In Pieces(44)

Even in the first days of my hiatus I began to prepare for what lay ahead, to smooth out some of the bumps I knew I’d be traveling over as soon as production started again. I gave up my Malibu apartment and rented a big ugly house in Hollywood, ten minutes from Columbia, eliminating the long commute that was not only a waste of my precious time but filled with anxiety, since I never knew when the temperamental Ferrari would overheat on the 101 freeway, forcing me to pull over and wait for traffic to thin before I could limp home. From Kings Road, I could almost coast to work if I had to. This time it was Princess who helped me load up the boxes, staying with me a great deal of the time, helping me unpack as if we were building a new life together.

My twenty-first birthday party, hosted by Screen Gems.





There are no family photos taken during most of those years because there was no family to take them. The only tools I have to unearth memories are the scrapbooks Aunt Gladys devotedly kept, basically documenting my career until 1989, when she passed away, less than a year after her older sister, my grandmother Joy. In the stacks of carefully cut-out articles, clippings, and fan magazine stories (all placed in clear plastic sleeves with the date on the top) I find a paparazzi-style photo of an overweight, double-chinned Sally. With long straight hair and short blunt bangs, I’m smiling gleefully as I stand jammed against two of the Monkees, Davy and Peter. It was my twenty-first birthday party, held at the Factory, hosted by Jackie Cooper and thrown by Screen Gems. I’d hated birthday parties ever since my brother’s fourth-grade no-show, and even though the whole event had been arranged by the studio and was mostly a publicity opportunity, I remember being very nervous. Shortly after the band’s deafening beat started up, a few familiar faces began to appear, mostly the cast and a few executives. But when I looked up to see those two strutting guys walking toward me carrying a big ribbon-bedecked package, I felt a jolt of either dread or excitement, not certain which. (I don’t remember opening that gift, which I’m sure had been put together by Screen Gems.) The contrived stories in both TV Radio Mirror and Movie Mirror dated February and March of 1968 reported that Davy was my date, but whatever it might look like in those photos, I remember that he wasn’t. Behind the smiling threesome, almost unnoticeable, looms my very tall little sister with an “I want to be in the picture too” look on her face. I was turning twenty-one but looked like a chubby fifteen-year-old. Princess was fifteen but looked twenty-one. She was my date.

What my sister was feeling as she stood glowing in my shadow, a statuesque beauty who looked so much like her father—with the same mannerisms, the same gliding gait—I’ll never really know. At the time, I couldn’t see far enough out of my own blur to ask her, and since she tended to balk at the suggestion of introspection, even if I had asked I don’t think she would’ve answered. As I look back now, I can see how excluded she must have felt from the original Ricky/Sally team. Not only was she the baby of the group but she also had a different father. A father whom she adored, whose very presence would turn her ordinary day into a celebration. A wise and supportive man she’d painted in her imagination, then plastered like a billboard over the father she actually had. She never talked about Jocko’s cruelty or neglect and remembered only the times when he had paid her any attention at all. When he had encouraged her to ride down steep hills on her skateboard, watching her careen dangerously around turns, then praising her for the scabs and scars she received, treating her like a chip off the old block because they were gathered without tears. She was long-legged and gracefully athletic, with the same kind of fearless physical prowess as her father. But when her brother began to blaze his way into the science world and her sister was catapulted into the arts, Princess wandered around feeling deficient, like she’d been born without thumbs. By the time she was fifteen, her adored father had escaped into his new life and Baa had hit a depressed, drunken bottom. Princess stopped attending public high school, was in and out of various alternative schools, then finally dropped out altogether, dabbling occasionally in the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Her life had been a constant slide down without anyone she could hold on to… except me, and I wasn’t exactly stationary either.

We had grown up together, often in the same room. We had never been apart for long, but as close as we were, there was always something thorny between us, something that neither of us could pick our way out of, something we couldn’t even begin to talk about or admit. There were the basic childhood rivalries, and the fact that she was in the heart of her teenage years, that she felt judged by the taskmaster in me and I felt threatened by her free spirit. And the minute I stepped into the spotlight of show biz, our already complicated sisterhood changed in ways that began to define us, to deepen the designated family roles we’d already been cast in. I often became her parent, frowning at her behavior, criticizing and lecturing her about how to fix her life—even though I had absolutely no idea how to fix my own. And everything was muddled with the reality that I now held the purse strings. Whether gifts or hand-me-downs, it all came with a mixed bag of emotions for both of us.

Yet she was my dearest friend. I missed her when she was gone and felt a lift when she walked into the house, sometimes arriving unannounced, dropped off by friends I didn’t know, people I never met. We’d put a Laura Nyro album on the stereo, turn it up so loud that the windows vibrated, and singing at the top of our lungs, we’d dance around the living room until we were drenched with sweat. We may have held each other at arm’s length but our hands were always locked together. She was my family, and I needed her as much as she needed me and we both needed Baa.