“The true surrealist answer to why anybody is anything is there is no why. Stop asking why.” — Susie Bright
◆
For years, the paparazzi had been trying to get shots of my crotch. There’s that famous photo of me exiting a limo. You know the one I mean. It was all over Gawker and TMZ. There were two other young actresses in the back of the limo with me. We were all freshly waxed and bleached. We were all young: twenty, nineteen, twenty. Bulimic, anorexic, bulimic. Cocaine, pills, heroin. When I was seventeen I was shot by a famous photographer for a famous magazine and everyone in America ripped their vaginas in half because you could see my bare back. Just my back. My spinal cord. Once I was eighteen, though, they went right for the snatch shots. Full exposure. No one complained anymore about the loss of my innocence for corporate financial gain. Everyone in America, far as I could tell, looked at the pictures; everyone wanted to know my vagina on a personal and intimate basis. I don’t remember now how much they got for that shot, but suffice it to say: a lot.
Now they write about how I’m middle-aged. I’m thirty-seven, thirty-eight. Maybe thirty-nine. I don’t even remember; I’ve been trained to lie about my age for so long. They like to make jokes about my twat, too. That one female comedian likes to make jokes about how many dicks have been inside it and how stretched out it must be, how dicks must get lost inside it, need GPS to find their way out, yada yada. I watched her comedy special. It was easy for her to talk about her vagina because it’s not famous. It hasn’t been on TMZ. When you grow up in the spotlight – America’s Sweetheart or America’s Sexpot, usually they want you to be both – the slutty virgin, their favorite fantasy, so ready, achingly ready, to give it up for ‘YOU’ – everyone feels like they know you personally. Even the guys you meet. That’s how I ended up married to K.D. He understood because he’d grown up in the spotlight, too. Or, at least, I thought he did. But it’s different for guys, I found out. It was different for Ryan Gosling and Justin Timberlake growing up on the Mickey Mouse Club than it was, say, for Christina Aguilera. No one cared when Ryan or Justin lost their virginities. No one wrote rap lyrics about them giving cunnilingus, name-checking the people they’d given it to. No one really cares how they’re aging, now, either. You don’t hear male comedians – or female ones, for that matter – making jokes about Ryan’s or Justin’s flaccid, middle-aged dicks, their graying, sagging testicles, their struggles to ‘get it up.’
The thing is once you’ve gotten used to everyone wanting to see your crotch, it’s a hard thing to get used to when they don’t, anymore. Just look at Madonna. Now she probably doesn’t even bother having it waxed. I know I didn’t. I didn’t get my asshole bleached anymore, either. Before all this happened, before my show got cancelled, before women on talk shows started saying I was a bad person, a bad mom, a horrible wife, etc. These women who, I guess, never took seriously the warning about living in glass houses.
◆
When I married K.D. I thought I had my happy ending. I thought everything would finally be okay. I stopped doing coke and throwing up my food. I stopped making records, too. I thought K.D. would protect me. He wanted me to stay home, for us to be a real family, and I wanted that, too. I wanted to have all his little babies, all the little K.D.’s in the world. So we moved to Idaho. K.D. even took a year off making action movies, stopped taking steroids, started running up the hills and through the fields instead of lifting. We’d both been working in the industry over a decade at this point. I’d legally emancipated myself at fifteen so I could work longer hours on set. K.D. had been a nationally ranked high school athlete and then a Heisman Trophy winner and then a bona fide box office money maker. You can get real tired after years of hustling, even at a young age. You can’t imagine how tired you can get, having to look good every time you go out to pump gas, every time you go to pick up some groceries with a friend. Stars, they’re just like us! I never scored high in those ‘who wore it better’ polls. I was forever getting caught with my thong sticking out of my pants, my acne showing through my makeup. There was always speculation I was pregnant, even though I was just bloated from eating too many hotdogs or because I was pms’ing or I’d had a few beers over a holiday weekend. It got so I was scared to leave our L.A. house for fear of another bad shot showing up in the tabloids. You can become a recluse that way: letting US Weekly and all of America affect your opinion of yourself.
K.D. and I had been the golden couple for five years by the time we moved to Idaho. Kandy & K.D. Everyone was so excited about America’s Sweetheart/Sexpot dating America’s Football Hero. When we showed up in matching red velvet at the Chateau for Lindsay’s birthday – our first public outing – the paparazzi went crazy. What people don’t remember, what people tend to forget: we were way bigger than Brangelina. We were bigger than Bennifer. Bigger even than Marilyn and Joe. The first time we had sex was at a hotel in Cannes, a week before Lindsay’s birthday – we had both just broken up with our respective boyfriend/girlfriend at the time (you-know-who & you-know-who) and were in town for the film festival (we each had a cameo in a different indie film) – and they wrote in the tabloids a few days after that that people could hear me screaming K.D.’s name in all four corners of the hotel that weekend. They said I sounded like a wounded animal, all that loud moaning and carrying on. What can I say? Our sex was real good then. Porno good. Better. Cuz we were in love. And K.D. went down on me then like a goddamn rabid animal. You never saw a man who liked to eat pussy that much. Especially an athlete. Athletes are famous for not eating pussy. I think I may have agreed to marry him on account of how much he liked to eat my pussy. The rumor may even be true that I accepted his proposal during an intense session of what I jokingly, but admiringly, gratefully, referred to as K.D.lingus. (There are some things even we stars like to keep to ourselves.)
At our wedding there were five media helicopters hovering overhead the entire time. We had to hire a fleet of security, even on boats, in the water. ‘Course, that didn’t stop K.D. from shooting at the helicopters himself before and after the cliff side ceremony. My wedding dress was copied all over the world. Even the kind of dog we got – Bichon Frise – became, for a brief time, the most coveted breed in the U.S. No one can live long under that kind of scrutiny or admiration. If you’re not careful, your relationship will implode. You’ll implode! You’ll end up like Michael Jackson, having a doctor come over and inject you with horse tranquilizers just so you can sleep at night. I should know, I tried those horse tranquilizers. Luckily, K.D. took it as a sign to get me out of L.A. That and the fact I was Googling how to whiten your eyeballs. I couldn’t stop staring at mine in a magnified mirror. I kept asking K.D., “Don’t they look yellow? Or at least off-white? Ecru? I want them white-white. Or people write you look tired. Or, God forbid, old.”
K.D. didn’t think my eyeballs looked ecru. K.D. thought I was going a little crazy out there in Hollywood. First he confiscated my magnifying mirror. Then he got us out of Hollywood. God bless him.
◆
At first, Idaho felt like a dream. K.D. and I were still young and still in love. We felt like Swiss Family Robinson. Or, no, more like whatever that 70s movie is where the family leaves the city for the country and the dad builds their house and the mom grows all their food: The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, I think it was called. Not that K.D. came close to building our house. Or that I ever planted a seed. But I stopped wearing makeup and getting my hair highlighted and took to wearing denim overalls the duration of my pregnancies, which were back to back, Irish twins they call them, giving birth to two babies in the same calendar year. K.D. thought it was adorable. We couldn’t get enough of each other, then. This wasn’t some Hollywood agent arranged marriage. I was no beard (even though I’ve heard it rumored, lately, since the scandal, that K.D. was always homosexual: not true, or if he was, he deserves an Oscar and a Palme d’Or). We really enjoyed fucking each other. Even without Hollywood waxing, without me getting my asshole bleached. I’d gone au naturel ‘down there’ and K.D. liked it. He said it made my pheromones stronger. Even with two little babies in the house, we still banged almost every night.
Then K.D. got an offer to do a movie with Will Smith. And I was left home with Kenny Junior and KellyAnn. I didn’t mind so much during that first movie. I wasn’t drinking then; I was still a ‘good mom’: attentive, warm, doting. K.D. and I video-chatted every night after they went to bed. A lot of nights we had phone sex. Or Facetime sex. I’d dress up for the calls in new negligees ala Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or BUtterfield 8, just to take them off for K.D. He’d been working out hard again, maybe he was back on steroids. He looked good. I still had a little bit of a tummy from the two recent pregnancies but K.D. said not to worry about it, that he liked my ‘little pot.’ He said it was sexy. Somewhere in the back of my head, though, I wondered how US Weekly readers would rate my ‘hotness.’
But after a few years in Idaho, you can feel like you’re going mad the other way, in the opposite direction from Hollywood, I mean. I was lonely. K.D. always seemed to be on location somewhere that wasn’t Idaho, making a film or promoting a film or having his photo taken with some actress who was younger than me, who hadn’t had two babies and so didn’t have a pot or scars running from her vagina to her anus. (I always pictured these young actresses’ anuses being pristine because mine had been, once.) I tried not to picture these young actresses’ flirting with K.D.; tried not to picture K.D. performing K.D.lingus on any of them. We didn’t Facetime as often, and when we did, it was usually so he could talk to Kenny Junior and KellyAnn.
I started missing my career: writing songs, making videos, wearing pretty costumes, going on tour, being told I was sexy and fun and cool, even if it was all bullshit, even if it was just people kissing my ass because I was a celebrity. I felt so blah all the time, alone in our Idaho home, with no one doing my hair and makeup, no creative outlet, no one to gossip with or talk to, but the kids. And they weren’t saying much. They only ever babbled, and mostly to each other: Irish twins. They were weird like that. Secretive. Clinging with each other, not me.
To be honest, I missed things like having my asshole bleached – the feeling of cleanliness it inspired. I missed my abs, too. It’d been a minute since I’d seen them, my ‘little pot’ having turned, in the subsequent years, into more of a ‘large cauldron’. I was walking around the house in sweatpants with the word PINK scrawled down the leg or over the ass, my hair in a ponytail, no makeup. And it wasn’t cute, the way rappers made it sound in songs. This wasn’t me at my prettiest. It was me at my most depressed, sloppiest, unattractive. And I missed K.D., I missed fucking my husband.
One week, when I knew he’d be back from filming soon, I drank pineapple juice five days straight. On reality TV shows women drank pineapple juice five days in a row as some sort of competition, then had someone judge the way their cooter juice smelled. I don’t remember how they did this, wiped some on a napkin, maybe. Or smeared it on a paper plate. I forget. Anyway, someone would be the judge (usually the least pretty female) and smell all the paper plates or all the napkins and at the end, whoever had the best smelling pussy juice would be crowned the winner (it usually, oddly, correlated to who was the prettiest). I wanted to be a winner for K.D. But K.D. was so tired, or claimed to be, when he finally made it home from Hawaii or the Bahamas or wherever they’d been gruelingly filming for three months, he couldn’t get it up. By the time he finally did on the third day of being home, either the effects of the juice had worn off or he didn’t notice. (K.D.lingus was quickly becoming a faint memory.) Either way, it was a bust. The thing is, I never even liked pineapple juice. It gives me heartburn.
I also hadn’t expected the other Idaho moms to shun me. I’d pictured myself hanging out with them, dressing down for them, being invited into their more modest homes, eating Triscuits or Wheat Thins or whatever Idaho moms ate, patiently and good-naturedly answering all their mundane questions about the MTV Video Music Awards and Brad Pitt, while our children played with each other in another room, even the Irish twins interacting with other children for once.
Instead, they either pretended not to know who I was (even the week my face was plastered on the cover of one of the main tabloids, a headline reading: “Kan Kandy Hide Out in Ketchum?”) or outright ignored me. They’d turn away when they saw me at the grocery store or in the preschool hallway, excluded my children and me from playdates and after-Storytime lunches, treating me differently from the other moms, like a pariah or Joan of Arc (I’d played Joan of Arc once, years ago, in a made-for-TV miniseries so I always thought of her in these sort of situations; I really identified with her). I didn’t mind so much for myself, but I thought it was cruel of them to treat Kenny Junior and KellyAnn differently, too. Even if they were a little strange, on account of them being Irish twins and all.
◆
The only person I had to talk to during this now-painful period in Idaho was my assistant, Kate. Kate was twenty-four, what we used to call chubby but now you called thick. I don’t know what her goals in life were. Is anyone’s actual goal in life to be a celebrity’s personal assistant? I remember the first time I realized such a job existed. I was watching Madonna’s Truth or Dare with my mom. I was eleven and obsessed with Madonna. This was right before I got my first TV show. Right before Mom and I moved to Hollywood. In Truth or Dare there’s a scene, Madonna’s birthday party or something, in which she, Madonna, recites a poem she wrote for her assistant. I forget the woman’s name. She acted, Madonna, like they were best friends. That surprised me. Kate wasn’t my best friend by any means, in part because I don’t have best friends, but I liked her. I didn’t trust her, though. When K.D. was home, I mean. I was super paranoid. How many articles can you read about celebrity men fucking the nanny (hello, Jude Law, Ben Affleck, Gavin Rossdale, Arnold Schwartzenegger), or, worse, leaving the wife for the nanny (hello, Ethan Hawke, Robin Williams -RIP), before you wake up and smell the coffee? And those are just the ones you hear about. The ones that make it to the tabloids because they actually break up the relationship. There are probably countless others that go undisclosed.
Maybe Kate’s goal all along was to steal K.D. from me. Or, at the very least, to fuck him. If it can happen to Gwen, it can happen to anyone. Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean the nanny – or your personal assistant – isn’t fucking your husband. (And, I know. I know. Blaming the woman is wrong and totally not 2019. The men are the assholes. I get it. Maybe it’s just a question of biology. Monogamy being bullshit and all that. Maybe I should have hired a male assistant. Yeah, right. Like K.D. would have gone for that.)
But Kate was okay. She signed a non-disclosure agreement – not that that means anything, anymore; she’s probably writing a book right now – and moved to Idaho to work for me. Working for me, it turned out, mostly meant pretending not to notice things. The main thing Kate pretended not to notice was my newly developing, ‘secret’ drinking – I was staying up late, enviously, obsessively, watching new videos by Beyonce and Rihanna, while downing half a fifth of vodka and smoking Kool unfiltereds. Another thing Kate pretended not to notice was how I wasn’t getting out of bed until noon and she was the one driving Kenny Junior and KellyAnn to school every morning, while I nursed my hangovers.
Over the years, an assortment of doctors prescribed me ‘sleeping pills’ and ‘wake up pills’ and ‘anxiety pills’. I knew I wasn’t supposed to mix them with alcohol but that was the only fun I had some nights: seeing what a particular pill-alcohol combo would yield as far as my personality and behavior. It’s not like K.D. was around to monitor the situation like he had been when we first got married. I was left to monitor myself (Kate knew her place and it wasn’t pretending to give a shit about my health – physical or otherwise) and I guess I was doing either a poor or fine job of it, depending on how you looked at it. On the rare occasion K.D. wanted to video chat at night I made sure to stay sober, at least until after we’d talked. I was turning into a real Betty Ford, stumbling around that Idaho log cabin mansion in my designer housecoat, a secret stash of pills in my pocket, till two or three in the afternoon. I had started, too, obsessively watching old Jane Fonda movies (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Coming Home, Klute) and old 60s foreign films about bored or repressed housewives who turned to prostitution to express themselves. That was sixty, seventy years ago; not much had changed, at least not as far as marriage and women’s sexual repression. I did a little Googling but it didn’t seem there were any private bordellos near me in Idaho. I’d thought I could go undercover, for research, like how that old rock n roller said he was doing research on child pornography so he could catch the criminals after the police caught him. I imagined the speech I would give K.D. if I were caught. “It’s for a role I was sent,” I would say. “For a movie.” Shit was getting real bad. I hadn’t read a script in years. K.D. knew that.
Later, Kate pretended not to notice the tabloid headlines referring to my husband and other women or my husband leaving me when they started popping up at the local grocery store and Wal-Mart. K.D. on a Kandy Cleanse: one headline read. Misery in Idaho: read another. They always found some photo in which neither of us was smiling to go along with these headlines, of course. Us walking through an airport, say. Who smiles walking through an airport? Maybe Taylor Swift does, but I sure as hell don’t. Especially not with two little kids and a personal assistant who may or may not smell of pineapple juice in tow.
It didn’t help that K.D. seemed less interested in sex now than ever. I’d try telling him my fantasies, sometimes, when he called, or during the rare opportunity we had a night together; whisper them into the phone, into his ear. But he’d act grossed out, turned off.
I remember one time I told him I wanted him to tie me to a chair the way Sean Penn had allegedly tied Madonna to one, and fist me (this wasn’t part of the rumor about Sean and Madonna, this was my own expansion of the fantasy).
“Jesus, Kandy,” he said. “You’re a mom now. You’re my wife. I don’t like thinking of you like that. That’s really sick to think about. And also, can you put some panties on? Jesus.”
So I stopped mentioning my fantasies to K.D. I stopped trying to seduce him, also. Instead, I took more pills, drank more vodka and champagne, fingered myself when I had to. I figured he was having an affair with another actress or Kate or both, but I pretended for his sake and my own I didn’t know. Shit was getting real bad. Real, real bad.
And then we got the call.
◆
The call came to me first, if you can believe it. Well, to my manager, Connie. (Yes, I still had one.) They wanted us to do a pilot, a TV show, a modern day Ozzie and Harriet, not just K.D. and me, but the kids, too. Kenny Junior and KellyAnn were five and six by this time. I was thirty, almost thirty-one.
“You’re still young,” my manager said.
I hadn’t doubted I was until she said it like that, like it was something to convince someone of.
“We can get you a personal trainer, get you in top shape in no time,” she said.
I said I had to think about it. It wasn’t exactly a French film exploring a woman’s repression and sexuality. It also wasn’t a new album, a big world tour.
“The great thing is you’d just be playing yourself!” Connie had added before hanging up.
Great, I’d thought. I hate myself. The whole point of acting was to become someone else.
◆
On the plus side, or, at least, I thought it was a plus side, I’d get to spend a lot more time with K.D. I got my phone to call him. He was on location in London with the blonde actress who had been in the three movies with The Rock. Marcy or Mandy or Marlene. By the time I got through, his manager had already told him.
“And, I’ll be able to spend way more time with Kenny Junior and KellyAnn,” he said. He sounded almost giddy.
We’d been together ten years. It was natural he’d think of the kids before me. After we hung up, I pictured him hanging out with Marlene or Marcy or Mandy, telling her, very honorably, he couldn’t have more than one drink with her, that he was, after all, a married man.
It made me want to throw up. In fact, I did throw up. But not from this image of K.D. and the anorexic blonde actress having a drink. The whole idea of moving back to L.A. and shooting a pilot had caused me to relapse. I’d eaten two whole rows of Oreos while on the phone with K.D. I was thinking about how my manager said she’d get me back in shape. I was just helping to speed things along. Oreos may be okay for vegans to eat, but they’re not okay for anyone in Hollywood to digest. I’d forgotten to drink anything with them while on the phone so I got a gallon of milk and poured some of that down my throat to make the regurgitation process easier. I wiped the milk from my upper lip wondering why I’d never been asked to do one of those milk ads you used to see all the time in magazines. Which was when I realized my upper lip needed waxing, too. Add it to the list.
◆
So we all moved back to L.A. K.D. found us a house in the same neighborhood as Rob Lowe. I didn’t care who our neighbors were. I didn’t plan on venturing much outside of our gates except to work. This wasn’t going to be reality TV. Cameramen and camerawomen weren’t going to be following us around in our everyday life. It was all going to be filmed inside a studio. A basic sitcom like Everybody Loves Raymond, but with actual family members as actors, playing ‘ourselves,’ but not really. More like Hollywood’s ideas of us. K.D. was going to be an action film star, but one who is somehow, miraculously home most nights and doesn’t do steroids or have drinks with younger, blonder actresses. And I was a pop star who’d given up her career for her husband and kids and wasn’t bulimic or a pill popper or a closet drinker or resentful. It was all a painful reminder of who the American public wanted me to be, expected me to be, and who was that – who was I?
I pondered this question the next seven years. I spent hours a week in the makeup chair, staring into the mirror, silently asking, Who are you? while the hair and makeup people – Guy and Rachel and Coco – flitted around me, trying to do something with my thinning hair, my sallow skin, my no-longer-cock-sucking lips. I remembered how Jane Fonda had said in one of the DVD special features on Klute that from age twenty to thirty she’d worn falsies (fake boobs you could remove from your brassiere at the end of the day), fake eyelashes, caked on makeup, Barbie doll blonde wigs, the works, because men in Hollywood (Jack Warner) said she must (“They were not going to invest a lot of money in a flat-chested actress. Movie stars did not have flat chests.”). I stared into the mirror wondering if I was brave enough to cut my hair like Jane’s in Klute, or shave it all off like you-know-who. I spent seven years asking this question, too: Are you brave?
There were just questions, never answers.
I only knew how they described me in the write up of the TV show, as K.D.’s wife, Kenny Junior and KellyAnn’s mom, a former teen pop princess, one of the original limo gang girls.
Now I was a sitcom actress. The ditzy blonde who doesn’t know what ‘bougie’ means. The ditzy wife whose husband and kids have to explain things like technology and teen lingo to her. I was the butt of almost every joke. They taped my face back before every show. It hurt like hell when they ripped it off after and pulled more of my hair out, but I just went along with it. I went along with everything because that’s what I had done since I was four and my mother had signed me up for pageants and dance competitions and auditions. I didn’t have a clue what autonomy meant or how to get it. I didn’t know how to say no, either. Most of the time I just shrugged my shoulders and lit a cigarette. It was my most common response.
◆
And somehow we were a success. Or, The Adventures of Kandy and K.D. was a success. Not just a quiet success, either. But a huge success. Suddenly our family was on the cover of every magazine, all over the internet: the most used photo of us the one in which we are all four, inexplicably, wearing denim and cowboy hats, taken by the same photographer who most famously shot the Kardashian Christmas card that one year it was controversial. K.D., the kids and I were asked to go on Ellen and both Jimmys’ late night shows, even the daytime, female-led talk shows, the women who would later eviscerate me. Had I known then…
For eight years, eight seasons, we had a top ten show.
And I slept-walked through most of it.
I tried, halfway through, arguing for better plots. I was bored out of my mind. I wanted more for my character. More for myself. I was tired of my character being on laughable, trendy diets and having silly misunderstandings with my, er, her husband. But none of my suggestions – that my character go away by herself for a few episodes to contemplate life or herself, or that she question her marriage or her sexuality, or that we have a serious episode about the passing down of eating disorders from one generation member to another (KellyAnn was already refusing to eat anything containing gluten or animal byproducts, which pretty much meant everything on the Kraft table) – were taken seriously.
I was told, “This is a sitcom, Kandy, not an after school special, not a movie on Lifetime.”
I had wanted to direct a few episodes, also. K.D. was directing more and more of them. But I knew that was fruitless, as well. Everyone just laughed at me, even though I rarely felt funny. They took everything I said as a joke. I was being type-cast in my own life. I didn’t know how to break out, so I gave up. I isolated myself with the wine and champagne and vodka, added Flexeril and Xanax, whatever else the doctors would prescribe for me. (There was always something new to try! Benzodiazepines! Lidocaine! The old Hollywood stand by: Valium.) I had started, in our fifth season, walking around set zonked out all the time; no one seemed to notice. Or maybe it was more that no one cared because I was easier to deal with, easier to handle. I’d stopped asking for things. Maybe that was better.
Meanwhile, the kids were flourishing. They were both social media influencers. Kenny Junior endorsed sneakers and energy drinks and jeans. KellyAnn flew to Paris with her personal assistant, Jia, to walk in a Marc Jacobs runway show. I couldn’t help but worry a little, knowing one of the twins on Everybody Loves Raymond had committed suicide at nineteen. Maybe he would have anyway, teens kill themselves even outside Hollywood, but it made you think. Kenny Junior and KellyAnn were getting older, were thirteen and fourteen, already through puberty. They’d grown up on camera, just like me, … that was why I worried. I knew what growing up in the limelight could do to a person: make you not a person but an object, a commodity. I didn’t want that for our kids, but K.D. said they were fine.
“Better than fine,” he said. “Thriving. They’ll probably get their own shows soon, record deals, movie roles, modeling contracts. Anything they want. Like Willow and Jaden. You need to stop worrying. It’s starting to sound like you’re jealous of their successes, Kandy, Jesus.”
K.D. was making his fifth action film with Will. The blonde actresses (and actors!) just kept getting younger and younger. What did he have to complain about?
Then in the eighth, and what would turn out to be our final season, the pills and alcohol and isolation got the better of me. Or I got the better of me. Full responsibility. Shit got real bad. Real bad. Oh, have you heard?
◆
Shit got real bad when Ambien got added into my daily repertoire. I was already on ephedrine to control my weight, and Xanax and Klonopin for anxiety, and Midol for my menstrual cramps, and Benadryl because I always seemed to have an itch. Not to mention the antibiotics some doctor or another were continuously prescribing me for earaches and UTIs and sinus infections. I started worrying, or wondering (is there a difference?), somewhere in the back of my brain, if I was destined to end up like Whitney Houston: dead in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub, my daughter in the next room. I kept waiting after Whitney died, and then The Cranberries’ singer Dolores O’Riordan, for the autopsies, the toxicology reports, to be released. Both deaths were determined to be ‘accidental drowning,’ though how Dolores accidentally drowned in a hotel bathtub in her pajamas I’ll never know. One would think if you get into a tub of water in your pj’s, or even if you get into an empty tub in your pj’s and then turn on the water, even if you’re drunk on five mini bottles of liquor and a mini bottle of champagne from the mini bar, it’s probably an intentional act, but what do I know. At least Whitney was naked – the scars from her (secret) breast augmentation visible, but still: her assistant leaves for half an hour, Whitney drinks a beer and does some blow and next thing you know she’s face down in the tub? Accidentally? I fantasized about accidents like this, even before the whole … well, you know. Even before then, there were ideations. Maybe it’s something about a woman in middle age. I always misthink ‘in the middle ages.’ Same thing.
But Ambien made it so I literally didn’t know what I was doing half the time. I would take one and ‘come to’ hours later, having consumed half a box of donuts (and not thrown them up!) or, once, having texted Will Smith, “I know about K.D. and Mandy and you.” Of course, in the light of day, I realized it was Melanie, not Mandy. And Will never replied, anyway. Will Smith was real smart like that. Not getting involved, recognizing a true psychopath when he saw one. Anyway, he had his own problems with Jada. He didn’t need to add to the problems in his life by fucking with me. Also, I didn’t know shit. I was just guessing.
◆
It wasn’t really like you’ve read about. Not really. It wasn’t nearly as bad and it was so much worse. The part you’ve read about: there were teen actors on set, playing Kenny Junior’s and KellyAnn’s best friends on the show. They weren’t their friends in real life. The male was seventeen, the female sixteen. They weren’t emancipated like we were back in the day. Kenny Junior and KellyAnn weren’t emancipated, either. Not that it would have made a difference, I was just thinking of how Drew Barrymore had had her own apartment at fifteen. How we all did. Different times.
Anyway, I was zonked out on all the pharmaceuticals and bored out of my mind and unhappy in my marriage and in my professional life and in my sex life: I was never getting screwed. And the kids didn’t need me at all anymore. Neither did K.D. And I was feeling very undesirable and unloved and blah blah blah, but I was locked into this contract, into this role, into this marriage … I couldn’t figure a way out. Kate was long gone. I had a new personal assistant. I couldn’t remember her name.
I guess, from what hazy memory I have, it started with extras and people in catering and wardrobe. Whoever happened to be on set. I would be tipsy on champagne and Ambiens, wandering around, bumping into walls, in my bathrobe or dressing gowns. Whatever. And I would sit down opposite the person, and my robe or gown would fall open, and my legs would uncross and recross again. Maybe I was smoking a cigarette. It all sounds so theatrical in the retelling. It was like I was auditioning for Sharon’s role in Basic Instinct. From what I remember. From what people have testified to in court, er, I mean, on CNN.com. That was an amazing role. The bitch in Basic Instinct. I had watched that scene over and over back in Idaho, during the dark, alcohol-fueled nights there. I guess it had stuck with me, somewhere deep in my subconscious mind. It was the only time I felt sexy: imagining myself as Sharon. I must have gotten some sort of erotic charge out of it, zonked out with no panties on. I guess I should have listened to K.D. when he told me to wear some.
And no one said anything for six months, nine months, a year. That’s the worst part. I’m not blaming anyone, any victims, I’m just saying. The one time I tried to shoplift as a teenager – a stupid Swatch at a Macy’s in some Indiana town I don’t even remember the name of, where I was shooting a movie no one ever saw – I got caught, taken, sobbing, to the back of the store. And I never shoplifted again! I was too terrified to go in a Macy’s for years after that. But no one said anything and I barely remembered, I had some vague memories but how could I trust them? I guess, as some journalist on Buzzfeed pointed out, I knew enough – even in my Ambien daze – that I never did it to Kenny Junior or KellyAnn. But I didn’t know enough not to do it to their TV show best friends: Marston and Hailie. Or, wait, those were their characters’ names. I don’t remember their real names. Honestly.
And whenever I did remember I would think: I only flashed my crotch. And wasn’t that what everyone had been clamoring to see, anyway? Twenty years earlier, but, still. Were all the thirty-nine year old vaginas in the world so horribly ugly and old and disfigured that no one ever wanted to see them again?
The answer, it seems, is: yes.
And then, finally, someone said something. Marston first, then Hailie, then every extra, grip, best boy, Kraft food person, electrician, lighting crew members, camera crew members, wardrobe assistants, even Guy and Rachel and Coco….at the exact same moment, it seemed, they all came forward. On Good Morning America and Anderson Cooper. Shit was real bad. The tabloids ran headlines like, “Kandy-Coated Creepiness Prevails on the set of The Adventures of Kandy and K.D.,” “X-Rated Views from a Drug-Addled Kandy: ‘No, thank you,’ Teen Costars Say,” and, my favorite, “The Not-So-Sweet-Side of America’s Former Sweetheart,” which, for the record, I never was.
◆
Of course, the show was immediately cancelled, our family photo – all of us, again, absurdly costumed in cowboy hats and denim – on the front page of People and US Weekly and Time (who knew it was even still around?), not to mention all over social media. All of a sudden, I was trending. I was commented on by everyone from Oprah (“We need to rethink the way we view and encourage child actors in this country to be sex symbols, how we can reimagine them into something more substantial and less potentially dangerous down the road.“) to the President (“Sad disgrace. One of the original ‘hot girls’, no longer hot. Sad, sad, sad. Nothing sadder than a former hot girl who doesn’t know she’s not hot anymore. Kandy once a solid 10, now, barely a 6. I’m being generous, America.”).
K.D. didn’t even do the prerequisite few weeks of a fallen politician’s spouse of pretending he was going to stick by my side. He had his stuff moved out of the guesthouse the day after the story broke on social media, and made comments in the press that confirmed his and, more horribly, our children’s, separation from me.
“My focus right now is on Kenny Junior and KellyAnn and how this will affect them and their careers. My aim is to ensure it doesn’t,” he was said to have told someone, Andy Coen, perhaps. I don’t remember. He was fully in their camp now. I’d heard he and the kids were staying, temporarily, at The Beverly Hilton. The kids, he informed me via a text message, were worried they’d lose their social media influencer statuses if they were in any way seen as standing with me.
“They’ll definitely see you later, once this has all blown over,” the text ended.
I didn’t bother to respond or to text Kenny Junior or KellyAnn. K.D. was right: I didn’t want to put them in the precarious position of choosing between their mother, an alleged sexual assaulter, and their social media followers and endorsements. I made the mistake of looking at the comments on KellyAnn’s Instagram once; I couldn’t blame her for distancing herself from me after that.
Then there was the press conference. “I never asked to see that,” my female teen costar said, looking horror-stricken. “It was….disturbing, you know?”
“She may have been hot once. I mean, that’s what I’ve heard,” the male teen added, “But no one wants to see her naked now; why doesn’t she get that? What would make her think, at her age, anyone wants to see her naked body? Just because she was famous a long time ago? I guess some people are just really delusional, you know? It’s actually really sad. I almost feel bad for her.”
“I don’t feel bad,” the teen girl actor said. “I know I’ll never be like her when I’m her age. I’ll definitely be aware of things like consent and how visual images need to be consented to just like everything else, like I can’t unsee that, you know? That’s what she doesn’t seem to get. I just feel bad for Kenny Junior and KellyAnn. It’s not their fault their mom is like this. They shouldn’t pay the price for a parent’s sexual misconduct.”
“That’s right,” the teen boy actor said. “We stand in full support of Kenny Junior and KellyAnn. So nobody unfollow them or anything. In fact, more people should follow them, now. And buy their sneakers and scent kits, too, while you’re at it. That’s really how you show support in 2019, economically.”
◆
My attorney said I was lucky the teen actors’ parents weren’t going to press charges. I didn’t feel lucky, but I nodded along, anyway. I considered my options: moving back to my tiny hometown in North Carolina and waiting to die, moving to Europe and doing drugs and waiting to die, or staying here in L.A., sticking it out. Death would still come, here in L.A., of course, but I wouldn’t be just sitting around waiting for it. Anyway, death was all around in L.A. Maybe I would use the animosity against me to get sober and get healthy, to make a better life for myself; get a ‘revenge body’ or whatever. Maybe I would join a cult like Scientology or the church Bieber went to or AA. I knew if I asked they would have to take me. They couldn’t reject anyone. No matter how disgraced you were. It was part of the attraction of cults. Maybe I would get deep into self-help books and TED talks and podcasts. Or maybe I’d just get really, obsessively into true crime as a way of avoiding myself (and the meaninglessness of life – and death) entirely.
For a while there, I just didn’t know which way I would turn. I spent a few countless nights watching the long interview with Jane Fonda on the Klute DVD over and over again because I didn’t have any friends (even my most recent personal assistant – whatshername – had quit), and Jane felt like one. In the interview, Jane looks about eight months pregnant and her shag from Klute is growing out and she talks impassionedly about women in Hollywood and women in the world and women who are political prisoners.
“I was in a cell with a woman who was a junky, who was kicking the habit, who had been committing a series of armed robberies in order to be able to get her heroin. I realized she was as much a political prisoner as the other women because she was forced into a situation: she had three children, she had no husband, she had no money, couldn’t get a job … she turned to heroin to escape the reality of her life, which she was unable to cope with and had no help, she couldn’t get on welfare, nothing. Society had forced her into a position where she became a criminal. And I identify very strongly with people who are victims.”
I’d never thought of a bank robber or a heroin addict as a political prisoner or a victim, but I knew what she meant. I could see how they were. I wondered, briefly, if I should finally give myself over fully to the self-destructive tendencies I’d been fighting all of my life: develop a real habit, rob a bank or two. I thought I might be seen as more worthy of empathy if I were a true criminal, the type of woman Jane Fonda might share a cell with, rather than the type of woman anonymous people tweet about. I thought if it’d helped the woman in the cell escape the reality of her life, maybe it would help me escape mine. Nothing had helped so far. But that didn’t mean heroin wouldn’t.
Before I made a decision, I decided to go further with my education. I got out the Belle de Jour DVD and watched a short documentary in which Susie Bright and a UC Berkley professor, Linda Williams, discussed the film in terms of it being “a representation of feminine sexuality and fantasy, themes of masochism, power and desire.”
“She is a woman with tremendous cognitive dissonance. She doesn’t own what she’s really doing and feeling. When young women are raised under a covenant that says that they must refuse sex, and push away sex, in order to retain their value, the catharsis, exciting thing, becomes: I must say no to sex, but then, secretly give in to it,” Susie Bright said.
“The question of morality in masochism is itself very interesting. The masochist, especially the female masochist, can’t just say I want this pleasure. She pursues pleasure through other people forcing it upon her. And that way she begins to discover what she likes. But it’s very important for her to continue to play the role of the good girl. The good girl who doesn’t know what she wants and who is compelled to have pleasure that she otherwise wouldn’t know about,” Professor Williams said.
I had to look up ‘cognitive dissonance.’ I looked up masochist, too. I thought about all the ways I had tried to be a ‘good girl’ over the years – first for my mother, and later for K.D., and always for the American public – and all the ways I’d failed. I tried to decide if I was a true female masochist or just lazy and self-loathing and passive aggressive. I wasn’t sure.
“No one’s ever going to say, ah, yes, the great feminist film, Belle de Jour. And yet, it is a movie of great interest to feminists who study imagery and sexuality: You have a female protagonist whose sexuality is at the center of the movie and, in fact, she gets to live out all kinds of outrageous behavior, she breaks every rule that she’s been brought up with, and, at the end, she doesn’t get punished for it. That’s really the best part of all. She seems to have gotten away with ‘murder.’ Only, in the case of a woman’s life, she has gotten away with sexual pleasure,” Susie Bright said. “Which … is … that’s like murder, isn’t it? [laughs] There’s some people who think it’s just as bad.”
I started thinking of my life in terms of sexual pleasure and myself as a female protagonist. I was guilty of outrageous behavior and breaking rules but I didn’t feel as though I had gotten away with sexual pleasure, or murder. Maybe I was a woman of tremendous cognitive dissonance. I still wasn’t sure what that meant. But I knew I hadn’t owned what I was doing or feeling. Maybe not once in my life. I knew it was about time I did.
◆
Three months after the show’s cancellation, after my cancellation, I rented a room at the Chateau Marmont (they were still happy to take my money). For some reason I wanted the ghost of John Belushi around me when I started writing my new songs. He hadn’t died in a bathtub but he’d died in the hotel: Bungalow 3. I figured he’d been a political prisoner of sorts, too. Unable to cope with life, needing a constant escape from reality. Maybe we all did.
“No one is irredeemable,” I remembered my mother telling me when I was a child. At the time I attributed her telling me this as a way of absolving herself – in her eyes and mine – of wrongdoing. She must have been aware, little anti-drug campaigner that I was, Little Miss Just-Say-No, I was judging her, continuously, and harshly. She’d been married a number of times, had dabbled in hard drug use, seriously flirted with alcoholism, was, as I saw it, a bona fide nymphomaniac, also. The older I got, though, I realized that message was personal to everyone, really, to myself, especially. Self-righteousness is an act of immaturity, a supreme lack of emotional growth and depth. Shallowness, as my mother would say. We are all sinners, a realization of the truly woke and learned and spiritually grown. Empathy, by way of admitting one’s own faults and sins, first and foremost. These were all the bumper stickers in my mind now. I meditated on the floor of my room, a Yankee candle – pumpkin-scented, of course – burning bright in front of me, asking for spiritual guidance from a dead man who’d died being injected with a speedball by a Canadian groupie. I figured he was the only person who could help me now.
◆
Snatch Shots. That’s the name of the mixtape I released on my own label – bungalow3 – last week, a photo of my snatch on the cover. I spent the last five months in seclusion writing the eighteen songs on the album. I guess you could say I was a little manic. Maybe sobriety will do that to you. I had refused to go to rehab, refused all the familiar Hollywood routes to sobriety and redemption. I decided I would do it myself, like I had always done everything, B.K.D. – before K.D. Like my ancestors in the Midwest. Quit cold turkey. So that’s what I did. ‘Course I had to fire my agent and my manager and everyone else first. ‘Course I still smoke (cigarettes) like a chimney. And I’m thicker by fifteen pounds. But the songs were the important things; and all I cared about. The great thing about hitting rock bottom is the lack of distraction down there. And I didn’t need to take Adderall just to write a fucking line.
At first there were only naysayers talking shit about me in the media and on social media; the talk-show women dissing me for putting my own freakin’ vagina on the cover of my own freakin’ album. But soon a couple other voices began to clap back, to argue for my autonomy over my body, and the clapback began to grow, maybe not to overpower the naysayers but at least to match them. I, of course, didn’t say anything. I kept my mouth shut, let the music speak for itself, let my snatch speak for itself, too.
And it seems like the mixtape is picking up speed, starting to sell. One of the songs – ‘Twat Olympics’ – is sort of going viral. At least that’s what KellyAnn texted me the other day. I guess now that there is an equal amount of support and hate for me, she feels a little more comfortable reaching back out. I get it. I don’t blame her for her silence. I’m just happy to hear from her again.
◆
I also heard, recently, from one of the other two women who were in the back of that limo with me years and years ago. “Good for you,” she said in a text message. “Refusing to lie face down in a bathtub just because you lived to be over thirty-nine.” I smiled. She was right. I had decided I wasn’t going to go out like that.
“Also,” she said. “I think your snatch looks pretty hot.” She added a winky-faced emoji. The fire emoji. I didn’t know if she was flirting with me or just being supportive. We’d always had a flirtatious friendship. We’d made out once, in the back of a different limo, high on some drug or another I can’t even now remember.
“Thanks,” I wrote in reply. “You should see it in person, some time.”
“I might just take you up on that,” she said.
I couldn’t decide if I should groom it before this happened. I had gotten used to my naked body looking like a grown-ass woman’s. I stood and looked at it in the mirror again, really studied it. Which was when I decided I wasn’t ever going to groom down there again. I wasn’t going to go out like that, either, like a prepubescent girl. When I died, I wanted the coroner to see pubes. I couldn’t remember if Whitney Houston had had any. Maybe the autopsy hadn’t specified. But I pictured her having them. I pictured Dolores O’Riordan having pubes, too. Under her cozy, water-soaked pajamas. I pictured KellyAnn having them, even if it was ‘wrong’ of me to picture my teenage daughter’s vagina. I pictured all us women having pubes again. It was a glorious image. At least I thought so.
