It wasn’t entirely my dad’s fault that I didn’t like visiting. I just wanted to be home with my mom. I vividly remember each timewe’d head back on the 101. The second I would see the communications tower above the Mulholland Tennis Club, which signals the high point of Laurel Canyon, I’d get giddy—great fluttering butterflies in my stomach—because I knew I was going to see her.
It was just the two of us, Nancy Priddy and her daughter, Christina Applegate, alone together in Laurel Canyon. When I would come home, I’d get the same feeling as when we would go to Magic Mountain—I’d see the waterslide on the hill and know I was close to one of my favorite places in all of Southern California.
My mom was always my Magic Mountain, too.
Back in 1968, in the gatefold of her album, my mother had written a short essay to introduce herself. This is how it begins.
One day a lyricist and good friend of mine said to me, “Nancy, why do you always write sad lyrics? You seem to see primarily the negative side of things.” Taken back a little, I went home and started reading through the reams of backs of envelopes, scraps of crumpled papers, and an occasional poorly typed piece of onion skin that I had accumulated. What a discovery one can make about oneself. It’s not unlike a Rorschach test or finding strange patterns in a collection of doodles.
What I discovered was not necessarily negativism or sadness, but an obvious quality of disappointment throughout the somewhat subconscious ramblings. I am an Aquarian and have been told that I am the true embodiment of Aquarius—for what it’s worth. It’s notnegativism, but extreme positivism that is at the basis of what I write—an incurable idealism that often gets rained, snowed, sleeted, and hailed upon by life.
Three years later, her love affair with my father over, the positivism of the move west and the birth of a child had been utterly subsumed by the rain, snow, sleet, and hail of abandonment.
And so was set a pattern that I too would follow my entire life: I share with my mother an idealism, a positivism, that is so often followed by terrible weather. In thinking back across my life, I have realized that when good things happen to me, as many good things have, they are invariably stalked by darkness, dampened by subsequent tragedies and trauma. My mother wrote,“I went home and started reading through the reams of backs of envelopes, scraps of crumpled papers, and an occasional poorly typed piece of onion skin… What a discovery one can make about oneself. It’s not unlike a Rorschach test or finding strange patterns in a collection of doodles. What I discovered was not necessarily negativism or sadness, but an obvious quality of disappointment.”In my mom’s words, I see not only her own foreshadowing of the pain Bob Applegate would bring into her life, but my own story, too. Here I am, looking back through the“scraps of crumpled papers”that constitute my own diaries, and I find throughout a similar sense of disappointment.
These days, as I sit on my bed in pain from the MS, my acting and dancing careers over, I think about the moments in my life when wonderful things have been followed by the dreadful. I finally made it to Broadway, only to get a terrible injury; I finally got the role of a lifetime inDead to Me,only to find out I had MS halfway through. This pattern is seemingly a genetic gift from my mother, a woman sohaunted by her own disappointments that she chose to highlight them in the sleeve notes to her album.
My father had escaped to chase a different consciousness in Big Sur, away, perhaps, from the shadows he saw in my mother’s eyes.
She and I, meanwhile, had to pick up the pieces however best we could. She tried her best to make our odd little house a home, but it was hard. Among its many “charms” was one narrow, three-foot-by-two-foot door near the ceiling that you had to walk up tiny stairs to reach and then crouch through to get to my bedroom, which was itself an illegally converted garage. It also housed for free so many fleas that when I wore white socks to school, there would be hundreds of tiny black dots visible on them.
My mom never made us feel like we were poor, though, whatever she was facing on a daily basis. She certainly neversaidwe were poor. The only thing she did say regularly was, “Don’t spend your money because you might be poor one day.” She taught me the value of things, and I still have those values. That’s why to this day I mostly wear secondhand clothing, which is often stuff I stole from set. My mom’s words—“Be careful”—ring in my ears.
But it wasn’t all bad. We could still drive our Nova down the mountain to the movies, just the two of us. We could join the lines on May 25, 1977, to see the magic ofStar Warsfor the first time. And a five-year-old girl could still dream of a future when she too had a star.
It’s no exaggeration to say that from that moment in 1977 onward, my whole goal in life was to get a star on that Walk of Fame. Because if that was to happen—if one day a crowd would gather and watch a star with my name on it be revealed from under a banner—then I’d be on this spinning planet forever. And maybe someday some kid would say, “Who’s that, Mommy?” And maybe the mommy gets to explain who I was.
An Oscar would be lovely, but you know what? You win the Oscar, give a six-minute speech, and nobody cares two days later, especially if your speech lasts six minutes just like it inevitably does the first time you give one. You put the naked-man statue in your guest bathroom, and it’s over. Ask an Oscar recipient where they keep their trinket and they’re likely to have to take a moment to remember exactly where it is.
But a star? Encased in concrete? Assuming no earthquake destroys it, the worst you’d have to deal with would be the traipsing feet of millions of tourists. No one ever forgets where their star resides—everyone knows the exact cross street without hesitation.
So a star became my lofty goal. A star would bemyOscar.
TWO
LALA LAND
RECENTLY,IFOUND Aphotograph taken sometime in the mid-1970s. In it, Stephen Stills—Uncle Dadu—is perched on the arm of a couch in a red shirt; behind him stands my father’s stepmother, Olive, and next to him sits my grandfather, Paul Applegate. My mother is also sitting on the couch, with me in a baby bikini leaning over her. And behind her, a man in glasses rests his hands on my mother’s shoulders, smiling at the camera as though everything is wonderful in this garden-variety family snap.
I was so shocked when I stumbled on the photo I could barely breathe. I couldn’t make sense of it; how was that man in glasses in the same room as my grandfather and his wife? Why was Stephen Stills there? Where was the photograph taken? Who took it? And how, given what I know now, were we all smiling so broadly, so innocently, at the unseen photographer?
Seeing the photo sent me spinning back to those days after my father left. Many of the keys to my life are encapsulated in thosemonths and years; they headline the story I’m telling, reverberate still, make a music I wish I had never heard.
I have a lot of time to think now that I’m basically bedbound. But this photograph… I just can’t make sense of it. It has given me a sense of earthmoving, an odd feeling of dislocation, as though my memory of those days is flawed. Again, I have to ask myself: how can what I know to be true be so in opposition to the easy smiles of this family pic? These six people in this picture look like the epitome of a happy family, broad smiles on happy faces, not a care in the world.
A happy family…?
Well, no, I was not raised in a happy family, in a happy place. Generational trauma is a real thing; I am living proof of it. This photograph sits beside my bed, and when I pick it up, beneath it I find a stain on my nightstand as though something altogether too hot has rested there too long.
I found out recently that the photograph was taken in Florida, probably in 1974, when Stephen was making his solo recordStills,which the man in glasses, a percussionist, played on, and which was partially recorded at the legendary Criteria Studios in North Miami. My grandparents were there because it was easier for them to visit Florida from New Jersey than to schlep all the way to California.
I stare at the man behind my mother. He’s wearing a T-shirt that readsITALIANabove a fist of power. Behind his head the flash of the camera obscures the photographer. But that flash obscures everything else, too.
At least until now.
The fleas weren’t the only vermin in our house on Lookout Mountain. After a couple of years of being alone, my mother invited into our lives a new man, a man who would unironically wear an Italian-power T-shirt and smile for the camera. He was the worst man imaginable.
With my father literally and figuratively out of the picture, my mother—shocked, hurt, lonely, scared, poor, devastated—got incredibly skinny and sick. At around that time, she was introduced to a musician, someone who played percussion for CSNY, the Eagles, the Bee Gees, Jackson Browne, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Barbra Streisand, Eric Clapton, Whitney Houston, Herbie Hancock—the list goes on and on.
