Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (23 page)

With Dodi. This was taken on the trip where he asked me to have his baby.

One of the zillions of conventions I’ve attended!

With my buddy, practical joker Jerry Doyle, on the set of
Babylon 5

Soaked in fake blood for “Between the Darkness and the Light,” the episode where my character, Susan Ivanova, is critically injured.

With my sweet friend Pat Tallman. I’m grateful to have met her on
Babylon 5.

HIGHLAND FLING

They may take our lives, but they’ll never take OUR FREEDOM!”

It was 1996, and
Braveheart
was the movie of the year. It blazed through the Academy Awards, sweeping up five Oscars, including best picture, and five additional nominations. It was a tragic, historical romance with an epic scope—easily one of my favorite films of all time. I saw the movie with my mom, and when the reluctant hero Robert the Bruce appeared on-screen, I turned to her and said, “God, I wish I could meet a man like that!” Especially as he was played with such smoldering intensity by green-eyed Scottish actor Angus Macfadyen.

A few months later I was having an early lunch with girlfriends on Sunset Plaza Drive when I saw Angus with Justin, an old friend of mine. Angus had a glass of white wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It was noon. He caught me looking at him and started staring back. I was surprised by the intensity of his gaze. His eyes contained all the qualities that attracted me to his character in the film. I’d try to match him, to maintain eye contact, but then I’d get embarrassed and turn away. I rejoined my girlfriends’ conversation, trying to ignore him, but eventually I’d turn and look and our eyes would lock again.

I plucked up my courage and walked over to his table on the pretense of talking to my friend. It was very exciting—a big, heart-pounding moment.

Once I started speaking, cool, confident Claudia resurfaced. This guy was just another actor. I’d left Dodi Fayed, for God’s sake. This guy was small-fry by comparison. The three of us chatted. I flirted with Angus a little. Reassured that I was back in command of my senses, I said my goodbyes and headed back to my friends. Angus came up behind me and touched my arm. Everything else seemed to fade away.

“Claudia. Can I see you again?”

“Sure. Justin’s got my number.”

Cool. Calm. Collected. I walked away trying not to show the prickling of excitement that ran across my skin and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

On the set of
Babylon 5
, I’d check my phone messages every half hour to see if he’d called. I went crazy waiting for him to call, and after a week I finally rang Justin.

“What’s going on? Why isn’t this guy calling me? I don’t normally have this problem!”

Justin explained that that was just Angus. He’d been holed up in his apartment for the last week drinking like a fish while he completed a series of paintings.

“Paintings? What’s he painting?”

“Oh, it’s depressing stuff. Really macabre. You know, the devil and all that.”

That should have set the warning bells ringing right then. A guy ignores you for a week because he’s too busy getting loaded and painting the devil. But looking at it through eyes dazzled by animal attraction, the image of the tortured artist not only seemed romantic but also bound Angus more tightly in my mind to the character of Robert the Bruce. I’d never met a man like Angus before—dark and brooding—the archetypical Scotsman. This was new and forbidden fruit.

I finally got a call from Angus, probably prompted by Justin, and we went out to dinner. It turned out we had very similar taste in literature, which is worth more to me than a super yacht and a solid-gold sink. He told me that he’d once been engaged to Catherine Zeta-Jones, before she came to America and became famous. Apparently, in her biography she claims that he was the best sex she ever had. I don’t know if I could make the same claim, but what he lacked in technique he made up for in enthusiasm. After making love we stayed up till four in the morning reciting poems from memory.

His favorite was Dylan Thomas’s “A Grief Ago,” which speaks of “hell wind and sea”—a wild, turbulent love.

I often recited Byron’s “When We Two Parted.”

In secret we met—

In silence I grieve,

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

If I should meet thee

After long years,

How should I greet thee?—

With silence and tears.

Unfortunately, those poems would serve as the bookends of our entire relationship.

Angus started writing poems for me. He’d leave them in his mailbox, and I’d pick them up on the way to the
Babylon 5
set. It was like a high school relationship, intense and disarming. I was utterly smitten.

He moved into my house a few months later, and by the time I’d finished working on
Babylon 5
, our relationship was in full swing. We’d smoke and drink wine, make love and read poetry. And we’d fight. We’d scream at each other, smash glasses, break furniture, and hurl insults. We had epic, alcohol-fueled battles that ran on into the night.

He’d just finished playing the wild, madly in love Richard Burton in
Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story
. Our love affair, he said, was as passionate, artistic, and crazy as theirs. It was a love that blinded me to the voices of concern from my friends, who’d started referring to us as Dick and Liz. They thought Angus wasn’t brooding or romantic but just plain rude. My mother once asked him, out of politeness, what he felt about his native country’s history.

“Fuck history. Where’s my fucking chicken?”

And I got up and got him his chicken. My mother was appalled.

Soon, he’d have such a hold over me that my friends would give him another name—the devil.

Angus reveled in all the bad habits that I’d kept in check throughout my career. He was undisciplined, he didn’t care about his body, he drank, he smoked, and he spewed his own inner darkness all over the horrible canvases that were now piling up in my pool house. The fights got worse, and I realized that he took a sadistic pleasure in them. He’d smile if he could make me cry.

I knew it was an unhealthy relationship, and, looking back, I suppose my friends hit the nail on the head. Angus might not have been the devil, but he was certainly
my
devil.