Babylon Confidential

about Gary’s death being connected to some foreign spy network. Who knows?

Last, Gary had a deformed pinky. It had been broken in a football accident, and he hadn’t had it reset properly. Wendy put a photo of it in the reward notice she posted, as it was the simplest, surefire way of immediately identifying his body. When they pulled what was supposed to be Gary’s body out of the aqueduct, the gun that he always carried with him was missing, along with both of his hands. After Wendy and his family pressed the police about the missing hands, another search of the car was conducted and some finger bones were found in the back seat. Wendy pushed to have them analyzed and the police coroner reported that no deformed pinky was found and that the bones were likely around 200 years old.

* * *

Whatever the truth, whatever happened that night on the highway, Gary’s death shook me and brought my own life into sharp focus.

After the funeral, I went to Gary’s beach house and met Wendy in person for the first time. We got to know each other and ended up talking through the night. I had a headache, and Wendy told me to get some aspirin in her bathroom cabinet. It was filled with more pills than there are flakes in a snow globe. I asked Wendy about them and she explained:

“Well, I finally got Gary on antidepressants, and that really helped his mood. He was prone to depression.”

I admired her persistence. I wish he’d taken pills with me, because it might have saved our marriage.

When I left the next morning, Wendy gave me a box of Gary’s unproduced scripts. There was some great material in there, his best work. Schwarzenegger scripts sell, Kurt Russell action scripts sell, but sometimes they sell at the expense of scripts like Come As You Are, a story about a female photojournalist. That script did the rounds in Hollywood for years, and came close to being made, first with Kathleen Turner and then Michelle Pfeiffer. But in the end it never got over the line.

Maybe if Gary had lived and made it as a director he would’ve had the influence to push it through. It was a great script, Academy Award material, and it’s a tragedy that it’s just sitting in a box in my attic gathering dust.

Up until Gary’s death, I’d always believed that I would eventually find my Prince Charming to settle down with and raise a few talented, gorgeous children. But after his funeral, when I looked back on the life I’d led since leaving home, on the decisions I’d made, my path seemed clear. If there had been any ambiguity about the meaning of the sign the moon had given me that night in Megeve, there wasn’t now. I got it. Family life wasn’t for me.

I had always known that I couldn’t be the kind of dependent woman Dodi had wanted me to be. Losing Justine was unbearably difficult, and she wasn’t even my biological child. After the accident when I’d lost Gary’s baby, after Gary’s death, all I could think about was what if I went and had a child of my own? What if I raised it and loved it and then that bitch fate swept in and things turned to shit again? I couldn’t bear to think about that.

I’d been shaped by my early life. I was made to stand on my own two feet and I was at my weakest whenever I relied on another person for reassurance and validation. I was convinced that I had the answer. I was my own woman. I would enjoy men, but I didn’t need them. This realization was like donning a suit of armor, a power that I’d accumulated through my own efforts, and I would set about making it stronger.

That inner voice continued to drive me forward. It told me that I could reach a larger audience and touch people’s lives. I would be immune to criticism, self-doubt, and fear. I was going to be a film actress, the next Katharine Hepburn.

When I got a call from my agent telling me that I’d landed a role on a sci-fi show that Warner Brothers was producing, I said to her, “You know I’m working on my movie career. Are you sure I should be committing to a TV series and a five-year contract?”

My agent laughed.

“Honey, there’s never been a sci-fi series that wasn’t a Star Trek spin-off that ran more than a couple of years. Trust me, you’ll be lucky to last for one.”

It turned out that my agent couldn’t have been more wrong. And it was lucky for me that she was.

^{The photo I used for my Variety ad announcing my role in Berrenger’s}

^{With Don Ameche and Bob Hope on the set of A Master Piece of Murder in Vancouver, Canada, 1984}

^{At the Carousel Ball with John Davis, 1984}

^{Lunch on the Sakara with Dodi, 1984}

^{Pregnant with Patrick in Megeve}

^{As the alien-possessed stripper Brenda Lee Van Buren in The Hidden, 1987}

^{With Shari Shattuck on the set of the 1990 bomb Mad About You}

^{With Gary when we first met on the set of The Heat, 1988}

^{My wedding, 1988, Lana Clarkson on the right, Donnelly Rhodes in the background}

^{With Jaclyn Smith and Patricia Kalember on the set of Kaleidoscope, 1990}

^{With my big love, Rod Dyer, 1992}

^{Hexed, Texas, 1993. I played a crazy model whose billboard gets defaced at the end of the movie.}

7. THE RIGHT HAND OF VENGEANCE

It’s January 19, 1994, and a massive aftershock from the Northridge earthquake hits. Everyone on the set starts screaming and running out of the studio, and I’m left on my own, strapped into the cockpit of a Star Fury combat fighter, helpless to escape. I’m locked into a Michelin Man spacesuit, and the helmet I’m wearing is all fogged up, so I have to keep pressing this button in my hand to operate the fan. The plastic visor clears up for a few seconds. I wait. It’s hot inside the suit, and the sound of the fan is getting on my nerves. Soon the aftershocks will subside, and then I’m going to give them a piece of my mind. They’re going to see firsthand just how much Claudia and Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova have in common.

* * *

Babylon 5 was something new to television—a science fiction novel in episodes. It wasn’t a space Western like Star Trek. There were no cute kids or robots. Joe Straczynski set out to write a novel for television, an adult-oriented series. The result was a richly textured story fueled by politics, diplomacy, philosophy, religion, history, and science.