“I would like to bring you up to date on the Comedian’s Health Sweepstakes. As it stands now, I lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks two to one. However, Richard still leads me one to nothing on burning yourself up! Well, the way it happened was: First Richard had a heart attack, then I had a heart attack; then Richard burnt himself up; then I said, ‘Fuck that—I’m gonna have another heart attack!’”
—Carlin at Carnegie, 1983
In May 1982, I walked out of my parents’ kitchen to the driveway and saw a limo pull up. My dad’s manager, Jerry Hamza, jumped out and yelled, “George is at St. John’s. He’s had a heart attack.”
Jerry and my dad had been at Dodger Stadium watching the Dodgers beat the Mets (my dad’s favorite team) when my dad got hit with an attack of angina. Dad and Jerry immediately went to the first-aid station, but soon realized that the first-aid room at Dodger Stadium was nothing more than a glorified place to get a Band-Aid. They quickly found the limo and its driver, John Batis, in the parking lot.
“I’m probably not having a heart attack, but just in case, we should probably get to St. John’s Hospital as soon as possible,” Dad said as they got in the limo.
Because they left before the end of the game, and because John broke every moving violation known to man, they made it to Santa Monica in twenty minutes. When my mom and I arrived, the doctors were not as optimistic as Dad was—it was way more serious than angina. It was almost a full blockage of the right descending artery. Grimly the doctors said that Dad’s pulse was around twenty and that we should go in to see him—this could be good-bye.
I was terrified and crying, but Dad was in good spirits and tried to calm me. “It’s okay, Kiddo. Everything’s going to be fine.” I wanted to believe him, but nothing he could say would calm my fear. I thought he was going to die.
After a while the doctors came to a consensus and decided to try an experimental anticoagulant that the hospital happened to have gotten just that week—Streptokinase. They had no idea if it would work. Within minutes the clot broke up, Dad’s pulse lifted, and his vital signs stabilized.
Dad got lucky, again.
* * *
Six months later, my mom went into St. John’s for a routine cyst removal from her breast. Because she had fake boobs, it had to be an inpatient procedure. And thank God it was. If it hadn’t been, they might have missed the malignant tumor. After she awoke to the news, they gave her forty-eight hours to make a choice: chemotherapy and radiation or a radical mastectomy. I was terrified that she’d follow in her own mother’s footsteps. But Mom had no doubt she was going to live. She opted for the mastectomy and refused the chemo and radiation because she knew that her liver couldn’t handle them after all the years of damage from drinking she’d done to it. She’d already had health issues because of it.
A year after Mom got sober in 1976, she had started to have a bunch of weird symptoms that no doctor could diagnose. A few called her crazy, others thought she had some kind of rheumatoid arthritis, but most were just stumped. Finally she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and non-A/non-B hepatitis (what these days they call hepatitis C). The fibromyalgia attacked the soft tissue in her joints and made my mom tired, achy, and depressed. The doctors had no idea where it came from. But Mom knew exactly where the hep-C came from—the one and only time she ever shot up drugs with an old neighbor. She was sure it must have been a dirty needle.
After the breast cancer surgery, in which they removed her entire left breast, Mom healed at home, and I became her nurse. Whatever anger I had about our past melted away as soon as I saw her now-mangled chest. It was a horror to look at. I could feel myself leave my body when it came time to change her bandages and bathe her. I wanted to run away. But with Dad on the road, there was no one else.
* * *
But did the Carlins let a little thing like their daughter dropping out of college and living with an older married man, or a heart attack, or breast cancer slow them down? No, of course not. We were the Three Musketeers—all for one, one for all.
After taping Carlin at Carnegie in New York, a year later we all got busy with taping Carlin on Campus in Los Angeles. Mom designed the set and produced the show, and I shot all the still photographs for the album cover. We were now a family production company—Cablestuff Productions. Dad bought a beautiful two-story building in Brentwood for our offices. Mom had a big peach-and-light-green office—very eighties; and Dad had the nicest office, but it was one he rarely worked in—he liked to write and keep his stuff at the home office. Jerry Hamza moved his family out from Rochester, New York, and he had the big corner office where he strategized and shaped Dad’s career. Ros, the funniest, gayest man I’d ever met (and my mom’s best friend from rehab) came onboard as the bookkeeper. Mom’s assistant was Theresa, a new friend we’d recently met when Mom, Andrew, and I had worked on a play with the now-heroic limo driver/actor/director John Batis. I took on the role of setting up the press interviews and travel for Dad’s touring while I dabbled in photography on the side. And because it just wouldn’t be right if anyone was left off the payroll, Andrew was brought on to build my dad a state-of-the-art recording studio. I felt happy because all the people—especially my dad—and areas of my life were connected.
Despite all that was going on, Dad was itching to do even more. In the early 1980s, sitcoms had become the avenue for comedians to take their careers to the next level, so Dad developed Apt. 2C. With the help of HBO, we shot a pilot about a writer, played by Dad, who could never get his work done because he was constantly getting distracted by his wacky friends, neighbors, and strangers who always seemed to need something from him. Because HBO loved and respected Dad, they gave him complete creative control, which meant he could do whatever he wanted, including casting me. While he was working on the script, I asked him to write me a part. I was ready and could now jump into my “Carol Burnett dream” and try my hand at sketch comedy. Theresa, my mom’s assistant, who had become my best friend, ended up writing me a really great part—a punk-rock Girl Scout who came to George’s door to sell him cookies.
After a month of casting the rest of the roles, a process I got to be a part of on every level, we shot the pilot at A&R Studios on La Brea, where Charlie Chaplin had built his studio in the 1920s. You could feel the business of show in every nook and cranny of the place. It was heady stuff. While we rehearsed on set that week, I hung out with the cast—Bobcat Goldthwait (wacky neighbor), Pat McCormick (needy mailman), and Lucy Webb (drunk neighbor). It was amazing. They were all seasoned professionals. I, on the other hand, had no idea what I was doing, but I jumped in anyway, not wanting to show my terror and inexperience.
The day of the taping I was really nervous. We taped two separate shows—the dress rehearsal and the show. Pat McCormick told me, “Just use it—the nerves—use it in your performance.” I had no idea what that meant. As I stood at my mark outside the door to “George’s apartment,” the stage manager, Dency, began counting down my cue, “Five, four, three, two…,” and then pointed to me. Bile began to travel up my throat as I knocked on the door to begin the scene. I had no idea what would come out of my mouth: my lines or my lunch. I’m pretty sure that was not what Pat had meant by “use it.”
Here’s the scene as we taped it:
George opens the door to find me, a punk-rock Girl Scout with my hair a multicolored Mohawk, dozens of accessories on my uniform, and an attitude the size of North America.
“Hey, did you order any cookies?” I ask in a thick New York accent.
Confused by my looks, he replies, “Are you a Girl Scout?”
“No, I’m a fucking zucchini. Did you order any cookies or not?” Throwing it right back at him.
“Yeah, I think I had the lemon wafers,” he answers.
Giving him the once-over—“Hey, macho guy!”—I go into my bag, “I don’t got no goddamn lemon wafers.” Holding up a box of cookies, “All I got are ginger snaps.”
“Oh, I had those last year, and I didn’t like them. They were too hard to chew,” he explains.
Dripping fake pity in my voice: “Too hard to chew? I’ll soften them up for ya.”
I drop the box of cookies on the floor and smash them multiple times with my left foot. I give him one last look as I say, “There’s your fucking cookies!” I then turn and saunter away, leaving George with a box of smashed cookies in his doorway. He looks directly into the camera and says, “Boy, scouting sure has changed.”
Moments after we shot the scene, Dad walked up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “Congratulations, Kiddo. You just got your first professional laugh.”
It felt so good.
* * *
When Andrew turned thirty and got the money from his trust, he immediately became the poster child for the saying “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Within a year of getting more than one hundred thousand dollars in blue-chip stocks and bonds, he liquidated it all, divorced his wife, and bought a speedboat, a tow truck, a Shelby Cobra Kit Car (which he built with my help in my parents’ driveway), a blue-gold macaw named Prudence, two yellow-napped Amazon parrots (one for me and one for my mom), numerous shotguns, rifles, and handguns (in my and my mom’s names—he was still not allowed to purchase firearms because of his felony conviction), multiple radio-controlled cars and planes, a full-size dune buggy, a cabin in Big Bear, scuba gear, and a pygmy goat named Toby. All that was missing was the partridge in the fucking pear tree.
Every day with Andrew was Christmas—for Andrew. And just like most kids on Christmas morning, he’d play with the shiny new thing for a little while and then discard it for the next new shiny thing. It makes me think about a line from “A Place for My Stuff” that my dad wrote during this time: “That’s what your house is, a place for your stuff, while you go out and get more stuff!”
Speaking of houses, by 1984 Andrew had asked me to marry him, but I had no desire to do that. I’d just turned twenty-one. Who gets married at twenty-one?
I compromised, and instead of walking down the aisle together, we moved into a cute little house in Santa Monica that my dad bought for us—what you could call “marriage-lite.” The first thing Andrew did when we moved into the house? Yup, he took a chainsaw to the wall that separated the kitchen from the hallway, and made a refrigerator-size hole in it. He then built a cabinet on the other side of the wall to hide the back of the fridge. Most male mammals mark their territory with urine. Andrew marked his with a chainsaw. The house had been built in the twenties and couldn’t fit a modern fridge. No worries. It did now.
Andrew continued his shopping spree, adding, to his already bloated collection of shit among other fine items—a large-scale German train set (complete with village), expensive stereo equipment, something called a Macintosh computer, lost-wax jewelry-making equipment, and even more radio-controlled cars, planes, and helicopters. Every horizontal surface of the house—table, counter, or shelf—was filled with some project of his in process, abandoned, or yet to be started.
Although Andrew had enough money for all his toys (and plenty of coke), he rarely had it for ordinary household stuff. My dad ended up paying for all the things one would need for a house—beds, furniture, kitchen appliances, and so on. Not to mention that he already paid for both Andrew and me to be on his payroll. This financial situation started to weigh on me. I knew I should be pulling my weight by this time in my life, but I was not sure how.
Although I’d been bitten by the showbiz bug after we did Apt. 2C, I felt incapable of doing anything serious about it. Yes, I had gotten my first professional laugh, but it’d been in a scene with George Carlin that I had not even auditioned for. I felt like a fake. I had no real acting or comedy training. I felt unprepared to go out and compete against people with real training and real ambition. All I could see was that I was a privileged, spoiled young woman who had never achieved anything without her daddy.
At age twenty-two, I was a Hollywood cliché and hated myself for it.
The minute I’d muster some focus and courage to move forward in my life, there’d be that little pile of white powder on the mirror calling me. I’d snort it, it would feel so good, and I’d feel so connected to the whole world, which was strange because I often didn’t leave the house for days on end. And then there was the no-food-and-no-sleep part of it, and then those fucking little birds chirping at the crack of fucking dawn. I’d peek out the miniblinds and see other people getting up and going to work and having a life. It was so depressing. I’d say to myself, You’ve got to just try and control yourself and get your shit together! And I’d promise myself I would, and then the thought would pop in my head, But there’s still a little coke left, somewhere. I know where—in the drawer downstairs! And so I’d go downstairs to the basement and find the drawer, but no coke. Then I’d notice at the bottom of the drawer some coke residue, and I’d collect it very carefully with the edge of a matchbook and scrape it into a little pile, ignoring the fact that there were obviously other particulates commingled with this precious stash. And then I’d snort it. Yes. I. Would.
And I knew, I knew I was wasting all my potential. I’d fallen behind all my peers, who were by now getting out of college and heading toward their futures. I’d get clean for a few months even though Andrew continued using, and I’d apply some discipline to my life. Right after Apt. 2C, I did just that. I enrolled in an acting class studying Viola Spolin Theater Games, with Stephen Book. I did good work with real working actors. I gained some confidence. Dad saw that I was enjoying myself and getting something from it, so he eventually joined the class. He wanted to expand his acting skills so he could get some parts in films. I was happy we got to deepen our relationship by doing something like this together.
At some point Stephen decided it would be interesting if my dad and I did a scene together. And it certainly was. We did a scene from the play Rain, which was about a morally torn missionary and a prostitute in the South Seas. I played the prostitute, and Dad played the missionary who was trying to save me while also unconsciously trying to bed me. Talk about weird Freudian shit. I wanted to be closer to my dad, but this was a bit much.
I’m not sure how helpful this exercise was in the end. The only thing I learned was that I never again wanted to be in a scene with my dad while wearing a skimpy robe over lingerie.
Even though I was able to get to class and focus while I was there, I couldn’t translate this into an acting career. I continually found myself distracted by Andrew with his newest adventure, shiny new toy, or pile of cocaine, and his son, Elliot, with his special-education needs and behavioral issues.
* * *
The day I met Elliot in late 1981, I thought: I’ll be shocked if this child makes it to eighteen. I looked into his beautiful blue eyes and saw a lost soul. He looked as if he had no reservoir of self-preservation, as if he were running on fumes of anxiety and distraction. I’d always felt a bit out of my body, but this little tyke was barely present. My heart ached for him, but from day one I was overwhelmed by his needs. Elliot wasn’t a handful; he was an armful. He was hyperactive, unruly, and impossible to placate. Part of me thought he was just a spoiled brat, and the other part thought there might be something seriously wrong with him. The experts told us he was somewhere in the middle. At age five, he was enrolled at a special-education school to help with his impulse-control and rage issues. He was put on Ritalin and then a myriad of other drugs to help him smooth out his moods so he could be in a regular special-education classroom in a Santa Monica public school. I was never clear on the cause of his behaviors. Was it because he’d been a blue baby at birth and had some brain damage? Or that he had attachment issues due to his mother’s suicide attempt, or that he had been left in front of the TV at the babysitter’s house for too many hours the first three years of his life? When he did allow you to take him into your arms, his little body vibrated with such anxious energy that it felt like his young soul was contemplating whether it was really safe to stick around here on Earth. The only thing that seemed to soothe him was plopping him down in front of a video, or buying him something. I hated that, and did it only when nothing else worked.
Of course I was worried that I was adding to his predicament by enabling his father’s behavior. I knew that Andrew and I getting all coked up playing Trivial Pursuit until all hours of the night was not adding stability to anybody’s life. But I also thought, At least we never argue. Andrew and his ex-wife did nothing but scream at each other when they were together. Our house was a “scream-free zone.” And Elliot genuinely liked me. When we were alone with each other, I knew he felt safe around me. Both his teachers and grandma, Andrew’s mother, Nancy, felt that I was the only calming influence in his life. But still, that did little to assuage my guilt about the cocaine.
* * *
By 1985 I was itching to do something more. I was four years into my relationship with Andrew and felt less and less like I was moving forward. I was bored with managing his needs and living by his whims. I knew that if I didn’t make a change soon, my life would become set in stone. I knew I needed to shake it up. I knew I needed to change everything.
So I agreed to marry Andrew.
I knew if I did, he would change. I knew if I did, he would finally grow up, settle down, and get a real job. Which meant that I, too, could finally grow up, settle down, and figure out what kind of real job I wanted. I was ready to quit doing drugs, too. I was tired and burned out by all the late nights and unfilled days. So when I decided to marry him, I made Andrew agree that we would quit doing drugs. I proposed that we make our wedding day the day we quit. He agreed. I was thrilled. I knew that finally my life could start for real.
Everything was set. It was to be a miniseries of a wedding. Mom stepped in as the “executive producer,” with the checkbook, and a big notebook filled with lots of tabs marked: “Catering,” “Flowers,” “Travel,” and the like. Part one of our miniseries wedding would be getting legally married in Las Vegas in mid-November 1985 with about twenty close friends in attendance. Part two would be a romantic and beautiful ceremony with just my parents, Elliot, my best friend and Mom’s assistant, Theresa, and Jerry Hamza and his new wife, Debbie. The ceremony would be on Christmas Eve at sunset on the veranda of the resort La Samanna on the island of Saint Martin. Part three would then be a big bash with more than one hundred people at my mom and dad’s house with all our friends and family in January.
In November, as planned, we went to Las Vegas with our parents and a few friends, and got legally married at the Chapel of the Bells on the Las Vegas Strip. I was now officially Kelly Sutton. We had the Honeymoon Suite at the Flamingo Hotel, and gambled all night at the casino. Every table I sat down at, I won money. I couldn’t lose. It was amazing. I took this as a clear sign from the universe that I was on track, and that marrying Andrew was definitely the right thing to do.
For part two of our Let’s-Get-Married miniseries we headed down to Saint Martin in the Caribbean, also as planned. For the past few years, we’d been coming with my parents to this resort. It was where the A-list of the A-list of Hollywood vacationed. Our first year there, we had Christmas Eve dinner with Norman Lear, and the next year we bonded with Susan Saint James and her husband, Dick Ebersol, on the veranda outside the bar. It was a magical place where rubbing shoulders with Peter Ustinov, Madonna, Oprah, Mary Tyler Moore, and Ivan Lendl was an everyday occurrence. I was excited to swim in the pristine ocean, eat four-star French food, and see who else would be roaming around the beach that year. After a long fourteen-hour day of travel from Los Angeles, through Dallas, and then down to the island in the Dutch Antilles, I walked out onto the veranda of our little villa to take in the surf and smell the hibiscus. I knew I had returned to paradise. I went inside to unpack.
“What’s this?” I asked Andrew, knowing full well what the small burrito-size brown paper bag I had just found in my suitcase was. I began to shake with rage.
“I thought we’d celebrate—” Andrew replied.
I ripped open the bag and saw the eighth of an ounce of coke. Then I saw red. Actual red. There was so much rage in me that I couldn’t speak. I was sucked into a maelstrom of anger and insights about him, my life, and my future. I realized that he really had zero respect for my wishes for a new life. I was disgusted that he thought he could just bulldoze me into getting his way by being charming and “innocent” again. I was terrified that he had put this stash in my suitcase. But ultimately I was pissed at myself for believing that he could actually be different. As I marched over to the toilet and flushed the white powder down it, I knew that the coke wasn’t all that had been flushed away. I knew I’d just made the worst mistake of my life by marrying Andrew, and that he’d never change.
I was fucked.
I should have just walked away then and there. But I didn’t. All I could think about was my grandmother Alice saying to my mother after she got pregnant, “You’ve made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.” I had to be a grown-up now. I had to take responsibility for my actions. I had to move forward with my chin up.
I went forward with the wedding ceremony in Saint Martin in my gorgeous off-white lace wedding dress. I smiled at everyone in the hotel restaurant who congratulated me and told me how beautiful I looked. I graciously thanked Susan Saint James and Dick Ebersol for the champagne we toasted with that night. I even laughed and was thrilled when, later that night, I ran into Bill Murray, and he stopped me suddenly in the middle of the restaurant and asked, “Haven’t we met before? Oh yes, it was the Pirates of the Penzance.”
I did not feel beautiful, or grateful, or thrilled. And I never let it show.