Claudia Christian - Babylon Confidential

At one of the agency meetings I met a young model from Kentucky who was my age. We got along great, and she asked me if I’d go out with her, because she needed a partner for a double date that night.

“Sure, who are we going out with?”

“Matt Dillon and Billy Idol.”

Billy had just come out with his single “White Wedding,” which was all over MTV, and Matt was working his way through the film adaptations of the S. E. Hinton novels Tex , The Outsiders , and Rumble Fish .

Was that how it was every night in New York? You agree to a date and next thing you know you’re hanging out with famous actors and rock stars? I was dazzled.

We met them at Billy’s apartment, which was a total mess. Everything was on the floor, and it looked like the aftermath of a burglary. The only things in the fridge were water and champagne.

On a glass coffee table were some really tacky earrings, and Billy wanted me to wear them.

“Put those on, darlin’. Put ’em on, put ’em on. They suit you.”

No, they fucking don’t. Imagine earrings with three fluffy snowballs hanging on a gold chain. I wore them all night and only found out later that they belonged to Billy’s insanely jealous live-in girlfriend and that if she’d seen me wearing them my odds of surviving the night would have been slim at best. I think Billy was hoping that she’d run into us and he’d get to watch a catfight.

But thankfully that didn’t happen, and instead Matt and Billy decided that they’d show us their favorite New York haunts. We ended up at the Limelight, which was this huge Gothic Revival church that had been a rehab center before it was converted into a nightclub. That night Jimmy Page and Robert Plant surprised the audience by playing an impromptu set. I was a huge Led Zeppelin fan, and there I was in the front row just a few feet from my idols. Matt Dillon and Billy Idol faded into the background; I forgot they were even there until Billy tapped me on the shoulder. Matt was taking my girlfriend from Kentucky off to the bathroom for some recreational activities, and he thought that we should follow suit. And from memory he didn’t put it that delicately.

By then my girlfriend had told me the story about the earrings, and to be honest, as much of an Anglophile as I am, I just didn’t find Billy very attractive or interesting. Add that to the fact that Led Zeppelin were playing, and without giving it a second thought I brushed off my first celebrity paramour. He should have known he had no chance when stacked up against Jimmy Page working the fret boards of his double-necked Gibson.

The next day I was back at the modeling agency.

“Claudia, darling, you’re the perfect height and you’ve got a nice face but please, we have to weigh you before we can go any further. Do you mind stepping on the scales? Thank you, darling.”

I climbed onto the scales. I was 5′9″ and 120 pounds. Zero body fat.

“Look, darling, we like you. You’ve got an interesting look but if you want to be a model you’ve got to commit to losing another five to ten pounds.”

“Ten more pounds?”

It was ridiculous. How much more could I starve myself? I wasn’t carrying any weight. We left the meeting, and I told Pam that I didn’t know how to become the person they were looking for. I was upset, anxious, worried that I might be passing up my one big shot. And then Pam stepped up to the plate.

“You know what? You’re fine as you are, I’m not gonna let you do this. Let’s go home.”

Thank God she said that; it was just what I needed to hear. I was a thin, pretty teenager and they wanted me to be anorexic. I went out and bought a bagel with cream cheese and felt a huge sense of relief. My friends at school couldn’t believe that I’d turned down the chance to be a model, and I’ll admit that the lifestyle had certainly been dazzling, but at fifteen I wasn’t ready psychologically, and I sure wasn’t going to kill myself for it. I refocused on my real goal—becoming an actress—which was a dream worth killing myself for.

In Laguna Beach my best friend at school was Kara. She was this beautiful, tall brunette. She was carefree and her own person, and that resonated strongly with me. When I was with her I felt that it just might be possible to move to Hollywood and realize my dream.

My mom had this very cool 1959 Mercedes 190SL, which looked like it belonged in a James Bond movie. We’d drive it down to the beach and buy chocolate chip croissants and lattes. That was our little pleasure. Sometimes Kara and I would go to the gay bars, the Boom Boom Room or the Little Shrimp, and drink—in our cheerleading outfits, no less! We’d watch drag queens sing on top of pianos while we sipped Tanqueray and tonics. The drag queens loved us, all the gay boys loved us, because we were a couple of cute girls who wanted to have fun. I loved gay men, and I still do.

Kara and I had a friend who lived in Emerald Bay, which was our way of getting into the parties there. And they were the best parties. Our high school girlfriends were so jealous; if you had a house there, you were golden. They were doubly impressed when my newly acquired boyfriend picked me up from school in his Porsche.

Arthur Ash Wilder, III, Esq. (a.k.a. Tre) was only 5′11″, but he had blond hair, beautiful blue-green eyes, and was he built. A six-pack, perfect body weight; you could crack an egg on his butt.

Kara and I had sneaked into this Newport Beach party. We were fifteen years old, but we were all dressed up and could have passed for twenty. I’d recently jumped up in size and filled out a bit, and now grown men wanted to meet me. It was a totally weird experience. I had been a fourth son, a tomboy. Three brothers had treated me like a fellow member of the Lost Boys from the minute I was born, and then one of them died and the others were so messed up by that that they didn’t pay me any attention. Add to that the fact that my dad was gone all the time and that when he was home he was too busy fighting with my mom to pay his daughter a compliment. And Tre picked up on that. He was a real sweet talker, and I fell for him hook, line, and sinker. I thought, “This guy is serious.” He was a lawyer, he was in tip-top shape, and he said that he wanted to see the world and conquer it at the same time, which was all very intriguing to me. It didn’t occur to me that a thirty-year-old lawyer should know better than to sleep with a fifteen-year-old high school student. We’d go out and I’d drink Dom Perignon and Cristal; he’d drink single malt scotch whiskey with his friends. I’d always thought of myself as an older person trapped in a younger person’s body, and here I was, hanging out with grown-ups. Cocaine was everywhere; it was the older person’s drug. The first time I saw it was in a bathroom, thousands of dollars worth of powder laid out on a mirror. I tried it once and it was okay, but I didn’t feel that I needed it. I was happy with champagne; I was having a good time. And besides, I’d learned a little something about drugs since moving to Laguna Beach.

Before I met Tre I’d dated a football player named Ricky. His parents went on vacations all the time, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the empty house was instantly filled with partying teenagers. I went into the kitchen and saw a blender with a vanilla milkshake in it. I thought the brown specks in it were vanilla bean; it tasted great. One of the guys on the football team came into the kitchen.

“Hey! Who drank the shake?”

“I did. Sorry, I didn’t know it was yours.”

“You drank the whole thing?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

“You are so fucked! Ricky! Check this out!”

It turned out the brown specks were mushrooms, the hallucinogenic type. Suddenly I didn’t feel so good. The walls were moving like waves, and the floor was falling out from under my feet. I ran to the living room so I could stand on the sofa. I looked around, and all of the lamps and lights in the house had gargoyles coming out of them. It was like that evil carnival in Ray Bradbury’s book Something Wicked This Way Comes .