9 Things We Learned From Anne Heche’s New Memoir

After the show, Heche writes, “She complimented my performance and then asked if I’d be interested in flying to New York City to screen test for a soap opera. I said, ‘Absolutely!’ (Beat, beat.) ‘What’s a soap opera?’ ” (She was raised without TV.) Just 16, she ended up turning down the part, but a few years later landed the roles of twins Vicky and Marley Love on Another World.

She almost became an architecture student

After four years on Another World, Heche decided that she should pursue “something ‘normal’ that could be a career.” But a week before she was planning to enroll in Parsons School of Design to study architecture, her agent called her and said she had a shot at a role in a film rendition of O Pioneers!, where she’d play the best friend of Jessica Lange’s character. Lange was her idol, she writes, so she auditioned, got the part and started filming right away in Nebraska. “The rest is history — or herstory, as I like to say.”

Director Oliver Stone wasn’t charmed by her whimsy

One of Heche’s agents described her as “a wild animal set free from its cage” when she first arrived in Hollywood. She remembers walking into Oliver Stone’s casting office in those early years: “I had no idea who he was then, but whoever he was, he didn’t look up when I walked into the room, and that seemed rude.” So she crawled under his glass desk and waved at him from below, saying, “ ‘Hi! I’m Anne.’ I smiled. ‘What’s your name?’” Stone would later tell his people to make sure Heche never auditioned for him again.

She fell for Ellen DeGeneres almost immediately

Heche writes that she first glimpsed comedian and TV host DeGeneres at a Vanity Fair Oscar party. She said to her agent, “Who is that?... Can I meet her?” When they were introduced, DeGeneres knew who Heche was, but “I did not have a clue about her, which she found shocking.” She’d never fallen in love with a woman before, and “did not, personally, identify as a lesbian. I simply fell in love! It was, to be clear, as odd to me as anyone else.”

But when she decided to go public with their relationship in 1997, Hollywood shunned her. (Read our excerpt about what happened here.)  

She gets first prize for most-embarrassing workplace story

On the set of The Juror, Heche was filming a hot sex scene with Alec Baldwin, both basically naked, when she got her period: “Blood was everywhere. … I had just menstruated all over Alec Baldwin and decimated the one set of sheets they had.” She adds, “The life of an architect was looking pretty good at this moment.”

She recounts an incident with Harvey Weinstein 

He exposed himself to her and “sleazily” suggested she perform a sexual act “and you’ll get the job.” As the world now knows, she was one of countless women the movie producer — now in prison — preyed upon. “He took advantage of his power and position to manipulate them into doing what they would never have chosen to do,” Heche notes. She’s said in interviews that he fired her from a film project after she rejected his advances.

She comes across as a genuinely kind person

Heche repeatedly states her dedication to fostering kindness, love, joy and truth, and encourages readers to embrace them as well: “These are the central tenets of how I live my life, and what I most want you to take away from this book,” she writes in the last chapter. “Remember: Anne says you can do it!”