With him finally gone from my life for good, I sold the log cabin. I couldn’t deal with the memories of being there anymore. The place was filled with his ghost and what he did to me: the lighter thrown, the blood spilled, the tequila forced down my throat, the nights he’d disappear into his film studio, which he’d set up in our guesthouse, and stay there till five in the morning, leaving me alone and wondering who this man in my house really was.
Living there became too painful. The vibes were wrong; the slip-and-slide gang had mostly moved on, but the wisteria still bloomed and does to this day, its roots so strong, its blossoms so beautiful—a reminder and a symbol of my resilience. But the entire property also felt small and claustrophobic, and the eighty steps from the street felt like eight hundred some days.
So on the back of the success ofMarried… with Childrenand themovies I’d made, I bought myself a house farther up on Lookout Mountain, secluded and beautiful. It has a gate, and security, and a koi pond, and when you look out, all you can see are trees.
I still live in that house. With my daughter, and my chimes, my fireplace, and my nag champa… and with these memories, swirling around my bed at night, ghostly and perverse, and I’m wondering where everyone is, wondering what I did wrong, what I did to deserve what happened to me.
I don’t know if this experience gave me strength. I only know that in the subsequent years, I found a calmness and a serenity. Perhaps I would have gotten there eventually, regardless of whether this had happened to me. I don’t know if I can say that there was a big lesson from all of it, except that it happened, and perhaps by sharing it, someone else might be able to escape more quickly than I did, or else perhaps they might be able to listen more closely to the voice that tells them when something is terribly wrong.
I certainly learned to listen to my heart, to my gut. And ever since I haven’t been controlled by anything or anyone.
I’m way too important. My opinions matter.
I am stronger, resilient, like that wisteria. What I went through brought me knowledge, a knowledge born out of being angry and scared.
In the years after all this, I found my footing, but I had to be constantly vigilant about how it screwed me up when it came to relationships. I wasn’t looking for just any man, not looking for a father figure. I was looking for an equal. Before, I would attract guys who I could control, or who controlled me. I was forever trying to please, please these men who seemed so unsettled in themselves.
I also learned not to sell myself short. I learned to have somerespect for myself. If men I dated didn’t see that, then they were the ones who needed a new perspective, not me.
Finally, I could see.
I haven’t seen that boyfriend since. It was as if a ghost, an Amityville horror, washed up at the door of my beautiful cabin, a house that’s long since been demolished and replaced with a monstrosity, its new owners unaware, I imagine, that once not so long ago a bunch of dickheads partied their asses off in all the zestful stupidity of a long-gone youth.
EIGHT
HAWAII
I’VE LOST COUNT OFhow many times my mother said to me, “It’s you and me against the world.” That puts a lot of pressure on a child and has probably loaned me a certain level of codependency. But more importantly, it has helped me develop the right safeguards against manipulation in this challenging business. It’s a toughness that I want to teach my daughter, but I want all young women, especially in show business, or any business, to always know that they need you more than you need them. My mom would say it to me when I’d go to auditions, and I still know it to be true: they need me more than I need them.
AsMarried… with Childrencame to its natural conclusion, I found myself desperate to leave Kelly Bundy behind. I couldn’t wait to take off the mask and be myself. I wanted to show the world, and myself, what I was capable of.
For the last two years ofMarried…I was wearing a wig because I had cut my hair short and dyed it a mix of black, cherry, and purple.I showed up with my new hairdo at a Fox event right before we were about to start filming the penultimate season.
“What’s happening here?” someone said, a look of shock and horror on their face.
“We’re getting a wig,” I said.
I’d had blond hair down to my butt for more or less a decade but now I didn’t care. There wasn’t much else they could say because it wasn’t as if I could suddenly grow my hair ten inches.
They needed me more than I needed them. It was me against the world, kid.
I’m grateful forMarried…,grateful for the time I spent there, grateful for the lessons I learned, grateful for the family I had in Ed and Katey and David, but if I didn’t get that girl away from me, I didn’t know what I would do.
I needed to be me. But that doesn’t mean I made great decisions. Right afterMarried…ended, a script came across my desk for a little movie calledLegally Blonde.I didn’t even audition or read for it or meet with anyone. I was done with the ditzy-blonde thing.
And to think, I could have had Reese Witherspoon Money™.
Instead, I needed to escape.
It all began with David Faustino, my brother onMarried…He had taken a vacation to Hawaii and returned with stars in his eyes. The way he described it made it sound both magical and one million miles away, both things I desperately needed. The friends David had made there—guys with names like Lawrence and Joji and Shaney Boy—sometimes flew to L.A. to visit him, and he would introduce me to them. I instantly fell in love with them as he had. They had akindness, and a sly wit about them, as though that magical outpost in the ocean freed their souls from the kinds of concerns we mainland-bound suckers never seem to escape.
Each time his friends returned to Hawaii, I would be desperate to see them again, to find a place where goodness and love prevailed. I didn’t know what paradise was until I went there. Given everything I’d been through, I wanted a paradise, and I found it in Maui, a place that would become my home away from home. WhenMarried…went on hiatus, or when I didn’t have a movie to shoot or a talk show to do, I would immediately fly there.
My friends in Hawaii filled my soul in ways I could never have imagined. Those beautiful people opened up their community to me in a way no tourist usually gets to see. Eventually, I found a place of my own where I could stay for a month at a time, and whenever I wasn’t working, that’s where you would find me.
The group of friends I made mostly worked at the luau, and I’d often show up just to watch them perform. At one point during a show, a canoe glided across the water with a flame on it, and my friend Shalia came out of the water in a white dress, so sinuous and gorgeous. I was captivated. Once the show was over, we’d sneak away to a nearby pineapple field to drink Bud Light and watch the skies, filled as they so often were with the most shooting stars you’ve ever seen, sparkling past our peripheral visions.
In those magical moments, these beautiful, kind, funny people became my family. The fact that I was “Christina Applegate” didn’t matter to anyone, and certainly not to me. It was on Maui that I got my nickname, or what I think of as my real name, those two syllables behind which my true soul resides.
