Babylon Confidential

I went back to my hotel room to learn that I’d booked A Wing and a Prayer. Fortune’s wheel had turned in my favor, though the news was bittersweet. I had an excuse to get out of Shanghai, and I took it. I needed time to myself, time to process the news of Dodi’s death.

Back in L.A. I got a call from producer Bill Panzer. Adrian Paul, the star of the TV show Highlander, had decided to move on, and they were looking for a woman to take over the series. He wanted me to play the part of Katherine in the Highlander episode “Two of Hearts.” This was just the thing I needed to get Dodi off of my mind. Highlander was a dream job—the shoot was in Paris, I’d get to play an eleventh-century immortal and mess around with swords, and there was even the possibility that I’d end up as the star of my own series.

When Angus got home he was uncharacteristically kind to me; he had sensed that after Dodi’s death I’d started to pull away from him. Always the optimist, I decided to invite him to Paris—it was our last, best hope for peace.

The Highlander set was heaven: horses, history, and mud. If I could just do historical dramas for the rest of my life, I’d die happy.

I’d started collecting knives and swords when I was a kid. My dad had been given some gifts when he opened a bank account, and one of them was a good-quality pocketknife. All of my brothers argued over who should get it, including Patrick, who wanted it for skinning, but when we drew straws I was the winner. There were cries of outrage, but my dad decreed that fair was fair and I got to keep it. When Patrick died I put it on his coffin as they lowered it into the ground, a parting gift. I loved that knife, at first because it was something my brothers wanted but couldn’t have, and later because it became a symbol of the love I held for Patrick. That was where my love of knives started and an interest in swords naturally followed on, but my dad wouldn’t let me start collecting until I turned seventeen.

Now I got to swing a medieval broadsword and be tutored by one of Hollywood’s leading sword masters, F. Braun McAsh. He was a very friendly, barrel-chested guy with a deep voice—a walking encyclopedia of arms and armor.

I wanted to do all my own fight scenes, but I had to convince the producers that I knew what I was doing or they would use a stunt double. One little mistake with a sword and an actress can be left incapacitated for a week.

Things couldn’t have worked out better on that front. After a minor accident on the set the producers had decided to institute a water-only policy, which was counter to the French crew’s traditional three-hour drinking lunches. I don’t think the American producers were aware of the French tendency to strike at the smallest infringements of their conditions, and disrupting the national pastime of eating and drinking was, to the crew’s minds, a catastrophic violation of human rights.

While protracted negotiations took place I got to spend more time with F. Braun learning how to fight. He’d pledged to the producers that every Highlander episode would feature a sword technique that had never been seen on film or television before, so I had lots to learn. He was patient and encouraging and taught me some neat tricks from his theatrical fencing repertoire (how to look good dueling on camera) and knowledge of historical sword fighting (how they really killed people with ruthless efficiency in times of yore).

My character, Katherine, was one of the oldest immortals in the Highlander series. She had even posed for the illustrations in the Kama Sutra, so I had to create a complex character—confident but with enough vulnerability that she could fall in love with a mortal man, who was played by Steven O’Shea.

The crew liked me, and I thought I had a shot at being the new star of the show. But at the end of the day they went with Elizabeth Gracen, who’d been in the original series. Also, she had slept with Bill Clinton, so she was in the news a lot; when it comes to TV ratings any publicity is good publicity. She chopped off her hair, dyed it white, and the new series was a flop.

* * *

Angus and I both had films at Cannes that year and decided to go together. It was 1998, I was thirty-three years old, and my biological clock was ticking like a time bomb.

I found out that I was pregnant in the bathroom of the Carlton Hotel. Clutching my pregnancy test, I told Angus the news through tear-stained eyes. We hugged, agreed it was the best thing in the world for both of us, and, right then and there, made a pact to raise the child together.

But because it was Angus, I expected the worst. I secretly hoped that things would work out, but I began to steel myself for the next fight. It never came, though, and by the four-month mark I was proudly sporting a baby bump. Things had changed. I felt secure in this relationship for the first time. I was finally going to be a mother. I just knew that I was going to have a boy with green eyes and dark hair. This was Patrick wanting to come back again.

And then Angus stopped having sex with me. I understood why—he had a Madonna-whore complex. God forbid you have sex with the mother of your child. What I couldn’t deal with was his sudden obsession with virgins. Angus had worked on a film with a blond actress who claimed she was a virgin. He would go on about it all the time: she was angelic, she was a born-again Christian, and she was only eighteen years old. I don’t know what the big deal is with virgins. Terrorists blow themselves up for a paradise filled with virgins. If I were a guy my idea of paradise would be a harem of sexually experienced bombshells, but then that’s just me. Angus was certainly titillated by the idea of going where no man had gone before, and I guess I felt the same sense of injustice that a bald man or a guy with a small dick feels. How do you compete? She’s a virgin, I’m not, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.

Then one day, on his way out the door with a buddy, Angus casually turned back to me and said, as if it were an afterthought, “I’ve changed my mind. Get rid of it.”

The emotional blow was so strong that he might as well have punched me in the belly. He left and I fell to the tile floor and cried so hard that a few hours later the baby spontaneously aborted.

After my failed relationship with Patrick Wachsberger, I had sworn that I’d never again become pregnant by a man who had no real interest in raising a child. Yet here I was, soaked in blood and frightened to death by what my body had just done. I didn’t know if it was the botched abortion in Italy that ruined my chances of having children, but something had made the whole process precarious. I just couldn’t seem to hold on to a child, and the fact that I’d lost one over an emotional outburst just didn’t make sense to me. I was a strong, healthy young woman.

But the next morning, while getting a D&C at my gynecologist’s office, I decided that God had saved me from a horrible future with the wrong man. I’d invested in love and I’d been burned again. The bricks I’d started laying after the losses of Justine and Patrick’s baby had now become a wall, and I decided that I would make it stronger and stronger so that nothing could get in and hurt me like that again. It didn’t occur to me that when you build defenses that strong you reach a point where even good things can’t penetrate anymore.

* * *

I came home from the supermarket one morning to find my friend Christine sitting in our kitchen. Lately, Angus had decided that I was drinking too much and got into the habit of lecturing me while he was drinking whatever was his poison of the day. Now he’d taken things to the next level. Christine had flown in from Canada after Angus called her up and told her he thought I had a serious drinking problem. Seriously, the source of all my woes, the pathological, selfish pig who drank like a fish, thought that I was the one with the problem and had staged a half-assed intervention. I drank soda water while Angus sat there looking smug and self-righteous, sipping on tequila mixed with orange juice at ten in the morning. In addition to confronting me about my drinking, Christine admitted that she was attending AA meetings and battling her own demons.

Interventions can work, but a person has to be ready. She has to recognize the problem in herself, and in this case, a pissed Scotsman and a well-meaning friend in the same boat didn’t have the right to preach to me.

It didn’t stop me from drinking. If anything it made things worse. I took it as it was truly meant—yet another attempt by Angus to cut my legs out from under me and keep me weak.

* * *

Angus was slated to play Orson Welles in Tim Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock in New York and he had to quit his comfort eating and binge drinking to play a young, svelte Welles.

After he flew to New York I dumped his things in the garage, called him at his hotel, and told him it was