Mary Weiland, Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Mental Illness. Mary Forsberg Weiland, wife of Scott Weiland, frontman of the famous band Stone Temple Pilots is making noise today with her new book. Weiland’s book Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Mental Illness tells the story of Scott Weiland shot to fame as frontman for 90s era grunge band Stone Temple Pilots which took the name literally.
Scott Weiland was stoned most of the time, strung out on heroin, often with his wife Mary Forsberg Weiland at his side. Mary Weiland says they were shooting up so much they had to wear long sleeves at a Fourth of July party at the Malibu home of Leonardo DiCaprio to hide the needle marks in their arms from the heroin.
That’s just one of the anecdotes Mary recounts about her time with Weiland and the band in her new memoir, “Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Mental Illness.”
Weiland a former model and now divorced, wrote the book with former Esquire editor Larkin Warren. She says she first met Scott when he was hired as a “go-fer” to drive her to modeling gigs for $8 an hour. It was the beginning of a relationship marked by all of the extravagance and decadence of rock ‘n roll.
Much of the time the couple spent together, they were doing drugs. “Scott would bring me a framed Neil Zlozower photograph of [Rolling Stone] Keith Richards; I’d lay out the goods right on top of Keith.”
Once while the power rock couple was attending a Playboy Mansion party Scott headed for the bathroom and disappeared: “I had no clue till much later that Scott’s time in the bathroom was spent with a crack pipe in his mouth,” she says.
Mary was pulled into the high-flying world of drug, sex and rock n’ roll as a 16-year-old model. Her biggest claim to fame came in March 2007, when she dragged husband Scott’s pricey rock-star wardrobe to their driveway and torched it. She was locked up in a mental hospital and diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder. Watching all this were her frightened extended family, and a conflicted husband wrestling with demons of his own. The tabloids called it the “Bonfire in Toluca Lake.”
“The bonfire was huge and very pretty. Everything went up in smoke quickly, except the shoe leather; the Guccis took the longest,” she writes. “The news reports said I’d torched $10,000 worth of Scott’s clothes, which was wrong by a factor of eight. He was somewhat insulted at their estimate: ‘Eighty thousand dollars, Mary,’ he said later.”
Stone Temple Pilots sold nearly 40 million records worldwide, including 17.5 million in the United States. Fifteen singles hit the top ten on the rock charts, including six number ones, and 1994’s Purple hit No. 1 on the pop chart.
In 1994, the band won a Grammy for “Best Hard Rock Performance” for their song “Plush”. Stone Temple Pilots were also ranked at number 40 on VH1’s “The 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.” Weiland’s drug addiction and run-ins with the law are credited with helping to break up the band.
