opened a nice bottle of merlot and poured myself a glass. After the second glass, I’d forgotten that I was waiting for anything.
In the strange way that the mind works, when we’re in a vulnerable place, the voice of our darkness, that little whispering monster, is never held accountable. When our confidence, our belief in ourselves is sufficiently silenced, the monster’s voice is all that’s left, and it masquerades as our true self, leads us to believe that its running commentary is true insight. It isn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time, and so I bought it. I didn’t realize it, but I’d opened the door to the world’s most persistent salesman. The monster had planted a foot firmly inside the door and didn’t plan on going anywhere.
I said before that telling Angus to get out of my life was one of the strongest things I’ve ever done, and I wasn’t exaggerating. I wasn’t just rejecting a man, I was rejecting my own shadow, my weakness, and my self- doubt. It was as empowering as it was frightening, but that darkness, that monster is a bitch. Just when you try to reclaim some of the ground you’ve lost, that’s when she digs her teeth in and won’t let go. And she did. Literally.
One night, as I was holding my cocker spaniel Lucy on my lap and petting her, she had a brain seizure and attacked me, mauling my face. I fell backward, but after a struggle managed to get her off and lock her in the kitchen. But by then the damage was done. She’d ripped off part of my lip, the flesh underneath my left eye, and a bit of my cheek.
I was in a panic. I couldn’t just go to an emergency room. What if I got some intern who tried to sew my face back on? Acting career over. I called my best friend Trish.
“My face is a wreck, I’m in big trouble. I need a good plastic surgeon.”
I gently lifted the washcloth I was using to hold my face on and took another peek in the mirror. “Make that a great plastic surgeon.”
Trish told me she knew of only one person who’d had really good plastic surgery, and in Hollywood that’s saying something.
So I called up this actress at 11 p.m., and she referred me to Dr. Brent Moelleken, who had been featured in ABC’s
I figured that a plastic surgeon wouldn’t work at night, so I’d have to wait until the morning to see him. I barely slept, my hand welded to my face. Now and then I’d have to press the skin back on, trying to get it to stick in place.
When I finally got into Dr. Moelleken’s office he took off the towel and frowned.
“I wish you’d have come to me last night. You shouldn’t have waited. Now I’ve got to cut away a lot of dead skin. There’s too much necrotic tissue.”
So I underwent reconstructive surgery, fists clenched, totally fearful of the end result. Because I was missing so much flesh under my eye the doctor had to invent a new procedure to reconstruct my face, the internal cheek lift, so that the eye wouldn’t droop. Then he sewed up the scars to make them look like the existing laugh lines around my eyes. When the surgery was over, he told me that he had high hopes.
“I’ve never really done this procedure on a dog bite, but you should be fine.”
I left with a sore, swollen face and a mind filled with images of Frankenstein’s monster, his face held together by stitches.
Recovering from the surgery meant that I couldn’t work for the next couple of months. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see that my eye was hanging at a funny angle. I’d never been the depressive type but now I felt black clouds rolling in.
Dodi and Princess Di were still much in the news, and constantly hearing about my old lover’s death wasn’t particularly helpful. The coverage had died down after the accident, but now there was some blonde on TV claiming that she was engaged to Dodi during the time I was staying at his Kensington flat. I had no idea if she was telling the truth or not, but I never saw her at Saint-Tropez or Monaco or Paris. There wasn’t even a photo of her in the flat. Perhaps Dodi had put my paratrooper ring to good use.
Lying on my couch, feeling totally adrift, I heard the voice of the monster clearly for the first time. It was a step up from the usual whispering and prodding. The petty compulsions that I’d given in to with Angus had gathered power. My little devil had grown up and was no longer content to sit on my shoulder and be brushed away. She was a fully formed monster and she wanted the starring role. Her voice was commanding, loud, and clear. And since it was the only one ringing inside my head at the time, I mistook it for my own.
That voice spoke to my deepest fears, but it seemed to make a lot of sense.
The voice was right. My career was over.
I still hadn’t pulled myself together after Angus, and now with the dog attack and Lucy having to be put down (she tried to bite four other people), I uncorked a bottle of wine, lay down on the couch, and went to town. There were strong emotions brewing, and I needed to wrap myself in the numbness I’d sought when I was with Angus. I needed some emotional medicine.
My angel must have been kicking around in my brain somewhere, though, because as I was sobering up from that first big solo binge good news arrived like Noah’s little white dove. And I thanked God, because it turned out that Dr. Moelleken was a genius after all. The stitches were removed, and when the swelling went down the scars faded and my face regained its former shape. If I looked really, really close in the mirror I could see some small scars in the lines at the corners of my eyes, but the face that looked back at me was my own. Big sigh of relief. My Frankenstein crisis was averted—no need to buy neck bolts.
That good news let some of the light back in. My self-image bounced back. I realized that I had drifted out to sea, that I’d gone far too far, and I reined in my drinking once more. The monster had underestimated the power of hope. It only takes a little light to drive away a lot of darkness, and once I gained some perspective I rushed back to dry land and a survivable lifestyle.
I took a new lover, a young southern guy named Taylor who I met on the set of the film
Despite the bad memories of Angus and Lucy’s attack, I loved the house I was living in. I wasn’t even contemplating a move when my Realtor neighbor asked me if I wanted to double my money and sell up. I’ve always had a good head for business, so I agreed, and he took me to look at a 6,000-square-foot mansion in Los Feliz. It harked back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, built in 1914 and perched on a hill next to a wacky-looking Frank Lloyd Wright house that looked like a Mayan temple with jaws. It was a two-story dwelling with classical revival architecture and a view of Los Angeles. It dripped movie-star quality. It was the kind of place you see in
This was the house of my dreams, and for the first time in my life I could afford it. I’d landed a job as the voice of Jaguar cars and was getting paid handsomely to go into a sound booth a few times a week and put on a phony British accent.
I sold my old house to David Boreanaz, the actor from
Los Feliz is a very artsy community, so I settled right in. So did my boyfriend Taylor, who moved in with me and immediately lost his job. Unable to pay anything toward his upkeep, he started doing jobs around the house. This was okay at first—he did his best—but somehow the situation seemed to drain the blood from our relationship. I didn’t like the idea of supporting a man. He was turning out to be a bad influence on me when it came to drinking,
