Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (9 page)

When I first moved to L.A.,
I spent a lot of time alone in the models’ apartment. Most of the girls were there only for a few days or were looking for a place of their own. Few were my age, and since I wasn’t going to high school, I didn’t do the hanging-out-with-girlfriends thing; mostly, I slept when I didn’t have a job to go to or watched MTV all day and night. In fact, I watched anything that was on, far into the night.

Living in front of the television set changed
soon after I turned seventeen, and Kristen Zang and Ivana Milicevic came into my life.

Kristen, a model and aspiring actress from Lake Orion, Michigan, came to the models’ apartment the day after my seventeenth birthday—a happy anniversary we still celebrate, seventeen years and counting. I met Ivana (born in Sarajevo but also raised in Michigan) at around the same time, at a callback for a music video, one that required appearing in a swimsuit.

I didn’t mind wearing a swimsuit or lingerie for an actual job, but I was never comfortable walking around less than half-dressed at a cattle call or an audition, so I’d concocted a strategy for any casting that required it. “Gosh, the agency didn’t tell me about that,” I’d say, wearing my hopeful smile instead. “Should I go home and get one?”—knowing full well that nobody was actually going to tell me to do that. Ivana, I learned, felt the same way—she hadn’t brought a swimsuit, either.

This time, the casting director was adamant. “No swimsuit, no audition. Sorry.”

Quickly agreeing that neither one of us could afford to walk away from a potential job, Ivana and I both stripped down to bra and panties (simultaneously). We didn’t get the job, but we walked away laughing, with the beginning of a strong friendship.

We both pulled that “I forgot my homework” trick for years—in fact, I still do. Recently, I was asked if I was interested in going on a call for a nurses’ uniform catalog (in which “show up in a bathing suit” was never mentioned). Work’s work, so in spite of having a two-baby body now, I gamely went off to the audition and walked into a room full of leggy teenagers in tiny bikinis, standing in a long
line hoping for the opportunity to show their books and their assets. I mean, seriously—have you ever met a nurse in a bikini? If you have, you were on the set of a porn flick.

Ivana, Kristen, and I were soon going to the same castings together and quickly earned a reputation not only for cracking ourselves up, but for turning sessions into comedy routines. “We sort of knew none of you was right for this,” the casting directors often said, “but it’s always fun to see you.”

Any pretense to being glamorous artistes or disciplined professionals went out the window. We were kids, and we acted like it—stayed out late, got up late, ate junk, had no fitness routine, and one of us (that would be me) sometimes smoked enough pot to give contact highs to the people who handed us our burgers and fries at the drive-thru windows.

Our first meal of the day was usually at the Sunset Grill on Sunset Boulevard near the Guitar Center. If there was anything on that menu that wasn’t a negative for cardiac health, I don’t know what it was. Even worse, we had to sneak past the modeling agency to get there, whistling the theme song to
Mission: Impossible
and hoping we wouldn’t run into anyone from the office. We’d put away egg-and-cheese sandwiches, race back home, clean ourselves up, then jump into Kristen’s little white convertible VW Rabbit for our various appointments. In a business full of rejection, we managed to laugh it off when it happened, as though we had nothing better to do that day than hit Burger King. Once back home, we’d watch MTV until it was time to go out for the evening, then begin the nightly ritual of getting ready. We changed outfits at least three times apiece before deciding on the final result, put makeup on, wiped it off, then put it
on again, all the while cranking up the volume on the radio or Luis’s boom box—hip-hop was generally the pick: Gang Starr, Nice & Smooth, and 2 Live Crew got plenty of play.

One night, in an effort to assist me with my ongoing quest not to look like a child, the girls came up with a genius idea for giving me boobs—they balled together a mountain of cotton balls and taped them to my chest; over that, I put on one of Kristen’s bras, and we stuffed it some more. Then we added bronzer down the middle of my chest, basically drawing on cleavage. One look in the mirror and we laughed so hard the tears rolled down our cheeks. That was one look that never left the apartment.

Once we were ready, we headed for the Roxbury, Saturday Night Fever, or the Formosa. A friend of ours, Brent Bolthouse, then an up-and-coming promoter (and now a major club owner) held a dinner every Thursday night in the restaurant section of the Roxbury, charging us only ten dollars. If you didn’t have the cash, you could go to Brent’s house during the day and stuff promotional material into envelopes to earn it. Dancing was our main exercise (of course, drinking canceled out any health benefits). Odds were good that we might find ourselves dancing next to Prince, or across the floor from Madonna. This was pre-paparazzi, pre-TMZ, pre-tabloid reporters going through your trash. Sometimes a photographer you knew would ask to take a picture and would give you a copy if you asked. It was fun and relaxed—nobody was going to speed down the street when you left, trying to take a picture of your crotch with his cell phone. Big names rarely go out for the fun of it anymore (photographs are either taken at staged events or by playing “gotcha!” at the grocery store), and I feel a lot of compassion for the kids who do. The paparazzi ruined L.A. nightlife.

One night Kristen was sitting by the open window of the models’ apartment when Nicolas Cage (whose assistant lived across the street) walked by and started a conversation. Nic’s career was already in high gear;
Moonstruck
had come out five years earlier, and he was working constantly. That chance meeting turned into a long-term relationship for Nic, then twenty-eight, and Kristen, nineteen, and it took the Girlfriend Shenanigans Show bicoastal.

Since all three of us had modeling agents in New York, when Nic would go there to shoot a film, we would go along ostensibly for our work as well, staying in whatever five-star hotel suite the film project was paying for, sleeping late, ordering room service, and coming up with trouble to get into at night. In L.A., the house that Nic and Kristen lived in together, up near Beachwood Canyon not far from the Hollywood sign, looked like a castle. In the bedroom there were remote control curtains that turned the room pitch black when closed, no matter how much the sun was shining outside. If Nic was out of town working, the three of us went out all night, came back to the castle, piled into the giant bed, hit the blackout shades, and slept half the next day away. “If there was a sleeping event in the Olympics,” Nic said to Kristen once, “I don’t know which one of you would win the gold.” When we finally woke up, we’d intercom downstairs for someone to bring us breakfast—because the house looked like a castle, we’d order Count Chocula cereal (it had a certain logic at the time).

Nic had a lot of guests at the castle, and one night Jim Carrey was among them. He glanced at a glass-doored cabinet, the top shelf of which held an ornate teapot and next to it a candlestick. “Oh, look!” he exclaimed after less than a second’s thought. “It’s the cast of
Beauty and the Beast
!”

Nic was a generous guy, but different from a lot of the other men we knew—intense, edgy, and not much interested in partying all night. He’d grown up inside the business—his grandfather was a famous movie music composer, his uncle was director Francis Ford Coppola, and Nic’s dad was a literature professor. I admired him for dropping Coppola as a last name when he first started and not using it to open doors.

About my friends’ private lives: L.A. was full of models, musicians, actors, directors, and writers. That’s always been true, and most of the people giving it a shot are kids. From a distance, it can look glamorous (although reality shows are quickly doing what they can to change that perception), but in many ways, it was and is no different from any other workplace or even college campus—young people find one another. You make lifelong friendships with people who have the same goals and the same stresses that you have. You socialize and date and maybe fall in love with the people you meet. Relationships begin, they matter, and then, for all the usual reasons, they come to an end.

I loved going out with my friends, but I wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend—a boyfriend was not part of my Future Mrs. Scott Weiland plan. Sometimes I went on a few dates hoping that something would happen, something to erase my feelings for Scott and the certainty that we’d be together. But I never had much success overriding my own emotions. It wasn’t fair to waste anyone else’s time, and I didn’t want to waste my own. I knew I’d marry him, even when that knowledge had no basis in reality. I simply believed it.

But that didn’t rule out guy friends, and as time passed, I made
some wonderful ones. Eric Dane and Balthazar Getty, for example, came to me as a pair. I was introduced to both of them when we were all out one night, and that was it. Eric and Balt were both getting TV and film work, and Ivana, Kristen, and I were all taking home nice paychecks. I think we found some form of comfort in not needing to put up an adult front. Four or five nights a week, we drank, danced, stayed at clubs until they closed, then we’d wake up the next day, do whatever we had to do for work, meet afterward, and start all over again.

I first met Guy Oseary (who now manages Madonna) when he was dating Kristen, just before she met Nic. I was going back and forth between California and New York for work, and sometimes stayed with Guy in L.A. He called me “Little Mary,” and used to give me self-help books all the time. One of them was called
How to Be an Adult
. If he’d ever given me a pop quiz to see if I’d actually read it, I’m not sure I would’ve passed.

Sometimes, Guy and I had silly phone conversations in the middle of the night, our own version of “Name That Tune,” where one of us would say the name of a band or a song, and the other one had to guess who it was, what it was, and what the label was. I was pretty good, but Guy had an encyclopedic rock brain—no surprise that he later ran Maverick Records. One night, we were on the phone well after midnight when suddenly he said, “Oh my God, Mary, your boy’s on TV!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Scott. Turn on MTV, quick.” And there he was. It was the video for “Sex Type Thing,” Scott’s first single. His hair was short, bleached blond, and the images in the video were violent and scary. He didn’t
look like anybody I’d seen before. That didn’t stop me from wanting to jump right through the TV screen.

There are people
you meet who enrich your life; there are people you meet who steal parts of your life. And there are people you meet who, in one way or another, save you. Or, maybe more important, help you save yourself.

One night at Brent Bolthouse’s birthday party, I was introduced to Anthony Kiedis, the front man for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and we had a sweet, funny chat in the kitchen. I knew the band’s music, and we spent nearly two hours talking about movies, too.

The next day, Anthony called Guy and told him he’d met a girl and was trying to find her. “She was staying here with me,” Guy said, laughing, “but she left today to go back to New York.”

The key to a long-lasting and deep friendship with a rock star is…never ever kiss them. Musicians are used to getting what they want. If you don’t give it to them, they’ll stay around till you do. What can happen during this time is that, as God is my witness, you can become friends.

The first time Anthony called, I thought it was Guy tricking me. We spoke on the phone quite a bit and then he flew to New York, where I was staying in a models’ apartment near the Empire State Building. When Anthony arrived, I answered the door wearing a white T-shirt on which I’d painted the word
trouble
with red nail polish. Attention, men: This is a girl’s way of advertising the kind of girl she is. (Just for the record, the white T-shirt I was wearing when I met Scott was blank.) The plan for the evening was to meet Rick Rubin, the Chili Peppers’ producer, for dinner.

When we got down to the sidewalk, Anthony had a slight look of horror on his face. Our chariot was a block-long stretch limo. He apologized for the ridiculousness of the car and for being the opposite of rock. That was the beginning of our friendship.

And no, I never kissed Anthony. We became close, loving friends. A few years later, he would be a major part of my addiction recovery. Had we never met, I don’t know how or if I could’ve eventually found my way. Anthony often drove me to twelve-step meetings, and we stayed in touch through my various attempts at sobriety. Just hearing his voice over the phone gave me enormous hope on the darkest days—I knew that he’d been where I was and that he’d found a way out. What I didn’t know was that during the times that I thought he was working or on tour, he was still struggling with his demons. It wasn’t until I read
Scar Tissue
, his autobiography, that I understood that all the while Anthony was being my true friend, his own soul was being badly shaken.

I met Steve Jones
backstage at a Sex Pistols concert in 1996, just before I was heading to Japan again. The Pistols were about to start the international leg of the Filthy Lucre reunion tour, and Steve and I kept in touch by phone.

If Steve had not been a musician, I believe his career calling would’ve been comedian. While I was in Japan, his calls often pulled me up out of weariness and the blues and into helpless laughter. When the tour came to Tokyo, I was right there waiting. I saw every show from the side of the stage. And I’m somewhat sorry to report this, but as far as I knew at the time, there were no crazy Sex Pistol antics that took place on- or offstage—I guess that will happen with age.

The Japanese kids were a sweet audience. I’d never seen calm and gratitude at a punk show. When the bus got back to the hotel each night, there were always fans waiting for autographs and pictures. One night, Steve was nearly finished signing and taking pictures when he suddenly told everyone to be quiet. The crowd hushed, at which point he let out what I’m guessing was the biggest, longest fart in Japanese history. For a moment, there was silence. Then Steve laughed, I laughed, and everyone else laughed. There have been many reenactments since that day.