Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (10 page)

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Authors: Melissa Francis

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir

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I wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. It was empty as usual, except for a few leftovers and some expired milk. Mom liked to go to the grocery store once a month at best, and buy more than we could possibly eat before it all went bad. Then we’d scrape and scrounge and stop for takeout until she broke down and went food shopping again. Anytime I went to a food store I tried to stock up on emergency peanut butter and English muffins. They were like gold by week three.

Tiffany followed me into the kitchen and took a seat at the counter near the fridge. I didn’t look at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You did a good job. It’s just that you look funny when you cry. And you did eat a lot in that scene.”

“No danger of that now,” I said with my head still in the fridge.

“I know.” She sat down at the kitchen table. “When you and Mom were in Sonora, dad and I made hamburgers every night or went out to dinner. It was pretty cool. Or I ate at Tiffany’s house.”

Tiffany’s best friend in her fifth-grade class was named Tiffany Peacock. She was petite and Hawaiian, with long dark hair and dark eyes and tan skin year-round. Mom said she had a promising future as a topless dancer, between her name and her early run at puberty.

It occurred to me then that I had no idea how my sister got to and from school when I was working. Mom was with me from dawn until after dark when we limped home from the set exhausted.

“What did you do after school while I was working?” I asked her. She was wearing Op short-shorts like the ones the other Tiffany liked to wear with white tank tops. I wondered when she got them.

Her right hand brushed her long, dark hair behind her shoulder and she shrugged. “I hung out at Tiffany’s house until Dad picked me up. Or Auntie M came and got me.”

“It’s like you don’t have a mom when I’m working,” I said sadly.

“Exactly.” She smiled.

I didn’t really buy it. “I wish you could come with us.”

“Nah.” She slid off her chair and left the kitchen.

The show ended and Mom got back on the phone in the kitchen so she could be congratulated by everyone she knew, while Dad tucked me into my bed. He sat down next to me and paused, as if he were rehearsing his words in his head.

“I want you to remember something.”

“What?”

“It’s a wonderful thing you are doing. Very special. And I’m so proud of you. Millions of people watched tonight. You did a great job. You should be very proud.”

I smiled in the darkness of my bedroom.

“But you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to?” I asked.

“You may decide you don’t feel like working and just want to go to school. That’s okay too,” he said pointedly.

“Why can’t I do both? I went back to school after we did the show this time. Mom says I’m going back to work after the summer. Why can’t I do both?”

Dad patted my arm. “You can do both. But school is the most important thing. Someday you will go to college. So you can’t forget about doing your schoolwork. I know you won’t.”

“Of course I won’t,” I said.

“Listen to me.” He paused again to make sure I stayed silent. “You can act when you grow up, but you also might want to do something else.”

“I’m going to be the first lady president.”

“Yes, you can be the first lady president. Or whatever you want. Whatever makes you happy. That’s what is so great about our country. It’s a free society with a free market.”

“What’s a free market?” I asked.

“It’s the reason why President Reagan stands up to the Soviets. So everyone in America can go to college and work hard and become whatever they want to be. You can work hard and move up in the world. Just because someone is born into a poor family, there’s no reason they can’t end up wealthy. It’s not the same in the Soviet Union. The people there don’t have the freedom to become anything they want if they work hard enough.”

I tried to imagine what he meant.

“My parents were very poor, okay? My shoes had holes in them.”

Here we go with the shoes, I thought.

“My dad bought one new car in his whole life. One. A four-hundred-dollar Chevy. He loved it. But my point is, we lived on the South Side of Chicago and we didn’t have a lot of stuff, like our family has now. My brother and I barely had any toys.” He paused for effect.

“But my parents worked hard and told me that I could go to college and have a much better life, and they were right. I went to college and became an engineer and now I own my own business. It’s a small business, but I’m my own boss. And we own our own home and have cars and a nice life. I want you to know that you will go to college, no matter what. And then you can choose to stay in showbiz, or you can choose to be a doctor, or the first lady president. Or an astronaut.”

“First lady president,” I repeated.

He laughed. “Someday I will tell you about Adam Smith and
The Wealth of Nations
.”

“Is that a book? Can you read it to me now?”

“No. It’s too late.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “But I will tell you now that it’s about the Invisible Hand.”

“Why is the hand invisible?” I was partly curious, partly stalling.

“Because you don’t need to see it to know it’s working,” he said wistfully.

“How do you know it’s there?”

“Because there’s evidence everywhere you look. It’s another way of saying market forces work when they are left alone. And it makes sense. It’s logical. That’s enough for tonight. Time to close your eyes, and think of something nice but sort of boring, like baseball. And you’ll fall asleep.”

He kissed my forehead gently, and I pictured this giant Invisible Hand throwing a baseball. I was watching the whole thing, as First Lady President.

By the time the next season of
Little House on the Prairie
began airing, my life had changed in a very specific way. Everywhere I went, people recognized me from the show.

I could feel the attention unfolding. A stranger would look in my direction, the way a person’s eyes naturally move over a face that passes in front of him. Then a flicker of recognition. The eyes dart back. They search my face, trying to place me. Then the shock of full recognition. A smile. Followed by a quick turn to the person next to them. A loud whisper, the other person looking confused. Their eyes find my face. The same process, the same jolt.

At first, I enjoyed the novelty of being recognized by strangers. Then the attention made me terribly self-conscious. I started to hide my face or turn away when a stranger started to recognize me. If they got up the nerve to ask, “Are you Cassandra from
Little House on the Prairie
?” I liked to say no. But I felt guilty when I did this because I knew I was being rude. I didn’t want to be mean or lie, but all the attention was just too much even though I had recently turned nine years old. I was still a kid, and it was an invasion.

In general, I could handle attention, but the kind that could be turned on and off like a light. This was a pulsating strobe I had no power to dim.

When the filming of
Little House
resumed in the fall, one of the more pleasant changes on the set was the addition of the character Nancy. Her real name was Allison Balson. The writers were reincarnating the original show by positioning me as the New Laura and giving me a New Nellie, or archenemy. Naturally the script called for Allison and me to loathe each other on sight, and just like the first pair of girls on the show, we ended up rolling in the mud, trying to scratch each other’s eyes out.

Allison had stunning pale blonde ringlets trimmed with bows and gorgeous dresses that I coveted. The wardrobe team decorated her each day like an exquisite, expensive doll. But playing the most elaborately bedecked character meant Allison got tortured in hair and makeup for two long hours every day, and she schlepped the heaviest ruffled petticoat around under her ornate dresses to keep them fluffed, even in the hundred-degree heat of the San Fernando Valley.

I also found a friend in Rachel, one of the twins who played Carrie, my adopted sister. Rachel was easygoing and relaxed, always happy to hang out on one of the unlit sets that wasn’t being used, or court trouble around the property truck. I’d latch on to her and her twin sister. The twins’ professional names were Lindsay and Sidney. From the back, we looked like triplets, with our long brown braids and prairie dresses. We’d steal into the fake Mercantile Exchange and snag candy from the set. Then we’d bite into the candy only to find out it had been aging on the set since the show started eight years earlier. But in a few days, we’d go back for more, hoping some set designer had restocked the shelves, though they never did.

Much to my dismay, Jason wanted to hang out with the older kids. But no matter what, a pack of kids, regulars or extras, roamed around the set when we weren’t in the schoolroom logging hours with our books. Still every grip, assistant director, and makeup artist looked out for the kids and doted on us.

Michael expected us to work like adults, but he also engineered horseplay in between shots. On rare occasion, he even wasted film. One blazing hot day in the Valley, I said my line, and when he turned to answer, he opened his mouth and a live bullfrog jumped out. This was no prop or product of Hollywood special effects. It was a filthy toad he’d found on the ground in between takes. I screamed in terror, no doubt only slightly less afraid than the poor frog who thought he’d turned into Michael’s lunch.

Another time Michael put a tarantula under his hat, then removed it and delivered his lines as if he didn’t know a huge furry black spider was perched on his head, slowly climbing through his bangs. When it stepped on his forehead with its long fuzzy creepy legs, we all screamed bloody murder. He was so pleased with the effect, he never seemed to consider the potential downside of recruiting a random desert tarantula to stroll on his face.

During one of the last weeks of the season on
Little House
, Mom invited my Brownie troop to take a field trip to the set. “Every single one replied yes,” she’d said smugly.

Eighteen third graders showed up with their moms. I ran to them excitedly when they arrived, but Jennifer and Marybeth stood a little stiffly as if they didn’t recognize me in my costume.

“Hey, guys!” I boomed.

Christy bounded over to me, but most of the others just stood silently, their heads swiveling as they tried to take in everything from the rafters to the blinding lights to the cable-covered floors.

“This . . . is where they shoot the interior shots,” Mom explained authoritatively as she walked the group around the set, displaying impressive leadership skills, especially for someone who had flatly refused to ever host a Brownie troop meeting at our house.

We’d been shooting a winter episode, and the set designers had stapled white foam sheets to all the wooden buildings and window frames to make it look like snow. The magic of the set, layered on top of the general wizardry of creating a television show, enchanted Brownie Troop 407.

The
Little House on the Prairie
set was without question a magical place to work. Which was why the end of the run crushed Mom’s spirit. She went from being on top of the world, bragging loudly wherever she went, to housebound and brooding.

The mini-Laura and mini-Nellie gambit had worked for a time to boost ratings and reignite the American heartland’s interest in a show that was getting long in the tooth, but then Michael decided the whole family had to go. The nineteenth-century well had finally run dry. His creative energies were turning to a new show,
Highway to Heaven
, in which he would play the role of an angel, no matter how improbable this might seem to television viewers who had read about his serial womanizing in the
National Enquirer
.

In the spring of 1982, I was sad to leave my new friends, but happy enough to go back to school and have more time to ride my horse. Besides, every job I had ever had had come to an end. Why would this one be any different? But Mom reacted as if someone close to her had died. After receiving the phone call informing us that the show was over, she didn’t answer the phone for days. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, including me.

“Why’s Mom so sad?” I asked Dad while we were both sitting on the couch in the living room. “Is she mad at me?”

“No, honey,” he said soothingly, stroking my hair. “She’s just really disappointed you guys aren’t working on
Little House
together any longer.”

“But I’ll get something else,” I said. “Is she going to stay in her room until I get something else?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s possible.”

“How will I get home from school?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out,” he offered.

“How will I go on auditions after school?” I asked.