and stopped the truck. The next morning, while I was shooting a scene with Robert Davi a huge gush of blood came running down my legs. I asked them to stop shooting, apologized, and then ran to the bathroom. When one of the producers knocked on the bathroom door to see if I was okay I told him to get me to an emergency room. I was suffering a miscarriage.
I was resting up in the hospital when the producers called and asked me to come back to do some reshoots. They implied that I’d lied about being pregnant and threatened legal action if I didn’t come back and finish the film within their scheduled time frame. So I went back to work, and they started shooting that same scene with Robert Davi. He made a point of lighting up his cigar in front of me.
“Now maybe you won’t be such a hormonally imbalanced bitch.”
What an ass. I couldn’t wait to get done with that film.
The loss of the baby was painful for me, and it turned out to be the end of my marriage. I remember the exact moment the relationship had run its course and I decided to file for divorce.
I’d made Gary a really nice lunch, put it on a platter, put on some sexy new lingerie I’d bought just for the occasion, and went into his office. It was an attempt to recapture the excitement of our early days. Gary turned from his computer, his face flushed with anger.
“Get out! Don’t you ever fucking come in here when I’m working.”
He quickly turned off the monitor, but not before I noticed that the screen was filled with non-English characters. In the moment I’d seen them, the writing looked like Cyrillic. This was weird, because as far as I knew Gary didn’t speak Russian, even though he had a Russian-Jewish background. I was offended and hurt. I dropped the tray and stormed out and that was that. I called a friend, got the name of a divorce attorney, and then closed the door to my heart once again.
With the benefit of hindsight I think my marriage to Gary was a big “fuck you” to my parents. I’d married a man who was exactly like my father. He wasn’t very demonstrative, and he had a short fuse. It’s the older-guy thing—if your relationship with your father doesn’t work out, then you marry a guy just like him and try to make him love you.
While I was filing for divorce with Gary I fell madly in love with graphic designer and restaurateur Rod Dyer.
I met Rod while dining at his restaurant Pane e Vino. We flirted from across the room, and after a while he came over to talk to me. I was wearing a 1930s-style suit, and Rod told me that he loved my tie, which was exactly the right thing to say. I put my hand on his knee, and he asked me to come back the following day and have lunch with him. When I did he presented me with a beautiful wooden box filled with antique ties and a deco-style card that he’d drawn himself. I was floored and immediately smitten. Short of a cheap ring with emerald shards that he bought for me when we got hitched, Gary had never given me anything. Gary loved women but he wasn’t the romantic type.
I used to drive an ’83 Harley-Davidson Sportster. When I wanted to see Rod, I’d tell Gary that I was going to the gym and then ride my bike across town from Mandeville Canyon to Beverly Hills. I’d see the sunrise above Sunset Boulevard as I raced along it, and then Rod and I would spend the morning making love. Rod was in the midst of a divorce as well and was living in the guesthouse of a famous producer friend. An hour or two later I’d get back on my Harley and race home. I guess Gary assumed the sweat was from my workout, and I suppose that, in a way, it was.
I divorced Gary, took my piano and my clothes, and moved into an apartment building on Doheny Drive. On my first day there I opened the paper and saw that my new movie,
We’d shot
It was also the first time I’d been back to Texas since my brother died. We’d left him behind when we returned to Connecticut, buried in a Houston cemetery. I had a few margaritas and drove out to visit him. I got lost looking for the grave—my recollection was that it was under a tree next to a fence bordering a paddock with horses. But things had changed. Now a freeway ran alongside his remains, a thin wire fence separating him from the traffic that rushed by. I found the plaque hidden beneath weeds and after clearing the site wiped the dirt off it. I lay down on top of his grave and cried. My marriage was over, but my career was gathering steam. I think I was hoping I’d feel his presence or receive some kind of sign, but there was nothing—Patrick had moved on. If he was watching over me from the other side, then it wasn’t from that place. I stood up and brushed the dust off of my clothes.
As for Gary, he ended up marrying a girl named Wendy, whom I like a lot. She was a nurse at a plastic surgeon’s office, and she had a lot of work done to her. She says to everyone that it made her look like Cher. I think she looks better.
Gary overcame his writer’s block with the help of medication and managed to pay off all his tax debts. He took on a lot of script-doctor work, fixing problems with other writers’ scripts, which pays well but doesn’t earn you screen credits.
As for Gary’s death, there are too many theories to cover them all here. It was reported in the media, private investigators were hired, conspiracy theories started up, and to this day it remains one of the most mysterious deaths in Hollywood history. I’ve been asked to do interviews about it at least a dozen times, and it still crops up in the news and in online reports from time to time. No one knows exactly what happened, but here’s what I do know.
In June 1997 Gary spent a week working with actress Marsha Mason on a remake of the 1949 movie
A year later his body was found in his Ford Explorer, submerged in the California aqueduct close to the town of Barstow. That closed the official police investigation, but the autopsy and subsequent private investigation opened doors to more unanswered questions.
I’m normally one for accepting the simplest explanation for things, Occam’s Razor and all that, but there were some odd facts that made it difficult for me to accept that Gary fell asleep at the wheel and drove his SUV off the road into a body of water.
First, it was unlikely that this was an accident at all, given that there was a lot of ground between the road and the aqueduct. Also, Gary was an experienced long-distance driver. He’d grown up in a trucking family, and when we were married he’d go for long drives just to clear his head and resolve script problems. And I mean long drives, thousands of miles. He’d be stuck on a script and then just up and say, “I’m off to Tennessee. I’ll see you when I’ve got this story nailed.”
Also, it was strange that Gary was found in the aqueduct at all, considering that I’d already looked. After his disappearance I’d enlisted the help of a friend who was an ex-marine. He assembled a team of divers and they went down into the aqueduct with infrared equipment and swept the area around Barstow from top to bottom. There was no sign of a car or a body. A year later, in the same area, after the police received a tip from an anonymous caller, the car and body miraculously appeared.
And then there was the Cyrillic I’d seen on his computer monitor. Wendy also reported seeing strange symbols on his computer screen, and when she asked him what they were, Gary had answered “encryption codes.” I don’t know what the ramifications of that are, but it’s certainly added fuel to the stories about the CIA, and since those Russian sleeper agents were found in New Jersey in 2010, I’m sure it won’t be long before someone is talking
