No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel (45 page)

SAVANNAH GIVING ME A FACE.

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

346 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

I will be a better parent than my parents ever were,
I promised myself, over and over. Of course, that wouldn’t be too hard. A rabid dog would have been a better parent than my father. But I really meant it. I really truly wanted to be a good mother. After all, there’s something miraculous about kids, all kids. There’s such fragility there. Such hope. Such dependence. One day I watched Savannah go off to kindergarten with her little lunch box: She looked like a tiny businesswoman going off to her tiny job.

Nathan spent half his time at his father’s house, the other half with me. He was angry about the divorce, and I couldn’t blame him. I told him I was sorry we’d made such a mess of things, but that that didn’t change how we felt about him, and that we both loved him so much we wanted to share him for the rest of our lives. He listened, but he was still angry. He could get angry about a cloudy day, a ripped shirt, soggy fries. I was patient with him, most of the time. But I lost it occasionally, and whenever I raised my voice and saw how much it frightened him, I was filled with remorse and self-loathing.
I will never again scream at
him,
I told myself.
Never ever
. But of course I broke the promise now and then, and felt worse about it every time.

Guilt, the way it wears you down. I let him play Game-boy for hours and hours, and he spent way too much time on the computer, and I never made him eat his veggies.

Pasta and cheeseburgers were all he ever wanted. I would have made him pheasant under glass if I thought he might eat it, but I didn’t know how. I wasn’t much of a cook, to be honest. Another shortcoming. Great! I guess I wasn’t much good as a mother, after all. Maybe I wasn’t much good, period.

That pithy little maxim my father had drummed into my head came pounding back like a migraine:
You’ll never
amount to anything.

N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 347

Once again I felt the presence of the lurking demon. I didn’t know what to do about it.
He isn’t real,
I assured myself.
It’s just your imagination.
I could feel myself slipping into the abyss. I was terrified. I felt more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. I reached for my Filofax, desperate for help, and went through each name in my address book.

There must have been four hundred of them—my
close,
personal
friends. But by the time I got to the Zs I decided I couldn’t call a single one. What would I tell them?
Well,
like, you know, there’s this fucking demon in my closet. He
has a face like a goddamn gargoyle. And he follows me
everywhere I go.
And what could they do? Arrange another intervention? Lock me up in a nuthouse?

WITH THE GALLANT TONY PECK, JULY 2000.

(((((((((((((((((((((((((

348 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

Then I began to rationalize my crazy thinking. I couldn’t tell them what was going on because they didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want to listen to my heavy shit. Life was all about surface. My friends liked me—if at all—

because I was Crazy Janice. I was a good time.

But the truth ran deeper. I was afraid of the bogeyman because no one had ever been there to help me face him, to hold my hand and tell me everything was going to be all right. There was no lifeguard on duty. Never had been.

My phone rang. I was almost afraid to answer it.

“Hello?” I said.

“Want to grab a bite to eat?” It was my friend Tony Peck, Gregory’s son and Cheryl Tiegs’s ex-husband. He swung by to get me and we drove through Beverly Hills to dinner. I put the demon out of my mind, relegating him to the backseat. The streets were ablaze with Christmas decorations. The night was clear and crisp.

“What a beautiful night,” I said, but to my ears I sounded like a moron. I thought I was going out of my mind.

Over dinner I smiled and laughed and gossiped and

went on and on about my two wonderful kids. I guess I went on about them a little too long, though, because suddenly I noticed that Tony had lost interest. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was looking at something across the room. Curious, I turned to look for myself. It was a beautiful woman. A girl, really. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. I looked back at Tony. I was shattered.

But the pain gave way, instantly, to anger.

“What?” he said.
Now
he was paying attention.

Okay, motherfucker. Fine. I know. I’m a long way from the girl I was twenty-odd years ago. In those days, I was the cliché. I would walk into a room and things would flat-out
change.
In those days, I did my best to act like beauty was a horrible burden, a crashing bore—but of course in N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 349

those days I could afford to behave like that. In those days beauty worked for me. It worked for me in spades. Beauty opened all the doors; it got me things I didn’t even know I wanted, and things I certainly didn’t deserve. And now?

What now? Who was I now? A pleasant diversion? Or was I even that much? After all, in this town, a town full of beautiful women, well—maybe I wasn’t all that pleasant or all that diverting.

“So, Tony,” I said, barely able to contain myself. “Have I lost my looks?”

“What?”

“No, no. Please. Be honest with me. I can take it.”

“Jesus, Janice—”

“Fuck this,” I snapped. I got to my feet and stormed out.

Poor, innocent Tony. He followed me out to the street, wondering what he’d done wrong. The valet went off to fetch Tony’s car, and Tony kept apologizing—God knows why!—and still I ignored him. When we reached my house I got out and slammed the door and went inside without so much as a good-bye. Then I fell apart.

What the hell was happening to me?
I looked at myself in the mirror. Was it over? No, goddamn it! Heads still turned when I walked into a room; men still wanted me. Or did they? I needed to be wanted. I couldn’t go on without being wanted. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that little bitch at the restaurant.
I used to be that woman,
I thought.
I
used to be the one who turned heads.

Now . . . Christ . . . I was becoming invisible.

I went to look in on Savannah. She was fast asleep. She looked like a little angel. I could see so much of my former self in her little face. She was . . . she was almost seven years old. And it hit me like a car wreck: That was almost the same age I’d been when the rat bastard had done what he’d done. A loud, involuntary whelp of pain burst loose 350 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

from deep inside me. Savannah stirred and turned on her side, but didn’t wake. I hurried out of her room, shaking with rage and terror.

Twenty milligrams of Ambien put me out for the night, and I slept the sleep of the dead. Sweet, dreamless sleep.

At seven a.m. Savannah burst into my room and crawled under the covers next to me.

“Is it almost Christmas yet?” she asked, snuggling

close.

“Almost,” I said.

“I can’t wait,” she said.

“What do you want from Santa Claus?” I asked her.

“A daddy,” she said.

“Well, you know, honey, that’s a tough one,” I said. “But I’ll ask.”

“You keep saying you’re going to tell me who my father is,” she went on. “I really really really want to know.”

I could feel my throat swelling with emotion. “Like I said, Sav, I’ll see what I can do.”

The whole morning, as I got her ready for school, I tried to keep it together: smiling like a lunatic, humming as I buttered her toast, laughing out of context.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “What could possibly be wrong?”

I drove her to school, got her settled in, got back in my car, and cranked up the music and went home. I pulled into the driveway, singing away at the top of my voice—

squawking
—and walked into my empty house and literally fell to the kitchen floor in tears. But I wasn’t just crying; this went well beyond crying. These were loud, keening howls. I was experiencing pain like I’d never experienced it before. I couldn’t stop. I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. I counted to ten. I counted to ten again. I told myself I would stop crying the
next
time I counted to ten, N O L I F E G UA R D O N D U T Y 351

but I couldn’t manage it. I struggled to my feet, crossed the kitchen, and reached into the back of the cupboard for my bottle. As I poured myself a stiff drink, I looked at the kitchen clock. It wasn’t even nine a.m.

I got back in my car and drove to West Hollywood,

scored a couple of grams of coke, and raced home. The phone was ringing as I walked inside and I reached for it without thinking. It was Tony Peck.

“Leave me alone,” I said, and hung up.

He kept calling. I grabbed my bottle of vodka and my coke, then went up to my room and did a couple of lines and drank the vodka straight from the bottle. The phone kept ringing. I tried to disconnect it, but I couldn’t figure it out, so I yanked the wires right out of the wall. I had another snort, another hit of booze. I could hear the phone ringing downstairs. I didn’t want to hear the phone, or any other goddamn thing. So I locked myself in the walk-in closet, and sat there among my designer dresses and designer shoes and designer fucking underwear and got drunk and buzzed and weepy. I was trying not to think. I was tired of thinking. Thinking had never done a goddamn thing for me. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop thinking about Savannah, and about what she needed in her life, and about what I had needed at her age and seemed, apparently, to need still.
A kid needs love, goddamn it. It’s that fucking
simple. Why can’t I even get that right?

I don’t know how much time passed. It was pitch dark in the closet. The cocaine was gone. The vodka bottle was almost empty. I was thinking about crawling into my bedroom and calling the corner store and asking them to deliver a couple of quarts, when suddenly the closet door burst open and I saw the fucking monster standing there, silhouetted against the frame.
Oh my God
, I thought.
He’s
here! He’s come for me!

352 J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

But it wasn’t the monster. It was Tony Peck.

“Jesus Christ, Janice,” he said. “What are you doing to yourself?” He picked me up, as if I were a child, and carried me into the bathroom. He stripped me and sat me in the tub and turned on the shower, then went downstairs to make a gallon of strong coffee.

Two hours later we were in his car, pulling up to a little café on Sunset Boulevard. It was across the street from the Chateau Marmont, where my friend John Belushi had died.

We went into the café, which had been cleared of tables, and sat near the back, on stiff, metal folding chairs that had been laid out in neat rows. A middle-aged woman was telling her sad story to several dozen attentive listeners. It was a pretty compelling story. Marriage, drinking, divorce, remarriage, more drinking, another divorce, some whoring around, still more drinking . . .

I signed up. They gave me some twelve-step literature.

They paired me up with a young woman who looked like she’d lived too hard for too long. I promised to call if I felt like having a drink. Tony dropped me at home. I poured myself a stiff drink, to brace myself for what was coming, then did what I’d been instructed to do: dumped every last ounce of alcohol in the house.

That first night was hell—and it was only the beginning.

I went to see my doctor the next morning. He gave me a little Valium and warned me not to overdo it. I took some Valium: I felt like washing it down with a drink. So I called my female “buddy”; kept calling; called at all hours of the day and night. I called Tony Peck. I called numbers at random and tried to engage strangers in conversation. (I felt so fucking alone—and so fucking scared.) I went over to see my neighbor and asked for a drink, and he was kind

enough to say no—even when I started screaming at him like a crazy woman.