her, “I cannot not do this film. It’s all that I’ve got.”

I don’t know if there was something in the way I said it, but she studied my face for a minute and then said, “Let me make a call. But at least stay tonight.”

The clinic staff clearly assumed I was going to be admitted for the duration because there was already a bag waiting for me, filled with all the stuff I could possibly need to move in for a month, which I guess they’d had my assistant pull together. Their approach was very clever: you couldn’t say, “I can’t start right now because I need such and such” because anything you could think of had already been provided. So you were kind of backed into a corner.

The next day I was called back to the admissions office, where I found Joel Schumacher and the two producers of the movie. It hadn’t occurred to me that they were behind all this. What could it matter to them if they had me in their film? First of all, I was nobody. This was only my third studio movie. And, what’s more, there were seven of us in the cast—what difference did I really make? But they had apparently met to discuss the situation because there was a negotiated plan in place. I could start the film with just fifteen days of sobriety if I completed the list of requirements that are usually done in thirty. When I left, there had to be a counselor with me 24/7 for the duration of the filming.

To this day, I see this as some version of divine intervention. If I’d had to give up the movie and go through the program to get sober for myself, I doubt I would have done it. I just didn’t value myself enough for that. But with the film at stake, and this enormous show of support from Craig Baumgarten, Joel Schumacher, and his colleagues, who I didn’t want to let down, I had something much bigger than me to fight for. And so I did.

I did absolutely everything that was asked of me. I checked every requirement off the list. I cooperated. I worked hard. I went to group counseling and one-on-one counseling, and I went to AA meetings and accepted the twelve steps into my life. There was even a family session, which my mother and brother attended. I got to vent my grievances at Ginny, but even in this environment it was clear she wasn’t capable of mothering me. So I just went through the motions and got it over with. It’s sort of funny to think about me apologizing for any problems I might have caused her because of my addiction.

Fifteen days later, I walked out with my wonderful, caring counselor and went straight to rehearsal. True to the conditions of my release from the rehab, she stayed with me day and night while we filmed at various locations in Washington, D.C., and around the campus at the University of Maryland, which we pretended was Georgetown. She was a lovely woman, a maternal presence that I hadn’t had since I’d lived with my grandmother in Roswell. Once again, I had that precious, reassuring feeling that someone was looking out for me, that someone cared about how I was doing. Schumacher—to his credit—just moved on, focusing on me as a professional, which was the most helpful thing he could possibly have done. Obviously, both Craig and Joel did an amazingly generous thing by supporting me while I got sober.

Sobriety was still anonymous back then—no one was admitting to, let alone trumpeting, going to rehab, and I did my best to keep a low profile and just be part of the group as we were shooting. Besides the seven of us, there were other young actors—around that set and at the parties we had when we finished shooting—who had been in films with different members of the cast: Molly Ringwald, Matt Dillon, Sean Penn and his brother Chris. We were dubbed the Brat Pack in the press, a term I hated, because it implied we were all a bunch of spoiled, partying, entitled juvenile delinquents. I’d never been anything even close to spoiled, and I certainly wasn’t partying.