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Mickey & the model

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Already a supermodel at age 20, Carré Otis auditioned for the film “Wild Orchid” and met co-star Mickey Rourke — and a tumultuous tabloid couple was born. Now remarried, drug-free and the mother of two daughters, Otis recounts their dangerous passion in her new memoir, “Beauty, Disrupted.” An excerpt:

There are moments in life that define us. Moments we know are coming. And one of those defining moments for me was the first time I met the man who would become my first husband. I walked through the door of director Zalman King’s house, and I changed my life.

It was a warm and sticky Los Angeles afternoon. I saw him right away. I will never forget the lone figure hunched in a corner. There at an open kitchen table, with stringy dark hair shrouding his face, trembling hands lifting a dainty saucer of coffee to his lips, sat the famed Mickey Rourke. I was curious but for some reason unimpressed.

My eyes rested momentarily on his hands, his pinkie finger raised as he took a sip of coffee from his cup. Mickey had unusual fingernails that seemed to curl over the ends of his nail beds, arching more like claws. A red flannel shirt, with a wifebeater underneath, didn’t hide his impressive torso and biceps. He wore torn bluejeans and a pair of unlaced boxing shoes.

Mickey didn’t stand or acknowledge me. Without looking at him or saying a word, I opened the large refrigerator door and rummaged for something to eat. I found leftover broccoli. I took it out and put some on a plate. Pulling out a chair, I sat down across from him and began to eat.

He lit another cigarette, and when he set it in the ashtray, I reached over, picked it up and took a drag.

He finally looked up, his eyes meeting mine, and smiled. It was a surprisingly open smile, a playful smile, a beautiful smile. And I smiled back. I looked back down at my broccoli, finally a bit bashful. Basically, we set the room on fire.

Already in those early days, my craving for him was at its strongest when we weren’t together. We’d be separated for a few hours, and I could think of nothing else but being with him again. We both loved the drama of it all, loved the fantasy of being head over heels in love, unable to be apart. When people ask why I would end up staying with him for so long, this is a huge part of the answer. The times we weren’t together were the times I wanted him most.

We had a passionate affair during the making of King’s “Wild Orchid.” After the movie wrapped, I ended up playing house for Mickey. I knew that something was very wrong with this new life of mine. By everyone else’s standards, I had everything I could possibly want: a big, beautiful home, a relationship with a famous actor. But I had to stop counting there. That was all there was.

Mickey, for instance, had seen a naked photo of me, shot by the famously gay photographer Steven Meisel, for Vanity Fair. He was furious.

“Everyone can see your ass! That’s my ass. And no one else’s.” To prove his point, Mickey sent two thugs to hunt down Meisel, and when they found him in a New York City elevator, they stole his signature floppy hat and took Polaroids of the terrified photographer. Word quickly got out that I was a liability to work with.

While he was doing all that he could to derail my career, Mickey was in Santa Fe, NM, filming “White Sands” with Willem Dafoe. The increasingly frantic phone calls I received from Mickey begging me to come visit him indicated that things were not going as well as expected.

I decided to fly out and spend a weekend with him. The house was gorgeous: a classic Santa Fe adobe with breathtaking views through floor-to-ceiling windows, huge fireplaces, and a grand kitchen and living room. I could get used to this, I thought.

The next day, we went out to dinner. We were almost at the restaurant when I looked down and saw a .357 Magnum on the floor near my feet.

“Damn it, Mickey!” I moaned, pointing to it. “What the hell?”

Mickey parked the car and leaned toward me, his voice soft but firm. “Otis, remember, it’s for our protection. I am sorry, though. I’ll talk to the guys about putting these things away.”

“Good idea,” I responded curtly. I stepped out of the car and turned around to grab my purse.

“Go ahead, I got it. I’ll bring it in,” Mick said. What I didn’t know was that he thought it would be a good idea to stash the gun inside my bag.

Dinner was uneventful. When we were through, we decided to drive the bike home and let a member of his entourage, Franco, drive the car.

“Come on, Otis. Let’s get into a bath!” Mickey laughed and chased me into the house. I screeched with delight and ran as fast as I could through the front door and toward the kitchen. Mickey ran to the fridge, searching for a bottle of white, while I slung my bag off my shoulder and tossed it onto the counter.

Boom! A tremendous noise reverberated through the kitchen.

“Gunshot!” Mickey screamed in a panic. “A bullet — it just whizzed past me!”

“What the f–k are you guys doing firing guns in the f–king house?” I yelled, stunned. And just then I noticed that everyone was staring at me, their eyes widening.

I stood there, suspended in time. My head reeled. I began to sway slowly from side to side. “Whoa,” I said numbly as I crumpled to the floor. “What the fu–”

I looked down at my bluejeans, my white shirt, and my black leather jacket. What was this strange red puddle flowing out around me in an eerily perfect circle? I looked back up at the guys, confused and bewildered.

An instant later, the message from the gunpowder reached my brain. I felt as if I were on fire, head to toe. I gasped, and then a wild scream erupted from me. The gun in my purse, the one without a safety, had discharged the second I’d slung my bag onto the counter.

Mickey ran toward me. “Where is the gun? Where did that come from?”

“Wait! Help me!” I finally cried out, forcing the words to come. “You gotta help me . . . I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding really bad.”

I wailed. It hurt so much to move.

“This is a nightmare. Clean this up!” Mickey was agitated. I could tell he had grave concerns that the press would get wind of the incident. I panicked, wondering which was more important: my life or covering up the fact that I’d been shot with Mickey Rourke’s gun? But Franco was with me, holding me firmly. “Mickey, front seat! You must drive this car. Fast!”

I had been hit with a hollow-point bullet. It was a miracle I was alive — never mind alive with my arm still attached to my body! The bullet had entered just two inches from my heart. The police questioned me, but no charges were filed.

My mother came to see me in Santa Fe as I recuperated. “Do you know . . . do you know you can come home, Carré?” she said, looking me in the eyes. I turned away from her. My hands shook, and tears streamed down my face.

“No, Mom, I can’t,” I said quietly. “It’s too late for that.”

A tremendous amount of unspoken guilt settled over Mickey and me for some time after the gun incident. The silence between us hung heavy in the air. So, too, did the reality of Mickey’s decline as an actor. He wasn’t the box-office hit he’d once been. Rather than reflect on his own responsibility for his diminishing film prospects, Mickey began to scorn acting, dubbing it a “career for sissies.”

I left Mickey in Miami to pursue his new boxing career. Back in Los Angeles, I started to heal.

But I wasn’t really surprised to get a call. I gave in. Just like that. My longing, my loneliness, everything that remained unresolved, had me buying into the hope that we could still set ourselves on the right course. On June 25, 1992, a limo picked me up in Los Angeles and drove me north up the coast to Big Sur.

Sure enough, there he was, sitting on the hood of a tricked-out ’69 Road Runner hot rod. Periwinkle blue with a white stripe up the center. The top was down.

“Otis . . . I . . . I don’t know what to say. I love you. I miss you. I need you. I . . . I want you.” He was stammering.

“Mickey, you really f–king hurt me. I don’t even know why I’m here. Other than that I love you, too. But love . . . it shouldn’t hurt like this.” I was emotional. My lip was trembling. I was trying not to cry.

Before I knew what he was doing, he got down on one knee. “Marry me, Carré,” he said.

“Jesus, Mickey. Wait. I haven’t seen you in months!” I was starting to feel panicked. “I need time, some time to think about this.”

“No. You answer me now,” he said firmly. Standing up, he went to the back of the car and opened the trunk. “I can’t live without you,” he said again, pulling out a long sword wrapped in beautiful Japanese cloth.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a hari-kari knife,” he replied, unwrapping it. The long metal sword caught the afternoon light. Mickey stared into my eyes. “Answer me or I will die.”

Was he serious? I wasn’t sure. I was terrified. I waited a beat. I recognized his standard my-way-or-the-highway ultimatum in all this, but it was tinged with a threat of a different kind this time. I heard myself say, “Yes, Mickey. I will marry you.”

Mickey and I were married the next day, June 26, in my hometown of San Francisco. A justice of the peace oversaw our vows as we stood several feet from a Dumpster in Golden Gate Park.

Mickey’s anxiety attack that morning should have made it clear to me that he, too, was doing it for the wrong reasons. He also must have thought that if he didn’t propose to me, he would lose me. We were married in the hope that our love would fulfill all that our lives up until that point had not. In the hope that somehow a piece of paper would magically heal the wounds we’d suffered at the hands of others and had inflicted on ourselves and each other.

We were wrong. Sadly and predictably, so very, very wrong.

From the book “Beauty, Disrupted: A Memoir,” Copyright © 2011 by Carré Otis. Reprinted with permission of It Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Otis will be signing books at Barnes & Noble, 227 W. 27th St., Tuesday at 5 p.m.