The movie was uneventful except for getting to know Maureen. More than one of the most amazing actresses of our time, Mo was an amazing woman. She was a ballsy broad, and she was just the tonic my soul needed. A real dame, she had a tremendous appetite for life. She liked to drink and eat, and she didn’t mince words.
I would sit down with her before work as she sipped a Bloody Mary and listen to her tell stories about herself that were legendary even then. My eyes bulged as she recounted the ribald speech she gave at the wrap party for Bye Bye Birdie, and we laughed together as she recalled seeing a critic she didn’t like at a restaurant and setting the back of his blazer on fire with a cigarette lighter. My favorite was the night Alan David took her out to dinner. After cutting into her steak and seeing it was medium instead of well done, as she’d requested, she summoned the waiter.
“Take this back and tell the chef I said to piss on it,” she said.
“Excuse me?” the waiter replied.
“Well, that’s what they do when you send food back,” she said. “I just want him to know that I know he’s going to piss on it. So tell him to piss on it.”
I discovered my own ballsy side when the production moved briefly to Chicago, where we shot a couple scenes. Rob had made Class in Chicago and he called ahead to his buddy John Cusack, who lived there, and asked him to show me around while I was there. He did, and we ended up having a little fling, which I kept from Rob. It was my own private “screw you.”
Only John and I ever knew about it. He was very sweet—and funny. Funny was a problem for me. Rob’s sense of humor kept me going back to him as much as our physical attraction did. He was brilliantly funny. I think the public finally caught a glimpse of his sense of humor in Wayne’s World, the Austin Powers movies, and Thank You for Smoking. But I knew how funny he was. He is also a gifted mimic. Lots of actors do Christopher Walken, but Rob’s Walken was dead-on.
We were very tight when he left for London to shoot Oxford Blues. Letters from him arrived by the bundle, and I joined him there for a couple of blissfully fun weeks. He had become close to Cassian Elwes, one of the movie’s producers, as well as Cassian’s brother, Cary, who was acting in the movie. It also featured Julian Sands and Amanda Pays, who freaked me out when I first saw her because of how similar she looked to Nastassja Kinski.
“Did you notice?” I asked Rob.
He nodded.
“Well, it’s freaking me out,” I said.
“Don’t,” he said. “There’s absolutely no reason. Believe me.”
“You’re right,” I said. “You’ve already picked up that seashell, haven’t you?”
London was a nonstop party. We drank and caroused our way through the city. I may have seen the sun rise too many times for my own good, but I felt secure and loved and in a really comfortable place. It seemed like Rob and I had been through a fire and come out much better for the pain.
Back in L.A., young Hollywood entered its golden age, a time when everyone made movies that seemed to define our generation. With his laserlike focus, Cruise was already in a league of his own, and Sean Penn, Tim Hutton, and Matt Dillon were very serious actors. Though he pursued his career with more levity, Rob was thrilled when he landed one of the leads in St. Elmo’s Fire, a coming-of-age film about a group of friends just out of college who are trying to figure out the rest of their lives.
There was good buzz around the project, whose cast included Emilio, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Mare Winningham, and Judd Nelson. We’d met Judd a couple of years before in New York, and I was sure he was going to be the next huge movie star. He was scary smart, brutally honest, and hilariously funny.
However, my favorite person on the picture was its brilliant director, Joel Schumacher, a wonderfully talented and entertaining man who was beginning an ascent that would make him one of Hollywood’s most successful and beloved filmmakers. He adored and, more than that, understood Rob, who would preen in his movie wardrobe (the school jacket, the hoodie sweatshirt, and the ribbed Henley T-shirt, as well as the high-top tennis shoes and mushed-down socks) and check himself out like Dorian Gray as he practiced the saxophone.
Joel referred to Rob affectionately as “the shameless creature.” I loved him for that brazenly honest and funny insight—because it was absolutely true. Rob was a shameless creature, whether he was admiring the highlights in his longish hair or listening to seashells.
He was a horny young man, as Tony Richardson once said, and he enjoyed the attention he got from girls who hounded him on the set at all hours. One day he was changing clothes in his dressing room with Emilio when, on a lark, he threw open the door and gave a full frontal flash to a crowd of delirious female admirers as he asked his wardrobe guy if he knew where his clothes were. Joel said they had to call the police to get the guys out of the trailer.
Nevertheless, we were going through one of the best times in our relationship. Joel welcomed me onto the set, and Rob had no qualms about having me there no matter what they were shooting. I watched the scene where Demi drives Rob home and he makes a move for her by dropping his keys in his sweatpants. They were shooting in an alley deep in Hollywood. Rob’s trailer was parked next to a church and above it was a neon sign that said, “Hollywood Is the Devil’s Toilet.” I thought that was brilliant. It reminded me of the scene in Scarface when Tony Montana sees the sign on the side of the blimp that says, “The World Is Yours.” At that moment, I felt the universe wink at me.
After those set visits, I went off and did Sylvester, a coming-of-age story about a young Texas wrangler who tries to make a quick windfall on the back of her best bronco at a three-day eventing competition. It was considered a hot project. The director, Tim Hunter, had launched Matt Dillon’s career in Tex, and the writer, Carol Sobieski, had done The Toy, Annie, and Honeysuckle Rose. Before getting the role, I auditioned numerous times during a nationwide search for the quintessential teen actress to play this scrappy, horse-breaking Texan.
I was thrilled when I got the part. It was my first feature film, and it finally put me in the same club as some of the guys in our crowd who occasionally thumbed their noses at me for being on TV.
They weren’t the only ones. From what I understand now, the producers, Ray Stark and Marty Jurow, wanted me, but Tim Hunter was against hiring me in the lead role of his movie. I represented everything he didn’t want. I got that message at our first meeting when he sat me down and said, “So we have to change everything about you.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means you have to change everything about you,” he reiterated. “Your mannerisms. Your look. Everything…”
As he explained it, everything included cutting off all my hair, which I’d anticipated. I wanted to get as deeply under the skin of this character, Charlene—Charlie—Railsback, as I could. Then he laid a big bomb on me. He said he wanted me to do as much of my own riding as possible.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“I don’t want the majority of your stunts to be done by a double,” he said. “We will have doubles on standby, but I don’t want to use them if I can use you.”
I knew this director didn’t like me. His opinion came through clearly. But I had grown up around wranglers and tough guys, Michael Landon being the toughest. I didn’t let Tim get to me. I knew that pros sucked it up. I thought, Pal, you’re going to like me by the time this fucking thing is over. As it turned out, I don’t think he did.
For months, I trained six hours a day, five days a week, with Benita (Bunny) Allen, a riding expert who worked the crap out of me. My arms quivered as I lifted the saddle over my head twenty-five times, but I needed to be in incredible shape. The horse Tim picked as Sylvester was over seventeen hands high and towered over my five-foot-three frame. I looked like a pea on top of him—but a determined pea.
By the time I left for the shoot, I had boy hair, a flat chest, and big biceps. My thighs were black-and-blue from that damn horse, and I had calluses on
the insides of my knees and all over my hands. There wasn’t an ounce of femininity left in me. I cried to Rob, “I’m a boy!” He was sweet about it, though. “It’s okay, Bunny-Mouse,” he said. “I think you look cute. I still love you.”
I lost whatever vanity was left once I got to Marfa, where I spent the next few months shooting Sylvester. Actually, we stayed in Alpine, Texas, where there was one streetlight and one motel. I got to stay in the motel owner’s swanky apartment behind the front desk. I called it the Norman Bates Suite. I’d wanted Rob to come with and help settle me in because I knew it was going to be a rough shoot. I was right, too. Unfortunately, he was learning to play hockey for his next movie, Youngblood, and then was off to Toronto.
As soon as I arrived in Marfa, I started to butt heads with Tim Hunter. Though I was playing a Texan, he didn’t want me to sound like a Texan. There are five dialects in the giant state of Texas, and he wouldn’t let me have a hint of any of them. My sanity was saved by my leading guy, Michael Schoeffling from 16 Candles, and my leading man, Richard Farnsworth, who was unflappable. He’d been around. Nothing ruffled him, which was a good lesson for me.
It seemed to me that I could never do enough to please Tim, and on top of that, my horse hated me. As much as the director didn’t want me in the movie, my horse wanted to be in it less. There were eight different horses, one for bucking, one for jumping, one for falling, and so on. But the main one, which I rode most often, was a monster. He nearly killed me one day. I was supposed to ride him straight away from the camera, into a field. Suddenly he took the bit in his mouth, stretched his neck out, and bolted for the trees at a full run with me on his back.
There was nothing I could do. Behind me, I could hear the head wrangler, Corky Randall, screaming, “Motherfucker! Someone get a horse!”
But the catch horse wasn’t able to catch up. From some remote corner of my brain, I remembered a safety talk that Benita had given me. I dropped one rein, grabbed the other with both hands, and pulled the horse’s nose into my knees. Suddenly he crow-hopped around and around. I stayed on him until he stopped, then jumped off and walked in a daze back to the crew. Grown men, seasoned cowboys, stared at me with their mouths agape.
Farnsworth was the only one sort of grinning, as if to say, “’Atta girl, you can handle anything.” In reality, he said, “That’s bullshit! It’s bullshit they made you ride that dumb animal. Everyone knows that horse is a dink.”
I walked into my trailer, sat on the sofa, and sobbed. My whole body was trembling. I remember watching my hands shake uncontrollably as I tried to drink water. Then there was a knock on the door. I opened it and saw Bunny holding Sylvester by the bridle. The horse was covered in sweat. She told me she punched him in the face a couple times. “Sylvester says he’s sorry,” she said.
I looked that horse straight in his big, seemingly remorseful eyes and said, “You better be sorry, you bastard, because I’m not going through that again.”
I got back on him and he tried his funny business two more times over the rest of the shoot, once when I was riding with Farnsworth and another time when we were doing dressage moves in an arena. Every day was hard and scary. We worked terribly long hours, but on the weekends, we partied our brains out. Our caterer had access to a private jet, and he would fly in the best food from L.A., as well as the best cocaine.
Still, the nights were extremely lonely. I rescued a kitten and named him Sylvester. He became my constant companion and I’d have him for the next fifteen years. He would ride to work on Richard’s shoulder, curled up in a little ball. It was such a cute sight: this big, old, rough cowboy with a little kitten sleeping next to his ear.
But the kitten wasn’t enough company for me. With Rob in Toronto, I began an on-set romance with the third AD, Frank Capra III (FC3). Though it wasn’t intentional, I got a taste of what Rob went through on The Hotel New Hampshire, and he got a taste of what I experienced on the other end. He would call and I wouldn’t be in my room. Marfa is famous as the place where Giant was filmed, and for the Marfa lights, these unexplained bursts of light that can be spotted off Route 67. They appear to bounce through the nighttime sky like giant glowing basketballs. A lot of our weekend parties were based around going to watch the ghost lights and getting obliterated. Rob sensed the distance I was putting between us as I spent time with Frank. He wrote me a letter from Toronto, saying he didn’t believe I was out all night looking at some stupid Marfa lights, and he warned that what I was doing was dangerous to us.
Even rereading his heartfelt words—“I hope you’ll give me a chance”—as I did often, didn’t deter me. I was lonely, scared, and by myself, which was, I discovered, not a good place for me. I didn’t do alone well. Performing the stunts, risking my safety, knowing the director disliked me, and just living every day on the edge got to me, and I spiraled downward quickly. I had no clue how needy I was, how I needed a man to fill me up. I still hadn’t acknowledged in an emotional sense that my father was actually dead. As a result, if I found myself in a needy place, as I did in Marfa, I would climb into someone else’s lap, like a kitten craving affection.
Then we moved locations to Lexington and Rob was able to visit, which ended my fling with FC3. I left as soon as filming ended and joined Rob in Toronto, where we argued and nitpicked at each other until he confronted me about my behavior in Marfa. Sobbing, I confessed, apologized, and begged his forgiveness. He also apologized for not having been available to me when I needed him.
With the Sturm und Drang behind us, we fell into the cozy lockstep of lovers. I’d planned to stay for a week and ended up there a month before I returned to L.A. for postproduction. The PR campaign kicked off when I became the youngest actor to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Afterward, I celebrated with my family and Rob at the old Brown Derby restaurant, where we devoured their famous cobb salad and grapefruit cake.
Sylvester’s opening coincided with the release of Rebecca De Mornay’s picture The Slugger’s Wife, so I crossed paths with her and Tom Cruise in different cities as we did a press junket across the country. To help with PR, my mother and Uncle Ray hired top Hollywood publicist Warren Cowan, who soon thereafter became the great love of my mother’s life and, years later, my stepdad.
Ironically, I missed walking the red carpet for my own premiere at the Equestrian Center because I was on the road doing PR. My mother dressed my sister Sara in a full equestrian outfit for the event, including jodhpurs, boots, vest, and helmet, and later showed me photos of her and Warren with various stars who’d attended.
Openings in other cities were planned, but they were canceled one by one as the reviews came in. Despite all the publicity efforts, I started to realize the movie was going to be a disaster, or, as Rob and I used to say, a whistling, screaming bomb. Indeed, you could hear Sylvester dropping from the sky.
And so it was. I wasn’t particularly shattered. I didn’t feel like my career was pinned on that one project. Aside from all the hard work that had gone into it, I was disappointed because I wanted to be able to say to Rob and the other guys whose movies were big hits that I was also in the club. I wanted to go, me too!
But I was realistic about my work. I had much more ego invested in my actual life.
fifteen
ANDY WANTS TO KNOW IF ANY FAMOUS PEOPLE ARE HERE
The tabloids only focused on breakups and bad news, so they were nowhere to be found when I took my mother on her first trip to Europe. It was their loss. They missed a good story—and a mostly good time.
We went with friends of my mother’s who were on a buying trip for their clothing store, with stops in London, Paris, Milan, Rome, Florence, and Venice. Even though she wasn’t paying the bill, my mom insisted on sharing a room with me to save money. She also prohibited me from calling home (again, it was the cost). As a result, I spent a lot of time talking to Rob from house phones in hotel lobbies.
In Paris, my mother and I were walking up the Champs-Elysées when I spi
ed Jodie Foster on a movie set. I said hello, and she invited me to hang out with her that night at her flat. “We’ll do something,” she said. After a week of nonstop togetherness with my mother and her friends, whom we nicknamed Stinko and Poo Poo Foot (at every restaurant, he ordered a veal dish called Stinko, and she kept stepping in dog poop), I accepted immediately, and with a sense of relief bordering on desperation that could have easily scared Jodie into reconsidering her offer. Fortunately, she didn’t.
Jodie and I had a delicious dinner at a neighborhood café and then hung out at her place. I spent the night there after we realized it had gotten very late. When I went back to the hotel the next morning I saw my mother waiting for me with a concerned expression on her face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Melissa, I have to ask you something,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Are you a lesbian?”
I scrunched up my face, puzzled by her query.
“No,” I said. “Why do you suddenly think I’m a lesbian?”
“Well, you know what they say about Jodie.”
“Ma, she’s a friend of mine,” I said. “And I don’t care what she is. That’s really immaterial. She’s a wonderful person.”
“I just wondered,” she said.
“I spent the night at her house. Big deal. That doesn’t make me a lesbian. I’m a very heterosexual woman. In fact, maybe too heterosexual.”
Our laughter was short-lived. Not to sound like a spoiled brat, but I was nearly out of my mind by the time we got to Venice. Aside from craving my own space and conversation with friends my own age, I couldn’t smoke around my mother and it was driving me crazy. (I was forty-one when I finally gave up cigarettes, and in all that time I never once lit up around her.)
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