But it was true. Ryan walks out of Hyde looking slightly tipsy, and oh, stop the presses, shame shame shame, how could she do this to America’s girls?
She just ... broke down one night. I was having dinner at her place, and she was paging through an issue ofPeoplewhile our pasta boiled. Ryan flipped to an article and suddenly yelled, “You have got to befuckingkidding me!” and I knew she was raging mad.
“What?” I asked.
She didn’t answer—instead, she marched to the living room and back, slapping anLA Todaymagazine next to the other one. “Look.”
I compared them. Both were fashion blurbs; one had a picture of Ryan in shorts and a crop top while shopping on Rodeo Drive, and the caption was something likeRodeo Risqué—Is Ryan showing too much skin for a Tuesday shopping trip?
In the other picture, Ryan wore a pair of sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with her hair tucked up under a baseball cap. I remembered when it was taken; we’d just gotten back from a trip to Portland and were stopping for gas. That caption said,Nice groutfit, Ryan! We guessthe star’s stylist is off duty. Or maybe Ryan’s been hitting the donuts a little too hard!or something equally stupid like that.
“What do they want from me?” she asked. “Skimpy or modest? Style or comfort? Skinny? What? I can’t do anything right.”
I threw both magazines in the trash.
Whenever celebrities get big enough—and women in particular, but not always—people stop seeing them as their own person. It’s like they felt like they owned Ryan, like they had bought her with her music. To some extent, it’s fair. I mean, no artist is anything without their fans. Music is made to be listened to. But they owed Ryan a lot more grace than they gave her.
I was trying to give her grace too. I was glad she was meeting new people, but I was bound to disapprove of some of them. Tyler Michaels and Braden Petri were obviously bad, but Evan Henderson was ... I don’t know. He was worse for her in a subtler way. I thought so, anyway.
But then, I wasn’t in her relationships with her.
That’s the problem with this project, isn’t it? That’s why I didn’t want to do this. You can hear everyone else’s chatter, but Ryan doesn’t get to tell her side of the story.
Did you ever consider that maybe she doesn’t want it told?
Evan Henderson
I figured you’d get around to me eventually. But I don’t know what to tell you. Ryan and I had a relationship back around 2009–2010, just before she released her third album.
She was unlike anyone I’d ever met. Bright, thoughtful, funny ... a lot of the other women her age that I dated were just ... I mean, sue me for saying it, but they were boring. And I don’t blame them. I blame the industry for making them that way. I’ll be the first to admit that these female musicians, actors, artists have to work twice as hard as the men to make less pay. It’s the sad reality. They have to be liked to keep making money.
So you find a lot of yes-women. Honestly, a lot of the people you’ll interact with in Hollywood are saying what they think you want them to say. We talk about valuing authenticity, but we don’t really mean it. Look what the tabloids did when Ryan lived her authentic life: judged her, beat her down, tried to get her to conform to their idea of what a young woman should be.
Yes, she was young. I was twenty-eight when we started dating; she was nineteen. People get all up in arms about age gaps these days, but they don’t understand how small the dating pool is in our industry. Also, all throughout history, there have been married couples who are ten, twenty years apart, even more. I’m not saying it’s right just because it’s what we’ve always done. But, you know.
None of that mattered at the beginning. Ryan wasn’t like other girls her age—she was brilliant. I was working on the biopic about Winston Churchill’s early life back then, and she was genuinely interested in the history around the movie, the portrait of a global and complex leader we were trying to evoke.
We would talk for hours about art and music. We traveled. I took her to my family’s summer home in Malta, and we would take the boat out into Mellieha Bay and just float. She told me how much she missed her father and that she didn’t know why he was pulling away from her and her mother. She told me about growing up in Hamilton and about Mari and Jas and Skip. I listened. I wanted to be there for her.
I told her about growing up in London and the culture shock moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting. We talked about my own struggles with my parents after my father died when I was young and my mother threatened to cut me off when I emigrated.
We were vulnerable with each other. I don’t know what happened.
I mean, I do. I guess the problem, as it so often is, was that we were at different stages of our lives. I had a responsibility to my career, as did she, and it meant I had to miss some of her important milestones because of the biopic—we were in Europe for filming when Ryan won her VMA for theFirebirdvideo trilogy. But she was on tour when I was home for my birthday.
Our time together was limited and precious. And yet, the things she wanted to do when weweretogether felt like a waste of time to me. There was a big Pacific Northwest camping trip with Kylie Cameron and all those friends that she wanted me to attend with her, and I thought I would rather chop my fingers off.
Ryan struggled with my friends too; we liked to have these big dinner parties where everyone would bring a dish they’d made themselves. Ryan brought brownies. They were classic, a very lovely gesture, but alongside my colleague’s wife’s duck à l’orange ... I don’t know. My group were either married or in long-term relationships, and I think that may have intimidated Ryan. Some even had kids.
I would always think things were going great, and then we’d get back to my place and Ryan would be in tears, talking about how I ignored her all night, how no one spoke to her. I would tell her that she just had to give them a chance. Did she even try engaging in conversation with the others?
And there was one night when she was so upset. She said, “You never ever talk about my music to your friends. Not once have you ever done it.”
I didn’t see how that could be true; surely I’d talked about it at some point. But even if I hadn’t, it seemed pretty immature to keep score like that. I’m not proud of it, but I did raise my voice, and I said, “Is that all you care about? Being the center of attention?”
And Ryan said, “Why are you even with me if you have so much contempt for me?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Of course I didn’t have contempt for her; I loved her. But she could be very frustrating sometimes.
