“But it’s mine,” I whispered.
She stood and crossed over to sit next to me, pressed her knee against mine. I’d grown skinnier than her, I noticed; the pills I was taking were suppressing my appetite. “So you keep doing it. We don’t need to do everything together, you know. You can go out there and be your own star. Not just one-half of a pair. You can be you.”
* * *
—
We killed our contract a few weeks later, much to Harriet’s dismay. On the Double died its untimely death, immediately relegated to the ash bin of forgotten kids’ TV series. I helped my sister pack her things and drove her and my mother back to Santa Barbara. I even spent the summer with them there, tanning on the beach and getting pedicures and going to bonfires with some of Elli’s old high school friends. They were nicer to us now that we were legitimate stars.
When the school year began, I drove back to Los Angeles, started college, and began going out for auditions alone. I ran around the city like a madwoman, juggling scripts and homework, using Adderall and Ritalin and the occasional line of cocaine to stay focused, then relying on booze and Valium to relax at the end of the day. I was finally living alone, far from the watchful eyes of my family, which meant that I could party as much as I wanted without getting the side-eye from my sister. And since I didn’t have to hide my habits anymore, I let them balloon to fill up the empty space in my life where Elli had once been.
Before I was even legally old enough to drink, I’d become a full-blown addict.
* * *
—
The thing about addiction stories is that they are all the same, and they are boring. God knows I’ve heard enough of them to know. I’ve heard them at AA meetings and NA meetings, in group therapy circles at residential rehab centers and in books that my rehab counselors gave me to read. I’ve sat over cups of coffee in darkened cafés and let my new recovery friends spill their tales of woe to me, just as I’ve spilled mine, both of us hoping that our confessions might cement a new intimacy that would somehow keep us both sober.
It rarely did. And then when we found each other again, on the other side of yet another relapse, mostly what I’d feel was shame, to be repeating the same sad story that everyone had already heard before, hoping that this time it might finally culminate in a happy ending.
So, at the risk of boring you utterly, I will make my own addiction story brief.
At thirteen, as you already know, I took my first Adderall.
At fifteen, at a Grammy preparty, I had my first drink (a margarita, puckery and sweet, which remained my go-to cocktail for the next fifteen years).
At sixteen, with Nick, I smoked pot for the first time.
At eighteen, now in college, I turned to ecstasy and coke, which I consumed at the nightclubs that turned a blind eye to the underage stars who drank themselves into stupors on their dance floors every weekend.
After that, there was some trendy dabbling with hallucinogens—acid and mushrooms, mostly—but these were never my thing. I didn’t like the way they made me turn inward.
I tried heroin only once. Needles scared me, and something about the idea of heroin felt desperate to me. Heroin was the treacherous terrain of addicts and street dwellers; the drug that would end with me dead or living under a bridge, I told myself. As long as I didn’t touch that, I had nothing to worry about. (Irony, rich.)
Instead, in my twenties, as my career started to go into free fall, I turned back to my original love: pills.
This time around, instead of pills that woke me up and made me feel alert, I turned to pills that blunted me and made me feel dreamy. I preferred opioids: Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet. I washed these down with vast quantities of alcohol, a daily roller-coaster ride that began each morning with a wash of euphoric calm, ascended into a giddy high, and then brought me crashing down into total obliteration. Most days I woke up not remembering most of what had happened after ten the previous evening. I didn’t mind that one bit.
* * *
—
My career, you see, had not survived the Great Cleaving. No one had warned me that twins, while a valuable commodity as children, stop being so appealing as grown-ups. (Unless you’re a porn star. There’s no shortage of demand for twincest vids, judging by the producers who approached me.) As adults, acting twins are a freak show, doomed to supporting roles in fantasy films and family comedies. Even when there is a dramatic role for identical twins, they’re usually just played by the same actor, a famous name making a play for that Oscar trophy.
There are even fewer parts for an actress whose main claim to fame is that she was a twin but isn’t anymore. You are essentially half a person.
Harriet took me out to lunch at Barney Greengrass not long after I came back to Los Angeles alone that fall. “I’m not going to lie to you, it’s going to be tough,” she warned me. She picked at her smoked fish, moving it left and right across the plate. “We need to rebrand you. Make everyone forget that Elli ever existed. It’s going to be like your career up until this point didn’t really happen.”
“I can change my name if that helps. I’ll be Samantha instead of Sam.” I looked at her hopefully. If anyone could figure out the situation, it was Harriet, who in her four decades in Hollywood had surely seen it all.
Harriet sighed, pushed her reading glasses back up onto her nose. She’d grown thin, dark circles under her eyes, her signature smoking jacket billowing around her torso. “We need to go deeper than that. Who are you as an actress, if you’re not playing opposite your sister? You can’t play adorable twin anymore. So what’s the story you plan to sell instead? Girl next door? Intellectual smarty-pants? Strong-willed badass?” She eyed me over the rims of her glasses. “Party girl?”
I blushed. The previous weekend, I’d gotten obliterated at a nightclub with a group of young actors and had been papped falling down on a sidewalk in Hollywood, my lace underwear visible under my hiked-up miniskirt. The photos showed up on TMZ, with the caption “Logan Twin Loses It Again.” “That was a one-time thing,” I lied.
“No it wasn’t.” Harriet coughed, an alarming wheeze that escalated into an uncontrollable hack. She pressed a napkin to her lips, and it came away pink. “I’m not your mother, so I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m not even going to get into the addiction question of it all, though I’ll tell you I know what’s at the end of this road you’re going down, and it’s not pretty. But practically speaking, you should know that casting agents pay attention to these things. They read the gossip pages, precisely so they know what they’re up against. Reliability is an asset, Sam. You want me to help you do this, you’re going to have to help yourself.”
* * *
—
I tried to follow her advice, I really did. I went home after that meeting determined to sober up, stop going out, stay straight and focused on my career. I stayed away from nightclubs, buckled down on homework, doubled up on auditions.
Who did I want to be as an actress? Harriet’s question clung to me. A star, of course, but maybe one who did the occasional theater stint. A Scarlett Johansson, or a Natalie Portman—the kind of actress who would open a blockbuster movie and also get an arty black-and-white portrait in The New York Times Magazine Great Performers issue. I signed up for a Shakespeare class and a course about silent-film Hollywood, thinking to myself that Harriet would be impressed with how serious I was becoming.