Inside Out(9)

As for my mother, she often got aggressive when she mixed drugs and alcohol, and my parents got kicked out of restaurants and bars as a matter of course. My mom would start a fight with other patrons or lose her temper with my dad and start breaking dishes. Once, when she didn’t like the way the check was delivered, she took off her high-heeled shoe and used it as a weapon against the waitress.

Somehow, in the middle of all their partying, my mom found a good job as a bookkeeper for a magazine distribution company owned by a man named Frank Diskin. DeAnna started working for him, too, and suddenly my family had more money—especially my mother. Frank gave her luxurious bonuses: a mink coat and, eventually, the ultimate status symbol for a New Mexico girl of that era, a Cadillac Seville in pale yellow. We ended up moving into the nicest house we’d ever occupied in Marina del Rey, with Frank Diskin paying our rent.

Why was this guy willing to spend so much on his bookkeeper? DeAnna remembers that whenever my mother was alone with Frank in his office, the door was always locked.


EVER SINCE THE episode in Canonsburg when my mother had tried to kill herself, I’d been subconsciously waiting for another disaster—another truly devastating situation that didn’t make sense, that I couldn’t control, and that would upend my already unstable life. It arrived without warning when I came home from school one day to find that my brother, my father, and almost every trace of them had vanished. “Where’s Morgan?” I asked my mother. “Where’s Dad?” It was not unprecedented for my dad to go missing, but my brother? She shrugged. “Your father and I are getting a divorce,” she said. “And he’d only consent if I gave him Morgan.”

I was stunned. I don’t know what was worst: losing my brother, losing my dad, or finding out that my father couldn’t bear to be parted from Morgan but was fine with abandoning me.

“You and I are moving to West Hollywood,” Ginny informed me. “I’ve found an apartment on Kings Road.” Frank Diskin was out of the picture. As my mother and DeAnna told it, the IRS had been after my father for back taxes for years, and when they caught up with him, he gave them dirt on Diskin in exchange for his own freedom. Basically, he offered the government the same deal he’d offered so many others: double or nothing.

There was only one problem. Losing Diskin meant losing our relative prosperity. Both my mother and DeAnna were out of jobs, and my family wouldn’t be able to stay in the house in the Marina. My mother was furious, and I guess for her it was the final straw that convinced her she’d be better off without my dad. Evidently, my father had hit a breaking point, too: before he left, he’d cut Ginny’s beautiful mink coat into pieces.

I was still reeling when she took me to see our new neighborhood. She was on a manic high, pointing out all the bars and movie theaters, the shops and restaurants. The complex where we were going to live was massive, but the actual apartment was tiny: one bedroom, which we would share; a kitchenette; and a little balcony overlooking the pool. It was like everything in my life was shrinking: my home, my family.


NOW THAT IT was just the two of us, my dynamic with Ginny shifted. It was more like we were sisters than mother and daughter. I was already used to living without rules or limits, but now we even started to look more like peers. I was developing into a teenager; and Ginny basically dressed like one, in miniskirts and low-cut tops. She dolled herself up every time she went out the apartment door. She had deliberately chosen a building where there were other single people and divorcées, and she made friends with one of our neighbors, Landi, who would go with her to the bars.

From our balcony, I used to see this beautiful girl hanging out at the pool, swimming and lying in the sun, growing ever more golden. She was the most radiant creature I’d ever seen, a German actress a few years older than I was, named Nastassja Kinski. I became her friend and acolyte.

The director Roman Polanski had brought Nastassja and her mother to America so that Nastassja could improve her English and her accent at Lee Strasberg’s acting studio. Polanski wanted Nastassja to star in Tess, a romantic tragedy he was going to make based on the Thomas Hardy novel, and he was willing to put off the film until she was ready. That’s how much faith he had in her, which certainly made sense to me. As far as I could tell, she was perfect.

She was self-possessed and in her body like nobody I’d ever seen before. She owned her sexuality completely, without self-consciousness or discomfort, with complete confidence and ease. In my whole life, I haven’t met many who have that in the way that she did. Nastassja was only seventeen, but she had already been in four films. Her star was on the rise in Hollywood, and she regularly received scripts from directors who wanted to work with her. That’s where I came in. Nastassja could speak English well, but she couldn’t really read it, so she asked me to read the screenplays out loud to her so she could decide which ones she wanted to pursue.

She would stare at me with her enormous green eyes, listening intently, and by the time I finished reading her a script, she’d know exactly what she thought; she had total clarity in her opinions. I was as dazzled by her confidence and her sense of direction as I was by her beauty and sensuality. And I saw the breathtaking effect that combination had on other people: like me, they were overcome by her sense of comfort, freedom, and power—though I doubt I identified it as power at the time, as the concept was unimaginable to me. I didn’t know what it was that she had, but I wanted it for myself.