American Prince (31 page)

After a while, the girls I hung out with were all using. It was a perfect environment for disaster. There were times when I’d be at some girl’s apartment and all I wanted to do was go back home, but I was too fucked up to move.

One time I went to an apartment on Fountain Avenue to buy cocaine. During the transaction, the gentleman I was buying it from reached under his desk and pulled out a .45-caliber handgun. He cocked it and laid it down on the desk. That was all he did. Maybe he was just trying to make sure I didn’t try anything funny. I kept my cool, made my purchase, and got the hell out of that apartment.

After he shut the door behind me, a door down the hall opened, and a girl poked her head out and said, “Hey, come here.”

I walked down to her and said, “Yes?”

“How much did you buy?” she said.

She obviously knew what the score was, so I didn’t play stupid. “Five grams,” I said.

She said, “I’ll give you a blow job for half a gram.” That happened to me more than once. Sometimes I’d go along, and sometimes not.

I remember another coke dealer who went by the street name of Madison. If a girl was around, sometimes Madison would pull out a pipe, take a hit, suck in a deep breath, and motion for the girl to come closer. He’d then blow the smoke into her mouth and give her a kiss. What a despicable thing I was involved in.

In my new environment, with my new friends, everywhere I went somebody had a gram or more. They’d put it in your hand, and each nostril would get a shot. It would give you a rush, and then twenty minutes later—if it took that long—you were craving more. Cocaine, it turned out, was not addictive: it was
very
addictive.

If you wanted sex during the 1980s in Hollywood, you needed only one of two things: cocaine or money. If a girl was addicted she was probably going to need a couple of hundred bucks to pay the rent because her rent money had already gone up in smoke. All you had to do if you wanted to have sex with her was give her money or coke. If you went to a party and flashed a gram bottle, you knew you were flaunting a commodity that every girl at that party wanted. Guys I knew really well—actors, producers, writers—were all using cocaine as a way to compete for girls.

After I began freebasing, my life got even stranger. I’d wake up in a room I didn’t recognize, in a house I couldn’t remember going to. I probably remembered the girl, but she was already gone; maybe she had left me a note, or maybe not. If I was making a movie, I’d get myself together and go to the studio. How I made those pictures, I’ll never know, but I’m proud that I was able to manage it. When it came time to work, somehow I was able to dispel all my distractions and all my weaknesses.

To escape from myself on the weekends, I went to the only drug-free safe haven I knew: Hefner’s. At Hef’s I’d watch a movie, eat some dinner, and flirt with a beautiful woman.

Some friends and I even created our own little place where we could take drugs anytime we wanted to. A hairdresser to the stars owned a little place in LA called The Candy Store. It had a doorman, and to get in you had to say the password, which changed every couple of days. In front the place sold candy—Tootsie Rolls, lemon drops, stuff like that—and in back was a disco with a small dance floor. I was the president of the club, and I had the best time. And the worst.

Being an addict gives you a peculiar mixture of thoughts and feelings. On the one hand, your body is crying for relief. On the other, when you’re freebasing cocaine, you feel extraordinarily good. Your life becomes much more intense. The candle burns very brightly. Yet you can see the damaging effects the addiction is having on you. You know that what you’re doing isn’t good for you—you know that it’s killing you, really—but you don’t stop. I knew that my cocaine use was hurting my looks, which was my stock-in-trade as a leading man. When the face that looks back at you from the morning mirror is puffy and haggard you start thinking to yourself,
Now I’m in serious trouble.

I wasn’t so addicted that I couldn’t make the few movies offered to me. My problem was that the movie offers were still few and far between, and now I needed all the money I could get—I had three ex-wives, six children, and a cocaine habit to support—so I was even less choosy about the work I did. And that was killing me. At times like this it wasn’t easy to remember that all I’d ever wanted to do was be in the movies.

In 1982 I worked in a movie called
BrainWaves.
Keir Dullea of
2001: A Space Odyssey
played the husband of a comatose accident victim, and somehow I, the surgeon, had given the wife the brain of a murder victim. The movie, which was awful, took twelve days to shoot. I had a hard time during filming because I was using really heavily.

Othello, the Black Commando
was next. I got the part of Iago because Tony Perkins, the actor they had hired to play the role, died. Max Boulois, the producer and actor who played Othello, called me up and said, “We’ll give you three hundred thousand dollars to come and do this movie.”

I said, “I’ll be there.” I got the money up front, but after paying me and covering other expenses, it turned out that Max didn’t have enough money left to make the picture. He said, “I’ll give you fifty percent of the picture if you give me back some money.”

I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t do that.” The movie was a bomb and so was my next film,
Balboa,
in which I played a scheming real estate tycoon. During the shooting of
Balboa,
I made the work bearable by chasing some of the beauties who played beach girls. My teenage son, Nicholas, stayed with me for part of the shooting of the picture. I was hitting on the girls and so was he. A chip off the old block.

Sonny Bono, a smart and funny man, appeared with me in the film. I liked Sonny very much. While I was living at the Keck estate, Sonny had come to me and asked if he and Cher could buy it. Since I didn’t own it, I couldn’t sell it. I could have exercised my right to buy it for three hundred thousand dollars and Sonny and Cher could have bought it from me, but Sonny thought that was too convoluted, so he passed.

I had worked with the two of them a little when I appeared on
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour
in the 1970s. I knew the couple had their problems. Cher was angry with Sonny, but Sonny loved her through it all.

Cher’s unhappiness stemmed from her desire not to be part of an act. She thought she could do better on her own, but for years she subjugated herself to the act for the sake of their marriage and their careers. She stayed with Sonny until she couldn’t stand it anymore. After they split, nobody expected Sonny to achieve anything, and at first it looked like they might be right. He did bad movies like
Balboa
until he gave acting up for politics. He became mayor of Palm Springs and later a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. I was glad for his success, knowing what a decent guy he was.

My next picture was
Where Is Parsifal?
The producer was Alexander Salkind, who also produced
Superman.
Peter Lawford and Orson Welles were my costars. The movie was a longer version of an hour-long television show about love, hate, and chasing women. Alex Sal kind was married to Berta Domínguez, who herself acted in the film. Berta was short, stocky, and older than Alex, who had to be in his sixties, and I was supposed to be her lover. Everyone was miscast in this film, including me. Of course, whatever Berta wanted, Berta got. She might stop shooting at two in the afternoon and have lunch or go see a girlfriend. When I saw her car coming back, I’d yell, “Here she comes,” and then we’d all go back to our places.

Orson Welles played Klingsor. In one scene I was supposed to talk to him while he sat in the backseat of a car, but Orson was so big that he couldn’t get out of the car. They had to have a special door made for him.

In one scene my character was having a conversation with Orson’s character. The director said “Action,” and I gave my line, and then the director yelled “Cut,” and asked me to do it again.

Without bothering to whisper, Orson said, “Tony, when you say it this time, change it. Make it a little funnier.”

I said, “You think so?”

He said, “You know what you want to say. Make it funnier.” So I did, and the director liked it better. Orson was right. Can you imagine getting direction from a genius like Orson Welles? For the rest of the film I inserted little pieces, interwove them in the dialogue, and it turned out fine. I enjoyed getting to know Orson off the set too. When he came to LA we’d have dinner at Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant. Orson would sit at the end table, where he was able to come and go as he pleased without anyone seeing him. He’d bring along a little dog that would bark at me.

“Orson,” I’d say, “he’s going to bite me.”

“Well, bite him back,” Orson said. “Fuck him.”

During the time I stayed in London making
Parsifal,
I spent a lot of time driving around at night looking for cocaine, descending into the depths of the city, looking for the drug I couldn’t live without.

When I returned to LA, I kept meeting girls who did cocaine, and I kept providing it to them. I lived aimlessly, using coke to numb myself to the sad state of my career. I was very lucky that Nicolas Roeg, a fine film director, asked me to play Senator Joseph McCarthy in the movie
Insignificance
in 1985. An actor by the name of Michael Emil played Albert Einstein, Theresa Russell played Marilyn Monroe, and Gary Busey played Joe DiMaggio. I liked my fellow actors a lot, and the script was wonderful. It was a good moment in a period that was otherwise memorable only for the depths of my despair. I was slowly killing myself, and I knew it. But I kept right on going.

My last film for what seemed like an eternity was
Club Life,
also known as
King of the City,
a musical thriller about a bouncer, which was released in 1986. After that, I simply could not get a fucking movie job. I wasn’t offered anything for the longest time, which was a terrible blow to me. I missed the action, I missed the money, but the thing I missed the most was just making movies.

M
y career didn’t
fall on hard times because of cocaine. Everyone was on coke. Maybe it was because, at the age of sixty, I was no longer a young man. That was when I began to see the sad truth about having devoted my life to my profession. I had given the movies everything I had ever since I was a kid, saving nickels and dimes from shining shoes so I could go see Tyrone Power at the Loews theater in the Bronx. Once I got to Hollywood, I gave it my all. I learned my lines; I did my own stunts; I tried to save the studio money. I could make movies quickly and easily. I could even make the actors around me better. But when an actor reaches a certain age, that’s it. The movie business is not a profession for old people, not if you’re in front of the camera.

By this time I began to see the value of having a backup plan for my acting career. I just wanted to hang around a set and be part of it. If I had planned ahead better, maybe I could have kept working as a makeup man or a screenwriter or a producer. But now it was too late for me to do anything about that. I was out in the cold, utterly miserable, and feeling hopeless. If my life didn’t turn around soon, I wasn’t going to have much left to turn around.

My attorney, Eli Blumenfeld, was the one who arranged for me to check into the Betty Ford clinic. He was the one who drove me from LA to Palm Springs, where the clinic was located. During the trip I fantasized about what going to Betty Ford would be like. I pictured bungalows with a nice lawn and a swimming pool, a place where I could spend a lot of time resting before I got up in the afternoon and took a leisurely walk. I assumed that after I arrived, the staff was going to give me a special shot in my ass to cure me. I was beginning to look forward to the magic bullet that was going to make all the pain suddenly go away.

I was so wrong. In the real-life clinic, I lived in a room with two other guys, and we all got up at the same time, went for breakfast, did some physical exercise, and then went as a group into a room where we had to talk about ourselves, telling everyone why we felt we needed help. There was no shot in the ass, and the staff didn’t cure you. You cured yourself by examining the reasons why you wanted to take drugs and alcohol and by sharing those reasons with people just like yourself. You had to dig deep in your soul every day and bring whatever you found there into the light.

I didn’t say much for the first couple of meetings; I just sat back and watched. In our group, some guys were dressed like they were going to a country club, but there were also guys who were store clerks and stevedores. I couldn’t understand how those guys could afford it. Betty Ford was expensive, so much so that there were times when I was more concerned with the cost than I was with my recovery.

When I was asked to speak, I told everyone about my childhood and what drugs I was doing, but I didn’t say too much more than that. I wasn’t very open at first because I didn’t want to come off worse than the guy sitting next to me. Everybody was like that; we started off by being cautious, but as time went on, we all got down to the real story. Fuck it. I was a prick. I was mean and ornery while I was using. Don’t come to me if you have a problem. I was in the depths of Dostoevsky, and in a perverse way, I enjoyed it.

We spent the first five days discovering what was really bothering us. We did this by talking it over as a group. You can sit around and think about your problems all you want, but somehow you don’t really face them until you tell someone else about them. One time I told the group, “My mother used to beat the shit out of me, and I hated it. I would hide under the bed so she wouldn’t find me.” These were the facts that I was hiding from, the experiences that made me feel small and helpless no matter how much I accomplished in life. Once I understood that certain events in my past were the source of the anger and self-loathing that had led to my addiction, then I could begin to work on the addiction itself.

After a couple of weeks I started to come to grips with how I really felt about everything that had happened to me. Dealing with all of that old pain was really difficult, but I felt the bitterness slowly start to recede. At the end of the twenty-eight days, I felt my fears slowly dissipating. The clinic counselors helped replace those fears with new thoughts and ideas about how to live life and be happy without having to rely on drugs to do it.