There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me (31 page)

Mom and Lisa, my best friend from high school, drove into the
city together one day and kidnapped me back from this pseudo-actor’s religion. Lisa had graduated from Villanova and was working for a bank. She was still living at home and her house was not far from ours. Mom and Lisa talked often but mostly hung out only with each other when I was around. They usually drank together on movie sets or when I was nearby but working.

The two of them took me to a diner and ordered me frozen yogurt with fruit and granola and said they just missed me. By the end of the meal I confessed to hating the class and realizing it was not where I wanted to be. Mom and Lisa said that I was starting to act weird and they were worried. Even though Mom did not show any signs of giving up drinking when aligned with my best friend, Lisa, she was able to help me become grounded again.

Mom and I were trying to scrounge up jobs for me to do. I assumed that when I graduated, my career would pick up where it had left off. I did not realize that it hadn’t left off anywhere because I was really neither an actress nor a model. I had become a celebrity and an advertising icon. But these days I was an ad icon without any ads. Back when I worked for Calvin, he had not renewed my contract for a second year because the jeans were being too identified with me and less with the brand. I got dropped. I had gained twenty pounds in college, and the deal Mom and I had—she’d stop drinking and I’d stop snacking—she broke in a day. I wasn’t getting my jobs but shitty commercials, mostly out of the country.

We decided a movie was needed.

I had filmed
Brenda Starr
the summer between my junior and senior year at Princeton with the intention of its being released around the time I graduated. The movie was way ahead of its time and was brilliantly conceived. The movie had been my mother’s idea.
Brenda Starr
had always been her favorite cartoon and she had been saying for years that she wanted me to play her in a film one day. She had optioned the rights at one point but was never able to set the project
up. Our option ran out and Mom did not put more of our money into holding on to it. Finally, Mom found the original cartoonist, Dale Messick, and even got Delia Ephron to write the first draft, and Mom found some independent company to fund it.

The problem was it didn’t have a studio behind it, and although the concept and the actors and the costumes and makeup and hair were incredible, the backers were questionable, and it got into terrible legal quicksand. The movie, although made before all the other cartoon and superhero movies, would not be released for three years, after a glut of blockbusters. It was doomed, but such a great idea. Mom had ideas like this and often seemed ahead of her time. She unfortunately was never able to parlay these trailblazing ideas into reality. She never had a team or the big guns behind her. We were the scrappy insurgent group that would get slaughtered trying to defend our small territory.

Anyway, the plan of having a movie released after graduation was foiled and I would soon begin to realize in what dire straits my career lay.

Every day I would ask my mom, “Am I going to get a movie? Am I going to get to act again?”

“Of course, just be patient.”

I kept asking, and I kept believing her words, but I was stagnating and I didn’t know where to turn.

•   •   •

Something had to change. Mom and I knew a few people who worked with an ICM agent named Sam Cohn, and she set up a meeting to sit down with him. He was a big agent and had clients like Meryl Streep and Louis Malle. I remember hearing him say that he would only take me on if I ceased being a celebrity and committed to being an actress. That sounded wonderful to me. He wanted to represent me, but only if my mother stepped down.

Well, there was zero chance of my mother stepping down from anywhere and she was very angry that anyone would even ask. Mom still had my utter support and I believed she would do whatever she thought best for my career. She refused and she made me walk away. I actually do feel that this was a pity because at the time it was a real opportunity that I was denied.

It’s funny—I had forgotten all about this but was reminded of it recently by Lila, who said she begged my mother to reconsider. Mom got angry with her for trying to divide the two of us and for entrusting my career and my well-being to a total stranger.

Looking back at this now, I get a pang of regret. I start thinking about the what-ifs of it all and feel anger and sadness. For so many years I did not feel valid as an actress. Having been deprived of the opportunity to become a respected actress pains me.

But, thinking about it, I also see it as comforting—proof that I had actually always been seen as a valid talent. The endorsement from a big agent was very important and yet my mother denied me it. And I blindly believed in her, even at this older age.

•   •   •

I believe that if I had had an agent even earlier, there might have been more continuity in my work and a stronger focus on quality rather than popularity. But then maybe I would have never left the business to attend college. Maybe I would have done my coveted period movies and then never been heard from again. Maybe I would have never earned enough to be able to live as comfortably as I do. The piece I had to take away, even if it did not result in anything, was that an esteemed person in the film industry had faith in me as a talent. He had incredible taste and an impressive roster of clients and he wanted to add me to it. This I would take with me forever. But at the time, it was not enough to cause me to find the strength to “abandon” my mom. My instincts were secondary. I allowed her to make the
decisions for me because I needed it and thought it was right. She had convinced me that nobody would have my best interests at heart as she did.

I had no idea that going away from the Hollywood game for years while getting an education would have such a negative effect. I also didn’t realize that I had never really been in the Hollywood game. There wasn’t even any footing to regain. Nobody knew what I was, myself included. Mom did not even think to ask me and didn’t seem to care herself. We needed to make a living and keep our houses, and as long as I was well-known, I could earn. It did not matter how. We had no contacts with whom to reassociate. The connections my mom had were mostly with people of questionable integrity and talent. We thought the power of my face was enough. She had no idea that we had no groundwork on which to build. It was worse than starting from zero. It was like starting from negative ten.

I had no power at the box office. I was not the skinny, exotic woman-child I had once been. I had been marketed as a commodity that was obtainable to do whatever song and dance asked of me. I’d sell deodorant, dolls, hair dryers, shampoo, makeup, stockings, and socks—just about anything anybody asked. The last film of any quality I had acted in was
Endless Love
and that was already six years past. I hung out with people like Michael Jackson and Wayne Newton, my manager was practically pickled and useless, and I had no agency representation. Things were not looking promising for a career worthy of much respect. We were floundering.

All I knew at this point was that none of the choices we were making felt good. I thought they were bricks being laid. What I should have seen was that the bricks needed to be solid and not made out of sand. “Work begets work” has always been part of my mom’s mantra and it had worked until now. But it should have been obvious to us all that shitty work begets shitty work and I was becoming trapped in a career path from which I might never recover.

The next few years featured creepy producers and shitty directors on independent films where my name procured the finances. They were bad movies without studio support and real low-rent talent at the helm. It was an extremely confusing and difficult time for me regarding my identity and my persona. Nothing was aligning.

I have no idea what Mom was doing to propel me toward anything except keeping my name out there. It still did not occur to her that we could use professional help. She did not want to share a percentage of the profits and resented giving 15 percent away to a person who did not get me the job in the first place. What I did not realize was that the jobs that she did get me were not the jobs I wanted anyway. It did not occur to my mom that there could have been a defined path if I wanted to be an actress. A path that included outside expertise and professional agents. I assume Mom contacted some old business connections, but what I remember from this time is
waiting
. I was trying to be patient by dancing and getting back in shape and by seeing films and by doing various less intense acting workshops.

Still, my patience was not paying off, and the Hula-Hoop had no need to be “remembered.”

•   •   •

I got some horrible weight-loss campaign for a company in Japan in 1993. I needed to lose the stubborn twenty pounds that I had gained in college and had kept on for six years. I thought it would be a great way to get in shape and make money. Japan was still a world that wanted me.

Mom and I had been to Japan many times and we always had a good time. We’d travel with Gavin or someone from his team and we laughed our way through tatami-mat sleeping, geisha shows, and raku throwing pots. We pretended to eat the raw things we all secretly gathered in our napkins, and poured our whiskies into CEO’s glasses. Gavin and I hardly drank alcohol, and getting the bosses
drunk helped make the evenings shorter. I am sure Mom would have welcomed the pour, but neither Gavin nor I would let that happen. We made friends and money and I got to see another country. Diana, Lisa, and various buddies came with me on those trips.

This trip was different. It was not the heyday of my eighties experience, and the company I was representing was ambiguous and would later go bankrupt from fraud. The flight to Japan was long and while I was sleeping, my mother was drinking. She would usually start a trip off not even drinking in the lounge. But then we’d board and she’d plug into the steady drip of red wine in those dumb little doll-size glasses. She probably justified every new pour by exclaiming how small the glasses were.

While on the plane she must have struck up a conversation with two businessmen who worked for Nescafé. They no doubt recognized me. Every human being on the face of the earth seemed to be able to recognize me by this point despite the fact I wasn’t really working.

We landed in Tokyo and went to the hotel to make that horrible decision whether to sleep for a while to combat jet lag. We had checked into our hotel suite and I had put on a hotel robe, when the doorbell rang. Mom had invited the two businessmen to meet me in our hotel room. I had not formally met them on the plane because I was asleep and Mom did not want to disturb me. She did not want to disturb me on the plane, but in the hotel, in a robe, jet-lagged and disheveled, it was perfectly good business. I yelled that I did not want to come out, only to see that the two men were already in the sitting area.

I gave in and in a few moments I was out there shaking hands and bowing and talking about how much I loved their country.

“Oh yes, I drink coffee but I especially enjoy the Japanese teahouses that we’ve seen in Kyoto. Oh yes, I actually prefer Nescafé. . . . How did you know? Are you saying I could use some right now, you silly you?”

I excused myself and tore the mask off in my adjoining room.
Wow, I must be in bad shape career-wise. That was gross. But this, too, shall pass. Just wait it out, Brooke
.

Still, I did it. I got the Nescafé-businessman gig and was flown to Paris to shoot the commercial. How could it be that despite the fact I’d acted in quality films like
Pretty Baby
and
Endless Love
and box-office hits like
The Blue Lagoon
—and also had a degree from an Ivy League school—I would still find myself in France doing a Nescafé commercial that would be dubbed in Japanese?

While in France, Mom would disappear to have meetings in the lobby of the gorgeous hotel and would return just as dinners were starting or interviews conducted. We were there four days and I think she must have been inebriated the entire time. Again, she was basically safe because she was not driving and was more contained by her inability to speak French. I could forge ahead and complete the current job. It felt good to be working again and the shooting environment was similar to that in the States. The project was not something I was proud to endorse and something about it felt very wrong and a bit pathetic.

I wrapped the commercial and packed my bags. I warned my mother that we needed to pack up and be ready for the flight the next day. I went to bed and got up for early coffee in the glass-paned atrium restaurant. I had a book to read and kept my eye on the time. As we got closer to departure time, Mom still had not shown up. I knew she had come home but she was gone again. I had not slept a lot so she must have slept even less. I returned to her room and found out that, sure enough, she had not packed and didn’t seem ready to get back to America. She had been out the whole night drinking and must have returned only for a short time.

I began getting the place packed up to go. When she finally stumbled in, I just stormed around the room throwing her stuff in bags and mumbling about how much I hated her. I had to get back to America. Staying another day was not an option. I had a bridal shower
I was throwing with a friend for Lisa and had to get back to New York by that afternoon.

I stomped and screamed and accused her of being a loser and made big claims about what a fuck-up my mother was. How fucking pathetic she was and what an idiot I was to think that she could ever pull herself together. How I was never going to get any acting jobs but be relegated to selling fucking instant coffee! Not even real brewed coffee, but
instant
. I was throwing her stuff in bags and she just watched. I always either moped or stomped and slammed doors and raised my voice when Mom drank, but there was a panic in my gut this time. I had to get out of this hotel and France and away from her, and I could not handle another moment of any of it. I did not want her to be the reason our travel plans got screwed up.