Val Kilmer has admitted he’s a slave to love in his new memoir, as he recalls flings with some of the world’s most famous women including Angelina Jolie, Cher, Carly Simon and Cindy Crawford.
But the 60-year-old admits he still pines for actress Daryl Hannah, writing in his new book I’m Your Huckleberry: ‘Lord knows I’ve suffered heartache. But Daryl was by far the most painful of all.’
He added: ‘I knew I would love her with my whole heart forever and that love has lost none of its strength. I am still in love with Daryl. When we finally broke up, I cried every single day for half a year.’
The 1980s heartthrob’s love life eventually ran dry, following a whirlwind of love affairs that started when he became Cher’s lover aged 21 and she was in her mid-thirties.
The Batman actor found himself single and out of money from losing land investments in 2015, living in a cottage in Malibu with the postman and local burrito man as his best friends.
‘I was a weirdo beach bum and it was bliss – then bliss turned to mayhem. I coughed up coagulated blood. I presumed this was the day of my death’, Kilmer confesses in his memoir that chronicles his lost loves and lifelong spiritual journey.
Val Kilmer has admitted he’s a slave to love in his new memoir. The 60-year-old admits he still pines for actress Daryl Hannah (pictured together in 2003) , writing in his new book I’m Your Huckleberry: ‘Lord knows I’ve suffered heartache. But Daryl was by far the most painful of all’
Kilmer recalled flings with the world’s most famous women including Angelina Jolie (together right in 2004), Carly Simon and Cindy Crawford (together left in Moscow in 1996)
The 1980s heartthrob’s love life ran dry, following a whirlwind of love affairs that started when he became Cher’s lover aged 21 and she was in her mid thirties. The Batman actor found himself single and out of money from losing land investments, living in a cottage in Malibu with the postman and local burrito man as his best friends
Kilmer describes how he called for an ambulance and crawled up the wooden stairs from his guesthouse to the Pacific Coast Highway so the ambulance could find him.
He woke up in a Santa Monica hospital after an emergency tracheotomy for throat cancer.
His old lover Cher had him transferred to David Geffen’s School of Medicine at UCLA where he underwent chemo and radiation over a two-month stay.
A lifelong Christian Scientist following the beliefs of both of his parents, Kilmer does not deny that he had cancer, but said accepting the diagnosis seemed surreal.
Kilmer’s memoir chronicles his lost loves and lifelong spiritual journey
Maybe his healing was by the hand of God and not doctors, he suggests.
‘I do not deny miraculous healing’, Kilmer writes, reflecting on the cancer that had caused his tongue to swell and block his lymph passages, requiring two tracheotomies.
‘The cancer miraculously healed much faster than any of the doctors predicted’.
Kilmer confesses he never felt alone and heard his hero Mark Twin say to him: ‘The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time’.
He recognized this as his chance to prove that he truly believed in God, so he called his spiritual practitioner who suggested he call the ambulance first. They prayed together and he felt calm.
‘My healing is steady, but so far slow. Speaking, once my joy and lifeblood, has become an hourly struggle’, he writes, comparing his voice to Marlon Brandon’s after downing several bottles of tequila.
Now when he talks, he has to put a finger to the aperture in his throat to be understood.
Kilmer said his focus has turned to listening and to prayer, saying: ‘I’m vain, but I’m working on it, baby, I’m working on it’.
Kilmer was born in Playa del Rey, California but his parents moved to Chatsworth on the sprawling northern border of the San Fernando Valley when his block was mowed down to make an LAX runway.
Kilmer was born in Playa del Rey, California but his parents moved to Chatsworth on the sprawling northern border of the San Fernando Valley when his block was mowed down to make an LAX runway
His father was an aerospace equipment distributor, stingy and but generous with himself, buying a Cadillac but not letting his mother purchase curtains for the living room.
Chatsworth was ‘the least glamorous corner of LA’ but Kilmer credits the neighborhood with giving him a starving yet stealthy spirit.
At age eight, Kilmer started secretly smoking his uncle’s Pall Mall cigarettes in his tree house – a habit he deeply regrets.
He read books by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of The Church of Christ, Scientist about divine love, feeling the thrill of being alive.
He felt like ‘a beatnik’ — writing plays and poems, admiring Marlon Brando and feeling spiritually ambitious with a five-year plan to achieve self-realization.
‘I was naturally and inordinately theatrical. I liked attention. I liked to emote. I liked to talk. It didn’t matter that I usually didn’t know what I was talking about,’ he writes.
Kilmer escaped the dreaded San Fernando Valley for New York City – where Marlon Brando, ‘the north star of my theatrical fantasies’, had studied 33 years earlier.
He enrolled at the Julliard School, the youngest ever to get accepted at the highly rated private performing arts conservatory.
His first goal was to get rid of his California accent.
Kilmer graduated and then fell under the spell of Cher when she picked him up in the city.
Kilmer graduated and then fell under the spell of Cher when she picked him up in the city. They rode off into the New York City sunset and headed west when he chose to live with her atop Caesars Palace in Vegas instead of furthering his acting studies. ‘We both loved laughing and went on doing so for well over a year’
Kilmer segued to Michelle Pfeiffer (pictured together in 1985) after playing in an ABC Afterschool Special, One Too Many and they became confidantes. He adored her, he confesses but had an unrequited crush on her younger sister
They rode off into the New York City sunset and headed west when he chose to live with her atop Caesars Palace in Vegas, instead of furthering his acting studies.
‘We both loved laughing and went on doing so for well over a year.
‘Cher trafficked in intoxicating glamour and I, a Valley boy, fell under her spell.’
After all that fun, he writes they were now less lovers and really best friends.
Kilmer segued to Michelle Pfeiffer after playing in an ABC Afterschool Special, One Too Many and they became confidantes. He adored her, he confesses but had an unrequited crush on her younger sister.
Ellen Barkin followed, a romance that was ‘as whimsical as it was whirlwind’.
‘I was crazy for her, and we had some fabulous days’, he recalled remembering her laugh and the softness of her hair.
But she became another who got away, ‘no doubt due to my unmanageable preoccupations, my neglect,’ Kilmer adds.
Kilmer fled to Santa Fe and finally hooked up with Joanne Whalley (pictured together), an actress he had met years earlier and watched her from afar while she had no interest in him. Now they fell in love and married in New Mexico, honeymooned on Marlon Brando’s island in Tahiti
Following in their parents’ footsteps: The Jay and Silent Bob Reboot actor has two children – Jack, 24; and Mercedes, 28 – with his Willow leading lady Joanne Whalley, whom he divorced in 1996 after eight years of marriage (pictured in 2018)
Carly Simon soon stepped in after the two met at a party in New York. Kilmer had arrived with Cher, but she had wandered off.
Kilmer quickly fell in love, writing: ‘I wanted to be with Carly every day of the rest of my life.’
But that faded he surmised when Carly realized he was hopelessly in love with her.
Kilmer fled to Santa Fe and finally hooked up with Joanne Whalley, an actress he had met years earlier and watched from afar while she had no interest in him.
Brando became Kilmer’s father figure and listened to him talk for hours, comforted him and nursed him back to emotional health. Pictured: Brando and Kilmer’s movie in 1996
Now they fell in love and married in New Mexico and honeymooned on Marlon Brando’s island in Tahiti.
They promised they would always be together but that promise began to fade when each wanted to film in a different city at the same time.
They eventually split up, but not before having two children. Their relationship had unraveled when she shut him out of the parental role, leaving Kilmer rarely seeing his kids.
Kilmer’s childhood hero Marlon Brando, then in his 60s, came calling and wanted to meet Kilmer after seeing him play Jim Morrison in the film, The Doors.
The Hollywood legend invited Kilmer up to his house on Mulholland Drive and their friendship blossomed.
Brando became Kilmer’s father figure and listened to him talk for hours, comforted him and nursed him back to emotional health.
In return, Kilmer read to Brando, poems by Yeats, Walt Whitman, Shakespearean sonnets. Sometimes Brando would weep.
Brando also gossiped about women and claimed he had an affair with Jackie Kennedy in the kitchen of the White House.
Next up in love land for Val was Cindy Crawford in 1996 while getting his divorce from the mother of his children.
Kilmer started creating art when he was in the hospital and it morphed into something people wanted to collect
‘The truth is I am lonely part of every day’: Eighties heartthrob Val Kilmer reveals he’s been single since the year 2000 in his new memoir, I’m Your Huckleberry (pictured March 16)
‘Oh God, I loved Cindy and just kept loving her, I thought I could have died from her love because its delight was simply too much to bear. I would die of happiness,’ he gushed.
They began traveling the world together but as the most in-demand supermodel, she was always one step away, heading for another city.
Angelina Jolie rescued Kilmer from his solitude and she was ‘perhaps the most soulful and serious of them all,’ Kilmer mused. He moved on to Jaycee Gossettt in 1999 for three years but then let her slip away.
Then came Daryl Hannah, ‘the 6′ tall Amazonian tower of delicate power’.
Kilmer’s heart still aches for Daryl and he writes ‘I knew I would love her with my whole heart forever and that love has lost none of its strength’.
Now without the company of a sweetheart and having loved so deeply, Kilmer feels he has nothing left to give in a romantic relationship and feels lonely part of every day.
Kilmer started creating art when he was in the hospital and it morphed into something people wanted to collect.
He set up an art factory in Brentwood and with a new lease on life, he feels he is no longer a slave to love and a hopeless romantic.
He is focused on friends, his art, his foundation and his spiritual growth.
Val Kilmer’s new memoir I’m Your Huckleberry is available here