In Pieces(33)
For a moment, I stood at the door, listening to the commotion outside, then turned a small wastepaper basket upside down and sat, my hands still shaking, feeling deeply alone but oddly thrilled. Never again would I walk down the street or push my cart through the produce aisle without being aware of people when they recognize me—and when they don’t recognize me. Either way, I was no longer a member of the club anymore. The Human Club. I was a celebrity.
8
Get Thee to a Nunnery
WHEN I WALKED onto the set—a classroom containing ten or twelve children of varying ages—everyone stopped dead in their tracks and stared at me. Gidget’s happy-go-lucky clothes were gone, and in their place I wore several layers of ankle-length ecru wool, starting with a long-sleeved dress. Over the dress, with its Peter Pan collar, was placed an apron-like panel called a scapular, the front section loosely belted at the waist, leaving the back to flap in the breeze—layer number two. After my long hair had been bound to my head with countless bobby pins, a nylon sock—which looked as though it had once been attached to a pair of panty hose—was pulled down over the top and anchored in place with long straight hairpins. Covering the whole wad was one of my two hat choices, and since this was an interior scene, I wore the smaller, scarf-like head covering with its shoulder-length veil attached to the back.
The camera had already been set up and the assistant director was in the process of placing the children into positions. There was a rote feeling to it all, probably because the scene had already been filmed the week before and they were planning to do it exactly the same. Only one thing would be different: This time I was playing the lead. The director—whom I’d worked with on several Gidget episodes and adored—put his arm around my shoulder with an easy smile and started to explain the shot. Before he could finish, however, the cameraman—whom I had not worked with before—butted in to introduce himself and at the same time began inspecting my appearance. Moving close, then pulling back, he flatly stated that I needed to cut my eyelashes. They were too long.
Mind you, these were not fake, glued-on eyelashes, but the things that grew out of my lids, for God’s sake, the same as my mother’s and grandmother’s. Trying to make light, I laughingly begged him to please let me keep them, saying that I was proud of them and it would be weird to cut them off! Joining the discussion at that point was the Catholic technical advisor, who took her job very seriously. Luckily, she didn’t remain for many episodes, at least not on the set. After giving my face an impersonal examination—everyone leaning in like they were looking at a painting on the wall—they walked to the edge of the set, then huddled together to discuss the serious situation while the crew waited, watching the unfolding drama. When a few uncomfortable moments had passed, it was announced: My eyelashes could stay. Praise be to God. Everyone quickly moved into their positions as the assistant director yelled an unnecessary “Quiet on the set.” Swack, as the director was called, suggested we run it once—then roll film. I was fine with that, and that’s what we did.
Even with my eyelashes in place, I felt defeated before I said my first line.
When Gidget was canceled after that one blur of a season, I felt only one quick painful stab and then it was gone. I’d never read the reviews, wouldn’t have known where to find the Nielsen ratings even if I’d wanted to know what they were, which I didn’t. I was only slightly aware that the show had been a product at all, bought and sold by an industry that needed to see an immediate profit (or the likelihood of one soon), something they didn’t see from Gidget. Maybe the fact that I had lived in a fogbank so long was keeping me from projecting ahead, forcing me to live one day at a time with very few expectations. I don’t know. But when I walked away from the girl I loved so much, I didn’t feel crushed. Gidget was still with me, was me. And living with her so relentlessly that year had given me things I hadn’t owned before: a tiny sliver of her confidence, her willingness to be optimistic, and her daring ability to look toward the future.
I hadn’t had an agent when I was initially cast as Gidget, so Jocko introduced me to Herb Tobias, who seemed like a nice man, though befuddled by the fact that I’d landed the starring role in a television series without any representation at all. And although Mr. Tobias visited the set during that first year of my career, maybe even asked me to lunch—something I have only a vague memory of—I always felt that he thought of me as an energetic flash in the pan. However, when I was asked to meet on two projects immediately after Gidget’s demise, and when those meetings resulted in two very different offers, Herb started calling with regularity, if only to say hi.
The first offer was for the lead in a play being produced at the Valley Music Theater—a short-lived but well-intentioned theater in the round, located in Tarzana… or was it Woodland Hills? Clearly not Broadway, where the play had first been produced in 1961, and later adapted into a film starring James Stewart and Sandra Dee. Take Her, She’s Mine is the story of a feisty teenage girl and her anxious, loving father, very Gidget -like territory. But this would be a stage production, like going back to the familiar drama department, and the father was to be played by the great Walter Pidgeon. I was thrilled. The other project was a movie entitled The Way West, starring Richard Widmark, Kirk Douglas, and Robert Mitchum, to be shot in Oregon all that summer, now 1966. I was to play a feisty teenage girl with an anxious loving father, which sounds painfully familiar, but this time everyone is stuck on a wagon train heading west and when this daughter finds herself pregnant by a creepy older guy, she jumps off the back of her covered wagon, rolling head over teakettle down the hill. This prompts the sweet redheaded boy—who has always loved her—to leap to her rescue, somehow running down the hill faster than she can bounce. Miraculously, he catches her, then marries her, even though he knows she is damaged goods. I chose to do that one.