Laura Banks

Sample chapters from The Wrath of Blonde

Pistachios and Other Distractions

“Why is it that, when you are lying in the sun, just your nose burns? Is your nose that much closer to the sun?” – Laura Banks

I cannot speak of Robert for very long before wishing to change the subject, so let’s talk about stupid stuff for a bit. There are small, incidental facts of life that leave me baffled: • How come fireflies are the only thing on the planet that light up, yet create no heat? • Why don’t certain pistachios open? Is that a defect in manufacturing that I must live with for the rest of my life? •Scotch Tape. Why is it called Scotch Tape? There are many varying stories, but it’s not that interesting. (Why did I even put this in my book?) Trying to scratch off a starting point on a roll of tape almost makes me weep. • Why do I get mad at other drivers on the road? Why don’t I have that level of anger elsewhere? It is a never discussed, but anger in cars is a somewhat socially acceptable agreed upon anger outlet. Everyone is allowed to get mildly cranky at an old lady at a red light who doesn’t move when it turns green. • You can also get mad at sports on TV. • And at the in-laws. • We also all agree that women are often mad at men, primarily exes. • You make a call, and you get a robot that demands (before you can proceed) your name, address, phone number, social security number, blood pressure and first-born astrological sign. You do that and then you are connected to a live operator (thirty minutes later) that asks the same questions all over again. • Why do they ask my marital status on the paperwork at the doctor’s office? Am I more easily located if I am married? Probably. Probably why I never married. (I put myself in the Witness Relocation Program.) Or does the doctor just want to know who they can go after for collections when I don’t pay my doctor visit bill of $150 for a nosebleed visit? There. I forgot what I was thinking about before. Footnote: Suicide claims more lives in the United States than car accidents, breast cancer and murder. The United States has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries, and the rate of Americans taking their own lives has risen almost every year since 2005. Suicide has not been this prevalent in the United States since World War II. Today, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the United States, and suicide rates have been on the rise in nearly every state since the turn of the twenty-first century. Get help if you need it. Please. Or help another.

Wheels of Fire

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” — Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now

I went on to star in three other movies, write books and make lots of comedy club appearances. It’s nice to talk about other achievements after a glorified yet small movie appearance in Star Trek II. (Hey, Kevin Costner got his break playing a dead body as an extra.) Many others started out as background artists, including Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who appeared for a beat in the film, Field of Dreams. John Wayne was a horse race spectator, and Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Clint Eastwood, and Sylvester Stallone were all extras first.

It was time for me to move on from being an extra to making a really horrible film, Wheels of Fire. It is part of Corman’s “Post-Nuke Collection”, which have cult followings in France and Germany.. The premise? In an apocalyptic future, a ruthless vehicular gang called the Highway Warriors conquer the wasteland through murder and plunder. During a raid, they kidnap the sister of a road warrior named Trace. He brings hell down upon them. I played Stinger, a bounty hunter. In Wheels of Fire, I lead a band of true believers and misfits into battle, and in Star Trek II, I navigated our course for the entire crew. Both times I died. Oops. Stuff happens. I tried. Heck, I was just taking orders from Khan. He should have changed the code of the Reliant so Kirk couldn’t lower our shields! (You can’t understand this unless you are a fan of this film. Most are and consider it the best of all the films.)

I played a Sigourney Weaver type, a part she might have taken (cough, cough) had she not gone to Yale. Am I bitter? No. I went to a state college, and I will never be that thin. That was another reason I failed in Hollywood. I liked to eat. There is something invigorating about leading hundreds of men into battle dressed in polyester. (I was wearing the polyester, not the men.) I carried grenades and a machine gun, and I had a pet hawk that cautioned me of impending danger. My costar was actually a notorious individual in real life. I knew him through the various casting offices in Los Angeles. He always showed up with a shiny new car, snakeskin boots, and lots of attitude. He was sexy— okay, very sexy. But on set he was a nightmare, very edgy and disinterested in getting to know me unless you count our make-out scene in the film, during which he copped a feel. “No nipple showing or touching of the nipple” was ridiculously written into my contract! He groped me, just to see if he could get away with it, after the director had yelled, “Cut!”

The real story of this person was how, as an out-of-work actor, he managed to have beau coup bucks. It turns out he was a cocaine dealer. I found that out while reading the life story of John Belushi in his biography, Wired by Bob Woodward, and this actor (whose name I choose to leave out) was one of his f*cking drug dealers. Awful. I kept my distance while filming, and he managed to badly burn his hand while using a flamethrower. I guess you can’t grab the barrel of a flamethrower. Get some Neosporin on that, stat!

Wheels of Fire is a bad movie. Haven’t you ever done something you are ashamed of? Licked your plate after a meal? Ate something off the floor? Posted a talking parrot on Instagram? Give me a break. I love talking birds, singing dogs on Instagram, and eating things off the floor, honoring the twenty-second rule. Don’t watch this B-film unless you have a crazy cousin, who is a fan of Apocalyptic Corman films who forces you to, in a friend’s basement over Christmas.

In Wheels of Fire, I played a willful bounty hunter, a very respectable role in a wretched project. My leading lady character, “Stinger” had strength, dignity and superpowers.

I almost died there, for real. I got very ill with a fever and was taken to healing waters in the middle of a forest one night. It was a mystical experience. I was completely fine and ready to walk across burning bridges by the next day. I was also rubbed down and massaged each evening by female masseuses. Some of them are called Helots. Once I sprained my ankle horribly and could not walk. They rubbed it and I was totally fine the next day. These ladies are doing something with energy healing work, for sure.

Our hotel was located on the Pagsanjan River, which was the same hotel the cast (Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, and Harrison Ford) and crew stayed while filming Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Coppola. There were monsoons, mud slides, and a few earthquakes while I was there. I should have known that I was arriving in a magical place when out my window I saw a moonrise just above the equator flying in from L.A. It felt like a sci-fi film before I even got there.

Like many other actors and musicians, I have explored gurus and Indian teachings. I was involved in a spiritual movement with Gurumayi, whom many consider to be a saint or mystic. I have met her and had very profound experiences in her presence. I had an altar set up to worship while there on location. Each evening I would sit and chant cross-legged on the floor and look at her image. The night I almost died from some mysterious, feverish bug I channeled her energy and what felt like, the spirit of Gandhi. I know that is weird, but it just happened. I went into all kinds of spontaneous yogic positions in the middle of the night and was completely healed.

Where I went through this healing transformation was in a wooden, handmade lodge, situated in the jungle, with Philippine long-tailed macaque monkeys in the trees bordering the property. There were bats in the open-air lobby. I had to for fun take a dugout canoe up to “shoot the falls” on the Pagsanjan River. The dugout had been hand-carved from one piece of wood. The Pagsanjan Falls were incredibly gorgeous. Craft services served the most delicious fish called a Sand Dab, served on plates made of large leaves. It reminded me of Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure Park where I worked as an astrologer, but for real.

On another occasion, we took a medium-sized boat across the ocean to Corregidor Island, a ghostly island in the middle of the South China Sea. Corregidor Island was heavily bombarded during the latter part of “World War II”. Americans suffered thousands of deaths and casualties there, with hundreds of thousands of POW’s kept there. The ruins there serve as a military memorial to American, Filipino and Japanese soldiers who served and lost their lives on the battlefield.

We packed our little boat with cast, crew, and equipment and got there and started filming by early morning. It was stunning to see the abandoned barracks; open bomb craters and the cliffs where Japanese soldiers had jumped to their deaths a few hundred feet below. There were fifty giant coastal guns which looked more like cannons, over fifteen feet in length, that were active during the war. We could see the shrapnel marks in the pock-marked walls from artillery fire. It was there that I died, too, pushed off a cliff.

We finally finished filming and exhausted from dying or dying from exhaustion and the heat of the Filipino sun, headed back to our rickety, forty-foot boat waiting at the nearby harbor. Suddenly there was a tremendous urgency for all of us to get seated anywhere and push off into the waters to get home. What the hell! I didn’t know why the crew seemed in such a panic to get back to the mainland. We were very weighed down with equipment. The water was almost coming onto the boat from both sides, and we were motoring at a very…slow…pace.

When we got back to Manila Bay, everyone seemed very relieved. I found out later that there was so much tension returning because those waters were known to have a large population of Great White Sharks! WTF? Mic drop. That is up there with when I walked on fire across thirty-five feet of hot coals and zip-lined across a forest in something called Warrior Camp. Ta-da. Give me adventure or give me death. Death was always nearby in such moments, which made life seem so much more of a gift. It’s the same thrill of not dying on stage when you do a comedy set.

To this day, filming Wheels of Fire is my most biggest life adventure. It reminded me of Spaulding Gray’s great film documentary, Swimming to Cambodia. Gray’s entire monologue is a rapid-fire account of almost dying in a foreign country while filming The Killing Fields, directed by Jonathan Demme. It also became a stage play that Gray toured with before he committed suicide. (What is with this suicide theme in my book? This is supposed to be funny.)

One time while filming, we were getting on a puddle-jumper from the Ninoy Aguino International Airport in Manila to our next location. We got to the airport and all hell broke loose. President Marcos was landing at the airport, so they shut the entire airport down. There were military police everywhere, with everyone on standby alert. We were not supposed to take off, but we did anyway. I felt like I was in Raiders of the Lost Arc and Harrison Ford nowhere in sight. Darn.

I cannot end this chapter without sharing this final story. The cast and crew were staying at a resort now called the Sunset Goddess Manila in Loague. Marcos had built it for one of his daughters’ weddings, then abandoned it. I stayed there when it was a ghost-town, a big, empty place and I was not at ease, because I could catch a disease…from the insects. I would stay up all I night in the room killing anything that crawled, slithered or flew, which I got pretty good at. I did not want a nibble from a third-world, plague-carrying skeeter. Those possible dreaded diseases include: Hepatitis A Typhoid (Food and water borne diseases.) Rabies, Malaria, Polio, Japanese encephalitis, Influenza, Travelers’ diarrhea, giardia and dysentery. Alrighty then.

Really? This is not the romantic filmmaking I imagined. Before I had landed in the Philippines, I had gotten about six inoculations. I didn’t want any insects on my body, ever, over there. I got tired of swatting at them all night and finally took a bath around midnight. What a mistake that was. While I was in the bath, a giant—and I mean enormous—reddish, hairy, Coconut Spider came crawling out of the tub drain in need of repair, with legs like a linebacker, thick and hairy six inches in diameter! The spider, not me. I felt like I was in a horror film inside a horror film, without the overpay. Well, this minibeast kept birthing itself from this gaping hole in the wall, and you know how I hate holes. I was now up and screaming. I wrapped myself in a towel and went howling down the hallways, looking for something to kill it with, or someone to kill for it being there in the first place. I tracked down an attendant with a broom and he want into the bathroom and made an enormous amount of noise. This gentle Filipino house attendant was just as eager as I was to kill that sucker. He finally got it and had to show me the guts in a napkin.

The only other time I was that frightened was when hundreds of cockroaches invaded my home in New York City. I was living in a high-rise apartment, a very pricey place with neighbors like Macaulay Culkin, Rush Limbaugh, and Paul Shaffer, but just my luck, my apartment was next to the trash compactor in the hallway. I guess they all had gathered in a hole (HOLE) in the wall behind my fridge, and all hell broke loose when the stove was moved away from the wall. I woke up to every square inch in my apartment covered in cockroaches, including the ceiling. I had stirred from my sleep because they were falling ON MY FACE! There. Now you are traumatized, too.  Go find a therapist.

Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson & Lipstick Lesbians (sample)

“If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women.”

—Jack Nicholson

Moving from Kansas to California meant I had to get a job selling something other than my body. I did have a gig singing telegrams for a year, performing at birthday parties with a clanking-symbol monkey toy. (We wore matching red vests.) Waitressing worked, too. (Snacks.) Here is the dynamite job I worked in Los Angeles: I was all legs in a mini skirt with a ponytail serving up cocktails to lipstick lesbians at the infamous “Rage Nightclub” in Hollywood. If you are not cool enough to know, a lipstick lesbian is a very feminine and beautiful gay woman. The producer was a company called “Clones”. The premise was to arrive at the club with another woman of similar appearance, a lookalike. And many of them did. At around eight o’clock the club opened its’ glass doors and hundreds of gorgeous doppelganger couples would pour in, arm in arm dressed in knock ‘em dead spandex. I always wondered if I might be secretly at least bisexual. They say women dream of sexual encounters with women. I have had a few of those but never considered myself bisexual. I could never see settling down with a woman, having candlelight dinners while watching “Gay Married at First Site” (which I love), but I do admire beautiful woman.

Back to my Nicholson and Beatty story! At midnight they would let three men in: José Ébar (a famous hairdresser at the time), Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. What were these three guys doing at a lesbian bar in the deepest of night? Are they looking for an easy n’ obvious multiple partners experience? Were they going to enjoy the challenge of turning a gay woman straight? Did somebody need a haircut and blow dry? I was trying to focus on taking drink orders, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Warren Beatty. I walked right over to him and said, “I’m yours. When do we leave? Where do you want to go?” I was adventurous and I wanted this movie star. He was the perfect specimen of man. As I dared to speak, I was lasciviously scoped out every inch of his 6’4” frame. He did not acknowledge my existence and kept staring straight ahead. I guess he wanted a lesbian, maybe two or three or four lesbians, instead of one heterosexual working girl. But he smelled so good, and his eyes were so twinkly. Why do movie stars smell good? Is it a secret cologne they all wear, “Ode d’ Cinema”?

I walked away disheartened with my tray of margaritas…and a little wet. What do I mean by wet? My tray of drinks, of course, has slightly spilled down the front of my…breasts. Back at my cocktail station, I put in my drink order and noticed that Jack Nicholson had planted himself next to me for most of the evening. WTF? Had he noticed me hitting on his friend? Each time I returned to my drink station, Jack would say something funny to me short and sweet. “How’s your night going, sweetheart?” I was a deer in headlights holding a drink tray. He had stepped off the silver screen into my life for the night, just as I had imagined it would always be.

After my shift ended at 2:00AM, I took off with lots of cash tucked away in my skirt pockets, smelling of Smirnoff and sweet lipstick lesbian perfume. I walked to my little Dodge Colt, the one I would later share with William Shatner, got in and started to pull out of the parking lot. I suddenly saw Jack Nicholson wearing a pair of dark sunglasses and leaning against a wall. Only a movie star who perfected wearing sunglasses (Jack) can wear them at 2AM and get away with it! I drove closer to him and rolled down my window and said, “Hello, Jack.”

He got into my car. I figured I could trust him. I didn’t need to see his ID to know who he was. I could always report him to the Screen Actors Guild if something went wrong. C’mon, it’s f*cking Jack Nicholson. On some level, I must have been thinking that if he turned into that Shining guy or The Cuckoo’s Nest dude, that it would not have been a bad way to die.

Jack got me. We effortlessly connected over conversation about the life of an actor like a couple of old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a while. There was an immediate and odd familiarity between us. My journalistic mentality (remember I edited the high school paper) prompted me to ask him endless questions, nervously delivered to one of the kings of cinema. “What was it like being a movie star in Hollywood? What was your favorite movie you ever made? When did you arrive in Hollywood? What was your first year like?”, I asked. I thought I could learn about Los Angeles and the world of a movie star from the inside out. I also knew I had a short amount of time before he either expected me to sleep with him or was called away by Warren. So, I was plugging away. I told him I was an actor. He said, “I only first came to Hollywood to look at movie stars. I never thought I’d become one.” He was enthralled by films, filmmakers, and movie stars just like I was when he arrived. You don’t imagine movie stars being in awe of other movie stars, but until they too are famous, it must happen all the time.

At this point Jack (or me, can’t remember) pulled out a joint and we started to smoke it. I was completely mesmerized. I was in a one-on-one, shoot-the-shit conversation with Jack Nicholson! His charisma, his massive presence as a person, had filled up every inch of the car and gone around the block. I felt his animal magnetism, like my entire body was riding a wave, a vibration coming off his body. Shatner has this same energy. Other famous people I have met that have this magnetic charm are Lauren Bacall, Warren Beatty, Leonard Bernstein, Pierce Brosnan, Bill Clinton, Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman, Mike Nichols, Julia Roberts, Carly Simon and Robin Williams.

It’s now 3:00 a.m. and it’s to the point in this stunningly starstruck encounter that I felt my imaginary world of movie stars and my real world of regular people (me) colliding with a big bang, but not in theory. I was lost looking at Jack’s big, gorgeous smile and all those teeth, dimples, skin dark from the sun and deep and soulful eyes, eyes and teeth and lips that were moving in front of me. I was looking at him from every angle and trying to embed the memory of this experience in my mind. I wanted to smell his breath. What air did he breathe that was different than mine? I was so stoned at one point that I almost lost control and reached over and kissed delicious mouth. But I wasn’t done asking him questions and you can’t talk with your mouth full of Jack. I asked him, “What is your biggest challenge as an actor?” He said with that famous voice, “Working with an actor who isn’t at my level and playing beneath my talents is hard.” Brilliant, I thought, and I could instantly see the truth in that and not for a minute did I think he was a braggart. Jack Nicholson is one of the few people who can get away with saying that. (I later was able to ask Richard Dreyfus the same question and he said he believes he can bring up the work of his fellow actor. Richard had a better answer, but he still wasn’t Jack.)

We smoked more grass and it got funnier and more surreal. Big surprise. Suddenly I saw a man approaching my car window. This person knocked on the glass and started to bend down to look inside. It was Warren Beatty, again! It was Jack on one side and Warren on the other. Now my leading-man-superstar-dreams were in stun mode. Jack cranked down the window of my little, stupid car and Warren said, “Hey, I’m inside, and we’ve got some champagne, and it’s a party in there. You should come in.” I felt like I had landed in Celebrity Candyland. I thought for sure I would lose Jack to Warren, but instead, he said, with that nasal rasp, “Well, I’m out here entertaining our hostess for the evening, and I’m going to stay out here with her.” Warren shot me a glance to try to figure out what made me so special as to bypass a room full of lesbians, then proceeded to walk back into Rage Nightclub. But he looked at me. Warren Beatty looked at me. And I looked back at him. I was in heaven. Some kind of heaven. And it couldn’t wait. But it had to wait. He was just passing by.

It reminds me of the one time I saw John F Kennedy, Jr. riding his bike on Seventh Ave in New York City. I looked at him, whizzing by. That is all I needed to imagine him as mine. In my stand-up comedy routine, I would joke that John, Jr. had planned to cycle past me that day, just to meet me at that intersection and ask me to marry him! It was fate. My grandfather worked with his grandfather and that perfect moment was meant to be. He just forgot to stop on his bike, look at me and propose. Oh, God, are you starting to get how exhausting it must be to have these delusions, these romantic notions? It is a wonder I ever did anything else but dream of these luxuriously handsome men, these mere drive-bys. But I had seen these famous faces everywhere, in the news and in films and television. I felt like I knew them and that they should know me in the same way.

Jack and I kept sharing and laughing and talking about his love of everything Tinseltown. I just kept looking at him in disbelief, probably with my mouth open and a few flies coming in and out. About thirty minutes later Warren Beatty came out to my car again. Jeez. My car was so embarrassing. I wish I had been their equal, a movie star, driving a white convertible Bentley, like my friend Susan from Thousand Oaks owned. Susan and I would cruise Rodeo Drive at least one day a week with everyone staring and wondering who we were. She was rich. I was a waitress. Okay, the cheap car I drove was appropriate given the fact that I could not afford another one. Who knows. Maybe that was part of my appeal. This time Warren was over on my side, about six inches from my… lips…face...breath…sun visor. He was stunning, liquid handsome. You could eat him with a spoon. And now, lest you forget, my dear reader, I was inoculated from the conversation with Jack Nicholson and stoned for at least an hour. Now I had Warren in my face. Rugged is an understatement. To this day he is the most handsome man I have ever met, with his chiseled, perfect features, super sparkly blue eyes, high cheekbones, and tons of black hair. Go watch Splendor in the Grass or Shampoo. You will get it. Warren looked at Jack and said, “Hey, we really gotta’ go.” I forced myself to pull away from my flat-out stare at Warren to witness Mr. Postman Always Rings Twice getting out of the car. But before disappearing back to the land of special people in Doodyville, he turned around and asked me for my phone number. Really?

I never expected him to call. Jack walked over to Warren’s small, black Mercedes convertible sports car and they got in and drove off. I don’t think I drove off right away. I think I had to remind myself to start breathing in and out again and wait for the feelings to come back to my extremities. I finally headed down Wilshire Boulevard to my home in West L.A. I thought I had lost them on the road, but suddenly they appeared next to me at a traffic light. We met up at a couple more lights – then they would disappear again, then zoom up next to me again. It was a real cat and mouse. Yet each time we would stop at a light, I would look over and see those two famous faces looking back at me. I was now being followed by two of the biggest movie stars of all time and starting to piece together (wow I’m smart) that their intentions might not be so pure. I remember laughing out loud with all the life that was in me—the situation was fabulous!

At our final shared red light, they motioned for me to follow them up the famous Mulholland Drive where they were neighbors alongside Marlon Brando. Mulholland Drive has some of the most exclusive and expensive homes in the world, housing mainly Hollywood celebrities. It had the nickname, Bad Boy Boulevard, due primarily to Jack and Warren. (Where is the Bad Girl Drive? Damn, they even celebrate bad boys with their own drive. Why can’t girls be bad and celebrated?) It was in that bizarre as hell moment that I knew I had an opportunity to have a three-way sexual escapade with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. The light turned green. I looked at them…smiled…and…offered a tiny Barbie wave…and drove away. But I was so tempted. Time stopped. I had to choose. I chose to protect the little girl in me from Kansas.

Out of all the women there that night, they had placed their bets on one smelly, heteroflexible waitress, and I turned them down. I look back at this story and I’m glad I said no, some of the time. I had to say no. My Kansas roots took hold again and let’s face it, they were a couple of aging lotharios. Now, I lean more towards wishing I had dived into the mist of the night with them, seen them up close and in every way, seen their mansions and what kind of underwear they wore. What a story to tell. I would delight in rewinding time and trading with them over other bottom feeders I had chosen over them.

But the story was not over. The next day I was at work at an actor’s casting and production facility, and I heard someone from the front yell out, “Laura, you have a call from someone named Jack on line two.” Holy crap. I picked up the phone and managed to squeak out, “Hi, Jack, let’s have lunch.” I was so nervous. I wanted to say anything before he could say anything, trying to keep it light and friendly. Of course, I knew he had only one reason to call me, and that was to beg me to bed him, so I suggested a snack instead. I was obviously intimidated. I mean, what do you say to a movie icon? He said back, “Well, Laura, I’m into f*cking, not eating.” I said, “Well, I’m into eating and not f*cking.” That actual dialog went on for days. He kept calling. I was determined to turn him down because by then I had spoken to my mother, who had told me that he was a part of the Charles Manson crowd. He was not. In subsequent years I would watch him in movies and think he was handsome and charismatic. I always thought that he was such an intense actor which can spill over into the sheet-sharing department. And as legendary ladies’ man, experience can equal talent. Sometimes not. He just had that animal magnetism, that lightning in a bottle that makes for living Hollywood legends, and great bedfellows. I was a bit disappointed a while later when I learned that his line to me, “I’m into f*cking, not eating,” was taken from the film Terms of Endearment with Shirley MacLaine, Warren Beatty’s sister, that he had just finished filming a few months before we met. It wasn’t even original—it was a line from a movie. Oh, boy.

A few months later, I was between apartments as usual, always moving, always looking for the next new neighborhood. I changed apartments the way some people change socks, so I wouldn’t have to go around the same block repeatedly, then die. (It’s that Truman Show reference, again.) I really can’t recall why I had no place to go that night. I must have been between places or maybe my lease on my next place wouldn’t start until the first of the month. Whatever the reason, I had decided that night was going to be memorable. I wanted to feel like a rock star, so I checked into the legendary Sunset Tropicana Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. In the sixties, the Tropicana was best known for the famous musicians who had called it home. The place was near the famous roadhouse, The Troubadour and Barney’s Beanery. Long-term residents included members of the Byrds, and the Ramones, Alice Cooper, Janis Joplin, Bob Marley, and Jim Morrison.

When I was there it was run down. The hotel’s day in the sun had passed. I’m sure it was risky being there as a single female. But I was 5’11” and with a hood on walking to my car I could look like a guy. Few people messed with me. I was raped once back in Kansas and once in Los Angeles, but I was still alive and no more fearful because of it. Maybe that has been my problem all along, but I bore easy. I remember the exact moment as a child I felt boredom, and from that moment forward I promised myself to stay away from such emotions at all costs, with safety as a secondary consideration. At the Tropicana, with everything I owned in a black, plastic bag, I felt very much alive and, as usual, I was taking chances with my life for the thrill of it. I could see the flashing neon sign out my bedroom window. The bed was lumpy and awful, and the room was filled with cheap furniture and the smell of what I imagined to be old, dead rock stars. There’s another cologne: Dead Rock Stars.

I decided to call Jack Nicholson. I still had his phone number. I remember wondering what is the craziest thing that I could do with him and not bed him. I decided I would have phone sex with him. I called and the caller screening service answered and put me on hold for a second, then immediately connected us. He said, “Well, hello Laura. How are you?”, in that voice that stops time. I said I was fine and then I made it sound like a joke and said, “What are you wearing?” He laughed, but quickly knew that I shifted into my sultry voice. I started to let my breath get heavier and my speech softer in luscious tones. I was holding in my laughter as I told him I was touching myself, which I was. This went on for a while and right before he reached orgasm, I reached orgasm first, and then I hung up! What was the psychology behind me doing that? Was I going to be the one who got away? Be memorable? Was I being funny? About six months later I was in a relationship with Alan and the phone rang in the middle of the night. It was Jack. I came back to bed and Alan asked who had called. I said, “Jack Nicholson. Go back to sleep.”

Years later I was working on the film Demon of Paradise in the Philippines with my co-star who told me that she had enjoyed horizontal refreshment with Jack. She said that he was a great lover and he had given her a tarantula-under-glass as a gift. I wondered if maybe I had missed out on some spider-ware, or more. Yep, I’m sure that would be a, yep.

Why did I pass on Jack, for real? Maybe deep down I knew he wouldn’t take me seriously and I didn’t want to be just one of his hundreds of buttered biscuits. But I was okay with being one of Shatner’s bedfellows, why didn’t I make love to an actor who had at least won an Oscar?