Shortly after Night Court, I booked another gig. The shoot for Rambling Rose felt slow and genteel, embodying the spirit of the South during the 1930s, just like it was supposed to. My role was straightforward and not very demanding. There was a lot of sitting at a dinner table and saying cute things. There was nothing that indicated that this movie would change everything and give me the biggest challenge of my life.
We shot in Wilmington, North Carolina and so began my love affair with filming on location. Getting to go somewhere new for months at a time and immersing myself in an unfamiliar place was intoxicating. It was fun to live out of a suitcase and make my home wherever I landed. It seemed unnecessary to have consistent companions or the comforts of my own bed; the delightful chaos of being on location made up for all that normal kid stuff. This first taste of what would be my life for the next decade proved to be a particularly lovely introduction. The production company had rented a small condo on the beach for my mom and me, with lots of windows and a carpet that always felt slightly damp from the sea air. The apartment was densely populated with cockroaches but I could run across the street and dig my toes into the sand in under a minute.
We filmed at Carolco Studio in Wilmington. North Carolina gave significant tax incentives to production companies that filmed there and since we also had exterior shots that needed to show the sleepy south of the 1930s, it was a perfect location. On the sound stage next door, another production was taking advantage of the tax perks; they were shooting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Our very different films tended to break for lunch around the same time, so we often ate together. The Turtles would remove their heads and sit with us in our original 1930s scratchy wool costumes, while we choked down our soggy sandwiches and wilted salads from the commissary and complained about the slow shooting schedule. Those Turtles were nice guys who increased my knowledge of ninja moves.
I had no clue who Robert Duvall was before working with him. Lonesome Dove and Apocalypse Now were not on my eleven-year-old movie-watching list. He was very kind, with a laid-back, approachable manner and he asked the cast and crew to call him Bobby. His laugh was deep and heartfelt, and he maintained his character’s Southern drawl even when we weren’t filming.
In between scenes, the other children on the film and I would be sent to “school.” This entailed corralling us into a florescent light drenched office with a few chairs, desks with sticky drawers and walls with peeling paint. It was oppressive on the best of days and it was a stark contrast to go from being a working professional on set, to being a bored 7th grade student with zero interest in memorizing the details of Canada’s parliamentary system. My schoolmates were six-year-old Evan, who played the youngest brother and our two stand-ins, Gelene and Jeffrey, who matched us in size, age and general appearance.
One day, Bobby’s assistant Brad knocked on the door of the schoolroom and popped his head in and addressed the tutor.
“Hey Ruth, Bobby would like to see Lisa.”
My teacher seemed surprised by the intrusion and she protested. She explained that she only had three hours a day, squeezed into fifteen-minute segments between shots, to attempt to get us a decent education. These were the legal rules of children working, she explained and she had to answer to the union. Brad smiled and nodded, acknowledging her plight. Then he simply repeated, “Bobby would like to see Lisa.” There was no negotiation, no explanation, no apology.
I shrugged at my tutor, barely concealing the smug look slapped across my face and obediently got up from my desk and followed Brad. It wasn’t that I cared so much about being summoned by one of Hollywood’s most revered film stars, I was just doing an internal happy dance at the fact that I got out of school. In the back of my mind I wondered what he wanted. Did he want to run lines? Sometimes actors did that during lighting set ups. But for which scene? Did I know all of them? Was I in trouble for something? Was this what happens when you get fired?
Brad wasn’t answering any questions as he walked me back to the set where we found Bobby. He was sitting in a rocking chair on the fake front porch of the Depression-era house that was built, to scale, on the soundstage. The place could have been torn out of a plantation in the Deep South, but instead of looking out over kudzu-laced weeping willows, the house gazed over the dirty warehouse floor snaked with heavy industrial cables and the ransacked craft services snack table. Bobby was dressed in his costume—he had his straw hat in his hand and was playing with the brim while he waited for me. He smiled when we arrived and gestured for me to sit in the rocking chair next to him.
“Do you need anything else, Bobby?” Brad asked him as he turned to leave.
“Thanks, we’re fine.”
I didn’t sit but instead I hovered and nervously picked at the porch railing, telling Bobby that my tutor was mad and attempted to re-explain the legalities of being a child actor and the three-hours-per-day schooling requirement. Plus, there were my teachers back home who were never happy that I was working, so all my work really needed to be done perfectly. What I left unsaid was that I wasn’t sure which adult I was supposed to obey. There were teachers demanding that school was the priority and then there was Bobby not taking no for an answer. No matter what I did, someone was going to be disappointed and I would always be failing somehow.
He listened to me patiently and then nodded and said, “Tell your teacher that you are going to learn much more here with me than in those textbooks. Sit down, Baby Doll.” He pointed again to the rocking chair next to him. I sat.
Bobby called for me often after that. He would let me get an hour of school in before sending Brad knocking at the schoolroom door. My tutor gave up trying to fight it. She would respond to the inevitable interference with a deep sigh and would say, “You can go,” just to hang on to the illusion that she still held some control over the schoolroom. Every time I arrived at the porch, Bobby had a new topic that he wanted to discuss. I don’t know why he chose me for these porch chats but I loved how freely and openly we spoke. All I knew was that he made me feel special.
Bobby legitimately wanted to know about my past eleven years of existence. He asked questions and really listened in a way that pre-teens are not accustomed to. He shared details about his life. He taught me how to tango. We talked about acting. He had a deep passion for the craft and I suspected I was assumed to have the same. He wanted to tell me how to keep a good head on my shoulders and teach me how to not get burned out by the film industry. He told me to keep people around me who would always tell me the truth and that I should never believe my reviews, good or bad, because both were likely to be exaggerated.
“And if you forget everything else, just remember this one thing,” he said. “It’s only a movie.”
It sounded like good advice, but it made me laugh anyway. I looked around at the hundreds of people who were reverently clocking eighteen-hour days and pouring their souls into this movie. I thought about our seven-million-dollar budget. Every moment on set always felt like it was Saving-the-World important, with people rushing around in an attempt to get everything perfect. And yet, here was a Hollywood legend saying it wasn’t that big of a deal. I didn’t get it. So, I laughed.
Filming progressed and the show was filled with fun kid-perks. We filmed near sluggish Southern streams and during my lunch break I would try to count all the painted turtles that dotted the muddy banks. My one day off every week was spent on the beach, eating hush puppies, chasing ghost crabs and playing Frisbee with Bobby’s dog, Gus. We had just a couple weeks of filming left when everything changed.
I was in the dingy school room, seated at my desk and attempting to avoid some bogus busywork that had been passed on to me by teachers back home who were upset that I was not seated in their classroom. They made it clear that they didn’t care for the daunting task of providing several months of work in advance. Some teachers simply refused to grade the assignments I had done on location and covered my report cards with Not Applicable. They sent work that had very little relevance to actual subjects, just so that they wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore. Each bogus page they gave me was a little academic mutiny in the form of a photocopied worksheet.
That day of work had already been long. We had several scenes still to film and I was exhausted. I looked at those worksheets and didn’t know how I was going to survive them. It was the end of October, and my mind easily wandered to Halloween. Trick-or-treating was, of course, thrilling, but I had spent so much time dressing up like a kid from the 1930s that the idea of wearing my own clothes seemed novel and attractive. I wondered if anyone would give me candy if I knocked on their door dressed in jeans and Chucks and told them that I was pretending to be a regular non-working child. I wanted to talk to the other kids, maybe find out their Halloween plans, so I pushed my chair back to stand up and the wheels of the chair got caught on the carpet. I flew backwards like I was in a bad slapstick comedy, with arms and legs flying through the air.
Crack. I heard it. It could have been the chair, but it wasn’t. It was my spine. The back of my head smashed in to the wall, my body snapped forward and there was a sharp burn when my knees collided with my nose. The other kids laughed, I must have looked ridiculous disappearing so suddenly behind my desk. I tried to laugh, too but realized I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t quite tell what hurt. Maybe it was just my pride, maybe my face burning was from embarrassment rather than impact. I gasped as the wind came back into my lungs. I put my hand up to my nose, but there was no blood. It was fine.
My tutor bolted over and tried to untangle the mess of chair, desk and me. I was dizzy and mortified from my graceless display. When I noticed that everyone was staring at me, I smiled from embarrassment and said, “Ta da!” to my amused but uncertain classmates. One of the kids ran to get my mother from my dressing room down the hall. The producers of the film quickly followed and my tutor requested we call an ambulance. They made me stay lying down, despite my insistence that I was fine. I just needed to walk it off and get a glass of water.
To my further humiliation, they did call an ambulance. But something else quickly took over the embarrassment. Had I known at the time what it was to be drunk, I would have recognized it as intoxication; I became completely drunk with shock. The pain vanished and I became aware of bizarre minor details. Life turned into a tilt-shift photograph, everything was fuzzy except for the almost excruciatingly sharp focus in the middle of my field of vision.
When the ambulance arrived, I learned that the EMT’s name was also Lisa, and through my fog this seemed absolutely hysterical. Two Lisas! One strapping the other to a board! I was Velcroed in with thick blue restraints and my head was sandwiched between padded blocks. The Velcro straps pulled at my waist-length hair but by that point my body had gone numb. All I could feel was a light tug, pulling my head to the side. As Lisa put me in the ambulance I remember begging them to not use the siren. They could use the lights, if they absolutely had to; otherwise they just needed to drive normally and calmly to the hospital. There didn’t need to be some siren, exclaiming to the world, “Excuse me, coming through, a dumb-ass klutzy kid just fell out of a chair! Coming through!”
I was still in my film costume when we arrived at the hospital. I was wearing authentic 1930s clothing with a large pink bow in my hair. I was quite concerned about what the hospital staff must think of me. I kept trying to explain that I was an actor, not for any presumed prestige, but to explain that I was not this prissy in my regular clothing choices. A sea of faces were smiling and nodding above me as they cut the costume off my body.
That day, the crew had planned a birthday party for my brother in the film. I had seen the cake and the producers were giving the birthday boy a puppy; there was no way I was going to miss that. I asked my mom to call the studio and tell them that I would be back soon and if they would just wait a few minutes, I would get off this stupid board and be back to watch the presentation of the puppy, with a large slice of cake in hand. She rubbed my arm and agreed to make the call. She didn’t mention that I had passed out for quite a while, the party had ended many hours prior and I wasn’t leaving that hospital any time soon. The doctors were looking at my x-rays. My back was broken and as I slipped in and out of consciousness, I heard the word paralyzed.
The early assessments of my injuries were inconsistent and confusing. They knew that I had damaged three vertebrae and had severe whiplash in my lower back but they could not tell the extent of the spinal injury. They said that it was the kind of damage they see when an adult falls off a roof. Although at first they thought that I might be paralyzed, the prognosis was revised and they said that I would be able to walk but it was unlikely that I would ever be back to my previous abilities.
Tests and drugs were doled out and my days in the hospital blurred together. I’d wake up to various scenes that felt like they were part of a play I was watching. Mom talking to nurses. Mom on the phone with Dad. Nurses poking at me. Mom asleep in a chair. At one point I came out of a drug-induced haze to find a large gorilla standing over my bed. He had dead, glossy black eyes, and reeked of gorilla sweat. There was a loud, persistent siren-like squealing as the monster attempted to hand me a bouquet of red balloons. When the nurses ran in to comfort me, I finally realized that the horrible sound was me screaming. The film crew ill-advisedly sent a guy in a gorilla costume to cheer me up. It was sweet and well-intentioned, however, let me just say that codeine and gorillas don’t mix, people. I still have nightmares about it.
In addition to the gorilla, various co-workers came to see me at the hospital. They brought flowers and books and healing crystals to line up along my spine, but Bobby never came. Brad brought good wishes and a card on Bobby’s behalf.
“He just…can’t. He can’t see you like this.”
It was only then that I realized that this might be a big deal. This was not another one of my clumsy spills that I could laugh off. I could almost handle being laughed at, but being pitied scared me. I took more painkillers and went back to sleep.
After a week in the hospital, I was fitted for a back brace and released with the doctor’s okay to get back to work. Bobby welcomed me back with a gentle hug, but everything had changed and I was no longer up for our porch sessions. I was pale, fragile, scared, and just trying to get the shoot finished.
They are not kidding when they say that the show must go on.
I was confined to bed rest except for five-minute spans, three times a day, which was the time that the doctor approved me to sit in a chair. Mom went into functional crisis mode, carefully watching the clock to make sure we didn’t go over my time limits. Always good in extraordinary situations, she stayed calm and became laser-like in her focus. This film became something to be conquered and she was going to make sure we finished the show and got out of there.
Since I couldn’t lift my arms over my head and I was now constantly wearing a metal back brace, the wardrobe department had to cut open my costumes and then hand-sew me back into them every day. The brace was shaped like a cross. It was attached to my front with thick adjustable straps and had large pads that sat along my collarbone, my pelvis, and curved around both sides of my body. The metal was constantly cold, the screws and bolts that held it together were jagged and snagged on everything. Mom covered the brace in shiny dolphin stickers to make it less scary, but it still resembled something you would find either on a construction site or in a medieval torture museum.
My stand-in, Gelene, would take my place for rehearsals. She looked a lot like me, with her long brown hair and slight build, so she was used as my body double for any scenes where I had to be moving. They dressed Gelene up in my costumes and filmed her from behind so you wouldn’t see her face. She made a perfectly good able-bodied me; she would run through the frame and no one was the wiser. When the shot required my face to be seen, I was carried to set and seated in a chair with my arms propped up on the table, where I would try to make my drugged eyes not look too stoned. Most of my lines were cut or shortened since I sounded like a meth addict. Normally, having lines cut is devastating for an actor, but I was just counting down the days until I could get back to Canada.
While scenes were being lit and set up, I would be carried to a twin mattress that had been placed on the floor in my dressing room. My mother would often leave me alone to get some rest and I would linger in my twilight stupor, waiting to be called back to work. She would pull the shades so I could sleep but I mostly stared at the pattern on the couch, trying to make out shapes and faces to keep myself occupied.
I took shallow breaths, the only kind that the tight back brace would allow, and wondered what this injury really meant. The doctors said it was really uncertain what kind of recovery I would have and what my physical abilities would be. Was this the end of my career? I wondered if I would even know how to be a kid who went to school full-time.
I knew how to work. There were the on-set politics to navigate and the lines to learn and the motions to replicate at exactly the same time for the continuity of every take. There was hair and makeup to sit still for, even if the hairdresser pulled a little too hard and the makeup felt heavy and greasy. There was the lighting to be aware of so that you didn’t stand in a shadow or cast your shadow on another actor. School was foreign territory, with its own unspoken rules that I didn’t understand. I worried about my ability to survive it.
But there was no guarantee that my body would be acceptable for film anymore. It felt unfathomable that this was the end of everything that I had known but I’d always felt like it was going to end somehow. Wasn’t acting temporary for most kids? I’d drift off to my drugged sleep feeling more confused than ever.
What usually woke me was the assistant director, saying that it was time to go to set. But one afternoon, I had a different visitor: the new puppy that my co-star had been given. He was a sweet little guy who tended to wander the halls of the office building that the dressing rooms were in.
“Hey, Buddy. C’mere,” I called from my mattress.
He wandered in to the room in that wiggly-butt puppy way and sniffed around. He looked in my mother’s giant carpetbag that held my script and snacks, he sniffed around my stack of untouched schoolwork and attempted to crawl under the side table to reach a lost potato chip. Then he came back to me.
“Whatcha doing, puppy?” I cooed at him.
What the puppy was doing, to my dismay, was peeing on me. There I was, broken-backed, unable to move, and being peed on. I’d never felt more vulnerable in my life. When I started yelling, my mom came running, followed by a couple other production assistants who all tried gallantly to stifle their giggles. The wardrobe people were even more unhappy than I was, as they carefully hand-scrubbed dog urine from my vintage, fifty-year-old wool skirt.
When the film was finished, my mother and I returned to Canada where I laid on the couch for many long months. School was out of the question, as I couldn’t sit in a chair for more than a few minutes at a time. So, a loop of old movies kept me entertained and distracted from the pain. I watched To Kill a Mockingbird and cheered when Bobby as Boo Radley stepped out of the shadows to save the day. It was somehow comforting to see my friend. I watched Scout and Boo sit on the porch together, just like Bobby and I had. It brought tears to my eyes when Mary Badham smiled up at Bobby, recognizing his gentle soul. Hey, Boo.
I was incredibly lucky to experience a growth spurt that allowed my spine the space to heal. I slowly came back to myself. After hours of daily physical therapy, only a few minor issues lingered. My right foot would drag when I got tired and some nerve damage in my lower back would act up occasionally. But I gained my weight back, gained my strength back and I was soon back to life. Back to life meant back to work: I didn’t have to conceive of a regular life after all. I had a princess to meet.
While I was wearing a back brace and watching game shows, the editors of Rambling Rose were cutting and splicing and creating art. The film would be my introduction to the world of premieres. I had already been in the movie with John Malkovich, but actors of bit parts (even the significant, doe-eyed bit parts) don’t get invited to the fancy premieres.
Later in life, it would become clear that attending premieres would feel like getting flayed. Some people must enjoy them, maybe the same kind of people who get excited about getting an invitation to parties at roller rinks or backyard barbeques or anniversary celebrations. Because premieres are much like those regular parties, except add another 700 people, paparazzi, forced ass-kissing motivated by a deep-seated fear that you will never work again, and small, low-carb food served on toothpicks, as required by scrawny Hollywood actresses to keep them that way. However, my first premier set the standard pretty high. It was a royal premiere in London, which meant the guest list included Princess Diana.
Publicity shot for “Rambling Rose.” With Laura Dern, Lukas Haas, Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd, and Evan Lockwood.
PHOTO COURTESY OF CAROLCO PICTURES.
When you are being introduced to royalty there is serious protocol because Brits are not known for screwing around when it comes to tradition. There were many rules to adhere to; when I met the princess, I could not speak until spoken to and when I did dare to open my mouth, I needed to say, “Your Royal Highness.” This level of formality felt completely awkward; my instinct would have been to give the princess a hug, offer her a piece of gum, and show her a picture of my dog.
I traveled with my entourage, which for me, consisted of my mother, father, and grandmother. For my Canadian grandmother, attending a royal premiere was akin to having brunch with Jesus. There was no way she was going to miss that. As soon as we arrived in London, I met with a woman whose actual job it was teaching me how to curtsey properly.
My curtsey teacher came to our hotel room, and it scared me a little to let her in. She looked like a cartoon someone had drawn of what a British curtsey teacher should look like. Her entire being was lithe and severe and her hair was pulled back so tightly that it made you wince just to look at it. After a brief history lesson about the curtsey, we practiced the move itself. I was something of a disappointment to her, as my curtsey looked more like I was suddenly tripping over something. She smiled a tight British smile and patiently requested I try again. She seemed convinced that I was about to massacre the ritual in front of her princess, which would inevitably cause the crumbling of the British Empire and everything it stood for. When she had done her best, she patted my shoulder a little too hard and said she was sure it would be fine—but please would I mind terribly spending another hour or so practicing in front of the bathroom mirror?
The whole thing was incredibly intimidating. I worried about what to say to Princess Diana. British weather seemed to be a terrible topic of conversation. Would I have enough time for a real heart-to-heart exchange? Should I tell her she looked beautiful or was that like telling Mount Everest it looked big?
Right before the main event, the actors, director, and producers of the film gathered together to watch an instructional video on how to properly meet and greet the princess. We crammed around the television in the producer’s hotel room. I brought a notebook. The air was thick with nerves and everyone else seemed to be hoping that the video would answer some questions for them, as well. We all sat around looking tense, the ladies smoothing hems and straightening pantyhose, the men buttoning and unbuttoning tuxedo jackets.
I poised my pen and paper as the video started; Rowan Atkinson came on screen as Mr. Bean. It was a spoof in which he was spit polishing his shoes and making a fool out of himself as he waited for his royal introduction. The video ended with him head-butting the Queen of England. I laughed, but it was the kind of laugh where I was simultaneously looking around, hopeful that the real video was about to start because the issue remained that I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing. Seriously? This was the “educational video”? The little skit was supposed to help everyone relax, but all it did was encourage me to scribble in my notebook, No head butting.
There was no time for questions as my family and I were ushered into a limo that took us to the theater. As we drove, it was the first time I realized we really were in London. There had been so much to think about with the premiere that there hadn’t been the chance to take it all in. We passed the silly red phone booths, the double-decker buses, and women with black umbrellas, who could have been stand-ins for Mary Poppins. I loved how different it all felt. Going to North Carolina for work had felt exotic, but international travel was on a whole other level.
When we arrived in front of the marquee, my heart froze. The street outside the theater was teeming with hundreds of people. It might have been thousands. When I panic, I hyperventilate, which often leads to blackouts. That had the potential to result in an unintentional royal head butt, so clearly it needed to stop.
“That’s…that’s a lot of people.”
Mom waved her hands dismissively at the crowd outside the tinted limo window.
“They’re waiting for the bus. Look, there’s the stop right there.”
She was right. There was a stop right outside the theater.
“It’s London. Everyone takes advantage of public transportation here. It’s very smart. Environmentally responsible, too.”
I was about to inquire as to why people would be waiting for the bus by crouching on top of the bus shelter with a long-lens camera, but my dad and Grandma beamed at me from the other side of the limo.
“They’re just waiting for the bus,” they agreed. There was a lot of nodding.
It seemed best to believe them and it calmed me down a bit as Mom pressed her thumb into my Breathe Button spot in the middle of my palm.
My family took their seats in the theater and left me to join the other people from the film in the reception line. I waited for the princess’s arrival, between Lucas Haas, who played my older brother in the film, and Jane Robinson, the costume director. I was wearing itchy tights and a horrendous black, flowery Laura Ashley dress with a wide, floppy lace collar that seemed quite sophisticated to my pre-teen sensibilities. The tights had been a last-minute purchase from a Marks & Spencer in London. I had forgotten to bring tights and my grandmother gasped at the thought of me meeting a princess with uncovered legs. My itchy British tights crushed my waist and made me even more uncomfortable. The princess took a long time to arrive but she was a princess, so no one said anything. I fidgeted and my still-healing back was starting to ache from standing so long.
The dark, rainy London night suddenly turned to daylight with all the flashbulbs and the air filled with the excited yelling of paparazzi. Moments later, Princess Diana stepped into the lobby of the theater and looked just as spectacular as you would expect. As she made her way down the line, being introduced to the representatives of the film, I tried to practice the curtsey in my mind. I slipped my foot behind my ankle a few times to make sure I could still move it.
She chatted a bit with each person she met. It very much resembled a wedding reception line, except Princess Diana was both bride and groom and was more stunning than both put together. When she was presented to the person just before me, I started to freak out again. Do I look at her now? Or is that eavesdropping? Do I stare straight ahead? Do I look at my shoes and feign surprise when she gets to me? “Oh! Hello there!” As if there was some other reason I had flown to another continent and was wearing itchy tights?
Before I was able to work out an answer, suddenly, Princess Diana was standing in front of me, reaching out her hand. I took it and curtsied, losing my balance a little and wobbling to the side. She smiled kindly and supported me with her other hand. Strike one. I was specifically told to not steady myself on the princess, as if she were some sort of bejeweled kickstand. But I was a clumsy twelve-year-old who tripped a lot in normal situations and was still nursing a broken back from falling out of a chair; this fumble was inevitable.
The official presentation was made by some sort of royal aid with a booming voice, “Lisa Jakub, an actress in the film.”
“Hello Lisa, it’s very nice to meet you.” Her words were effortless and felt like sunshine.
“It’s an honor to meet you, Your Royal Highness.”
Okay, I got through that part. That was the line I had planned. Now we were free-styling. It seems an easy thing, to have a conversation and respond like a human being to another human being, but when there are several cameras in your face and you’re holding the hand of a princess, it’s not so simple.
“You look so pretty!” she remarked. I blushed and looked at my feet, then remembered that you are supposed to keep eye contact. I looked back up and stared blankly. Saying, “Thank you,” seemed like I was accepting the premise that I was pretty, which is hard to do under regular circumstances, let alone while standing next to Princess Diana. Saying, “You look pretty, too,” seemed trite, as if I hadn’t thought she looked pretty until she thought I did. I fished around in my brain for something else to say. Nope. Nothing.
Trying not to fall down. With Renny Harlin, Martha Coolidge, Jane Robinson, and Diana, Princess of Wales.
PHOTO: TIM CLARKE
“I hear you did a lovely job in the film.” She kindly made up for my lack of words.
“Thank you, Your Royal Highness.”
“I have a son that is just about your age; his name is William. I’m sure he would love to meet you.”
Was Princess Diana is trying to set me up with her son? Now, this would be a hell of a first date for me.
“Oh. Yes. Okay. That sounds fun.”
“Well, it’s settled then, we will have to do that sometime.” She beamed more sunshine at me.
Again, I was stymied. How was that going to work? I almost said, “Should I just stop by the palace one day, or…?” I went with, “Thank you, your Royal Highness,” because I had already said that successfully and was fairly confident that my mouth could make those same sounds again.
She gave me a final, sweet smile and moved on down the line to greet the rest of the people from the film. I just stood there looking forward. We had all flown to Europe for those twenty seconds and now they were done. Had I done a good job? It was a surprisingly intimate public moment that no one could grade me on. I was surrounded by crowds of people and cameras but I suddenly felt very alone. People to my left and right were worried about their own performances, my mom hadn’t been there, nor my curtsey teacher or anyone else that I could count on for an honest critique of my behavior. If I had another take I could have done it better, been more charming and articulate. I could have done that curtsey better and would have said something funny so that I could have heard her laugh. But, for better or worse, life didn’t just write “Take 2” on the slate, offering another chance to be perfect in that moment. There was no choice but to be content with what had happened, even if I felt the pressure to have made it worthwhile. So, I exhaled and tried to wiggle my toes within my stiff, shiny black shoes and wondered how we were going to work out this whole William thing.
After surviving the receiving line, we all made our way into the theater and watched the film. I was a few seats down from Diana and kept stealing glances to see if she liked it. She laughed and cried in the appropriate places and seemed to enjoy herself. She was indescribably beautiful, lit by the flickering screen. It’s hard to understand the full impact of meeting someone like that at age twelve, but I at least understood that I was in the presence of someone who radiated goodness. It had nothing to do with her status. It had to do with the fact that she was kind and she gave me a loving smile when she had to support my curtsey. She had seen my nervousness and had tried to comfort me, mother me. Her title was meaningless. She was simply a kind person.
And I’ve decided to forgive William for going a different way with his choice of wife. Even though Kate might not have been his mother’s first choice.
Six years later, I was in a limo coming home from the airport when I heard about Princess Diana’s death. I had just finished a shoot and they always send limos for that sort of thing because it’s supposed to be impressive and they want to make you feel like you are more important that you really are. I’m always uncomfortable and usually carsick in limos but this was a different kind of awful. The horrible news came on the radio and the driver turned it up for us. My parents and I were all in the backseat and I started shaking. It took a while for the tears to come; my tear ducts were shocked shut.
I stared out the window of the limo and thought of her staring out the window of her limo. She was gentle and had held my hand longer than necessary. She loved her boys. Now, the paparazzi, who had been stoked and encouraged by what I did for a living, were gaining strength like a well-fed dragon. They had chased her. Hunted her. And now she was dead. This job of mine had put me in this unique position to meet this spectacular person, but, I wondered, at what price? My body had been turned inside out and my lungs were too small. I heard my mother whisper to my dad, “Put your arm around her.” He did.
Rambling Rose wasn’t a box office blockbuster, but the critics enjoyed it. The film earned Oscar nominations for Diane Ladd and Laura Dern, the first time a mother and daughter had been nominated together for the same film. However, the film industry journey is rarely a straight line for an actor. There are huge ups and downs and nothing is a guaranteed stepping stone to the next career conquest. So, shortly after going to a premiere with a princess, Mom and I were back living in an unfurnished apartment, sitting in casting waiting rooms filled with pre-teen brunettes, silently mouthing their lines and practicing their nonchalant hair flips.
My agent and manager concluded that I needed to spend more time in Los Angeles in an attempt to take advantage of the film’s modest success. Living in hotels for months on end was getting expensive, even the barebones hotels with the threadbare carpeting where we tended to reside. We didn’t know anyone in L.A. who we could stay with. Most of the other people we knew were living out of suitcases, too—kid actors and their moms who lived elsewhere and came to L.A. to chase down a job.
Like any good transients, we turned to the odd world of short-term rentals. My mother and I rented an unfurnished two-bedroom apartment on a month-to-month basis in North Hollywood. It was classic California valley architecture; our place was on the second floor and overlooked an open-air cement courtyard that was decorated with small palm trees in terra cotta pots. We bought a cardboard banker’s box for me to use as a school desk. We picnicked on the floor and slept on lumpy, leaky plastic air mattresses that were intended to be used in a pool.
Such a fleeting and precarious life felt thrilling, like we were just dandelion seeds waiting for a strong breeze to scatter us absolutely anywhere. One good audition would mean a new job and we would fold up our lives and our cardboard furniture and simply vanish as if we had never lived in apartment 2F. The sparse, minimalist look of the place also offered a significant change from our small, cluttered house in Canada where there was often a dog/turtle/piece of construction equipment in the way. I could practice cartwheels unencumbered by something as invasive as a couch. Mom pointed out that one of the leading causes of injury in an earthquake was from bookcases or other pieces of furniture falling over, so we were likely in the safest place in all of Los Angeles, seismologically speaking. Her ability to make our peculiar life seem normal, and even sensible, was extraordinary. I reveled in the thought that maybe “different” didn’t have to mean “wrong.”
Auditions were picking up, but I’d still only have two or three a week, so there was a lot of time to fill. I could memorize about a page of dialogue a minute, so audition preparation was hardly time-consuming. Three months moved slowly. We didn’t really have friends, and you can only walk around at the mall for so long, even in California. I would sit around the bare apartment and read A Wrinkle in Time over and over again. Mom and I would play cards and browse the video store for old movies. We bought an annual pass to Universal Studios and went three times a week to go on the E.T. ride and watch the lady in a Lucille Ball costume pose for photos with tourists.
And I would write. I always wrote. I wrote fantasies, war epics, and pop-up books. I journaled constantly. Everything that happened to me had to be chronicled in a spiral bound notebook or else it didn’t really count. An event could only be processed and become real when it had words and phrases and commas associated with it. Otherwise, who could ever say it really happened? I tried to make sense of my life, and attempted to work out my complicated feelings about auditions and the idea of possibly becoming famous. I wondered what it would be like to play soccer or violin. I wondered how it felt to take home a permission form for a field trip and not immediately wonder if I’d be out of town filming something when it was time to go to the museum.
However, I also felt badly for the kids who didn’t know how to walk into camera frame and stop exactly at a T mark on the floor without looking down. It was impossible to imagine a life that didn’t include table reads and wardrobe calls; it was like trying to imagine what the world would look like without the color blue.
About three weeks into our stay in California, distracted by Uno tournaments and daily trips to browse the sale racks at Macy’s and eat greasy Chinese in the food court, I realized that my schoolbooks had yet to be opened. My mom believed that I should be responsible enough to set my own schedule. There was no such thing as “school hours.” I was in charge of keeping track of that myself. The books were still stacked in the corner of my closet, complete with instructions from my teachers back home. I panicked. What if I was detrimentally far behind when I got home? I imagined sitting in class and being completely lost as they discussed viscosity levels or inferential logic. I imagined failing a grade and more deeply entrenching myself in weirdo status. Paralyzed in my fear, all I could do was stare at the books, piled up in the corner and threatening to bury me in an academic wasteland.
When I finally found the courage to crack the spine of my French textbook, it turned out that I could actually do a whole week’s worth of work in about two hours. I caught up pretty quickly and wondered why all that time spent in school was necessary if it could all be done so efficiently. Learning by myself was easy. I could just get to the important parts and not be distracted by that whole idea of socialization. When I went back to Canada and sat in the classroom, it all felt like boring filler, like glorified group babysitting. I looked forward to getting back to my own version of independent study in L.A., at my homemade desk rigged up with an air mattress and a sagging cardboard box.
For our next stay in California, we landed at the Oakwood Apartments, a well-known temporary housing complex where production houses and theater companies often put their actors up. Oakwood did have one perk over our place in North Hollywood; the apartments were furnished. I use the word furnished with some trepidation because in the early 1990s they were furnished the way an Eastern European hotel by the airport might have been furnished in the late 1970s. There were dusty fabric flowers in vases filled with some sort of plastic resin that was supposed to look like water, and which was almost certainly carcinogenic. There were brown polyester bedspreads with frayed edges and cigarette burns. The watercolor prints of landscapes were bolted to the walls, as if anyone would actually be tempted to steal them. But the whole set up was better than our cardboard tables and I could just scotch tape a Back to the Future poster over the still-life print of peaches in its shiny gold frame.
We did several stints at the Oakwood over the years. Mom and I tried out a variety of floor plans. We rented the 400-square-foot studio apartment and shared the Murphy bed. I always hated making my bed, so just folding it back into the wall seemed an ingenious way to tidy up. Bedtime became much more exciting as I tried to ride the bed on its descent from its cave. It was a great disappointment when I was working more frequently and we got a two bedroom, which had an eat-in kitchen, a little balcony, and two separate beds that kept all four of their legs on the ground. It didn’t occur to me then that it was unusual that my jobs dictated the type of living arrangement that we had. Since that was the case with all the other actors in the complex, it just seemed like that was the way life in L.A. worked. Everyone’s apartment size was an indication of how good the last few months of auditions had been for them.
It was mind-blowing to me, even then, that there were people who lived at the Oakwood full time. By nature, corporate housing is a temporary situation but there were a hardy few who had been there for upwards of twenty years. It was very expensive to live there for any extended period of time and I wondered why anyone would do it. The architecture was wildly unattractive and the mind-numbing sameness of the twenty-six low, square buildings, lettered A-Z was the aesthetic equivalent of living in a McDonald’s.
It soon became clear that the true allure of the Oakwood was Hollywood itself. By living within the paper-thin walls of corporate housing, you were immersed in the acting community. There was something comforting about being with people who were struggling, just like you. You could pick up your mail and chat with a neighbor who understood what it meant to have a good audition or a bad one. They understood what it felt like when you nailed the scene, when the dialogue flowed seamlessly and the tears fell on cue or the joke got a laugh. Then, the producers would give you that smile and nod to each other and say, “you’ll be hearing from us very soon.” Those good auditions were such a high that you’d float back to the car and not even care about spending two hours in traffic to get home.
But, the neighbors also understood how it felt when you finished your scene and the producers sat stony-faced behind the long table. You knew you had flubbed the line and not tapped the emotion and had done that unnatural gesture with your hand. The producers sat quietly, their silence piercing the air and clearly expressing that they will not call you back. Definitely not for this job and maybe not for any other job, either. You had walked out with your head down as you passed the better actors just waiting for their turn. Everyone understood how that drive home felt even longer than two hours.
Oakwood residents knew what was filming, who was in town, which show just lost their backing, and which manager was open to new clients. It was the center of the universe for the not-quite-theres. One of our neighbors had been a professional extra for twenty years. He had made a career out of being the guy in the background. When he worked, he worked for fourteen hours a day, was treated like cattle, never had any lines, was paid poorly, and rarely got any real screen time. That was his chosen profession because he liked to be close to that intoxicating on-set energy. Being part of a film community was so venerated, that it was worth the sacrifice.
Down the hall from us lived a woman named Sandra who had spent decades working as a stand-in. She was almost beautiful. All of her individual features should have added up to a movie star, but everything was just a quarter-inch off. Just a little bit too big or too small or too much to the left side. Her posture was not quite graceful, her voice just a little too high and grating. So, it was her job to stand in the shot while the lighting crew set up, so that the actress could take a break. That’s a real job. A set, while being a communal project that everyone is working on together, is also incredibly hierarchical. Who is lording over the top? Actors. Directors. Producers. They get all the glory and the praise, they pose in front of the step-and-repeat at premieres and get draped in loaner jewelry from Van Cleef and Arpels.
But a film couldn’t get made without Sandra standing in for her actress. She’s never been on a single frame of film, yet, she is important. Those people are integral to the process but like many others who devote their lives to filmmaking, they get little credit. That’s why she lives at the Oakwood and she’d never have it any other way.
Here was an entire community of people where I could finally belong. It was a place where everyone spoke on-set lingo, and no one looked twice at the people who paced by the pool, talking to themselves and gesturing wildly while rehearsing their lines. Hollywood’s superficiality, the politics that demanded to be played, the deep insecurity and brokenness that seemed to fester with each new rejection—it was all worth it to be part of the process. In a million subtle ways, my new neighbors showed me that this life was worth giving up everything for. I breathed in their admiration for the film industry and absorbed it so deeply that it almost felt like it originated from myself. It didn’t feel like it was merely devotion by proxy. I was hooked.
