Kiss and Tell (10 page)

I started dodging and weaving, going in and out of side streets like we were in some kind of movie. I don’t know what I was thinking… that I could lose them? Not likely. It was so silly. We made it to my apartment, where I showered and packed an overnight bag. I figured whoever was following us would be gone by then, so I took off for the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Peter was staying, and didn’t think any more about it. The next morning, as I was coming through the lobby, I saw one of Hef’s security guys standing by the front doors, waiting for me. I just said, “Oh, good morning.” That was pretty much the end of that relationship. It was clearly not working out for either one of us.

Hef was a great boyfriend. He was always loving and supportive, but hey, he wanted a girlfriend with him at home. He wanted what he wanted; I wanted what I wanted. There was no terrible, bitter breakup—nothing traumatic at all. It was a chapter in both our lives that was over. I wasn’t going to cry about it. Well, not much. I think a huge mistake many women make is to think,
Okay, I’ve found the guy, and now I’m going to change him.
Women find a guy and try to change him, but he never does; men find a woman and hope she won’t ever change, and she always does. As a woman, to hope you will change a man—that’s a fool’s game. Hef wasn’t going to change for me. There wasn’t going to be any more compromise on either side.

During our year and a half together Hef had given me many fabulous gifts—but especially confidence in myself. He made me feel tremendously important and valued. He treated me like an adult and asked my opinion about things, engaged me in conversation, and never treated me like a doll. I owe him big. He did a great deal for me: for my sense of self, for my finances, and I would even say for my sense of morality, though that’s certainly quite subjective! He even supported me through our breakup: He paid my rent and gave me Louis XIV furniture for my little apartment. We split the dogs we both loved and stayed in touch. We remained friends; I missed him a lot, and I visited him frequently.

I landed a job as a regular on a soap,
Days of our Lives,
and things calmed down a little. I was on my own, for real this time.

JOSH TAYLOR PLAYED MY LOVE INTEREST ON DAYS OF OUR LIVES. WE HAD FUN TOGETHER, AND WERE AMONG THE FIRST TO START MAKING OUT IN STRANGE PLACES (I.E. ON THE BAR) ON DAYTIME SOAPS.

Chapter Seven

Sexy in the City

S
hortly after I moved in with Tracy and Cindy, my sister and I decided to move into a different apartment on our own. We found a place on Burton Way in Beverly Hills, where we lived next door to George Hamilton. In addition to the role on
Days of Our Lives,
I started getting a lot of work guest-starring on shows like
Fantasy Island.
I still saw Hef pretty regularly, while attending screenings and parties at the Mansion, and he continued to help me with all sorts of things, depending on how I was doing. Sometimes I was lonely and missed him. Soon after our breakup, he acquired a new girlfriend, the polar opposite of me. She was pretty, with dark hair and eyes, and rumored to be unstable and a little wacky. Well, maybe not
that
opposite of me! They had a tumultuous relationship, which was evident later in a palimony suit brought by her against Hef. As for me, I never saw Peter again after leaving the Beverly Wilshire that morning. I was done with that, too. The set romance was over.

I was enjoying my freedom. It was the early eighties in L.A. and everybody was on some kind of drug. So many people were doing cocaine back then, you couldn’t find anybody sober. Even the casting agents were high. I was running around town, burning through my money, buying friends left and right. I had a few casual dates during this time, and a few strange ones, too, including a five-week relationship with producer Robert Evans, though I don’t think he even remembers it! I barely do. He was debonair and charming, and I remember he wanted me to dress differently and gave me his silk shirts to wear. I think he did that with every girl after Ali McGraw! Odd, but—whatever. He was a fun distraction for a little while.

Around this time, 1983, I went off to shoot a film,
Hot Dog… The Movie.
It was really a great little cult movie, very popular when it was released. Part of its appeal might have been that you could see everyone’s breasts, but probably more important were the Olympic-caliber ski doubles that were featured. Everybody thought the skiing sequences were so authentic; we were all very into the sport part of it.
Hot Dog
marked my first time appearing naked in a movie. It was a very strange experience.

I was not anxious to appear totally nude. If the audience could catch a glimpse while I walked by onscreen, that was one thing, but I didn’t want to do the Annette Bening number where you just stand there naked talking for a few minutes—remember
The Grifters?
I just wasn’t that brave yet. First of all,
Hot Dog
wasn’t a high-enough quality film. The funny thing is, the bigger the movie, the more willing most actresses are to run around naked. That’s interesting, because a higher-quality, bigger-budget movie draws more people to see it, and therefore more people see you naked. As an actress in a low-budget film, you debate,
Hmmm, I don’t know if I want to show my tits, it’s not a very good movie.
But
Hot Dog
was the best role I was offered at the time. When you’re at that stage, you just try to be the best actor in the project. I was going to do a good job and not worry about the writing and the plot and all that. I was just a peon.

So, there I was in the hot tub with my costar, shooting my first nude love scene, and there was a problem: he kept getting an erection, which the director kept seeing emerge above water. I was taken aside and told, “Look Shannon, you’ve got to help us out, because we have to keep shooting this over because we keep getting a glimpse of his thing.” Immediately I shot back, “Oh, you can see my thing but not his thing, that’s how it works?” But that
is
the way it works, so I just used my elbow to keep it down underwater. I’m not sure my costar knew what we were doing, though I’m sure he will now. In the end, only my breasts showed while we were fake-humping. Except in water scenes, I always wore my merkin. Some actors called it a “Barbie patch” because it was usually a nude-colored triangle of fabric taped over the pubic area. Men wore a kind of sock, if you will.

Everything in love scenes is fake, and that’s odd, because the only experience that would be helpful for the scene is really making out with the other person. So when it came to kissing the other actor, I wasn’t sure what I should do. Give him tongue, or not?
Is he supposed to be doing this? Is he taking advantage of me? How can he be getting a boner; isn’t this atmosphere too nerve-racking for that to happen?
Apparently not. Since that first time I’ve done plenty of love scenes, and, even when you don’t really get along with the man you’re doing a scene with, I’m here to tell you that guys are dogs, they’ll get it up for anybody. If a guy ever tells you he can’t get it up because he has a headache or something, take it from me, he’s lying. A man can be in a fake love scene surrounded by crew members making out with a woman he doesn’t even like, and he’ll get it up. It’s just an automatic push-button response. But, just for the record, every love scene I ever did on film was simulated. There was no soft porn, no sex whatsoever.

There were always plenty of guys on the crew standing around, but they were mostly used to seeing love scenes and naked girls. I didn’t mind too much, because everyone had pretty much seen me naked before—I had been in
Playboy,
after all. But it was different moving around nude. I always made sure to have a good relationship with the lighting guy and the cameraman, because in the end they were very important to me. “If you light the cheese on the back of my leg, I will hunt you down and kill you!”—that type of thing. It’s important to get a good rapport going with the crew, and I always did. We got along famously.

On the
Hot Dog
set one particular guy on the crew caught my eye immediately; he could have been a Burt Reynolds double. I really liked him, and he really liked me, so it was full speed ahead. I wanted to have some fun, and we started to have an affair on location at Lake Tahoe. This new guy was so-o-o cute, but something was not quite right. I just couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

When the movie wrapped we both returned to L.A. and carried on with the affair. I gave him a key to my apartment on Burton Way. One night I came home to find him wearing women’s clothes. My first thought was, “Wow, you make a really ugly chick.” What I said was, “My God, where do you go dressed up like that. What do you do?”

Obviously I am not a person who sees something and gets totally uptight and appalled by it or runs away. I go there.
What is this thing that you like? Let me check it out and see.
That’s always been my attitude. If curiosity killed the cat, at least four of my lives must be used up by now. And in the end, sex wasn’t much different, just better for him.

He took me to the Queen Mary, a club where they performed drag shows. Obviously, I was not thinking straight, because once we got there everybody immediately knew who I was. I had a following, and not only that, it turned out I was wildly popular with cross dressers. I thought, “Oh God, what have I done? I’ve been outed or something.” It was very strange to be recognized, to have people come up to me and want to meet me. I learned that there were actually drag queens who wanted to be me. They knew who I was. They’re attracted to strong women, and being six feet tall made me quite an imposing presence. I stood there in the drag club thinking, “What an odd fan base.”

The drag queens were amazingly talented. It was unbelievable how they sang more like Diana Ross and Cher than the real thing. So my boyfriend and I went there a few times, but the novelty quickly wore off for me. I started looking around for new dates. A cross-dresser wasn’t quite the ideal boyfriend material I had in mind.

A few weeks later I started seeing producer Joel Silver, a filmmaker who’s well known for his big blockbuster films. I met him at some movie or fight night at the Mansion. Joel was a vivacious workaholic with a quick wit—all traits I admired. His business partner, Jimmy Iovine, was seeing another Playmate named Vicki. They went on to get married and have four children, and she later became an author, writing a hip guide to motherhood.

I remember walking in Las Vegas once when Joel turned to me and asked, “Why can’t you be more like Vicki?” She was a preppy little brunette, and we couldn’t have been more different in looks or temperament. She’s a great girl, but his comment bothered me. “Joel, why are you dating me if you want me to be more like Vicki?” I was still looking for the right man, and he certainly hadn’t found his ideal girl in me.

One night Joel and I were sitting around his house when we both heard an anguished cry: “I hope you’re happy now!” Then—
tap, tap, tap
—the sound of high heels running away down the driveway. We jumped up to see who it was, and it was my cross-dresser, wearing his high heels. He had been peeking through the windows, spying on me! He had followed me. He was brokenhearted because he thought I was cheating on him, but in my mind what we had was not what I considered a relationship. He was married, for God’s sake, and cheating on his wife in a dress! To this day Joel still tells that “I hope you’re happy now!” story. So embarrassing.

GREGORY HARRISON

Somewhere around this time I worked as a guest star on a television show, and while I was on the lot I ran into Gregory Harrison, who was starring in
Trapper John, M.D.
We had a little liaison. One day he said, “I’m going to go surfing, do you want to come?” I said sure, and off we went with friends to Australia. Somehow his wife, whom he had forgotten to tell me about, found out about this, and called to tell him: “Your shit’s on the driveway.” This was back when actors never told anyone they were married, because then they wouldn’t be considered “hot.” The surf date was suddenly over; he raced back to L.A. because he didn’t want to lose half his stuff, and he’s stayed with his wife to this day, as far as I know. Ah, the power of alimony.

I was batting a thousand at this point and figured I was going to have to start asking “Are you married?” It was quite an active little year or two; I was feeling my oats, having fun. I had some good taste, I had some bad taste, but I was tasting. I had some good judgment, I had some bad judgment, but I never made judgments. “Equal opportunity for all” was my motto. It was great, but I hadn’t fallen in love with anybody, though not for lack of looking. My career was plodding along, but not really shooting up.

Our huge apartment next door to George Hamilton was really too big for just my sister and me. It was also too expensive. I was making good money acting, but my sister and I were going through every dime I brought in. Tracy was dabbling in modeling a bit by now and was leading her own separate life, meeting and hanging out with all kinds of people. She met Chico Ross, Diana Ross’s little brother, through a mutual friend named Ruben, and they dated for a while. On a whim the two of them eloped to Vegas. Tracy told my mom about the wedding by phone but was too afraid to tell me. She thought that I would talk her out of it—I might have tried.

It’s possible that Tracy and Chico felt a bond because they both had famous sisters, the second-banana kind of feeling. To me, Tracy was never a second banana. In fact, I had always wanted to be like her. She was so cute, smart and athletic that people were always attracted to her instantly; she never even had to try. She was just so likeable, everything I wanted to be and thought I wasn’t. I wanted my sister to be happy and forgave her for not telling me about the wedding. It wasn’t like it changed our lifestyle; she and Chico never really lived separately from me for even one day. For a wedding present I gave them my Mazda 626, the one I’d bought in my Toronto days. Chico lost it. Don’t ask me how you lose a car, but that kind of behavior pretty much sums Chico up at that point in time.

Ruben, not Chico, became our roommate in a new apartment on Doheny Drive in West Hollywood. So, along with Tracy, Chico, Ruben, and all my new girlfriends, the party continued. But the yearly Midsummer Night’s Dream party was coming up, and it would soon change my life yet again.