There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me (32 page)

She refused to listen but instead left the room, having not lifted a finger to prep for the trip. I yelled after her, “Be downstairs when the car gets here!”

Slam
.

I finished getting everything thrown together and called a bellman to help get the bags into the car. I waited in the car in absolute embarrassment and disgust. I was disgusted at her. I was disgusted with myself for being so helpless and bound to this dynamic. When was I going to learn? Mom showed up at the last minute and I was seething inside at how pitiable my life was. We fought and her words were imbued with vitriol. I was an ingrate, she said, and why couldn’t I be as talented an actress elsewhere as I was during the act of fury I was displaying? She said I had a fat ass and I did not appreciate anything.

She had been drinking all morning, either at the hotel bar or at some place nearby. When she had left the room earlier, she must have gone to get a few last-minute nips before the flight. The last few must have hit her while she was on the drive to the airport, and she actually passed out in the car. I can count on one hand the times Mom
had ever passed out. She never even took naps. I watched her as the car stopped and the door was opened. She was still not wake. I made a weak attempt to stir her but realized I did not want her to awake at that moment. I got my bags and stormed off to check in. I purposely took her passport with me because I had gotten it from the room safe with the jewelry. I planned on leaving France with it in hand but did not have the guts to keep her ability to exit the country. At the very last second, I ran back to the car where she was still slumped over, and I threw the passport inside the slightly opened window.

“Mademoiselle, what should I do wif yur muzzer?”

“Je ne sais pas. . . . C’est comme tu veux. Merci.”
I do not know.
It is as you wish. Thank you.

I boarded the Concorde flight to JFK airport. I sobbed the entire flight. The actress Amy Irving was on the same flight and asked if she could help. Ironically her mother, Priscilla Pointer, had been one of the acting coaches hired for me on
Just You and Me, Kid
. I told Amy that I had just left my mom passed out in a car at departures. She gave me a warm smile. Once again I had the feelings of survival and sadness mixed with a tad of freedom of not having to be on the trip with Mom.

We landed, and while in baggage claim, my new video camera was stolen right from under my nose. Mom managed to show up the next day at 11:00
A.M.
at the shower as if nothing had happened. She breezed through the party with grandeur and a wrapped Hermès scarf and began the red wine all over again.

I should have held on to her passport.

•   •   •

Something had to shift. I could only think of shifting my mother’s behavior, not my life. If I could just get her to stop drinking, my career would pick up again.

Lila and I researched treatment facilities together once again.
Auntie Lila had moved away from Teri and from working at our company a few years prior and was now residing in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona. We both knew that it was bad with Mom, and even though I had much less leverage than the first time, we needed to try something. She’d never again fall for meeting us at a location with her bags secretly packed.

I put a call into Betty Ford herself. I explained my situation and she promised that if I could get my mother to go to the Betty Ford Center, she would have a bed ready for me. I would just have to get Mom to commit to going back into treatment. Lila knew an intervention specialist who flew in to places all over the country to help with interventions. We asked him to join Mom, Lila, and me in Haworth, New Jersey.

Mom saw us “interventing” a mile away. She sat on our long, low, floral-upholstered couch and dug in. She said she would
never
again go to treatment and was insulted and disgusted by us all. She was angry and adamantly refused to go. She attacked me for trying to control her, and even when I was being soft, and loving, and saying this was necessary and good for us both, she just shook her head.

“If I want to stop, I’ll stop.”

I told her about Betty Ford and she blurted out something about not being an addict or in bad enough shape for a place like the Betty Ford clinic. She claimed she did not have a drinking problem. Well, she was right there! My mother never had a problem with her drinking. It was the rest of us who did. I even think she meant this double entendre herself. Another one of her little word manipulations.

“Fuck you. Fuck you both, Lila.” She looked at the intervention specialist and said, “I don’t give a shit who you are, but I want you out of my house.”

“Your daughter asked me to come, Teri, to help her,” he responded.

“Well, great, help her and get the fuck out of my life.”

“But, Mom . . .”

“I began in this world alone, and I’ll end in this world alone. I don’t need you,
Brooke
, to tell me how to live.”

“But I really love you, Mom, and—”

“Yeah, and Peter really loved Jesus. Where did it get him?”

She had this cocky expression on her face as if she had just won. She would often say to me while I was growing up that one day I “would deny [her] like Peter.” She sat there triumphant, seemingly pleased with the proof that I had denied her just like the apostle Peter did to Jesus when the pressure was on. It was crazy when she chose to pull out the religion card and how hypocritical she remained.

This attempt at an intervention was an abject failure. Money down the drain and a lost hot-commodity bed rejected. I called Mrs. Ford and apologized. I thanked her for the special treatment but said that my mom wouldn’t be coming to the center. She told me that Mom would never get help until she wanted it for herself. I explained that it did not seem as if anything like that was ever going to happen. Mrs. Ford recommended that I never give up hope.

To this day, the ACOA kid in me thinks that if only Betty Ford’s had been available the first time, maybe it would all somehow have been different.

•   •   •

I walked away in defeat and without any plan. I continued to live in New York City and go to events if asked. Mom proceeded as if nothing had ever transpired, but every now and then would throw the attempt up in my face to reinforce how I had failed and how she would never be outsmarted. She was a true addict.

I shot some interesting photos for
Paper
magazine and was kind of getting into the creative groups via the magazine. I did readings and performance pieces for fun makeup artists and was asked by the likes of Russell Simmons to join him on a panel to discuss what was in and what was out in our culture these days. I was hoping that maybe
through my fabulous community of gay artistic friends I would find a niche and get back on top of things again.

It was during this time that I began to date Liam Neeson. He was a tall Irish actor and a drunk who was thirteen years my senior. He wooed me with his brogue, his poetry, and his shitty choice of cheap pinot grigio wine. I rebelled with him and poured myself into his rhythm. I would take dance classes all morning and then meet up with him at the bar at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park South. We’d drink and talk to Norman, the bartender, and discuss literature and acting. We would daydream about our future. Norman was, and is, a living legend who looked out for me.

During those days, I existed on cheese and crackers and wine and the relationship. I was going to grow up and the Irish drinking actor was the perfect solution. I was so impressed with going out with a real movie star and I was so familiar with what it was like to live with an alcoholic who lived in dreamworlds. Liam and my mom were perfect for me. And, of course she took to him the way she did to all other tall, manly, gruff drunks. She flirted and welcomed him home. It did not get as creepy as it could have, since Liam hungered after any female attention, but none of it was healthy or real. I was struck by how it was somehow familiar. It was such a cliché and I could not see it.

We got serious enough after only three months, and I thought that this would get me away from my mother and earn me the respect I wanted so desperately. He was a real actor, and if he chose me, then I would be exposed to a higher caliber of the entertainment industry. I could finally be serious. He asked me to marry him but without a ring. I told Mom and she worried she would not be invited. That was her immediate response. Nothing about me, but about where she fit in instead. “Watch: When you get married, you probably won’t even invite me!”

I told her I would always invite her for the rest of my life whether I wanted to or not. I added that even when she did show up for me,
she was never really there anyway because she would be drunk. She brushed it off and said, “We’ll see. . . .”

Who knows what she meant by that, but I pretended I was engaged. We spent a Christmas together and Mom suggested that I give Liam a copy of my brilliant book that had been crafted while I was at Princeton. She actually thought it was a clever idea just like her arranging for a Brooke doll to be delivered to John Travolta’s hotel on his birthday. I inscribed the book with some mush about my days being in focus since he came into my life. The blurred handwriting was because of the steady flow of wine. I could not fight my mother’s drinking, so why not throw responsibility away and join the booze brigade?

Everybody was staying slightly buzzed all day long and we were one big happy family. Until I went to Italy for some job.

Liam had to fly to LA that night to check on a basement flood in his home. I told him to phone me when he arrived.

“Oh, it’ll be late, darlin’.”

“Well, I won’t fall asleep until I know you are safe. And you did ask me to marry you, so you can tell me the plane was safe.”

I never heard from him again.

•   •   •

When I got home I crawled back to Mommy. I was too weak and sad and scared and heartbroken. My mama would let me cry and tell me it would pass. We were living in this old Tudor-style house that was too big for two people and beginning to get run-down, and we had no future plans. The Grey Gardens tenure had actually begun. I was obviously incapable of living in the big world alone.

This time Mom did not try to talk me out of it. She happily let me get right back into some of the old routines. Who was the more pathetic one now? We were holding on to multiple properties and fostering dogs in attempts to find them homes. Strangely, people adopted them because they had been in my custody and because people are
crazy
. So maybe we differed from Little and Big Edie, in some ways, but the writing was on the wall for us to transform seemingly into a mother and daughter living alone in a festering relationship of enmeshment and fear. I cried a lot and tried to start every day anew.

I wish I only knew you in the mornings, Mama. . . .

It felt like I was back to the beginning. Even though I had gotten an education and I had done a great deal of work on myself to separate from her, I had been defeated yet again. I was right back in the thicket.

Part Four

She says things like how she hates me and then in the next breath like a crazy person says, “I love you more than life.”

—Brooke’s diary

Chapter Thirteen

We Met by Fax

I
survived my heartache from my whirlwind three months with the Irishman and a few more random crushes after that, but it was the last time I ran home to Mommy. I slowly and steadily eased back into living by myself in the city and did a lot of soul-searching.

I had gone to California to meet some filmmakers who were looking for an actress who would want to go live in South Africa for three months and film a movie about raising orphaned leopard cubs in the wild. The movie would be called
Running Wild
. I jumped at the offer. Going to live in a camp in the middle of the bush was just what I needed. Mom and I both traveled there, but after I got settled, Mom went back to America. Her asthma was bad and the dust and wildlife were doing a lot of damage. She was not well and was better off at home.