You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (28 page)

The fact that an actor can be afraid of theater might seem confusing, but doing a film is nothing like a live performance. Yes, there are a lot of people on set, but none of them are really looking at you. They are looking to see if the light is falling on you in the right way. Or if your hair is curling in the right places. Or if you lifted up that glass on the same line that you did when we shot from the other angle. They are watching details of you; they are not watching you as a whole person. Thus, film acting was never stressful, it felt intimate—like the director and my fellow actors were the only ones in the room.

A dauntingly beautiful makeup artist named Kelley was part of this new group of friends and we quickly bonded over the fact that we each had a parade of disappointing relationships. Kelley and I decided to get tattoos that illustrated, in a stylish and sophisticated manor, the concept of, “Fuck you, men.” It seemed a good time to declare our feminine independence, since I had finally given up on my latest boyfriend, who had a frustrating habit of telling me he was out with the guys when he was really out banging either the girl from
The Real World
or the girl from
Survivor.

Kelley and I sat in the Barnes & Noble going through symbol encyclopedias and tracing the ones that best signified our autonomy. We chose a tattoo shop in Venice Beach because it was the first one whose neon “Open” sign was lit, and it didn’t look like the kind of place were our chances of contracting tetanus were unreasonably high.

While the tattoo guy traced the Celtic knot onto my ankle, I stared at photos of bare-breasted mermaids and skulls biting roses and pretended it didn’t hurt like hell. It only took ten minutes for my tiny tat but I was proud of it. It was the most controversial thing I had ever done, aside from reading
Fear of Flying
when I was sixteen.

A tattoo is defiant by definition, but as an actor, it was a particularly insubordinate choice. Every image decision I had ever made, from eyebrow shaping to daily food selections, had been with the initial thought of my career. What would make me the most visually acceptable for the widest variety of roles? Would a particular hairstyle limit me for period pieces? If I was a little more muscular could I be considered for action films? My body had been a time-share situation since I was four years old. This tattoo ruined me as a blank canvas.

With this decision, I had claimed my body as belonging to me first. It felt bold and although I was seemingly staking my independence from men, it was really more of an independence from the ownership of the film industry. For the first time ever, my career was taking a backseat to my life.

The next day, I wanted to show off my new ink. The first person I showed it to was my friend Jeremy. We had recently become closer, due to the fact that my parents were in the process of separating. His parents had separated when he was in his late teens so he could relate and advise me on how to navigate these painful waters.

“I’ve been there.” He’d say that phrase, that has no practical purpose, but offers a world of comfort.

My parents’ marriage crumpled into a heap of lies and neglect. I felt responsible. This is a typical kid reaction to parents separating but I had evidence to back up the claim. When I ran into an old set tutor of mine at a shopping mall, she asked about my parents. I lowered my eyes and shoved my hands in my pockets and told her they were separating.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “But, in a lot of ways, that makes sense. You know, because of you. All that traveling your mom had to do with you for
work. It’s tough on a family.”

I remember this moment even more vividly than the moment that my parents told me they were separating. It felt like being hit in the temple with a pick axe. Someone’s white Keds squeaked by along the bleached tile floors and nearly blew out my eardrums. The bright lighting of the Macy’s makeup counter sliced through my eyeballs and I had to hold on to a rack of discounted necklaces to stay on my feet. It actually
had
been my fault. I had destroyed my family.

People would tell me that divorce is common among the parents of child actors, as if this might be a comforting fact. It was true that my mom had been dedicated to my career from the beginning. She dropped everything on a moment’s notice to go on location while my dad ran his business at home. Sure, flying to Rome to visit his wife and daughter for a week might have sounded exotic, but we could all have benefited from more quantity over quality. Apparently, the break-up of their marriage was a
fait accompli
—another hidden cost in this acting career contract I had signed when I was four.

For seventeen years, I had been an inevitable wedge, taking my mother away and leaving my father with nothing more than a few good stories to tell at the golf club. I felt guilty and angry with both my parents for not stopping it sooner, for not putting our family first, for not getting a chaperone to travel with me so that they could care for their marriage. Maybe if my mother had stopped all the gallivanting with me, and if my father had stepped up and put his foot down. Maybe if I had had rules and boundaries and someone had thought about this career of mine in a larger context, things could have been different. There were consequences to being a child actor that went beyond the now seemingly minor issue of being repeatedly thrown out of high schools.

I was pissed off. My career, my relationships, and now my family— they were all unraveling around me and there was nothing I could do but stand there in the mall, clutching a rack of cheap necklaces, feeling completely responsible and completely helpless at the same time. Once again
I was a passive participant in my own life. I went home and punched the tile walls in my shower until my knuckles bled.

For the first time I understood the emotion behind the teary-eyed teenaged girls that approached me and wanted to talk about
Mrs. Doubtfire
and how it helped them through their parents’ break up. Divorce was rarely dealt with realistically in the media and it was groundbreaking that that the film didn’t throw in a bullshit Hollywood reconciliation at the end. My angry character Lydia meant something to these kids of divorce, which I only truly understood after being wounded by separation myself. I always defended Lydia when people said she was mean, because I loved her and really felt that she was just misunderstood and hurt. After my parents separated, I understood her emotion on an even deeper level. I wish I hadn’t.

My friend Jeremy and I would talk about how painful it was, even in the pseudo-adulthood of your early twenties, to watch the dissolution of your parents’ marriage. It might be easier than when you are a little kid, but then again, when you are a little kid, your parents don’t ask you for dating advice, so, in some ways it was worse. Worse or not, it was agonizing and Jeremy got that. At a Super Bowl party at a friend’s house, we sat on the floor in a corner and he listened to me. He actually listened.
While there was football on
.

Kelley and I decided to cook dinner. This was huge. We didn’t cook. It was just about as daring as saying we would skydive into a swimming pool. We figured someone else should witness this monumental event, so we invited ourselves over to Tim and Jeremy’s apartment where we would cook for the boys, drink wine, and stay overnight so that we weren’t driving. There was nothing illicit about it; the four of us were close friends—crashing at one another’s places was not unheard of.

I had attempted to sleep on the couch, but the crick in my neck had
become unbearable. So, emboldened by one and a half glasses of wine, I climbed into Jeremy’s bed. Not to make myself sound too innocent in the whole thing; I had admittedly begun to see him differently. He was no longer merely the sidekick of my former hook-up buddy. He was a man who related to me, listened to me, and made me laugh the kind of laugh where it’s hard to catch your breath and you have to put your hand up on your chest. I started to notice how smart he was. He was scary smart, actually. But it was balanced out by the fact that he made adorable blunders like saying “drownding” and never remembered if an albatross was a bird or a fish.

So, I ended up in his bed where we talked and shushed each other’s laughter. I kissed him first because I knew he never would, since the roommate code dictated that Tim had dibs on me. The whole night we kissed and talked and nothing more. And that’s when I knew it was something real. It was enough to just be next to him and feel him breathe in the stillness that only comes at 3 a.m. after you’ve been peeling open your heart for the past four hours. I draped my arm over his chest and rested my hand lightly on his neck. That was all I needed. Everything beneath my skin melted into a warm swirl.

The next morning we snuck out of the apartment to hide our guilty consciences from Tim and Kelley and he walked me to my car, which was parked next door in the 24-hour grocery store parking lot. Behind the grocery store dumpster, he kissed me, a real Hollywood kiss—had it not been for the dumpster. At home, I curled up on the couch, with swollen lips and a sleep-deprivation headache and wondered what the hell I was getting myself into. Another boy was not going to fix anything. My parents were proof that this film life could destroy any relationship it touched.

Within four hours, Jeremy called me for a real date. I was confused and exhausted by the night of enamored gazing, plus there was the looming fear that Tim would kill me for dating his roommate, but I was still intrigued. Could there really be something here, with this guy who
had been just a friend for more than four years? This guy who I don’t remember meeting, but who I always remember being there?

While getting ready for our first date, I made a list of things we could talk about and slipped it in my back pocket. There had never been a problem with conversation with Jeremy but spending hours outlining the contours of someone always changed the dynamics. I drove to the restaurant to meet him and prove my status as an independent woman and make the statement that things hadn’t changed that much. Dinner was the most fun two hours I ever spent with someone and the list stayed in my back pocket.

We moved on to the next part of the date, the theater portion. We were going to see a play at the Mark Taper Forum, the smaller of the two venues that Jeremy worked at. Before the play began, he wanted to show me the Ahmanson theater, which was dark, meaning there was no current production there. He swaggered around as we went backstage, past all the costumes and lights, which were all much larger and grander than the ones I was used to working with for film. It was endearing to see him in his element, he was confident in a way that I never saw standing in line at a movie opening or at large group dinners at Hamburger Hamlet.

Jeremy took my hand to guide me through the darkened halls, lined with musty costumes and abandoned props. I kept wondering if he was going to sneak me into a dark corner and kiss me, passionately pushing me against the heavy ropes that lifted the curtains. It seemed there were endless numbers of romantic situations we could find ourselves in back here. We turned a corner. Suddenly, I was on stage. We had walked through the wings and there were two thousand empty seats, staring back at me, full of judgment and anger. Any hopes of romance drained out of me. I snapped my head to look over at him, terror in my eyes. He was so proud of himself and totally misread the look.

“Cool, right?”

I began hyperventilating. His face dropped.

He dealt with our first panic attack together quite well. He rubbed
my back tried to make it better. I gasped and turned purple and tried to stop my hands from shaking. When I could finally breathe again, he helped me up off the floor as I wiped my nose on my sleeve. A guy inducing a panic attack on the first date is not a great sign, but it gave Jeremy a chance to do something absolutely heroic. He took my hand.

“Can you tell me what I can do to help you when that happens? Just so I know for next time?”

I knew at that moment that I was going to keep him.

In the past, I had always fallen for the latent possibilities I saw in someone. I loved what they could be, if I could only get my hands on them for a while. The battered and broken men, the ones that looked like they could have been set out on a folding table at a garage sale, were the ones that drew me in. I always hoped that once I shaved off a slice of my soul to close up the gaps, then I could glue them back together and make them whole. The more broken they were, the less broken I felt.

But Jeremy appeared to be a complete human person. He needed no mending, no saving. He didn’t need me to prop him up and make him stable enough to stand on his own. He was just fine. It was both intriguing and disconcerting. What would I do with a man who was not a project? I was usually the one who swept in and made it all okay, I was the knight in shining armor. In past relationships, me and the shattered man that I had rescued would ride off into the sunset upon
my
horse. But, he didn’t need that. He just wanted to love me. There was actually a delineation where I stopped and Jeremy began.