Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster (7 page)

In my high school, drinking was just what everyone did. Because I grew up just outside of the city known as “the beer capital of the universe,” all one needed to buy a six-pack of beer was two dollars and a hilariously bad fake ID. In the eighties, all this entailed was writing
1965
with a black marker over
1967
on your driver’s license. There weren’t a lot of drugs around, just a little pot, but there was always booze, and lots of it. We mostly drank on the weekends, but as I got older, it became more pervasive. By the time I was a senior, birthdays were just an excuse for all of us to get breakfast at the local Howard Johnson. We would all pour vodka into our glasses of orange juice under the table, and then go to school hammered. I’m not quite sure what the point was; however, we thought it was just fantastic.

I still loved acting, even more than drinking. Most of the time. Even though my biggest dream of becoming a FAMOUS ACTRESS was still all-consuming, over the years I had tacked on another goal: to someday move to my favorite city in the universe, New York, and then become a FAMOUS ACTRESS. When I was a kid, I loved Judy Blume books, but not for the mild pornographic elements that intrigued everyone else. I would read them because they were either set in New York, or in New Jersey, which was right next to New York. In high school, countless hours of
other
were devoted to imagining my future life there.

Even with my continued devotion to
other
, I somehow managed to just scrape through math and science, and for a “former retard” I scored high enough on the SATs to get into NYU’s Tisch School of Drama. Two of my dreams were coming true: I was going to learn how to become a FAMOUS ACTRESS, and I was living in my dream city while doing it.

It was on my very first day of NYU that my life and goals changed forever. That was the day I met the most magical, complicated, and influential man of my life: David. He was my age, but far smarter and turned me on to all things brilliant and fabulous and funny. He was terrifyingly smart, and no one I have ever met in my life has ever made me laugh harder than he did. He adored the film critic Pauline Kael and introduced me to Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Brian De Palma. I’m only slightly ashamed to say that my happiest memories of college were spent in his dorm room (usually smoking pot), watching movies like
Mommie Dearest
,
Imitation of Life
,
The Fan
,
Dressed to Kill
,
The Exorcist
, and
Eyes of Laura Mars.
He remains to this day my favorite stage actor of all time. I sometimes wonder what kind of boring actress I’d be if I hadn’t met him.

Apropos of nothing, he was the first man to ever tell me I was beautiful. He was gay, but when you’ve spent your whole life desperately wishing someone would saw your legs off at the knee, a compliment’s a compliment. Up until then, I had been saddled with the one label all girls fear: I had a “good personality.” Ick. Translation: I was funny, smart, and repulsive. Once I moved to New York City, however, my height started to become a positive thing. It took a while for it to sink in. A tiny, adorable girl would come up to me at a party and say, “I would give
anything
to be your height!” and it was only after I’d say, “Shut the fuck up, you midget bitch,” and she’d burst into tears, that I understood that she’d
meant it.

It was also in New York that I discovered that having a good personality was, in itself, an attractive quality. I was starting to blossom,
finally.
By the time I was in my early twenties, and if I was having an especially good hair day, I could (if one squinted) be described as “decent looking” and occasionally even “striking.” Okay, only my mom called me striking. But gay men? Gay men used words like “gorgeous!,” “stunning!,” and “beautiful!” Which might have something to do with why my relationships with gay men tend to be more successful than my relationships with straight men.

And it all started with David. Also because of him, my ambition slowly morphed into a fierce desire to
be good
. Which, I suppose, included famousness, but to me all that really meant at the time was that people would compliment me a lot, and that I could afford a summer home in Maine.

Looking back, I think one of the happiest times in my life was after NYU, when I was a “Waitress-Slash-Out-of-Work Actor.” Everyone I knew was in the same boat, so it was a tight club of warriors whose members included just about everyone I loved. And hated. And was jealous of. And was proud of. And hated.

We all worked our asses off. We’d hold down miserable jobs and spend every free moment hanging our own lights in some Lower East Side, rat-infested shithole, handing out flyers, headshots, and meager résumés to anyone we could. I was a member of the Atlantic Theater Company, which is now a massively successful and powerful theater and production company. But back then, things were very different. We’d spend our summers in Vermont, producing and acting in plays, and sometimes bringing a play back to New York.

There were three gorgeous blondes in Atlantic who had seniority over me, which meant for four or five years I was Cinderella. I’d be the prop girl, or the assistant director, or sometimes run lines with one of the blondes. Sometimes I was thrown a bone and at the end of the summer I’d be given a role or two in the annual evening of one acts, which is where the playwright Howard Korder saw me perform.

Thank God he did, because when I was twenty-four, he gave me my first “big break.” He decided to let Atlantic produce his brilliant new play
The Lights
, and only because of his insistence that I get cast in one of the pivotal roles. “Rose” was an exceptional part—a bossy, mean, sad, funny, very angry lush. Surprisingly, the role fit me like a glove. We did it in Burlington, Vermont, and I was just ecstatic. I remember thinking,
There’s nothing that can top this!

Turns out, as usual, I was wrong. The producers from the Lincoln Center Theater, Bernie Gersten and André Bishop, came up to Vermont to see
The Lights
and decided to move it right into their small theater, the Mitzi Newhouse, at LINCOLN EFFING CENTER! It wasn’t a smashing success, but it was the moment I was sure I was finally
making it.
I was right this time.

Someone from the Carsey-Werner Company (producers of shows like
Roseanne
and
That ’70s Show
, among many others) came to New York and decided to see the play. The next day, he called my agent to say they were developing a show in the next year or two that starred John Lithgow as an alien and that I might be right for one of the roles.
Wait a minute, sir. Are you saying that in a year, I’d MAYBE be allowed to audition to play an alien with that creepy guy from
Cliffhanger
and
Raising Cain
? What an honor, I’ll just sit here and wait for your call!

Yeah, right, like that would ever happen.

And of course, because I’m always wrong, it did. Once
3rd Rock
became a huge success, one would think that I would’ve been giddy to be showered with the labels that came next. Especially after working so hard. I mean,
hello
! Who the hell wouldn’t? Therefore, imagine my overwhelming confusion and crushing disappointment when I discovered that the words “famous,” “star,” or “celebrity” did not suit me at all. In fact, all they really left me with was an overpowering fear that people would discover what I
really
was: a Freak in sheep’s clothing. They’re labels that bring to mind the kind of gorgeous, perfect, soulless, egomaniacal, self-absorbed people I laugh at and judge just as harshly as you.

Not only that, but it always felt as if they must be talking about some stranger, a fur-sheathed glamour-puss who gets a French mani/pedi every morning, has an entire closet devoted simply to her shoes, and pettily tosses her hairbrush at her maid’s skull whenever the mood strikes her.

One of the most unsettling aspects was to suddenly be considered a babe. After a lifetime of knowing I was a dog, when scripts for
3rd Rock
would say, “All the men can’t speak, Sally’s so hot” or “Sally enters. Jaws drop” and the like, I was honestly baffled and terrified. I was positive that one day the producers would wake up and think,
What the fuck are we
doing
? Let’s see if Brooke Shields or someone
actually
hot is available!
And I’d immediately be shipped back to dogtown, where I belonged.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved doing
3rd Rock.
The acting part. It was just everything else that came with it that threw me for a big fat loop. Honestly, I suppose I just didn’t think the whole “famous” thing through well enough. I assumed that one could be “famous” whenever one felt like it, then go back to normal the rest of the time. It was a sad day when I had to acknowledge that I loved everything about being a FAMOUS ACTRESS except the FAMOUS part.

I’m quite aware that it’s probably a bit of a stretch for anyone to feel any sympathy for the trials and tribulations of being “famous,” in fact, I think I just vomited a little in my mouth, so I won’t loiter here long. But before I move on, have any of you ever marveled at the sheer number of “famous” people who, since pretty much the dawn of show biz, have been cursed with drug addiction, sex addiction, or alcoholism? Or who’ve purposely sabotaged a career most people would (and do) murder to have? Or who’ve died a horrible, early death? Very often all of the above?

It has definitely struck
me
, but then one of my favorite books of all time is
Hollywood Babylon
by Kenneth Anger. When a highly sensitive person with low self-esteem and a deep-seated need for approval becomes overnight famous, is suddenly “celebrated” everywhere they go, is stalked by knuckleheads with long-range lenses, and then is given truckloads of disposable income, the end result can be a human being who is simply a shell, a hologram of who they once were. They are now creatures consumed by an unrelenting emptiness that nothing will fill.

It was my very real fear of becoming this hologram that inspired me to hand my ass back to New York the second my time as a Famous Hollywood Celebrity ended (in other words,
3rd Rock
was canceled). I just wanted to go back to acting in plays, which is what I was doing before I was sidetracked by that damn alien show. I started getting roles I could have only dreamt of when I was a kid, in brilliant plays. I loved it.

Unfortunately, people in Hollywood confuse “having a theater career” with being dead. “
I totally saw a
Dateline
about her last year. How sad is it that they never caught her killer? Hon, we’d like two Cobb salads, please.
” To those who didn’t think I was dead, I was labeled “A Has-Been.” Which is
totally
different from being dead. I think.

Ah, what the hell did I care? I was doing what I loved! Rehearsing (
drinks after with the cast
), performing (
drinks after with friends
), auditioning (
if I got the role, drinks. If I didn’t, more drinks
). Enormous dinners at midnight (
drinksdrinksdrinks
). I gotta tell you, for a while there it was fun, fun, fun. Until my devotion to an incredibly unhealthy lifestyle blossomed out of control, as did my ass—and I became fat, fat, fat.

At the time, however, I was convinced I was simply “bloated,” which for some insane reason, I found preferable to “fat.” Therefore, when I was occasionally dubbed “a
Fat
Has-Been,” I was filled with righteous indignation. “That’s
Bloated
Has-Been to you,
National Enquirer
!” Thank God I gracefully graduated from that label era, which I stupidly assumed was as bad as it was gonna get for me. I mean,
a Fat Has-Been
?

Yucky, right?

Turns out, a few brand-spanking-new (and far worse) labels were breathlessly waiting for me just around the corner, absolutely giddy with anticipation.

Up to this point in my life, I had convinced myself that I was a fairly “tough broad.” When confronted by anything terrifying (or when simply confronted by anything), all it took was twenty-four hours of weeping on my kitchen floor combined with a bottle of painkillers and a box of red wine, and the next day I’d be good as new.

But because I’m the direct result of generations of people who believed it was a matter of life or death to keep every single flaw or weakness one may have had strictly to one’s self, I had always found being the object of any press scandal (whether it be true or false) to be devastating. Not to mention terribly mortifying.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s say (and this is purely theoretical) that there was a young lady who hated her thighs. She hid these thighs from everyone, for years. Even with her boyfriend of two years (let’s call him Mr. Wonderful), she continually thought of new and creative ways to hide her thighs from him. When naked, she’d either talk as she backed out of the bedroom, “Did I tell you this hilarious story? About Andy being kicked off the plane? Okay, so Andy says. . . wait, I’ll tell you after I pee.” Or she’d cleverly plant a towel bedside for future coverage. “Gosh, it’s freezing. Oh, thank God, here’s a towel.” This goes on and on. She’s thirty-five years old.

Then, one sunny morning as our heroine was innocently walking her dogs, she happened to walk by a newsstand and was astonished to notice her bathing suit on the cover of a tabloid magazine.
That’s funny, I wonder who bought the same suit as me,
she thought to herself, before it hit her. That
was
her bathing suit. And she was, tragically, IN IT
.