old stories, through new eyes. In July, she
sent me a video clip of Jimi Hendrix that
reminded her of a surreal aspect of the
day she was raped: for a moment, when
the stranger approached her, she mistook
him for Hendrix. During the assault, she
willed herself to think that the man was
Hendrix. “It felt safer, and strangely it
hasn’t ruined Jimi Hendrix for me,” she
said. Years later, however, she found her-
self hanging out with a man who was a
Hendrix fan. One night, they did mush-
rooms at Johnny Depp’s house, in the
Hollywood Hills. Depp, who was edit-
ing a film, was sober that night; as Apple
recalled, he “kind of led” her and her friend
to a bedroom, then shut the door and
left. “Nothing bad happened, but I felt
kind of used and uncomfortable with my
friend making out with me,” she said. “I
used to just let things happen. I remem-
ber I wrote the bridge to ‘Fast as You
Can’ in the car on the way home, and he
was playing Jimi Hendrix, and my mind
was swirling things together.”
That has always been Apple’s expe-
rience: the past overlapping with the
present, just as it does in her notebooks.
Sometimes it recurs through painful
flashbacks, sometimes as echoes to be
turned into art. The evening at Depp’s
house wasn’t a #MeToo moment, she
added. “Johnny Depp was a nice guy,
and so was my friend. But I think that,
at that time, I was struggling with my
sexuality, and trying to force it into what
I thought it should be, and everything
felt dirty. Going out with boys, getting
high, getting scared, and going home
feeling like a dirty wimp was my thing.”
Apple came of age in a culture that
viewed young men as potential auteurs
and young women as commodities to be
used, then discarded. Although she had
only positive memories of her youthful
romance with David Blaine, she was dis-
turbed to learn that he was listed in Jeffrey
Epstein’s black book. In high school, Apple
was friends with Mia Farrow’s daughter
Daisy Previn, and during sleepovers at
Farrow’s house she used to run into
Woody Allen in the kitchen. “There are
all these unwritten but signed N.D.A.s
all over the place,” she said, about the en-
tertainment industry. “Because you’ll have
to deal with the repercussions if you talk.”
She met Paul Thomas Anderson in
1997, during a Rolling Stone cover shoot
in which she floated in a pool, her hair
fanning out like Ophelia’s. She was
twenty; he was twenty-seven. After she
climbed out of the water, her first words
to him were “Do you smoke pot?” An-
derson followed her to Hawaii. (The pro-
tagonist of his film “Punch-Drunk Love”
makes the same impulsive journey.)
“That’s where we solidified,” she told me.
“I remember going to meet him at the
bar at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and
he was laughing at me because I wasmarching around on what he called my
‘determined march to nowhere.’”
The singer and the director became
an It Couple, their work rippling with
mutual influences. She wrote a rap for
“Magnolia”; he directed videos for her
songs. But, as Apple remembers it, the
romance was painful and chaotic. They
snorted cocaine and gobbled Ecstasy.
Apple drank, heavily. Mostly, she told
me, he was coldly critical, contemptu-
ous in a way that left her fearful and
numb. Apple’s parents remember an
awful night when the couple took them
to dinner and were openly rude. (Apple
backs this up: “We both attended that
dinner as little fuckers.”) In the lobby,
her mother asked Anderson why Apple
was acting this way. He snapped, “Ask
yourself—you made her.”
Anderson had a temper. After attend-
ing the 1998 Academy Awards, he threw
a chair across a room. Apple remembers
telling herself, “Fuck this, this is not a
good relationship.” She took a cab to her
dad’s house, but returned home the next
day. In 2000, when she was getting treat-
ment for O.C.D., her psychiatrist sug-
gested that she do volunteer work with
kids who had similar conditions. Apple
was buoyant as Anderson drove her to
an orientation at U.C.L.A.’s occupational-
therapy ward, but he was fuming. He
screeched up to the sidewalk, undid her
seat belt, and shoved her out of his car;
she fell to the ground, spilling her purse
in front of some nurses she was going
to be working with. At parties, he’d hiss
harsh words in her ear, calling her a bad
partner, while behaving sweetly on the
surface; she’d tear up, which, she thinks,
made her look unstable to strangers.
(Anderson, through his agent, declined
to comment.)
Anderson didn’t hit her, Apple said.
He praised her as an artist. Today, he’s
in a long-term relationship with the ac-
tress Maya Rudolph, with whom he has
four children. He directed the video for
“Hot Knife,” in 2011; Apple said that
by then she felt more able to hold her
own—and she said that he might have
changed. Yet the relationship had warped
her early years, she said, in ways she still
reckoned with. She’d never spoken
poorly of him, because it didn’t seem
“classy”; she wavered on whether to do
so now. But she wanted to put an end
to many fans’ nostalgia about their time