Chapter 4 Quit #2
I don’t hold that friend responsible—after all, who knows which words we say or things we do might dramatically affect those around us?
She could not have known that three words would set me on a course that would lead directly to me being unable to bask in the successes I’ve been lucky enough to have had in my career.
So much so that it is hard for me to even talk about my work in this book; the thought that anything I say might be construed as bragging fills me with a quiet terror.
Deep down I’m proud of what I’ve done, of pushing past the deprivations of my life and having a successful career, but I’ll be damned if I’ll say that out loud.
And here’s why: I had made it clear to one of my dearest friends that I never wanted to brag about what was happening to me professionally.
The phrase I used was, “Tell me if I ever get weird with what I’m doing.
” And I meant it—I didn’t want to be one of those people who thought that my job as an actor somehow signified that I was special.
We actors can get so self-regarding, as though the act of inhabiting a character that is different from ourselves is some kind of alchemy, when in fact it’s a trade, as mystical and mysterious as knowing how to cut hair or unclog a sink.
Acting for me had always been a job of survival; acting was how my family ate.
Just because there were cameras and audiences didn’t mean that what I did was necessarily hallowed or rarefied.
I knew the techniques required to be funny, for example—that didn’t mean I had the keys to cosmic comedy.
I just understood where the beats of a line needed to go, the correct timing, the most effective way to hit the right inflection.
But it wasn’t like I was splitting the atom or saving lives in an emergency room.
So even by my early teens, I meant it when I said, “Tell me if I ever get weird with what I’m doing.
” But I was about to be caught up short by that plea.
One day my friend and I were on Pico when I realized with a start that we were passing by the 20th Century Fox lot where I was filming Heart of the City.
We’d been chatting and I hadn’t been paying attention, and I remember vividly that the Doors were playing on the car stereo, so my mind was on the music.
But echoing the entry on the title page of my journal—business address: “20th Cen Fox”—I innocently said, “Oh my god, that’s so weird. That’s where I live!”
There was a beat of silence.
“You’re doing it,” my friend said.
My blood stopped. And that was it. Tell me if I ever get weird with what I’m doing. I had gotten weird; I had broken a sacred inner rule to never come off as someone who thought that acting was anything special.
Since that day, I have never spoken again about my accomplishments. Not a single day. I don’t boast because that girl whispered in my ear, and still whispers every day, “You’re doing it.”
But it’s not a searing modesty. It’s much worse than that.
I’m not just desperate to play down my career: in fact I’ve often felt great shame for doing what I do.
Being busted for doing the exact thing I always promised I wouldn’t left a taste in my mouth I can’t get rid of.
The shame is like a virus, hooking onto my low self-esteem and leaving me struggling to gain pleasure in my work.
You see my sad eyes? Now maybe you’re starting to get why.
When a new show, originally called Not the Cosbys (oh, the irony) but retitled Married…
with Children, was casting, they too wanted a tough, rough-around-the-edges, blue-collar kid to play the character Kelly Bundy, the daughter of a blue-collar slob and a live-wire, blowsy woman.
(As originally conceived, Kelly was not a dumbass: she was a biker chick.)
Too many young women coming up in Hollywood since childhood experience unwanted attention and abuse within the industry, but I was lucky to avoid it.
I’ll never really know why, of course, and we need to stop talking about what women can do and talk more about how men can stop.
But I’ve always had a hunch that being scary was one of the ways I was able to avoid the kind of sexual assaults perpetrated by all those guys who have been exposed in the last few years.
My attitude was always—and here I’m quoting myself—“I’m not going to tickle your winky for a job.
” That was not my jam, thank you very much.
It went further than making sure they knew I wasn’t going to be railroaded into doing something I didn’t want to do: I wasn’t going to be nice to people just for the sake of it either.
I always felt that I should get a job from merit, not because of my personality.
So those fuckers who thought intimidation, be it sexual or otherwise, was the currency knew not to screw with me from the get-go.
I didn’t play that game; I made them scared of me.
Harvey Weinstein, for example, was definitely afraid of me.
Once, at a Miramax party, I heard him being lascivious about a woman as she passed by, and before I could even think, I said, “Oh, come on, man. That’s just gross.
” Weinstein just kind of looked at me, and I could tell he was thinking, Don’t talk to me like that.
But at the same time, I could sense a different kind of appraisal, as though he was also thinking, This chick doesn’t fuck around.
And he was right to be afraid of me. I did not fuck around.
From an early age my mom had told me that people in the business needed me more than I needed them. And that stuck with me. It got me through whenever I was being pressured.
When it came to Married… with Children, I didn’t care either way, though. I read the script and thought it was trash. To me, and to my mom, it read like a bunch of poorly written potty humor. Not the Cosbys, and certainly not for me, thankyouverymuch.
Gosh, I’m getting fat! I have gained so much weight…
As my career on TV blossomed, so did my struggles with body image.
By February 15, 1985, when I wrote those words about myself, I was working on a comedy called Washingtoon.
The pressures of being onscreen had played into my already low self-esteem, creating a tremendously painful and damaging sense that I needed to be as skinny as possible.
There are more references to my weight than pretty much anything else in my diaries at around this time.
I didn’t write much about the roles I was doing.
Even at thirteen, working on TV was a job rather than anything notable.
So I’ll state for the record that in Washingtoon I played a character with the entirely believable name Sally Forehead (at least it wasn’t Fivehead, I suppose).
Sally was the bratty daughter of an idealistic DC politician in an era—the Reagan years—so long ago and comparatively innocent that politicians could be both harmless figures of fun while at the same time committed to trying to make people’s lives better.
I know, can you imagine? Now audiences would laugh at the show’s ridiculousness instead of at, well, its jokes.
You need to watch only a few minutes of Washingtoon to see how far our political culture has fallen.
The characters might have been buffoons, but they were endearingly earnest. The world that show depicted feels as close to modern politics as to the Roman Senate.
And there I am, with my Thompson Twins haircut, shaved on the side and all kinds of crazy on top, wearing long, dangly, mid-eighties earrings, gently ribbing my father about the charade that is his job.
I’m as wiry and slim as any thirteen-year-old might be, and yet my diary continually harps on my appearance. Even though Washingtoon was short-lived, I was now firmly in the public eye, and that pressure was taking a huge toll. By June 2, 1985, I was writing this in my diary.
I’m turning into a vegetarian… I’ve got to lose weight. I’m becoming a fat blob. I look at myself in the mirror and I see a vision of obesity and blubber. Anyway, I hope I become anorexic.
I’d been struggling with these kinds of thoughts for years, and though no one moment can lead to a lifetime’s affliction, one incident in particular still weighs heavy on my heart.
When I was eight years old, one of the neighborhood kids poked at my leg and said, “You’re fat.
” I can trace my obsession with my appearance to that comment, though so many other factors led me to be predisposed to that terrible Irish illness, Ann O’Rexia.
I was the child who had been surrounded by abuse.
I lived in the public eye. I grew up in a city obsessed with appearance.
I craved control in a childhood that had none.
All these things made that kid’s comment land hard—they were the kindling just waiting for the spark of cruelty.
So began a lifelong struggle with body image and weight, a horrible relationship with food, and a warped sense of self, so bad that I’d spend the rest of my life with a rampant dysmorphia. I never saw the skinny girl everyone else did. I only ever saw something else, and I still do.
As 1985 went on, my issues with weight grew only more pressing, more dire.