Could It Be Forever? My Story (36 page)

M
any years ago, I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to spend any time focusing on revenge or re-experiencing the painful moments when people intentionally went out of their way to cause me pain and to try to impose their wills on me. I also made a promise never to mention my second wife’s name in public and have made a concerted effort not to think about her in private. I don’t really want to regurgitate what was undoubtedly the deepest, darkest place I have ever been. But as this book lays bare the most intimate parts of my journey through life, I would be remiss if I left her out of the equation, as dark and grim as this particular part of my life was.

I have a deep passion for horse racing and breeding
racehorses, thoroughbreds, and it has taken me all over the globe. I have spent a lot of time throughout the past 30 years in Kentucky. In the late 70s, in the early days of my dealings in the horse business, I met a couple named Mark and Meryl Tanz. He was Canadian, she was from South Africa. She was a strikingly attractive woman with a very strong personality.

My very first recollection of the two of them is that he seemed much older than her. I learned later that he was a very kind, very generous and very tolerant individual. I also learned that she was psychologically totally unbalanced. She hid it very well, particularly when you first met her. She could be charming and laugh and be jovial and gave a good impression. But what she was hiding was really very dark. I’m talkin’ black. All of us have insecurities. All of us have flaws. I accept them. I have my own.

I happened to be doing some business with some very dear friends of mine who live in Kentucky who, in turn, were doing business with Mark and Meryl, which is how we met. And we became acquaintances. They were having quite a lot of success in the racing world, and I was having a fair amount of success breeding horses. They purchased a couple of horses from me that I had bred, who went on to become, I believe, fairly successful on the racetrack.

This led to a casual friendship over the next few years. At one point, I found myself in Kentucky, staying with my friends, who had a wonderful farm there and were almost like my adopted family. And, lo and behold, Meryl Tanz was also staying there. She had divorced, re-married and divorced
again, all since the last time I had seen her. And she was lookin’ for love. As for me, I was rather lost, feeling quite depressed over the divorce from Kay and the loss of my friendship with her.

There was something in Meryl that I felt I connected with. Certainly the horses were one thing we had in common, but mostly I think it was that she was damaged. And I have always felt, from the time I was a little boy, that I could make everybody OK. I believed I could fix her.

But after 18 months of fighting, raging, brooding, screaming, crying, I packed what I could fit into two suitcases and walked out the door, never to return. I knew this was the first step for me to find happiness. So, as I had preached so many years before, it was time for me to come on, get happy.

I left that marriage with less than a thousand dollars in my bank account. My only possessions were the things I could carry out of the house. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have a job. And I didn’t have anywhere to live. Yeah, I did a good job of wrecking my life, didn’t I? Emotionally I bottomed out. I had two failed marriages and a failed career. I knew I was smoking and drinking way too much. I even began to black out on a number of occasions.

When I was going through that divorce, I rented a room across from my best friend, Sam’s. Then, for about six months, I lived in the guest bedroom of his sister’s two-bedroom apartment. I believe it cost me $350 a month. I bought a bed. I bought a clock. I bought a set of sheets and a pillow. And that’s about all I had. I was broke, but I was
whole. I had huge debts, no job, no agent, no money, no prospects for a job, but I had myself.

My brothers were busy with their own lives. Although they were sympathetic to what was going on in mine, they could offer nothing more than an occasional ‘Let’s go have lunch’, or ‘C’mon, you’ve got to get rid of this anger and get out of this funk.’

So by the mid 80s, I was broke and almost everything in my life was negative. I was depressed and withdrawn. My debts only kept growing larger. My attorneys kept sending me bills. At the time, I got hit with a paternity suit, which made the
New York Post’
s notorious ‘Page Six’.

While the
Post
was printing the news of the paternity suit, halfway around the world a sleazy little newspaper in Germany was printing an ‘exclusive interview’ I’d supposedly given them, in which I allegedly came out as a homosexual. Incredibly, the story got picked up by a paper in England, then another. You try to deny something like that and you
only wind up drawing more attention to it. More recently, it’s even found its way into a book, which reported that I had revealed my homosexuality while in Germany. Yeah, right. I hadn’t even been to Germany at the time of the supposed interview. I was in L.A., struggling like hell to come up with another rabbit to pull out of my hat. But it always amused me when people assumed I was gay. It still does.

But I couldn’t worry much about what newspapers were or were not writing about me. That was the least of my concerns. In almost every way imaginable, my life was just not working.

When I suffered these severe financial problems, no one in my family was in any position to help me out. None of my brothers had made that kind of money. They were all struggling to take care of themselves. By then, my brother Shaun had a wife and three kids to support. His career was not exactly going very well at the time I was hitting bottom; he had his own problems to deal with. Shaun didn’t make as much money from his handful of hit records as some might imagine. It’s pretty much a myth that recording artists make a fortune from records. Most of the time, the record companies make the money, not the artists. My brother Patrick was an actor trying to make a living himself. So there was really no money around. I had no one to turn to for help. I did borrow some money a couple of times, just so I could make my child support payments.

Taking the money and running is not something that has ever enticed me. Doing crap for a big cheque is not something
I’ve ever done or ever want to do. Having to work just for the money is something I had to do a couple of times in my life and I always regretted it. I did it only to survive, not because I wanted to buy a car or live on a yacht.

I turned down a small fortune to work in South Africa when apartheid was still in effect. My conscience wouldn’t allow me to do it, even though I desperately needed the money. But I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t respected the sanctions. I was offered a million dollars for me, along with another half a million in cash and half a million to the government of Sun City, but I had to turn it down.

People still knew my name, they knew I had been a teen heartthrob many years before. But all that was ancient history. Professionally, nobody really cared about me any more.

Most people, at this point, might have contemplated suicide. Not I. I always believed that I had the strength and the talent to make it through this darkness. I’ve always seen suicide as the ultimate sign of weakness and failure.

Meanwhile, I received an invitation to go to Aspen, Colorado, for a couple of days. Get out of L.A. and ski? Sounded too good to be true. While I was there, I ran into an old friend who said Don Johnson, who had by now made it big, was in town and was throwing a party with Bruce Willis. This friend said, ‘David, Bruce knows you’re in town and wants you to come to the party. Your name will be on the list. All of Hollywood is going to be at this party.’

So I decided to go to the party. When I arrived, there were only a dozen or so people there; I was one of the first to arrive. Don was holding court, wearing a ridiculous mohair suit that must have cost two grand! I walked up to him. This was a guy who’d known me from the beginning, who’d been to my home – an old, old friend. I feel close to people I go way back with. The last time I’d seen him, he’d driven up to my house in his beat-up old Volkswagen. I was thinking,
This is going to be great; I can tell him how happy I am for all his success.

I said, ‘Don, how are you, man? Great to see you,’ thinking how glad this old friend would be to see me.

He just looked at me, smiled tightly for just a beat, and then went back to his conversation with somebody else. He absolutely iced me.

I laughed to try to break the tension, and said, ‘Don, you’re kidding. Right?’

When he didn’t turn around, I said, ‘Don’t do this, Don.’

No response.

‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ I said, and walked away, wondering,
Are you a human being any more, Don? Are you for real?

Was this what being a star had done to him? Did he think that he could now snub people he felt he’d risen above? Maybe, in his mind, that was his way of paying me back for getting jobs he’d wanted when we were both starting out. Maybe he didn’t want this reminder of his early years hanging around. I’ve witnessed how fame corrupts people. He was gone.

I was feeling a lot of pain because of my divorce, and so many other things. I just felt like I’d failed at everything. I’d done a lot in England, but nothing in America, where it really counted, my home. I’d felt lost many times in my life, but this time more than ever. I was hypersensitive, kind of like an outsider coming back, trying to start my life and career over again. And to have Don snub me . . . I felt as if he was saying,
Hey, I never really rated you anyway
or
I don’t need you losers any longer.
At the time, it hurt.

It seemed like a thousand people walked through the door of the party, a veritable who’s who of showbiz. I walked out quietly. Alone. Nobody noticed I’d left, I’m sure.

Maybe most people in the business no longer cared about me. One did, however. That same year, I found someone to represent me as an agent who eventually became my manager, Melanie Green. She was a real fan of mine and, even though I told her I was fundamentally a mess, she offered to represent me. And that, I think, marked the beginning of my professional recovery.

I realised that I needed to get myself healthy and try to rebuild my life. I began searching for the tools I needed to make that happen. I began searching for the keys. It was one step at a time. Then two steps. Then three steps. Suddenly I was walking again. Suddenly I was beginning to feel like my life was my own again.

The only difference between a happy man and an unhappy man is how he feels within himself. It has nothing to do with what he has in his bank account, nothing to do with
his creature comforts. It was an internal search that I began. Trying not to make the same mistakes I had made in the past. Trying to learn from those mistakes. Trying to rebuild my life from the bottom up, from the very basics of waking up in the morning to taking care of my body. I knew I had to take baby steps. And so it began.

I received a call from my attorney who said that an old friend of mine, Sue Shifrin, had called and that she was back in Los Angeles and that she wanted to speak with me. I wrote down her number and immediately called her and invited her to dinner. We had dinner a few nights later and then the next night, and the next, and, well, you know how that goes.