Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter

by Melissa Francis

  Then as the train left, he felt guilty and changed his mind.

  Now the train thundered down the track, with more smoke billowing from it than I’d ever seen come from something that wasn’t on fire. With similar dramatic flair, Michael rode his wagon onto the track in front of the speeding train and pulled the horses to a wrenching stop

  The conductor would either stop or crush Michael, his fictional son, Albert, who was along for the ride, and two perfectly good horses, to smithereens.

  Both in the story and in real life, it looked like Michael was taking a huge risk.

  I was sure the train would stop.

  Pretty sure.

  The horses were more confident than I was. All day, the wranglers kept swapping out two sets of big burly chestnuts to serve as the horses in Michael’s team. I could tell the difference between all four horses because I’d been riding for as long as I could remember. Still, I was amazed that they assumed the viewers of the show were so gullible or nearsighted that they wouldn’t notice.

  All four horses seemed accustomed to Michael’s brand of high drama, and didn’t flinch as a hundred tons of steaming steel barreled toward them. They stood bravely on the track and waited for the engine to grind to a halt.

  As the train roared closer, Michael pulled the reins tight and rapped them snuggly around the brake handle. Then he leaped down from the wagon seat and strutted to the middle of the tracks, where he stood boldly watching the train screech and scrape, finally slowing and stopping, leaving only the smallest cushion of air between them.

  “I’ve put two children on board. I’m here to take them back!” Michael shouted the line to the conductor who hung his head out of the window. He then ran to the side of the train and boarded.

  He did the take once and yelled, “Print!”

  Michael was the king of the one-take scene. I was learning quickly that he worked efficiently and wasted nothing. For a man who flew around in his own Learjet, he was tight with a penny, as the modest honey wagons and Super 8 attested. Even I noticed the downgrade a few hours after we’d landed.

  Now it was my and Jason’s turn. The camera and lighting team set up inside a passenger car, making the focal point a row of seats in the middle. Extras in similar costumes sat in the other seats.

  We rehearsed once. I had no lines. Supposedly, I was still in a state of shock after seeing my parents pulverized.

  Jason and I held hands at the doorway of the train car. The assistant director yelled the standard questions that set every scene in motion: “Rolling? Speed? Speed! Marker!”

  The next line fell always to Michael: “Action!”

  The conductor ushered us down the center aisle and pointed to the seat. We sat down and Jason started his dialogue: “It’s going to be okay, Cassandra. We’ll find a way. I can take care of both us without Ma and Pa. . . .”

  After a few more sentences, tears started rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t know why I was crying. The writers hadn’t put that in the script. But everything Jason said made our lives sound so hopeless. Plus I just felt stressed and tired. I was supposed to be mute, but I couldn’t help it. And once the tears started flowing, they turned into a flood.

  Fortunately, Jason kept going, even though he had to be wondering why I was crying. Halfway through Jason’s speech, Michael shoved his way past the conductor to our row.

  “Listen, how would you two like to come with me?” he said.

  “Yes! Oh, yes!” Jason said. I hoped Michael didn’t see my tears, but by now I was sobbing, so there was no way he could miss them. He didn’t seem mad.

  “It’s not forever. Just until we find you a more permanent home. You can do chores and help out.”

  “What if you don’t find us a home?” Jason asked.

  “Well, then you’ll have to go on to the orphanage, but at least it’s hope. It’s something,” Michael said, near tears now himself.

  He swept me up into his arms like a western superhero and carried me off the train with Jason on our heels. We got outside the train and he yelled, “Cut! And print!”

  Then he laughed loudly and kissed my cheek while squeezing me so tight I thought my head might pop off.

  “That was great!” Michael said. “Who told you to do that?”

  I didn’t answer but just buried my head in his shoulder, thrilled I wasn’t in trouble.

  Mom took me back to the honey wagon so I could change out of my clothes. She was wearing a purple plaid Ralph Lauren dress with a flowing skirt that made her look like a modern version of the other women on the train. She had curled and teased her short dark hair, but it wilted a bit during the long workday. Her makeup, which had initially been flawless, smeared around her eyes a little after hours of wear.

  She sat me on the stiff bench that was supposed to be a couch, and started unlacing my boots. I looked in the mirror and noticed that my yellow eyes matched hers.

  “You were perfect today. Did you really cry during the train scene? I couldn’t hear what was going on from outside.” She gripped my calf as she struggled to free my foot from the pitiless boot.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Everything Jason said made me sad. I couldn’t help it.”

  “He did all the heavy lifting, and you stole the scene,” she said with a smile.

  “Jason’s nice. I like him.”

  “Well that’s fine. Just be careful. Don’t let him upstage you.”

  I didn’t know what she meant and I was too tired to care.

  When we got back to L.A., we filmed the indoor scenes on Stage 15 of the MGM Studios lot in Culver City, and the exterior scenes on the permanent outdoor set where the fictional town of Walnut Grove had been thriving for the past seven years. In both locations, the cast and crew fell back into their well-worn groove, and I realized that Michael was in fact the center of the universe. He called all the shots, got all the attention, and drove all the action. He was the energy that made the earth rotate.

  We pulled up to a chain link fence that seemed to guard absolutely nothing.

  “The whole town of Walnut Grove is supposed to be here somewhere. But I don’t see a thing,” Mom said, looking off into the distance.

  We had followed a sheet of directions into the low rolling hills of Simi Valley. The crew in Sonora had described the location of the permanent outdoor set as “the middle of nowhere.” It turned out “nowhere” was roughly twenty minutes from our house.

  An AD stood at the opening of the fence holding a clipboard in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other. He leaned into the open car window and addressed my mom, who wore a frilly western shirt and dark blue jeans. She was really getting into the frontier theme.

  “Who do we have here?” he asked with a smile.

  I smiled back. “I’m Missy!”

  “You’re the third Missy then actually.”

  I had heard this in Sonora. Apparently, almost all the brunette actresses playing Ingalls children were named Melissa, or Missy for short. What an odd coincidence. There was Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson. Melissa Gilbert was the star. She played Laura Ingalls Wilder, the real-life pioneer who had written the Little House books, on which the show was based.

  I hadn’t read the books, and I’d only seen the show once, after I’d already landed the role. Mom let me stay up late to watch it so I’d understand why we wore bizarre clothes and spoke strangely. Little House came on at 8 PM when I usually went to bed, so I was thrilled to stay up late, curled up in one of our family-room chairs with my white Persian cat in my lap.

  The show itself was really boring, at least to me, an eight-year-old more used to sitcoms and cartoons. All the characters ran around, literally, in the dirt, and rode in the backs of wagons with dramatic music playing loudly in the background. They endured a lot of heartache over stuff that didn’t seem like a big deal to me. Mom said the story was basically a nightime soap opera, whatever that meant. She showed me a section of the
Los Angeles Times that reported television ratings, and claimed that more Americans watched Little House on the Prairie than almost any other show. I just couldn’t figure out why. But it was starting to sink in that my role was a big deal.

  The two other Melissas were both super old. Melissa Gilbert still starred on the show every week as the married schoolteacher, Laura. But in real life, Mom said she was dating someone named Rob Lowe, who was supposedly gorgeous because he had, among other things, pink cheeks. This made absolutely no sense to me. I wondered if he was overheated a lot. She and my aunt buzzed about how handsome he was, and how handsome Michael was, which made even less sense. Whatever.

  Melissa Sue Anderson played Mary, the oldest sister in the Ingalls family. Like me she was called Missy. She was very pretty with shiny blonde hair and big blue eyes. Mom explained that Missy “didn’t know what a good thing she had” and quit right before I arrived. From what I’d seen so far, I agreed with Mom. There were so many great places to play on the set and most of the crew were willing to entertain you. Being part of the regular cast was hard work for sure, but the food was good and there was loads of praise when you did a good job. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would quit.

  The man with the clipboard opened the gate and directed us to a small group of parked cars. We parked and got out of the white Porsche with the red and blue racing strip that Mom had just bought from Dick Clark. Another person everyone but me seemed to know. All the moms at school had been startled when Mom traded in the brown station wagon for a slightly used Porsche that she had bought from a glorified game show host. But Mom figured we were celebrities now too, so we needed a ride that reflected our shift in status.

  A white van idled nearby. We climbed inside and it took us up a path carved into the side of the hill. We drove for about five minutes before we saw a small wooden house on the left with a barn and a corral next to it. With its asymmetrical roof, the house looked more like a big outhouse than a place where people would live. The barn dwarfed the house, but it still looked as if it could be blown down by a good strong wind.

  We kept driving past the buildings, and after another five minutes we arrived at a ghost town. An old mill with a big spinning water-wheel was attached to a small bridge that led to the town. All the buildings there were clustered in a circle as if they were huddling together for warmth. At the far end of the circle sat a church or a schoolhouse, I couldn’t tell which. To the right was a long red hotel, and across the circle from that was a big white storefront. There wasn’t a human being in sight.

  The van passed through the town and rolled up another small hill, where we found a team of honey wagons and prop trucks. That’s where all the people were hiding. The driver let us out and Mom took my hand, gripping it so hard I thought the bones might crack.

  The AD jumped out in front of us. The walkie-talkie peeked out of the pocket of his already dusty jeans as he ran his right hand through his shaggy brown hair. He pointed to a honey wagon on the left. “Missy’s dressing room is right up there. She can get something to eat, and get dressed and report to makeup. She needs to be on the set by eight. We’re doing the wagon roll scene first.”

  Everything was shot out of sequence. So in today’s shot, Mom had explained, I would be watching my still-alive pretend parents meet their disastrous fate.

  I looked around at all the people in jeans holding coffee cups or smoking, as we climbed the metal stairs to the dressing room marked MISSY FRANCIS.” Inside, the same purple dress and limp blue bonnet that I’d worn on the set in Sonora were waiting for me. Even worse, the sackcloth petticoat had made the trip too, along with the awful boots. Just looking at them made me cringe. The blisters on my ankles had yet to heal.

  Mom helped me put on the getup, including the rubber band socks. Then we wandered over to the craft services truck and hopped on the long line for food.

  “Let the little girl cut to the front,” a rough-looking guy on the crew said. He winked at me as he sipped his coffee. I stepped up to the window where the short-order cook listened to our hopes and dreams about breakfast. The crackle of frying bacon made my stomach growl.

  “She’ll have an egg and bacon burrito. Scramble the egg and add a little bit of American cheese. I will just have a hard-boiled egg.” Once again, Mom had joined the latest diet craze, which usually lasted a few weeks. She’d shed weight, and was simultaneously thrilled and viciously cranky until she went back to Baskin-Robbins chocolate fudge ice cream and traded the hunger-induced mood swings for defeated depression. The crash dieting tended to coincide with important events. Apparently, my new job qualified as one.

  Always hungry at breakfast, I wolfed down my burrito in record time. I had never seen eggs and bacon wrapped together in a burrito. Genius! It seemed like a dish that had been invented so the crew could eat standing up without utensils.

  “Does she go to school?” an extra’s mom asked my mom while we were eating.

  “Yes. And even though she works all the time, she’s first in her class, bless her heart.” I’d heard this speech before. She’d go on to say how I got a 99 on some standardized test and now I was in a special reading group. It seemed like a good opportunity to slip away and get seconds.

  I slid down from my chair and went over to a picnic table that smelled like heaven. A huge box of doughnuts was nestled between baskets of muffins and a rainbow of fresh fruit. I swiped a glazed doughnut and tried to eat most of it before I turned back to Mom. She’d be furious that I was eating more.

  I scarfed it down and then skipped back to the table in time to hear Mom delivering the wrap-up to one of her half-dozen or so talking points that she regularly used with new mothers.

  “So that’s when the teacher told me just how gifted Missy is. She already reads at a sixth-grade level. Her teacher actually said that her being out of school will give the other kids time to catch up! Can you imagine? I was so upset. I’ve got to find her another school, I guess, if the rest of the class is holding her back like that.” She smiled at the extra’s mom, who was nodding politely. “We’re thinking about Lycee International. It’s French immersion. Jodie Foster goes there, but it’s just so far, I can’t imagine dragging her through the traffic every day.”

  Well, that didn’t make any sense, I thought. We sat in mountains of traffic every day when we went for interviews. But I had made the mistake of speaking up during one of Mom’s stories before and learned that no one but Mom was allowed to talk. Afterward, when we’d gotten in the car, she’d pinched my arm ferociously and said, “You are never to contradict me in front of another adult ever again. Do you understand me?” The pain shooting through my arm confirmed how serious she was.

  This time I stood quietly while she finished. I didn’t care much about the accuracy of these stories.

  “So let’s go get you into hair and makeup, sweetie,” Mom announced, ushering me back toward the honey wagon.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. We walked back up to my dressing room and I went in alone. By now I was too full, and felt like I needed to throw up. All the breakfast food I’d devoured was sitting heavily in my stomach.

  I emerged from the bathroom to find Mom waiting outside at the base of the trailer steps.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “My stomach hurts.”

  “That’s because you stuffed yourself full of so much junk. Why did you do that?” She shook her head sadly. “I saw you eat that doughnut, by the way. You better be careful. You’re getting a real tummy. Do you remember what the doctor said? You need to watch it. You are right on the verge of being fat. Do you want to fight this terrible battle your whole life like every woman in our family? We’re genetically predisposed to fat bodies. We come from fat stock. Do you want to follow in those footsteps? Look at your sister. She’s packed on so much weight. I think it’s too late for her.”

  I was taken aback by Mom’s criticism of Tiffany. My sister looked fine to me. After all, she was the pretty one
. Her hair was lighter and longer than mine, and Mom let her have bangs, which made her look grown-up. We had the same big round eyes, but Tiffany didn’t smile as much as I did, which made her look more soulful.

  As for Mom, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Her dark hair set off her light eyes, and she had a big smile that showed off her perfect teeth. Although she was always on a diet, she never seemed fat to me.

  Now I looked down at my protruding belly and tried to suck it in. It didn’t work. I wished I had a sweater to hide the bulge.

  The AD rushed over and saved me. “We need Missy in hair and makeup like ten minutes ago.”

  When I got to the set, Michael stood on a grassy landing. He gestured with his arms, explaining to the cinematographer where the action would lead.

  “So Cassandra, James, Albert stand here.” He pointed to wooden crosses lying on the ground as marks. “I’m here.... Then when the wagon picks up speed, I’ll go to my second mark here. Then we’ll push close on the kids as the wagon rolls off the hill and cracks up into a million pieces. We can do the tight on James and Cassandra as a cutaway if they don’t get to the emotion and it doesn’t work as one shot.”

  The AD turned to Mom. “Is she ready?”

  “Yes.”

  She kneeled down next to me and my fat belly. “You need to watch the wagon fall off the side of the hill and go from scared to really crying, imagining that your parents are inside it. Can you do that? This is really critical. This is the scene that got you this part. You need to really look scared and then produce real tears while you’re watching. You can do it, sweetie.”

  She paused for a second.

  “You absolutely have to do it now.”

  No pressure.

  It was true, I had produced real tears on demand at the audition. We’d learned I was the only eight-year-old who had done it right that day. Now they wanted to see if I could deliver again. I got the feeling that they’d give me a car if I succeeded.