By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (16 page)

Maybe it’s not all that surprising, but I had a couple of run-ins with Captain Dye. He called Tom Hanks “Turd Number One” and called me “Turd Number Two”—everyone else he just called turds. At one point I said to him, “Don’t call me a turd anymore. I don’t like it. I’m doing my job out here, and don’t do that anymore.” He made me do something like two hundred push-ups for that.

Apparently, my manager Beth got a call from one of the producers who said that if I didn’t get with the program, they would consider sending out offers to other actors to replace me. I guess the names Bill Paxton and Gary Sinise were mentioned. Beth called me and said, “Look, this is it; if you get fired by Spielberg, you’re never going to get another job again.” I got right in line after that.

Still, the truth is that we had all been run ragged from boot camp and wanted to quit. At one point, Tom Hanks called a meeting for all of us where he said we should all stick with it. And it turned out that it was really important that we did that because we ended up doing a couple of maneuvers that were difficult and that we wouldn’t have learned to do if we’d left. But it rained every fucking day of that boot camp and it was as if Captain Dye had booked the rain especially for us. He’d say, “If it ain’t raining, you ain’t training. If it ain’t snowing, we ain’t going!” And “Up the hill, down the hill, fuck the hill, Rangers, Rangers, can’t quit, can’t quit, don’t quit, don’t quit, won’t quit, won’t quit, Rangers, Rangers.” We’d run miles singing that shit, which certainly bonded us together.

By the time boot camp was over and we’d all gone to Ireland to begin filming, Maeve had reconsidered the divorce and even agreed to come out to be with me. When she got there, I did everything I could to show her that I could be a better man. I made love to her with the desperation of someone who’s dying—because, in a lot of ways, I felt like I would die without her.

I stayed sober throughout the whole production, in large part because Maeve was there with me so much of the time. But I was also white-knuckling it—meaning that I was still thinking obsessively about using heroin and just not allowing myself to do any. It helped that it wasn’t exactly easy to get there. I did go out to try to find it once but I had a hard time locating any so I just said, “Fuck it.” And I
remember one day I was sitting on set just preoccupied with using and someone on the crew who’d had a heroin problem came and sat down next to me and said, “Stop thinking about it.” Addicts have this way of being able to read other addicts, and it was like he could tell exactly what I was thinking. I’d talk to that guy at night when my cravings were bad, and that really helped. I also became very good friends with actor Jeremy Davies, and that friendship helped a lot as well.

One day when we were shooting, I twisted my ankle and, about an hour later, it really hurt. And, look, I know myself; I understood that painkillers were a distinct possibility if I went to the doctor. My ankle did really hurt, and it’s not like I purposely twisted it in order to go to the ER, but I just think my brain understood that drugs were accessible and that maybe made me think I was in more pain than I actually was. Beth and her sister—who were visiting at the time—took me to the hospital, in Dublin I think, and when the doctor came in, he asked if I was okay or if I needed morphine. I said, “Actually, yes,” at the same time as Beth said, “No, he definitely doesn’t.”

Beth could always make me laugh. One day when she was still there visiting, production moved my trailer from where it had been the entire shoot. I needed to change for a scene, and I started to get upset because I didn’t know where I was supposed to go or where my other wardrobe was. Someone handed me an incredibly small T-shirt, but because I was angry, I didn’t even really notice its size. I just took off what I was wearing and put that on instead. I was still sort of ranting while wearing this shirt, but then I looked over at Beth and saw that she and her sister were trying to keep from cracking up. That’s when I started laughing, and pretty soon we were all howling.

I just kind of fudged my way through staying sober on that shoot. I wasn’t going to meetings—I wasn’t doing everything right—but I didn’t use. And thank God for that because they tested me a lot and
there was no cheating these tests—you couldn’t get fake urine because you had to go in with no clothes on and no bottles.

My dad hadn’t been to many of my movie sets, but he flew to Wexford Island, where he ended up sitting with Tom Hanks for a while, and then he sat with Steven for four days and watched him. I think Steven was kind of fascinated with my father because he saw me one way and then he met my dad, who was this very sophisticated, Harvard-educated, elegantly dressed gentleman.

I had a wonderful time working with Tom Hanks—we were sort of “good Tom” and “bad Tom,” and you can guess who was which. We played good friends. In scenes where it was just the two of us, our characters called one another by their first names, and only Rangers who knew each other very well did that. And my character’s real purpose in the movie was to keep Hanks’s character alive and make sure that the other men didn’t see that he was falling apart. At the end of the shoot, Tom wrote me a beautiful note about how he’d never forget making the movie with me.

Saving Private Ryan
meant a lot to me. It gave me an opportunity to pay homage and honor and give my respects to the fighting man, to my own family, and to America itself. I don’t think we, as Americans, think enough about the men who fight to keep this country free, and I was glad to be a part of something that might inspire people to think about that more. The average age of those men on D-day was eighteen, and it was amazing to me that these teenagers were willing to risk, and sadly often lose, their lives for us. And working with Steven was amazing. Watching him make the D-day scene come to life was unforgettable. He had no storyboards and no shot list; he’d just come out and point to what he wanted. The technicians told us we had two seconds to get past each land mine, and if we were too close to it, we could lose a foot. That helped me sort out my motivation
for the scene. The whole experience was extremely rewarding but it was also a very tough shoot. I worked every one of the sixty-one days, although that was actually less than it was supposed to be. We were scheduled to go sixty-eight but finished seven days early.

In between making
Saving Private Ryan
and the release, I packed on forty pounds to play John Gotti in the NBC miniseries
Witness to the Mob.
It was for De Niro’s production company, and he said, “Listen, we can do this two ways: you can wear a fat man suit or you can gain the weight.” I wanted my character to feel real, and the fact was that Gotti couldn’t lay off the cannoli, so I gained the weight. His belly was a sign of his success. He was a big man in every way, and that was his tragic flaw. So I basically went from being in the best shape of my life after
Saving Private Ryan
—I was 180 pounds of all muscle—to being a complete glutton. I ate cream sauce with everything I could get my hands on. I ate lots of pizza, ice cream, meatball sandwiches, and macadamia brittle. I got so fat that at one point, when I was in the shower, I looked down and I couldn’t even see my dick anymore. I became such a pig that Maeve said I even started snoring.

I took the weight off—carefully, under a doctor’s supervision—to make a smaller, blue-collar movie called
The Florentine,
which was written by my friend Tom Benson and starred people who were all friends of mine: Jeremy Davies, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, and Maeve. I played a guy who comes back to town and finds out his ex-girlfriend is getting married. I also made a movie called
The Match,
where I played a former air force fighter pilot guy who’s become the local drunk in a small Scottish town where he was based during Desert Storm. That was a definite departure from the kind of thing I normally did—it was a sweet little romantic comedy starring Richard E. Grant—but I really enjoyed it.

Then I signed on to a Martin Scorsese movie,
Bringing Out the
Dead,
which starred Nicolas Cage as a burned-out ambulance driver who believes he’s seeing the ghosts of people he couldn’t save. I played his ex-partner, a real psychopath who’s sort of the last thing Cage’s character needs at that point. I relocated to New York to do it. It was a lot of night shoots and I didn’t get along at all with Marc Anthony—the guy who would go on to marry Jennifer Lopez but back then played this crazy homeless guy in the film. During one scene, he was lying on a stretcher in the ambulance when I was fighting with him and very suddenly and unexpectedly the IV and all the stuff that was hanging above him fell and hit him in the balls. He blamed me for that and started swearing and yelling at me. Production had to literally pull us apart.

When I returned to L.A., I once again struggled to stay sober. One night Maeve and I went out to dinner with producer Brad Bell and his wife at Asia de Cuba, which had opened out of the pool bar at the Mondrian Hotel. I kept slipping away, saying I was going to the bathroom, but I was actually just going to the bar and ordering drinks. Because I was drunk, when I ran into a friend of mine named Michael Stone, I invited him to come over afterward. Maeve knew that Michael and I would do drugs together, and she put her foot down. She said, “If he comes over, I swear to God I’m calling nine-one-one.”

When we got home, Michael rang the bell so Maeve—true to her word—started to dial 911. She was sitting on the couch with the phone, and I tried to kick it out of her hand but accidentally kicked her in the neck instead. I started apologizing as she hung up the phone and then Michael walked in the door. The phone started ringing, but we ignored it while Maeve told Michael and his friends that they had to leave because she didn’t want drugs in the house. Michael said he understood and that he hadn’t known that I was trying to stay clean. But the phone call we hadn’t picked up was 911 calling back,
which is what they do if you call them and hang up. And if you don’t pick up, apparently they show up at your house. Suddenly six cops were at my door.

Even though I’d been drunk, I was suddenly sober as could be. It’s like how if you’re drunk and get in a car accident, you suddenly feel completely sober. I was arrested and taken to the West Hollywood sheriff’s department. Still, I bailed out right away, and life kept moving forward.

I’d have periods of sobriety, but chemicals just had such a hold over me. It was always the same old story: I’d get sober, have a few good weeks and go to meetings and show everybody that I was sober. And then I’d have something like a glass of wine. That would turn into three bottles of wine, which would turn into heroin. I’ve always had a very strong constitution. My friend Scott used to say that he would see me put away more liquor than he’d ever seen anyone drink, and then I’d bounce out of bed the next morning, ready to face the day. Of course, whenever I’d relapse, at first I’d always try to convince everyone I was still sober—I think some of the best acting I’ve ever done in my life, in fact, was pretending I was sober when I was high as a kite. But after a while, everyone would always catch on.

Maeve hated all the dope street lingo and thought that it was all part of the addiction, so she’d never call anything by those words—she called balloons “tomatoes,” for example. Our whole marriage was fraught with problems because of my relationship with heroin. I kept thinking I could stay sober without going to meetings, but she thought I needed to go, so to ensure that I went, she’d go with me. But then she began to learn about codependency and realized that it wasn’t healthy for her to be doing that because it just made me rely on her to stay sober. She started going to Al-Anon and left me to go to AA meetings on my own, but I just couldn’t seem to commit to them.

Like I said, Maeve could always tell when I’d slip up. At one point, she found out I was taking Vicodin, which I’d gotten from a Doctor Feelgood guy I’d met at the gym. She tore that guy a new asshole, but I continued to get away with taking it. I think, subconsciously, I would sometimes be purposely sloppy in trying to cover my tracks so that she’d catch me and I’d thus have to stop the cycle—at least temporarily.

Finally, one day she said she thought I should go on methadone so that I could be weaned off opiates and wouldn’t then try to get ahold of Vicodin when I wasn’t doing heroin. I thought it would be like a regular methadone clinic—where you have to wait in line forever and people would see me there, so I told her, “I can’t go to the methadone clinic, Maeve. Heroin addiction isn’t chic.” She said, “You just don’t want to stand in line, you dick. You say the reason you can’t go is that you’re famous, but that’s not what you’re thinking about; you’re really thinking about the inconvenience of standing in line.” When she said things like that, I’d think, “This woman knows me better than I know myself.” Because it was true. I really just didn’t want to have to wait an hour in line. But she said, “I’ve handled it.” She’d called Dallas Taylor, the guy who’d led the intervention that put me in Exodus the first time, and he’d told her about a hospital in Century Park where they’d give you whatever amount of methadone you needed. The woman who ran the place was named Caroline Perry. People said she overcharged, but she had enormous success.

The first day I went there, I lied to Caroline. I somehow got her and Maeve to do what they had to do, but then when I got Caroline alone, I said, “I lied to you, Miss Perry, because my wife was here. I’m using a lot more than I said I was in front of her.” They were going to give me 80 milligrams of methadone and I told her, “Giving me eighty milligrams is like giving me, if I was a cow, one piece of straw or blade of grass. I need a field.” So she upped it to 200 milligrams, which is the
highest amount you can ever get. The way they give you methadone is they put it in Tang juice, because you can’t get high off of it when it’s diluted that much, and the sugar in the Tang makes it difficult to cook the juice down if you wanted to inject the methadone.

I would advise anyone not to get on methadone, because it’s really difficult to get off of. It’s supposed to be curing you of heroin addiction, but you just become addicted to methadone. If you’re on a high dose, you can’t get out of bed unless you have it. You feel high on it but the high isn’t nearly as good as a heroin high. You feel some contentment and some sedation but you don’t get any of the euphoria you get from heroin—which is, of course, the best part of heroin. At first you feel stimulated, but as time goes on, you just feel sort of lethargic. I’d say being on methadone means feeling better than normal but not quite high.