Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (19 page)

I had no idea he was going to ask me to have his baby.

DEATH BY IRONY

Dodi and I laughed and loved our way across London. He’d just finished working as executive producer on
The Scarlet Letter
with Gary Oldman and Demi Moore. I told him about my adventures on
Babylon 5
and learned that he’d already enjoyed some episodes with European friends who were fans of the show. We always seemed to meet when things were going especially well for us.

Despite starring in a sci-fi series and having worked on two sci-fi movies I was woefully ignorant of the genre. Dodi set out to educate me and ran screening nights with movies like
Blade Runner
and
Alien
.

We had such a good time that he invited me to stay for a few months until
Babylon 5
started filming again.

When Dodi and I first started dating years before, he gave me a big gold ring with an amethyst set in it. The inner band was engraved with his name.

“They gave this to me after I completed my service in the Egyptian paratroopers.”

It was a heartfelt gift, one that I’d cherished for more than a decade, but now it was time to return it. I was going through a period of returning keepsakes to old lovers. I’d sent one guy back his high school football ring and another his grandfather’s wedding ring. It seemed like the right thing to do.

So one night while we were drinking champagne after making love I fished the ring out of my purse and pressed it into his palm.

“You should hang on to this. One day, when you settle down, you can give it to someone you really love.”

He looked at the ring with a slightly confused expression. Then he looked back at me, then back to the ring, and then he burst out laughing. In that same instant I got the joke.

“You made these rings up, didn’t you? There’s a whole host of women out there with these things!”

He looked embarrassed for a moment and then it was my turn to laugh.

“And I schlepped it all the way back here so that you could give it to someone else!”

I have to admit, in that environment even the air seemed better, more luxurious. When I remember Dodi, I always think of wonderful smells: the deep, musky tendrils of smoke from his Cuban cigars; the crisp, clean fragrance of his cologne; the sensual undertones from the exquisite leather seats in his private jets and cars. I loved the ambiance.

But there were downsides. An entourage of staff and armed security formed a protective perimeter around us 24/7. It always used to amaze me that Dodi could live like that. He told me that he’d been kidnapped as a child and that as a result he had grown up used to having a serious security presence. Having a battery of armed guards clear the way for him was second nature.

The idea of hiring men to lay their lives on the line for my safety made me a little uneasy. Even when I have security at sci-fi conventions I always go out of my way to make friends with them. Some of Dodi’s guards were treated okay, but others would be swapped out and replaced like his girlfriends. For Dodi, they were so completely integrated into his life that they were invisible.

A billionaire lives in a rarefied world. Everywhere he goes the red carpet is (often literally) rolled out before him. Elegant cars with courteous, uniformed drivers picked us up at the door. When we ate out it was at the best tables in Michelin-starred restaurants. The chefs would come out to greet Dodi as an old friend, inquiring whether the food was satisfactory.

Dodi lived in another world that just happened to intersect with mine. You don’t need to travel to an alien planet if you want to see another form of sentient life. You don’t need an interdimensional transporter to visit a parallel reality. You just need a few billion dollars and the whole world changes around you.

When I got back to L.A. I fell in love with a house in the Hollywood Hills but was $25,000 short of the amount needed to settle. I signed the contract anyway, not knowing where I’d find the money. The next day I opened the mail to find a residual check for a little over $25,000—my cut from the sales of Ivanova merchandising. Everything seemed to be going my way.

Back on set John was waiting for me with open arms. Neither of us asked any questions or offered any answers. We just started up where we’d left off.

Dodi and I talked on the phone as often as we could. Whenever I had a break from
Babylon 5
he flew me (first class, naturally) to meet him. During the production hiatus Dodi and I had been able to drink and dine with abandon, but while I was shooting the series I maintained a healthy diet and drank lightly or not at all. The one time I did drink too much, while at a friend’s birthday dinner, John noticed it immediately the following morning when he was lighting me for a scene.

“What did you do last night, baby? Your eyes are all puffy.”

I was so embarrassed I never did it again.

For all the fooling around we did, in the trailers and on the set, John and I always took the job seriously and maintained our professionalism. I didn’t drink much at all in those years, even when I wanted to, because I had respect for the gift I’d been given. I was on a hit show, working with so many people I loved. The very thought that I could let my colleagues down and disappoint the fans by indulging myself with a drinking spree in my off hours was unthinkable. My drinking was still at the point where I could control it.

In 1995 I celebrated my thirtieth birthday with a party attended by the
Babylon 5
regulars. I noticed throughout the night that Jeff Conaway was acting a bit off. By the end of the party he was completely wasted and holed up in the bathroom doing lines. A mutual friend told me that Jeff was having a bad night—his wife was about to leave him because she couldn’t handle his addictions anymore.

“Addictions? What addictions?”

“Cocaine, alcohol, painkillers, you name it.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t seen any sign of that, because on set Jeff was a consummate professional. He was always on time, he’d have his dialogue down, and he was always friendly and sober. The only behavior that had ever stuck in my mind as being unusual was that he used to carry around supersized bottles of vitamins. I thought it was pretty cool that he had all of these pills, potions, and unguents in his trailer, so one day after an exhausting shooting schedule I asked him what I should take.

“Here, take a niacin tablet. That’ll pick you up.”

I brought it home and tried it. My skin turned bright red and started burning. I rushed into the shower and turned the cold tap on full force. That stopped the burning, but when I tried to get out of the shower I was hit by a dizzy spell and ended up lying on the floor feeling as if I’d just been through the spin cycle in a washing machine. The next day I went into work and tracked him down.

“What the hell were you thinking giving me that stuff?”

“Oh. You can’t take the whole niacin pill. You have to build up a tolerance, so you should just take a little bit. I guess I should have told you that.”

A few years ago I saw Jeff on TV. He was in a reality show called
Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew
. It broke my heart watching that. He looked like a frail old man, not the handsome, talented guy I knew.

He had a girlfriend who was bringing him drugs during the show, which ended up getting him kicked off, and then he’d come back and then get kicked off again. They were getting him to talk about his past, his tortured childhood, trying to get him to confront the fact that he was an addict, but it always puzzled me that no one did anything to treat his biological addiction. The more you drink or take drugs, the more the neuro-pathways of addiction and compulsion in the brain are strengthened. Why weren’t the doctors on the show treating this instead of just the psychological component? Addicts attract other addicts, for comfort, for mutual justification, or, as in this case, just to help feed the addiction. I thought it was sad that there seemed to be no one there for Jeff. Maybe he’d burned through his friends and family, broken one promise too many. Most addicts do. I know I did.

Jeff, like many people I know, was an opiate addict. He had an accident early on in his career on the set of the movie
Grease
, while shooting the “Greased Lightning” scene, that left him with chronic neck and back pain. Most opiate addicts start their addiction after going to a doctor and complaining about back or neck pain; some of the painkillers that they’re prescribed are derived from the same source as heroin.

Jeff had multiple surgeries to try to rid himself of the pain, but by then he was addicted to painkillers. One addiction led to another until they finally claimed his life at age sixty in May 2011. It was a tremendous tragedy that Jeff died so young, battling his demons to the end until his body wore out and couldn’t take it anymore. In the aftermath I got the impression that the media were very blasé about his death. They even left him out of the Emmy memorial photo montage.

Jeff was fifteen years older than me. At the time, the news of his addiction was tragic, but I didn’t see that it had any relevance to my own life. I had no inkling that before long the same monster that haunted Jeff would come knocking on my door, and I’d be designing my own detox-vitamin program. I was too busy living the life I’d always dreamed of.