Authors: Melissa Gilbert
In September, I won reelection to a second term, and Membership First once again took a stronghold in the Hollywood division. While my return to the union’s starring role was a vote of confidence for my platform, it wreaked havoc on my personal life. Bruce would come home on a break and resent me for being consumed by negotiations; and I would, in turn, resent him. We weren’t communicating well, if at all; our biorhythms ran in opposite directions.
That Bruce was in Canada shooting a movie when I celebrated my fortieth birthday didn’t help. I had a slumber party the night before with my closest girlfriends and then a larger bash the next night with all my favorite foods, dancing, and a screening in the backyard of my all-time favorite movie,
My Favorite Year
. It was a sort of last hurrah in the house; shortly thereafter we realized we needed to downsize, since one of us was not working as much as she had in the past as a result of the SAG presidency.
There was other fallout from the presidency. The TV/Theatrical negotiation was taking a toll on me emotionally. It is very difficult to take a package of proposals into a negotiation and then begin the back-and-forth of deciding what goes and what stays. It’s almost like deciding which child will live and which will die.
I spent many nights distracted, sleepless, tossing and turning with worry. One night, I fell asleep on Bruce’s side of the bed, which was wrought iron, with four large posts that had decorative vines and roses wrapping around them. In the middle of the night, I got up to go to the bathroom and on my way back I walked straight into the bed. I knew from the immediate pain I had done major damage. I just didn’t know how bad.
Afraid to look, I went back into the bathroom and turned on the light. I saw that I had a gash across my forehead and a cut across my nose; in fact, there was a flap of skin hanging open next to my nose. Blood poured down my face and neck. After washing my face, I decided to call my dermatologist in the morning rather than wake Michael up and go to the emergency room. So I put butterfly Band-Aids on the flap next to my nose and somehow I managed to fall back asleep. In AA one would call that self-will run riot. In my world it was a perfect example of my constitutional incapability to ask for help.
At seven the next morning, I dropped Michael off at school and went to the dermatologist, who put 15 stitches in my face, bandaged me up, and gave me a prescription for pain pills, and then I drove to the AMPTP headquarters for that day’s round of negotiations. Later, my car wouldn’t start and I needed a tow, which only added insult to injury.
I felt like the world was trying to thwart me with one frustration after another. In reality, I brought on the problems myself. I didn’t see what should have been obvious when I looked in the mirror and saw myself covered in bandages: I was overwhelmed, fighting the world, taking on too much, and trying to do it all myself. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for help—not even the night before when I had stared into the bathroom mirror and seen my face covered in blood.
How much more of a clue did I need till I woke up?
More.
M
y final act as president of the Screen Actors Guild was to get the theatrical agreement negotiated, out to the membership, and passed—and by the end of my term we would do that. Bruce was still traveling back and forth shooting
Young Blades
, and our marriage was in deep trouble.
Things just weren’t right. My face wasn’t healing properly. Then I started having trouble with one of my implants. I went to the doctor who had put them in ten years earlier, and he recommended changing them immediately. It was a tricky situation because we were at a crucial part of the negotiations and I knew I would need four days to recover from surgery.
I pulled Pisano and AFTRA’s national executive director, Greg Hessinger, aside and informed them that I needed to have some surgery and would be unavailable from Thursday through Sunday. Pisano worried the surgery must be pretty intense for me to need four days off. I tried to slough off his desire for more info by explaining it was a girl thing, but after seeing he was genuinely concerned, I decided the hell with it and said, “Guys, ten years ago I had breast implants put in and now I’m having some problems. They need replacing. I’m not making a big deal.”
“Understood,” Bob said.
Greg nodded uncomfortably.
I came through surgery fine. Whether my marriage would fare as well was still up in the air. I harped on Bruce when he was home and made him feel like he couldn’t do anything right. I was overly capable, and he had become extremely self-sufficient again from living on his own in Canada. We fought so badly that he started to use the D-word. We loved each other, but we knew something had to change or we couldn’t go on living together, which I found unacceptable. So did he.
When
Young Blades
ended and Bruce was home for good, we went straight to the therapist, who asked us point-blank if we were telling her that our marriage was no longer her primary patient, that we were done. Two hours later, after a long, hard look at the twelve years we had spent together, we left having made a pact. We weren’t just going to work out our differences. We were going to make our marriage work. We had a child, a home, and a life together. I must give Bruce a tremendous amount of credit. He is a very rare and special man in that he has always been willing to go to therapy to make our marriage and our family work. In fact, in my family we are all great believers in therapy and go in any number of combinations: Bruce and me; Bruce and Lee; me and Dakota; Bruce, me, and Michael. It has softened and healed Bruce’s relationship with Sam and Lee. It has made us a solid family unit, and none of it would have been possible if Bruce hadn’t been willing.
There was still a wild card—me. While I worked on my marriage, I failed to acknowledge the entirety of my own self-destructive behavior and its effect on my family. If I had, I would have dealt with my alcohol consumption. I clearly had a drinking problem and wasn’t facing it. I had already ripped my face apart in the middle of the night. My body had fallen apart from stress. I was a mess.
What was I waiting for? Why didn’t I recognize the obvious? As Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote, “Once you begin being naughty, it’s easier to go on and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.”
In my case, I went to New Orleans to make the movie
Heart of the Storm
. I was already close with director Charles Wilkinson and bonded quickly with my costars, especially Brian Wimmer. We shot from sunset to sunrise and then went back to our hotel in Covington, where our tightly knit cast and crew unwound by playing guitar and drinking. Our cocktail hour was at eight in the morning.
My drinking was out of control. Though I never drank at work, I consumed twice as much as everybody else when we were off. I was probably hungover 85 percent of the time, but I thought I was having a blast. I had no idea how much stress and strain I was trying to suppress.
Then I returned home. On August 8, I was in the kitchen making dinner, drinking wine, and going through my motions of trying to secretly keep my glass full. I was up to three bottles a night at this point. After opening the fridge and topping my glass off inside so no one could see, I shut the door and saw Michael standing there, looking up at me.
“Momma, you’re not going to drink more wine, are you?” he asked.
My heart stopped. That was my bolt of clarity from out of the sky, my spiritual awakening. It scared and humiliated me more than anything I had ever experienced. My nine-year-old kid had asked me to stop drinking. I was sick that he knew I had a problem. I didn’t wonder how many other people knew. The pain and guilt flooded over me in a tidal wave. I immediately went upstairs to my room and collapsed in a heap on the floor, sobbing.
T
he next day I showed up at my therapist’s office. I may as well have crawled in on my hands and knees. She already knew what had happened. I simply said, “I surrender. I will do it the right way this time. I will do whatever I need to do to stop drinking. I have to stay sober.”
To keep myself on course, I began attending AA meetings. Private, women-only ones. I realized I needed help, and it ran counter to my nature to ask for it. But I couldn’t do it alone. Not much later, I ran into my friend, Michael Des Barres, whom I hadn’t seen in years. We talked for a while and he suggested I go to a meeting that he regularly attended. I went and immediately felt at home. The meeting was small and closed to people who weren’t alcoholics, but it was still a public meeting. I ran into more friends there, some from as far back as childhood. I had found my home and still maintained my precious anonymity.
Soon after, I faced my greatest fear about such gatherings when I agreed to speak at a much larger meeting in Beverly Hills. As I was standing outside waiting for my friends, a woman came up to me and said that as a longtime fan of
Little House,
she was excited to see me at her meeting. Then she caught herself, apologized profusely, and said, “Wait. How do you do anonymous?”
I shook my head and said, “I don’t—and come to think of it, it really doesn’t matter compared to the alternative.”
I had never spoken truer words. For years, I had been afraid of people judging me harshly if they knew I had a problem, even though it was almost de rigueur in Hollywood to have a drug or drinking problem. In reality, I only feared one person finding out the truth: me. And as soon as I came to terms with that, well, facing the facts of my life was a lot easier and less tiring than running away from them.
I
n the fall of my last term as SAG president, I received a call about an eleven-year-old boy named Dustin Meraz. Dustin was a patient at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, and he was dying of an exceptionally horrible form of cancer called neuroblastoma. After being told he wanted to be an actor, I arranged for Dustin to receive an honorary SAG card. Then I decided to turn the presentation into a full-fledged ceremony.
If I couldn’t use my powers as president for good, what good were they? So I made a few calls and showed up at Children’s Hospital with Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Stephen Collins. They helped me give Dustin his SAG card in front of his family, his roommate, and the hospital staffers. It was an afternoon that none of us will ever forget. Dustin passed away just a few weeks later. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him. His words are engraved on a bracelet I wear on my left wrist: “Today is a gift, have fun.” Could there be better advice?
Later that year, I was invited back for a Christmas party with the kids on Dustin’s unit. I brought Leo,
Spider-Man
’s Tobey Maguire, and my sister Sara. During the party, Lori Butterworth, the founder of the Children’s Hospice & Palliative Care Coalition, took me aside and said she noticed that I had an aptitude for relating to these extremely sick children.
I had visited sick children in hospitals since my first season on
Little House,
and somehow I always wound up on the pediatric oncology floor. But my so-called aptitude may actually have been my curiosity as an adult to learn how to live from these children.
I went out to lunch with Lori, aka “the blond tornado,” and her cofounder, Devon Dabbs. They explained the massive amount of resources and money needed to take care of terminally ill children and then pitched me on helping them raise awareness for the Coalition’s work. I immediately agreed. Just putting together the words “hospice” and “children” seemed wrong. But they had my commitment with the first mention of a single statistic—that 92 percent of children that die in the United States die in uncontrolled pain.
As far as I was concerned that figure was disgusting, frightening, and thoroughly unacceptable. Part of the problem was silly law. Children had to qualify for hospice care. They often fought their illnesses harder and longer than adults simply because they were children. Hospice was suddenly taken away if they showed any improvement; there was no transition. I promised to do whatever I could to help lower that statistic and change the law, even if we had to do it one child at a time.
In February 2005, I said my good-byes as president of the Screen Actors Guild at the union’s annual awards show. Bruce was out of town, so I took Sam and Lee, who looked incredibly handsome in their tuxedos, Gucci shoes, black shirts, and pink ties, which they gamely wore to match my pink dress with black flowers.
My stepsons were especially impressed when my gorgeous pretend daughter Jennifer Garner mentioned in her thank-you as winner for Best Actress in a Drama that I had once played her mother (I could see everyone in the auditorium quickly doing the math; we’re eight years apart). Then at the after-party Kiefer Sutherland literally swept me off my feet with a giant bear hug, and while holding me in his arms, he pressed his lips to my ear and whispered, “You look so beautiful.”
“Watch it, those are my stepsons standing to my side,” I said, blushing.
He put me down, stepped back, and then, while looking directly at Sam and Lee, said, “Boys, I’m in love with your stepmother.”
“Awesome,” Sam said.
“Cool,” Lee chimed.
It was a wonderful night and I made it through sober.
Three weeks later, members of SAG and AFTRA voted to accept a new three-year contract with studios covering theatrical and TV production. The $200 million deal I had spent years helping to craft and negotiate had passed. I considered it the crowning achievement of my two terms as SAG’s chief elected officer.
My joy was tempered when my dear friend and colleague Bob Pisano decided to resign as executive director. As he put it, he had become part of the problem. The board hired Greg Hessinger in his place. I would miss Bob horribly, but I was pleased the Guild would be in Greg’s very capable hands.
Unable to slow down, I managed to set sane limits and boundaries. I promised Bruce no SAG-related work before 8:00 a.m. or after 8:00 p.m. Between those hours, the family had me to themselves. I was also sober—six months and counting at that point—which put the kibosh on whooping it up at parties and events. Without a drink in my hand, I felt uncomfortable in social situations.
We stayed home most nights. Bruce and I would read, watch TV, and have friends or family over for dinner. The closest I got to life in the fast lane was the express line at the grocery store. But I was okay with driving carpools and helping with homework. Laura Ingalls Wilder once said, “It’s the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones, after all.” She was right.
After nearly forty years in show business, I devoted time and energy to figuring out myself. Sobriety was one facet, and I took it more seriously than ever. Knowing that my life depended on avoiding alcohol, I committed to working on the fourth step in AA’s twelve-step program. I had never done that before.
I was able to tackle the first three steps without any difficulty. I could admit that I was powerless over alcohol. I could believe a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. And I could turn my life over to God as I understood Him. But I had always procrastinated when it came to the fourth step—making a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. Who wants to face up to all the darkness and bad things she has done in her life?
For me, it wasn’t a matter of whether I wanted to do this anymore. I
needed
to take a long, honest look at myself. One could say that all the time I had spent looking at myself in the mirror or on-screen, whether it was at my nose, my boobs, a fancy gown, or my face after bloodying it on the bedpost, were either missed opportunities or a gradual lead-up to this more crucial assessment of the way I looked on the inside.
With help from my therapist, I went to work trying to understand why I had made various choices throughout my adult life and what had driven me to this point. For months, I tackled the big questions that seemed to define me: Why was I so overly competent? Why was I constitutionally unable to ask anyone for help? Why was I unable to say no? Why, why, why was I the way I was?
The answer was like a nasty joke. Thanks to a lifetime spent on TV, I had been popular, admired, and loved my whole life by everyone except myself. Inside, I couldn’t get past the first twenty-four hours of my life, when my mother and father had given me away. I was made to see and accept that the motivating factor behind many of my decisions was feeling I had to prove I was worthy and lovable.
I worked through that with exercises. My therapist had me imagine myself as a five-year-old and write a letter to my birth mother, Cathy, asking why she hadn’t kept me, why she had gotten pregnant in the first place, and if she ever wondered what had happened to me. Then she had me answer those questions. I was shocked when I found myself in the guise of my birth mother, writing back that she had put me up for adoption to give me a chance at a better life than she could provide.
“Why hadn’t I ever thought of it in that way?” I asked my therapist.
“Here’s a better question,” she said. “How are you going to go forward now that you have thought of it?”
There was no short, simple answer. My healing was an evolving process of recognition, awareness, and understanding. I didn’t have to look for fixes outside of myself, not in work, men, or alcohol; I could find them in myself. I didn’t have to worry about proving that I was lovable; I was already lovable. I could even love myself. I didn’t have to be perfect; there was no such thing as perfect. I didn’t have to worry about getting someplace; I was always exactly where I needed to be.
I had always been afraid that if I started to let out some of that pain, fear, and betrayal, I would start to cry and never stop. But finally confronting those wounds, whether through writing letters or just talking, helped. Sure, I cried—but not for long. And I felt better afterward.
I learned that a feeling is just that—a feeling. I didn’t have to stay sad my whole life. Nor did I have to stay mad. Likewise, I wasn’t able to stay happy all the time either. I was better off when I experienced everything life dealt me and then moved on to the next thing—whatever that turned out to be.
I also learned how to ask for help when I needed it. I was blessed to have a great circle of girlfriends around me, my own league of extraordinary women: Sandy, Amanda, Cordelia, Tina, Leilani, Colleen, Ali, and Kari, girlfriends I could call on when I needed help, and they were always there. I also had a very close relationship with my sister Sara. By then our age difference seemed virtually nonexistent. We have all been through so much together—marriages, divorces, births, deaths. Each one of them has contributed something unique to my life. Each of them has been a part of my history and I have been a part of theirs. What a miracle for someone like me who trusted no one, especially other women, to have a circle of women who share my secrets and in turn share theirs.
After a couple years, I could see both therapy and sobriety paying off. I stayed open and aware in most situations, if I got down I didn’t stay down, and above all, I tried to behave as if my number one goal was to return in my next life as a fat, happy house cat whose only task would be to look for the warm spot.
I
n October 2006, I was elected president of the board for the Children’s Hospice & Palliative Care Coalition. Six months later, I testified in front of the California state senate about the need to change hospice eligibility requirements. I also took a course in pediatric end-of-life nursing and got involved with kids and their families. That’s where I felt like I was at my best.
I know it’s where I have been able to do my most memorable work, as I am able to make a difference in a child’s life. If I can help a child die pain-free and with dignity, then I’ve done something extraordinary.
Take sixteen-year-old Nick Snow. On the day we met at Children’s Hospital, he had battled and beaten neuroblastoma, and I couldn’t stop staring at his Afro. It may have been the world’s biggest. Leo DiCaprio was with me that day and he said what I was thinking: “Dude, that’s a hell of an Afro.” Nick explained he grew it for all the years he didn’t have hair.
His will was like the Energizer bunny. He didn’t know when to stop. He flunked hospice twice—both times he rebounded slightly after new treatments. He was aware of what was going on each time hospice was pulled from him. His belief was that kids should be able to have hospice in palliative care whenever they needed, not just when the rules allowed. As he aptly said, it was cruel to make parents choose between curing and caring.
Nick eventually died not from cancer but from a perforated bowel. I think he was tired from years of fighting and he just needed to rest. Thanks to him and others like him, though, we were able to pass the Nick Snow Act in California in 2009. This was the first big step in abolishing the hospice eligibility regulations for children, and the first step in creating a comprehensive, compassionate hospice benefit for children; the idea will sweep across California in stages. Now the goal is to spread that enlightened policy change across the United States.
In Akron, I met David, seventeen, who, without being able to speak a word, let me know that although he was scared as he battled leukemia, he was determined to win. He emanated courage. Then there was Jessica, a little girl who had bone cancer. When I asked her if she was afraid, she said, “No, not for me. But I worry about my mom and dad.” She squeezed my hand and said, “I believe that a thousand years on earth is one day in heaven. So by the time I’m sitting down for my first lunch, my mom and dad will be there.”
I had a friend whose baby died suddenly and unexpectedly. I discussed this tragedy with my son Michael. My little philosopher reasoned that this baby had been an angel. He went even further, postulating that all children start out as angels, flying down from heaven. At some point, their wings fall off. But my friend’s baby hadn’t lost his wings, and so he had to fly back.
I decided that all kids who died were angels who hadn’t lost their wings. As for why they had to die in pain, I could only ask, who would do that to an angel?
These courageous children reinforced my belief in heaven. I’m not sure there is a hell, but there absolutely has to be something better. There has to be a pony in this barn full of crap. It just has to get easier. Which begs the questions, why is life so complicated, why is it such a puzzle, why do most of us find it such a struggle on so many different levels?
My therapist shared a theory she had come across, and I liked it. It held that before making your next journey in this life, your soul sits at a large, circular conference table and chooses the souls who are going to be part of your life. As for which particular people would be chosen, I figured they would be individuals from previous lives with whom there was still unfinished business.
My son, Michael Boxleitner, is definitely one of those people. His arrival into this world taught me about the miracle of life, and every day thereafter has been a reminder to me to appreciate it. Other people provided different lessons. Sam and Lee taught me that siblings do not have to be connected by blood to truly love and care for one another. More important, I learned that my love for each of my children is equal, whether they grew under my heart or in it.
Bo was the catalyst who pushed me to confront my own birth and taught me to begin to set boundaries, and I dragged Rob into my life to show me it was okay to be free with myself. Michael Landon showed me the most important thing was family and home. So he had three families and three homes—he tried. Bruce has enhanced my personal growth; we have taught each other to stay and work out situations rather than run away and miss the stuff that matters, the sweet, simple things.