High On Arrival (23 page)

25

I went back to the barnhouse that Mick and I shared near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and did what I’d been longing to do every minute of my time at the Lodge. I immersed myself in raising Shane. I hadn’t seen my boy for nine long months. When I walked in the front door, Shane came running to me and threw himself into my arms. He had long blond hair with funny bangs, missing teeth, and was wearing his Batman pajamas with the attached cape. He was the cutest thing I’d seen in my life, and I held him for as long as he’d let me.

Starting the next day, I took Shane to school every day. I drove him to karate, soccer, playdates, birthday parties. Mick and I read him every Roald Dahl children’s book ever published. I put on Spandex and went to aerobics to burn off the rehab weight. I got into cooking and hosted a Tupperware-type party for moms, friends, and neighbors. I loved my newfound sobriety and was careful to preserve it. Stroudsburg was a small town with a strong recovery community. I surrounded myself with other clean former users. I didn’t put anything chemical in my mouth, not even aspirin. I was a new person, not just because I wasn’t using. I dressed differently. I spent my time differently. I lived in the country, surrounded by trees and streams and frogs and snow, far from the palm trees, cars, and people of Los Angeles. I had done what I thought was necessary to stay sober—I changed everything about myself and it was incredible. Being a mom made me very happy.

Playing wife didn’t come as easily to me. When I came out of the Lodge, it was the first time Mick had known me sober. In truth, it was the first time I had known myself sober. When one member of a couple gets sober and the other doesn’t need to, it’s as if you are navigating a whole new relationship. Mick and I tried to make our relationship work, we really did. But we were on different paths. Mick had fallen in love with me and all my quirkiness. He’d always been quiet, soft-spoken, and spiritual. After our son was born he’d grown up a lot—he stopped smoking, drinking, and using. Mick stuck with me through my addiction, but now that I was sober, my true self was evident. I’m always talking, singing, making jokes. This wasn’t a huge change, but it started to grate on him. He got cranky. Cliché as it sounds, Mick and I were growing apart. We were great friends, and we were completely in love with our son. But the romance was gone. After several years of trying to make it work, we decided to let go of what wasn’t working—the romance— and to keep what was: the friendship and the parenting.

Maybe this is true for everyone, but I’ve found that once I love somebody, it doesn’t really go away. As I said, I even loved Jeff Sessler as we went through a horrid and painful divorce. Just because the relationship doesn’t work, the love doesn’t disappear. It just becomes a different type of love. I’ve stayed friends with pretty much all of my exes, but especially Mick, who was and is a perfect, lovely partner in raising our son. He calls me “Ma” and I call him “Pa.” But even now there’s only so much of me he can take at a time. I see a curtain come across his eyes and I say, “I love you, Pa, but I’m going to leave you alone now.”

At some point Mick and I decided we wanted to get Shane a British passport to match his father’s. It was an opportunity for him to move freely in the world. We petitioned the Crown, but they wouldn’t issue the passport unless Mick and I were married. So—even though we were no longer a couple—we got married.

Although it was meant to be a perfunctory ceremony in our living room, Shane wanted to dress up, so he put on his Cub Scouts uniform. I wore a minidress with boots. We took a ring I was already wearing (as I had done for my wedding to Jeff Sessler) and put it on a couch pillow so Shane could be the ring bearer. Our dear friends Randy and Suzi VanWarmer flew in from Nashville. A local guy from who-knows-what ministry performed the ceremony wearing a fire engine red shirt, a black tie, and a black jacket. When he was done I expected him to segue straight into his Vegas act.

After the quick ceremony I noticed that there were match-books lying around the tables. A closer look revealed that they said “Mick & Laura” with the date. There were also Mick & Laura napkins, and a Mick & Laura wedding snow globe music box. Leave it to Randy and Suzi not to come empty-handed. Once we were official, Mick presented me with a huge box. Inside were ten enormous photo albums. Mick had gathered all the photos we’d taken over the years—from the day we met to Shane’s birth, millions of them—and put them together in those ten huge photo albums. Mick had worked on it for weeks and weeks. It was my wedding present.

Mick and I stayed married for many years. We were very close. Whenever anything good or bad happened, Mick was the first person I’d call. But eventually we found that the kind of intimacy we shared—we talked on the phone many times a day—wasn’t fair to our partners. It was tough on our relationships and we had to back off for their sakes, but we will always be family.

After a couple years of living in the mountains of Pennsylvania, I found myself sitting in our house, listening to my sister Chynna’s new album, crying. Wilson Phillips, Chynna’s group with Carnie and Wendy Wilson, was at the height of their success. I played the cassette tape and thought how beautiful Chynna’s voice sounded, and how happy I was for her. Chynna and I have always had a complicated relationship, and it was particularly so at that point. I couldn’t help comparing where we were in our lives and thinking,
Look what I’ve done to myself, all my wasted opportunities.

Our rural existence was idyllic, but something was missing. Then I realized,
Wait a minute. I’m an actress.
I started yearning to work again. The question was whether the industry that had watched me crash and burn would take me back.

In 1994 I went to L.A. and had a meeting with an agent at the big Hollywood agency William Morris. The agent I met with listened to me for a few minutes, then said, “You know what, Mackenzie? Don’t even bother. Go back to Pennsylvania, raise your kid, and forget about Hollywood.” He didn’t think there was a soul who would hire me. But I loved acting, and I owed it to myself to try again, to return to a piece of my former life, but to do it right this time. I called Pat McQueeney, my beloved manager whom I’d fired on the advice of my father. To my great relief and delight, she accepted my apology. Pat told me she knew the woman who was perfect for me: Arlene Dayton, a veteran Hollywood manager. Arlene took me on and with single-minded determination set about reestablishing my career. Arlene was on a mission.

In later years, Arlene told me she’d promised herself she’d never fall in love with another client, but then I came along. She was like a mother to me; I loved her so. She was my manager until her death.

With Arlene’s help I started making the rounds. Soon I landed my first part as a clean and sober actress: in a wink-wink casting decision, I was to play an intervention counselor on
Beverly Hills 90210,
running an intervention on Luke Perry’s character.

A lot of what holds former child stars back is an inflated idea of status. They won’t read. They won’t audition. But—especially if there’s been a gap in your work, and especially if that gap existed because you were publicly and embarrassingly fired from a major sitcom—you
have
to audition. I pounded the pavement, man, and just started booking stuff.
NYPD Blue; ER; Walker,
Texas Ranger; Melrose Place
. I didn’t care that I was a day player. It was amazing to be working.

I rented a house with my old friend Sue Blue—she’s one of my best friends to this day—up the street from my mother’s condo. Soon after we moved in, Shane came to spend the summer with me. When it came time for him to go back to Pennsylvania—school was starting soon—I talked to Mick on the phone as I packed. I said, “Look, here’s his little underwear. And his little socks.” His clothes made me cry. I didn’t want him to go back, but his school, his home, were in Pennsylvania. He needed to go back. But that summer I knew I wanted to create a home for him, and the following year he came to stay.

Every morning I got up at six, took Shane to school, went to work, and came home in time to make dinner. To be self-supporting after the life I’d lived made me feel fulfilled and good. There was nothing in my mind that could ever make me pick up another drug again. I was a working mom. Who would give that up? Why would I give it up? There wasn’t a chance.

Getting clean was a chance for me to return to some of the people I’d lost over my years of addiction. Valerie has had the same phone number for twenty-five years, a number that she has managed to keep no matter where she moved, and I’ve never forgotten it. When I moved back to L.A., I called that number. An answering machine picked up, and I left a message: “Hey Val, it’s Mack. I’m just thinking of you. I love you. I’m six months clean. You don’t have to call me back but here’s my number. I love you.” Val didn’t call back. A while later I left another message: “Hey Val, it’s Mack. I’m eight months clean …” This went on for close to a year. I just kept leaving messages. I never wondered why she wasn’t calling me back. I’d done damage and I knew it. Val is a reserved, private person. I knew it wouldn’t be easy for her to just pick up the phone, but one day the phone rang and it was Valerie.

I apologized and Val was very gracious. We started being buddies again. I brought Shane over to play with her son, Wolfie, while Val and I sat on the couch drinking coffee, petting her cats, and talking about the old days. Val said, “Mack, I was always frightened for you. I’m so proud of you.” Another time she invited me to her beach house in Malibu. It was a spectacular home that she had purchased with
One Day at a Time
money long ago, even before she married Ed. At least one of us was smart with her money. A couple of her other girlfriends came, and Alex Van Halen, Eddie’s brother. Val, her girlfriends, and I climbed onto a big, deep couch and talked about girl stuff: breakups, dating, our bodies. We talked about being mothers, and Val and I couldn’t help musing on how we’d played children and now we were the parents.

We weren’t the only ones who found this mildly amusing, at the very least. Val and I went to the mall once and as we wandered through the makeup section of a department store, I saw people recognizing us. They noticed me, then whipped around, not sure if they’d just seen Val a few makeup stations away. The looks on their faces said, “Does she know the other one is here?” Wherever we went, people seemed somewhat flummoxed at seeing us together as grown women instead of the teenagers we once were and played on TV. I wasn’t so confused by it, but I was amazed and grateful for the renewed friendship with Val.

Another unexpected friendship seemed to emerge fully formed. Peter Tork, formerly of the Monkees, asked me to sing a song on his album
Stranger Things Have Happened
alongside Owen Elliot, the daughter of Mama Cass. Owen and I had crossed paths many times over the years. Her first memory of me is at Chynna’s eleventh birthday party. I was one of the grownups chauffeuring the younger guests to On the Rox, the small bar above the Roxy. Owen climbed into the backseat of the TV star’s red Mercedes convertible, with no idea that we would one day be best friends.

Now, as we recorded a song called “Giant Step,” we felt a kinship—her mother and my father were a Mama and a Papa— and that connection ran deeper than we might have anticipated. We were both part of a strange little family. From the day we met we were comfortable saying anything to each other. There was a bond between us that felt like it had always been there.

Years passed during which I lived in L.A., building a life outside of my drug world. I worked with more joy and fulfillment than I’d ever known, took care of my sweet little man, developed friendships that weren’t inspired or defined by drugs, and spent time with loved ones. Those are years that I cherish more than any others in my life, but what makes them the best is also what makes them less interesting to tell. When I was high I had always feared the boredom of sobriety. Happiness was mind-blowing excess and hyperstimulated decadence. But when I was in the midst of a normal life, I saw that the quietness of real life in the real world was a kind of joy and happiness I’d never felt before. It was sweet and solid and familiar and comfortable—a rocking chair, a temperate day, a good view.

As I watched Shane grow up, I often reflected on my youth and the radically different world I’d known. I already knew my childhood was crazy and didn’t necessarily produce healthy people. But I started to see my youth on Shane’s time line. When Shane was five, I looked at him and thought that I must have been that innocent and vulnerable at his age. But I was in the Virgin Islands, wandering around and talking to sailors. How could someone let me run around alone? I mean, Shane spent his early years living in the country. He ran around pretending to be a Jedi warrior or catching frogs with a pack of kids in the woods near our house, but there were parents all around. Sober parents. We knew where the kids were. I never would have allowed him to tramp off alone.

This went on through all the stages of Shane’s life. When Shane was around seven or eight, he came home one day and said, “I want to be an actor.” Our next-door neighbor’s son Jesse was a couple of years older than Shane. He was an actor, and I guess that put the idea in Shane’s head. My agent had been urging me to let Shane do a movie.