Premier: Nov 1996
On a hill overlooking the Sunset Strip, amid palm trees and billboards, traffic jams and strip malls, looms the Chateau Marmont Hotel, a legendary home away from home for Hollywood's grungy and glamorous. The soft yellow lights in its Oriental-carpeted hallways have a way of making almost anything look pretty. But not so with actor Peter Greene. With a blond Turkish girl on his track-marked twig of an arm, Greene checked into the Chateau's Suite 59 with a purpose. Since hearing the news that his best friend--New York writer and stone-cold junkie Clayton Brooks--had staged a fatal indoor-atrium swan dive from the 45th floor of New York's Marriott Marquis, Greene had been on a long-term kamikaze mission himself, one he was going to finish tonight. But he would not be checking out like Clayton did--no cheesy, tourist-coddling hotel for him.
Greene's pallor matched the jaundiced color scheme of his suite. Wired to the nicotine-stained gills from shooting straight cocaine all week, he was in no shape to appreciate the room's amenities--'50s- style furniture, a crochet-adorned queen-size bed, top-of-the-line condoms in the bathroom. He needed heroin to bring Suite 59 alive. Room service wasn't delivering.
So Greene grabbed the girl, left the Sunset Strip, and hustled downtown, where he scored his fix. It took him and his companion a couple of hours to make it back. He plopped himself into a plush velvet couch and planted a speedball into an eager vein, the blond staring on all the while. She liked to watch: watch him check, register, and boot the crimson extraction into the entrance on his potholed vein. As the heroin-cocaine mix invaded every cell left in Greene, he saw the room's white curtains changing into wings, wafting angel breath over his almost lifeless body. He actually felt its caresses until his battered, frenzied soul caught the sweet nod of an answer to a junkie's prayer. Peter Greene was leaving Los Angeles.
A lithe, wily actor with eyes of cold blue, Peter Greene is not known as much by name as he is for a few sharp, in-your-face performances: the paranoid, schizophrenic father in Lodge Kerrigan's wrenching Clean, Shaven; the petty thief in Nick Gomez's Laws of Gravity; the "Gimp"-baiting security guard Zed in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction; a ruthless gangster in Judgment Night; the heavy in the lightweight Chuck Russell hit The Mask; a terrorist in Geoff Murphy's Under Siege 2: Dark Territory; and the fence called Redfoot in Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects. This fall, he plays a blackmailing devil opposite Halle Berry in Amy Holden Jones's thriller The Rich Man's Wife. Each time Peter Greene shows up onscreen, he is piercing, memorable. Many times when he's shown up on film sets, he's been completely loaded on drugs and/or alcohol.
In many industries, an employee found getting high on the job might get one shot at hush-hush rehab, and then be shown the door. Unless they're just fired on the spot. That's not how they do it in L.A., where industry mechanics can be somewhat more perverse. Here, sometimes the trick is to keep "edgy" stars sated with just the right amount of drugs to enable them to function (if merely for the benefit of the cameras), but not enough to push them over the brink. One-take wonders like Jan-Michael Vincent can be propped up in front of cameras until the day their liver explodes, their last ancillary market is exploited, and they become yesterday's tabloid news--or until they break their neck in a car wreck, as Vincent did recently. If they're luckier, like recovering cocaine addict Gary Busey, they get a chance to cycle through the Hollywood system again and again, making more comebacks than mere mortality can explain.
Unlike some no less tragic has-been actors, the fiercely talented Greene delivers. Marginally talented or charismatic screwups are a dime a dozen, but a true junkie artist is a rarity. And in Hollywood, such creatures are deified for living outside of the lines of self-control and responsibility until an industry of celebrity winds up flourishing around their tombstones.
During filming on The Usual Suspects, Greene luxuriously improvised a memorable filmic moment by flicking a lit cigarette into Stephen Baldwin's face. Suspects writer Christopher McQuarrie calls Greene a "million-dollar day player," which could be translated as "Get him in, nail the money shot, and get him out before he wreaks havoc."
Nick Gomez, director of Greene's seminal turn in Laws of Gravity, says, "I really do put him on the same kind of intuitive, instinctive, real gut-edgy outsider level of someone like Robert De Niro. Peter's emotional life is so resonant, and so close to the surface, that he doesn't know how to work any other way. That's his strength as an actor, which at the same time is his weakness as an individual and [makes him] a political monster in a town that eats you alive."
The Rich Man's Wife director Holden Jones says, "Peter is terrific in the movie. There's no doubt about it. You can't take your eyes off him when he's in a scene. He's a mercurial presence. The camera loves him. He does unexpected and wonderful things." She pauses. "And he's scary as hell."
Caravan Pictures' decision to cast Greene in The Rich Man's Wife did not come easily, given a reputation passed down from producer to producer, casting agent to casting agent. Some stories were real, others imagined. Yes, he was found huddled in a closet, clutching a crack pipe on Judgment Night. No, he's not a murderer. Yes, he had trouble getting into Canada to do a film given his criminal record (a prior each for assault and drug possession). But when Holden Jones witnessed a spectacular reading by the actor, she insisted to the skeptical suits upstairs: "I don't care about the stories. I want him."
For those on the outside, it seems incredible that someone could survive the daily abuse that Peter Greene inflicted upon himself. But Greene not only survived, he worked. Day in, day out, on film after film, Greene's addiction remained unchecked, and not a day's filming was lost. But after fifteen years and increasing dosages, it was getting harder and harder to punch the clock. When production of The Rich Man's Wife began, Greene's ability to function--and his delusion that he was well-nigh indestructible--was almost completely eroded. By the second week of shooting in Seattle, Greene was mainlining at least a tenth of an ounce of heroin a day in his trailer. He was getting strung out. He couldn't maintain. His two coconspirators--a personal assistant who hung ready 24/7 and a makeup girl who literally covered his tracks with cakey flesh-toned makeup--were losing their grip on an actor who was losing his mind. He had to either kick or quit the film.
Jump-starting his withdrawal from heroin, Greene fell from his trailer, an unscripted stunt that conveniently aggravated an old back injury. Trembling and moaning, he hobbled to the set to begin a day of intense physicality, insisting on suffering through the scene work. Hours passed before a doctor arrived on the set, administered a mini-exam, then reluctantly wrote a prescription for the minimal ten painkilling Percodans and a matching amount of muscle-relaxing Flexeril. In front of dumbfounded producers, Greene railed: "This doctor is a quack! I want 50 Percodan!" The doctor advised, "If he doesn't get drowsy on what I've prescribed, he's addicted to them." The doctor also noticed a burn in a very strange location--the crook of Greene's arm. That was, in fact, where he had been shooting up a dozen times a day. Greene had literally poured boiling water on his flesh to hide his track marks, which until then had been camouflaged with makeup.
No stranger to detox, Greene this time got to go through the grueling, loin-clawing withdrawal ritual in a studio-financed hotel room with the aid of the prescribed meds and a dose of methadone shipped in. The first night was hell. A sleepless crew member housed in the room above his reported that Greene was up all night, pacing and stomping around his room, punching walls, and intermittently haranguing his agent by phone: "Get me off this movie! I don't care what you have to do!"
He didn't get off the movie, but he was off heroin, at least for the moment. He continued to self-medicate, downing at least a fifth of Wild Turkey 101 from the moment he "came to" to the instant he passed out. Despite his frequent assertions that he wanted to get help, it was as if he was marking time until he could get back to L.A., where the film was to be completed. Once back in town, he tailspinned. He began chasing his booze with crack, scored on Hollywood corners where dealers lurked, hiding rocks in their mouths, waiting for buyers to spit them out to.
Greene was still managing to make his moments in front of the camera work. It was then, during the last week of shooting, while in his cups at a Hollywood bar, that Greene was told of Clayton Brooks's suicide. It was the worst thing that could have happened. The Rich Man's Wife wrapped, Greene's surrogate movie family disintegrated, and Greene stumbled off to the Viper Room. More accurately, the sidewalk outside the Viper Room, where night after night he'd sit, losing his mind (again), his trembling hands trying to vice-grip the voices inside his skull.
Greene's agent dumped him for missing appointments. It wasn't a great loss. Offers weren't exactly pouring in, and Greene was in no condition to read, let alone work. Checks by his few remaining friends found the desiccated Greene practically decomposing in his apartment. They begged him to leave and get to a treatment center. Now. He made promises that he would check in. Tomorrow.
Junkies are like that. "I'll quit tomorrow," they say, but they never stop until they've reached their own personal bottoms of unfathomable demoralization, hopelessness, and despair. Greene was ready to quit. But he didn't admit himself into rehab. He checked into the Chateau Marmont.
Chatting with his perfectly pleasant suburban mother offers few clues as to how Peter Greene got to that place. By her account, his New Jersey childhood was charmed. Greene's siblings lead conventional lives; his younger brother, John, is a Wall Street broker, and his younger sister, Mary Anne, is a married nurse.
Mrs. Green (Greene adds the extra e for his Screen Actors Guild card) recalls some average suburban window-breaking episodes and reveals that while an altar boy Peter was ousted for a while for lifting the priest's cassock during Mass. She also remembers his kindness to younger children and animals, and to those less fortunate. More than once he brought homeless men he found at the rectory to the dinner table for a meal.
This Italian mom had the standard doctor-lawyer aspirations for the son she called Errol Flynn. Her son didn't reveal his own ambitions. Instead, he dropped out of Montclair High School and began his schooling on the streets of Manhattan at fifteen.
Greene's first job--as a busboy--didn't last long. He was fired for stealing chickens. So what. The big city was full of new adventures: running from the mole people in the labyrinth of storm sewers and subway tracks below Times Square, then surfacing to bathe in the bustling humanity of Grand Central Station. Broke, he was too embarrassed to go home. Fleeting comfort came from jaunts to Union Square Park; scoring a couple of nickel bags of pot, rolling it all up into joints, he'd then dash up to Times Square and lose himself in a marijuana haze deep inside a refrigerated movie house. Then he found work--a hooker subcontracted him as a pot-delivery boy in and around Manhattan. He was soon making good money and brushing elbows with West Side Irish and Italian gangsters.
The hooker had no qualms about banging her johns in front of him, or introducing him to more powerful drugs than pot. Once, she got him loaded on angel dust and he landed, almost comatose, on her bedroom floor--all he could see was a mirror over her bed, and her screwing some Hell's Kitchen thug in it.
He spent his days on Washington Square Park benches, near New York University. Despite having ditched the higher-learning scene, he constantly remembered something his mother once told him: "The more you know, the more you can imagine." He took to stealing books from students in the park.
One day Greene was confronted by a nutty professor who was wise to his pilfering. "If you're going to steal a book," asked the older academic, "why Marketing?" The sidewalk student looked down, and sure enough, in his hands was Marketing and Bookkeeping. The professor took him under his wing.
The prof was no chicken hawk, as Greene first suspected; merely a stoned-out eccentric whose SoHo loft was lined with books--and drugs--for Greene's consumption. Greene was sixteen when the professor injected him with cocaine for the first time.
One snowblind night, Greene found some LSD in a little Oriental box stashed on a bookshelf. The trip he took that evening found portraits of Jesus jumping to life from the walls, talking to him. Greene broke an arm and didn't even know it. And soon after that, Greene's benefactor met his maker, unceremoniously dying of an overdose, leaving his now more streetwise charge alone again.
Until Greene hooked up with Kenny, a coke dealer just in from California. And before long, he and Kenny had the downtown after-hours scene locked and loaded on the quarter-ounces of cocaine they were pumping to the club set via a network of bartenders. The duo's Gramercy apartment was furnished with shoeboxes full of cash. With money and coke came girls proffering blow jobs in bar bathrooms and providing breakfast companionship in 14th Street greasy spoons.
The ride couldn't last. Kenny--who had been leading a closeted gay lifestyle--was murdered in the apartment by some rough trade he'd picked up in the thickets of Central Park. Greene was hauled in as a suspect in his partner's murder, but passed a lie-detector test and subsequently graduated to the big time, dealing with and for a Colombian cartel.
Greene at twenty was a strikingly handsome, gun-toting, drug-running menace, newly wed to a French-Spanish beauty queen, Elizabetha Nuņez. She needed immigration papers; he needed a translator for his dealings with his South American connections. But it was more than a marriage of convenience. There were some moments when one could have seen them as just another New York couple in love, having their quiet dinners with neighborhood friends in their neat flat.
But family life got dicey when Greene, now dealing kilos of cocaine, dug too deep into his own stash and, caught off guard, was hijacked for a few ounces of product. He sensed trouble and moved his bride to a safe house. Even a paltry three ounces doesn't miss the fierce scrutiny of Colombian businessmen, and in short order, a hit man was sent up from Miami with a warning to Greene: "If you don't have the three ounces back, you're dead tomorrow." He whisked his wife off on a plane to Miami, and--wired and paranoid--made the mistake of trying to hide out in the now not-so-safe safe house.
He had barely arrived there when the joint was firebombed. Greene escaped and rang up his wife: "Look. You can't come home. I fucked up." Though practically strangers to each other since then, Greene never took steps to have the marriage dissolved.
The only places left to hide were in way, way, way off-Broadway theater spaces where he "fell" into acting at 25. Greene met the legendary actress and coach Penny Allen, for whom he did a scene from the play K2. Allen recalls: "[In the scene,] he knew he was going to die, and it was almost that sacrificial element that's within Peter. He's the kind of actor that will walk the edge, in the best sense of the word. No matter what it costs."
Allen championed Greene's talent, nudging him into the New York independent-film world, where an actor could be a rogue and revered for it. Greene was soon reunited with a childhood friend he hadn't seen much since he left home: Clayton Brooks. They now bonded over something else: dope. Brooks had some unusual ideas--and unusual ways of expressing them--that kept even the easily bored Greene captivated. As a junkie Brooks was hard-core; as a writer, prolific; and as a poet-performance artist, he was outrageous.
Now Greene had more than just a partner in crime, he had a friend with whom he could talk about God, the devil, sexuality, the government, ad infinitum. With a couple of strong bags of China White in each of them, they could walk winter streets with jackets wide open, warm with the breath of confidences exchanged and bloodstreams full of dope and Little Italy cappuccino.
Greene went to Hollywood. Brooks stayed in New York, and eventually crashed. He "realized" that as a failed writer, he had to die for his words to live--if only in a passionate suicide note to his friend.
In Hollywood, Greene had sleepwalked through a career of playing bad guys brilliantly. He knew this. He had destroyed everything worthwhile in his life. At an age when many men are raising children, he was busy poisoning the child inside of him--that "Errol Flynn" character he liked less and less every day--and becoming as cold and ruthless as any villain he portrayed in movies. All Greene had left was Brooks's suicide and his hallucinations. Friends received the occasional phone call in which he would narrate the movements of SWAT teams he thought he saw swarming outside from his apartment balcony. His voice on randomly dialed answering machines rang with the tragic irony that he had--for that moment--become a chemically induced facsimile of the schizo-paranoid he played in Clean, Shaven. Past traumas had caught up with him, and there was no relief.
Unless he followed Clayton.
Indeed, he gave suicide his best shot that long March night at the Marmont, but Peter Greene woke up. Later, at home, with a shot of dope strong enough to kill an elephant, he tried again. He took the shot, threw up on himself, and passed out for three days. A worried friend called the Los Angeles police, who awakened him by banging on the door.
The windows in his home had been shut with the heat on full blast while he slumbered in his own waste, bathed in toxic sweat as blood, syringes, and crack pipes baked in the ovenlike apartment. He rose and answered the door. He found three cops asking if they could come in. "Not unless you got a warrant." Before he could cry foul, the cops were in and had him handcuffed to a chair. They were laughing at him.
He heard their mocking laughter and was mortified. It finally hit him: the epiphany that would humble him enough so he could ask for help. Shit, the cops who found him so hilarious didn't even have anything to arrest him on. He'd finished everything. After the cops split, he picked up the phone.
Puffing a cigar, strolling along Venice Beach, marveling at the ocean--a sight that escaped him as a smacked-out zombie--the newly sober Peter Greene would seem to have a lot to enjoy this afternoon. But Greene's crying a lot today, racked with guilt for leaving Clayton Brooks alone in New York to die without him. "If Clayton were with us, he wouldn't have jumped. He may have been around a little bit longer. You see, he didn't have anybody around to go on walks, to shoot the shit with him . . . and I wasn't around anymore."
All of a sudden, through the fellowship of those who--given their own war stories of addiction--empathized enough to care, Greene isn't out there raging alone anymore. He's in the gym, agonizing under iron he's not yet fit to pump, getting wacky on espresso, and putting on a few good, sculptured pounds. He's telling his own war stories--the events chronicled above were related mostly by Greene himself. He wanted help, and it came through.
But it's still not easy. The emotions once reserved for screen time have come flooding to the surface as he baby-steps through his first months clean. At times, the addict's rage instinct kicks in, and he lashes out with his thousand-yard stare, or worse, his fists. Almost any recollection of his past now brings a throb of guilt. Faces you'd figure he has no business remembering keep popping up, like that of a little boy who watched the junkies get high at a shooting gallery Greene frequented in New York. "I felt so close to that kid," says Greene, trying to make sense of it all, "but I'd be sitting there with a fucking needle in my arm talking to [him]. And he'd be so excited to talk and shit. And I saw him about six years later. . . . He must've been sixteen . . . and before I even saw the tracks, I knew he was on the shit."
He regrets letting his parents get old without him; hurting every woman he ever thought he loved; being so selfish; becoming so insane.
He's grateful for his new sanity. "I used to thrive on [that insanity]. I would do whatever the fuck I wanted when I wanted to, and no one could tell me no. . . . And now I realize that all the no's I've ever heard were for my own good, but I took them as a definite offense to me. 'Who are you to tell me I'm fucked up?' " He shakes his head. "Meanwhile, I'm puking out of a fucking car and getting beat up by Mexicans."
While he sometimes has to remind himself not to romanticize the squalor of his past, one thing he knows to the bone is that for him to get high is to die, and each day is a test.
He was recently called back to the scene of his almost-fatal meltdown. A day of reshoots was needed on The Rich Man's Wife. He suited up and at call time, his head was held high. The makeup artist who had camouflaged his track marks saw his newly healed arm and beamed with pride. Greene menaced his way through the new scenes like there had never been a break in continuity.
At Chaya Brasserie, a trendy Hollywood bistro, Greene leans over his giant steak and says, "We're men now, dude. And it took me this long to realize what you have to do to be a man. And you know what? I have this strange little inkling that maybe being a man ain't as hard as I thought it was. Maybe life on life's terms ain't so fucking bad."
When the movie tough guy is reminded that it takes a real tough guy to surrender, he says, "Then you know what? I'm ready. My white flag is up," he announces for the entire restaurant to hear. "And it's huge." He starts to laugh. It's infectious. "And you can see it twenty miles away." Heads turn in the restaurant, but no one runs for cover.
Mark Ebner is a Los Angeles-based writer who was Peter Greene's personal assistant on the set of The Rich Man's Wife. Peter Greene, now back to work on the independent-film circuit, hopes some sick junkie gets well because of this story.