Mom was going back to New York for a few days. I loved Mom’s friend and welcomed a sleepover. I had no idea what was really going on. At one point I remember somebody banging on the hotel door. I hid in the tub and Mom’s friend opened the door. Someone—it may have been Tony Wade—asked if she had seen me. She calmly replied no. I remained undetected, had some room service, and went to bed.
The next morning, at call time, I went down to the lobby as usual. The moment I got off the elevator, Tony was waiting for me. He quickly hustled me into the stairwell, and on the cold, gray metal stairs, he very seriously looked me in the eye and said: “Your mother has been in a very serious accident. There was a lot of blood and you may never see her again.”
Somehow I knew it was time to be defiant again. Head slightly cocked, with a slightly curious scowl on my forehead, I said, “Oh, that’s funny because I spoke to her and she sounded fine, so if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to work.”
I don’t know if I was channeling Violet at that moment, but I didn’t like Tony Wade anyway, and I loved knowing I was doing what my mom needed and that we were a team. I was unflappable and enjoyed being a good soldier.
I continued filming while Mom remained in New York for a few days. During this time she managed to get a mechanic friend to come check out her vehicle. He deduced that the brakes on my mother’s car had undoubtedly been manually cut, and that the whole thing was a setup.
After Mom returned from New York, things changed for me. First of all, we moved out of the St. Charles Hotel and into the Fairmont Hotel, which was a beautiful old hotel in the downtown area of New Orleans. It was safe and quiet, and because we were separated from the rest of the crew, it meant fewer parties. It was, however, closer to Igor’s and therefore easier for my mother to stop in for a nip more often. I tried to look on the bright side by justifying that it was also easier for me to find Mom on those nights she went missing for a bit. It was a beautiful, fancy hotel, and I honestly don’t think Mom picked it for its proximity to booze, but I wouldn’t put it past her.
Suddenly I wasn’t working such long hours and I had more breaks on set in which to study. Things got so much better for me that I remember frequently feeling guilty. I even felt kind of like I was missing out by not working the same hours as everyone else. I loved being with these people, even if it meant all day and night. They had become my family. Even when we were waiting on the light or moving locations, I wanted to play games with them and enjoy our inside jokes. Sometimes it was sticking a KICK ME sign on a big gaffer’s back, or doing arts and crafts with the wardrobe people, but it felt like home. I loved the actresses and would entertain them on the big porch of the white house by singing Barbra Streisand’s “Queen Bee.” The girls loved it, and Mom loved that they loved me. One day I wasn’t called in until later in the day, but I got up and ready to go anyway. My mom said I did not have to go in.
“Oh, but I have to, Mama.”
“Why?”
“Because I am their bubble.”
I found out later that Mom had been able to alert the proper people and fix the situation legally, so I would actually get the benefits that I was meant to by being a member of SAG. I remember a welfare worker–type person being brought in and the tone on set changing. Production was on alert and no longer allowed to abuse the rules as they had been for almost three months.
The production company was less than overjoyed by this new state of affairs and I am sure it made my mother even more unpopular with Polly and Tony. But it worked. Thankfully for everyone, we only had about a month’s worth of filming left for completion of the movie, and I don’t remember these rules adding any days to the schedule.
I enjoyed my new freedom, but not fully. It was too much of a change and I felt isolated. I kind of wanted to let the crew bend the rules at times, and I’d beg the teacher to let me stay on set to finish an uncompleted sequence, but she rarely complied. We all wanted to get this movie finished.
Finally, the wrap was upon us. The last day of filming was surreal. This had been my first starring role in a film. I loved the feeling of being part of a film family and I had grown very attached to everyone involved. I was even, in a way, attached to Polly and Tony. Something happens when you share an experience with people. A bond is created, and whether it’s a positive or negative experience, connection is made. Because of my youth and maturity I bonded easily.
The day we shot our last shot, the cast and crew erupted with applause and hugs. It was the applause of collective relief. Four months of hard work, tears, pain, fear, insecurities, and rough conditions. We had survived together. We had created something we all felt was important.
At the wrap party, back at the St. Charles Hotel, my mom asked me what I wanted as a wrap gift. I said I wanted to cut my hair all off. I wanted a haircut partially because my hair had been destroyed during the making of the film with irons and teasing and techniques that were used to make it look frizzy and of the era. My main reason, however, was that I thought that if I chopped off all my hair, they would not be able to call me the next day and say we had reshoots or a scene had been added. As sad as I was that it was over, I was so relieved that I did not have to actually film anymore. I wanted to make sure that I would be unable to, if called. My mom gave me money then and there and said I could go do what I wanted.
“Surprise me,” she said.
I was thrilled with that freedom and went to a local salon. I told the woman to cut it all off and she gave me a shapeless bob. I really didn’t care what my hair looked like. To me it was liberating to be able to turn my head from left to right and have my hair swing back and forth past each shoulder. I was excited about how light and released I felt. This was a seeming act of rebellion and I felt freed. I would not follow up this act in any way for decades.
Two days after we wrapped, Mom and I boarded a plane to New York. I cried the entire plane ride “home.” I instantly missed everyone and felt I had not said good-bye to everyone enough. It felt like a death. I had never felt more disoriented or homesick in my life. I was confused by my feelings but knew they were quite real. Going back into the real world and my real life would be like reentering Earth’s atmosphere after going to outer space.
Once in New York City I couldn’t shake my depression. Mom tried to comfort me by saying we would keep in touch with people, but somehow I knew that would not be the case. I felt drained and tired and a bit confused. Together, Mom and I made the decision that we were done. I would not be filming any more movies. The entire experience, and the toll it took to endure and then readapt to real life, was too much to take.
Chapter Six
Fuck ’Em If They Can’t Handle It
Once I returned to New York it was time to go back to school. This year I was starting junior high in a brand-new school. I had only attended schools so far on the Upper East Side. I had gone to the Everett School through the second grade until it closed. From third through sixth grade I went to the Lenox School. It was an all-girls school and would stay that way until 1974. It was a wonderful school and academically superior to my next school.
Mom, however, did not want me to continue at an all-girls school because she said she believed it was important for girls and boys to be friends and not socially intimidated by one another. I adored Lenox and still have a friend I hold dear to my heart from those years. But Mom insisted. The natural progression for me—especially because my dad was paying my tuition—was for me to go to a Spence, Brearley, or Chapin, all legendary and traditional girls’ schools, but Mom wanted me to have a coed education. So after wrapping Pretty Baby and right after returning to New York, I enrolled at the New Lincoln School. New Lincoln was a coed school known for its diversity. I remained there and floundered for two years. We had no uniforms and the curriculum was characteristic of the seventies.
Going to a new school was both a relief and in ways frightful. The frightful part came fir
st in the form of a pair of gauchos. Because I was attending a school that did not require uniforms, a first for me, I needed practically an entirely new wardrobe. Mom took me shopping and we picked out clothes that would be fitting for a school in England. She took me to thrift shops for my clothes and proceeded to amass a wardrobe of wool vests, tweed jackets, corduroy gauchos, plaid skirts, white shirts, and of all things . . . dickies! She might as well have included a cabby hat.
I followed her lead, as usual, and got excited about looking smart and stylish for my first day of school. I chose the gauchos and a white shirt and vest, finished off with penny loafers. I walked proudly into my first day of seventh grade in an outfit straight out of the musical Newsies. I took one look at the jeans-clad, ripped-T-shirt-wearing hippie kids and wanted to run. I couldn’t believe Mom let me go to this school dressed like I should have been on a street corner yelling out headlines. I was so embarrassed and mad that when I got home I said I looked stupid and that everybody made fun of me, and I refused to wear any of the clothes Mom bought me ever again. She didn’t fight me and even bought me the Frye boots I eventually begged for and wore almost every day. I’d tuck my blue jeans into my Frye boots and I finally fit in.
During this time Mom and I began putting together a book called The Brooke Book, which consisted of photos of me, my writings and poetry, and various tidbits about my mother’s prized baby girl. She worked on the book with her longtime friend John Holland, who was a hairdresser in the city. I loved John and laughed a lot with him. He and Mom believed I was “special” and that a book about me would actually sell. They worked on it a while, found a publisher, Pocket Books, and planned to release it around the time Pretty Baby hit the theatres.
The first few months of school, I made some very good friends but I struggled in my classes. The school was way too progressive for me, and the kids were much more mature. We were still living on Seventy-Third Street and I would walk to school every day with my mother. Just like the years before, mornings with my mother, before she started drinking, were once again the best times. She would pick me up in the afternoons, and the moment I looked at her face, I could tell. She’d look at me as if I were accusing her of doing the exact thing that she was doing. But I didn’t have the guts to say this to her on the walks to school because I didn’t want to ruin the one time a day I knew she would be most lucid. Even a hangover was a welcome relief from who she was when she drank.
Enough time had passed and the negative parts of Pretty Baby had all but been forgotten. I remained sought after for movies. I soon got an offer to be in a movie called Tilt starring Charles Durning. I would be playing a young pinball whiz who runs away from home to gamble by playing pinball.
Even though my mother and I had sworn I was done with movies, some time had passed and this project could not have seemed more different from Pretty Baby in terms of tone, time period, and duration of filming—only a few weeks in November and December 1977. Plus, this one sounded fun and we could use the money. But was it the right move for me, careerwise? My mother had no real long-term plan for my career, nor did she consider the quality of the projects or the directors. She appreciated the beauty of Pretty Baby but seemed unable to turn down projects just because they didn’t carry the same artistic weight.
Did it not occur to her that following up a movie of the caliber of Pretty Baby with one being guided by a first-time American director might not have been such a smart move? There didn’t seem to be a great deal of thought put into any of it beyond the question of money and the possibility of adventure. It seemed that my mom made many of my career choices based on everything but the creative factors.
To this day I remain shocked at her lack of commitment to craft. She truly had exquisite taste in the cinema we watched, but those parameters never seemed to consistently apply to me and the work I was doing or could be doing.
This absence of commitment to becoming a cultivated actor was perpetuated and supported over the years. It was easy to do because I was always busy working on something, so we could justify that I was successful and getting better. Two prominent film directors hired me because they did not want a studied thespian but an untapped resource. I had been labeled a “raw talent.” Was raw talent supposed to become “studied”? Wouldn’t that contradict the situation? And yet how was it supposed to be nurtured? Mom did not have a clue.
When working with directors like Louis Malle or, later, Franco Zeffirelli, I would trust them completely to spend time actually directing me. I knew they would not finish a scene until they were satisfied.
Later, I thought that because I knew I wanted to be an actress, Mom’s goal was for me to be a cultivated one. She convinced me that work led to work and it would all come together, but I believe people became confused as to what I was. In high school, while I was dreaming of being in Merchant Ivory movies, Mom seemed to have had little focus beyond keeping me in the public eye and maintaining a name the world knew. I think Mom’s goal was for me to be a movie star and for us to earn enough money to be wealthy. Fame to her was not a bad thing but it opened doors. She associated it with power. We both worked very hard for the money we had but not for the clarity of a career.
I am rather conflicted by it all. I appreciate that my work did not take precedence over my young life. Yet this attitude also seemed to keep me from committing to my work in a way imperative for growth and to cause a lack of clarity as to what I really was.
As a result, I never researched or deeply contemplated the characters I played, either. I learned my lines right before bed the night before and sometimes even on the day. I have a photographic memory, so memorization came easily. Mom never discussed the lives of the characters I portrayed. I never studied acting or took it very seriously. The moment the director yelled “Cut,” I would jump out of character and back into silly kid-Brooke mode. I resented scenes in which I had to feel deep emotion. I wanted to pretend but not actually be affected by the emotions.
This was in a way healthy for a girl my age with my acute innocence but would take a toll on my talent. I just didn’t take any of it too seriously. I thought all the actors who moped around or stayed in character all day were missing out on the fun it was to make movies.
But in the end, I feel my talent suffered. It would not be until years later that I recognized that I deeply wanted to be an actress and that I saw the beauty in identifying with the characters I played. My focus shifted slowly toward wanting to improve my ability. As I grew older, being respected for the quality of my work became my priority. As I matured, it all became a matter of perspective and balance. Whereas I had previously thought it a waste of time and embarrassing, I began to value the deeper levels of acting. I found freedom in detaching from everything to focus on a character. This would not happen until years later, however.
But back in 1977, I was too young to think in terms of a creative next move filmwise. But the sound of spending two months in sunny Santa Cruz, where I’d be eating Butterfingers and playing pinball, sounded a lot better than staying in New York, getting C’s on tests, and being still somewhat socially awkward. Plus, I’d heard I’d have two pinball machines in the house we’d rent. It sounded like a vacation. I reconsidered my original position of never again doing another movie.
It’s funny how Mom’s stringent rules on my missing school changed just as I was entering my most important years of education. Just when my actual presence in school should have mattered, Mom decided that it made sense to leave for a few months at a time. But I didn’t mind—I wasn’t doing that well in my classes anyway! On set I would have a social worker and a tutor and I could get my assignments from my school. It might even be a positive thing, almost like being homeschooled. In addition, as an A-plus student in ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics), the only class in which I seemed to currently excel, I was secretly hoping that being away from New York would inspire my mother to curb the booze. Oh, how I continued to hang on
to that persistent dream.
Mom and I packed up and headed out to Santa Cruz, California, and settled into a big wooden ranch-style house on a quaint street. Inside the living room sat the promised two pinball machines. One was Bally and the other a Williams. I was thrilled. I played during every free moment I had and became quite good. I had the mechanic set my tilt feature to be very delicate so as to make the game harder for me. I started to get very competitive but it was never against anybody else. I was always going up against my highest score.
I’d practice and practice, but at the time I had a bad temper in general and had always been a sore loser. I hated not winning, and if I made what I considered a stupid mistake, I often took it out on the machine. I once got so mad at myself for not playing well that I smashed my flat hands on the surface of the machine and screamed. Can anyone say “projection”?! Mom got so angry at me for displaying such a temper that she sent me directly to bed.
Even then I found it funny how conventional ways of parenting seemed so ill fitting on Mom. She typically didn’t just ground me or send me to my room. No, she’d pour Yoo-hoo down the toilet or wake me up in the middle of the night and get me out of bed for no real reason. And on this particularly frustrating pinball evening, that was her exact punishment of choice. After sending me to my room, she continued to drink with friends, then suddenly decided to wake me up and force me into the living room. By now it was extremely late and I had fallen asleep on the top bunk of the dark-painted pine bunk bed. She threw open the door and told me to come out now. She told me to sit on the brown velvet couch in the living room and stare at the pinball machine. She wouldn’t allow me to play but made me just sit there, looking at it and thinking about how not to get so angry. Well, this just made me angrier, quite honestly. It felt crazy to me, but I admittedly never smashed my hands on top of the machine again. Once more Mom’s behavior was reinforced.
There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me Page 10