Chapter 11
Dr. Cohart gave me the number of “New Beginnings” at Century City Hospital, a six-week live-in drug and alcohol recovery program. I made the call and they said they’d send a cab right over but I had four things to take care of first.
1. I wasn’t sure if I still had insurance through the Screen Actors Guild. I had been doing very little work and was well behind on dues. Miraculously, after a phone call I learned that my insurance was still good.
2. I needed $200 for the deductible and I was flat broke. I drove over to Mickey Fox’s apartment and told her what I was doing and that I needed money. Mickey was elated for me and even though she was living on social security and barely had two dimes to scrape together at that moment, she and two of her friends were able to pool their cash and loan me the money.
3. I went back to my apartment at Ken Rose’s house and apologized for not arranging for my dog Fudge’s care while I was off with Jack and asked Ken and Helen if they could continue to care for him over the next six weeks. They were more than willing.
4. I went back to my little apartment and drank a half-pint of vodka — a wimpy amount for a true alcoholic but I didn’t have the money for any size larger.
The next morning, August 17, 1984, Ken drove me to Century City Hospital and I checked myself into the program.
First things first. At New Beginnings they gave me a full medical checkup, something I hadn’t had in a long time. They found I was suffering from anemia, malnutrition, and the first stages of liver disease.
After that, they went through my suitcase and all my belongings to ensure I hadn’t tried to sneak in any drugs or alcohol and then they took everything away, except for the clothes I’d wear and a few other essentials. My private room was essentially a hospital room — no swanky health spa setting here. The bed was a standard issue hospital bed and the room had a lot of the functional trappings of a typical medical facility.
They kept me on a mild sedative and in isolation for the first two days so the medical staff could keep me under observation and see how I managed the physical and emotional effects of alcohol withdrawal.
While I felt weak, I hardly felt terrible. The idea of life without alcohol was not a daunting prospect, nor was it sad, disappointing or awful. It was something else altogether.
It was as though for years I’d been wearing a suit made of bowling balls and when I entered New Beginnings, they had all fallen off and gone crashing away. It was the biggest relief you can possibly imagine. It was like getting out of jail. Like escaping from kidnappers. I felt totally liberated. There was no more hiding. No more lies. No more pretending I didn’t have a problem.
The idea that I could be in control of my life — instead of the thing inside of me that craved alcohol — was freeing and transformative. For the first time in a long, long time, I was happy.
More than happy, I was euphoric.
I called my brother and sister and other family members and the response from all of them was relief too. They said things like “Thank God we have you back.” Alcohol had put barriers between us. Now I had returned to their lives and they were welcomed joyfully and tearfully back into mine.
I called Jeanne and other friends and told them things like, “The food here is so good!” Looking back I realize it was pretty standard, ho-hum hospital food like turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy. But after such long neglect, living on a diet of vodka and hotdogs, this food was rich, solid, nourishing, and dazzling. I’d forgotten what it felt like to actually feel good.
After my brief isolation I was judged ready to mix with the others in the program, to attend the meetings held throughout the day, have meals in the common area, and take part in the other events.
One of the things my counselors stressed was the idea of learning how to tell the truth. Anyone with an addiction like this becomes a world-class, overachieving, Triple-A-rated liar. And the worst lies are the ones you tell yourself.
I have to say, it’s pretty hard learning how to be truthful.
One of our exercises was to write our feelings every day. And I had to learn to write the real things I felt — not to write things other people wanted to hear, not to gain something, not for the effect it might have, not for the image I hoped to create for myself.
This is hard for anyone though I have a tendency to believe — perhaps in a self-centered way — that it may be harder for actors. We want to be liked. We spend our careers obsessing over winning people over whether it’s an audience watching us on the big screen or a casting director’s 19-year-old intern who’s operating the video camera during an audition in a nondescript office.
A lot of the people in the recovery program were younger than I was and were coming off of profound addictions to drugs such as amphetamines, barbiturates, and heroin, drugs I’d never taken and had no connection to.
We all told our stories in the group meetings — or pieces of our stories or versions of our stories. We were all taking those first steps into the strange unknown — telling the unprettified truth about ourselves, which is scary and awkward. In one meeting I stood up when it was my turn and related how after I’d come back to Los Angeles and was bouncing from place to place after I lost my home and was housesitting for a friend. I’d run out of unemployment money, there weren’t any residual checks coming in, I was just eking by, and how my dog Fudge and I were living on packages of hotdogs. I realized while relating this that I was hearing someone crying. I looked around the group and saw girl in her 20s who’d burst out in tears as I was talking about my dog and me living on nothing and I remember looking at her in confusion, unsure why this would make anyone cry. I’d just been talking about how I’d made it through a rough spot; it hadn’t occurred to me that that level of poverty would move someone so much. But we were all raw and new and our emotions were wobbly and wonky. I know mine were.
An important step, they told us, was to admit that you were an alcoholic. Yep. I was. No problem with that. Another was to admit my helplessness in the face of alcohol, to understand that I would never stop wanting it, there would be no finish line to cross and that for the rest of my life I would require support — the support of others in recovery, of friends and family, and of a “higher power.” I did indeed find such powerful support in the program and made many new friendships.
My relationship with my self changed. We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And I began to see that the story I’d always told myself about myself — my internal autobiography — was completely different than I’d ever imagined.
The new and truthful central story of my life was this: when I was born there was a tiny seed implanted in my brain, something I’d inherited from my dad, that sweet, kind, quiet man who started his day with bourbon and kept cases of Jim Beam in the barn and my mom, who had cocktail hour all too often. Hell, it came from their parents too. I remember my grandmother on my mother’s side always had a little brown bottle with her, which she called her heart medicine. I hadn’t realized what it was until one day she went to the pharmacy in Yuba City to get a refill and was complaining about the price. The pharmacist, who apparently had no use for euphemism, said pretty loudly, “Well, ma’am, the price of brandy has gone up.”
When I was a child and I hung out on the fringes of those weekend cocktail parties that make up my first memories, and I would take sips of those drinks, the seed stirred. Later in high school when I drank beer with my friends, the seed cracked open and something peeked out, liking what I was doing. In college, at the Pasadena Playhouse, I started to drink in earnest. The umbilical-cord-like worm that came out of that seed grew, stretching itself out lazily across the top of my brain. Over time it continued to grow, nourished and strengthened by the alcohol I kept feeding it. And eventually it had a voice and it was my voice and it had thoughts and desires and they were now my thoughts and desires. It was telling me what to drink and when to drink. It told me that Tim Considine was totally off base, controlling, and no fun at all when he said we should stop drinking. It told me that he was the wrong guy for me and that better things were to be had outside our relationship. It said drinking was more important than Tim, more important than my marriage. Later, as I entered my thirties, it became clear that I couldn’t keep drinking and ever have children. I had seen Barbara Jean caring for her seven beautiful kids and I knew somewhere inside that I could barely take care of my dog. And so I got my tubes tied because the worm mandated that drinking was more important than children. But we both came to an agreement, the worm and I, that my career was still important. We struck that bargain. And while shooting Little House we stuck to that deal. I would say, “Okay I have to work now but as soon as I’m finished filming, then we can drink again.” But after Little House was over, the worm had no more patience and it told me I didn’t need to go to auditions or show up to meetings with my agent. In fact I didn’t need to work anymore. I needed to devote myself fully to the worm and I needed to start the day drinking and I needed to take cocaine in order to increase my capacity to drink and to feed the worm. Then it told me I needed to marry Jordan. The worm liked Jordan because we both liked to stay at home and drink and do cocaine and drink more. Somewhere in the haze though, I wanted to quit all this, something didn’t feel right, and I moved to San Francisco and I tried to stop and I went to that spa but the worm said, “You can’t quit, you need me. You have to drink. Who will you be without drinking? What will you do? Drinking is your life.”
Back in Los Angeles, after I’d lost everything, the worm told me it was no problem if I didn’t have money — vodka was cheap and smoking crack was cheaper than cocaine and just as good. If anyone, such as Ken Rose, questioned my drinking, the worm took great offense and told me to cut those people out of my life. It told me to move in with Jack. I didn’t need to go out of the apartment. I didn’t need my family. I didn’t need to work. I didn’t need to eat. I just needed to keep drinking. I had to. Nothing else mattered.
Going into alcohol recovery with its ongoing group meetings, mentoring, and community of support meant that I, Charlotte, the true Charlotte, had reasserted herself and that I stopped feeding the worm. But I couldn’t kill it. It was always there. And it would always remain there. Sometimes sleeping but sometimes still whispering, “Go buy a bottle. No one will know. You can hide it. You don’t have to tell anyone. It’ll be fine. You can handle it. You deserve it.”
It was a strange time. The freedom, the new sense of lightness, and the clarity were amazing. But learning to live without alcohol, without the worm, meant nothing short of starting life over. Finding my boundaries, my voice, my likes and dislikes, finding my identity. Even simple things like how did I pass the time? How did I reward myself? How did I prop myself up on hard days? My relationship to the world, to my innermost self, and even to my own body felt tentative, new, vulnerable, and not always clear.
It was like a divorce, a cure, a release from prison, a death, a transformation, and a rebirth all wrapped in one.
At New Beginnings the staff told me that once my six-week stay was over, I needed to change everything in my life. Even down to rearranging the furniture in my apartment. Anything in my surroundings that could remind me of old ideas, old patterns, old ways of thought had to change.
I realized pretty quickly that it was going to be hard to significantly reinvent the look of my one-room apartment. So I was grateful when Jeanne called, to her everlasting credit, and invited me to move in with her.
Jeanne was starting over too. After dating for several years, and just 11 months of marriage, Stephen had broken the news that he wanted a divorce; he’d already, unbeknownst to her, set himself up in an apartment and had another relationship well underway. Nothing had prepared her for this and it smashed through her like a freight train.
So we were both beaten up, both bruised, and starting over. I moved into the house that she and Stephen had shared in Sherman Oaks, which was situated up on a hill, offered a lot of privacy up off the street and was surrounded by trees and greenery. It was an ideal place to begin again.
I knew one of the most important things I could do was to ensure that I didn’t have hours and hours of time with nothing to do — as I had done following my stint on Little House.
My first job was to go to meetings. I threw myself into recovery, committing to — and succeeding in — going to 90 group meetings in my first 90 days out of the live-in program. I was gung-ho. I went to a group meeting on Radford Street in Studio City and on Thursdays and Saturdays I drove my yellow Pacer over to New Beginnings and took some women who were in the program to the group meeting as well.
Beyond that I needed to fill the hours of my day. The old schedule of working a day or two here and there with lots of days in between to fill — and falling back into old habits — wasn’t going to work any longer. Which is why I count myself extremely fortunate to have connected with a great TV and film industry company called Lantana in Santa Monica. Lantana was created by producers Alex Winitsky and Arlene Sellers. They’d produced a strong line-up of films since the mid-1970s such as The Seven-Percent Solution, Swing Shift, and Stanley & Iris. During that time they’d both gotten sick of driving from their home in Beverly Hills up the 405 to their production offices in the San Fernando Valley. The traffic was usually terrible and a ridiculous waste of time so they got the ingenious idea of starting Lantana in Santa Monica which would offer office space, including pre- and post-production space to film companies.
When you’re a producer and you’ve put together your total package — you’ve got a script, a director, and a couple of main actors — and you get the green light from a studio, what you need to do overnight is create a company that will make the film. You have to get the gears of your project moving right away. It’s called a green light because it means go. Now.
You need an office for yourself and other producers, for your writers, you need a casting office and more. At Lantana we were able to offer connected office space in Santa Monica (not up the river of bumper-to-bumper traffic in the San Fernando Valley) and when you came to us and said, “We’d like to rent this block of six offices,” the next morning you could move in. You’d have furniture, desks, phones, a computer network, Internet service — everything.
At Lantana I performed a lot of different jobs — as did the entire staff of six people — under the excellent management of Maggi Kelly, who’d been Robert Altman’s assistant and had gone on to run his Lion’s Gate Films before this. I would show prospective clients the offices, talk them through the set-up we could offer and I could write-up leases. The idea of production offices in Santa Monica was a big hit and a lot of industry people came through to check out our set-up. Tom Cruise came by once while director Cameron Crowe had offices there. Someone had seen Tom walk up the hallway into the bathroom and Maggi let me know she was going to park her bulldog Gladys in the hall, to see if Tom would stop to pet her on his way back out. And it worked. He took one look at Gladys, couldn’t resist her charms, and we got to meet Tom. Denzel Washington was another guy all the ladies in the office wanted to meet. When they heard that I was touring Denzel there was more excitement than if the Pope was visiting. I made sure we had to drop by the office to review lease agreements.
Of course not everyone can be a lovely person. We rented space to Shirley MacLaine who didn’t seem to like anything about the place and not just predictable things such as carpet color or the style of furniture but, among other things, made it clear that she hated having a window in her second-floor office. What she had in mind was to take out the glass completely and simply have a rectangular hole in her wall open to the noise of traffic, wind, rain, and the elements. Okay. Our crew promptly and efficiently responded to this peculiar demand and removed the windowpane. For our efforts there was no hint of appreciation. There were never any of the little touches of humanity that we gave and got with other people in the building. Even so, when she complained of suffering from some kind of allergy issue I went down to the nearest Rite-Aid and bought three or four different over-the-counter allergy medications, thinking one of them might help. When I offered them to her she practically threw them back at me. “I wouldn’t take any of that crap,” she said.
She never had a nice thing to say. None of us ever heard a “please” or a “thank you” or anything other than demands. Fortunately the majority of our clients were exactly the opposite.
We were a great crew at Lantana and we’ve all stayed in touch. Maggi remains one of my dearest friends. Arlene Sellers and I had an odd relationship though. Every Friday at closing time for years she’d swing through the main office and wish everyone a happy weekend and then she’d walk past my desk and say over her shoulder on the way out the door. “Charlotte, we won’t be needing you next week.”
The first dozen or so times this happened I looked over to Maggi with a sinking heart and Maggi would silently shake her head as if to say “Don’t pay any attention to that.”
I would show up again on Monday and everything was fine.
Even so, for reasons I still don’t understand, Arlene fired me every Friday for a long, long time.
In terms of my acting career, just like everything else it felt like starting over. Could I still act? Could I handle an audition, the pressures of shooting, or decompressing at home alone without alcohol?
Any career capital I’d built since the early 1960s was gone. It didn’t matter that I’d been on Bonanza or had acted with Jimmy Stewart in Cheyenne Social Club or that I’d been in Eraserhead one of the most successful midnight movies ever or even that I’d been part of the blockbuster that Little House on the Prairie had eventually become. Professionally speaking, I was no one. I wasn’t the freckled blonde of the 1960s or the straight haired, sexually charged flower child of the ‘70s. This was the ‘80s, the Reagan-era and I was 43. Single. Had barely a penny to my name. I was starting again. At the bottom.
Well, a girl’s gotta work. Through a friend I became acquainted with Sally Sussman, who was the head writer for the daytime soap The Young and The Restless. Out of nothing more than sheer kindness, she decided to write a role for me on the show. I would play Tamara Logan, a psychic who was the only person who had any information about the kidnapping of one of the show’s leading ladies.
That first morning of shooting I was driving down the 405 to CBS and dying inside, totally filled with anxiety.
I’d learned a lot in my recovery group sessions about strategies for handling negative emotions so I started a conversation with myself. I knew my lines, knew where I was going, had my wardrobe with me, knew I’d be on time for make-up. And I decided that this emotional energy wasn’t anxiety, it was anticipation.
It felt exactly the same inside of me but calling it anticipation began to make me feel a bit better.
When I was actually in make-up, I realized I still hadn’t really transformed this anxiety into something more productive. That’s when I noticed a young actor sitting in the chair next to me, who seemed more nervous than I was. I don’t remember his name but it was his first gig and he was bubbling over with apprehension, reminding me of Beau Bridges the first time I shot My Three Sons. He was playing a waiter and he only had a couple of lines like, “What will you be having tonight?” and “For the lady?” So I told myself that I was going to take all my bundled up nervous energy and I was going to steer it toward helping this young guy.
“Do you want run your lines with me?” I asked him.
“Really?”
“Sure. It’s no problem. We can go over to the set,” I said, meaning the set for the restaurant.
“It’s okay if we do that?”
“Sure, it’s just sitting there. We won’t bother a soul.”
We went over to the set and he ran his lines and burned through some of his worry and by focusing on someone else, I was able to let go of mine.
I have to be honest, I hated shooting a soap. They didn’t do re-takes, they shot each scene using two enormous tape cameras, and the worst part were the cue cards — which drove me crazy. No matter what kind of project it is, I show up knowing my lines and there is nothing more distracting than a guy holding up giant cue cards just to the left or right of the camera.
Because I hated it, I don’t think I was very good and in good old soap opera fashion they took care of it by giving me a tragic accident.
Yes, Tamara Logan was hit by a car.
My role now was to lie in convincing semi-consciousness in a hospital bed only able to communicate by blinking my eyes — once for yes, twice for no. President Gerald Ford’s son, the actor Steven Ford, was on the show at the time — a very sweet, funny guy — and he gave me the nickname “Blinky.”
I spent weeks lying in that hospital bed blinking my heart out as the investigation heated up. The truth is it was the best possible acting job I could have gotten at the time in order to get back in the game. I will always be so grateful to Sally.
I was fortunate that my reentry into acting was so gentle as it prepped me for something more stressful just around the corner.
My agent called to tell me that Michael Landon’s production company was interested in having me play the role of a nurse at a summer camp in two-part episode of Highway to Heaven.
Like on Little House Mike played multiple roles on this show — executive producer, writer, director, and star. The premise was that he was an angel sent from heaven to do good works on earth and that Victor French was his human friend and partner. Nearly all of the crew from Little House had moved with Michael to Highway to Heaven. Whitey Snider was doing make-up, Kent McCray was a producer, Bill Claxton would direct various episodes, etc., so I knew what I was in for.
I liked Mike a lot but he could, on the right day, be a tough guy to work with. I knew that on Little House one of the adult cast members had quit drinking, gone into recovery, and never mentioned it. Ever. The reason being there was quite a bit of drinking on the Little House set among Mike and the crew. The culture was one of boyish pranks, put-downs, and smack-talk. If Mike knew this cast member had quit drinking, it would be like a weakness exposed and Mike would likely have unloaded with some teasing and smart-assery. I don’t think for a moment that he saw it as hurtful — it was all part of the fun in his mind.
As it turned out, all of my scenes were with Mike, who was also directing, and I was very nervous. He was his usual easy-breezy self and tried to joke and make conversation in between takes and I wasn’t any good at banter at that point. I needed to really stay focused on my role and my lines and honestly I was more than a little scared that I was going to blow it. Afraid I might expose some personal, fragile part of myself and have it jovially and amiably dropkicked in front of the crew.
Fortunately we made it through and all was well. I was certainly grateful to Mike for the work. And of course it was a pleasure to see Victor again.
Ultimately filming that episode was a healthy challenge that allowed me to start taking risks and regaining my confidence.
Soon after that I was working more frequently. I had a ball playing a well-meaning but slightly dingy activist on a couple episodes of Matlock, playing opposite Andy Griffith, who was a real pro and just as warm and great to work with as you’d expect.
On the personal side, as I continued to venture back into the world; I met a guy at a recovery meeting and we started to spend time together. I of course had no real idea how you navigated these waters as the new me, the truthful me, the sober me.
One night our hanging out led to being in bed together. This may well have been the first time that I’d ever had sex sober. I certainly hadn’t been sober on that first historic occasion at the Heartbreak Hotel back in Pasadena. And I can’t think of any other sexual experience I’d ever had that didn’t go hand-in-hand with feeling that roller coaster of alcohol and/or cocaine in my head.
It didn’t feel right. I didn’t have the aggression for it that came with being drunk. I wasn’t game and ready to go. I felt self-conscious, awkward, and uncomfortable. Completely the opposite of how sex should feel or ever had felt.
I ended the relationship after that. I hadn’t found my footing.
The new me wasn’t ready.