Babylon Confidential

Unfortunately, those poems would serve as the bookends of our entire relationship.

* * *

Angus started writing poems for me. He’d leave them in his mailbox, and I’d pick them up on the way to the Babylon 5 set. It was like a high school relationship, intense and disarming. I was utterly smitten.

He moved into my house a few months later, and by the time I’d finished working on Babylon 5, our relationship was in full swing. We’d smoke and drink wine, make love and read poetry. And we’d fight. We’d scream at each other, smash glasses, break furniture, and hurl insults. We had epic, alcohol-fueled battles that ran on into the night.

He’d just finished playing the wild, madly in love Richard Burton in Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story. Our love affair, he said, was as passionate, artistic, and crazy as theirs. It was a love that blinded me to the voices of concern from my friends, who’d started referring to us as Dick and Liz. They thought Angus wasn’t brooding or romantic but just plain rude. My mother once asked him, out of politeness, what he felt about his native country’s history.

“Fuck history. Where’s my fucking chicken?”

And I got up and got him his chicken. My mother was appalled.

Soon, he’d have such a hold over me that my friends would give him another name—the devil.

* * *

Angus reveled in all the bad habits that I’d kept in check throughout my career. He was undisciplined, he didn’t care about his body, he drank, he smoked, and he spewed his own inner darkness all over the horrible canvases that were now piling up in my pool house. The fights got worse, and I realized that he took a sadistic pleasure in them. He’d smile if he could make me cry.

I knew it was an unhealthy relationship, and, looking back, I suppose my friends hit the nail on the head. Angus might not have been the devil, but he was certainly my devil.

* * *

Snide and Prejudice was a new Philippe Mora movie, and Angus and I were both cast in it. He played Adolf Hitler (I kid you not, this is how weird Hollywood can get), and I was cast as a character representing all the women in Hitler’s life. The whole story was built around inmates in an insane asylum and, to be honest, the movie was a piece of shit, its only saving grace being the other talented cast members that I had the pleasure to meet—Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac (I’d been a fan since I first bought Rumors as a kid) and Rene Auberjonois from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Things with Angus were as bad as ever, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. I’d become emotionally dependent. And since I couldn’t leave, I found myself drinking more and more to numb myself to the pain of our relationship. It was the first time in my life that I drank to escape. Before that, alcohol had only ever been a lubricant that made a night out more fun or a fine meal even more pleasurable. Now I was using it as an emotional painkiller.

* * *

In the summer of 1998 I went out to lunch with my friend Galen Johnson and Alejandro Jodorowsky, the French-Chilean avant-garde filmmaker, comic book writer, and spiritual guru. Jodorowsky was an interesting guy. He talked about how John Lennon had given him a million dollars to make his movie The Holy Mountain, and he’d come close to making what would have been the most interesting and bizarre adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, to have starred Salvador Dali and Orson Welles with music composed by Pink Floyd and production design by comic-book artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud and surrealist artist H. R. Giger. Galen told me that Jodorowsky was supposed to have psychic powers and had invented his own spiritual healing system called Psychomagic, which sounded more like a Hitchcock pisstake by Mel Brooks than a form of therapy. After lunch Jodorowsky went on his way and Galen told me to sit a while longer. When I’d gone to the bathroom Jodorowsky had given him a message to pass on to me.

“He said that you were going to have a drinking problem, that you’ll struggle with alcohol and your weight when you get older and that you need to watch out now.”

I laughed out loud and Galen joined in. Even with the emotional drinking Angus was driving me to, it seemed ridiculous. I couldn’t see it. I hasten to add that Jodorowsky also predicted that I’d be married and fabulously successful within two years of that lunch, so if he had a psychic flash of me at age thirty-nine as a size fourteen with a glass of champagne in hand, then I must have also been holding an Oscar aloft in the other while I straddled Prince Charming. I should have taken the warning as it was meant. He had nothing to gain, and was just sharing an insight, but I wasn’t able to hear him. My drinking problem was already underway, but it was operating in stealth mode, flying beneath the radar of my conscious mind.

* * *

Angus was offered a job in China doing a crap action film, and I encouraged him to take it. I was hoping that while he was gone I’d have time to get back on my feet. Also, I’d been keeping a secret from him. Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy’s West Coast editor, wanted me to pose for her magazine. I knew Angus would go apeshit if I said yes. In the fantasy world that he imagined he ruled (population two), I wasn’t for sharing. I felt better the second he was out of the house. I found that I could make my own choices just fine without someone standing over me whispering disparaging comments in my ear. I agreed to do Playboy and started training with a former ballerina, who had me doing hundreds of lunges every day. By the time she was finished with me I was in the best shape of my life.

Angus invited me to join him in Shanghai, and, feeling empowered by my time alone, I agreed to go. I was myself again—outgoing, funny Claudia. I felt fantastic, I’d stopped drinking, and I’d never looked better. But I underestimated Angus and his need to re-establish a hold over me. He was a master of the devastating one-liner, and when I arrived in China he knocked my legs right out from under me with the first words out of his mouth: “Look at you. This is an improvement. When we first met I thought you looked a little chunky.”

This from a guy with a belly like Winston Churchill’s. When he was offered the role of Peter Lawford in the TV movie The Rat Pack, they only gave it to him with a proviso that he lose thirty pounds. I tried to help him exercise and eat healthy food, but eventually gave up. He was an unapologetic glutton.

In hindsight, I think there were two poisons in our relationship. The first was Angus’s need to project his many inadequacies onto me. The second was that he would keep me bound to him by constantly tugging at the ropes of my own emotional weaknesses. By criticizing me, targeting my fears, and then switching back to false affection, he kept me weak.

* * *

It’s hard to enjoy your first visit to China when your travel partner makes it his mission to be rude to every Chinese person you meet. On the set of the movie he got off to not so good a start by insisting that he rewrite his part. He was perfectly correct in saying that they’d written him as a second-rate James Bond villain, but his attempts to inject Taoist philosophy into a character who battled kung-fu kangaroos were equally terrible, and you can imagine how the Chinese might love having a Westerner lecture them on his superior knowledge of their culture.

One night when we walked into the hotel restaurant the hostess asked, “Smoking or not smoking?”

Angus held up his cigarette. “What the fuck do you think?”

Angus wasn’t racist, he was just universally rude. Most Scottish people I’ve met are funny and have a clever, wry wit, but not Angus. He could have held up the cigarette and said something like, “I’d continue this battle of wits with you, but you’re obviously unarmed,” but he lacked the imagination for humor.

I left dinner early and hit the gym. I needed to keep in shape for my upcoming photo shoot. I was watching the TV while running on the treadmill when it was announced that Dodi and Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. It hit me hard. I sat down in the gym and cried. Dodi had been my friend for nearly twenty years, and I deeply regretted not being able to talk to him one last time, especially after leaving him so abruptly.

Dodi’s fears of dying childless had come to pass. He’d started seeing Diana not long after we parted ways, and I wondered, with our last conversation on my mind, if he’d asked her to have the child that I’d refused him.