The newlywed and newly straight actress--perhaps better known as comedian Ellen DeGeneres' former lesbian lover than for her numerous movie roles--has told Barbara Walters she's three months pregnant.
Heche broke the good news on ABC's 20/20 Wednesday night, but she didn't disclose her pregnancy during her much-talked-about (and, dare we say, bizarre) interview with Walters. Instead, Walters reported that Heche called her with the baby scoop after the two had already met to chat about her new book, Call Me Crazy. The book reveals that Heche was sexually abused by her father until she was 12 and that it drove her "insane."
"I'm not crazy," Heche told Walters. "But it's a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me."
Heche, 32, tied the knot with 27-year-old cameraman Coley Laffoon last Saturday--a little more than a year after she and DeGeneres separated. During Wednesday's interview, Heche opened up to Walters about a host of different topics: childhood, her career, God, spaceships, Fresno, a secret language she used to speak and, of course, her relationship with DeGeneres. (It was "the best sex I'd ever had," she gushed.)
The star of Six Days, Seven Nights and Psycho also revealed that she suffered so greatly at the hands of her father, a church choir director, that she began to develop multiple personalities.
"I had a fantasy world that I escaped to. I called my other personality Celestia," said Heche. "I called the other world that I created for myself 'The Fourth Dimension.' I believed I was from that world. I believed I was from another planet. I think I was insane."
Heche said that the memories of those terrible years as a toddler are what led to her breakdown last August near Fresno, California, the day news broke that she and DeGeneres called it quits after three years together. Heche was hospitalized after police found her roaming door to door in a rural area, appearing shaken and confused and making strange statements to homeowners.
"I was told to go to a place where I would meet a spaceship," Heche told Walters. "I was told in order to get on the spaceship that I would have to take a hit of Ecstasy. Fresno was the culmination of a journey and a world that I thought I needed to escape to in order to find love."
It was then that Heche, who said she doesn't abuse drugs, set about regaining her sanity and confronting her traumatic childhood.
She also said she feared that her father, Don, who died of AIDS in 1983, might have infected her with the AIDS virus (he had already given her herpes).
"I remember entering the bed with him many times," Heche added. "I went through fighting to get him off me. I went through screaming for my mother. I went through a terror of thinking I was going to die. I went through thoughts of wanting to die."
That, says Heche, is what drove her to drinking, drugs and sex to try and get the "shame out of my life." And by the time she was 25, she acknowledged that her personality had split into two: herself and Celestia. The mental illness, however, eventually led her into a career best suited for multiple personalities--Hollywood.
"I think everything I've done in all my insanity was trying to get my parents to love me," she reflected. "My father loved movie stars. I decided I needed to become famous to get his love. My mother loved Jesus, so I wanted to become Jesus Christ. I wanted to save the world to get her love."
On Ellen, Heche said she met DeGeneres at a 1997 Vanity Fair Oscar party and instantly "saw the most ravishing woman I had ever seen."
"Her name was Ellen DeGeneres. She was radiating," Heche reminisced. "I think at certain times in people's lives you just radiate an energy and a glow of fabulousness. And that was her. I had never seen anybody so lit up."
One thing led to another and Heche, who had never slept with a woman before, had sex with DeGeneres that night.
"I felt cared for...I felt free to express a part of me that I had not been able to express with a man. I felt sensuous and sexual the way I hadn't before," Heche said.
But with a man now at her side, Heche said she refused to limit herself by sexuality.
"You fall in love with a person, not a sex," she said.