Another Chapter for Me and Jessica Hahn

I never wanted to see her again. It had been four years since my last meeting with Jessica Hahn, and the encounter had left me vaguely depressed. I had grown impatient with the dramatic entrances, the breathless admissions, the sudden, teary outbursts of a woman writing, producing and starring in her own soap opera.

Maybe it was just curiosity that made me call her last month, or maybe I’m a little wiser now, a little less judgmental. Whatever the reason, there seemed to be an inevitability about our reunion.

I hadn’t known anyone like her, and she had never met anyone like me. She was 27 when we met, a church secretary who wore stiletto-heeled boots and $100 sunglasses and who had to ask me whether the Washington Post was a legitimate newspaper. Fascinated but skeptical, I had approached her with my reporter’s notebook like an earnest young Margaret Mead.

Underneath the makeup, the costume and the teased-out hair, Jessica seemed to have a good heart. How had she gotten mixed up with the charlatan minister Jim Bakker and his clown-faced wife, Tammy Faye? And why, after all her protestations that she had been violated, did Jessica pose nude for Playboy magazine?

The closer I got, the more elusive the answers became. She wasn’t behaving as I would have behaved. Ultimately, I wanted no more of her.

I was relieved when Jessica and her handlers from Playboy finally rode off in a stretch limousine, leaving me on the steps of a courthouse in Albany, N.Y., one chilly October afternoon. She returned to her world in a working-class section of Long Island. I flew back to my world in Manhattan.

A few weeks later, I found a new job and moved 3,000 miles away. It had been a big and flashy national story, but secretly, I was relieved to be leaving it behind. For a little insurance, I threw away her phone number.

But it wasn’t the end, and I think I must have known that. Like me, Jessica tired of her life on the East Coast and moved west in search of something else. I remember wincing when I heard on my car radio last year that she was involved in a mud-wrestling competition. I was vaguely aware that she had hooked up at some point with Sam Kinison, the high-decibel and somewhat unpleasant comic, and that seemed sad.

As I drove up to her apartment building off the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, I realized with some surprise that I was looking forward to seeing her, to talking about old times and familiar places. Even after four years in California, I still felt a little off balance, like a tourist whose vacation had gone on too long.

She kept me waiting in her living room for a good 20 minutes, and I got a kick out of that. It was a small apartment, and she was in the bedroom fussing with her makeup. I laughed at the mirrored living-room walls and at the white-lacquered piano: Tammy Faye Bakker had bought such an instrument with money wheedled from the faithful.

Nothing had changed, I thought to myself, but of course, everything had. We are all works in progress, but some of us take a little longer and strain a little harder to find our places.

She emerged from her bedroom in an exercise outfit. Very L.A., I thought. At 32, she was slimmer by 30 pounds or so, had had some minor plastic surgery and had tamed her wild hair. For the next three hours we sat on her balcony, watching the sun set and talking. I took down what she had to say about politics, love, romance, Hollywood, friendship.

She looked softer, prettier. I told her so, and she seemed pleased. The Jessica with the boots and the attitude seemed like some other person, she said, someone she didn’t know.

I abandoned my journalist’s reserve and told her what I had really thought, but was afraid to say, when we met. I reminded her about the night so many years ago when my colleague Geraldine Baum and I tracked her down and found her alone and scared in her apartment up the back stairs of an old house in West Babylon.

We sat in her kitchen that night, drinking coffee and talking, leery of each other and circling like boxers. She didn’t understand what was happening, she told us. She threw down a copy of a supermarket tabloid and demanded to know how they could say such things about her. We said we didn’t understand either. She wept uncontrollably.

Geraldine and I went back to the office and stayed late. Jessica’s hysterics had rattled us, and we were worried about her mental state. Was that the behavior of someone contemplating suicide? We weren’t sure, but we thought it might be. We didn’t want to push her over the edge, so we decided not to write anything that night. Our editors at Newsday agreed. They did the right thing, and I was proud of them.

I told Jessica all this and more as the light faded over West Hollywood. I told her that I thought she had been gullible, that she had let too many men run her life.

She had already come to that realization and, of course, didn’t need me to tell her. I felt pompous.

She confided that she still felt like an outsider here and wondered whether Los Angeles would ever feel like home. It struck me that we weren’t so different.

We laughed a lot that night about the media hysteria we had both taken part in; about the strange men who had come out of the woodwork to claim they had slept with her; about the toupeed and perfumed Long Island minister she had worked for, been in love with and ultimately helped send to jail for income tax evasion.

“What a nightmare,” she said. “What a jerk.”

But with self-realization has come a measure of profound sadness. Her vibrant young mother lapsed into a depression and died after the Bakker-Hahn affair became national news. Jessica took a hard look and blames herself.

“She felt responsible for so much, and she loved me. I remember crying and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ and kicking the walls and just weeping.

“Now I have no one to answer to but me. I’m responsible for the good things, and I’m responsible for the bad.”

I suppose it was inevitable that an attractive young woman of some notoriety but no particular career prospects would try her hand at acting. Her name got her an audition for a role on “Married . . . With Children” last fall, and some amount of innate talent won her the part. She played a “shoe groupie” who fell madly in love with shoe salesman Al Bundy. She recognized the character, she said.

It was a small role, but she hopes it’s a beginning. A Laaaawng Island accent still gets in her way, and financially, times are tough. Her million-dollar fee from Playboy is long gone, much of it taken by the Internal Revenue Service and lawyers. She is willing to pay her dues, she says, if she can just figure out how one pays dues in Hollywood.

“I know I’m a cartoon character,” she says, with a degree of self-awareness that would have been alien to the old Jessica. She recognizes that she has much to overcome. I wish her well.

We said we would get together for dinner sometime soon, and I think we meant it. I hope she calls.