Stephen awkwardly reached through the open window and grabbed one. “All right, thanks.” She then went on to insist he take a bite while also saying, “I do not like Laura. She is not right for you. You must leave her. She is not the one!”
Luckily, I wasn’t there at the time, but Stephen recounted the story to me later. “I don’t know what came over me, but I was so upset and offended that I pointed at her and said, ‘DO NOT EVER SPEAK LIKE THAT ABOUT THE WOMAN I LOVE.’ And then she nodded respectfully. I think she gets it now.”
“Wow. We’re like Romeo and Juliet, but if your family was the landlord and there wasn’t really anything at stake.”
“Yes, that’s exactly it.” Stephen nodded. We had a good laugh. Stephen’s such a gentle creature, it takes a lot to get him to yell.
There were so many similarities between Stephen and me. We always joked that we were from different countries but the same town. Stephen grew up in Faversham, this suburb outside of London; I was from a suburb outside of Chicago. The towns even look strangely similar, with their long front yards and brick buildings. We both grew up working-class, his dad was employed at a furniture store and his mother was a waitress.
Stephen is half Irish and half British. In the 1960s his father moved to London from a very poor town in Southern Ireland. His name was Sean Murphy, and it really doesn’t get more Irish than that. When Sean was looking for work, every business had a sign up that said: No dogs, no Blacks, no Irish.
When he was walking home from another unsuccessful day looking for work, he looked up and saw the Hilton Hotel. Hilton, he decided, sounds British. He proceeded to change his name from Sean Murphy to John Hilton. He got rid of his accent and finally found a job ushering in a movie theater. He met his wife-to-be Mavis when they were both working as ushers. They got married and had Stephen. Then the three of them moved into this tiny one-bedroom apartment together until they moved into the slightly bigger two-bedroom town house, which they still have today.
There’s something about growing up the same way that gives you a deep connection. We both unconsciously poured water into the dish soap to make it last longer and had parents who didn’t pressure us to go to college. Instead they supported our artistic endeavors even though the odds were against us.
Stephen will sometimes look at me with fear in his eyes and ask, “What if we go bankrupt and lose our house and our careers?”
I’ll just smile at him and say, “Then we’ll move to a cheap city and get a one-bedroom apartment and have a baby and I’ll still make comedy and you’ll still make music and we’ll still be in love and happy.”
Stephen will smile back at me, then. “That sounds bloody rubbish, doesn’t it?”
It does a bit.
Stephen’s mom raised him on pop music. She’d have the radio blasting, and Stephen would contribute by banging pots and pans. When he got older, he traded the cooking utensils for piano, and then piano for synthesizers. By the time he was a teenager, he was creating elaborate musical soundscapes in his room alone, not coming out until he was satisfied with what he’d made.
When high school rolled around, his mother would drop him at the entrance of the school and he would immediately walk out the back door. He was completely over it—there was just no way he was going. He had music dreams to make happen, and they did not feature algebra.
He completed his angsty demeanor with all-black outfits and dark eyeliner. He and his friends would drop acid, travel to London, and walk around at four in the morning. One early morning when they were taking an acid-walk, a cop stopped them. “What’s going on?” the cop asked after blocking their path.
Pupils dilated, Stephen smiled at him. “We have emotional problems.”
The cop stepped forward menacingly. “It’s four in the morning, bud. You got drugs in your pockets?”
He and his friends looked at each other . . . then ran! Hey, Stephen didn’t have time to get arrested—he had a music career to attend to. When he was fifteen years old, he got a record deal, dropped out of high school, and moved to London. The record label put him up in this abandoned, repurposed church attic, where he would sit alone and compose music twenty-four hours a day. I’m not exaggerating. He started taking speed to keep himself awake and working, and he became addicted to it. In that music scene it’s common, even celebrated, to go to work fucked up. I can’t speak for him, but I’d guess that it’s even harder to realize you have a problem and fix it when you’re submerged in that world, surrounded by people who are also fucked up all the time.
Stephen really had his own crazy story. He’d start every morning with straight vodka, and pepper it through the day with drugs to keep the high sustained. He was even worse than me when he finally woke up from his addiction. But thank God, he did. He changed himself and figured out how to create music and use his genius without supplementing it all with drugs.
A short while before I met him, he got a call from Hans Zimmer. Hans said that he loved Stephen’s music and he wanted him to come out to LA to compose films with him. So Stephen hopped on a plane and came out here. It was that simple. I mean, when Hans Zimmer tells you to move, you move.
That’s when I met him. He was eight years sober. When we got engaged, when we got married, I had never even seen what Stephen was like when he was drinking or using. If he had been using, he wouldn’t have been able to handle the pressure of working under Hans Zimmer, he wouldn’t have moved out to LA, I wouldn’t have met him or liked him, and we wouldn’t have been together in this one-bedroom apartment cuddled up on the couch, peacefully ready for the rest of our lives, with our crazy Russian landlady skulking outside the window.
When things got more financially stable for us, we moved out of our one-bedroom apartment and into a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica. It was beautiful, with big windows and sunlight and a kitchen that wasn’t super-busted. But . . . our neighbors at the new place made us miss the Russian lady and her bathtub of fruit.
Our downstairs neighbors had this strange energy about them. They were full-on hoarders living in filth, and they were so angry all the time. Stephen and I held our breath while passing their front door. “Their scent makes me appreciate the sweet smell of our apartment even more!” Stephen would say, trying to look at the bright side. They paid only four hundred dollars a month because of rent control. Both of them just stayed in the apartment all day, every day. They barely ever came out.
Since they were on the bottom floor, they had free rein of the front yard, where they kept their huge, angry dogs. The dogs would lunge at anyone who passed in front of their apartment, and they would only be stopped by this tiny little gate that looked like it was weakening with every lunge. It was terrifying. Their rabid barking would be our morning alarm clock and our soothing bedtime soundtrack. But tell me all about that bright side again, Stephen?
Then, next door to us was this sweet young family with two children, ages one and three. The dogs would lunge at the kids every time they left their apartment. The family would constantly ask the hoarders to put their dogs inside, and the hoarders would ask them to go die. Stephen and I had moved into the middle of a full-on feud.
One day, the barking from downstairs stopped. Wait, how was I supposed to sleep without their vicious barking? I was used to it now, and the silence was unsettling. The next day, the young mom knocked on our door with tears in her eyes.