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And after he died, when Nancy Sinatra came to New York and wanted Guiliani to put a statue of Sinatra in Times Square, I wrote a letter to the Mayor and said, “He’s Hoboken and Hollywood, he’s not a New Yorker.” I didn’t use the Mafia stuff.

JH: Guiliani knew all about it.

DD: Yeah, he knew.

JH: He was a U.S. Attorney and he put a lot of them behind bars, so he knew.

DD: He knew. So I mean anyway...Sinatra....

JH: Had you been getting along okay with him before this incident? Did he do this to embarrass you?

DD: He didn’t like us. He thought we were…I mean, we moved in very high circles, and I don’t think my job warranted the circle that we moved in.

JH: You can’t be popular because you have a job at a producer level?

DD: Yeah.

JH: When your son, Griffin, got started in Hollywood, did he express an interest in acting, directing or producing?

DD: Acting.

JH: Was that something where you could say to him, “Why don’t you go talk to this person or go talk to that person”? Or did he just go in and do it on his own?

DD: He really did it on his own. He’s always been very sensitive about all of the connections that he had.

Actually, at the time he started, I was on my ass. I mean, I went through quite a few years of being seriously in trouble. And I was in a cabin in Oregon when his picture was in New York magazine for producing the movie Chilly Scenes of Winter, a wonderful movie.

JH: You say you were on your ass. What I find remarkable is that you—unlike so many other people who just opt for rehab—you went to that cabin in Oregon and you got yourself off everything. How did you do that without any help; counseling, medication...?

DD: I just...I just knew I had to change.

JH: But you were fighting both alcohol and cocaine addictions at the same time?

DD: Oh yeah. Yeah. I stopped everything in that cabin. That cabin was again one of the great things of my life.

I was dropped when I went through my bad period, and then on the night before I left, I was invited to dinner at the last minute by Mrs. Jack Benny. She was a big Hollywood hostess. And I got there—and I knew her well, and her grandchildren and my children were friends—and she hardly spoke to me. I realized I was just like a fill-in for somebody who dropped out. And I thought...this is, you know...I can’t handle this anymore. I gotta go. And I left the next day and I drove and drove and drove. I was heading for the Cascade Mountains because I thought the sound of it was nice.

“By this time, I’d lost my convertible Mercedes. I’d lost everything.”

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.

“I had one suitcase and a typewriter and that’s all from my old life.”

Then I went back...I took the bus back...and I knew that my time was over. Time to move. I stayed maybe another two weeks in the cabin, and I went back to LA and I had no money, but I had a beautiful apartment that somebody sublet when I was away, and beautiful things, and I sold every single thing I owned, including my Turnbull and Asser shirts. And all of the people whom I knew came in and bought, and I then left there and went to New York to start my life over. I had one suitcase and a typewriter and that’s all from my old life. I sold everything.

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