In Pieces(38)

And waiting for me at our table in the back sat Steve, smiling sweetly through it all, looking like a young Steve McQueen to my insane Baby Jane.


Right after The Flying Nun pilot was picked up, I’d moved from my first apartment in Encino to one in Malibu, just down from the Colony. It was in a twelve-unit complex standing on tall wooden stilts, like telephone poles, allowing the waves to roll under the building at high tide, vibrating the floor and tingling your feet. When production started in June of ’67 my MGB started racking up mileage as I drove to and from work every day—PCH before the sun came up and PCH long after it went down.

I remember dragging myself home one night, relieved to be out of the scratchy wool for a few hours, and when I opened the door to my apartment there on the sofa sat Steve, happily sifting a large brick of grass through the sieve I used to drain spaghetti. Like most of our generation, he had found marijuana, and on the coffee table before him was a small mountain of freshly cleaned weed, waiting to eventually be dumped into the two-foot-tall Brach’s candy jar standing empty on the floor. He’d push and plead and criticize, but I rarely participated in either the cleaning or the smoking of it. I told myself it was because I had so little time and that frolicking through the night, eating Hostess Ding Dongs with abandon, was something I didn’t need. That I had a job. Which was all true but in reality, I didn’t know how to frolic and Steve did.

During the day while I was at work, Steve would often rescue Princess from her life in the Valley, bringing her to the Malibu apartment to get her away from our incoherent mother, who was in the process of falling apart, and her father, with his freak show of false posturing. Jocko’s career was down to an occasional low-paying personal appearance, and soon he disappeared, abruptly departing with one of the many women in his life, leaving me to pay the rent on a small apartment in the Valley for my broken mother and little sister.

Now fourteen, and almost six feet tall, Princess ran wild like an escaped puppy frantically sniffing and peeing everywhere with no one to grab her collar. One moment she seemed like my comrade, and the next she felt like a responsibility I didn’t know how to accept. But unless I took her to work with me—which I did frequently—I wouldn’t see her. Too often I’d drag myself into the apartment late in the evening, and everywhere I looked would be the remnants of the fun-filled day that Steve and my sister had enjoyed. Sand still on their feet, they’d sit on the balcony smoking a joint, and no matter what I said—or didn’t say—my “adult supervisor” tone always gave me away. I began to feel like the boring grumpy ant to their happy-go-lucky grasshoppers.

Steve really needed to have a life of his own, separate from mine, with his own identity. But how do two people grow up together, build strength in their own legs, when they’re always leaning on each other? How could he find his place in the world when my life kept sucking him in, making it hard for him to take those first wobbly steps to begin a craft or career? Maybe that’s part of the reason why he’d lose interest in everything after his initial burst of enthusiasm. He’d won a track scholarship and though he had real talent, he was impatient with the coaches, aggravated by their rules and the mindless, repetitive tasks he was forced to do, so he stopped going to practice.

As I look back right now, I realize that it was all of those mindless, repetitive tasks I was forced to endure day after day, the getting up and doing every scene the best I could, over and over, that gave me a kind of “miles in the saddle.” They strengthened muscles not located in my body but in my heart—muscles not easy to access and certainly not fun. But easy is overrated and fun is extremely relative.


As that year crawled away, month after month, summer somehow becoming fall, I began to change for reasons I couldn’t name, other than the fact that I was working all day then coming home and instantly turning into Ebenezer Scrooge. And when, in a moment of anger, Steve told me with a dismissive air that this “acting stuff” was nothing, that anyone could do it, that he could do it too if he wanted, the self-righteous out I needed presented itself. Midway through that first year of the Nun, I found myself alone. I was without Steve and my brother and my mother. I didn’t drink, as Baa did, so I ate. And for the first time in my life I wanted food, over all else.

I would drive to work early in the morning, work all day, drive home at night, eat, and go to sleep. Next day, I would wake up before it was light, drive to work, work all day, drive home, eat, sleep. And on Saturdays, I would go into the recording studio or do a photo layout, then fill the rest of the day cooking and eating, trying to drown my loneliness in a vat of spaghetti with gobs of meat sauce and a whole chocolate cake, unable to stop eating even when I was in physical pain. And always I was alone, hiding in a closet of food.

I’d stick my fingers down my throat, longing for the relief of puking, but get nothing except a hacking, impotent gag. Maybe that belongs under the category of “God works in mysterious ways.” I’d never heard of an eating disorder—no one talked about such things in the late sixties. But if I’d found the ability to regurgitate all the self-loathing I’d shoveled into myself, perhaps I would have continued down that destructive highway. Luckily, I didn’t.

Instead, I suffered for days after each binge, the following morning being the worst. After sleeping ten or eleven hours, I would wake in agony, my entire body swollen and inflamed, actually sore to the touch. On Mondays, I’d go on a starvation diet of grapefruit and eggs or would eat nothing but cucumbers for a week. And when that wasn’t enough, I started visiting the famous Louise Long as well. I’m not sure what Ms. Long’s technique was called, but massage it wasn’t. In the wee hours, before my 6:30 or 7 a.m. call, I’d drive to her place in the Valley, which was always overflowing with actresses (some famous, most not) all looking to get the crap pulverized out of them before heading off to work. In the overly heated little house, Louise or one of her trained associates would move from one sheet-covered table to another and violently pound on the naked bodies of all the women who had come looking for instant slenderizing or atonement—or both. For months, my black-and-blue anatomy looked like it had been in an automobile accident, so I guess it was a good thing I wasn’t wearing Gidget’s bathing suits anymore. But it didn’t matter how much I got smacked around, or how many days I lived on hard-boiled eggs. My weekend benders were winning, and soon the press started reporting on my “baby fat,” visible to every columnist I plopped down next to during lunch. My face was so round that my bangs looked shorter.