Claudia Christian - Babylon Confidential

David stood by me through the tail end of my struggle, and although he was incredibly supportive our social life had taken on a dismal atmosphere of early dinners and subdued conversation. Now we enjoyed cooking together, dinner parties, wine, and laughter. We survived the monster together and emerged from that ordeal as stronger, closer friends.

My life had come full circle. I had worked hard, taken risks, and believed in myself at the start of my career in Hollywood. I’d experienced meteoric highs and cataclysmic lows. I’d gone from a smart, attractive woman in her early thirties with a six-figure income, a mansion, and a successful career to someone consumed by addiction, an unrecognizable creature, sneaking out, drinking spirits from a paper bag in a bus shelter. I’d gone from someone who was in love with life to a woman who was humiliated, wracked with suicidal thoughts. And now I’d been given the ultimate blessing, the ultimate miracle—a fresh start. Not the false start I used to have when I’d recover from a binge. This was real; I could feel it in my bones.

The Tahitian water is a bright, azure blue, creating an atmosphere of invigorating peace. I’m halfway through my glass of champagne. When I finish it, I’ll get a massage and later go snorkeling with David in the lagoon teeming with tropical fish. I’ve had my pill, and the monster slumbers in the back of my brain, as if it had never been. I actually see Tahiti this time, the color, the slow pace of life, the beauty. A white seaplane flies overhead carrying passengers back to the main island of Tahiti. I’ll be on that plane soon enough, heading back to star in a new film. My friends were right, this is paradise, but so is every aspect of my life now. I’m free from hell; I can finally enjoy heaven.

I was forty-four years old and doing an explicit sex scene for Adam Rifkin’s LOOK . It was six months after he’d called me, nine months since I’d been on The Sinclair Method. I had read the scripts for LOOK , and Adam was right—the part of Stella was absolutely hilarious—but I could see that it was going to be a demanding role. I got to do my own wardrobe for the part and had a chance to really build Stella from the outside in.

True to his calling as an experimental director, Adam made sure that the LOOK experience was unlike anything else I’d worked on, even the movie we did with Charlie Sheen’s freeform poetry. There was no traditional filmmaking; it was all flip cams, nanny cams, closed-circuit cameras, and webcams. LOOK was a comment on how many times we’re photographed and filmed every day without knowing it. It was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, run-around-Beverly-Hills-stealing-shots kind of production. I felt as I did back at the beginning, as an eighteen-year-old in Cannes stealing shots beside Clint Eastwood, a twenty-one-year-old taking revenge on her lover by filming in his house. It felt great. I was happy as a clam, except that it’s never easy shooting fully nude sex scenes in a stranger’s house, let alone at forty-four years of age. That makes for a long day.

We wrapped the last scene of the day, an argument in Stella’s kitchen. There was a bottle of wine on the counter. I thought it was a prop filled with water. My character was an alcoholic, so halfway through the scene I picked it up and took a swig.

Fuck! It’s real! I didn’t take my pill!

It was a scary moment. I couldn’t yell “Cut!” I was in the middle of a scene, and I couldn’t bring myself to spit out red wine all over the place that Adam had borrowed for filming. I wished Jesus were there to do the reverse of his water-to-wine trick, but he wasn’t, so I swallowed. I’d been so fastidious with The Sinclair Method, following the rules to the letter, but what happens now? Would I suddenly go bonkers and turn into my psycho character from Hexed ? Would the monster leap out of its cave, right back into the driver’s seat? I dealt with the problem at hand first. I kept my cool and asked them to replace the wine with water on the next take.

I got in the car and drove home. I knew I wasn’t cured yet, that I was still working my way through this thing. I felt the urge to drink. I stopped at a store and bought a big bottle of fancy Belgian beer that I intended to share with David. I took my pill in the car on the way home. I was feeling better by the time I pulled into the driveway. I needed David, needed to tell him about how fate had just rolled me. I needed him to sympathize with the bad end to my day. But relationships by nature are unstable things. Sometimes you’re in perfect harmony; sometimes you’re coexisting in different dimensions.

The second I got through the door I started telling David about my day. I told the story chronologically and didn’t make it to the part about the mix-up with the wine. I’d forgotten that this was the first time he’d heard about the hard-core sex scenes. He went bananas. Fuck, I should have seen that coming, I should have played it smarter. But I’d lost perspective; the world was crumbling around me. I retreated into the bathroom and locked the door, the bottle of beer still in the plastic shopping bag in my hand. I could hear the monster laughing.

I knew we’d get back together. How did you ever think you could get by without me? We were made for each other.

She could talk all the trash she wanted, because I’d taken my pill. I was in a bad place, but once that beer was done it was done. It wasn’t going to lead to anything else, because I wasn’t back in the monster’s cave, just in the shadow-world transit lounge, just passing through.

It took me about a year to unlearn the behaviors associated with drinking. It takes that long to let go of the guilt and anger, to stop being so defensive. The Incident of the Belgian Beer & the Bathroom was a one-off, but it taught me an important lesson. The biological cure starts working straightaway, but the psychological cure takes longer. I mean, it’s all in The Cure for Alcoholism , and I had become friends with Drs. Sinclair and Eskapa, so I knew that I had to learn new behaviors with the help of the breathing space created by the naltrexone. But book smarts and street smarts are two different things. It takes a little longer to learn to literally change your mind.

At Christmas in 2010 I was back in Napa, back on a dusty street in a Sergio Leone Western where Claudia lives or dies depending on her ability to avoid the hail of emotional bullets. The family stands opposite me, they’re all armed, and they have twitchy trigger fingers.