Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex, and Addiction (26 page)

I was going to appear nude in a glossy magazine that would be seen by millions of people around the world. I’d been anxious about my butt appearing on a fifty-foot screen in
The Hidden
, but that was nothing compared to a permanent, published record of my naked form.

What are you worried about? Seriously, you’re prepared. You’ve trained hard, you’re in the best shape of your adult life.
Playboy
shoot? Bring it on.

Ah, there was my angel, my armor, the strength and confidence that had carried me forward into a successful international acting career. And it was right. I’d done a million lunges, I had buns of steel, I was beautiful, and the next time a casting director called me “chunky,” I’d roll up a copy of my issue of
Playboy
and use it to smack him upside the head.

The shoot ran over four days, and I can tell you right now that being a nude model isn’t anywhere near as easy as it looks. I’d have to sit in one spot for hours and then climb a steel wall and hang there with the photographer yelling, “Stick your butt out a little more. Suck in your gut!” It’s a surreal experience. In one pose they had my head on the floor and my ass up on a divan, which I suppose looks sexy in the photos but in reality nearly ripped all the muscles in my already-injured neck. The suffering paid off, though. When I saw the Polaroids, I was thrilled.

Wow. Good job, Claudia, you look fantastic. You worked so hard, all that exercise and dieting. You deserve a treat. It’s time to party and let your hair down.

Sometimes the devil on your shoulder has the best ideas, and now I saw no danger in indulging. She was right; it was time to party.

I flew to the UK for work, gave up on sit-ups and lunges and hit the pubs and restaurants with abandon. Beer and chips, wine and desserts, I let myself go and loved every minute of it.

Then
Playboy
called. The photos weren’t “edgy enough.” They wanted a reshoot. I had to get back on the plane to L.A. and do the shoot within twenty-four hours of landing. I was a blob, completely bloated from flying and living it up. I drank nettle tea and prayed. The shoot they published was disappointing. To me, the original shoot was fresher and far more beautiful. Luckily, I was able to secure the rights to both sets of negatives, but what should have been a naked triumph after all the training I’d done failed to have the curative effect on my self-image that I’d hoped for.

See, I told you. You’re fat. Your career is going down the gurgler. You’d better go on a starvation diet or something. Now that’s going to be tough, so get yourself a good stiff drink.

I waited for those words to bounce off my armor, for my angel to knock the monster down a peg or two with some devastating comeback, but all was quiet on the angelic front. While I was waiting for her to show up, I opened a nice bottle of merlot and poured myself a glass. After the second glass, I’d forgotten that I was waiting for anything.

In the strange way that the mind works, when we’re in a vulnerable place, the voice of our darkness, that little whispering monster, is never held accountable. When our confidence, our belief in ourselves is sufficiently silenced, the monster’s voice is all that’s left, and it masquerades as our true self, leads us to believe that its running commentary is true insight. It isn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time, and so I bought it. I didn’t realize it, but I’d opened the door to the world’s most persistent salesman. The monster had planted a foot firmly inside the door and didn’t plan on going anywhere.

I said before that telling Angus to get out of my life was one of the strongest things I’ve ever done, and I wasn’t exaggerating. I wasn’t just rejecting a man, I was rejecting my own shadow, my weakness, and my self-doubt. It was as empowering as it was frightening, but that darkness, that monster is a bitch. Just when you try to reclaim some of the ground you’ve lost, that’s when she digs her teeth in and won’t let go. And she did. Literally.

One night, as I was holding my cocker spaniel Lucy on my lap and petting her, she had a brain seizure and attacked me, mauling my face. I fell backward, but after a struggle managed to get her off and lock her in the kitchen. But by then the damage was done. She’d ripped off part of my lip, the flesh underneath my left eye, and a bit of my cheek.

I was in a panic. I couldn’t just go to an emergency room. What if I got some intern who tried to sew my face back on? Acting career over. I called my best friend Trish.

“My face is a wreck, I’m in big trouble. I need a good plastic surgeon.”

I gently lifted the washcloth I was using to hold my face on and took another peek in the mirror. “Make that a great plastic surgeon.”

Trish told me she knew of only one person who’d had really good plastic surgery, and in Hollywood that’s saying something.

So I called up this actress at 11 p.m., and she referred me to Dr. Brent Moelleken, who had been featured in ABC’s
Extreme Makeover
and Discovery Channel’s
Plastic Surgery Before & After
.

I figured that a plastic surgeon wouldn’t work at night, so I’d have to wait until the morning to see him. I barely slept, my hand welded to my face. Now and then I’d have to press the skin back on, trying to get it to stick in place.

When I finally got into Dr. Moelleken’s office he took off the towel and frowned.

“I wish you’d have come to me last night. You shouldn’t have waited. Now I’ve got to cut away a lot of dead skin. There’s too much necrotic tissue.”

So I underwent reconstructive surgery, fists clenched, totally fearful of the end result. Because I was missing so much flesh under my eye the doctor had to invent a new procedure to reconstruct my face, the internal cheek lift, so that the eye wouldn’t droop. Then he sewed up the scars to make them look like the existing laugh lines around my eyes. When the surgery was over, he told me that he had high hopes.

“I’ve never really done this procedure on a dog bite, but you should be fine.”

I left with a sore, swollen face and a mind filled with images of Frankenstein’s monster, his face held together by stitches.

Recovering from the surgery meant that I couldn’t work for the next couple of months. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I could see that my eye was hanging at a funny angle. I’d never been the depressive type but now I felt black clouds rolling in.

Dodi and Princess Di were still much in the news, and constantly hearing about my old lover’s death wasn’t particularly helpful. The coverage had died down after the accident, but now there was some blonde on TV claiming that she was engaged to Dodi during the time I was staying at his Kensington flat. I had no idea if she was telling the truth or not, but I never saw her at Saint-Tropez or Monaco or Paris. There wasn’t even a photo of her in the flat. Perhaps Dodi had put my paratrooper ring to good use.

Lying on my couch, feeling totally adrift, I heard the voice of the monster clearly for the first time. It was a step up from the usual whispering and prodding. The petty compulsions that I’d given in to with Angus had gathered power. My little devil had grown up and was no longer content to sit on my shoulder and be brushed away. She was a fully formed monster and she wanted the starring role. Her voice was commanding, loud, and clear. And since it was the only one ringing inside my head at the time, I mistook it for my own.

You know that you’re deformed.

That voice spoke to my deepest fears, but it seemed to make a lot of sense.

Don’t worry. There are roles for people like you. You can put on prosthetics and play aliens for the rest of your life.

The voice was right. My career was over.

I still hadn’t pulled myself together after Angus, and now with the dog attack and Lucy having to be put down (she tried to bite four other people), I uncorked a bottle of wine, lay down on the couch, and went to town. There were strong emotions brewing, and I needed to wrap myself in the numbness I’d sought when I was with Angus. I needed some emotional medicine.

My angel must have been kicking around in my brain somewhere, though, because as I was sobering up from that first big solo binge good news arrived like Noah’s little white dove. And I thanked God, because it turned out that Dr. Moelleken was a genius after all. The stitches were removed, and when the swelling went down the scars faded and my face regained its former shape. If I looked really, really close in the mirror I could see some small scars in the lines at the corners of my eyes, but the face that looked back at me was my own. Big sigh of relief. My Frankenstein crisis was averted—no need to buy neck bolts.

That good news let some of the light back in. My self-image bounced back. I realized that I had drifted out to sea, that I’d gone far too far, and I reined in my drinking once more. The monster had underestimated the power of hope. It only takes a little light to drive away a lot of darkness, and once I gained some perspective I rushed back to dry land and a survivable lifestyle.

I took a new lover, a young southern guy named Taylor who I met on the set of the film
True Rights
. I was playing an obnoxious middle-aged reality-TV producer, and I had to wear a wig and a fat suit. Taylor started flirting with me when I was wearing the fat suit. He didn’t know what I really looked like, and at the end of the day when I took it off, he got a pleasant surprise. He got an even bigger surprise when I took him back to my place. Taylor was kind and funny, just what I needed. He had a beautiful body, a great head of hair, and golden skin. Sexually we were a perfect fit.

Despite the bad memories of Angus and Lucy’s attack, I loved the house I was living in. I wasn’t even contemplating a move when my Realtor neighbor asked me if I wanted to double my money and sell up. I’ve always had a good head for business, so I agreed, and he took me to look at a 6,000-square-foot mansion in Los Feliz. It harked back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, built in 1914 and perched on a hill next to a wacky-looking Frank Lloyd Wright house that looked like a Mayan temple with jaws. It was a two-story dwelling with classical revival architecture and a view of Los Angeles. It dripped movie-star quality. It was the kind of place you see in
Architectural Digest
. It had a large, beautiful foyer, two master suites, four additional bathrooms, four fireplaces, three offices, and a gorgeous designer pool. My Realtor friend advised me to buy it. He thought it was massively undervalued. He needn’t have bothered with the sales pitch. I’d fallen in love with it at first sight, before I’d even set foot inside the front door.

This was the house of my dreams, and for the first time in my life I could afford it. I’d landed a job as the voice of Jaguar cars and was getting paid handsomely to go into a sound booth a few times a week and put on a phony British accent.

I sold my old house to David Boreanaz, the actor from
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and
Bones
, and moved into my Hollywood dream home.

Los Feliz is a very artsy community, so I settled right in. So did my boyfriend Taylor, who moved in with me and immediately lost his job. Unable to pay anything toward his upkeep, he started doing jobs around the house. This was okay at first—he did his best—but somehow the situation seemed to drain the blood from our relationship. I didn’t like the idea of supporting a man. He was turning out to be a bad influence on me when it came to drinking, as well. He was much younger than I, and when we’d go toe to toe at clubs and parties I’d always come off much worse the next morning.

When it became clear that Taylor wasn’t making any effort to find work I decided that I wasn’t going to keep on supporting his new career as a houseboy and drinking buddy, so I sent him on his way.

I didn’t need a partner, my face was fixed, I had the house of my dreams, and I’d put my darkness behind me. The monster’s power play had failed, and she had been kicked out of the driver’s seat, demoted back to passenger status. What I didn’t realize was that the monster was in it for the long haul. She hadn’t disappeared, only retreated as a tactical gambit. She’d given up the battle with the idea of winning the war. The incident with Lucy had nearly sent me so far under that I hadn’t been able to surface in time, but the good news about my facial reconstruction had been like a life preserver, allowing me to pull myself back up to the surface. But now, with every single sip, neurological pathways were beginning to form, and before long those pathways would become an eight-lane expressway. Alcohol addiction is a learned behavior, and the lesson I’d learned was to turn to the bottle when things got tough.