Anne Heche.Photo: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
Anne Heche’s new book.
When Heche began her first and only relationship with a woman in 1997, the sight of her and DeGeneres holding hands at the White House sent shock waves through the world. It also hindered Heche’s promising film career, but, Duffy says, that three-year relationship moved the needle for how we view same-sex relationships — change we can see clearly today.
Heche writes: “In 1997, I began a relationship withEllen DeGeneresand was on the set of my first starring role in a big-budget movie, Six Days, Seven Nights. I was called into my costar Harrison Ford’s trailer one lunch break within the first week of shooting. I was met with the sight of director Ivan Reitman and Harrison sitting on one of two white pleather sofas. I hesitantly sat on the opposite white pleather sofa.
They had seen the evening news. Rumors were reported that Ellen and I were pregnant. Our ‘pregnancy’ was everywhere. They showed me this as proof of why this openness about my relationship was becoming a pain in the ass for them. Why, Ivan asked me, can’t I just be like Jodie Foster? (I didn’t know what that meant. ‘Everybody knows it,’ he explained, ‘it’ being her sexuality. ‘She just doesn’t talk about it.')
I found it odd that anyone thought I could get pregnant so quickly with a woman, but even odder, that they cared so much about the perception that I was going to ruin a movie that hadn’t even been shot?
Anne Heche and Ellen DeGeneres.Barry King/WireImage
The most devastating thing of all, through it all, from the first week with Ellen to writing my first book,Call Me Crazyin 2001, was that no one bothered to ask me about any of it. No matter how many articles were written about me, no one asked me why I had done what I did. What was the force that would have made a human being risk everything they’d been promised, their entire career? Why? Why would I have done that?
Love became my destiny.”
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Anne Heche with her sons.
Even after Heche’s death, Duffy still feels connected to her. “A while back, we were talking about the afterlife, and I said, ‘If you die, you would probably haunt the s— out of me,’ and she said, ‘You would definitely feel me.’ "
“I knew at the moment she decided she was gonna go,” she recalls. “I said to her, ‘I got you. I’m here for you, I’m here for your boys.’ She can fly free now. She is soaring and does not need to be contained anymore. That gives me a lot of peace, knowing that she is finally free to be as big and bold as she deserves to be.”
For more on Anne Heche’s new book, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribehere.
source: people.com
