Authors: Bobbie Brown,Caroline Ryder
I sat in our bedroom, with a dish on my lap, and cut the powder with one of Tommy’s credit cards. I had heard you didn’t need that much speed to feel the effects, so I made a very small line. The first hit was a surprise. Unlike cocaine, it burned, sending lightning bolts through my eyeballs. I learned to look past the pain, because this was a high like no other. It felt . . . natural. My ADD mind felt oddly at peace. One of the chief things meth does is to release serotonin in the brain, so suddenly I was the optimistic, positive, confident Bobbie again. Plus, I could cook dinner for Tommy without the tiniest urge to taste what was in the pan. From day one, I was hooked.
The weekend I started using speed (behind Tommy’s back, for the record), Tommy took us out on his boat to Lake Mead near Las Vegas for a mini vacation (you might recognize the location from the sex tape he and Pamela Anderson would make, in the not too distant future). I didn’t eat anything the
whole weekend, because the speed I had taken had, to my glee, completely destroyed my appetite. “Why aren’t you eating?” Tommy asked me, and I told him I just didn’t feel hungry, no biggie. Tommy wanted me to water-ski, which I had never tried before, but when I tried to get up, my legs buckled beneath me. I was too weak for water sports. My body was starving. I could practically feel the weight dropping off as my metabolism sped up . . . I liked it.
From day one, I started using a little speed every day, and was impressed at how quickly I was losing weight. Very soon it got to the point where I was
too
thin. Grotesquely thin. There is a photo I did for
Cosmopolitan
(one of the rare modeling gigs I did during that period) in which I weighed ninety pounds. Now, instead of making fun of my curves, Tommy was calling me Skeletor. I couldn’t win. But I had given up everything, handed Tommy complete power and control over me. The more I gave up, the less he respected me. The less he respected me, the more I used. The more I used, the less I respected myself. The cycle of addiction had begun. I was starting to fuck up big-time, throwing away opportunities that could have made me a major star, because my life’s focus had now narrowed to just two things—Tommy and drugs.
Robert De Niro called the house, trying to convince Tommy to let me read for the part of Ginger, his wife in the movie
Casino
, with Martin Scorsese set to direct. The mighty Robert De Niro was calling
me
. Most boyfriends would have been delighted. But Tommy wasn’t having any of it and told my agent that I would
not be available to audition. Who knows, maybe I would have got the part, maybe I would have got a different part. Point is, I’ll never know. The role went to Sharon Stone, who won a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for her performance. As I watched my career disintegrate before my eyes, it became harder for me to bury my resentment. I stopped being the fun, sassy Bobbie Brown who Tommy had fallen in love with. I became a bitchy, anorexic tweaker, obsessed with cleaning, who certainly didn’t feel like lying around naked with Tommy anymore.
Improbable as this sounds, I did way more drugs than Tommy Lee. At least, during the time we were together. Tommy had already gone through his period of insane drug use with Mötley during the ’80s, and by 1994, his lifestyle was relatively tame in comparison. He would do coke socially, maybe one weekend out of a month. At around 7:30
P.M.
every night he would make a cocktail and smoke some pot. That was about as wild as he got.
Sometimes we would go down the street to a restaurant that Tommy adored, just to get a shot of this cognac that Tommy loved. It was six hundred dollars a shot, and tasted like soft, very expensive flames licking your throat. Tommy and I always knew how to have fun, even as the cracks began to appear in our relationship.
We went to Japan with Mötley. Things were up-and-down between Tommy and me, as we veered from lovey-dovey to antagonistic from one moment to the next. “I want a tattoo,” announced Tommy. “A real yakuza tattoo.” Tommy had gotten
it into his head that he wanted the Japanese mafia to give him some ink, and our promoter in Japan, a mysterious Japanese gentleman called Mr. Udo, had grudgingly agreed he would help.
We were picked up by one of Mr. Udo’s drivers, who drove us through the backstreets of Tokyo in a van with blacked-out windows. We reached a driveway, and a garage door went up, behind which lay a serene compound, a secret yakuza world tucked away from the hustle and bustle on the other side. We entered a building through the back door and went up some stairs to a small studio where the artist was waiting, sitting cross-legged on the floor. He told Tommy to lie on the floor while he drew a traditional
wabori
design; then he inked it on Tommy’s skin using not an electric needle, but a needle attached to a long bamboo handle. Tommy was gritting his teeth through the pain, while I checked his face for blackheads. The artist explained to us, through an interpreter, how some yakuza get pearls sewn into their dicks, a sort of “ribbed for pleasure” effect for their women. Tommy laughed and said he was considering getting some, but I rolled my eyes.
Waste of good pearls,
I thought, squeezing a big blackhead on Tommy’s chin.
Afterward, we were invited to dinner with Mr. Udo. During the meal I said I was full, which caused the Japanese at the table to erupt in suppressed giggles. “To say you’re full in Japanese means you are pregnant,” whispered our interpreter.
“Oh, no, not full,” I said loudly, pointing to my belly and shaking my head. I plunged my chopsticks into my bowl of rice,
leaving them pointing straight up in the air, which prompted more hushed laughter at the table.
“Don’t do that, signifies bad omen,” said our interpreter. I had grown up on voodoo, gris-gris, and swamp magic, but never before had I met such a superstitious people. Me being me, I took my chopsticks and put them in my ears. “Well, how about this? Bad luck too?”
“Please stop,” said the interpreter.
“What about this?” I said, sticking a chopstick up my nose. Mr. Udo smiled politely, and changed the subject.
That night, Tommy and I got in a huge fight in the hotel room. Who knows why? All I knew was that the squabbles were getting meaner and more regular. It didn’t help that I was high nearly all the time. I had smuggled meth to Japan in a little matchbox in the pocket of a pair of jeans deep inside my suitcase. Tommy still didn’t have a clue that I was using. Poor guy, he just wanted to have fun and enjoy the trip, and kept asking me to go with him to this press event and that party—but I didn’t give a shit. All I wanted to do was sit and pick my face in the bathroom mirror. “Fine, Bobbie, stay home and be a weirdo,” said Tommy, confused.
One weekend, not long after we had returned home to Malibu from Japan, some unexpected visitors showed up—Heather Locklear’s sister and her husband. Uninvited
and unexpected. “We just wanted to lie down on the beach, so we thought we’d visit you guys!” It was the weirdest thing ever, but I played it cool. “Sure, come on in.” Tommy was also caught off guard, but we were gracious hosts and hung out with them the whole day.
“Tommy, do you think Heather’s trying to check up on you or something?” I asked him afterward. He said he was as weirded out as I was about it. Maybe I was paranoid, but I was nobody’s fool. It definitely felt to me like her sister had been sent in as a spy. Then, one afternoon, Heather Locklear herself called.
“Oh, hey, girl, what’s happening?” said Tommy.
This is too much,
I thought. I couldn’t believe how casual he was being with his ex, like it was no biggie that she was calling, even though they hadn’t talked in over a year. She asked him something mundane, what their dentist’s phone number was or something. Something she could easily have figured out on her own. By now, I was fully spooked. I confronted Tommy.
“What the fuck is going on? Have you guys been seeing each other?”
“Bobbie, you and I spend every waking moment together—how is that even possible?”
“I don’t fucking believe you. You’re all the same.
Liars!
Once a cheater, always a cheater. Joan Rivers was right.”
Tommy was so irritated with me by this point, he got on a plane to Vegas by himself, where he met up with buddies and partied it up for a weekend. That was his payback, his big “fuck you.” It was the first time in our relationship that he had gone on vacation without me, aside from touring. I was so mad I
packed a bag, and Taylar and I went to stay at Sharise’s. When he got back to Malibu, Tommy called and begged me to come home, and after a few days, I did. I thought we had moved on, but a couple of weeks later, the phone rang in the dead of night. A breathy-sounding girl on the line.
“Heyyyy . . . can I speak to Tommy?”
“Who is this?” I asked. The line went dead. Remember, we had a phone service. So anyone who was able to call the house must have gotten the okay from Tommy or me to do so. The next day, I asked the phone company to send me a record of all the numbers that had called. Sure enough, the number had a Vegas dial code. I decided to call this girl, whoever she was, and find out what was going on.
“How do you know Tommy?” I demanded. “I’m his fiancée.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. Well, me and my friends spent the night with him in his room. We were having a party.”
“Did anything happen?”
“Well, maybe some blow jobs.”
When Tommy came home, I quite justifiably raised hell. I wasn’t counting on Tommy raising it back at me.
“Fuck you, now you think you’re the phone police?” Tommy grabbed me by my hair and dragged me across the living room. My daughter was watching as he threw me on the couch and pinned me down. “What are you, a fucking cop?” I remembered watching my father do the same to my mother. “Go on, hit me,” I snarled. Tommy let go. Taylar was crying, and I rushed over to her and held her close.
The next night, Tommy told me he was going to Matt Sorum’s house for a party, and that he wanted to go alone. His buddy Elijah Blue showed up and they left the house together.
Fuck that,
I thought, getting dressed.
What am I, Cinderella?
I told Taylar’s nanny that I would be home in a few hours, and drove to Matt’s house. I walked through the party, and saw Tommy talking to some buddies. We made eye contact and then ignored each other for the rest of the night. I left at around 2
A.M.
and went to bed. At around 8
A.M.
I was woken up by the sound of Tommy getting home. I walked into the living room and there they were, Tommy and his buddy Whitfield Crane, long-haired lead singer of the band Ugly Kid Joe. Whitfield, this goofy, handsome kid who looked like a surfer, was on our sofa dangling his legs over his head.
“If you were ice cream, what flavor would you be?” Whitfield asked me. “I think you’d be tutti-frutti.”
“Fucking clown,” I muttered, looking at Tommy. “So why exactly did you bring this asshole home?”
Tommy grabbed me by the arm and marched me to the bedroom and started yelling. Athena and her boyfriend James happened to be staying with us in the guest bedroom. Hearing the commotion, Athena came running into our bedroom. By this point Tommy had me by the throat, pinned against the wall.
“You’re a fuckin’ bitch!”
Taylar was pulling on his ankles.
“Let her go, you athhhhhole!” she said, with her three-year-old lisp. I punched Tommy in the face, and he loosened his
grip around my neck. I fell to the carpet, crying. “Oh, shit . . .” whispered Athena, stunned.
I couldn’t believe Taylar was having to witness the very same bullshit I had grown up with as a child. When I got with Tommy, I had no idea he would be violent against women. Now, enough was enough. There was no way Taylar was going to grow up seeing what I had. I told Tommy I was moving out.
I found a three-bedroom condo in Studio City and moved myself in. Because I had not worked in a year, I had to sell all my jewelry so I could pay my first month’s rent and buy Christmas presents for Taylar. I sold my wedding ring, the platinum bracelet Jani had given me, and Tommy’s engagement ring. He had asked for it back as I was leaving. “Are you serious? Fuck you, cheese ball!” I screamed, slamming the door behind me.
A few days after Christmas, on December 28, I went back to Tommy’s. He had been calling me nonstop, begging me to come home. “No way,” I said. “Well, I’m not going to let you in to get your stuff,” he said, turning nasty again. “Come on, Tommy, I need my things!”
“I’m not even going to open the door, not until you give me the ring back.”
“I don’t have the ring, I told you I had to sell it to get my apartment!”
He hung up. I went to see my friend Lene Hefner, a former
Los Angeles Raiders cheerleader turned porn star, and asked if she would come with me to Tommy’s to get my stuff. “It’s going to be ugly,” she said, sounding nervous. “Maybe we should stop at the police station and have them escort us?” We stopped at the cop station that was on the same street as our home, and a nice officer said he would come with us, for protection. The cop rang the doorbell.
“Mr. Lee, I am here with Bobbie Brown—can you open the door, please?”
Tommy opened the door.
“I am here to supervise Miss Brown getting her belongings,” said the cop.
“That’s not fucking legal. You can’t just come here and demand things from me.”
“Mr. Lee, her mail still comes here, so legally this is her residence too. She has a right to get her belongings. She felt in fear for her safety and asked me to come along. I am going to ask that you remain in the living room with me while she gathers some things that belong to her and her child.”
The cop walked us into the house and stood in the living room. It was beyond awkward. Tommy started following me around the house as I gathered up my things, yelling. “This is my fucking house!” He tried to grab me, and I screamed. The cop came running in. “What happened?”
“He just tried to grab her,” said Lene.
“Sir, I am going to ask you not to touch her again.”
Tommy, who had lost his grip on reality, went to grab my
arm again. The cop stepped in, put Tommy in cuffs, read him his rights, and took him away in the cop car. I wished things hadn’t had to become so dramatic. But that’s what Tommy and I were—pure drama. I didn’t press charges in the end. As I had tried to explain to Tommy all along, I just wanted my clothes and some plates, knives, and forks for me and Taylar to eat with, dammit!