Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (42 page)

Cocaine is a very evil thing because of its power to delude you. It deludes you into believing that it can’t hurt you because it’s supposedly not physically addictive the way heroin is. Worse yet, it deludes you into believing that you are better for using it—that
you sing better, talk better, feel better,
are
better, while you’re on it. On that balcony, though, the delusion evaporated, and I was horrified by what I saw. Astrid would try to comfort me: “It’s just that Bill really cares about you, and he wants you to . . . feels you need to stop using. He just wants you to figure that out for yourself.”

I did. At the end of those two weeks, Bill came to me and said, “I want you to know that you are my friend, and that we will always be friends. But it’s your choice now.” I looked at him in that moment and thought that after this, Bill Wyman could run over me with a car and I’d still get up and say, “Thank you,” because he helped me save my life. He showed me myself, and I’ll thank him for that until the day I die.

I stopped using. I went back to London with Bill and Astrid, and though I still made the rounds of the clubs with my friends, I struggled to stay sober. In a deeply painful irony, however, as I got better, Astrid got worse. She’d been able to hide the cocaine she was using from Bill for a long time, but now she was beginning to fall apart. Making the situation worse was the fact that Bill was cheating on her, but unwilling to admit it. Sober myself, I watched in pain as Astrid disintegrated before our very eyes. One night we all went to dinner at Trader Vic’s. Keith Moon and his longtime girlfriend Anita were with us, too. Afterward when we came home, Astrid walked into the bathroom, locked the door, and slit her wrists. It was horrible. We had to find a doctor who would come in the middle of the night because if we took her to a hospital, it would be all over the press within hours. As it was, whoever came would find the room filled with “rock and roll royalty”—the Who and the Rolling Stones. I found a doctor who would come, and I got cash to pay him with. We bound Astrid’s wrists until the doctor got there and sewed them up. Afterward I paid his fee and some hush money in cash, warning him not to tell anyone what had happened that night. It was my mother all over again; I was fifteen years old and calling the doctor to come and take care of Miss
Garland privately at the hotel. God knows, I knew what to do in a situation like that. At that moment part of me wished I weren’t sober. I wanted something to dull the pain.

Whatever pain I was feeling was nothing compared to Bill’s, however. He watched in agony as a sixteen-year relationship crumbled under the pressure of Astrid’s addiction, and he felt partly to blame. Bill and Astrid were so much in love; I’d always thought of them as the perfect couple, the two people in all the world who would always be together. The night she slit her wrists, Bill and I went walking through the streets together afterward, and when we came to an alley, Bill just collapsed in sobs, saying, “I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know what to give her, how to make her happy.” I put my arms around him, and he sobbed on my shoulders. I was frightened. This was serious.

A few days later Astrid agreed to go to a clinic, but it didn’t work. Once she came out, the cycle started all over again. She was in and out of clinics for a while, and Bill tried to hold onto hope, but the relationship was doomed. It was so painful to watch him struggle to come to grips with the truth. The man who had rescued me from addiction was helpless to save the woman he loved.

Eventually, the relationship collapsed, but fortunately Astrid did not. She was able to get sober and, ironically, was among the first of her friends to do so. She lives in Los Angeles now and works with a rehab clinic there. She’s happy and in good health. I have always admired Astrid’s strength and courage, and love and respect her deeply. Bill later married Suzanne Costa, and they now live in London with their two beautiful children. Bill eventually quit the Stones. He and Astrid still share a deep affection in spite of the pain they caused each other, and they’ve remained in contact over the years. But even now, twenty years later, I remember their breakup as one of the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed.

I
t was about that time that a new neighbor moved into the cottage behind our flat. The new neighbor’s name was Christopher Reeve.
I’d seen a picture of Chris that the
Superman
producer’s wife, my friend Skye Aubrey, had brought over to show me. No one besides a few soap opera fans had heard of Chris until he did the movie, but even in photos, he was cute. He was even cuter in the flesh—or should I say, in the spandex. I nicknamed him “Crittifer Reeb.”

Chris had never been to England and didn’t know a soul, so we would invite him over to our house to spend time. I’d watch his dates come in and out of his house as I stood at my kitchen window, and I’d give Chris a thumbs-up or thumbs-down rating on his women, which he thought was hilarious. When he brought Gay home for the first time, his former lady and the mother of his kids, I gave him the big high sign because I thought she was great.

Meanwhile, I was having fun running around with the
Superman
crowd. With my career in low gear and drugs off-limits for me, there wasn’t much to keep me busy during the day.
Superman
provided a pleasant distraction. Richard Donner, an old friend of Jack Haley Jr.’s and a talented director, was directing the film. I spent a lot of time on the set or with the cast. Dick used to make us all laugh on the set. When it was time for Chris to do a take, Dick would always scream, “Hey, you in the tights! Get over here!” When it came time for Marlon Brando to shoot his part as Superman’s father, I was very excited about going to the set to watch. As a child I’d known Marlon Brando as George Englund’s friend, when Joe and I hung out in Cloris Leachman’s kitchen on Rockingham Drive, but I’d never seen him as an actor, and I looked forward to seeing a screen legend in action. What a disappointment he turned out to be. When it came time for him to shoot, there were cue cards everywhere with his lines on them. He had only about seven lines in the film, but he hadn’t even memorized them. Instead he had to read them.

I became close friends with Valerie Perrine, who played a villain, and with her new boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. It was the first time I had met him. Dodi was only nineteen at the time, the son of Mohammed al-Fayed, super-rich future owner of the department
store Harrods, in London. Valerie was thirty-three and a little embarrassed about her young boyfriend. She needn’t have been; Dodi adored her, and he treated her like a queen. Dodi was sweet, eager to please, and he did everything in his power to woo this glamorous older woman. Every time he came to pick her up, he drove a different car. After a month or so of this, Valerie asked him where he was getting all these cars. At his home in London he took her down in the elevator to the basement and showed her. The entire bottom level was a huge garage, filled with expensive cars of every imaginable type. Valerie was floored.

Dodi then asked her what car she wanted to go out in that night. Looking around the huge basement, she quickly spotted her choice. “That one,” she told him, pointing to a white Rolls-Royce. They climbed in and were off for the evening.

Dodi later got a lot of criticism when he began dating Princess Diana. No one seemed to think he was good enough for her, and the press had a field day with him, portraying him as a heartless playboy. That’s not the Dodi I knew for twenty years. The man I knew was warm, funny, generous, and a faithful friend to me and several other people within my circle. I always knew I could call Dodi anytime, anywhere in the world, and he would be there for me. He never left town without making certain his friends had all of his emergency numbers—just in case we needed him. I still have them all listed in my organizer, accurate up to the day he died. Valerie enjoyed every moment of her relationship with Dodi. She used to tell me wonderful stories about their times together.

I loved being with Valerie; she has always had a wonderful sense of humor. One day Jake and Valerie and I went shopping in London. I had my heart set on a very beautiful Yves St. Laurent cape. Jake said he’d buy it for me, but when he saw how much it cost, he hesitated. “It’s too expensive,” he said. I got really upset at him, because I’d thought he was going to buy it for me and all of a sudden he was backing out. We left the shop and walked down Bond Street a little way and went into a shoe store, and when we
got inside, I discovered that my purse was missing. “This is just great,” I thought, “my purse is gone, I didn’t get the cape, I’m having a wonderful day.” I burst into tears. Jake felt so bad, and so guilty, that he took me back to Yves St. Laurent and bought me the cape. The three of us walked back out, and Jake hailed a cab and left to go to a meeting.

As Valerie and I stood together at the curb, watching the cab drive away, she leaned over quietly and slipped my purse into my hand. I looked at her in astonishment and said, “You mean you . . .” She had taken my purse and hidden it under the heavy coat she was wearing. Valerie said, “You got your cape, didn’t you?” Valerie and I laughed all the way home. I couldn’t stop giggling. When Jake got home, he couldn’t figure out what was so funny. The next day Valerie called, and I pretended the police had found my purse. I wasn’t about to tell Jake the truth. He’d make me take the cape back.

By the time
Superman
wrapped, I was getting awfully homesick for America. London had begun to wear thin. There had been a lot of in-fighting among the Arrows, and the result had been that Jake found himself out of the group. Jake met a guy named Paul Vigrass who had also broken away from a musical group, and the two of them were planning to team up and form a new group, but so far nothing had come of it. My career was stalled, and I didn’t see much hope of jump-starting it in London just then. Besides, I’d been in London for two years by 1978 and was just plain homesick for America. Jake and I talked it over and decided to go to New York for a week, just to visit and see what was going on there. The plan was for us to stay with Alan and Arlene Lazare in New York for a week or two while we decided what to do next. So we bought our tickets, flew to New York, and moved in temporarily with the Lazares.

T
he Lazares are my oldest and dearest friends in New York. I’d first met them a few years before—when I was doing
Promises,
Promises
—at a Halloween party at the Friars Club one night. Everyone was in costume, and Alan was dressed up as a mad doctor, which was especially funny since he really is a doctor. He was wearing his white medical jacket with lots of fake blood on it, a lunatic mask, and had a rubber amputated hand in his pocket. I was with a wonderful actor friend named Noel Craig, and we hit it off with Alan and Arlene right away. We all started talking, and at the end of the evening, Arlene asked us if we’d like to go to dinner with them the next night. I looked at Noel and said, “What do you think, Noel? We haven’t actually seen this guy without his mask. No telling what he looks like.”

Noel said, “Yeah, why not?”

So we all went to dinner the next night. And the night after that. And the night after that. We had a wonderful time, except for one thing: Alan still hadn’t taken off the mask. There he was in his nice suit, still wearing that stupid mask. It was like going out with the Phantom of the Opera. After a while I began to think he was slightly nuts, so I asked him, “What are you doing? Why are you still going around like the mad doctor?”

Alan said, “I am a doctor. No, really. A periodontist.” Eventually he did take off the mask, and Arlene explained that the gag was just Alan’s quirky sense of humor. Under the mask was a very dear and very bright man.

No sooner had Jake and I arrived at the Lazares’ apartment from London that winter than Alan asked us if we knew what had been going on in New York. I had no idea what he meant. So he told us that a new club had opened about a month before, and that it was wildest place he’d ever seen in his life. “A guy named Steve Rubell runs it,” he told us, “and the man is crazy. I mean, really crazy. The whole place is pandemonium.”

“What do you mean, he’s crazy?” I asked him.

Alan said, “He only lets certain people in. He’s put up a velvet rope and staked the place out with bouncers so he can control who comes in.” I was floored. I’d never heard of anybody doing that.
Alan continued, “Listen, if I can get this guy on the phone, will you talk to him and convince him it’s really you? He knows your sister, and if you talk to him, I’m pretty sure he’ll let you in.”

Intrigued, I said, “Okay. I guess so.”

Alan made some calls, and a few minutes later he handed me the phone and I heard a nasally voice on the other end say, “Lorna, is that really you?” Then Steve said, “If you want to come on down tonight, I’ll keep an eye out for you. You can come in.” And after a very brief and rather bizarre conversation, he hung up.

I still thought this was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard of, but I was more than a little curious to see the place. Party girl that I was, this newest and hippest of clubs was intriguing. After I got off the phone with Steve Rubell, we all went to dinner and then took a cab to the new club. As we pulled up a block or so away, I got my first glimpse of Studio 54. I was astounded. In the streets surrounding the club stood hundreds of people, blocking off the intersection, all hoping to get into the Studio. It was staggering; I’d never seen anything like it in my life, and I thought I’d seen everything by then. A man Alan identified as Steve Rubell was standing on a platform outside the club, where he could see over the crowd and choose the people to be admitted. Alan grabbed my hand tightly, said, “Here we go,” and started pushing forward through the crowd. Jake and Arlene followed close behind. As we neared the platform, Alan began shouting, “Steve! Steve, I’ve got Lorna! Here she is!” Steve heard the shouting and gave his people orders to let us pass. We shoved our way through the crush to the doors, and someone let us in. For me, walking through those doors was like entering the gates of heaven. I’d reached the Promised land.