Either I started to see Charlie in a more romantic light or I just felt safe and comfortable with him, and I began to think I could marry him and live in Miami forever. I thought I might audit classes at the University of Miami and make a home.

  I found something comfortable also about being around people of the Jewish faith. Charlie is Jewish, and his friends Andrew and Stephen are very dedicated to the Jewish faith. I loved the importance that laughter and warmth played in the families of the Jewish people I’ve known. On Mayfair Lane our neighbors and friends were the Coguts. They would invite us over for Seder dinner. I loved it: It was formal but friendly and so deep and full of meaning. I was only a little girl, but I understood the importance of the ritual.

  I sat next to Ga Ga, one of the Cogut grandmothers and a Holocaust survivor, and had the most incredible conversations with her. I wasn’t afraid to ask her questions about her life, and she wasn’t afraid to answer them. There were tears, laughter, and hugs and in those talks. I felt wonderfully warm with them.

  A lot of my father’s business sense came from his Jewish partners’ way of thinking, and that sense was passed down to me. I adored my father’s business partners Lawrence Stroll, who had the biggest heart; Joel Horowitz, who was a mensch and very funny; and Silas Chou, who though was not Jewish was a wise and witty Chinese man I considered to be the neck—the strength—of the whole brand. They were our family.

  I felt the same way with Charlie. So I started studying the Torah and looking into the process of converting to Judaism. When I told my mother I was thinking of converting she said, “I wish there was a Jewish pill I could give all my children to make them instantly Jewish.”

  Truth was, I needed a good friend and shoulder to cry on much more than a lover or a husband. That was why I clung to Charlie so tightly.

  When the MTV show aired in October, a bunch of us Miami friends gathered in Charlie’s living room. We laughed and hollered and made fun of the show from head to toe. Though it felt good to laugh at myself, and I was impressed at the clever way they edited us to make us look a lot more ridiculous than we actually were (I had to admit, it kept the show interesting and engaging), I began to feel a little embarrassed that I was on national television acting like a dumb rich girl.

  Had I been in another place physically and emotionally, I might have given myself credit for a producing a show that was on the front end of a television phenomenon that would dominate the television entertainment world. But I wasn’t in that place, so instead I kept sneaking off to the refrigerator to take little nips out of a Jäger bottle to round off the edges of anxiety I was feeling.

  There were a couple of redeeming moments during Rich Girls. We filmed Bill Clinton awarding commendation medals, forty years overdue, to the surviving sailors from the USS Mason. The ceremony took place on the deck of the new USS Mason, named after the original and docked that day in New York Harbor. We also filmed my class’s graduation from PCS, an event in which I was awarded high honors.

  At some point I received a call from Wendy at MTV telling me that the show was getting some of the highest ratings numbers they had seen in a while, but what she said was lost on me. Though intellectually I knew what it meant, on a deep emotional level I couldn’t process the information. I just wanted it all to go away, so I talked myself into the idea that the show was a bust. I began to realize otherwise one day at a gas station in Miami. Charlie waited for me in the car as I ran in to buy a pack of gum. In the store, I thought people were staring at me but I shrugged it off as paranoia until someone asked if they could take a photo of me. If I didn’t know then that my life had changed, I found out for sure a couple of days later.

  Besides playing basketball or tennis at Andrew’s and going to Marty’s for karaoke at night, I didn’t go out much in Miami. Charlie ran most of the errands. One day, however, I decided to go to the Target store in Coral Gables to do some shopping. I always like the big, red shopping carts they have in Target—they make me feel like I’m a kid again.

  So off I went. I don’t even think I’d brushed my teeth that morning. I had my hair in dreadlocks with massive red string wrapped in them. I was feeling shitty physically. The nausea, which had started during filming of the show, had been growing worse and I felt as if my heart were beating out of my chest. (I didn’t know then that heart palpitations are a common symptom in Lyme sufferers.) I couldn’t walk very well due to swollen joints, and my memory was becoming weaker.

  I’d gone to Target to buy lanterns and other lights for Charlie’s garden but there were so many twinkle lights to choose from, I started to get a headache. Normal people take a short amount of time to make simple decisions, but you would have thought I was deciding on my wedding dress. Decision making had become so challenging for me that often I would just close my eyes, point, and click, so to speak.

  Anyway, I was standing there staring at the lights for I don’t know how long when I had the sensation of people looking at me. I turned around and a group of about six shoppers was watching me. “You’re Ally from Rich Girls,” one of them said in an amazed way. A woman aimed her flip-phone at me to take a photo. I felt like an animal in a zoo. “What are you doing in Coral Gables?” another asked. “What are you doing in Target!” a woman squealed.

  My anxious answers became long-winded and scattered. I decided to zip it when I realized that I was divulging unnecessary amounts of personal information. I signed autographs and posed for pictures, but I couldn’t wait to get away. I couldn’t imagine how people with enduring fame handled this.

  I began to full-on freak out when the same scenario repeated itself several more times in the store. I paid for the lanterns and then barreled out, pushing the basket in front of me. I remember thinking, Oh, my God. I can never go to a store again.

  Though my time in Miami was mostly fun and had its moments of normalcy, I was living in a state of compete denial about Rich Girls. While I was floating around in this state of denial, a part of my soul had broken off and was now on people’s television sets and making me a celebrity. It was such a strange time in my life—as if I existed between two worlds. For a time I was able to manage it. But in moments like the one at Target, when the my two worlds collided, I was left with a question that shook me to my core.

  How do I live the rest of my life?

  thirteen

  FROM THE ER TO BUNGALOW 8

  “Lyme carditis occurs when Lyme disease bacteria enter the tissues of the heart. This can interfere with the normal movement of electrical signals from the heart’s upper to lower chambers, a process that coordinates the beating of the heart. The result is something physicians call ‘heart block,’ which can be mild, moderate, or severe. Heart block from Lyme carditis can progress rapidly.”

  —CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION

  Despite my denial, Rich Girls was a breakout hit, exceeding even the most optimistic predictions. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about it. That Thanksgiving, my father wanted the family to gather on Mustique. We rented out two houses on the island to hold the overflow of cousins, uncles, and aunts. When everyone gets together it is chaotic, fun, crazy, and unpredictable. Complicated. Still, I’m usually excited to spend time with them. On this trip, however, I had an enormous amount of emotional baggage. I was worried sick about the family’s reaction to the show and did whatever I could to not talk about it.

  When I got back to Miami I began to experience more severe bouts of nausea. During one attack, Charlie took me to the emergency room. The doctor asked about my medical history. I told him I had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia, which I’d been treated for, and that I had suffered through major panic attacks in the recent years. I told him about my ovarian cysts, which had sent me to the hospital twice, causing the doctors to prescribe me birth control pills to dissolve the cysts. The damn pills made me so nauseous and depressed from the weight gain and water retention that I stopped taking them two years prior to living in Miami. I told him that, despite all of the treatments I’d been on and all the doctors I’d seen, no one could really tell me what was wrong with me.

  In the ER they couldn’t, either. I wasn’t pregnant, I didn’t have appendicitis, and the blood work they took came back normal (I think). They put a catheter in me at one point, God knows why, but it had me screaming in agony. They found that I had a permanent heart murmur but said it was nothing serious.

  No one could figure out what was going on.

  Afterward I felt well enough to take a trip to Orlando to visit my cousin Jaimie. On the way back, however, I couldn’t get on the plane because I was paranoid. I thought people were following me. I thought someone was going to blow up the plane. I thought I was being watched.

  I started to think about Jaime and Rich Girls. I’d refused to do any talk shows or interviews, and I knew she was mad at me. I also knew I couldn’t even think of the show, let alone talk about it, without experiencing severe anxiety. My panic at the airport led to an attack of nausea. It hit me right as I was going through security. Every few minutes I had to run to a garbage can to vomit.

  A tall, black man with a shiny security badge, weathered face, kind eyes, and big hands took me to a room so I could calm down and call my father. My dad basically told me to just try to relax and get on the flight. He didn’t understand that I was really starting to unravel. The security man reminded me of Wilfred from the burrito episode. He bought me a Coca-Cola, and told me to take small sips and to put salt on the end of my tongue to help stop the nausea. He sat with me and I cried in his arms. I wanted to go home with him and eat his wife’s meat loaf or something. All I really wanted was a simple home life.

  I decided I would just drive home to Miami. I took the shuttle to the car rental and waited in line. I’d never rented a car before and didn’t know I had to be twenty-five. When they told me I couldn’t take a car, I had another mini-breakdown and cried. I wandered across the street to a beautiful lawn with a beautiful little tree, which I climbed and sat in for about four hours. I sang little songs to myself and wrote poetry. Maybe I could just stay in the tree, I thought. Finally, I called Charlie and he drove all the way to Orlando to rescue me.

  The next day I was in the Miami hospital again, this time with headaches along with the severe nausea. When they took my blood pressure, it was out of whack. After I was released, I checked into the Shore Club hotel in Miami, where I stayed for a couple of weeks—I didn’t want to be sick in front of Charlie’s friends. At the Shore Club, I was assigned bungalow number 8 on the beach, which made me smile. Bungalow 8 was then a popular nightclub in Manhattan, but I was very far from clubbing mode. I was living on Pedialyte, saltine crackers, and Marlboro Lights. I was also taking the occasional hit off a joint to sooth the waves of nausea. Just the thought of alcohol made my stomach heave. I kept my father in the loop about what was going on and at one point he flew down to check on me. He spoke to me mostly about what I was going to do next with my future. This only added to the anxiety and nausea.

  At some point Charlie’s friend Andrew called his brother, who was a doctor. The doctor and his wife came to visit me at the Shore Club. It was the doctor’s wife who saw what was wrong: “Honey,” she said, “your nausea is coming from tremendous amounts of anxiety.”

  I knew she was right. In that moment I knew it was the show that was making me even sicker that I’d already been before. I knew I had to cut it out of my life like a cancer or I would never get better.

  If I had any doubt about what I should do, Charlie put it to rest. He had stayed with me through many of these hospital visits and took great care of me. He witnessed the anxiety and paranoia I experienced when people recognized me. He knew the show wasn’t good for me and the strain I was feeling in my relationship with Jaime.

  My costar and I had grown very distant, and I was afraid to tell her that I didn’t want to do the talk shows, TV spots, or magazine interviews, let alone film a second season. I had distanced myself from her because I thought she probably enjoyed filming and the glow of the spotlight, whereas I was turned off by it. I felt violated by it.

  What I didn’t know was that Lyme disease was causing me so much pain and mental disorder that it was impossible for me to do what the show and Jaime wanted.

  Charlie gave me an ultimatum. He told me that he couldn’t be with me anymore if I didn’t call Jaime and tell her that I could no longer be part of the show. Charlie had stayed through the darkest part of my life. His only agenda was caring for me. I picked up my phone and I dialed Jaime.

  On the phone I was cold, emotionless. I think I left my body a little bit. I just told her the truth but did so in a rude and blunt way. I wasn’t going to have any part in the show anymore, I said. I didn’t care about the contract—I would get out of it somehow. I told her that I no longer wanted to be her friend.

  I didn’t show an ounce of compassion or remorse. I just ripped off the Band-Aid as rapidly as I could. I wanted the nausea to stop once and for all and I believed in my heart that cutting my ties to Jaime and Rich Girls was the only way that would happen.

  Now I feel bad about how I handled the situation, but when I hung up the phone that day I felt as though a great weight had lifted off my shoulders. For the first time in weeks I didn’t feel nauseous at all. I thought Charlie and the doctor’s wife were right: It was the anxiety over Rich Girls that made me sick to my stomach.

  A few days after I called Jaime, I flew back to New York. It was mid-December and I wanted to be with my family for Christmas. I really thought everything was going to be better.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  fourteen

  COMMENCING COUNTDOWN, ENGINES ON…

  “Disruptions caused by GI borreliosis [Lyme] may include, amongst many others, distortions of taste, failure of other neural functions that supply the entire GI tract—paralysis or partial paralysis of the tongue, gag reflex, esophagus, stomach and nearby organs.…”

  —VIRGINIA T. SHERR, M.D.

  The last two weeks of December 2003 form in my memory like a series of Polaroid snapshots.

  The first one that comes into focus is perhaps the most random. After I landed in New York City, I went to a middle school in Harlem where my uncle Andy and cousin Mike Fredo were performing in a Christmas pageant. They asked me to come and sing along with them. I felt safe and normal with Andy and Mike, and singing in the Harlem middle school was as far away from Rich Girls as I could get.

  Except, as it turned out, people in Harlem watched Rich Girls, too, and several of the kids asked about the show. I felt none of the anxiety, however, that I’d had in Florida. It was fun. I kept it low-key and deflected the attention. For a moment, it was as though I had truly left the worst behind and a new life beckoned.

  The next scene I remember is being with my friend Danielle driving to Chelsea Piers in Manhattan to go bowling with some of her college guy friends. But instead of bowling we went to a hamburger place nearby called Lucky’s. Don’t ask me why, but for some reason I was able to eat Lucky’s hamburgers without getting nauseous. Remember, I was on a straight diet of Pedialyte up until then. I had no inclination to drink alcohol, but I was still medicating myself with weed. It really did help with my stomach. Maybe it had something to do with Lucky’s hamburgers tasting so good.

  I was drinking a lot of water, maybe three or four liters a day. I felt as if I was almost getting high off the water. I felt so dehydrated, and I had a strong instinct that I just needed to flush and hydrate.

  I’d parked my car, a navy blue 2001 Range Rover with tan interior, in a covered lot at Chelsea Piers. The Range Rover became my home. I called people, like my cousin Jennifer, to come visit me there. “We’ll get burgers!” I’d exclaim. It was almost as though I’d made the decision to live out of my car, and I did for a week, maybe two. I didn’t sleep in my car, but I’d spend a lot of time just sitting inside it because I felt safe and somewhat anonymous.

  Though it sounds strange recounting this period of my life, back then it didn’t seem strange at all!

  I don’t know how much I slept during that time. I think I went to my mom’s house and hung out with her one night and maybe walked across the street to my dad’s. I vaguely remember driving up to Danielle’s college in Massachusetts and staying there for a couple of sleepless nights.

  It dawned on me at one point that I should probably go Christmas shopping. Then I really started going crazy. When buying gifts for family and friends, I had no sense of reality, no sense of how much money one should or shouldn’t spend. I drove up to Connecticut and visited a jewelry store to go random gift shopping. I saw this beautiful, 1920s headband, something a flapper would wear, and I bought it for myself for Christmas. (I might have been going crazy, but my sense of style was intact. I still wear the piece. It’s beautiful.)

  The jeweler was in the back of the store when I first saw him, working on the jewelry, but then he came out front to help with customers. I took one look at him and for a reason I still cannot fully explain I said, “Hey, you have to tell your sons that you and your wife are separating.”

  The look of shock on the poor man’s face is still clear in my memory. He was middle-aged, Jewish. “Do I know you?” he asked. I think I shrugged. “How do you know these things?” he insisted. I must have opened up psychically, because I’d nailed him. He told me that he and his wife were discussing divorce and that he did have a couple of sons he hadn’t told yet. I walked out of the store with my newly purchased 1920s era headband, content that I’d helped the man. (I don’t think I helped him at all, actually; I think I just totally freaked him out. The whole episode was something out of The Twilight Zone.)