Babylon Confidential

by Christian, Claudia

  I changed in the weeks after the rape. I could feel myself withdrawing from life and I realized that I needed to do something. I couldn’t let him win. I still couldn’t bring myself to talk to my parents about it, because Patrick’s death had delivered a nearly fatal wound to their marriage and in my fourteen-year-old mind, I guess I was worried that my news might deliver the killing blow. And I was scared. There was the constant threat that it would happen again. He lived right next door, and we’d just moved in. I would have to see him again, see his house and that van every day that I lived in Nellie Gail Ranch. I needed to get away, so I talked my parents into letting me get out of Laguna Hills for the summer and headed up north to visit my cousin Caroline, who was about my age. I made a decision that I wasn’t going to let the rapist ruin my life or take my virginity, even though he had, so I promised myself that while I was away I would choose a boy and have sex, and I’d pretend that it was my first time.

  So I went to the state fair with my cousin and I met this guy who was about twenty. He was really tall with long blond hair, a country boy, very nice and sweet. After a couple of days of going back to the fair and flirting we went out on a date, while my cousin covered for me by staying at the fair. I told him what had happened to me. I told him I’d been raped and that I didn’t want that to be my first experience and I asked him to help me. He was the sweetest guy. He made the softest, most gentle love to me and he kissed me and he held me. I needed to do that to try and get the effects of the rape out of my system. I needed to convince myself that not all men were assholes, and psychologically I needed to reclaim my virginity and some of my inner strength.

  When summer was over I headed back to Laguna Hills. I knew that the rapist would still be there but I’d learned one thing about myself that allowed me to keep it all together. I had learned that I was a survivor.

  BAIT AND SWITCH

  Rather than dying down, things got much worse with the rapist next door. He started throwing pebbles at my window every night, trying to get me to come outside. I would lie in my bed petrified, praying that my parents would hear him. I guess after a few weeks he figured out that the pedophile Romeo approach wasn’t going to win me over, so he gave up and started stalking me at school. He’d sit in his van and wait for me to walk home. I told my girlfriend, the one who’d taken me to the clinic after the rape, and she agreed to help. I’d hide in her car while she drove right past him. When I got home I’d lock myself in my room and wait for my hands to stop shaking.

  Things didn’t stay that way forever. It cost my parents almost every penny that they’d saved, but they found this great house in Laguna Beach and announced that we were moving.

  Laguna Beach was only twenty minutes away by car, but it was one of the most exclusive beach communities in the United States—a completely different world. It was a self-contained city bordered on all sides by ocean, hills, and woods. The closeness of nature reminded me of Connecticut, and that made it feel like home in a way that Laguna Hills never could. There was a thriving arts community, I was at a better school, and, best of all, the rapist didn’t follow me. I hadn’t realized until we moved to Laguna Beach that I’d been carrying this oppressive weight around, as if that guy in the back of the van was still on top of me. Now that weight began to evaporate.

  The boys there walked around in surf shorts, the girls were naturally beautiful, and no one wore makeup or heels, so I had to change again to fit in.

  My new school had a strong arts program; our most distinguished alumnus was Richard Chamberlain, and our football team was even called the Artists. I got onto the junior varsity cheerleading team, and we had little painting palettes on our cheerleading sweaters. We had had to come up with cheers to fit the theme: “Paint them into a corner! Pour turpentine on them!” It was all good fun and I felt my self-confidence returning.

  Soon after we moved I was approached by a contemporary artist who wanted to photograph me for his exhibition in the Laguna Beach Festival of the Arts. He wanted to take a series of images of me in a bathing suit, posing up against a wall. I was nervous, but my parents looked into it and heard that he was a legitimate artist, and it seemed like a good opportunity to get some professional photos for a portfolio as well as some public exposure to help my acting career get going. Before the festival I got my own set of prints—I was over the moon with the result. The photos were beautiful, and to this day I count them as some of the best ever taken of me.

  I proudly met my family and friends outside the exhibition on the opening day. The photos were to be printed in large format and hung in a series along a wall. I struggled to see the pictures through the crowd of people that had gathered around them. It seemed as though I was a hit. I nudged my way forward and then stood, frozen in stunned silence. My excitement vanished, and black clouds of humiliation rolled in. The series was titled “Beauty Deconstructed,” and the artist had splattered the life-size photographs of me with his own blood and feces.

  Some of the people in the crowd looked at me and then back at the pictures and then back at me. I turned and ran. My parents followed me back to their car and I cried all the way home.

  It was a horribly disappointing experience, but despite the embarrassment those photos led to a strange and interesting series of events.

  A few days after the exhibition I was approached by a photographer named Pam Bouchard. She loved the images and sent them on to Eileen Ford in New York, who agreed to see me.

  The Ford Agency has represented some of the world’s top models, including Cheryl Tiegs, Christy Turlington, Christie Brinkley, and Jerry Hall. Some have even gone on to be successful actresses, like Elle MacPherson, Sharon Stone, and Courteney Cox. I figured that if I were lucky I could start out as a model and bridge into acting. I was already skinny, but I wanted to give it my best shot, so I stepped up my diet regime to political-prisoner-on-hunger- strike level.

  Pam was openly gay and despite my parents being fairly straight-laced, she somehow convinced them that she would be a suitable chaperone, and off we went to the Big Apple. The hotel was cheap and nasty, but Pam had lined up a bunch of meetings, and once we started doing the rounds I found myself getting invited out to the coolest parties. And Pam was great. She really believed in me and helped me to believe in myself, and best of all she let me go wherever I wanted. I met Scott Webster, who was one of the first male supermodels and was, unsurprisingly, fucking gorgeous, and I found my way to Studio 54, where I saw things that fifteen-year-old girls are not supposed to see. With an intake of only 1,000 calories per day, I was lightheaded and literally dazzled by the bright lights and activity of New York City.

  At one of the agency meetings I met a young model from Kentucky who was my age. We got along great, and she asked me if I’d go out with her, because she needed a partner for a double date that night.

  “Sure, who are we going out with?”

  “Matt Dillon and Billy Idol.”

  Billy had just come out with his single “White Wedding,” which was all over MTV, and Matt was working his way through the film adaptations of the S. E. Hinton novels Tex, The Outsiders, and Rumble Fish.

  Was that how it was every night in New York? You agree to a date and next thing you know you’re hanging out with famous actors and rock stars? I was dazzled.

  We met them at Billy’s apartment, which was a total mess. Everything was on the floor, and it looked like the aftermath of a burglary. The only things in the fridge were water and champagne.

  On a glass coffee table were some really tacky earrings, and Billy wanted me to wear them.

  “Put those on, darlin’. Put ’em on, put ’em on. They suit you.”

  No, they fucking don’t. Imagine earrings with three fluffy snowballs hanging on a gold chain. I wore them all night and only found out later that they belonged to Billy’s insanely jealous live-in girlfriend and that if she’d seen me wearing them my odds of surviving the night would have been slim at best. I think Billy was hoping that she’d
run into us and he’d get to watch a catfight.

  But thankfully that didn’t happen, and instead Matt and Billy decided that they’d show us their favorite New York haunts. We ended up at the Limelight, which was this huge Gothic Revival church that had been a rehab center before it was converted into a nightclub. That night Jimmy Page and Robert Plant surprised the audience by playing an impromptu set. I was a huge Led Zeppelin fan, and there I was in the front row just a few feet from my idols. Matt Dillon and Billy Idol faded into the background; I forgot they were even there until Billy tapped me on the shoulder. Matt was taking my girlfriend from Kentucky off to the bathroom for some recreational activities, and he thought that we should follow suit. And from memory he didn’t put it that delicately.

  By then my girlfriend had told me the story about the earrings, and to be honest, as much of an Anglophile as I am, I just didn’t find Billy very attractive or interesting. Add that to the fact that Led Zeppelin were playing, and without giving it a second thought I brushed off my first celebrity paramour. He should have known he had no chance when stacked up against Jimmy Page working the fret boards of his double-necked Gibson.

  The next day I was back at the modeling agency.

  “Claudia, darling, you’re the perfect height and you’ve got a nice face but please, we have to weigh you before we can go any further. Do you mind stepping on the scales? Thank you, darling.”

  I climbed onto the scales. I was 5'9" and 120 pounds. Zero body fat.

  “Look, darling, we like you. You’ve got an interesting look but if you want to be a model you’ve got to commit to losing another five to ten pounds.”

  “Ten more pounds?”

  It was ridiculous. How much more could I starve myself? I wasn’t carrying any weight. We left the meeting, and I told Pam that I didn’t know how to become the person they were looking for. I was upset, anxious, worried that I might be passing up my one big shot. And then Pam stepped up to the plate.

  “You know what? You’re fine as you are, I’m not gonna let you do this. Let’s go home.”

  Thank God she said that; it was just what I needed to hear. I was a thin, pretty teenager and they wanted me to be anorexic. I went out and bought a bagel with cream cheese and felt a huge sense of relief. My friends at school couldn’t believe that I’d turned down the chance to be a model, and I’ll admit that the lifestyle had certainly been dazzling, but at fifteen I wasn’t ready psychologically, and I sure wasn’t going to kill myself for it. I refocused on my real goal—becoming an actress—which was a dream worth killing myself for.

  In Laguna Beach my best friend at school was Kara. She was this beautiful, tall brunette. She was carefree and her own person, and that resonated strongly with me. When I was with her I felt that it just might be possible to move to Hollywood and realize my dream.

  My mom had this very cool 1959 Mercedes 190SL, which looked like it belonged in a James Bond movie. We’d drive it down to the beach and buy chocolate chip croissants and lattes. That was our little pleasure. Sometimes Kara and I would go to the gay bars, the Boom Boom Room or the Little Shrimp, and drink—in our cheerleading outfits, no less! We’d watch drag queens sing on top of pianos while we sipped Tanqueray and tonics. The drag queens loved us, all the gay boys loved us, because we were a couple of cute girls who wanted to have fun. I loved gay men, and I still do.

  Kara and I had a friend who lived in Emerald Bay, which was our way of getting into the parties there. And they were the best parties. Our high school girlfriends were so jealous; if you had a house there, you were golden. They were doubly impressed when my newly acquired boyfriend picked me up from school in his Porsche.

  Arthur Ash Wilder, III, Esq. (a.k.a. Tre) was only 5'11", but he had blond hair, beautiful blue-green eyes, and was he built. A six-pack, perfect body weight; you could crack an egg on his butt.

  Kara and I had sneaked into this Newport Beach party. We were fifteen years old, but we were all dressed up and could have passed for twenty. I’d recently jumped up in size and filled out a bit, and now grown men wanted to meet me. It was a totally weird experience. I had been a fourth son, a tomboy. Three brothers had treated me like a fellow member of the Lost Boys from the minute I was born, and then one of them died and the others were so messed up by that that they didn’t pay me any attention. Add to that the fact that my dad was gone all the time and that when he was home he was too busy fighting with my mom to pay his daughter a compliment. And Tre picked up on that. He was a real sweet talker, and I fell for him hook, line, and sinker. I thought, “This guy is serious.” He was a lawyer, he was in tip-top shape, and he said that he wanted to see the world and conquer it at the same time, which was all very intriguing to me. It didn’t occur to me that a thirty-year-old lawyer should know better than to sleep with a fifteen-year-old high school student. We’d go out and I’d drink Dom Perignon and Cristal; he’d drink single malt scotch whiskey with his friends. I’d always thought of myself as an older person trapped in a younger person’s body, and here I was, hanging out with grown-ups. Cocaine was everywhere; it was the older person’s drug. The first time I saw it was in a bathroom, thousands of dollars worth of powder laid out on a mirror. I tried it once and it was okay, but I didn’t feel that I needed it. I was happy with champagne; I was having a good time. And besides, I’d learned a little something about drugs since moving to Laguna Beach.

  Before I met Tre I’d dated a football player named Ricky. His parents went on vacations all the time, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the empty house was instantly filled with partying teenagers. I went into the kitchen and saw a blender with a vanilla milkshake in it. I thought the brown specks in it were vanilla bean; it tasted great. One of the guys on the football team came into the kitchen.

  “Hey! Who drank the shake?”

  “I did. Sorry, I didn’t know it was yours.”

  “You drank the whole thing?”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry.”

  “You are so fucked! Ricky! Check this out!”

  It turned out the brown specks were mushrooms, the hallucinogenic type. Suddenly I didn’t feel so good. The walls were moving like waves, and the floor was falling out from under my feet. I ran to the living room so I could stand on the sofa. I looked around, and all of the lamps and lights in the house had gargoyles coming out of them. It was like that evil carnival in Ray Bradbury’s book Something Wicked This Way Comes.

  This “high” lasted the entire day and night, and my boyfriend babysat me through the whole thing. The one time he left me by myself, to go to the bathroom, I stripped off my clothes and climbed up onto the roof. He didn’t leave my side after that. It was the pits, and after that hellish experience I decided to stick to champagne.

  Sometimes Tre would pick me up at lunchtime, take me home for a quickie, then drop me back at school. He’d tell his secretary he was out playing golf. To say that the Tre situation didn’t go down well with my parents is an understatement of monumental proportion, though not in the way you might expect. True to form, they took opposing sides and dug in for protracted trench warfare. My dad was against the relationship. In his eyes, Tre was a deadbeat preying on an underage girl, and he’d be damned if I was going to see him while I lived under his roof. My mother supported my seeing Tre, because he was rich, handsome, and an attorney. She’d grown up without a lot of material comforts after the war, and she was old-world European in the way she thought about things. The age difference was less important than the opportunity to haul in a good-sized catch.

  The fracture in my parents’ marriage that ran right back to Patrick’s death widened into a fissure, and I found myself with a foot on either side, struggling not to fall in. Things came to a head when my mom let me go away with Tre for a weekend in Palm Springs. My dad was pissed off and went for broke. He saw the whole thing in the light of my plan to pursue an acting career. He proclaimed that being an actress was little better than being a whore and that the Tre situation was already one step too many do
wn the path of damnation. He told me to get out of his house if I wanted to play at working in Hollywood, and I didn’t argue.

  It turned out he was right about Tre, though. Tre was a walking façade. His blond hair was parted a little bit too far to the right because he was balding, and he’d inherited those beautiful blue eyes from his mean, low-class father. If I sound bitter it’s because I was. Tre lived his life for his father, and when he died Tre took on his role and became desperate and chubby, an aging party boy. Before he crashed, though, he made sure, like any good kamikaze pilot, to take as many people with him as possible.

  But in hindsight we all have 20/20 vision. I thought I knew what I wanted. I turned sixteen, kept on seeing Tre, and set myself seriously to the task of becoming an actress. I had a few months to get out, so I started working three jobs to save money and was lucky enough to have the world’s coolest guidance counselor, a woman named Jan Fritzen, who convinced my parents to let me work toward finishing high school a year early.

  I’ve found in life that if you’re single-minded and tenacious enough, if you keep on putting one foot in front of the other, eventually the universe meets you halfway. In this case it happened at a coffee shop I was working at on the Pacific Coast Highway.

  It was the first real cappuccino place in town, and the South African owner was a complete pervert. Every time he would pinch my butt, I would steal money out of the cash register. Eventually he wised up and installed a camera, but the pinching didn’t stop, so I quit—but not before I got my big break.

  The actor Barry Newman was a regular at the shop. He’d starred in the legal drama Petrocelli in the ’70s. He hit on me a little, but when I told him I was sixteen, he backed right off, which I appreciated. We started chatting when he came in, and I shared my dream of becoming an actress. Barry introduced me to his friend Charlie Peck, a veteran Hollywood writer who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Charlie was a small, older guy who drove this huge Cadillac and had to sit on two telephone books to see over the top of the wheel. He took a liking to me because of my name; he’d been married to the Italian sex symbol Claudia Cardinale. We got on well, and he promised that he’d set up a meeting with Joan Green, an L.A. talent manager who represented Heather Locklear. I was blown away. At the time Locklear was the only actress to have appeared on two TV series simultaneously: Dynasty and T.J. Hooker. This was an amazing opportunity, and I remember trying to play it cool even though I had butterflies slam dancing in my stomach.