Ione Skye on famous lovers, film secrets and her relationship with absent father
The Sydney-based actor and artist – whose best-selling memoir has taken the world by storm – spares no detail when reflecting on her film career, famous lovers and the hole left by her absent father, folk singer Donovan.
Ione Skye is dressed casually in jeans, a pink shirt and a matching pink necklace when she opens the door to the sandstone Woollahra home where she lives with her husband, musician and Sydney native Ben Lee, and their two daughters. Lee is pottering in the kitchen and we briefly reminisce about a record store we both frequented in the ’90s before Skye and I send him upstairs (he won’t resurface until it’s time to do the school run). I’m here to talk to Skye about her memoir, Say Everything – and although she’ll discuss it with prestigious media outlets like The Times of London and The New York Times, I alone am given a glimpse of her life in Australia.
Their home is warm; one of Skye’s paintings, a feminine, feathery swan on brown paper, hangs above her desk, which is stacked with neat piles of books and a bunch of hydrangeas. She says painting was her “first love”; she has exhibited her work in Tokyo and Los Angeles, including a joint show with filmmaker Sofia Coppola and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. The family’s brand new dachshund puppy plays at our feet – we get very excited when he toilets in the designated toileting area. As Skye prepares a cheeseboard I’m reminded of a passage in her memoir in which she recalls being set up with her ex, the father of her eldest daughter (a brief encounter that reads like a fever dream of upmarket Manhattan life). “He’ll find your movie-star life fun,” her friend says. “And he really goes for earthy, zaftig, sexy women.”
“I hadn’t known that ‘earthy and zaftig’ was how I presented,” Skye writes. “But OK.”
It’s true. Skye exudes an old-world Hollywood glamour, and has the pedigree to match, but she is earthy and zaftig, I think, as she settles down opposite me on the couch. Our shoes are off, feet tucked up, and we face each other to discuss her memoir, in which she really does say everything.
As the daughter of Scottish folk musician Donovan (a fraught relationship, but more on that later) and model Enid Karl, the characters in Skye’s life read like a roll-call of rock 'n' roll-meets-Hollywood-royalty. Her teenage memories paint a high Los Angeles picture – reading books by her next-door neighbour Eve Babitz on the school bus (“I hadn’t known she was a famous writer, just that she was messy and twinkly, drove a bummy car, and once fell asleep with a lit cigarette that almost burned her house down”), and rolling with a nepo-baby crowd before nepo-babies even had a name. There was a spell where she spent more time in Frank Zappa’s family home than she did in her own (“Like Charles Ryder falling under the spell of the Marchmains in Brideshead Revisited, I’d fallen in love with the Zappas, one by one”).
Mick Jagger’s daughter Karis was, and is, a firm friend. River Phoenix, another dear friend, was an early crush. She recalls being cast in her first film, River’s Edge, opposite a “21-year-old Canadian named Keanu Reeves” and coming onto him – hard – on one occasion while he was taking a shower. He declined her advances and offered to get her a dry shirt. It was actually her second attempt to seduce him. “Can I come to your place after wrap?” she whispered in his ear once they’d finished filming their love scene for the film. “‘Let me drive you home,’ he said abruptly, pulling up my bra strap,” she writes, adding: “Why had he stopped? Maybe he thought I was too young? Maybe he just wanted to take it slow? Who knew. Sometimes he seemed almost alien – not unfeeling, just tuned in to different cues and frequencies than us humans.”
She gives visceral detail and writes with unbridled sensuality about her trysts. About how, for example, she did eventually end up in bed with John Cusack many years after they filmed Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, the 1989 film that would make Skye a star (“I’d needed to get him out of my system and it had worked – now I knew we were meant to be in love only in the movies”). Crowe had been introduced to Skye by Frank Zappa’s daughter Moon. He recalls: “Moon was a guardian angel for Ione at the time. She put us together very carefully and protectively, letting me know that Ione was someone special. She was right. Ione was exactly what we had been looking for … She looked like a soulful, sheltered girl from the northwest. She had a kind of inner light, which was what Cusack’s character would fall in love with.
“Ione had no acting tricks; she was fresh and we all kind of guided her through some of the tougher emotional scenes … In the end, she summoned her own emotions beautifully … and that’s what you see on camera. That’s what you saw then, and that’s why you see today in her book. Her true soul.”
In the memoir Skye details how she followed her model brother, Donovan Leitch, around New York as he dated everyone from Kate Moss to Gwyneth Paltrow (“Is she always this mean to you?” she asked him). But Say Everything is far from a trashy tell-all. Skye’s writing is insightful and her revelations vulnerable, raw and often painfully relatable – catapulting Say Everything into the bestseller list on its release in the US this month, and earning rave reviews from everyone from New York magazine’s The Cut site to People. And yes, there is a lot of sex. Skye has often said she felt comfortable baring all for the camera from a young age. How does it feel baring all in print? “I’m half joking … but maybe it’s part of growing up in LA? People just say everything!” Skye laughs.
“But I do have a rebellious streak, there’s a side of me that wants to bare it all in almost an aggressive way. I feel compelled to be honest, because a certain type of honesty, in a safe space, is very important. And for better or worse, being a pretty little quiet girl with a big older brother, in a man’s world, and having this space-cadet-deer-in-the-headlights character, meant I never really felt heard. And so for me, having realised that people are interested to hear my story, it’s therapeutic to bare all.”
Skye was conceived in a gypsy caravan on the Scottish island of the same name (Skye is actually her middle name, but she adopted it as her surname). Her father Donovan, known for the hits Catch the Wind, Mellow Yellow, Sunshine Superman and Season of the Witch, left Enid before Skye was born. It was an indelible betrayal that left both women scarred. Skye first met her father when she was 17 – until that point he had referred to her only as “the girl” in his communications with Enid.
Skye’s love and tenderness for her mother (“Happiness was a messy house, steaming bowls of chicken soup, and dozing off in Mom’s bed to the Taxi theme song on TV”) is a constant throughout the book, and it’s hard not to feel sad for the young Skye when she describes feeling the need to be “sweet and helpful and perfect” during her mother’s depressive episodes. “Each night, after bringing Mom her Red Zinger tea and soaking up as much of her pain as I could, I’d retire to my room, put on my Little House on the Prairie nightgown, brush my hair with a hundred strokes, and fall asleep with my hands folded on my chest like a little vampire angel,” she writes in a chapter called Girlhood.
Skye tells me that her mother’s desire to be the wife of a rock star imprinted on her at a young age (before Donovan, her mother had dated Jim Morrison, Keith Richards and Denny Doherty from the Mamas and the Papas) and I note that, yes, there does seem to be a pattern there. I grew up watching Skye in offbeat films – alongside Drew Barrymore in Tamra Davis’ Guncrazy, as the vulnerable Trudi in Gas Food Lodging – but I admit that Skye first came onto my radar as the patron saint of ’90s indie girls who dated the boys in the band. “Yeah, like three times in a row,” she says. “It wasn’t just once! It was every major relationship.” (She says the last three words as though they have full stops between them.)
“I thought once I was with – definitely not Anthony! – but Adam, I was cured of it. I just felt so happy and healed.” “Anthony” is Anthony Kiedis, frontman of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, who Skye dated and lived with when she was 16. Barely old enough to drive, Skye spent many nights driving around the backstreets of Los Angeles looking for the then 24-year-old singer, who was addicted to heroin and would often go missing.
Reflecting on that time, and on Kiedis (who still dates much younger women), Skye says: “In some ways he is a good guy but … he’s a troubled dude. He made amends a long time ago and they actually worked. But I do wish I hadn’t gone through all of that. You know how there are things and you think ‘That was hard, but I learned a lot’? That wasn’t one of those.”
And Adam is Adam Horowitz, Skye’s ex husband and one third of the rap outfit Beastie Boys. For a time, Skye and Horowitz were an iconic ’90s “It” couple. “Adam was in one of the biggest bands of our generation, and I had just starred in Say Anything. We were the perfect amount of famous,” Skye writes.
Yet a large chunk of her memoir is devoted to unpacking the grief and shame she carries over the unravelling of their marriage, which ended when Horowitz came home from tour early to discover Skye in their pool with a woman. “This might be the moment to make a confession,” she writes. “I was a serial cheater.”
Skye writes about her infidelities, which were mainly with women (she dated the model Alice Temple, Jenny Shimizu, and the ’90s queer icon and Madonna’s bestie Ingrid Casares), with insight and honesty.
“This habit – an obvious sign of my deep insecurity and need for validation – was something I’d never liked about myself, but I always thought that once I fell deeply in love with someone, I’d stop. Then I met Adam and fell head over heels and got married and thought for sure the problem was solved. But my cheating was never about my partners, it was about me.” I can’t help but feel that she still carries a scarlet letter for her “sins” (she still can’t listen to a Beastie Boys song 25 years on from her divorce, “it’s like a death”) and Skye admits that one of her intentions in writing her memoir was to let go of the past.
“One of the things I really wanted was to get further ahead in forgiving myself, letting go of that relationship, and being more attached to my life now,” Skye says. And her life now – settled in Australia – appears to be a happy and stable one. Lee and Skye are committed to living in Sydney while their youngest daughter Goldie finishes school, and Kate (Skye’s daughter from a very brief relationship with furniture designer David Netto) attends Sydney University. Lee frequently tours the country and the couple co-host a podcast called Weirder Together. “Ben has patiently lived with me throughout the whole process. But the miraculous thing is, unlike my mother, who seemed to attach to other men and husbands but never really got over my father, miraculously, with Ben, I was able to fully attach to him while I was grieving.”
Of all the revelations in Skye’s book, it’s the story of how Lee turned her down at the start of their relationship that made my jaw drop. Skye describes how, the day after their first night together, Lee tells her that texting him five times in quick succession is “coming on too strong” and that “whatever she’s feeling he is not”.
“The balls on him!” Skye laughs when I confess my shock that Lee, who is eight years younger than Skye and grew up watching her, starry-eyed, from afar, would have such audacity. (Some, like Powderfinger singer Bernard Fanning, who famously called Lee a “precocious little c..t”, might argue that it’s on brand and to be fair, he did date A-lister Claire Danes at the height of her 1990s fame). The truth is that Lee was, clearly, very much into his future wife – he just wanted to take things slowly to be sure that Skye wasn’t “chasing a high”.
Writing her memoir has also helped Skye grapple with her career “as a medium actor who was not super famous”. While her roles in films such as The Rachel Papers and David Fincher’s Zodiac have garnered her a cult following, she has not had the trajectory of contemporaries such as Winona Ryder or Drew Barrymore, and she’s made peace with that.
During a publicity blitz for the book across America and the UK, Skye appeared on Barrymore’s high profile talk show, The Drew Barrymore Show. “I idolised you!” Barrymore tells Skye as they reflected on their shared history of being far too young for the “hedonistic wild Hollywood world” of their adolescence, and wild nights at the nightclub Helena’s with much older men.
Skye: “Jack Nicholson …”
Barrymore: “I used to party hard with him. He was fun.”
She launched her memoir in true Old Hollywood style, with a party at the Chateau Marmont hosted by Karis Jagger, her Rachel Papers co-star Amelia Fleetwood (daughter of Mick Fleetwood and model Jenny Boyd) and the film director, actor and screenwriter Zoe Cassavetes (daughter of filmmaker John Cassavetes and actor Gena Rowlands). Speaking after the party on the Weirder Together podcast, it sounds like a sort of validation has occurred for Skye. “This has been such a cohesive way for me to be seen. It’s been so satisfying to have people see my mind.”
At 54, she spends her time painting, podcasting and directing short films. She has plenty going on, career-wise. She has appeared in Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s series Camping, and in Chloë Sevigny’s directorial debut, Kitty, and will feature in the upcoming horror/comedy film Anaconda alongside Paul Rudd and Jack Black.
And while she has never had her breakthrough conversation with her famous father, she describes a recent family trip to see him in Ireland as “glorious”.
“Is it a coincidence that the three major relationships in my life have been with musicians?” Skye writes towards the end of her memoir. “Maybe not. I grew up wishing my father’s songs had expressed love for me. Now my partner sings achingly beautiful, romantic songs about me, and silly, sweet ones for our daughters to make them laugh. His love, devotion and camaraderie make the world feel limitless, yet safe, for all of us. And nothing has helped me make peace with my fatherless past more than seeing Ben father my daughters.”
Say Anything (Harper Collins) is out on April 2
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