Ryan White - My Own Story (23 page)

We took a cab from our local hotel to Capitol Hill, and walked into a vast room with a high ceiling and wooden paneling on all four walls. The press was everywhere, snapping pictures and rolling cameras. I blinked at the TV lights. We sat in the center of the room at a plain wooden table with microphones and water pitchers on it. Jill had on a dressy dress and pearls, but I’d decided to wear what I’d wear to school: a loose white shirt, jeans, and untied high-top sneakers. I carried my statement with me.

When we sat down, there were rows of people sitting on chairs behind us. I wasn’t sure who they were, but I guessed they wanted to hear the three of us. In front of us were the commissioners, sitting in a row on a small stage along a high wooden desk, like the judge’s bench I remembered from courtrooms. A bunch of photographers sat on the stage below the commissioners and kept snapping away at us.

I had a couple of small coughing attacks and had to pause for a sip of water. I told the Commission about the hardships that go along with AIDS, and how I tried to turn the other cheek. But I also talked about the stars who’d helped me. I made sure to mention Elton, Greg, Matt, and of course Alyssa. And I talked about my dream of fitting in somewhere—and now I did.

“My life is better now,” I wound up. “I’m a normal happy teenager again. I’m just one of the kids, and all because the students at Hamilton Heights High School listened to the facts, educated their parents and themselves, and believed in me. I believe in myself as I look forward to graduating from Hamilton Heights High School in 1991. My school is proof that AIDS education in schools works.”

Then I sat back and heaved a big sigh of relief. The hard part was over now. Jill told the Commission what our school’s program had been like, and how AIDS education was a permanent part of our curriculum. Governor Orr of Indiana had given Hamilton Heights an award for setting an example to other schools and making our state look good. I was glad we were taking the message all the way to the President.

Ryan and Jill Stewart during a hearing at the President’s Commission on AIDS, March 1988.

Jill ended up by paying me a nice compliment. She said that as far as Hamilton Heights was concerned, when a student with AIDS comes to school, it’s important to find out what the family and the person want. “But,” she went on, “that’s leaving out how much Ryan has done for us. He puts life in perspective. These things you can’t measure.”

Luckily the commissioners said Ted Koppel had asked Jill and me just about all the questions they could think of. They did want Mom to tell them how we kept our spirits up.

“For one thing, Ryan looks normal,” Mom said. She knows what counts with me. “When he’s been in the hospital, he’s seen kids who were disfigured, or in a lot more pain than he was. Then I’ve always told him, ‘You have to go out and reach for things in life—not just sit around.’ ”

W
HAT
M
OM
had said about my looking okay came back to me later on. In August we were going to spend a month in Statesville, North Carolina, a little town where the Landsburg Company wanted to shoot our movie. John Herzfeld, the director, came to visit us in Cicero and I drove him around.

“Whoa, Ryan!” he exclaimed. “Slow down! I want to live to make the movie.”

Later we ate pizza at our kitchen table and went over the script again. We had gone through this before. There had been about four different versions. The first one wasn’t right at all. It just had our names stuck in every now and then to make it sound like it was about us. But the next one was better. We made sure everything was in the right order. We ended up changing a bunch of lines because they didn’t sound like Mom and Andrea and me talking. We got rid of all the seven-dollar words, dictionary words.

Let me tell you, rewriting a script is
slow.
One time we had a script meeting and Mom kept working, but I fell asleep. Heather was there, and she took a picture of me to prove it.

There weren’t any exaggerations in the script, though. Just the opposite, really. There was only time to show a few of the awful things that happened to us. Some stuff had to be clumped together, like court hearings and trips to the hospital, or you’d be watching all night.

Then John said out of the blue, “Ryan, how’d you like to play Chad?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You mean it?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” John said.

“Wow!” I said.
“Yeah!”

Not everyone with a terminal illness looks good enough to be in a movie. I reminded myself one more time that I was luckier than a lot of other sick kids. But Mom was worried that I’d get upset playing someone who’d died.

“Mom,” I said, “it’s only acting.”

I’d been on TV often enough so I wasn’t nervous around cameras. I looked over my lines just once, the day before my scene. After all, I was the only one who knew what Chad had been like.

Besides, once we got to Statesville, I was incredibly busy. All three of us were. Some days we had to be on the set, ready to work, at 6:30 in the morning. Sometimes we were still filming after midnight. And when we weren’t working, there were lots of people to hang out with.

Ryan and Lukas Haas sitting on their director’s chairs during filming of
The Ryan White Story,
1988.

We each had our own director’s chair and we had our own trailer to rest in when we didn’t have to be on the set. We’d thought we’d be spending most of our time there, off in a corner. Not so. John Herzfeld wouldn’t make a move without us. He had to hear from us all the time. He wanted to make sure everything looked and sounded just the way we remembered. We were the resident experts!

At first we held back. We wanted to be polite, and we were afraid we might not know what we were talking about. Sometimes we didn’t. Doug Whitley was the location manager—he had found Statesville and all the buildings where we filmed. When we arrived, he took us to see the house that John had picked to be ours.

We looked at each other. We didn’t know what to say. It was a nice old house—once. Now it was really run-down, nothing like our house in Kokomo.

“Gol-leee,” Mom began.

Doug read our minds. “Don’t worry,” he said. “John knows what he’s doing. Wait ’til the art department gets through with the place.”

The film crew moved out the family who lived in the house, and put them up in a motel while we shot. Mom ended up having a great time helping to fix the house so it looked like it was really ours. We brought my camouflage curtains and sheets and my I.U. pennants for my bedroom, and Andrea’s skating trophies and ribbons for hers. I lent Lukas my I.U. sweatshirt and the shirt I had actually worn the day I went back to Western. Mom put up some of our own Christmas decorations for the scene where the robbery is discovered.

It was weird watching everyone work so hard to make it look like winter when the temperature was over a hundred degrees every day. People talked about how all they were going to remember about making our movie was the heat. When we needed snow, the crew made it out of wood chips. Once they overdid it and we had a small blizzard on the set—in about thirty seconds, two inches of fake snow fell!

John kept bugging us to tell him if things weren’t right. “Ryan,” he’d say to me, “I don’t want you calling me up afterward and complaining about the movie. You’re here—you can make a difference.”

So we tried. Actors like to work in different ways. Judith Light was playing Mom. Whenever I saw Judith on the set, I’d say, “Hi, Mom!” I had already met her out in Malibu at Linda Otto’s house. Back then I had just said a quick hello-good-to-meet-you, and then raced out to the surf with Heather and Andrea. “You certainly aren’t star-struck,” Judith laughed. Well, after all, it was our big chance to do some boogie boarding. You put your board under your stomach, turn your back on the wave, and then jump up to catch it as it’s going by.

Before we had left for Statesville, Judith had spent three or four hours on the phone with Mom, asking her tons of questions about how she grew up, and how she brought Andrea and me up. She wanted to know how Mom handled my hemophilia. Mom told her how Grandma used to make me padded suits. One day Mom saw me trying to stumble around in one of them.

“I thought, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” Mom told Judith. “ ‘I’ve got to get this stuff off him.’ ”

“What if Ryan acted up?” Judith asked. “What did you do? Would you grab him and hold him tight?”

“Yeah, I’d even spank him!” Mom said. True enough!

Andrea, Ryan, Judith Light, and Heather meet at Linda Otto’s house in Malibu, 1988.

Mom and Judith got to be very good friends. Mom watched Judith in every scene, except for the one where she has to tell me I have AIDS. That was too hard. I know how Mom felt—at least a little bit, I guess. The day they filmed Barney’s accident, I had had to go back to Hamilton Heights to register for my sophomore year. I was glad I had an excuse to be gone.

That scene where I find out I have AIDS was filmed in an abandoned hospital in Statesville. The art department had to work hard there! Judith would go into my hospital room and do one take. Meanwhile, Mom listened in on a headset out in the hall. In between takes, Judith would come out to see Mom. They’d hug each other and cry until Judith had to get her hair and makeup fixed for the next take.

Ryan and Andrea with young cast members of
The Ryan White Story.
Left to right: Nikki Cox (who plays Andrea); Kathy Wagner (who plays Kris); Ryan, Casey Ellison (who plays Heath); and Andrea.

Lukas Haas and I were more casual. We never did have any heart-to-heart talks about the real me. Mostly we ran around together, along with Andrea and Nikki Cox, who played my sister; Casey Ellison, who was my old buddy Heath; and Kathy Wagner, who played Kris, my ex. You wouldn’t think that Statesville would even have a hotel, but it did. So when we weren’t working, the bunch of us spent a lot of time in each other’s rooms, staying up ’til all hours, ordering from room service and playing Nintendo. Or we’d go up to the roof of the hotel and try to fly a toy airplane that never did work.

Or we’d explore the old hospital. The art department had fixed up only three rooms to use in the movie. Every other room was dirty and musty. Some had broken windows. We discovered a dentist’s chair and some other equipment we could play with. In one room we found old pills scattered all over the floor. In another there was a dead bat! We chased each other through the hospital’s corridors, yelling, “Did you see the bat? Did you see the bat?”