By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (15 page)

Even though I had very solid sobriety at that point, I started to panic about everything going on in my life, and I actually planned to relapse once I got to Chicago—which was where I was flying into for the wedding. So before I went to the airport to go to Illinois, I got up really early in the morning and bought a bunch of heroin. I hadn’t done any heroin in a long time, and I bought about two hundred dollars’ worth and then threw out about two-thirds of it. I had ten balloons and ended up taking only three or four. I flew to Chicago with my friend Scott, and I was just a bundle of nerves—partially because I was flying with heroin, partially because I knew I was about to do heroin for the first time in a long time, partially because I hate flying, and partially because I was getting married. I was just a mess and ordered a drink the minute I stepped on the plane; I think I’d downed it by the time I sat down.

When we got to Chicago, I made up this bizarre excuse for Scott about having to go to McDonald’s and have a burger or something;
in reality I needed to get tinfoil to do the heroin. So we went to the closest McDonald’s to the airport, and as I ordered a burger, I said in a whisper to the counter person, “By the way, do you have any tinfoil?” Scott heard me. He knew me really well and understood that my asking about tinfoil meant I was trying to get it to get high. He just said, “Tinfoil? That’s it, mister,” and led me out of there. I played innocent and tried to convince him that he’d heard wrong or misunderstood what was happening, but he wasn’t having it. He just said, “That’s it—let’s go.” He asked me to hand over the dope, and I didn’t deny having any, but I didn’t hand anything over, either.

The next night, there was a barbecue at Maeve’s house, where her family was going to meet mine for the first time. I was, honestly, terrified. Her family is so lovely and respectable and I didn’t know how they were going to react to mine. And Maeve knew that the best way to handle the situation would be to tell the bartenders not to serve me any alcohol. But what she didn’t count on was that my high school friends from Detroit would all be there, slipping me drinks. Everything went okay between our two families, but I got pretty drunk, which means that I didn’t feel like ending the night after the party. So a group of us went out to clubs in Chicago afterward. And I know this sounds bad, but my Detroit friends and I always called each other “nigga”—it was just something we did. So we walked into this nightclub and, completely drunk, I basically screamed, “Where the fuck are all these niggas coming from?” It was one of those movie-like moments where there was complete silence in the place. And then I heard a deep voice from behind me ask, “Now what did you say?” and I saw a big black hand in front of my face. It turned out that, completely randomly, Laurence Fishburne happened to be in town and he was at that club. As he stared down at me, he suddenly realized he knew me. He got this weird look on his face and just went, “Tom? Is
that you?” I was, of course, horrified and did my best to try to explain myself, but I was so embarrassed that I ended up getting even more obliterated. By the time I got back to my hotel room that night, I was a complete wreck.

The next morning, Maeve and my mom came to my room and basically said I had to stop drinking or the wedding was off. I promised them that I would stop, and I was determined to keep my word.

That night was the rehearsal dinner, and I had to give this big speech about how Maeve and I met. I was incredibly nervous and think it might actually have gone better if I’d had a drink. But I was stone-cold sober and just sweating up a storm—which is what I do when I’m anxious—and the speech was a disaster. I tried to just talk about how Maeve and I met, but then I delved into this whole thing about how we were dating other people but really had the hots for each other. I was just sweating and sweating, and it was getting worse and worse. Finally, Scott put a hand on my shoulder and said, “I think that’s enough.”

But then, of course, we got married the next day. It was, I have to say, a really beautiful wedding. My friend Scott filled in for De Niro. Michael Mann was there, as was Michael Wincott, an actor I’d become friends with on
Strange Days
. Ashley Hamilton—whom I’d met through getting sober—and John McGinley and some of our other actor friends also came out for it. Ashley Hamilton actually proposed to Angie Everhart at our wedding, and they got married a few months later. Anyway, after the wedding, Maeve and I flew back to L.A. to bring our dog home and then we went on our honeymoon to Hawaii.

Fairly soon after we were married, we bought a beautiful, 2,800-square-foot, three-bedroom ranch-style house in Benedict Canyon. We looked around some—Maeve looked even as far as Malibu Colony—but we settled on that house, and we completely loved it. It
had a pool and a gym, but that wasn’t why I loved it. It was just that it was all ours. The house became almost like a living, breathing thing to me. And we chose what to fill it with very thoughtfully. We liked the bed at the Four Seasons, so I actually called the hotel and asked them what kind of beds they had there. Maeve ordered that exact bed, and we attached it to our headboard, which was a hundred-year-old Irish church door. Everything in the house was like that; carefully selected and exactly the way we wanted it.

One of the first investments we made as a couple was in Ago, the restaurant that De Niro, Harvey Weinstein, and a few other people had opened. We were part of a group of investors that included Christopher Walken, Tony Scott, and Ridley Scott. It was truly a spectacular time.
The Relic
ended up doing well—it knocked
Evita
out from the top box-office spot when it came out—and I won the Best Actor award at the Madrid Film Festival.

We had a wonderful group of friends. We would have dinner at Ago with De Niro and his wife, Grace, spend Thanksgiving with Michael Mann, and plan vacations with Mike Medavoy and Sean Penn. Maeve and I also liked to travel together. We went to Hawaii, London, Paris, Dublin, and Venice. And if neither of us was on set, we had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together every day. The problem was when we were apart. I was so in love with Maeve that being around her actually made me forget about drugs. But when I wasn’t around her—when she was working more and more on
The Bold and the Beautiful
—that’s when things would get dangerous, and I’d relapse.

But whether I was staying sober or relapsing, work continued to go well. I signed with a new manager, Beth Holden, who arranged for me to have a meeting with the director Terrence Malick, who was then putting together
The Thin Red Line,
a World War II movie with Sean Penn. He told me that he wanted to cast me but couldn’t decide
which part. At the same time, Matthew McConaughey—who was another of Beth’s clients—was shooting
Amistad
with Steven Spielberg, so Beth got ahold of the script for the other World War II movie that was floating around town then,
Saving Private Ryan
. She asked Denise Chamian, who was casting the movie, what she thought of me for the part of Sergeant Mike Hovarth. Denise liked the idea but said that Steven was concerned about my relationship with drugs.

Then one day, I got the call: Steven Spielberg wanted to meet with me. But he wanted Maeve to come to the meeting, too. So the two of us went in and sat down with him and the first thing he did was turn to Maeve and ask, “Can Tom stay clean and sober?”

She swore that I could. I swore that I could. My guess is that working with John Belushi on
1941
had made Spielberg cautious about ever working with another addict—though he didn’t say that. Steven’s a very understanding and loving man. He believes in family and right and wrong and home and hearth and all that good stuff. And because of Steven’s experiences in life and the way he was raised in Phoenix and his beginnings in Hollywood, he hasn’t forgotten who he is. He never abused drugs even though he was around a lot of them, but he didn’t judge people who did. He had a sense of humor, too. I remember him saying at that meeting, “Well, it is a war movie so if you relapse, I guess we could just kill you off at any time.”

He also told me he’d loved my performances in
Natural Born Killers
and
Heat
but that he’d always seen a heroic quality in me that had never been explored by a filmmaker, and he wanted to bring that out. He said, “It’s like you’ve been given part of a piano and have only been allowed to play certain notes. I want to give you the whole piano.”

The one wrinkle in all of this was that Terrence Malick took my not doing
The Thin Red Line
as a complete betrayal. But he’d never decided
which part he wanted me to play, and ultimately, I think I made the better choice.

I had to lose a little weight before I went over to England for
Saving Private Ryan
and we got it put in my contract that production would pay for a trainer for me to lose the weight I needed to in L.A. Because Maeve’s story line on
The Bold and the Beautiful
had heated up and she had to be at work there almost every day, she and I tried to figure out what would be the best plan for keeping me clean. After promising Steven that I could stay sober for the shoot, she felt like the best way to get me out of our house—where I had memories of a lot of drug slips—would be for us to go to San Ysidro Ranch for a month. It was our favorite place to vacation, and she knew that if we went there, I could work out with a trainer, eat well, and just be in a peaceful place. So that’s exactly what we did. I stayed there, reading, looking at my script, exercising, and hanging out with our dog, while she commuted to CBS in Hollywood every day for work. I actually didn’t think about doing drugs and we had a lovely, romantic month there. When we drove back to L.A., I was really proud of myself that I was about to do the best movie of my life clean and sober.

Maeve was working pretty much every day, but her producers agreed to give her two weeks off and then lighten up her story line so that she could easily travel back and forth to England that summer to see me while I was shooting. The problem was that those two weeks didn’t start until two days after I was scheduled to leave.

I’ve always had a serious fear of flying and was borderline convinced that the plane would crash or something bad would happen if Maeve didn’t fly with me. I was so irrational that I begged her to fly out with me on a Tuesday, then fly back to L.A. the next day for work, and then fly back again. And I said all sorts of cruel things about how I was making more money than her so she should just blow off her
work. I felt sort of irrationally hurt by the fact that she wouldn’t come, and I just started striking out in whatever way I could—but she stood her ground and said that she couldn’t do it, though she would come to see me when her vacation started. Honestly, I was a spoiled brat back then, and so I left feeling like she’d betrayed me.

When I got to London, I felt bad about how much torture I’d put Maeve through over flying out with me so I called her and said, “I miss you—call me no matter what time it is.” Then, as I was going to dinner, I ran into an actress I knew named Charlotte Lewis in the lobby of the hotel. She was in
Coming to America
and was considered sort of the Kim Basinger of her time. And while we’re all responsible for our own actions and I’m in no way saying I
wasn’t
at fault here, Charlotte was clearly out to seduce me. And, well, she succeeded and the two of us ended up back in my hotel room. As soon as we had sex, I felt terrible and was actually crying quietly into my pillow afterward. Charlotte reached over to cuddle, and I had to move away. And then—well, Maeve called. I felt so guilty and confused and fucked-up that I picked up the phone instead of letting it ring and answered in a sort of whisper. Maeve said, “Oh, you sound like you were asleep—go back to bed and call me tomorrow.” And then Charlotte said, in the loudest voice you can possibly imagine, “Who’s that?” Maeve of course heard her and asked, “Who’s that? Is that the TV?” And I couldn’t lie. I just immediately started crying.

Maeve was furious. She paused and then said, “You just made your bed—now you’ll have to lie in it.” She was absolutely right. I loved this woman with everything in me, and yet I ended up in bed with someone I didn’t even like. Maeve was supposed to fly out to London the next day to be with me for part of the shoot, but instead she went to see the divorce lawyer Dennis Wasser. And I guess when she was meeting with him, she was crying so hard that he said to her,
“You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?” And he suggested that she really think about whether she should move forward with a divorce.

I begged her not to leave me. I got everyone I could to do the same. De Niro called her and told her that she should stick with me, that sobriety was hard and I was struggling and had fucked up but that I loved her. I had to leave for the boot camp we had to do before the movie started, and I was completely devastated. Here I was supposed to be this tough guy and I was crying to all the other guys that she was leaving me. I knew she still loved me, though.

Boot camp was, honestly, fucking awful. I had worked with the guy who ran it—a veteran marine named Dale Dye—on
Born on the Fourth of July
and
Natural Born Killers,
and he was tough.

We had to spend six days in a forest in England, sleeping outside and going through a grueling training regimen. All we had were these World War II–type blankets and rations and Dye wouldn’t even call us by our real names—only by our character names. We had to get up at dawn and run five miles every morning in full military gear. It was cold and miserable and I threw up all down my shirt on the first day. But Dye said that we wouldn’t be able to portray military discipline if we didn’t live it. I knew he had a point but it was terrible. I only ate beans in tomato sauce the whole time. The whole goal of the training was to reprogram us: they were literally trying to take out parts of our personalities and bring out our aggressive nature so we could think like the “killing machines” we were playing.