High On Arrival

by Mackenzie Phillips

  Barbara was Julie’s clingy, perky, saccharine-sweet little sister. In Julie’s mind poor Barbie needed to be torn up and spit out on a daily basis. Valerie was straight out of Granada Hills, just as bubbly, clean, and eager as Barbara. Val’s innocence only made me feel more sophisticated, as I felt with most people my age. But I wasn’t all confidence. After all, I was still a teenager and what teenager wouldn’t feel ugly next to Val? My bad skin was a particular source of angst. Norman Lear, the producer, didn’t want me to wear much makeup on the show because my skin was “teenage.” Meanwhile Val had perfect, glowing skin that I couldn’t help envying.

  I don’t remember re-rehearsing, reshooting, rewatching, or recelebrating the new pilot that included Val as Barbara any more than I remember the first go-round, but CBS was satisfied with the new ensemble and decided to put the show on the air.

  That first season we shot fifteen episodes of the show, and we adopted a regular work schedule similar to that of most sitcoms. We shot one episode per week. On Monday we got the script for that week’s show. We did a “table read,” running our lines so the writers could see what was and wasn’t working. Bonnie felt a responsibility to the character and always gave a million notes on the scripts. She’d say, “Ann would object to this behavior from the girls,” or she’d point out that Ann wouldn’t laugh off every single one of the slimy superintendent Schneider’s advances, day after day. At some point Ann had to try to put a stop to it. Bonnie wanted to bring Ann’s ex-husband, Ed Cooper, played by Joseph Campanella, into the show more in order to highlight the conflicts that arose there. Above all, she didn’t want it to be sitcom fluff—she wanted it to deal honestly with the struggles and truths of raising two teenagers as a single mother. She never gave up. She drove the producers nuts. But she absolutely made the show better.

  I had enormous respect for Bonnie’s passion, but I was young and knew my place. Most of my notes were suggestions for how to make Julie’s lines funnier or tweaks to her voice or reactions. I was from a broken family, so this was familiar territory for me. Sometimes, as I got the hang of things, I’d make suggestions about how scenes could be shot. Once, for a tough shot where they needed to look into our apartment but also needed a turnaround shot to see the wall, I suggested that they cut a hole in the wall. The director, Alan Rafkin, gave me the unofficial “Director of the Week” award for that idea.

  After two days of rehearsal, on Thursday, we’d move to the soundstage, where the crew would start blocking the scenes for the cameras. This was tedious. We had to repeat scenes over and over so they could time the camera moves up in the director’s booth. I was a teenager about it, letting my boredom show, but I never caused problems. My mother’s instructions to be kind and polite to everyone came to the surface on the set. In an industry where some actors see themselves at the top of a hierarchy, I never saw it that way. I was always equally friendly with cast, crew, and guest actors. I welcomed strange faces and was happy to hang out with whoever was around. To this day, if I run into an actor who was an extra on the show, or a grip, or a gofer, he or she invariably tells me that I made him or her feel like a human being. Later there was much to regret about my behavior during my years on the show, but I was never, ever a diva.

  Friday nights we taped the show before a live studio audience. In the afternoon, after a run-through, we’d get into wardrobe. I always made sure Julie looked cool. Often, I’d wear my own clothes—the opening credits had me in my own forest green leotard and tights doing yoga. I’d wear bell-bottom Landlubber jeans with Kork-Ease shoes—huge wedgie platforms with crisscross straps that I had in both pink and red. Under the strappy platforms I’d wear Hot Sox—bright socks with stripes, stars, or rainbow colors. I was the tallest woman in the cast by far, so you’d think those platforms would be verboten, but they liked to joke about my height and weight in the scripts. Pat Harrington as Schneider would tease me that if I turned sideways in the shower I’d disappear, or he’d call me “a Q-tip with eyes.”

  We taped the show in front of the studio audience twice— actually in front of two different studio audiences—so that they’d have a couple different takes to choose from when they were editing the show. Performing in front of a live audience never bothered me—I finally had the attention I’d always wanted—and it taught me how to be a better actor. There is no faster way to learn what is working and what isn’t. We could tweak a line through infinite rehearsals, but the true test was simple: did the audience laugh? Performing live taught me the importance of good timing.

  Aunt Rosie was my on-set guardian. She was with me all day every day. My cousin Patty worked in wardrobe, and Nancy was my stand-in. All three of them were often in the studio audience to applaud me. On Sunday nights at eight we would watch the show at home together, often with friends, on CBS. (This was pre-VCR, pre-TiVo, in the hard-core days of appointment television.)

  I read a lot on the set. My father had given me and my brother Jeffrey a list of must-read books for Phillips children. He wanted his children to be able to discuss literature and art. I dutifully read all of the books on the list, cover to cover, but come to think of it, I don’t remember ever talking to Dad about any of them. The list included Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Comedians by Graham Greene, works by Byron and Shelley, and Cosmic Consciousness: A Study of the Evolution of the Human Mind, which was written by Richard Maurice Bucke in 1901. Also on the list were The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and Orlando by Virginia Woolf, both of which deal with characters who are determined not to grow old. It was a notion that appealed to my father so much that he and Gen gave my brother Tam the middle name Orlando.

  One time I was reading off-list—Dune by Frank Herbert— and Aunt Rosie picked it up while I was busy rehearsing and became engrossed. During my breaks I took it back, but Rosie took it back up while I was working. Every time I read a great book, I hate putting it down because it feels like the story will go on without me. As I rehearsed I kept thinking about my book in Rosie’s hands, wondering what was happening on the planet Arrakis. Late in the afternoon, I glanced over at Rosie to see if I could tell by the look on her face whether ill had befallen the hero, Paul. For the first time all day she wasn’t buried in the book. Dune was on her lap and she was chatting with Valerie’s mother, Nancy. A surge of tenderness toward Aunt Rosie swelled up in me. She had given up having a life to sit on the set with me day in and day out. She was always there, a constant. I loved her for that and more.

  Having family around bore quite a contrast to the days of American Graffiti, when I’d shown up in San Francisco all by myself. But Dad was still Dad. I was dying for him to see a taping of the show, and one Friday he and Genevieve said they’d come. I asked Pat Palmer, the producer, to reserve two seats for them and she taped off two chairs. When the warm-up comedian went out to get the audience riled up for the upcoming show, I peeked out from behind the curtain. The audience was full, except for two empty chairs. Dad and Gen were late. The comedian finished and we came out onstage to tape the first scene. I snuck a glance at the audience. The seats were still empty. All night, through both tapings, I kept waiting for my father, hoping he was going to show up, believing against all reason that he would. But he never showed. This happened many times.

  Maybe Dad wasn’t eager to see the show, but others were. We’d go to work on Monday mornings and they’d give us the overnights—the ratings for the night before. Back in those days there were only five networks, no cable, no computers competing for audience share. We regularly had an audience of around twelve million people—more than twenty percent of the total audience. It was huge. We were often the number one show of the week. The show was in the top ten, or close to it, for most of its run.

  When I watch episodes of the show now, I cringe at my overacting. Why didn’t anybody say anything to me? But I guess the high ratings prove that broad, over-the-top comedy was the sitcom style at the time. I do remember Alan Rafkin saying things to Val like, “Valerie, can you
hold up your hand so we know you’re acting?” She took a lot of shit. It was not a critically acclaimed show, but with numbers like ours nobody cared much. The powers that be just said, “Oh, yeah, right, but America loved it.” Our show was another feather in Norman Lear’s cap.

  Val and I both went to school on set. We were supposed to do four hours of schoolwork per day, in twenty-minute increments or longer. I kept the same on-set teacher, Gladys Hirsh, from American Graffiti through all of One Day at a Time. I loved the Waldorf curriculum at Highland Hall and at first brought it with me, but Highland Hall didn’t want a working student who only came to school during hiatus, our three-month break from shooting the show. So when we were on hiatus I started going to Hollywood Professional School while Val went back to public high school.

  Hollywood Professional School was an odd place on Hollywood Boulevard a couple blocks east of Western. It was in a rank, dangerous part of Hollywood, a strange place for a school. The building was very old, with cement floors painted institutional gray and green. It was not fancy.

  The students were all kids who thought they were going to be stars: ice skaters, jugglers, kids who did commercials, wannabes, and, randomly, Leif Garrett. One girl kept spray paint and a rolled-up sock in her locker. She’d spray the sock and huff the paint.

  Classes took place from 8:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. so kids could go on auditions in the afternoon. The teachers were old and crazy. Mrs. Anderson, the creative writing teacher, regularly went off on tangents about her personal life in the middle of class. She’d say, “That reminds me of when I was in Mexico, there was a young man, he was beautiful …” and for the rest of the class we were hearing about rum drinks and coconuts. Meanwhile she criticized my stories for being too hard to believe. So much for “creative” writing.

  Our civics teacher was even worse. She had white-blond hair and wore more makeup than a showgirl. Her face shone as if she had a coating of Vaseline on her face. Her idea of teaching us civics was to require us to copy the entire glossary of the textbook verbatim. While we wrote away, she played belly-dancing music and walked around with finger cymbals on. Eventually she was arrested for prostitution in front of the school. For all my absences, hitchhiking, acid-influenced attendance, and hippie schooling, I’d always managed to be a good student. But Hollywood Professional School was a joke. I was like, “Are you kidding me, this is school?”

  Nobody, including me, was about to complain. Not that it would have mattered if we did. The school’s principal, Mrs. Mann, had a beautiful house in Beachwood Canyon. She liked to have big parties for all the students where we’d play kissing games.

  It was tricky to make friends at Hollywood Professional—we were all coming and going—but I did have a boyfriend. Two of my classmates were Andy and David Williams, identical twins who were nephews of the singer Andy Williams. They were lanky, with long, thick blond hair in matching shag cuts and strong noses. They were built like aristocrats. The twins wore turtlenecks with gabardine slacks, perfectly shined loafers, and matching Cartier watches with gold chains. They were musicians, trying to launch a twin-brother pop act that I don’t think ever went anywhere. Andy was my boyfriend the whole first year that One Day at a Time was on the air, but it must have been one of those early, token relationships where we spent most of our time socializing in groups and hanging out together at parties. My only surviving memory of the relationship is how spectacularly elegant Andy was and what he would one day say to me when it came to an end.

  Not long after I started working on One Day at a Time, I was invited to appear on the game show Hollywood Squares. I sat in the square next to the brilliant Paul Lynde. At Hollywood Squares they shot five episodes in a single day. The first time I did it everything went smoothly. Being a Square was fun—all the challenge of a game show but none of the pressure. When they invited me back again … and again, I was delighted. But before one of my subsequent appearances I ran into a little trouble.

  I may have been a professional all day long, but I was still a kid when I hung out with my brother. Jeffrey and I liked to play a game we called Bicycle. We’d lie down on the floor, put our feet up against each other’s feet, and bicycle as fast as we could. On this particular occasion—the night before I was due to tape Hollywood Squares—Jeffrey was over at our house and we had a Bicycle session that got a little rambunctious. Jeffrey’s foot slipped and he kicked me in the eye. I had a shiner the size of California.

  There was no way I could show up to Hollywood Squares with a black eye. Patty took one look at me and said, “Dr. Feelgood is your only hope.” Our own Dr. Feelgood was the family resource for speed prescriptions. Family, friends, and associates went to him every week. The girls would hide rolls of quarters in their underwear to make sure they “made weight” for stronger drugs. Dr. Feelgood was the next best thing to a miracle worker, so Patty brought me to him. I don’t know what he gave me, but the next day I was as good as new. Not exactly the life lesson I needed: it wouldn’t be the first time Dr. Feelgood gave me something to get me through another day.

  By day I was a prematurely employed young girl, throwing myself into the role of teen-dream Julie Cooper or going to school with my cute, clean boyfriend. On weekends I was living out Ann Romano’s worst nightmare. I smoked pot, drank wine, and took Quaaludes (and maybe some barbiturates). But Aunt Rosie carefully supervised the part of my life that took place within her field of vision. I went to work every day. On hiatus, I went to school every day. I didn’t party every night. Many a night Patty and I curled up next to each other in bed to read. For the most part I was doing what I thought most teenagers did— stretching the rules, experimenting, living through experience. It was fun, and I had no desire for the partying to escalate, no instinct that it was dangerous, no sense that it might lead to disaster.

  8

  After the first season of One Day at a Time aired, my father mentioned that I could spend the summer in London with him and Genevieve. Dad had a flat off Kings Road on Glebe Place. I leapt at the invitation—wherever Dad’s party was, I would follow.

  For the first couple days Dad and I sat around, mostly singing and doing coke. Then one afternoon Dad and Keith Richards (the Rolling Stone with a known heroin habit) came home and started crawling around on the floor looking for bits of heroin or cocaine. I helped. Still that same little girl who wanted to roll joints for Daddy’s friends. Finally, disappointed, they said they were going to go score. As they hurried out the door, they told me they’d meet me at Redlands, Keith’s house in the country, that night. A driver would soon arrive to pick me up. Then they left.

  I packed a small bag and waited. And waited. Nobody came. Hours passed and night fell and nobody came. I was a confident sixteen-year-old, but it was my first time in London. I hadn’t been there long and wasn’t remotely oriented to being in another country, alone, without cash or friends or keys or food in the refrigerator. Late that night I went to sleep with all the lights on, expecting Dad and Keith to walk through the door any minute.

  At three in the morning I woke up with a start. The power was out. The phone was dead. I was still alone in the flat. I found a single candle and lit it. I sat in front of my stepmother’s vanity table, and when I looked in the mirror I saw the distorted, spooky shadow of my face, lit by the candle below. It reminded me of the slumber-party game where you turn out the lights, hold a candle up to your chin, and chant “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” waiting for the ghost of a woman who murdered her children to appear. But different specters appeared to me that night.

  Here I was, waiting for Dad, again. He had abandoned me, I had found him, and now he had disappeared again. I knew full well that there was no guarantee that a driver would ever arrive or that Dad would walk back in that door. Why was he that way? What was it about me that made it so easy for him to leave? What was wrong with me? Was I invisible? Did I exist? I started writing in my diary, a thick blank book with a shiny silver cover. I wrote and wrote, in red ink by candlelight. Hour
s passed. So often my father had left me to fend for myself, but when I was younger it was an adventure. Now, in my melodramatic teenage mind, it was terrifying. I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. Nobody was coming to get me. I had been abandoned. Was I even there in the first place? Was I real or someone else’s dream? Was there anyone outside this flat? I was in a void, having lost everything but myself. It was like being dead.

  That night I took measure of my life for the first time, and it seemed to be nothing but a series of random events that dropped me into a hole. Dad was gone again, in pursuit of personal nirvana, but the pure hedonism he envisioned doesn’t exist. You always take others down with you. I try not to blame my father for being who he was, but he should have known or learned this. I think about my own son and I can’t imagine how anyone could desert a sixteen-year-old like that. And in the same instant I think about what I did to my son, and the deep regrets I have, and I know how someone can.

  I had been left, for the millionth time, told by my father’s actions that I was worthless and inconsequential, that I couldn’t count on anyone, that nobody cared what became of me, that I had to fend for myself and if I didn’t, well, that was my tough shit. If ever there was a potential turning point, a moment in my youth when I might have been angry at my father, blamed him for forgetting me time and time again, dismantled his power over me, this was the moment. But I loved—or, more accurately, yearned—for him too intensely to be angry or to dismiss him. Instead, I turned my anger inward, self-destructing. What was it about me that made it so easy for him to disappear? I looked at myself in the mirror and cried and cried.

  Days passed. I wrote in my journal, contemplating my own existence, page after page of distraught teenage fear and fury that would one day burn to ashes in a house fire. I ate some old bread and Marmite. I wept.