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

by Tom Sizemore

  But then, of course, we got married the next day. It was, I have to say, a really beautiful wedding. My friend Scott filled in for De Niro. Michael Mann was there, as was Michael Wincott, an actor I’d become friends with on Strange Days. Ashley Hamilton—whom I’d met through getting sober—and John McGinley and some of our other actor friends also came out for it. Ashley Hamilton actually proposed to Angie Everhart at our wedding, and they got married a few months later. Anyway, after the wedding, Maeve and I flew back to L.A. to bring our dog home and then we went on our honeymoon to Hawaii.

  Fairly soon after we were married, we bought a beautiful, 2,800-square-foot, three-bedroom ranch-style house in Benedict Canyon. We looked around some—Maeve looked even as far as Malibu Colony—but we settled on that house, and we completely loved it. It had a pool and a gym, but that wasn’t why I loved it. It was just that it was all ours. The house became almost like a living, breathing thing to me. And we chose what to fill it with very thoughtfully. We liked the bed at the Four Seasons, so I actually called the hotel and asked them what kind of beds they had there. Maeve ordered that exact bed, and we attached it to our headboard, which was a hundred-year-old Irish church door. Everything in the house was like that; carefully selected and exactly the way we wanted it.

  One of the first investments we made as a couple was in Ago, the restaurant that De Niro, Harvey Weinstein, and a few other people had opened. We were part of a group of investors that included Christopher Walken, Tony Scott, and Ridley Scott. It was truly a spectacular time. The Relic ended up doing well—it knocked Evita out from the top box-office spot when it came out—and I won the Best Actor award at the Madrid Film Festival.

  We had a wonderful group of friends. We would have dinner at Ago with De Niro and his wife, Grace, spend Thanksgiving with Michael Mann, and plan vacations with Mike Medavoy and Sean Penn. Maeve and I also liked to travel together. We went to Hawaii, London, Paris, Dublin, and Venice. And if neither of us was on set, we had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together every day. The problem was when we were apart. I was so in love with Maeve that being around her actually made me forget about drugs. But when I wasn’t around her—when she was working more and more on The Bold and the Beautiful—that’s when things would get dangerous, and I’d relapse.

  But whether I was staying sober or relapsing, work continued to go well. I signed with a new manager, Beth Holden, who arranged for me to have a meeting with the director Terrence Malick, who was then putting together The Thin Red Line, a World War II movie with Sean Penn. He told me that he wanted to cast me but couldn’t decide which part. At the same time, Matthew McConaughey—who was another of Beth’s clients—was shooting Amistad with Steven Spielberg, so Beth got ahold of the script for the other World War II movie that was floating around town then, Saving Private Ryan. She asked Denise Chamian, who was casting the movie, what she thought of me for the part of Sergeant Mike Hovarth. Denise liked the idea but said that Steven was concerned about my relationship with drugs.

  Then one day, I got the call: Steven Spielberg wanted to meet with me. But he wanted Maeve to come to the meeting, too. So the two of us went in and sat down with him and the first thing he did was turn to Maeve and ask, “Can Tom stay clean and sober?”

  She swore that I could. I swore that I could. My guess is that working with John Belushi on 1941 had made Spielberg cautious about ever working with another addict—though he didn’t say that. Steven’s a very understanding and loving man. He believes in family and right and wrong and home and hearth and all that good stuff. And because of Steven’s experiences in life and the way he was raised in Phoenix and his beginnings in Hollywood, he hasn’t forgotten who he is. He never abused drugs even though he was around a lot of them, but he didn’t judge people who did. He had a sense of humor, too. I remember him saying at that meeting, “Well, it is a war movie so if you relapse, I guess we could just kill you off at any time.”

  He also told me he’d loved my performances in Natural Born Killers and Heat but that he’d always seen a heroic quality in me that had never been explored by a filmmaker, and he wanted to bring that out. He said, “It’s like you’ve been given part of a piano and have only been allowed to play certain notes. I want to give you the whole piano.”

  The one wrinkle in all of this was that Terrence Malick took my not doing The Thin Red Line as a complete betrayal. But he’d never decided which part he wanted me to play, and ultimately, I think I made the better choice.

  I had to lose a little weight before I went over to England for Saving Private Ryan and we got it put in my contract that production would pay for a trainer for me to lose the weight I needed to in L.A. Because Maeve’s story line on The Bold and the Beautiful had heated up and she had to be at work there almost every day, she and I tried to figure out what would be the best plan for keeping me clean. After promising Steven that I could stay sober for the shoot, she felt like the best way to get me out of our house—where I had memories of a lot of drug slips—would be for us to go to San Ysidro Ranch for a month. It was our favorite place to vacation, and she knew that if we went there, I could work out with a trainer, eat well, and just be in a peaceful place. So that’s exactly what we did. I stayed there, reading, looking at my script, exercising, and hanging out with our dog, while she commuted to CBS in Hollywood every day for work. I actually didn’t think about doing drugs and we had a lovely, romantic month there. When we drove back to L.A., I was really proud of myself that I was about to do the best movie of my life clean and sober.

  Maeve was working pretty much every day, but her producers agreed to give her two weeks off and then lighten up her story line so that she could easily travel back and forth to England that summer to see me while I was shooting. The problem was that those two weeks didn’t start until two days after I was scheduled to leave.

  I’ve always had a serious fear of flying and was borderline convinced that the plane would crash or something bad would happen if Maeve didn’t fly with me. I was so irrational that I begged her to fly out with me on a Tuesday, then fly back to L.A. the next day for work, and then fly back again. And I said all sorts of cruel things about how I was making more money than her so she should just blow off her work. I felt sort of irrationally hurt by the fact that she wouldn’t come, and I just started striking out in whatever way I could—but she stood her ground and said that she couldn’t do it, though she would come to see me when her vacation started. Honestly, I was a spoiled brat back then, and so I left feeling like she’d betrayed me.

  When I got to London, I felt bad about how much torture I’d put Maeve through over flying out with me so I called her and said, “I miss you—call me no matter what time it is.” Then, as I was going to dinner, I ran into an actress I knew named Charlotte Lewis in the lobby of the hotel. She was in Coming to America and was considered sort of the Kim Basinger of her time. And while we’re all responsible for our own actions and I’m in no way saying I wasn’t at fault here, Charlotte was clearly out to seduce me. And, well, she succeeded and the two of us ended up back in my hotel room. As soon as we had sex, I felt terrible and was actually crying quietly into my pillow afterward. Charlotte reached over to cuddle, and I had to move away. And then—well, Maeve called. I felt so guilty and confused and fucked-up that I picked up the phone instead of letting it ring and answered in a sort of whisper. Maeve said, “Oh, you sound like you were asleep—go back to bed and call me tomorrow.” And then Charlotte said, in the loudest voice you can possibly imagine, “Who’s that?” Maeve of course heard her and asked, “Who’s that? Is that the TV?” And I couldn’t lie. I just immediately started crying.

  Maeve was furious. She paused and then said, “You just made your bed—now you’ll have to lie in it.” She was absolutely right. I loved this woman with everything in me, and yet I ended up in bed with someone I didn’t even like. Maeve was supposed to fly out to London the next day to be with me for part of the shoot, but instead she went to see the divorce lawyer De
nnis Wasser. And I guess when she was meeting with him, she was crying so hard that he said to her, “You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?” And he suggested that she really think about whether she should move forward with a divorce.

  I begged her not to leave me. I got everyone I could to do the same. De Niro called her and told her that she should stick with me, that sobriety was hard and I was struggling and had fucked up but that I loved her. I had to leave for the boot camp we had to do before the movie started, and I was completely devastated. Here I was supposed to be this tough guy and I was crying to all the other guys that she was leaving me. I knew she still loved me, though.

  Boot camp was, honestly, fucking awful. I had worked with the guy who ran it—a veteran marine named Dale Dye—on Born on the Fourth of July and Natural Born Killers, and he was tough.

  We had to spend six days in a forest in England, sleeping outside and going through a grueling training regimen. All we had were these World War II–type blankets and rations and Dye wouldn’t even call us by our real names—only by our character names. We had to get up at dawn and run five miles every morning in full military gear. It was cold and miserable and I threw up all down my shirt on the first day. But Dye said that we wouldn’t be able to portray military discipline if we didn’t live it. I knew he had a point but it was terrible. I only ate beans in tomato sauce the whole time. The whole goal of the training was to reprogram us: they were literally trying to take out parts of our personalities and bring out our aggressive nature so we could think like the “killing machines” we were playing.

  Maybe it’s not all that surprising, but I had a couple of run-ins with Captain Dye. He called Tom Hanks “Turd Number One” and called me “Turd Number Two”—everyone else he just called turds. At one point I said to him, “Don’t call me a turd anymore. I don’t like it. I’m doing my job out here, and don’t do that anymore.” He made me do something like two hundred push-ups for that.

  Apparently, my manager Beth got a call from one of the producers who said that if I didn’t get with the program, they would consider sending out offers to other actors to replace me. I guess the names Bill Paxton and Gary Sinise were mentioned. Beth called me and said, “Look, this is it; if you get fired by Spielberg, you’re never going to get another job again.” I got right in line after that.

  Still, the truth is that we had all been run ragged from boot camp and wanted to quit. At one point, Tom Hanks called a meeting for all of us where he said we should all stick with it. And it turned out that it was really important that we did that because we ended up doing a couple of maneuvers that were difficult and that we wouldn’t have learned to do if we’d left. But it rained every fucking day of that boot camp and it was as if Captain Dye had booked the rain especially for us. He’d say, “If it ain’t raining, you ain’t training. If it ain’t snowing, we ain’t going!” And “Up the hill, down the hill, fuck the hill, Rangers, Rangers, can’t quit, can’t quit, don’t quit, don’t quit, won’t quit, won’t quit, Rangers, Rangers.” We’d run miles singing that shit, which certainly bonded us together.

  By the time boot camp was over and we’d all gone to Ireland to begin filming, Maeve had reconsidered the divorce and even agreed to come out to be with me. When she got there, I did everything I could to show her that I could be a better man. I made love to her with the desperation of someone who’s dying—because, in a lot of ways, I felt like I would die without her.

  I stayed sober throughout the whole production, in large part because Maeve was there with me so much of the time. But I was also white-knuckling it—meaning that I was still thinking obsessively about using heroin and just not allowing myself to do any. It helped that it wasn’t exactly easy to get there. I did go out to try to find it once but I had a hard time locating any so I just said, “Fuck it.” And I remember one day I was sitting on set just preoccupied with using and someone on the crew who’d had a heroin problem came and sat down next to me and said, “Stop thinking about it.” Addicts have this way of being able to read other addicts, and it was like he could tell exactly what I was thinking. I’d talk to that guy at night when my cravings were bad, and that really helped. I also became very good friends with actor Jeremy Davies, and that friendship helped a lot as well.

  One day when we were shooting, I twisted my ankle and, about an hour later, it really hurt. And, look, I know myself; I understood that painkillers were a distinct possibility if I went to the doctor. My ankle did really hurt, and it’s not like I purposely twisted it in order to go to the ER, but I just think my brain understood that drugs were accessible and that maybe made me think I was in more pain than I actually was. Beth and her sister—who were visiting at the time—took me to the hospital, in Dublin I think, and when the doctor came in, he asked if I was okay or if I needed morphine. I said, “Actually, yes,” at the same time as Beth said, “No, he definitely doesn’t.”

  Beth could always make me laugh. One day when she was still there visiting, production moved my trailer from where it had been the entire shoot. I needed to change for a scene, and I started to get upset because I didn’t know where I was supposed to go or where my other wardrobe was. Someone handed me an incredibly small T-shirt, but because I was angry, I didn’t even really notice its size. I just took off what I was wearing and put that on instead. I was still sort of ranting while wearing this shirt, but then I looked over at Beth and saw that she and her sister were trying to keep from cracking up. That’s when I started laughing, and pretty soon we were all howling.

  I just kind of fudged my way through staying sober on that shoot. I wasn’t going to meetings—I wasn’t doing everything right—but I didn’t use. And thank God for that because they tested me a lot and there was no cheating these tests—you couldn’t get fake urine because you had to go in with no clothes on and no bottles.

  My dad hadn’t been to many of my movie sets, but he flew to Wexford Island, where he ended up sitting with Tom Hanks for a while, and then he sat with Steven for four days and watched him. I think Steven was kind of fascinated with my father because he saw me one way and then he met my dad, who was this very sophisticated, Harvard-educated, elegantly dressed gentleman.

  I had a wonderful time working with Tom Hanks—we were sort of “good Tom” and “bad Tom,” and you can guess who was which. We played good friends. In scenes where it was just the two of us, our characters called one another by their first names, and only Rangers who knew each other very well did that. And my character’s real purpose in the movie was to keep Hanks’s character alive and make sure that the other men didn’t see that he was falling apart. At the end of the shoot, Tom wrote me a beautiful note about how he’d never forget making the movie with me.

  Saving Private Ryan meant a lot to me. It gave me an opportunity to pay homage and honor and give my respects to the fighting man, to my own family, and to America itself. I don’t think we, as Americans, think enough about the men who fight to keep this country free, and I was glad to be a part of something that might inspire people to think about that more. The average age of those men on D-day was eighteen, and it was amazing to me that these teenagers were willing to risk, and sadly often lose, their lives for us. And working with Steven was amazing. Watching him make the D-day scene come to life was unforgettable. He had no storyboards and no shot list; he’d just come out and point to what he wanted. The technicians told us we had two seconds to get past each land mine, and if we were too close to it, we could lose a foot. That helped me sort out my motivation for the scene. The whole experience was extremely rewarding but it was also a very tough shoot. I worked every one of the sixty-one days, although that was actually less than it was supposed to be. We were scheduled to go sixty-eight but finished seven days early.

  In between making Saving Private Ryan and the release, I packed on forty pounds to play John Gotti in the NBC miniseries Witness to the Mob. It was for De Niro’s production company, and he said, “Listen, we can do this two ways: you can we
ar a fat man suit or you can gain the weight.” I wanted my character to feel real, and the fact was that Gotti couldn’t lay off the cannoli, so I gained the weight. His belly was a sign of his success. He was a big man in every way, and that was his tragic flaw. So I basically went from being in the best shape of my life after Saving Private Ryan—I was 180 pounds of all muscle—to being a complete glutton. I ate cream sauce with everything I could get my hands on. I ate lots of pizza, ice cream, meatball sandwiches, and macadamia brittle. I got so fat that at one point, when I was in the shower, I looked down and I couldn’t even see my dick anymore. I became such a pig that Maeve said I even started snoring.

  I took the weight off—carefully, under a doctor’s supervision—to make a smaller, blue-collar movie called The Florentine, which was written by my friend Tom Benson and starred people who were all friends of mine: Jeremy Davies, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, and Maeve. I played a guy who comes back to town and finds out his ex-girlfriend is getting married. I also made a movie called The Match, where I played a former air force fighter pilot guy who’s become the local drunk in a small Scottish town where he was based during Desert Storm. That was a definite departure from the kind of thing I normally did—it was a sweet little romantic comedy starring Richard E. Grant—but I really enjoyed it.

  Then I signed on to a Martin Scorsese movie, Bringing Out the Dead, which starred Nicolas Cage as a burned-out ambulance driver who believes he’s seeing the ghosts of people he couldn’t save. I played his ex-partner, a real psychopath who’s sort of the last thing Cage’s character needs at that point. I relocated to New York to do it. It was a lot of night shoots and I didn’t get along at all with Marc Anthony—the guy who would go on to marry Jennifer Lopez but back then played this crazy homeless guy in the film. During one scene, he was lying on a stretcher in the ambulance when I was fighting with him and very suddenly and unexpectedly the IV and all the stuff that was hanging above him fell and hit him in the balls. He blamed me for that and started swearing and yelling at me. Production had to literally pull us apart.