Prairie Tale (11 page)

Did that make me cold? No, it made me brutally pragmatic, like a female Holden Caulfield, someone who woke up one morning and found that nothing in her life fit the way it used to. It was as if Mike’s divorce and Harold’s brush with death pushed me outside my old comfort zone and into a new place where I thought about myself a lot, if not all the time, which filled me with anxiety and confusion.

None of that showed on
Little House,
which was experiencing its own growing pains. As it moved toward the end of its seventh season, Ma was going through menopause, Laura announced she was pregnant (I jokingly thought of myself as the first pregnant virgin since the Virgin Mary), and we added two babies to the cast. Off camera, Mike was emotionally done and preparing to exit the show; at season’s end, Melissa Sue also decided to leave and pursue a feature film career. At Sunday dinner the week of her announcement, my grandfather said, “What a moron this is! Who leaves a hit show?”

Not me, that’s for sure. I had a career beyond
Little House
. In fact, Uncle Ray and my mother had already lined up a remake of
Splendor in the Grass
for my summer break. All I craved was to be cool and have a boyfriend. Despite my efforts, both seemed hopelessly out of reach—even when I took Scott Baio, by that time a good friend, to the homecoming dance my junior year. I thought he’d give me a modicum of cool; everyone would see Chachi and want to talk to us. But no one came near us. At my twentieth high school reunion, I found out that none of the boys asked me out because they figured I was dating movie stars, like Scott.

What was wrong with me? So much, as far as I was concerned. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a girl with squinty eyes, a chunky body, no boobs, thin lips, a big, fat nose, ugly yellow teeth, and unhip hair (I wasn’t allowed to cut it, ever). I tried to improve the picture with makeup, but I wore too much and I looked like a drag queen.

Adolescence is torturous at best. For a repressed, dorky child star it is a living hell. I had no idea who I was, or what I was doing or feeling. I just knew that I was overwhelmed and ugly and unlovable. My mother described me as young for my age. “She’s not what you’d call streetwise,” she once told a reporter. Ya think? My days were fully scheduled. I was sheltered, overprotected, and rarely alone. In some ways, I was like the princess in the tower looking out the window and wondering what was going on out in the world. I craved information and wanted to be around people who were more open and honest, and spoke about things other than what “nice girls” would do.

I started to spend more time with my godparents, Mitzi and Charlie, and their daughter, Jennifer. Their house was funkier than mine, their friends were edgier, and things were looser, wackier, and louder there. Uncle Charlie drank and smoked grass, and he was open about it. Unlike the people in my house, they kept few things hidden. One time, Mitzi and Jenny got into a fistfight on the floor right in front of me. They would tell each other to fuck off, call each other names, and have screaming arguments. Five minutes later, they’d be kissing and hugging each other. They were like Eugene O’Neill rewritten by Neil Simon. I thought they were fantastic. I still do.

I also gravitated toward Uncle Ray’s associate Alan David and his wife, Bunny. They were barely ten years older than me, very hip, and on the cutting edge of Hollywood, as typified by their modern-style, glass-and-steel home in the Encino hills. They actually lived near my house, but I may as well have been light-years away.

From their house to their lifestyle, they had a contemporary edge that drew me in. Alan was plugged into everything in town, and Bunny was effortlessly funky and elegant. Professional stylists got paid huge money to produce for magazines a look she was able to put together by herself. At their house, we listened to the Rolling Stones and the Who, as did Mitzi and Charlie (he liked Cream, too), but Alan and Bunny were also into the Cars, Elvis Costello, and other New Wave groups. I needed major help graduating from Barry Manilow, and they knew what was cool.

I didn’t tell my mom or Uncle Ray about anything we did or said there, not that I did anything that had to be kept secret. But Alan and Bunny smoked and drank and talked about doing drugs and sex with even more openness than at my godparents’ house. It was exciting and liberating to be around them and occasionally ask a question containing a word or words I wouldn’t use at home.

At my house, no one talked about LSD. Bunny and Alan told me that when she got pregnant with their son Ari, Alan said, “What if what they say about acid is true? We might as well just go ahead and name this kid Bambi.” Just that snippet of conversation blew me away. It referenced two of the biggest taboos in my world, sex and drugs—and not just drugs, which typically meant smoking pot, but acid. Through the combination of my mother and school, I’d been brainwashed into believing two things: (1) Charles Manson–like killers lurked in every canyon in L.A., and (2) doing acid or LSD would turn you into a vegetable. It was to your brain what salt is to a slug: instant fizzle.

Apparently, that wasn’t true; at least the part about acid wasn’t. According to what I picked up from Alan and Bunny, you could take LSD, not wake up with the IQ of a zucchini, have a pretty wild time in bed, and lead a normal life, too!

They realized I was a good girl struggling with normal issues. I think they saw that I felt things I couldn’t articulate, that I was at that point in adolescence when a little voice inside me was about to whisper in my ear, “Get ready, we’re going to go a little faster now. We’re going to try a few new things. And, uh, your mother doesn’t have to know.” They used to tell me not to worry because I was going to turn into a whole different creature when I had my first serious relationship. Years later, in fact, they told me that one night they were having dinner when Alan made a bold but prescient prediction. He said, “Everything’s going to change the first time that girl has sex.” Bunny agreed.

They were right, too.

T
o prepare for
Splendor in the Grass,
I went back to Jeff Corey and had even more uncomfortable conversations about sexuality. If I had been older, wiser, and mouthier, I would have asked Uncle Ray and my mother why we were remaking a movie whose 1961 original starring Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood was nearly perfect. But there was a lot of excitement around the idea of letting Hollywood see me in a new light in this sexually charged story of two young people in pre–Depression era Kansas, whose attraction to each other was thwarted by the day’s conservative mores and their small town’s class divides.

So I had to talk to Jeff about falling in love and what sex was like, things I didn’t know anything about and had no desire to discuss with an older man who looked like a skinny version of Santa Claus in Birkenstocks. When he asked if I knew what it was like to feel a strong attraction to a boy, I said no and tried not to openly cringe.

“Haven’t you ever had any crushes?” he asked.

“Those, yeah,” I said, shrugging uncomfortably.

“And you’ve felt butterflies in your stomach?”

“I guess.”

“Well, just imagine what it’s like to feel butterflies in your entire body,” he said.

Then we talked—actually, he talked and I listened—about attraction, sexuality, and desire. I did my best not to freak out when he explained the difference between desire for another person and downright
hunger
for them. I feared he might ask me a question or that I would get way more information than I wanted, and I didn’t know how I was going to manage if he took it any further.

I can appreciate the information Jeff was trying to convey. Relationships, and their sexual undercurrents, are at the heart of almost every performance a young adult and adult actor gives. I just wasn’t ready to go there so openly.

Making it stranger was the process I went through simultaneously with wardrobe and makeup to get ready for the role. It wasn’t enough for me to play Deanie; I also had to look like a ripe young woman, apparently riper than I was in real life. They literally rebuilt me for the movie, emphasis on
built
. In addition to new hair, makeup, and fingernails, they gave me visibly more pronounced curves with a girdle and a corset, and a sumptuously padded bra and painted-on cleavage.

I wore a padded bra on
Little House
because I didn’t have any boobs to speak of, and once you were a woman on that show, you couldn’t be smaller than a B cup. But the effect on
Splendor
was entirely different. I didn’t know what to make of myself when I looked in the mirror. I wanted to say, “Good Lord, that’s not me, it’s like some creepy drag-queen version of me…help! Get me outta here!” However, as I began to assimilate the new exterior, my insides were beginning to change as well. Indeed, another side to the wholesome, tentative little girl began to emerge. Not coincidentally, Uncle Ray scheduled Douglas Kirkland to shoot my first true glamour photo session at this time. When my mother said, “Make the camera fall in love with you,” my head was filled with a new set of thoughts. The shots came out great. Maybe a little oversexualized for a girl of seventeen, but pretty nonetheless; maybe I had to jump way beyond myself in order to pull back to who I really was at that time.

Throughout this process, director Richard Sarafian and the network executives overseeing the production were casting for the young man to play Bud Stamper, the handsome object of my desire. Needless to say, I was intrigued and, for the first time, involved in the decision-making process.

The choice came down to two actors, and I had to do a screen test with both. I found out they were in their early twenties; one was blond and the other had dark hair. For the screen test, the director chose the “down on your knees before me, slave woman” scene, probably the most incendiary and sexually layered scene in the whole picture. I was convinced Richard picked it to test me as much as the guys.

In the scene, Bud grabs Deanie by the wrists and makes her kneel in front of him, her face to his crotch, and says, “Down on your knees before me, slave woman. Tell me you’d do anything for me.”

She bursts out crying.

“I’d do anything for you,” she says. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry it has to be this way.”

I was scared and uptight doing the scene with the blond actor, Michael, who went first. It was easy for me to break down and cry as he pushed me to the floor because the whole thing scared me. I knew what was being implied, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it, and I didn’t feel any chemistry with Michael. Then I did the scene again with dark-haired Cyril O’Reilly, and it was a completely different experience.

I chalk it up to chemistry. From the moment I looked into Cyril’s eyes, I was history. The wind was knocked out of the room. It was like the shot down the hallway in
Poltergeist
: dolly in/zoom out. I didn’t feel threatened or intimidated by him at all. I felt completely safe. Maybe it was because he had my father’s coloring. Maybe it was because he drank and smoked and the smell of alcohol and cigarettes had been programmed into my brain as good, familiar, and manly after seven years of being hugged by Mike. One thing I do know: it didn’t hurt that he was absolutely gorgeous.

I was thrilled when Cyril got the job. Our first rehearsal was in an empty office in Uncle Ray’s building. Richard Sarafian, Cyril, and I sat around a table and prepared to read through the script. It was a rare occasion when I was left alone with coworkers without a guardian, my mother, or Uncle Ray nearby. After a few minutes of friendly chitchat, Dick Sarafian said, “Okay, let’s get down to business.”

Cyril closed his script and looked at both of us.

“Before we do this,” he said, “can we get something out of the way?”

“Huh?” I said.

“I’ve got to do this one thing so it’s not hanging over us,” he said. “Just so it’s done.”

“Sure,” Dick said.

“I guess,” I said.

Suddenly he leaned in and kissed me. I’m talking a real, mature, deep kiss. Then he sat back and stared into my eyes, looking for a reaction. Cyril seemed pleased. He said, “There. Now we don’t have to do that for the first time again.” Flushed and flustered, I said something like, “Well, then, there it is.”

Had I been able to keep my wits about me, I might’ve asked him to try it again. But my head was spinning in a pleasurable daze the likes of which I’d never experienced. I felt that kiss somewhere deep in my abdomen and from there it spread warm and glowing out past the tips of my fingers and the ends of my toes and through and out each strand of my hair. It was like liquid electricity. That was it. Cyril had closed the sale before I even knew I was in the market for anything. All I knew was that I wanted more of whatever that was.

S
hooting the movie was an extraordinary experience for me. There was the love story on-screen, and then there was the even better real-life romance that developed away from the camera. I fell in love for the first time. Cyril would come over to my house after work to rehearse and there was a lot of making out when my mother wasn’t checking on us, and there was much more intense kissing in the trailer once we began production.

To replicate the look of 1920s Kansas, we shot in older neighborhoods in Altadena and Pasadena. We had fun learning to drive vintage cars. I was the youngest among the ridiculously talented cast that included Eva Marie Saint, Ned Beatty, and Michelle Pfeiffer, who was a new young actress generating incredible buzz within the industry. She had recently married actor Peter Horton and didn’t want to work, but the producers wanted her to play Bud’s older sister, which was such a terrific role that Michelle agreed to do it.

She came in and was mind-bogglingly beautiful and sexy sexy sexy in a really quiet, earthy way. We had one scene together, the New Year’s Eve scene when she is gang-raped in a car and takes off. It’s a pivotal moment for Deanie, who, in her desperation and pain, later tries to take on a bunch of dudes in a car and ends up trying to kill herself. I was entranced as I watched her work. She was grounded, centered, and focused. She clearly had a process, which fascinated me, as I didn’t yet have one.

One day early in the production, my mother pointed to Ally Sheedy, who was making her film debut as one of Deanie’s two close friends. She complimented her looks and predicted Ally would be a big star someday.

“I can just feel it,” she said. “I can see something special in her.”

I remember cocking my head toward her, feeling slightly jealous that she would say that about someone other than me. She was right, of course.

I was just glad she wasn’t peppering me with questions about my relationship with Cyril. I spent all my private time after rehearsals and before I was needed in front of the camera with him, talking, sharing secrets, and of course, making out. The movie’s crew was for the most part from
Little House,
so it must have freaked them out to see me, their little Half Pint, following this guy around the set like a puppy. Making out with him on camera, though, was awkward for me.

He would whisper in my ear, “Relax. Relax. It’s okay.” And I’d say, “They know that we do this in private.”

“No, they don’t,” he insisted. “They really don’t.”

But they must have.

B
izarrely, much of the time I was with Cyril, talking or making out, I was dressed in the Deanie garb. My butt was girdled and my boobs were padded. My face was made up and my fingernails were acrylic and I was wearing a hair piece. On the outside, I was totally artificial. I was the best Hollywood could create, painted-on cleavage and all. Yet none of that stuff mattered to Cyril. What was underneath was exactly what he wanted—the real me.

Though he never commented directly, Cyril looked past the shading, highlighting, and padding; he got past all of that figuratively and literally. By my seventeenth birthday, which I celebrated on the set, we were on the edge of going all the way. We would get right up to it and then one of us would go “no, no, no.” It was usually Cyril who would stop and say, “You’re not ready. You don’t have to do this.”

He read me correctly. He really was a hell of a guy. After growing up slowly, I felt like the pedal was suddenly pressed against the metal and I was hanging on tightly to prevent myself from crashing. I wanted to go all the way, but then I would get scared and convince myself I wasn’t ready to add that milestone to my life. My brain and body were at war. I would push Cyril, then back off, and then push again. It was like a dance, a very frustrating dance, one we did in my trailer, in his trailer, or at my house.

Since he lived in Hollywood and I wasn’t allowed to drive that far by myself or alone at night, he would usually come to my house. He would show up on the doorstep smoking a cigarette and my mother would turn to me with a disapproving look and say, “It’s just gross to walk up to someone’s house with a cigarette.”

Oh, and he would usually have a beer, which was something else my mother would comment on. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that she didn’t like him. It was more her way of talking around actual concerns. Cyril and I would sit outside and talk while he drank his beer and smoked his cigarette, and then at opportune moments when no one was looking we would make out wildly and go through our yes-no-maybe-not-yet dance.

We spent the last week of production shooting at High Falls State Park in Forsyth, Georgia. My mother accompanied me to this small southern town that was no more than five miles from the “Welcome” sign to the next town. The film’s cast and crew took over the local Best Western, where my mother and I had adjoining rooms. A wrap party was scheduled for the last day of production, and after shooting the last scene, everybody went back to the hotel to shower and change.

Somehow I managed to get Cyril into my room without my mother’s knowledge. I was determined that this was going to be the moment when it all happened, when I changed. I knew this was a monumental time in any girl’s life. It really is a moment when we first try on our woman shoes, which is especially challenging and scary when the whole world wants you to stay a child! Once again I relied on that voice inside me, the one that pushes me to move forward even if I’m terrified. Particularly if I’m terrified.

I knew it was a momentous occasion. Not an ounce of magnitude was lost on me. I was scared it was going to hurt. I was scared of not knowing how to do it. I was scared of all the things that could be horribly wrong with doing it, including the possibility I could end up pregnant. I was scared that if I did go all the way, Cyril wouldn’t want to see me anymore because nice girls didn’t do it. I was scared I couldn’t be Half Pint anymore. I was scared my mother would disown me if she found out. I was scared I’d be thought of as a skank.

I was scared of so many things, and yet when push came to shove, the voice in my head took over and said,
Look, at some point you’re going to do it. You love this man, he clearly loves you. Sooner or later it’s got to happen.

Well, it turned out to be sooner. Cyril couldn’t have been sweeter, nicer, kinder, or gentler. It wasn’t scary, and it wasn’t awful. In fact, it was actually very sweet and very tender, exactly the kind of experience I would highly recommend to any young woman. God bless Cyril O’Reilly and his dear, gentle heart.

Afterward Cyril snuck out and went to his room. We arrived separately at the wrap party, where we had an even more exciting time stealing glances at each other from across the room as we talked to people, knowing we had done this incredible thing and nobody else knew. It was the sweetest secret, and just a wee bit dangerous.

We flew home the next day, sitting next to each other on the plane. As we snuggled up against each other, I started to sing a Lionel Richie song, which was very uncharacteristic of me. But the words just floated out:
Thanks for the times that you’ve given me. The memories are all in my mind.
(It’s “Three Times a Lady,” but the verses were more important than the chorus here!) I sang it into Cyril’s ear from beginning to end. It was a whisper sort of singing. Soft, warm, and just for him. It made him cry. I wiped tears from my eyes, too.