Babylon Confidential

Some good came out of that meeting, though. Patrick told me that Justine was in town, now in her early twenties, and pursuing a career as an actress. That made me smile. Patrick passed my card on to Justine and she agreed to meet me for lunch.

She’d grown up and turned into a beautiful young woman, but the resemblance between us was gone. As we sat down together I was struck by the realization that Justine was older now than I was when I’d played my part in raising her. As we chatted and swapped pleasantries I realized that she didn’t remember a thing, not a single thing.

“Don’t you remember when you had the meltdown at Bloomingdale’s and I bought you the party dresses?”

“Ah, no. Sorry.”

“Don’t you remember the Christmas when we made snow angels?”

“No.”

“But what about the letters I sent, and the gifts?”

She asked me what I was talking about, which confirmed what I’d already suspected. Her mother hadn’t passed on a thing I’d sent her. She’d actively worked to erase my memory from Justine’s mind. Jealousy is a green-eyed monster, and I guess she’d gotten her claws into Beatrice. It was like being trapped in a sci-fi show where someone you love has all their memories wiped out. Memory gains so much of its power in being shared. Justine and I had a bond based on shared experience, but for her those moments were gone. It was devastating.

“So you don’t really remember me at all?”

“Oh, no. I remember the feeling of you, and that you were a good person in my life and that I was happy when we were all together.”

Later I did some reading on child psychology and consoled myself with the thought that, although the memories we shared in her early years were gone, the influence I had on her would have been formative and profound. I gave her love and attention and all the good things I had in me, and today, somewhere in her heart, that love burns on as part of the complex mixture that is grown-up Justine.

6. BLOOD, DEATH, AND TAXES

It was 1988, I was twenty-three years old, and I’d just landed a role starring in Clean and Sober with Michael Keaton, a movie about a real estate agent with a cocaine addiction. It was my first respectablebig-studio movie. The director was Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of Moonlighting, and I also got to work with Morgan Freeman and Tate Donovan, who later starred in The O.C. We shot the movie in a real rehab clinic in downtown Pennsylvania. It was gritty and smoke-filled, just what you’d expect a rehab clinic to look like.

Michael Keaton’s performance was particularly good. He took a gutsy departure from his usual comedy roles and proved that he had the chops to cut it as a dramatic actor. The academy totally snubbed him for an Oscar that year.

I played the role of Iris, one of the patients in the rehab center. Iris is in for cocaine addiction as well, and she has an affair with Tate Donovan’s character. Morgan Freeman, who plays the center’s director, accuses Iris of being stoned and kicks her out of rehab.

When my brother Jimmy was in rehab, they made him watch Clean and Sober over and over. In one scene I have to wear a dorky leotard, and when Jimmy’s friends found out that I was his sister they used to give him no end of grief.

Years later I ran into Morgan Freeman at a Cirque du Soleil show in Santa Monica. We talked about Clean and Sober, and he said to me, “You know, I always thought you’d make it because you’ve got those eyes that tell the story.”

I thought that that was the kindest thing for him to say. It was nice that he’d remembered me and doubly nice that he’d been kind enough to compliment me at the height of his career.

Over the course of my own career I’ve played an addict of every kind of substance except for the one that finally beat me—alcohol. Later in life I would find myself in rehab, having graduated from playing the part of an addict to actually being one.

* * *

By the time Clean and Sober was released I was twenty-three years old and playing the love interest in The Heat, a CBS Summer Playhouse movie with Billy Campbell, who would go on to star in The Rocketeer. Gary Devore, the writer, was a confident, charismatic man in his late forties who’d walk around the set in jeans and cowboy boots.

Gary was the best man at Tommy Lee Jones’s wedding and was godfather to Peter Strauss’s son. He was buddies with Kurt Russell and had written movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christopher Walken, and Billy Crystal.

We started up a full-blown Hollywood set romance. The sex was exciting, so much so that I couldn’t even really tell you what the show was about.

After filming The Heat we said our goodbyes and I went back to Montgomery Clift’s old house, which I was renting in the Hollywood Hills. Monty had been a pain-pill addict and, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, an alcoholic. I didn’t seek out the old haunts of alcoholic actors; that’s just Hollywood. Close your eyes, throw a dart at a map of available rentals, and odds are you’ll find yourself living in the house of a former movie star with a substance abuse problem.

Speaking of which, by that time Lana Clarkson was living with me. The house didn’t have a second bedroom, but it did have a spare bathroom that the owners had at some point turned into makeshift accommodation for their kid. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen an Amazonian blonde sleeping on a single bed balanced precariously on top of a tiny closet.

Gary called me up one night, and I mentioned that I was going to Canada to visit my friend Christine.

“Great! I’ll come with you and we can get hitched.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure.”

Six weeks later we were married. We hadn’t even been on a date.

* * *

It was an insane idea but it was charged with spontaneity, and something about that appealed to me. After the difficulties of my painful, drawn-out relationship with Patrick I figured that this would have just as much chance of working out as something that I overthought and overplanned.

At the time, Christine was a location manager, so she threw together a spectacular wedding for me. The only decision I had to make was whether I wanted a yacht or a helicopter. I took the yacht.

My friend Lana and I traveled to Vancouver together. She seemed more excited about the wedding than I was. Gary and I met up and did tequila shots in the limo on the way. Everybody was so fucked up on coke and booze that it was more like a frat party than a wedding. Aboard the yacht Lana swept into my bachelorette party, tears streaming down her face, wailing about how no one would ever want to marry her. I tried to get her to join in the fun but she preferred to make a dramatic exit. She couldn’t handle so much attention being directed toward me on my special day and set about putting the spotlight back where she thought it belonged. Ten minutes later Christine confronted me, outraged that I’d made Lana the maid of honor after all the work she’d done. It turned out that Lana had gone up to the yacht’s captain and signed herself up for the job on the marriage certificate without telling anyone, including me.

It wasn’t what you’d call a traditional wedding. I still wasn’t talking to my parents, so in place of my mother there was a skinny Japanese guy in drag wearing a fluffy hat. I don’t know who he was or where he materialized from, but we were smashed and the wedding seemed to be coming together in its own weird way, so I went along for the ride. Gary had never met his best man, Donnelly Rhodes, who would play my father in an episode of