Authors: Lisa Gee
This adult is usually mum or dad – who else would do it for nothing? They have to be there, looking after their working child, and so can’t be somewhere else, earning a living or caring for any other children. They become financially dependent on the working child and ‘it’s an all-too-familiar story, that these young people come to their eighteenth birthday and discover, to their horror, that they’re the only one in the family that’s working’.
And then, suddenly, they’re not. After
The Donna Reed Show
ended,
Paul Petersen’s career – like that of many juvenile actors when they reach adulthood, especially if they are identified with one particular role, like Petersen was – stalled. He went off the rails.
Whether the ratio of child performers who grow up wild – or, at a minimum, live out dangerously feral late teens and early twenties – is higher than it is for the general population, I don’t know. And I don’t think anyone does. Certainly, at eighteen or twenty, having worked in film or TV, they most likely have access to more money to buy more alcohol and narcotics and faster cars than most other kids – excepting, of course, those with very rich parents, who may get into similar trouble when they come into their trust funds. Being that age, having lots of money and no gainful employment is dangerous.
Petersen reckons that ‘about half’ of his troubles would have happened if he’d never set foot in a TV studio. He’d been a rambunctious child, sacked from his first job as a Mouseketeer for ‘behaviour unbecoming’, regarded by his teachers as one of the brightest boys in the class, but also amongst the most disruptive. He says he’s ‘genetically predisposed to being an alcoholic’, and ‘didn’t learn how to say no’ until he was well into his forties. ‘That’s on my back, I get that and I’m responsible.’ But ‘a significant chunk of the rest, I was either driven to, or encouraged to do by people who were not supportive of my efforts, but were envious and jealous and couldn’t wait for me to fail’.
‘I was very lucky,’ Mark Lester (most famous for playing the title role in the 1968 film version of
Oliver!
) told me, ‘to go from one film to the next up until the age of eighteen when the work just didn’t come in.’ At the same time as the work stopped, he gained access to his earnings and spent the next couple of years spending them on the traditional drink, drugs and fast cars. Then he went into rehab, came out, got into martial arts and then, having developed an interest in sports injuries, trained as an osteopath. He seems a very practical, down-to-earth person, not given to speculation. ‘I don’t know,’ he said when I asked if he thought he’d have gone off the rails whether
or
not he’d gone into the entertainment business. ‘But it’s probably in my genetic make-up. Maybe I was given more opportunity to do it, but I probably would have done anyway.’
Danny Bonaduce – famous as Danny Partridge in
The Partridge Family
, and for his subsequent hellraising – is fond of pointing out that when he was in rehab, ‘he was the only former child star among forty-eight patients – nine of whom, he added, were dentists’.
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So, if you worry about your kids growing up to have drug problems, keep them out of the medical professions: it’s not only dentists that get hooked. Lots of doctors do, too. They have access to all sorts of substances that other people don’t and, because they are clever and know the telltale signs, tend to be highly skilled at concealing their own addictions. And a paramedic told me recently that loads of ambulance crews rely on diazepam to help them sleep. ‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘we couldn’t cope with the shift patterns.’
Anxious to explore what I might be condemning my child to, I read some former child performers’ autobiographies. Shirley Temple had come through it all with flying colours, even though she ended up with very little of the money she earned through her movies. Her autobiography
Child Star
is dedicated ‘lovingly’ to her mother. Miraculously, despite the fact that her mum was the archetypal, ultra-pushy stage mother, Rose Hovick, June Havoc survived childhood stardom and struggled her way to adult acting and, much later on, writing and directing success. Her story, told in two volumes of memoirs, is an extraordinary one.
At the height of her career in the early 1920s, ‘Dainty Baby’ June’s act earned a staggering $1,500 a week as she headlined around the lucrative vaudeville circuit. But then puberty and moving pictures struck, work became harder to find, and wages dropped. Her mother grew increasingly hysterical. In 1929, June secretly married and tried to run away with Bobby Reed, a dancer in her act. She might have
been
thirteen – at least, that’s how old Rose told her she was on her birthday: ‘My baby is thirteen today. I just can’t believe it!’ June told Bobby she thought she was ‘at least sixteen’. But she couldn’t be sure. As she explained to him, she had an impressive collection of birth certificates that her mother had had forged so she could work illegally young. ‘Two of them make me twenty-one now. The others can’t be used. They make me over thirty.’
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Mrs Hovick discovered and attempted to foil the newly-weds’ escape plans. Following a scene in a police station during which she tried to shoot Bobby – but didn’t have a clue how to use her gun and left the safety catch on – the pair got away.
Marriage was June’s only way out of the embarrassingly childish act that Mrs Hovick was still touting round the remains of the vaudeville circuit. June had wanted out for a while. A couple of years earlier, she’d realised: ‘I was much too big, not only for the act and the clothes, but for my billing: “Dainty Baby June”. I was gangly. Nothing about me pleased me. I was still doing the same wretched baby-talk kind of act … The same act that was remarkable for a little child … [was] completely uninteresting for a gangly teenager … Maybe I no longer looked like a ferret, but I hadn’t emerged a beauty … I knew I was no longer cute.’ June was offered the chance of training with Samuel L. ‘Roxy’ Rothafel, renowned for producing the best stage shows of the time at his New York theatre, the Roxy. ‘Give me this little girl for three years,’ Roxy said, offering to take care of them whilst June was training – provided they forgot about their act – ‘and I’ll give you a star.’ But Rose Hovick was having none of it. Despite her daughter’s desperate entreaties, she bawled Rothafel out: ‘Mother’s voice was shrill. “She
is
a star! She’s headlined in vaudeville since … You want to separate us! That’s what you’re trying to do – separate me from my baby. How cruel!”’.
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Meanwhile June’s older sister Louise
was
emerging a beauty.
During
June’s starring years, Louise – blessed, allegedly, with none of her sister’s talent – was forced by their mother to wear boys’ clothes. She was kept firmly in her younger sibling’s shadow to ensure that all attention focused on June. When June married and left the act, Louise stepped into the spotlight and within a few years had achieved a much higher level of fame than her child star sister. She became the world’s best-known burlesque artiste, Gypsy Rose Lee, feted for the sassy humour of her striptease act, and able to get away with revealing comparatively little flesh.
In her memoirs, Gypsy described their archetypal stage mother as ‘charming, courageous, resourceful and ambitious. She was also, in a feminine way, ruthless.’ Once Gypsy hit the big time, Mrs Hovick didn’t bother with June, who by the early 1930s was separated from Bobby and struggling to scrape a living doing the rounds of the gruelling dance marathons. The first volume of June’s extraordinary memoirs is very matter-of-fact about her mother’s coldness. I wondered how she felt about it, imagining a combination of sadness, disorientation, a sense of abandonment, but also relief and freedom after all the years of intense attention and pushing. Now in her mid-nineties – and just over a decade into her retirement – Miss Havoc explained, via her assistant Tana:
‘Yes, of course that’s how I felt, but I also experienced bewilderment at the sense of relief and freedom. I did love my mother but found those feelings a little uneasy to have. And by the time that happened, I was more cognisant of my mother’s ways than I had been as a child; and while things were hard, I held on to my dream. That occupied me emotionally – that and taking care of my infant daughter.’
Miss Havoc also told me how, despite the kind of upbringing that would drive most people to drink and drugs – or at least extended bouts of unproductive self-pity – she got up, dusted herself down and worked incredibly hard to forge herself a successful adult career
‘I gained the uproarious, unconditional acclaim of the audiences I
played
to – waves and waves of love coming over the footlights. This, along with the approval and guidance of many of the vaudevillians with whom I worked, gave me a strong foundation of self-respect, and knowledge of talent and achievement.’
She went on to explain how most vaudevillians prided themselves on their family values. ‘I learned right from wrong by being among them backstage. I hate to see the young actors of today being exploited when so many of them have had little opportunity to plumb the depths of their talent and instead are being turned into “icons”, whatever that means.’
There is, in other words, a big difference between being a working child actor and a child star. June Havoc was both, but she was both at a time before the press and public felt entitled to invade a star’s personal space, and in a place – vaudeville – where the focus was on teamwork, on the responsibility performers had to each other and to their audience, to keep going even when they felt rotten, to hone their skills and to work hard. As Tana told me, if you were working in vaudeville, you ‘went on stage no matter what. I suppose the odd missing limb might excuse you, or a coma, but other than that, you went out there because the rest of the people in the act – perhaps all the acts on the bill – depended on you.’
And then came film, and then television, video, DVD. With the evolution in media came a change in how we, the audience, respond and relate to the performers. With traditional theatre, the differences between us and them and – crucially – between performance and real life are clear. As filming techniques and technology increased in sophistication, as television arrived in our living rooms and started taking over our lives, the relationships between audience and performer changed. The more our lives are ruled by TV, the more proprietorial we feel towards the people on it and the less we are able to distinguish between real life and drama.
In her book
Former Child Stars: the story of America’s least wanted
, journalist Joal Ryan posits the theory that ‘a TV kid makes a more
personal
impression than a movie kid’. Her idea is that kids on TV shows are watched over years by children, grow up with us and are seen as peers and attainable, whereas children on films are movie stars and different. I think it’s more that anyone who appears on a regular basis in our living rooms along with our families feels familiar. Because we’re used to them being in our homes, we feel – on some primordial level – as if they are kin.
Weirdly, it works the other way round, too. A few years ago, a family friend, an actor, was in a TV series called
A Thing Called Love
. I watched avidly. During one episode, his character was rounded on by several of his friends who all shouted at him a lot. I can’t remember why. What I can remember are the emotions this scene evoked in me. I got very cross and upset with the people who were being horrid to my friend, and felt very protective towards him – which is embarrassing and, given the fact that he’s six foot tall and works out (I’m four foot eleven and don’t) and perfectly capable of looking after himself, hilarious. I am – like most people – intellectually sophisticated enough to distinguish between real life and TV drama. On a deeper, emotional level I can’t tell the difference.
Some months after Dora finished in
The Sound of Music
, she went to audition for a prestigious TV police drama. We knew only that her role involved cavorting round London Zoo, posthumously, as a figment of her grieving father’s distressed imagination. That, I thought, would be enormous fun for her, and given that was all it involved, I reckoned I could cope with the fact that her character was dead. After the casting she told me that she’d had to lie still without breathing for thirty seconds. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Dunno,’ she replied happily, having thoroughly enjoyed herself. I had a fairly good idea, but consoled myself with the conviction that she wouldn’t get the part anyway.
A few days later we heard that she had been cast. The job would start in two days, when she would have to wear a party dress and have her picture taken with penguins. That was very exciting. Then we
heard
that they needed to know how tall she was so they could buy a body double to use for when they showed her having her operation. And could I please bring in some family photos of her, but, naturally, none with her real family in. Then I discovered that her character was due to die as a result of a (routine) operation that, in real life, the sister of one of her best friends was waiting to have. And that viewers would see her character lying on a mortuary slab, as her grieving father – who spent more time than was strictly healthy visiting his dead daughter there – wouldn’t let her be buried.
I pulled her. It was all too much. Although she would undoubtedly have had a fantastic time, and got to work with a highly respected director, top-notch cast and award-winning company, it felt wrong. It would have been a brilliant career opportunity, but might have caused her friend worry and upset, completely unnecessarily. And then there was my reaction to consider. Although I would know, indisputably, that Dora was alive and well, if I watched her performance and saw her lying on that mortuary slab, in the context of a realistic, contemporary drama, I would feel that something terrible had happened to her. Given how strong my emotional reaction was to my friend’s character being shouted at, I could imagine exactly how this would affect me. I’m still not sure whether my response was flaky or normal. I am sure, however, that she’ll have plenty of other brilliant career opportunities when she’s old enough to have a career.