Is My Bow Too Big? How I Went From Saturday Night Live to the Tea Party (3 page)

If you drop your head, you fall.

Ingenue

They said to bust into Hollywood

You had to have a bust.

I said, “You must?”

They said, “You must.”

W
hen I was seventeen, my dad said, “What do you want to be when you grow up? Because you’re going to be grown up soon, and the quicker you decide on your career, the more years of preparation, the better you will be at it.”

I hadn’t really thought about this. A teacher like him? A nurse like mom? “If I could be anything… I’d like to be in
The Sound of Music
, and play my ukulele on top of a mountain with all my kids in matching outfits, and make lots of money, and marry the captain.”

Since we didn’t have a TV and were only allowed to see G-rated movies, my fantasies were limited. But that was the perfect life for me.

“Sounds like an actress,” Dad grimly replied.

I’d never thought of a movie as a career choice. Acting was as far away from my world as China. But, when he seemed to take it seriously, so did I. From his leather recliner, Dad said, “Well, Christianity and show biz don’t mix very well, so I don’t recommend it, but if that’s what you want, give it a hundred percent.”

After Florida Bible College, I attended Furman University on a partial gymnastic scholarship. I accidentally tripped into my first play when Professor Rhett Bryson noticed me in his theatre supporting my auditioning friend. He gave me the role of ditzy Roman slave. He directed me to eat a real daisy, on stage, petal by petal, and swallow it. Maybe he was testing my dedication to the arts. I made the audience laugh. I was instantly addicted.
Laughter.
Where could I get another hit?

I promptly switched from an English major to a Theatre major and went to Auburn, because it was cheaper. My parents worked, and since we weren’t a minority, I couldn’t get government money for tuition. I worked as a Steak and Ale waitress and assistant manager at Woodwinds Apartments. My job there was collecting rent money from people who didn’t have any. Awkward. Acting roles were hard to get. It seemed like the promiscuous girls got all the good roles. I finally got a role—playing a lesbian in
The Killing of Sister George
. The only line I remember is “She made me drink her bath water,” in a British accent. I told the student director that I was a Christian so I would not kiss the other actress on the mouth. I would hug her (with clothes on), standing up, but that was it.

I got a “D” in Speech: “You’re never going to be an actress with a voice like that!”

One day, I was tapped on the shoulder during class and brought to the Registrar’s office. I was told that I couldn’t continue classes because my tuition was unpaid. “Aren’t my parents supposed to do that?”

“They didn’t.”

“Can I sleep in my dorm room tonight?”

“Let me check.”

So I took a bus to Memphis to audition for
Circle in the Square
. Rejected. I then went to Birmingham to audition for
Summerfest ’80
and I got a spot in the chorus line. My first paid acting job: $600. That’s where I met Johnny Crawford. He changed my life.

I was doing handstands on big truck tires and fire hydrants trying to get his attention. All the girls in Birmingham that summer wanted Johnny Crawford (
The Rifleman
), the real actor from Hollywood, to notice them. He noticed my row of flip-flops during the dance sequence of
Meet Me in St. Louis
. At our lunch break, he invited me to dine with him alone at Burger King.

“You have a unique voice. You’re like a thirties girl. You should be in my nightclub act.” He was smiling and shaking his head, as if to say, “I can’t believe I’m saying this to a girl I just met.”

I thought,
Wow, this is better than flirting. He’s inviting me to Los Angeles to be in an actual real show!
“Well, you’ll have to call my parents and ask permission, I guess, because I’m only nineteen. How old are you?”

“Thirty-three,” he said, smiling sweetly.

“I never saw
The Rifleman
. We didn’t have a TV.”

He called my parents, and then put me on the phone with them.

“It’s okay?!” I exclaimed.

“Well, we trust you. Just be sure to start college in the fall.” I looked at the phone quizzically. I didn’t have any money, and neither did they. Johnny went back to Hollywood when his role in
St. Louis
ended, and we college students in the chorus line stayed on for the last two plays of the summer run. The other girls on my hall were numb with envy. Each night Johnny would call me on the hall’s payphone and talk to me about Hollywood and the act we would do together.

With the one-way ticket Johnny sent me, I arrived at the LA airport with my college trunk and my ukulele. He was an hour late. I was worried because I only had a dime in my pocket and the payphones required a quarter. There were no cell phones then. I couldn’t think of one person I even faintly knew in California. Finally, Johnny’s 1929 Chrysler pulled up and he handed me a dozen red roses, but I don’t think I was impressed at the romantic Hollywood greeting as much as I was relieved that I wouldn’t be homeless for a night.

At his house we promptly started preparing for his show, which was opening in two nights. He would sing Bing Crosby tunes with his guitar while I played the comic relief; a fawning admirer who gets dragged off the stage by bouncers only to return as a vamp and do gymnastics while he sang
Temptation
, and then again as a butler dressing him as he sings
Puttin’ On My Top Hat
. We had great chemistry. While he was resisting me, you could tell he wanted me badly. The crowd loved it. Big hit. Romance with a catch and a moral dilemma.

Standing near the grand piano, in the living room of Johnny’s family home which overlooked the Hollywood sign, I asked, “Where should I sleep?”

“What?” he asked, completely taken off-guard.

I smiled. “I told you I was a Baptist virgin and I don’t sleep with men.”.

“I thought you were kidding.”

My mind retraced our brief history and I realized I had done a handstand on a chair in his hotel room. But I was just flirting.

“Then why did I bring you here?”

“To be in your nightclub act,” I answered.

“Oh, yeah.”

I was permitted to sleep on the couch for the next few weeks. We made zero money for our big hit show. Los Angeles assumes they are doing you a favor to allow you to perform in their city. There is so much talent just sitting there, waiting for a chance to be seen. Many times a performer will pay to perform in LA. The city compensates with their population of powerful people who might see your act and give you a chance to make it big. Johnny had no money. He had been a child star. He lived with his dad. I had my dime. I quickly learned after two weeks that I needed to find an income-producing job and a place to sleep.

One day Johnny said, “I can’t really date anyone with a twenty-year-old blonde Baptist virgin sleeping on my couch.” So I borrowed his dad’s bike and rode it down the hill into the city to answer an ad I found in
The LA Times
. It was a job serving food to old people at The Kipling Retirement Hotel. My compensation was free room and board—no money, but at least a place to sleep. “Hotel” was appropriate because no one stayed there very long. I assumed that the “board” in the phrase “room and board” meant I’d get free food. It did. But, it was old-people food: lots of applesauce and Jello. The manager there was a Christian, so I guess he understood why I couldn’t live with the son of the Rifleman. He gave me the job. He showed me to my little room.

I was the only girl employee in a hallway of twelve or so single young guy employees who smoked pot all day. One guy didn’t. He had just become born-again. I wanted to talk to him about Jesus, but I got scared of him when he said that he quit his job as a schoolteacher to live on the street and study the Bible all day. One middle-aged guy who worked at the dishwasher machine had a big clump of snarly black hair that hung down off one side of his head. It looked like a bat’s nest
.
He was sweet and would swish the clump from side to side like a surfer. I kept staring at it. Didn’t he ever look in the mirror? Maybe he didn’t know there was a glob hanging off the side of his head. The other guys would just stare at me like they couldn’t believe this young blonde virgin was living across the hall from them. They were kind of scared of me, like I might explode if spoken to. Now that I had a place to stay, I just needed to find a paying job. Every day an old person would die; just drop over in the middle of breakfast or lunch. There was an ambulance sitting across the street just waiting—no flashing lights or anything—just waiting for the manager to wave him over.

Johnny put my big black college trunk in his 1929 Chrysler and dropped me off at the retirement hotel. He felt guilty because he knew he was the only person I knew in the whole state, but he was glad to be free from the responsibility. I was writing to my high school sweetheart Paul at the time. His dad forbade him from marrying me until he finished college. If he really loved me, he would disobey his dad and marry me; but Paul always followed the rules. So I gave his diamond ring back, but not in my heart. I weighed my two options: I had no college tuition, so I could either be a typist in Miami and wait for Paul to graduate, or be a typist in Los Angeles and wait for Paul to graduate. But in L.A., I could chase my whim of acting. I knew this was the only time in my life I could chase a whim. I had no husband, no kids, no responsibilities.

Johnny treated me to Wendy’s. We discussed my stage name. “Vera Luz,” he suggested. “Because you’re not loose!” He laughed. I said, “Well, if we make up a name, I’ll feel fake, and what if someone says my name and I don’t turn around because I can’t remember that’s me?”

“What’s your real name?”

“Victoria Lynn Jackson.”

Johnny laughed bigger. “Well, that’s a perfect stage name, Victoria Jackson!”

So there it was. He called the Screen Actor’s Guild
(SAG
) and there was no Victoria Jackson listed, so I could have it.

Johnny told me “they” like big eyes.

I practiced holding my eyes open wider. I asked, “How do I get an agent?”

Johnny sighed, “I don’t know. I can’t even get an agent.”

Later, I asked Johnny why he never took me to Hef’s Playboy Mansion where he went every weekend. He was on “the list.” He said, “Because all the girls who go there change.”

“What do you mean?”

“They start drinking, and smoking, and get breast implants.”

I said, “I won’t change.”

The Playboy Mansion

You’re probably wondering why a twenty-year-old Baptist virgin would want to go to the Playboy Mansion… to network of course! How else do you get an agent?

I was networking. I was an observer at the Mansion. I was never asked to pose nude. I would have said no, but they could have asked. Hef, the owner, never learned my name. Instead he called me “darlin’.” I never saw anything unseemly. Well, I never went upstairs either. It was like a country club for the has-beens and wanna-be’s, with a couple of curious hot-now’s walking around with eager eyes. I saw some celebrities and a myriad of identical, scantily-clad, fake-boobed blondes who had all changed their names from Cindy or Sue to Mystique or Raven. Most of them disappeared into the fabric of Hollywood’s never-was’s. I heard rumors. I saw Holly. She was physically perfect. I felt very inadequate, except for the fact that I could do a handstand and she couldn’t. I asked one of the butlers, “Is Holly an actress or a model?”

He said, “She lives here.”

I knew she wasn’t Hef’s girlfriend, so I asked, “Where?”

“On the grounds.”

“How much is the rent?” I received a knowing glance.