“I WENT DOWN, AND I CAME BACK UP IN A REARRANGED KIND OF WAY”
IT’S JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME CALLING.
He asks, “How are you?” and before he can hear an answer, there’s a commotion on his end—phone-fumbling sounds; a tiny Chihuahua freaking out; Van Damme’s wife, Gladys Portugues, laughing; his own low chuckle.
“Ah la la,” sighs Van Damme, back on the line. It sounds like French for What can you do?
“I’ve got my dog next to me on the table,” he explains, “and we just got back from the Caribbean”—again the dog yaps, and Van Damme says, “Lola, stop it” in a firm, don’t-test-me tone—“and she is so jealous of my wife, it’s unbelievable.”
Lately Van Damme and Lola have also been in France, Belgium, Italy, and Monaco. “So Mademoiselle Lola is now spoiled, because she’s been going from hotel to hotel.” He speaks to the dog one more time, his voice high and sweet—“Right, Lola?”—and then chuckles, as if delighted to know there’s a creature in the world that loves him this much. Heh heh heh heh.
There’s another explosion of tiny barks. Van Damme laughs. “Lola. Stop it.” He tries again, more sternly. “Lola. Stop. Stop. Stop.”
Van Damme turned 60 last October. In his time on this planet, he’s been a nobody from Belgium, a global box-office sensation, a coke-torqued tabloid train wreck, and a ’90s-kitsch punchline. When he was 38, he told interviewers sincerely that he believed he’d be dead of a massive heart attack by 50—and this was after he kicked the drugs, recommitting to work and family and fitness and Gladys, who’d cared for their son and daughter, Kristopher and Bianca, during the years Van Damme spent letting his demons drive.
Van Damme and Gladys got divorced in 1992, as his wild years ramped up, but they remarried by the end of the decade, making Gladys his fifth wife as well as his third wife. If not for her? “Impossible for me that Van Damme was “coked out of his mind” on the set of 1994’s when he could be persuaded to show up.
