Читать книгу Babylon Confidential - Claudia Christian - Страница 15

COCAINE BLUES

In the ’80s the white line that ran down the middle of the Hollywood fast lane was painted on with happy dust. Every­one was doing blow, and I was no exception. I was nineteen and enjoying the attentions of a charming thirty-six-year-old Frenchman named Patrick Wachsberger, whose company produced the recent Twilight movies. I was 5'9" and a slender size six, but Patrick (pronounced Pat-REEK) was stick-thin; I could barely fit into his jeans.

In New York, they’d taught me that the skinnier you are, the closer you are to ideal beauty. Although I’d accepted the fact that I was incapable of building a career around being a human skeleton, the voices of Eileen Ford and her cronies still echoed in my head. French men like skinny women—I’d convinced myself of that, along with the notion that I had to lose more weight.

Luckily, I discovered that if you snorted cocaine you didn’t need to eat. I was a size two in no time at all. I lived on one meal a day—breakfast. The only downside was swallowing. My throat was raw from a combination of cocaine and ocean saltwater spray, the discerning user’s choice for flushing out encrusted sinuses. Add cigarettes to that and a little red wine to come down and voila, you have a gullet that struggles to swallow anything solid. I basically lived on yogurt and smoothies.

Some people take cocaine to feel powerful and confident. It had the opposite effect on me. It made me paranoid. I would become terribly self-conscious. All I wanted to do was lock myself in the bathroom and clean it from top to bottom with a toothbrush or sit down and do my taxes. So I never took cocaine for recreation. I used it as a weight-loss drug. Looking back, I suppose that spending $350 a week on a weight-loss medication might seem a little extravagant (not to mention just plain stupid), but hey, those were the days, my friend. Blow was everywhere, and that white line seemed to never end.

Before things got serious with Patrick I dated a handsome one-legged guy who worked in a shoe shop at the Beverly Center mall, and after him the hunky soap star Hank Cheyne. We went to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands and had a really fun, sexy time. Hank was plagued by the curse that comes from playing a bad guy on TV—he’d walk down the street in New York and random strangers would swear and spit at him.

I had a brief engagement to an Italian prince that didn’t work out. We had a big engagement party at the Ritz hotel in London with Michael Feinstein playing. The prince was a Six Million Dollar Man, which is not to say that he could last forever in bed, but that he’d carry three stamps in his pocket worth $6 million—talk about portable wealth. The relationship had already been in trouble because his family wanted me to give up my career, move to Italy, and churn out babies. But things came to a head when I found out that the Ferrari Testarossa that he’d given me to drive around Switzerland actually belonged to his aristocratic lover, a woman in her midforties. That and he had a fetish for girls in high heels, corsets, and garter belts—the exact outfit worn by the prostitute on his first sexual encounter. It was fun for the first few times, but he insisted that I put on the same getup every time, which wore thin quickly. At that point in my life, it was just a little too weird.

Then I had a one-night stand with George Clooney. We first met on Riptide and then later on Babytalk, a TV series that tried to capitalize on the success of the talking-baby movie Look Who’s Talking. I played the voice of one of the babies, and George played a guy who was sweet on the single mom. They still haven’t sent me my Emmy for that performance, but I live in hope. George and I hooked up after our first meeting. After shooting our scenes we went back to my place, I did some blow, we had a good time, and then he rode off into the sunset on his bright yellow Harley, mullet cut whipping in the wind. He wasn’t the George Clooney that you see now. Like a good red wine, he seems to have improved with age.

After six months of dating, Patrick and I decided to get serious, and I gave up my apartment and moved into his designer home on Sunset Plaza Drive. It was my first grown-up relationship, and there was an aspect of it that made me more than a little uneasy. Patrick had a two-year-old daughter named Justine. He told me that the child’s mother, Beatrice, lived in Paris and had a boyfriend and that he had been awarded sole custody. Patrick was always busy with movie-related business, and I could tell from the get-go that he was a hands-off parent. My worry was that he was looking for a replacement mom for Justine and had settled on me. It was an unfounded fear. Patrick had hired a nanny to help with Justine. The problem was that I was going through a period in my life in which I was more than a little baby crazy, and Justine was totally adorable. I unofficially adopted her and set my mind to raising her.

Of course, the cocaine had to stop. Two things helped me with that.

The first was that not many people knew I was taking it. I’d kept my habit to myself and never used it in public, unlike Mike Hammer star Stacy Keach. I’d starred on that show right before Keach got busted at Heathrow airport trying to smuggle ten grams of cocaine in his assistant’s shaving-cream jar. I’d worked with actors who were so coked up that my lips went numb when I kissed them. I figured I didn’t want to get that kind of reputation.

My second and much more effective aid to stopping coke was fear. I’d had a scare one night when I flushed out my sinuses. I blew my nose and a chunk of flesh and cartilage came out. I found a flashlight and hand mirror, looked up my nose, and I swear that I could see a hole. I shoved a blob of Neosporin up there in the hope of plugging it, popped a couple of Tylenol PMs, and tried to sleep. In the morning I opened the fridge and discovered a slice of the lemon tart I’d made for dinner the previous night. My guests had said it was divine and especially zingy. I took a bite, chewed, and moved it around in my mouth for a full half minute before I realized I’d lost my sense of taste. Another test, conducted with the help of some freshly cut flowers, confirmed that my sense of smell had departed as well. Cooking has always been an important part of my life, so losing my primary culinary senses was truly terrifying.

I stopped my coke habit like Superman stops a runaway train: instantaneously. I crushed it like a tin can. I was young and strong, and my ability to give it up so suddenly without any serious damage to my health gave me a false sense of invulnerability. That unfortunate misconception would catch up with me later in life. Some bad habits you can walk away from scot-free but others are like ivy: they wind their way around you tightly, mixing their tendrils with yours until you don’t know where they end and you begin.

Luckily, about two weeks later my senses returned to normal working order, but after a warning like that I didn’t need to be told twice. For the time being snow season was over.

On the home front, I was doing everything I could to provide a normal, happy environment for Justine. I was young, but I think I did a good job as a makeshift mom. We did craft projects together, dug our fingers into cookie dough, and I stuffed her tiny shoes with little surprises for St. Nicholas Day. I tried to fill her life with fun new experiences. I gave Justine her first party dress, her first Christmas, and her first Easter. I tried to make her life as special as my mother had made mine when I was a little girl. And I loved it. I had a perfect, beautiful little girl who even looked like me, so everyone naturally assumed that she was my daughter. I didn’t contradict them.

Patrick and I threw dinner parties all the time. It was a glamorous life, but the coke parties made it stressful given that I was raising a small child. We would hire an Italian chef named Tono who cooked amazing dinners. It was a gastronomic tragedy, because no one but me ate the food. But, man, was the bartender busy! And you’ve never seen nostrils vacuum up blow so fast. Everyone was doing it. O.J. Simpson would bring his wife Nicole and spend the night flirting with every other woman at the party. Patrick and I had a guest bathroom, and I was constantly rushing in after guests, wiping neat little lines of white coke off the back of the black toilet and matching sink for fear that Justine’s nanny would see them.

One day I got a call from my agent. New Line Cinema had just produced the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and they were now planning to make a movie called The Hidden.

“They’re recasting the role of the alien-possessed stripper. It’s the only female role in the movie. It’s light on dialogue, but you get to shoot machine guns.”

I went along to audition but knew I was in trouble when I read that one of Brenda Lee Van Buren’s essential character attributes was that she be “big busted.” At 120 pounds and 5'9", I didn’t have much going on in the chest department, but, never one to give in, I prepared for the audition by stuffing my bra with socks and tissues. I got an immediate callback, although this time they wanted me to come in wearing a bikini. I began to panic, worrying that my chest’s secret identity would be revealed. I rose to the challenge and concocted an ingenious device made of shoulder pads and electrical tape.

I knew that wouldn’t be quite enough, so I set about devising measures to draw attention away from my faux boobs. The next day I strutted into the production offices wearing a khaki dress with snaps down the front. When they asked to see my body I ripped the dress open in one dramatic movement, did a quick spin, thanked them, and left. An hour later I had the job.

I love acting. Aside from being Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend, where else can you start your workday at a police academy shooting Steyrs and AK-47s and end it learning how to pole dance from Janet Jackson’s choreographer? The guns I was good at, but the pole dancing—I had no natural ability in that department. The choreographer did her best, and then threw her hands up in frustration and sent me to some men’s clubs to see experts in action. I took my best friend to the Aladdin, a strip joint on Sunset Boulevard, and came to appreciate just how athletic some of those girls are. I met the dancers after their shift. One of them was a former Olympic skier. Some were clearly drugged up and working to support their habits, but most of them were hardened pros earning serious money and seemed as sharp-minded as any executive I’d encountered in the entertainment industry.

Now it’s bad enough when you have to put on a convincing strip show in front of cameras for the first time, but when I learned that I’d have to do it in a g-string made out of dollar bills my anxiety scaled previously unconquered heights; it’s every actress’s worst nightmare to see her butt fifty feet tall in a movie theater.

I decided that I needed to lose more weight for the role and visited a place called the Lindora clinic where they put me on a 500-calorie-a-day diet and shot me full of a combination of vitamins and a substance that I would later discover to be pregnant-horse urine.

My first day on set I was scheduled to perform the strip scene. The director, Jack Sholder, was not a happy man when he discovered that I’d duped them in regard to my physical attributes. Luckily, I’d already come clean to the wardrobe mistress, who’d set about designing a set of prosthetic breasts that I could wear under a cut-off T-shirt. It was a double win for me, because it meant that I also got to dodge the topless scene that Jack had planned on filming.

Working with Kyle MacLachlan was very exciting. By then he’d starred in the David Lynch movies Blue Velvet and Dune. Both he and Michael Nouri were total gentlemen, a real pleasure to work with, and the rest of the film went without a hitch. Well, mostly.

I was on the roof of a building shooting my final scene, and I mean that literally. I shoot Kyle with a machine gun, Michael Nouri shoots me in the head, and I shoot him back, knocking him over the side of a building. Kyle comes to rescue him, shooting me nine times in the process, rescues his friend, loads a fresh clip in his gun, and shoots me another seven times, and then I escape by jumping through a twenty-foot-high neon sign and fall three stories to my death. Simple, right?

In the movie business they attach little explosives called squibs to your clothes to make it look like you’re being riddled with bullets. One of the squibs exploded close to my face, and a piece of the metallic jacket I was wearing shot into my eye. It burned like a son of a bitch but I kept on until we got the take. But after that, I lost the ability to shoot a gun without blinking. Back then I had the Bruce Willis open-eye stare down perfectly, and now I have this blinking reflex, and I look like a total amateur. I recently found myself at a firing range shooting antique firearms for charity with Joe Pesci and Lou Ferrigno, the original Incredible Hulk. I was determined to show these guys that I knew what I was doing, but the instant my blunderbuss went off, my eyes slammed shut, a reflexive protection against fashion shrapnel.

I attended the premiere of The Hidden and was pleased that my fake boobs looked convincing. Whether the horse piss worked I don’t know, but when my butt had its premiere on the big screen, I breathed a sigh of relief; the nightmare had been averted—my alien-possessed ass looked pretty damn good.

But as one nightmare ended, another began. I was a real movie actress now and, as I would learn the hard way, things change when you appear nearly naked on the big screen. Someone, somewhere out there, is looking at you and thinking that they’d like to get close to you—real close to you.

There was this guy who had seen The Hidden and decided that I was from Venus and had brought the AIDS virus to planet Earth. No kidding, this is what he actually thought. This guy would park outside my place and masturbate, and sometimes tail me in his car. I called the LAPD but their hands were tied, because this was before Rebecca Schaeffer was killed—the event that brought about the anti-stalker laws of the ’90s. I went back and forth with the police until one cop took pity on me and said, “Look, we can’t do anything about him masturbating, but I do think he could be dangerous. Do you own a gun? You’re going to need one. So you wait until he’s out front, put on something nice, and invite him in. Make sure he’s inside the house and then shoot him. When we come over, you say that he broke in. But you make sure he’s deep inside the house. Otherwise you’re the one we’re going to have to arrest.” Really? No thanks. The guy creeped me out but I didn’t want to shoot him.

I drove to a lunch meeting a few weeks after that and realized the stalker was following me in his car. He was really freaking me out, and as I tried to get away from him I accidentally ran a red light and got hit by a van. My engine blew up, my car was totaled, but all I could think about was my number one fan, who’d climbed out of his car and was now heading toward me. I was convinced he was going to try to kill me. A crowd started to gather, so my stalker vanished, but in the meantime someone saw me trying to start my engine to try and get away. When the police arrived, I was arrested for trying to leave the scene of an accident. I explained about the stalker and why I was trying to leave, but they didn’t believe my story. I ended up having to perform six months of community service at the old Globe Playhouse. I was back, not to perform Shakespeare, but to make cookies for the audience. I lasted three weeks in baking hell (all the while wishing I’d invested in a handgun and a lace teddy like that cop had advised) before I offered to pay to have the theater’s roof repaired in exchange for their filling out my community service book.

The stalker vanished after that. He was the first but he wouldn’t be my last. There would be a dozen other stalkers that would plague me to varying degrees over the years, including one guy who quit his job, sold his house, and tried to move into mine, thinking we were married.

The movie-star world isn’t all champagne and caviar.