Happy Accidents, Page 2

  I didn’t think too much of it, since I’d been doing fine all this time. But I could hear my mom saying to the doctor in a hushed tone, “Will she live a normal life?” I think this was my mom’s constant concern for me, reflecting her Midwestern priority list, on which “normal life” came right after “food” and “shelter.” But I was thrilled with the diagnosis, because I was finally special—and getting some attention.

  It came in handy, too—when I wanted to take revenge on a bully in elementary school. I was a safety patrol officer, which meant I wore an orange vest and helped kids cross the street. When one boy whacked me in the head as he crossed, I pretended he had deafened my one good ear. I made a big deal out of it, holding my head and looking scared, and they called the kid’s mom in. Someone yelled, “CAN YOU HEAR ME?” while I just shook my head and flailed my arms. That kid was in trouble.

  As much as I joked around, and as loving as my parents were, I still always felt a weird, dark energy bottled up inside. Even as a very young kid, I had a sense I was missing out on something. My body was filled with a buzzing nervous tension that constantly threatened to erupt in what my mother came to call “thrashing.”

  Whenever the pent-up energy got to be too much, I’d throw myself to the floor and pitch a fit. I’d flail my arms and kick my legs, rolling around like I was possessed. It wasn’t even that I was angry or upset—it was just that I couldn’t take the built-up pressure. I had to release that energy somehow, and the only way that I knew was to have a total spazz-out on the floor.

  “Get up! Stop thrashing!” Mom would shriek. She had absolutely no idea what I was doing or why. But I couldn’t get up or stop—not until I’d spewed out whatever was bottled up inside me. It never lasted very long, as I wasn’t really that upset. It was more like this was something my body needed to do—a sudden physical cataclysm, like a violent sneeze.

  The problem was, I just never felt quite right—in my body, with my family, in the world. As much fun as I had with my parents, sister, and brother, I still felt like an outsider, like no one understood me at all.

  These feelings scared me, so I would joke about them. “I know you adopted me,” I’d announce gravely to my mother. “I know I came from the Greens, down the street.” There were no Greens living on our street, but that was part of the joke. I didn’t belong anywhere, to anyone. I was alone.

  I not only felt out of place in my family, I also felt out of place in my own body. Growing up, I didn’t feel like the other girls seemed to feel. I wanted to be a boy. I loved Halloween, because I could dress up as a guy—I was a hobo, a pirate, a ghost who wore a tie, and one year I was excited to dress as Orville Wright for a book report on the Wright Brothers. I went bare chested in the summers until I was eight and my mom finally pulled the plug on that. She grabbed me off my bike and sent me into the house. “Put a shirt on!!” Watching Disney movies, I wanted to be the heroic prince—not the weak, girly, pathetic princess who always needed rescuing. I had no interest in being saved by a guy on a white horse.

  Whenever I could get away with it, I’d sneak into my dad’s room and put on his clothes. I loved everything in his closets—his suits, his button-down shirts, his ties, his shoes. I’d dress myself up, fill his martini glass with water, and look at myself in the mirror, sipping my “cocktail” like the quintessential sixties man I longed to be. It was very Mad Men. (This past year I went trick-or-treating as Don Draper. Some things never change.)

  I embraced the melodramatic potential of all these feelings clashing around in my body. “No one understands me!” I would cry, hurling myself onto my bed in tears. As I saw it, there was only one person in the world who ever understood me, and he had died on my fourth birthday. My grandfather.

  I actually have no idea if Grandpa understood me at all, but this was a useful notion for an emotionally overwrought child to cling to. The family lore was that whenever I came over, he would shout, “Here comes the house wrecker!” He adored me, a truth that seemed obvious enough in one of the few surviving photographs of us together. It was taken in June of 1964, just before my fourth birthday. My sister and I are wearing matching dresses and playing near my grandfather, who is beaming at me with a look of pure love.

  Grandpa beams adoringly at me. Oh, and Julie’s there, too.

  The fact that he died soon after that picture was taken and on my birthday only added to the mystique, and for years afterward, whenever I felt sad or alone, I’d think to myself, If only Grandpa were alive. He would have appreciated me.

  I just wanted to believe that someone, somewhere, understood me. And since Grandpa wasn’t an option, I went for the next best person: Mary Tyler Moore. I watched a lot of television and loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Soon, I began imagining myself as a character in it. I’d write scenes for myself, where I’d go to Mary for advice, and she’d look into my eyes and say, “Jane, you are so special.” In my scenes, Mary and I had a very sweet, tender relationship. She got me.

  When I was twelve, the feeling that I was odd and misunderstood jumped to a whole new level. That was the year my friends the Stevenson twins gave a name to another feeling I’d been having.

  Jill and Michelle Stevenson were in my class at school, and every year during spring break they went with their parents to South Florida. They told me about a weird thing they’d seen there. “Sometimes,” Jill said, “you’ll see boys holding hands with each other on the beach, instead of with girls. It’s because they’re gay.”

  They could already procure a tone of scandal and disgust, as if the subject were the sexual proclivities of circus freaks. I just stood there in shock.

  Oh my god, I thought, that’s what I have. I’m the girl version of that.

  No sooner had this thought burst into my head than another followed: No one can ever, ever know. I may have only just learned what being “gay” meant, but I knew instinctively it was a disease and a curse. I’d always had crushes on girls and hadn’t really thought too much about it. But watching the Stevenson twins’ mortification about the South Florida boys told me everything I needed to know: being “gay” was sick and perverse, and if you had the misfortune of being that way, you’d better hope no one ever found out.

  Chapter 2

  Grand Delusions

  Like any good, closeted young lesbian of the seventies, I developed a raging crush on Ron Howard.

  Not a well-known fact, but many young lesbians have gay boyfriends, or crushes so safe they might as well be gay. Happy Days was my favorite TV show, and Ron, who played all-American boy Richie Cunningham, was cute, boyish, and asexual—all Mayberry and apple pie. I thought Anson Williams, who played Potsie, was cute, too, but less so. As I wrote in my scrapbook, he was just “pretty good foxy.”

  Ron and Anson came to town in the summer of 1974, just after I turned fourteen, to promote Happy Days. When they were on WGN, the big talk radio station in Chicago, I called in and said, matter-of-factly, “Hi, I’m fourteen and I want to be an actress.” I don’t remember exactly what Ron said, but it was something sensible like “Stay in school, be in plays, and then when you get out of college, if you still want to do it, you should come to Los Angeles.” Then, Anson Williams piped up: “Jane, here’s what you should do,” he said. “Go downtown to the Screen Actors Guild, get a list of agents, and start writing to them.”

  My desirability assessments of the stars of TV’s Happy Days.

  This was stupid advice to give to a fourteen-year-old girl in Chicago—especially one whose entire acting résumé consisted of a couple of school plays and a sixth-grade talent show where I pretended to play the guitar. But I didn’t know that. I decided Anson was right, so not long afterward, when I was downtown with my parents, I made sure we stopped by the Screen Actors Guild office so I could get a list of talent agents in Chicago. An office assistant made a copy on mimeographed paper for me, and I went home and wrote them all letters. Our family had visited Universal Studios on a vacation to California the previous summer, s
o I sent a letter off to them as well. I watched the credits of The Brady Bunch, to see who cast the show, and wrote them a note of my availability while I was at it. I think I even sent a school picture.

  Needless to say, the talent agents and studio executives did not come knocking. But one afternoon, maybe six months later, I finally did get a reply. It was from the office of Monique James, the head of casting for Universal Studios.

  Okay, so it was from Linda, assistant to the casting director, who perhaps was taking this opportunity to feel better about her assistant status by crushing the dream of a young girl in suburban Chicago. And . . . she spelled my name wrong. And . . . it was just about the most unencouraging letter she could have possibly sent.

  An observant child, or maybe just one who wasn’t completely delusional, would have felt dismissed by this. But I was over the moon—it was on Universal letterhead! Yes, they got my name wrong, but Jamie is such a cute name! I was never a fan of my name anyway. I was so buoyed by the letter that I put it in my scrapbook. Linda Abbott and Monique James might have thought I would never come to Hollywood, but in my mind I was trying to figure out travel plans.

  I had known early on, almost out of the chute, that I wanted to be an actress. My first theatrical experience happened at the age of about five, when my parents took me to see a school play one of the neighborhood kids was in. I remember going into the dark theater, and when the lights came up, there was this whole world that came out of nowhere. It was alive and bright and you could see that everyone had makeup on.

  We were sitting very close to the stage, and as part of the play, there was a little kid in a cage, playing a bird. I remember thinking, Let the bird out of the cage, let him out! That is how real it was to me. I was transfixed by the whole experience, as if I were watching magic happen right in front of me.

  My folks loved to sing and perform themselves, and even more so with an audience. This was post–World War II cocktail culture, and Rodgers and Hammerstein weren’t the only ones exploring the world through song and dance. Our parish church, St. Jude’s, put on a show every year called Port o’ Call, and this was the highlight of my parents’ performing lives. The various schoolrooms at St. Jude’s were transformed into McGinty’s Irish tavern, full of revelers, or a Hawaiian luau with grass-skirted hula dancers, or a risqué German cabaret for which the neighbor ladies donned fishnets, eliciting hoots and howls. The audience would go from room to room, taking in various spectacles from other ports of call. I was there with my parents every night until the final bow was taken. I was absolutely riveted by the frenzied backstage energy of putting on a show. I remember the smells and the sights, the thick pancake makeup, and how they all dropped trou in full view of one another in the tiny cloakroom that served as the dressing room. All the adults were so focused and engaged when they put on these shows. And I was literally beside myself with elation to be among this business called show.

  Dad sings “Look to the Rainbow” in the Irish Room, St. Jude’s Port o’ Call show.

  But to my parents this was something you did for fun, not for a living. My mom was not on board with my plan to become an actress. As I wrote those letters to agents at our dining room table, she asked, “Who are you writing to?” When I told her, she spoke to me in that flat voice of Midwestern reality.

  “Janie, you know, people can’t always do what they want to do,” she said. “And it’s probably not realistic to think you’ll be a Hollywood star.” To her, my saying I wanted to be an actress was a little like saying I wanted to be an elf. “Well, honey,” she’d have said, “you can dress up as one, and you can have fun as one, but you’re not gonna be one.”

  I’m sure that to Mom, this was just realistic motherly advice, like telling me to stay out of traffic. She wanted to convince me to dream a little less big, to protect me from heartache—but of course her words just made things worse. Sitting there at the dining room table, I started to cry from the depths of my soul, feeling my life was over before it had begun.

  My mother felt terrible. She tried to console me, saying she wanted me to be the best actress I could be, but that I should be careful of aiming too high. Years later, she’d tell me that until that moment, she’d had no idea how dead serious I was about being an actress. But that realization didn’t change her message. She would reluctantly support me in the years ahead, but she still wanted me to have a backup plan, which usually involved learning to type.

  About five months after getting the Universal letter, I got a reply to a fan letter I had sent to Vicki Lawrence, a star of The Carol Burnett Show, a program I so loved and wanted to be on that it hurt just thinking about it. She sent me an autographed photo, a soft-focus headshot of her gazing meaningfully into the camera, her hair gently feathered. It came with a form fan letter printed on blue paper, but at the bottom she’d written a note: “Janie, Keep working hard, learning, & be determined & positive!”

  Vicki Lawrence wrote me back!

  I knew that Vicki had gotten on The Carol Burnett Show because of a fan letter she’d written to Carol. So, of course, I had the fantasy that my letter to Vicki would produce the same result. The fact that it didn’t was of no consequence to me—I’d received a personal note from Vicki Lawrence. And she’d even spelled my name right.

  These snippets of encouragement were huge to me—my bubble was now un-burstable. I pasted Vicki’s letter and photo into my scrapbook, along with the Universal letter and my Ron Howard photos, and continued forward.

  Speaking of my scrapbook, I dug it out recently and was delighted to find it was a proud monument to absolute mediocrity.

  Included are my report cards (mostly Bs and Cs), in addition to other cherished mementos of averageness:

  • An “Award for Achievement” from Vandenberg Elementary School—the award they gave to kids who didn’t win an award.

  • A handwritten schedule for my basketball team, the Dirksen Junior High “B” team, showing a final record of three wins and eleven losses.

  • Ribbons for third-place finishes in a 1975 swim meet.

  I appear to be greatly amused by my own mediocrity, writing silly notes in the margins throughout the scrapbook:

  • Beside my basketball numerals, which were awarded to benchwarmers (starting players received letters), I wrote in all caps: “AGAIN! HA HA!”

  • Next to a note from my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Gerson, that read “Mr. & Mrs. Lynch, Jane has put forth much more effort recently. She is doing better work and behaving better. I hope this continues,” I scribbled: “It didn’t! HA!”

  • Beside the letter from Universal, in which my name had been misspelled, I wrote: “Jamie, Ha ha! I think I’ll keep it.” On the next page, I pasted the envelope the letter had come in, highlighting its return address of the “New Talent” department. I wrote, “New Talent! That’s me!”

  There is no Volume #2.

  Of course, not everything in the scrapbook was a monument to mediocrity. There was also a photo postcard from Anson Williams, who kept writing me for some reason, with a handwritten note on the back.

  As I recall, when Anson sang he sounded like a Lawrence Welk baritone. Not my cup of tea, so I never did his bidding. (Besides, he was only “pretty good foxy.”)

  I did not like his singing. I did not write a letter asking when he would sing again.

  During freshman year in high school, I was cast as The King in a one-act production of The Ugly Duckling (the beginning, incidentally, of a lifelong pattern of being cast in roles originally intended for men). I was thrilled out of my mind—this was what I wanted to do with my life! This was my dream, and now I was officially taking the first step toward fulfilling it.

  My name appeared in the school newspaper, The Bagpipe, along with those of the rest of the cast, and by all appearances, I was on my way. But when we started rehearsals, I found myself paralyzed with fear—the fear of blowing it. So . . . I quit the play and joined the tennis team instead.

  I don’t thi
nk anyone understood why I had quit. I’m sure I didn’t. I know now it was out of pure terror. I was face-to-face with my destiny and I walked away from it rather than risk failure.

  In my scrapbook, I pasted the article about The Ugly Duckling, then right next to it, I pasted another article about the tennis team. Underneath, I wrote this: “Had to drop out of play because of tennis, but mostly because I couldn’t get my character. Darn!” Obviously I had either read something or heard someone talk about the importance of “getting your character,” and I used that to feel better about what I had done. My poor little fourteen-year-old self had no idea how to process this.

  My poor little conflicted self!

  But deep down inside, I knew I had killed the thing I most wanted in the world. I couldn’t stand to stay away, though, so I signed up to work on the stage crew. Stage crew—when I could have been in the thing! In the official program for the evening of one-acts, I made little check marks next to all my friends who were in the cast and crew—and I put a little star by my own name. I was putting on a brave face, but inside I was crushed.

  Making things even worse, I was now officially branded a quitter. In the spring of my freshman year, I tried out for another play, but I didn’t get chosen. One girl who got a part told my sister, Julie, it was because I’d quit The Ugly Duckling. When the same thing happened with Man of La Mancha—I was even passed over for the chorus!—I realized with dread that at age fourteen, my acting career was already over.