By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (12 page)

When the movie wrapped, Juliette and I came back to L.A., and even though I was sharing my apartment on Harratt with Vanessa, I was spending a lot of time in this $2.5 million house Juliette had bought on Outpost Drive in Hollywood. At one point we even talked about me paying the mortgage with her, but I just could never get it together to move my stuff in from my apartment and neither could she; so she kept a place she had up on Sunset Plaza and I kept the one I had with Vanessa. And ironically, while we had all these places to live, the house we were mostly living in, on Outpost, had no furniture in it.

I went straight from
Natural Born Killers
to
Devil in a Blue Dress
and then I had a little break before
Strange Days
. That’s when my managers suggested I go to a rehab program at UCLA. They had a thirty-day program on Santa Monica Boulevard, and I went and stayed for a month—and then got high within four hours of getting out. I thought I wanted to be clean, but I found out I didn’t—something I didn’t know then would grow to be a pattern. And I just didn’t understand the whole concept of staying away from certain people, places, and things. I understood what it meant but it just didn’t seem doable then.

And in many ways, heroin really worked for me in those days. I remember every detail of what it was like to go cop when I was back in L.A. after
Natural Born Killers
had wrapped. I remember the way the heroin smelled in my car. I remember that we were still living in the aftermath of the riots so the cops weren’t bothering as much with trying to arrest people for drug possession. I would drive downtown, to Bonnie Brae and Third Streets at nine fifteen in the morning, knowing that I’d be able to go home afterward and watch a football game on DirecTV. And I’d feel on top of the world in my fancy car. After copping, I’d stop at a market and buy a moon pie. I’d put a Chet Baker cassette on and damn it if the whole scenario didn’t feel romantic to me. I’d be holding the heroin in my hand knowing that if I were stopped, I could just swallow a balloon. But I was never stopped.

Usually I’d pull over and either roll up a dollar bill and snort the heroin or put it on tinfoil and put a lighter under it and smoke it just a few blocks away from where I got it. You couldn’t get bad heroin then—heroin then was only bad if you stepped on it. Speed can be bad because it’s man-made, but heroin was beautiful, especially in those days. I’d take four hits, then I’d drive down that hill with Chet Baker still playing, and I thought I was just the coolest motherfucker. Or maybe
cool
isn’t the right word. I just felt beyond the reach of
pain. Above it all. Like I was floating above this horrible morality play called the
Interpersonal Relationships of the Young and Successful and the Mysteries of Young Adulthood
. I’m not kidding about that name, either: if you look back at some of the journals I was keeping then, I’d write that shit down. Before then, I’d felt the first stirrings of loneliness—my first heartbreaks—and I didn’t like it at all. Heroin got me above all of it. Heroin allowed me to watch other people trudge the road—ironically, that’s a phrase from the AA Big Book, but the truth is I looked at people who were suffering through normal life pain and I thought they were nuts. My guy friends would talk about liking girls and I’d watch them risking getting rejected and getting their feelings hurt and I’d think they were out of their minds for putting up with that stuff.

Strange Days
was a really difficult movie. It filmed for seventeen weeks in the summer of 1994, and it went on and on. It was a brilliant film, though, in a lot of ways. James Cameron wrote the script, which was about an ex-cop—played by Ralph Fiennes—who deals disks that contain recorded memories and emotions that people become addicted to. Cameron was originally going to direct it but instead Kathryn Bigelow, who had been married to him and whom I’d worked with on
Point Break
, did. And completely coincidentally—having nothing to do with me—Maeve ended up working as a production assistant on
Strange Days
.

Maeve and I had actually been in touch since
Natural Born Killers
had wrapped, because the whole time I was with Juliette and juggling Vanessa, I was also pursuing her. Our relationship was purely platonic because she still had her boyfriend, and I liked her all the more for the fact that she wouldn’t jump into bed with me the way other women would. I would basically call her every morning and ask her out for coffee, and every morning she would say no. But I could
tell that she liked me and that I was wearing her down. And then one night she found out that her boyfriend in Chicago had been cheating on her. I didn’t know that yet, of course, but the next morning when I called and asked her out for coffee, she said yes. Coffee turned into her coming back to my apartment on Harratt and listening to Sheryl Crow’s first album, which I was obsessed with at that point, and that turned into her not leaving for two days. Although she refused to have sex with me, we made out for pretty much forty-eight hours straight, and she slept in my arms—the only woman I’d ever done that with who didn’t have sex with me. They were truly the most romantic two days of my life. Of course, our relationship couldn’t develop from there because I was still with Vanessa—who, conveniently enough, had been in New York during those two days—and also with Juliette, but Maeve and I remained friends.

At the same time, I thought I was in love with Juliette. In retrospect, I think I was in love with the whole idea of her. And I was in love with what was happening in my career more than anything else. When Juliette and I were up in her house, things got really weird. First off, at age thirty-two, I was significantly older than she was. And even though she had a nascent intelligence and a kind of knowledge about human nature, she’d never gone to college, and she had a very different upbringing from me. So after we got over the lustful part at the beginning, we didn’t have a lot in common aside from the fact that we both liked to do a lot of drugs. And she never wanted to leave the house, ever—not even to go outside. We had a big TV with porn playing 24/7, which I thought was cute in the beginning, but it started to wear on me after a while. I’d say, “Turn it off” and she’d say, “But I like the
music
”—which I thought was one of the great lines of all time. Still, whenever I looked up, it seemed like there was some guy’s big hairy ass on the screen. At one
point, I taped something over the screen for a while, but she took it off.

All we had, furniture-wise, was a huge bed and one end table. It was a weird setup, made weirder by the fact that she didn’t want me to leave the room. I’d get up to go take a shower and she’d go, “Where are you going? Can I come with you?” And she’d get a blanket, come into the bathroom, and sleep on the floor and wait for me.

Juliette had been a star since she was fifteen and in some ways she was very mature, but she also had a way of keeping people away from her. She really was a sweetheart; she just didn’t understand all the adulation she received. In many ways, I don’t think she was comfortable in the spotlight.

At a certain point, for some reason she decided she didn’t want to see her brother’s face anymore—and that was a problem since he was working as her assistant. So she had me paint this sentence on the outside of the bedroom door: “I don’t want to ever see you again, your sister.” And then she insisted I get a saw, carve a hole in the bedroom door, and paint “Deliver all food here.” We literally didn’t leave the room after that and never saw anyone. The food would be brought up, and we’d just stay there. She’d originally wanted her brother to buy furniture for the house, but she never gave him any money because she didn’t know what to do with the place. I walked around the house once and told her, “You know, this is a really great house—let’s furnish this fucking thing and live in it,” and she’d say, “I like this
room
.” Essentially, we were really high and really rich.

I was still fairly new to heroin then and honestly, it felt like the best thing about it was going out to score. The euphoric anticipation—the excitement of knowing you were about to be altered, in a profoundly positive way—was the greatest high there was to me back then. Even
if I was dope-sick, I loved going to cop because I knew I wasn’t going to be sick long.

With heroin, especially back then, you couldn’t just buy from one guy: the dealers, like the dealers in New York’s Alphabet City, didn’t have enough. And dope was different strengths. It sounds insane, I realize, but if you ever heard that a guy OD’d from a certain batch of heroin, you’d find out who his dealer had been because you knew that heroin was good.

Juliette and I would go through phases where we’d try to quit. I know people who decide to quit suddenly and start flushing all their drugs down the toilet, but I never did it like that: I’d make sure I’d do all the drugs and then, when I was done, I’d say, “Okay, I’m not going to do that anymore.” I’d make it a day, sometimes two—I’d never make it more than three. By then, my feet would start to get real heavy and I’d go, “Fuck it, I know how to fix this.”

Of course, things were getting strange up there on Outpost: when you’re doing that many drugs, things have a way of always getting strange. And I was actually starting to get a little worried about Juliette. So one day I asked her brother to call her manager, Joel Stevens, who was a Scientologist and a really nice guy. And one night Joel just barged in there and Juliette picked up the nearest large object she could find and threw it right at his fucking head, hitting him in the face. He was bleeding everywhere, and she was screaming, “Bad, bad, bad idea! Bad idea! Bad idea, Joel! You could have upset Tom!” Like she was worried about me.

That led to an intervention of sorts on her. She’d been to rehab before, and she knew it was coming. She told me she wanted me to say that I wanted to get clean as well so they’d let us go to rehab together.

I asked her, “Will we get clean?”

She said, “No, we’ll go to Scientology rehab and we don’t have to really get clean there.”

Three days later, Juliette’s agent, Joel, her mom, her dad, her brother, and some girlfriends came up. I’d heard about interventions—I was only a few months away from my own, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. It was tedious. I remember thinking, “I’ll never let this happen to me.” They carted her off to Narconon, the Scientology rehab—I didn’t end up going after all—and that was pretty much the end of our relationship.

While Juliette and I haven’t talked since the late 1990s, I hear she’s sober now. I know she’s somewhat off the map, but I think, knowing her the way I did, that that’s a conscious choice. She plays in a band called Juliette and the Licks, and the sense I get is that she didn’t want to do movies anymore. I think her early success and all the drugs and getting involved with Brad Pitt and then having him become such a mega star made her feel like the world of being a motion picture star was a hurtful place to be. She always loved music—she wrote and sang a song called “Born Bad” in
Natural Born Killers
and she also sang in
Strange Days
. I think she saw the music world as kinder than the movie one. And who knows—she may be right.

I
N MANY WAYS,
once Juliette and I weren’t involved anymore, my life started to feel normal again. I was still doing heroin but considerably less than when I was with Juliette, and my agents and managers seemed very positive about the direction my career was headed in. But I had no idea just how well things were going until I got a call one day from my agent at the time, Bryan Lourd.

“Robert De Niro wants to meet you tomorrow night at the Monkey Bar for dinner,” he said. Of course I didn’t believe it—Robert De Niro had been my idol since I’d first seen
Taxi Driver,
so I thought it was somebody playing a joke on me. I said, “Who is this? This isn’t funny.” But it was Bryan, and he was serious. Some people think I’m egotistical, but I’ve always been somewhat insecure about my work, and was especially so back then. I just couldn’t believe it.

I had met De Niro before, when I did a movie called
Guilty by Suspicion
in 1991. On that shoot he was all about the work, and I only had two scenes, so we didn’t get to know each other too well. But two years later, when I got this call from Bryan, De Niro and Michael Mann were
putting together
Heat,
and I guess De Niro had seen
True Romance
and
Natural Born Killers
before their release. He had been interested in Quentin Tarantino—he was thinking about
Jackie Brown
already—and he wanted to see Quentin’s work. Quentin had written both
Natural Born Killers
and
True Romance
.
Natural Born Killers
was actually the first script Quentin sold—Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy bought it from him when he was still working at a video store and selling scripts out of the trunk of his car. Don Murphy told me the story. Don was renting a Japanese movie from the video store where Quentin worked, and they started talking. Quentin said he was a screenwriter and gave him copies of
Natural Born Killers, True Romance,
and
Reservoir Dogs
. Don called up Jane and said, “There’s a genius working at the Manhattan Beach video store.” And they bought
Natural Born Killers
.

Anyway, De Niro apparently really liked my performances in
True Romance
and
Natural Born Killers
so he asked Michael Mann if he knew of me. Michael didn’t, so Bob had the two movies screened for him and said, “It’s your choice—you’re the director,” but he made it clear he wanted me to play Michael Cheritto.

But I didn’t know any of this at the time. Once I realized Bryan wasn’t joking, I asked him why De Niro wanted to have dinner with me. Bryan said, “I don’t know, but I’m sure he’ll tell you.” I was terrified and told Bryan I didn’t want to do it. But I got it together and showed up that night at the Monkey Bar. I was extremely nervous, so I just sat down with De Niro and said, “Before we start, I have to tell you something. I’ve had a picture of you on my wall since I was fifteen, and I still have it on my wall even though I’m a grown-up, and it’s the first thing I see every morning.” It was true. It’s this huge poster that I bought through a magazine, and I still have it to this day even though it’s really torn up.