In person, as in her fresh tell-all memoir, 90s Hollywood “It” girl Ione Skye doesn’t hold back. Whether she’s discussing menopausal hormone treatmen
In person, as in her fresh tell-all memoir, 90s Hollywood “It” girl Ione Skye doesn’t hold back. Whether she’s discussing menopausal hormone treatment (she’s on it), her libido (“It’s not what it was but [musician husband Ben Lee] and I have a really nice sex life”) or her ex Anthony Kiedis’s fondness for dating teenagers (“Why can’t you be with a grown-up?” she sighs), for 54-year-old Skye, there’s no such thing as too much information too early in the morning.
Skye’s aptly named memoir, Say Everything, has been praised as raw, revealing, disarming and horny. “I definitely didn’t want to hurt people,” the actor says when we meet over breakfast at a cafe near her Sydney home. It’s just that between recounting her sexcapades with both male and female celebrities – “Writing a sex scene is so funny because I didn’t want it to be cringy, sleazy or too crass,” she laughs – Skye had a lot of past to surrender and guilt to process. It is, she says, also a cautionary tale for her two daughters.
Her droll and self-aware memoir, which dishes on the private lives of heavyweights from Madonna to Gwyneth Paltrow to Robert Downey Jr, has captured the attention of everyone from Miranda July (“I gobbled it up,” she gushed) to 90s-curious gen Zers: “People are fascinated with what life was like out in the world without [smart]phones.”
Ione Skye and Keanu Reeves in 1986 film River’s Edge, her first film role. Photograph: Hemdale/Allstar
Name-dropping comes naturally to this OG nepo baby. Skye, named for the island where she was conceived, is the daughter of Scottish flower power singer Donovan, who left her mother, US model Enid Karl, and Skye’s older brother Dono, before Ione was born. Her mother’s previous boyfriends included Jim Morrison, Keith Richards and Dudley Moore, but it was Donovan and his desertion that Karl never really got over as she struggled as a single mother (and occasional pot dealer) in Los Angeles. Skye didn’t meet her renowned father until she was 17, in an awkward encounter her book recounts in farcical detail.
Father and daughter have since reconciled, but she is nervous about him reading the book, in which Donovan’s absence looms huge. “I would always be an abandoned daughter, always searching for proof of love,” Skye writes – while explaining how she blew up her first marriage to Beastie Boys rapper Adam Horovitz (AKA Ad-Rock) by cheating on him repeatedly.
Skye and John Cusask in 1989 film Say Anything. Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox
Growing up, Skye gravitated towards other daughters of renowned fathers, including Karis Jagger, Amelia Fleetwood and the Zappa children. At 15 she quit school and became legally “emancipated”, taking up her first film role opposite Keanu Reeves in the 1986 teen thriller River’s Edge.
Skye always kept detailed personal journals, and she has mined the juiciest material for her memoir. Some of her teenage antics read like a gen X schoolgirl’s wildest fantasies: there’s her (ultimately fruitless) pursuit of Reeves, who politely turns her down in his LA apartment one night after filming: “When I reached for his belt buckle, Keanu took my wrist, stopping me.” She canoodles with her good friend River Phoenix, develops a crush on her Say Anything co-star John Cusack (it won’t be consummated until years later), has a fling with Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, then shacks up at 16 with his heroin-addicted bandmate, Anthony Kiedis, eight years her senior.
Anthony Kiedis and Skye at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards. Photograph: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
While Skye didn’t consider their age gap problematic at the time, she does now. The self-confessed “helicopter mum” says her “hackles rise” just imagining her 15-year-old daughter Goldie in her shoes. She also finds it curious that Kiedis continues to date much younger women. “If someone never has a relationship with a woman their own age, that I do not understand,” she says. Neither Goldie nor Skye’s 23-year-old daughter, Kate, have read Say Everything yet, “but they know about my life,” she assures me, “and my destructive way I had sex.”
The intense, unprotected sex she had with Kiedis “freaked” her out, as did the rock star’s serial unfaithfulness and jealous rages; she also claims there was a HIV scare, an abortion Kiedis didn’t accompany her to, and many fearful nights driving around LA searching for the singer when he disappeared on drug binges. “The need to save [Anthony] was an addiction in itself,” she writes.
Then at 18, Skye met “the first great love of my life”: Adam Horovitz, a man she describes as “a sweetie pie”. They soon moved in together, and for a while, life was “one long daydream”. The pair tied the knot when Skye was 21, just as the Beastie Boys’ star was rising, pulling Horovitz away on months-long tours. Skye “felt abandoned by his protracted absences”. Alone in LA, she began joyfully – but guiltily – exploring her bisexuality, first with British model Alice Temple, then with two of Madonna’s exes, Ingrid Casares and Jenny Shimizu. (Strap-on sex with Shimizu, she writes, “made me needy and devoted. I wanted to be her dog, like in that Stooges song.”) Skye’s infidelities became more inconsiderate. One day Horovitz arrived home from a tour to find her in flagrante in their back yard pool.
Her anguish at hurting Horovitz is still apparent three decades on. “I secretly hope [reading my memoir] helps him and his family but I kind of know their personalities and I almost think it might be doing the opposite, unfortunately,” she says.
(L-R) Skye’s brother Dono Leitch, Adam Horovitz and Skye. Photograph: Supplied by Harper Collins Australia
Despite its promise to say everything, Skye’s memoir ends surprisingly early: in 2006, when she was in the throes of fresh lust with another “short king”, the Australian singer Ben Lee. They had first met a decade before when Lee’s band signed to the Beastie Boys’ record label. Skye describes the first time they had sex as “the best sex I’d had since Jenny” – but Lee, who had previously been in a long-term relationship with actor Claire Danes, felt Skye was coming on too robust. “Whatever you’re feeling, I am not,” he tells her, curtly, after their first night together.
Skye and Lee married in 2008 in a Hindu wedding ceremony in India; they had daughter Goldie nine months later. “The way you father the girls has practically healed me,” she writes of Lee. Skye has been faithful throughout their marriage – something she felt necessary to include, because “people are going to wonder”.
“I don’t feel I’m missing out,” she says. “I think I’m a little more straight than gay, but anyway, all I know is I’m happy and I’m not distracted and looking around.”
The fact her memoir speeds over her last two decades with Lee was not due to any demands from him for privacy but because her publisher wanted it to end on “a bit of a cliffhanger”, leaving the door open for a sequel. And anyone craving a closer look at the couple’s life can tune into their weekly podcast, Weirder Together, in which they banter about family life, renowned friends and their original pursuits – from Lee’s music to Skye’s latest film roles.
In Sydney, the ‘ghosts’ of Skye’s Hollywood past aren’t ‘in my face all the time’, she says. Photograph: Cybele Malinowski
Midway through our conversation, Skye’s megawatt smile lights up. She waves to someone across the courtyard. “Oh Ben!” she exclaims. “You saw my location!” Lee walks over beaming, trailing the couple’s miniature long-haired dachshund, Gus, who is six months vintage today. “It’s his half birthday,” Lee coos as Skye scoops up her “baby boy”.
Later, I ask Skye if Lee’s strict touring schedule has ever brought up the same insecurities she felt with Horovitz.
“Oh my god, yes!” she says. “When [Ben] would [leave LA and tour Australia] and especially when Goldie was little, I almost would have a full breakdown inside. It triggered so much for me. Luckily at that point I had emotional maturity and I knew to go to therapy and I knew to get help, and to communicate with Ben and other people about my feelings.”
‘I was just like: “Oh my god, I might lose him”’ … Skye with her husband, musician Ben Lee
Another challenge early in their relationship was Lee’s enmeshment in spiritual cults. There was an Indian guru (“I was really trying my hardest to be supportive, but it was like having a whole other person [in the relationship],” recalls Skye), then a “more rigid” group involving a Peruvian leader and ayahuasca ceremonies. “That was scary, because I was just like: ‘Oh my god, I might lose him’ … not physically – but losing his mind into something.”
There were parallels, Skye says, in trying to extricate Kiedis from heroin addiction and Lee from “fanaticism”. She was relieved when internal ructions in the ayahuasca group finally “snapped” her husband out of it.
The couple currently reside in Australia, where their daughters are studying. Sydney’s natural beauty inspires Skye to paint, and she likes that the “ghosts” of her Hollywood past aren’t “in my face all the time”.
But Hollywood hasn’t moved on just yet. Her friends are having fun imagining who might play Ione in a film adaptation of Say Everything, with Sofia Coppola suggesting Saltburn actor Alison Oliver. I ponder, half-jokingly, whether the film would pass the Bechdel test. “Maybe not,” Skye muses. “Even when I’m in my big lesbian phase, I’m always thinking about Adam [Horovitz].”
And nearly 40 years after he turned her down, there is one Hollywood ghost Skye hopes her memoir resurrects. “I would love for Keanu to [read it] and think it’s great,” she grins.
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