Ione Skye considers herself “kind of shy” — but she spares no detail about romancing famous men (and women) in Hollywood in her new memoir.
“I often said, if I had as much confidence in my pursuit to get somebody in bed as I did in my career, I would have been Reese Witherspoon or something,” the actress said with a laugh. “I just wish I had that confidence with my acting.”
It took years for the star of the 1989 Gen X classic “Say Anything” to pluck up courage to write her book, “Say Everything,” she admitted in a revealing interview with Page Six.
The end result is a fascinating Hollywood story. There’s the moment she tried to seduce Keanu Reeves on her first movie, her abortion as a teen after getting pregnant by the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, her trysts with “Say Anything” co-star John Cusack and Matthew Perry, and a short-lived marriage to Beastie Boy Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz.
“I was very worried about protecting people,” Skye said of writing the book. “But I think the biggest feeling was just being really happy to tell my story. As cheesy as that sounds, I really, really wanted to.”
The 54-year-old actress was born in London to ’60s folk singer Donovan — of the hits “Jennifer Juniper” and “Mellow Yellow” — and model Enid Karl. When Skye was still a baby, Donovan sent her, along with her mom and older brother, actor Donovan Leitch, back to the US after falling for Rolling Stone Brian Jones’ widow, Linda. (Donovan and Linda are still married today.)
Skye didn’t see her father for years, and the book is interwoven with her thoughts on her famous dad, who demanded a paternity test. The two eventually met and, she writes, have an affectionate relationship today.
She grew up in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where she started hanging out in Hollywood at a young age.
In one distressing moment in the book, she recounts how she lost her virginity at 14 to a rich jock, while telling him, “I’m so young, I’m so young.”
“It sounds so obvious — like, the search for a father,” Skye told Page Six. “I don’t know why I thought having sex with someone would make them love you and want you, and you would be needed.”
When she was 16, her brother pushed her to audition for the movie “River’s Edge,” which starred an up-and-coming Keanu Reeves, who was then 21. She describes him as “ridiculously gorgeous” and writes how they headed back to his home after filming a sex scene.
Despite a steamy make-out session that led to Skye joining him in the shower, Reeves gently told her he didn’t want to go any further.
“I don’t think I was really ready for sex after my first thing with the rich kid in high school or junior high school,” Skye told Page Six. “I kind of freaked myself out. And it took Keanu to make me try again. But I knew even if I got there, I wasn’t ready. But I thought, ‘You have to go for this. This person is so amazing and cute …’”
They remained friends. Said Skye: “I think he’s used to people trying to get to him. I mean, I’ve talked to other women who wanted him and we’re like, ‘You poor guy!’
‘”Everybody was chasing him and he was such a gentleman. He was so sweet. And the way he rejected me was so sweet. He liked me, but I do think, thankfully in a way, he was like, ‘This is too young.’”
Months later, she met Flea, the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who had a bit part in her next movie, “Stranded.”
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Although she was smitten and they hooked up a few times, Flea — then 24 to Skye’s 16 — was in love with the woman who would become his wife.
But he did introduce her to the Chili Peppers’ frontman, Anthony Kiedis, who was also 24 and fresh out of rehab for heroin addiction.
“Only someone with a fairy-tale view of the world would have been open to a setup with Anthony at that particular stage in his life,” Skye writes. “Especially if they’d heard the stories I’d heard. But I liked the idea of this dangerous, dark prince of a rock ‘n’ roller.”
They had their fateful meeting at her 17th birthday party. Just a few days later she flew to meet him in Tucson, Arizona, and they slept together.
“I won’t say the ‘me after Anthony’ completely lost her innocence,’” Skye writes. “I would find it again, at least. And we would have our share of sweetness and good times too.”
The couple were inseparable and moved in together, but she would spend nights driving around looking for him, worried he had overdosed. She describes her exposure to her drug abuse, which Kiedis has talked and written about, as “very harrowing … As bohemian as my childhood was, I never saw someone doing hard drugs. And that was just such a big thing to experience.”
At one point she had to go for an HIV test with him due to his cheating and drug abuse. And, in one of the most jarring moments of the book, Skye describes getting pregnant by him at 17 and going for an abortion.
Kiedis didn’t join her — instead, he “dropped her at the curb” of a Beverly Hills doctor’s office.
Skye admits that she has struggled with writing this passage.
“Firstly, our group of friends were very unsafe, ironically, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. For some reason we were [all] still being really unsafe. Not just me,” she told Page Six.
“It was weird because a lot of people were having unsafe sex as far as passing STDs and that kind of thing. [It’s] miraculous that I survived. But why was he not even taking that precaution? It was like, wait, ‘Do you want to get someone [pregnant]?’ It’s very strange to me.”
As for the abortion, she said, “I was so young that I don’t blame myself at all. I really just felt like, ‘I’m taking care of myself.’
“And then the fact that he didn’t show up … I think he just couldn’t deal. Clearly he wasn’t dealing with just having a normal life, let alone a heightened experience like that.”
Asked if she reached out to Kiedis, now 62, ahead of the memoir, Skye replied: “No. He reached out to me for [his 2004 book] ‘Scar Tissue’ because there’s a picture of me without my top on. So I’m in his book, and now this is the companion. We have love still between each other when we see each other. And I’m friends with his mom, who I love.”
Despite trying heroin once, Skye never gave into the larger Hollywood temptation, and she said she could not believe it when her childhood friend River Phoenix died of an overdose in 1993 at age 23. The memoir also details her brief fling with Matthew Perry, her and Phoenix’s co-star in 1989’s “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon.”
“I never saw River doing hard drugs and I never knew Matthew during periods when he was doing a lot of pills and stuff,” she said. (Perry died after taking ketamine in 2023.)
“It was so great to catch everybody at that time,” she said of the “Jimmy Reardon” era, “when a lot of the wounds hadn’t come up to the surface yet. And we were all just creative, fun friends, very open. Matthew was just so sweet and already hysterically funny.
Her relationship with Kiedis ended when she fell in love with Horovtiz, and the pair wed in 1992. One thing that is abundantly clear in Skye’s memoir is her absolute love for the Beastie Boy — and her regret that she cheated on him.
During their marriage she had flings with a stream of women, including Miami nightlife promoter Ingrid Casares and model Jenny Shimizu — both of whom were also linked to Madonna — as well as model Alice Temple.
Her marriage ended when Horovitz, who knew of her affairs, walked in on her and her girlfriend Mai Lei in the pool at their home.
“Finally he was like, ‘I can’t. We gotta break up,’” Skye said.
“Even though I knew, ‘This is one of the greatest people in the world, I should stay with him. We would be happy till the day we died,” she went along with it. “I think I was too young to be married.”
Skye, who said she still misses the “amazing” Horovitz “as a friend and a person in my life,” adds that, “in another reality, we would have been absolutely happy together.
Horovitz and Skye — who is famously name-checked in the Beastie Boys song “Get It Together” (“Ad-Rock is down with the Ione”) — divorced in 2000. He went on to wed Bikini Kill musician Kathleen Hanna, while Skye had a daughter, Kate, now 24, with interior designer David Netto.
She has been with her second husband, Australian musician Ben Lee, since 2006. They also share a daughter, Goldie, 15.
Of her bisexuality, Skye said, “Every time I dated a woman, after a certain amount of time, I would say, ‘I’m more straight than gay.’ I would really want to be with a man again.”
Above all, said Skye — who recently finished a new “Anaconda” film alongside Jack Black, Paul Rudd and Thandiwe Newton — writing the book gave her insight into her talents after years of doubting herself.
“I’ve got the confidence that I should have had all along.”
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