When your mother asks, “Do you want a piece of advice?” it’s a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.
— Erma Bombeck
I was already very much Mary Ann when I auditioned for the Gilligan’s Island role — the work ethic, the values, the study habits. I got those from my parents.
Lucky for me, Sherwood Schwartz, who created Gilligan’s Island, wanted a girl like that to be the voice of reason on the island.
I think Sherwood really had a vision when he created Gilligan’s Island. He created a family of misfits, not relatives. Everything Sherwood did had a family feel to it. He followed Gilligan’s Island by creating The Brady Bunch.
His own family was old fashioned and it came through in his writing. I feel privileged to be part of that company.
Why would a silly show about seven misfits on an island have such staying power? Because it was about family trying to live together in harmony.
Where did my talent (assuming I have any) come from? I would have to say my family. I grew up with my mother in Reno, Nevada. I spent a great deal of time with my father in Las Vegas, which was 400 or so miles south. Reno was just across the California border at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and gambling was legal — and most, if not all of the vices you can associate with a gambling town in the Fifties were there in spades.
Actually, that’s not quite right. I grew up in two Renos. There was the Reno of bright lights and glitz and gambling and prostitution and quick divorces. There was also the Reno of normal, middle class suburbs and suburban family values and an award-winning high school — one of the top schools in the country at the time. I really grew up in the second Reno, even as I observed the glitz of the other Reno.
My family had western roots. My great-great-grandfather drove a stagecoach in the gold rush of 1849. My grandmother on my mother’s side, Rose, made her piano debut when she was nine at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City. It was a real gold rush boomtown. It’s been a ghost town, but today there is a resurgence of mining there.
Grammie Rose could compose music, paint, play the piano, and design and sew clothing. She was the artist in the family.
My father was larger than life, even by Las Vegas standards. He was physically imposing — 6’4” and 250 pounds — and a hale fellow, well met. He was gentle, successful, and smart. He never met a stranger. My father was self-made and bore the confidence of a self-made man. He showed it early. When he was a schoolboy, his mother made a mistake with a load of wash and all the trousers came out pink. His brothers refused to wear them to school. He said, “Give them to me, mom. I’ll wear them and dare them to tease me.”
My father was a very kind and giving man. They called him Big Joe Wells. He had a heart the size of Nevada. He was even asked to run for governor of Nevada. They said, “But which party, Joe?”
One of my father’s good friends and a regular in his household was Rex Bell. Along with being a Western movie star and the husband of Clara Bowe, he was lieutenant governor of Nevada.
There’s the difference between Las Vegas and Reno. It was two lives for me. My father had an expansive house and a stable. My mother and I lived in a small tract house near my high school in Reno. My father had quite a large household staff. My mother never even wanted a gardener. Stars and VIPs passed through my father’s home in Vegas. The governor never visited our house in Reno.
Knowing these two worlds was a gift to me. It gave me perspective. There was respect between my two households and love resided there. Between my mother, my father, my stepmother, and my brother and sister . . . and me. Wait! Include the in-laws, too.
We used to say you never knew who my father would bring home — a homeless guy off the street or the governor. Before he was a co-founder of the Thunderbird Hotel on the Las Vegas strip, my father established his first success by starting a trucking company, Wells Cargo, which then grew into a highway construction company and a mining company with interests even in Peru and Turkey.
On the day of my father’s funeral, the federal courts in Las Vegas were closed. It was the first time this gesture had ever been made for someone who was not a judge.
Here’s a story that was told by my grandmother Wells. When my father was a child about the age of 6 or 7, he was very late coming home from school, which, of course, worried the family. When he arrived, my grandmother scolded him and wanted to know where he had been. He answered, “I was following a bee and I wanted to see where he lived.”
My mother was as straight-laced as she was small (she stood barely over five feet). She was smart. Very smart. Even though her father wouldn’t let her go to college, she became a professional bookkeeper and worked until she was 72.
My mother met my father when he applied for credit at the Reno Chevrolet dealership where she worked as a bookkeeper. She tried to talk her boss out of giving him credit (she got nowhere). Ah, it all started from there.
My parents divorced when I was four, but I never felt I grew up in a broken home. I never heard a bad word about my parents from either one of them. My parents remained close after the divorce and throughout their lives and were in sync about how I was to be raised. When my father remarried, my stepmother, Betty, and my mother became friends. They, too, were in sync about me. I lived with my mother, but I grew up surrounded by love in two homes.
I didn’t grow up in a divided family. I grew up in separate families. We celebrated holidays together. It was two families as one. Imagine that. Not easy, I assume. I never saw any discord. It wasn’t a competition. It was about raising me right.
I lived as an only child with my mother. It was just the two of us in our little house. Of the many things I learned from my mother, two stand out: Her independence and her discipline. Oops. Don’t forget her genius in the kitchen.
She was a wonderful homemaker and an excellent bookkeeper for five pediatricians at the same time. She devoted her life to me. No matter how hard she worked, she was there when I got home each day.
She never lectured me about manners. I was taught by example. She watched me like a hawk. She loved me and I came first in her life.
We had a nice, small house. She bought it. She cooked, she cleaned, she gardened. There were always fresh vegetables on our table. She was a homemaker. She was a Brownie leader. She taught me independence. She worked five days a week and I never saw her go on a date. She thought my father was a great man and a great father and she didn’t want me to have a stepfather.
Story time! My mother was a world-class worrier. That is not an overstatement! When I was a junior in college, my sweetheart was a quarterback for the University of Washington football team. He wanted to drive me from Reno back to the University of Washington in Seattle. My mother didn’t want me in the car with a boy for that length of time, but she let me go.
While we were driving through Oregon, a highway patrol car pulled us over. The patrolman approached the car and asked, “Is there a Dawn Wells in this car?” I said I was. The patrolman said, “Call your mother.”
Another one! I was 65 years old, walking through an airport in Australia. A pilot walked up to me. “Are you Dawn Wells?” “Yes.” “Your mother has been looking for you all day.”
My father died early and suddenly in a bungled procedure at a hospital. My mother had never remarried. I think she never stopped loving my father. There was a bond. They were more like a brother and sister.
She lived a long and full life. She moved to Los Angeles to be with me. She got a job with the county. (Note to self: never forget her being turned down for a job in a doctor’s office when he said, “Why are you applying for this job? I need a tall, good-looking blonde.”)
When I fell in love and moved to Nashville, my mother moved there as well. When I fell out of love, I moved back to California and she moved to the Gulf Shores of Florida. She managed my beach property for me and she loved it. I still see that little five-foot-tall woman walking the beach to this day.
She developed macular degeneration and almost lost her eyesight. That’s when she moved into my guest house in California. She never lost her mental capacity.
She did not raise me with an iron fist. She raised me with an iron mind. She was very strong, independent, smart, and capable. She was fair, disciplined, and she gave lots of love as a great foundation. She was very difficult at times. She taught me that very well.
My mother and I shared the same birthday. She always made the same cake for me every year (and only on our birthday) and would ship it wherever I was. On her last birthday with me — she was 93 — she said, “It’s getting kind of late. Let’s make the cake together.” We did. I still miss her.
My family is still with me in many ways, large and small. I still use my grandmother’s spoon in the kitchen. I have cookware that was my mother’s. I use an old tin pot that always has been in my family. Is an old tin pot an antique? Well, not in the sense that it has value in a shop. It’s just a wonderful thing that carries along from generation to generation. A connection. A continuity. These things have meaning. Be careful before you discard them.
During our last Thanksgiving together, my mother was making cranberry sauce from scratch and decided it was time I learned how. As I made the sauce, she insisted I was doing it wrong. “It is not going to jell, Dawn.” Well, me being overly confident, I said, “Of course it will jell.” We had quite an argument. In the end, it jelled. I still have that extra package of raw cranberries in my freezer from that day so many years ago. Well, I turned out to be right that day, but . . .
I am not a mother. I am not trying to be your mother. I am absolutely not trying to tell your mother how to be a mother!!! . . . three exclamation points again. I can only speak to you as someone who had a mother. Can we agree that we all have that in common? In an earlier chapter of this book I said, “I’ll be the scout. You be the wagon train.” I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. I’ve made the mistakes. I’ve learned from them (I hope).
Well, where do you think your mother was all those years before you came along? Was she just waiting to be your mother? No! She was out there. She led a life. She saw it. She made mistakes. She learned from them (she hopes).
Your mother has many jobs. One of them is to tell you Things You Don’t Want to Hear. While all the world around you is whispering into your little brain, your mother wants to talk with your Big Brain.
What you may see as a taskmaster, an oppressive ruler, an authority without authority is, in fact, a woman expressing unconditional love. Yes, she has the right to go through your private things, to search your drawers, to look under your bed, to monitor your social media. You are not bulletproof. You don’t understand that. She does. And she has the authority to say so.
You don’t know everything. Wait, that’s not it. You have not yet had to apply what you think you know to the real world. You don’t know if it will work, which makes it way to easy to assume it will.
Let me tell you, just about anything sounds like it will work until you try it. What’s that old saying? “For every complex problem there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.” You aren’t stupid. You are inexperienced. You are really the opposite of stupid. The very essence of stupid is experience without learning.
So much of Hollywood drama and comedy depends upon dysfunctional families, you’d think there is an epidemic of flawed people. If you start getting the idea that this is the norm, well, take it from your scout, it isn’t.
I have had varied roles in raising children. They were not my own. My first family included a stepbrother and stepsister who were adopted by my father and his second wife. In my second family, I was a stepmother in spirit to two girls. In my third family, I was honored to be a godmother. And now there are grandchildren.
A surrogate mother.
My father was married four times. He and his last wife, Betty, adopted two kids — a daughter, Weslee, and a son, Joe Carson (Kit) — when I was fifteen. They lived in Las Vegas. When I went to visit when they were little, I played with them like they were my dolls. I was more like an aunt than a sister. I never shared a home with them.
That all changed after my father died suddenly and Betty became ill. I became a sort of surrogate mother for the kids when they were twelve and thirteen years old. Along with my mother, we shared in some of the raising of Weslee and Kit until they became adults. Kit has since passed away. Weslee has raised her three sons and Kit’s daughter. It’s a great family, and really, the only immediate family I have on my family tree.
A stepmother in spirit.
I was blessed to be in a relationship with a wonderful man for fifteen years. Tom lived in Nashville. We never married. We never lived together, but I was committed enough to move to Nashville and then move my mother to Nashville and buy her a house there.
Tom had two delightful daughters, Kim and Julie. Tom and I and the girls’ mother, Pat, brought those two girls through the “terrible teens.” Pat and I were friendly. There was a mutual respect.
I am still very much a part of the lives of Kim and Julie. They say you don’t get to choose your family. Well, in a way I did. I couldn’t have chosen a better one. And now, Julie has fabulous children of her own — Amy, Elizabeth, and Austin. I am especially close to Kim and to Amy, who now has an adopted son.
Tom’s brother had Down Syndrome. His mother suffered from Alzheimer’s and was in a nursing home for eleven years. I was there for him and for them. They were all a very important part of my life. I think of them as my family.
A Godmother.
My dear friend Gail shared her very special children with me. Perhaps you recall the story of Jimmy — the boy who was brain damaged as a baby — from the earlier chapter on Optimism. Jim (only I call him Jimmy) is Gail’s son. Jimmy has a sister, Cindy, who is deaf.
I learned so much from Gail. She refused to see her children as “different.” She and her children have succeeded against the odds. They are the best they can be. Today, Cindy has children of her own, too. She is a fabulous mother. She uses a hearing dog. I am the godmother of her oldest son, Matthew. I think of Cindy as the daughter I never had. I am so proud to be associated with her family.
Mother of my mother.
In her later years, my mother came to live with me. Slowly, our roles reversed. It was a privileged time for me. I am so fortunate. It was my turn to give back to her. I now understand unconditional love.
It’s not like I can’t see the genuine problems. I’ve seen dysfunction. Divorce, blended families, single mothers. I think it is more accurate to say there is a bit of dysfunction in every family.
I call mine a great dysfunctional family, just out of the normal world. It’s a perfect dysfunctional family.
You can find yourself in an environment where there is authority without authority, or worse, no authority, and you so young. You didn’t choose this world. It’s a world you never made. This is awful for you. It can leave you to grow on your own. It can make you vulnerable.
Let’s say you are on your own. You are forced to be your own guide, your own leader, your own scout. If you choose to listen and look, you are assaulted, and I mean assaulted, by cultural messages that tell you to behave pretty much as you please. Notice, please, I said, “If you choose to listen and look.”
It’s so easy to look only at the world that is right in front of your eyes, especially if that world is on a television or movie screen. That world isn’t real. It isn’t truth. It isn’t history. It isn’t normal. It can’t be normal. It is made up, concocted, fabricated to fit neatly into a little rectangle. Your life doesn’t fit into a little rectangle. Don’t let others set your boundaries. Look past the rectangle. The same goes with what you hear.
If you don’t have parental guidance and you are on your own, you must make the same demand on this world that my mother made of me, “Think it through. Convince me you are right.”
Bring the debater in you to life every day. Ask yourself these questions.
What is the point of doing this?
What is the benefit?
Where does it get me?
What’s the other side?
What’s the worst that can happen?
Look at both sides. Prove claims of truth. If you lack parental guidance, you weigh the answers to these questions. In the absence of parental guidance, you must be in charge of your surroundings as much as possible. You must find mentors. You must find people you trust. You must understand that you really do need guidance. We can begin with…
Here is a Dawn Rule of Thumb: If you are in a room and everybody in the room is in total agreement with you, then you are in the wrong room.
Are your friends debaters?
Do they think independently?
Are you their devil’s advocate?
Who is your devil’s advocate?
Do you learn from your friends?
Is what you learn of any real value?
What is the value of your friendships?
Are your friends real? Hmmm. Why do I ask? If you have a thousand social media friends, you don’t have a thousand friends. C’mon, do you really need Mary Ann to clue you in on that one?
Friendship runs deep in your life. Your friends can be male or female, young or old. You can have friends for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Friendships create bonds that withstand separation. You can have a friend for a season and see her years later, and the bond is still there. You know what they say, “Friends are the family you get to choose.”
Who to choose? Who will choose you? We live in a world where you have to decide which friends are real. So, what is a real friend?
Cliques are not friendships.
The motivations are wrong. Look, you can’t belong to a friendship. True friendships are formed by attraction, like magnets. They are not formed by repulsion, by shutting out, by closing doors or turning backs. Friends don’t turn backs, they have your back. True friendships are formed by appreciation. They are not formed by criticism. Cliques tend to have leaders. The leader establishes the behavior of the clique. Leaders expect followers to behave like followers. Egad! Here you are chafing at the authority of your parents and accepting the authority of…what, some bossy kid? True friendship is above peer pressure. True friendship never asks you to sacrifice the inner you.
Sisterhood is essential.
Sisterhood is good for the soul. We talked about male friends in an earlier chapter. Now, it’s time to embrace…well, ourselves. Sisterhood is a safe haven. The commonality of sisterhood is common interests and goals and common observations. Sisterhood is good for the mind and heart. It is, really, the opposite of a clique. It isn’t a surface. It is deeper.
You can’t really want to belong to a sisterhood, either. It isn’t an existing thing where you knock on the door and ask if you can come in. Sisterhood grows around you. It evolves. All of a sudden, there it is! You hardly bother to ask how it was formed. You never have to sacrifice the inner you to be in a sisterhood. You never have to adjust your standards or morals. Sisterhood is your Big Brain. Cliques are your little brain.
Envy doesn’t equal popularity.
You don’t have to be the center of attention to be popular. You don’t need to have things that other people desire — looks, clothes, cars, club memberships, whatever. You’ll never be popular trying to make people want to like you or worse, be like you. Wanting, trying, to be popular may just be the quickest way to make yourself unpopular.
You can’t grow popularity.
You can’t harvest it.
You certainly can’t store it so you can use it later.
Popularity grows on you by itself. How? People are attracted to people who take a genuine interest in them. Emphasis on the word genuine. It’s that simple.
If you can sincerely demonstrate for your friends that you understand their worth and potential — that you think they are important — and if you are kind to your friends and if you treat them as equals, you will be popular.
Here’s the best part. Even as your popularity grows, you will never think of yourself as popular. This is because you become popular by not thinking of yourself. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a cheerleader. Just keep in mind how silly you’d look if there was nobody in the stands.
If you are reading this and you feel shunned and insecure, if you feel you don’t belong anywhere, I beg you to understand: If you feel that life somehow manages to never include you, this too shall pass. There is a place for you. The single hardest thing to get across to young people is just how temporary most of the life that surrounds you right now is. You can feel like you are in a canoe in the rapids and there is no end. You can feel like the water will never slow down and be calm. It will. You are in a time of discovery. When you arrive on the other side of the rapids, you will not be the same person you are today.
Will the new person be a better person? That’s up to you. It also depends on whom you associate with. It’s a good idea to keep in mind that fringe groups and gangs exist for people who believe themselves to be alone.
Think about it, a group of loners. It is so easy to be drawn into this if you feel alone, too. Well, keep in mind that gangs and fringe groups are no different than cliques. The same rules apply. They have leaders and followers. They have rules you must obey. The group is only interested in you insofar as you benefit the group. It’s a one-way deal. The group is asking for you to disappear. The group doesn’t want you to come out of the rapids as a better person because the group knows the better person won’t stick around. Most important, who is doing the thinking in a gang or a fringe group? Let’s say you are in one? Who is the devil’s advocate? Look around. Do you see one? I thought so. Do you see any Big Brains working? I thought so. In which case, why isn’t your Big Brain working?
We are surrounded by imperfect people. We get along by navigating those imperfections. That’s what the castaways on Gilligan’s Island did every week. The castaways didn’t choose each other. The castaways didn’t start the “three-hour tour” as friends. The castaways had one common bond thrust upon them, of course. They were stuck together on an island. If it had stopped there, the scriptwriters would have given up on the second episode. The castaways found other common bonds. They discovered new tolerances within themselves. There were no outcasts. There were no grudges.
Being marooned on an island with no chance of escape may be the last place on Earth anybody would want to be. The castaways made this last place on earth a safe haven for humanity.
The castaways somehow made a tiny place larger — big enough for all of them. The castaways understood there was life on the other side of the island. They talked about it. They hoped for it. They planned for it. There was no despair. That’s what friends and family can do for you. They can brighten your darkest hour. And you theirs.
I have a sister, nieces, nephews, cousins, and three surrogate families, so to speak. My family consists of not only blood relatives but the people who became the nucleus of my life. Some are genetic, some by chance, some by choice, all ages, all genders, some near, and some far. Each fills a special need. Some more than others. I do not come from a large family; I never lived with brothers or sisters, but I learned to share and co-exist in harmony with those whom I share my life.
My Reno high school friends are my lifelong friends. So are my classmates at Stephens College, University of Washington, Alpha Chi Omega sorority, co-stars and neighbors. Some of my most extraordinary experiences have been adventures with incredible women from my alma maters: a gorilla climb in Rwanda, African safaris, fly fishing around the world and canoeing through the Solomon Islands with no running water or electricity. Sharing these experiences are the facets of my life. They are the sum of who I am and always becoming. These are valued friends for a lifetime! BFF? Isn’t that how the techies say it? Best Friends Forever?
Sherwood Schwartz and hand-carved cast. Photo: Dawn Wells Archives
A FAMILY OF FRIENDS
A studio lot is an intimate world. You develop family habits. For instance, Bob Denver and I developed the habit of speaking fast when we were in a scene together. It got faster and faster. Our director, Les Goodwin, said, “You two could do a thirty-minute sitcom in fifteen minutes. You talk so fast.” One Christmas, Bobby decided he’d find a tiny island we could all buy and give each part of the crew a little part of it. It didn’t happen because Thurston wanted to buy liquor, instead. The miser! :-)
In a way, we became a miniature family within that working environment. Alan, Russell, and I were very close. Later, Natalie Schafer and I became so close, I was like the daughter she never had. Bobby and I had a very special bond, too. I was privileged to be invited to his home. We filled niches for each other. Odd, but it was the opposite of being marooned. We weren’t isolated or alone. We had each other.