Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  The fact is I had learned a lot about both the craft and logistics of acting since my first on-screen roles. By logistics I mean things like which gate you enter at Warner Brothers, where hair and makeup is located at CBS, where you’ll find stage 13 at Paramount (there is no stage 13 — ha!). And as far as craft goes, I mean what can you deliver emotionally, what kind of authenticity can you bring to a character when the director says “Action” and the crew goes silent and 150 lights in the rigging overhead are warming your skin.

  Something was working because I was getting parts. But I’d often find myself on set preparing for a scene and feel my breath coming more quickly and a rising sense of panic like “I don’t know if I can do this.” Or I’d feel as though the people who’d hired me hadn’t done their homework and didn’t realize their mistake.

  The truth is I was well liked. A number of directors hired me for multiple projects. Part of that may have been because I was never any trouble — always showed up prepared, didn’t question anything, simply did my lines and got out of the way.

  Peter Tewksbury, whose career went back to the early days of television, directed all the episodes that I was in on My Three Sons and later asked me to come play a role on another show he was directing called It’s a Man’s World. And then again, when he moved into features and was directing the Sandra Dee and George Hamilton big-screen comedy, Doctor, You Must Be Kidding, he again asked me to come play a role.

  The sense of inadequacy I felt with Tim was mirrored in my lack of confidence on set. And like anyone would, I looked for ways to bolster my feelings about myself. Alcohol was an obvious crutch but with Tim’s self-imposed sobriety, I could really only indulge in that away from him.

  Drinking was only part of the picture though. I was hungry for something deeper. Something bigger than myself. Something spiritual. Growing up, our family had been more or less Catholic. My dad never went to any sort of church but my mom was sort of a holiday Catholic, going to Mass on Christmas Eve. My sister Barbara Jean, however, was big into it, in part perhaps because it offered an escape from our home. She nearly always took me to Mass with her. When I moved away and went to the Pasadena Playhouse I attended Mass regularly there. Not entirely because I was a serious believer but because it was a connection to home.

  While dating Tim, a friend had invited me to check out the Hollywood Christian Group. There were a lot of familiar industry faces at these once-a-week meetings. And it wasn’t heavy-duty stuff. I just found it inspirational. One night the speaker was Dale Evans, who was well-known for appearing on TV and film alongside her husband, Roy Rogers, whom I’d almost met as a child. I don’t remember the specifics of what Dale talked about that night — probably things that had happened in her life and ways that her beliefs had seen her through hard times.

  On the way home in the car, I came to a stop light on Vine Street when suddenly I had the feeling that my dad needed something. He needed it urgently. I didn’t know what it was but I felt his presence right there with me. I’d never felt such a powerful sense of someone being with me like that.

  I knew my parents were on a little getaway together in Calistoga, up in Napa Valley, spending a few days at one of their favorite hot springs spas. I couldn’t imagine what this feeling meant but right then and there, I did the only thing I could. I prayed for my dad — asking God that Honey get whatever it was he needed.

  Back at my apartment, about an hour later I got a telephone call from my brother Lewis — Dad had died. My sweet, quiet, loving father was suddenly gone.

  Earlier that day at the spa, he’d walked from their room out to the truck to retrieve something and he’d had a sudden, incapacitating spasm of pain in his abdomen. The agony was so intense he couldn’t move. He could only honk the horn until help came.

  My mom followed the ambulance as it took him to St. Helena Hospital, which was only a few miles away. There they stabilized him and it looked like he was going to be okay. The truth is things weren’t good for him health-wise. He was 80 lbs. overweight or more and ten years prior had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver from years of alcoholism. But that night, they’d knocked the pain in his liver and he was feeling better, though they’d need to keep him for a few days. My mom asked the physician if she should remain there or if she could run back to Yuba City to get the things they’d need for a longer stay. Because all signs were good, the physician said it’d be fine for her to go.

  On her way back home that night, dad’s temperature spiked, and with very little warning he died, slipping from this world in an unfamiliar hospital room surrounded by strangers. For a guy who had always loved being around his family it must have been an awful and disorienting way to go. At the very moment of his passing I was on Vine St., sensing him calling out to me.

  He was just 56 years old.

  Even now, more than 50 years later, I still feel the loss of a girl losing her daddy. And tears still blur my eyes when I think of that night.

  Tim had no interest in the Hollywood Christian Center nor in organized religion in general. He didn’t give me a hard time about going, it just wasn’t his thing. What he did have interest in was transcendental meditation and so on our second anniversary we went to the Westwood Meditation Center where we studied meditation techniques and were given our mantra — the multi-vowel word that you repeat as you descend into a meditative state. Typically each student is given their own mantra but since we were a couple we were given the same word, which I found annoying. I wanted my own.

  We threw ourselves into mediation. Practicing at home, continuing to go to the center, and even going to a retreat in Tahoe where we worked with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who founded the Transcendental Meditation movement, videotaping his hours-long talks. Honestly, meditation didn’t do a lot for me. I was trying to find something that Tim and I could do together as a couple. That’s what couples do, right? Couple things. By now his Go Cart racing had become boring to me. Hanging out with the other drivers and mechanics and their wives was drudgery. His photography was interesting. He was really good. We’d become friends with Joni Mitchell, a Laurel Canyon neighbor and we’d go down to the Troubadour to watch her perform. Tim took a gazillion pictures of her. In fact one of his best is on the cover of her iconic Blue album.

  The problem with photography is that he spent a lot of time in the dark room.

  I kept up the mediation, at some point, simply for the social side of it. But I could feel things changing in our relationship…we were drifting from each other. Hollywood was old news to Tim but it was still a very shiny new object to me. I was in my twenties and living in a town of limitless possibilities — for work, for parties, for friends, for sex, for drugs, for everything that made being alive exhilarating.

  It killed me to stay home at night. How could you possibly spend an evening at home when you were young and good-looking and in movies and in the heart of Tinseltown? Someone somewhere was having more fun than I was and I wanted that someone to be me.

  At a meditation retreat I met Richard Beymer again — whom I’d first run into at the commissary at Goldwyn Studios while I was shooting The Loretta Young Show and he was filming West Side Story. I still thought Richard was one of the yummiest men alive and soon we were meeting up for drinks and seeing each other and all the rest.

  Meanwhile, back in Laurel Canyon Tim and I lived next door to a well-known architect, Jon Jerde and his wife Gail. Jon was an intense, fascinating, brooding kind of guy. The sort who would tear through the Hollywood Hills on his motorcycle at three in the morning when he couldn’t sleep. When the timing was right, Jon or I would sneak through the opening in our back fence for a quickie.

  Also, my old friend from the Pasadena Playhouse days, Stuart Margolin, lived around the corner. There was some long-standing attraction between us that had been the inspiration for his 1965 two-person one-act play called Involution, which Stuart directed and I performed at The Cellar Door Theater with Smokey Roberds. Coleman Andrews wrote a terrific
review in the Free Press saying that the play was at times painful “because one has to constantly remind oneself that it is only a play, and not a nightmare repetition of something that took place in one’s own life not too long before.” He added that “Smokey Roberds and Charlotte Stewart live the play, as though it were written for them.” Funny Coleman should say that.

  By now my relationship with Stuart had progressed a great deal past the stage of Involution in which we’d been dancing around the idea of mutual attraction. We were now getting together at his house or at mine whenever possible. There were other men too, like Johnny Mandel, the composer who wrote “Shadow of Your Smile” and “Suicide is Painless” and still others in situations best described as dressing-room flings.

  There’s no way to dress any of this up as quirky, romantic, or adventurous. By our second year of marriage I was cheating on Tim.

  Why did I sleep around? At the time, I told myself it was fun and it felt good. On a deeper level though, and in hindsight, I realize that an unsettling portrait of our relationship had emerged for me. The house we lived in was Tim’s house. My name wasn’t on it. We never had a joint bank account. He never visited my parents in Yuba City; they always had to come south. And then there was the business of the cheap Disneyland engagement ring. Yes, Tim married me, but underneath it all, I wasn’t sure why — I didn’t seem important to him. I didn’t feel like I measured up. This was never going to be a partnership. I was never going to have a say. He’d made that clear to me yet again when, as a wedding present he had bought me a 1966 Mustang, which I absolutely loved. Then one day I came home and it was gone. He informed me that he thought it was junk and — without any prior discussion — sold it to a friend of his. With no offer of a replacement car, my parents gave me their Country Squire Station Wagon, which I drove around Hollywood, while Tim drove his Mercedes.

  By contrast, the men I slept with wanted me. I ranked high in their priorities. They risked a lot to be with me. I felt desired. I felt good enough. To them I wasn’t Charlotte from Yuba City. I was just Charlotte, an actress from Laurel Canyon — I was pretty, confident, sexy, and great in bed. That’s the Charlotte I wanted to be. But being her and being married to Tim meant telling a lot of lies about where I’d been, who I’d been with, how I’d spent my day, how I felt about our lives together. Lies that built up and up and up requiring more sex and more alcohol to make each day livable. Like drinking one poison as an antidote to another.

  Chapter 4

  Meltdown

  By 1969 it was clear I couldn’t keep this up. I was living an entire life apart from Tim — a life I had to work harder and harder to conceal. I had to conceal my restlessness, discontent, anger, sadness, recklessness, and self-loathing. It’s hard to be “the bad guy.” In a situation like this the most comforting thing you can do is concoct an alternate narrative in which everything you’ve done is someone else’s fault. Blame your spouse. Blame your upbringing. Blame Hollywood. Blame the ‘60s. Fault anything but yourself. Delusion can be very cheering. But I couldn’t pull that off. I knew what I had promised at the altar, knew what Tim believed about us, and what he imagined our future to look like.

  I also understood that while I had loved the sparkly swirl of our dating life, our honeymoon, and the early romantic days, I clearly, clearly, clearly wasn’t ready to spend the rest of my life being Mrs. Tim Considine.

  I cared deeply for Tim and I didn’t think of myself as a quitter but I didn’t know what to do. I was in more pain than I’d ever known: greater than the abortion, greater than my dad’s death. Pain that was becoming more impossible to keep inside.

  Then I was just done.

  I reached a breaking point where I couldn’t lie anymore and I couldn’t tell the truth. The constant, grinding inner turmoil, the fear, the churning in my stomach, the unbearable self-hate — I just wanted it to stop.

  Tim was going to be away for the weekend for his Air Force Reservist training and it seemed like the best moment to resolve everything.

  I was in a play at the time and I drove into town and informed the director that I couldn’t be in the show any longer.

  He responded, understandably, by losing his mind.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m sick. I can’t be in the play.”

  I’d never done anything like this before. My whole career had been all about never missing an audition, an appointment, a day of shooting or a performance, never calling in sick, never questioning a director, never knowingly being a disappointment. In my professional life, being five minutes early was being late. I always knew my lines, tried to have amicable relationships with everyone in the cast and crew, did my best to please.

  But the truth is, I was sick. Down to my very core.

  After leaving the theater, I was driving home along Highway 1 with the Pacific stretched out to the horizon and I thought, “This is the last time I’ll see the ocean…this is my last day…”

  I got back to the house and wrote a note that simply said, “I’m sorry.” I sat on the bed and poured a bunch of Miltown tablets into my hand — Miltown was a popular relaxant, a precursor to Valium and Xanax. I swallowed enough to do the job and just as I was lying down I heard a knock at our gate. I’m not sure why but I got up and looked outside. It was a neighbor who saw me peek through the blinds. He waved and I stuck my head out the door. Turns out he’d brought his mother over to meet me. I smiled, excused myself, and went into the bathroom, stuck my finger down my throat and brought up the Miltown. It would be terribly rude to pass out in front of company.

  The three of us visited for a while and when they left, with that final farce over, I began again — swallowing the remaining Miltown tablets, lying down next to the suicide note, closing my eyes, and feeling darkness wash over me.

  To a queasy mix of surprise, disappointment, and relief, I realized I was waking up. How long I was asleep, my body dutifully metabolizing all that Miltown, I don’t know. It may have been hours, a day, perhaps longer.

  Tim was lying next to me.

  He’d read the note and wanted to know what it meant.

  I started crying. This was it.

  I had no way out.

  I told him I had another life, that I’d been going out, that I’d been sleeping around.

  He listened with a kind of palpable intensity emanating from him. He told me in a quiet, steady voice that he wanted to know everything and I didn’t hold back.

  Maybe I should have kept some of it to myself. Maybe I went too far. Was I giving him the honesty he was asking for or was I just vomiting up all the toxins that were inside of me? My suicide attempt hadn’t been a cry for help. I thought I was beyond help. I couldn’t imagine what else would make the pain go away. Everything had gotten so complicated. I couldn’t justify my behavior. I was seeing so many men while trying to please so many people. I couldn’t say no and felt completely out of control.

  Tim didn’t yell, didn’t cry, didn’t make a scene, didn’t demand that I leave. He absorbed it all and then called my mother, calmly told her that I was very sick, and asked if she would come down for a few days.

  Other than that, his reaction was numbness. Silence.

  Mom flew down right away and he was polite and nice to her and he seemed to tolerate my presence reasonably but it was a very tense week. I don’t know what Tim told her. Perhaps not much. The only details I gave her was that I had attempted suicide — though told her nothing about all the reasons for it — which I knew that, especially after losing my dad, would be devastating to her. When she left she said to me, “We will never speak of this again.” And she didn’t. Not a word, not a hint. That’s how she dealt with things like this, with pure stoicism.

  Now it was just the two of us again in a very quiet house. Tim had shut down. He literally sat on the couch and stared at the wall for what seemed like weeks.

  I apologized in every possible way. I tried to get him to talk, tried to break through. But he simply wouldn’t — or
couldn’t — respond. He was completely traumatized.

  I remember sitting in the living room watching him sit in silence. And I knew that I would never be able to say “I’m sorry” enough. It was over. There were no pieces to pick up.

  With enormous, choking sadness, I told Tim that I was moving out and wanted a divorce.

  In the meantime, Gail Jerde from next door had gotten wind of what happened and she and Jon were in the process of splitting up. She’d moved in with her parents for the time being. She knew I was looking for a place and asked if I wanted to move in too.

  You had to know Gail to understand this. She didn’t hold anything against me — as far as she was concerned, Jon was a lousy human being. She loved to tell people when we went out together that I’d slept with her ex-husband. She even dragged me along with her to one of their divorce sessions in court. She was very entertained by this.

  When it came time to deal with lawyers in our divorce, I made it clear that I didn’t want any of Tim’s money and being lawyers of course they suspected that I was up to something. They actually required me to undergo a psychological evaluation because they thought I was either crazy or was feigning mental instability for some cunning purpose.

  In fact, I didn’t want Tim’s money. I knew how hard he’d worked for it. But the biggest reason was simple — I didn’t deserve any. Again, I’d stood in a church and vowed to Tim to be faithful and I’d broken that promise and in doing so had broken his heart and had damaged his spirit.