Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (7 page)

When we arrived in New York, we were met by some staff members from
Seventeen
and a stretch limo. I had never seen a limo up close—now I was riding in one. We pulled up in front of the St. Regis Hotel, in the middle of Manhattan. Walking into that lobby, I was Dorothy in Oz. I dropped my pitiful suitcase at the desk (“We’ll bring it up, Miss.” Miss!) and headed for my room, which was beyond my imagination. I walked around touching everything. A TV! Fancy cashews for five dollars! I wanted to eat them. The bathroom was as big as a station wagon and had white makeup lights all around the mirror. The beds (I had a roommate, another girl from San Diego) were pure luxury, piled high with pillows and comforters that looked like silk. There was gold-embossed stationery in the little desk drawer. Now I knew why the rich were so happy. They had comfy beds, pricey snacks, special paper to writer letters on, and someone to carry their luggage. I tried desperately to sleep but could not. How could I go home with this knowledge and be content? Was it even okay to want a life that looked like this? Was there a way to actually work for it, even if I lost this contest? I started preparing for the crash. I would lose, I would be sent home. It would all become a memory, and when I was old, I’d question whether it really happened at all.

In the next few days, as the
Seventeen
contestants moved through the city together, our every move was captured by a photographer for the magazine. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe, we went to the musical
Grand Hotel
—I sat through the performance in stunned silence. I had never questioned how TV came to be, how movies came to be, or if acting was an actual job, but there it all was, right in front of me. I wanted in, I wanted access. Not as an actor (I knew even then
I’d never have the chops to be an actor), but to be part of putting all this magic together—I wanted to do that. I didn’t expect anyone to hand it to me, but I was frantic to know how to ask for the job. Or what job to even ask for.

As thrilled as I was by Broadway, I was just as thrilled by the food. It was everywhere, and there was a lot of it. Salty pretzels and Italian ices from sidewalk vendors. Hot dogs with mustard and relish from flirty old guys with striped umbrellas over their carts. My favorite eating adventure was at Tavern on the Green, right in the middle of Central Park, rising up and twinkling in the darkness like something Walt Disney had created. Everyone around us was so dressed up, I just knew that people at every table were talking about fascinating things (the fact that many of them were tourists like me never entered my mind). The menu was out of a fairy tale. Baby vegetables. Fancy potatoes, sauces with cream, butter, and wine; herbs and spices I’d never heard of. How long had people been eating like this? How could I decide what to eat? What was foie gras? What was beef en croûte? What was escarole, or shiitake or mascarpone or passion fruit or Napoleons? Why would anybody voluntarily eat raw oysters or snails in a little shell? I ordered an appetizer and an entrée, then I ordered more. Some duck. Some lamb. I wanted to taste everything. I was far, far away from the free-lunch line. When the waiter asked, “May I interest any of the young ladies in dessert?” I answered yes before he even got the entire sentence out. The
Seventeen
staff was cracking up; this was not typical model behavior (or typical magazine editor behavior either, I’d bet).

While we were there, Kathleen Turner walked in.
Jewel of the Nile, War of the Roses.
The first celebrity I’d ever seen. She was regal,
glamorous: it was as though light radiated all around her. In that moment, I knew I’d move to New York one day. There was so much to learn.

The next day, one of our stops was the famous Louis Licari salon for haircuts and color. I had long hair with sun-drenched highlights courtesy of Mother Nature. The
Seventeen
people told me to sit for a while and wait for the other girls to finish up. I’d never had a professional haircut or color, and there was no way I was leaving without a full makeover. I begged, insisted, and then fought with the hair stylist and the staff from
Seventeen
. They finally gave in. The sensation of having your head shampooed by someone else—scrub, rinse, repeat, condition, rinse—is unlike any other. I felt like a princess. In the studio the next morning, being photographed for our cover tries, I kept staring at myself in the mirror. That girl, braces and all, was beautiful. Not only that, they even liked my braces—they told me to keep smiling a big smile “until your cheeks hurt.” Who knew smiling could actually hurt?

On our last day in New York, we met for breakfast in the Rainbow Room, on the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Center. The ride in the elevator made my ears pop; the view of the city from those windows made my eyes pop. On one side, the East River; on the other, the Hudson River. A ship on the Hudson looked tiny; the Empire State Building, twenty blocks south, looked like a toy. I kept waiting for somebody to wake me up and tell me it was a school day and if I didn’t move it, I was going to be late.

All the top agents in New York came to meet with us that day. Representatives from top agencies like Ford and Elite talked with me, and once again, I spoke with Karen Lee from Pauline’s. After Washington, she’d kept in touch with me and Candy just as she’d
said she would, and now, she said, it was time—I was ready. There was a comfort level with Karen. She took an obvious personal interest in me. I knew I was wading into big waters—I’d need someone to play the same role with me that Candy did.

Ultimately, I was one of the finalists in the
Seventeen
contest. I didn’t make it onto the magazine cover, and I didn’t win the Geo Tracker. I told myself it was probably just as well—at that point, my mother couldn’t even afford driving lessons for me, what would we have done with a car? I won another JC Penney gift certificate (which I traded in for cash when I got home, and then went right to the Gap and spent it). Candy got me more local modeling jobs. And my
Seventeen
adventures made it into every publication in Southern California. This had little effect on my social status at school. Well, maybe in the boy department—the Mary in those pictures was not the Mary who sat next to them in class. If anything, it made me even more self-conscious. Modeling school, the work that came out of it, and my dreams for the future—all of that was very private, like something breakable, and I didn’t want anyone near it.

The universe plays tricks. Had I won that car, I never would have met my future husband. That little Geo Tracker would’ve significantly rerouted the course of my life.

My mother’s wild single days
(which weren’t wild at all, of course) lasted barely a year. She met and fell in love with someone, and that someone fell in love with her. His name was Mark, he was a career navy guy—he worked on the flight deck of a carrier at North Island Naval Base in Coronado—and their decision to marry came (it seemed to me) very quickly. My father had remarried as well.
Johnny had a bigger struggle with this than I did, since he’d been living with my dad (and had a much closer relationship to him than I had at that point), and the new stepmother came with two teenagers. My reaction to anything Mom and Dad did increasingly was, “Oh God, whatever.”

I liked Mark. He steadied my mother, he loved her, and it was obvious to anyone who saw them. He, too, had gone through a difficult childhood, with most of the responsibility for his own siblings—to this day, the man won’t eat pancakes because they were a primary food group for him growing up. There seem to be two schools of reaction if you come from that world—you either get stuck in it, or you get up and run. Going back is not an option for us runners. With Mark, I knew that we were safe and that my mother would be cherished for the rest of her life.

Soon after they were married, however, he learned that he was being transferred to Lakehurst, New Jersey (point of interest: this is where the
Hindenburg
went down). Predictably, I threw a fit, which lasted about half a day—Johnny threw one, too, because Mom wanted him to move east with us. The other news came not long after that: Mom and Mark were expecting a baby. That information was hard to take in at first. It was more family (although with the various aunts and uncles and cousins, there was never any shortage of family), but it felt like a different family, and it was all going to happen in a different place. My mother’s last name was different; my new baby sister, a blue-eyed blonde named Suzy, would have a different last name, too. We would be three thousand miles away from where we’d started. And then I heard the thunderclap: New Jersey was just across the river from New York City! Duh.

The new house was standard-issue military housing: two-story
brick, with three bedrooms, and houses just like it up and down the block. Almost immediately after we settled in, I started plotting. I didn’t give much effort to fitting into my new school, and I got a part-time job at Burger King to put more walking-around money into my pockets. Train money, subway money, taxicab money.

Mom and I took the train into New York, where Karen Lee introduced me to Pauline Bernatchez, the agency’s French founder. She had started it in Paris, they told me. All around us, photos and blown-up magazine covers of the world’s most beautiful women graced the walls. The agents gave us a rundown of how things would work; almost immediately, I was sent out (alone) on my first shoot for a teen catalog. I did some fashion shoots for
Seventeen
, I did more catalog work—but the one that amazed me the most in those early days was for gloves. Just my hands in gloves. For one hundred fifty dollars an hour! This is genius, I thought.

Then came winter: dark mornings and short days and navigating my way around New York City in a coat that didn’t protect me. I was always cold, was always being weighed and measured, and was always hungry. I actually believed Fig Newtons were health food—the package said so. My romance with the city wore off quickly, and I pleaded to go back to California. My mother decided that both Johnny and I should go back (primarily, I think, because we were both a pain in the ass). Julie, then only four, and Suzy, the new baby girl, would of course stay with Mom and Mark. The plan: I would live with Grandma Rosa in suburban L.A. (where the modeling agency assured me I would have plenty of work) and go to high school there, and my brother would again live with my dad.

Mom got a cross-country itinerary from Greyhound (not for the most direct route, as we would discover) and put together a suitcase
full of groceries; tearfully, we all said good-bye. I was fifteen, John was twelve. We’d both been working very hard for a couple of years to get away with something and now, it seemed, we’d finally done it. Together, we ate our combined weight in Bugles and Fig Newtons as we made our way west.

Within days of our arrival, Johnny was in San Diego at my dad’s, Candy had cleaned me up and was taking me to modeling open calls, and I finally settled on Bordeaux Model Management for L.A. representation. And I was once again plotting—this time, how to get out of the horrible high school near my grandmother’s. That dear, befuddled woman. I talked her into signing a paper that she didn’t really understand, which stated that I was transferring to another school and needed my records. I then presented the school officials with the paper, they released the records to me—in effect, they released
me
—and that was it. I was done. I packed my bags and took the bus to the Greyhound station without telling my grandma. Then, like a B-movie cliché, I got off at the Hollywood station and never left.

It would take me another ten years of correspondence school to get my high school degree, but before my sixteenth birthday, I was living in a models’ apartment on Hollywood Boulevard and taking care of myself. Well, sort of.

A model’s apartment
(most agencies have them, all over the world) is a far cry from a suite at the St. Regis, but the concept is somewhat the same—you come in from out of town, you stay there while you work, and the agency that either rents or owns the apartment (or, more accurately, rents or owns you) charges your rent against your earnings. The apartments vary in size and quality, but at least you’re always assured of a place to sleep and a fridge to store diet soda, morning-after chilled eye packs, and leftover takeout food.

Our apartment had two bedrooms, and most of the time, I shared one with Luis, a young booker from the agency. Luis loved us girls, but not girls in general, if you know what I mean. He taught me a lot about being a woman. When I first moved into that apartment, I was wearing slip-on Vans; thanks to Luis, when I moved out I was wearing five-inch Vivienne Westwood platform heels.

There were three twin beds in the other bedroom, plus a pull-out couch. The roster of girls camping there changed every few days, and most of them were less than stellar in the housekeeping department. In my experience, there are three main reasons why models don’t make great housekeepers: (1) they usually leave home at a very young age and miss out on Mom’s homemaking tips; (2) they are constantly traveling, and when you don’t stay in one place long enough for the dust to build up, you don’t know it exists; (3) they’re fucking models and they don’t give a shit. They’d wear dirty clothes for days, never wash their bedding, use towels to remove their makeup and then leave them on the floor. Luis and I were tidy in our own corner, but maybe twice a month we’d lose it and take that apartment down. In fact, forget the St. Regis comparison: The models’ apartment was more like the Bermuda Triangle. Agents were scared to step foot in it for fear of disappearing. Some girls slept in their designer clothes, otherwise they’d never see them again. High-end cosmetics evaporated; so did expensive shoes. Food was the biggest mystery of all—you’d get up to answer the door and return to an empty plate that just a moment before had been occupied by a slice of pizza.

My modeling assignments covered the whole range of the junior category in print—catalogs, newspaper circulars, and all the teen magazines, including
Sassy, YM
, and
Seventeen
. I sent all the pictures and magazines to my mother, and called her as often as the scary
long-distance phone charges would allow, reassuring her that yes, I was working hard; yes, I was behaving myself; yes, Candy was still keeping an eye on me; and yes, I was putting all my money into the bank. She had her hands full with two little girls, and I’d become very practiced at BS-ing her. I had an agency allowance of seventy-five dollars a week, appointments almost every day, and no homework. Nobody to tell me to go to bed at a reasonable time at night, nobody to suggest I take a look at the salad and vegetable choices at the diner. Probably just as well—I couldn’t have made healthy choices on that budget.

Los Angeles may have had a weather advantage over New York City, but it did not have New York’s public transportation system and it didn’t have an actual city center, either—it sprawled in all directions. I was always late, or heading the wrong way on a bus or in a cab I couldn’t afford. I got to know some of the local models (or “L.A. girls,” as we were called, because we never wanted to leave L.A., even though L.A. modeling options were and still are crap), and sometimes one of them drove me to and from jobs or castings—Cameron Diaz, Amy Smart, Charlize Theron, and Ali Larter were all starting out at the same time I was, and each was kind enough to let me hitch rides with them. But the agency bookers decided I needed someone reliable to pick me up and deliver me. There was this musician guy, they said. He was in some band trying to make it; in the meantime, he needed a day job. They would pay him eight dollars an hour to ferry me around. Wow, my own driver and a limo, I thought. One day I walked into the agency, and there he was.

It was not a limo; it was an old, boat-sized Chrysler with a bad leak on the passenger’s-side floor. I can’t tell you how many of my shoes that car destroyed. The driver was not Prince Charming or
Sir Lancelot; he was a quiet, soft-spoken young guy with grin lines radiating from his blue eyes. He wore a white T-shirt, Levi’s, and motorcycle boots. And sometimes a jacket, like something a delivery guy would wear: vintage, faded green, with a 7 Up insignia on the front. I still have that jacket. I won’t give it up. His name was Scott Weiland. I had just turned sixteen; he was twenty-three.

Along with the usual assortment of earthquakes and fires, L.A. was experiencing a series of heat waves that made asphalt melt and the horizon shimmer. Looking at Scott as he spoke, I felt my body sway, as though I’d brought the weather inside with me. I was torn between running back around the corner to my apartment or inching my way closer. It wasn’t something that he did or did not do. There was no special look or exchange between us. What I felt, instantly, was unlike anything I’d experienced before, yet I knew exactly what it was. I was hit, and hit hard, with the immediate knowledge that he was the one. I didn’t question, then or now, whether those feelings were a good idea. They just were. Maybe it was the click that comes when you recognize your soul mate, the click that doomed Romeo and Juliet. Maybe I saw something in his face that asked me to love him. All these years later, I lean more toward the latter.

Every day when I knew Scott was coming to pick me up, I talked to myself: Pull it together, Mary. Try to make yourself look at least eighteen. He’s coming, he’s coming. Flipping my hair, I rehearsed dialogue in the mirror. In the mirror, I was always smart and funny and cool. In the car, I went mute. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t look at him. I’d stare out the window, with my stomach looping up and over. Or I’d have the
Thomas Guide: Los Angeles
open in my lap as we figured out where my appointments were.

Neither of us had any real money. For lunch, sometimes we went
to a little Thai restaurant and split a plate of fried rice for a dollar, drowning it in chili sauce to make it taste like anything other than rice that had been in a pot since the night before.

When you sit across a table from someone and share food, you actually have to look at him and, eventually, say something. We talked about music—the Seattle grunge scene was exploding on mainstream radio, so Nirvana was generally the headliner for our conversations, with Alice in Chains a close second. His band’s name was Mighty Joe Young, and they played anywhere they could around L.A.; this is what he’d always wanted to do, and they were working hard to get noticed, to get a record deal and move up to the next level. From the music talk, we went on to share the personal things—how I got to L.A., how he did, and all about our fractured family trees, both of us with remarried parents, siblings, stepparents, stepsiblings, and half siblings. He had a serious girlfriend, he said. I heard that information, filed it away, and did everything I could not to think about it again. Everything else I committed to memory.

Scott’s parents, Sharon and Kent, were California kids, like mine, but Northern California, near Santa Cruz. They, too, married young and divorced young as well, when Scott was only three. His dad was a surfer, and a little wild and crazy. His mom remarried; his stepfather, Dave (who was the furthest thing from wild and crazy, Scott told me—a Notre Dame graduate who worked for Lockheed Martin), adopted him when he was five, and the family moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, outside of Cleveland. He had three brothers, all younger, and he actually sang in the church choir when he was a kid. A little town named Chagrin Falls and a church choir—it all sounded like something out of a storybook to me.

In the summer, Scott would visit his dad in California, and from
the way he smiled at the memories, I don’t think there was much choir practice going on there. Scott credits Kent for being the one who passed on a love for music and singing.

When Scott was fifteen, his stepdad was transferred back to California, and the family moved to Huntington Beach. Scott had played football for his Chagrin Falls school, went west with a strong letter of recommendation from his coach, showed up on the first day of practice all ready to go, and the Huntington Beach coach kind of yawned. As he was talking, I could visualize his first day on that sunny field, suited up for practice, letter in hand, and shot down. Not the most promising beginning.

He played football anyway, kept his stepdad happy, and began to get into the same kind of trouble I did, pulling the “You tell your mom you’re staying at my house and I’ll tell my mom I’m staying at your house” trick. Weekends with his new friends were spent riding bicycles to parties, a fine old California tradition—roll up, the front lawn is covered in bikes, the lights are all on, and the grown-ups are mysteriously someplace else. The other tradition he discovered was beer pimping: break up into pairs and split up, each group hitting a different liquor store. The goal is simple: Get someone who’s old enough to go in and buy you some booze. Scott wasn’t new to drinking, but his new friends took it (and him) to another level. They were also very busy getting to first, second, and the occasional third base with girls. If this had been happening back in Chagrin Falls, Scott told me, nobody had let him in on the secret.

Regardless of how slick they are, teenagers get caught at some point. Scott woke up one morning to find that his friend’s dad had come home early and busted the house full of hungover boys. He
made them each call their parents and confess what they’d done. Scott spent the first month of his freshman year, in his new town, on restriction. Not only was Scott naive, but so were his parents.

One of his friends, Corey, invited him to a barbecue one weekend, where the guys were playing in a backyard band. For reasons Scott’s not quite sure of now (and he sends out a “no offense” to his friend Ross, who is Corey’s brother and was the lead singer), he said to himself, I can do this better than he can. I can write it, I can sing it, and I can do it better.

There’s an argument for being stubbornly unrealistic about your dreams. Otherwise they’re not dreams—they’re just ideas you had once and then left behind. Once Scott focused on music, he never changed his mind. He went to Orange Coast College for two years to please his stepdad, and still never changed his mind. When he asked to take the following year off to focus solely on music, Dave said yes, he’d support that—but only if the band was run “as a business, not a stoner side project.” I don’t know if anybody’s ever actually done a statistical study, but I’d guess the Big Book of Rock History is filled with stories of artists who somehow (if messily) managed to do both.

Scott was
actually the first person to give me advice about boys. I was pretty much a blank slate in that area. I’d never had a real conversation with my mother about boys and sex (and she never had one with her mother, either, which is how I came into the world when she was eighteen). Luis had explained girl mechanics to me, but nobody ever sat me down and said, “This is how boys work.” In
simple language, without freaking me out, Scott did. He was nothing at all like the man people see onstage now, caught up in the music that takes him someplace else—to the casual observer, he was simply my very kind friend. My very kind friend who had me talking to myself in my bathroom mirror.

One morning, Scott was taking me to an appointment, and I was supposed to be a little cleaned up before I got there. There was Chap-stick, lip liner, mascara, and blush buried at the bottom of my school bag. I didn’t have a compact or a mirror; even now, I’m clumsy about putting this stuff on my own face and have always been grateful to the professionals who know what they’re doing. Scott pulled the car into an alley just off Rodeo Drive and Wilshire Boulevard, parked it, and waited for me to get out. “I can’t,” I said. “I don’t know how to make any of this work.” I knew that his girlfriend was a professional makeup artist; turning to him, I handed him the lip liner and said, “Can you do it for me?”

Without a word, he took the pencil and spent the next couple of minutes working on my crooked lips while perspiring like a member of a bomb squad. I wanted him to kiss me. Kiss me, kiss me. I closed my eyes while he worked on my face hoping, wishing, and begging God that he would. He didn’t.

Scott drove for other models, too, and one night, he came over to the apartment to pick up one of them. His band was playing a gig just a few blocks from the apartment; he invited her to come hear them. When I heard this, my stomach sank. He was wearing that green jacket. After they left, I flung myself on the couch and sobbed. I wasn’t old enough to get through that front door. That was the last time I ever let my actual age be a barrier between where I was and where I wanted to go.

The modeling agency
began talking about sending me overseas—to Paris, London, Italy, Japan. This was a big deal, but because I was still a minor, the logistics were complicated. It was suggested that I go to court and become legally emancipated.

I wondered at first if Mom would be hurt, that she would think I was rejecting her. And she certainly asked a lot of questions. But when Candy Westbrook and I explained what was happening, she was, as in all things, practical: I was all the way across the country, I was supporting myself, and I needed to make decisions quickly about an industry she knew nothing about. “This is your chance,” she said. “I never got mine, and I’m not going to deny you yours. Worst-case scenario, you can always come home.”

My mother came west to go to court with me, and Candy came with us as well. The judge spoke with both of them, wanting to be certain this was a business decision, not a family rift or some kind of fight that would harm me in some way. He asked me a lot of questions, too. When the three of us walked back outside, I was a full-fledged legal adult.

Right around the same period of time, newspapers and tabloids flashed headlines about Drew Barrymore going to court to become legally emancipated. Her reasons were entirely different from mine—a bank account some very tricky people were going after, and a much bigger fight about it in a New York court. When I read the story, I thought, Good for her. (Because my emancipation didn’t get the publicity hers did, few people ever knew I could sign my own contracts. “I’ll make sure my lawyer sees this,” I’d say, and rarely, if ever, signed a thing for the rest of my career.)