Book Excerpt: Hollywood Wanted Anne Heche to be Quiet About Her Sexuality
The late Anne Heche's still-unfinished memoir is slated to hit bookstore shelves next week and excerpts have been shared with the media.
It’s been less than a year since Anne Heche succumbed to injuries sustained during a car accident and passed away, and in just a few days, one of her final projects will be released to the world.
The actor’s still-unfinished memoir is slated to hit store shelves next week, and in advance of the title dropping, excerpts have been shared with the media, including one that details how her same-sex love was received in Hollywood.
In the memoir, titled Call Me Anne, the actor describes one scene that shows just how difficult life was for LGBTQ talents in Hollywood who were open about their sexuality only a few decades ago. Heche details a meeting she had with director Ivan Reitman and fellow actor Harrison Ford while they were all working on the film Six Days, Seven Nights – one of her biggest roles – in which her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres came up in a not-so-positive way.
Here is the excerpt, first shared by People, in full:
“In 1997, I began a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres and was on the set of my first starring role in a big-budget movie, Six Days, Seven Nights. I was called into my costar Harrison Ford’s trailer one lunch break within the first week of shooting. I was met with the sight of director Ivan Reitman and Harrison sitting on one of two white pleather sofas. I hesitantly sat on the opposite white pleather sofa.
They had seen the evening news. Rumors were reported that Ellen and I were pregnant. Our ‘pregnancy’ was everywhere. They showed me this as proof of why this openness about my relationship was becoming a pain in the ass for them. Why, Ivan asked me, can’t I just be like Jodie Foster? (I didn’t know what that meant. ‘Everybody knows it,’ he explained, ‘it’ being her sexuality. ‘She just doesn’t talk about it.’)
I found it odd that anyone thought I could get pregnant so quickly with a woman, but even odder, that they cared so much about the perception that I was going to ruin a movie that hadn’t even been shot?
The most devastating thing of all, through it all, from the first week with Ellen to writing my first book, Call Me Crazy in 2001, was that no one bothered to ask me about any of it. No matter how many articles were written about me, no one asked me why I had done what I did. What was the force that would have made a human being risk everything they’d been promised, their entire career? Why? Why would I have done that?
Since nobody asked, I will tell you why. Because I had lived in a family that was built upon lies. My father hid his sexuality his entire life. When I met Ellen and she was open and honest about her sexuality, it was the most attractive and alluring quality in a person that I had ever seen. I was mesmerized by her honesty, and that is why she was the first and only woman that I ever fell in love with. I was in love with a person who had chosen to leverage her very public persona in support of the cause she was standing up for, which was LGBTQ+ rights for everybody on the planet who wanted them.
Love became my destiny.”
Heche and DeGeneres dated for three years in the ’90s before splitting up. For much of the latter part of her career, Heche faced various health issues, and her career never rebounded after her very public romance with the future daytime TV host.
The actor was killed after being involved in a series of car accidents in Los Angeles in August, 2022. She eventually fell into a coma and was placed on life support for a while before her family decided to let her pass.
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