By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (11 page)

But I knew the casting director on
Natural Born Killers;
she called and told me that Oliver was significantly expanding the part of Detective Jack Scagnetti. Still, she said he was leaning toward Gary Old-man or Jimmy Woods. I knew the entire Mickey monologue by heart, so one night at the Monkey Bar, when I saw Oliver there I went up to him and said, “I can’t believe you’re going to cast Woody as Mickey.” And I started in on Mickey’s monologue right then and there. This is obviously a profoundly bad idea in a lot of ways, but I was doing it well, I guess, and I actually followed him out to his car to finish it. When I was done, he looked at me and said, “You know what? Come to my office tomorrow. I want to hear that monologue again and put you on tape doing it.” So I went to his office the next day and did it again. When I was done this time, he said, “What do you think about playing Scagnetti?” I was still very focused on somehow getting the part of Mickey, so I said I didn’t know. He was leaving his office for the day and he said, “Walk with me to my car.” We started walking to his car and he said, “Walk like Scagnetti would walk,” so I started doing that. Then he asked, “Do you think Scagnetti would have change in his pocket?” He induced me into the character like that. Then he had me follow him in my car to his house in Malibu, and we worked on the character of Scagnetti for a couple of hours.

When my agent called to tell me that I’d officially gotten the part, I was high on coke and on my way to get more. But when I heard that the movie was starting in a little less than three months, I called the
dealer back right away and canceled the transaction. I just thought, “How am I going to do a lead role in an Oliver Stone movie in eighty-seven days if I’m fucked-up?”

I didn’t really know how to get sober, so I called Bobby Pastorelli, an actor I’d met on a movie I’d done called
Striking Distance
. He played the house painter in
Murphy Brown
and later OD’d—I think he might have killed himself—but at the time he was in AA and he started taking me to meetings.

My agents and the people I worked with didn’t really know I’d been doing drugs and I was hoping I could get off them before the movie started. I wasn’t a dummy; I knew that the club of actors who get opportunities like the one I was about to get was small, and I didn’t want to fuck it up.

I actually managed to put together nearly three months of clean time before the movie started. And before the table read, I had a private meeting with Oliver where he said, “I’m building a table, okay? And I’ve got Robert Downey Jr. and Juliette Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson. I’ve got four good legs already. Do you get what I mean?” And I just said, “I promise you, I’m not going to fuck up your table.”

We started working in L.A., at Hollywood Center Studios, and then we flew out to Winslow, Arizona, for the shoot. Oliver and I were closer by then. He loved that I knew so many Shakespeare monologues—he’d come to my room, in his footsie pajamas, and say, “Come on, Tom, do that monologue again.” It was hilarious.

Playing Scagnetti was a defining moment for me. In the beginning, I couldn’t identify with him, really—with his viciousness and his pettiness. I had to steep myself in serial murder. I read Bundy interviews. I met serial killer John Wayne Gacy on death row in Illinois. I made myself sick. I felt sick, like there was a tumor in me. Even in the
hair: I had an
Eraserhead
haircut. I lost twenty-two pounds so that I could turn myself into a snake—a lizard and cold-blooded killer with no remorse or conscience. I got very heavily into the character but I sort of cut myself off from normal society in the process.

The hysteria when the movie came out was kind of ridiculous. Obviously Oliver makes controversial movies, but John Grisham went out and said that Oliver should be held accountable for the fact that two kids who watched the movie killed someone; that was simply an ignorant thing to say. The movie was meant to alarm. It wasn’t meant to enrage young people to go out and kill people—that wasn’t what Oliver Stone was saying. He was saying that in twentieth-century America there’s a premium on the media, violence, and fame, which can lead to enshrinement in a virtual hall of fame for misdeeds.

Very early in the shoot I had to do a scene where I strangle a naked girl and orgasm in the process, and I was incredibly nervous—I think because so much of what goes on in that scene just isn’t right. It was one of the girl’s first acting roles, and she was nervous as hell, and that didn’t help. We did two takes and Oliver came up and said to me, “Come on, take a break for a minute and think about what you’re doing.” I panicked. I just couldn’t pull it together, and all I could think was that I’d be more free and easy and with it if I were on some sort of drug. That really was my coping mechanism, even at that early stage.

So I asked someone on the set, “Can you get me a bottle of whisky, and if it’s possible—don’t tell anybody—but can you get me a gram of coke?” This was a different time. It was 1993 and it was an Oliver Stone set and you could talk fairly freely about most things, although you wouldn’t say something like that in front of Oliver.

I’m sure I could have done the scene without drugs; this was really just an excuse for me to use; in retrospect, I realize my addiction was already a monster. Anyway, the guy came back, motioned to the
fake coke I was supposed to snort in the scene, and said, “Dump that shit out.” Then he said, “Merck, so be cool,” as he put the new stuff out. Merck is pharmaceutical pure coke—Keith Richards talks about it in his book. It was really good for a while, but it turned on me fast: it made me really paranoid. In any case, that night I took a couple of swigs and did some real coke and I was able to do that scene with that gal and do it well.

Juliette Lewis had come to the set for her karate lesson because the next day she was going to shoot the scene where she beats the guys up in the diner. I had actually met her originally at the rehearsal and liked her right away. I knew Brad Pitt, her former boyfriend, because we’d played hoops together, so I’d asked him back then if it was okay with him if I went after her. He said, “Is it okay? I’ll drive you there! I want to be your agent on this one!” I think she was bothering him—phone calls and stuff. But actually, she was the one who left him, not the other way around. She left him over a pair of shoes, I swear to God. She had been nominated for an Oscar for
Cape Fear
—nobody knew who he was at that point but he was her boyfriend—and I guess he made them late to the Academy Awards because he couldn’t decide which pair of shoes to wear. The limo was waiting and she couldn’t get him out of the house. She was sixteen and she dumped him over that.

By the time Juliette showed up on the set, I already had a huge crush on her. She was only eighteen years old, and I really believed she was an intuitive genius—her talent was really, really sexy and attractive to me. So she was standing there watching me and when the scene was done, she said something like “Hey, Tom, that was really good. Are you like that with all the girls? I’ve often wanted to be strangled to death.” And she started laughing.

I said, “Yeah, I’ve strangled several girls to death myself. That’s why
I was so good; it was easy to do. So whenever you want to be strangled to death, you know who to call.” She said, “I’d like to be strangled to death right now.” That was how we flirted with each other.

Later, she left a message at my hotel room, and that night we used heroin together and had sex. Once I started using heroin again, it was like I’d never stopped and my eighty-seven days of sobriety were a distant memory. Heroin just put this hazy gauze over everything and made Juliette seem even more glamorous than she already seemed to me at the time as a two-time Oscar nominee. But what we did together was anything but glamorous. We were at the Best Western—the only hotel in Winslow—getting high and ordering corn flakes. We ordered like twenty-nine bowls of that shit. We could never eat it all—we were too high or it made us sick—so it would sit there, and we’d order some more, and that would get soggy.

During the shoot, when we had breaks, Juliette and I would come back to L.A. to get more dope. I was just snorting and smoking, not shooting, and I wasn’t feeling too bad about it, either, because I felt like I was doing great work. Of course I was addicted again, but when I was working I used the minimal amount of dope, just enough not to get sick from withdrawal. I’d use enough to get what heroin addicts call “well”—which really just meant to get normal. Basically, if I was using sixty dollars’ worth of smack during the breaks, then I’d use ten to fifteen dollars’ worth a day once I was back on set—so little that I wouldn’t even be noticeably impaired. If I felt sickness coming on again, I’d do a little bit more. I never wanted to be high—or at least be seen as high—on a movie. People really didn’t know that I was using, but they did eventually become suspicious because I was with Juliette all the time, and she briefly became inoperative; she couldn’t stay awake during the takes.

Her agents flew out and everyone asked me what was going on.
I told them, “I don’t know what she’s doing. I just fuck her and I go back to my room. Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing when I’m asleep.” They sort of believed me, even though my own problem wasn’t exactly under control. I was doing a lot of running around and juggling.

Some of that juggling involved the fact that I’d met someone else. See, one day, when we were shooting the courtroom scene where Juliette is testifying, I saw what had to be the prettiest extra in the history of extras: she had blond hair, beautiful teeth, and an unbelievable body. Her name was Maeve Quinlan. I was standing next to Woody Harrelson when I saw her, and he said, “Who’s gonna fuck her first?” We started taking bets. I said, “Robert,” talking about Downey. He said, “I bet it’s you or me—or maybe Oliver. How about I go second and you go third?” And I said, “I don’t care when I go, as long as I get a chance.” I didn’t know then that I was talking about my future wife.

Maeve was actually Juliette’s stand-in and they just happened to use her as an extra on that courtroom day. She and Juliette didn’t look anything alike, but they were both petite, and with a brunette wig on, Maeve could stand in for her.

When the scene wrapped, Maeve was walking down the courthouse steps in front of me, and I just busted out with “You have the greatest ass I think I have ever, ever seen.” She turned around and said, “And you have the most pathetic come-on line I have ever, ever heard. Does that line actually work?” As she kept walking down the courtroom steps, I burst into laughter. I couldn’t believe how brazenly she’d just called me out on my shit. Then she turned around and started laughing as well, and it was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen. I said to her, “Oh shit, now you’ve really done it. Great ass, great grin. What’s next—great heart?” She just kept laughing, and I know this sounds ridiculous but as we stood there, laughing and looking at each other, it’s like everything went into soft focus.

The truth is, the whole time I knew Maeve—and that goes up through today—her ass, her grin, and her heart were and are pretty much the best I’ve ever come across. What I didn’t know that day but I would soon come to find out is that she was completely unlike any other girl I’d ever met: she came from this amazing family in Chicago, had graduated from the University of Southern California on a full-ride tennis scholarship, and her dad and brothers were all doctors. You don’t ever find girls like her on movie sets; you don’t really find girls like her anywhere.

I’d heard that Woody made a run at her and she turned him down, and I think I used that as a reason to talk to her the next time I saw her. I went up to her and said, “I heard my buddy went after you.” At first, she denied it to protect him, which really endeared her to me. She could have said something bad, but instead she said it was completely untrue.

One day I asked her if she wanted to have lunch with me. The cast and crew usually ate meals together, but I sometimes liked to eat in my trailer alone, and so when I asked her to eat with me, I meant alone with me there. But when we got our food and I nodded in the direction of my trailer, she just shook her head. It was clear then that with her I wasn’t going to be able to get away with the kind of things I could with other women.

What’s funny is she had actually seen me before that day at the courthouse and thought I was an idiot. Back when we were all at Hollywood Center Studios—which is where we were working before we went on location to Arizona—she passed me on the lot. Apparently I was standing there in my underwear, with my sunglasses on my forehead, smoking a cigarette. She told me later that she just thought, “Who the hell walks around a public place in underwear acting like he’s in jeans? It’s one thing to do it in wardrobe and your trailer but in the middle of the lot?” But while she was partially horrified, I think
another part of her found it refreshing. Like I said, she’d had this extremely proper upbringing, and I don’t think she’d been around many people who didn’t really give a fuck about what people thought.

So we became friends during the shoot. She had a boyfriend back in Chicago, and I was really with Juliette, but I knew already that I genuinely liked Maeve a lot. And believe it or not, I had two other women that I was also involved with at the time. One was Vanessa Lasky, a wonderful girl who was the assistant to the manager I was with at the time, Suzan Bymel. When I first signed with Suzan, she had said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t get involved with my assistant,” and, of course, that was the first thing I did. Vanessa and I were involved for years, on and off; she eventually ended up marrying a CAA agent named Steve Alexander and becoming a successful interior designer.

I was also still seeing the British socialite Linda Evans, and the crazy thing about this particular time in my life is that I wasn’t
casually
dating any of these women: I felt like I was passionately in love with Vanessa, Juliette, and, later, with Maeve, too. I do believe it’s possible to love more than one woman at a time, but even I knew that this many women was excessive.