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.
I was beginning to resent my role as her bar companion; it seemed like she was just using me as bait for these men—and as her designated driver, albeit one without a license.
When I look back, it’s incredible that we never got caught, but then again, in those days Ginny could have taught a master class at defying expectations (and odds). For somebody who was getting by on a thread, all the apartments we moved into, though small, were clean, often newly built, and generally in safe neighborhoods. We were never “slumming it.” Maybe she was continuing the game she and my father used to play, staying one jump ahead of the landlords by using aliases, but whatever the reason, in the first two years after my parents split, we moved seven times. One move was a matter of safety, after a guy she’d been dating got angry at her: I came home from school one day to find all the electrical wires cut and the smell of urine in our apartment. He’d come by and marked every corner of the place, like a dog.
The stress of being on the run from apartment to apartment was contributing, I’m sure, to my mother’s instability as well as my own anxiety. One night when I came home late, she was waiting by the door. “Where have you been? You know you’re supposed to be home by eleven,” she shrieked. Home by eleven? Never once had she mentioned a curfew or asked where I’d been or where I was going. When I gave her some smart-ass rejoinder, she raised her hand to hit me. I lost it. “How dare you suddenly try to be a mother!” I yelled at her. “Everything’s about you! So don’t pretend for a minute you care about me and what time I come home.” And instead of her slapping me, I slapped her. It felt good. She never raised a hand toward me again.
THE WORST COLLATERAL damage from all these moves was my education. When I went back to Fairfax to sign up for tenth-grade courses after our short stint in Brentwood, there were none available, at least not to me. I needed to make up credits, the school explained, and those courses were all filled. Why no one had told me about my lack of credits before I have no idea. Maybe they didn’t care, or maybe I didn’t.
The choices Fairfax presented to me were either to take noncredit courses like driver’s ed or to switch to a special “continuation” school that was attached to Fairfax and attended by kids who were misfits or had drug issues or learning disabilities. I didn’t fit into any of those categories, but that was the school I opted to attend, and I surprised myself by actively liking it and doing quite well there.
One thing was clear: I had to figure out a way to support myself so I could start leading my own life and escape from the crazy unpredictability of my mother’s. And that’s exactly what the continuation school offered: I entered a program called “four and four,” which entailed four hours of classes and four hours of paid work, for which you earned credit. My very first job, which I got through a girlfriend at school, was with a collection agency. My slightly husky voice made me sound older than my age, and every afternoon I called and threatened people to pay up, or else. I kept waiting for my mom and dad to appear on the call lists.
It felt good to have my own pocket money and not have to rely on my mother, and it enabled me to enroll in an acting class—which turned out to be my salvation.
Despite her financial straits, from time to time my mom and her friends would hit L.A. hot spots like Le Dome, where Jackie Collins always went for lunch with her friends. We were there one night when a man who looked to be in his late forties or early fifties came over to our table and introduced himself as Val Dumas. He said if we liked Le Dome, we should come by his restaurant, Mirabelle, sometime. He had a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance; I remember thinking he resembled Bijan, that quintessentially eighties icon who was always splashed across billboards in a tuxedo flogging his perfume. Val was a tall, elegant man with an air of superiority or money—or both—dressed in a soft button-down shirt and neatly pressed slacks, and Italian loafers. He chatted us up for a while, and then when my mom couldn’t find her car keys, he offered us a ride home in his brown Mercedes but insisted I sit next to him in the passenger seat.
I had lunch with him at Mirabelle not long afterward. There were lots of plants, it had a relaxed, California-casual vibe, and the whole thing felt fun and harmless: it was broad daylight, and we were in public. I didn’t question why a middle-aged man would want to hang out with a fifteen-year-old girl.
He started showing up at school, waiting for me outside in his car after classes let out. It was easier not having to take the bus, and often we’d stop at Mirabelle and have something to eat at his regular table. I told myself he was like a friend of the family, but there was something about him that made me slightly uneasy—an unsettling sense I had that he wouldn’t always be so helpful and pleasant, a vague anxiety that there was something not quite right. I began to make excuses to avoid him.
Then one day when I got home from school he was there—inside the apartment, waiting for me. I felt the blood drain from my body. “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “Where’s my mom?”
I have blotted out the exact sequence of events—the details that led from me opening the front door, to wondering if my mother had given him a key, to feeling trapped in my own home with a man three times my age and twice my size, to him raping me.
For decades, I didn’t even think of it as rape. I thought
