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 calledNot the Cosbys(oh, the irony) but retitledMarried… 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 wasnotmy 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 heardhim 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 toMarried… 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 calledWashingtoon.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 inWashingtoonI played a character with the entirely believable name Sally Forehead (at least it wasn’tFivehead, 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 ofWashingtoonto 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 thoughWashingtoonwas 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 thatcomment, 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.
I’m really down on myself and my body… I have decided to not eat anything and to just drink water and such (other liquids). I feel that in no time at all I will be the skinniest of all my friends, and people will like me more. I strive to be beautiful, but nothing seems to work. My mom said that I might be able to suck the fat out of my thighs. It’s a new form of plastic surgery and it is great. I just hope that I can do it soon. The only problem is I might have to be full-grown and maybe I am or maybe I’m not, but I still hope I can do it no matter what it costs. Let’s have a toast to being skinny and me getting the fat sucked out.
It breaks my heart to read this now. The extremity of it all scares me—the pressure I must have felt as an actor to conform to the weird Hollywood “perfection,” not to mention that I was already conflating being thin with being liked. No one pointed out that I wasdangerously skinny, that my idea of self was warped and I did not need to change myself further. In fact, it was the opposite.
I was a young woman on the precipice of adulthood whose body was already her greatest enemy, not her ally. My mother, all too knowledgeable about the pressures of being a woman, had seemingly done enough research to give me damaging ideas about how to brutalize myself with liposuction, how to reach for a “perfection” that was neither obtainable nor even real. I was thirteen. I can only imagine that this was a projection of her own struggles, of a bond that went beyond mother and child into something closer, intermingled in ways that were both more meaningful and more codependent.
It would take me years to understand that “perfect” was a chimera, a falsehood, and a life-threatening falsehood at that. That I could be a size 0 and call myself a “fat blob” signaled the failure of so many things: my own ability to see clearly, my mother’s guidance, the culture of not just Hollywood but the wider world. Was it any wonder that when I looked in the mirror, I saw not beauty but the opposite?
Still, I saw beauty in others. I had been fortunate to meet a girl on the set ofCharles in Chargenamed Samantha Smith, who stood out as an incredible role model.
I had appeared in two episodes of the first season ofCharles in Charge, which was then a smash hit show. In one I’d taped—episode 6, “Slumber Party”—Samantha had also appeared, playing one of the girls who shows up for the party. (Each of the girls arrives with something to contribute to the evening’s fun. One brought a poster of Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran and I can only imagine that was my idea.)
Samantha was already famous before her brief cameo onCharles in Charge.In November 1982, she had written a simple letter to the then leader of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov. In the letter, she had revealed to the Russian premier her fears about a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviets, imploring him to commit to avoiding a catastrophe. Andropov eventually wrote back; on the back of his very public response, Samantha had become a symbol of hope for the two Cold War superpowers, had subsequently spent two weeks in Russia, and had become a significant celebrity on her return stateside.
When she and I met, none of that really mattered. We were just two sharp kids working on a TV show, and we quickly became firm friends; she was sweet and interesting and wise beyond her years.
Then one day I was sitting on the steps outside the set ofWashingtoon,having a cigarette, when someone found me to deliver the news.
“Can you believe that little girl who wrote that letter to the Soviets just died in a plane crash?”
My heart stopped, and my head fell into my hands. There had been a crash in Maine as Samantha had been returning home from shooting a TV show, and she and her father, along with four other passengers and two crew, had died.
I couldn’t breathe. One of the older actors onWashingtoon,seeing me crying, asked me what had happened. I could barely get the words out.
“My friend just died,” I said.
The actor took out a piece of yellow paper, and with a blue pen he wrote, “Here’s to the tears of friendship. May they crystallize as they fall and be worn as gems in the memory of those we love.”
I still have that piece of paper.
