Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (29 page)

Hello!? Why do people think I do drugs? I think when I drink too much, my personality changes. That must be it because I don’t do coke anymore and I hate pot and have never popped a pill in my life!

I knew what had made up Hilary’s mind—it was the night back in L.A. when I’d almost had the accident. She saw the state I was in and couldn’t believe I was that fucked up just from alcohol.

I was highly defensive, and in the heat of the moment I told Deborah about some personal things that Hilary had said about her. I regretted that almost instantly, but the damage was done, and that led to something of a falling out between Hilary and me.

On the European convention trail I drank far too much—it was hard to say no with fans offering to buy—and found myself laid up in bed with a terrible case of flu. It occurred to me that my immune system was weakening. I was getting sick a lot more often than usual, but I put it down to stress, getting older, and my busy schedule. I still hadn’t made the connection that my drinking was affecting my health. I felt fat. My arms looked like legs of lamb. Lying in bed, sick as a dog, I began to perceive my need for alcohol as something more than a kind of little devil, an irritating prick of a thing that sat on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. It was more as if I had my own internal Kenny. I felt it as a serious, ominous presence, but I still underestimated it. I hadn’t stepped into the arena yet. I didn’t have any sense of the monster I was really up against, but there were signs that I recognized. I had concerns. I started praying, something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl.

“God, drinking is a waste of time and money. It’s a waste of the talent I’ve been given, not to mention that it’s keeping me fat. Please, help me get rid of the desire to drink. I’ve had enough.”

I recovered from the flu and felt much better. What’s more, I didn’t give alcohol a second thought. Not long after that I was dining alone at the restaurant at the Balmoral Hotel when the maître d’ asked me if I wanted to sit in the bar and have a drink or go straight to my table. I replied without a thought, “I don’t drink.” I was very pleased with myself and hoped my newfound temperance would find some staying power.

Heading home I felt empowered. Without alcohol the whole Kenny problem came into sharp focus. Was this the best I could do? Kenny? The thought that I’d be stuck with him forever terrified me. This guy was like a tumor. I was still upset about the business with Hilary but determined to set things right, to take charge of my life. Kenny had to go, and if he wouldn’t leave on his own, then, just like a tumor, he’d have to be cut out.

Within three days of returning to L.A. I was drinking again. Kenny didn’t accept my decision to stop drinking or my insistence that we needed to go our separate ways, starting with my telling him to get the hell out of my house.

“You’re overreacting. There’s nothing wrong. Please, give me a chance. Let’s talk this out.”

And as he was talking he’d top off my glass. My steely resolve melted. He was my enabler. It was as if my internal monster were feeding him his lines, saying just the right things to take the edge off my words, giving Kenny room to turn things around and keep clinging on. Kenny figured he had a winning card, and he just kept on playing it, but I’d been in that place before, with Angus. I hit the point where I realized that if things continued, this guy was going to suffocate me and somehow I’d end up dead.

It came down to a scene in the kitchen with me on my knees crying and begging for him to get out of my life. He saw I meant it, that I was desperate and right on the edge of taking drastic action of some kind. So what did he do? He stole money that had been put into a neighborhood driveway fund and took my LeRoy Neiman painting of the Piazza del Popolo. He used it to decorate his new apartment, which was, I kid you not, exactly fifty feet from my back door. You could throw a stone at his front door from my house.

It was like
Fatal Attraction
with the sexes switched around. He even took some of the leftover paint I’d used on the walls of my house and painted his apartment the same color. And he ramped up the flood of phone and answering-machine messages to the point that I was getting more than fifty a day.

I was worried enough that I felt I had to take out a restraining order to keep him away from me. When I requested the order, the official took one look at my cell phone record and signed off on it straightaway.

A few weeks later I was due to fly to Louisiana, to meet with a woman associated with the prison and work out the details for shooting
The White
Buffalo
. I boarded the plane in Los Angeles and found Kenny sitting in a seat a few rows behind mine. That’s when I thought, “Holy shit, this guy is really stalking me.” I was done with playing nice. Fear motivated me to find my strength, and I turned to the flight attendant and said, “I need you to remove that man; I have a restraining order against him, and he’s not to be within a hundred feet of me.”

Federal marshals boarded the flight and dragged Kenny out of there, and all of a sudden he wasn’t so pushy and aggressive. When I got back from Louisiana I was seriously worried about what his next move would be, but it seemed that being dragged off the plane and held in custody had flipped a switch in Kenny’s brain. He got the message that it was over and that he’d gone way past what could be considered normal behavior.

And then I got the bad news about the movie. Everyone had been doing their best to ignore Kenny and move forward, but by then he’d already done too much damage. The investors had decided to pull their money and put it into another project. And he didn’t just capsize
The White Buffalo
.
Wild Cooking
and
Hourglass
fell off the table as well, even though we’d pitched
Hourglass
to
Highlander
producer Bill Panzer and he’d loved it.

So, though I was finally free of Kenny he had dragged my dreams down with him. My movie had gone the way of the buffalo. And if you want to know exactly what it was that I lost, allow me to share the very last scene with you: They set the white buffalo free with the rest of the herd on protected land. We see an aerial shot of this little speck of white in the brown sea of the brown herd; she’s free, no longer a circus attraction. The white buffalo was Hope—hope that I’d move forward with my life toward a bright and happy future, that my career would take the next step forward and flourish.

My mom saw that clearly. To this day she still asks me when I’m going to make
The White Buffalo
. She’s convinced that everything in the universe will align for me if I can just make that movie. And I still haven’t given up. The White Buffalo Calf Woman is powerful medicine, and I believe that if the movie is meant to be, then a miracle will appear at the right time, like the birth of a white buffalo.

My relationships with Angus and Kenny were bad medicine in the conventional sense of the word as well as the spiritual, Indian one. Relationships like that can kill you, literally, if you can’t break away from them in time. I couldn’t see it at the time; it seems as though you can only ever see these things with the benefit of hindsight. But I’d heard the monster whispering, and on some level I knew the role Kenny would play in my life. The moment I allowed Kenny to overstay his welcome, I didn’t just fall off the tightrope—I took Kenny’s hand and stepped off, dropping willingly into the darkness below.

So now I was alone, a chubby mess, and my drinking hadn’t let up at all. I was stressed and exhausted. I’d thrown everything into trying to patch up the holes Kenny had made and keep the movie afloat, all to no avail. I’d put on ten or fifteen pounds, and when the auditions for on-camera parts suddenly dried up, friends and colleagues would talk to me as if I were a contestant on
The Biggest Loser
who needed to go on a starvation diet before their bones and organs failed under the weight of their own body mass. I didn’t care that I wasn’t landing any on-camera acting jobs, because my voiceover career was in full swing. I did computer games, animated movies, commercials, you name it.
The White Buffalo
might have been dead, but the checks kept rolling in, and that allowed me to bankroll my new creative passion—remodeling my house.

I lost myself in building a relationship with my house. I figured that was one partnership I could count on.

THE FALL OF BABYLON

I’ve moved many times in my life because I was always looking for home, a place that was a reflection of the best parts of me, and now I knew that I’d found it. I poured my heart and soul and almost every penny of income I generated into making the house match the idealized picture in my mind. It was my baby. I spared no expense. The place was a hive of busy men in overalls. I’ve always loved redoing homes. My mother is one of the most talented interior designers in the country, and both my brother and stepfather build luxury homes; it’s a family passion.

At the same time that I was throwing every spare dollar into beautifying my home I was investing just as heavily in another project—working at drinking myself to death. Creation and destruction, birth and death, they’re all part of the same cycle.