Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (28 page)

I’d met Kenny only once, very briefly, before the night my friend Hilary brought him to my house. He was a wannabe producer, which is a nice way of saying he was unemployed, and he was very interested in the projects I was working on. There was a sci-fi time-travel show in development called
Hourglass
that I was going to star in with Alexandra Tydings, who played Aphrodite on the TV series
Xena: Warrior Princess
. We were to play two scientists in neoprene catsuits who get sent into the past by accident and have historical adventures. Then there was a reality TV show,
Wild Cooking
, where people would be given twenty dollars to buy their own ingredients. They’d hike to a remote location, cook a meal in twenty minutes on a camping stove, and be judged by a famous L.A. restaurateur. And of course there was
The White Buffalo
.

That night we were drinking, and as the night wore on my tendency to make stupid decisions increased proportionally to the amount of red wine I imbibed, and that was a lot.

“Claudia, Kenny was going to stay with me, but I’ve got the kids, and it’s a long way to Agoura Hills. Can he stay here? It’ll only be for a few days.”

“Sure, why not? I’ve got three spare bedrooms.”

I invited Kenny to stay for two nights, and that turned into a week. He started talking about my film and TV projects as if he owned them, and I started hinting, fairly bluntly, that he should go and find his own place. He promised he would, but instead he’d spend every night drinking and cooking. He’d encourage me to join him, and at that time I didn’t need to be asked twice to do either.

The conscious checks I’d put in place, those little reminders to keep an eye on my tendency to overconsume, were banished. I could control myself when I was alone, but now I had an enabler, someone who was actively tempting me on a daily basis. Within a week I found myself in bed with Kenny, things turned romantic, and without asking he decided that his guest status had been upgraded to that of live-in partner.

Kenny had dark hair and brown eyes. Sometimes he looked handsome, and sometimes he looked dorky. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t feel embarrassed about shuffling around the house in novelty slippers and pajamas covered in cartoon moose. But Kenny was insidious, like a creeping vine. He knew exactly how to find the gaps in my armor and the old wounds that lay below it—he just had to keep me eating and drinking. He was an emotional eater, and I got hooked into his trip. I’m usually a salad-and-grilled-fish gal, but with Kenny my intake of red wine increased along with my diet of fatty foods. I was chowing down pizza and going halves on big plates of lasagna, which was totally unlike me.

Kenny wasn’t a dark soul like Angus, but he was a user. He saw a way to live off me and help his career at the same time, and so he moved in, stretched out, and made himself at home.

I’m not saying I was without fault. It takes two to tango. If I’d met a healthy, successful, straightforward guy who drank lightly or not at all, I probably could have held off the disease for a few more years. But I didn’t meet that guy. I believe you attract people at certain points in your life, that you send out signals letting people know what you want, and sometimes what you’re looking for isn’t a good thing. My monster was whispering in my ear, and it wanted to drink bad medicine.

Kenny and I went on holiday to Havana and spent New Year’s Eve in a musty room at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba drinking champagne and making love. If the heroines of
Hourglass
had appeared suddenly in modern-day Cuba, you’d have forgiven them for thinking they were in the 1950s. The cars were rusted classics, men wore suits and hats, and no one had built anything new in fifty years.

We ate and drank and then drank some more. People opened up their homes so you could go in and have dinner, which was pretty wonderful. An older woman sang soulful songs while we ate yet another variation on chicken and beans. We went to Hemingway’s favorite Havana bar, El Floridita. The daiquiris were mediocre, so we gave up on them and started downing cubanitos, a concoction of rum and tomato juice, and man, did they have a kick! At other times, when I’d consumed too much wine and passed out, I’d wake up at 2 a.m., after the alcohol wore off and the sugar kicked in, but spirits, and those cubanitos in particular, knocked me right out.

Even at that early stage in our relationship Kenny didn’t want to let me out of his sight or do anything on his own. At first I thought his need to be near me all the time was sweet, but by the end of that trip I felt slightly claustrophobic around him.

I came out of that holiday with love handles that had their own zip code and a roll of fat hanging over my jeans. I had Holly book me into a convention straight away. I had to get some distance from Kenny, not just personally but also professionally. He hadn’t just elbowed his way into my life; by then he was also trying to take over any of my projects that looked like they might be going somewhere, especially
The White Buffalo
.

Kenny’s producing background meant that he could calculate budgets and that seemed reasonable (when you’re pitching a show it helps a lot if you’ve got budgets drawn up), but that benefit came with a much greater liability—Kenny himself.

This was in the day when cell phones had a walkie-talkie feature that could be used by two people in the same vicinity—someone could start talking to you without having to place a call. It got to the point where Kenny was buzzing me every five minutes. It was like having Jim Carrey’s character from
The Cable Guy
in your life—it was driving me crazy. I’d be driving along and I’d hear his voice coming through the phone.

“Hey, it’s me. Are you there? Are you there? Hello? Hey, it’s me? Answer the phone. I know you’re there. Hello?”

Even worse, Kenny did the same thing to Hilary and Alan and to the movie’s investors, and they didn’t like being badgered, not at all. They called me and asked that Kenny stop bothering them. Instead of backing off, Kenny read this as the signal to pounce. He’d get in their faces, chewing them out like Jack Warner, except that Kenny didn’t actually have any power or innate confidence, so he just ended up offending and annoying people.

As for me, I was in a kind of fugue state. I knew this guy was a walking disaster but the relationship and the bad habits it fed were keeping me from seeing the seriousness of the situation. I’d lost my enthusiasm and energy, and that made it hard to act decisively. Then I discovered that Kenny had been accessing my computer and reading my files. The mild claustrophobia that had started in Cuba was now all but suffocating me. Added to that, my drinking was getting to the point at which other people were starting to recognize that I had a problem.

Hilary and I went out one night and had a couple of glasses of champagne. I never drink and drive. Even the thought of getting a ticket terrifies me, let alone getting into an accident, which is why I did most of my drinking at home. But this night I’d had a few glasses on an empty stomach before Hilary arrived, so my judgment wasn’t what it should have been. I was driving, it was getting dark, and I missed a red light on Sunset Plaza Drive as people were trying to cross the street. I had to slam on the brakes fast to stop from plowing into them. We were thrown forward, but luckily had our seatbelts on. I pulled over. Hilary was visibly upset.

“You almost killed those people! What’s wrong with you?”

I thought she was overreacting at the time. I don’t think that now.

I had some conventions lined up in Europe, and they couldn’t have come at a better time. I desperately needed space to gain some perspective on what was going wrong in my life.

Before I left for Europe I’d managed to strike a deal with the Angola prison in Louisiana related to filming
The White Buffalo
. The prison maintains a buffalo herd, and was not only going to let us work with the prisoners who managed the buffaloes but also let us film, lodge, and eat there. By this stage we’d done storyboards, casting, and other preproduction. I’d found my lead boy, which was no easy feat, and I had two men willing to play the uncle. While I was in London I took some time to revise the script. You only have to look at the story and themes in that script to see my whole life laid out. On a deep level we know ourselves, know what’s coming, what our life story is, the lessons we have to learn and relearn. It’s nearly impossible to consciously recognize these things ahead of time, and yet they’re so clear when we look back.

In the story, the boy’s parents were alcoholics. In the opening scene the mother has this flask that she’s swigging from and is trying it keep hidden from the kid while she’s speeding without a seatbelt down the highway.

Right there is my sense of abandonment following my parents’ divorce, my looming drinking problem, and my life starting to run away from me at high speed as I head into the unknown.

In a sense, the little boy was Patrick, as well, with his love of Native American culture. The white buffalo calf, as the center of the conflict, being claimed by different parties for their own purposes, was my soul hanging in the balance between light and dark.

If that sounds a little melodramatic it’s because our inner lives are. We experience sweeping emotions, devastating disappointments, and ecstatic highs, but as we mature we learn to regulate the power of those experiences, to keep the sound of them muffled under a layer of manners and self-censorship. Those learned strategies allow us to deal with the complex range of interactions that life throws at us, but in our inner world these forces are still at work, driving us to courses of action, many of which we only consciously rationalize after the fact. In dreams and in art, as we create, our emotions and experiences resurface, and as we express them they make the drama in the average soap opera look about as exciting as eating cardboard.

The climax of the movie comes when the buffalo’s fate is put in the boy’s hands. I think that in a sense I was asking Patrick to help me find a way through my own inner conflict.

One night in London I went out to dinner at Hush with Roger Moore’s kids Geoffrey and Deborah, who I knew through Hilary. When I was alone with Deborah she told me that she was worried about me, that Hilary told her I was on drugs. I was livid. It was highly unprofessional of Hilary to be spreading gossip about me, especially in an industry where reputation is so closely linked to livelihood. As far as I was concerned, you could call me a drunk—the truth is the truth. But I wouldn’t stand for being called a drug addict. I considered that an unforgivable offense. That night I wrote in my diary: