Posted on 09/06/2001 10:33:11 AM PDT by Teacup
Anne Heche says the sexual molestation she suffered at the hands of her father caused her to escape into a "fourth dimension" fantasy world in which she believed she was from another planet.
"I'm not crazy," Heche tells 20/20 on Wednesday in an exclusive interview with Barbara Walters. "But it's a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me."
In the wide-ranging interview, Heche, 32, talks about her childhood, her career, her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres — she says her first night with the comedian was "the best sex I'd ever had" — and new love Coleman "Coley" Laffoon, a 27-year-old cameraman whom she married on Saturday.
Heche, promoting her new book, Call Me Crazy (Simon & Schuster), says she's had lifelong battle with mental illness.
"I had a fantasy world that I escaped to. I called my other personality Celestia," she explains. "I believed I was from that world. I believed I was from another planet. I think I was insane."
Her Father's Secret Sex Life
Heche traces her problems back to her father. Donald Heche, a choir director in a Baptist church, began sexually abusing his daughter when she was still a toddler, she says.
"He raped me … he fondled me, he put me on all fours, and had sex with me," says Heche, qualifying that the abuse is only "in my memory."
"I think it's always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn't carry around a tape recorder … I didn't chisel anything in stone … Anybody can look and say, 'Well how do you know for sure?' And that's one of the most painful things about it. You don't."
She says she contracted herpes from him. "I had a rash, I had sores, I had welts on my nose and on my lips," she says.
,b>Heche did not learn that her father also had homosexual encounters until 1983, when he was dying of AIDS . When she learned he had the disease, she feared for her own life, she says.
To get away, Heche says, "I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life."
Heche also began acting, playing twins on the soap opera Another World from 1988 to 1992.
By the time she was 25, Heche says her personality had begun to fragment, shattering into moments of madness. Celestia, her other personality whom she believed was a reincarnation of God, spoke a different language and had special powers.
"You name it, I could do it. I could see into the future. I could heal people," Heche says. "I don't know where it came from. I was, in my mind, learning it from God."
Falling in Love: First Steve, Then Ellen
Having been abused as a child affected her adult relationships, she says. For two years, she dated actor/comedian Steve Martin, 24 years her senior. Heche says she thought she had found love with him.
"I wanted the love of an older man. I wanted comfort. I wanted humor. I wanted all of the things that he offered," she says. "Why did we break up? There's wasn't anything wrong with Steve. It was just that it was not what I wanted to commit my life to."
Then, in 1997 on Oscar night, she says, "I saw the most ravishing woman I had ever seen in my life standing across the room. Her name was Ellen DeGeneres. She was radiating. I think at certain times in people's lives you just radiate an energy and a glow of fabulousness. And that was her. I had never seen anybody so lit up."
They slept together that night. "Up until that point, that was the best sex I'd ever had," says Heche, who says she had never before had sex with a woman. "I felt cared for … I felt free to express a part of me that I had not been able to express with a man. I felt sensuous and sexual in a way I hadn't before."
DeGeneres' sitcom character was about to announce her homosexuality, and soon Heche and DeGeneres would become America's most prominent lesbian couple. But behind the united front they presented to the world, there were difficulties.
"Ellen knew everything," Heche says, including her identity as Celestia, and her belief that she could speak to the dead.
Their three-year relationship ended in August 2000. The day after the breakup, Heche was found wandering door-to-door in Fresno, Calif. She ended up in a stranger's back yard, deeply confused.
"I was told to go to a place where I would meet a spaceship. I was told in order to get on the spaceship that I would have to take a hit of Ecstasy," says Heche, who adds that she is not a consistent drug user. "Fresno was the culmination of a journey and a world that I thought I needed to escape to in order to find love."
That day, Heche says, she regained her sanity and began to put the fragmented pieces of her life in place.
"I'm here … I could not be more elated with my life," says Heche.
'You Fall in Love With a Person, Not a Sex'
Heche met her new husband while working on a documentary about DeGeneres. She denies that the new relationship hastened the demise of the old one.
"How do you put into a sentence why you break up with somebody?" asks Heche. "We had gotten to the point where we were not happy together anymore. We had become isolated from the world, together."
Heche says she does not label herself straight, gay or bisexual — and that Laffoon understands her. "He's an extraordinary guy," says Heche. "He's one of the few people I've ever met who actually embraces the same notion about sexuality that I do … which is that you love who you love. You fall in love with a person, not a sex."
She adds: "I would never limit myself to saying I would be with a man or a woman."
Heche sees herself as a survivor. She's starred in such movies as the remake of Psycho and Six Days, Seven Nights , with Harrison Ford. She now says she has a TV comedy in the works.
"I think everything I've done in all my insanity was to try to get my parents to love me," she says. "My father loved movie stars. I decided I needed to become famous to get his love. My mother loved Jesus. That was her thing. So I wanted to become Jesus Christ."
As an adult, Heche says she confronted her mother about her father's sexual abuse. "She hung up the phone on me," Heche recalls. "To have gone through so much work to heal myself and have my mother not acknowledge in any way that she was sorry for what had happened to me broke my heart."
20/20 tried to contact Heche's family for comment. Susan Bergman, the actress's older sister, said the family had not yet read Heche's book or seen the interview. Bergman said they plan to issue a statement that will be posted on the Internet after they watch the interview Wednesday night.
Heche says she wrote Call Me Crazy to say goodbye "once and for all, to my story of shame and embrace my life choice of love."
"The fact that there are people hearing my story is the icing on the most beautiful cake in the world, that I imagine says, 'Happy freedom, Anne. You have made it to the other side.'"
Rebecca Raphael contributed to this report.
Post-modern psycho babble in a nut shell. This loser has "struggled her whole life" until she seeks therapy. The therapist helps her "uncover" deep secrets from her past which may not have even taken place (she even admits they may not have taken place). Next step: Get on the horn and tell your Mom that your Dad molested you as a child. Sounds like an old ATT commercial, doesn't it?
So now her Mom is the bad guy for not cleaning up the pile of crap that Heche just dumped on her doorstep after "she had gone through so much work to heal."
The pop culture religion of the Post-Modern world is that self and experience equate to God. So in this loser's twisted world, her mother was a bit player who was expected to play her part and help her be "healed" of an event she's not even sure occurred.
To quote my favorite movie, Miller's Crossing, she's one sick twist.
Jack? Oh, JOHN Kennedy. Thanks for the spell check. Should keep you busy around here. Some have interesting grammer on their home pages. Lot's of work here for you.
You Say Tomato, I Say Tomãto
Maybe that was his third personality speaking - the horse's a__ she's become.
What if one of these celebrities who go out and blow their mouths about alleged abuse from their past at the hands of their parents were to be sued by the people they are slandering? Wouldn't that be an interesting watch on Court TV?
She's so "tolerant" amd "comapssionate"!! Especially when she's just stuffed her nose with
"something " the only thing that makes her able to live with herself and/or all of herselves.
WHO CARES???
Isn't that always the easy way out for some of these folks. Excuses, excuses.
By the looks of it, quite a few of us are interested. Why did you read this?
She 'discovers' memories of being raped in half-a-dozen different ways, for years, by her Baptist choir director father who is now dead - of AIDS - having turned to homosexualty after leaving his family.
So, poor little Ann turns to promiscuity, drugs and booze to 'escape the shame' of being her dead father's rape victim. To cope with her shame she secretly adopts another persona and establishes a fantasy life which she lives in for years. All the while she's auditioning for jobs, acting on TV, being a slut, drugging it up and generally being a typical Hollywood show-biz citizen, but no one knows about her fantasy life as a Goddess or Princess or whatever she claims she was when she talked to God and all the rest of this New Age drivel she spouts. Along the way, poor Ann meets Ellen DeGerenes and voila! True love. Yada yada yada it doesn't work out (surprise) and then, Ann's voices tell her to 'take a hit of Ecstasy' to meet a spaceship yada yada yada. Are you laughing out loud yet? I was at this point.
Finally, a day in the hospital and 30 years of 'insanity' are...poof!...gone. Wow. Who needs shrinks and meds? Now, Ann's pregnant, married to some photographer. That'll last. What a total crock this nutcase hands us and insults our intelligence by expecting anyone outside of Hollyweird to buy it.
Ann is now a lifelong professional victim and blames every stupid thing she's ever done (whoring around, drugs) on her long-dead, gay, Bapist daddy and by inference, mommy. Boo Hoo for poor little abused Ann. The idiotic fantasy world she 'created' is right out of a second-rate novel and her taking a hit of Ecstasy to get to the spaceship is such a thinly veiled attempt to cover herself for a self-inflicted drug overdose that it's not even funny anymore, just plain insulting. "I was insane for most of my life but I'm fine now" says poor little Ann, the now-and-forever victim. Gee Ann, how would you know?
There are lots of very real childhood victims of parental abuse, sexual and otherwise and maybe Ann Heche is one of them, but we'll never know that for sure, as she said. Her use of that unknowable abuse to explain her whole sordid life is a little too pat for me to buy into. The episode as 'a temporary lesbian' with Ellen DeGerenes is just another attempt at debauchery in my opinion, and the vast publicity it generated for her didn't hurt at all, especially since 99% of it was positive.
Now, Ann is a recovered insanity victim, too. Of course, we only have her word on this as she never told her many therapists about the fantasy life and no one ever knew of the alleged sexual abuse, either.
I find this woman disgusting in her adoption of victimhood status to relieve her of any personal responsibility for her life and the many negative things she's indulged in. That she now expects sympathy and probably support and applause for being 'brave' and 'telling all' is galling.
A nobody with minimal talent that should disappear from sight but in Hollywood's twisted mindset, will probably be a huge 'star' or at least be treated as if she were. Another Rosanne. Another immature, irresponsible, whining, lying loser. Another one of Hollywood's 'Beautiful People'. Right.
(In case some of you don't know this. Ellen will have a new show this year)
Love object
ANNE Heche's loss is a potential gain for other women who've been flocking to tapings of "The Ellen Show," the new CBS sitcom starring Ellen DeGeneres. "Practically everyone lining up there was an Anne Heche-lookalike," an L.A. source told msnbc.com's Jeannette Walls. "There were dozens of hot-looking lesbians with short blonde hair." Not all the gals behaved like ladies: "When there were only a few seats left, a fist fight almost broke out."
YIKES!!!! Girls will be girls I guess.
I didn't read it. I clicked on this mess, scrolled down to reply #1 and posted my reply. Sorry, I got better things to do than sweat/post/joke over a bunch of Hollywood wakoz.
The barf part that I caught was the gay gal stating,"they (Ellen and Ann) were the perfect role models"
My sentiments exactly. I've never been an Ann fan and I found I detested her when I read she was a contributing cause to Robert Downey, Jr.'s bender last November (coke--they had the Ally McBeal connection).
I don't think of Ann as nuts so much as just one big narcissist. She MUST be the center of attention. Once the shock value of being with Ellen wore off, she went on to other things, including the book and interview. Now people are talking about her again, so no wonder she's happy.
The one thing I don't buy is her alleged abuse. We're supposed to believe that her dad was a flamer, but couldn't express it, so he abused his pre-pubescent DAUGHTER as a substitute. Yeah, right.
I had to turn off the interview. Didn't learn about the pregnancy until this morning. We should all be saying a few prayers for the babe in utero; I sure wouldn't want to be the one inheriting those genes!
Well la-di-friggin-da, ain't that somethin'? The new hubby may not be the "best" she ever had, but he got the job done (assuming it's his). :)
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