CHAPTER 34

CH-CH-CHANGES

To my surprise, my accountant confronted me with the devastating news that to come up with the money necessary to pay Mark off, I would have to sell my house—the house my family had lived in for eight years, the house my child had grown up in. It was jarring and difficult for us to leave our longtime home and the friends and neighbors we’d grown so close to. Because I was going to have to seriously scale back, I held an estate sale, selling most of my furniture and tons of Elvira memorabilia because I would no longer be able to afford a big house in which to keep it all. Everyone who saw the estate sale ad figured I’d died, which in a way I had. Here I was, getting rid of my possessions, with no place to live, no jobs coming up, and no clear direction.

I tried hard to ignore my feelings for T. I was still having a difficult time coming to terms with having a relationship with a woman. I was so confused. I felt like a teenager decoding all the old societal BS that I’d stored in my brain about gender and sexual orientation. Despite our mutual feelings for each other, I pushed her away, and she went back to her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

With no funds to buy a house, I moved into a small rental in East Hollywood. It was a big adjustment, and I was struggling. I was on my own for the first time in almost thirty years, a newly single mom, with no prospects of work before me. I did my best to act as my own manager/agent, but although I’ve always dabbled in the business end of my career, it certainly wasn’t my forte.

It took me time to process my relationship with T. I’d been straight my whole life, but now I’d suddenly turned gay overnight? I was having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I was someone who had spent most of her life hanging around with gay men, and now here I was, ashamed of my feelings for a woman. I felt like such a hypocrite. I eventually gave up my ridiculous preconceived notions about what sexual category I fit into and realized that when you love someone, and they love you back, that’s all that matters. Eventually I called T and, after telling her what a difficult time I was having trying to cope with all the duties of work, home, and raising a child on my own, she offered to come back to LA and help out. Once again, she came to my rescue and got us through a very dark period, and I never wanted her to leave again.

I scraped together enough money to put a small down payment on a house in the Silverlake area of LA, and T and I moved in together. Around the same time, Eric Gardner, my former manager, came back into my life. He and I had always talked about finding replacements to play Elvira and possibly installing them in malls around the country at Halloween, like Santa Claus at Christmas. Things would be so much more lucrative if there were more of me, right? We came up with the idea of turning our search into a television show, and with Eric’s help, we produced a reality show: The Search for the Next Elvira. It had a limited run on the short-lived Fox Reality Channel, only four episodes in October 2007, but it made me some much-needed moolah and got Elvira back into the public eye. In the end, the idea of multiple Elviras didn’t pan out because fans still demanded the real thing, but there was a big upside. I met Ted Biaselli, one of the writers on the show. Ted had a wicked sense of humor and was so in tune with Elvira’s voice that it was spooky! Since John Paragon had moved on, I’d been desperate for another writer, so discovering Ted was a godsend.

In the meantime, my ex-husband bought a large property just north of LA in the mountains outside the small, picturesque town of Ojai. To share custody without making a three-hour round trip every few days, T and I decided that moving up to Ojai would be a good idea. Getting out of the middle of the big city really sounded good to us, too, and whenever a job came up, I figured, I could always drive down to LA. So one year after my divorce, here I was, selling my house again, renting in Ojai, and moving for the third time. Even though we were only an hour and a half outside of Hollywood, it quickly became apparent that, as far as showbiz was concerned, I might as well have moved back to Kansas. Not being in Hollywood networking and meeting people kept me out of the loop, and my business suffered even more. Over the next three years, I spent endless hours commuting to LA for business, but as far as I was concerned there was no other choice. Spending as much time as possible with my teenager, who would soon be graduating from high school and leaving home, was my priority.

A close friend, Joe Kaminkow, who’d helped keep me afloat since my divorce by licensing my character for various gaming-industry projects, did me another enormous favor by introducing me to the man who would ultimately help put Elvira back on the map. Scott Marcus, an entertainment-industry veteran and former marketing exec at a major studio, came onboard, and little by little my merchandise, licensing, and product-development numbers made a comeback. As the first client of his newly formed management company, he brought his invaluable experience onboard and, over time, helped bring Elvira back from the dead. He became not only my manager, but my best friend, and I’m so grateful to have found him.

Frustrated because I couldn’t seem to get a Hollywood production company interested in another Elvira project, I decided to jump-start my career by producing twenty-six new episodes of Movie Macabre in May 2011. Apparently, I’d learned nothing from my little venture funding Haunted Hills, because I gambled my savings, personally bankrolling the project. Ted came up with some of the most hilarious material I’d ever done, and the show exceeded my wildest expectations, but wouldn’t you know it, just as it was released in TV syndication, the bottom dropped out of the market. Déjà vu all over again. We were left with terrible time slots in most areas of the country, and you were lucky if you could even find my show on TV because it generally aired at around 4:00 a.m., wedged between infomercials for The Clapper and the Snuggie. Fortunately we were able to release the new Movie Macabre on DVD, and once again, it became a project that started out slow but gained popularity over time.

I guess I should have seen the signs that moving to Ojai wasn’t a good idea. The night we arrived, while lifting Mina, my ninety-pound rottweiler, out of the car, she threw her head back and broke my nose. I sustained other injuries over the following three years. I fell while hiking, chipping my front tooth, cracking my ribs, and fracturing a cheekbone. Walking out of a restaurant one night, stressed and overwhelmed about my show, I missed a step and sprained my ankle so badly that it also broke two bones in my foot. The cherry on top of our time in Ojai was getting bitten on my shoulder by a black widow—an insanely painful experience, by the way, that I heartily do not recommend. Although I’d been to the hospital only once in my forty-something years in LA, other than to give birth, by the time we left Ojai, the emergency-room attendants and I were on a first-name basis.

In 2012, T and I became empty nesters and moved back to Hollywood where we bought a little house on a tree-lined street, just a few blocks from my original starting point at KHJ-TV.