Babylon Confidential

drive it down to the beach and buy chocolate chip croissants and lattes. That was our little pleasure. Sometimes Kara and I would go to the gay bars, the Boom Boom Room or the Little Shrimp, and drink—in our cheerleading outfits, no less! We’d watch drag queens sing on top of pianos while we sipped Tanqueray and tonics. The drag queens loved us, all the gay boys loved us, because we were a couple of cute girls who wanted to have fun. I loved gay men, and I still do.

Kara and I had a friend who lived in Emerald Bay, which was our way of getting into the parties there. And they were the best parties. Our high school girlfriends were so jealous; if you had a house there, you were golden. They were doubly impressed when my newly acquired boyfriend picked me up from school in his Porsche.

Arthur Ash Wilder, III, Esq. (a.k.a. Tre) was only 5?11?, but he had blond hair, beautiful blue-green eyes, and was he built. A six-pack, perfect body weight; you could crack an egg on his butt.

Kara and I had sneaked into this Newport Beach party. We were fifteen years old, but we were all dressed up and could have passed for twenty. I’d recently jumped up in size and filled out a bit, and now grown men wanted to meet me. It was a totally weird experience. I had been a fourth son, a tomboy. Three brothers had treated me like a fellow member of the Lost Boys from the minute I was born, and then one of them died and the others were so messed up by that that they didn’t pay me any attention. Add to that the fact that my dad was gone all the time and that when he was home he was too busy fighting with my mom to pay his daughter a compliment. And Tre picked up on that. He was a real sweet talker, and I fell for him hook, line, and sinker. I thought, “This guy is serious.” He was a lawyer, he was in tip-top shape, and he said that he wanted to see the world and conquer it at the same time, which was all very intriguing to me. It didn’t occur to me that a thirty-year-old lawyer should know better than to sleep with a fifteen-year-old high school student. We’d go out and I’d drink Dom Perignon and Cristal; he’d drink single malt scotch whiskey with his friends. I’d always thought of myself as an older person trapped in a younger person’s body, and here I was, hanging out with grown-ups. Cocaine was everywhere; it was the older person’s drug. The first time I saw it was in a bathroom, thousands of dollars worth of powder laid out on a mirror. I tried it once and it was okay, but I didn’t feel that I needed it. I was happy with champagne; I was having a good time. And besides, I’d learned a little something about drugs since moving to Laguna Beach.

Before I met Tre I’d dated a football player named Ricky. His parents went on vacations all the time, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the empty house was instantly filled with partying teenagers. I went into the kitchen and saw a blender with a vanilla milkshake in it. I thought the brown specks in it were vanilla bean; it tasted great. One of the guys on the football team came into the kitchen.

“Hey! Who drank the shake?”

“I did. Sorry, I didn’t know it was yours.”

“You drank the whole thing?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

“You are so fucked! Ricky! Check this out!”

It turned out the brown specks were mushrooms, the hallucinogenic type. Suddenly I didn’t feel so good. The walls were moving like waves, and the floor was falling out from under my feet. I ran to the living room so I could stand on the sofa. I looked around, and all of the lamps and lights in the house had gargoyles coming out of them. It was like that evil carnival in Ray Bradbury’s book Something Wicked This Way Comes.

This “high” lasted the entire day and night, and my boyfriend babysat me through the whole thing. The one time he left me by myself, to go to the bathroom, I stripped off my clothes and climbed up onto the roof. He didn’t leave my side after that. It was the pits, and after that hellish experience I decided to stick to champagne.

* * *

Sometimes Tre would pick me up at lunchtime, take me home for a quickie, then drop me back at school. He’d tell his secretary he was out playing golf. To say that the Tre situation didn’t go down well with my parents is an understatement of monumental proportion, though not in the way you might expect. True to form, they took opposing sides and dug in for protracted trench warfare. My dad was against the relationship. In his eyes, Tre was a deadbeat preying on an underage girl, and he’d be damned if I was going to see him while I lived under his roof. My mother supported my seeing Tre, because he was rich, handsome, and an attorney. She’d grown up without a lot of material comforts after the war, and she was old-world European in the way she thought about things. The age difference was less important than the opportunity to haul in a good-sized catch.

The fracture in my parents’ marriage that ran right back to Patrick’s death widened into a fissure, and I found myself with a foot on either side, struggling not to fall in. Things came to a head when my mom let me go away with Tre for a weekend in Palm Springs. My dad was pissed off and went for broke. He saw the whole thing in the light of my plan to pursue an acting career. He proclaimed that being an actress was little better than being a whore and that the Tre situation was already one step too many down the path of damnation. He told me to get out of his house if I wanted to play at working in Hollywood, and I didn’t argue.

It turned out he was right about Tre, though. Tre was a walking facade. His blond hair was parted a little bit too far to the right because he was balding, and he’d inherited those beautiful blue eyes from his mean, low-class father. If I sound bitter it’s because I was. Tre lived his life for his father, and when he died Tre took on his role and became desperate and chubby, an aging party boy. Before he crashed, though, he made sure, like any good kamikaze pilot, to take as many people with him as possible.

But in hindsight we all have 20/20 vision. I thought I knew what I wanted. I turned sixteen, kept on seeing Tre, and set myself seriously to the task of becoming an actress. I had a few months to get out, so I started working three jobs to save money and was lucky enough to have the world’s coolest guidance counselor, a woman named Jan Fritzen, who convinced my parents to let me work toward finishing high school a year early.

I’ve found in life that if you’re single-minded and tenacious enough, if you keep on putting one foot in front of the other, eventually the universe meets you halfway. In this case it happened at a coffee shop I was working at on the Pacific Coast Highway.

It was the first real cappuccino place in town, and the South African owner was a complete pervert. Every time he would pinch my butt, I would steal money out of the cash register. Eventually he wised up and installed a camera, but the pinching didn’t stop, so I quit—but not before I got my big break.

The actor Barry Newman was a regular at the shop. He’d starred in the legal drama Petrocelli in the ’70s. He hit on me a little, but when I told him I was sixteen, he backed right off, which I appreciated. We started chatting when he came in, and I shared my dream of becoming an actress. Barry introduced me to his friend Charlie Peck, a veteran Hollywood writer who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Charlie was a small, older guy who drove this huge Cadillac and had to sit on two telephone books to see over the top of the wheel. He took a liking to me because of my name; he’d been married to the Italian sex symbol Claudia Cardinale. We got on well, and he promised that he’d set up a meeting with Joan Green, an L.A. talent manager who represented Heather Locklear. I was blown away. At the time Locklear was the only actress to have appeared on two TV series simultaneously: Dynasty and T.J. Hooker. This was an amazing opportunity, and I remember trying to play it cool even though I had butterflies slam dancing in my stomach.

“Next Wednesday? Three o’clock? Sure I can get up to L.A.”

Of course, I couldn’t get up to L.A. on a bus or in a taxi, so I stole my mother’s car. Up until that point I’d been allowed to borrow it to drive down the hill to school and back, and occasionally to the beach. So on the appointed Wednesday I skipped school and drove to Los Angeles. Halfway there I hit something on the freeway and it ripped up the entire underside of the car and totally wrecked it. I had no money to get the car towed. The police ended up taking me to a pay phone so I could call my mom. She took the fall for me, telling my dad that she was behind the wheel. But my luck held out; I was able to set up another meeting with Joan Green.

The next time I played it smarter and convinced my brother Vincent, who already lived in L.A., to take me up there, and I crashed on his couch.

Joan was totally professional but high-strung and slightly neurotic. She weighed me on a scale in her office, decided she liked the way I looked, and asked if I would come back and do a scene for her. “No problem,” I replied and then walked out of her office wondering where on earth I was going to find a scene. I didn’t know there was an actor’s bookstore called Samuel French; I didn’t know anything. I’d done plays like Oliver and Annie, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to do a scene from either of those oldies, so I wrote a monologue about an eighteenth-century female musician who wasn’t allowed to play the violin because she was expected to get married and just shut up. I brought my violin along and played a few notes and then launched