By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (19 page)

When I first told my manager Beth that I was seeing Heidi, her
reaction was pretty much this: “Out of all the women in the world, this is the one you pick? Isn’t there someone else you could date?” Beth was fairly adamant about the idea that my relationship with Heidi be kept out of the press at all costs, but stories about the two of us started popping up in the
National Enquirer
. People told me they thought Heidi was feeding the
Enquirer
stories about us, but who knows? I wasn’t exactly hiding the fact that I was with her.

Beth ended up really coming around on Heidi and seeing what a nice person she could be, but she still maintained that the fewer people who knew about our relationship, the better. She would say, “You’re in line to be the next Gene Hackman or De Niro, and the movie business is a sheep business; you really are your image, and you have to stay on the right side of things.” Of course, she was right.

But I was having a real honeymoon with both meth and with Heidi. The two were very tied together in my mind and later, it felt like both turned on me at the same time. For roughly the first year and a half that I was with Heidi, it was an honest-to-God good relationship—or at least as good as a relationship between two people on meth could be. The truth is, we weren’t actually doing it all that much together. I was always very private with my drug use—that was part of my paranoia. I did drugs alone, whether I was living with people who did the same drugs or not. I think I was always so deeply ashamed of the fact that I was doing drugs at all, that doing them by myself allowed me to be in some sort of denial; people wouldn’t talk to me about drugs if they didn’t know whether I was doing them and I could just pretend that I wasn’t. The truth is, because we weren’t really doing the meth together, I don’t actually know how much she was using.

In my mind, I was doing well. I felt like I’d gone from being this guy who was very depressed and half dead after his wife left him to someone who was very much alive and very, very virile. On a certain level, I
knew that what I was doing was bad—that all drugs are bad for you—and I did everything in my power to avoid thinking about that. I felt like I was coming-to after having the gauze of heartbreak over my face. Drugs work; that’s why they’re such a big problem. Anyone who says drugs don’t work isn’t getting ahold of good drugs.

When Heidi moved in with me up at Benedict Canyon, we set up ground rules and one of the main ones was that it was pretty much an open relationship. I knew what she’d done for a living, and I didn’t have a lot of sexual jealousy. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but my attitude was I don’t give a fuck if you suck off the fucking Lakers as long as you come home to me. It was a decadent time; threesomes were common, and I once had six women in bed with me at one time. I had always been very focused on girls and sex but there was something about meth that transformed general ideas I had about how I wanted to sleep with as many women as possible into a reality. I also think when you’re letting yourself fall deep into a hole with drugs, whatever reins you have on other aspects of your life can easily disintegrate.

Heidi and I started to fight about the other women but we fought about other things as well. When I went on Howard Stern to promote
Black Hawk Down,
I arranged for her to come with me so that she could promote her book
Pandering
. And Heidi made a big thing on the air about how she didn’t like
Black Hawk Down,
which was just about the worst thing she could have done. I took her as my date to the premiere, which didn’t do anything to help make anyone take the movie seriously. Originally, the movie’s producers had talked about doing an Academy Award campaign for me but they never did. Instead the film just sort of came and went and didn’t end up doing anything for me. I think Beth was right about the sheep mentality and the fact that my association with Heidi meant I was losing credibility.

I stopped doing meth before making a TV movie with Ving
Rhames called
Sins of the Father—
mostly because I was afraid of taking it with me on the plane to Canada and getting busted. Earlier in my career, when I was addicted to heroin, I’d FedEx drugs ahead of time. But I really knew my way around heroin—I knew where to get it, how to handle it, and how to move it around. And I also knew I could get methadone legit from a clinic so I wouldn’t get sick. This was a whole different game. Plus, being addicted to meth is nothing like being addicted to heroin. I couldn’t do meth and work the way I could on heroin. On meth, you look like hell, you feel like hell, and the only reason you stay up is to do more meth, which makes you look more and more like hell. You also start acting very strange. I was keeping to myself on
Sins of the Father,
and I while I could still act, I didn’t look good. My instincts were dulled, and I could feel it.

I came home and started doing meth again but then stopped using before my next movie,
Swindle
. But when I got back to Canada for
Swindle,
I called Heidi and said, “I don’t want to feel this low-energy, what can I do?” The truth is that I felt like my ass had fallen three stories down, and I was carrying four hundred pounds on my back. We were really in love at this point, and she was very upset that I was in that state, but she knew meth. She said, “I understand. Now listen to me. I’m sending a girl up there with a large amount of the stuff. But just so you feel better now, you already have some.” She explained she’d actually slipped some into a Visine bottle in my toiletries case. She talked me through how to get it out: you squirt it on any surface—glass, preferably—and you just wait and the water evaporates and it turns back into fucking speed. It’s amazing. Twenty minutes after you put it there, the atmosphere just sucks up the water and there the meth is in its original form. I was relieved, of course, but it wasn’t much—just three or four lines.

The woman she sent up with drugs—a friend of ours—got there
the next day. She’d emptied a bunch of sports pills, then cut up meth so finely that it looked like the white stuff in the middle, put that back in there, then resealed the bottle like it had never been opened. The girl ended up coming back and doing the same thing again during the shoot, and since no one’s going to fly to Prince George, British Columbia, and then fly out the next day unless they’re doing something that’s not right, we acted like she was my girlfriend. She’d check into my room and sleep on the rollaway bed for two nights. When I went to work, she’d kick around the hotel.

To many people, I’m sure this would sound like an odd way to express your love but that’s how Heidi showed me she cared about me—by making sure I always had enough meth.

THE LONGER I
was with Heidi, the more open our relationship became. What I mean by that is that my house essentially became something of a very well-appointed flophouse for hookers—ones I met, of course, through her. And I was a very understanding landlord.

All these girls were under twenty-five and beautiful. When you’re thirty-nine and these gorgeous twenty-three-year-old girls are offering to suck your cock, you don’t say, “No way, get out of here, I’ve got to read the Bible.” At least you don’t if you’re me. I was meeting most of them through Heidi, and they were just around all the time.

I’d also met another woman I really liked: Jessie Tuite, a beautiful young black girl I’d met through a friend. I remember our first conversation; I told her I was looking for my conscience and asked her if she’d seen it.

She said, “Your conscience?” and I said, “No, actually not my conscience—my heart.” She said, “It’s probably really small so we might
want to go buy a microscope,” and I said, “Come with me, we’ll go buy one.” I really, really liked her from the start. She was so different from most of the other drug-addled Heidi girls who were in my life then.

Things with Jessie got serious enough that Heidi and I actually split up, and in early 2002, I asked Jessie to move in with me. But she made it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t even consider moving in unless I got rid of Karen, Alana, and all the other girls, and the fact that she drew that line made me like her more, so I did it. I got rid of the other women. Jessie took really good care of me. My assistant Carol sort of schooled her in what I liked, and she made sure I had things just right and ate okay and everything.

After what had happened on
Swindle
—when I’d gotten to the location only to realize I needed to have drugs sent to me if I wanted to be able to function at all—I decided to stop the meth before I did my next movie,
Dreamcatcher
.
Dreamcatcher
was this surreal horror movie Lawrence Kasdan made from a Stephen King script about four guys who end up being invaded by these parasitic aliens, and I played a military officer whom Morgan Freeman sends to lead an air strike against the aliens’ ship. I didn’t take any drugs with me, and I stayed sober for the shoot. I also ended up making a lifelong friend in Thomas Jane.

I liked him from day one, when we did the read-through, because he didn’t have any shoes on, even though it was about one degree out. The director Lawrence Kasdan said, “Tom, did you forget to put on your shoes?” And Tom said, “I don’t wear any shoes.” Tom’s part hillbilly. He’s from the South, where you sit under the fucking willow tree and drink moonshine without your shoes on. But let me tell you, you don’t want to fuck with Tom Jane because that motherfucker can fight like a goddamn animal. He’s fearless.

He’s also a great guy. He has a brother who has a lot of problems,
and I remember he brought that brother to Paris for the
Dreamcatcher
premiere and press junket there. It was then that I saw Tom in a totally different way. He was so loving and kind and patient with his brother without ever apologizing for him. The way his brother would look at him sometimes—like he loved him more than anything in the world—was touching. Tom doesn’t reveal much about himself but he’s one of the brightest people I know. He’s read all of Proust, all of Dostoevsky, and is a very well rounded person. He’s also a self-made person, and I don’t think he’s even touched his abilities as an actor yet.

While we were doing
Dreamcatcher,
which was a four- or five-month undertaking, I was cast in Michael Mann’s new CBS series
Robbery Homicide Division
. My character was a tough L.A. detective who went after the worst of the worst: killers, serial rapists, and white-collar criminals who were robbing poor people. It was similar, thematically, to
Heat
in that it was about an L.A. cop who was working the Robbery Homicide Division, and it was about the Los Angeles that nobody sees—where it’s bloody and violent and there’s no war on drugs because the drugs have won. The show was a big deal. When we went to New York for the upfronts—where the TV networks announce their new shows for the press and for advertisers who buy commercial time “up front”—Nina Tassler, who was senior vice president of drama development at CBS, said, “The casting coup for the season was getting Tom Sizemore to do
Robbery Homicide Division
.” This was after
The Sopranos
had taken off and expectations were high for another phenomenal TV show.

Heidi was back in my life by then and I understood that if I was going to be able to do this TV show, I really had to stay away from the drugs. So when I knew that
Robbery Homicide Division
was definitely going to happen, I called Heidi from Canada and told her, “I’ve been off meth for three months and although I love you, I can’t come back
to that house if you’re using.” I told her I thought she should go to rehab but she said she didn’t want to. I even told her I’d buy her a car if she went. She still didn’t want to go. And though we stayed involved with each other, she felt I’d rejected her and she became even more jealous of the other women around. She was also convinced that I had stolen her little black book—the book that supposedly contained the names of all her high-profile clients and all their predilections. She convinced herself that I had taken it and hid it.

My relationship with Heidi was definitely causing problems with other people in my life as well. When I was shooting
Robbery Homicide Division,
I went to a restaurant with Heidi one night and a famous guy—I can’t say who—came up to me and said, “How does it feel to be in a room where nine of the ten guys have come in your girlfriend’s mouth?”

I saw her turn red when he said it, because she’d heard it—he’d said it so she could hear it. She looked stricken—like someone had stabbed her. And I’m always going to defend my girlfriend no matter what. So I grabbed him by the arm and threw him out the door of the restaurant and into the side of a car.

The cops got me out of there and called an ambulance for the guy. The two cops came to the set of
Robbery Homicide Division
the next day and basically said, “We know what happened last night and as far as we’re concerned, it never happened.” Michael Mann was with them, and he was very relieved. We both were. I can’t tell you who it was that fixed it, but he was a very powerful friend of mine.

I’d learned from my marriage that when things start to go wrong in a relationship, there’s a period when you can try to fix it, but after that point, if things still aren’t working, you should get out of it. It was becoming clear that Heidi and I were both only causing each other pain, and in May 2002 I simply said to her, “I don’t love you the way
you love me and I think this is over.” And that, combined with the fact that she assumed I had her little black book, made her incredibly angry. When she moved out, she said, “I’m going to drive you to kill yourself, motherfucker.”

I didn’t realize how serious she was.

The following December, Heidi’s friend Brooke Ford claimed that I’d hurt her, which was not true. I always suspected that Heidi put her up to it, perhaps to lend credence to Heidi’s own claims of abuse when she later filed them. But not surprisingly, Brooke didn’t pursue the allegations; even though she called the cops and made the claim, she didn’t show up in court, and the whole thing was dropped. But the fact that it was dropped didn’t matter. What mattered was that an allegation like that was out there. The allegation is what makes news, not the fact that an allegation is dropped.