Like most of you, the Anne Celeste Heche drama threw me for a loop. Having read her book, I knew all about her mental health and substance abuse issues, so the basic facts of the initial incident didn't shock me overmuch. It's when you start getting into the weeds that it all gets a bit disturbing.
The ongoing investigation around Anne Heche's car crash has come to an end, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.On Friday, the same day that PEOPLE confirmed the 53-year-old actress died from injuries sustained in the crash, the LAPD confirmed that authorities would no longer be pursuing an investigation related to the fiery crash."As of today, there will be no further investigative efforts made in this case," the LAPD said in a statement to PEOPLE. "Any information or records that have been requested prior to this turn of events will still be collected as they arrive as a matter of formalities and included in the overall case. When a person suspected of a crime expires, we do not present for filing consideration."
“Anne Heche’s wrecked mini towed away from Walgrove Avenue in Mar Vista, Los Angeles. Home security footage obtained by a local CBS station showed a blue car recklessly speeding through a suburban-style community before the crash.The nightmarish incident began unfolding a few minutes earlier, as Heche drove through a Mar Vista apartment complex and slammed into a garage door. Bystanders tried to get the “Donnie Brasco” actress out of the vehicle, but she backed up, drove off and went careening down Preston Way where she then veered into a small home, authorities said.“My first thought was that it was a car malfunction or that there was some sort of medical issue,” (David) Manpearl said of the speeding car. “The car was going three times faster than it should have been. She blew through three intersections. There was no turning or swerving or braking or skid marks.”
The actress — who was intubated with serious burns in a nearby hospital — was expected to “pull through,” her ex-boyfriend, Thomas Jane, said in a statement.
Now, you may have gleaned now and then that I have a bit of a fixation on manic pixies with both prodigious talents and sexual trauma in their jackets. Especially when their breakthrough role was playing twins.
Heche got a less-scathing kiss-off from jilted lover Steve Martin (she clearly had a thing for older dudes) in the similarly underrated Bowfinger, a movie I'd take over The Jerk any day of the week. Note Hathor Graham in the Inanna Heche role.
By 1997, Heche — who had just turned 28 years old — was poised to become Tinseltown’s next leading lady, having inked deals to star in a rom-com opposite Harrison Ford and appear in a highly anticipated Gus Van Sant remake of “Psycho.”But in August of that year, the starlet went public with the much older — 11 years her senior — and much more famous DeGeneres, who had publicly come out on the cover of Time magazine just four months earlier.The couple cozied up for the cameras at the premiere of Heche’s disaster flick “Volcano” and their groundbreaking same-sex romance exploded into the public eye.“It changed my life forever,” Heche admitted to Page Six in 2020. “The stigma attached to that relationship was so bad … I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years. I was fired from a $10 million picture deal.”The Emmy winner and Tony nominee further hit out at DeGeneres in a 2021 podcast interview, describing her ex-girlfriend as a money-hungry “bitch” who may have sabotaged her career in the wake of their split.“I broke up with her because her goal was to have a lot of money. Mine was to find love, and hers was, ‘I want $60 billion,’ ” Heche said. “Good, good luck; our forks are never going to meet.”
Following her separation from DeGeneres in August 2000, Heche drove from Los Angeles to Cantua Creek in a Toyota SUV. She was wearing only a bra and shorts at the time, parked the car, and walked 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km), before reaching a ranch house. The homeowner, Araceli Campiz, who had seen Heche in a movie, recognized her and let her in.After drinking a significant amount of water, Heche "took off her Nikes and said she needed to take a shower." Campiz assumed that Heche was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but Heche later revealed that she had taken ecstasy. After taking a shower, Heche entered the living room, asked for a pair of slippers, and suggested that they should watch a movie.After half an hour, Campiz contacted the Fresno County sheriff's department. Heche later told the deputies that she was "God, and was going to take everyone back to heaven in a spaceship." She was then taken by ambulance to Fresno's University Medical Center and admitted to the psychiatric unit, but was released within a few hours.
Heche stated she was "insane" for the first 31 years of her life, and that this was triggered by being sexually abused by her father during her infancy and childhood. In a series of nationally televised interviews with Barbara Walters, Matt Lauer, and Larry King to promote Call Me Crazy in 2001, Heche stated that she created a fantasy world called the "Fourth Dimension" to make herself feel safe, and had an alter ego who was the daughter of God and half-sister of Jesus Christ named "Celestia", who had contacts with extraterrestrial life forms.On March 3, 1983, when Heche was 13, her 45-year-old father died of HIV/AIDS, which she believed was contracted from a homosexual partner:
"He was in complete denial until the day he died. We know he got it from his gay relationships. Absolutely. I don't think it was just one. He was a very promiscuous man, and we knew his lifestyle then", Heche said on Larry King Live. Heche said that he repeatedly raped her from the time she was an infant until she was 12, giving her genital herpes.
There were these questions, which would have been definitively answered with a five-second Internet search. Meaning that sex-pests may have preferences, but that's like someone having a preference for steak but will settle for lobster:
When asked "But why would a gay man rape a girl?" in a 2001 interview with The Advocate, Heche replied "I don't think he was just a gay man. I think he was sexually deviant. My belief was that my father was gay and he had to cover that up. I think he was sexually abusive. The more he couldn't be who he was, the more that came out of him in [the] ways that it did."
In a 1998 interview, she reflected that her father being closeted ultimately "destroyed his happiness and our family. But it did teach me to tell the truth. Nothing else is worth anything."
Then this:
Three months after her father's death, Heche's 18-year-old brother Nathan was killed in a car crash. The official determination was that he fell asleep at the wheel and struck a tree, though Heche claims it was suicide.
The film was co-written and directed by the late Donald Cammell, a portrait-painting prodigy turned filmmaker, best known for co-directing Performance with Nicolas Roeg. But he was also mixed up with some unsavory elements from early on.
Brought up in a bohemian atmosphere, Donald Cammell was raised in an environment he described as "filled with magicians, metaphysicians, spiritualists and demons" including Aleister Crowley.Yeah, it's like that: cursed from birth. So you shouldn't be surprised that Cammell offed himself after Wild Side got condemned to straight-to-video hell.
Check out Robert Phoenix's video on Inanna Heche and the weirdness surrounding her death.
And don't forget the epic Stanley Kubrick and the Roswell Ritual livestream over at the SSI. It will help put a lot of this madness into context.