Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness (10 page)

The most exciting activity you can do with Steve is eat. We are a perfect match in this department. It should be televised. We’ve been in deep middle-of-the-night conversations and suddenly decided that Thanksgiving dinner would be delicious. At four in the morning, we’re at Jerry’s Deli asking for extra gravy.

As much as I love how funny he is, the best part of Steve Jones is his honesty and openness. There is no man behind his curtain—he has no curtain. Listening to him talk about addiction was the first time I understood that it was a disease. Not one that I had, of course—it took a long time for me to acknowledge that, and Steve’s not a finger-wagging, lecture-giving person. But he doesn’t bullshit, either. He’s walked the recovery walk for many years and quietly helped countless others along the way. When I was in and out of treatment centers, he was a rock. Steve will always be there for you if you really want it—you just have to know that you’re not going to get the soft and sweet version of him.

I jumped
to Wilhelmina Models, a bigger agency that represented many of the most visible and popular models of the time—icons
like Lauren Hutton, Beverly Johnson, and Janice Dickinson, and beginners like me and Rebecca Gayheart, who would later marry Eric Dane.

Much to the distress of some casting agents, I was not growing into the size of my feet—I was stuck at five foot seven at a time when nobody wanted to look at anybody under five foot nine (thank God for platform shoes). Nevertheless, I was getting work in print and in so many music videos that I lost count—a country artist, a French singer, a rock band, Belinda Carlisle, k.d. lang. I was making two to five thousand dollars a day on a regular basis, and when I booked jobs for Estée Lauder and Max Factor, the fees went to twenty thousand or more. Paris, Milan, more trips to Japan—my passport was getting a workout.

I was smart enough to know the odds against my success. Supposedly, the industry average was something like sixty auditions to get a callback (and that wasn’t even the guarantee of a paid job). For every job I booked, hundreds of other girls were rejected. Only three years after my stint at the Burger King in Lakehurst, New Jersey, I was making more money than either of my parents would ever make combined.

My booker at Wilhelmina, also new to the business, was Jeff Kolsrud. Although the entire agency worked on my behalf, Jeff became my point person, the one I checked in with every day—which got easier once I moved out of the models’ apartment and Jeff and I became roommates. He also became my mentor, my other brother, and as dear to me as Kristen and Ivana. It was as though I had reconstituted my family. The little house Jeff and I shared was not a crash pad, it was a home, and my need for order was something he shared as well. When my statements came from the agency, he sat
with me as my mother had done when I was a little girl, helping me go through every item, every charge. He understood every aspect of the business that up until then I hadn’t paid much attention to—as long as the money came in, I spent it. If I ever wanted my own place, he said, that had to stop. Jeff had a sense of the future that I didn’t have, and he wanted me to start planning for it. His own future would be a big one: he is the creator and owner of Q Model Management in New York, founded in 1998 and now one of the hottest agencies in the country. He developed
Models NYC
for MSNBC; he became an activist on behalf of the homeless, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the Central Park Conservancy—and a couple of years ago, he and his partner, Franco, welcomed their baby daughter into the world. That little girl has the best outlook on life of anyone I’ve ever met. When she wakes up in the morning, the first thing out of her little mouth is “I happy.”

Jeff teased me mercilessly about oversleeping, about staying out until dawn, and especially about my model-challenged diet, informing me that putting potato chips
on
a bologna-and-cheese sandwich rather than simply next to it was not exactly creative gourmet. “You’re getting a little roundy,” he said in the gentlest way. “I’m not sure how much longer you can use the ‘growing girl’ excuse.”

Jeff even taught me how to drive—on weekends, he went with me to the empty CBS Studios parking lot on Fairfax and Beverly, and took a lot of deep Zen breaths while I struggled to master the intricacies of “drive” and “reverse.”

I knew I had Jeff’s affection, but I valued his judgment and wanted his respect. I tried to keep the worst of my increasing wild-girl behavior far away from our friendship, but when the cycles of depression would roll in and I couldn’t manage to get myself out of
bed, it was hard to hide. When I finally got my own place and spent more than the rent on a great big soft bed with linens as beautiful as the ones I’d first slept in at the St. Regis, he teased me about that, too. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to have a bed that’s even tougher to get out of, Mary,” he said.

The Holy Grail
of print for a model is
Vogue
magazine, and in particular,
Vogue Italia
, the Milan-based magazine that every advertiser, fashion editor, and modeling agent thumbs through religiously. Appearing in
Vogue
, I knew I was where a lot of girls wanted to be—certainly where I could never have imagined being. Nevertheless, in the middle of a shoot in Paris, surrounded by makeup artists and special lighting, wearing beautiful clothes, having my makeup done by artists who were as important on one side of the camera as the photographers were on the other side, I felt hollow and frightened. The feeling intensified when night came and I was alone in a foreign country, going back to an apartment with shutters on the windows that kept out the light. I slept through my castings, fell asleep in the makeup chair, barely spoke with anyone during my shoots, and in spite of being invited out, I huddled in bed all day Saturday and Sunday. Finally, I called the agency and begged them to get me out of there. Where? they asked. I didn’t care. A change of scenery, a different hotel. They shipped me to London.

I went to work right after I arrived; a few days later, I got a message from my booker at the London agency. “There’s a phone call from someone on his way to London. He wants to know if you’ll have time to see him?” It was Scott.

I may have been lonely and depressed, but I had one thought
and one thought only: Finally, that man and I are going to kiss each other.

I was working a fashion show the day we were scheduled to meet at his hotel. I stuttered through that first phone call. “I need some time to get back to my place and clean up,” I told him.

“No, no, it’s not a problem. Come straight here,” he said. I walked into the hotel lobby in platform boots, a purple fur coat, and garish purple eye makeup, and was greeted by the somewhat alarmed stares from a bunch of men in Savile Row pinstripes. Moments later, Scott arrived in a leather jacket and pink hair. We went into the bar to catch up. It had been more than a year since we’d seen each other. I wasn’t a little girl anymore; he wasn’t my driver. We weren’t best friends or old drinking buddies. For a while, I didn’t know what we were. And I wasn’t sure what to order, either. Scott suggested a Fuzzy Navel—peach schnapps and orange juice. Probably thought the girl could use something nutritious.

He told me all about the Stone Temple Pilots tour for
Core
; they’d been opening for Rage Against the Machine and Megadeth, playing to huge crowds and increased notice (some of it mixed) from the critics. They were getting more video play on MTV; VH-1 was beginning to be important as well. The rest of the tour in Europe would be about smaller clubs, connecting with fans the way they’d done in California, continuing to make the case that they weren’t just “another grunge band,” said Scott.

I tried to keep up my end of the conversation.
Vogue, Seventeen, Glamour
magazine, blah blah blah. Long awkward pauses in between. “I want to ask you something,” he’d say, and then stop.

“Okay,” I said. “What?”

“Wait a minute, I have to go to the bathroom. Be right back.”
Then he’d leave. Then he’d come back. Then we went through the whole routine again. He wanted to ask me a question, I wanted to hear it, but wait, he had to get up and leave for a minute. I drank more Fuzzy Navels. There’s such a thing as too much orange juice. Finally, I’d had it with his getting-up-leaving-coming-back routine; I couldn’t stand not knowing for one more minute. “
What
did you want to ask me?”

“I want to ask you if I can kiss you.”

We sat on a couch in the hotel lobby and kissed each other until five o’clock in the morning. I think the next hotel shift was coming in to work when I finally decided that he was being too much of a gentleman. “Do you want me to walk you to your room?” I asked.

We stepped into the elevator, and when the doors closed, we held hands until we got into his room. It was a tiny room—two twin beds, with only a small space between them.

San Diego girl that I was, and London being what it is, I’d been freezing all day and had many layers of clothing to remove. After waiting for each other as long as we had, we now had to wait through Mary Undresses Item by Item. First, the massive purple jacket; then the platform boots and the super-warm socks. Black leggings. Black tights under them. A black sweater, then a tank top. Finally, I was sitting on the bed in panties and a bra. It was almost dawn. I look back on those two exhausted, drunk people and I’m amazed that the man hadn’t gone to sleep already. But no, there he was. He took off his T-shirt and handed it to me. It seemed a funny gesture at that moment. Looking back now, I think the T-shirt may have represented something more. Even though I knew that he loved me and that it was right that we were in that room, I don’t think he was
prepared for half-naked Mary—I’d led him up to his room, I’d taken off all my clothes, and I found that I wasn’t quite sure what to do next. We figured it out. Two grown people in a tiny twin bed. It’s a good thing our intention was to be on top of each other, since that was the only choice. The only camera that matters is the one that is in my mind, and there is nothing about that night (or what was left of it) that I will ever forget.

I had a call for an English magazine the following morning, and in spite of no sleep at all, I made it on time, made it through the shoot, and love those pictures to this day. I was glowing and I knew it. I canceled work for the following week to be with him. We went out, we saw the sights, we clung to each other like ivy on old London houses. He had a couple of publicity interviews to do for the tour. I went with him, and gossip soon had rock star Scott Weiland spending time with some American child. “It was Europe, she was seventeen, and she was emancipated,” he said. And, she admits now, she was completely delirious.

I didn’t ask about Jannina. I assumed they weren’t together. Naive is an understatement. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to hear about anything in the real world. And I really didn’t want to hear Scott telling me he had to leave London to head back to Miami to appear on MTV’s
Spring Break
. “Germany,” he said.

“What?”

“After Miami, the rest of the tour is in Germany. Meet me in Germany. Then the tour goes to Italy after. You can be with me then, too.” And then he was gone.

The MTV appearance took it all to another level for STP, and meanwhile, I had crashed again, back to having only two speeds:
Scott and off. I crawled into a hole. I surfaced only long enough each day for weepy transatlantic phone calls.

I showed up in Germany the same day that the guys did, and what happened next was a little reminiscent of the Beatles’ film
A Hard Day’s Night
—not in terms of the impact of the tour, but the comedy that took place around the romance. The two DeLeo brothers, Robert (bass) and Dean, were sharing a tiny hotel room; Scott was supposed to share one with percussionist Eric Kretz. But Kretz had to pile in with the DeLeos to make room for me (he’d had to do the same in the London hotel, poor guy—he was always having to move out for me). The guys were all riding on the adrenaline that their success and the publicity had earned them; I was riding on the adrenaline of big love. They could’ve been angry or resentful at my presence, but instead they were warm and welcoming and incredibly kind.

Scott and I hit all the pubs, we saw all the sights, and we held hands everywhere we went. This was boyfriend/girlfriend stuff, and sometimes I thought my heart was going to fly out of my chest with joy.

The rest of the trip was on a double-decker tour bus, with bunks up top and a couple of seats up there as well, where we sat and watched the country go by. There was no such thing as privacy—if Scott and I wanted to be together, we simply squeezed into one of the bunks and I hoped, in my girl naïvety, that none of the guys would know what we were doing. It made no sense, of course—rock stars on a tour bus, and me praying nobody noticed the girl giggling in the top bunk. At one point, we were all watching a Led Zeppelin documentary together, and the unreality of where I was and the people I was with just washed over me. But the feeling wasn’t “This
is just the most bizarre thing ever”—it was “This feels right. This is where I’m supposed to be.”

I’ve come to understand that there are egos and resentments in every band (because what family doesn’t have egos and resentments?). But these guys were funny. They could read one another and they loved one another, even on days when maybe they didn’t like one another much. Meeting them when the band was just taking off was so much fun because they took nothing for granted and got excited about everything that was happening. My first impressions, formed on that tour, haven’t changed much over the years. They’re now older, wiser versions of themselves.

Watching Dean and Robert trade wiseass banter is the equivalent of seeing a Venus and Serena Williams match. Even now, I’m sometimes taken aback that they were raised in New Jersey. I’m not saying there aren’t laid-back people in New Jersey, but Dean’s whole vibe is San Diego beach town—he’s always smiling and laughing, and really doesn’t seem to give a fuck. That’s my kind of people. In the words of his former wife, Juliana, “he’s a charismatic guitar god to his enigmatic lead singer. And he’s a nice guy.”