I never got a chance to tell her. Seven weeks after our lunch, I woke up to a headline in Variety: “Legendary Agent Harriet Sunday Dies of Complications from Lung Cancer.” It had been a fatal pulmonary thromboembolism. She hadn’t even told her clients she was sick.
Elli came down for the funeral and we clung to each other at Harriet’s grave, and then she went back to Santa Barbara to take finals and I completely fell apart. I felt untethered, as if all the responsible eyes on me had vanished, and now that I was unobserved, I didn’t have a clue who I should be anymore.
I began doing a tequila shot with my coffee in the morning, and by the time the end of my freshman year rolled around I was generally loaded by midafternoon.
I found a new agent, a thirtysomething guy who wore ironic socks, drove a Porsche, and talked a good game but kept calling me Sammy on our phone calls. Without a true champion, the auditions started to shrivel up almost immediately. I was a good actress, but not so good that I stood out; and my reputation—as a twin, as a child actor, as a party girl—preceded me, an anchor I couldn’t unlodge without the goodwill granted to one of “Harriet’s girls.” I booked the occasional part, mostly in indie films that never made it past the film festival circuit, or guest appearances in short-lived television comedies. I even managed to get a sizable “best friend” role in a superhero franchise film, which seemed like it might be my big breakthrough, except that the movie bombed at the box office and ended up being a liability on my résumé.
I managed a few years at USC, but all those years of low-demand school on set of our shows had left me with lackluster study habits; plus, I missed too many classes for jobs and auditions, so my grades were dismal. Eventually I just gave up and dropped out to “focus on my career,” as I told my family. But there wasn’t much of a career to focus on, just an endless parade of auditions that seemed to lead nowhere even as I watched my acting peers sprint past me and off into the distance.
It’s hard to describe the humiliation that comes with the dawning awareness that you have already peaked by your early twenties; that, in fact, your career high had come and gone before you even graduated high school. Your ego shrinks with each fresh rejection, until all that’s left is a peanut of hard, bitter self-doubt. As the jobs got smaller and smaller, I could see the endgame, and it was no longer black-and-white portraiture. It was obsolescence.
I filled the void with alcohol and pills, which took the sting out of my empty days. But that meant I was partying too much, and the wicked hangovers (combined with a growing sense of futility) led to a few too many missed auditions. I was blackballed by casting agents because of this, and by twenty-six my career was essentially over other than the occasional role in a low-budget horror film.
Somehow I’d eked out a living without having to think much about the state of my bank account. Even if the indies and the bit parts didn’t pay well, I still had the syndication checks from To the Maxx trickling in every few months. But as the years passed, the four-figure check I’d come to count on became a three-figure check, and then two, as the reruns dried up. Elli and I had been paid generously for On the Double, but even a seven-figure bank account dwindles quickly when you’re not replenishing it.
Especially with a habit like mine.
By my mid-twenties, I was spending six figures a year on this habit—pills for twenty to forty dollars a pop, a dozen a day, plus a similar number of fifteen-dollar cocktails when I went barhopping each night. An average day might cost me five hundred dollars. Add in the cost of an upscale residential rehab program—four rounds, at thirty to forty thousand per stay—plus the two-hundred-an-hour counselors and therapists to help me get to “the root of my dependencies,” and I spent a cool million dollars on my addictions over the course of the decade.
By the time I realized that I was broke, I was in a hole so deep that it felt like I might never climb out again. Instead of curbing my habit—or doing something logical, like considering a whole new career trajectory—I started selling everything of value that I owned to supplement my increasingly meager acting income. First, the small condo that I’d bought in West Hollywood at age nineteen. Then my designer clothes—straight to consignment. My Porsche, my midcentury modern furniture, a portrait that a now-famous photographer once took of me and my sister: all gone. I sold everything I had, right down to my plasma and my hair, stopping just shy of selling my body on the streets of Hollywood.
* * *
—
The big question for any addict is why. Yes, there are biological factors, genes passed down, an ancestral weakness in the DNA, and in my case these were easy to pinpoint: I had alcoholic grandparents on both sides, and my mother always did love her wine a bit more than she probably should. Addiction can also be blamed on the neurodevelopmental damage that comes from childhood experiences; and surely becoming a child actor so young—living my life as a performance for adult approval while divorced from “normal” friendships with my peers—did its psychological damage on me. The therapists that I went to told me that I had become addicted to being the center of attention, and when that disappeared I looked for other ways to replicate the high that I’d once gotten from fame.
In other words, I’d destroyed myself by trying to perpetually remain the teenage ingenue in the silver dress, flashbulbs popping, the star of my own life.
If you ask me, though, I turned to intoxicants because I was lonely. Because the most essential part of me had been severed from me—my Elli, my twin, my other half—and there was no one to replace her with. I’d never had real friends, only transients and sycophants and employees, or the kids who passed through my set on their way to their own. I’d never much bothered with them because I had Elli; I didn’t need them. So by the time I struck out on my own, I’d honestly forgotten how to make friends. I still felt an itchy need for companionship, like a phantom limb—I knew I was too alone—but mostly what I wanted was Elli. Opioids and alcohol paved over that hole, smoothed it out until it was shallow, a barely noticeable dent. As long as I remained high, following the party crowd from bar to nightclub to afterparty, I was fine.
I didn’t blame my sister for the path that my life had taken without her. Would things have been any different if she’d stayed, and we’d watched our novelty twin act fade away into bit parts in children’s movies? Probably not. Maybe, though…maybe if she’d been there to prop me up, I wouldn’t have fallen so low.
But that kind of conjecture is pointless. If I’ve learned nothing else from years of rehab, it’s that the person responsible for your addiction is ultimately always yourself.
12
IT HAD NOW BEEN six days since I arrived in Santa Barbara and I’d said I was only going to stay a long weekend, but no one seemed particularly concerned about the fact that I was still there. Probably because the minute I left they would have to start changing Charlotte’s Pull-Ups themselves. The way I saw it, my ongoing presence was a sign that things with my sister were decidedly not right—that she had not, as my mother insisted she would, figured out her shit and come back to retrieve her daughter. And yet my mother’s capacity for intentional blindness was breathtaking. Behind his morning newspaper, my father was looking more gray and drawn by the day—he understood, surely, that something had gone sideways—but my mother’s chirpy positivity was like a bulldozer, paving him under.
“So what do my girls have planned today?” My mother was buzzing around the kitchen, spooning chia seeds into coconut milk, squeezing lemon into her green tea. I sat next to Charlotte at the breakfast table, cutting bananas into coins that the toddler shoved into her mouth with slimy fists.
“First the park,” I said. “Then maybe we’ll go to the aquarium.”
My mom brightened. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”