by Val Kilmer
John, who has long since passed, wasn’t a bad guy. But he hurt me and he hurt Marlon. Poor John. Poor Marlon. Poor Richard Stanley, the first director who was fired and went feral and lived in the bush with the hippie stoner expats and came to the set in costume as a pigman or a dogman or a catwoman. Sometimes, to blow my mind, he would scream out my name from a sea of hundreds of extras covered in makeup and giant wigs and costumes with antlers and tails and hoofs and claws. I would say to newcomers on our madhouse set, “This isn’t The Island of Dr. Moreau. The island is Dr. Moreau.” If you are ever having a really screwed-up day and need to come down right away, tune into the film, and that’ll sober you right up.
For obvious reasons, I have never been able to watch the movie. But I also have not been able to forget how deeply I loved Marlon. Years later, a mutual friend of ours called him lazy. I explained that Marlon was not lazy. He was spacey. He was different. He stayed up all night reading, writing, scribbling philosophical and metaphysical thoughts. If, then, I showed up at his house the next afternoon and he fell asleep on the couch right there in front of me, I understood why. His was a wandering, nonlinear spirit. His talent assumed forms I could not always grasp, but his friendship never faltered. He’s what I called STG—short-term genius. He couldn’t plan a lunch for the day after tomorrow, but right there in the moment he may have been the most insightful man of our time.
Crocodiles & Ecstasy
The day we wrapped The Island of Dr. Moreau, I flew to Africa for another large-scale production, The Ghost and the Darkness, with Michael Douglas as my costar. During the shoot, my closest companion was Cindy Crawford.
My divorce from Joanne led me to Cindy, whom I had known for a while but left alone due to the outside chance that my marriage might be salvageable. When TV told me otherwise, I took up that pursuit without hesitation.
The divorce was brutal. I made the epic mistake of moving the legal procedure from California to New Mexico, so that the children didn’t have to be dragged into the mess, as they often are with high-profile divorces. I thought we would have a better chance of a quiet divorce in our home state. Besides, it’s where we all lived, though Joanne had just moved to LA to start a new life without me. It was a costly decision. The divorce laws in the Land of Enchantment are less than enchanting; they calculate back earnings in a way that left me pillaged and penniless. In California, the estate is split the day of the separation. In New Mexico, money earned is calculated as equal until the divorce is finalized, so it’s in the lawyers’ best interest to have it take as long as possible. The suit dragged on for almost five years, through several teams of lawyers. I kept trying to explain to Joanne that all we were doing was robbing our children of any annuity they might gain from the fortune we were giving the lawyers instead. All I ever wanted was for Love to reign in our house. I prayed for humility and forgiveness every day for years and years and years.
The Pecos River Ranch, with the house in the middle distance
I had expanded my landholdings in New Mexico from sixteen hundred to six thousand acres, probably the most dazzling six thousand acres in the whole state because of our eleven springs and six miles of the Pecos River and being surrounded on three sides by a national forest. My compound included buildings to hold theaters and workshops. The main house was at once enormous, intimate, and rustic. It was half log cabin, half adobe. The loss of my material world was happening at the same time that I could still demand big salaries. Money was flying in and out. I was dizzy with all the motion.
My marriage was dead but my courtship of Cindy Crawford was alive. We had met at a couple of parties. We flirted. We danced. We joked. We exchanged numbers. Rather than wax rhapsodic, let me present a bullet-point summary of her beguiling nature:
Cindy is America.
Cindy is a happy person who loves her family deeply.
She’s an original who re-created her industry, which was at times cruel and perverse, and she did it with grace and without finger-pointing.
She is a natural athlete and loves glorious things that a man just can’t get enough of.
She loves to cook, and still one of my favorite meals of my entire life is a simple salmon dish that, after our African sojourn, she prepared at her Malibu beach house.
There are at least fifty more bullet points, and I’ve yet to mention the two that moved me most. One is she’s completely honest. How many people can you say that about? The second is related to the first: she’s ingenious at making contact, in every single sense. The song, I believe, is called “Body and Soul.” You can hear it sung by Sarah Vaughan or played by Stan Getz, but it’s Cindy’s song. We exchanged crushes. We may have even begun falling in love. But that love wouldn’t be confirmed until our time in Africa.
I wanted to show her Africa’s majesty. I prepared a surprise dinner by a river that meandered through the rhino preserve where I was filming. I asked some of my closest African friends to help me hours before with a gorgeous bohemian blanket, caviar I had flown in, and fresh local fish prepared by the finest chef in town. I set up Moroccan pillows and selected moody music and asked the heavens for a meteor shower.
I remember being literally dizzy from so many things being right about that night. I never thought of it this way until this moment, but it was our honeymoon. So there we were, completely lost in our love, and if there’s one thing Africa is when you really need her to be, she’s romantic. Just at the right moment, probably after a divine dessert, the sky rained down stars, falling and shooting up and across, and then blackness and peace. “Peace like a river,” as Paul Simon would sing.
So there we were, like some king and queen from a fairy tale, just whispering, “I love you,” back and forth, with tears rolling down. And then, in the deafening silence, we heard kerplunk! from the river. Do I tell her it’s a crocodile and ruin the moment? No. Here we are in the middle of a perfect night, a perfect life. Are we going to be eaten now? We could have just as easily been eaten earlier, taking a bath. No. But, maybe. But, if we are? Okay.
Oh God, I loved Cindy and just kept loving her. I thought I could have died from her love, not because it was difficult but because its delight was simply too much to bear. I would die of happiness. I would die of gratitude. I would die if Cindy couldn’t accompany me to Moscow, where, after all the lion-killing drama that comprised The Ghost and the Darkness was spent, I was due to shoot The Saint. I hoped to bring my saint with me.
The Sinner Is the Saint
My bid for an ever-blooming franchise fruit was basically what you might call a Tom and Jerry movie. I put James Bond, Ethan Hunt, Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan, and the rest in this category. The cat tries to catch the uncatchable mouse. All else is window dressing. The Saint had lots of window dressing. It was great fun and in some ways opened up the window for the Mission: Impossible franchise nailed by Tom Cruise with impassioned athleticism. In The Saint, I spoke in a variety of accents, wore a variety of disguises, pulled off a variety of stunts—not as well, I might add, as Cruise or Damon, but I gave it my all.
I must make a public apology to the writer, Wesley Strick, whose characters I refashioned from start to finish. The script was great, but I knew we had the opportunity to do something special with the main character, to be unique. And that always makes people nervous. But I explained to the executives the studio sent out to meet with me and discuss the project that the audience doesn’t care about the studio. They don’t care about safe choices and good investments. They care about stories, and they want to be moved, to be stirred, to be lifted out of their seats. Impassioned and with every fiber of my being, I pitched my fully fleshed idea, and they went for it.
David Brown, the classiest of all the producers that I had ever worked for—his films include The Sting and Jaws—upon my initial arrival at Heathrow, was there to greet me holding an umbrella and wearing a three-piece suit, overcoat, and hat. After a grand hug, his first words were, “My star.”
I almost wept.
I asked him, “Why are you here? Is Helen on my flight? I didn’t see her.” (His wife was Helen Gurley Brown, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, who loved me doubly because of Cindy.)
“No, my dear boy, I am here to pick you up and welcome you to London.”
I hugged him again. It wasn’t fashionable yet to hug men. But I hugged him as though he had just saved my child’s life. You don’t know what it’s like to be respected like that on a film. As crucial as actors are to a project, it just doesn’t happen.
During the shoot, there was a coup among the producers that resulted in David Brown’s removal, an unfortunate and mistaken move in my opinion. Nonetheless, the film was completed and earned its place, not as the ongoing franchise I had imagined, but as a lively piece of entertainment that had my quixotic character on the run.
Because Cindy was by my side, we had to sneak around a lot, which puts a strain on a girl who has worked her whole life to become a household name. The day after the movie wrapped, she and I began traveling the world. We fell so deeply in love that we started color-blocking the interiors of our imaginary ranch. The living room was rust. The kitchen was coral. The ranch turned out to be real. We were really in New Mexico and I was really living a life outside Hollywood. I credit Cindy with my rebirth after the divorce from Joanne. She was always trying hard to make it work—her career and our relationship—always sensitive to my vulnerabilities. And yet always floating a few inches above the ground. Why, then, didn’t we last?
With Cindy Crawford in Moscow, 1996
Well, I suppose you could say we had a cat-and-mouse thing of our own. Right when I was about to catch her, for a long weekend by the beach or a month in the mountains, she’d disappear. Right when I was walking across the room to hug her, she was leaving to get on a plane. I could hardly blame her. I imagined she spent much of her life fending off the advances of men and, as a result, acquired this defense mechanism that was in equal parts ingenious and infuriating. It was a spiritual bubble, a kind of impermeable membrane, that prevented anyone or anything from disturbing her sense of inner peace, accomplishment, poise, and process.
She scheduled herself down to the quarter hour. She would say, “Okay, Brazil on Monday. France on Wednesday. And then I’ll spend the weekend with you.” Even then I’d think, When are you going to just relax and decompress? She’d fly to spend the weekend with me, and in the car, before she even came inside, her agent would call. She was the world’s most in-demand supermodel, and yet she felt a hunger to keep building and growing.
It’s a heartbreaker. Cindy was always one step away. We were together for a nearly a year. We didn’t have a fight when it was over. It was a conversation about choices.
“When’s the last time you took a break?” I asked. I meant it rhetorically, but she stopped to think and, like a comic book hero, placed her hand to her chin. She considered the question in earnest. After several seconds of silence she admitted that she couldn’t remember.
I have tried many times to make sense out of my actions and even after all these years, sometimes it just gets too hard to contemplate.
I am glad she is happy. I wish her well.
More, More, More
Years later, I was rescued from an icy inferno of solitude by another angel. Perhaps the most soulful and serious of them all. Angelina. When people ask me what Angelina Jolie is like, I always say she’s like other women and other superstars, but just more. More gorgeous. More wise. More tragic. More magic. More grounded. Is it worth it? Worth knowing people who require weeks of effort to understand even a little? Yes. These paradigms of power and prowess are the women who have inspired men throughout history to fight battles, build nations, and leave their lives and wives behind. I melt at the sight of girls like these. Not because I am masochistic, but because I am a slave to Love. I am a hopeless romantic.
I haven’t had a girlfriend in twenty years. My editor—who is not as averse to Googling as I am—says fifteen. But time isn’t real anyway, so what’s the difference? Time is a dimension that is in constant flux, influenced by gravity, and perhaps a timekeeper. The truth is I am lonely part of every day. We all know how it goes.
Help, I need somebody.
Help, not just anybody.
We sing along with impossible yearning and tap our toes to the beat. No matter what we possess, most of us want more, more, more. Is this the survival instinct and essence of the human being? Or is it just capitalism?
We dream. We desire. We adapt. We play.
Angie didn’t remember when I stopped her on the street when she had just wrapped Gia and a Rolling Stones music video. I saw her so far down the street that I had enough time to catch my breath and calm down and then work myself back up again and act completely the fool. I told her what she’d heard her whole life. She acted like no one had ever told her she was one of the most striking women in the world. I asked if she was an actress, blah blah blah. I wanted to wash the filthy New York sidewalk for however many miles she cared to cover that crisp autumn day. Years later, when Oliver Stone asked us to play husband and wife (not just husband and wife, but king and queen warring over the very soul of their only son, the future ruler of the entire civilized world), I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. We developed a friendship. I was around when Angie’s mom was losing her battle with cancer. They were living in her mom’s favorite hotel. Or maybe it was Angie’s. I happened to be staying there myself. It was meaningful and mortal and effortless and exquisite.
The film was Alexander. I told Oliver I’d only do it if the king and queen could have flashbacks to falling hard for each other and storming the castle with passion, before turning against each other. I was half kidding. He didn’t pick up on the humor. “What?” I tried to clarify. Finally I just sighed. “Oh, never mind. I just dig her, Oliver. It would be nice if we had some flashbacks when they were in love and happy together.”
With Angelina Jolie at the UK premiere of Alexander
Oliver was on a mission to realize his twenty-five-year dream of bringing Alexander to the screen and wasn’t in the mood for clowning.
“Get a room, Val. This film isn’t about you. It could have been, but I guess you weren’t ready.”
Ah, there was the old salt-in-the-wound Oliver I’d come to know and love. He was talking about the time right before we’d wrapped The Doors, and he was encouraging, but more like demanding, I read all the books I could on Alexander the Great. But I didn’t really have a firm grasp on what he wanted to do with it all. It’s like saying you’re going to do the story of Genghis Khan. Okay, good luck with that. You’re going to film with real armies and cross the Bering Strait? Sure. Gimme a call when you get the money.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t wait to rehearse. I couldn’t wait to kiss Angie, buy her a Gulfstream jet, and have V+J painted in rainbow glory on the tail. She had recently adopted her first child, Maddox, and the paparazzi were obsessed with this postmodern Madonna, the perfect picture of unapproachable stardom and impossibly chic maternal instinct.
I believe in the power of beauty and the art of Love itself. Now consider, as I must, the reality that the similarities between father and son will be striking to any discerning reader of this book. I like to say I played out my affairs in three acts.
Act I was that I wouldn’t reveal myself because I was investigating whether I wanted to marry a girl or not. Then, after we fought and determined we were utterly wrong for each other, I could say, “You don’t know me at all.” True. But I also hadn’t even tried to let her in.
Act II was about trying before I was ready. I married Joanne, ready for the bliss of everlasting companionship but secretly hoping it would heal me and fill in my black holes. Of course only God can fill those holes, a fact that we humans often ignore. So the great depression of our marriage came when we realized that we couldn’t fix each other.
Act III incorporates my more recent romantic history. You’ll soon see that I worked feverishly at sustaining relationships with t
wo remarkable women. That sustenance was based on being open, grounded, and self-loving, and allowing someone to complement rather than complete me. It takes a wild amount of self-growth and evolution to keep a romance alive. With Cindy, I tried and failed.
In the aftermath of that relationship, I sought peace of mind by reading, reading, reading. Books have always sustained me, especially when the blues blow through like a hurricane. At this point, I rediscovered not only a book but an author I had loved since childhood. On some level, the author’s central subject was childhood itself. His genius was in relocating the humor and joy of long-forgotten childhoods. Humor and joy were just what the doctor ordered.
Never the Twain Shall Meet
Over sixty years ago, well-known Mark Twain scholar Leslie Fiedler wrote an interesting essay about Huckleberry Finn in which he argued that the bonding between Huck and Jim involved more than a mischievous white boy escaping civilization in the company of a runaway slave. The article, called “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” quotes Jim calling out to Huck. Fiedler points to a bond of luminous Love that defines their relationship. The critic maintains that, beyond the twists and turns of the story, Twain’s real subject is more than the exploration of forbidden male-to-male (and white-to-black) Love; Twain is exploring the nature of Love itself. Fiedler saw Twain as I saw Twain: as a religious writer.
At the start of the twenty-first century, I felt myself drawn to Twain in a way I hadn’t experienced since childhood. Head-on, he addressed the major issues that haunted America then and haunt it now: the hypocrisy of polite society, the pernicious evil of racism, the essential artistic urge to rail against conformity and find unfettered expression in biting wit and outrageous drama. Huck and Jim are two of the great characters in the history of our literature because of their improbable but absolute need for one another. Twain saw the humanity in the miscreant boy and the desperate slave. He turned hopeless tragedy into hilarious comedy without trivializing the tragedy or compromising the comedy.
