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 about Her Life Spent 'Insane' FOX News Blasts Network Interviews Promoting Heche Views Actress Tells of Dad's Rapes - Speaks Respectfully of Ellen |
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By Jack Nichols
New York, New York-Anne Heche, whose book Call Me Crazy has been released, spoke
last night with Barbara Walters on ABC's 20/20. The no-holds-barred interview was condemned
in advance by O'Reilly on FOX News.
Ms. Heche's story, said Barbara Walters, "has been one of abuse, tragedy and insanity." The insanity lasted, reportedly for 31 years. During her love affair with Ellen DeGeneres, Anne admitted, she'd also been attuned to the imaginative creations of her own mind, calling herself Celestia, a seer who, she said, often had visions and heard the voice of God speaking in a tongue she understood from the 4th Dimension where she believed herself to be living. Indeed, she was from another planet, she reckoned. At one point the actress seemed overcome with emotion. Barbara Walters asked, "Want some water?" Barbara Walters reflected on a photograph showing Anne Heche with her family: "They were the epitome of the perfect American family…deeply religious, blond haired, the father in charge of the church choir." But Don Heche, Anne's father, was a closeted gay man, she said, and, apparently, as badly confused by such hiding of himself as circumstances would allow. He'd been both chronically unemployed and abusive. He had a wife and children. He loved movies. Anne had early wanted to become a movie star, she said, to tempt her father's love. She defined the searches she'd made through life as ones in which she'd hoped to get love from her parents. To tempt her mother's love, she became, in her own mind, a Christ-like presence, Celestia, because her mother's greatest loving, she knew, had been mostly reserved for Jesus.
Barbara Walters told what happened next: "Free of his wife and children Don Heche moved to New York. The family was shocked when they realized that their church-going father was wildly, flamboyantly gay. It was the 80s and Don Heche was embracing the unfettered nightlife and unprotected sex of the times." "My dad died March 4, 1983," says his daughter. The causes were complications related to AIDS. Anne had walked the streets with her father as he increasingly lost weight and strength. Because of their relations, Anne feared that she too might have the virus. Her secret persona, Celestia, surfaced in her mind following her mothers' hanging up the receiver following a conversation in which Anne had told her about her husband's long-time abuse. That her mother had turned away from this news that Anne very much needed her to believe, reportedly caused the star, already in therapy, a fragmenting of her personality. She told how she'd tried sex, drugs and other methods of escape from her frail family. "I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life," she told Barbara Walters. Anne Heche replied when asked that neither she nor Ellen Degeneres are currently friends. This fact does not seem to lessen her high regard for Ellen, however, whose physical attentions she described as the most caring and most exciting she'd known. Now, however, although Ms. Heche has united with Coleman Laffoon, a camera man she met while making a documentary about Ellen and although she is happily touting a 3-month pregnancy, she no longer considers herself "insane". Rather, she assures listeners, she's never felt so at ease and so satisfied by life. Neither will she label herself either heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. She says her new male spouse feels similarly about such matters. |
