Remembering Former Love Brandon Lee 20 Years After his Death on the set of “The Crow”

My year with a beautiful boy gone too soon.

Twenty years ago a young man’s trajectory to stardom was cut tragically short. Legendary martial artist and actor Bruce Lee’s charismatic son, Brandon, was carving a name of his own in film when he died tragically on the set of the gothic, comic film The Crow.

I spent a year with Brandon before his rocket took off and this is the small part of his story that is mine as well. I remember you, beautiful boy.

April 1990.

It’s one a.m. and I’m wiped out after a long waitressing shift for the Ahmanson Theater crowd in downtown L.A. I’m about to turn out the light over the clock radio when my phone rings. I figure it’s my old college roommate calling after anchoring the eleven o’clock news at KSBW Monterey. I’m too tired to talk about her latest military romance so I let the answering machine pick up. My chirpy outgoing message grates on my nerves, then the long beep.

“Shan? Shannon, are you there?”

It’s Brandon. He doesn’t sound like himself. His voice is weighted by sadness, urgent with some indecipherable fear. Adrenaline courses through me, I quickly pick up.

“Hello?”

“You’re there.” He sounds relieved.

“Yes. Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. I was listening to John Lennon, you know, I was listening to Beautiful Boy … the song about his son …”

Brandon’s crying, which he’s never done in front of me. He’s larger than life, given to grand gestures and grandstanding. He’s confident, cocky and romantic, but rarely vulnerable.

“I miss my dad,” he says brokenly, “Can you come over?”

“I’ll be right there.”

Banging the phone down, I yank on my sweats and grab the glasses I wear when I’m not wearing contact lenses. I jump in my shoe-skate Honda and pull out of my garage in sixty seconds flat. Rescuing people is my religion.

When I arrive I find Brandon in his bedroom huddled under his heavy duvet. He looks like a small boy, with dark smudges under his eyes.

“Hey, sweetheart,” I say.

“Come here,” he holds his arms out to me. I climb into bed next to him, put my arms around him. I notice the TV is on.

“What are you watching?”

“My dad’s funeral.”

On screen is newsreel footage on a VHS tape of his father’s ceremonial funeral in Hong Kong sixteen years earlier. In the grainy footage Bruce Lee’s corpse rests in an open casket displayed to all in a throng-filled square that’s a paparazzi/media circus.

His body is shrouded in white silk revealing only his waxen, expressionless face.

Photographers shove to get pictures. Security holds back fans. Brandon’s mom, Linda, wearing short brown hair, maintains a stoic expression behind dark sunglasses until she’s led to the casket and sees her husband. There she breaks down.

It’s strange to see this iteration of Linda. The Linda I know is cheerful, bubbly and blonde. She keeps a welcoming, humble ranch home in the Pacific Palisades and is a low-key mom with her feet planted firmly on the ground. Not the tragic, public widow in this newsreel.

Next there are shots of Brandon, aged eight, and his little sister Shannon, then four, hoisted up by handlers so they can look down at their father in his coffin. They seem bewildered. Incapable of processing the madness of the situation let alone the fact of their dad’s death.

“You can’t watch this anymore,” I say. “You’re just torturing yourself.”

I get out of bed and turn off the TV. Brandon doesn’t try to stop me or argue with me.

“Will you stay with me?” he asks.

“Of course I will.”

I climb back in bed. Kiss his face. Hold him.

“Don’t leave,” he says in a way that makes the hair stand up on my neck.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I murmur like a vow, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

It’s quiet for a while. Brandon’s breathing evens. His body relaxes. I think he’s fallen asleep. Then he says like a mantra, like a prayer, “I’m going to die young. Younger than my dad did.”

“Don’t say that!” I scold. “You’re going to live to be a very, very old man.”

But I’m wrong.

Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong on July 20th, 1973 in his rumored mistress’ apartment from brain edema, a possible reaction to a painkiller. The coroner’s report said, “Death by misadventure.”

He was thirty-two years old.

Brandon will die twenty years later on March 31st,1993 in Wilmington, North Carolina when a dummy bullet penetrates his abdomen and lodges in his spine while shooting a scene from the gothic-comic film The Crow.

He will only be twenty-eight years old.

*****

Hollywood, June 1989.

I’m an aspiring actress (and, as night must follow day, also a waitress) hanging out at The Cat and Fiddle pub on Sunset Boulevard with the cast of an Equity-waiver play called Fullfed Beast, written and directed by John Lee Hancock. Later Hancock would go on to write and direct films like The Rookie and The Blind Side, but at the moment is struggling for work like the rest of us.

My friend Robin, who is the makeup artist for the play, invited me to the after-party.

I watch the actor named Brandon shoot pool. Robin told me earlier that he’s Bruce Lee’s son, which I thought was kind of cool. But it wasn’t until he walked onstage, chock-full of charisma, that my heart throbbed like a teeny-bopper at a David Cassidy concert circa 1975.

He played Flea, a hard-edged incarcerated criminal, and I sat in the front row of the audience so close to him I could’ve plucked the cigarette he inexpertly sucked right out of his mouth.

But whenever I approach Brandon at the pub he keeps leading me over to his best friend, Bill, then dashing off. I’m not interested in Bill, who looks a lot like me, blonde, blue-eyed, familiar. It’s Brandon I find dreamy. To me he’s exotic, fine-boned, hazel-eyed, with dark brows and hair. He moves like a sinuous cat.

As the night winds down I’ve given up my Brandon quest. I sit at a table despondently finishing my beer when I feel two hands placed on either of my shoulders. I lean my head back and look up to find Brandon’s face looking down into mine.

“Are you flirting with me?” I demand.

“Am I flirting with you?” He seems to consider the idea for the first time, teasing me a bit. “I guess I am.”

“Good,” I say with a confidence I wish I had when it came to auditions. I’m always very confident with men, right up until the moment I fall in love with them, after which I become a nervous wreck.

Having recently broken up with my college sweetheart I hope I’m done with Love and will remain as simultaneously aloof and amorous as a female Errol Flynn.

Two minutes later I’m on the back of Brandon’s fast-flying motorcycle grabbing on to this leather-jacketed wild-child for dear life.

*****

The first thing I notice when his motorcycle rolls up the long, cracked-cement driveway to his bungalow house is the 1959 Cadillac hearse.

“You own a hearse?”

Brandon shoots me a mega-watt, chipped-tooth smile, “It’s great for camping.”

“You’re not doing the whole James Dean thing are you? The leather jacket, the boots, the motorcycle, a hearse?”

“Baby, I’m a lot more original than James Dean.” Opening his front door with a flourish he says, “Welcome to my humble abode.”

Entering his chicly ramshackle, tiny craftsman Silver Lake home is like entering a seductive, Oriental universe. Asian scarves are casually draped over thrift-store lampshades. Japanese folding screens dissect the rooms. Chopsticks rest in a bamboo kitchen drying rack. Brandon sashays about the room lighting a studiously haphazard array of candles. I’ve never seen a boy move with such grace and flare.

Books by Sartre, Camus, Ayn Rand and Stanislavsky litter makeshift bookshelves. VHS tapes of Last Tango In Paris, A Clockwork Orange and Harold & Maude sit on top of his VCR.

The walls are whitewashed, the beaten up hardwood floors covered with threadbare Persian rugs. He’s got the whole eclectic, mysterious, artsy actor-thing down to a T, I think. It’s working. Weak knees? Check. Sweaty palms? Check. Butterflies in stomach? Check, and we’re ready for lift off.

“This is Mister Wim,” Brandon says, indicating a sleeping gray tabby curled attractively on a throw pillow, perfectly punctuating the scene.

“He’s like Jack Kerouac,” says Brandon, working a perhaps over-rehearsed reference. “He’ll disappear for days and just when I think he’s dead, that’s when he comes off The Road, hung-over and hungry.”

“This house is major chick bait.”

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Would you like to accompany me into the den?”

“The den? Or your woman lair?”

“Decide for yourself.”

We step into an enclosed patio graced with a vast, inviting beanbag chair. Really more of a bean bag bed. I can’t help but laugh.

“After you, milady,” he offers the beanbag like a Seventeenth Century highborn baron-robber straight off the set of The Three Musketeers. I sit and am instantly vacuum-sucked into the center of the beanbag, ostensibly trapped. I try to reposition myself, grunting and straining which only manages to further entrench me in a sea of cascading beans.

“Maybe this’ll help,” says Brandon and he plops right down next to me, catapulting me straight into his arms. We’re both laughing. For all his hip, I’m-a-cool-eclectic-dude duds and home furnishings he has a surprisingly goofy laugh. It’s endearing and uncontrived.

“May I?” he asks, leaning in.

“Yes.”

He kisses me. It’s a sweet kiss. It asks permission and makes no assumptions. I return his kiss, which turns out to be more than a kiss. It’s an invitation into his life. For one brief year Brandon Lee will be my beau.

*****

March 31ST, 1993.

On the day Brandon dies I work the lunch shift at a Santa Monica restaurant called Ocean Avenue Seafood. It’s an ordinary day. But when I get home around three o’clock there are twenty-three messages on my answering machine.

My first thought is that my dad’s had a heart attack. His doctor’s want him to have open-heart surgery and he simply refuses.

With quick-sweating palms I push the message button. It isn’t until the fifth message that I realize what’s happened. The first four messages are ambiguous condolences from friends, but the fifth message mentions Brandon. “I’m so sorry about Brandon Lee,” says a co-worker. “You dated him once, didn’t you?”

I click on the news and Brandon’s the headliner.

I haven’t seen or spoken to him in two years and three months. I wonder why people are calling me? He isn’t in my life anymore. He doesn’t matter to me.

But that night I have the closest thing to a panic attack I’ve ever had. My heart won’t stop pounding. I can’t catch my breath. My brain is invaded by horror-movie images of Brandon’s shocking death.

Thus begins my year of magical thinking: I believe wholeheartedly that Brandon sought Fame to step out from under his father’s shadow and the price of Fame was his life.

*****

July 1989.

It’s two in the morning. A knock at the door of Brandon’s house startles us awake. Quicker than I can open my eyes he’s moved off the bed and nimbly picked up a baseball bat he keeps by the door of his bedroom.

“Be careful,” I whisper, but he’s gone.

I listen nervously for sounds of violence in the living room, wondering what I’ll do if I actually hear any. I search for a weapon I can brandish other than my tennis shoes when I hear a woman’s voice, emotional, urgent. Pretty soon Brandon returns looking sheepish. “It’s my ex-girlfriend, Lisa” he says, “Her boyfriend just broke up with her and she’s really upset.”

“Oh, okay, should I go?”

“I don’t want you to, but, yeah, maybe you better.”

“Okay.”

Quickly I gather my things. As I dart past he stops me, holds my face in both hands and kisses me solemnly on the lips.

Outside I jump in my car. Brandon’s ex has returned to her car at the curb; waiting for me to back out of the long drive so she can pull in. I glimpse her face briefly in the driver’s side window. She’s blonde and fair. I wonder if she’s still in love with Brandon. I wonder if he’ll have sex with her. I realize I’m not triggered by that possibility. I’m not invested yet. I’m not in love.

A few hours later, at six a.m. there’s a knock on my apartment door. I open the door in my pajamas to find Brandon standing ashen and hovering on my stoop.

“Sorry to come over so early,” he says

“It’s okay. Is everything all right? Is your ex okay?”

“Yeah, she’ll be okay.”

We sit on the stoop, him looking intently into my eyes.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?”

“No, of course not, what could you do?”

“She was just really upset, but I want you to know nothing happened. I’m with you now.”

He takes my hands in his. I’m surprised his hands are trembling, his lips tremble too when he kisses me. I know this trembling on a cellular level.

I’m seven years old riding shotgun in my mom’s 1969 Volkswagen van as she drives us up PCH in the dead of a 3 a.m. getaway from my stepdad, The Cop, toward my grandma’s house.

Salty ocean air blasts through her open window whipping her thick, black hair magnificently around her head as if she were a Greek Fury. The Cop’s made her cry again. “Mom, you’re too good for him,” I tell her, “You deserve someone who treats you better.” I know you’re right, sweetheart,” she says. “Maybe I should end it. What do you think I should do?”

That’s when the trembling begins. It starts in my hands. I try to stop it by clenching them together. But soon it moves into my chest, causing my pajama shirt to vibrate, and up my neck until it reaches my jaw. This is my chance. If I say the right words in the right way, maybe my mom will leave him forever. “Choose me, choose me, choose me,” plays in my head to the drumbeat of my chattering teeth.

The summer I turn ten my mom finally does leave The Cop, but the fallout isn’t what I expect. Mom sends me to my dad for a temporary stretch that turns into a permanent living arrangement. Though I see my warm, fiercely loving mom on holidays and for stretches in the summer she becomes my first painful loss.

Its his trembling that makes me fall in love with Brandon.

*****

April 1993.

“Eliza doesn’t want any old girlfriends at Brandon’s memorial service,” says Bill’s girlfriend on the phone. Eliza Hutton is Brandon’s fiancée. I read that Brandon and Eliza were two weeks from their wedding day when he died on the set of The Crow. They were supposed to marry in Ensenada, Mexico.

Being banned from the memorial service knocks the wind out of me. I won’t be able to say my final good-byes. The last time Brandon and I spoke on the phone I’d told him I wasn’t sure I wanted to get back together, that I needed more time.

His last words to me were, “Call me when you get your shit together.”

I won’t be able to apologize for breaking my vow not to leave him.

*****

I’m obsessed with Eliza Hutton. I see photos of her cuddling with Brandon on a large sofa chair in People magazine. He’s touching her hair and gazing into her eyes. There’s one photo of them taken at a red-carpet event of some kind. Brandon’s got his arm around Eliza and is pulling her in close. He’s looking off camera, but she looks straight into the lens. Her face is beatific. She. Loves. This. Man.

How did she forge a bond with Brandon that I couldn’t? Was she more altruistic, less vain and ego-driven than me? Was she simply a better person?

And there, back in the corner of my shallow lizard brain that ever-present mantra of every would-be Hollywood actress, Was she prettier than me?

In my finer moments I’m heart-broken for Brandon’s fiancée. If I’m having unexpected anxiety attacks in the middle of the night about a boy I haven’t seen in over two years, how is she able to draw breath? How will she go on and live her life? Will she ever marry, have children, be happy?

I devour every news story about Brandon’s death, as if somehow learning every detail will help me make sense of what happened.

It was 12:30 a.m. on March 31st when filming of the fatal scene began. Between seventy-five and one hundred people were on the set when Brandon, as his character Eric Draven, walked through a door carrying a grocery bag and Michael Massee, who played a thug named Funboy, shot him from fifteen feet away.

A dummy bullet that was still lodged in Massee’s .44-caliber revolver penetrated Brandon’s lower right abdomen and lodged in his spine. People on the set didn’t realize anything was wrong at first.

I torture myself visualizing Brandon lying on the ground bleeding to death while the crew went on about their business, thinking he was joking, just pretending to be shot.

That would be just like him. He was a shameless prankster.

My stomach turns thinking of him in crisis with no one responding. I wonder if he was still conscious for a few moments, but I can’t find out.

Irrationally, I consider the shooter, Michael Massee, the henchman of Fate, somehow complicit in this karmic tragedy.

As soon as the crew realized Brandon was shot they called paramedics who rushed him to Wilmington’s New Hanover Regional Medical Center. He underwent five hours of surgery. He suffered extensive vascular and intestinal damage and his bleeding was so severe that he was eventually transfused with sixty pints of blood.

Eliza and Linda both flew to him from two different locations. I can’t find out if either of them made it to his side before he died and this nags at me.

Please God, don’t let him have been alone when he died. I can still see him in his bedroom hiding under that heavy duvet with tear-smudged eyes.

*****

Will Hollywood release The Crow? I’m not thinking specifically about Dimension Films, which produced the movie or Miramax Films, which might distribute it. I view Hollywood as a monotheistic demon-God that ate Brandon alive. It seems unconscionable that anyone could release the film that killed him. Then a darker thought emerges that has nothing to do with the circumstances of Brandon’s death.

He’s out of the race. Now I can catch up.

This unbidden thought is followed by deep self-loathing. Brandon’s death means I don’t have to compare my failure to his success anymore.

*****

November 1989.

I sit under a spotlight in French artist Emile Keff’s studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. By day the studio displays asymmetrical modern art metal figures. By night, it moonlights as a theater for 10-to-Midnight, a show produced and directed by John Lee Hancock and his troupe of actors and playwrights, which includes Brandon and me.

The place is crammed with people who’ve stopped talking to watch me perform a piece I’ve written for myself. As I begin I notice, out of the corner of my eye, Brandon goofing around with his friend Bill instead of paying rapt attention to me.

I’m furious he’s interrupting my moment. Five months into our relationship some of the novelty of new love and lust has died down and our relationship is dogged by the fact we’re two out-of-work actors vying for center stage. This showcase is an opportunity to get traction; we’ve already had several hot young actors, like Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix, show up to check us out. We’re hopeful they’ll ask to join us, lending us some Insider Hollywood cred.

I finish my monologue with a sense of relief as the room applauds. My spotlight is extinguished as Brandon’s fades up.

He’s performing The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe; informing me earlier that the raven is a symbol of ill-omen and death.

When we first met Brandon’s flirtation with death seemed mysterious and edgy. He’s taken me to floatation tanks in West Hollywood to see what it would feel like to be disembodied. He won’t put any locks on the doors of his house even though he lives in a dangerous neighborhood. He regales me with stories of lying down in dry ice to see what it would feel like to be a corpse. He drives his motorcycle too fast and, of course, there’s the hearse.

But now this fixation on death as a leitmotif in his life makes him seem like a poser. There has never been anyone more alive than Brandon and less mysterious.

Like a lot of young actors with perpetual Rebel-Without-A-Cause furrowed brows Brandon romanticizes rising stars who flashed out in car crashes or overdosed on drugs, whose early and untimely deaths made them legends; his father being one of them. And while I know Brandon doesn’t really want to die, he certainly yearns for that level of adulation.

Brandon approaches the final verses of The Raven where the narrator bemoans the death of his beloved Lenore, and interprets the arrival of the raven as a harbinger of doom.

“And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor, Shall be lifted — nevermore!”

During the course of the monologue Brandon has transformed from a goofball kid into a magnetic death wraith. All of the grand gestures that have begun to wear thin in our private life are exactly right for the stage. His body moves with the supple fluidity of oil in water. He manipulates words with surgical precision. His laser-like focus is keenly intelligent. And transfixing. I feel an electric energy course through the room, not one eye can look away.

There’s no doubt Brandon’s going to have opportunities because his father is Bruce Lee, but it’s patently clear tonight he has the goods to back it up. He’s going to be a star. It’s just a matter of time.

Will I get anywhere without him? The only reason I’m performing with this highbrow troupe is thanks to Brandon.

My jealousy knocks me flat.

*****

June 1993.

“Do you think Fame killed Brandon?” asks Laura, a petite, attractive woman, sitting opposite me over untouched eggs at Rae’s Diner on Pico.

I don’t know Laura well. She was in the legendary Jeff Corey ’s scene study class in Malibu when Brandon came there with me. I never worked with her, but he did.

I was envious of her at the time because Brandon asked her to perform in John Lee Hancock’s next play instead of me. Laura was a happily married mother of one so I wasn’t worried they would have an affair. I was simply devastated he might think she was a better actress.

Laura called me out of the blue after Brandon’s death. We’d never spoken much before and we sit here together, two outliers with no outlet, unlikely friends huddling to find comfort and meaning.

“I’m not religious,” she says, “or superstitious, but it feels like there was something supernatural about his death.”

My heart picks up its pace. My palms sweat. I’m not the only one who feels like Brandon unknowingly sold his soul to the Devil by walking down the road to Fame, by predicting he’d die younger than his dad, almost taunting Death.

Several facts cause me to feel Brandon’s death was indeed supernatural.

It’s disconcerting how similar Brandon’s death and his character Eric Draven’s death are; a gang of criminals shoot and kill Draven and his fiancé shortly before their wedding. Brandon is also shot and killed right before his wedding.

I can’t help compulsively fixating on how The Raven and The Crow are similar symbolic omens, the hopeless loss of a loved one never to be regained.

The news rags are full of conspiracy theories that also seem karmic:

The Chinese mafia had Brandon and his father murdered for revealing Chinese Karate to the white man.

The Triad theory; a group of organized criminals with ties to the Hong Kong entertainment industry killed Bruce for refusing to be in their movies, their wrath trickled down to Brandon.

The Illuminati killed Brandon; their pyramid symbolism is all over The Crow, according to one theorist.

Finally there’s the eerie coincidence that in Bruce Lee’s final film, Game of Death, he played an actor, who is severely wounded by a live bullet on set.

The more I immerse myself in the press on Brandon’s death the dimmer my memory of the real Brandon becomes. He starts belonging to other people. It’s hard now to separate what I’m reading in magazines and newspapers and seeing on television from what I remember of him during our time together.

I dig through my old journals, pulling out two volumes from June 1989 to July 1990 to excavate him.

*****

April 1990.

Brandon and I fly down the 10 Freeway on his motorcycle toward Big Bear where the Lee’s have a cabin. The career inactivity in L.A. is too much to bear. We have to keep moving or we’ll suffocate in the inertia that typifies the life of out-of-work actors.

My favorite memory of the cabin is the bat.

After a day of hiking, dinner and a bottle of wine we climb into bed, click off the lights, plunging into the kind of blackness you only find in remote locales. As we lay there in the pre-sleep quiet we hear distinct scratching noises, then a goose-bump raising squeak.

“What was that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” says Brandon, his voice an octave higher.

Squeak. Squeak. Scratch. Scratch.

“Something’s in here with us,” I whisper shout.

“Shit.”

“What do you mean, shit? What is it?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Go turn on the light and we’ll see.”

“I’m not getting out of the bed to turn on the light.”

“But you’re the man. You’re a member of The Sierra Club!”

We‘re six-year olds camping outdoors in a tent at night after hearing a particularly gruesome scary story. Squeak. Squeak. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

“Sweet Jesus,” says Brandon.

“Crap.”

“Okay, okay, let’s just put the comforter around us both and we can run to the door and turn on the light.”

“Okay. Crap crap crap.”

“On three … one … two … three!”

We lurch off the bed, struggling to stay cocooned in the comforter, no limbs exposed to anything that might bite. Gasping and flailing we reach the light switch.

Brandon throws it on revealing a small, terrified black bat hanging upside down from the overhead light fixture. We scream like schoolgirls; the bat screams like a bat; then flies erratically around the room, dive-bombing us several times. Shrieking we fling ourselves out the bedroom door and slam it shut behind us. When we stop shuddering we make a plan.

“You go in with a broom,” I say, “and get the bat out of the room.”

“Why do I have to be the one to go in with the broom?”

“Because you’ve done that outdoorsy stuff … that Outward Bound.”

“Why did I tell you any of that?”

“Because you wanted to get laid.”

“Oh. Right. Shit.”

Brandon briefly disappears then comes back with a broom. He prepares himself for battle and this is one of those moments where his yen for theatricality is utterly charming. He flexes his muscles, puffs up his chest and kisses me one last time, then storms into the breach. I shudder squeamishly behind the door as Brandon swipes at the panicky thimble-sized bat.

“Is it out yet? Is it out?”

“No, no … shit! I dropped the broom! Ahhhh!”

Brandon flies out of the bedroom and slams the door shut. Fifteen minutes later we’re sleeping on the veranda outside in a mammoth, squashy beige beanbag under a blanket of stars. (The Lees love beanbags). Never mind there are a lot more bats outside than the little one inside.

*****

July 1993.

My journals bring Brandon back to me. Although it was difficult to be one of two actors in a relationship I’m reminded of all the collaborative work we did during that year. Besides working on 10-to-Midnight, we shot a David Mamet scene from his play Edmond, controversial due to the racist characters, in which we were both miscast and fairly awful.

We also worked on Lanford Wilson’s play, Burn This.

It’s the story of an uptight dancer-choreographer, Anna, whose gay, beloved roommate Peter has just died. She comes home from his funeral shattered that his family denies Peter’s homosexuality; that they didn’t want to know the real man.

The loss of her closest friend forces Anna to confront her own cowardice when it comes to taking risks in her work and her love life. She realizes she’s been playing it safe for too long; that life is too short.

Enter Peter’s brash, volatile, married brother, Pale (the roles were originated by an icily beautiful Joan Allen and a volcanic John Malkovich).

Pale is also broken open by his brother’s death, admitting to himself he’s in a loveless marriage. Anna and Pale embark on an unlikely love affair that both terrifies and catalyzes them to break out of their dead lives.

Brandon and I worked painstakingly on the piece, he, as the volatile Pale, and me as the frozen Anna. The theme of risk and doing only the things we were passionate about resonated for both of us.

In one scene between Anna, her remaining gay roommate, Larry, and her “safe” boyfriend Burton, the play’s theme is explicit:

“Did Anna tell you she’s working on a dance for Fred?” Larry asks Burton.

“Yeah, that’s great,” Burton replies.

“Oh sure,” says Anna, “Scares the hell out of me … I think it’s all getting a little too personal.”

“Good,” says Burton, “It’s supposed to be — Make it as personal as you can. Believe me, you can’t imagine a feeling everyone hasn’t had. Make it personal, tell the truth, and then write, ‘Burn This’ on it.”

At the end of the play, when Anna has tried everything she can think of to get rid of the explosive Pale, he arrives unexpectedly after seeing a performance of the new dance she choreographed.

“That was me and you up there,” he says, “Only we ain’t never danced. I could probably sue you for that.”

She asks why he came when she told him not to. He reads a note her roommate Larry gave him:

“It says, ‘Pale, doll. Here’s a ticket for the program tonight and my keys. We’re going to the cast party and won’t be home until three. I don’t know how you’re doing, but Anna is in pretty bad shape. This isn’t opera; this is life, why should love always be tragic? Burn this.’”

Pale hands Anna the note. She folds it into a tent, puts it in an ashtray.

“I been in pretty bad shape here, too,” Pale says. “I’m thirty-six years old, I got a wife. I got two kids. I never felt nothin’ like this.”

“I haven’t either.”

“I don’t know what to do with myself here.”

“I know,” says Anna. She lights a match, puts it under Larry’s note; they watch it burn.

*****

July 1990.

On the last night of our relationship Brandon and I sit in a Pasadena art-house theater watching a Canadian film called Jesus of Montreal: a priest approaches a troupe of out-of-work actors asking them to freshen up his church’s stale passion play.

As the actors viscerally recreate the final days of Christ’s life, their own lives evolve. They reconnect with their dignity and eschew ambition for integrity. By the end of the film when the protagonist, who portrays Christ, dies in the subways of Montreal I can’t stop the river of tears running down my face.

For months I’ve wanted out of my relationship with Brandon.

Twice I’ve tried to end it, but can’t seem to find the courage. There’s no denying we have an empathic connection. We’re most connected in bed, whether sleeping or making love. There we’re unguarded and our two abandoned children take refuge.

Out of bed we don’t do so well. I feel like I can’t get close to him. Like he’s “on” all the time. Even when we’re alone it feels like he’s playing to a camera. I wonder if it stems from his formative years spent under the glare of paparazzi cameras. Or maybe he feels pressured to be as electric as his dad?

I don’t know. And I’ve given up trying to know.

I’m aware the scenario of two actors in one relationship is difficult. We’re both alphas, we both want to be the rock star, but something more insidious reveals itself as I watch Jesus of Montreal.

I’ve been in denial, but can’t be any more. I fully acknowledge to myself that I’m still with Brandon because his rocket’s about to launch and I want to come along for the ride.

There it is. In black and white. I’m using him.

It dawns on me I’m in jeopardy of losing my soul. Not in a dramatic way, like the stories you hear as a kid where the protagonist knowingly signs his soul over to the Devil for a bit of earthly fame. It’s far more mundane, just a series of incremental decisions away from right action that lead a person away from his or her integrity. I worry I’ll wake up one day and realize I have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of.

Brandon drives us back to his house, holding my hand, asking over and over again, “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

I know if I say the words out loud I can’t take them back. We’ll be over and I’m already in mourning. He takes me to bed and we try to find each other there. It’s the first time it feels wrong to be in his bed.

Afterward I lay my head on his chest, my tears dripping onto his skin. “Please tell me what’s wrong,” he murmurs. I want to give him an explanation that won’t hurt him. “I’m looking for home,” I say, “and we’re not it.”

The moment I say it, I realize it’s true. Brandon isn’t expecting a break-up, which catches me off-guard. Things have been so tense and frayed for some time that I thought he might be the one to end it first.

I try to leave and get as far as the living room when I hear him call my name from the bedroom.

I’m stopped dead by the pain in his voice. I know that pain and don’t want to be the cause of it. So, I go back to him. It’s not a new promise. Our relationship is now a dying thing that will run its course. I go back to him because I love him, imperfectly, and I can’t bear his suffering in this moment. We hold each other without words. Eventually we fall asleep.

In the morning we’re exhausted, but he’s calm and resigned to my leaving. I get in my car and back down that long, broken cement drive, the tears coming again of their own volition. I keep hearing John Lennon’s voice singing over and over, “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful … beautiful boy.”

*****

March 31st, 1994.

It’s been a year since Brandon died. I don’t remember it’s the anniversary of his death until I see it on the news at midnight after working my shift at the restaurant.

I realize there’s no charge around his death for me anymore. It no longer seems supernatural. It just seems heartbreaking that a young man with such promise was felled by a stroke of bad luck. And that the people who loved him the most are surely still suffering. I say a prayer to a God I’m not sure exists for Linda and Shannon and Eliza.

It will be ten years before I watch The Crow. I don’t see the Devil there, just Brandon giving his best performance. The only flaw in the film, for me, is all the heavy makeup that obscures his face. A face I’d like to study closely once more.

The night of the one-year anniversary of Brandon’s death I pull a box down from the top of my closet where I keep all of my memorabilia. There’s something I need to find. A letter he’d written me and tucked in my screen door two months after we broke up.

I dig through piles of letters, schoolwork, old photos. Finally I find it. A small, white envelope with just my name scrawled in black across the front. I pull out the brief letter inside and read:

August 1990:

“Dear One — this is a letter to say goodbye. I remember our lovemaking (…) that is what I miss the most — we never did talk very well together — but that’s not trivial because I remember the love that stirred in me then (…) I was warm and content when I watched you sleep or held you, or else when I curled up in your arms and listened to your heartbeat and heard what I needed to hear. I miss you sometimes, but I don’t want to, I’m learning not to. Remember the good things. Love. Burn This.”

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The following was excerpted from my book Smash, Crash and Burn: Tales From the Edge of Celebrity. And if you’d like to watch a rough, unedited film of my work with Brandon you can Click Here. To keep in touch with me you can visit my site The Woman Formerly Known As Beautiful.