Chapter 1 Star, Fucker! #2
By my bedside I keep a large, battered, brown leather photo album that my father created back in 1972. At the start of the album, he has written his daughter a letter.
Christina,
Today, May 26th, year 1972, you there he is again, smoking a joint (he’s written “Peace!” on that photo—of course he has).
There I am in a red outfit and white Mary Janes; sitting on his lap on a carousel horse; again on his lap as he plays a piano, no shirt (him, not me).
There I am in my mother’s arms, and at a birthday party; in a stroller, or peering in surprise at the flash from a photo booth, my father’s huge beard scratching my baby face.
But there are no pictures of me and my parents together. Instead, there are pictures of my father with a different partner, a different family.
In his note, my father references a trip east to New York and New Jersey. Right after I showed up that Thanksgiving in 1971, my paternal grandparents asked to see me—they lived in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. So when my mom went to New York for work, I went to see my grandparents.
In New York, my mom was to tape an episode of Days of Our Lives, and I was in the episode, too.
I was three months old. The episode, number 1,597, aired on March 7, 1972.
In it, I play baby Burt Grizzell, “son” of Mrs. Grizzell, played by my mother.
(I would be invited back for a subsequent episode, though without my mother this time, and still a boy.) Mom and I also did a Playtex Nurser commercial together, in which my mother is bottle-feeding me with a Playtex collapsible bottle while saying, “What a difference! Now she has less gas… because natural nipples mean less air in her tummy!”
(Three and a half decades later I would write in my diary, “Sat up again. Sponge bath humiliation. So gassy. That was funny. Walked to the window.” This was four days after the double mastectomy that saved my life.)
Two months later, my father wrote another letter to me in that album.
Oh my child we are together again, only to find that we shall be together always. We are in Big Sur now, and you are 8 months old—wow! Can you believe it? What is Big Sur, you asked—well, it’s a paradise for those who understand, those who wish to get back to the basics, but wish to grow…
That reference to Big Sur hangs heavy. When my mother called my father to say she was heading home from that first trip to the East Coast, his two-word reply devastated her and set in motion a chain of terrible events for me and my mom, events whose ripples still move through both of our lives.
“We’re on our way home,” my mom said.
“So soon?” my dad said.
He really didn’t need to say anything else.
There is a photo from that time that haunts me now because it presages so much of what was to come.
In it, my heavily bearded father is sitting cross-legged in a white sleeveless tee, head shaved, at the foot of what looks like two redwoods.
This is him at Big Sur—it appears he’s communing with something, almost Buddha-like, the once-slick music executive in a suit now replaced by this uncompromising figure in combat boots.
He looks more like he’s spent time in San Quentin than Monterey County.
With those two words—“So soon?”—Dad headed away from Nancy Priddy, away from his newborn, to make a new life in Big Sur on the Pacific Coast, six hours north of Laurel Canyon. When we arrived home, he was gone.
My father never came back.
For us, it was a disaster; for him, it would prove to be a kismet move.
On the first day he got to Big Sur, a woman staying at the same rooming house told him that she could feel his presence in the building.
Family lore goes that she wandered downstairs and said to Bob Applegate, “Are you a Scorpio?”
“Yes, I am,” he said, and that was about all it took—something ignited, and they were together from that moment on, early in 1972, right up until Tuesday, March 18, 2025, at 4:59 a.m., when my father died.
What to make of my father’s abandonment of me and my mother?
He always claimed that he was convinced that my mom was continuing to have an affair with Stephen Stills while she was pregnant with me, but anyone who’s ever been pregnant knows that the last thing you want to do is have sex with someone who’s not the father—if you want to have sex at all.
I think it was simply my dad’s way of justifying leaving us.
There is a third letter to me in that photo album.
Christina’s World by Daddy
We’ve been here now for 2 days. You, my darling, have caused quite a rush, not only for me but for everyone who touches you. These two days, as the few times we have spent together before, have been the highest, and most peaceful and fulfilling days of life.
Later tonight if it’s okay with you, we shall sit by the fire and together become one. So high—you make me so high!
I don’t think I was the only thing making my father high back then.
My father was doing a lot of acid in the early 1970s, and his brain seemed in chaos.
Acid will force a mind into telling lies to itself, lies like the one about my mother continuing to have a relationship with Stephen Stills.
They were lies my father believed, and lies that crushed my mother and would eventually confuse and hurt his new daughter, when she became old enough to know that her father was gone.
But there was so much more to my father’s life than LSD-generated stories. And it all began long before I showed up. When I uncovered the real story, everything changed, but that would take me another thirty years.
Bob was gone, into a new relationship, a new orbit, so high, so high, and my mother and I were left entirely alone.
I went to Big Sur as a little baby a few times, until my father and his new wife moved first to Burbank, in the Valley, and then to Woodland Hills, out on the 101 near Calabasas.
I was court-ordered to go to his new house, which had a pool, at least, every other weekend for years—I hated it, but I’ll admit I loved the pool and idyllic setting.
My father was by now back in the music business full-time, and things had gone well enough that he drove a Mercedes.
Mom and I had our beaten-down Nova and lived in a little row house.
It wasn’t entirely my dad’s fault that I didn’t like visiting.
I just wanted to be home with my mom. I vividly remember each time we’d head back on the 101.
The second I would see the communications tower above the Mulholland Tennis Club, which signals the high point of Laurel Canyon, I’d get giddy—great fluttering butterflies in my stomach—because I knew I was going to see her.
It was just the two of us, Nancy Priddy and her daughter, Christina Applegate, alone together in Laurel Canyon.
When I would come home, I’d get the same feeling as when we would go to Magic Mountain—I’d see the waterslide on the hill and know I was close to one of my favorite places in all of Southern California.
My mom was always my Magic Mountain, too.
Back in 1968, in the gatefold of her album, my mother had written a short essay to introduce herself. This is how it begins.
One day a lyricist and good friend of mine said to me, “Nancy, why do you always write sad lyrics? You seem to see primarily the negative side of things.” Taken back a little, I went home and started reading through the reams of backs of envelopes, scraps of crumpled papers, and an occasional poorly typed piece of onion skin that I had accumulated.
What a discovery one can make about oneself.
It’s not unlike a Rorschach test or finding strange patterns in a collection of doodles.
What I discovered was not necessarily negativism or sadness, but an obvious quality of disappointment throughout the somewhat subconscious ramblings.
I am an Aquarian and have been told that I am the true embodiment of Aquarius—for what it’s worth.
It’s not negativism, but extreme positivism that is at the basis of what I write—an incurable idealism that often gets rained, snowed, sleeted, and hailed upon by life.
Three years later, her love affair with my father over, the positivism of the move west and the birth of a child had been utterly subsumed by the rain, snow, sleet, and hail of abandonment.
And so was set a pattern that I too would follow my entire life: I share with my mother an idealism, a positivism, that is so often followed by terrible weather.
In thinking back across my life, I have realized that when good things happen to me, as many good things have, they are invariably stalked by darkness, dampened by subsequent tragedies and trauma.
My mother wrote, “I went home and started reading through the reams of backs of envelopes, scraps of crumpled papers, and an occasional poorly typed piece of onion skin… What a discovery one can make about oneself. It’s not unlike a Rorschach test or finding strange patterns in a collection of doodles.
What I discovered was not necessarily negativism or sadness, but an obvious quality of disappointment.
” In my mom’s words, I see not only her own foreshadowing of the pain Bob Applegate would bring into her life, but my own story, too.
Here I am, looking back through the “scraps of crumpled papers” that constitute my own diaries, and I find throughout a similar sense of disappointment.
These days, as I sit on my bed in pain from the MS, my acting and dancing careers over, I think about the moments in my life when wonderful things have been followed by the dreadful.
I finally made it to Broadway, only to get a terrible injury; I finally got the role of a lifetime in Dead to Me, only to find out I had MS halfway through.
This pattern is seemingly a genetic gift from my mother, a woman so haunted by her own disappointments that she chose to highlight them in the sleeve notes to her album.
My father had escaped to chase a different consciousness in Big Sur, away, perhaps, from the shadows he saw in my mother’s eyes.
She and I, meanwhile, had to pick up the pieces however best we could.
She tried her best to make our odd little house a home, but it was hard.
Among its many “charms” was one narrow, three-foot-by-two-foot door near the ceiling that you had to walk up tiny stairs to reach and then crouch through to get to my bedroom, which was itself an illegally converted garage.
It also housed for free so many fleas that when I wore white socks to school, there would be hundreds of tiny black dots visible on them.
My mom never made us feel like we were poor, though, whatever she was facing on a daily basis.
She certainly never said we were poor. The only thing she did say regularly was, “Don’t spend your money because you might be poor one day.
” She taught me the value of things, and I still have those values.
That’s why to this day I mostly wear secondhand clothing, which is often stuff I stole from set.
My mom’s words—“Be careful”—ring in my ears.
But it wasn’t all bad. We could still drive our Nova down the mountain to the movies, just the two of us. We could join the lines on May 25, 1977, to see the magic of Star Wars for the first time. And a five-year-old girl could still dream of a future when she too had a star.
It’s no exaggeration to say that from that moment in 1977 onward, my whole goal in life was to get a star on that Walk of Fame.
Because if that was to happen—if one day a crowd would gather and watch a star with my name on it be revealed from under a banner—then I’d be on this spinning planet forever.
And maybe someday some kid would say, “Who’s that, Mommy?
” And maybe the mommy gets to explain who I was.
An Oscar would be lovely, but you know what?
You win the Oscar, give a six-minute speech, and nobody cares two days later, especially if your speech lasts six minutes just like it inevitably does the first time you give one.
You put the naked-man statue in your guest bathroom, and it’s over.
Ask an Oscar recipient where they keep their trinket and they’re likely to have to take a moment to remember exactly where it is.
But a star? Encased in concrete? Assuming no earthquake destroys it, the worst you’d have to deal with would be the traipsing feet of millions of tourists. No one ever forgets where their star resides—everyone knows the exact cross street without hesitation.
So a star became my lofty goal. A star would be my Oscar.