I WAS THE GUY WHO INTRODUCED ANNE HECHE TO ELLEN DeGENERES

A VANITY FAIR OSCAR PARTY, AN ALLURE COVER STORY, AND A FEW MORE MEMORIES

Anne Heche tragically died this past weekend from injuries she suffered in a fiery car accident. My Facebook feed was filled with tributes to her fierce and fearless talent as an actress. Her life itself was filled with many narratives. I was amazed after reading many of them that she survived as long as she did and with a kind of dinged-up dignity but, damn it, dignity nonetheless. She was certainly a singular actress, maybe even a great one. People would often use the lazily laconic term “crazy” to describe her - there was meanness in that laziness too - but I think “alchemic” is a better one; she often added an alchemic ingredient to a film or television series (or even a dinner party) and there certainly was such an ingredient in the talent that conjured her and allowed her to reinvent her life as an actress. A kind of inscrutability lay beneath her divinely scratched up surface. She was “a presence,” another lazy, rather generic term for the space her talent held for her waiting for her to stride inside its protective aura. Outside of that space, her inscrutable brilliance could sometimes match her rather scrawny physical presence, but once inside it there was a kind of giantess who gestured with both method and maybe, yes, a bit of madness mixed in with her anger and finally forgiveness toward so many personal backstories that helped to mold her performances into finely sculpted characters that, like her now, were both spectral and real as all great acting is as it tears at that membrane between the two that must be torn for us to suspend our disbelief. We believed Anne Heche. That’s why she could sometimes be scary to behold for some: belief belies the cynicism that has become the very sinew within our own membranous, much too brainy comprehension of the world. We need more membrane tearers.

There were many kind and deeply considered remembrances from those on social media who had worked with her and many others that hailed her film and television work. But I was haunted by the lone one I read about her work on the Broadway stage. Sarah Schulman wrote, “There is a lot going on out there but one moment of appreciation for Anne Heche’s transcendent performance in Proof, in the second cast. Sometimes when people get to Broadway the performance mutes and becomes more even and palatable. But when she stepped out of that house in her pretty dress for her father’s funeral, her performance persuaded us that the character was driven by grief, had not bathed in days, and that dress hung on her boney shoulders like she was a crooked hanger. It was Jack Doulin who called and told me ‘don’t miss this’ and he was so right. I am still thinking about it.”

One of Heche’s most famous - infamous? - narratives was her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres before she broke up with Ellen having decided that she was finally heterosexual or maybe more bi than she had thought when first falling in love with DeGeneres. She had to live through being accused lazily of being crazy, especially by Ellen partisans. I was one back then myself but I never thought Anne was crazy. “Singular’ was the word that always surfaced when I thought of her - as it already has in this column.

I was the guy who introduced Anne and Ellen and witnessed their instant connection, that first spark of love - of lust? - between them. We were all at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party back around 1997. Ellen’s Time cover story in which she came out was just about to break or had just broken - I can't precisely recall. Ellen was sitting on one side of me at my table that night and we talked a lot about how she had initially wanted to come out on the cover of Vanity Fair and had wanted me to be the writer of the story. But Pat Kingsley, her publicist at the time, insisted on putting her on the cover to TIME instead. It has, however, been one of the regrets regarding my career that Ellen and I didn't get to do that story like we both had wanted. We were still consoling each other over that media-might-have-been that night. But being on Time made it more of a news story so I think it worked out better for her in the end. Kingsley was right to make that PR call.

The late photographer Herb Ritts brought Ellen to the party that night. He and I were old friends from my days at Interview where I was Executive Editor and had hired him often to do shoots there. I even did a story on Herb himself for Vanity Fair about his home in Santa Fe. (Click here to read it.) I adored him. A sweet man. I miss him. This past weekend would have also been his 70th birthday.

Herb and Ellen were at my table that night for the dinner served at Morton’s during the Oscar’s telecast. Ellen sat to my right. On the other side of me was a young actress I had never met but was happy when I looked at the seating chart and saw that she was at my table as well. She introduced herself to me as we took our seats and I turned to Ellen on my other side and said, "Ellen, do you know Anne Heche?" She didn’t until that moment and I could feel that instant spark that ignited between them when they shook hands across my chest. It seemed to reverberate inside my own emotionally scarred heart. I will never forget the actual physical feel of it as they reached across me and rested their forearms atop my chest, each hand lingering in the other until their fingers were momentarily entwined as the handshake shape-shifted into a tender and tentative handhold. As we turned to our dinner and tried to carry on a conversation over the din of “darling”s and “do you know"s and “damn you look good”s, their sparks kept landing in my food. During the dessert course, I finally whispered to Ellen, "Do you want to trade seats?" She did. And that is how their shared narrative, Anne’s and Ellens’, began - by my getting out of their way.

Ellen has lived several narratives herself before and since. Thankfully she didn't hold my being the matchmaker that night against me when Anne broke her heart. Ellen was even the first person who gave me a blurb for Mississippi Sissy when I sent her an early galley and I will always have a place in my emotionally scarred heart for that too. Her kindness for lending her stamp of approval to that book about how such a heart became scarred in such a way still reverberates there.

A few years later Ellen and I did get to do a cover story for Allure magazine which got a lot of attention because, among other things, she admitted to being molested by her stepfather. The original draft of that story was much richer than the rather truncated version that Allure ran because the magazine just didn’t have the space to run the longer version. We also talked a lot about Anne in the story - that too got a lot of attention. The fact that Anne broke Ellen’s heart so deeply speaks not to an insouciant cruelty on her part but how powerful she could be when she purposefully blew through someone’s life, sometimes pausing there for some much needed rest because she calibrated with a well-honed wariness on which she was weaned as a child that such a person, such a place, could be an almost-trusted, much-needed way station. She was, yes, a powerful force to which so many who came in contact with it now attest.

Below is an excerpt from my first draft of that Allure cover story on Ellen who opened up about Anne in a rather astonishing way now that I have re-read the profile. The long opening of the story took place at a taping of her talk show about which she said, "You make so much money. You have anything you want and everything at your disposal. You lose track of what we’re put on the planet for. I’m getting preachy - I’m sorry. But that’s what I believe. If I am able to reach that many people on a daily basis, then it would be so … ah … lovely to have some kind of impact or contribution that is positive. That’s what killed me so much when I came out. All I wanted to do was make people laugh. That, in turn, gave me so much joy. Then when I decided to be honest with people it was somehow taken away for a while. The fact that I’m able again to do that and, at the same time, be who I am completely … ah ….it … ah …”. At that her blue eyes welled with tears. “I think part of it is that everybody loves a comeback. I’m sure I’ll be knocked down again at some point …”

The second section took place at her home. I had at the taping referred to the audience’s anticipation of the show’s starting and their dancing to Rick James’s “Super Freak” to get them worked up even more as they waited as a kind of exquisite mayhem.

Here is some of what I wrote in that second section:

Exquisite Mayhem - a collection of German photographer Theo Ehret’s 1960s portraits of bikini-clad California women in assorted “apartment wrestling” tableaux - is the name of one of the hundreds of art and photography books that are lined on shelves and piled on tables in the living room of the main house of DeGeneres’s six-acre Hollywood Hills compound. (She purchased the home a couple of years ago for a little over $7 million from Max Mutchnick, one of the creators of Will and Grace, and subsequently bought up three of the adjoining properties.) A painting by Martin Mull, who co-starred with DeGeneres in her follow-up ill-fated CBS sitcom in 2001, hangs on one wall of the austerely sophisticated room. A gigantic sliver of a lone figure floating serenely in a vast sea of blue by environmental photographer Richard Misrach hangs opposite the Mull. Two custom-made cafe-au-lait colored chaises are positioned in front of the fireplace above which hangs a plasma television screen. Over in the corner, one of sculptor Robert Graham’s naked female torsos stands sentinel where it is stationed on its slender plinth. A couple of orange club chairs have closed in on each other.

DeGeneres, a day after the taping her talk show, curls up with Cricket, one her cats, on the long beige sofa that backs up to a huge and inviting screen porch that runs along the length of the entire room. The deeply burnished brown colors of Cricket’s calico-ed coat are, as if art directed, in keeping with the warm palette that surrounds her purring presence. Though her closets are filled with Jil Sander, Gucci, and Dolce and Gabbana, DeGeneres is wearing an old blue slightly striped Oxford dress shirt and slacks this same color as the sofa. A plush pair of suede sneakers completes the comfortable ensemble. Has she become the Imelda Marcos of tennis shoes? “At the show I am, but I don’t have too many pairs here at home. I have bad feet. I can’t wear hard soles or I’d be in pain all the time. I can’t be barefoot. So it’s sneakers for me.”

Her partner, Portia de Rossi, sixteen years DeGeneres’s junior, comes rushing in through the front door. She’s been outside trying unsuccessfully to find Subtle, another of the couple’s cats, who has run off in the rain. Her slight dishevelment adds to her sensual presence as she shakes dry her damp blonde hair, its strands struggling to once more fall past her t-shirted shoulders. She apologizes for not being able to find the thirteen-year-old feline who was spotted by a neighbor, she reports, sashaying along one of the hillside’s sloping side streets. Sashaying herself off toward the kitchen, de Rossi graciously returns with heaving plates of muffins and fruits and cheeses.

“Thank you, baby. But what have I told you about putting on a uniform first,” DeGeneres kids her, tenderly eliciting a toughened smile from both of them before de Rossi heads outside again to try and summon their beloved pet back into its rightful fold. “She’s the sweetest girl in the world,” says DeGeneres, watching her walk away as de Rossi, overhearing the remark, tosses her one last loving look. After her much publicized relationship and breakup with actress Anne Heche and the suddenness with which she seemed to leave her next partner, photographer and actress Alexandra Hedison, when she and de Rossi fell head-over-heels in love, does DeGeneres ever fear that she’s getting the reputation of being a bit of a womanizer? “I’m more of a serial monogamist,” she says. “Alex and I were together for four years. Before I was with Anne I was with someone for four years. Before that, I was with someone for six years. I hope and pray that Portia and I are together the rest of our lives. That’s what we both want.”

“So which is the better description of you?” I ask. “The post-modern Warren Beatty? Or the post-modern Elizabeth Taylor?”

DeGeneres mimics Cricket’s squirm. “Oh, God,” she says, rolling her tired eyes. “Can I go back to your calling me a combination of James and Elaine Joyce?” she asks, referencing my description of her stream-of-consciousness comic monologue the day before at her talk show taping. “ Better yet. Can’t I just be me?” She looks out past the screen porch toward her pool and lush acres of land. Memories seem to flood her as persistently as the winter’s continuing rain earlier cut a river down through her property: her first lover’s death in a car accident back in New Orleans after one of their many fights, the lack of medical care during her childhood when she suffered a horrible knee injury that exposed both her splintered bones and the limits of her Christian Science beliefs, the simultaneous and deeply felt rejection she felt from both Heche and the public during the down days of her career. “Anne broke my heart into a million pieces. I’ve never spoken to her since she left,” she says quietly, recalling the night I first introduced the two when I was seated between them at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party. “I mean, the way I came out was such a personal search for freedom and to get rid of shame and Anne was so fearless ... My family was always such a quiet, fearful family,” she says, bragging now, however, about her older brother Vance’s career as a television producer and her “lioness” mother Betty’s newfound life as a gay right’s spokesperson. She’s not as close to her equally proud father Elliot - her parents divorced when she was thirteen - but they are able to put their religious differences aside and maintain a respectful relationship. “It would have been interesting like in that movie Sliding Doors,” she continues, “if on that night you introduced me to Anne and let her sit in your seat that I would have gone, ‘No!’ and walked away. When she left, I’d wake up in the morning and my eyes would just immediately fill up with tears and I would start convulsively crying. I’d watch the sun come up and then go down and I’d literally be in the same place on the floor. I finally just thought, I’m not going to let this destroy me. I’m so grateful for it finally. I think everybody needs to have their heart broken. I had always broken other people’s hearts and I had never known what that felt like - plus to have it done to me so publicly and to also feel humiliated ... But you have to look at every single moment in life as a gift and be grateful. Not just the good moments either. The bad moments - as much as you would like for them to go away - they form you. I had a situation with my stepdad when he molested me. I shouldn’t even call him my stepdad - that’s horrible - he was my mother’s husband. But all these little things that cause us to suffer are pieces that add all kinds of different ways to reflect the light almost. Someone once told me that a broken heart leaves cracks so that the light can come in. I feel like it did that for me. I feel like I’m a more giving person now. I’m a more compassionate person. I used to be the kind of person who took care of everything and was in relationships in which I was the caregiver in every way. Especially after Anne, I felt it was important to have an equal. I want that back. I do enough in my life that when I get home here I really do want to just be small and be quiet and be taken care of as well.”

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Proofreading the column above I thought of the phrase I like to use: Everything connects. Like lots of writers, I am the “thing” that is “every” in my own narrative it so often seems. This weekend as Anne Heche shape-shifted into another kind of space that death had been holding for her, I unexpectedly turned to this memory of her. I had not thought about that night and introducing her to Ellen maybe since I wrote that story on Ellen for Allure in 2005. Maybe as Anne was transitioning she was also recalling that night that handshake of hers shape-shifted itself atop my chest into the tentative tenderness of holding Ellen DeGeneres’s hand. I sensed they could feel my heart beating beneath their hands that night. I certainly could. Maybe it was the simplicity of a beating heart she was remembering as hers ceased to do so. Not mine necessarily, just the beat itself beneath such momentary tenderness as she tore through life’s tentative membrane. I’d like to think that of her just as I like to think of life as just such an incessant beat beneath such unexpected and fleeting moments of tenderness. Everything else is just narrative.