By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (8 page)

It blew my mind, first, that it was him, and second, that he knew my name. I was sort of speechless but he just added, “You should be careful before you go around shouting things like that; one day you might say it to an actual cripple and that might be uncomfortable.” I just stood there, nodding sort of dumbly. I had pressed the button on the elevator, but no light went on so I just assumed it was broken, but then John reached out with his crutch and pressed it and the light suddenly flicked on. I remember thinking, “He’s so magnetic that he has the ability to make broken elevators work.” He was extremely nice and we became good friends.

When he reached his arm out with his crutch, it was the most built arm I’d ever seen, and I thought to myself, “I want my arm to look like that.” He told me that he didn’t much go to the gym. “I go to the gym to use the steam room,” he said. “New York City’s my gym.” He explained
that he’d Rollerblade or skateboard to Central Park and then play football or Frisbee there and do chin-ups on buildings that he passed where they were doing construction. It sounds silly, but that really inspired me, and I started doing a workout routine where I throw a football against a wall outside; it’s a routine I keep up to this day.

Randy came over and said, “What’d I tell you? Now do you believe me?” and the three of us just laughed. John shot the scene where he played guitar and then later he watched me do a scene. And we actually hung out a little after that: I played football with him in Central Park a few times and went out to dinner with him and his friends. One night he invited me out with people who were involved in his magazine,
George
. I felt uncomfortable, because I didn’t really fit in or know what they were talking about, and he just suddenly said to everyone, “Hey, let’s stop talking about
George
because it’s got to be boring for Tom.” He was that kind of a guy: he was very compassionate and had the sort of presence that naturally made people want to follow. I have to admit that meeting and befriending him was incredibly exciting. It might sound ridiculous but it was one of the best things that happened to me when I first started out as an actor. I was devastated when he died; he was a remarkable man.

This is around when I signed with a manager named Suzan Bymel. She was friends with a filmmaker named Jill Goldman, who was putting together her first movie, a romantic drama titled
Love Is Like That
(later changed to
Bad Love
). I was basically told, “Hey, Jill Goldman’s really rich, and if you go through the rehearsal process for the movie, she’ll foot the bill for you to live at the Chateau Marmont while you shoot it.” So I went through the rehearsal process, she did end up putting me up at the Chateau, and the movie became one of my favorite roles of all time. I played this passionate loser named Lenny who falls for this girl when she comes into the gas station where he’s working.
They have money problems, as well as relationship problems, and they end up scheming to rob a fading movie star the woman works for. It was a small movie, but I loved playing a romantic lead—especially opposite Pamela Gidley, who was a big model at the time. While I was shooting
Love Is Like That
I landed a recurring role in the CBS drama
China Beach—
which starred Dana Delaney and was about a U.S. military hospital during the Vietnam War, and in which Dana Delaney played the head nurse—as Sergeant Vinnie Ventresca, a wounded sergeant from Brooklyn who handles the mine-sniffing dogs.

Around then, Bryan Lourd basically said to me, “I need you to be in L.A. now for work.” And my attitude was “Great—I’ll be there next week.” The way I looked at it was this: I had worked my ass off for ten years to get opportunities, and now that I was going to be getting some, I didn’t want to miss a single one. I think Edie was miffed by how easily I made the decision to leave New York, but a real decision is when you weigh one possibility against another and this was no decision: I just said yes, knowing it was the right thing to do. Even though Edie and I had a huge fight about the whole thing, she helped me pack and even agreed to ship the stuff I couldn’t take with me. (However, I realized I’d be leaving her with literally nothing if I took the bed and the couch and all the rest of the furniture, so I ended up just taking my books.)

First I went to Chicago to make a movie called
Watch It,
and then, on May 1, 1991, I moved to L.A., into an apartment on Harratt Street in West Hollywood. I really liked my driver on
Watch It,
a guy named Scott Silver, and he was always talking about how he wanted to be a screenwriter. So I told him that if he wanted to move out to L.A., he could live with me. On set, I also became better friends with John McGinley. The two of us would joke about how I lived in a Hollywood mansion. I think Scott really believed that that was what he was
going to be moving into when he decided to come out, but it was just a two-bedroom condo. Scott enrolled in the American Film Institute and lived with me the whole time. He ended up making it as a screenwriter, too; in 2011, he was nominated for an Oscar for his script for
The Fighter
.

I didn’t like L.A. all that much but L.A. was liking me. I suddenly had a million dollars to burn. But I was pretty careful with it. I wanted to get a Porsche, for example, but instead I got a Mustang—though I did end up later getting a Porsche. I have never cared all that much about things—possessions—although sometimes I get a little superstitious. For instance, I had this certain pair of jeans that I was wearing when I got my first job, and so I started to believe that I had to wear them on every audition or job meeting I went to or else I wouldn’t get the part. This pair of jeans got to be disgusting—completely ripped up and tattered—and I seriously looked like some kind of a grunge kid in them. But I kept wearing them.

It was getting to the point that before I’d even finish a job, I had another one, and in a way I never had time to really sit down and think about what was happening. I did a small comedic role in
Point Break
and played a bank president in
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
—my second time working with Mickey Rourke.

The amazing thing is that I wasn’t being pigeonholed at all. I was being used for both drama and comedy and I could go from playing a romantic lead in
Love Is Like That
to playing a gay serial killer in
Where Sleeping Dogs Lie,
with Sharon Stone. But it’s not like I was getting everything I tried out for. I auditioned some six times for the part of Mr. Pink in
Reservoir Dogs
. It came down to Steve Buscemi or me, and they wanted me to go to Sundance in Colorado and workshop it before they’d even cast me. Obviously they cast Buscemi.

What I remember above all from that period is that on every
movie, the director would pull me aside for dinner or a talk and tell me that I should be aware that I had an incredible ability, and that I should never lose sight of it because I could become one of the greatest actors who ever lived. But I never dwelled on those things; I didn’t know how to handle hearing something like that. So I’d just go on to the next project.

O
NE OF MY
FIRST
leading roles was in a movie called
Passenger 57,
but honestly, what was most memorable about that entire experience was that it introduced me to Elizabeth Hurley. I remember when I first saw her, four days into the movie, at the table read in Orlando, Florida: I’d never seen a girl that beautiful in my life. She had stunningly flawless ivory skin, a beautiful voice, and a charming throaty laugh.

Wesley Snipes, whom I’d known for a long time and was one of the stars of the film, saw her at the same time. He looked at me and said, “You can have the black girl,” meaning the actress who was playing the other stewardess. I saw that he might be serious about hitting on Elizabeth so right then I walked across the room to where Elizabeth was at a table getting a brownie or something. I started to introduce myself to her and she said, “I know who you are.” I think I stammered out, “What?” And she said, “I’m in room 219 and you’re in room 119. It’s on the cast list.”

I said something like “I have to apologize but I’m kind of a neophyte when it comes to talking to women as beautiful as you.” And
she said, “A neophyte? I love you.” I laughed and said, “It’s that easy?” and she said, “I’m sorry, I meant that I love the fact that you know the word
neophyte
.” I laughed and asked her to dinner, explaining that I was a neophyte at that, too.

Later that night, we went to an Italian restaurant in central Florida, then went back to her room and drank wine and listened to the Beatles; we just kind of cuddled and sang the songs to each other and hung out, and then I went home. I didn’t even try to kiss her. I felt like she was just too pretty to kiss. To me, her beauty blocked everything out. It was actually really unhealthy because I let her beauty keep me in a subordinate position. I literally couldn’t conceal my awe or worshipful feelings for her.

The next day she came by my room and said, “Come on, we’re going to get some magazines and books.” We drove to a Borders, and she bought
Madame Bovary
and a bunch of other books; I was impressed. That night we went back to her hotel room, which had a little kitchenette, and she made roasted chicken with green beans and broke out two bottles of wine. I think I was in love by the time I had my second glass. Then she went into the bedroom and came out in lingerie that would make her later outfits in the
Austin Powers
movies seem tame, and she got on the coffee table and stripped. And it was a goddamn good routine, too. She knew what she was doing because in the middle of it she looked at me and asked, “Is it too bright for you?” And then she got down and dimmed the lights and got back up and started dancing to the song again.

I was twenty-six, which means that I had a hard-on if someone attractive breathed heavily across the room. So I could have hit Roger Clemens’s fastball with my dick at that point. And after she was done with her routine, she sat on top of me and we had sex on the couch. Then we went to the bedroom and did it again. It was wonderful. Usually
when you make love to somebody for the first time, you see the potential but because one of you is a little nervous, it isn’t all that it can be. This was spectacular from the beginning.

I essentially moved into her room for the rest of the shoot and after the movie wrapped, we went back to L.A. And that’s when I found out that she already had a boyfriend back in England: Hugh Grant. He hadn’t done
Four Weddings and a Funeral
yet, and I didn’t know who he was—I just figured he was some out-of-work British actor. Little did I know that everyone knew he was going to be a movie star any minute and he was
Vanity Fair
editor Tina Brown’s best friend. Once I found out about him, Elizabeth started being honest with me about it. I’d be at her place and she’d say, “Hugh is coming in nine days; when do you think you should start taking your things out?” I’d get tearful and not let her see it. I just loved her. I didn’t see other girls, didn’t talk about other girls—I was completely enraptured and in her world. But then Hugh would come to town and I’d say to my friends, “I’m done, I don’t have to deal with this, I can go out with this other girl who likes me,” but I could never do it. I’d make dates with people when he was there, but I never kept them.

It hurts me to say this because she was never really mine, but in many ways Elizabeth was the seminal relationship of my young adulthood. She taught me a lot about myself. She taught me that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I’d always thought I was the kind of person who’d never take that kind of treatment from a girl, and what I learned is that I’ll take a lot of things from a girl if I love her, and in fact I’ll take too much. I really lost myself in Elizabeth Hurley. I didn’t do what was best for me. I blew off an audition once just to drive her to the airport when she didn’t have a ride.

Eventually I was able to get out of my relationship with Elizabeth but I never really got over her—I just moved on out of emotional necessity.
I even ended up dating a friend of hers years later—a British socialite named Linda Evans who lived in the same house with Elizabeth, where all these young actor guys would hang out: people like Gary Oldman and Robert Downey Jr. and a boxer and model named Gary Stretch.

The last time Elizabeth and I saw each other romantically was heartbreaking; I called her up and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” We went to walk her dog, right after Hugh had left town for the thirteenth time in the three years we were together. I was sitting in her car afterward and I just started crying and she said, “Don’t cry. Let’s walk the dog.” She didn’t like tears—no Brits do. They’ve been bombed by the Nazis: they’re tough motherfuckers. She said, “Tom, I’m begging you, please, stop it—I feel bad enough.”

She never meant to hurt me; it was just one of those situations. You have to be very mature and sophisticated when handling the intricacies of two people and you throw in a third person; throw in the word
love,
too, and it can be very complicated for somebody who’s the object of affection for two different men. And I have to say, Hugh Grant is a wonderful guy. He’s truly gifted and also a kind, soft-spoken, humble man. I always liked him, but I’ve grown to love him for the way he’s taken on the wiretapping situation in England. He’s a guy who does the right thing. Except, of course, in the case of Divine Brown. And look, I get it: he likes having his cock sucked by different people. So do I. He just should have done it at home. But my point is that in the end, Elizabeth’s loyalty was to Hugh.

AT THIS POINT
in time, I was making a lot of new friends—mostly actors who seemed to have exciting lives.

One night, not long after I’d been cast in the movie
Heart and Souls,
with Robert Downey Jr., Robert invited me to a party. It got pretty late and a group of us—Robert and five or six girls—ended up in the private music room of his apartment; there was a guitar and piano and a few other instruments. I remember that Robert took out a plastic bag filled with coke and put a whole bunch of it onto this gold plate he had. He was dividing it into lines and I was just watching; the whole thing made me really nervous—especially when everyone started doing the lines. Still, I wanted to be in that room, and everyone else was doing it, and I felt all this pressure—it was all in my head, of course, because I’m sure I could have not done it and no one would have even noticed. But I wanted to be like they were, fabulous or whatever it was in my head that I thought they were. And really, I had no idea at that point that I’d ever end up being an addict. At that point, I never thought I drank alcoholically. The girls went first with the coke and then Robert did it; he passed the straw to me and I thought, “Well, since he did it, then I’m going to.”