February 20, 2009, 3:32 PM

The Last Days of Heath Ledger

While the late actor's colleagues look back at a memorable performance — and a life cut short — at the Academy Awards, look back at this fictional account of his final week

By Lisa Taddeo

[more from this author]

J. Vespa/WireImage.com

Originally published in the April 2008 issue

To write a conceivable chronicle of Heath Ledger's final days, writer Lisa Taddeo visited the actor's neighborhood, talked to the store owners and bartenders who may have seen him during his last week, and read as many accounts and rumors about the events surrounding his death as possible. She filled in the rest with her imagination. The result is what we call reported fiction. Some of the elements are true. (Ledger was in London. He was a regular at the Beatrice Inn and the Mirö Cafe. And he was infatuated with Nick Drake.) Others are not.

***

It becomes theatrically important,after you die, what your last few days are like.

For me, it was just like any other weekend in my life. I didn't eat a last meal, I didn't jerk off any more or any less, I didn't climb a mountain or end up swinging from a noose withMozart's Requiem in the background. But suddenly it's important exactly what I did, because they are the last few days, and what you do in the last few days, down to your last lunch, becomes a fairy tale.

If you force me to make my last weekend a microcosm of my existence, and what my existence means to you, then I'll tell you how it went and who I played. But first things first: It was an accident. I'm not some fucked-up star who couldn't deal. I could deal; I just couldn't sleep.

Saturday

1.19.08

Two Jokers

10:47 p.m.

You don't say no to Jack.

It's the last Saturday night of my life. I'm in London and we've just finished a shoot on my last movie,Parnassus. It's a movie you will likely never see. I got to play a charlatan who fools this theater troupe and steals all their costumes. Every day I was in a different costume, every day a different person.

So we're done. It's late, I'm tired, and it's fucking cold here in this sneezing bitch of a city. I want to drink something warm. I want to lie down, maybe take a bath. But Jack's beckoned.

Msg: joker1 to joker2. you're in london, i'm in london. meet me at pasha for a late night tagine. 30 min. you're buying.

So it's back out into the pissing rain. Race to the Tube, through Palace Gate, pass the janky-toothed, flat-faced Brit chicks at the bar. Goose-step down the stairs into the subterranean Moroccan den.

He's sitting there with a purple scarf wrapped around his neck, holding his decapitated head in place atop his clavicle, and he's got a bottle of wine going plus two tumblers of vodka.

You're five minutes late, he says. That Marlboro-fucked voice and that unsmiling smile. They're even scarier in real life.

He shoves both tumblers in front of me. Jack likes to get sauced quick, or get you sauced, and then show you he's a bigger man by walking you out of the place. It's how he stays young.

They have these belly dancers, Jack says. There's one I'm in love with. Her name is Sueño. She says we were lovers in another life. Her name means "dream." I believe her.

You believe in reincarnation?

Fuck no. I meant about her name. I think I'll let her take me home tonight.

I look around, making eye contact with one of the belly girls and giving her the soul-eye business. Which one is she? I say. I'm taunting Jack. He's got his art, his lavish fucking career he likes to lord over me to prove something. But I've got this face. I've got an unlined neck.

The waiter arrives and Jack's pulley eyebrows order for the both of us -- some vegetarian nonsense for me, the lamb tagine for him. If I'd known it was the last Saturday of my life, I wouldn't have let this cadaverous lunatic order for me. Funny, you don't regret the big things but rather the picayune bullshit. Lamb over carrots. For fuck's sake.

Jack starts telling me about the girl he picked up yesterday at Piccadilly. He says she barked like a puppy while he did her, I'm feigning young-boy adulation, like, Wow, Jack the Wolfman. Then he says, Listen kid, I asked you out here for a reason.

Yeah, what's that?

The food's come and Jack's sucking on a lamb bone like it's pussy meat -- because Jack is always proving something, like,You played a gay cowboy, hooray, but I'm J.J. Gittes, I'm Jimmy Hoffa, I'm the devil. I'm the motherfuckin' Joker.I want to warn you about some shit.

The caesuras in his speech are maddening, like he's about to deliver the Newest Testament and he's waiting for you to carve every last one of his words into stone. I nod at him like, Keep talking.

Your art, kid.

What about it?

I think you're letting it lead you by the balls.

What?

Don't get all bent outta shape. I'm just sayin', you're at a crucial point now.

How's that? I ask.

See, that's the thing about Jack, you don't want to fucking listen, you're annoyed by the way he delivers his agonizingly self-masturbatory Chekhov-in-Jerry-Garcia-suspenders diatribe, but when Jack gets to the point, the point is brave.

And here's the point: I heard you kept that gay little journal for the Joker, and in this latest one you finished shooting, Gilliam told me you were talking all the usual overanxious peripatetic bullshit, like, I wanna direct, I wanna make art, not justbe art. Blah, blah, blah. Forget it, kid. Jack flicks his paw in the air like he's dismissing the world.

A waiter in Moroccan garb jumps back like he's been slapped.

Jack puts down his glass, drops a clean lamb bone onto his plate.Tink. Jackcleans his plate.Always proving it.All night.

What I mean is, live your goddamn life. Fall in love again. Hell, fall in love five more times and fuck a coliseum of college chicks in between. Don't be so goddamn concerned with how you're gonna be remembered. All work and no play and all that garbage.

At that, he grabs the wine bottle like a king. I swear, there was something of royalty to him, his purple scarf, his leaning back in that velvet Moroccan settee and spreading his legs like he's got seven cocks that need room to breathe. The bottle might be mead, and here is King Arthur, laying down for me the riches of his experience. He empties the bottle and belches like a pirate. The smell of lusty lamb rushes back at me in a colorful wave.

Just then, like magic, the music gets louder, the sitar in the speakers clangs like a thousand BB pellets against hammered copper, and a six-foot Indian-haired goddess emerges from the kitchen. She has a terra-cotta stomach sunstroked with henna. She's wearing a bustier with tassels springing from its nipples like tit whiskers. She gyrates over to the table. She holds her hand out and beckons Jack with her long witchy finger. Jack the king. Jack the Joker. Jack with lamb grease wetting the regal belly of his shirt. She grabs him by the scarf and pulls him like a mutt toward the kitchen.

He turns back to me with that demented smile that was never an act. Kid, he says, forget what the world wants from you. Go live out your own fuckingsueño.

Andstay...away...from...the...god...damn...pills.

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