Inside Out

This came to light when George and DeAnna decided to move into our apartment complex and discovered that, thanks to my parents, they were already there. I don’t even remember them being particularly angry about it; they simply assumed my parents’ names for the purposes of their own lease. Having my aunt and uncle so close by was a huge comfort. As my mom and dad spiraled further out of control, George and DeAnna filled in the gaps time after time: they gave us rides when we needed them, fed us, listened to us when we had problems. They took me to my first concert: Aerosmith, in 1975. (They wanted to sit up in the stands; my friend and I were desperate to get onto the grass down where the action was. During “Sweet Emotion,” I remember, a stranger casually passed me a bottle of rum; I went to lift it to my mouth, but DeAnna snatched it away.)

Southern California in the mid-seventies was different from anywhere we’d been before. I was in seventh grade—at my third school that year—and all the cool kids wore Dittos jeans and smoked cigarettes and pot. I became close with a girl named Adrien, who had long blond hair: the quintessential California girl in a tube top. She was my mentor in misbehaving, introducing me to hard liquor and Marlboro Reds.

I got busted smoking at school and was sent to the principal’s office. My punishment was suspension. I was horrified. I’d never been in trouble before; up until then fitting in had never required acting out. My mom came to pick me up, and we were quiet on the way home. Then she removed a cigarette from her pack, waved it in my direction, and said, “Go ahead.” Instead, I took out one of my own. She reached over and lit it, and we never talked about it again.

That marked the beginning of a new stage in our relationship. I was only thirteen, but when I asked Ginny if I could go with friends to a club in the Valley, she said, “Sure—take the car. If you get stopped by the police just say you’re driving it without your parents’ permission.” I had learned how to drive back in Roswell, but I didn’t know the Valley. I didn’t know the freeway. I had no experience driving at night. Somehow, I made it to the club, with two other kids—who are lucky to be alive—as my passengers. From then on, I was regularly assigned to run family errands in that car. “Just remember: we don’t know you’re driving it,” Ginny told me. It was convenient for my parents, and it was one more way of seeing what they could get away with.

My parents didn’t set boundaries for me because they couldn’t even set them for themselves. They were drinking more than ever and taking Percodan, Valium, and Quaaludes that my father somehow obtained prescriptions for and filled at different drugstores using all my parents’ various aliases. He had the look to go with the partying: bell-bottoms and long sideburns. He even got a perm.

As for my mother, she often got aggressive when she mixed drugs and alcohol, and my parents got kicked out of restaurants and bars as a matter of course. My mom would start a fight with other patrons or lose her temper with my dad and start breaking dishes. Once, when she didn’t like the way the check was delivered, she took off her high-heeled shoe and used it as a weapon against the waitress.

Somehow, in the middle of all their partying, my mom found a good job as a bookkeeper for a magazine distribution company owned by a man named Frank Diskin. DeAnna started working for him, too, and suddenly my family had more money—especially my mother. Frank gave her luxurious bonuses: a mink coat and, eventually, the ultimate status symbol for a New Mexico girl of that era, a Cadillac Seville in pale yellow. We ended up moving into the nicest house we’d ever occupied in Marina del Rey, with Frank Diskin paying our rent.

Why was this guy willing to spend so much on his bookkeeper? DeAnna remembers that whenever my mother was alone with Frank in his office, the door was always locked.

EVER SINCE THE episode in Canonsburg when my mother had tried to kill herself, I’d been subconsciously waiting for another disaster—another truly devastating situation that didn’t make sense, that I couldn’t control, and that would upend my already unstable life. It arrived without warning when I came home from school one day to find that my brother, my father, and almost every trace of them had vanished. “Where’s Morgan?” I asked my mother. “Where’s Dad?” It was not unprecedented for my dad to go missing, but my brother? She shrugged. “Your father and I are getting a divorce,” she said. “And he’d only consent if I gave him Morgan.”

I was stunned. I don’t know what was worst: losing my brother, losing my dad, or finding out that my father couldn’t bear to be parted from Morgan but was fine with abandoning me.

“You and I are moving to West Hollywood,” Ginny informed me. “I’ve found an apartment on Kings Road.” Frank Diskin was out of the picture. As my mother and DeAnna told it, the IRS had been after my father for back taxes for years, and when they caught up with him, he gave them dirt on Diskin in exchange for his own freedom. Basically, he offered the government the same deal he’d offered so many others: double or nothing.

There was only one problem. Losing Diskin meant losing our relative prosperity. Both my mother and DeAnna were out of jobs, and my family wouldn’t be able to stay in the house in the Marina. My mother was furious, and I guess for her it was the final straw that convinced her she’d be better off without my dad. Evidently, my father had hit a breaking point, too: before he left, he’d cut Ginny’s beautiful mink coat into pieces.

I was still reeling when she took me to see our new neighborhood. She was on a manic high, pointing out all the bars and movie theaters, the shops and restaurants. The complex where we were going to live was massive, but the actual apartment was tiny: one bedroom, which we would share; a kitchenette; and a little balcony overlooking the pool. It was like everything in my life was shrinking: my home, my family.

NOW THAT IT was just the two of us, my dynamic with Ginny shifted. It was more like we were sisters than mother and daughter. I was already used to living without rules or limits, but now we even started to look more like peers. I was developing into a teenager; and Ginny basically dressed like one, in miniskirts and low-cut tops. She dolled herself up every time she went out the apartment door. She had deliberately chosen a building where there were other single people and divorcées, and she made friends with one of our neighbors, Landi, who would go with her to the bars.

From our balcony, I used to see this beautiful girl hanging out at the pool, swimming and lying in the sun, growing ever more golden. She was the most radiant creature I’d ever seen, a German actress a few years older than I was, named Nastassja Kinski. I became her friend and acolyte.

The director Roman Polanski had brought Nastassja and her mother to America so that Nastassja could improve her English and her accent at Lee Strasberg’s acting studio. Polanski wanted Nastassja to star in Tess, a romantic tragedy he was going to make based on the Thomas Hardy novel, and he was willing to put off the film until she was ready. That’s how much faith he had in her, which certainly made sense to me. As far as I could tell, she was perfect.

She was self-possessed and in her body like nobody I’d ever seen before. She owned her sexuality completely, without self-consciousness or discomfort, with complete confidence and ease. In my whole life, I haven’t met many who have that in the way that she did. Nastassja was only seventeen, but she had already been in four films. Her star was on the rise in Hollywood, and she regularly received scripts from directors who wanted to work with her. That’s where I came in. Nastassja could speak English well, but she couldn’t really read it, so she asked me to read the screenplays out loud to her so she could decide which ones she wanted to pursue.

She would stare at me with her enormous green eyes, listening intently, and by the time I finished reading her a script, she’d know exactly what she thought; she had total clarity in her opinions. I was as dazzled by her confidence and her sense of direction as I was by her beauty and sensuality. And I saw the breathtaking effect that combination had on other people: like me, they were overcome by her sense of comfort, freedom, and power—though I doubt I identified it as power at the time, as the concept was unimaginable to me. I didn’t know what it was that she had, but I wanted it for myself.

Nastassja’s mom may have been even less reliable than mine. It had fallen to Nastassja, from the age of twelve, to support them both. I wasn’t paying for my mother’s life (yet), but I understood the feeling of being responsible for the person who was supposed to be responsible for you. Emotionally, it felt like it was my job to keep Ginny alive. It was a sad but powerful thing Nastassja and I had in common. For a time, we were very close.

I decided to follow Nastassja’s example—I wanted to do what she did, and if that meant acting, then so be it. I learned by watching, observing, asking myself: How is this person doing this? What do you need to do to make this work—do you need to get an agent? (Not: I want to be an actor, mind you. But: How do I make this happen?) I went with Nastassja to her dance classes, trying to emulate her grace, and one night she took me along to dinner with Polanski. He tracked me down to invite me to dinner a second time months later, and I went with my mom. He was a perfect gentleman on both of those evenings, but he had been convicted of having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. (I saw this dynamic all around me. Thirteen was a little extreme, but in my world, believe it or not, relationships with underage girls was the norm.) He expected probation following his plea bargain, but the judge saw it differently. Faced with imprisonment, Polanski fled the United States just a few days after that second dinner. He ended up making Tess in France; the film received three Oscars, and Nastassja won a Golden Globe.

I was disappointed when she moved out of the apartment building. It would be two decades before we saw each other again—unexpectedly, at Elizabeth Taylor’s regular Sunday lunch. When we embraced, it was like a homecoming. We knew each other in a way that no one else could.

MY DAD WAS living with Morgan in Redondo Beach, and we went to visit them—he wouldn’t let Morgan come to our place. Ginny was behind the wheel in the yellow Cadillac she had managed to hang on to from Diskin, with Landi along for the ride in back. I sat in the passenger seat, explaining to Landi the complicated history of my parents’ relationship, which I had put together from years of snooping around. For instance, I knew from poking through the metal fireproof box where documents were stored that my birth certificate was dated November 11, 1962, and that the date on my parents’ marriage license was February 1963—which at first I had assumed was a mistake: it should have said February 1962, nine months before I was born. But I’d since realized that they don’t make mistakes on that kind of thing. Obviously, it took Ginny a while to get divorced from that guy Charlie she was with when my dad went to college, so she could marry my dad, who got her pregnant with me, and . . .

I stopped. I turned toward my mother. And out of my mouth came the words, “Is he my real father?” Somewhere deep down, though, I already knew the answer.

She snapped, “Who told you that?” But nobody told me. Nobody had to.

A flood of questions came into my head. Who else knows about this? Everybody, as it turned out: all my cousins, even the younger ones, knew that Danny was not my biological father. I thought of all the times I’d told them about the ways I was like him, how I inherited my eye problems from him, my love of spicy food, and they had stood there, looking at me, knowing I was clueless, deluded. Why wasn’t I ever told? “Because your dad never wanted you to know,” Ginny said. “He made everyone promise because he thought you wouldn’t feel the same about him.”

Ten minutes later, we were at my dad’s impersonal stucco two-bedroom apartment. My mother dropped the bomb the second we walked in the door: “Demi knows.” In no time, she had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and she seemed high on the drama of the situation—the power it had given her to hurt him.

He avoided meeting my eyes. He looked numb. It was only one in the afternoon, but he had likely polished off a six-pack before we got there.

Nobody asked me if I was okay, or if I had questions. Neither of my parents seemed to care about what this revelation meant to me.

They went into the bedroom and kept fighting, or maybe they started having sex . . . with them there was always a fine line.

I felt exposed and stupid and somehow dirty. So I did what they’d taught me to do when the shit hit the fan. I got in the car and took off. Not for good—yet. I had nowhere to go but back to my mother’s apartment. But I was practicing.

Chapter 4

Not long after the bombshell dropped, I was visiting my aunt Choc in Amarillo, Texas. I told her that I knew about my dad. “It’s about time,” she said. She’d always liked my biological father, Charlie, she told me, and had happy memories from the time she spent with him and my mother. “You know, he lives in Texas,” she added. “We could try calling him.” She did, and the next day he showed up at her door. I didn’t know what to feel or how to behave: he was a stranger, but he was my father. He was handsome, about five-ten, with brown hair, probably around thirty-five years old at the time. I looked to see where I might connect. In fact, my eye problem was something I’d inherited from my father—this father. He had been devastated, he told me, when my mom left him, and he had always wanted to meet me.

I was fourteen, and I wasn’t equipped to cope with this situation. And it only got worse: Ginny showed up. Never content to let drama unfold without her at its center, she got on a plane the second Choc told her that Charlie was coming. When she arrived, she whisked Charlie off into a room alone. I spent the entire day compulsively rolling joints and smoking them, acting like I was just fine and didn’t need a thing.

Charlie, on the other hand, was excited, and invited me to come and visit him and meet my grandparents and half siblings. A few months later, I flew to Houston and he picked me up at the airport—with his mistress. He dropped her off on the way to see his parents, who were so happy to meet me; they’d always wanted to, they said. As it turned out, my grandma Marie had snuck them a few photos over the years, knowing how much it would mean to them. I stayed with them that night.

Charlie’s wife felt insecure—and rightfully so: he’d introduced me to his mistress first—and was reluctant to meet me. I went over to his house on my second day to meet her and my half siblings—one of whom was a brother from yet another one of Charlie’s marriages who looked exactly like a male version of me. It was awkward. I didn’t know where I fit in or even why I was there. I left feeling clear about one thing: Charlie may have been my biological father, but Danny was my dad.

The justification for having kept my paternity a secret from me was that Danny feared that if I found out, I would feel differently about him. But the reality was that once I knew, he pulled away from me. Even before my parents’ split, he had become distant, withdrawing into drinking and drugs. And, of course, once they decided to divorce, it was my brother he couldn’t live without, not me. But after my discovery, our relationship completely deteriorated. He ceased making any effort to see me; he stopped calling; when we did see each other—when my mom and I visited Morgan—he barely looked at me and his hugs were awkward and forced. He was just . . . gone.

DISCOVERING THAT I’D been lied to my entire life about something so profound wasn’t great for my relationship with my mother, either. Whatever fragile trust we had shared was shattered now that I realized she had gotten pregnant with me when she was still with Charlie, and then just come up with a lie that was more convenient than the truth. But like every child in history who has been let down time and again by her parents, I held out the irrational hope that my mother would change and become someone I could count on.

Instead, one afternoon when I came home from school, I found her sprawled across the bed, surrounded by empty pill bottles. I remember calling the hospital for an ambulance in a kind of frozen trance, a dissociated state that would become increasingly familiar to me as years passed, in which I would leave my body and just cope without really being present. An ambulance came and took us to the hospital to get her stomach pumped. Everyone in the building saw the arrival of the paramedics and her departure from the apartment on a gurney. I was somehow simultaneously embarrassed, numb, and terrified.

My mother survived that incident. But her faux suicide attempts became a regular occurrence, a routine. Back would come the emergency medical teams with their sirens and gurneys, and off we’d go to get her stomach pumped again. She didn’t want to die: she was crying out for help, and she wanted attention. Often, her overdoses followed some sort of devastating interaction with my dad. The man I thought of as my dad, anyway.

I was in a constant state of anxious vigilance. I never knew what I’d find when I walked through that apartment door: my mother’s self-destructiveness was boundless, narcissistic, and unstoppable. And yet I was developing armor: I took comfort in my ability to deal with her crises and the knowledge that I could handle whatever came my way. I never felt I was going to fall apart, never turned to anybody and said, “I can’t take this.” I could get through anything she threw at me: if she tried to kill herself; if I had to peel her off of a bar stool; if she told me Danny wasn’t my real dad. I would survive, no matter what. But I would survive by being on guard. And then, when crisis struck, by exiting my body: functional but frozen.

Everyone knew about my mother in our apartment complex, of course, and I adopted an invulnerable, self-sufficient persona in response. My character was on her own, unfettered by curfews or rules. Every time I tossed off “My mother doesn’t care if I . . .” or “I can do whatever I want . . .,” I rode the wave of that dubious freedom, but I also felt the emptiness of it. I did not feel particularly sympathetic toward Ginny. Even as a fourteen-year-old I realized that her self-absorption and “suicide attempts” came at my expense.

Her accelerating self-destructiveness lent an urgency to my attempts to define myself in opposition to her. I’m a different person, I kept telling myself. I’m not like that. But the insecurity that had been nipping at my heels was intensifying.

I was the girl whose mother was always trying to kill herself. I was the girl who’d been abandoned by two fathers. My wandering eye suddenly seemed like an obvious physical manifestation of the truth about me: I was just off, and everyone could tell. I had surgery just before I turned fifteen that finally fixed my eye, but in my own mind, I remained marked as broken.

All of this coincided with puberty. My transformation from a skinny, lazy-eyed kid to a young woman who men desired was confusing. The unfurling of my sexuality was linked for me on the deepest level with shame. It would be decades before I could even begin to disentangle the two.

I STARTED SPENDING time with a couple of guys who lived down the hall and were very friendly to me. They were older, in their mid- to late twenties, but I thought I could impress them and join their crowd by acting cooler and more mature than I actually was. I was alone a lot in my mother’s apartment, and sometimes they’d stop by to visit, or I’d wander down the hall and hang out with them at their place.

One evening, I was in their apartment drinking beer, and we were all flirting. It was fun at first: I was still quite innocent, just beginning to discover the effect I had on guys. But I wasn’t in any way prepared for the consequences. One of them made a move, and the other one disappeared. That was evidently what he had wanted from me all along, and somehow, I felt I had no choice, that it was my job to give it to him—like I was obligated to fulfill his expectation just because he harbored it. I blamed myself for acting provocative and older than my years.

Afterward, I was left with the hollow, empty feeling of being used. A new kind of lonely.

GINNY WAS NOT really interested in how I was doing at my vast new school, Fairfax High, and she didn’t care about my report card or even seem to register that such a thing existed. When we spent time together, it was as if we were a pair of girlfriends out on the town. She never offered me any guidance; there was no talk about college, for example, or discussion of my future. Instead, the conversation revolved around how unfairly life had treated her, what she had missed out on, and how she wanted to find the kind of relationship she deserved.

She succeeded for a while when she took up with a great guy named Ron Felicia, who owned a recording studio. They actually had a seemingly healthy relationship, and he really grounded her for the short time they were together. For a few months, we even moved in with him. I didn’t have to change schools, though I wouldn’t have minded—I wasn’t really involved in anything at Fairfax High. By that point, I was numb to the whole high school scene and was just trying to get through it. I’d managed to make few friends out of the thousand kids who were my classmates. (I’m sorry not to have crossed paths with Flea or Anthony Kiedis, who were at Fairfax at that time but whom I didn’t befriend until decades later—though I seriously doubt I was cool enough to run with their crowd.)

Through Ron, I met a guy who was kind of a pretty-girl-type agent. It was difficult to get work because I was inexperienced and underage: Helen Hunt, Jodie Foster—people like that had all been acting since they were very young. I was on the outside looking in at the entertainment industry, and as I had always done, I learned by the fake-it-till-you-make-it method. I’d love to say that the underlying drive came from a fascination with plays that I encountered in school, or from the thrill of performing classic roles in drama class. I wish that was how I came to acting, but, in truth, Hollywood was like one more school I had to figure out, one more system to game. I chipped away at it, trying to grasp how it worked. It would be years before I made a living as an actress, but that first agent did get me a small role on a TV show called Kaz playing a thirteen-year-old prostitute. My big first line that got me my SAG card was, “Fifty dollars, mister.”

As much as my mother wanted a relationship with a kind man, and Ron Felicia was that, she couldn’t sustain it. Instead, she felt compelled to ruin it and managed to—dramatically—when Ron came home one day to find her in bed with my dad. Ron was understandably furious, punched Danny, and threw my mother out. She and I hastily moved to a little studio in Brentwood right off Sunset—I drive by it all the time, and I always feel a little pit in my stomach.

There were always men. Ginny and I got a lot of attention from them when we went out together at night. I remember sitting at the bar at Carlos ’n Charlie’s, a trendy Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood. She was drinking too much and eyeing the guys at the bar flirtatiously. Whenever I recognized her boozy, blowsy come-hither look setting in I cringed. One of the men took the bait and came over to us. “Are you two sisters?” he asked. (It was Ginny’s favorite question.) “No.” She grinned. “This is my daughter.” The man protested that she couldn’t possibly be old enough to be my mother. And really, she wasn’t: she was a thirty-four-year-old woman with a fifteen-year-old daughter. She chuckled as he leered at me.