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.
