But this time instead of pouncing and attacking, Mom paused. Her eyes got stuck on the stitches in Tiffany’s forehead and the anger drained from her face. She studied the scars setting in, Tiffany’s skin dotted with purple here and there. Then she leaned forward and her head fell into the palms of her hands.
I looked over from the pan I was stirring. Dad hung in the doorway, still looking at the ceiling. Mom’s eyes were hidden in her hands, and I couldn’t tell if she was crying or just exhausted into silence. Tiffany had returned to her magazine, her feet tucked underneath her and her shoulders rolled forward, her whole body curved protectively into a ball. I turned off the burner, and as the gas flame popped and went out, the room fell silent.
CHAPTER NINE
I walked down the hallway, tugging at the hem of my navy blue pleated skirt. I wondered if I’d shortened my new school uniform a little too much, since it fell to about the same length as my cheerleading skirt. I tucked in the hem of my blue collared shirt as I neared the classroom. The taskmasters at my new school were fanatics about the dress code.
Two girls stood at their locker. One said, “That’s her!” Then they turned back just as quickly and started whispering.
I’d graduated from elementary school to Chaminade College Prep, the Catholic coed school where Tiffany went. Everyone on campus knew me as the girl from Little House on the Prairie. When I’d gone to cheerleading camp the summer before school started with the other girls who’d made the Chaminade squad, twelve- and thirteen-year-old cheerleaders had mobbed my room looking for Cassandra.
“Is she in there?” I’d heard a girl say in the hall while I stayed hidden in my room, tired of being a spectacle. The girl knocked, and I could see through the peephole that she’d brought half a dozen friends in matching blue and white cheerleading uniforms and pigtails that bounced as they turned their heads to one another.
“I’m going to slide this program under the door. Maybe she’ll sign it if I put a note on it. Let’s come back after lunch,” the leader of the group said. She turned and left as the rest of her squad trailed after her.
Little House on the Prairie had been out of the primetime lineup for almost three years, but the fervor around the show had yet to die down. It still ran every day in reruns on the syndicated channels, in more than one language, so they’d cycle through the seasons pretty quickly. You could always tell when they’d gotten to my years, because more people would stop me on the street than usual.
For the first half of seventh grade, I was so distracted by a new middle school and a huge batch of new classmates and friends that I barely noticed that I hadn’t worked much. I was grateful not to be working, in fact, because I didn’t want to miss a minute of my new life. I moved from class to class, mixing with different kids every period. I had eight teachers instead of one, a whole range of new subjects to dig into, like chemistry and Spanish. And then there was a brand-new selection of boys. The student body was almost ten times the size of my old school.
I’d scored a handful of meaty commercials during the summer and the fall, national spots that ran often and filled the mailbox with checks. Every afternoon my mom brought in the mail, quickly sifting the junk mail and tucking the envelopes with checks in a neat stack inside her purse.
But while commercials still seemed a dependable “get,” the theatrical roles were proving to be more of a challenge. Fellow veterans were no longer peers but major roadblocks, Sydney Penny in particular. She was petite and absolutely gorgeous with dark skin and shiny dark eyes that set off her sparkling white teeth and pink nail-beds. Mom said she looked “ethnic,” but casting directors who would normally complain about the challenge of matching someone with Cherokee roots to a set of fictional parents didn’t seem to mind. Even though she was a couple of years older than I, her smaller frame helped her pass for my age and thus take my roles as well as the ones in her age bracket.
She wasn’t the only problem. There were too many other girls like her. The field had simply gotten a lot more competitive now that we were all young teens who knew the drill, understood the value of working, and showed up at auditions hungry.
But a few months into seventh grade, just when I was starting to really worry I was washing up as an actress, I somehow landed a big one. This was the perfect role to end a dry patch, the lead on a new series on NBC. The creators had already sold a slate of episodes to the network, and the first one was centered on my character and a little brother.
The premise was wildly improbable. The show focused on a combined orphanage and old-age home. I was pretty sure orphanages didn’t exist anymore, although this would be my third or fourth time inhabiting a fictional one on TV. The show was called Morningstar, Eveningstar just in case the viewer missed the juxtaposition of the oldies and the kids, all left for dead by their biological families. The script and the dialogue were saccharine sweet, but then again I had come from the corniest family drama ever to enthrall viewers.
The new show was even shot on the MGM lot where we did Little House. Returning to work on the lot was like going home, if home was a place where you’d find a new crew of kids in your bedroom every time you returned.
The producers cast Fred Savage, a boy out of Chicago, to be my little brother. Fred was short and round, with a pudgy nose, dark eyes, and a mop of coarse curly dark hair that fell in his eyes when it got too long. We didn’t actually match that well physically since my eyes and hair were both lighter, but the producers figured it was close enough. Fred had come out to L.A. with his mom for the job and brought a midwestern accent with him.
The show had seven adults and seven kids for balance. Tammy Lauren played one of the older girls. She was about six years older than I and a veteran like myself. Like so many successful child actors, Tammy was fit and had a compact frame, and was pretty but not stunning. She had bouncy blonde blunt-cut hair that fell to her shoulders and swung when she walked, and bright blue eyes. All her features were bigger than the space they filled: eyes, nose, teeth and lips, which was also a common trait among actors. Mom always said successful actors had little bodies and huge heads and even bigger facial features because that’s what the camera liked.
Tammy’s loud, friendly, funny demeanor made almost everyone like her immediately. Like a true workhorse, she showed up every day, lines learned, acting choices made, hoping to stand out and outshine the rest of us or prove to the writers the next episode should be based on her. She was competitive, but only with herself, never the rest of us, which was rare in our business.
The boy closest to my age was Joaquin Phoenix. He’d decided to call himself Leaf, though, to fit in with his older siblings who had the woodsy names, River and Rain. Rain, however, was currently calling herself Rainbow, so who knew what anyone’s real name was in that family. River never came to the set, but Rainbow hung around all the time, and I took to her immediately because of her free-spirited friendliness. With her round face and warm smile, she loved life and lacked the bitchiness girls my age were already developing. She and Leaf had two younger sisters as well, Liberty and Summer, who looked like twins to me but weren’t.
Leaf was younger than me but handsome in a rough way with wavy brown hair, light eyes and red lips. He was born in Puerto Rico to parents who were missionaries for the Church of God, which explained a lot. The whole family could sing and play instruments, and they’d traveled through Central and South America in a van, singing in tiny town squares for donations to buy food. On the set, Leaf had declined to eat a Caesar salad because it had egg in it and he was vegan, a practice I’d never heard of.
In spite of this perceived worldliness, a lot of basic stuff I took for granted was brand-new to him because Leaf’s parents homeschooled their children, regardless of whether they were traveling or in one place. The birthday party we threw for him in the studio schoolroom turned out to be the first one he’d ever had.
“Happy birthday, Leaf!” the teacher chimed in when we finished the song. She presented him wit
h a cake that craft services had made without eggs.
We crowded in to hug him and pat him on the back, and his eyes welled up with tears. Then he hugged the set teacher as if she’d given him a kidney.
“I haven’t had a party like this before,” he said quietly, now suddenly shy.
I couldn’t believe he’d missed the gravy train of presents all those years, but he seemed more struck by the gesture. I was charmed by the idea that he’d seen so much of the world and also so little.
Two older boys and a young black girl who wasn’t even in school yet filled out the seven, but I stuck mostly to the Phoenix clan or Tammy.
On Little House, we’d spent half our days on the lot, and the other half outdoors in Simi Valley, and on the Simi days, the show runner would hand out per diems. A per diem consisted of a little yellow envelope filled with cash that was supposed to cover our gas and expenses for not being on the lot. Ironically, on the per diem days, they also fed you from the world-class catering truck in addition to doling out gas money. The per diem equaled twenty-seven bucks a day, which Mom let me keep. That kind of cash really stacked up in my piggy bank at home.
But on this new show, we spent every day on the lot, so no per diem. And on the lot, the cast had to fend for themselves when it came to food and buy what was available out of their own pocket. We could leave the property, though we only had an hour.
I loved to eat at the studio commissary. Mom said it was expensive, but they had crackers on the table and you got to see many of the other actors who were on the lot shooting different shows, so we became regulars. I always ordered a BLT sandwich. Leaf’s mom thought the commissary was pricey too, so her brood rarely visited, but Tammy and her mom often joined us.
When the show started, Mom finally told me what I was getting paid. I was making five thousand dollars per episode, which was great money for a fourteen-year-old girl in the late’80s. I think she couldn’t help herself this time. She was brimming with the news. She’d fired my agent and hired a new one who had brokered this deal. She’d lined up Harry Gold, Missy and Tracey Gold’s father. They were both very successful child actors with regular shows and their dad had managed their careers so well he decided to make managing kids his business.
“See,” Mom told Dad. “Jack wouldn’t have gotten this much money.” Jack was the agent she’d fired.
Dad was standing at the sink shaving, and she was sitting on the edge of their bed, where she could look into the bathroom and talk to his reflection in the mirror.
“How much money?” I piped in. No one had noticed that I’d entered the bedroom.
“You don’t need to worry about that,” she said.
“Come on,” I pressed.
“Five thousand dollars an episode,” she boasted.
I was dazzled. Five grand went a long way back then. It took a week and a half to do an episode so I calculated I’d be rich by the end of the year. She quickly straightened me out.
“They only sold seven episodes. So you’re getting $35,000 for the whole thing until they rerun it, and the government takes about half.”
“What?” That seemed illegal to me.
“I know. I always fill out the form that you have ten dependents so they don’t take the money right away, but we have to pay the IRS at the end of the year anyway, so they get you one way or the other.”
I put the fact that I had to give away half my earnings to the government on the back burner and started to plan for the other part. “What are we buying? Can I have a new horse?”
“No. It all goes into the bank for college. You know that.”
“That account must have a bazillion dollars in it by now,” I said.
“I’ll never tell,” Mom said.
After the first episode aired, I got the sense the show was a clunker. Even though I was only fourteen and probably didn’t have the most sophisticated taste, I knew Morningstar was hokey beyond belief. There was a catchphrase we all said at the end of the first episode, “Rain on you!” which made absolutely no sense to me. When we all delivered the punch line together, I hoped I was the only one who didn’t get it.
Unfortunately, the critics didn’t get it either. Somehow hitting the audience over the head with obvious moral lessons had worked for Little House but failed miserably for this show. We were in the midst of shooting the third episode when the first one aired to mostly crickets. It was a blow. Everyone hoped for a miracle, but there are few miracles in TV land. If no one watches, and the critics don’t encourage people to tune in, it’s pretty much hopeless.
They’d hired an acting coach to work with the kids, which I immediately resented. I’d never been coached, never taken a single acting class, and had always won praise on the set. To motivate me, Mom shared that the consensus among the writers was that Leaf was the best actor in the bunch. That certainly irked me.
“I’m going to tell you what Sherry said, but this is meant to make you better,” Mom said. Sherry was the new acting coach. We were in the car, and I kept my eyes on the road. Directors and casting agents had always said my acting was authentic, that I didn’t overact or sing my lines like so many kids who thought they were way up onstage in the school pageant playing to the last row of seats.
“They all think Leaf walks on water of course. Probably because of his older brother. But I have to say, the kid’s a good little actor. Tammy’s a hard worker; she’s always thinking about the scene that came before the one she’s in, where her character is emotionally, sort of where she’s been and where she’s going. But she can overact,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
Mom had paid keen attention to the comments from the writers and directors over the years. Her on-the-job training had transformed her into a spot-on critic.
“David,” she continued, referring to one of the older boys, “David is hopeless. He’s never worked before and it shows. He’s in way over his head and the episode they did around him is tragic.” She ticked down the list.
“Freddy’s got good potential they say, but he’s hammy. He’s always rolling his eyes. He puts in a bit of a canned performance, like his mom spends all her time telling him exactly how to say each line. He can do a take ten times, and the words will come out the same, every single time. Nothing real about it.”
She paused.
Here it comes, I thought. I could feel my temperature rise, and the backs of my legs start to stick to the leather of the car seat. She glanced at me briefly, but delivered most of her critique to the traffic in front of her.
“And you. Sometimes you’re engaged, and sometimes you throw away your lines. Leaf is focused and every performance is real. He beat the hell out of you in that scene where the two of you were supposed to get in a fistfight, and he was right to do it. I know he hurt you, just like he would have in real life. You and Allison used to do that fake fighting on Little House, and I should have stepped in and told you it looked staged and silly. Someone should have pointed it out. I was counting on Michael or someone to say something if it wasn’t right. I thought I knew the least of everyone there, but I should have told you.” She shook her head.
“They say Leaf’s committed, every single time. Do you understand what that means? To commit to the character? You have to get into her shoes and really believe you are her and believe what are you saying. Not thinking about getting back to the schoolroom to finish your math work. Not thinking about what you want for lunch. I’ve always left the acting to you. Just taught you the lines and left the way you said it up to you. That’s worked for fourteen years. But this is what Sherry and the writers are saying. In fact, they told me to talk to you because they don’t think you are taking Sherry seriously.”
I hadn’t moved a muscle during the lecture, hadn’t made a sound. I hated what she was saying, hated what I was hearing, hated what I knew to be true. But that wasn’t slowing her down.
“You are not always disciplined about acting. You are not taking your craft seriously enough. I think you ta
ke it for granted. You have to get serious now and work harder. If this show doesn’t get picked up, you only have these performances, and every single one is a precious gift. You need to work like every performance could be your last. Because it could be. I am seriously afraid it could be.”
We rode the rest of the way home in silence. The message burned like a block of dry ice I had tried to grab out of an Igloo cooler on the set. It seemed harmless at first, but before I knew what was happening, it was stuck to my hand, searing the skin until I could figure out how to scrape it off.
The last episode we shot of Morningstar was ripped right out of the Little House playbook. A fictional family came to visit the orphanage and wanted to adopt my little brother, Fred Savage’s character, but not me. Freddy and I were the only pair who had two shows centered on them in the original seven-episode slate.
I wanted to make the most of this opportunity, since Mom had told me so pointedly that this could be my last shot for a while. But when we rehearsed the scene, my voice came out sounding as if someone else were talking. I tried again, but every line sounded wrong, and I couldn’t imagine what would make them sound right. I was so focused on doing the best I could, I had lost my footing and was floundering. Now I just wanted to get through the scene alive.
Just to make life a little more interesting, Mom had pointed out that the Levi’s they had bought for me to wear in the first episode were now snug. I assumed they’d shrunk, but Mom reminded me that they’d washed the hell out of them before we started shooting since we were all supposed to be orphans with handed-down clothes. She told me I’d made too many trips to the craft services snack table in the afternoon when they put out all the cookies and candies.
“Tammy never eats that junk. Look how disciplined she is. Meanwhile, you’ve packed on the pounds. Look at that rubber tire around your waist! And now those jeans are tight on your thighs too,” Mom pointed out after rehearsal.
Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter Page 11
