Q 13

PLAYBOY: You've been part of many scenes: modeling, Warhol's, acting, music, drugs. Which would you rather have sat out?

Patti D'Arbanville: I wish that I had sat out my second marriage. He was abusive. I was just looking backward. He had been my first boyfriend. I was obsessed with him from the time I was thirteen years old. I found him in Florida thirteen years later and I married him two months after that. But, actually, I was in love with this nineteen-year-old boy that I remembered. He was not the same guy. I appeared one day where he was working and said, "Yo, this is it. Yo, I'm ready." Thirteen years later. I was fulfilling some adolescent dream I had about the love of my life and it turned out badly, though, in retrospect, it was probably good that I got that out of my system. Except that I could have done without the black eye.

Q 14

PLAYBOY: You were mentioned in Warhol Diaries. Did he get it right?

Patti D'Arbanville: Yeah. He said that I was the cream of the crop but that I didn't know how to dress. [Points to her cutoff jeans and T-shirt] I still don't.

Q 15

PLAYBOY: What's the title of your autobiography?

Patti D'Arbanville: Only Saints Can Sleep with Scorpions. When I was a year old, my family moved to Miami. We were very poor and my mother didn't have a crib, so she put me on the floor in a closet, and when she woke up in the morning, I was covered with scorpions. But none of them had touched me. She said only saints can sleep with scorpions.

Q 16

PLAYBOY: Take us on a tour of your tattoos.

Patti D'Arbanville: I have them on my left shoulder, my thigh, my spine, my right ankle, my left hip and my right butt cheek. The one on my right ankle is a rose piercing a heart with blood dripping down, and that's the first one I got. It denotes an emotional state. [Smiles] On the left hip is a heart being pierced by a dagger, with blood dripping. Another heartache. I got the black rose on my spine and the little heart on my cheek in 1986. I got the Bengal tiger on my thigh because of a dream. I had a power dream about a tiger and afterward, it seemed important to have that on my body. I woke up with tattoo fever.

Q 17

PLAYBOY: How much like a shampoo or soap commercial is your bathing routine?

Patti D'Arbanville: [Laughs] Zest. Yeah, I use all the soap. I lather myself profusely: I don't take showers. I take baths. I just like the way the warm water feels caressing my body. Some people say, "You're bathing in your own filth." I don't care. Baths take more time. They're more relaxing. If I have to take a shower, it's because either there is no tub--in which case I change the hotel room--or I'm in a real big hurry. I can talk at length about some baths I've had. One time, I sat in the bathtub for seven hours and read the whole of Mila 18, by Leon Uris, in between turning on the hot and cold water. I use my feet or hands, depending on what part of the book I am into at that particular point. I also like candles, but only when I'm alone. Otherwise, you run the risk of catching on fire.

Q 18

PLAYBOY: How do you put a screen lover at ease?

Patti D'Arbanville: No one has ever seemed nervous to me. [Laughs] The only time I felt a bit nervous was when I did Real Genius, I had to make it with a fifteen-year-old boy. To calm things down, we laughed a lot and talked about Nintendo games--I've got a six-year-old, remember? It worked. But how often do you have a fifteen-year-old boy in a love scene? That happens only in real life.

Q 19

PLAYBOY: What should someone your age know about life?

Patti D'Arbanville: To stop repeating patterns that are bad for you. I'm self-destructive. I had to recognize when that was imminent, when I started to lack self-esteem. I saw a chain of events. I'd do something bad, feel shitty and want to hurt myself more for doing it. Self-worth is probably going to be the theme of the Nineties.

Q 20

PLAYBOY: Last summer, the Rob Lowe tape caused quite a stir. Is there a tape of anyone you'd like to get as a gift?

Patti D'Arbanville: Maybe Dolph Lundgren's.