Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (11 page)

One day I got a call from my agent. New Line Cinema had just produced the original
A Nightmare on Elm Street
, and they were now planning to make a movie called
The Hidden
.

“They’re recasting the role of the alien-possessed stripper. It’s the only female role in the movie. It’s light on dialogue, but you get to shoot machine guns.”

I went along to audition but knew I was in trouble when I read that one of Brenda Lee Van Buren’s essential character attributes was that she be “big busted.” At 120 pounds and 5'9", I didn’t have much going on in the chest department, but, never one to give in, I prepared for the audition by stuffing my bra with socks and tissues. I got an immediate callback, although this time they wanted me to come in wearing a bikini. I began to panic, worrying that my chest’s secret identity would be revealed. I rose to the challenge and concocted an ingenious device made of shoulder pads and electrical tape.

I knew that wouldn’t be quite enough, so I set about devising measures to draw attention away from my faux boobs. The next day I strutted into the production offices wearing a khaki dress with snaps down the front. When they asked to see my body I ripped the dress open in one dramatic movement, did a quick spin, thanked them, and left. An hour later I had the job.

I love acting. Aside from being Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend, where else can you start your workday at a police academy shooting Steyrs and AK-47s and end it learning how to pole dance from Janet Jackson’s choreographer? The guns I was good at, but the pole dancing—I had no natural ability in that department. The choreographer did her best, and then threw her hands up in frustration and sent me to some men’s clubs to see experts in action. I took my best friend to the Aladdin, a strip joint on Sunset Boulevard, and came to appreciate just how athletic some of those girls are. I met the dancers after their shift. One of them was a former Olympic skier. Some were clearly drugged up and working to support their habits, but most of them were hardened pros earning serious money and seemed as sharp-minded as any executive I’d encountered in the entertainment industry.

Now it’s bad enough when you have to put on a convincing strip show in front of cameras for the first time, but when I learned that I’d have to do it in a g-string made out of dollar bills my anxiety scaled previously unconquered heights; it’s every actress’s worst nightmare to see her butt fifty feet tall in a movie theater.

I decided that I needed to lose more weight for the role and visited a place called the Lindora clinic where they put me on a 500-calorie-a-day diet and shot me full of a combination of vitamins and a substance that I would later discover to be pregnant-horse urine.

My first day on set I was scheduled to perform the strip scene. The director, Jack Sholder, was not a happy man when he discovered that I’d duped them in regard to my physical attributes. Luckily, I’d already come clean to the wardrobe mistress, who’d set about designing a set of prosthetic breasts that I could wear under a cut-off T-shirt. It was a double win for me, because it meant that I also got to dodge the topless scene that Jack had planned on filming.

Working with Kyle MacLachlan was very exciting. By then he’d starred in the David Lynch movies
Blue Velvet
and
Dune
. Both he and Michael Nouri were total gentlemen, a real pleasure to work with, and the rest of the film went without a hitch. Well, mostly.

I was on the roof of a building shooting my final scene, and I mean that literally. I shoot Kyle with a machine gun, Michael Nouri shoots me in the head, and I shoot him back, knocking him over the side of a building. Kyle comes to rescue him, shooting me nine times in the process, rescues his friend, loads a fresh clip in his gun, and shoots me another seven times, and then I escape by jumping through a twenty-foot-high neon sign and fall three stories to my death. Simple, right?

In the movie business they attach little explosives called squibs to your clothes to make it look like you’re being riddled with bullets. One of the squibs exploded close to my face, and a piece of the metallic jacket I was wearing shot into my eye. It burned like a son of a bitch but I kept on until we got the take. But after that, I lost the ability to shoot a gun without blinking. Back then I had the Bruce Willis open-eye stare down perfectly, and now I have this blinking reflex, and I look like a total amateur. I recently found myself at a firing range shooting antique firearms for charity with Joe Pesci and Lou Ferrigno, the original Incredible Hulk. I was determined to show these guys that I knew what I was doing, but the instant my blunderbuss went off, my eyes slammed shut, a reflexive protection against fashion shrapnel.

I attended the premiere of
The Hidden
and was pleased that my fake boobs looked convincing. Whether the horse piss worked I don’t know, but when my butt had its premiere on the big screen, I breathed a sigh of relief; the nightmare had been averted—my alien-possessed ass looked pretty damn good.

But as one nightmare ended, another began. I was a real movie actress now and, as I would learn the hard way, things change when you appear nearly naked on the big screen. Someone, somewhere out there, is looking at you and thinking that they’d like to get close to you—real close to you.

There was this guy who had seen
The Hidden
and decided that I was from Venus and had brought the AIDS virus to planet Earth. No kidding, this is what he actually thought. This guy would park outside my place and masturbate, and sometimes tail me in his car. I called the LAPD but their hands were tied, because this was before Rebecca Schaeffer was killed—the event that brought about the anti-stalker laws of the ’90s. I went back and forth with the police until one cop took pity on me and said, “Look, we can’t do anything about him masturbating, but I do think he could be dangerous. Do you own a gun? You’re going to need one. So you wait until he’s out front, put on something nice, and invite him in. Make sure he’s inside the house and then shoot him. When we come over, you say that he broke in. But you make sure he’s deep inside the house. Otherwise you’re the one we’re going to have to arrest.” Really? No thanks. The guy creeped me out but I didn’t want to shoot him.

I drove to a lunch meeting a few weeks after that and realized the stalker was following me in his car. He was really freaking me out, and as I tried to get away from him I accidentally ran a red light and got hit by a van. My engine blew up, my car was totaled, but all I could think about was my number one fan, who’d climbed out of his car and was now heading toward me. I was convinced he was going to try to kill me. A crowd started to gather, so my stalker vanished, but in the meantime someone saw me trying to start my engine to try and get away. When the police arrived, I was arrested for trying to leave the scene of an accident. I explained about the stalker and why I was trying to leave, but they didn’t believe my story. I ended up having to perform six months of community service at the old Globe Playhouse. I was back, not to perform Shakespeare, but to make cookies for the audience. I lasted three weeks in baking hell (all the while wishing I’d invested in a handgun and a lace teddy like that cop had advised) before I offered to pay to have the theater’s roof repaired in exchange for their filling out my community service book.

The stalker vanished after that. He was the first but he wouldn’t be my last. There would be a dozen other stalkers that would plague me to varying degrees over the years, including one guy who quit his job, sold his house, and tried to move into mine, thinking we were married.

The movie-star world isn’t all champagne and caviar.

Time passed, and I thought that things were going well with Patrick until I learned from a friend that he was cheating on me. Before I had a chance to confront him I had to travel to shoot my next movie.
Never on Tuesday
was the story of a pretty young lesbian who finds herself stuck in the middle of the desert with two horny young men played by Peter Berg (
Chicago Hope
) and Andrew Lauer (
Caroline in the City
). It’s better than it sounds. We shot the movie in Borrego Springs in the California desert. The director was a young guy named Adam Rifkin, who was making his directorial debut. He always dressed in black Converse tennis shoes and a baseball hat. Little did I know that Adam was both talented and driven and that
Never on Tuesday
would be the first of many projects I would do with him over the course of my career. It was clear in the audition that they wanted a big-name actress for the female lead, but I tried my best to turn on the charm, and Adam fought hard to get me the part. I’d put a little weight back on since giving up cocaine, so when the studio offered me the role it was on the condition that I lose ten pounds and work out with a former Olympic gymnast, who had me running up and down the bleacher steps at UCLA on a diet of one bran muffin a day.

Charlie Sheen was flown in for a cameo role. He’d just come off
Wall Street
and
No Man’s Land
, so his star was rapidly ascending. They didn’t have a large budget, so my guess is the studio paid him with drugs and hookers so he’d feel like a total frickin’ rock star from Mars.

Whatever they were paying him with, it worked, because A-list guys started coming out of the woodwork. Nic Cage wore a huge fake nose, playing a crazy man in a red Ferrari. Gilbert Gottfried played a lunatic salesman. Emilio Estevez and Cary Elwes (
The Princess Bride
,
Saw
) played hick brothers in a tow truck, gold teeth and all. There was a real party atmosphere, and we’d all hang out and play pool and drink tequila. It wasn’t long before other members of the Brat Pack appeared.

I’d met Rob Lowe before, and, coincidentally, my makeup artist on that movie was Sheryl Berkoff, who would go on to marry Rob. (At the time, though, I think she was seeing Emilio Estevez.) This was just before Rob got into trouble with the first ever celebrity sex-tape scandal.

One night after partying, Rob and I went to a hotel on Sunset Boulevard that is now called the Standard, got drunk, did an eight ball, and ended up in bed together. We were so coked up that the sex was numb and not anyone’s definition of fantastic, but the conversation was great. We bitched about our families and personal problems late into the night. I thought of Patrick and concluded that if you’re going to have revenge sex, you might as well have it with the world’s most beautiful man.