Copyright (c) 2011 by Meredith Baxter
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
All photos from the Meredith Baxter Collection unless otherwise credited.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-307-71932-4
Front jacket photograph: Marc Royce
v3.1
To Allan Manings
Author's Note
I have told the truth about my story as best I can recall and up to a point. There are a few names I have changed to ensure privacy. There are some incidents that have been truncated or eliminated because full disclosure is often tedious, dreary, and redundant.
A few of my children posited their opinion that for me to write about my life automatically meant I was writing about theirs, which I think they experienced as a form of trespass. So, although our lives are inextricably linked, I tried to limit telling my children's stories because, after all, those stories are not mine to tell. In truth, I felt awkward even writing about their feelings or perceptions, believing it was not my right to represent them with any particular slant. Consequently in this book, for the most part, I've avoided talking much about them at all, which belies that they were and are the center of my life; they have taught me great love, patience, and compassion, which have shaped me in the richest ways.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author's Note
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Photo Insert
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
On the night of November 31, 2009, I was sitting in the bathtub at the Four Seasons Hotel in midtown Manhattan, having a meltdown. The following morning I was supposed to go on the Today Show so I could come out on national television. Even my partner of four years, Nancy Locke, was concerned for me. Would it look like a pathetic career move? Would it look like a desperate bid for attention? Were there factions in my family that didn't yet know? How would people in the industry look at me now? Would I look foolish? Would my waning career be perceived as going up in a small ignoble puff of smoke? I was fraught with uncertainty.
It was the offer of two free tickets to the Caribbean a few weeks earlier on the inaugural voyage of Sweet, a lesbian cruise line, which had culminated in my sitting in this now lukewarm tub in New York City. The web series I was appearing in, We Have to Stop Now, would be filming more episodes on the cruise; would I like to join them and film some added scenes? I was a little wary of being so exposed on a lesbian cruise, but it took very little discussion for Nancy and me to decide we really wanted to go. So I called the show's producers, took a deep breath, and said, "We're in!"
We departed out of New Orleans and headed to Mexico, sailing right into Hurricane Ida. Our huge ocean liner was tossed around like a Coke can and Nancy and I just held on to each other for dear life but we made it through to Belize City, then to Honduras, then back to Cozumel. We had so much fun. Nancy and I kept it low key, reading, sitting in the sun, enjoying the day trips, meeting new people. I knew that there was press on board as well as a lot of cameras, but except for the few scenes I had to do, we steered clear of them. On the last night of the seven-day cruise, we saw our amazingly funny friend, comic Suzanne Westenhoefer, perform. At the end of her act, she looked out into the crowd and, echoing the words of gay rights activist Harvey Milk, said, "Come out. If you're not out, come out."
Okay ... that got me. I had been struggling with the idea for some time. I was on a lesbian cruise, but who was I really out to? I had been letting my friends and family know since 2003. But I wasn't out to the world; I always told myself I had too much at stake. At that moment, I looked at Nancy, my darling Nancy, who had been out for thirty years, and I just knew it was time.
That night, back in our cabin, I started flailing around for a plan. I'd put an ad in the newspaper! I was thinking it should be modest, sort of like a birth announcement, and it could say something like, "Hey ... Just thought I'd let you know I'm gay, (signed) Meredith Baxter."
We returned home to Los Angeles on Sunday, November 15. On Monday morning, I put a call into the office of my manager, Alan Iezman, to broach the idea of the coming-out process and what that might look like. Well, Alan had wanted to talk to me because he'd already gotten some calls from National Enquirer, Star, and the celebrity gossip website PerezHilton. They all knew that I was on the cruise, and they had photographs of me and Nancy. No! This was my worst nightmare!
My manager suggested I talk to Howard Bragman, a well-known Hollywood publicist who specialized in guiding celebrities through the coming-out process. Howard's first words were, "Well, aren't you full of surprises?" Then he said, "We have to take control of the story or you will have no say in it at all." He said, "We'll get you into People magazine and then we'll go to New York and you'll do the Today Show." No! This was horrible! This was even worse than the Enquirer!
What? No ad? A major network? A major publication? No, no, no. This isn't warranted! This was way over the top. But Howard was already moving. "First I have to see if the Today Show wants you." Fifteen minutes later, he called me back and said, "The Today Show wants you and they want you next week, so we have to get People magazine over to your house within the next few days." I didn't have time to react. This was appalling but--I just went on stunned autopilot. "Okay. Okay."
Cut back to me crying and now shivering in the Four Seasons bathtub. Why am I doing this? Why should anybody have to do this? I just wailed. I was going to make a most personal announcement on national television and people were going to say, "Her? Family Ties has been off the air for twenty years. Who cares?"
Then Nancy came in and talked to me as I wept. Nancy talked about the shame she felt when she first came out, how she hid being gay from those around her because she was scared how they would react. She told me how comforting it would have been to her back then to see someone like me, a known actress, someone people seemed to like, coming forward and being open about who they were.
Ah. This could be helpful? This was being of service? As long as I kept a tight focus on the bigger picture, it made what was about to happen much more meaningful and relevant, almost spiritual. Research has shown that when people have a friend or someone in their family who is gay, they seem more open to gay issues. All right, I haven't been in the limelight for a while, but people do still seem to respond to me. So maybe people will think, "Oh, Meredith. I like her! She's nonthreatening! She's friendly! She talks to you! So, she's gay! She was the same as she was before we knew; nothing has changed."
And perhaps, the next time those people will go to vote, they'll think about me and other gay people they know, and perhaps they won't so quickly vote away gay marriage rights; maybe they'll vote with real equality in mind.
And perhaps, for someone who's been fearful of coming out, this will give him or her courage to take the next step. Okay. I can do this.
I'd met Today Show host Matt Lauer back in 2008 when he interviewed Gary David Goldberg, the creator of Family T
ies, me, and the rest of the Family Ties cast for our 20 Years Later reunion. So, before the interview began, I asked for a few minutes with Matt. He couldn't have been lovelier to me. He said, "Boy, I didn't see this coming. I'm here with you, Meredith. This is fine. It's all going to be great."
When we were seated on the set, I looked out the window behind Matt where New Yorkers congregate outside the studio, waiting to watch the show, and they were all excitedly waving and yelling, "Hi!" NBC was pretaping my segment and, since this episode wasn't going to air for a couple of days, our conversation wasn't piped outside, but I couldn't help imagining a live TV scenario: the crowd would be watching and waving, trying to get my attention, and then I'd blurt out, "I'm a lesbian!" The smiles would collapse and the waving hands would quickly be stuffed back into pockets and whoosh, the crowd would disperse. That's what was going through my mind as the cameras started rolling.
Matt Lauer gave me a nice intro, something like, "She's one of the most beloved TV moms of all time" and "This morning she's going to disclose something." He looked at me expectantly and I was horrified. I might have said, "Don't you know? Do I have to say it??" After a bit of stammering I just spoke from my heart. I announced that I was a lesbian, that it had been a later-in-life discovery. I said I hadn't fought the discovery but embraced it, that it had clarified some aspects of my relationships with men. I told of my wonderful relationship with Nancy and the unqualified love and support I'd found in my family and friends. I said I felt that coming out like that, on the Today Show, was a political act and that perhaps knowing I was a lesbian might free people to be more generous and understanding of the rights of others in the gay, lesbian, and transgender community. I hadn't memorized anything, but I think I said everything I wanted to say. Then it was over and I wondered, "Did I just set myself on fire on national television?"
Nancy and I walked out of NBC into a gentle, calming winter drizzle, leaving all the hoopla behind us. We were high and shaky on the adrenaline of the morning. Strolling the city streets, huddled together under a large umbrella as taxis swooshed by, was the perfect antidote. We watched people ice-skate; we window-shopped; we lunched in a bistro; I bought some great cheap boots and then we wandered into Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue. It was packed with shoppers on each floor. Like everyone else, we tried on jewelry. I really liked a squarish silver ring with some letters stamped on it. It read T & Co. I didn't have my reading glasses with me--it looked like TACO, which I thought was a pretty whimsical touch for such a highfalutin outfit. Nancy found a similar ring, with the same letters, but round and convex; we bought each other rings to commemorate the day and wandered back out into the rain.
Over the next few weeks, I started to give some thought to writing about this experience. About two years earlier, the subject of my writing a book had been broached by someone I work with. So I toyed with doing something slim showing my paintings and drawings, and perhaps throw in some fab recipes and a few words of pithy, learned wisdom appropriate to each. I had even made a few selections from my artwork but never really moved beyond that because the project felt just a little lifeless and nonspecific. What would be different now? I didn't want to just write about the coming-out experience. I hoped I had more to offer than that. (Although, if you googled me, you'd think that announcing I was a lesbian was just about the only thing I'd ever done.) What have I learned in my sixty-three years? I'll tell you the truth, everything I know I learned in a 12-step program or therapy. So I decided I could talk about my life and how I changed my thinking.
As a child I was held captive by feelings of fear, shame, anger, loneliness, and a profound sense of being unloved. I developed a belief system about myself based on these feelings that shaped and directed the trajectory of my entire life. I was defined by that thinking and undone by it. Every decision and relationship was governed by it. I decided I wanted to write about where the belief system sprang from, the choices I made because of it, and how, slowly over time, it is metamorphosing. For years, I saw myself as a victim; I wanted you to see me as a victim too, because if I were a victim, then I wasn't responsible, was I? Learning to accept responsibility for myself and my choices has been a rough and often reluctant path to trudge but the rewards have been copious and surprising. Becoming healthier and more mature, I attract like people. I'm no longer looking for someone or something outside myself to make me okay; I'm discovering I'm just fine as I am.
It is a lifelong process, thank goodness, because I'd hate to think I had to be done anytime soon; I still have work to do. And it is a spiritual experience. I believe that when something as deeply ingrained as my belief system changes, it has to come from a power greater than me. Which, really, shouldn't have been hard to find.
Chapter 1
(Left to right) My parents, Nancy and Tom Baxter, with Brian, Richard, and me, 1947.
To know me, you must first know my mother, Nancy Ann Whitney. More than anything else, my mother wanted to be an actress--a famous actress--which in the 1950s was all about being young, sexy, and available. She was all that, and more. She had big blue eyes, alabaster skin, a heart-shaped face, a beautiful figure. She was just a knockout.
But my mother seemed to feel there was an obstacle to her making it in show business in Hollywood. Children. And she had three of them by the time she was twenty-three--my two older brothers, Dick and Brian, and me. The fact that we existed made her seem older than she was. Her solution was to have us call her by her new stage name, Whitney Blake. We were not to call her "Mommy" anymore. We were to call her Whitney. I think she was hoping if we called her that, people might assume she was our aunt or maybe an older sister.
I can remember coming home from first grade, walking through the front door of our little white Craftsman-style house on Indiana Avenue in South Pasadena, and calling out, "Mommy, I'm home!"
No answer. I was confused; her car was out front. I stood very still.
"Mommy, I'm home!"
Still nothing. Then I remembered.
"Whitney?"
"Yes, dear?" her musical voice rang out from the middle bedroom, where she kept a vanity table at which she'd do her makeup.
Although I believe she had no idea about the psychological impact this might have on her children, now that I'm older I realize that Whitney was probably just giving us what she got. Whitney's mother was born Martha Mae Wilkerson--my brothers and I called her Memaw. She was a scrappy, tough, smart, and wily survivor. She wasn't the soft, fuzzy type; she didn't coddle Whitney and she didn't coddle me. Whenever I would complain about my clothes, as girls do, Memaw would tell me in her dry, crackly voice, "When I was little I had a red dress and a blue dress. When I was wearin' the red dress, I washed and ironed the blue dress. When I was wearin' the blue dress, I washed and ironed the red one. I didn't have choices."
Memaw was from Arkansas and married five times over the course of her life. She kept burying husbands (and sometimes I think there should be some exhumations to find out why). Whitney was only six when her real dad, Harry C. Whitney, a Secret Service man who guarded President Woodrow Wilson, died from alcoholism. Memaw's replacement husbands came at such a clip that Whitney never formed much of an attachment to any of them.
One of her stepfathers, Al, patented a fitting for oil rigs--his last name was Wells, ironically. He and Memaw would drift from oil field to oil field around the country. Sometimes they'd drag Whitney and her younger brother, Buddy, along. Just as often, Memaw would leave her kids behind, once with a couple of former missionaries and another time with her elementary school teacher.
It wasn't until the fifth grade that Whitney discovered drama class, when the boy who was supposed to play Oberon in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream came down with a case of stage fright and she took over the role. From that day forward, Whitney realized that no matter what school she was in, the drama department would become home until Memaw announced it was time to pull up stakes and move again. Whitney said that the nearest thing she had to a real f
amily when she was growing up were the casts of the plays that she appeared in.
Whitney was instead devoted to her brothers and sisters of the theater. One story she delighted in telling was about the time she was appearing in a Pasadena City College production that had a furniture dilemma: one scene needed a table, chairs, and a couch for the set, and none could be located. On opening night, Memaw shows up to watch her daughter perform, and when the curtain rises, she sees her entire living room set onstage. How Whitney managed to get the furniture out of her mother's house without anyone noticing is one thing. To reveal it in such a fashion required real chutzpah, which Whitney had in spades.
So in a way, Whitney's maternal model was someone who put her ambition ahead of her maternal responsibilities, and that's how she was with us. Dick, Brian, and I didn't talk about it much; we just lived it. It's what was. My brother Dick, the eldest, is very philosophical about her. He says, "Well, she did the best she could." But I think Brian and I took her actions more personally. They really shaped me; I had a strong sense of having been abandoned by her, that she didn't want me, that she didn't want to be my mother.
My mother was so intent on becoming an actress that eventually even Memaw got on board and told her that after she graduated from high school, she'd support her financially for one year. After that she would be on her own. Whitney attended the lower division of Pasadena City College, a sort of accelerated high school program for students interested in the performing arts, and she helped out at the college radio station, which was where she met my father, Tom Baxter. Just after Whitney turned eighteen, she got her high school diploma, she and Tom got married, and Whitney was finally able to move away from her mother. My father supported his rapidly growing family as an engineer with the Southern Pacific Railroad and later as a sound engineer specializing in live radio and television.
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