Chapter 7
Notes For This Isn’t Gold
A MEMOIR BY MELINDA BYERS
EARLY ON
He told me when we met that he had been fat as a child, and it wasn’t until he turned sixteen that he lost the extra thirty pounds he’d been carrying around since age eleven. I wasn’t sure if I should believe him because at the time I was working as a caterer, and I thought he might be making up this story in order to persuade me to bring him low-fat snacks that weren’t on the menu the studio had decided on. It turned out that he wasn’t lying, because eventually I saw the pictures that proved he really had been a fat kid. He looked so different in these photos from his current healthy and handsome self that his transformation seemed almost miraculous. “What finally made you lose the weight?” I asked.
“My brother’s girlfriend,” he said.
“Was she an aerobics instructor or something?”
His smile was sly. “No, I had a crush on her and wanted to steal her from him.”
I think I laughed, but I can’t remember for sure. I do know that I was a little taken aback. “Did you?”
“No, but I certainly tried.”
He loved to eat, still does, I’m sure, and I know how to cook, so it was, for a little while, a match made in the kitchen, if not in heaven. That day in July when he appeared at the table where I was setting out fruit cups and brownies, he was the sexiest man I had ever met. He was thirty-eight and I was twenty-nine, recently separated from a husband who was very earnest about ruining his life by shooting up whenever he could get the drugs his body had become dependent on, which was every day by the time I left him. If you had told me when Toby and I separated that my next husband would be a movie star, I would have laughed in your face. Even though I catered movie sets all the time, the only guys who talked to me were the crew and a few of the actors with bit parts, probably because they assumed I’d be an easy lay, which wasn’t true because (a) I was married, and (b) I’m not a slut. But I was, I guess you could say, kind of a babe. I had big breasts (real) and long legs and thick black hair that has since gone gray and now I have to dye it. I still have the boobs and the legs though. Renn was a fan of all three. He was also, for a while, the ideal man, a wild dream that seemed to have come true. Not surprisingly, I assumed that he’d be the love of my life.
It should be clear from the start how much I cared for him because some of the things I have to say on these pages won’t flatter him. Nonetheless, I feel like I have to write this book because a lot of people think that marrying a movie star is the next best thing to being a movie star. Well, guess what, it’s not. It’s very hard. Basically impossible, as it turns out, and I’m pretty sure that Renn’s first wife would agree with me, considering how things worked out for her too. I have never suffered so much as I did during the four and a half years of my marriage to Renn. I never once felt that I had him for real. I assumed that he would go back to his wife and kids, or that one of his beautiful, famous costars would steal him from me. It happens all the time. If it didn’t, part of the economy would collapse because a whole slew of gossip rags and bloggers would be out of business. The fact that it doesn’t happen even more often is a mystery to me. If you spend three months, six or seven days a week, behaving with someone the same way that you behave with your lawfully wedded husband or wife because the script calls for it, you are bound to get attached. The line between what’s real and what’s not is easy to blur, and on a movie set, it sometimes feels like how my college dorm felt on Friday nights—there’s the sense that just about anything goes, and with everyone’s parents so far away and oblivious to what their children are up to, sometimes crazy things do happen.
RENN & CO.
Where is Andrea, Renn’s brother’s coveted girlfriend, now? She’s married, with three grown daughters, and lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where she’s been an elementary school teacher for the past twenty-four years. (I know this because Renn’s brother [Phil] told me. He got in touch with her recently through Facebook. Renn’s brother’s Facebook friends: 217. Renn’s Facebook followers: 1,089,476. Not as many as younger actors, but still a pretty good number for an actor in his fifties. He [or, more likely, his publicist] maintains a fan page instead of a regular account because I suppose it would be too hard to keep up with so many individual “friends,” and he would also probably have to deal with a lot of messages and posts from fans gone rabid. I used to have these nightmares where strange women would come up to me and throw acid in my face when I was out with Renn because they were so jealous. It never happened, but more than a few times we almost had to run away [literally] from someone who wouldn’t leave us alone.)
I once asked Renn if Andrea ever contacted him after he became famous, and he said that she had. I asked if anything had happened between them. It took him a few seconds to reply, but he said no, no, he was already married to Lucy by then.
Where is Renn’s brother now? In Niles, Illinois, which is a Chicago suburb not far from where they grew up. Phil is also a teacher, though he teaches high school students, not grade-schoolers. He works at Niles North, which is close to a fancy shopping mall where a month before we were married, Renn bought me three thousand dollars’ worth of clothes at the Marshall Field’s department store—four dresses, three pairs of shoes, two summer sweaters, one pair of tailored linen slacks. We were visiting Phil and his family because Phil’s son was graduating from high school and he wanted Uncle Renn to come and make him look good in front of all of his unconvincingly jaded classmates. Renn was nice about obliging because he liked playing the role of the coolest uncle in the world, as Phil’s son called him in front of all of his teachers and the entire graduating class during his salutatorian speech. Tyler didn’t mention his father in the speech, but Phil was smiling when I glanced at him. I suppose he had gotten used to the fact he couldn’t compete with his brother, at least not anymore.
The irony is, after Tyler’s speech, Renn said to me under his breath, “I wish my own son felt even half as lucky to have me as a father.”
Self-pity? Yes, I suppose so. Even if you make twenty-five million dollars or more a year, you’re not necessarily going to be happy. What I’ll say about Renn’s son, Billy, is that he wasn’t a bad kid. He was twelve when Renn and I got together, and his sister, Anna, was a year younger. (I thought she was a sweet girl when I knew her, and she probably still is, but she didn’t return my phone calls while I was working on this book.) Anyway, if you’re twelve and your parents are getting divorced, you’re going to be mad at them and at the world. Billy was no exception, but he didn’t take out his anger on the family cat and dog (Squirt and Tuba) or hit his sister or steal cigarettes from the convenience store near his middle school. I always thought that he would become an actor too, but in high school he only tried out for a couple of plays and was cast in small roles that he apparently thought weren’t worth his time. In college he majored in economics, but I don’t think he’s put this degree to use. He’s good at math though, something his father isn’t, which is one reason why he’s been robbed by two different business managers in the course of five years (though both of them were caught—one by Lucy, the other by Renn’s investment broker—and forced to return the money).
A SHORT DETOUR: A FEW NOTES ABOUT ME, YOUR GUIDE ON THIS HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME
I was born in Cary, North Carolina, and for the first ten years of my life, I wanted to be a nurse because one of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Judy, was a nurse. She is one of my favorite people and can play the harmonica and the piano and tried to teach me both, but I couldn’t sit still for long enough to get beyond the practice scales. After that, I wanted to be a teacher, and then a radio broadcaster, either as a deejay or as a producer. After college, though, I couldn’t get a job in radio to save my life or anyone else’s, despite the increasingly short skirts I wore to interviews when I knew the interviewer would be a man. The jobs almost always went to a male candidate, a couple of whom were fired within a month, and then they’d bring me back to interview again and not offer me the job a second time. Eventually, out of fury and desperation, I took a job at an overpriced, mediocre restaurant in Century City as a prep cook before I decided to learn how to cook for real, which required more loans, for culinary school this time, and several angry promises to my father that I would pay him back, which I did, but not all I owed him until I married Renn.
Movies have always been a part of my life, as they are a part of most people’s lives, and because I lived in Los Angeles from the age of eighteen on, they became even more important to me because I would often see movie stars doing the same things that average people did—sitting in traffic jams, eating breakfast at a diner, even, in one case, checking out library books (it was Debra Winger who I saw doing this, or else she had an identical twin). When I started catering for movie studios, I was even more intimately connected to them, but I felt as if there were an invisible wall between me and the actors and more famous directors, one through which I would never be allowed to pass. It’s not like I cried myself to sleep every night thinking about how small my life was compared to the people who were getting top billing (or even middle) in the credits in each production that I catered, but I did feel this sense of isolation and hopelessness at times—my husband’s drug use certainly didn’t help matters—and when Renn noticed me and started coming by the catering van a couple of times a day to talk to me about the places I had traveled (not very many) and the books I had read, I probably would have forfeited ten years of my life to be his mistress, not to mention his wife. Girls from small towns in North Carolina (or anywhere else, for that matter) do not usually end up the wives of famous men. We are taught, tacitly or no, to stay out of trouble, to think kind thoughts and behave with tact and forbearance, to get a good education, and to be sure that we can provide for ourselves if necessary. We are not supposed to talk back or expect too much from life or put on airs. If we do those things, we will surely be putting ourselves in harm’s way. You reap what you sow—this is probably the mantra of all small southern towns, if not northern ones too. I have reaped what I have sown, and this, I suppose, is my cautionary tale.
Q & A
Over the years, a few people have asked me what one thing Renn did while we were together that upset me more than anything else. If you’re going to ask a question like that, you probably aren’t too worried about causing pain because you’re forcing someone to revisit a moment in her life that likely she has tried to forget. Yet if you catch her at the right time, she might actually enjoy this chance to say something unkind about the person who treated her badly.
What was the one thing? Well, there wasn’t just one. Marriages fall apart because eventually there is a critical mass of wrongdoing and petty selfishness that suffocates all of the affection and desire that presumably once existed between the couple. Renn almost never bothered to call me or have someone call on his behalf when he was delayed in meetings or on the set. I can’t remember how many times I cooked us what I hoped would be a dazzling meal but then was forced to eat alone or throw it in the garbage because by the time he came through the door, grouchy and not at all interested in talking to me after his long day at work, the food was cold and congealed and generally unappetizing. And this was when he was in town. For half the time we were married, at least half, he was far away, often on the other side of the planet. I was invited to go with him to a few of his faraway shoots and stay for a week or two, but usually that was when his kids were also invited and he needed me there to look after them.
Some other things he did that won’t win him any trophies:
1. He sometimes went to parties hosted by his movie friends and didn’t invite me along.
2. He wouldn’t even discuss having a child with me. “Out of the question,” he said. “Who’s going to raise the kid? I’m gone a lot and you certainly can’t do it by yourself. You can barely get yourself dressed in the morning.” (An exaggeration. I had bad days once in a while, but they didn’t happen that often.)
3. He hadn’t had a prenup with Lucy, but he did have one with me. He must have known that he would eventually want to dump me too. It wasn’t that the agreement was stingy, but I should have known that if he could foresee the possibility of divorce, he could probably also foresee himself going through with it.
4. He cheated on me. He slept with at least two of his costars, the first when they were off filming in Bordeaux, the second in Lima. These were the two affairs that he admitted to. I’m sure there were more, but I didn’t have proof. The reason I found out about these two tramps was because the one from the Bordeaux shoot called and told me. She was trying to steal Renn for herself, I’m sure, not do me any favors, which is what she had the nerve to claim: “You should know that he’s not a good guy. If he’ll run around on you, you really don’t need that. What self-respecting woman does?” I told her to go to hell. I told her that it wasn’t any of her goddamn business what happened in our marriage because I was the one wearing the ring on my finger, not her.
The tramp from the Lima shoot didn’t call, but she did send a letter to Renn that I intercepted. She was such an idiot; she should have sent it to the studio, not his home address, but I guess she thought that I’d be too lazy to collect our mail each day, let alone open it. I can only imagine the stories Renn told her about me, the two of them bonding over my alleged bouts of depression and how my gray moods must have taken a toll on poor Renn who deserved a strong woman, even if he wasn’t ever home to spend time with her or to talk to her for more than five minutes every few days when he was out of town.
5. He tried to keep his kids from me after he filed for divorce. It was sad for Billy, Anna, and me because we liked each other, for real, and the fact that Renn didn’t want me seeing them anymore, let alone talking to them on the phone, was probably more hurtful than when I had to deal with the two tramps gloating over how he’d f*cked them.
6. He often laughed at me when I mispronounced a word or if I didn’t know things like Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal or that Bora Bora is an island in French Polynesia, not a city in Malaysia. But how many people do know these facts? I graduated cum laude from USC with a degree in communications. I’m not stupid, but there are so many things to know about the world, and God forbid I didn’t know all of the exact same things that Renn knew. Does he know how to make beurre blanc? Does he know that cheesecloth is an important tool when you’re making fruit preserves or Greek yogurt? I’m sure he doesn’t. He was so condescending so many times that it’s a wonder I didn’t dump him before he had a chance to dump me.
7. He left me for another woman. Poetic justice, some will say, considering how he and I got together. Sure, I understand. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t suffer. He didn’t marry her though, probably because she moved to Prague to pursue a career as a sculptor, which seemed pretentious and ridiculous to me at the time, and still does, frankly. She had the money to do it though and not get anxious if her work was awful and didn’t sell, because her father owned a rifle factory in Virginia. Renn met her when he was making a film about the Civil War in the same town where her father’s factory is. After he divorced me, it was only a few months before she moved to Europe and told him that she was going to dump him if he didn’t buy a place in Prague and spend at least a few months of the year there with her. I have to say that I kind of admire her guts, or maybe it was just an air of entitlement. She was only twenty-four at the time and almost model-beautiful and probably had lots of men after her, though I doubt any of them were both famous and rich the way Renn was.
Other questions people (therapists, mainly) have asked:
What one thing did Renn do that made you happier than anything else?
That’s a hard question too. I guess you could say it’s that he noticed me, when there were so many other women (and men) who wanted him to notice them too. He also made it possible for me to quit my job, which I liked well enough while I was doing it, but if you don’t have to work, it’s pretty tempting not to. I started to drink more than I should have though, having so much free time on my hands and no kids to take care of, other than my stepchildren once in a while. But they didn’t need me to take care of them, both of them independent and bright enough to keep themselves busy. I once blamed Renn for my excesses with alcohol, and this got around in an embarrassingly public way, but I don’t drink anymore and haven’t in about a year and a half.
What did you learn about yourself while you were married to him?
One thing I learned is that I don’t do well with uncertainty. This is something my current therapist helped me to figure out. I realize now that most people don’t do very well with uncertainty because the biggest events in our lives, namely, our births and deaths, are out of our control, so in between these two points, we try as hard as we can, almost to the point of insanity (and beyond, in some cases), to control what we can. I’m not a fatalist, but I do think that there are quite a few things that we can’t control, like what time the mail will be delivered or how many dings we’ll get on the car in the parking lot, or why we like raspberries more than strawberries. Actually, many things probably are beyond our control, even the people we’ll fall in love with, but I suppose that if a movie star comes calling, you’re more likely to fall in love with him than the guy bagging your groceries. I suppose what I mean is, I could have been smarter, I could have recognized the odds against long-term happiness when I fell for a movie star. The bagger is probably a safer bet, even if he doesn’t earn much of a living, because for one, he doesn’t have anywhere near the same number of sexual options that a movie star does.
There was never a day or night when I felt truly at ease being Renn Ivins’s wife. I think I must have known from day one that it wouldn’t last, in part because he left someone else for me, which I did feel bad about (I’m not the sort of competitive freak show who thrives on stealing other women’s guys), even though I didn’t ever offer to return him to her. If I were a different kind of woman, all along I might have been able to say to myself, “Just have fun and enjoy the ride while it lasts,” but I’m not that kind of woman. I wish I were, but I’m not.
What have you learned about yourself since the divorce?
I knew myself pretty well by the time Renn and I divorced, but I wasn’t particularly thrilled with what I learned during our marriage, namely that I was often very jealous, insecure, needy, angry, vindictive, afraid. I knew that people everywhere were plagued by these same feelings, but it didn’t matter because I was the one feeling them. That’s like saying, “Don’t be afraid of death because we all die.” No kidding, but that doesn’t really make it any better, does it?
What did Renn spend his money on?
1. He spent it on cars. When we were married, he had a Porsche Spyder like the one James Dean died in, a Jaguar, a silver Mercedes convertible, a Lexus, and a Chevy half-ton pickup for when he felt like pretending he knew how to do home-improvement projects like repairing the cedar deck that led from the sliding glass door off the kitchen to the pool. I think he still has most of those cars, or newer models, along with a Smart car (a gift from the manufacturer—I doubt he ever drives it, but his housekeeper apparently does) and a hybrid Ford Escape. He keeps half of these cars in a separate garage that he rents one town over from his house in the Hollywood Hills.
2. He spent it on his kids. He put something like six or seven million dollars X 2 into trusts for his son and daughter, which they couldn’t access until they turned twenty-one, and I think the most they can take out during any one year is two or three hundred thousand, unless Renn gives them permission to take out more. That’s still a lot of money, and with these trusts earning interest and dividends on the bonds and stocks or whatever Renn set up with his broker, Anna and Billy are set for life.
3. He spent it on his first wife. She gets a lot of money from him every year because she has never remarried. Something like two or three million, probably, on top of the twenty million in property and liquid assets that she got at the time of their divorce. She doesn’t need it either, being a doctor who probably earns at least half a million on her own annually.
4. He spent it on food. He goes to the French Laundry up in Napa Valley as often as he can, which is about three or four times a year. He goes to Chez Panisse almost as often, which, like the visit to the French Laundry, requires a flight up to San Francisco and a limo driver or else he rents a car and drives himself and whichever woman is accompanying him. He also has an excellent chef named Spike Light (really) who, since our divorce, cooks his meals whenever he’s in L.A. and not dining out. He took this chef with him from time to time when he was doing shoots in Mexico or other places not too far away, but eventually he had to stop because the chef is married and his wife got angry when he left town for more than a few days, not trusting him to keep it zipped up or who knows what.
5. He spent it on staying (or at least looking) young—personal trainers, nutritionists, collagen injections, facials, Botox, dietary supplements, very expensive hair and skin products, hair and eyebrow stylists, massage therapists, private yoga and Feldenkrais classes, acupuncturists, aromatherapists, fashion consultants, karate and capoeira instructors, mud spas, mineral baths, protein powders, spirulina, manicures, and yes, pedicures.
6. He spent it on real estate. He owns vacation homes in Palm Springs and on Sanibel Island in Florida. He also owns a huge house in L.A. (where I lived with him after Lucy moved out with their two kids), a three-bedroom condo in New York City (with a twenty-eight-hundred-dollar monthly assessment, which he pays whether he’s there or not), and a two-bedroom apartment in Rome.
7. He spent it on clothes. He likes Armani, as cliched as it is for a movie star to like this designer. He also likes Ralph Lauren for casual clothes, and someone named Manfred G, who is a designer in New York who “creates” silk neckties and socks, charging something like five hundred dollars for his boring, monochromatic ties and two hundred for a pair of silk-and-wool socks.
8. He didn’t spend it on drugs, nor did he spend it on strippers, as far as I know. He did give some of his money to charity every year, and he was generous with friends and family. I think he has probably “loaned” his brother Phil at least a million dollars by now. Renn put his nephew Tyler through college, and gave him money for a car, clothes, books, and spring-break trips, all of the same things he gave to Billy and Anna.
9. He spent it on reserving a seat on a Space Shuttle trip to the moon. (Just kidding.)
10. He spent it on an astrologer. (Not kidding—at least once a month, either in person or over the phone, depending on where he was working. It cost five hundred an hour or something exorbitant like this. Renn might not be a drunk or a druggie like my first ex-husband, but he certainly has his expensive addictions.)
MISCELLANEOUS BITS, BUTS, & MAYBES*
Some things Renn said:
1. On 9/11, which is about the same time our marriage collapsed: “How could this not have happened to us? We barge around the world with our guns loaded and our dicks in our hands and expect people to offer us their virginal daughters and oil reserves, but not everyone wants to do what we tell them to.”
He also said, after the bombs started to fall on Afghanistan: “If I were a younger man, I’d go to Kabul and teach drama classes for a year.”
I told him that they needed volunteers to rebuild their hospitals and sewer lines and restore their power grid more than they needed someone to teach Shakespeare or David Mamet or whoever he would have taught. He was offended by this and told me that I was a philistine, a word I had to look up later. But I still thought my comment made sense—before opening their copies of Romeo and Juliet, the Afghanis would need functioning toilets and lights to read by, wouldn’t they?
I also didn’t see why he had to be a young man to teach in Afghanistan. He could go at forty-three as easily as someone who was twenty-three. It’s not like I wanted him to go, but by that time, I was so tired of his lame excuses for not doing the things he bragged he might do that I wouldn’t let him coast by with this whopper.
2. “I understand why people want to be vegetarians, but who do they think they’re fooling? We’re carnivores, and most of us have the pointy canines to prove it.”
He said this during a discussion he was having with his daughter about her decision to become a vegetarian during her freshman year of high school. She didn’t stick for very long with her no-meat diet, and when she returned to her old ways, Renn gave her a twenty-pound box of Omaha steaks, which she wouldn’t accept, furious with what she perceived as his gloating. “I told you that I’m only eating chicken and fish, not red meat. Ever,” she fumed. I’m sure she meant it, but I’m also pretty sure she did go back to eating red meat again. By that time Renn and I were divorced, so I don’t know what he did when he found out that she was eating steak again. In case it’s not clear, he likes to tease people, but he’s not a big fan of being teased himself.
3. “I’m an ass man and a tits man. Why should I have to choose between the two?” Indeed. The usual laws of supply and demand do not apply to movie stars.
4. “The reason I’m hired for the best roles is because I am the best. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying this, because it’s true.”
He said these modest words after Parachute Point debuted (his crappiest movie, worse than The Writing on the Wall, if you ask me. Parachute is totally cheesy, and the boy who played his son was smarmy with a capital S) when being interviewed by a movie critic for the L.A. Times. I’m not sure why Renn thought he could get away with saying something as self-aggrandizing as this and not be made fun of or lose some of his fans and industry allies, not to mention his friends. His publicist had to perform God knows how many unholy acts to convince the journalist not to publish this quote.
5. “I love Monet. I don’t care what those a*sholes think. If they could paint like he could, they wouldn’t be such stuck-up pricks about his water lilies or cathedrals or dying wife.”
At a fund-raiser for the Getty where he donated a big wad of cash to their endowment, he was almost apoplectic when he saw a couple of museum officials rolling their eyes after he said that his favorite artist was Monet. “Isn’t it possible that they were rolling their eyes over something else?” I asked him, trying to make him feel better. His reply: “I know you can be pretty f*cking dense sometimes, but I think this one wins the grand prize.”
6. “I’m not a bully. Bullies beat people up and can’t control their tempers. I’ve never been like that in my life.”
He knew that he was being pretty selective in his definition of bully. I told him that he was forgetting about the people who are emotionally and verbally abusive, which, needless to say, I thought described him pretty well. He said that all married people argue sometimes, and it wasn’t my job to rate everything he said by some asinine bully scale that I’d gotten from watching Oprah or listening to Loveline or whatever sorry-ass bullshit I squandered my time on when he wasn’t home. (Oprah, by the way, adores him, and by then he had been on her show at least four or five times.)
7. “If one more person stops me and says how my movies got them to quit drinking or gambling or f*cking their brother’s wife, I’m seriously going to kill them.”
We were at the Grove when he said this, late for a birthday party for Martin Landau, I think it was, and were trying to find a suitable gift. Renn liked shopping, but if he wasn’t in the mood to talk to fans, he knew better than to go to the mall thirty minutes before we were supposed to be at a surprise party ten miles away.
*Most of the above was excised from the published version.
The books on his nightstand:
1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What California guy or wannabe hippie of a certain age and social class doesn’t pretend to like this book?
2. Women by Charles Bukowski. I didn’t read this novel until a few years after we were divorced. It helped me to see why Renn treated me the way that he sometimes did. With this being one of his favorite books . . . well, read it for yourself and see if you too aren’t worried about a guy who thinks this is the best thing since clean water.
3. The Stranger (both a French and an English version). He knew passages of this book by heart, and for some reason, he identified with Meursault, Camus’s strange murderer/anti-hero, who hoped at the novel’s end that he would be greeted by cries of hatred from the people who had come to witness his execution. I didn’t get this, and Renn thought that I was ignorant for not understanding what Camus was doing.
“He’s finally starting to feel something at the end,” he said. “After being indifferent to everything before now.”
“But why cries of hatred? That’s terrible,” I said. “You actually identify with him?”
“Yes, I do. It doesn’t matter if they’re cries of love or hatred,” he snapped. “The point is, he feels something after a long time of feeling nothing. He’s lucky. It’s a story of redemption, ultimately.”
I didn’t think so, and still don’t. Needless to say, I don’t have to discuss it with him any longer.
4. Romeo and Juliet. One of his dreams when we were together was to make a modern-day version of this beloved (but tiresomely everywhere) play in Paris with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with Juliet as a lonely cashier at a Parisian movie house and Romeo as an usher who for years paints Juliet’s portrait from photos he takes of her unobserved. I thought this made Romeo seem pretty creepy, but Renn didn’t at all. “He’s a frustrated romantic, like so many of us,” he said.
“Not you,” I said, trying not to sound as unhappy as I felt. “You can have whoever you want.”
He opened his mouth to argue but then thought better of it.
5. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. His children’s favorite book when they were little. It was one of my favorites too. He told me that he read it to Anna and Billy at least ten times while they were growing up. I asked him to read it to me too, and he did not long after we were married. He used different voices for the major characters, and the fact that he bothered with this, that he took his time reading it, performing it, really, using all of his considerable actor’s skills, was probably the single sweetest thing he ever did for me.
Causes he is interested in and/or donates to, in no particular order:**
1. PETA (because of Anna, not because he is against people wearing fur or eating animals, but I do think he genuinely feels bad about the animals that live their short lives on factory farms)
2. VoL (Victims of Landmines—losing a limb is one of his phobias)
3. GiRLS (Girls in Real-Life Situations—an organization devoted to finding and freeing girls from child prostitution. A worthy cause, obviously, but the director, Tamara Snow, is someone Renn f*cked while he was still married to me, I’m about 98 percent sure)
4. HHOP (HIV Hospice of Pasadena—he had a close friend who died there, a guy he met in college who tried to convince Renn that he was bi when they were still in school together, but I don’t think Renn ever fell for it)
5. Cows for Life (because Renn has a soft spot for Wisconsin—both of his parents are from there. CFL is based in Madison, and their mission is to convince all dairy farmers to stop using bovine growth hormones on their herds)
6. SOCC (Save Our California Coast—I think the name probably speaks for itself. I’m not sure if Renn had an affair with anyone who works for them, but I wouldn’t be surprised)
7. WWF (World Wildlife Fund, not the World Wrestling Federation. He loves the earth. He really does. Especially when he can ride around on it in a Land Rover on an African savannah)
8. Himself (for the promotion and upkeep of his Movie Star Lifestyle)
**Some of the above was also excised from the published version.
Not all of it was bad:
He wasn’t selfish or condescending the whole time we were together; otherwise I would probably have left him before he left me. He had many soft spots, gentle habits, and generous moments. He loved his parents and brother, and both of his children, and treated them all well. He was also curious about the world and felt compassion and interest in people whose lives were very different from his. I don’t think he would ever have been interested in me if he weren’t willing to give everyone a fair chance at earning his attention. But this democratic spirit often made me jealous because I never felt like he was fully there, even when we were alone together. He was always preoccupied by some project or half-baked hope or why someone important was taking so long to call him back. His life seemed to me, the outsider housewife, to be full of suspense, of secret dealings and intrigue—it wasn’t just his movies that were filled with these things. He seemed to have so many ideas and sometimes woke in the middle of the night to make a phone call or scribble in a notebook that he kept on his nightstand, a habit that woke me up because he would always click on the bedside lamp.
Regarding Monet, he also loved Modigliani, Ed Paschke, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud. He didn’t own much art, though, which seemed a strange omission, considering how many art books he had and how much money too. He could have bought some interesting things, and there are plenty of good galleries in L.A., not to mention in many of the other places he has traveled. He had a framed charcoal drawing of two small monkeys embracing that his daughter and one of her friends drew for him that he loved, though I thought it was kind of silly. Monkeys? Why? The friend, J, had a big crush on him and used to show up at our house in low-cut blouses and no bra and take every chance she could to bend over in front of him. I think she hated me. Needless to say, the feeling was mutual.
For as long as I was with him, it felt like I had to be constantly on the lookout for other women who were trying to get too close to him. It was both exhausting and futile because he wanted the pretty ones to get too close to him. I realized later that basically every straight man wants this. I am a jealous person. I think most people are jealous, if they’re being honest. But we are forced to swallow this poison alone, and sometimes it corrodes the soul. (Yes, Renn, if you’re reading this, I do love melodrama.)
One good thing is that I wasn’t yet thirty-six when the divorce went through. It could have been worse; I could have been his first wife’s age, or even older. Even though I’m not an actress or someone who desperately needs her looks to pay the bills, it seems to me that the worst thing a woman can do is grow older. I still had several years left to have a baby, but I ended up not having one. Going out with other men after Renn, especially at first, was very strange. I thought that I needed and wanted an ordinary guy, but in truth, I wanted someone more unique. Even though Renn was ungenerous and very harsh with me by the end, I couldn’t help but compare the men I dated to him. They weren’t as good-looking or as interesting or as charming or wealthy. He is a man who has everything other men want. Absolutely everything, and if he doesn’t, he can quickly acquire it. This is not the kind of man a sane woman should want to date. He is too impossible, knowing himself to be better than everyone else.