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

by Tom Sizemore

  By the time Juliette showed up on the set, I already had a huge crush on her. She was only eighteen years old, and I really believed she was an intuitive genius—her talent was really, really sexy and attractive to me. So she was standing there watching me and when the scene was done, she said something like “Hey, Tom, that was really good. Are you like that with all the girls? I’ve often wanted to be strangled to death.” And she started laughing.

  I said, “Yeah, I’ve strangled several girls to death myself. That’s why I was so good; it was easy to do. So whenever you want to be strangled to death, you know who to call.” She said, “I’d like to be strangled to death right now.” That was how we flirted with each other.

  Later, she left a message at my hotel room, and that night we used heroin together and had sex. Once I started using heroin again, it was like I’d never stopped and my eighty-seven days of sobriety were a distant memory. Heroin just put this hazy gauze over everything and made Juliette seem even more glamorous than she already seemed to me at the time as a two-time Oscar nominee. But what we did together was anything but glamorous. We were at the Best Western—the only hotel in Winslow—getting high and ordering corn flakes. We ordered like twenty-nine bowls of that shit. We could never eat it all—we were too high or it made us sick—so it would sit there, and we’d order some more, and that would get soggy.

  During the shoot, when we had breaks, Juliette and I would come back to L.A. to get more dope. I was just snorting and smoking, not shooting, and I wasn’t feeling too bad about it, either, because I felt like I was doing great work. Of course I was addicted again, but when I was working I used the minimal amount of dope, just enough not to get sick from withdrawal. I’d use enough to get what heroin addicts call “well”—which really just meant to get normal. Basically, if I was using sixty dollars’ worth of smack during the breaks, then I’d use ten to fifteen dollars’ worth a day once I was back on set—so little that I wouldn’t even be noticeably impaired. If I felt sickness coming on again, I’d do a little bit more. I never wanted to be high—or at least be seen as high—on a movie. People really didn’t know that I was using, but they did eventually become suspicious because I was with Juliette all the time, and she briefly became inoperative; she couldn’t stay awake during the takes.

  Her agents flew out and everyone asked me what was going on. I told them, “I don’t know what she’s doing. I just fuck her and I go back to my room. Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing when I’m asleep.” They sort of believed me, even though my own problem wasn’t exactly under control. I was doing a lot of running around and juggling.

  Some of that juggling involved the fact that I’d met someone else. See, one day, when we were shooting the courtroom scene where Juliette is testifying, I saw what had to be the prettiest extra in the history of extras: she had blond hair, beautiful teeth, and an unbelievable body. Her name was Maeve Quinlan. I was standing next to Woody Harrelson when I saw her, and he said, “Who’s gonna fuck her first?” We started taking bets. I said, “Robert,” talking about Downey. He said, “I bet it’s you or me—or maybe Oliver. How about I go second and you go third?” And I said, “I don’t care when I go, as long as I get a chance.” I didn’t know then that I was talking about my future wife.

  Maeve was actually Juliette’s stand-in and they just happened to use her as an extra on that courtroom day. She and Juliette didn’t look anything alike, but they were both petite, and with a brunette wig on, Maeve could stand in for her.

  When the scene wrapped, Maeve was walking down the courthouse steps in front of me, and I just busted out with “You have the greatest ass I think I have ever, ever seen.” She turned around and said, “And you have the most pathetic come-on line I have ever, ever heard. Does that line actually work?” As she kept walking down the courtroom steps, I burst into laughter. I couldn’t believe how brazenly she’d just called me out on my shit. Then she turned around and started laughing as well, and it was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen. I said to her, “Oh shit, now you’ve really done it. Great ass, great grin. What’s next—great heart?” She just kept laughing, and I know this sounds ridiculous but as we stood there, laughing and looking at each other, it’s like everything went into soft focus.

  The truth is, the whole time I knew Maeve—and that goes up through today—her ass, her grin, and her heart were and are pretty much the best I’ve ever come across. What I didn’t know that day but I would soon come to find out is that she was completely unlike any other girl I’d ever met: she came from this amazing family in Chicago, had graduated from the University of Southern California on a full-ride tennis scholarship, and her dad and brothers were all doctors. You don’t ever find girls like her on movie sets; you don’t really find girls like her anywhere.

  I’d heard that Woody made a run at her and she turned him down, and I think I used that as a reason to talk to her the next time I saw her. I went up to her and said, “I heard my buddy went after you.” At first, she denied it to protect him, which really endeared her to me. She could have said something bad, but instead she said it was completely untrue.

  One day I asked her if she wanted to have lunch with me. The cast and crew usually ate meals together, but I sometimes liked to eat in my trailer alone, and so when I asked her to eat with me, I meant alone with me there. But when we got our food and I nodded in the direction of my trailer, she just shook her head. It was clear then that with her I wasn’t going to be able to get away with the kind of things I could with other women.

  What’s funny is she had actually seen me before that day at the courthouse and thought I was an idiot. Back when we were all at Hollywood Center Studios—which is where we were working before we went on location to Arizona—she passed me on the lot. Apparently I was standing there in my underwear, with my sunglasses on my forehead, smoking a cigarette. She told me later that she just thought, “Who the hell walks around a public place in underwear acting like he’s in jeans? It’s one thing to do it in wardrobe and your trailer but in the middle of the lot?” But while she was partially horrified, I think another part of her found it refreshing. Like I said, she’d had this extremely proper upbringing, and I don’t think she’d been around many people who didn’t really give a fuck about what people thought.

  So we became friends during the shoot. She had a boyfriend back in Chicago, and I was really with Juliette, but I knew already that I genuinely liked Maeve a lot. And believe it or not, I had two other women that I was also involved with at the time. One was Vanessa Lasky, a wonderful girl who was the assistant to the manager I was with at the time, Suzan Bymel. When I first signed with Suzan, she had said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t get involved with my assistant,” and, of course, that was the first thing I did. Vanessa and I were involved for years, on and off; she eventually ended up marrying a CAA agent named Steve Alexander and becoming a successful interior designer.

  I was also still seeing the British socialite Linda Evans, and the crazy thing about this particular time in my life is that I wasn’t casually dating any of these women: I felt like I was passionately in love with Vanessa, Juliette, and, later, with Maeve, too. I do believe it’s possible to love more than one woman at a time, but even I knew that this many women was excessive.

  When the movie wrapped, Juliette and I came back to L.A., and even though I was sharing my apartment on Harratt with Vanessa, I was spending a lot of time in this $2.5 million house Juliette had bought on Outpost Drive in Hollywood. At one point we even talked about me paying the mortgage with her, but I just could never get it together to move my stuff in from my apartment and neither could she; so she kept a place she had up on Sunset Plaza and I kept the one I had with Vanessa. And ironically, while we had all these places to live, the house we were mostly living in, on Outpost, had no furniture in it.

  I went straight from Natural Born Killers to Devil in a Blue Dress and then I had a little break before Strange Days. That’s when my managers sugges
ted I go to a rehab program at UCLA. They had a thirty-day program on Santa Monica Boulevard, and I went and stayed for a month—and then got high within four hours of getting out. I thought I wanted to be clean, but I found out I didn’t—something I didn’t know then would grow to be a pattern. And I just didn’t understand the whole concept of staying away from certain people, places, and things. I understood what it meant but it just didn’t seem doable then.

  And in many ways, heroin really worked for me in those days. I remember every detail of what it was like to go cop when I was back in L.A. after Natural Born Killers had wrapped. I remember the way the heroin smelled in my car. I remember that we were still living in the aftermath of the riots so the cops weren’t bothering as much with trying to arrest people for drug possession. I would drive downtown, to Bonnie Brae and Third Streets at nine fifteen in the morning, knowing that I’d be able to go home afterward and watch a football game on DirecTV. And I’d feel on top of the world in my fancy car. After copping, I’d stop at a market and buy a moon pie. I’d put a Chet Baker cassette on and damn it if the whole scenario didn’t feel romantic to me. I’d be holding the heroin in my hand knowing that if I were stopped, I could just swallow a balloon. But I was never stopped.

  Usually I’d pull over and either roll up a dollar bill and snort the heroin or put it on tinfoil and put a lighter under it and smoke it just a few blocks away from where I got it. You couldn’t get bad heroin then—heroin then was only bad if you stepped on it. Speed can be bad because it’s man-made, but heroin was beautiful, especially in those days. I’d take four hits, then I’d drive down that hill with Chet Baker still playing, and I thought I was just the coolest motherfucker. Or maybe cool isn’t the right word. I just felt beyond the reach of pain. Above it all. Like I was floating above this horrible morality play called the Interpersonal Relationships of the Young and Successful and the Mysteries of Young Adulthood. I’m not kidding about that name, either: if you look back at some of the journals I was keeping then, I’d write that shit down. Before then, I’d felt the first stirrings of loneliness—my first heartbreaks—and I didn’t like it at all. Heroin got me above all of it. Heroin allowed me to watch other people trudge the road—ironically, that’s a phrase from the AA Big Book, but the truth is I looked at people who were suffering through normal life pain and I thought they were nuts. My guy friends would talk about liking girls and I’d watch them risking getting rejected and getting their feelings hurt and I’d think they were out of their minds for putting up with that stuff.

  Strange Days was a really difficult movie. It filmed for seventeen weeks in the summer of 1994, and it went on and on. It was a brilliant film, though, in a lot of ways. James Cameron wrote the script, which was about an ex-cop—played by Ralph Fiennes—who deals disks that contain recorded memories and emotions that people become addicted to. Cameron was originally going to direct it but instead Kathryn Bigelow, who had been married to him and whom I’d worked with on Point Break, did. And completely coincidentally—having nothing to do with me—Maeve ended up working as a production assistant on Strange Days.

  Maeve and I had actually been in touch since Natural Born Killers had wrapped, because the whole time I was with Juliette and juggling Vanessa, I was also pursuing her. Our relationship was purely platonic because she still had her boyfriend, and I liked her all the more for the fact that she wouldn’t jump into bed with me the way other women would. I would basically call her every morning and ask her out for coffee, and every morning she would say no. But I could tell that she liked me and that I was wearing her down. And then one night she found out that her boyfriend in Chicago had been cheating on her. I didn’t know that yet, of course, but the next morning when I called and asked her out for coffee, she said yes. Coffee turned into her coming back to my apartment on Harratt and listening to Sheryl Crow’s first album, which I was obsessed with at that point, and that turned into her not leaving for two days. Although she refused to have sex with me, we made out for pretty much forty-eight hours straight, and she slept in my arms—the only woman I’d ever done that with who didn’t have sex with me. They were truly the most romantic two days of my life. Of course, our relationship couldn’t develop from there because I was still with Vanessa—who, conveniently enough, had been in New York during those two days—and also with Juliette, but Maeve and I remained friends.

  At the same time, I thought I was in love with Juliette. In retrospect, I think I was in love with the whole idea of her. And I was in love with what was happening in my career more than anything else. When Juliette and I were up in her house, things got really weird. First off, at age thirty-two, I was significantly older than she was. And even though she had a nascent intelligence and a kind of knowledge about human nature, she’d never gone to college, and she had a very different upbringing from me. So after we got over the lustful part at the beginning, we didn’t have a lot in common aside from the fact that we both liked to do a lot of drugs. And she never wanted to leave the house, ever—not even to go outside. We had a big TV with porn playing 24/7, which I thought was cute in the beginning, but it started to wear on me after a while. I’d say, “Turn it off” and she’d say, “But I like the music”—which I thought was one of the great lines of all time. Still, whenever I looked up, it seemed like there was some guy’s big hairy ass on the screen. At one point, I taped something over the screen for a while, but she took it off.

  All we had, furniture-wise, was a huge bed and one end table. It was a weird setup, made weirder by the fact that she didn’t want me to leave the room. I’d get up to go take a shower and she’d go, “Where are you going? Can I come with you?” And she’d get a blanket, come into the bathroom, and sleep on the floor and wait for me.

  Juliette had been a star since she was fifteen and in some ways she was very mature, but she also had a way of keeping people away from her. She really was a sweetheart; she just didn’t understand all the adulation she received. In many ways, I don’t think she was comfortable in the spotlight.

  At a certain point, for some reason she decided she didn’t want to see her brother’s face anymore—and that was a problem since he was working as her assistant. So she had me paint this sentence on the outside of the bedroom door: “I don’t want to ever see you again, your sister.” And then she insisted I get a saw, carve a hole in the bedroom door, and paint “Deliver all food here.” We literally didn’t leave the room after that and never saw anyone. The food would be brought up, and we’d just stay there. She’d originally wanted her brother to buy furniture for the house, but she never gave him any money because she didn’t know what to do with the place. I walked around the house once and told her, “You know, this is a really great house—let’s furnish this fucking thing and live in it,” and she’d say, “I like this room.” Essentially, we were really high and really rich.

  I was still fairly new to heroin then and honestly, it felt like the best thing about it was going out to score. The euphoric anticipation—the excitement of knowing you were about to be altered, in a profoundly positive way—was the greatest high there was to me back then. Even if I was dope-sick, I loved going to cop because I knew I wasn’t going to be sick long.

  With heroin, especially back then, you couldn’t just buy from one guy: the dealers, like the dealers in New York’s Alphabet City, didn’t have enough. And dope was different strengths. It sounds insane, I realize, but if you ever heard that a guy OD’d from a certain batch of heroin, you’d find out who his dealer had been because you knew that heroin was good.

  Juliette and I would go through phases where we’d try to quit. I know people who decide to quit suddenly and start flushing all their drugs down the toilet, but I never did it like that: I’d make sure I’d do all the drugs and then, when I was done, I’d say, “Okay, I’m not going to do that anymore.” I’d make it a day, sometimes two—I’d never make it more than three. By then, my feet would start to get real heavy and I’d go, “Fuck it, I know how to f
ix this.”

  Of course, things were getting strange up there on Outpost: when you’re doing that many drugs, things have a way of always getting strange. And I was actually starting to get a little worried about Juliette. So one day I asked her brother to call her manager, Joel Stevens, who was a Scientologist and a really nice guy. And one night Joel just barged in there and Juliette picked up the nearest large object she could find and threw it right at his fucking head, hitting him in the face. He was bleeding everywhere, and she was screaming, “Bad, bad, bad idea! Bad idea! Bad idea, Joel! You could have upset Tom!” Like she was worried about me.

  That led to an intervention of sorts on her. She’d been to rehab before, and she knew it was coming. She told me she wanted me to say that I wanted to get clean as well so they’d let us go to rehab together.

  I asked her, “Will we get clean?”

  She said, “No, we’ll go to Scientology rehab and we don’t have to really get clean there.”

  Three days later, Juliette’s agent, Joel, her mom, her dad, her brother, and some girlfriends came up. I’d heard about interventions—I was only a few months away from my own, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. It was tedious. I remember thinking, “I’ll never let this happen to me.” They carted her off to Narconon, the Scientology rehab—I didn’t end up going after all—and that was pretty much the end of our relationship.