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By this time, I’d lost my convertible Mercedes. I’d lost everything. I was in this little, cheap Ford—two-door Ford—and I got a flat tire, and I didn’t know how to change a flat tire. So I rented this little cabin for one night.
JH: Was it right where you broke down?
DD: Near, near, in this little town called Camp Sherman, and I ended up staying there for six months in that cabin. I had no telephone and no television, and I literally lived in silence. It was the most incredible period of recovering, licking my wounds and coming to terms with myself because all that time and stuff...you know? I had become a phony Hollywood person. And all that bulls--- ended in the cabin. I used to think it was "this person's" fault that I didn’t get that movie, or "that person" did this or that. I came to realize that the fault was always mine. It was an incredible period for me, and that’s when I started to write my first book in that cabin.
JH: The way you’re describing it, it was
almost epiphanic for you. You had this epiphany of yourself and
had gone back to being yourself. You rid your system, from the psychological
level straight to the physical level, of all of the trappings of
Hollywood.
DD: Yeah. Yeah. And then this wonderful woman whom I rented this little cabin from, she invited me to her house and her husband’s for Thanksgiving. I didn’t know them. She had daughters and their husbands and all kinds of people. And they would start to talk, you know, about—I never told anything about my life and they never asked any questions—but one of the sisters or daughters-in-law, whomever it was, was talking about Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands. I produced a movie with Elizabeth Taylor.
JH: Ash Wednesday.
DD:
And I knew her very, very well, and the information that this daughter
was saying about Elizabeth Taylor was wrong. And I let it pass,
and that was like scissoring one more thing that tied me to Hollywood,
you see what I’m saying? It was the most fascinating thing. She
was talking about Elizabeth's seven husbands and she had the order wrong. Now the old
me would have said, “Oh, no, no, Nicky Hilton was the first husband, and...” but I let it pass. It
doesn’t matter. It was an amazing moment, you know what I mean?
When I’d let all that stuff just take over my life?
JH: It must have been extraordinary.
DD: Yeah. It felt so good.
JH: I’ll bet it did because you were yourself again. You had yourself back.
DD: Yeah, yeah. It was amazing!
JH: After the cabin you just went back to...?
DD: No, after the cabin, I didn’t. What happened that ended that is that my brother committed suicide. My brother Stephen. I was so broke that I didn’t have enough money to go to his funeral, nor did I have a telephone. To get me, you had to call this lady who owned the cabin. My aunt called me and said, “You have got to come.” She said, “I will pay for the ticket,” or something. So, I went to New Canaan, Connecticut, where my brother lived. [It was] a terrible thing. We still don’t know why he did what he did.
But at that funeral...you see I’d toyed with the idea of suicide myself.
JH: While you were in the cabin?
DD: Yeah, I did. And when I saw that...that casket go up the aisle with three little kids, 9, 6 and 3, I felt, I’ll never do that. I will never be tempted by that. That was no longer an option.
JH: So, you decided that after the funeral, I’m not going to....
DD: I’m not gonna [commit suicide]. And I
went back and I got to Portland Oregon. And in the Portland Airport
when I got off, the whole thing hit me. I mean of the six months
that I’d been there, the whole failure of Hollywood after the golden
days there, and the the loss of the brother, and my wife had left
me and everything happened. We had two children that died—this was
long before the murder [of Dominique]—and it was like in the
Portland Airport, I just fell apart.
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DD: He really did it on his own. He’s always been very sensitive about
all of the connections that he had. 
