phone.
“Hey, it’s me. Are you there? Are you there? Hello? Hey, it’s me? Answer the phone. I know you’re there. Hello?”
Even worse, Kenny did the same thing to Hilary and Alan and to the movie’s investors, and they didn’t like being badgered, not at all. They called me and asked that Kenny stop bothering them. Instead of backing off, Kenny read this as the signal to pounce. He’d get in their faces, chewing them out like Jack Warner, except that Kenny didn’t actually have any power or innate confidence, so he just ended up offending and annoying people.
As for me, I was in a kind of fugue state. I knew this guy was a walking disaster but the relationship and the bad habits it fed were keeping me from seeing the seriousness of the situation. I’d lost my enthusiasm and energy, and that made it hard to act decisively. Then I discovered that Kenny had been accessing my computer and reading my files. The mild claustrophobia that had started in Cuba was now all but suffocating me. Added to that, my drinking was getting to the point at which other people were starting to recognize that I had a problem.
Hilary and I went out one night and had a couple of glasses of champagne. I never drink and drive. Even the thought of getting a ticket terrifies me, let alone getting into an accident, which is why I did most of my drinking at home. But this night I’d had a few glasses on an empty stomach before Hilary arrived, so my judgment wasn’t what it should have been. I was driving, it was getting dark, and I missed a red light on Sunset Plaza Drive as people were trying to cross the street. I had to slam on the brakes fast to stop from plowing into them. We were thrown forward, but luckily had our seatbelts on. I pulled over. Hilary was visibly upset.
“You almost killed those people! What’s wrong with you?”
I thought she was overreacting at the time. I don’t think that now.
I had some conventions lined up in Europe, and they couldn’t have come at a better time. I desperately needed space to gain some perspective on what was going wrong in my life.
Before I left for Europe I’d managed to strike a deal with the Angola prison in Louisiana related to filming
In the story, the boy’s parents were alcoholics. In the opening scene the mother has this flask that she’s swigging from and is trying it keep hidden from the kid while she’s speeding without a seatbelt down the highway.
Right there is my sense of abandonment following my parents’ divorce, my looming drinking problem, and my life starting to run away from me at high speed as I head into the unknown.
In a sense, the little boy was Patrick, as well, with his love of Native American culture. The white buffalo calf, as the center of the conflict, being claimed by different parties for their own purposes, was my soul hanging in the balance between light and dark.
If that sounds a little melodramatic it’s because our inner lives are. We experience sweeping emotions, devastating disappointments, and ecstatic highs, but as we mature we learn to regulate the power of those experiences, to keep the sound of them muffled under a layer of manners and self-censorship. Those learned strategies allow us to deal with the complex range of interactions that life throws at us, but in our inner world these forces are still at work, driving us to courses of action, many of which we only consciously rationalize after the fact. In dreams and in art, as we create, our emotions and experiences resurface, and as we express them they make the drama in the average soap opera look about as exciting as eating cardboard.
The climax of the movie comes when the buffalo’s fate is put in the boy’s hands. I think that in a sense I was asking Patrick to help me find a way through my own inner conflict.
One night in London I went out to dinner at Hush with Roger Moore’s kids Geoffrey and Deborah, who I knew through Hilary. When I was alone with Deborah she told me that she was worried about me, that Hilary told her I was on drugs. I was livid. It was highly unprofessional of Hilary to be spreading gossip about me, especially in an industry where reputation is so closely linked to livelihood. As far as I was concerned, you could call me a drunk— the truth is the truth. But I wouldn’t stand for being called a drug addict. I considered that an unforgivable offense. That night I wrote in my diary:
Hello!? Why do people think I do drugs? I think when I drink too much, my personality changes. That must be it because I don’t do coke anymore and I hate pot and have never popped a pill in my life!
I knew what had made up Hilary’s mind—it was the night back in L.A. when I’d almost had the accident. She saw the state I was in and couldn’t believe I was that fucked up just from alcohol.
I was highly defensive, and in the heat of the moment I told Deborah about some personal things that Hilary had said about her. I regretted that almost instantly, but the damage was done, and that led to something of a falling out between Hilary and me.
On the European convention trail I drank far too much—it was hard to say no with fans offering to buy—and found myself laid up in bed with a terrible case of flu. It occurred to me that my immune system was weakening. I was getting sick a lot more often than usual, but I put it down to stress, getting older, and my busy schedule. I still hadn’t made the connection that my drinking was affecting my health. I felt fat. My arms looked like legs of lamb. Lying in bed, sick as a dog, I began to perceive my need for alcohol as something more than a kind of little devil, an irritating prick of a thing that sat on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. It was more as if I had my own internal Kenny. I felt it as a serious, ominous presence, but I still underestimated it. I hadn’t stepped into the arena yet. I didn’t have any sense of the monster I was really up against, but there were signs that I recognized. I had concerns. I started praying, something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl.
“God, drinking is a waste of time and money. It’s a waste of the talent I’ve been given, not to mention that it’s keeping me fat. Please, help me get rid of the desire to drink. I’ve had enough.”
I recovered from the flu and felt much better. What’s more, I didn’t give alcohol a second thought. Not long after that I was dining alone at the restaurant at the Balmoral Hotel when the maitre d’ asked me if I wanted to sit in the bar and have a drink or go straight to my table. I replied without a thought, “I don’t drink.” I was very pleased with myself and hoped my newfound temperance would find some staying power.
Heading home I felt empowered. Without alcohol the whole Kenny problem came into sharp focus. Was this the best I could do? Kenny? The thought that I’d be stuck with him forever terrified me. This guy was like a tumor. I was still upset about the business with Hilary but determined to set things right, to take charge of my life. Kenny had to go, and if he wouldn’t leave on his own, then, just like a tumor, he’d have to be cut out.
Within three days of returning to L.A. I was drinking again. Kenny didn’t accept my decision to stop drinking or my insistence that we needed to go our separate ways, starting with my telling him to get the hell out of my house.
“You’re overreacting. There’s nothing wrong. Please, give me a chance. Let’s talk this out.”
And as he was talking he’d top off my glass. My steely resolve melted. He was my enabler. It was as if my internal monster were feeding him his lines, saying just the right things to take the edge off my words, giving Kenny room to turn things around and keep clinging on. Kenny figured he had a winning card, and he just kept on playing it, but I’d been in that place before, with Angus. I hit the point where I realized that if things continued, this guy was going to suffocate me and somehow I’d end up dead.
It came down to a scene in the kitchen with me on my knees crying and begging for him to get out of my life. He saw I meant it, that I was desperate and right on the edge of taking drastic action of some kind. So what did he do? He stole money that had been put into a neighborhood driveway fund and took my LeRoy Neiman painting of the Piazza del Popolo. He used it to decorate his new apartment, which was, I kid you not, exactly fifty feet from my back door. You could throw a stone at his front door from my house.
It was like
