I paced the floor of my dressing room, palms pressed hard against my temples. I was trying to escape the noise inside my head. My stomach churned as if I’d downed some bad orange juice.
Please don’t make me do this.
I pressed my hands tighter, trying to squeeze out the angst and frustration.
If only . . .
To the outside, it would have seemed ironic that a television star envied by millions could be here pacing, distraught and alone in his dressing room.
Confrontation had never been my thing. That’s why I had agents—slick suits who enjoyed negotiating a higher salary, bigger perks, more respect. But this wasn’t something they would do for me. They wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. If I had tried to tell them what I was about to do they would have said that I was over-reacting and was going to ruin my career.
“Let it go, Kirk,” they would have insisted. “Do your job. Give ’em that million-dollar smile and don’t blow it. Get to syndication and we’ll all be multi-millionaires.”
I was a peace-loving guy by nature. I prided myself on being a devilish clown, laughing his way through life and using that optimistic outlook to lighten the burdens of others. But I couldn’t chuckle my way through this one.
I had to figure out a way to get my point across without offending the producers. I needed to be a man, even though I wasn’t quite one—at least not legally. I was just a 17-year-old kid who wanted to do the right thing. And I knew that no matter how I tried to camouflage, soften or sweet-talk it, someone would be unhappy, maybe even furious, by what I had to say. I hated the lose-lose place I found myself in. I hated it.
I opened my eyes and saw the glow of my over-priced Swatch. (Again, the ’80s.) I didn’t have much time left. I needed to do this or let it go.
I took a deep breath and got a drink of water to strengthen myself for what was ahead. I didn’t want my voice to do that Mike Seaver puberty-crack or my bosses would have a difficult time taking my concerns seriously.
I stood in front of the mirror to practice my speech. No one was here to tell me how to say my lines as my mom did when I was younger. I didn’t have a writer handing me lines to make me witty and resolve everything at the end of 23.5 minutes. I didn’t have a director to tell me the right way to look, the right emotion to portray or the right inflection to get the desired response from my audience.
I ran my fingers through my curly mullet, trying to mess it up so I didn’t look too Hollywood-slick. I gripped the sides of the sink and took a deep breath. I am an actor. I can do this, I told myself, loosening my neck by performing a few head rolls. Kirk, you’ve gotta make a choice. Are you going to do what you think is right or are you gonna compromise?
“I want to do the right thing,” I answered aloud, like an overly earnest character in an after-school special.
But what was the right thing? Letting the show go on, as written? Or stepping in, hoping that I could—in a respectful way—point out how things could be different? It would be a mistake to remind producers what they already knew—that a TV series has an unspoken agreement with its audience to be what it has been from the beginning. A sitcom shouldn’t become a drama. Nobody wants to see a homicide investigation on Mr. Belvedere. (On Murphy Brown, maybe.) A show about a middle-class suburban family shouldn’t suddenly focus on illegal immigrants and their struggle to cross the border.
My inner voice kept reminding me that I was just a kid, while the producers were authority figures—albeit odd authority figures. As a child actor, I had learned early that I wielded more power than most adults, yet my parents instilled within me a respect and a desire to submit to authority. My parents never put up with the typical child-star behavior. At the same time, I was taught to speak firmly, as an adult, to these powerful figures who had the ability to turn my life into a Hollywood game. I needed to walk the fine line of standing up for my convictions and respecting authority.
Pacing, I tried to find words to express how I felt about the new direction of Growing Pains. It felt as though we were straying from what made our show successful: the fact it was a wholesome family show.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hey, guys,” I said to the makeup mirror, trying to muster my most sincere smile. “How ya doin’? How was your weekend?”
The hardest part would be to explain my motives. I knew how others would see it. I knew the quiet uproar it would cause. Tension on the set would thicken. The producers and writers would be irritated. The cast and crew would roll their eyes or glare at me over the stupidity of what I was asking. Maybe some would try to understand, but most wouldn’t.
Most would think I was flaunting my celebrity.
No matter what I said or did, that would be the fallout. No matter how I tried to share my true heart, the assumption in “the business” would be that I was messing with the status quo as a power play.
Power-tripping had never been me. Fame and celebrity didn’t come naturally. I really didn’t like star-struck fans following me with their mouths agape, watching everything I did as if I were a freak. I wanted to be a normal teenage kid with an unusual job. I wanted to be seen for me, not given higher status as a human being just because I’d landed a part on a hit show.
I leaned my forehead against the door, wishing I could just let it go so that we could be the happy cast and crew we’d always been. But something had happened to me and I no longer saw life the same way.
In the early years of the show, I had earned a reputation as the prankster who planted stink bombs under the audience seats, greased doorknobs and hid crew members’ cars in bushes. I initiated practical jokes, laughter, ribbing and the sarcastic comments that flew around stage like the evil monkeys on The Wizard of Oz. My fellow cast members affectionately named me “Devil Boy.”
But I had recently become a new man. I had stepped from the house that had fallen from the twister and it had changed my entire world from black-and-white to Technicolor. Once there, no matter what Dorothy or the Wizard said, I realized I couldn’t go back.
“Is it wrong to bring my new convictions to the set?” I asked myself. “Should I keep them wrapped up inside, letting business be business? After all, TV isn’t real. A sitcom is just a story. And the stories aren’t real. The characters aren’t real, either.”
Now I sounded like a crazy person, talking to myself in my dressing room.
I knew Mike Seaver wasn’t me and I wasn’t him, but viewers didn’t seem to know the difference. To them, the Seavers existed. If Mike took drugs, kids would assume it was okay to take drugs—all because Mike was cool and someone to follow.
I didn’t want to blow it. That would be my nightmare. I desperately wanted to do the right thing in a no-win situation. I knew people would be unhappy with me. But it was something I had to do . . . and the time was now.