Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (24 page)

Snide and Prejudice
was a new Philippe Mora movie, and Angus and I were both cast in it. He played Adolf Hitler (I kid you not, this is how weird Hollywood can get), and I was cast as a character representing all the women in Hitler’s life. The whole story was built around inmates in an insane asylum and, to be honest, the movie was a piece of shit, its only saving grace being the other talented cast members that I had the pleasure to meet—Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac (I’d been a fan since I first bought
Rumors
as a kid) and René Auberjonois from
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
.

Things with Angus were as bad as ever, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. I’d become emotionally dependent. And since I couldn’t leave, I found myself drinking more and more to numb myself to the pain of our relationship. It was the first time in my life that I drank to escape. Before that, alcohol had only ever been a lubricant that made a night out more fun or a fine meal even more pleasurable. Now I was using it as an emotional painkiller.

In the summer of 1998 I went out to lunch with my friend Galen Johnson and Alejandro Jodorowsky, the French-Chilean avant-garde filmmaker, comic book writer, and spiritual guru. Jodorowsky was an interesting guy. He talked about how John Lennon had given him a million dollars to make his movie
The Holy Mountain
, and he’d come close to making what would have been the most interesting and bizarre adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel
Dune
, to have starred Salvador Dalí and Orson Welles with music composed by Pink Floyd and production design by comic-book artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud and surrealist artist H. R. Giger. Galen told me that Jodorowsky was supposed to have psychic powers and had invented his own spiritual healing system called Psychomagic, which sounded more like a Hitchcock pisstake by Mel Brooks than a form of therapy. After lunch Jodorowsky went on his way and Galen told me to sit a while longer. When I’d gone to the bathroom Jodorowsky had given him a message to pass on to me.

“He said that you were going to have a drinking problem, that you’ll struggle with alcohol and your weight when you get older and that you need to watch out now.”

I laughed out loud and Galen joined in. Even with the emotional drinking Angus was driving me to, it seemed ridiculous. I couldn’t see it. I hasten to add that Jodorowsky also predicted that I’d be married and fabulously successful within two years of that lunch, so if he had a psychic flash of me at age thirty-nine as a size fourteen with a glass of champagne in hand, then I must have also been holding an Oscar aloft in the other while I straddled Prince Charming. I should have taken the warning as it was meant. He had nothing to gain, and was just sharing an insight, but I wasn’t able to hear him. My drinking problem was already underway, but it was operating in stealth mode, flying beneath the radar of my conscious mind.

Angus was offered a job in China doing a crap action film, and I encouraged him to take it. I was hoping that while he was gone I’d have time to get back on my feet. Also, I’d been keeping a secret from him. Marilyn Grabowski,
Playboy’
s West Coast editor, wanted me to pose for her magazine. I knew Angus would go apeshit if I said yes. In the fantasy world that he imagined he ruled (population two), I wasn’t for sharing. I felt better the second he was out of the house. I found that I could make my own choices just fine without someone standing over me whispering disparaging comments in my ear. I agreed to do
Playboy
and started training with a former ballerina, who had me doing hundreds of lunges every day. By the time she was finished with me I was in the best shape of my life.

Angus invited me to join him in Shanghai, and, feeling empowered by my time alone, I agreed to go. I was myself again—outgoing, funny Claudia. I felt fantastic, I’d stopped drinking, and I’d never looked better. But I underestimated Angus and his need to re-establish a hold over me. He was a master of the devastating one-liner, and when I arrived in China he knocked my legs right out from under me with the first words out of his mouth: “Look at you. This is an improvement. When we first met I thought you looked a little chunky.”

This from a guy with a belly like Winston Churchill’s. When he was offered the role of Peter Lawford in the TV movie
The Rat Pack
, they only gave it to him with a proviso that he lose thirty pounds. I tried to help him exercise and eat healthy food, but eventually gave up. He was an unapologetic glutton.

In hindsight, I think there were two poisons in our relationship. The first was Angus’s need to project his many inadequacies onto me. The second was that he would keep me bound to him by constantly tugging at the ropes of my own emotional weaknesses. By criticizing me, targeting my fears, and then switching back to false affection, he kept me weak.

It’s hard to enjoy your first visit to China when your travel partner makes it his mission to be rude to every Chinese person you meet. On the set of the movie he got off to not so good a start by insisting that he rewrite his part. He was perfectly correct in saying that they’d written him as a second-rate James Bond villain, but his attempts to inject Taoist philosophy into a character who battled kung-fu kangaroos were equally terrible, and you can imagine how the Chinese might love having a Westerner lecture them on his superior knowledge of their culture.

One night when we walked into the hotel restaurant the hostess asked, “Smoking or not smoking?”

Angus held up his cigarette. “What the fuck do you think?”

Angus wasn’t racist, he was just universally rude. Most Scottish people I’ve met are funny and have a clever, wry wit, but not Angus. He could have held up the cigarette and said something like, “I’d continue this battle of wits with you, but you’re obviously unarmed,” but he lacked the imagination for humor.

I left dinner early and hit the gym. I needed to keep in shape for my upcoming photo shoot. I was watching the TV while running on the treadmill when it was announced that Dodi and Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. It hit me hard. I sat down in the gym and cried. Dodi had been my friend for nearly twenty years, and I deeply regretted not being able to talk to him one last time, especially after leaving him so abruptly.

Dodi’s fears of dying childless had come to pass. He’d started seeing Diana not long after we parted ways, and I wondered, with our last conversation on my mind, if he’d asked her to have the child that I’d refused him.

I went back to my hotel room to learn that I’d booked
A Wing and a Prayer
. Fortune’s wheel had turned in my favor, though the news was bittersweet. I had an excuse to get out of Shanghai, and I took it. I needed time to myself, time to process the news of Dodi’s death.

Back in L.A. I got a call from producer Bill Panzer. Adrian Paul, the star of the TV show
Highlander
, had decided to move on, and they were looking for a woman to take over the series. He wanted me to play the part of Katherine in the
Highlander
episode “Two of Hearts.” This was just the thing I needed to get Dodi off of my mind.
Highlander
was a dream job—the shoot was in Paris, I’d get to play an eleventh-century immortal and mess around with swords, and there was even the possibility that I’d end up as the star of my own series.

When Angus got home he was uncharacteristically kind to me; he had sensed that after Dodi’s death I’d started to pull away from him. Always the optimist, I decided to invite him to Paris—it was our last, best hope for peace.

The
Highlander
set was heaven: horses, history, and mud. If I could just do historical dramas for the rest of my life, I’d die happy.

I’d started collecting knives and swords when I was a kid. My dad had been given some gifts when he opened a bank account, and one of them was a good-quality pocketknife. All of my brothers argued over who should get it, including Patrick, who wanted it for skinning, but when we drew straws I was the winner. There were cries of outrage, but my dad decreed that fair was fair and I got to keep it. When Patrick died I put it on his coffin as they lowered it into the ground, a parting gift. I loved that knife, at first because it was something my brothers wanted but couldn’t have, and later because it became a symbol of the love I held for Patrick. That was where my love of knives started and an interest in swords naturally followed on, but my dad wouldn’t let me start collecting until I turned seventeen.

Now I got to swing a medieval broadsword and be tutored by one of Hollywood’s leading sword masters, F. Braun McAsh. He was a very friendly, barrel-chested guy with a deep voice—a walking encyclopedia of arms and armor.

I wanted to do all my own fight scenes, but I had to convince the producers that I knew what I was doing or they would use a stunt double. One little mistake with a sword and an actress can be left incapacitated for a week.

Things couldn’t have worked out better on that front. After a minor accident on the set the producers had decided to institute a water-only policy, which was counter to the French crew’s traditional three-hour drinking lunches. I don’t think the American producers were aware of the French tendency to strike at the smallest infringements of their conditions, and disrupting the national pastime of eating and drinking was, to the crew’s minds, a catastrophic violation of human rights.

While protracted negotiations took place I got to spend more time with F. Braun learning how to fight. He’d pledged to the producers that every
Highlander
episode would feature a sword technique that had never been seen on film or television before, so I had lots to learn. He was patient and encouraging and taught me some neat tricks from his theatrical fencing repertoire (how to look good dueling on camera) and knowledge of historical sword fighting (how they really killed people with ruthless efficiency in times of yore).

My character, Katherine, was one of the oldest immortals in the
Highlander
series. She had even posed for the illustrations in the
Kama Sutra
, so I had to create a complex character—confident but with enough vulnerability that she could fall in love with a mortal man, who was played by Steven O’Shea.

The crew liked me, and I thought I had a shot at being the new star of the show. But at the end of the day they went with Elizabeth Gracen, who’d been in the original series. Also, she had slept with Bill Clinton, so she was in the news a lot; when it comes to TV ratings any publicity is good publicity. She chopped off her hair, dyed it white, and the new series was a flop.