By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (10 page)

From there, he became my regular dealer and friend. And I think I was allowed into his circle—actually, he
told
me I was allowed into his circle—because of my appetite for destruction and my talent. This circle wasn’t about fame. Keanu Reeves wasn’t a part of it. Tom Cruise wasn’t there, either. It was a group of people who all sort of felt like rock stars even if they weren’t rock stars—people who liked to party and could handle their shit. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were in it. It was a group of people who weren’t going to snitch on each other. In 1992 and 1993, the whole scene really took place between six or eight houses and a handful of bars, including the Viper Room and Small’s K.O., which was on Melrose and Gower and later became Forty Deuce. People wouldn’t even really go to Small’s—well, you’d go to the bar to see who was there but then you’d end up at this room across the street, doing drugs all night.

Bob would get heroin and coke and drop it off for you at your house. He was a fan of mine, and I was a fan of his, but mostly we were both just fans of drugs. He told me that he and Anthony had this thing where they could look into someone’s eyes and immediately know if they were a junkie just like you and you could trust them for life. I think I was a part of that.

I didn’t have a lot of perspective on my life then so I never sat back and said, “Hey, I’m a part of this crowd of hot young actors and musicians.” I basically just took it for granted that I deserved to be there. I had this weird belief in myself. I didn’t think anyone I met was a better actor than I was. I felt like I belonged. Later, when I met Jack Nicholson
and Robert De Niro, that felt like a big deal. But I didn’t give a shit about actors my age. It was cool to be with those people but I just felt it was where I was supposed to be. And I didn’t think of what we were doing as particularly dangerous, really. When River died—and later, when Kurt Cobain died—I was shocked and it broke my heart, but it didn’t stop me from doing what I was doing.

Still, I didn’t hang out with
anyone
all that much. I was never the guy that hung out. I’d pop into places that were hip and cool, usually just to see if I could meet a girl maybe, but I didn’t really spend a lot of time with other guys much at all. I was not ubiquitous on the scene, like some other actors. I liked acting, I liked reading, I liked movies. And I always loved the company of girls. Really, I’m pretty much the same guy today, just without the drugs.

I liked hanging out with Bob Forrest, though—maybe because his addiction back then made mine look minor. He had his own house when I first met him, but he quickly lost it and moved in with Johnny Depp. He’d be driving around in Johnny’s cars sometimes and then other people’s cars other times. You never really knew if he was supposed to be driving the car he was in. You’d ask him, “Is this car reported as stolen?” And he’d say, “You know, I honestly don’t know.”

I remember threatening Bob one time; the details are a little murky, but I think I believed he’d stolen one of Johnny’s cars and sold it to a chop shop. Even though I had plenty of money, I was always looking for ways to get free dope, so I decided to threaten him by telling him that I’d tell Johnny he stole the car unless he gave me free drugs.

I broke a beer bottle and said, “You see this? I’m going to drive this through your fucking forehead.” But he called for Johnny, and I had to get rid of it really fast. As he was helping me clean it up, Bob said, “Even if it was true, who would he believe: hot-tempered Tom or the
even-keeled Bob?” I never ended up telling Johnny, and I doubt there was anything to tell. To this day, Bob maintains that he never stole any of Johnny’s cars.

He did at one point borrow his girlfriend Stacey Grenrock’s car and sell the stereo for drugs. She worked for Johnny at the Viper Room, and Bob was always borrowing her car and then disappearing in it for a few days to do drugs. Eventually Bob was arrested, and everyone decided that they’d had it with bailing him out of trouble. When Bob called Johnny, his assistant—the ex-girlfriend whose car stereo he’d swapped for drugs—wouldn’t put the call through and when he tried to call Anthony Kiedis, the Chili Peppers manager also shut him down. He ended up getting sober in jail.

I was really fond of Bob, but he’d been to rehab numerous times already and made many attempts to stay clean, and he just didn’t seem to be able to do it. I was nowhere near as fucked-up as he was—which made me think I was okay. I was getting progressively worse, of course, but gradually, whereas Bob was already deeply enmeshed in addiction when I met him.

I think he did nine months in county jail, and when he got out and was clean, he got a job washing dishes at this breakfast place in Silver-lake called Millie’s. We all felt so bad for him—it was this very hip place so everyone would go there for pancakes and see Bob making minimum wage.

One time John Frusciante actually said to Bob, “I will pay you whatever you make here if you just quit”—but Bob seemed happy. He told me later that the more it weirded people out to see him in that position, the more certain he became that it was the right thing for him to be doing. He started going to AA meetings over at the Gay and Lesbian Center because it was near Millie’s and no one would hassle him there or say, “Hey, weren’t you once a big-time musician and now
you wash dishes?” We were all so spoiled, but it’s like he learned how to unspoil himself. From there he became an incredible inspiration to others struggling with addiction. Believe me, if you’d seen the way Bob did drugs, it would blow your mind that he could be sober for five minutes, let alone for five days or a year. I don’t know if Robert Downey Jr. or I would have ever gotten sober if we hadn’t been able to say, “My God, if Bob Forrest can get clean, then anyone can.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. My point is that he has helped a whole lot of people. John Frusciante ended up becoming terribly addicted later: he had a big black hole in his arm and was pushing a shopping cart around when Bob found him. Bob took him to Las Encinas, and he got better. Still, when Bob went to jail we all thought he was the worst drug addict we’d ever seen. We didn’t have any way of knowing then that I was going to make what he’d been through look minor.

WHEN I GOT
called in for
True Romance,
the director Tony Scott talked to me about playing the role of the assassin who beats up Patricia Arquette. But I didn’t want to beat Patricia Arquette up and then die. I wanted to play Cody Nicholson—Nickels—to Chris Penn’s Nicky Dimes. They ended up casting my old chess pal Jimmy Gandolfini as the assassin.

Years later, I met with David Chase when he was putting together
The Sopranos
. It was just a pilot at that point, but it was awfully good. Still, I thought back then that TV was beneath me; plus, I’d gained forty-eight pounds to play John Gotti in a movie and I would have had to keep the weight on. You never know what’s going to turn into the pop sensation of the decade.

True Romance
was only a week of work, but I couldn’t believe I was part of the most amazing cast I’d ever heard of: Christopher Walken
and Gary Oldman and Brad Pitt and Dennis Hopper and Val Kilmer and Samuel Jackson. All my scenes were with Chris Penn, God rest his soul, so we got to know each other really well. His brother Sean came to the set one day and watched us work and we became good friends, too.

We filmed at the abandoned Ambassador Hotel in L.A., where Robert Kennedy was shot, and everyone called that scene “the clusterfuck.” Tony started every take like this: “Rock and roll, motherfuckers! Action!” The fucking feathers from the exploding pillows were there for four days. I got killed in one take and had to lie there the whole time with feathers in my mouth.

It was tough keeping a straight face during the scenes with Bronson Pinchot, who had the listening device in his crotch; the laughs in that scene are completely authentic. The part where we’re listening to what’s going on in the elevator was all improvised. Chris Penn was a wonderful, underrated actor—a real pro.

We did takes where Chris slapped Bronson across the face with the bag of coke, then grabbed him and smashed his head on the table. There’d be some woman talking about her boobs, and all of a sudden Chris Penn would be strangling Bronson. I just about died laughing.

Chris told me, “Sean thinks you’re a really good actor, and my brother is the greatest actor in the world.” He always used to say that Sean was the greatest actor in the world. It breaks my heart thinking about that because Chris really idolized his brother, and he was just the sweetest guy—a wonderful, funny, talented man lost far too soon.

ALONG WITH MY
increase in film opportunities came an increase in drug use and along with that came an increased interest in sex. I had once been a guy who’d assumed he’d stay with one woman his entire life.
But suddenly I was a successful young actor, and it began to dawn on me that my sexual possibilities had opened up exponentially. While of course it was exciting—I knew it was every guy’s dream to have this happen—in retrospect I’d say the sex screwed me up almost as much as the drugs. I became addicted to the conquest. I’d meet or find out about a woman and want to know that I could get her. And then I would. I didn’t succeed every time, of course, but I succeeded a lot. Obviously it was an ego game. But it wasn’t as obvious—at least to me at the time—that it was a sort of Pandora’s box I couldn’t seem to shut.

The opportunities I would get would blow my mind. In 1989, I got a call from the assistant to a big shot in the industry—literally the biggest star in the world at the time—and was told, “She wants to meet you.” When I got there, another of her assistants said, “She’d like you to come this way now,” and I was brought into an anteroom. And then this superstar walked in, sat down, and said, “So tell me about yourself.”

I said, “Um . . . I’m old enough.” I knew what it was all about. We talked for a few more minutes and then she walked out and the assistant came in a minute later and led me up to her room to take a shower. She had probably said, “Have him washed and cleaned” or something, so I took a shower and got into a tub. I was in great shape then, and by the time I actually got into her bedroom, I wasn’t nervous at all, even though part of me was thinking, “You’re the biggest fucking female star that ever lived—you’re a shot-caller. What the hell are you doing here with me?” But I ended up sleeping with her for three years, so I got over that after a while. She liked me. She told me, “You always come through.” I think she meant sexually.

By this point, I was also sleeping with Linda Evans, this British socialite I’d met through Elizabeth Hurley. Even though I was head over heels for Elizabeth when I first met Linda, I’d always sort of make sexual overtures to Linda, but in a joking way. At some point, once Elizabeth
and I had been finished for a long time, Linda made it clear that she was interested and we got very close very fast. We went out to the Hamptons together, where we stayed at Julian Schnabel’s place, and I even took her home to meet my parents. She and I partied together, but we also had a very genuine connection. Honestly, drugs were a part of pretty much all my relationships at that time—I didn’t really spend time with anyone who didn’t do drugs—and I actually think her drug problem back then was worse than mine. She was mercurial, so the ups were very up and the downs were very down, and I think I believed I could save her and she believed she could save me.

We stayed together on and off for years—though I’d often be juggling several other women at the same time. In the later years we were together, we’d try to quit doing drugs but we would never be able to stay off them. At one point we both stayed sober for thirty days, and then she decided to throw us a party to celebrate that fact at the Monkey Bar. Clearly there were some very basic elements of sobriety that we were failing to understand—or at least incorporate into our lives. We both slipped at that party: each of us took the same friend with us into the bathroom to do coke and told him not to tell the other one that we were using again. The whole thing came out the next day.

Linda was seeing another man during part of the time that we were together, an insanely wealthy European gentleman who lived in New York. When she and I got more serious, she called him up to break things off with him—to tell him she’d fallen in love with me—and he didn’t take it very well and kept calling her afterward. She would always be so upset after getting off the phone with him that I called him up and said, “Listen, you’re upsetting my old lady really bad.” I was so pissed-off that I actually flew to New York to talk to him about it, and we ended up getting in a fistfight. I flew back to L.A.—I
had only been gone for something like twelve hours—and never told Linda word one about it. But then he called her and exaggerated the entire thing. She went crazy, and I have to admit that what I did was completely wrong. Drugs had completely clouded my judgment and made me much more likely to do irrational things, like fly to New York to get in a fight with my girlfriend’s other boyfriend. I should have at the very least told her I was doing it, but I was so in love with her and I was jealous of him because I felt like he had a hold on her that I didn’t, mostly by virtue of the fact that he’d known her longer. She went so crazy that she kicked me in the chest, and I went flying across the room.

I had become pretty good friends with Sean Penn by this point, and he was the one I called whenever I got into a jam with a woman, because he was always really good with women. But when Sean got to our place and saw shit flying across the room and the general state she was in, he said, “I’m leaving—you two are crazy.” That was, essentially, the end of my relationship with Linda; we stayed together for about another four months but she could never forgive me for what I did.

Despite all of the insanity, we loved each other—we really did. The truth is that my life was insane at that point, so a crazy relationship fit right in.

EVER SINCE
Born on the Fourth of July,
I’d wanted to work with Oliver Stone again. He was ballsy and brilliant and doing things that no one else was. When I found out that he was putting together
Natural Born Killers
, in 1992, I was told that the only part he thought I was right for was Mickey, the lead, and Warner Bros. essentially told him whom
he had to cast for that. Originally he’d hired Michael Madsen, but Warner told him that if he cast Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, or Woody Harrelson, the budget would grow from $7 million to $35 million. Only Mel and Woody read for the part, and Woody was coming off of
White Men Can’t Jump
and
Indecent Proposal,
so he was cast. My name never entered the discussion.