Chapter 37
“Well, I don’t,” he retorted, walking off.
Increasingly, I felt out of my element. I didn’t know how to relate to people of such magnitude and was overwhelmed.
Demi was talking about casting Bruce Willis as Scarpetta’s investigative sidekick Pete Marino.
I was excited but unable to shake anxiety and dread.
I began seeing a psychiatrist in Richmond and she suggested I try the antidepressant Prozac.
That proved to be a near-fatal mistake. I couldn’t calm down and began drinking more.
It was like pouring gasoline on a fire. Demi began asking when she could see my screenplay, and I was increasingly frantic.
That December my father and Rita joined Betsy Mikell and a few of my other friends at my rental house in Malibu.
Spending a few days with Dad didn’t help my mood.
Midday my film agent Diane Cairns called and said she’d finished reading my first draft of the screenplay.
She asked me to meet for dinner at Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica.
I was ecstatic but scared. I knew I should hire a limousine to take me there.
But I wasn’t thinking right. The Prozac made me more impulsive and reckless.
I couldn’t seem to make intelligent decisions.
I decided to drive myself and got to the restaurant fine.
I didn’t drink much, still feeling the effects of the Bloody Marys.
Of course, I shouldn’t have had any alcohol at all but indulged in a few liqueurs.
I also didn’t eat much of my pasta with marinara sauce, taking most of it with me in a takeout container.
Leaving the restaurant between 9 and 10 p.m., I merged back onto the Pacific Coast Highway.
It was pitch-black and still raining. The last thing I remember is being confused by taillights getting closer on my right.
I thought I must be in the wrong lane. I slowed down, and the taillights kept getting closer.
I didn’t realize that what I saw was an abandoned van pulled off on the shoulder.
I slammed into it at an angle, my car flipping several times.
I landed on the other side of the highway, the roof caved in.
I recall hanging upside down before slipping out of the seat belt.
Blood dripped, and I thought, I’ve ruined my head.
I’d find out later the inside of the car was splattered with pasta and marinara sauce.
The screenplay of Cruel and Unusual disappeared, as did my Oakley sunglasses.
Later, more images would come back to me.
A firefighter in a yellow slicker asked in a loud voice if I could hear him, and I answered “yes.”
Cut out of the car with hydraulic tools, I was med flighted to the UCLA hospital. I suffered a concussion, a sprained neck, and lacerations to my face and head. I woke up while a doctor was stitching my scalp as Irene Brafstein sat nearby watching, her oxygen tank parked by her leg.
A former tutor to child stars, she was my best friend in L.A. She explained that I’d given someone her number as my emergency contact. I didn’t remember that. She said I’d informed the doctors they could take all my organs. I wouldn’t need them anymore. I didn’t remember that either.
“You were saying a lot of crazy stuff,” she said.
The clothing I’d worn in the accident was returned at the hospital.
It was surreal seeing my bloody Chanel shirt and Escada blazer that had been cut off me by the rescue squad.
Betsy flew to L.A. to stay with me in Malibu, and my first night home Demi called.
I told her what had happened, and she was incredulous.
“That was you?” she asked.
She said several of her bodyguards had been stuck in traffic because of the accident.
When they drove past the mangled white Mercedes, they were certain the driver had to be dead.
I’ve often wondered if I was and came back.
I remember an out-of-body experience, watching firefighters extricate me.
It was as if I were hovering over the wreck.
I returned to Richmond with stitches, and bits of glass still in my scalp.
Charged with DUI, I wondered what was going on that I would do anything so stupid.
I was beside myself. How wasteful after all I’d been given.
Just when it seemed my life was everything I’d dreamed of, I almost killed myself.
Was it intentional? I needed to figure that out before it was too late.
Demi and I had another visit scheduled at the FBI Academy.
We were supposed to attend a multiday course on profiling and criminal investigation.
I told her not to come. I said I needed to figure out why I wasn’t dead.
The last thing on my mind was the movie.
She wanted to see the script and I said no.
Maybe it was best if she didn’t play Scarpetta after all.
I didn’t have a contract, nothing but a verbal agreement.
I called my film agent and said the deal was off.
When the head of Columbia studios, Michael Nathanson, rang my house, I wouldn’t take his call.
Columbia threatened to sue me, and I said to go ahead.
Nothing came of it. But I wasn’t thinking right, my neck and head hurting like crazy.
I kept falling asleep without warning as if I had narcolepsy.
I owe Demi an apology and have told her that.
What happened to the movie wasn’t her fault, and to this day I feel bad about how much of her time I wasted.
I can’t imagine how aggravated she must have been.
I didn’t realize it then, but I wasn’t myself and shouldn’t have been making major decisions.
Looking back, I don’t think I was ready to turn over Scarpetta to her or anyone.
“If I did, I’d be giving my power away,” I noted in my journal at the time.
On January 19, 1993, I left for the FBI Academy.
Demi was supposed to be with me, but I’d blown her off.
I went alone and could scarcely think straight.
I stayed at Quantico several days, living in the dorm just as I’d always done, speaking at a banquet on January 21.
I wasn’t cogent and made my talk very short.
“I just thanked everyone for everything and briefly relayed what I have been through and why I was absent for most of the course,” I journaled at the time.
I told my audience of FBI agents that had I not been in a loaner Mercedes sedan I most likely would have been killed.
“This is the near-death experience you hear about but hope you’ll never have,” I said, adding that “it has been good to be here at Quantico with my buddies.”
The entries I made in my journal at the time don’t resemble my handwriting.
I still can’t decipher what I was trying to say in some entries.
After returning home, I woke up one morning and felt as if I’d had a stroke.
Incoherent, I was staggering and couldn’t remember anything.
Rushed to the hospital, I twitched so badly I had to be sedated for an MRI.
There was no evidence of a brain injury, and the worst of the symptoms quickly subsided.
Throughout it all I was talking to Faye Dunaway.
Incredibly supportive, she’d call to see how I was doing and agreed it would be wise for me to check myself into a treatment center. I asked my office to set it up.
While I struggled to recover, I spent much of my time in my bathrobe.
I slept a lot and was chronically agitated.
After a battery of tests, there was no evidence of permanent damage, but I was scared.
My friend Sue Lewis stopped by daily to check on me.
Finally, I called Ruth Graham and said I needed her.
She stayed in my Windsor Farms house the weekend of March 12, 1993. A decade had passed since her biography came out, and we weren’t the same people with each other. We were more like equals.
“We are better friends than we’ve ever been,” I wrote in my journal during her visit.
We had as much fun as ever, shopping, and raiding my closet playing dress-up. Ruth and I were about the same size, and we put on Escada suits and neckties to go out to dinner with Betsy. We went to Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and Ruth was the designated driver.
She handled my Mercedes 500E like Richard Petty, and I was reminded of her reputation when I was a kid riding my bicycle in Montreat. The neighbors would warn, “Watch out for Mrs. Graham.” She was notorious for always being in a hurry, flying along the hilly roads, careening around curves.
Not long after her visit to Richmond I stopped taking Prozac and noted that I felt “like myself again.” But I was having terrible nightmares, sweating, tossing and turning.
I dreamed I was being chased by people who wanted to rob and kill me.
I tried to shoot them with my 9mm pistol, but it wouldn’t work.
I heard sirens screaming loudly. In another dream, I was in a plane crash.
Obviously, I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, reliving what I couldn’t recall.
Betsy was either at my Richmond house or I was staying on the sofa in her apartment.
The first day of April, I checked into Edgehill treatment center in Newport, Rhode Island.
In my journal I described it as “one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. ”
My first room there had two hospital beds separated by a divider curtain. Beyond my window, huge rocks hulked. Thunder and rain sounded like the ocean washing over the shore. Seagulls startled me as they soared past in graceful flashes of white. The setting was beautiful but not to be enjoyed.
The first few days I was in a ward for patients under close observation. Most of them were heroin and cocaine addicts. I noticed that they joked a lot to mask their misery.
“Almost everybody smokes,” I wrote. “I am feeling invaded. I can’t even read the newspaper without someone interrupting and basically forcing me into a conversation.”