We signed and recorded Beautiful Mess. Of course, Capitol wanted a hit too, and that record didn’t have one single on it. Oh, it had some fine music and a lot of great guests, but no singles. And then came the never-ending bus tours. Eighty-nine shows in ninety-three days, two weeks off, and then start the whole thing over again. I’d hide in my hotel room and do drugs.
“Hey, where’s Bob? We need to hit the road!”
“He’s holed up in his room. Says he’s not coming out.”
“What? What the fuck’s wrong with that guy?”
“Says someone needs to call the label. He wants a bigger per diem. Says he won’t come out otherwise. Wants money now.”
I could hear an angry fist pound at the door. “Goddamn it, Bob! Let’s go!”
Something had to give, and I suspected that it would be me. It was 1992 and a trip to rehab was in my immediate future. I had been down that road before.
HAZELDEN
They always say that nuthin’s perfect … Trust me, I’m well aware of that.
—“Nuthin’s Perfect,” Thelonious Monster
In late January of 1989, under the low lights of a fancy Hollywood restaurant called Citrus, I sat with people I trusted and listened to their concerns. It wasn’t an intervention. At least it wasn’t in the traditional sense of how you might think of it. Everyone sitting at the table knew me well enough to realize that any ham-handed attempt to scare me sober wouldn’t work.
“You gotta do it, man. You need to straighten yourself out,” said Anthony, who had himself recently taken the cure.
“Anthony’s right,” said my girlfriend Marin.
Danny and Nick, businessmen to the bitter end, just asked me how my songwriting was going. I didn’t have a good answer to that. It wasn’t going at all. I played with my food while everybody else ate and talked at me. By the end of the meal, I felt like I really didn’t have a choice. I agreed to go to treatment. Time to lose my cherry. All drug addicts go through rehab, Bob, I told myself.
I knew I did a lot of drugs, but was I really as bad as they all seemed to think? By any measure, for a young guy, I did all right. I lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills, I had money in the bank, and I ate at the Musso and Frank Grill every day for breakfast. They knew me there. “Right this way, sir!” the ancient waiter in the red vest would say as he led me to one of the plush booths. “Shall I bring you the usual?”
“Yes,” I’d say, and add, “But yesterday the bacon wasn’t cooked enough. Can you make sure it’s right today?”
“Absolutely, sir! May I get you something from the bar?”
“Vodka and orange juice, man.”
“Excellent choice as always, sir!” he’d say, and smartly march to the bar and quickly return with my order in a tall, cold glass. And there I would sit, sipping my drink until the food arrived. My order was always the same: a couple of the joint’s famous flannel cakes—thin, golden pancakes of an uncommonly large diameter, topped with fresh creamery butter and genuine maple syrup—accompanied by a pillow of fluffy scrambled eggs the color of lemons accented with a sprig of fresh dill and a couple slices of crisp bacon.
I lived a sweet life. How many people could say that? But the more my friends talked, the more I became convinced I had a problem. I may have been an alcoholic and a drug addict, but it was still hard for me to really believe it. I thought I had solid control over my habits. When I was at home with Marin, I only smoked heroin. It was my little concession to the domestic life. How many hard-core junkies could stay off the needle like that?
“Please, Bob, just go,” Marin said. It made sense. She came from Hollywood royalty: her dad was actor Dennis Hopper, and her mother was actress Brooke Hayward. Her grandmother was Margaret Sullavan. Her mother’s great-grandfather was Monroe Hayward, a former United States senator from Nebraska. Marin grew up on the East Coast and attended prep schools with the Fonda kids. She had gone to Ivy League Brown University. Life with me was something she wasn’t exactly prepared for.
They wore me down. By the time the check arrived, I had agreed to go to rehab. Two days later, on February 2, 1989, I found myself at LAX and wondered if I had made a mistake. I’ve had better mornings, for fucking sure, I thought. It was one of those shatteringly clear Southern California winter mornings that happen when the dry Santa Anas—the hot, seasonal winds that blow in from the desert—scrub the skies clean and all the happy, normal people of Los Angeles give hosannas and praises in thanks that they don’t live in some barren, ice-bound part of the country. They walked around with a particular look on their faces, a frozen rictus that seems to barely disguise an inner scream. Or maybe they really are happy. It’s always hard to gauge people here in L.A. It’s
