Free Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock 'N' Roll, and Mental Illness by Mary Forsberg Weiland, Larkin Warren Page B
Authors: Mary Forsberg Weiland, Larkin Warren
which lasted about half a day—Johnny threw one, too, because Mom wanted him to move east with us. The other news came not long after that: Mom and Mark were expecting a baby. That information was hard to take in at first. It was more family (although with the various aunts and uncles and cousins, there was never any shortage of family), but it felt like a different family, and it was all going to happen in a different place. My mother’s last name was different; my new baby sister, a blue-eyed blonde named Suzy, would have a different last name, too. We would be three thousand miles away from where we’d started. And then I heard the thunderclap: New Jersey was just across the river from New York City! Duh.
The new house was standard-issue military housing: two-storybrick, with three bedrooms, and houses just like it up and down the block. Almost immediately after we settled in, I started plotting. I didn’t give much effort to fitting into my new school, and I got a part-time job at Burger King to put more walking-around money into my pockets. Train money, subway money, taxicab money.
Mom and I took the train into New York, where Karen Lee introduced me to Pauline Bernatchez, the agency’s French founder. She had started it in Paris, they told me. All around us, photos and blown-up magazine covers of the world’s most beautiful women graced the walls. The agents gave us a rundown of how things would work; almost immediately, I was sent out (alone) on my first shoot for a teen catalog. I did some fashion shoots for Seventeen , I did more catalog work—but the one that amazed me the most in those early days was for gloves. Just my hands in gloves. For one hundred fifty dollars an hour! This is genius, I thought.
Then came winter: dark mornings and short days and navigating my way around New York City in a coat that didn’t protect me. I was always cold, was always being weighed and measured, and was always hungry. I actually believed Fig Newtons were health food—the package said so. My romance with the city wore off quickly, and I pleaded to go back to California. My mother decided that both Johnny and I should go back (primarily, I think, because we were both a pain in the ass). Julie, then only four, and Suzy, the new baby girl, would of course stay with Mom and Mark. The plan: I would live with Grandma Rosa in suburban L.A. (where the modeling agency assured me I would have plenty of work) and go to high school there, and my brother would again live with my dad.
Mom got a cross-country itinerary from Greyhound (not for the most direct route, as we would discover) and put together a suitcasefull of groceries; tearfully, we all said good-bye. I was fifteen, John was twelve. We’d both been working very hard for a couple of years to get away with something and now, it seemed, we’d finally done it. Together, we ate our combined weight in Bugles and Fig Newtons as we made our way west.
Within days of our arrival, Johnny was in San Diego at my dad’s, Candy had cleaned me up and was taking me to modeling open calls, and I finally settled on Bordeaux Model Management for L.A. representation. And I was once again plotting—this time, how to get out of the horrible high school near my grandmother’s. That dear, befuddled woman. I talked her into signing a paper that she didn’t really understand, which stated that I was transferring to another school and needed my records. I then presented the school officials with the paper, they released the records to me—in effect, they released me —and that was it. I was done. I packed my bags and took the bus to the Greyhound station without telling my grandma. Then, like a B-movie cliché, I got off at the Hollywood station and never left.
It would take me another ten years of correspondence school to get my high school degree, but before my sixteenth birthday, I was living in a models’ apartment on Hollywood Boulevard and taking care of myself. Well, sort
The new house was standard-issue military housing: two-storybrick, with three bedrooms, and houses just like it up and down the block. Almost immediately after we settled in, I started plotting. I didn’t give much effort to fitting into my new school, and I got a part-time job at Burger King to put more walking-around money into my pockets. Train money, subway money, taxicab money.
Mom and I took the train into New York, where Karen Lee introduced me to Pauline Bernatchez, the agency’s French founder. She had started it in Paris, they told me. All around us, photos and blown-up magazine covers of the world’s most beautiful women graced the walls. The agents gave us a rundown of how things would work; almost immediately, I was sent out (alone) on my first shoot for a teen catalog. I did some fashion shoots for Seventeen , I did more catalog work—but the one that amazed me the most in those early days was for gloves. Just my hands in gloves. For one hundred fifty dollars an hour! This is genius, I thought.
Then came winter: dark mornings and short days and navigating my way around New York City in a coat that didn’t protect me. I was always cold, was always being weighed and measured, and was always hungry. I actually believed Fig Newtons were health food—the package said so. My romance with the city wore off quickly, and I pleaded to go back to California. My mother decided that both Johnny and I should go back (primarily, I think, because we were both a pain in the ass). Julie, then only four, and Suzy, the new baby girl, would of course stay with Mom and Mark. The plan: I would live with Grandma Rosa in suburban L.A. (where the modeling agency assured me I would have plenty of work) and go to high school there, and my brother would again live with my dad.
Mom got a cross-country itinerary from Greyhound (not for the most direct route, as we would discover) and put together a suitcasefull of groceries; tearfully, we all said good-bye. I was fifteen, John was twelve. We’d both been working very hard for a couple of years to get away with something and now, it seemed, we’d finally done it. Together, we ate our combined weight in Bugles and Fig Newtons as we made our way west.
Within days of our arrival, Johnny was in San Diego at my dad’s, Candy had cleaned me up and was taking me to modeling open calls, and I finally settled on Bordeaux Model Management for L.A. representation. And I was once again plotting—this time, how to get out of the horrible high school near my grandmother’s. That dear, befuddled woman. I talked her into signing a paper that she didn’t really understand, which stated that I was transferring to another school and needed my records. I then presented the school officials with the paper, they released the records to me—in effect, they released me —and that was it. I was done. I packed my bags and took the bus to the Greyhound station without telling my grandma. Then, like a B-movie cliché, I got off at the Hollywood station and never left.
It would take me another ten years of correspondence school to get my high school degree, but before my sixteenth birthday, I was living in a models’ apartment on Hollywood Boulevard and taking care of myself. Well, sort