Chapter 5 Married… with Children
FIVE
MARRIED… WITH CHILDREN
Love,
Christina Applegate
( just practicing!)
BY THE MIDDLE OF September 1986, I was practicing signing my name for fans. Thank god my friend who’d busted me for my attitude as we passed Fox that day wasn’t privy to my diaries.
I had been regularly working for my entire childhood, but as I approached fifteen, perhaps some part of me recognized that a new kind of fame—the kind of fame where autographs would be asked for and granted—was just around the corner.
Sure, I’d done a whole bunch of TV shows, but I could still walk the streets of Los Angeles without anyone recognizing me.
All that was about to change.
The first episode of Married… with Children aired on April 5, 1987.
The show wasn’t a hit out of the gate—Fox was then a brand-new channel, joining ABC, CBS, and NBC (imagine: just four stations!), and it was years away from being the juggernaut it is these days.
I don’t think any of us thought the show itself would still be going a decade later, and the early, snobbish reviews hardly helped.
Most of them focused on what was perceived to be the show’s crudity, broadness of humor, misogyny, and obsession with sex.
Loved by critics or not, I was suddenly on a major TV show and quickly became paid accordingly.
I started at twenty grand per show, which for a fifteen-year-old was a lot of money (it was a lot for anyone, and it still is).
I already owned that house behind the Country Store in Laurel Canyon, the one the early radio ads had funded, but now my bank account swelled with network cash.
But money wouldn’t solve everything. By January 1988, the negative aura around the show, and my lingering superiority complex when it came to comedy, was evident in my diary entries.
That month I wrote, “I’ll show these fuckers that I ain’t no comedy bullshit actress…
,” and “I need to do a movie. I like it so much more than this fucking comedy live-audience bullshit. Comedy is all timing and line readings. I hate that.”
Despite my teenage angst, the set itself was a formative place to work because it was all professional all the time—few allowances were made for my tender age, and I respected that.
I remember being sick with a 103-degree fever one day.
I was lying on the famous couch and said to a nearby stage manager, “Can you please get me some orange juice?”
She said simply but not unkindly, “You have legs.”
Message received. I never asked anybody for anything ever again, to the point where years later, when I was working eighteen hours a day because I was the central character, and in every scene, of the sitcom Samantha Who?, I was still running off to get my own coffee, until a PA finally stopped me.
“Can you please stop going to craft services?” he said. “You’re actually taking time away from set.” Still, it hurt every bit of myself to ask him to get me my double espresso. (I was so tired I was drinking ten or more every day just to get through.)
So Married… was where I truly grew up. It was a place of do it for yourself, a place to be professional, to be on time, to know your lines, and everyone else’s, to hit your marks.
There was no fucking about—ever. (Let it also be noted that my mother came to every single taping across all eleven years.) It may have looked like a loosey-goosey comedy, but as I’ve said, comedy doesn’t work unless it’s tight, choreographed, nailed.
We nailed it every single week.
Though Kelly Bundy was supposed to be a tough biker chick, that changed quickly.
A short time after the show began, I happened to go to the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard to watch a documentary called The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.
In the movie, documentarian Penelope Spheeris heads to Gazzarri’s, a nightclub on the Sunset Strip, to chat with a young woman named Cindy Birmisa, aka Miss Gazzarri Dancer 1987.
Cindy had just won that prestigious competition, a contest in which girls wearing Lycra dresses, their hair way up, super big, all crimped and groupie-like, dance and twerk for their suppers, all hoping to win that cherished title.
At one point, Spheeris asks Miss Gazzarri, “What are you going to do now?,” and without missing a beat, Ms. Birmisa answers, “I’m going to continue on with my modeling and hopefully go on with my actressing.”
The next morning, I called production and the wardrobe people on Married…
“Kelly Bundy is someone else now. We’re going down to Melrose. We’re going to get some concho belts. We’re going to get Lycra dresses. We’re going to go full rock slut.”
Kelly Bundy was going to do some actressing.
The transformation was immediate, and iconic. Kelly Bundy now exuded a kind of innocent sexiness. She was fully recognizable as an eighties icon, a lovable airhead who hung out with wannabe rock stars.
If you watch Married… with Children closely, you’ll see pretty quickly that I played Kelly as a tease, and as a virgin—which is why I think viewers loved her rather than hated her.
One of the creators, Michael Moye, and I talked about this regularly.
We agreed to keep Kelly virginal and have the “Kelly is a tramp” opinion come solely from her brother, Bud.
In season 2, Bud says, “You’re dirt, Kel.
” When I watch this now, it rings so harshly and makes Bud seem despicable to me.
But in the episode, I reply, “Yes, but everybody knows it!,” taking the wind out of his misogynist sails.
Kelly knew what people thought of her and wasn’t fazed by it because we all knew, or should have known, it wasn’t true.
(And yet, alas, in that same episode I’m wearing a tight leather skirt and wiggling my ass to put the other bowlers off in a bowling tournament.)
That said, Kelly was never overtly promiscuous.
Bud might have accused her of it, but she gave no indication that she did much beyond flirting.
She was a product of the time, of MTV music videos, with women who wore corsets that were way too tight and did weird stuff for guys with frizzy hair.
At the time, these videos were everywhere, and it was my way of expressing what was happening in the zeitgeist. Yet I have been told that I just played a whore. Not true.
Kelly was important to me, and I needed to be perfect for her.
I’d shaped the role, and I would damn well put my all into it.
I dug myself into a hole with that character, though, because I had to be skinny.
I had a vision of the specific clothes I wanted her to wear, and to wear those clothes, I had to lean even deeper into my eating disorder.
The anorexia was terrible. I wanted my bones to be sticking out. If I did eat something, I’d punish myself. Sometimes I wouldn’t eat for a whole day.
My diary from those days recounts the deepening of my self-image torture, through both prose and poetry.
On TV I was playing a kind of dumb-blonde, Miss Gazzarri Dancer role, but in private I was writing poetry and dressing grungily, slathered in patchouli oil like a little hippie weirdo.
In fact, my diary from 1987 reveals a sixteen-year-old who, though now increasingly famous, was still deeply conflicted, struggling, and often in emotional agony.
There’s a poem from that time titled “Help Me I’m Falling,” a reference to the Joni Mitchell song “Help Me.”
The sea is not a sea
A tree is not a tree.
It has all gone away.
I cannot see.
The walls are closing in
I don’t know where I’ve been
My life has lost its light
There comes nothing from within.
I only am alone
I only am one
There is no one else
God, what have I done
There was once a shining star
I don’t know where you are
You have all burnt out
You have traveled oh so far
Not that there is nothing
The bride has thrown the ring
The moon is black
I’m a bird without a wing
The surrounding pages are filled with the pain of a young woman whose traumatic childhood was catching up with her.
I feel there is something missing. I don’t know what, but something. I feel cluttered, I feel lonely. I feel claustrophobic…
I’m losing weight but I can’t see it. I’m getting compulsive about it though.
I mean I’m not puking my food up or anything.
But I’m afraid to eat and I shouldn’t eat.
I just don’t want to gain it back… I want to change my appearance completely.
I hate to look at myself anymore. I’m bored with everything about me.
My hair, face, body. I want auburn hair right above my breasts.
I want a defined face. I want to be beautiful.
But now I’m too plain. I’m not ugly, but I’m not anything exciting.
I will blow them away with my portrayal of a nympho on Jump Street though. So ha, ha, motherfuckers.
In 1987, I had indeed booked a guest spot on 21 Jump Street, another hit Fox show.
It was being filmed in Vancouver rather than L.A.
, and it would be the series that made Johnny Depp’s name.
I already knew Johnny: he was part of my friend group growing up, a group that included my still-best friend, Sam Sarkar.
Sam has been there for me in every conceivable way since I was fifteen years old.
He’s seen me at my best, and my worst; my mom always said I should have married him.
But it’s for the best that I didn’t, because he’s one of my closest friends and I know he always will be.