Chapter 5 Married… with Children #3
By season 2, I was still only sixteen years old, and dressing relatively modestly on the show, although there were times I would walk on set and the crowd would catcall me.
In episode 3 of that second season, I entered stage left in an off-the-shoulder sea-green dress, and someone audibly whistled from the audience.
I was so disconnected from who I was and what I gave off—I had no idea I was attractive to anyone, as multiple entries in my journals will attest—that the catcalling passed me by completely.
And it wasn’t just that I didn’t expect anyone to actually express lust my way—I was just working, very much focused on the scene and what it needed to be a success, concentrating on landing my lines with the right cadence and timing, hitting my spots, reacting to the other actors in what I hoped was a genuine and convincing way.
Just because it’s a comedy doesn’t mean it should be all about the laughs—you have to get the basics dead-on in comedy, perhaps even more so than in a serious drama.
Too much or too little and you miss the mark completely and it stops being funny.
I treated this job as I’d treated all the ones that came before. I had to get it right.
And yes, I was truly innocent, and I was very young, so the whooping and hollering? I didn’t hear it, even though we always had a live audience, and sometimes they would get so loud and inappropriate that the crew would have to tell them to shut up.
By season 3 all bets were off—by episode 3 of that season I was in a tight purple shirt, my leg up on a table, trying to entice “Matt the football player.” More and more my midriff was bare, the clothes tighter, the skirts shorter.
By season 5, my god: I can walk into the living room, as I do in episode 13, “The Godfather,” in a leather fringed jacket over a short red shirt and there’s a five-second break in the scene while the crowd hollers lustily at me.
I look at all this now, and I cringe. The show was indeed broad, and lewd, and it wouldn’t have a shot in hell of being made these days.
That’s a good thing: it’s hard enough for young women to thrive in a world of appearances.
Just the other day I caught myself pointing out to Sadie how bloated my stomach was, having just gotten home from yet another hospital visit.
Immediately, I regretted saying anything at all about appearances to my daughter.
I never want anyone, me least of all, to talk about how women look, especially around Sadie.
I want people to love her for her smarts, and humor, and charisma, and kindness (all things they do, indeed, love her for).
Her physical beauty should be beside the point, so I’m damned if I’m going to echo what the world is already saying too loudly.
Back in the late eighties, the world seemed to think that I, Christina Applegate, not Kelly Bundy, dressed like Miss Gazzarri, too.
This suited me greatly because away from the set I could just be me and not be recognized.
I could walk through Hollywood and only the keenest of observers would recognize me.
Still, every Friday for a taping I had to squeeze into those clothes, clothes that would show if you ate something as tiny as a single grape.
If I was going to eat something as horrendously huge as a bagel, say, I would scoop it out and maybe eat only half of it, or maybe half of a half.
And that would be my food intake for an entire day.
I can’t tell if I’m getting fat or not. It truly is becoming an obsession. I am going to be thin. I am destined to be thin. I am THIN!!! I want to be so that people say, “Shit, I wish I could have a body like that.” They will if I get my act together.
…
I feel like a cow again. I gained two pounds. I still don’t like the direction. I’ve got to stop eating. I can’t help it though. (119 lbs. I want to be 110. Let’s see how fast I can do it.)
…
I’ve gained some weight back that I lost. But see, I don’t have a deadline to lose the weight like I did when the dance episode [Season 3, Episode 13] was coming up. I felt so much better then when my stomach was super flat.
I knew my anger toward myself, my self-denial of food, and my generally damaging relationship with it were all trauma-based.
I had seen altogether too much at a young age, and any sense of control and safety was passing at best. Anorexia has been likened to a kind of OCD.
When someone makes me feel out of control, I have to reassert that control, and anorexia lets me do that.
(She is a bitch, though—she still sometimes sneaks her way in.
But I now have the power to tell her to go fuck herself, too.) I’ve often said that if I could live in a Japanese minka with sliding doors, tatami mats, and maybe one bonsai tree, I’d be the happiest person alive.
Like many traumatized people, I ache for control, and food is one place I’m able to achieve it.
The week before I turned eighteen, I wrote,
Wednesday, November 15, 1989, 11:07 p.m.
What can I say? Once again I feel fat. I think I’m getting a grip on why I do, so often. No guy = fat girl. A guy = skinny, happy girl. Go figure. Then work, hard work = skinny happy girl.
My diaries list almost endless problems with the men I picked to date.
When I was seventeen, for a brief second, I hung out with Anthony Kiedis.
I had gone to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers at this weird venue, a Masonic hall or somewhere just like that.
I distinctly remember that we all sat on folding chairs, and there was carpet on the floor.
At some point my friend told me that the lead singer wanted to say hi to me.
When Anthony found me, he had a top hat on.
“Why are you wearing a top hat?” I said.
“I want to go out with you,” he said. That’s not why he was wearing the top hat. He had ignored my question.
“Okay,” I said, realizing I probably wasn’t going to get an answer about the hat.
We planned a date to go to a farmer’s market—let me repeat that: Anthony Kiedis and I planned a date at a farmer’s market. That’s how punk rock we were.
Cut to: I’m sitting at a farmer’s market with Anthony and then my mom shows up to pick me up, buys herself a sandwich, and joins us.
My favorite thing that Antoine—that’s what we all called him—ever said to me was about how he sometimes avoided using deodorant.
“A horse will know me before they will know you,” he said.
I think it’s very important to be recognized by horses. Then Antoine dumped me, but right after he did so, he said, “Hey, could you do my laundry?”
And like a stupid fucking fan I did it.
My feeling has always been, “I’m going to fix you. I’m going to save you. I’m going to help you. I have the means to help you. I have the means to save you, and I have the means to fix you.” I loved the assholes and fuckups because they were interesting and different and musical and weird.
Many women find men they want to fix, counting on a serial hope that these men will become what we envisage for our lives.
Sometimes it’s possible, but mostly, ladies, it ain’t.
My universe always sent me beautifully fucked-up dudes in need of fixing.
But maybe I was the one who needed fixing after all.
I was constantly in conflict with men who didn’t call me, who played games, who shifted their affections and ignored me.
Partly this is because we were all so young, of course, but I also think I was fatally attracted to men who were troubled and selfish and self-centered.
(This would come to be very true the older I got.) And somehow, I’d allied my self-worth and my disgust for my own body with the fluctuating attentions of young men who were unserious about relationships, if they thought about them at all.
What I desperately wanted was control, and that control was often most fervently needed when I came up against cruel behavior.
A few years after Married… ended, I shot a movie in England, and someone in the production crew was so cruel to me, verbally abusing me, that I found myself controlling the situation by yet again severely limiting what went into my body.
Most days I would have only soup for lunch.
If there was one drop of oil in it, I would push it away, telling myself I couldn’t eat it.
Some days I would have one bite—one bite!
—of a banana, and nothing more. I even had a spin bike installed in my hotel room, and I’d spin all day long.
Now, having a daughter and wanting so much for her, it kills me how I treated my young self.
I was down to maybe one hundred pounds, and one day I kept one of my best friends waiting while I did another forty-five minutes on the bike—she had traveled four hours across the UK to see me. When I finished my workout, she said to me, “You look disgusting.”
I hadn’t even looked in the mirror—I couldn’t bear to—so this was news to me.
I remember sitting on the toilet that day and looking down at my stomach…
only to find I had no stomach. All I could see were bones—rib bones, hip bones, bones bones bones.
I used to joke back then that if my hip bones weren’t the first thing to enter a room, I was overweight.