When Anne Heche was Jesus

The actress had an eerie religious journey

In 1997, a young blonde woman became a tabloid sensation when she started dating Ellen DeGeneres, the most famous lesbian in the world.

I’m thinking over Anne Heche’s difficult story—so often a religious one. She later said she’d been mentally ill. She’d thought she was a reincarnation of Jesus, named ‘Celestia’, sent to earth to spread a message of love.

They met the evening of March 24, 1997.

Anne went to the Vanity Fair party after the Academy Awards, where The English Patient won ‘best picture’. She recalled later:

“I saw Ellen across a crowded room, not knowing anything at all except how I was just drawn to her. It was very clear from the moment I saw her that this was something more powerful than anything I could have controlled.”

She was 27, 5'5" and heterosexual—or had been?

Ellen was unsure about dating a straight woman a decade younger. But Anne was sure. It seemed a storybook romance, carried out before the mass media. And Evangelical America went on red alert.

It was remarkably good timing for a romance.

Ellen, the star of a sitcom (named Ellen) was on the edge of coming out of the closet, a major marker in Pop Culture. No one was surprised, but the policy of the culture, as in the military, was ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’.

Ellen’s romantic history had been rocky, and she was single. She’d be saying she was lesbian all by herself. Except then, there was Anne.

Had Anne done it for fame? There was talk. The two were the subject of an SNL skit, where the Anne Heche character says: “I used to date men for years, but nobody noticed.”

But it did seem perfect. It seemed divine. Ellen’s mother later writes: “Anne really seems to have been delivered to her by no accident — ‘an angel,’ as Ellen calls her.”

For Ellen, coming out was a practical problem.

“I never wanted to be the spokesperson for the gay community,” she tells Time on her April 13th cover story. She explains:

“Now I feel comfortable with myself, and I don’t have to be fearful about something damaging my career if it gets out, because now I’m in control of it — sort of. No one can hurt me now.”

But for Anne, it was a religious event. She told USA Today:

“I think my life is an example of what can be when you live your life in truth. I’m a testament to reality being as good as any fantasy…”

And she was telling a story about her father.

It’s in many of the early newspaper clips. On the Oprah show on April 30th, it was her first subject: the church choir director named Donald Heche who’d fathered five kids, then died of AIDS in 1983.

When Oprah asked how he’d influenced her, Anne replied:

“Well, when you watch somebody who lives their life lying, and then destroys themself through a disease, you tend to look at that and go, ‘Now how can I do something different?’”

She seemed blissfully happy — able to be with Ellen, and a public ‘representative of the truth’, as her father had not.

“This is heaven to me,” she says.

The question lingered: was Anne a lesbian?

She didn’t speak of sexual attraction to Ellen, or women, but of contact with true personhood. It seems to have been that way from the start. Ellen’s mother quotes Anne saying: “It’s not about what’s between your legs. It’s about what’s between your ears and in your heart.”

“I fell in love with a person,” as Anne told Oprah.

“You felt sexually attracted to her?” Oprah quizzed.

She felt their “souls connect,” Anne replies. She’d realized:

“…my soul was meant to be with hers, and that’s all that mattered. I loved beyond the sex. I think in love there’s no sex, there’s no segregation, there’s no anything. There is just love.”

Anne Celeste Heche was born on May 25, 1969.

She was the youngest of five children of Donald and Nancy Heche. He’d been a man on track for success, winning a full scholarship to college, intending to be a Methodist minister. Then he decided to be a medical doctor. Then he shifted to business school. Then he was unemployed.

All he seemed to love was making music at church. The family had become Baptist, more suited to Nancy’s tastes. Anne recalls seeing him up directing the choir: “He would sway his arms in the air like a fairy and everyone loved it, including my mother.”

Her father, she suggests, read as gay to everyone except his wife. She recalls his “prissy” expressions and decorating projects, like turning an old chandelier into Christmas ornaments.

She recalls his “business trips” to New York City.

The family was summoned there in 1983, to be told by a doctor that her father had AIDS. It was his coming out party. He was dead a month later. The family didn’t know if they’d also contracted it, and didn’t know who he’d been.

A month later, Anne’s older brother died in a car crash. In a horrifying vacuum, the youngest daughter became the “man of the family.” By intense self-determination, Anne went to work as an actress, and was the family’s breadwinner.

Her personal life, she’d recall, got messy. “I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life.”

She launched herself as a soap opera actress.

She got semi-famous on Another World, playing ‘good’ and ‘evil’ twin sisters.

She dated the musician Lindsay Buckingham and the actor Steve Martin. He’s said to have described it as a “torturous love affair.”

And then — God began to speak to her. She writes:

“In my mind I became Jesus. I was called Celestia the reincarnation of God. I believed that I was the Second Coming here to teach the world about pure love. I believed that each and every person on this planet was God, and I was here to show them their reflection. I believed that I was born to tell this truth to the world, just like Jesus believed he was. I believed I was given my calling by God in heaven. I believed that I was going to become famous to do this.”

Among the teachings she was to distribute to the planet was a higher realm of reality in which, as she wrote:

“…there was no gender distinction. It was a world of Gods where everyone was everything that they wanted to be. There was complete acceptance and understanding there.”

She cut her hair into a boyish crop.

She dyed it blonde, nearly white, a strange figure of a gamine girl—a boy-girl. She was modern, beautiful, androgynous. In 1997 she burst on the scene in a slew of movies, like Donnie Brasco and I Know What You Did Last Summer. In Wag the Dog, she was in a role written for a man.

She had stories of her own to tell. She wrote and filmed a short movie, Stripping For Jesus, about a stripper who writes Bible verses on her body before doing her routine. (It’s not been re-released.)

Anne played the stripper’s sister, but writes: “It was my story. My life as I saw it, and I was determined to make it as good as possible.”

Explaining the plot to the press, she’d say:

“Both sisters end up completely alone in their own fucking hell, which is the whole point. Religion doesn’t solve anything.”

And then there was Ellen.

They seemed to write a gospel between them: a story of cosmic love. For several years, they reigned as lesbian celebrities. Anne starred in Return to Paradise, and Psycho, rumored to have had an affair with her co-star of each, Vince Vaughn.

In a 1998 interview with the Baltimore Sun, she’s determined to talk about her personal life. Her agent had tried to downplay it, she said—and got fired.

“I let the people go who asked me not to be open about my relationship with Ellen,” Anne says. “They were asking me to be a little less of myself, and it was an education to see how uncomfortable they were with gays. But those aren’t the people I wanted in my life.”

She talks about her father. “I’m sure he is looking down, if he is above, or, I dunno, maybe he’s looking up, stunned.”

She says she’s working on a children’s book, titled Adelaide, God’s Fairy.

She doesn’t talk about the movie industry dropping her.

Ellen lost her sitcom.

With Anne not getting movie roles anymore, being lesbian celebrities was their only role left. They both fired their agents, since they weren’t working, and moved to a farm outside L.A. to escape the press.

Then Ellen did a comedy tour. Anne accompanied — week after week, city after city. The relationship was troubled, and she left.

Ellen seems to have concluded that Anne was deceptive from the start. “I guess she wasn’t gay,” she’s said to have said. “I see now that I was being used.”

Anne reappeared in public in a strange scene.

She was hiking around the Fresno area, as one does, in a bra and shorts, high on ecstasy. She walked into a stranger’s home, took off her shoes, and seemed ready to live there.

The owner called the cops. When they arrived, Heche identified herself as God, and said she was “going to take everyone back to heaven in a spaceship.”

She charged ahead to try and re-start her career. She married—a man. In 2001, she published a memoir. It’s full of details of an Evangelical childhood, with a father who was lost in his closet, and a mother who seems lost in theological tortures. She writes:

“My mother once told me that her only purpose for being on earth was to get into heaven. When I asked her why she just didn’t kill herself then, she told me it was because killing yourself is a sin and living here on earth was about suffering so that you would not suffer once you got to heaven. This strange logic carried me through my high school years. I often wondered why she didn’t say that once of her purposes was to love her children, or herself.”

The book, Call Me Crazy, was more noted for Anne claiming she’d been “insane” for the first 31 years of her life, until the Fresno episode.

And from infancy on, she said, she’d been raped by her father.

Her appearance became more feminine.

She resumed work as an actress, dismissing readings of her sexuality. She says in 2001: ”I have a right to love whom I want to love. I understand many homosexuals believe it’s not a choice, but I made a choice out of joy.”

She was different. There were only hints of the strange being she’d been—the Anne Heche who was never clearly heterosexual, or even human.

Celestia was just a memory.

She’d told Ellen about Celestia.

What did Ellen do, an interviewer asked in 2001?

“She tried to break up with me,” Anne replies.

In interviews over the next years she’d talk about why she left Ellen. “We had gotten to the point where we were not happy together anymore,” she says. “We had become isolated from the world, together.”

Or another time: “I broke up with her because her goal was to have a lot of money and mine was to find love.”

She’d retell the old stories, like the evening they met.

“…she was beaming light. There was nothing that could have shone brighter than who she was in the center of that room. I’ll never forget.”

She came to agree—years later—with Ellen’s advice. “She did say, ‘Don’t do this,’” Anne said on a 2018 podcast. “You are going to ruin your career.”

She rushes forward, her thoughts and words jumbled. She’s talking about about her father dying. “I was sexually abused and survived the AIDS epidemic.”

Anne and her husband divorced, and she had a long-term relationship with another man, as that concluded. She had a son with each man. She kept working — never allowed onto Ellen’s new talk show to promote anything.

Her name, she was told, was never to be mentioned around Ellen. They never met again. In 2017, Ellen did an episode for the ‘20th Anniversary’ of her coming out, and Anne was edited out.

Her mother became an Evangelical star.

Nancy Heche was a national figure speaking out against homosexuality at ‘Love Won Out’ events. In 2006, she published her memoir, Love Won Out, offered as a guide for family members in dealing with gay issues.

She recalled that brief telephone call. “I’ve fallen in love — with a woman,” Anne said. “I wanted to tell you right away because it’s going to be very public.” Then she had to go.

Nancy had become anti-gay with a passion, remembering many times the long-dead husband who’d done her wrong. There was hope for them, she counseled. Just look at her daughter—who came out of a homosexual relationship, and was straight again.

“Stop calling me an ex-gay,” Anne said in a curt posting to her website. “The ‘Ex-gay’ events that are going on right now make me sick,” she writes.

“The fact that my mother is using my name to promote this movement makes me even sicker. I could not disagree more adamantly with what she and her group of unloving, unaccepting, Bible preaching hate mongers are doing.”

Her mother wanted back in Anne’s life.

Nancy’s religious views had evolved. As she said in a 2009 interview:

“I had to move out of this letter-of-the-law approach. It was easy for me to be black and white, no shades of gray. But we need vulnerability, an open heart, an understanding heart, a desire to search to see God’s heart.”

She hadn’t dealt well with her daughter ‘coming out’, she acknowledged. She said: “God had to teach me a lot. We’re to act out of our healing, not out of our woundedness. I was hurt and felt betrayed.”

They never reconciled. Their last words, Nancy recalled, had been on the phone. “Jesus loves you, Anne,” she’d said, as Anne hung up.

On August 5, 2022 she was at a hair salon in Venice, California.

She wanted a blue wig, but the salon didn’t have one. She bought a red wig instead, then left. Richard Glass, the proprietor, posted the encounter to Instagram. He’d later say he didn’t perceive Heche to be high or anything.

Driving manically down residential streets in her blue Mini Cooper, she crashed into a garage, reversed, sped away. Moments later, her car hurtled into an inferno.

“A car just went through my neighbor’s house,” went the report to 911, as the caller tried to see through the smoke: “they’re kinda trapped…inside the car.”

Firefighters arrived as Anne, badly burned, was taken to the hospital. On August 11, at age 53, she was declared brain dead.

Her organs were donated. Long thought to have been on cocaine, an autopsy found it wasn’t so. It was her own mysterious trip. 🔶