PROFILE

 

As I wait for Heche to arrive I wonder what to expect. Will she be nutty or normal? Lesbian or straight? What's the story behind her marriage? How embarrassed is she about Fresno? Then there's the business over her book. After Call Me Crazy came out, Heche's sister Abigail, who is two years older, said she didn't believe their father had abused Heche - that it was just another of her bids or attention. Meanwhile Heche's mother, Nancy (portrayed by Heche as a fundamentalist Christian who cast herself as a victim and lived her life 'under curiosity arrest'), stated that she could 'find no place [for herself] among the lies and blasphemies in the pages of this book'.'Single woman in a corner - you must be Marianne,' says a high, candy voice, and Heche is sticking out a thin, thin hand towards me. She doesn't look mad. She looks beautiful. She's in a pair of tight jeans and a pale blue roll-neck jumper that shows a milky strip of concave stomach. Her short white-blond hair has grown out and hangs in long, expensively cut honey-gold layers. Her skin is flawless with an apricot sheen. Her blue eyes sparkle like a swimming-pool. Her charm is full-on. She curls cosily in a red leather armchair. It turns out she's staying at the Mercer while she starts rehearsals for Twentieth Century. Her husband and Homer - with whom she shares a fifth-storey penthouse in a quiet, residential area in LA - will join her in a rented Upper West Side apartment for the five-month run. 'We wanted to embrace city life so we're moving into a high rise on the 68th floor,' she says. 'We see it as an adventure.' We talk about Baldwin. 'He's rocking,' she says. 'So good. I did a movie called The Juror with him ten years ago and he came to see me in Proof last year, and we were tickled by the idea of working together again.'But she is distracted because the waiter hasn't come to take our order. 'It'll be quicker if I get him,' she says and strides across the foyer, a girlish figure with a sexy strut that seems to invite people to watch. Heche has the whole box of tricks - the head toss, the Lady Di look, the shimmy. But when she talks she is straightforward. 'Hell, yeah!' she exclaims when I ask if she remembers that August day in Fresno. 'Every detail. I see my life as pre- and post-Fresno. I have no embarrassment about that. I'm very grateful for that moment. I made a choice there that day: I like it here on earth; I like what I created; bye-bye fantasy.' Her line is that she is completely well these days. 'You question it when you're insane,' she says, 'but you know when you're sane.' She leans towards me intently. 'Now I'm clean. Not confused. Here. Grounded. With it. Loving. On the planet.'

"You had such terrible things on your vagina as a baby I couldn't put diapers on you.'

She says her mental health began to concern her as soon as she left home. In particular it bothered her that she could hardly remember her childhood, and so from the age of 18, during her first job playing twins in a soap opera called Another World, she had therapy. She had Reichian therapy, which uncovered the suppressed 'body memories' of the incest through a therapist touching her body, and she tried LSD therapy (now generally frowned upon by the medical profession). She believes they both helped, though she says it wasn't fun - she often curled up screaming or weeping on the couch. But it brought her to the point where, aged 25, she felt she could confront her mother about the thing that most enraged her: how she could have allowed  Heche to be abused and not recognise it was happening. The conversation went badly. 'Oh, honey,' her mother sighed when Heche got her on the telephone. 'I guess that explains that terrible diaper rash you had as a child. They were sores. You had such terrible things on your vagina as a baby I couldn't put diapers on you.' Heche says it was this conversation that caused her personality to split. The whole thing was too painful, so she began to believe she was Celestia, sent to give love to the world. And Celestia remained an on-off presence for another six years. In the days leading up to her split from DeGeneres and consequent breakdown she heard voices telling her she was God. Weird energy pulsed through her. She says in her memoir that she began writing books in the symbols of a strange new language, and healing her friends by touch. She had visions, began singing opera, and woke to find stigmata on her feet - 'a bloody, oozy scab'. The voices were what sent her to Fresno. And it was in the hospital there that she woke a week later covered in sweat and realising she was cured.

Now, I don't want to put a damper on things, but I wonder if you can be cured like that overnight. These things can take a lifetime. 'Yeah. But I didn't want it to,' Heche says. So she's there? She nods. 'Oh - I don't need to look in any more. I've done it.'