By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir

by Tom Sizemore

  I liked hanging out with Bob Forrest, though—maybe because his addiction back then made mine look minor. He had his own house when I first met him, but he quickly lost it and moved in with Johnny Depp. He’d be driving around in Johnny’s cars sometimes and then other people’s cars other times. You never really knew if he was supposed to be driving the car he was in. You’d ask him, “Is this car reported as stolen?” And he’d say, “You know, I honestly don’t know.”

  I remember threatening Bob one time; the details are a little murky, but I think I believed he’d stolen one of Johnny’s cars and sold it to a chop shop. Even though I had plenty of money, I was always looking for ways to get free dope, so I decided to threaten him by telling him that I’d tell Johnny he stole the car unless he gave me free drugs.

  I broke a beer bottle and said, “You see this? I’m going to drive this through your fucking forehead.” But he called for Johnny, and I had to get rid of it really fast. As he was helping me clean it up, Bob said, “Even if it was true, who would he believe: hot-tempered Tom or the even-keeled Bob?” I never ended up telling Johnny, and I doubt there was anything to tell. To this day, Bob maintains that he never stole any of Johnny’s cars.

  He did at one point borrow his girlfriend Stacey Grenrock’s car and sell the stereo for drugs. She worked for Johnny at the Viper Room, and Bob was always borrowing her car and then disappearing in it for a few days to do drugs. Eventually Bob was arrested, and everyone decided that they’d had it with bailing him out of trouble. When Bob called Johnny, his assistant—the ex-girlfriend whose car stereo he’d swapped for drugs—wouldn’t put the call through and when he tried to call Anthony Kiedis, the Chili Peppers manager also shut him down. He ended up getting sober in jail.

  I was really fond of Bob, but he’d been to rehab numerous times already and made many attempts to stay clean, and he just didn’t seem to be able to do it. I was nowhere near as fucked-up as he was—which made me think I was okay. I was getting progressively worse, of course, but gradually, whereas Bob was already deeply enmeshed in addiction when I met him.

  I think he did nine months in county jail, and when he got out and was clean, he got a job washing dishes at this breakfast place in Silver-lake called Millie’s. We all felt so bad for him—it was this very hip place so everyone would go there for pancakes and see Bob making minimum wage.

  One time John Frusciante actually said to Bob, “I will pay you whatever you make here if you just quit”—but Bob seemed happy. He told me later that the more it weirded people out to see him in that position, the more certain he became that it was the right thing for him to be doing. He started going to AA meetings over at the Gay and Lesbian Center because it was near Millie’s and no one would hassle him there or say, “Hey, weren’t you once a big-time musician and now you wash dishes?” We were all so spoiled, but it’s like he learned how to unspoil himself. From there he became an incredible inspiration to others struggling with addiction. Believe me, if you’d seen the way Bob did drugs, it would blow your mind that he could be sober for five minutes, let alone for five days or a year. I don’t know if Robert Downey Jr. or I would have ever gotten sober if we hadn’t been able to say, “My God, if Bob Forrest can get clean, then anyone can.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. My point is that he has helped a whole lot of people. John Frusciante ended up becoming terribly addicted later: he had a big black hole in his arm and was pushing a shopping cart around when Bob found him. Bob took him to Las Encinas, and he got better. Still, when Bob went to jail we all thought he was the worst drug addict we’d ever seen. We didn’t have any way of knowing then that I was going to make what he’d been through look minor.

  WHEN I GOT called in for True Romance, the director Tony Scott talked to me about playing the role of the assassin who beats up Patricia Arquette. But I didn’t want to beat Patricia Arquette up and then die. I wanted to play Cody Nicholson—Nickels—to Chris Penn’s Nicky Dimes. They ended up casting my old chess pal Jimmy Gandolfini as the assassin.

  Years later, I met with David Chase when he was putting together The Sopranos. It was just a pilot at that point, but it was awfully good. Still, I thought back then that TV was beneath me; plus, I’d gained forty-eight pounds to play John Gotti in a movie and I would have had to keep the weight on. You never know what’s going to turn into the pop sensation of the decade.

  True Romance was only a week of work, but I couldn’t believe I was part of the most amazing cast I’d ever heard of: Christopher Walken and Gary Oldman and Brad Pitt and Dennis Hopper and Val Kilmer and Samuel Jackson. All my scenes were with Chris Penn, God rest his soul, so we got to know each other really well. His brother Sean came to the set one day and watched us work and we became good friends, too.

  We filmed at the abandoned Ambassador Hotel in L.A., where Robert Kennedy was shot, and everyone called that scene “the clusterfuck.” Tony started every take like this: “Rock and roll, motherfuckers! Action!” The fucking feathers from the exploding pillows were there for four days. I got killed in one take and had to lie there the whole time with feathers in my mouth.

  It was tough keeping a straight face during the scenes with Bronson Pinchot, who had the listening device in his crotch; the laughs in that scene are completely authentic. The part where we’re listening to what’s going on in the elevator was all improvised. Chris Penn was a wonderful, underrated actor—a real pro.

  We did takes where Chris slapped Bronson across the face with the bag of coke, then grabbed him and smashed his head on the table. There’d be some woman talking about her boobs, and all of a sudden Chris Penn would be strangling Bronson. I just about died laughing.

  Chris told me, “Sean thinks you’re a really good actor, and my brother is the greatest actor in the world.” He always used to say that Sean was the greatest actor in the world. It breaks my heart thinking about that because Chris really idolized his brother, and he was just the sweetest guy—a wonderful, funny, talented man lost far too soon.

  ALONG WITH MY increase in film opportunities came an increase in drug use and along with that came an increased interest in sex. I had once been a guy who’d assumed he’d stay with one woman his entire life. But suddenly I was a successful young actor, and it began to dawn on me that my sexual possibilities had opened up exponentially. While of course it was exciting—I knew it was every guy’s dream to have this happen—in retrospect I’d say the sex screwed me up almost as much as the drugs. I became addicted to the conquest. I’d meet or find out about a woman and want to know that I could get her. And then I would. I didn’t succeed every time, of course, but I succeeded a lot. Obviously it was an ego game. But it wasn’t as obvious—at least to me at the time—that it was a sort of Pandora’s box I couldn’t seem to shut.

  The opportunities I would get would blow my mind. In 1989, I got a call from the assistant to a big shot in the industry—literally the biggest star in the world at the time—and was told, “She wants to meet you.” When I got there, another of her assistants said, “She’d like you to come this way now,” and I was brought into an anteroom. And then this superstar walked in, sat down, and said, “So tell me about yourself.”

  I said, “Um . . . I’m old enough.” I knew what it was all about. We talked for a few more minutes and then she walked out and the assistant came in a minute later and led me up to her room to take a shower. She had probably said, “Have him washed and cleaned” or something, so I took a shower and got into a tub. I was in great shape then, and by the time I actually got into her bedroom, I wasn’t nervous at all, even though part of me was thinking, “You’re the biggest fucking female star that ever lived—you’re a shot-caller. What the hell are you doing here with me?” But I ended up sleeping with her for three years, so I got over that after a while. She liked me. She told me, “You always come through.” I think she meant sexually.

  By this point, I was also sleeping with Linda Evans, this British socialite I’d met through Elizabeth Hurley. Even though
I was head over heels for Elizabeth when I first met Linda, I’d always sort of make sexual overtures to Linda, but in a joking way. At some point, once Elizabeth and I had been finished for a long time, Linda made it clear that she was interested and we got very close very fast. We went out to the Hamptons together, where we stayed at Julian Schnabel’s place, and I even took her home to meet my parents. She and I partied together, but we also had a very genuine connection. Honestly, drugs were a part of pretty much all my relationships at that time—I didn’t really spend time with anyone who didn’t do drugs—and I actually think her drug problem back then was worse than mine. She was mercurial, so the ups were very up and the downs were very down, and I think I believed I could save her and she believed she could save me.

  We stayed together on and off for years—though I’d often be juggling several other women at the same time. In the later years we were together, we’d try to quit doing drugs but we would never be able to stay off them. At one point we both stayed sober for thirty days, and then she decided to throw us a party to celebrate that fact at the Monkey Bar. Clearly there were some very basic elements of sobriety that we were failing to understand—or at least incorporate into our lives. We both slipped at that party: each of us took the same friend with us into the bathroom to do coke and told him not to tell the other one that we were using again. The whole thing came out the next day.

  Linda was seeing another man during part of the time that we were together, an insanely wealthy European gentleman who lived in New York. When she and I got more serious, she called him up to break things off with him—to tell him she’d fallen in love with me—and he didn’t take it very well and kept calling her afterward. She would always be so upset after getting off the phone with him that I called him up and said, “Listen, you’re upsetting my old lady really bad.” I was so pissed-off that I actually flew to New York to talk to him about it, and we ended up getting in a fistfight. I flew back to L.A.—I had only been gone for something like twelve hours—and never told Linda word one about it. But then he called her and exaggerated the entire thing. She went crazy, and I have to admit that what I did was completely wrong. Drugs had completely clouded my judgment and made me much more likely to do irrational things, like fly to New York to get in a fight with my girlfriend’s other boyfriend. I should have at the very least told her I was doing it, but I was so in love with her and I was jealous of him because I felt like he had a hold on her that I didn’t, mostly by virtue of the fact that he’d known her longer. She went so crazy that she kicked me in the chest, and I went flying across the room.

  I had become pretty good friends with Sean Penn by this point, and he was the one I called whenever I got into a jam with a woman, because he was always really good with women. But when Sean got to our place and saw shit flying across the room and the general state she was in, he said, “I’m leaving—you two are crazy.” That was, essentially, the end of my relationship with Linda; we stayed together for about another four months but she could never forgive me for what I did.

  Despite all of the insanity, we loved each other—we really did. The truth is that my life was insane at that point, so a crazy relationship fit right in.

  EVER SINCE Born on the Fourth of July, I’d wanted to work with Oliver Stone again. He was ballsy and brilliant and doing things that no one else was. When I found out that he was putting together Natural Born Killers, in 1992, I was told that the only part he thought I was right for was Mickey, the lead, and Warner Bros. essentially told him whom he had to cast for that. Originally he’d hired Michael Madsen, but Warner told him that if he cast Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, or Woody Harrelson, the budget would grow from $7 million to $35 million. Only Mel and Woody read for the part, and Woody was coming off of White Men Can’t Jump and Indecent Proposal, so he was cast. My name never entered the discussion.

  But I knew the casting director on Natural Born Killers; she called and told me that Oliver was significantly expanding the part of Detective Jack Scagnetti. Still, she said he was leaning toward Gary Old-man or Jimmy Woods. I knew the entire Mickey monologue by heart, so one night at the Monkey Bar, when I saw Oliver there I went up to him and said, “I can’t believe you’re going to cast Woody as Mickey.” And I started in on Mickey’s monologue right then and there. This is obviously a profoundly bad idea in a lot of ways, but I was doing it well, I guess, and I actually followed him out to his car to finish it. When I was done, he looked at me and said, “You know what? Come to my office tomorrow. I want to hear that monologue again and put you on tape doing it.” So I went to his office the next day and did it again. When I was done this time, he said, “What do you think about playing Scagnetti?” I was still very focused on somehow getting the part of Mickey, so I said I didn’t know. He was leaving his office for the day and he said, “Walk with me to my car.” We started walking to his car and he said, “Walk like Scagnetti would walk,” so I started doing that. Then he asked, “Do you think Scagnetti would have change in his pocket?” He induced me into the character like that. Then he had me follow him in my car to his house in Malibu, and we worked on the character of Scagnetti for a couple of hours.

  When my agent called to tell me that I’d officially gotten the part, I was high on coke and on my way to get more. But when I heard that the movie was starting in a little less than three months, I called the dealer back right away and canceled the transaction. I just thought, “How am I going to do a lead role in an Oliver Stone movie in eighty-seven days if I’m fucked-up?”

  I didn’t really know how to get sober, so I called Bobby Pastorelli, an actor I’d met on a movie I’d done called Striking Distance. He played the house painter in Murphy Brown and later OD’d—I think he might have killed himself—but at the time he was in AA and he started taking me to meetings.

  My agents and the people I worked with didn’t really know I’d been doing drugs and I was hoping I could get off them before the movie started. I wasn’t a dummy; I knew that the club of actors who get opportunities like the one I was about to get was small, and I didn’t want to fuck it up.

  I actually managed to put together nearly three months of clean time before the movie started. And before the table read, I had a private meeting with Oliver where he said, “I’m building a table, okay? And I’ve got Robert Downey Jr. and Juliette Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Harrelson. I’ve got four good legs already. Do you get what I mean?” And I just said, “I promise you, I’m not going to fuck up your table.”

  We started working in L.A., at Hollywood Center Studios, and then we flew out to Winslow, Arizona, for the shoot. Oliver and I were closer by then. He loved that I knew so many Shakespeare monologues—he’d come to my room, in his footsie pajamas, and say, “Come on, Tom, do that monologue again.” It was hilarious.

  Playing Scagnetti was a defining moment for me. In the beginning, I couldn’t identify with him, really—with his viciousness and his pettiness. I had to steep myself in serial murder. I read Bundy interviews. I met serial killer John Wayne Gacy on death row in Illinois. I made myself sick. I felt sick, like there was a tumor in me. Even in the hair: I had an Eraserhead haircut. I lost twenty-two pounds so that I could turn myself into a snake—a lizard and cold-blooded killer with no remorse or conscience. I got very heavily into the character but I sort of cut myself off from normal society in the process.

  The hysteria when the movie came out was kind of ridiculous. Obviously Oliver makes controversial movies, but John Grisham went out and said that Oliver should be held accountable for the fact that two kids who watched the movie killed someone; that was simply an ignorant thing to say. The movie was meant to alarm. It wasn’t meant to enrage young people to go out and kill people—that wasn’t what Oliver Stone was saying. He was saying that in twentieth-century America there’s a premium on the media, violence, and fame, which can lead to enshrinement in a virtual hall of fame for misdeeds.

  Very early in the shoot I had to do a scene where I strangle
a naked girl and orgasm in the process, and I was incredibly nervous—I think because so much of what goes on in that scene just isn’t right. It was one of the girl’s first acting roles, and she was nervous as hell, and that didn’t help. We did two takes and Oliver came up and said to me, “Come on, take a break for a minute and think about what you’re doing.” I panicked. I just couldn’t pull it together, and all I could think was that I’d be more free and easy and with it if I were on some sort of drug. That really was my coping mechanism, even at that early stage.

  So I asked someone on the set, “Can you get me a bottle of whisky, and if it’s possible—don’t tell anybody—but can you get me a gram of coke?” This was a different time. It was 1993 and it was an Oliver Stone set and you could talk fairly freely about most things, although you wouldn’t say something like that in front of Oliver.

  I’m sure I could have done the scene without drugs; this was really just an excuse for me to use; in retrospect, I realize my addiction was already a monster. Anyway, the guy came back, motioned to the fake coke I was supposed to snort in the scene, and said, “Dump that shit out.” Then he said, “Merck, so be cool,” as he put the new stuff out. Merck is pharmaceutical pure coke—Keith Richards talks about it in his book. It was really good for a while, but it turned on me fast: it made me really paranoid. In any case, that night I took a couple of swigs and did some real coke and I was able to do that scene with that gal and do it well.

  Juliette Lewis had come to the set for her karate lesson because the next day she was going to shoot the scene where she beats the guys up in the diner. I had actually met her originally at the rehearsal and liked her right away. I knew Brad Pitt, her former boyfriend, because we’d played hoops together, so I’d asked him back then if it was okay with him if I went after her. He said, “Is it okay? I’ll drive you there! I want to be your agent on this one!” I think she was bothering him—phone calls and stuff. But actually, she was the one who left him, not the other way around. She left him over a pair of shoes, I swear to God. She had been nominated for an Oscar for Cape Fear—nobody knew who he was at that point but he was her boyfriend—and I guess he made them late to the Academy Awards because he couldn’t decide which pair of shoes to wear. The limo was waiting and she couldn’t get him out of the house. She was sixteen and she dumped him over that.