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

by Tom Sizemore

  Heidi and I started to fight about the other women but we fought about other things as well. When I went on Howard Stern to promote Black Hawk Down, I arranged for her to come with me so that she could promote her book Pandering. And Heidi made a big thing on the air about how she didn’t like Black Hawk Down, which was just about the worst thing she could have done. I took her as my date to the premiere, which didn’t do anything to help make anyone take the movie seriously. Originally, the movie’s producers had talked about doing an Academy Award campaign for me but they never did. Instead the film just sort of came and went and didn’t end up doing anything for me. I think Beth was right about the sheep mentality and the fact that my association with Heidi meant I was losing credibility.

  I stopped doing meth before making a TV movie with Ving Rhames called Sins of the Father—mostly because I was afraid of taking it with me on the plane to Canada and getting busted. Earlier in my career, when I was addicted to heroin, I’d FedEx drugs ahead of time. But I really knew my way around heroin—I knew where to get it, how to handle it, and how to move it around. And I also knew I could get methadone legit from a clinic so I wouldn’t get sick. This was a whole different game. Plus, being addicted to meth is nothing like being addicted to heroin. I couldn’t do meth and work the way I could on heroin. On meth, you look like hell, you feel like hell, and the only reason you stay up is to do more meth, which makes you look more and more like hell. You also start acting very strange. I was keeping to myself on Sins of the Father, and I while I could still act, I didn’t look good. My instincts were dulled, and I could feel it.

  I came home and started doing meth again but then stopped using before my next movie, Swindle. But when I got back to Canada for Swindle, I called Heidi and said, “I don’t want to feel this low-energy, what can I do?” The truth is that I felt like my ass had fallen three stories down, and I was carrying four hundred pounds on my back. We were really in love at this point, and she was very upset that I was in that state, but she knew meth. She said, “I understand. Now listen to me. I’m sending a girl up there with a large amount of the stuff. But just so you feel better now, you already have some.” She explained she’d actually slipped some into a Visine bottle in my toiletries case. She talked me through how to get it out: you squirt it on any surface—glass, preferably—and you just wait and the water evaporates and it turns back into fucking speed. It’s amazing. Twenty minutes after you put it there, the atmosphere just sucks up the water and there the meth is in its original form. I was relieved, of course, but it wasn’t much—just three or four lines.

  The woman she sent up with drugs—a friend of ours—got there the next day. She’d emptied a bunch of sports pills, then cut up meth so finely that it looked like the white stuff in the middle, put that back in there, then resealed the bottle like it had never been opened. The girl ended up coming back and doing the same thing again during the shoot, and since no one’s going to fly to Prince George, British Columbia, and then fly out the next day unless they’re doing something that’s not right, we acted like she was my girlfriend. She’d check into my room and sleep on the rollaway bed for two nights. When I went to work, she’d kick around the hotel.

  To many people, I’m sure this would sound like an odd way to express your love but that’s how Heidi showed me she cared about me—by making sure I always had enough meth.

  THE LONGER I was with Heidi, the more open our relationship became. What I mean by that is that my house essentially became something of a very well-appointed flophouse for hookers—ones I met, of course, through her. And I was a very understanding landlord.

  All these girls were under twenty-five and beautiful. When you’re thirty-nine and these gorgeous twenty-three-year-old girls are offering to suck your cock, you don’t say, “No way, get out of here, I’ve got to read the Bible.” At least you don’t if you’re me. I was meeting most of them through Heidi, and they were just around all the time.

  I’d also met another woman I really liked: Jessie Tuite, a beautiful young black girl I’d met through a friend. I remember our first conversation; I told her I was looking for my conscience and asked her if she’d seen it.

  She said, “Your conscience?” and I said, “No, actually not my conscience—my heart.” She said, “It’s probably really small so we might want to go buy a microscope,” and I said, “Come with me, we’ll go buy one.” I really, really liked her from the start. She was so different from most of the other drug-addled Heidi girls who were in my life then.

  Things with Jessie got serious enough that Heidi and I actually split up, and in early 2002, I asked Jessie to move in with me. But she made it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t even consider moving in unless I got rid of Karen, Alana, and all the other girls, and the fact that she drew that line made me like her more, so I did it. I got rid of the other women. Jessie took really good care of me. My assistant Carol sort of schooled her in what I liked, and she made sure I had things just right and ate okay and everything.

  After what had happened on Swindle—when I’d gotten to the location only to realize I needed to have drugs sent to me if I wanted to be able to function at all—I decided to stop the meth before I did my next movie, Dreamcatcher. Dreamcatcher was this surreal horror movie Lawrence Kasdan made from a Stephen King script about four guys who end up being invaded by these parasitic aliens, and I played a military officer whom Morgan Freeman sends to lead an air strike against the aliens’ ship. I didn’t take any drugs with me, and I stayed sober for the shoot. I also ended up making a lifelong friend in Thomas Jane.

  I liked him from day one, when we did the read-through, because he didn’t have any shoes on, even though it was about one degree out. The director Lawrence Kasdan said, “Tom, did you forget to put on your shoes?” And Tom said, “I don’t wear any shoes.” Tom’s part hillbilly. He’s from the South, where you sit under the fucking willow tree and drink moonshine without your shoes on. But let me tell you, you don’t want to fuck with Tom Jane because that motherfucker can fight like a goddamn animal. He’s fearless.

  He’s also a great guy. He has a brother who has a lot of problems, and I remember he brought that brother to Paris for the Dreamcatcher premiere and press junket there. It was then that I saw Tom in a totally different way. He was so loving and kind and patient with his brother without ever apologizing for him. The way his brother would look at him sometimes—like he loved him more than anything in the world—was touching. Tom doesn’t reveal much about himself but he’s one of the brightest people I know. He’s read all of Proust, all of Dostoevsky, and is a very well rounded person. He’s also a self-made person, and I don’t think he’s even touched his abilities as an actor yet.

  While we were doing Dreamcatcher, which was a four- or five-month undertaking, I was cast in Michael Mann’s new CBS series Robbery Homicide Division. My character was a tough L.A. detective who went after the worst of the worst: killers, serial rapists, and white-collar criminals who were robbing poor people. It was similar, thematically, to Heat in that it was about an L.A. cop who was working the Robbery Homicide Division, and it was about the Los Angeles that nobody sees—where it’s bloody and violent and there’s no war on drugs because the drugs have won. The show was a big deal. When we went to New York for the upfronts—where the TV networks announce their new shows for the press and for advertisers who buy commercial time “up front”—Nina Tassler, who was senior vice president of drama development at CBS, said, “The casting coup for the season was getting Tom Sizemore to do Robbery Homicide Division.” This was after The Sopranos had taken off and expectations were high for another phenomenal TV show.

  Heidi was back in my life by then and I understood that if I was going to be able to do this TV show, I really had to stay away from the drugs. So when I knew that Robbery Homicide Division was definitely going to happen, I called Heidi from Canada and told her, “I’ve been off meth for three months and although I love you, I can’t come back to that house if y
ou’re using.” I told her I thought she should go to rehab but she said she didn’t want to. I even told her I’d buy her a car if she went. She still didn’t want to go. And though we stayed involved with each other, she felt I’d rejected her and she became even more jealous of the other women around. She was also convinced that I had stolen her little black book—the book that supposedly contained the names of all her high-profile clients and all their predilections. She convinced herself that I had taken it and hid it.

  My relationship with Heidi was definitely causing problems with other people in my life as well. When I was shooting Robbery Homicide Division, I went to a restaurant with Heidi one night and a famous guy—I can’t say who—came up to me and said, “How does it feel to be in a room where nine of the ten guys have come in your girlfriend’s mouth?”

  I saw her turn red when he said it, because she’d heard it—he’d said it so she could hear it. She looked stricken—like someone had stabbed her. And I’m always going to defend my girlfriend no matter what. So I grabbed him by the arm and threw him out the door of the restaurant and into the side of a car.

  The cops got me out of there and called an ambulance for the guy. The two cops came to the set of Robbery Homicide Division the next day and basically said, “We know what happened last night and as far as we’re concerned, it never happened.” Michael Mann was with them, and he was very relieved. We both were. I can’t tell you who it was that fixed it, but he was a very powerful friend of mine.

  I’d learned from my marriage that when things start to go wrong in a relationship, there’s a period when you can try to fix it, but after that point, if things still aren’t working, you should get out of it. It was becoming clear that Heidi and I were both only causing each other pain, and in May 2002 I simply said to her, “I don’t love you the way you love me and I think this is over.” And that, combined with the fact that she assumed I had her little black book, made her incredibly angry. When she moved out, she said, “I’m going to drive you to kill yourself, motherfucker.”

  I didn’t realize how serious she was.

  The following December, Heidi’s friend Brooke Ford claimed that I’d hurt her, which was not true. I always suspected that Heidi put her up to it, perhaps to lend credence to Heidi’s own claims of abuse when she later filed them. But not surprisingly, Brooke didn’t pursue the allegations; even though she called the cops and made the claim, she didn’t show up in court, and the whole thing was dropped. But the fact that it was dropped didn’t matter. What mattered was that an allegation like that was out there. The allegation is what makes news, not the fact that an allegation is dropped.

  The same week that Brooke made her claim and the whole thing broke in the press, in December 2002, Robbery Homicide Division was canceled. It was critically acclaimed, but it just didn’t have the ratings to make it. I got the news from CBS executive Les Moonves, and then, two days later, I was arrested. The show wasn’t canceled because I was arrested but the personal drama I was involved in certainly didn’t help anything. Still, I thought the work I was doing was some of my best yet.

  Michael Mann had asked me to stay away from Heidi before I even did Black Hawk Down, back when we were originally talking about Robbery Homicide Division. But at the time, that seemed like a lot to ask. Of course, he was right and my relationship with him was entirely destroyed because of her—a true tragedy because he’d really been something of a father figure to me.

  My career was really on the line. A big part of an actor’s job is to stay, if not loved, at least well liked. And look, are you going to turn on the TV and watch someone you think is a piece of shit who abuses women? No, you’re not.

  Even though Heidi was already setting out to destroy me, she still managed to save my life one night when I had a horrible car accident in April 2003. Even though we’d broken up and she wasn’t living with me anymore—and even though, by any reasonable person’s logic, I should have been staying far, far away from her—Heidi and I were still meeting up. And one night after meeting up with her at a hotel, around 3:30 A.M., I turned a corner on Benedict Canyon, and I don’t know who was in whose lane but there was another car there and I swerved to avoid hitting it. I wasn’t intoxicated—just tired—and I was going fast. I was probably coming around that corner at 50 miles per hour, and you should be at 20. I couldn’t get control of the car, and I hit the gas to get out of the way, and then I crashed into a wall. My airbag deployed and my head went through the window. It was really cold up there, and all of a sudden, I felt this warmth coming down over my face—I didn’t know at the time it was blood, but that’s what brought me out of the semiconscious state I was in. I saw a light in my rearview mirror; the brake light of the car that I’d avoided. I waved my arm but right after I waved, I watched the brake light go from a very bright color to a pale color and then I watched it drive away. The driver went slow for about ten feet and then raced away. They left me there to die, which leads me to believe the driver must have been drunk, because who else would do something like that?

  At that time in Benedict Canyon, all the houses were way off the street and most of them were behind gates. But when I got up and dragged myself over there, I saw that there was a house with no gate. I knocked really loudly but no one answered. I was screaming, “Hey, I need help, I need help, I’m bleeding badly, I’m going to die out here!” There was no response and I could feel myself getting weaker. I went out to the street and yelled, “Help me!” as loud as I could and then I got to the side of the road and lay down.

  That’s when I checked my pockets and realized I had pot on me. Even in that state, I was concerned about getting busted, but I could barely get up because I’d broken my ankle and fractured my leg. Still, I managed to get a golf club out of the trunk and use it as a cane. Blood was rolling off my face and I looked down and saw that the white T-shirt I’d been wearing was crimson. I started to cry and said out loud, “I’m gonna die.” But I clearly didn’t think so because I dug a hole with my hands, buried the dope in there, and tried to push it down with the golf club.

  Then I saw a white light from probably thirty yards away cut through the dark and I yelled in its direction, “Help me!” It turns out that someone was building a small complex up there in the canyon and they had a guard shack to guard their materials. And this gentleman who was there had heard me and had gotten out a flashlight and was walking toward me. As he got closer, the beam of his flashlight got brighter.

  This man’s reaction when he saw me was so horrifying that that’s when I knew how bad I must have looked. He started to call an ambulance but I didn’t think an ambulance would get me to a hospital in enough time. I knew Heidi was just down that hill, so I used his cell phone to call her. She got right up there and put me in her car and then she called her dad, who’s a doctor, and asked him to recommend a surgeon.

  When we got to Century City Hospital, the surgeon came in and said, “We’re going to fix this—I’m the Michael Jordan of surgery. And you’re going to have to be the Michael Jordan of patients because I can’t give you any anesthetic at all—there’s too much glass in this cut. You have to be completely awake and with me.” I was crying and he said, “You have to stop crying, goddamn it. Otherwise, you’re going to have a big gash on your forehead. Is that what you want?” He was tough on me, but I respond well to extreme pressure.

  The surgery was nineteen hours long and it took three weeks for me to recuperate. I was making a movie called Paparazzi at the time and they had to shut down production for two weeks and then work around me for the week after. For those few weeks, I looked like Frankenstein, and when I healed and got back to work, I thought I’d survived the biggest ordeal of my life. I had no idea that the true ordeal was just about to hit.

  PAPARAZZI HAD BEEN back in production for another three weeks when Mel Gibson, who was producing the movie, walked up to me one day on set.

  “You’re about to be arrested,” he said. I asked for what and he said, “Heidi
said you hit her.” I was sure he was kidding—I almost started to laugh—but I looked into his eyes and saw that he was entirely serious. A series of incidents flashed before me: different fights Heidi and I had gotten into, her threat that she would destroy my life, but also memories of how loving and supportive she’d been the night of my accident and so many other times. Even though I wasn’t high, in many ways I felt like I was: everything took on a veil of surreality. And I thought, “Well, this is all a misunderstanding. I’ll just clear this up—whatever it is—and maybe even laugh about it later.” But while the veil of surreality lasted, nothing ever got cleared up. Before I could even say anything to Mel, the cops were standing there in front of me. I guess they’d gone to my house first and my housekeeper had told them I was at work. They told me that they’d let me finish my day on the set but that I’d need to turn myself in later that evening.

  I went into my work mode—where I just focused on my lines and dove into the character I was playing as much as I possibly could, while telling myself not to react until I had all of the facts. I called my attorney—someone CAA had recommended, named Michael Fitzgerald—and after work, he came and picked me up and took me to a Taco Bell parking lot nearby where the cops were waiting. I was booked and after I bailed out, Michael drove me home.

  My relationship with Heidi had been passionate from the beginning: everything we did together was in extremes, from the drugs to the love to the eventual hatred. And because meth imbued so much of our relationship, everything was exacerbated and heightened. When we were angry, we both said a lot of things we didn’t mean and left each other angry messages when we were fighting. But I had never hit her and I assumed the truth would come out quickly or that she would drop her case. Heidi would not let that happen, however; she was determined to make me pay.