Authors: Melissa Gilbert
I grabbed my Filofax and started counting days. It turned out I was about a week late. I bought a home pregnancy test, then tossed and turned through the night, waiting for the morning, when the instructions said to take the test. At the first glimmer of sunlight, I leapt out of bed, ran to the bathroom, and took the test.
It was positive.
I was pregnant.
My heart raced and my hands shook uncontrollably. I laughed and cried at the same time. My brain didn’t know what to think, so it thought everything:
A baby.
My baby.
Mine. And Rob’s.
Our child.
Oh God, the wedding! We would have to move the wedding date up! No way was I walking down the aisle with a bulging stomach and a train of whispers.
What was Rob going to say? I tried to imagine his reaction. How happy would he be when I told him the news? Surely he would be happy. Right?
My mind wouldn’t stop. I was going to be a mother. I was going to have a family of my own. I made an appointment with my ob-gyn, who confirmed that I was pregnant, gave me a big hug, and sent me on my way with a handful of pamphlets and prenatal vitamins. My life was about to change in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine. It was going to be exactly the way I had dreamed. I was beyond happy. I wanted to tell Rob the news in person, so I left the next day for the Hamptons. I arrived and slipped contentedly into his arms, thinking,
This is the man I love, the man I am going to marry, the man I am about to tell a secret that will make our lives perfect
. He held me and told me how happy he was that I had come back to be with him, how badly he had missed me, and how much he loved me.
That was my cue. With my cheek pressed against his face, I whispered, “There’s more. I’m pregnant.”
Silence.
I pulled back from him just enough to see his face. “Rob?”
He walked away from me and sat down on a patio chair across the room. I sat in the chair opposite him and said something along the lines of, “I know. It’s a lot, and not something we planned. But we have time to prepare. How difficult can it be? People have been having babies forever.”
I prattled on until I saw the look on his face change from shocked to positively panic-stricken.
More silence ensued. It was like I had stepped into a bottomless pit. I felt the terror of falling and no one to catch me.
Finally Rob cleared his throat, and with his voice trembling and tears in his eyes he said very softly, “I can’t be a father.”
“What?”
“I can’t be a father,” he said in a firmer voice.
Before I could respond, he said, “I can’t be a husband.” He had tears running down his face. “Melissa, I can’t be a boyfriend right now either.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “I don’t understand.” I stared at him. “You have to tell me exactly what you mean!”
Rob started to cry.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I just can’t do it. I can’t do any of it. It’s over.”
“Over?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I walked over to him, put my arms around him, and we cried together. Both of us knew this time it really was over. Done. Finished.
I wanted to go home, but it was too late for me to get back to JFK and catch a plane and frankly, I just didn’t have the strength. I stayed the night with him. I don’t think I slept a minute. I watched Rob sleep while my mind replayed and analyzed what seemed like every moment of our relationship. Frustrated, I then stared into the darkness, as if I might find a window through which I could see what would happen next.
Rob was so lucky; anytime things got rough, God bless him, he would go to sleep. While I was as worked up as a supercomputer ablaze with blinking lights, he was fast asleep, curled up facing me, breathing rhythmically, and looking beautiful, contented, peaceful, and blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.
The next day was a blur. Before getting on the plane, I called home and rallied my girlfriends and my mother. They began the process of moving me back into my mom’s guesthouse. I was a walking zombie. Everyone helped me unpack. Periodically my mother or one of my girlfriends would shove food in front of me and order me to eat, since I am the type of person who loses her appetite when going through any emotional upheaval. None of them knew I was pregnant.
Later that night, after everyone left and I found myself alone, I began one of the great cries of my lifetime. It was a full-on wailing, the kind of tear-filled purge that comes from deep inside. It was the kind that leaves you dehydrated, exhausted, and cleansed.
When it was over, I began to deal with the most difficult decision I had ever faced. What the hell was I going to do?
The way I saw it, I had three choices: (1) keep the baby and become a single mother at age twenty-three; (2) give the baby up for adoption; or (3) get an abortion.
Within days, the matter was complicated further by the press. Somehow the tabloids had sniffed out our breakup; their reporters circled like vultures. Headlines cropped up everywhere I turned. One said, “Jilted!” Another screamed, “Left at the Altar!” Lovely. Whatever decision I made about this pregnancy, it could
maybe
be kept private if I chose option three. Otherwise it would be splashed all over the place. My decision was also colored by the effect my image had on young girls.
For days, I felt like the world was on my shoulders. I had never been as torn or as scared in my life. I couldn’t eat or sleep. My fuse was short. I snapped at my mother and at my friends, all of whom thought my moods were related solely to the breakup with Rob. I still hadn’t told anyone what was really going on, and wasn’t about to until I had reached a conclusion.
Finally, I began to see things a bit more clearly. I eliminated one option—having the baby and putting it up for adoption. I had never wanted to be anything but a mother myself. I had been drawn to babies from the time I was a little girl obsessed with my baby dolls, and I’d felt like a surrogate mom to Sara when she was a baby. I always knew my ultimate role in life would be that of mother.
Furthermore, I wasn’t about to repeat my birth mother’s decision. I would never give up my own child. Never. It wasn’t a question. It would never happen. How would I keep my pregnancy a secret anyway? The only way I could keep something like that private would be to move to Outer Mongolia. Even then…
No, adoption was not and never would be an option. I understood why it was for other people. Just not for me.
This left me with two choices: being a young single mother or having an abortion. I researched both subjects. I processed the information. Rob, the only other person who knew, checked in on me. I gave him credit. He assured me that he would honor whatever decision I made and help in whatever way I needed.
I also prayed to God, to my father, and to all the angels who might possibly hear my pleas to help me find my way.
I would love to say that I did finally reach a conclusion, but I didn’t need to. I woke up one morning and began spotting. Scared, I finally told my mother what was going on and she took me to my doctor. He did an ultrasound and told me that I was having a miscarriage. I went home in a daze and let nature take its course. I called Rob and told him what had happened. He seemed relieved. We made an attempt at a conversation but it was too sad.
My mom was amazing. She held me while I cried, brought me soup in bed, and stayed with me until I fell asleep.
A couple of days later I went back to the doctor with a fever. Things were not going well and I had to have an emergency D & C. It was done in my doctor’s office with a local anesthetic, and it was painful. Coupled with my broken heart, the whole experience was agony and gave me some very real and scary insight into what an abortion must be like. It was horrendous, but it was over.
There was nothing left for me to do afterward but go home and face reality. I had lost the baby and my relationship with Rob.
Now I was completely, totally alone, and it hurt like hell.
I
n the weeks after that, I didn’t function well. I rolled along as smoothly as a car with three flat tires. My self-esteem bottomed out. I felt unmoored and adrift, which I hated, since I saw myself as much stronger and more self-reliant than those women whose happiness was dependent on having a man in their life.
I was embarrassed, too. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me five or six times…damn! My friends comforted me, though, and my sister made me laugh. I dove back into AA meetings with a renewed zeal and determination to get my footing back, and indeed, I found some comforting fellowship there, including an interesting guy named Danny Sugerman.
Everyone in L.A. knew Danny, and most had a story about him. He was that kind of guy. He had long, dark hair, angular features, and wire-rimmed glasses. A friend of his once wrote that Danny took quite literally the quote “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and it was true.
At age twelve, he began answering fan mail for the Doors. He was a fan and hung around their offices, and Jim Morrison took a liking to him and had their manager hire him. After Morrison died in 1971, he became the band’s manager, a task he undertook for nearly thirty years. For better or worse, Morrison was the biggest influence on his life. Danny’s first book,
No One Here Gets Out Alive,
was a biography that painted the rock icon as more mystic poet than macabre addict. Not surprisingly, Danny was a little like that, too—dark, funny, smart, mesmerizing. Whatever doors Morrison had opened for him—and there were plenty—Danny not only walked through them, but he also felt obligated to share his experiences.
During this time when I was floundering, I had some deep, fascinating conversations with him about life and pain and the ability to come through both smarter and wiser. “One of the wonderful things about human beings,” he later wrote in his book
Wonderland Avenue,
is that “we can and often do change, not always gracefully and not often willingly, but occasionally just like that, in a snap, we change. Sometimes fast, sometimes slowly, sometimes for no reason at all or maybe a hundred and fifty.”
Such philosophizing was music to my soul; I needed to hear it, and Danny’s years of battling heroin addiction as well as his relationship with Morrison provided him with an endless supply. His stories fascinated me. I was a sponge for all the lessons he needed to share in order to feel whole himself. I’d never talked with anyone as seriously about the big issues of life. I felt drawn to him.
He, in turn, gravitated to my injured soul, to my neediness. My pain was something he related to, and I had plenty of it. I was fragile. I cried at the drop of a pin. I questioned who I was as a woman. I felt unlovable and undesirable. I didn’t see any meaning to my life. It was all just misery.
In addition to psychological woes, I was hobbled by a week of horrible and ultimately debilitating pains in my lower right side. After examining me, my doctor held up an X-ray in front of my face and pointed to the problem: a large cyst on my ovary. I went in for surgery, but with a great deal of trepidation about the pain medication I would need afterward. Between all my AA meetings and the talks I’d had with Danny about heroin, morphine, Dilaudid, and other shit he rammed up his veins, I worried I’d end up doing the same thing.
But everything went fine. I recovered in the fancy eighth floor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I regulated my pain medication with a PDA, or patient directed analgesic. Basically, when I pushed a button, it administered a squirt of morphine or Demerol into my IV. I tried to go fifteen or twenty minutes longer than necessary to prove to myself that I wasn’t a junkie. I wasn’t. Downers were not yet my drug of choice anyway.
One day I heard a sharp knock on my door, and before I could say “Come in,” it swung open and Danny walked in carrying a stack of books.
These books, he said, were full of information I should know. They ranged from poetry to rock biographies. Danny rattled off titles and the names of authors, including Rimbaud (“the original rock star,” he said), Allen Ginsberg, and his friend Pamela Des Barres. I devoured her memoir of life as a groupie,
I’m with the Band,
and picked through the other material.
I was entranced by Ginsberg’s epic
Howl
—how could I not be sucked in by the opening lines, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”? Danny then pointed me to works by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and from there, he turned me on to music by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and the Cure. It was as if I’d gone to college with the Brat Pack and now Danny was providing me my master’s in counter-culture.
As he nursed me through my recovery with wheat germ shakes, we began having an affair. In retrospect, it was a risky thing to have done. Danny was an ex-junkie, and we were having unprotected sex. I was not in a good place psychologically. The breakup with Rob had left me traumatized, and I was lonely, scared, and desperate to be loved. And although Danny had been sober for a long stretch, you only had to scratch the surface to find that crazy, dramatic, addictlike behavior.
Danny and I were the perfect codependent couple. Empathetic to a fault, self-centered, and overly dramatic. Danny was sure that one day we would get married. Swept up in the drama and romance of his proclamation, I agreed. We toasted ourselves with champagne. One night, Danny did a couple lines of blow someone had given him, then turned to me and said, “It’s cool. I’m not doing heroin.”
I nodded my approval. In reality, I could not have been more clueless. No, that’s not true. I had read
Wonderland Avenue
and so I was familiar with the dark Danny who appeared with the flip of a switch, the Danny who was always on the precipice of despair and death. I was drawn to that drama. But I also knew it was just a phase.
Late that summer, I went with him to New York to see a show by Echo and the Bunnymen. The English rock band had provided a faithful cover of the Doors’ song “People Are Strange” for the
Lost Boys
movie soundtrack, and the Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who Danny managed, was playing with them in concert.
While we were there, I received a call from my agent in L.A., asking if I’d be interested in auditioning for a new off-Broadway play called
A Shayna Maidel
. He explained it was the story of two Jewish sisters who reunite in 1946 following a twenty-year separation. One was a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, and the other had grown up in America.
I was moved by the bare-bones description. I was also intrigued by what doing the play would mean, namely, moving to New York. I’d never lived away from home before. In addition to the challenge of doing something new, I’d be getting a fresh start. I wasn’t getting feature work. I didn’t have anything tying me to home. As I told my agent, it sounded exactly like the kind of opportunity I needed.
“I have to warn you,” he said, “this is off-Broadway. There’s very little money. Like five hundred bucks a week.”
“I hope you enjoy your ten percent.” I laughed. “And don’t spend it all in one place. I’m still interested.”
Years earlier I had auditioned for one of Joe Papp’s Shakespeare productions at the Public Theater, and I’d choked. Not a word came out of my mouth. But this time was different. After reading
A Shayna Maidel,
which I thought was an extraordinarily written piece, I walked into the audition full of what-do-I-have-to-lose determination, not to mention that little voice in me whispering,
Watch this,
and damn if I didn’t get the role. I was shocked—beyond shocked, in fact.
Danny had already gone back to L.A. and in the interim, I began talking to Rob, who was doing a play in nearby Westport, Connecticut. He had a few days off and wanted to visit me. I made it clear I wasn’t going to start up another relationship. He still wanted to remain friends, as did I, and we agreed to try to pull it off. So he came into the city and stayed with me for three days. He helped me look for an apartment, and we used the time together to talk ourselves into a good place.
On our last night there, we were about to walk into the hotel lobby when I recognized the band just inside the door. I grabbed Rob and pulled him back.
“No, you can’t go in there,” I exclaimed. “The Bunnymen are in there.”
He had no idea what I was talking about.
“Are you nuts?” He laughed. “What the hell are the bunny men?”
I explained as I dragged him around the block to the hotel’s back entrance. From then on, the “bunny men” became a private joke of ours. If we crossed paths, he would ask if the bunny men were there.
The ensuing days were full of chores. I found a furnished apartment in Gramercy Park, met with playwright Barbara LeBow and director Mary Robinson, and began the process of blowing off Danny, which was cruel. But I couldn’t handle another face-to-face. I delivered the final blow over the phone when I was back in L.A. and busy packing all my belongings.
After a going-away send-off, I flew back East with my dog, Sidney, and my cat, Sylvester. My apartment wasn’t going to be available for a month, so the three of us stayed in my friend Tom Hulce’s apartment. He had left menus from nearby restaurants on the table, and on that first night Sidney, Sylvester, and I ate Chinese takeout. Then I sat in bed all night and listened to sirens and the other sounds of the city, shaking, crying, and thinking,
Oh my God, what have I done?
I felt like I had bitten off more than I could chew. I was pathetic.
H
ow pathetic was I?
I woke up the next day with the single-minded goal of finding a City National Bank where I could break a hundred-dollar bill. I didn’t have anything smaller and didn’t know I could go into any store and get change. I thought I had to go to a branch of my bank. I knew how to do many things, including how to write checks and use credit cards, of which I had many at my disposal. But I had no idea where to break that hundred. Who doesn’t know how to get change? As my Papa Harry would say, “What kind of moron doesn’t know from this?”
When I finally realized that I was never going to find a City National Bank, or any bank open at that early hour, I walked into the nearest bodega and asked the guy behind the deli counter if he could break my hundred. I was sweating and practically in tears. I told him that I had to get to rehearsal. Like he cared. He said he’d break it, but I’m sure he thought I was crazy. Or maybe not; it was New York City, after all.
I was so grateful. On my way out, I had a revelation. I wondered if all the bodegas and neighborhood markets were like this one. I turned back to the guy who’d helped me.
“Can I get change here again?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “But you better buy something, too.”
With change in hand, I could catch a taxi to rehearsal. (The subway was beyond me then.) I was determined to make a good impression by getting to the theater early. I knew that people had a preconceived notion of TV actors, particularly those who were celebrities, as I was at the time. They expected them to show up late, bring an entourage, and make demands. I wanted them to think of me as I saw myself: a hardworking, accessible, anticelebrity actor.
However, I got to the Westside Arts Theater on Forty-third Street so early it was still locked. I sat outside on the steps. Eventually a beautiful blond woman who I recognized from auditions came walking up and in a sweet voice asked if I was waiting for rehearsals. Her name was Cordelia Richards, and she was playing my sister’s best friend. She sat down next to me and we bonded immediately. She could trace her lineage back to the
Mayflower
. She had gone to Brown and been housemates with John Kennedy Jr. and Christiane Aman-pour. Now she lived in a loft on Bleecker Street with her boyfriend Will Patton, a brilliant actor himself.
The whole play had just six characters. My sister was played by Gordana Rashovich, whose backstage warmup consisted of drinking a coffee and a coke, chain-smoking cigarettes, and biting her knuckles till the skin peeled off; then she’d file over the area with an emery board to keep the skin smooth. She was an interesting woman and a very talented actress. The rest of the cast included Joan MacIntosh, Paul Sparer, and Jon Tenney, whose dashing good looks and talent crashed down on me like a falling piano. I was smitten before he made me laugh, which he did often and effortlessly. I always go for the funny.
We began a lovely little romance, which we tried to keep others from knowing about to avoid distracting people from the work we were doing. We shared a cab to rehearsals if one of us spent the night at the other’s place, but we had the taxi stop a block or two away from the theater and one of us would get out to walk the rest of the way. One day, as Jon hopped out, we heard someone exclaim, “Gotcha!” It was Cordelia, who was standing right there with a giant grin plastered across her face.
“Don’t say anything, okay?” I asked.
She gave me a look and said, “Like everyone doesn’t already know what’s going on?”
Before I left L.A., my mother had said she couldn’t believe I was going to be one of those actresses running to rehearsal with a cup of coffee, a bagel, and my scarf trailing in the breeze. Nor could I believe it when I actually stepped into that role, slipping on pedal pushers and ballet flats in the morning and buying my coffee and bagel across the street from my apartment before hurrying to the theater.
Rehearsals were grueling, but I was determined to make a go of it. My advisors back in L.A. warned the play could be a flop. I didn’t believe them—or care. Not only did the work push me creatively to exercise new muscles, I enjoyed my newfound independence in New York City. Every day seemed full of possibility. If there was a gallery opening, I was in. A nightclub opening, I was in. A sweet affair with Jon Tenney, great, I was all for it.
Did it hurt the play when the romance ended at the tail end of rehearsals? No, we remained a tightly knit group of friends. After shows, we ate dinner together at Le Madeleine, the French bistro next door to the theater. On Mondays, when the theater was dark, my New York pals would meet for southern home cooking at Live Bait, a joint on Twenty-third Street, and then we danced till the wee hours at Heartbreak. We called Monday nights “Bait and Break.”