Nanny died in October 1988. She suffered three strokes and went into a coma. Our family held nightly prayer groups, but after a few difficult days, Mom took her off life support. It took Mom years to recover from the loss, since Nanny was always her brightest guiding light.
I mention this now because most of the Harts agree that Mom never would’ve had the courage to leave Dad if Nanny were still alive when it happened. Mom seconds this. She would have eagerly turned to Nanny for advice, and Nanny would have sent Mom back to her unhappy marriage because, as she used to say, “Divorce is not part of my vocabulary.” But it seems that at this significant juncture for Mom, she needed to find her own way. To this day, we all hold Nanny in a very saint-like place in our hearts, and her name, Joan, will continue to be passed down through generations of our family (my mom, my cousin, and I all share the middle name Joan).
Mom definitely made the most of her journey toward discovering her new, grown-up self, especially since she never got to sow her wild oats when she was young. So despite having five kids between the ages of three and thirteen, she explored her new city, home, and men like the foxy broad she was. As I mentioned earlier, Mom made friends with a Broadway singer named Allan when she was on that cruise for my sister’s gig, so she invited him to be our seventh roommate, and his social life gave hers a head start. As an adult, I’m still not sure why Allan agreed to this arrangement—he couldn’t have found it too easy to bring men home to an apartment full of small kids and irritable teens!—though we all loved him and considered him part of our forever-changing family. And as Mom’s social Sherpa, Allan introduced her to lots of Broadway backup dancers and singers. Her best girlfriend, Ayn, was also part of this scene, so she was Mom’s partner in crime.
The major upside of all this, for me anyway, was that these Broadway guys became my guncles, or gay uncles, and had a strong hand in teaching me lots of adult lessons—particularly one guncle named Chris. I’d already read Our Bodies, Ourselves, so I knew how babies were made, but I also lived in Manhattan during the ’90s when AIDS was rampant in the artistic community. When I started dating my first real boyfriend, Mike, in 1992, Mom didn’t sit me down to clarify or expand on “the talk.” She sent me to a Nine Inch Nails concert with Chris. On the car ride to the Meadowlands Stadium in Jersey, Chris explained how the birds and the bees worked, with a special emphasis on HIV. This was a topic he knew well, since he was infected with the virus.
Allan and my guncles introduced Mom to the gay club scene, at which point she turned into a regular Kathy Griffin. She partied with them on weekends, leaving behind her Dad-related frustrations and all those creepy straight men who’d otherwise hit on her. (Us kids went to Dad’s house on weekends, which worked out perfectly.) Mom’s clubbing wardrobe consisted mainly of short-shorts, bra tops, go-go boots, and the occasional neon wig. She bought them at Patricia Fields’ eponymous store, which is now known for its women’s clothing, but back then was populated mostly by drag queens. At the end of the weekend, I could smell my pillowcase and tell which guncle had slept in my bed after a night of club-hopping, based on its scent alone.
Sometimes Mom took me with her to the clubs because I loved to dance. Eventually, we became close to the doorman at Limelight’s gay entrance. (At the time, some clubs had separate doors to keep belligerent heteros at bay. This also made it easy for me to take friends there on my own.) One night when my mom and I were out dancing, a fake-tattoo artist was hanging out near the main entrance, and I asked him to give me a Celtic cross on my left breast. I loved the design so much that I used a permanent marker to keep it going for days, and five years later, I got the real deal inked on the back of my neck. I didn’t want to scare future breast-fed babies with it on my boob and besides, Mom’s big rule was that tattoos were perfectly okay as long as they didn’t show in a wedding gown.
After almost a year of adventures in self-reinvention, Mom finally met a guy named Leslie at one of her gay bars. After a spat with her friend Eric about who Leslie was checking out—him or her—Mom decided to ask him and learned that he was a straight man on the hunt for unsuspecting women at gay bars. (It really scaled back on his competition.) Mom didn’t expose us to a lot of her dates when she left Dad, though I don’t think she dated much. But with Leslie, she made it a point to keep us away from the phone if he called, which made me realize she really liked this guy. Originally from the Bronx, Leslie was raised in a boys’ home with some of his brothers after his mom died; her eleven children were torn in different directions.
Nowadays, you’d consider Leslie a metrosexual—but back then, he was just a handsome, generous man who took great pride in his movie-star looks. He was also a hairdresser and a plumber, so he could highlight my and Mom’s hair one day, and fix our leaky sink the next. That first Christmas, he helped Mom play Santa for her five kids by giving me his old skis and lending a hand with shopping for my siblings. He began joining us for family vacations and soon moved into our apartment when Allan’s lease was up. Before we knew it, Mom was pregnant with her sixth child at the age of thirty-seven. Leslie wanted a kid, and who was Mom to refuse? She adored being pregnant and was really good at pushing out the babies. My sister Alexandra, or Ali as we call her, was born in 1993.
We needed more space, so we said good-bye to our town house, and Mom, Leslie, and I went in on a gorgeous old home in Englewood, New Jersey. I was a proud homeowner at the age of nineteen. Our three-story house had plenty of room for the six siblings living there—me, Trisha, Elizabeth, Brian, Emily, and Alexandra—plus a massive backyard, pool, and tennis court. The house was also surrounded on three sides by a very old cemetery where the Lindbergh baby was supposedly buried. Our expansive digs were a big difference from our Sixth Avenue spot, to say the least. Mom and Leslie got married at a nearby church and threw the reception in our backyard, and all the kids were part of this beautiful event. Three years later, they had my mom’s seventh child, Samantha, after moving the whole family to California to shoot the ABC series Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Dad got remarried around the same time to a woman named Lisa, and they had my sister Mackenzie, the youngest of our brood.
* * *
After I finished Clarissa, I got a bunch of calls to audition for characters that were too racy for Mom’s seventeen-year-old girl. So she brilliantly decided that we needed control over any project I’d be a part of and started our production company, Hartbreak Films. To get it going, Mom bought the rights to the Archie comic book series Sabrina the Teenage Witch and turned it into a Showtime movie as our first project. But Hartbreak wasn’t just another job for her—it was a new layer to her evolving identity. Mom now had her first “real” career that strangers took seriously, since housewife and stage mom/manager didn’t earn her a lot of positive attention. She also began to dress the part of an exec, though to her that meant wearing short Bebe skirt suits and snug tops to meetings, instead of navy blue suits. She was in her late thirties and felt young and feisty. Why not show it?
Co-owning a company with my mom had the makings of a messy and confusing nightmare, but we handled its launch seamlessly and it’s thriving today. I can’t think of anyone I trust more than my mother, so why wouldn’t I trust her with our careers? In a lot of ways, my successes and failures have always been hers too, so our company just feels like a natural extension of that. At Hartbreak, I love to brainstorm kooky ideas for movies or shows, and she’ll do the research to find out if there’s a market for it and help me make it happen. For example, I’d always wanted to produce a movie based on Shirley Temple’s biography, so in 2001, we turned the book into ABC’s Wonderful World of Disney’s Child Star. One of the highlights of my life was getting invited to Shirley’s house to have lunch and discuss the film. (A lot of people think she’s passed on, but she still sends me Christmas cards to this day.) Sure, Mom and I get in fights or occasionally disagree about a project, actor, or writer, but Hartbreak also gives us a reason to have lunch or get on the phone to discuss future projec
ts. We’re not the type of family that calls to talk about the weather, hear someone’s voice, or gossip, so it’s the perfect excuse. We’re more likely to text, or, when we do call, forget the niceties and get right to the reason we rang in the first place. It’s not unusual to hear anyone in my family answer the phone with, “What do you want? I’m busy.”
* * *
In 2009, Mom had trouble keeping her left flip-flop on her foot. She and Leslie had moved to Malibu two years prior, bought a sailboat, and Mom traded her Jimmy Choo heels for flats. The flip-flop debacle went on for about a year, but she wasn’t quick to see a doctor since she was nervous about how serious it might be; she was losing motor control on one side of her body, and she knew that could indicate a neurological problem. When Mom finally made an appointment, she was diagnosed with a large brain tumor called a meningioma.
I was in a meeting when my phone rang a few times and I didn’t answer it. Then I saw a text come through from Mom that said, “I have a brain tumor. Call me.” When I called her back, Mom didn’t ask if I was sitting down. She immediately told me what was going on in her no-nonsense voice, though this time it was tinged with so much panic that I hardly recognized it.
My head began to spin, and it was hard to believe that such a scary health concern was really happening to our family. My first and sudden reaction seemed perfectly sound at the time. I told her we had to find Dr. Shepherd—you know, the dreamy TV brain surgeon on Grey’s Anatomy—because he’d know how to handle this. Clearly, that wasn’t a realistic option.
The next morning, I went with Mom to her neurologist in the city to further evaluate her MRI. All the prime-time medical dramas in the world couldn’t have prepared me for what I saw on that film. The tumor was the size of a tennis ball and starting to cross what’s called the superior sagittal sinus, which is a channel that drains the blood from the brain into the internal jugular vein. She needed immediate surgery to remove it and relieve the pressure it was putting on her nervous system. After surgery, the doctor would confirm whether or not the tumor was cancerous.
When news like this hits a family, usually life seems to stop until the situation resolves. But I’m a terrible nurse, as are most of my family members. Mom will be the first to tell you exactly what to do to feel better, but rarely do the Harts make chicken soup. And with an illness as severe as possible cancer, it’s hard to know how to help even if you want to. So I did my best, at warp speed, while multitasking—which is just what Mom would have done.
During the week of Mom’s surgery, a lot of stuff fell on my responsible shoulders. First, I had to fly all of my siblings into Los Angeles for her surgery, which was scheduled for that Wednesday. Since they were all going to stay with me, I also had to coordinate rides to and from the airport. Then in the middle of Mom’s ten-hour brain surgery, my publicist called to tell me People magazine had put me on their cover for a weight-loss story I did, and to get ready for an onslaught of interviews starting that afternoon, though I was in no mental state for it. The following day was my sister Trisha’s thirtieth birthday, so we treated her to a very somber dinner in between visits to Mom’s recovery room. And on Friday, operating on no sleep, I had to do a live TV interview to promote SweetHarts, the candy store I was opening the next day. Mom was a co-owner and supposed to be there, but of course, she was still in the hospital and on bed rest for weeks after.
While I was at the TV studio, waiting to go live and forgetting I had on a body microphone, my partner at SweetHarts asked with some thick sarcasm how I’d managed to get the cover of People that week. I’d just read how the magazine had told The New York Times that they had Bristol Palin, some divorcing reality stars, a former teen star (me), and Farrah Fawcett, who was gravely ill at the time, all on hold for the cover, depending on what happened when. With this piece of information in mind, I made a tasteless joke to my partner that I thought was private—and let’s not forget my delirium over everything that was going on with my mom. I told him Farrah didn’t die, so People picked me. I know, I know. On Saturday, with a heavy conscience and Mom in my thoughts, I hosted the mayor and a few hundred people at the SweetHarts store opening, in a striped Betsey Johnson dress that made me look like I’d just ridden in on the Good Ship Lollipop.
Mom’s surgery was a success, and the tumor was benign. But just when I thought I was out of the woods, I found out that some jackass on the other end of the mic sold the Farrah comment to the press. When it hit the blogosphere, hate mail began rolling in. Angry bloggers called me “Melissa Joan No-Hart No-Soul.” But Mom was on the mend and that mattered more than anything a bunch of anonymous jerks could take out of context. After her surgery, Mom had some sickness from her seizure meds, trouble controlling her emotions, and lots of residual pain as her brain stretched back into the space that had been impeded by the tumor. After a year, she got her memory and sense of humor back, though she told me the Farrah incident was definitely not funny.
* * *
Now that I’m an adult with a family of my own, Mom and I can finally laugh at the complexities of our relationship. I know Mom’s not perfect, but neither am I—though I don’t think you’ll find me in a neon wig and hot pants anytime soon. I can’t rock it like she can. But we do share a close bond that can’t be easily explained or broken. Without a doubt, we love, respect, and look out for each other. When we fight, we might hurl insults or the first thing we see (chairs included), but we often let it go the next day. We don’t keep score or hold grudges. She’s the mom my girlfriends said they wished they’d had, the MILF my guy friends still ogle—and to me, she’ll always be a friend first, parent second, and business partner third. Rather than fault her for being Paula, I prefer to cut her some slack and make the best of her colorful ways. We have a lot more memories to make.
Mom’s always been able to wear a lot of hats at once, and maybe because we’re a little older now, I can finally laugh about how easily she flits from being a role model one minute to a good time the next. She’s a wonderful grandmother to her five grandkids, no matter how much she wished that day would never come because it makes her feel old. After all, she was only forty-seven when she found out my sister Liz, the first among us to have a child, was pregnant. Mom spent all nine months of Lizzie’s gestation trying out different names that made her sound delightful, and not like a little old lady who sits on the porch knitting afghans. She finally settled on GG, short for Grandma Gilliams (her married name), right as my nephew Christopher entered the world. Simple and direct, but with a casual wink. That’s so her. As is the fact that I once gave her the keys to our house in Lake Tahoe so she could spend a quiet week there with Leslie, but thanks to our security cameras, I found out she had twelve people and two dogs over for the holiday without even telling me. It looked like a party and a half.
On a grumpy day, it’s easy to echo what most daughters say, which is that we wouldn’t want to turn out like our moms. But honestly, I’d feel so honored to send my children into the world as successfully as my mom did. My siblings and I have good values, have traveled the world, have supportive relationships, and we know how to have a good time. I’m grateful for Mom’s sacrifices, admire her strength, and appreciate her unconditional love, support, and trust. She’s also good with words. On birthday and congratulations cards, she always writes at the bottom, “If I could have gone to heaven and chosen a child, I still would have picked you.” I save them all in my hope chest that Nanny and Papa built.
Chapter 9
AN A FOR EFFORT
At eighteen years old, I’d left my proverbial nests—a stable and happy television family on Clarissa and a regal new home in the Jersey suburbs with a new stepdad and baby sister. I was now responsible for myself and legally deemed an adult, but I also felt the extra pressure to decide whether I should continue on my current show-business path, take a break, or quit the industry altogether. I could totally see myself as one of those child stars who, as an adult, becomes a lawyer or an art dealer—why not?
So I did what most high school grads do when they need to buy some time while discovering what comes next. I went to college.
When I was biking through France after Clarissa ended, with those rich brats from Long Island, I was trying to get over my first painful breakup. But I also had an aha moment that helped nudge me toward the coed route. From time to time, the other kids and I took breaks to rest our sore crotches by doing other outdoorsy things like ride horses, ski in the Alps, and sunbathe in Cannes. In this spirit, our group went rafting one afternoon and encountered a whirlpool. Since the swirling water made the raft circle for a while instead of rush down the rapids, our leader said that if anyone wanted to challenge themselves by jumping out of the boat, scaling a rock wall, and then leaping off a cliff with a thirty-foot drop, now would be the time to do it. The rafts would wait until we climbed the wall and found our way through the trees to the rocky ledge, and then once we saw the boats begin to move downriver, we’d need to jump in the vicinity of the rafts. Here, our leaders would then safely pull us back into the boats. Of course, there was a catch to all this—once you left the raft, it couldn’t head back upstream to grab you if you chickened out; the river only flowed in one direction. I was terrified of this dare, but I went for it (I was the only girl who did, too). I had a hard time scrambling to the top, and I hesitated when I got to the ledge. But then I just cleared my head, held my nose, and jumped into the unknown. Scary, rushing waters be damned.
It was like that Alanis Morissette song, “Thank You”: The moment I jumped off of it/Was the moment I touched down.
I mention this because I always wanted to go to college, although I had other options in the acting world, and going outside my showbiz comfort zone was daunting. But like when I jumped off that cliff, my instincts told me that life wouldn’t be complete without satisfying this urge. I liked the rush that came with learning new things and having fresh ideas—a feeling I remembered, and missed, from my public school days. So in the fall of 1994, I took a leap of faith and became a freshman at New York University. A lot of TV stars move on to feature films to feel the thrill of exploring new characters and psyches, and my decision to go to college wasn’t so different. I needed a new adventure after Clarissa, and becoming a student could be my most exhilarating role yet.
Melissa Explains It All: Tales from My Abnormally Normal Life Page 10