You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (13 page)

On the set of Matinee with Simon Fenton.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
.

The scene was reduced to only a kiss, which was in absolutely no way, “only a kiss.” It was my first ever kiss; it was monumental on multiple levels. What if I did it wrong? What if I was destined to be labeled a terrible kisser because it would be forever documented for any potential suitors to study and determine my worthiness as a possible kissing partner?

In the days leading up to the kiss, my co-star and I tried desperately to avoid each other in the small trailer that we used for our schooling, but avoidance proved to be difficult in a space that was only eight feet wide. Teenaged angst permeated the trailer, where we sat as far apart as possible and pretended it was unintentional that we kicked each other’s chairs on the way to the bathroom.

We were filming on a sound stage on the Universal Studios backlot in Orlando, so when we weren’t needed on set and our three hours of daily school was done, my co-star and I could ditch each other and escape into the theme park. This must be one of the most fun ways to avoid a boy. Having a theme park as your office includes perks like a front-of-the-line pass, which means that you can skip the hour-long wait and get in a quick ride on King Kong or Indiana Jones after lunch. I got to know the Rocket Pop vendors by name and learned where the performers in character costumes stored their giant heads.

What’s problematic about working on a backlot is when the trams of tourists ride by, and the guide with the headset points you out as being one of the stars of a new movie filming on the lot as you’re walking to the bathroom. Then, you find yourself wanting to hide behind a churro cart, but feeling like you are contractually obligated to pose and smile while they whip out their disposable cameras. After all, you are a Universal Artist and you need to earn that front-of-the-line pass. So, I’d just stand there, uncomfortable with the attention and imagining that I was one of the performers who wore the big suits and giant heads to pose with tourists. They were just taking photos of the costume actor on the outside. They couldn’t see the real, tiny me who was hiding underneath, sweating
and dying to go home.

The day of the kiss finally arrived. My co-star, equally horrified by the task before us, dealt with it like sixteen-year-old boys are apt to do: he made it even more terrible. He refused the Binaca breath spray that was standard issue for any actor doing a kissing scene. He joked and jabbed and I felt like shit. The scene turned out fine. It looked clumsy and stressful; exactly what it was. I don’t know how many takes we did, although I would guess it was 593. It was more likely five.

I comforted myself by deciding that the kiss didn’t count. It couldn’t count. This couldn’t be the big first kiss that I would remember forever. I’d heard other girls talk about their first kiss, which had been sweet and never
ever
involved a lighting crew. Those girls had actually
liked
the person they were kissing, or at the very least they were friends carrying out a dare. It couldn’t count as a real kiss if the two people were not really speaking to each other at the time, could it? I’d hugged lots of people on film, maybe it was just an extension of that. A lip hug.

I would later sign a release to have the kissing scene played in the film
Beethoven’s Second
. When they show movies in movies, the actors involved need to agree to the release of their images. The contract didn’t say what the clip would be used for and in retrospect perhaps it would have been a good idea to ask for more details. As it turns out, Beethoven the dog and his girlfriend go see
Matinee
at the drive in, and apparently my wounding kiss created some romantic moments for the canine couple. Even though the event did nothing for my co-star or me, I guess it’s nice that we could turn on some dogs.

It was after
Matinee
that the fan letters started coming from prisons. They came through my agent, and she would mail the stacks of envelopes to my house in Canada. They were perfectly polite, written on lined paper with frilly edges where the page had been torn out of a spiral
notebook. The handwriting was slow and careful as the convicts listed the television shows and movies that they had enjoyed watching me in. After the request for a signed 8x10 photograph, at the very bottom of the page in smaller, slightly reluctant lettering, they identified the name of their prison and their prisoner number. They kindly included return envelopes, self-addressed to places like San Quentin and Folsom. It was exciting to get mail from a notorious prison.

My parents implemented a strict no-writing-back-to-fan-letters policy, one of the few rules about anything in my childhood. I obeyed, even though I always felt badly about the prisoners spending their allowance on stamps and taking up their (perhaps not so precious) time to write to me. A few young colleagues of mine were having problems with obsessed fans and stalkers. The reigning wisdom was that while it was nice that people took the time to express their affection, becoming pen pals with fans opened up the possibility for something scarier. John Hinckley Jr. had shot Reagan in an attempt to get Jodie Foster’s attention and none of us wanted to set ourselves up to be the next fixation.

Fan letters arrived from non-felons, too. People shared select pieces of information about their lives, hoping to trade some sort of faux intimacy for a signed photo. Not knowing what to do with the letters, I left them all to pile up in the corner, where they would eventually slide under the china cabinet and co-mingle with dust bunnies and lost cat toys. I quickly stopped reading fan letters all together, because it was uncomfortable to have people know you if you don’t know them. It’s like seeing someone at a party who asks about your parents by name, but you have no clue who they are. I secretly wished these fans could be my real-life friends and would occasionally poke through the envelopes to check the return address for their geographical proximity. The number of meaningful relationships I was able to maintain was dwindling fast and these fans already had some sort of affinity for me, even if their motivation had nothing to do with who I really was.

My mother and agent kept an eye on the increasing stacks of letters,
scanning them for anything threatening or dangerous. There were a few creepy ones, I think, but I was never privy to the details of them. My mother’s normally lax leash on me seemed to get a little tighter after a fat envelope of mail would arrive. Was this what fame felt like? Was it supposed to feel awkward and dangerous?

Regardless of my trepidation about the realities of fame, I went back to L.A. and went back to my job looking for work. Each year from January to April, television shows would cast for their new seasons and L.A. was even more densely populated with chiseled cheekbones and blinding veneers. Pilot season is like migration season for birds. Would-be-actors flock to Hollywood, feeding and mating and milling around. They cluster together at hip new clubs, acting studios and gyms offering the latest fitness trend. They all preen their prettiest feathers, flap their wings to get attention and peck out the eyes of potential competition. I’d be there, too, snagging whatever audition crumbs the production companies threw out to me.

The rest of the year would be spent bouncing around working on shows and occasionally going home to Canada in an attempt to be a regular kid. This transition was always a little bumpy. When I was home, I was stressing about my science project examining the effect of Diet Coke on carnations and trying to navigate where to sit at lunch. It was different from L.A., where I was going to parties in which Dolly Parton was telling me that my performance made her cry and that, “tears were splashing off my big ole boobs.” She was a delightful, tiny little thing and it was hard to know what to say.
I’m sorry? Thank you?
Do you look at her boobs or not? It seems like a really rude thing to do at a party, but when it’s Dolly Parton, and when she’s gesturing to them, who knows what the rules are?

Instead of entering through a red carpet with photographers, going
to a party in Canada involved tripping over a pile of Reebok High Tops that were mixed with dirty, melted snow in the front hallway of a suburban three-bedroom house. A newly-made friend of mine had a party in his parent’s unfinished basement and I added my high tops to the slushy pile. As I walked through the sheets stapled to the exposed beams to delineate rooms, I saw Fritos in giant plastic bowls and cases of warm Sprite stacked on the cement floor.

There were couples making out, sprawled over the worn armrests of the couch, the boys testing to see how far they could get with under-the-girl’s-flannel-shirt action. Smashing Pumpkins’
Siamese Dream
blared in the background, drowning out the sounds of overeager hands being slapped away. I longed to be one of those girls who was having her shirt buttons tested, but it didn’t seem like I was ever going to be wanted like that. There would always be movies in the way, positioned strategically between me and anyone I tried to have a relationship with. They thought of me as “The Girl from the Movies” first, anything else was secondary.

I was already learning to be wary of people’s intentions. Everything seemed to be going well with this one girl I was starting to be friends with, until I commented that a shirt in a shop window was cute. She immediately ran in, bought it for me and then asked if I would wear it on TV. I tried to decline the shirt and explain that I had no control over what I wore on set, but she stomped off and we never spoke again. If it was that awkward just trying to have friends, a boyfriend seemed out of the question. It was obvious that I would always have to settle for boys who were paid to kiss me while a crew stood around and watched.

Just beyond the masses of enraged hormones, a group of guys huddled around an old TV, the kind that looks like furniture, in the corner. There was a news show on, reporting that Kurt Cobain had been found dead in his home, with a shotgun and a suicide note nearby. Several of the guys were crying. I had never seen boys cry before. It was totally disconcerting. Suddenly, they looked ten years younger, and like they had accidently been separated from their parents at a theme park. They
were lost. Devastated and broken. Their puffy pink eyes filled the place where the standard teenage boy irreverence and snark should have been.

One of the guys went over to the tape player, silenced the Smashing Pumpkins, and put in the
Nevermind
cassette. We all listened to “Come As You Are” with a quiet reverence, except for the making-out people, who were too thrilled with the possibilities of the dark basement to take a moment of grief-filled respect.

As I watched the guys wipe their noses on their sleeves, mumbling, “Fuck, man,” into their chests, I realized that entertainment could really mean something to people. It could be art. Regular people, like these Canadian 9
^th
graders, felt connected to Cobain. They felt his pain and they mourned the loss of him like they would a dear friend. Performers held a lot of responsibility to the world that watched us. We asked to be invited in to people’s lives and hearts and when we entered, it came with emotional responsibility. It didn’t need to be logical. It was a gut thing.

That accountability sat heavily on my shoulders. Of course, I was clearly not famous like Kurt Cobain and I had no desire to kill myself. But it was the first time that the flip side of this relationship was so clear to me. I saw the people who were on the other end of the fan mail I got, the people who said that they felt a connection and had been impacted by my work. I didn’t know if I was an artist, I was no more confident in my acting chops than I had been when the first graders whipped me with willow branches. But it was clear that whatever I was, I was involved with art and art could mean something. It could be epic and genuine, essentially human and primal. It could also be painful and heart-wrenching and occasionally fatal. It was serious and needed to be taken seriously.

My history teacher was not impressed that I was missing my test because I had to go for tea at the White House with Barbara Bush. Being Canadian, the whole thing was less remarkable than it would have been if I actually knew the words to the Pledge of Allegiance, but it was neat anyway. I did a TV movie with Jessica Tandy called
The Story Lady
and it was about reading being a good thing. It was shocking to think that this was news to anyone, but apparently Barbara Bush enjoyed it and wanted people to watch a movie about books. She was involved in a symposium called, “Developing the Lifetime Reading Habit: Libraries, Youth and Elders,” so Mom and I got to go to the White House.

The director, producer, writer, and some other actors from the film were also invited and we stood around a very flowery room at the White House and drank tea with the First Lady. She seemed nice and was wearing a suit with white sneakers that had the word “READ” on them in puffy gold paint. I wondered if she had done that herself or if there was an official White House bedazzler. We drank tea from tiny floral china cups and I learned how to eat finger sandwiches without dropping the saucer. There were photo ops and Mrs. Bush gave a little speech about the movie and then my mother and I just stood around awkwardly for a
while, trying not to touch anything. Neither Mom nor I ever felt comfortable in fancy situations. We were the kind of family that went camping for vacations and considered dinner at Sizzler to be only for extra extra special occasions. So, we passed our uneasiness back and forth, while we stood below a larger-than-life-size painting of Jackie O in a gilded frame that probably cost more than our house.