Can't You Clone Him?

 

Her husband helped a lot, she says. The couple were engaged less than a year after her breakdown, in May 2001. They made their home in Los Angeles, and Laffoon gave up his job to look after their child. 'He's the most incredible person anyone ever meets. My friends all go, "Can't you clone him?"' Heche exclaims, her face lighting up. 'His interaction with people is clean and free of judgement. There's no drama anywhere - I blame it on his loving parents! I wouldn't have been able to recognise that purity of heart without cleaning mine up first.' She wouldn't have fancied him? She shoots me a look. 'Oh, I would have been attracted. He's cute.'They met when Heche hired him to help her film a documentary about DeGeneres's return to stand-up comedy. 'It wasn't love at first sight - I was very much involved with Ellen. But I definitely saw in Coley a different way to live. A non-dramatic, accepting, easy way. Then Ellen and I dissolved our relationship. I met him on the street when I was looking for a place to live. He was with his girlfriend. Then he broke up with her, but funnily enough that break up had nothing to do with me, either. And there was this ridiculous show I'd seen in the paper, and I was in my car, and I called information for Coley's number. I said, "Hi, it's Anne."' Her voice goes little. '"Wanna go to a show with me?"' Her eyes soften. 'And we ended up going and having margaritas.'Wasn't the marriage a little unexpected, though? She bursts out laughing. 'Yeah, boy, it looked like it was going the wrong - another way, didn't it? But that [her time with Ellen] was a great part of the journey. A very, very good part of the journey. It got me to understand what I needed for the rest of my life.'Heche says in her book that her relationship with DeGeneres began crumbling after a year. DeGeneres apparently felt rejected by Hollywood, so they moved to a little town called Ojai, near Santa Barbara. There the comedienne got jealous and insecure about Heche making films, so Heche stopped. 'My priority was love,' Heche explains now. 'I was willing to do anything for that. So whereas people would give me advice based on what they thought my career should be, I was making choices for what my love-life should be. I can look back now and see I must have confused a lot of people, but my choices were always founded in my heart. If that meant not doing movies for two years because the person who I was in love with needed that kind of commitment to show my love, it wasn't even a question.' But surely that was an unreasonable thing to be asked? She shrugs. 'It was a mutual decision in our relationship. There was a lot going on! Plus, it wasn't me saying, "No, thank you" to my creative expression. I wrote two movies that I directed during that time. It was a time for me of exploration. It wasn't like somebody ordered me to do something. Together we were forming a life. 'Heche says that life finally ended when she told DeGeneres she needed to see more friends and have an office outside the house. 'I don't want a girlfriend who wants those things,' she claims DeGeneres replied. The women are not in touch. Heche is not in touch with her family either. The autobiography was a bit of a grenade in that department. Heche wrote it in six weeks, with the help of Laffoon, and smoked her last cigarette the day she finished. It is dominated by the creepy figure of her pursed-mouth father, who spent most of his time directing choirs for his local church in Ohio, and rarely had a job. He pretended he was straight when he was gay and that the family were rich when they were poor. He took Heche to auditions, hoping her blond-haired, blue-eyed perfection would earn money. She did, but it was not enough. The family were thrown out of a succession of low-grade homes across America until they wound up in a house on stilts by the ocean in Atlantic City. Eventually, they were thrown out of that too. Heche grew up mortified by strange growths on her face. She later discovered they were from the herpes her father had given her. Three months after he died of Aids (which he didn't admit to having either) her brother Nathan killed himself driving his car off the road. He was 18. Heche, then 14, and her sisters - Susan was 26, Abigail 16 - were told it would be eight years before they could be sure they didn't have HIV. She gives a memorable thumbnail portrait of the family in those years. 'Abi hated Susan, Susan hated us both and I roamed somewhere in the middle of it all, confused and outraged at them. They knew nothing of my abuse, and certainly they had never said they had been abused; we just simply didn't connect. We each thought that what the others were doing to keep their lives together was wrong. Abi was stripping, Susan was popping out kids and having an affair, I was taking drugs and playing hookers in plays, and my mother stayed blinded to it all the while, buried in her Bible.' I ask Heche why she didn't ask her sisters if their father abused them, too. She leans away, her iridescent charm turned to ice. 'I'm really finished talking about my family.' She will talk about Homer, though, who is now two. 'He's such a loving boy,' Heche murmurs. 'I miss him so much. He's so cute.' She gives a watery smile. 'It was always my dream. I always believed I'd discover something called love that didn't feel bad, or that I would leave the planet. It was one thing or the other. And once I had my life and found my family, and found my love, it was, like, "Wow! I want to be an actress, man!" I'm now focused on the next level of my career - specifically stating, I'm ready to embrace being a leading lady, because I never regarded myself as one before. The career I built, being half of myself, I'm amazed by.' She grins. 'Sure, I still have a lot to learn. But now it's fun - before it was just a pain in the neck.'