From hanging out with River Phoenix to marrying a Beastie Boy – the actress has written a revealing memoir about being at the centre of Gen X pop culture.
When I was a teenager, there was no one I wanted to be more than Ione Skye. The daughter of the
“Now I want to ask about your life,” Skye says brightly midway through our interview. She is in her home in Sydney, where she lives with her husband, the Australian musician Ben Lee, and their 15-year-old daughter, Goldie. (Skye also has a 23-year-old daughter, Kate, from a previous relationship.) But who cares about my life because we are talking about Skye’s lush, open-hearted memoir, Say Everything, which really lives up to the title.
Yours is the most erotic book I’ve ever read in my life, I tell her.
“Oh good! Which parts in particular?”
Shall we start with making out with Keanu Reeves?
She puts her hand to her chest: “Oh, Keanu,” she says, smiling.
Oh, Keanu, indeed.
Even before she was born, Skye, now 54, was at the centre of where it was all happening: her parents met at the LA music spot Whisky a Go Go, her mother an ex of Keith Richards and Jim Morrison, her father already a star. But by the time Skye, their second child, was born, he was already pursuing Linda Lawrence, the former girlfriend of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Skye and her older brother, Donovan Leitch, also an actor, were raised by their mother, Enid, largely in Los Angeles and became close friends with the children of other musicians, including Karis Jagger and Amy Fleetwood. You can probably guess who their fathers are.
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Advertise with NZME.“There was a comfortable familiarity there, in that we had these great mothers, some of whom were now single, who fell in love with these big rock stars,” she says. Skye knew her friends’ fathers, especially Mick Jagger, who was once pouring her a glass of champagne when an earthquake aftershock struck – “Mick, eyebrows raised in surprise, calmly held the champagne bottle aloft like an airplane steward in turbulence. When it was over he laughed and said, ‘Good fun, LA!’ and went back to filling my glass,” she writes.
But she didn’t meet her own father until she was 18. She wanted to ask how he could have abandoned her, but quickly realised he was too flaky to give her any reasonable answers. How does she feel about him now? “I feel a tenderness toward him because he’s so deeply artistic and such an idealist. He lives in Ireland now, in this magical pink house surrounded by ponies, and he still has this wish for the world to be Atlantis.”
And yet his absence definitely affected her: “The fact that all my big relationships have been with musicians, that has to be tied to my father being a musician. Even the actors I’ve liked, like River and Keanu, they were musicians too.”
Ah yes, River and Keanu. Skye met Reeves, then an unknown, when they were cast in the 1986 film River’s Edge, which she only auditioned for at her brother Dono’s urging. Her “lust was in full, overpowering bloom” for him, she writes – “The way he slung his jacket across the back of the booth, tore a sugar pack with his teeth, licked a dot of ketchup from his thumb. Every gesture was sexier than the last.” This is pure Gen X erotica. They made out twice, but Reeves stopped matters from going further. “He wasn’t as into me as I was with him, but he was such a gentleman about it that I didn’t feel like a fool. I felt like anybody would try their hardest to be with him,” she says correctly.
After River’s Edge she made A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, starring Phoenix. “Both Keanu and River, they weren’t famous then, but you just looked at them and knew they were special and wanted to be around them.” Phoenix was already with his girlfriend, the actress Martha Plimpton, but that didn’t stop him and Skye from enjoying the kissing scenes in their film so much that the director had to yell “Cut!” five times before they broke apart.
It was at this point that she met Kiedis, 24 to her 16. Also, he was already a heroin addict when she fell for him, and like many lovers of addicts she became addicted to being the carer, worrying about Kiedis when he disappeared on benders, tending to him when he returned, pale and sick. “It’s not that I wish I could erase that experience, but I wish it happened 10 years later. I did not need to see all of that then,” she says. She never took heroin with Kiedis, but she did try it once in that period, and she had the sense to know that she liked it too much to ever try it again. “It was nerve-racking to write about trying heroin because you worry about the labels people put on you. But that was my honest experience,” she says.
Skye eventually broke up with Kiedis when she fell for Horovitz, who was everything her first boyfriend was not: loyal, kind and stable. She had just made Say Anything and he was a Beastie Boy, and it felt like the world was theirs. There was such an innocence to the Nineties celebrity world, with no phone cameras and minimal paparazzi. “Things just felt less self-conscious then, and people weren’t famous in a way that was annoying,” she says.
She found this in London, too, when she came to the city to star in The Rachel Papers alongside Dexter Fletcher and fell in with the Primrose Hill set. “There was Jude Law and Sadie Frost and Pulp, and there was so much exciting, sexy energy. And back in LA there were people like Winona Ryder and Gwyneth Paltrow. We were all working, but college age, and it felt sloppy and fun.” Until Phoenix, who she was close to, suddenly died. “I still can’t watch movies that he’s in,” she says quietly.
And Paltrow doesn’t sound that fun. She dated Skye’s brother and Skye writes about how “intimidating” she was even then, and how “mean” she could be to Dono. “I find Gwyneth so intriguing because you think, is she warm or just pretending? Is she a mean girl?” she says. “She definitely has an edge but no one knows how edgy that edge is.”
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Skye and Horovitz married when she was 21 and he was 25, but their inevitable frequent separations due to work led to inevitable problems. “My drug was women,” she writes: while Horovitz was touring, Skye – who had always suspected she was bisexual – had multiple affairs with women, including Ingrid Casares and Jenny Shimizu, both of whom also went out with Madonna. By this point in the mid-Nineties Skye was friendly with Madonna, after making the film Four Rooms together, and the singer took a shine to Skye, although one of the first things she told her was that she hated Dono. “I was always aware of wanting to impress her. But you know, Madonna has always been kind of a mean girl,” she says.
Horovitz eventually found out about the affairs and left her for Kathleen Hanna of the feminist punk band Bikini Kill. Skye tried to recover by running around New York with Dono, who dated a succession of models, including Kate Moss, before marrying the Scottish model Kirsty Hume. Skye had her daughter Kate with the interior designer David Netto, and although their relationship didn’t stick, she adored being a mother. She had a few flings, including with Matthew Perry (“The sex was perfectly pleasant”) and – thrillingly for fans of Say Anything – Cusack (less thrillingly, she describes their one sexual encounter as “kinda flat, it was fine”). She continued to work, including on Arrested Development, and one night in 2006 she bumped into Ben Lee, who was 28, eight years younger than her. Two years later they got married, and as fans of their adorable podcast, Weirder Together, know, they have been goofily happy, and monogamous, ever since.
“When I met Ben, I felt, I can do this. Other people have vibrant long-term relationships, they keep the sex life going, and finally I believed I could do it too,” she says. And she did. The queen of teen dreams got her happily ever after.
- Say Everything by Ione Skye (HarperCollins)
Written by: Hadley Freeman
©2025 TIMES OF LONDON
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