Whatever...Love Is Love (10 page)

Without thinking, I just kept walking straight ahead against the cold wind. Suddenly, something caught my eye. I caught a glint of light coming from the snow, outside of a gray stone building. I went over to see what it was. It was a shoe. Not just any shoe. It was a golden, glittery pump. And what did this Cinderella do? She sat down in the snow on 23rd Street, took off her black army boot, and put the gold shoe on. And it fit. Perfectly.

“Thank you, God,” I said over and over again. “Thank you for this sign.” I just knew that he was telling me that I was on the right path and to stay the course. I took that golden shoe as a gift. It would be with me for almost 20 years. That shoe would travel from New York to LA and back again. Whenever I got depressed, I would look at it and remember how it had been delivered as a sign to tell me that I was supposed to keep going. I was supposed to be acting.

Over the years, my friends and family loved to laugh at me, because I would look for signs everywhere. Of course I don't always find them, but I do believe there are signs out there for all of us. My mom taught my siblings and me this when we were kids. Whenever Mom was in a tough situation, a rose would appear. She said it was a sign from Mary that all would be well, and most of the time she was right. “Signs are everywhere,” she said. “We just have to keep our eyes, ears, and hearts open for them.”

But now there's something I need to confess, something I learned to do well during all those years in Catholic school. For me, that shoe was not just a sign that I should continue acting. It was my missing glass slipper. I believed, until an embarrassingly adult age, that I would find the Prince Charming who went along with that shoe. Yes, I had Prince Charming Syndrome. I don't think that is an approved mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, but it should be, because I think many of us suffer from it.

I always believed that my Prince Charming was coming. I searched my whole life for a match to my shoe, waiting for some prince to show up with it in his hands. I met so many princes along the way. Some of them acted quite princely. Some of them even looked quite princely. Some of them
were
princely. But most of the princes I found in my 20s and 30s were just the same guy over and over, with a different name.

Here's a snapshot of some of my princes.

The first I'll call Prince Charmingly Unconscious. He would express his love for me only when he was on Vicodin.

The day after we slept together, I called him. He didn't call back the next day, or the day after that. And for a month, I lay in bed despondent. I listened to Sarah McLachlan's album
Mirrorball
and the song “Hold On” over and over, and I cried like a baby.

I was devastated when, shortly after, a tabloid ran a story about him hooking up with a 20-something stripper and getting sent to rehab for prescription drug addiction. He looked bloated and dissipated in the photo. “See,” I thought to myself, “if he had only given in to his love for me, he would be so much better. I know he had had intimacy issues, but if I had only stuck around long enough, I could've helped him break through them.”

The second, Prince Bad Charming, told me on the first night we met that he was a “man of bad character,” a player, and had just had a threesome in Montreal with two friends or two hookers, I can't remember anymore. He said what he liked about the threesome was that the other two didn't need him, that they were quite happy without him. A therapist might have said that he was a voyeur, enjoying the others' pleasure of each other, and enjoying the bizarre validation he got from being reminded that he wasn't really needed or wanted.

He told me after a couple of hours of talking that he was never this open with anyone. He told me that he either had a connection with a woman or else he wanted to have sex with her. Now he was stuck, because we seemed to have this mystical connection
and
he wanted to sleep with me. So, what did I think?

“Yes! The real Prince Charming has arrived!” was what I thought. Of course.

Our first kiss happened that very first night and I was sure I was in love. It had been a long time since I'd felt the exhilaration of that sort of physical and (I thought) spiritual connection, and though he told me outright that he was nearly incapable of intimacy, I believed, of course, he could change. Of course I did. In my head I knew that I was being a foolish woman and that he certainly would not change. But my little girl heart so wanted it to be true.

A few days later we met for dinner with a small group. I was a little drunk and decided to be the first one to leave. As I got up, in my skintight black skirt and four-inch heels, and made my way around the table, kissing everyone good-bye, my prince said, “I'll walk you out and get you a cab.” I knew what this meant. I had been thinking of kissing him all night. I was even more drawn to him since he had been so vulnerable with me the other day, sharing his story of his days as a drug addict. He was more damaged than I could have imagined.

He took me over to some bushes behind the restaurant, threw me against the wall, and started kissing me ferociously. It was a blurry haze of hands and tongues. Suddenly, he stopped.

“What's going on here?” he asked.

I was out of breath. “What do you mean? We're kissing, we like each other, and we're single. What could be wrong with this?”

And as his sexual energy subsided, he put his hands on his head and said, “I'm not actually single.”

I was dumbfounded. “But you told me just three weeks ago that you were single! How the hell did you get a girlfriend in three weeks, especially after the way we kissed at my house? Are you out of your mind?” Now I was fuming but, not surprisingly, even more turned on.

“Remember the girl I told you about, my friend? Well, we decided to give it a go. She is a great person, and I'm not that sexually into her, but she's my best friend, so what do you think?”

“So break up with her,” I almost yelled.

Sweet tortured soul said, “I can't.”

I was officially devastated but managed to say, “Then don't kiss me anymore.”

I turned away, jumped in a cab, and left him staring longingly after me with sad actor eyes. It was a classic scene from a bad romantic comedy.

Naturally it didn't end there. A few weeks later, after daily make-out sessions, I finally decided to sleep with him. I wore a slip dress with knee-high stockings. I was ready for sexy, loving sex. After his hourly texts expressing his deep love and appreciation for me, it seemed he was ready as well. I fantasized that he would meet me at the door and we would pounce on each other and make love. Then we would hold each other for a while and afterward eat Chinese takeout from cartons and laugh while we lie in bed naked. It was another scene I'd written in my head for the romantic comedy I was hoping to star in opposite him.

Instead, I found him having a massage when I opened his door. I hung out on his balcony for an hour until he was done getting poked and prodded. I wanted to leave. I knew that if I had more self-respect, I would have left. But my anxiety had been spiked and my brain was not working properly.

When the masseuse left, I silently made my way to the white couch in his living room. While he checked his messages to see how his next movie was coming along, I stared at the coffee table in front of me and saw a greeting card from his girlfriend. It declared, “My undying love and affection.” I got a glimpse of the inside and saw that the writing was like that of a high school girl, complete with hearts over the
i
's.

“She has it worse than me,” I thought. And at least he wasn't lying to me about who he was. But then, the emotionally adolescent part of me thought, “Oh God, he loves her more.” I got more and more depressed sitting there.

Instead of my well-written love scene, we ended up having brief sex on the couch. Suffice to say, he was satisfied. When I pretended to be “satisfied,” he leapt off the couch to his computer. I was sweaty and my creamy-white slip dress torn. I was mortified. He called out to me, and of course I ran to him.

I went over to his chair and I tried to embrace him. Seriously, yes, I tried. He told me about his upcoming movie and showed me screenshots of his oiled abs and scruffy, mean-looking face. He said that this film would make him a full-blown movie star, as he took me painstakingly through every scene. He then showed me fan mail from various women around the world. He was so proud. I was both disgusted and jealous in equal amounts.

Finally, I got a hold of myself, popped up, and said, near tears, “I am in so much pain right now.”

He looked at me and asked, “What's wrong, baby? Do you need an aspirin?”

And this just about sums up the depth of our emotional connection. An aspirin.

Another prince was actually a bit closer to “princely” than the others. Our relationship began in a magical place, with him riding in on his white horse to save me and the world. He asked me to marry him before we had even kissed. He was obviously looking for a princess of his own, a woman to save him and tell him he was a good guy. Three months later we were screaming and throwing steaks at each other's heads and he was telling me what a “fuckup” I was.

All three of these men were figments of my imagination, just characters in my play. I had cast myself as Cinderella, hoping my Prince Charming would notice me and choose me as his special one. I actually thought every one of these men was my soul mate. Now I see how delusional I was, and how I debased myself when I should have known better. It embarrasses me, in some ways, to even remember the way I behaved. And yet the lessons I learned from each of these relationships were life changing. I realized that I “made people up.” I had a fantasy in my mind of who each of these men was, even when I didn't really know any of them.

I've seen these guys in tabloids over the years. One of them turned out to be a lonely, addicted, unhappy, not-so-good-looking man who barely worked again. The other looks the same, except he's orange, because he's become addicted to the fake tanner he's been using for years. And the third one, well, he's still out there looking.

As much as I do enjoy a good vengeful laugh about my fictional princes, I see now that they were lonely and afraid, too, needing validation as much as I did. They needed to know that they were famous enough, rich enough, and good enough to be wanted by every woman they met. I can't say I wasn't looking for the same. We were all dancing to the same music. I felt like a victim of their neuroses at the time, but, in fact, I was just as neurotic as they were.

The names and circumstances have been changed to protect the guilty. So don't try and guess who these guys are. Besides, who they are is not important. They're really just one big mashup of variations on a theme: handsome, self-involved, with a heap of hopes and dreams projected onto them by me.

I wanted to be special. I thought when I became the
one
all of my anxiety would disappear and then I would be someone. These bad princes were not going to do that for me. But I eventually learned that not even the good princes could.

I was lucky to have a few good princes in my life. Men who held me when I felt I was broken, made me laugh, understood me, and showed me all of themselves. Thank God the father of my child is one of the good ones. But, even still, no one could help fill the hole that I felt was inside of me. I was on an endless search for the mate to my golden shoe.

My first golden shoe, the one I had found on the street in New York City as a young woman, brought me luck—from being cast on
ER,
then in
Payback, Coyote Ugly, The Cooler, A History of Violence,
and others that came after. One day during the acceptance of an award in San Francisco, I thought about my old shoe. I thought about how all the dreams I had connected to that talisman had come true. I was by then a working actress, acknowledged for taking challenging roles. I was a mother of a really great kid. I realized, while I was giving the speech, that the shoe had given me everything I asked for and more. I decided to tell the crowd the story of my magic shoe and decided the time had come for me to pass the shoe on to another Cinderella, someone else who needed dreams.

And I did.

Not long afterward, in the midst of yet another breakup, I went to New York to make a film. I brought my golden shoe. It was springtime and the cherry blossoms were out in Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. I went with my golden shoe in hand to lie in the green grass. I was wondering what I should do with my shoe. I took out my phone and started to photograph it. First in the grass, then in my hand, and finally near the big tree I used to sit under when I was a struggling actress right off the bus from Philly. I realized the moment had come to let it go.

I went back to my room and wrote my story on two sheets of paper. I didn't put my name on it, but explained the story of the shoe and how it had brought me luck and given me the courage to walk on no matter what. I wrote that the key was to stand on your own feet, in your own shoes, and not wait for Prince Charming or Cinderella to kneel before you with arms outstretched so that you could succeed.

I put the shoe on a piece of old cardboard outside of the front door of the hotel. I wrote in big letters “IF you are a size 9 please try me on, if not keep walking.” I put the note underneath the shoe and I made the doormen promise to keep an eye on it. A few minutes later I got in my car to go to the airport. I turned around and watched my shoe till it was out of sight and then I started bawling my eyes out. The kind driver asked me if I was okay and I told him my story. He said something like “It was very brave of you to let it go. Remember, what you give, you get back tenfold.”

I probably will never know who has that magic shoe, but I hope they were inspired by it as much as I was. I hope they are flying right now and following their dreams.