Wishful Drinking

9 AN ALTERED, FALTERING SELF

Now, come back with me to when I was first told that I was an alcoholic—which greatly relieved me by the way, because I knew something was the matter with me, so I thought, “Great! That’s it—that’s what I’ve been struggling with (and enjoying) all this time! Fantastic!”

But what they further do—to (I think) soften the blow of this arguably awkward new way of looking at yourself—they enumerate a number of other famous and accomplished folks who have also struggled with (and enjoyed) alcoholism.

There was:

Scott Fitzgerald

Mel Gibson

Dylan Thomas

Ireland

Rush Limbaugh

Lindsay Lohan

Russia

And George W. Bush

I think their point is—don’t feel bad, you’re joining an illustrious group. Great people have been alcoholics. Oh, be one, it’s fun!

Now I don’t think they’re implying you could be great, but those people weren’t exactly losers (except probably to some members of their families, and all of their constituents) so relax and join the great drunks who staggered the Earth before you.

So, when I was told I was a manic-depressive, there was a whole new list waiting for me.

There was Abraham Lincoln—who wrote the Gettysburg Address in four hours—now that’s pretty manic

Winston Churchill, who called his depressed mood the black dog

Korea

Kristy McNichol and Sir Isaac Newton (who I think would have made an adorable couple!)

Mark Twain

St. Francis

St. Theresa

Jonathan Winters

Poor Brittany Spears

And George W. Bush

Well, naturally after this list I felt invigorated—but then that is part of my diagnosis.

So, to celebrate my newfound ascent into the lofty heights of this noble group, I thought I would inaugurate a Bipolar Pride Day. You know, with floats and parades and stuff! On the floats we would get the depressives, and they wouldn’t even have to leave their beds—we’d just roll their beds out of their houses, and they could continue staring off miserably into space. And then for the manics, we’d have the manic marching band, with manics laughing and talking and shopping and fucking and making bad judgment calls.

Of course, all this is still in the early planning stages—and knowing manics it probably always will be—but the point is we have a plan and that’s what counts. Because when you’re manic, every urge is like an edict from the Vatican. No plan is a bad one, because if you’re there and you’re doing it, it can’t be bad. It’s like a bank error in your favor.

Mania is, in effect, liquid confidence… when the tide comes in, it’s all good. But when the tide goes out, the mood that cannot and should not be named comes over you and into you. Because to name it would be an act of summoning.

Losing your mind is a frightening thing—especially if you have a lot to lose—but once it’s lost, it’s fine! No big deal! There could be a light shining out of your head. It’s sort of like glowing in your own dark.

Part of my story—because God forbid you miss a minute of it—is that I stayed awake for six days. This happened because two of my medications were interacting badly, so the doctors put me on what they called a medication vacation—now on a vacation like this you don’t get a tan, there is no Club Med, and you can’t send cute little postcards. Now, anyone who has stayed awake for six days knows that there’s every chance that they’ll wind up psychotic. Anyway, I did, and part of how that manifested was that I thought everything on television was about me.

Now if anything like this should happen to you, I have some excellent advice. Don’t watch CNN. Please. Watch one of those pet training shows or cooking shows—even some of the discovery shows might be okay. But I watched CNN, and at the time Versace had just been killed by that man Cunanin, and the police were frantically scouring the Eastern seaboard for him. So I was Cunanin, Versace, and the Police. Now this is exhausting programming.

But by the time I got to be Versace, he was dead. And also by then I was in the real hospital part of Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, and I could literally hear the nurses outside of the door saying, “Don’t listen to her, she’s crazy.”

My brother eventually arrived and he had to call the mental hospital to see about getting me in because there was, as my friend Dave says, “no room at the bin.” You had to be seriously nuts to qualify for residence in the lockdown ward. So finally, the head doctor of the facility came over. This guy looked like this kind of weird John Steinbeck character with his abnormally high pants and his strangely neat hair and his trimmed just so beard.

So he walks in, and I say, “Finally, here’s someone who can tell us what it’s like to get his cock sucked.”

Because (as you might have noticed) I had begun swearing a lot and apparently I couldn’t stop. Something in me had become unleashed and taming it was not imminent.

Anyway, this was my audition for the locked ward, and, as you probably guessed by now, I passed. I made it into the mental hospital. Hurray!

When you qualify for the mental hospital, you have to sign yourself in, like commitment papers, I guess; but I was so far gone I didn’t know what I was signing or doing, and so when they put the papers in front of me, I took the pen and I signed with my left hand, “Shame.”

That’s how I signed in for the mental hospital. How sad is that?

Oh, and my form of mental illness is also a tiny bit infectious by the way. I may have gotten it from Amy Winehouse’s toilet seat. So, by the end of this book you could be gay and insane! Unless you began that way.

Anyway, ever since my fateful announcement on Diane Sawyer that I was mentally ill—like anyone really needed to know that. Don’t you hate it when celebrities just blah blah blah—talk about themselves—I mean, who asked?—I find it all so wearying…

Anyway, where was I? So having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything (okay fine, not acting, but what about a tiny little award for writing? Nope), I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. I’m apparently very good at it and am honored for it regularly. Probably one of the reasons I’m such a shoo-in is that there’s no swimsuit portion of the competition.

Hey, look, it’s better than being bad at being mentally ill, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?

The first time I did drugs was when I was thirteen. Before we lost all our money, my family had a vacation house in Palm Springs, about two hours outside of Beverly Hills, where I ostensibly grew up. So periodically my mother used to rent that house in Palm Springs to these people who, after one of their stays, left behind a bag of marijuana. Who knows? Maybe they left it intentionally, a kind of chemical sacrifice on the altar of appreciation for their time there. Anyway, after my mother found the pot, she came to me and said, “Dear, I thought instead of you going outside and smoking pot where you might get caught and get in trouble—I thought you and I might experiment with it together.”

Well, frankly at the time, and let’s face it—even now—I couldn’t imagine anything weirder. But what actually came to pass was that after presenting this bizarre, albeit marginally appealing proposal, my mother got swept back up in the whirlwind of her life and promptly forgot about it. But being the crafty, eager-for-the-altered-state person I was destined to become, I absolutely did not. So once it became obvious that our proposed experiment had slipped my mother’s mind, I snuck into the lab of her sacheted underwear drawer and stole the pot, subsequently experimenting my brains out in my backyard tree house with my friend May—who coincidentally also ended up in A.A.!

And you’ve got to figure that I enjoyed it, because I ended up experimenting with marijuana for the next six years until it suddenly—and I think rather rudely—turned on me. Where at the onset it was all giggles and munchies and floating in a friendly haze—it suddenly became creepy and dark and scary. What was a junkie to do? Well, the answer was quite obvious—I needed to find a new replacement drug. This was when I was about nineteen, while I was filming Star Wars. (It ultimately turned out to be Harrison’s pot that did me in.) So, after carefully casting about for a substitute substance, I finally settled into my new drug digs—hallucinogens and painkillers. Mind expanders and painkillers. (Though over time and protracted use their meanings got jumbled until they became mind relievers and pain expanders—a place where everything hurt and nothing made sense.)

Anyway, at a certain point in my early twenties, my mother started to become worried about my obviously ever-increasing drug ingestion. So she ended up doing what any concerned parent would do.

She called Cary Grant.

In case you haven’t heard, one of the many things Mr. Grant was known for at the time was the fact that at some point in the sixties he famously did a course of LSD while under a doctor’s supervision. It’s always been difficult for me to imagine this… do they actually drop the acid in the doctor’s office? Does the doctor do it too? I always thought there was a kind of strange dignity and an even stranger credibility given to acid done under the cool shade of medical supervision. Sometimes, when I heard the phrase “experimenting with drugs,” I imagined someone in a white coat excitedly emerging from a lab carrying a smoking beaker and shouting, “I found it, I found it!” But when I heard that Cary Grant had experimented with acid under the supervision of his doctor, well, in a way it was as if he was dedicating his hallucinogenic jaunt to modern science. I imagined him doing it a little reluctantly and with a quiet dignity. After, of course, washing his hands and putting on one of those backless hospital garbs ten minutes before the medicinal acid kicked in.

Anyway, my concerned and caring mother called Cary Grant and told him that her daughter had a problem with acid. You know, like I was mainlining the stuff. You have to admit though, on a certain level, it was an incredibly darling thing for her to do—especially when you factor in the fact that I loved Cary Grant. I still do—only now at more of a distance. He’s probably the only famous person I was ever really in awe of. Having two celebrity parents, and a few celebrity boyfriends, it was extremely rare for me to get star struck. Not that I was blasé about famous people—I just wasn’t bowled over and tongue-tied and staring, as if I’d just undergone more electroshock therapy or stuck my finger in a socket.

But Cary Grant, well… he just killed me. I mean, I was completely blown away by him. He had it all—an easygoing class, quiet confidence, wit—all in this beyond-handsome package. So when the phone rang and a familiar voice informed me that he was Cary Grant—even a Cary Grant that was gonna maybe give me a “just say no” drug lecture—well, initially I was, in fact, totally tongue-tied. Normally, I wouldn’t have believed that the person on the other end really was Cary Grant—but when he told me my mother had asked him to call, well that sounded eerily like some bizarre thing my mother would do.

In a way, there was actually a precedent for this Cary Grant intervention call.

Some years prior, I was in London en route to my mother’s wedding (I don’t like to miss any of my parents’ weddings). She called me at the hotel where I was staying, and when I didn’t answer the phone she became understandably concerned. So she let the phone ring and ring and ring—until finally she panicked. She knew I was in the room so, in her mind, probably the only reason I wasn’t answering the phone was that I had overdosed. So she did what any normal concerned mother might do when troubled about her daughter’s well being.

She called Ava Gardner.

And she asks Ava to come to my hotel and get the concierge to let her into my room to make sure I’m not dead.

Anyway, the reason this relates to Cary Grant—if it isn’t obvious—is that the Ava Gardner Rescue Squad (good title for a rock band) is the reason I would even begin to believe that someone telling me that they were Cary Grant might actually in fact be Cary Grant. So initially when I got on the phone with Mr. Grant, I was incredibly nervous seeing as how I was on the phone with no less then my fucking hero, but once we began to discuss my acid addiction, after a freakishly short time I found myself chatting gaily with what might as well have been a Cary Grant impersonator. (Because let’s face it, there was no actual visual confirmation that this was, in fact, Cary Grant.) So I think I finally convinced him that, despite my mother’s insistence, I didn’t have an acid problem (which, for the most part, was true). What I did have was an opiate problem, but frankly that was none of Cary Grant’s fucking business. No matter how much I admired him.

Anyway, though we chatted for about an hour or so, I have basically no memory of what we discussed. Oh yes, there was one thing… Chevy Chase and how he had insinuated on some talk show that Mr. Grant was bisexual. Now, as it happened, I was working on a film with Chevy at that time (a marvelous film called Under the Rainbow—a riveting film about the making of the Wizard of Oz—starring Chevy, me, Eve Arden, and three thousand dwarves), and Chevy and I were getting along somewhat less than a house on fire. So on top of our LSD chat, we had that in common. Poor Chevy Chase relations. So when our hour-long chat was up, I bid Mr. Grant a grateful good-bye, gleefully told all my friends, and end of story. Now, I thought, I had a Cary Grant story to tell my children and grandchildren for years to come. Right?

Well, as it turned out, actually no—not right—because my Cary Grant story continued and this time from an unexpected direction.

A few years later my father went to Princess Grace’s funeral in Monaco.

Please ask me if he actually knew the princess. Of course he didn’t. My father had never even met the woman—either prior to her ascent to the throne when she was “just” plain old Grace Kelly, the Oscar-winning movie star or after she became Monaco’s very own royal highness.

But I learned that you don’t actually have to know the person whose funeral you’re attending. In fact, sometimes, depending on the person, it’s better that way, but my father had his own reasons for going to the funeral for this very famous, beautiful woman. Publicity.

So there’s my father wandering around aimlessly at this far-flung funeral of a famous woman—one of the few beautiful women of his generation that he hadn’t slept with—shmoozing with the thousands of other mourners, trying to make eye contact with someone who he could grieve with and maybe generate a photo op in the process, when he spies Cary Grant. And something clicked in his brain and that something turned out to be the dim recollection of a story he’d only just recently been told.

What was it again? Oh yeah—something to do with his first-born daughter.

By now he’s walked up to my hero and he says the first thing that pops into his head, which is something along the lines of “My daughter Carrie is addicted to acid, and I’m very worried about her. Would you mind maybe having a talk with her?”

Great. I’ve now gone from having an acid problem straight to a full-on LSD addiction (as if such a thing were possible). I’m mainlining the stuff.

So here we go again. Poor Cary Grant (I’m sure he’s very rarely been called that) gets back from the funeral and in due course calls me again to discuss my issue with slamming acid.

Well, if I was embarrassed the first time he called me, this time I was completely humiliated. I explain to Mr. Grant, after thanking him profusely for taking the time out to counsel me on my alleged dependence on hallucinogens, that, in fact, I didn’t spend all that much time with my father—the time required to be able to accurately ascertain as to whether or not I had any sort of problem, much less a drug one. I suggest to Mr. Grant that my mother would probably be in a much better position to determine whether or not I was tripping my brain out on a daily basis than my father, who I’d spent, on average, one day a year with.

So Mr. Grant says, “Well, it was very nice of your father to express his concern. It’s very difficult to maintain a relationship with a child after the mother and father have divorced. I have a daughter myself and I see her as much as I can, but when a child divides her time between two houses, no matter how you try it’s impossible to spend as much time with your child as you’d like to.”

So perhaps my father’s motive hadn’t been solely to find a subject matter to talk to Cary Grant about at the photo-op funeral. Mr. Grant didn’t seem to think so. So maybe this was another example of nothing ever being just one thing. No motive is pure. No one is good or bad—but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

Anyway, Mr. Grant and I stay on the phone for over an hour talking about this and that—how he wishes he could be a more involved parent—you know, the usual shooting-the-shit-with-Cary-Grant-type thing. It was great.

The phone call eventually comes to a close, and I immediately go to the liquor store and buy him a bottle of wine from his birth year, which is something like 1907, and now he calls me again to thank me.

And in that final phone call, I believe he told me, “I don’t even like wine.”

I mean, we’re ultimately talking about no less than three calls from Cary Grant. The guy was practically stalking me!

Anyway, cut to a few months later, and I’m at this premiere or charity event or something and I turn and there, just a few feet away from me, actually in the flesh—as far in as you could get—is Cary Grant. Big as life and twice as famous.

But this time it’s not just some disembodied voice that sounds a lot like Cary Grant—no, this is the real deal. Classy and handsome and just about everything a human can possibly be when they’re a DNA jackpot. But am I intimidated? Oh, my god, yes.

So—with my heart pounding in my ears and my nose and my hair, I sheepishly approach my ideal and very timidly tap him on the back, withdrawing my hand immediately as if I burned my finger on his radioactive sizzling hot, iconic back. Whereupon Cary Grant turns, and I immediately start backing away from him, as though one of us was contaminated.

“Hi. I’m Debbie Reynolds’s daughter,” I admit as though this was a crime. “We talked on the phone?”

I’m stooped over like someone frightened and ashamed.

“Anyway, no big deal—I don’t want to bother you—I just wanted to say hi.”

“Oh hello, yes. How are you?”

I’m still backing up, forcing him to follow me.

“Oh, I’m fine,” I whisper. “Everything’s great! Good to see you. Bye!”

And I fled the scene of this social crime, never to return.

Years later, while I was in Australia doing some terrible film, they announced on the radio that Cary Grant had passed away. And I remember getting this pain—the kind you get when you experience a body blow. Or lose something essential.

Who would talk me out of slamming LSD now?

So I think to myself after all this, after all the night clubs and the gay husband and the rehabs (one of my fellow inmates at the last rehab I was in was Ozzie Osbourne… that went well!)… so, after all the rehabs and all the mental hospitals, I think to myself: If what doesn’t kill you makes you—well, what doesn’t kill you makes you not dead but if what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, then I should be able to lift Cedars-Sinai Hospital and glow in the dark. So I say to myself at this point—BRING IT ON!!!

Don’t ever say that. Because it will be brought.

’Cause that’s when my friend Greg died.