Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (44 page)

Studio 54 really did change all of our lives. It changed our perception of what was normal behavior, and it created a new standard of nightlife that lingers even today. New York had been through a long drab period in the early seventies where people didn’t go out much, because there was no place special to go. Studio 54 changed all that. It was a social phenomenon that came to symbolize all that was unique to the early eighties. It was the ultimate disco, the place every club is compared to until this day. Studio 54 put New York back on the map. People flew in from all over the world just to go there. I still think of the Studio every time I hear my friend Paul Jabarra’s disco classic, “Last Dance.” We lived to be there; everyone would be on the phone the next day saying, “Did you see this? Did you hear about that?” It was insane, of course, and often dangerous, but there was a strange innocence about it, too. The eighties would teach us all hard lessons about the price that is paid for chemical addiction and sexual promiscuity, but in those days we hadn’t heard of AIDS and the term “drug abuse” wasn’t in our vocabulary. That would come soon enough, for me and for so many others.

I
t couldn’t last. It didn’t. Eventually Studio 54 collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. Political pressure began building as the conservative backlash went into full swing and Ronald Reagan’s moral majority elected him to office. The New York police had been willing to ignore celebrity excesses in favor of catching real criminals, but that came to an end when the Feds were called in to investigate Studio 54. They found everything. It turned out that Steve Rubell had been stuffing money into the ceiling of the Studio instead of paying taxes, and the Feds found a fortune stashed away, tax-free. They also found drugs, and they found Steve’s little black books with the records of who had been using what, complete with little “c’s” for “cocaine” next to our names. In short order, they shut the place down. The last party, as it came to be called, was over.

For me, the party would soon be over forever.

© Michael Jacobs

Joey, Liza, and me at the Directors Guild re-release of the restored version of
A Star Is Born,
July 1983.

F
or nearly ten years I had been living my life as if it were one long party. To say I hadn’t been taking my life very seriously is one of the great understatements. I don’t altogether know why. Maybe it’s because for so many years I was “little Lorna,” forced to go to bed while my mother and big sister had all the fun. Maybe it was that I spent my preteen and early teen years with adult responsibilities as caretaker of my mother and little brother instead of just going to the school dances like other girls my age. Maybe it was just the time and place I lived in. I don’t know. Probably it was a combination of factors. Whatever the reason, as my thirtieth birthday approached in 1982, Nature took me into her firm grip. It was time for me to clean up my act.

One night I got really high with a friend from the Studio; even for me, it was a lot of cocaine. So much cocaine, in fact, that I was violently ill the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. After vomiting for three or four days, it began to dawn on me that I really wasn’t having a whole lot of fun. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t been having fun on cocaine for quite some time. For weeks I had followed a pattern of doing a line of coke, retching my stomach out, doing another line of coke, and so forth. For years I’d been able to drink, use, fall asleep, and start all over the next day
with only a few unpleasant recovery hours at most. Now, though, it was taking me days to recover from a night out, and a night out doing what? Sitting in a basement with a bunch of fellow junkies. Every night for years I’d spent hours doing my hair and makeup and getting dressed up just to go sit in the basement at Studio 54 and get stoned. I’m a slow learner, but eventually I do get the point, and as I leaned over the toilet bowl one miserable morning, I said to myself, “What are you doing? Are you nuts? This is definitely not fun.”

I’d never been the lonely drug user who holed up alone with her drug; on the contrary, I used drugs as a social activity, a way to have fun with friends. Unfortunately, though, unlike some of my friends, I’d always been an all or nothing user. Other people could do a line or two of coke at a party and say, “That’s enough,” but I would keep on using until there was no more to be found. Once I started, I couldn’t quit. It was the same with the Lorna Specials I drank; I never drank just one. And to compound the problem, taking too much cocaine left me so high I’d have to take a sedative such as Quaalude to come down again. It was a vicious cycle, and I had to stop. My body was screaming in protest. So I did stop, just like that. I never touched another line of coke.

Physically, it was easy enough. Physically, I felt better the minute I quit. Luckily, cocaine isn’t addictive the way heroin is, and it doesn’t have the long half-life in your fat cells that were such a problem with the medications my mother took. So physically I did just fine. It was the psychological adjustment that was tough. I really wanted the coke, and I knew that if someone put it within my reach, I’d take it. The only way I knew to handle the craving was to avoid the stuff, which meant simply not being around it. I continued going to Studio 54 when it reopened for a while under new management, but now I limited my activities to the dance floor. No more trips to the basement to share the goodies people had with them. I might still have a Lorna Special at the bar on
occasion, but that was easier; I could limit my alcohol intake easily once I no longer needed to balance the cocaine. As for my drug-using friends, I avoided going out with them to places where people would be using, and if they arrived at my house to socialize in the evening with their pockets full of drugs, I’d say, “Sorry, gotta go!” and get out of there as fast as I could.
Avoid temptation
became my new motto. I’d finally learned my limits.

Sick of the club circuit, I turned to summer stock to jump-start my career once more. Summer stock is bread and butter for American actors who need work. Revivals of old plays, especially musicals, are its primary stock-in-trade. Casts filled with former stars and talented second-stringers tour the countryside in the summertime, bringing well-staged professional productions to cities and towns all over America. It’s exhausting but fun, and I enjoyed being back onstage, doing what I do best. In 1979 I’d done
Grease
in summer stock with Barry Williams of
The Brady Bunch
and Gary Sandy, former star of the popular TV series
WKRP in Cincinnati.
Two years later, in 1981, I did the national tour of
They’re Playing Our Song.
I enjoyed the work, I needed it, and the continual touring made it easier for me to stay away from the dangers of the old Studio crowd.

I even quit smoking that year. I’d never been a heavy smoker, but still, nicotine was just one more stimulant in my body. That little light dawned during a performance of
Grease
one summer in Ohio. I had this tiny little dance number, and at the end I was wheezing so hard I could barely breathe. I thought to myself, “This is ridiculous. From a couple of hops I’m huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf. I have to quit smoking.” And I did. It wasn’t very hard. I’d rarely smoked unless I was high, so once I quit getting high, I lost the desire for cigarettes. It was a good thing, too, since I was later diagnosed with asthma and told smoking could be dangerous for me. Once the cigarettes went, I was completely free of chemicals for the first time since I was a teenager.
It’s a wonder my body, not to mention my friends, didn’t die from the shock. I’d like to say that getting sober was a moment of profound revelation for me, but it wasn’t. It was really more of a practical necessity. The revelations would come, but not yet.

Along with my newly improved health and state of mind, my career was looking up as well. In 1982 I heard that they were doing a sequel to the movie
Grease
called
Grease 2,
and I was ready to kill for the part. I went on a crash diet, eating nothing but watermelon three times a day, and worked hard to get into shape. I flew to California to audition, and I was thrilled when I got the role. It was my first real film role (you can get a quick glimpse of Joey and me on the boat in the Thames scene of I
Could Go On Singing).
We were all disappointed with the movie’s poor reception; we’d hoped it would be as big a hit as the original
Grease.
Still, it was a start for me.

Just as
Grease 2
was drawing to an end in 1982 and I was getting worried about another job, one of the dancers in the movie, a girl named Donna King, told me they were holding auditions in New York for the American premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s London hit
Cats.
I arranged for an audition as soon as I got back to New York, and it went very, very well. I read for the lead role of Grizabella, and Andrew was very impressed with my tryout. I’d never met him before, but we got along well, and he told me he wanted me to work on the show with the musical director for three or four months. I worked with the musical director and dance master every day, at the producer’s expense, learning the role.

Andrew returned to London while I rehearsed. He was negotiating to do a movie version of
Evita
at the time (fifteen years before it actually happened), and Liza had done a screen test for the role. A rumor circulated through the tabloids that I was trying out for the same role opposite my sister, but it wasn’t true. I never saw myself as Eva Peron, but I desperately wanted the role of Grizabella the Cat.

Meanwhile, Liza was in London discussing
Evita
with Andrew, who told my sister I had gotten the Grizabella role. Liza called me from London with the news I’d gotten the part, but said I had to wait for Trevor Nunn, the director, to formally approve Andrew’s choice. As far as Liza and Andrew were concerned, Trevor’s approval was just a formality. Four months after my original audition, Trevor came to New York and saw my final version. I had been working very hard to get ready for him, because Grizabella was clearly the role of a lifetime.

The next day it came out in the trades that Betty Buckley had been cast as Grizabella. I was devastated. Trevor Nunn wrote me a very nice note explaining that the decision had nothing to do with my performance; it was just that they’d decided to go with another actress, someone with a different look from mine. I later found out the role had originally been written for the distinguished English actress Dame Judi Dench, who is older than I am (but not old!). Trevor’s explanation didn’t help. Intellectually, I understood his decision, but emotionally, I was desolate. My friend John Napier, the set designer for
Cats,
said he’d thought the role was already mine, too. To this day he says I’m the only person who ever sang the role of Grizabella and made him cry. What a painful loss that was. Sometimes this is a tough business to be in.

After a stint onstage as Peppermint Patty in
Snoopy,
the sequel to
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,
I was cast in a second film, a remake of the sixties beach classic,
Where the Boys Are.
No sooner had I finished shooting the movie than I got a wonderful opportunity to star opposite Farrah Fawcett off Broadway in
Extremities,
a brilliant and harrowing piece about a rapist and his victims. My life was taking a definite turn for the better.

My newly sanitized social life began improving, too. I began going to a little eating place called Café Central after work with the members of the
Extremities
cast. It was a dumpy little place on the West Side with good food and what people refer to as
atmosphere. We’d go there after the show for a late dinner or early breakfast. I’d get something to eat and have one drink, but I stayed out of the bathroom. If people were doing drugs in there, I didn’t want to know about it. Cafe Central soon became an actors’ hangout. It was there I first got to know Mickey Rourke and Joe Pesci. The only problem was the bartender, a guy named Bruce who never seemed to get a drink order right. No matter what I ordered, I got the wrong thing. Fortunately, Bruce turned out to have talent for something other than bartending. A year later I saw him on the TV show
Moonlighting
and discovered that Bruce the Bartender’s last name was Willis.