Babylon Confidential

Bacchus where I could accord my drinking the status it deserved. Somewhere in the darkness my monster was smiling and sharpening her claws.

* * *

My 720-square-foot basement conversion merited an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Den of Festivity.” I hired my friend Michael Weiss, a highly skilled carpenter who builds sets and props for movies and TV shows, to do the work. He was one of the McStaggers, a group of my friends named for their love of drinking and partying. We used to have medieval parties, dressed in period costume. Michael was known as Haggis McStagger. They called me, quite undeservedly, Trouble McStagger. Michael quickly got carried away and didn’t have a hard time convincing me to transform the basement into something spectacular—a party room that looked like a castle dungeon. Michael’s design even dedicated a wall for the display of the cutlery collection that I’d been building since my father gave me that jackknife—it now included knives, swords, and daggers, which added to the medieval ambience. The wine cellar had a sealed, self-closing door and storage capacity of 2,000 bottles.

When the journalist for the Los Angeles Times asked Michael why a house with a single resident needed the space of an average-sized house set aside for wine and its consumption, Michael replied, “Claudia entertains a lot. I’d come back with 20 to 30 cases [of wine], and a few weeks later it would be gone.”

Sure, I partied a lot, just not always with other people. I was falling headfirst into alcoholism. On some level I knew that, but at least, as I consoled myself, I was doing it in style. And I reassured myself that I had it under control. If I had to, I could stay sober for up to six months, and then I’d make up for it by drinking solidly for two weeks.

The dungeon was furnished with benches and lamps of medieval style and a bed in a Moroccan motif that Michael built. The bed was eight feet by ten and stood in an alcove—a nice place for guests to enjoy a private tete-a-tete (or more).

Alexandra Tydings, a newly appointed McStagger, added the final touch—a sign that read, “Welcome to the Dungeon.”

The dungeon was a hit, and I threw some of the best parties I’ve ever attended in my life. We could easily fit twenty people down there at a time, and keeping the wine cellar stocked required constant vigilance. I was drowning in wine, but no one touched my French futures. I had them tucked away, off limits. They were an investment, they were young, and they were the creme de la creme of my collection.

I spent considerable amounts of time and money constructing my own underground temple to addiction, a shrine to the disease that was eating away at me. What can I say? Like all the pleasures of the netherworld, it seemed like a good idea at the time. We even had a sex swing that a friend bought. I never used it. I didn’t like the idea of the woman sitting there doing nothing while the guy spun her around or pushed her like a child at a playground, but I let it hang there. Somehow it seemed to fit the atmosphere.

* * *

Around this time, I landed the ultimate voiceover job—a character in a Disney movie. I played Helga, the sexy villainess in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a film that also starred Michael J. Fox, James Garner, and Leonard Nimoy. It was a departure from the Disney musical movies that were popular at the time. It was darker, aimed at an older audience, and was more story-driven. They even got Mike Mignola, creator of the Hellboy comics, to consult on the production sketches.

I was so excited! I was going to be a Happy Meal toy. Babylon 5 was great, but you know you’ve made it when you can buy an action figure of yourself with a hamburger, fries, and a Coke.

I recorded my part in the studio where they made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and shared a recording booth with Demi Moore, who was working on The Hunchback of Notre Dame II.

Atlantis was a blast. And because I had a great job, I was happy and the drinking stopped. I sobered up and began to feel like my old, confident self. I can say now, with the 20/20 vision that hindsight gives us all, that if I had been working on a regular series back then my alcohol addiction would have been postponed. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have caught up with me eventually. You can’t escape genetics, and my brother Jimmy and I share a bad gene, no doubt about it. But when I’m working fourteen hours a day, I come home happy and exhausted, go to bed, get up, and go back to work. There’s no time to drink, no idle mind for the devil to work with.

But the problem with animated films is that there’s a lot of time between studio sessions. Between movies I’d do my Jaguar spots, but they were only a few hours a week, if that.

When I walked out of the Disney studio at the end of Atlantis I cried all the way home. I’d loved working with the team at Disney. I wasn’t used to all the positive feedback I received there. That rarely happens when you’re working as a live-action actress. Occasionally, if you do something extraordinary, the crew responds with spontaneous applause, but those moments are few and far between. Directors rarely give you anything, but these Disney guys laughed and encouraged me. They wrote extra dialogue, asked me to do multiple takes simply to amuse them, and I ate it up. I felt needed and talented and funny and all of those things that fed my soul.

“Yeah, that’s great! Go bigger, go broader! Sexier!”

That enthusiasm buoyed me up. It helped keep me afloat. Atlantis gave me a reason not to drink.

* * *

And then my career—just like the mythical Atlantis—vanished overnight. One minute it was there, the next minute it had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. I lost the Jaguar account—they decided that the voice of Jaguar should be a man’s. I’d done the one thing my parents had always told me not to: I’d spent my money, thinking that I’d always make more. I’d poured nearly every penny into my house. But of course the expenses don’t go away. There was still the mortgage, the cost of keeping up a mansion, and I had responsibilities to the people who worked for me. I waited for the next job—it wouldn’t be long coming—maybe my film career would pick up again or I’d land another juicy voiceover gig.

You’re all washed up. Those Hollywood assholes don’t want you anymore. But that’s okay. I’m here for you. Say, I could slay a drink. Anything in the cupboard?

I was sick of waiting, so I took the monster’s advice and relieved the mounting pressure with a Veuve Clicquot, a nice bottle I’d set aside for the party crowd. They’d stopped coming around, anyway. I felt less and less like partying with friends. I was doing fine on my own. I was short on money, short on friends, short on work, but at least I wasn’t short of a good drink.

More time passed, and I began to get desperate. My fan base was still strong, so I started selling my underwear on eBay with a little three-by-five card with a lipstick kiss on it. As pathetic as I felt while shipping them out to their respective buyers, they did sell well—but not well enough to pay my mortgage. So I sold the copies of film and TV scripts I’d saved, memorabilia, artwork, and eventually jewelry and antiques. I sold everything I could sell, short of myself, to save my house. The whole situation was ridiculous, because I only owed half a million on a house worth more than four times that. I only needed one job to hang on to it. One paid job would lead to another, and the ball would start rolling again. I put out the word that I needed a gig, tried to call in old favors, sent out head shots to producers and directors I’d worked with before. The phone was as silent as the grave.

Staring at the phone, drink in hand, it dawned on me that I now spent so much time drinking that it had pretty much become my new career. The realization that I’d gone pro hit home, hand-in-hand with the acceptance that I was an alcoholic.

Before that, I was aware that I’d go on binges, but I’d rationalized to myself, quite convincingly, that they were just reactions to emotional triggers. My mom had remarried, and both she and her new husband used to get on my case about my drinking. They knew that there was something going on. My mom’s father had been a drinker, and she could smell a lie a mile off. She offered to pay for me to go to therapy. I think she was desperate to find a reason for my behavior. No one imagined that it could be a physical disease. Everyone just thought I was being indulgent and self-destructive. I figured that therapy was worth a shot. There was no doubt that I was carrying around a mountain of unresolved shit.

A dear friend recommended a good therapist, and I started seeing her three to four times a week at $200 a