Shaker Run and
Nicollette Breakup

There were still some film parts for me. I starred in Thunder Alley, playing a singer, of all things. (I was happy to have won the audition by actually singing—imagine!) Next up was Shaker Run, which was shot in New Zealand. I played a stunt car driver along with Cliff Robertson. Before I headed off, I had done a lot of soul-searching about Nicollette. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. It was that simple. I never wanted to lose her again. We were always going through these mini breakups and I, in my selfishness, would automatically go off and find comfort elsewhere during the time we were apart. She hated that, just like I did when she behaved the same way. I was tired of that behavior. I was twenty-four years old, and she was twenty-two. I wanted to propose to Nicollette, and I wanted it to be special.

Once I arrived in New Zealand, I began making arrangements to pop the question to Nicollette. I then flew her down there, under the cover story that I missed her and wanted her down there for a little vacation. I had a Jeroboam Moët & Chandon champagne waiting for her in Queenstown in my hotel suite overlooking the water and the snow-covered mountains. I had bought her a beautiful half-carat diamond and I secretly put the diamond in a champagne flute, carefully filling the glass only halfway. We toasted, but to my shock, she knocked the champagne back like she was doing a shot. The rock must have hit a tooth, and she said, “What the hell…?” and I pointed out the diamond in the glass and said to her, “Will you marry me?” There was a huge pause. She looked me lovingly in the eyes and said, “Yes, I will marry you.” It was the special moment I was looking for. And then we spent a blissful night together. She was with me for about a week, and thankfully I had some time off from shooting so that we could make a real vacation of it. We took a helicopter ride with Cliff Robertson; we went on a jet boat excursion and took long romantic walks together. It was wonderful.

The night before she left to go back home (I had a couple of weeks left to shoot), I basically told Nicollette everything I’d done in my life. Everyone I’d been with, every crazy sexual situation—everything. She wanted to know, and I shared it with her because I wanted to come clean. I wanted her to know everything about me so that we could both move on together without any baggage. And then she left.

A couple of days after she got home, I woke up in the middle of the night after having had a nightmare about us. I couldn’t recall the exact details, but in the dream she was leaving me. The dream was too real to ignore, so I picked up the phone and called her at her friend Vicky’s house, where she was staying. She had recently moved out of my house because we’d decided it would be good for both of us to have a little space. I felt very scared as the phone rang. It was as if I had experienced an omen. Vicky answered the phone. I said right away, “Vicky, can I please speak to Nicollette? There was a pause. “She is sleeping,” Vicky answered. “Can you please wake her up?” “Leif, she told me, she wants to sleep.” This wasn’t making sense. “Vicky, come on, you know me. Can you please help me out here? Can I please speak to Nicollette?” I knew Vicky well enough to know she was holding something back. We went back and forth a couple of times, I started to lose it, and she finally blurted, “She’s not here, Leif.”

My heart sank. “Where is she?” I asked.

“She’s at Tim’s.”

“Tim who?”

“Tim Hutton.”

I couldn’t believe it. I had recently been partying with Tim, Sean Penn, and a few other guys. I had actually introduced Tim to Nicollette not long before. I felt like the ground fell away under my feet. She had just accepted my proposal. How could she do this? I had poured my heart out to her. I needed to get home right away. I went to the production people and told them I had to go home to deal with an emergency. They thought I was crazy. Barring something like a death in the family, I could not leave them high and dry, so I finished up my work in the next few days. In one stunt scene that I was doing myself, I crashed into one of the cameras and got a big gash on my head. I was a mess. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I had to get home.

When I finally got back to Los Angeles a couple of days later, I went right to her apartment but Nicollette was not there. I started making phone calls all over town, but I could not locate her. This was worse than what I was feeling in New Zealand because I was now so close and yet so far. I drove out to Malibu and knocked on Timothy Hutton’s door. When he answered, I said to him, “Is Nicollette here?” He looked very surprised, fumbled for a moment, and said, “Why would she be here?” Okay, fine. Now I was just getting lied to. The next several days were so dark and so bleak, I didn’t know what to do with myself. When I did finally find Nicollette and talk to her, it was like my worst nightmare coming true. In short, she explained to me that after hearing me talk to her about all that I had done in life, she had thought about it on the way home and decided that there were still plenty of things that she wanted to do. Right away I regretted pouring my heart out to her. She wanted to have all of the experiences that I had had. My coming clean with her was an awakening for her. And so she reconsidered her promise to me, and that was it. That was it for good. There was no more Nicollette in my life. And I had never felt as bad as I did when I finally realized that it was over. I needed to self-medicate. Badly.

Not long after the breakup with Nicollette, I was down in Florida to play in a celebrity tennis tournament. The brothers Jimmy and Vince Van Patten were also playing. I knew Vince because we had done the TV show Three for the Road together. I didn’t know Jimmy that well, yet I poured my heart out to both of them about Nicollette and how shattered I was. What I didn’t know is that she had also been sleeping with Jimmy Van Patten. Those guys didn’t say a word to me. They let me go on and on, and I looked like such a fool. I felt like everybody was letting me down. Why do I trust so few people today? Gee, I wonder.