by Tom Sizemore
He opened the door, but I was drinking a cup of coffee when I walked in and he said, “No drinking in my trailer”—even though he himself was drinking a cup of coffee at the time. So I dumped the coffee and tossed the Styrofoam cup on the ground outside the trailer, planning to pick it up when I left his trailer. He said, “Litterbug. Go pick that up.”
That’s when I snapped again. I was wearing my space jacket because we’d been in the middle of shooting a scene, but I took it off and said, “Look, Val, we’re no longer on Mars. Now we’re back on earth. And here on earth, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.” His assistant walked up and said, “Hey, Tom, why don’t you go?” And then she ran and got my assistant, Carol. Carol coaxed me back to the set.
The next day he kept us waiting nine hours—on a twelve-hour day. When he came out, we shot a scene where he needed a certain prop, and he handed it off to the prop girl rather than holding on to it when he had to do another take. Then he called the prop girl to get the prop again and I guess he felt she wasn’t fast enough. This was an eighteen-year-old, completely defenseless girl on her first job, and when she walked up with the prop, Val called her a dumb bitch and then flicked a lit cigarette at her, which actually burned her chest. It was one of the most heinous acts I’d ever seen a person do, and I’d seen a lot of heinous acts in my life.
I’d finally had it. One of the producers who knew how tense the situation was getting had called my manager Beth and said, “Listen, if it comes to blows between Tom and Val, can you ask Tom to not hit Val in the face? Because that might be hard to cover with makeup.” Since I knew I couldn’t hit him in the face, I hit him as hard as I could in the chest, and he fell down. I remember Simon Baker just going, “Fuuuuuuck.” I continued to hit him in the chest, stomach, and arms.
This whole thing was obviously frightening for everyone on the set, but at the same time, I think a lot of people had wanted to punch Val themselves for quite a while. Because of the delays Val was causing, we were going over our allotted time, which meant that a lot of the crew people, who were all planning to work on the Matrix sequel, were losing those jobs.
Mark Canton, who was one of the producers on the movie, flew out from L.A. the next day. The day’s shoot had been canceled so Val could go to the doctor. He had made it sound to anyone who would listen like I had completely incapacitated him, but he was fine; I doubt he could even get a painkiller prescription. But he took out a restraining order against me, which made finishing the movie challenging; still, we managed.
The truth is, both Val and I were going through terrible times with our wives. I was struggling with my sobriety, which was growing incredibly hard on Maeve. I knew she still loved me, but I also knew that she was getting close to not being able to put up with much more. And when I flew home for a weekend during Red Planet, we went to a barbecue and got into the blowup to end all blowups. I went back to Australia assuming we would patch things up the way we always did, but this time I was wrong.
In November 1999, she filed for divorce. I’m not even sure I can describe what that felt like, except to say that if I’d been punched in the gut and had my insides eviscerated, it probably would have felt better.
Val was going through a terrible time with his wife, Joanne Whalley, and they were actually in the process of finalizing their divorce during the shoot. If we’d both been able to just talk about what was going on and tell each other how much we were hurting, I bet a lot of this could have been avoided. But I didn’t tell anyone on the set what was going on with Maeve—I kept it all bottled up inside and then allowed it to flare out in these unhealthy ways—and for that, I’m very sorry.
Val and I actually talked about all of this at the Red Planet premiere and made up and even became friends again. But back then, by the time I got home from the shoot, a few weeks before Christmas, Maeve had moved into an apartment—taking our dog with her—and wouldn’t even tell me where it was. She flew to Dublin to be with her family for Christmas, and I called her every day that she was gone, begging her to reconsider and come back.
When she returned to town, she agreed to see me, but only if I met her at her therapist’s office. We went to therapy every single day for three weeks—trying to work everything out. Finally the therapist said that she thought we were ready to go out for a date. I had just been nominated for a Golden Globe—for an HBO movie called Witness Protection—and Maeve and I agreed that going to the award show together would be an ideal date.
I didn’t win, and then, to add insult to injury, my mom called and told me that when the camera was supposed to show me when they announced my name as a nominee, it actually flashed on someone else. On top of that, I had expected that Maeve would want to come back home after the show, and she didn’t. I was beginning to finally accept, for good, the fact that I was really losing her. I asked her if she’d spend the upcoming Valentine’s Day with me, and she said no.
The divorce proceedings, which had begun in late 2000 and were halted while we were in therapy together, resumed. I was traumatized.
When it came to the women I truly loved, I always picked people who were better than me—I think to make up for something I felt I lacked. Both Maeve and my girlfriend in graduate school, Michelle, were extraordinarily good women. With both of them, I was initially attracted to how pretty they were, but what I couldn’t have consciously known at the time was how tough they both were as well. They were the kind of women who would say no and mean it. When Maeve left, I would think about how much tougher she was than me. I’d think about one night, when a friend of hers was over and we were all drunk, the friend followed me to the bathroom and said she wanted to have a ménage à trois with us. Because I was buzzed and because I’m a guy, I thought it was a great idea, and so the friend and I went up to Maeve—all giggling and everything—and asked her what she thought. She said, “I won’t do that,” and suddenly the evening went from being funny and playful to being incredibly serious, with that friend being escorted out the door and me being directed to sleep on the couch. I remember feeling that night like I was being scolded like a little kid, but I was also nearly in awe of someone who had enough strength to say, “I won’t do that.” I had never had any boundaries like that—any lines I’d ever drawn or things I’d decided I wouldn’t do—and most everyone I knew didn’t, either. That was one of the many things I dwelled on about Maeve as I stayed alone in the house and wept for the six months after she left.
I couldn’t have sex with anyone for a very long time, nor could I even conceive of it. I tried to do so, right when she left me—I tried to sleep with an old girlfriend—but when she took off her clothes, I just started crying because it was so jarring. I wasn’t on drugs or anything—I was on air, trying to breathe my way through being heartbroken. Luckily, my ex understood; she wrapped a sheet around me as I cried, in heaving sobs. I eventually just accepted that it was going to take time to get over the dissolution of my marriage.
CHAPTER 5
HEIDI
FOR A LONG time, I walked around in a constant state of depression. “Walking around” is actually overstating matters: for nearly a month, I was too depressed to even leave my house. And once I could, I was very much the walking wounded: I wasn’t dissolving into tears every second but I was in active pain and looking for any way possible to escape it.
Near the end of January 2001, I found a way. I had met Heidi Fleiss years earlier, in the late 1980s, when she was around the whole Hollywood scene, before she was arrested. Crazy as it may sound, I’d actually always had something of a crush on her. She was really pretty then, as well as funny, smart, and sassy—not remotely what she seems like today. That January night I had been at a barbecue with Jeff Greene, a very successful real estate developer who hung around with a bunch of celebrities. I knew he was friends with Heidi, so I told him that he should call her and have her meet us at Las Palmas, a club that was big at the time. So he called her and invited her out, and when she pulled up outside in her F
ord Explorer, I jumped out of Jeff’s car and into hers. She was shocked and asked me what the hell I was doing. I just said, “All I want is three weeks of your undivided time.” She laughed and said, “I have three hours.” Then she looked at me and asked, “What the hell do you want with me anyway? I’m every man’s nightmare.” I said, “Well, haven’t you heard? I’m a nightmare, too.”
The flip side of my depression has always been excitement: if I could get excited about something, all the sad feelings that were crippling me would fall away. And, partly because of who she was and partly because of what she represented, Heidi Fleiss seemed exciting to me. That night, we went into Las Palmas and partied with Hugh Hefner and a whole bunch of rock stars. Heidi and I got a table, had drinks, and flirted, and different people were coming and going from our table there all night. I ended up inviting a whole bunch of them over to my house afterward to continue the party, but you never really know with those kinds of things who’s going to show. I asked Heidi for a ride home from Las Palmas, and when we got to my place, I invited her inside. As I was giving her a tour, all these people suddenly descended on my house—somewhere around two hundred people, including some of Heidi’s former girls. It turned into a crazy night.
Looking back, I believe I thought my depression had lifted but in fact it had just been replaced by something far more dangerous. And if I’d known what crystal meth was going to do to me, I never would have tried it.
Of course, crystal affects people differently, but the way it affected me is by making me want to have sex with every woman on earth. I already wanted to, anyway: I’ve always had a very strong libido. Later, when my life really fell apart, a guy who was temporarily acting as my manager put out this story that I had a condition he referred to as priapism, where I was never sexually satisfied. That’s not true, but I’ve always been rapacious.
Heidi and I were seeing each other fairly regularly by the time I left for Morocco to shoot Black Hawk Down during the summer of 2001. So whenever I had eight or more days off in a row on the shoot—which happened twice—I would come back to L.A. and stay with her. Even though I didn’t see it this way at the time, I was also coming back in order to do a lot of meth. Heidi was the one who had it—I didn’t know how to buy it or anything. Because she was so much more familiar with the drug than I was, she would do her best to not let me go overboard: she wouldn’t let me stay up all night on it and she essentially wanted us both to use it wisely and not the way she’d used it in the past. I was lying to myself, of course, but I thought I was just using a sort of aphrodisiac; I didn’t realize I was simply transferring my former heroin addiction to another drug. But my love affair with meth didn’t begin in earnest until I was done with Black Hawk Down; on set, I mostly stayed sober by playing a lot of chess with Ewan McGregor. He beat me something like 664 games in a row.
Once Heidi and I really started dating, all we did together was watch TV and movies. In many ways, it was just a normal relationship. She’d said to me at the beginning, “I don’t care what we do, as long as we don’t watch Martin,” because, she told me, when you’re in prison, the black inmates usually run the dayroom, and they want to watch Martin all day. When I went to prison later, I learned firsthand that she was right. Male or female, the situation is the same: the blacks want to watch Martin, the whites want to watch Cops, and the Mexicans want to fight outside.
She lived on Franklin Avenue by Gower Street and we’d walk over to the Mayfair market, buy all these juices, and then come back to her house. It was all very wholesome. One day, we went and bought a fan at Home Depot together. I’m not kidding—that’s how boring and basic our day-to-day activities were. It was really hot this one day and her place didn’t have air-conditioning, so we went to Home Depot for a goddamn fan. I hadn’t done something like that in a long time because I’d become a spoiled movie star with an assistant. I’m not kidding—I didn’t go into a grocery store for eight years and when I did, I was so overwhelmed by all the options that I just said, “Fuck it, I’ll go home.” But that day was so simple and so nice. We went back to her place, turned on the fan, and watched a movie; the whole thing was incredibly romantic.
The fan broke just ten days later, and I think that was the last we ever spent time at her house. She essentially just moved in with me. One day, when we were walking down the street, I looked at her and was struck by this sudden and strong conviction that I loved her. Just as I realized it, I said it out loud—I went, “Fuck, I love you.” She looked over at me, very slowly, and said, “I know.” Then she paused and said, “I love you, too.” Honestly, I was as surprised as anyone: that’s why the sentence started with the word fuck. I’d never been with a woman who was a convict and prostitute before. And I’d always liked girls that were more classically pretty. But at the same time, loving her almost empowered me. I felt like I’d been trying to fit some mold I didn’t really match—in Hollywood, in the world—before then: I’d tried marrying the beautiful blonde, the First Lady type of woman, and it hadn’t worked. In retrospect, I just married my First Lady—Maeve—too soon. I should marry her now, though she wouldn’t have me now. But being with Heidi felt right back then.
She was already embittered and caustic but she was also a lot of fun. And I think I knew her in a way that no one else did, except maybe her sister. She was meant to have a much different life than she ended up having: if she hadn’t gotten sidetracked by money and drugs, I think she would have ended up running a major corporation. She’s from an excellent, successful family. She just got off track.
I was with her when she was dealing with her parole and it was the first time I ever knew anyone in that situation. I saw very clearly that the system was set up for people to fail. There’s no way anybody can keep all those appointments, particularly parolees who don’t have any money and don’t have cars; you just can’t get to all these places they make you go to get drug tested or to all the meetings they want you to make. When I realized that, I decided that I wasn’t going to let her fail. I saw her parole officer fuck with her, too: he’d call her at 9 A.M. and say, “You have to be here in twenty minutes or I’ll violate you,” when he knew she lived eighteen minutes away. It’s not against the law to be late, unless your parole officer tells you, “If you’re late, you’re going back to prison.”
Heidi could be very charming, and she was chastened by what she’d been through. She was walking around with a big W for whore on her chest, and it brought her down. I didn’t think that what the criminal justice system did to her was right. Yes, she did things that were illegal, but I didn’t think it was fair that only she got in trouble—not the other girls, nor any of her customers.
There were days when she would say, “I can’t do it anymore. I should just go back to prison—it’s what they want.” It was horrible. I was in love with her, and I saw her try so hard to meet these conditions for her parole, and when she could meet them, they’d just make it harder. But they didn’t know she had a secret weapon: me. They’d say, “You have to pay restitution—you owe us eighteen hundred bucks.” If she didn’t have it, I’d pay it. Anything they wanted, money-wise, I gave to them. There were mornings when we were in Benedict Canyon and had to race down that fucking mountain and we’d get there with four seconds to spare. I did everything I could to get her off parole, which is why in the end her betrayal hurt so much.
When I first told my manager Beth that I was seeing Heidi, her reaction was pretty much this: “Out of all the women in the world, this is the one you pick? Isn’t there someone else you could date?” Beth was fairly adamant about the idea that my relationship with Heidi be kept out of the press at all costs, but stories about the two of us started popping up in the National Enquirer. People told me they thought Heidi was feeding the Enquirer stories about us, but who knows? I wasn’t exactly hiding the fact that I was with her.
Beth ended up really coming around on Heidi and seeing what a nice person she could be, but she still maintained that the fewer p
eople who knew about our relationship, the better. She would say, “You’re in line to be the next Gene Hackman or De Niro, and the movie business is a sheep business; you really are your image, and you have to stay on the right side of things.” Of course, she was right.
But I was having a real honeymoon with both meth and with Heidi. The two were very tied together in my mind and later, it felt like both turned on me at the same time. For roughly the first year and a half that I was with Heidi, it was an honest-to-God good relationship—or at least as good as a relationship between two people on meth could be. The truth is, we weren’t actually doing it all that much together. I was always very private with my drug use—that was part of my paranoia. I did drugs alone, whether I was living with people who did the same drugs or not. I think I was always so deeply ashamed of the fact that I was doing drugs at all, that doing them by myself allowed me to be in some sort of denial; people wouldn’t talk to me about drugs if they didn’t know whether I was doing them and I could just pretend that I wasn’t. The truth is, because we weren’t really doing the meth together, I don’t actually know how much she was using.
In my mind, I was doing well. I felt like I’d gone from being this guy who was very depressed and half dead after his wife left him to someone who was very much alive and very, very virile. On a certain level, I knew that what I was doing was bad—that all drugs are bad for you—and I did everything in my power to avoid thinking about that. I felt like I was coming-to after having the gauze of heartbreak over my face. Drugs work; that’s why they’re such a big problem. Anyone who says drugs don’t work isn’t getting ahold of good drugs.
When Heidi moved in with me up at Benedict Canyon, we set up ground rules and one of the main ones was that it was pretty much an open relationship. I knew what she’d done for a living, and I didn’t have a lot of sexual jealousy. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but my attitude was I don’t give a fuck if you suck off the fucking Lakers as long as you come home to me. It was a decadent time; threesomes were common, and I once had six women in bed with me at one time. I had always been very focused on girls and sex but there was something about meth that transformed general ideas I had about how I wanted to sleep with as many women as possible into a reality. I also think when you’re letting yourself fall deep into a hole with drugs, whatever reins you have on other aspects of your life can easily disintegrate.
