Out of curiosity, we thought maybe we would take a little trip through Anne Heche's few appearances on this site, to track what we've thought of her during the site's comparatively short existence. In September 2000, we mourned the end of Heche's relationship with Ellen DeGeneres, and threw in a reference to Heche's episode wandering around nude in Fresno immediately after the breakup: "There are only so many times in a person's career that she can claim to be 'exhausted' and 'dehydrated' and not 'totally fucking baked' and 'loco.'" In June 2001, we went so far as to make Heche Mercury in the Galaxy of Fame as we commemorated the fact that the famous lesbian was getting married to a man. And just one month ago today, we sent up Heche's then-recent Barbara Walters interview, which naturally coincided with the release of Heche's autobiography, Call Me Crazy.

So, to recap: we started the site in the blush of Heche's and DeGeneres's love affair. Then we had occasion to take notice of Heche when she broke up with DeGeneres and went nuts; when she took up with a man; and when she wrote a book detailing her love life and insanity.

And there are those who say Heche is an opportunist? A media whore? That she has exposed the intimate details of her life for the delectation of the public, in the interest of increasing her fame? The very idea.

So, I've read Call Me Crazy. And, thank you, Anne, I believe I will. Call you crazy, I mean.

I don't want to put myself in a position where I might be sued for libel, so I won't call Heche a liar. I am certainly not in a position to verify any of the facts she publishes in the book, after all. I will say only that the book tells a good story -- a tall tale, if you will. After watching Heche's interview with Barbara Walters -- completely floored, as I'm sure we all were, by the incredible story she told, and her evident facility in telling it (unlike most Walters interviewees, she didn't even cry!) -- I vowed that I would get my mitts on the book at the earliest possible opportunity, assuming that the book would contain even more amazing stories than the interview. Sadly, that's not really the case.

For those of you who missed the interview, another recap: Heche was the youngest of four children in a born-again Christian household. Her father was domineering, and was pathologically concerned with keeping up appearances; the family made it look as though they were rich, when in fact they were poor as a result of Mr. Heche's mismanagement of their funds, and the fact that he seldom had a job and forbade Mrs. Heche from working. Heche claims -- and in the interview, she seemed very careful to couch her accusations in conditional language ("in my memory," "as I recall it," etc.) -- that her father sexually abused her from the time she was an infant, and that he gave her herpes before she was out of diapers. Eventually, it became clear to the family that Mr. Heche was gay, and Mrs. Heche forced him to leave the family. Not long afterward, he died of AIDS; his was one of the first reported cases of the disease in the U.S.

All of that is Part I. Part II is that when Heche underwent therapy and came to an awareness of the abuse she'd suffered (memory of which she says she repressed for most of her adolescent and young adulthood), she confronted her mother with her story; her mother would neither confirm or deny Heche's memories of that time, and generally was not very receptive to Heche's version of events. After that, Heche started hearing the voice of God, who told her that she was the Second Coming of Christ. She was known by the name Celestia; the voice she heard taught her a special language, dictated to her a new scripture (basically a gospel of love) she was to transcribe, and gave her the power to read minds, heal illness, and levitate. Heche believed herself to be Christ/Celestia for several years, during which time she was apparently functional, appearing in more than a dozen movies. It was also during this period that she met and started her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres. When the relationship ended, Heche's fevered mind conveyed that her mission on earth was over, and that she was to go to Fresno, where God would send a spaceship to take her to Heaven. At this point, the authorities found her and had her committed, since she was all babbling and naked and showing up in people's houses asking whether they'd seen her spaceship. Her manager and another friend came to see Heche in the hospital; she asked them whether they were going to come to Heaven with her, but they told her they liked it on Earth and needed her to stay on Earth, too. At this point, Heche pretty much just decided to stop being crazy, and start being sane again. No therapy. No drugs. Just stopped with the crazy, just like that. And she's been fine ever since, she says, marrying her love Coley Laffoon and (as she announced at the end of the Walters interview) getting pregnant with his child.

The sad fact is that you don't get very much more dish in the book. As is the (sad, sorry) case with so many Hollywood autobiographies these days, Call Me Crazy is slim on gossip and bloated with indulgent, New Age-y therapyspeak and self-affirmations -- even a little more than usual in this book since Heche practically breaks her neck in the effort to distance herself from her rigid Christian upbringing. (And she's little more creative in her Christian putdowns than the average sullen teenager: "I was already in hell and certainly the devil would be more entertaining than the preacher" (37); "Christians can listen to anything over and over again and seem to stay interested" (29); but then it turns out she can't even be bothered to look up the details of the story of Jonah when she relates an anecdote about a play she and her siblings performed based on the Bible story (58).) Heche ascribes her career motivations to her father; he once drove Brooke Shields to school (50-52) and was so impressed with himself for his proximity to celebrity that Heche figured the best way to get his attention would be to become famous herself: "Would that be enough, Daddy? Would you love me then? Would you drive me to school and not somebody else? What could I do to make you love me the way that you love her, Daddy?...Daddy?" (52). Her insanity, on the other hand, is Heche's mother's fault. Since the last thing Mrs. Heche told Anne after Anne dropped the years-of-molestation bomb on her is apparently "Jesus loves you, Anne" (102), Anne decided that the only way to make her mother care about her would be to become Jesus herself. In case you don't get that, she makes absolutely sure to spell it out: "Knowing that my mother's only purpose was to love Jesus made me understand that unless I was Jesus, I wouldn't receive her love....[M]y dad loved movie stars and my mother loved Jesus....Jesus or movie star? After careful and unconscious debate, I tackled the easier challenge first" (110).

I don't doubt that Heche had a really messed-up childhood. Her elder sister Susan has also written a book about their family's ordeal living with their father, who was obviously a very bad person. However, Heche claims that (a) she had herpes sores on her "baby girl's pussy" (56) so bad that her mother couldn't diaper her...and I just can't go on living if I believe it's physically possible for a man to vaginally penetrate an infant girl, and (b) she says that the memories of her father's abuse didn't come back until after she took LSD (150). To me, that kind of casts a little doubt on the reliability of those memories.

But this is Fametracker, so let's talk about the celebrities. There's a chapter or so about Heche's two-year affair with Steve Martin. Throughout her youth, she says, she was attracted to much older men, looking to them to be father figures she could love and respect, unlike her biological father. Her relationship with Martin ended when he bought a house (which she'd identified as her dream house when he asked...when they toured it together) thinking she was going to move in with him, and she didn't want to. (The opportunistic Heather Graham character in the Martin-scripted Bowfinger is said to have been based on Heche.) Heche took up with DeGeneres a mere four days before DeGeneres's big (and long overdue) announcement in 1997 that she was, in fact, gay. When she went home with DeGeneres, the night they met, she was shocked -- shocked -- to discover that DeGeneres had bought the very dream house Martin had intended to buy and occupy with Heche! What a stunning coincidence! I don't buy it. Heche fully admits that the next three and a half years of her life were spent, with DeGeneres, as the spokeswomen for lesbians everywhere. She rakes a little muck, claiming that DeGeneres fell apart after the cancellation of her sitcom: "She sank into a depression that would last the next two years of our relationship. She stopped having perspective" (225). Really? Because it seems to me that DeGeneres was still out and about quite a bit during that period. Heche claims that DeGeneres was so needy and depressed that Heche didn't feel able to tell her that Heche's needs weren't being met. In 2000, DeGeneres embarked upon a comedy tour and Heche was with her every step of the way, filming the shows for a planned HBO documentary. At the end, Heche says she told DeGeneres, "I needed friends...and a place for an office where I could think and write outside of our house. It was an ultimatum, as she pointed out. If I didn't get those things, I was going to leave her. 'I don't want a girlfriend who wants those things'" (237). Just like that? Two and a half years, over office space? Sorry. Don't buy it.

Ultimately I guess the book is worth reading; it's just not as sensationalistic and crazy as I had hoped -- or, rather, it's the same crazy over and over again. And the voice Heche has chosen for herself -- a gawky, corny, rube who is just so gosh-darned lucky to star in everything from The Juror to Another World to her own Stripping for Jesus -- wears after only a few "golly"-soaked pages.

At this point I'm a lot more interested in an autobiography of Ellen DeGeneres, covering the Heche years; I don't think I got the whole story here.