“If you watched television anytime during the early 1990s, you saw the commercial. There was the good-looking hunk in a Jeep, heading north along the rugged Pacific Coast Highway. The raven-haired beauty in a red vintage Dino Ferrari convertible accelerates to eighty-five miles an hour, pulls up even with the Jeep on a spectacular hairpin turn, and inquires about the maker of the hunk’s pants.

“Thank you,” says the raven-haired beauty. She abruptly brakes, executes a perfect 180-degree turn, and heads back to wherever beautiful women in exotic sports cars go when their thirty seconds are over.

Which in this case was wheels-up on a steep bluff about a hundred feet off the highway.

The raven-haired beauty herself was safely drinking diet soda and gossiping with the crew. Her stunt double, a blonde in a wig, was trapped underneath the twisted metal of what was once a very expensive Italian sports car.

That was me.

Don’t even ask what went wrong. Too much speed at the turn, a split-second miscalculation, the director’s fault, the car prep crew’s fault, my fault—who knows? Stuff happens.

The car fishtailed. The rear wheels squealed as they skidded off the smooth surface and caught the soft shoulder, spinning me out of control. I tried to correct, but with no power steering and no shoulder harness—damn those vintage cars—it was impossible. The Ferrari took flight and came down hard, bouncing off the highway surface and flipping over once, twice, three times.

The lack of a shoulder harness probably saved my life. While the car was still airborne, before the first point of impact, I had enough freedom of movement to pull myself sideways into the passenger seat, folding up into the cubbyhole of space beneath the glove compartment.

It was pitch-dark in that little coffin. I was covered in shards of windshield glass and pretty badly banged up, but I was alive and my neck wasn’t broken. I had just enough time to count my blessings before I heard a hissing sound and smelled the leaking gas. I found the walkie-talkie and screamed into it, “GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

Suddenly a dozen crew members were beside the car. They needed about thirty seconds to heave the Ferrari right side up and pull me out of my hiding place—about as long as the commercial lasts, and let me tell you that is one long, long commercial.

What did I think about all that time? My daughter? My son? My mother? No. Did I see that white light and a bunch of angels beckoning me to join them? No. Did I thank God for keeping me alive? Later. My first thought was, Awwww, shhhhit, I smashed up a $250,000 car. Do I have to tell you that this proved to be a turning point in my life?

The crew tracked down an identical 1973 Dino Ferrari in Los Angeles, and we managed to get the shot down the next day. The commercial ran for quite a while and earned me enough in residuals to do yet another major remodel on my house. The incident itself turned out to be a legend in the stunt driving business. To this day, people will tell me this story about an upside-down Dino Ferrari and how nobody could believe that the stunt driver got out of it alive.

There’s always another Ferrari: That’s the real lesson of this story.

It’s also, in a way, the real lesson of my life.

College boys used to steal my cutouts; I’m told that somebody ran it for homecoming queen (I nearly won) at Pepperdine University. The college girls used it in their dorms to hang their sweaters on.

You’ve seen me in other national media campaigns—billboards and magazine ads for More and Kent cigarettes, Coca-Cola, Las Vegas Sahara Hotel, Mattel toys, Smirnoff vodka, Adidas sportswear, JCPenney, L.A. Gear, Lipton tea, the cover of American Woman Motor Sports, and several catalog covers for department stores. The list goes on and on.

As a stunt driver, you’ve seen me doubling for Cindy Crawford in her Pepsi commercials, driving a red Lam borghini while two little boys watch in awe as she chugs the soft drink. For Oldsmobile, I worked on several spots for “The New Generation of Olds” campaign, better known to the public as “This is Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile.” In one of the spots I doubled for Priscilla Presley, driving in and out of the surf on the beach with a helicopter filming in close proximity. Her daughter, Lisa Marie, was my petrified passenger. But the really tricky spot was the “007” commercial, filmed in Hawaii, where I doubled Roger Moore’s daughter. The helicopter work was intense—two inches off my bumper for eight white-knuckled days. Speed had to be extremely precise or the chopper would have been in my trunk, and my head fifty feet away from the scene. We had every stunt the writers could conjure up in that spot: motorcycles crashing; explosions; biplanes passing overhead within feet of the vehicle, expelling smoke and obstructing my vision.

Enough on the commercials. After twenty years, my résumé is eighteen pages long, and I’m not pitching a job here.

I’ve done quite a bit of work in feature films. In Casper, I doubled the lead actress, crashing a car into a tree and making a high fall. It was only forty feet, but with the blue screen it looked to be two hundred. For the movie Shattered, I did a near miss with another vehicle at seventy miles per hour. On Spy Hard, we did a chase scene on the city streets of downtown L.A. In Tony Danza’s latest flop, Love to Kill, I crashed a pickup truck through a glass solarium and did most of the car chase scenes in the film.

For television, I’ve worked on Melrose Place quite often, and I’ve doubled for Linda Evans on Dynasty. I’ve since moved on to Unsolved Mysteries and Diagnosis Murder. The last episode for Diagnosis Murder I worked on was a getaway car stunt, doubling for Piper Laurie.

There are literally hundreds of films and commercials I’ve worked on in past years where I do the action and the actress gets the glory, but who cares? I’ve had my day in the limelight. My smile isn’t seen on the screen, but my teeth are sparkling all the way to the bank.

You might have seen my photograph in past years in the feature sections of some newspapers and “rag” magazines, if you read that sort of thing. “An unidentified companion.” That was me. “The blonde.” That was me, too. In earlier days, I was photographed by paparazzi in the company of Peter Lawford and David Janssen, both of whom died young as a result of living too fast. There I was cuddling up to O.J. (We worked together on a Hertz spot, and later I got to know him and Nicole socially in the Hollywood club scene.) There I was cuddling up to actor Hugh O’Brian at a party in Aspen. There I was dining with Quincy Jones at Drai’s, a hip supper club in Beverly Hills. And that recently married son of an ex-president? Well, that could have been me, if someone were to blow a hole in the secrecy of it all and tip off the paparazzi, but I don’t make it a practice to get into a limousine (arranged by Washington’s top security people) with married men, particularly when I don’t know my destination. Dinner, they said. But for security reasons they couldn’t tell me where. Married and divorced three times, I did manage to learn something.

A gangster’s girlfriend and another’s wife who spent most of her life in the shadows of the underworld, a witness to murder and unspeakable brutality, a woman whose own life had been threatened more than once. That was me too.

A wheel-woman for the Mob, which is how I wound up doing stunts for a living, that early “getaway” training. I saw the “bad guys” do good things and the “good guys” commit crimes, distorting my view of reality. My young mind was manipulated by men who held tremendous power, not only in their own dark world, but also in our own government.

The CIA has nothing on the Mob, except for the fact that no one investigates them. Back in my New York days, the CIA had a sixteen-year relationship with the Mob, starting with Carlo Gambino, working closely together in money laundering, extortion, and murder. The Mob pulled the trigger, but the CIA loaded the gun. I don’t know if it still exists; I’m no longer around as a witness. It wasn’t easy moving away from this world, and I suppose I will always be bound in some way.

And then there’s the Georgia I was before I became Kodak’s Summer Girl and got married to the Mob: the good Catholic girl in my First Communion dress, looking shy and angelic, with a circle of white daisies surrounding my veil.

How did I get from there to here?

I discovered I’d built an entire professional persona, not in conjunction with my life as a woman, not in support of it, but in contradiction to it. My career has been a perfect avoidance technique for truths about my life I never wanted to face. As I have so often in my life when I entered a crisis, I thought only of the external, inanimate elements of that crisis, never the woman at the center. High-speed avoidance of the bad guys isn’t just what I do in front of the camera; it’s what I’ve done my entire life. Too much speed at the turns, too many split-second miscalculations, somebody else’s fault, my fault—who knows? Stuff happens, I thought.

And that is when I began writing this book.