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

by Tom Sizemore

  I didn’t call Heidi right away. It was only three weeks after she’d saved my life, and I was really in too much shock to talk to her. I could barely talk to anyone. The Brooke Ford accusation had been one thing—a claim by a random girl that was dropped. But Heidi had been deeply embedded in my world, had been someone I truly loved, and this was the deepest betrayal possible. Though part of me clung to this idea that the truth would come out and the whole mess would be over, another part of me knew that when Heidi set her mind to something, she didn’t let go. In a certain way, I understood that life as I knew it was over.

  CHAPTER 6

  FULL-COURT PRESS

  AS THE SUMMER of 2003 chugged along, Heidi added more fuel to her fire. I called to talk to her about her accusations and we ended up getting in another fight; she reported what I’d said during the conversation, labeling it witness intimidation, and I was arrested again. I began to realize that Heidi wasn’t just out to get revenge on me: she wanted to make me pay for every wrong that had ever been committed against her by anyone.

  But I knew that I was telling the truth and so I went into the trial that August confident that her lies would be exposed. The trial is a bit of a blur. I just sat there for the eleven days, despondent over what my life had become. I was advised not to take the stand, and I didn’t. Heidi testified for three days, crying and saying that I’d left her ninety harassing phone calls and had beat her.

  Most of the focus was on April 8, 2002, a night when Tom Jane was over at my house because I was showing him the pilot of a film Michael Madsen and I were putting together. The National Enquirer had run some story saying that I was sleeping with other women—something Heidi knew about already—and she was pissed. We’d already fought about it. That night she called and started in about that again. We were arguing over the phone about it but clearly weren’t getting anywhere, so when I hung up, I disconnected the phone. That’s when she showed up, completely irate. We went outside and kept arguing while Tom Jane tried to intervene and get us to stop. I’m not going to lie—I was angry. I told her to give back the Porsche I’d given her as a gift and I wasn’t too gracious about it. And that upset her so much that when I headed back inside, she jumped on me and bit my ear. I flinched and she went flying off my back, falling onto the driveway. She claimed that I threw her onto the driveway, which was patently untrue. The truth is that she was completely out of control and I just wanted her out of my house. Tom tried to help as best as he could, giving her ice and ultimately driving her to her sister’s house. And during the trial, Tom explained all of that; he was out of town so he gave his testimony over video.

  Heidi also claimed that I’d put a cigarette out on her and beat her at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York because she’d criticized Black Hawk Down on Howard Stern—despite the fact that there were no witnesses or medical records from this alleged incident. She also claimed that I’d punched her in the jaw at the Beverly Hills Hotel on April 8, which was literally five nights before she saved my life after my car accident. She said all sorts of ridiculous things. She claimed we had a contract that said that I’d pay her half a million dollars if I hit her. She also claimed that I destroyed her collection of china figurines with a baseball bat and threatened to kill her brother.

  I was guilty—guilty of losing my temper and leaving her horrible messages both when we were in our fights and when I called to talk to her about her accusations. I heard every single one of those messages during the trial because they played them in court. And I felt terrible—terrible when I left them and even more terrible when I heard them. The things I said were, without question, wrong. Heidi and I had a really twisted, drug-fueled, dysfunctional relationship, and the way we talked to each other was hardly delicate, but that didn’t give me license to say the things that I did.

  There were a great many holes in Heidi’s testimony, but I was so far gone on the drugs at that point that I wasn’t able to focus on it. In fact, we were later able to argue that the pictures she presented as evidence were phony. In my petition for a writ of habeas corpus, a photo expert named Jeffrey Sedlik concluded that. Heidi had claimed a friend of hers named Tara Dabrizzi had shot the main photo being used as evidence and that the reason nobody could find this girl—because believe me, I tried—was that she’d left the country the next day. I knew that if we could prove that Heidi had taken the photo herself, we would be able to overturn my conviction.

  I finally concluded that Tara Dabrizzi either was a fictional person or she was born in her home and essentially never left it—never having had a birth certificate, hospital record, Social Security number, driver’s license, health insurance, W-2, or utility bill—except for the day Heidi claimed the photos were taken that she presented in court as proof of my guilt, and never surfaced again. These were photos that irrevocably, drastically transformed my life and yet the fact that Dabrizzi probably didn’t actually exist never came up in my trial.

  In the habeas corpus filing, Sedlik said that you could see it was Heidi taking the picture of herself—something that was obvious once you looked at the photo closely. He also said that the focus pattern was “an optical impossibility” because the bruise was in soft focus while other parts of the photo, such as her hair and chin, were in sharp focus.

  Nothing about what Heidi claimed during the trial made sense to me, and yet she was never really questioned on any of it. She claimed that I had punched her twice, but the photos she presented as evidence showed only one possible injury. And the day after the attack supposedly took place, Heidi spent the night with me at the Bel Air Hotel, which doesn’t make any sense if she was really, as she claimed, feeling like her life was in danger around me. Another thing that Sedlik figured out from examining the camera’s metadata is that the photos weren’t taken on April 13, which Heidi claimed was a few days after the supposed attack took place, but on May 12. Heidi was amazing with computers and photos and yet none of this was ever examined. And we’re talking about the testimony of someone who had been convicted of nine felonies.

  Much later, in July 2007, another lawyer I hired ended up interviewing Dr. Michael Carden, the plastic surgeon who’d stitched me up the night of the car accident. Carden explained that Heidi didn’t have any bruises or any sign of injuries when he treated me, and that we clearly got along well. For the appeals that followed, I went through a slew of other attorneys. I essentially spent millions on these lawyers at a time when I wasn’t raking in millions anymore.

  Heidi convinced everyone. She sobbed on the witness stand and claimed that the reason she didn’t file charges at the time was that she was afraid no one would believe her. The jury, which was made up of seven men and five women, deliberated for three days. On August 18, they threw out most of the claims and I was found guilty of one count each of domestic violence, criminal threats, vandalism, and harassing phone calls. The domestic violence charge was for the incident she claimed happened at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a few days before the car accident when she saved me.

  My bail was set at one hundred thousand dollars and I was told that I was facing up to four years in prison, but that the sentencing would happen when we returned to court in October.

  Even though I knew it could have gone worse, I was still devastated. But I did everything I could not to show that: after getting the news, the only statement I gave was one thanking my family and fans for their support.

  SHORTLY AFTER THE trial, I made a movie called Hustle, in which I played Pete Rose—the former major-league baseball player and manager who was busted for betting on baseball when he was playing for and managing the Cincinnati Reds. It was the first opportunity I had to work with the great Peter Bogdanovich, and there was quite a lot about Rose’s life that I related to. Playing a guy who had once received great accolades before having the press and then the world turn against him came pretty naturally to me.

  Peter Bogdanovich and I worked well together. He told me that he thought I was extremely creative in terms of my ideas
for blocking and movement and he was never afraid to say, “Actually, that’s a little quirky” and suggest I do something else. And I think in large part because of our relationship, I managed to stay sober for the entirety of the twenty-day shoot.

  Peter would tell me that I really got “under the skin of the character” and found Pete Rose within me, rather than doing it in what he called Paul Muni style. Muni was a 1930s actor known for immersing himself in the study of the traits and mannerisms of the real person being portrayed. Peter would say that people have a mistaken understanding of acting because they think it’s about being somebody else when you can’t actually be somebody else; so it’s really about how to best “look for the character in you” and find the facet of them that you can identify with. He told me that all the greats—Cary Grant, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, any of those guys—acted that way.

  Even though a lot of directors might have considered me a liability at that point in time, Peter doesn’t really care about that kind of thing. He used to say that Mary McBride Smith, John Ford’s wife, would tell him, “Pete, if you want to stay in the movie business, never believe everything you hear and only believe half of what you see.” So he said he never listened to anything anyone else said about actors. Peter was just generally not judgmental. He saw more actors on coke in the 1970s and ’80s than probably anyone else, and when he talked to me about drugs, all he said was “You know, you should be careful.”

  By then, I’d worked with a variety of creative geniuses who were often a bit cantankerous, and I actually felt that the animosity between us could summon up more interesting performances out of me. So sometimes I’d want to stir things up with Peter. But he just wouldn’t bite. I’d say to him, “Why don’t you do something to make me hate you? I can’t work with directors I don’t hate. Do something hateful.” And he’d just respond, “Tom, you’re crazy.” At one point I asked him, “Aren’t you ever a prick?” And he said, “I’m just not.” He kept a friendly, upbeat feeling on set.

  We did get into a beef one time when we had to finish a scene in very little time and I was complaining about it. He suddenly snapped at me, “What the hell do you want to do about it?” I’m actually incredibly sensitive and get my feelings hurt fairly easily, which always seems to surprise people. I was pretty taken aback and just sort of walked away, but he followed after me and we patched things up quickly.

  Peter told me that his favorite scene in the movie is one near the end, where I’m being interrogated and I definitively say that I never bet on baseball. He said that the brilliance of it was that you somehow believed me even though you knew I was lying because you’d actually seen me bet. The irony, of course, was that I’d just been in court telling the truth while everyone assumed I was lying.

  But aside from brief moments of being able to work with people like Peter Bogdanovich, my life just continued to go downhill. And one day when I was feeling incredibly frustrated by the state my life was in, I called my manager, Beth, and asked if she could come over. I wanted to see if there was some way she could help me get out of all the trouble I was in, but we ended up having a massive fight, which resulted in the dissolution of our relationship. We did work together again, briefly, when Rob Lowe helped me get on his show Dr. Vegas, but our relationship was never really the same.

  The drugs had really lost their joie de vivre for me, as had life. I remember waking up one morning and saying to myself, “Why bother?” I was chained to that fucking pipe and I had this kind of deflated feeling where all the air had left my body and I felt like a bag of bones. It was a monumental effort just to get out of bed. On the one hand, I’d feel okay whenever I got more dope because I’d say to myself, “Hey, I’ve got a couple million dollars and everything is groovy,” but at the same time, I knew things were the opposite of groovy and that what I was doing was really, really wrong. I’d sit there on the couch and ask myself what I was doing but also feel like I had no choice but to keep hitting the pipe. And then I’d think or say out loud, “I’m going to stop,” and the next second I’d take another hit off the pipe. And then I’d think, “Okay, I’m going to call rehabs as soon as I finish everything I have.” And then I’d call rehabs—I’d call places in Israel or Finland and ask them if they had any beds. They’d say, “Yes, where are you calling from?” and I’d answer, “L.A.” There would be a pause and then the person would say, “Well, sir, they have many rehabilitation centers in L.A.—maybe you should check there first.” I’d hang up the phone, knowing that I wasn’t really ready to change or else why the fuck would I have been calling a rehab in Finland? So then I’d throw myself into something like reading Proust.

  After enough nights like this, I essentially fell into a monumental depression that no drug could ever remedy or make me forget. I couldn’t do much of anything. And whenever I’d start to feel better, I’d see a headline about “Tom Sizemore, the woman batterer” and sink again.

  So one night near when I was due back in court, I’d just had it. I took somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred—I think it was 182—of my antidepressant trazodone, put on the song “Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Radiohead, turned the lights off in my house, and lay down in my gym. I really believed I was lying down to die. I was so fucked-up during that period of time that I’d forgotten that suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

  Jessie, the UCLA student that I’d been seeing, just happened to stop by. She wasn’t living with me at the time but I think she had a bad feeling about something so she took a cab up there. And when the cab pulled through the gate and she saw that all the lights were off, she knew something was wrong and she ran in screaming my name. I was unconscious, so I didn’t hear it, but that’s what she told me afterward.

  She somehow knew to run to the gym—that was an area of my house that was just mine, that none of the girls or anyone else used—and found me back there, passed out, lying flat on my back with a glass of water and six empty pill bottles next to me. She told me later that my face was already blue, so she raced outside and stopped the cabdriver, already halfway down the driveway, and got him to turn around and come back.

  Initially he was telling her “I don’t want to be part of this,” but she convinced him to take us by assuring him that he didn’t have to be a part of anything and could just drop us off at a hospital. And so he drove us to Sherman Oaks Hospital, where they rolled me out of the cab. All I knew is that when I came to, I had a catheter up my dick. I cried for five hours when they told me how close I was to death, and I wasn’t surprised that they decided to keep me in the 5150 wing for a few days.

  I went back to court in late October. People showed up to support me. Charlie Sheen and a few other friends were there. I was definitely humbled by everything that had happened, and I’d written a letter to that effect, which was read in court. The judge concluded that my problem was drug addiction and sentenced me to six months in jail, but he said that I could get my sentence cut in half if I successfully completed rehab.

  So I went to a rehab called Rancho L’Abri in Mexico. Once again, I thought I wanted to get clean. But the drugs had a serious hold of me at this point—even more than they did before, because now I really wanted to blot out reality with a vengeance. They didn’t work anymore—I got no relief from them whatsoever—but I had to use them all the time to feel okay. Which is why I brought speed into rehab with me on some paper in a notebook.

  The first night I was there, I did the speed. I’d figured out after Heidi had slipped the speed in my Visine bottle how to transport speed myself and discovered that you could put it on a piece of paper and then put a few drops of distilled water on it. If you use regular water, the chemicals ruin the speed, but distilled water doesn’t have all this shit in it, so it’s fine. The speed is actually contained on there, very concentrated. You can’t go into a rehab or through airport security with seventy-five pieces of torn paper, but you can have a couple of phone numbers in your pocket, maybe one in your wallet,
and another in your notebook, and that’s all you need. That’s two thousand dollars’ worth of speed. And if you’re not in a situation where you can take it out when you want to do the drugs, you can always just eat it. It’s not good for your stomach or your teeth, but it works. And nobody searching your bag is going to be suspicious of a few pieces of paper scattered around.

  Rancho L’Abri wasn’t a lockdown rehab but it was a serious motherfucker, so they had security at night patrolling the fence and whole area. To even get to the fence was hard. And I’d decided I wanted out.

  Later that first night—on November 22, 2003—I went to bed just after midnight. But at around three in the morning, I got up, did more speed, and pulled my blanket around me. I walked down the hall and, as I passed a tech, I muttered, “Fuck, man, any dope in this fucking place?” as if I was in pain, but I was actually high as a kite. I’d brought a mister bottle with me and had misted my face so it looked like I was sweating out a detox.

  I went outside to smoke a cigarette. I watched the fence, counting how long it took the guard to get from one point to the next; it was a couple of minutes. Sometimes it was ten minutes, but you have to plan for the shortest amount of time. I was forty-one years old, and I knew that getting over that fence was going to be hard. I felt like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.

  I managed to climb over the fence and then walk the nine miles to the freeway and to a waiting limousine that I’d called and ordered from L.A. One of the girls who was living in my house was in the car, and we got high and had sex on the way back. The only way I can explain why I did what I did is that my addiction was like a beast at that point and the beast was running the show.