Babylon Confidential

the flood of phone and answering-machine messages to the point that I was getting more than fifty a day.

I was worried enough that I felt I had to take out a restraining order to keep him away from me. When I requested the order, the official took one look at my cell phone record and signed off on it straightaway.

* * *

A few weeks later I was due to fly to Louisiana, to meet with a woman associated with the prison and work out the details for shooting The White Buffalo. I boarded the plane in Los Angeles and found Kenny sitting in a seat a few rows behind mine. That’s when I thought, “Holy shit, this guy is really stalking me.” I was done with playing nice. Fear motivated me to find my strength, and I turned to the flight attendant and said, “I need you to remove that man; I have a restraining order against him, and he’s not to be within a hundred feet of me.”

Federal marshals boarded the flight and dragged Kenny out of there, and all of a sudden he wasn’t so pushy and aggressive. When I got back from Louisiana I was seriously worried about what his next move would be, but it seemed that being dragged off the plane and held in custody had flipped a switch in Kenny’s brain. He got the message that it was over and that he’d gone way past what could be considered normal behavior.

And then I got the bad news about the movie. Everyone had been doing their best to ignore Kenny and move forward, but by then he’d already done too much damage. The investors had decided to pull their money and put it into another project. And he didn’t just capsize The White Buffalo. Wild Cooking and Hourglass fell off the table as well, even though we’d pitched Hourglass to Highlander producer Bill Panzer and he’d loved it.

So, though I was finally free of Kenny he had dragged my dreams down with him. My movie had gone the way of the buffalo. And if you want to know exactly what it was that I lost, allow me to share the very last scene with you: They set the white buffalo free with the rest of the herd on protected land. We see an aerial shot of this little speck of white in the brown sea of the brown herd; she’s free, no longer a circus attraction. The white buffalo was Hope—hope that I’d move forward with my life toward a bright and happy future, that my career would take the next step forward and flourish.

My mom saw that clearly. To this day she still asks me when I’m going to make The White Buffalo. She’s convinced that everything in the universe will align for me if I can just make that movie. And I still haven’t given up. The White Buffalo Calf Woman is powerful medicine, and I believe that if the movie is meant to be, then a miracle will appear at the right time, like the birth of a white buffalo.

* * *

My relationships with Angus and Kenny were bad medicine in the conventional sense of the word as well as the spiritual, Indian one. Relationships like that can kill you, literally, if you can’t break away from them in time. I couldn’t see it at the time; it seems as though you can only ever see these things with the benefit of hindsight. But I’d heard the monster whispering, and on some level I knew the role Kenny would play in my life. The moment I allowed Kenny to overstay his welcome, I didn’t just fall off the tightrope—I took Kenny’s hand and stepped off, dropping willingly into the darkness below.

* * *

So now I was alone, a chubby mess, and my drinking hadn’t let up at all. I was stressed and exhausted. I’d thrown everything into trying to patch up the holes Kenny had made and keep the movie afloat, all to no avail. I’d put on ten or fifteen pounds, and when the auditions for on-camera parts suddenly dried up, friends and colleagues would talk to me as if I were a contestant on The Biggest Loser who needed to go on a starvation diet before their bones and organs failed under the weight of their own body mass. I didn’t care that I wasn’t landing any on-camera acting jobs, because my voiceover career was in full swing. I did computer games, animated movies, commercials, you name it. The White Buffalo might have been dead, but the checks kept rolling in, and that allowed me to bankroll my new creative passion—remodeling my house.

I lost myself in building a relationship with my house. I figured that was one partnership I could count on.

12. THE FALL OF BABYLON

I’ve moved many times in my life because I was always looking for home, a place that was a reflection of the best parts of me, and now I knew that I’d found it. I poured my heart and soul and almost every penny of income I generated into making the house match the idealized picture in my mind. It was my baby. I spared no expense. The place was a hive of busy men in overalls. I’ve always loved redoing homes. My mother is one of the most talented interior designers in the country, and both my brother and stepfather build luxury homes; it’s a family passion.

At the same time that I was throwing every spare dollar into beautifying my home I was investing just as heavily in another project—working at drinking myself to death. Creation and destruction, birth and death, they’re all part of the same cycle.

Cooking and entertaining always come first for me, so the kitchen was the number-one priority. In the mornings I’d counteract my hangover by drinking enough tea to drown an Englishman and then hit the granite shops to pick out materials. By the time I finished, my kitchen was incredible: massive marble bench tops, French-style cupboards finished in seafoam green (a four-layer process that involved painting and aging the wood), and two Sub-Zero refrigerators. I had Wolf ranges that ran along an entire wall with a custom Ann Sacks tile backsplash depicting an idyllic Italian country scene. You could feed a small army out of that kitchen.

My next greatest love, after cooking, is books. I had a two-story library built with hand-carved oak bookshelves. A double-length rail ladder allowed me to slide along the shelves to browse my thousands of volumes. I had brass plates made with the names of the subject categories engraved on them: History, Cooking, Religion, Fiction.

I was pretty fucking pleased with myself. I owned my own mansion, and I’d decked it out just the way I wanted.

Yet something was missing, one more thing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

A wine cellar. You need a really big wine cellar.

The monster was speaking again and once more, it was making what seemed like pretty good sense.

You deserve it. You’ve worked hard to get where you are. You deserve to celebrate in style, and for that you’ll need to fuel the amazing parties you’re throwing.

Something kept me from indulging in that particular fantasy right away. I knew I was drinking more than usual, and it certainly wasn’t like me to drink alone. Maybe a wine cellar wasn’t the best idea. Instead I went shopping for tapestries, created outdoor rooms, and converted one of the extra bedrooms into a huge walk-in closet.

It might have been my dream house, but they say that in dreams a house is a reflection of yourself, your body. I think that putting my house in order was subconsciously an attempt to save myself from the disease that was slowly creeping up on me. I was perfecting my external world while my interior one was steadily crumbling away. Also, throwing myself so completely into my renovation kept me from having to acknowledge my emerging drinking problem. It kept it just below the surface of my awareness.

And then my friend Trish’s husband, Martin “Mutt” Cohen, asked me if I wanted to invest in wine futures. Mutt was a big-name music attorney. He handled groups like Chicago and Boyz II Men, and he was a wine aficionado and head of the L.A. division of the Confrerie de la Chaine des Rotisseurs, the world’s oldest and largest food and wine society.

“Two thousand is going to be an excellent year. Buy them up and in ten years you can either drink them or sell them. Either way you’ll come out a winner.”

I was flush—another check had just arrived—and I thought that idea sounded just peachy. Mutt wrote me a list of every single French wine that I should buy: Chateau La Freynelle, Christian Moreau, Chateau Ducru Beaucaillou Saint Julien, Chateau Lafite Rothschild, all the best stuff. My bill was just under fourteen grand. A year later they arrived all at once. By then I’d already completed construction of my ultimate wine cellar, a shrine to