On the last day of production, at the very hotel where the cast and crew were staying, Kim and I ambled around the pool, shooting a scene where Doc McCoy and his wife, Carol, are reunited after his prison term in a Mexican hellhole. When they called “Cut!” on the last take, Kim pushed me in the pool. Everyone laughed and then much of the crew jumped in after me. That night, we held a party at the hotel bar. Everyone showed up and got drunk, and Kim and I could finally share a smile about how the two spoiled monsters in Susan Lyne’s Premiere magazine article managed to shoot a picture where everyone had a good time. All the more reason it was so hard to go back to LA to face Kim’s ongoing problems.
Going home meant facing a mountain of appellate and bankruptcy court filings. I wanted to continue the feeling of hope and positivity that the Arizona trip had fostered, even slightly. So I went to Tiffany’s in Beverly Hills and bought Kim a ring. One afternoon, I sat in our backyard with Kim’s sister Ashley and her husband, Joe. Joe was a quiet, shy Southerner and one of the most decent and easygoing guys I’ve ever met. I had told Joe and Ashley of my plan. Neither of them endorsed it and for different reasons. Ashley knew Kim was cursed in her romantic relationships. Joe joked that it was the men who married into the family who were cursed. I brought up the subject of marriage to Kim infrequently. When I did, I sensed alternately that she was enthusiastic or that I was putting a saddle on a wild horse. I thought my idea of getting married was a chance to start over, albeit through that most traditional of commitments. Ashley just looked at me sweetly and sympathetically, as if to say, “One can never tell with Kim.”
Undaunted, I drove Kim to Taft High School at the foot of the hills along Ventura Boulevard, where we would often run on the track. As we walked along the track, there were kids playing soccer while others jogged past us. Did she see the proposal coming? I couldn’t tell. When I asked her to marry me, believing at that moment that, united, we could face her mounting difficulties, she seemed genuinely confused. She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. She was, to say the least, overwhelmed by all the turns her life had taken.
Choosing to propose directly on the heels of the court case was, in hindsight, bad timing. My tendency to want to fix everything, and my belief that I can, got the better of me. Was this poor kid from Massapequa now prepared to make someone else’s troubles disappear by supplying the necessary funding? Was I confusing pity with love? Nonetheless, we were married in August of that year. About a hundred friends and family members came. The wedding was held at the home of a friend in East Hampton, on the beach. Naturally, I made all of the arrangements.
The term “fugue state” best describes the remainder of 1993 and all of 1994. Kim almost never worked. When I went on location, she was less inclined than ever to visit me. It seemed like the only laughs we had, the only closeness I actually detected, was during the big Northridge earthquake in January of 1994. The earthquake was the quintessential California rite of passage for me. There were long lines everywhere as San Fernando Valley homeowners struggled to stock up on everything from groceries to gasoline. I’ll never forget these seemingly insignificant, flimsy metal straps that held a hot water heater in place and how I scoured the Valley to buy one. One afternoon, when all the gas lines had been turned off in our neighborhood, ruling out the possibility of cooking at home, I found us a hot meal from a local Italian restaurant that had a generator. When I walked in with the food, it was a scene out of one of those movies where the survivors of a plane crash are rescued in the snowy mountains. I was the hero just by showing up with pasta and a salad.
I went to New Orleans in 1994 to shoot Heaven’s Prisoners with the wonderful Mary Stuart Masterson, who, as Kim seemed to recede more and more, I probably fell in love with while we were shooting. Teri Hatcher, by no means anyone’s first choice for the role of Eric Roberts’s wife, turned out to be tough and brave. (I always enjoy when an actor comes to set and ends up changing your mind about them.) Kim came down once, for a weekend, then flew back to LA to figure out how to get out of the hole she was in. When I was home, appellate lawyers and bankruptcy lawyers called the house regularly, pleading for direction regarding Kim’s case. Kim wouldn’t take their calls, so the responsibility fell to me. Two or three times a week, lawyers asked me for certain direction or approvals, most of which meant more money in fees. Although, eventually, Kim’s verdict was reversed on appeal, the path to that ruling was agonizing.
On New Year’s Day 1995, on the front page of the Sunday business section, the New York Times ran an article entitled “The Basinger Bankruptcy Bomb” about powerful people who had sidestepped significant debt through strategic bankruptcy filings. In it, Kim was portrayed as a capricious, irresponsible woman who flagrantly exploited bankruptcy law, living extravagantly in spite of a pile of bills she refused to pay. (Remember, the verdict was ultimately overturned, providing a textbook example of the kind of case that bankruptcy protection was designed for.) The writer of the article, private investigators later uncovered, lived in Texas, had never come to New York, and had never seen my home in New York or Kim’s home in LA, both of which she described as either “lavish” or a “mansion.” She was wrong on both counts.
After reading the article, Kim vibrated with anger. She spent the day on the phone with her lawyers, wondering what she had to do to catch a break from all of the misrepresentations of both the case and her in the press. That very evening, we were scheduled to fly to Lima and then on to the Peruvian rain forest to shoot a documentary for Turner Broadcasting, but Kim declared that the trip was off. Just the slightest criticism in the press could set her off, and this piece was unfair and inaccurate in several ways, so much so that her attorneys wrote a rebuttal that the Times printed a week later. As we headed to the airport, Kim was brimming over with embarrassment and indignation.
I spent the morning screaming at Kim’s lawyers about how I wanted to kill the Times reporter, perhaps also sensing that all of this wasn’t very good for me either. Kim only sat and glared at me. Yet, somehow, we managed to get in the car and head to the airport to shoot the film, which was about the illegal exportation of exotic birds. The trip up the Tambopata River to the Tambopata Research Center, slightly west of the Bolivian border, was an awkward, uncomfortable experience. The week we spent in mosquito-netted lean-tos with the legendary documentarian Robert Drew, his wife, Anne, and our crew was not what I had envisioned. Our time away from the noise and vulgarity of the US media, however, turned out to be the thing we needed to begin to breathe again.