twenty
I wasn’t the only one fascinated by the changes new motherhood brought. About six weeks after bringing Dakota home, a time when I was consumed with nursing and pumping, keeping ledgers of Dakota’s eating habits, bathing him, dressing him, and watching every second of his extraordinary little life, Bo and I attended the New York City premiere of Great Balls of Fire, Dennis Quaid’s tour de force portrayal of the turbulent life of rock pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis.
It was a beautiful June night, and I enjoyed getting dressed up for the first time in months. I couldn’t remember the last time Bo and I had gone out. I wore a sexy black strapless bustier dress, which was perfect for a red carpet event, but not so perfect, I realized, for a nursing mom. My attitude? Tough. I stuck in a couple of round, absorbent breast pads so I didn’t leak and went to the gala.
By the end of the movie, though, my boobs were enormous. Since this was my first time away from home, I hadn’t anticipated what would happen after my milk let down. At first I thought, okay, I can handle this. But it kept happening and they kept getting bigger. By the time we got to the after-party, they were enormous and rock-hard. If I hadn’t been enjoying myself, I would have gone home. But Bo was hammered and I wanted to visit with friends. Johnny Depp was sitting beside me; we’d known each other for a while at that point, and when I turned to say something to him, he leaned toward me and stared at my boobs with a stunned and innocent curiosity.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, embarrassed and pulling back. “I’ve never seen anything like those in my life.”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t know what to do about them.”
“What’s happening with them?” he asked.
“It’s milk,” I said.
“Milk?”
I gave Johnny a quick primer about being a nursing mother. He asked several questions, and finally he asked if he could touch them. I said, “Yeah, do whatever you want.” For the next two minutes, I sat there with Johnny Depp holding my breasts as I chatted away with other friends around the table.
With Dakota making me happy to the core, my life in New York couldn’t have gotten any better—and it didn’t. One day as I was taking Dakota to a checkup, I was standing on Hudson Street, trying to hail a cab. I had the baby in a snuggly, a backpack on one shoulder, a portable stroller slung over the other, and a car seat in one hand. As I juggled all that stuff, I projected a few years forward and wondered what we were going to do when Dakota wanted to ride a bike or throw a baseball.
I started to think about moving back to L.A. Bo had once lived there and hated it so much he swore he’d never live there again. I pushed the idea more seriously after a crack house sprung up in the midst of our family-oriented neighborhood and some of the mothers were being held up as they took their children to and from school.
I also wanted more support from family. I didn’t have a nanny, and sometimes, as much as I loved my baby, Dakota pushed me to the edge of sanity.
One night in particular, he cried for four straight hours, most likely from a bout of colic, which was unusual for him. His nonstop wailing was like torture, the new mother’s version of waterboarding. When I couldn’t find Bo to help me, I called Cordelia, who was going through a breakup with her boyfriend, and got her to come over and sit with Dakota while I took a much-needed walk around the block, during which even the crack-addicted muggers kept their distance from me.
I had never felt as crazed, but the walk helped me to recenter myself. A few days later, though, I was even crazier.
It was the Fourth of July, and we had friends over for a barbecue that was a perfect, all-American celebration. As Bo cleaned up the kitchen, I said good night, put the baby down, washed my face, and went to bed. Around three in the morning, I heard Dakota wake up, hungry. It was one of the rare occasions when I was simply too tired to nurse him, and with the baby in my arms, I went downstairs to get some pumped milk from the fridge.
The first floor was all one giant space, with the kitchen on one side and the living room on the other, and the stairs were on the living room side. My eyes weren’t fully focused as I walked toward the kitchen. It was dark except for the TV, which was on, and the sofa was right in front of me. On it I saw Bo having sex with a woman.
For a moment, I thought I was dreaming. I shook my head and blinked my eyes to make sure I was awake. Bo was indeed screwing another woman. He stopped and turned toward me.
“What are you looking at?” he snarled.
I didn’t know what to say. How does a person answer that question?
I walked past him, got the milk out of the refrigerator, warmed it up, and went back upstairs as he continued to screw that woman on my sofa. In hindsight, I can’t believe that I didn’t grab him by the scruff of the neck and throw him out the door. But I didn’t know what to do. There’s not a chapter on that situation in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. As I fed the baby, I heard the front door open and close, then a stomp-stomp-stomp up the stairs. The bedroom door flung open and Bo stood at the foot of the bed like an angry bull.
“What’s your problem?” he asked.
“I’m not going to discuss it while I’m holding the baby,” I said. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“No, we’re going to talk about it now.”
“No,” I insisted. “Later.”
After I had fed Dakota and tucked him back in his crib, we did have the conversation. I could see that Bo had been drinking heavily, and I was doubtful that talking would help. But I wanted to know how he thought what I’d seen was my fault. I couldn’t imagine what kind of convoluted, Bo-centric idiocy I was going to hear. He didn’t disappoint. Bo explained it was because I hadn’t had sex with him and he needed to get laid. I was dumbfounded. I pointed out that I’d had a C-section two months earlier and neither my body nor my mind was ready for an amorous romp.
“Aside from the fact that this person”—I gestured at myself—“doesn’t yell, ‘Do me, Daddy,’ I just can’t imagine such a thing right now.”
I explained my whole body’s purpose was to nurture and feed a newborn. My brain was hyperfocused on the purity and sanctity of motherhood. Sex was the last thing on my mind. The last thing I could imagine myself doing.
Bo cried and said he was a terrible person. Maybe not terrible, I said, but what he did was pretty messed up. I had no idea how messed up until he offered to tell me exactly what had happened. According to Bo, after finishing the dishes, he was flipping through the TV channels when he began watching The Robin Byrd Show, a sex program hosted by the porn actress on public access. The show was filled with advertisements for 800 numbers to call to speak to hookers. He got so horny he called one.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You were screwing a hooker? In my house?”
“Yeah,” he said angrily. “What’s your problem?”
“My problem?” I said. “Wait a minute. I’m going to make a phone call.”
I don’t know what came over me or where I got the idea, but I called Bo’s mother in Texas and told her the situation: that her son thought I had a problem because I was upset after finding him having sex with a hooker on the sofa in our living room while I was upstairs with our two-month-old child. Then I handed the receiver to Bo, who was speechless.
The middle-of-the-night drama was so absurd that I couldn’t even cry. In AA, they talk about moments of clarity and spiritual awakenings, moments when you realize that your life is out of control and you have to change it. Looking at Bo, I had one of those moments. I realized I had to get out of my marriage. I had to leave him. In fact, I never should have married him. I didn’t even like him anymore.
I realized I had an even bigger problem when I went back upstairs and checked on Dakota. How could I leave Bo when we had this kid? I didn’t want my precious son growing up without his father the way I did when my parents divorced. I wasn’t going to do that to my child. Or if I did, I knew I was first going to try everything possible to avoid it.
Although Bo begged for my forgiveness, I didn’t give it that night or the next. It took me a long time to get over what he’d done, and basically, the way I got over it was by telling him that I was done with New York. We were going to move back to L.A.
We decompressed in Sun Valley, where we hooked up with my mother, who was vacationing there. During that stay, for the first time in my life, I asked her about my birth family. We had spoken about it in cursory ways when I was little. Then years passed when I never gave it a single thought. But now, inspired by Dakota’s resemblance to me, I was curious to know if there were any more people out there who looked like me. If there were, I wanted to meet them.
Before returning to L.A., she gave me a last name for my birth father, Darlington, but professed to not know any other details. A few weeks later, after we had visited Bo’s family in Texas and arrived in L.A., where we rented a house on one of the “bird” streets in the Hollywood Hills, Bo hired a private investigator to search for more information. I was costarring with Scott Valentine in the TV movie Without Her Consent, the last project under my production company’s banner, when the PI unearthed a copy of my original birth certificate.
Obviously I didn’t need confirmation that I existed. Nor was I looking to replace my mother or memories of my father; they would always be my parents. But I had never heard any details about my arrival in this world, none of the kinds of stories I would be able to tell my own child. I was eager to read that birth certificate for myself. I discovered that my father’s name was David Darlington and my mother’s name was Susan Alabaster. As for my name, it said “Baby Girl Darlington.” What kind of name was that? I tried to imagine the conversation between the nurse and my birth parents.
“Do you have a name for her?”
“No, just put down Baby Girl. We don’t want her.”
Of course, such a conversation may not have occurred. Either way, I was good with Baby Girl, my name for the first twenty-four hours of my life. Rob had called me Baby Girl soon after we met. The other nicknames people had given me over the years included Half Pint, Mel, Merv, Smelly, Lissa, Lizard, Bunny, Mouse, Franchise, Wissy-do, Whisper, Gem, Fancy, Melodious, and Poopsidoodle. Baby Girl was one of the better ones.
The PI wasn’t able to turn up any additional information on either Darlington or Alabaster, which we thought sounded like an assumed name (and we turned out to be correct), and Bo and I on our own would randomly call information in different parts of L.A. looking for David Darlington, to no avail. I don’t know why, but it never dawned on me to look beyond the city.
After a few months of getting nowhere, we abandoned the search on all fronts. Our lives got too busy, and the PI was ridiculously expensive. However, in the back of my mind, I knew that one day I would pick the search back up. I might not find them or get the answers I wanted. But somehow I understood that just asking the questions could be equally if not more beneficial.
Soon after, while I shot Without Her Consent, we leased a lovely house in Sherman Oaks. Bo packed up our belongings in New York and drove them to the white house with blue shutters and a white picket fence, previously owned by my pal Tracy Nelson. It was in perfect condition, and we were able to move right in, along with our new nanny, Rosa, her daughter Linda, my dogs, Sidney and Maggie, and my cats, Sylvester and Christmas. Soon we added a stray Lab that Rosa found and named him Brando. I don’t remember if I knew how much Bo drank or if I overlooked it because that was easier while I was working long hours on the movie, but life was pretty manageable.
In the fall, I got ready to leave for Hong Kong, where I was starting my next project, Forbidden Nights, a big-budget movie for CBS about an American schoolteacher who takes a two-year assignment in China and must confront major cultural obstacles after she falls in love with one of her students. Talk about being out of your element. Production actually began outside of Hong Kong, in one of the new territories, about an hour outside of the city. Everything was either a mall or it was still turn-of-the-century backward. Aside from me, the cast was either Asian-American or Asian, and the crew was mostly Brits and Australians. One man seemed to control everything from the equipment to the trailers; I suspected he was connected to the Triad mob.
I had a nice bus to change in, but unlike the luxury Winnebago I had on my previous picture in L.A., this one didn’t have a bathroom. Instead, I was directed to a porta-potty, except this one was sans potty; it was just a squat hole. I wasn’t ever going to be known as a prima donna, but I drew the line at a squat hole. If I needed a toilet, I asked to be driven to the nearest hotel.
Others felt the same. Being fish out of water, the Aussies and Brits got together every night in someone’s hotel room for a meeting of what someone dubbed the RPPS, the Rape, Plunder, and Pillage Society. Basically, it was the name given to the room where everyone would gather to eat, drink (not me, since I was still nursing), carry on, and unwind after a day of really impossible shooting, crowd control, and culture shock. They were a fun group of people who served as a social life raft, and ultimately they did provide much-needed support.
One day we were shooting in the middle of some small town’s square that was doubling as Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Like others on the crew, I was dispirited from feeling isolated and adrift, lost in a foreign country where not even the Chinese takeout tasted like the Chinese takeout I was used to. All of a sudden I looked up and saw Monty Python’s Terry Jones walking toward me. I thought I was hallucinating. What would he be doing out in the middle of nowhere in China?
I had always been a devoted, or rather devout fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. From behind me, I heard one of the English grips shout “Oy.” Without missing a beat, Terry drifted over to our encampment, eager to say hello to people who spoke with an accent similar to his. He spent the rest of the day with us and stayed through that night’s RPPS gathering. We traded lines from The Holy Grail and The Life of Brian, and he did the Silly Walk with us. One of the highlights of my life will always be the memory of standing in that room with Terry and singing “The Lumberjack Song.”
Bo, who was on location with me, had a great deal of time on his hands, so he found a tailor who made him a new wardrobe of custom suits and shirts, complete with his name embroidered in his signature on the cuffs of the shirts. One night I was eating dinner with Rosa and Dakota when Bo returned and said he had a surprise for me. He had me close my eyes and hold out my hands. When I opened my eyes again, I saw a Cartier box in front of me. Inside was an eighteen-karat gold ladies’ panther watch. I had carried on about wanting this watch for years, ever since Rob had gotten the men’s version years before. Unlike Rob, I didn’t have the stones to pay that kind of money for a watch. I have a feeling that when Britney Spears got engaged to K-Fed, she felt the same way I did at that moment: I had the watch I wanted, but I was also concerned that I had just bought myself the watch without my knowledge.
I said thank you and let Bo know I was thrilled. The deed was done. I owned the watch. But then he said, “Look what I got.” He pushed up his sleeve and revealed a brand-new Rolex. Although smiling, I thought, Oh my God, I am working my ass off in a foreign country with nothing but a port-a-squat toilet and this guy is spending the money I’m making as fast as I make it.
Bo’s drinking was more of a problem than his spending. At the next night’s RPPS, he had a little more than he should have and, thinking he was funny, snatched a stuffed dog from the daughter of one of the crew guys. After saying “We have a beagle and sometimes he drives me crazy,” he began punching and stomping on the toy dog. He was out of control, and the little girl was in tears. Embarrassed, I dragged Bo out and sent him back to our room.
After a couple more awkward episodes, he was banned altogether from the RPPS gatherings. That’s when he decided he would have his own fun, and then things really got out of control. One night I went to the RPPS, hung out for a bit, then went to my room. When I woke up in the morning, Bo wasn’t there. Nor was he back at the end of the day.
After dinner, I went to the RPPS and asked the guys what I should do. A bunch of them who knew Hong Kong said they would make calls and find him. That reassured me, but when I woke up the following morning, Bo still hadn’t returned. At that point, I panicked. I was in Hong Kong, breast-feeding my kid, depleted of strength and energy, and now I was also sick and nervous. It was surreal. Almost like I was living in one of my Lifetime movies.
When I walked back into the hotel that night after work, Bo was waiting for me. I didn’t know whether to hug him or hit him. He said he had hooked up with some British sailors and ended up on a two-day bender. Though relieved he was safe, I told him that I couldn’t handle dealing with him or even worrying about him. I wanted him to go home and get sober. He broke down in tears, said he was sorry, and agreed he needed help.
“I’ll leave,” he said.
“Good. Let’s get you on the next flight.”
Then it was as if a switch went off inside him. What about his suits? He insisted he couldn’t leave until his custom-made suits were finished. He phoned the tailor and found out they wouldn’t be ready for a couple more days. Rather than argue, I said fine, he could wait for the suits. But he couldn’t stay with me. He had to find another hotel. I couldn’t work, take care of Dakota, and worry about him.
I felt horribly guilty, hateful, and hurtful for sending him away, but he seemed to understand. In hindsight, I think I did the right thing. I received nothing but support from the crew that night at the RPPS. A few of them generously said their wives would take turns with the baby if I needed help. Around ten o’clock, I went back to my room and began to get ready for bed when the phone rang. It was Bo, and he was out of his mind, screaming at me.
“You’re not going to take my son,” he said. “I know what you’re planning to do, you fucking bitch. I know this is just the beginning of the end. You’re sending me away so you can divorce me, take everything…”
I don’t know whether the conversation escalated or de-escalated, but Bo accused me of using him solely to father a child and swore he was going to see me dead before I took his son. He was quite graphic about it.
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” he said. “I’m going to take our son. And I’m going to leave. And I’m going to leave you dying in a pool of blood.”
Even though I knew that rage was fueled by alcohol, or maybe because it was, I took Bo seriously. I called in several producers and members of the crew with whom I was close and told them what had happened. They phoned the police. They moved Dakota, Rosa, and me to a new suite, and stationed guards outside the door and at the hotel’s various entrances. Then, in case Bo managed to circumvent all those barriers, our key grip, David Nichols, slept on the floor at the foot of my bed.
As it turned out, Bo never showed up. After a thorough search, the police found him passed out in some hotel room with a large samurai sword next to him. They basically ushered him out of the country, and my godfather, Charlie, met him at the airport in L.A. and checked him into rehab.
Somehow the tabloids got wind of the story, which I denied for months before finally admitting to a TV Guide reporter with Bo at my side that he had a “tendency to lose control of himself” when he drank and that following a difficult time, “I asked him to leave Hong Kong and get help.”
What I didn’t describe was the relief I felt after he left and how that subsequently opened up the floodgates of an Oh my God, what have I done with my life? string of questions. I couldn’t believe what I saw in the mirror. My hair was dyed black, I had lost weight, my eyes were permanently bloodshot, and I was alone with a baby and a nanny in this far-off land. I shook my head in disbelief. Who had I become?
I needed a life preserver, and I found one in David Nichols. I hung on to him for the rest of the shoot. From Sydney, he had a sane but carefree attitude about life that I needed, and I might have had a complete breakdown if not for his joyful, peaceful, and reassuring presence. We talked endlessly about what I was going to do when I got home. His answers were always to the point. He said, “Figure out what you want in life, what you want for yourself, and what you want for your child. Nothing else matters. Where do you want to be? What do you want out of your marriage? What are you willing to put up with?”
They were all excellent points. We would sit down after work and I would write list after list, trying to figure out what I wanted. I never got a chance to thank David for the help he provided, but I’ve remained eternally grateful. He helped me find the strength to stand up for myself. He also started me on the process of realizing that I, like many people, could have everything I had ever wanted in life but still be missing the things I actually needed.