F or many girls, best friends are their first loves. They spend all their time together. Learn from each other. Protect each other. When I was nine, my best friend was year-old ingenue Lara Flynn Boyle. The world fell in love with Lara long before I did. From the very first, she was determined to buck this image. In a cover story for Rolling Stone , the journalist seems taken aback by Lara, then just One quiet summer night in , the nascent couple was dressed for dinner, the engine of his Mercedes the only sound.
My father moved to make a left on Mulholland from Coldwater, just a quarter mile from our house, when their car collided with another. When Dad finally came to, head dripping blood, he looked up to see Lara crawling out of the sunroof. I first heard about the crash not from any members of my family, but from a nosy mother at school.
Not knowing the news would be picked up by the tabloids, he wanted to introduce Lara on his own terms. Their union was presented as something to be ashamed of, inspiring the kind of tsk-tsk condemnation that belies the thrill of imagining such a life.
People who were interested in my dad and Lara, like the mother at school, were interested in them not just because they were dangerous and intelligent, but also because by reading about them, they felt dangerous and intelligent too. The spectacle of the relationship between Jack Nicholson and this Twin Peaks star—33 years his junior—was so scandalous, no one could see they were actually falling in love.
The family Lara walked into was actually kind of typical. And yet, this was the marvelous world of Jack Nicholson. We would drive golf balls into the canyons. And though we never saw him, my brother and I lived in constant terror of our reclusive neighbor Marlon Brando, who could come lumbering down our shared driveway in search of ice cream at any moment, trailed by his pair of snapping black English mastiffs. In other words, like the Banks family of Mary Poppins fame, we were primed for the arrival of magic.
