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 watchMarried… with Childrenclosely, 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 didweird 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…
