Babylon Confidential

My room was like a different dimension. You opened the door from the smoke-filled bondage universe and stepped through the portal into Teen Girl World. I couldn’t afford new things, so I’d decorated with various odds and ends brought from home: a frilly pink duvet with ’70s rainbow sheets, a boom box, an oversize Led Zeppelin poster with the hermit from the tarot deck on it, and a small shelf with my favorite books. The only things I had that were definitively adult were the clothes that my mom had bought me—classy, expensive items—and the beginnings of an edged-weapon collection that my dad had encouraged.

Michael was a young, handsome guy, so he developed a thriving social life in no time at all, but I didn’t know anyone in L.A. I’d sit in my room trying to ignore the smell of garbage and the sound of the guys in the next room slapping the crap out of each other in the throes of passion and wonder what on earth I’d gotten myself into. Then I started getting sick in the mornings. When I took a home pregnancy test, the strip turned blue.

* * *

The pregnancy came as a shock. I’d been on the pill. My mom always insisted that every time she’d been knocked up, three boys and one girl, she’d been using birth control. My mom is given to hyperbole, so I’d taken that with a pinch of salt. Now I knew better. I also knew I had to get an abortion. I was far too young to have a child, and at that time I felt as though Charles Manson would have been a better candidate for fatherhood than Tre. I went to a clinic in downtown L.A. and found myself sitting silently with a half-dozen miserable women, waiting for a bed. It was like a production line. They put me under for six minutes, scraped me out, and gave me a glass of orange juice when I woke up. A nurse took the empty glass from my hand and tapped her clipboard impatiently.

“You’re all done. We need the bed for the next girl.”

I walked out of there feeling miserable and alone, but I was determined to hold it all together. I went back to the apartment, sat down, and worked out my expenses. The abortion had eaten into my already meager savings; I couldn’t make next month’s rent. What if I lost my room? Where the hell do you go when you can’t afford to live in a smoke-filled bondage den? If they’d given me an Academy Award right then and there, I’d have hocked it for fifty bucks.

I needed to stave off homelessness long enough to keep my dream alive, so I went down to a Mexican restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard and told the manager that I was a twenty-one-year-old Canadian (to explain why I didn’t have any ID). I don’t know if he believed me, but I got a job as a cocktail waitress. I had to wear this black leotard with fishnet stockings, high heels, and a little black bow tie. At the end of the shift I collected my tips—a grand total of twelve dollars. I went back to the apartment, locked myself in my room, and burst into tears. Stop the fucking world, I want to get off.

I was down to two choices: endure that shitty job or run back home with my tail between my legs. I convinced myself that something was going to happen. It just had to, because those two options were no options at all.

The next day I got a call. Joan had booked me for a five-line-or-under job on Dallas, which was enough to get me my union card. The clouds parted, and within a week I went from failed cocktail waitress to working actress on one of the most popular TV series of all time. It totally blew my mind to see Victoria Principal and Linda Grey walking around in person. It was only a small part, but it meant the world to me. I was an actress—a proper, working, Hollywood actress—and that little taste was all I needed to whet my appetite for success and dispel all doubt.

The episode was called “Some Do… Some Don’t,” and I was performing with Christopher Atkins (of The Blue Lagoon fame) in a storyline in which he was having an affair with Linda Grey’s character. Larry Hagman was directing, and he showed up on set wearing lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a feather. He was a very nice, very funny guy. I learned later that he was drinking up to four bottles of champagne a day while working on Dallas. That didn’t surprise me. It was a crazy successful show, and everything was laid on for the cast and crew. They put on steak and lobster for lunch. Everyone had his or her own private trailer. It felt very sexy.

Before I knew it I had another job, this time on Falcon Crest. Jane Wyman was a hard-ass pro, so all my scenes with her were very short and to the point. She was an old-school actress who commanded respect. Cliff Robertson was also in that series, and he was a complete asshole. I was running lines with Cliff when one of the assistant directors asked me if I could see my mark. I turned away for a second and told the assistant director that yes, thank you, I could see the mark just fine. Next thing I knew Robertson grabbed me by the throat and pushed me up against a wall.

“If you ever turn away from me when we’re running lines, I will fucking destroy you!”

I thought he was out of his mind. It was my first experience working with someone who was so volatile, and no one came to help me out or put a leash on Cliff.

Next I worked on T.J. Hooker with Heather Locklear and William Shatner. Shatner was hitting on anything with two legs. He invited me into his dressing room at lunch to run lines and started turning on the charm while finishing up a plate of Thai food. I wasn’t interested, but that didn’t seem to faze him. He moved in for a kiss, and a wave of garlic breath hit me in the face. He couldn’t have repelled a vampire any more effectively.

I began to wonder if this was how women were treated in the industry, if Robertson and Shatner were only the tip of a great, misogynistic iceberg.

I thank God to this day that I booked Dallas first, because that job bolstered my confidence just enough to allow me to shrug off those negative experiences. If I’d worked on those other shows first, faced with the idea of enduring a whole career of men like that, I might have considered donning the black leotard and heading back to the Mexican joint.

That year I went on to appear in The Calendar Girl Murders with Sharon Stone and Tom Skerrit and the action series Riptide. Joan got me so much work that by the end of 1983 my tax return showed $200,000 in income. I sent it home to my parents. I like to think of it as my “fuck you W2.”

I went on to book my first regular role on a series in Berrenger’s, playing Melody Hughes. Berrenger’s was exciting, because we were on a big stage, the Lorimar NBC set, and we had a lot of stars in the show, including Cesar Romero, Jack Scalia, and Yvette Mimieux. And for the first time in my career, I was cast in a role that was much older than my actual age (in this case thirty at eighteen). This would become a recurring event.

When I knew we’d been picked up for thirteen episodes I fled my room in the S&M den and moved into a beautiful, spacious apartment on Hayworth Avenue where the Golden Age gossip columnist Sheilah Graham had once lived with her lover, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The great novelist had been in poor health, in part due to alcoholism. After he suffered a heart attack, his doctor advised him to avoid exertion, so he moved in with Graham to avoid climbing the two flights of stairs at his Laurel Avenue apartment. Fitzgerald died in Graham’s apartment soon after.

Jeff Conaway, who I’d later star with in Babylon 5, played my lover on Berrenger’s, and Anita Morris, who was a big-name Broadway star, played my southern mother. She was a very sexy redhead with an incredible body, and in the show we were both having a relationship with Jeff’s character. For the first time in my life, if someone asked me what I did for work, I could honestly proclaim, “I’m an actress. I’m on NBC every Wednesday night at nine.” I started buying beautiful things to furnish my apartment. No more leather straps and masks! I was living alone, I had a career, I was making money. It was heaven. Now I felt that I’d arrived in Hollywood. I was living the life I’d always dreamed of.

I’d hang out at Spago and Nipper’s in Beverly Hills and Helena’s in Silver Lake. One night I went out to a club called Tramp at the Beverly Center and found myself at a table drinking with Rod Stewart and nightclub entrepreneur Victor Drai, who would come in and out of my life. I met his wife when I was coming out of the bathroom that night. I recognized her immediately as Kelly LeBrock, one of the most beautiful women in the world. She was on the cover of Vogue, had starred in The Woman in Red with Gene Wilder, and was about to start shooting Weird Science. She pushed me back into the bathroom stall as I was exiting, locked the door, pinned me up against the wall, and kissed me on the mouth. It was the first time I’d been kissed by a woman, and it was one of the sexiest moments of my life. We went back and sat with Victor and Rod and carried on as if nothing had happened. It was our little secret.