Doris Day was classy. She was also orange. Back in the '50s and early '60s, when she starred in those legendary romantic comedies and musicals like Pillow Talk, her appeal was all about being bouncy and squeaky clean, the blonde with the megawatt smile. Now nearing fifty, she'd adjusted her image to good-natured, sporty sun worshipper, and in an effort to always appear tan and fabulous, she used some kind of terra cotta-hued makeup. However, it wouldn't look right to cut from her (color of adobe) to me (normal flesh tone) and back to her (color of adobe). We'd both look funny, but she'd look worse. They remedied that by making me tanner.
The first morning I was going to work with Doris, I sat down in the makeup chair and was told, "Get ready, we're going to ruddy you up, honey!" And they did, until Doris and I almost matched. There was less difference in our coloring now, but on camera, Doris always looked just a little bit tanner, just that much healthier than anyone else around! It struck me as odd but interesting, and an early lesson in the technical instruction on just what makeup could achieve.
Sometimes, I would learn, being the first name on the call sheet manifested less charitable impressions. When I shot a guest role on a lawyer series called The D.A., I found myself acting opposite Robert Conrad, at that time a big television star from his role as the wisecracking gunslinger James West on The Wild Wild West. My part on the episode was that of a hippie who for some reason was in a swimming hole, supposedly nude. It was wintertime and we shot this outdoor scene on the Universal back lot, where there was a big pond. They tried to heat it up, but the water was still so numbingly cold that by the time they finally got the footage they needed, I was chilled to the marrow and shaking so hard I couldn't stop. As soon as I stepped out of the water, the costumer wrapped me in a quilted piano blanket and, pointing toward a limousine parked nearby, said, "Go get in the car, go get in the car!"
Happily! I ran to it, leapt in, and no sooner had I settled myself into the backseat when the door flew open and Robert Conrad's head popped in.
"Hey," he barked. "This is my car."
Damn. Hippies got no respect.
As it turned out, none of the networks was interested in picking up Young Love. Back before I'd shot the pilot, Jack told me that if the spin-off didn't work, there was yet another series that was ready to cast me, and if that fell through, there was yet another one after that. So no matter what happened, I was guaranteed a show. Okay, that sounds great; I'm on a roll! But they didn't happen. Each one fell through. Another lesson. Unless I am standing on the set with a script and someone is yelling "Action!" I don't have the job.
So now I'm an unemployed young single mother with time on her hands and no one to tell her what to do. Teddy was about three and a half, Eva about one and a half, and when we weren't reading stories, much of their playtime was spent romping with the many neighbor children. I was by far the youngest mom around, certainly the least mature, and most likely to be out there playing with the children. I remember washing dishes one day, watching the kids out the kitchen window. It overlooked the driveway and I could see about six little ones, Teddy and Eva among them, hustling about with water balloons. I hooted out the window at them; they jumped in surprise and heaved a couple of filled balloons at me in retaliation, which exploded on the window screen, soaking my shirt and face. I roared and leapt out the back door, chased them around, then grabbed the garden hose they'd been using. They fled up the drive, laughing and screaming, ran all the way around the house and back into the kitchen, confident they were safe. I raced after them into the kitchen, hose bent in half so no water could come out, where we had a standoff. They had one more balloon. I had the hose. They threw the balloon. I unbent the hose and began squirting them. We were all shrieking! I don't think any of us could believe I'd actually hose them in the house but it was the most freeing, reckless, fantastic thing I'd ever done. My house was damp for weeks but I was the Wyatt Earp of the neighborhood.
The kids would see their dad periodically. After our divorce, Bob's fortunes took a sharp downward turn. I would have loved it if he could have taken the kids during my occasional jobs, but for a while he was basically living out of his truck. I opted for leaving the children with a sweet neighbor family with six children when I worked. It was difficult for Bob and the kids to spend time together. I know the kids missed him but I was ill prepared to know how to make it easier for them or him. When my mother and father divorced, Whitney rarely spoke to Tom. When he came to pick us up she'd have Jack or one of us kids answer the door and my father never came in the house. It was all fairly antiseptic. I actually believe my mother added a canopy to our front doorstep on Whitley Terrace so in case of rain there would still be no need to invite my father in. I basically learned, when you divorce them, you kill them. I didn't question it. It seemed to work for everyone. I never heard my father complain. I accepted those were the rules of divorce. I myself followed those same guidelines. I had feelings about it, but I certainly never examined them.
In the early '70s, hippie characters were becoming popular on mainstream television and I was casting-perfect with my long blond hair, big eyes, and soft voice. If a casting director needed to find someone to wear a headband and a dress made from an Indian-print bedspread, it wasn't exactly a stretch to imagine me in the part. I was an all-purpose hippie. On an episode of The Partridge Family called "Where Do Mermaids Go?" I played Jenny, a backpack- and sleeping-bag-toting hippie girl who appears to be penniless but is secretly ... a benevolent heiress. In predictable sitcom style, Jenny teaches the Partridges how difficult it is when people are interested in you only for your money. (As if they didn't know.) Lessons are learned all around. Roll end credits.
In doing this show, I reconnected with and started dating David Cassidy, the star of The Partridge Family. We might have met before the show but I'm not sure; I'd been hearing his name for years because his mother, Evelyn Ward, and her new husband, Elliot Silverstein, were friends with Whitney and Jack. I felt like David and I had a history together.
David was a perfect teen idol and could ignite hysteria by entering a room, so we rarely went anywhere in public. When my brother Dick heard that David and I were an item, he drily asked, "Do you know how many twelve-year-olds wish they could trade places with you?"
Cassidy was a very sweet guy and we laughed a lot together. It was a lark for me while it lasted. I wasn't interested in a serious relationship, but I found David very touching. I can't tell you exactly how we ended, but I think it had to do with him flying around the country, performing at sold-out concerts, and my reading about him being with other women. He was three years younger than I and doing what came with his rock star territory, which was fine. There was just nothing for me there.
In the meantime, I was making my feature film debut in the horror sequel Ben. The idea behind Ben was to capitalize on the surprisingly successful Willard, a weird little drama about a young man who cultivates a rat army that eventually turns on him. The sequel concerned another frail, lonely protagonist--this time a little boy--whose only friend is a rat he names Ben. Sadly, the boy's pet is evil and possesses telepathic powers that allow him to rally swarms of other rats to assist him in taking control of Los Angeles, as rats are wont to do, I imagine. Some film executive heard a pitch about rats taking over Los Angeles and thought he had a hit on his hands. In the end, the film is mostly remembered because Michael Jackson sang the theme song; not only was Ben his first number one song as a solo artist, it was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe. Not bad for a love song about a rat. To fans of the genre, Ben was too hokey to capture much of the creeping fear generated by its predecessor. But I loved making it.
In one of my favorite scenes, the little boy discovers that the Board of Health is out to destroy Ben and he heads down into an underground sewer to warn him. My character, the boy's older sister, follows him into the darkness and is attacked by a mob of rats.
In retrospect, the special effects used in this scene seemed hilariously low-tech, sort
of the grand-scale version of something you'd see in an elementary school play today. The special effects guys had boxes full of stuffed rats in varying sizes and colors. Some looked phony, others were real taxidermied rats. They fastened them to me with varying lengths of string so when I moved, the rats would swing around somewhat. For the big rodent-swarm moment, I was supposed to crouch down and look into the opening of a pseudo-sewage pipe, facing the camera. The sewer, dressed to look revoltingly filthy and solicit "eews" from the audience when I fall in it, was just peat moss and bits of fake garbage. On "Action!" a bunch of real live rats were released down the pipe toward me and at a given point the camera found me being attacked by rats, all of them looking very threatening and disgusting. I screamed, thrashing about wildly in terror, which meant my little tethered vermin passengers were thrashing wildly, too. Ah, we could taste the Oscar.
The other exciting part about Ben was that I was paid $5,000 for my week of work. That was the most money I'd ever made! I was going to be moving into a larger house in Sherman Oaks, which was great but was lacking in some major essentials. With my big paycheck, I went out and in one day bought a washing machine, a dryer, a television set, and a freezer. I was the appliance queen!
When it came to jobs, I never worried about career advancement, I just wanted to get paid. My mother always seemed to feel she needed to subscribe to whatever Hollywood's rules were--predominantly, in the '50s and '60s, always be young and beautiful and happy. I felt the pressure wore her down, brought her disappointment, and made her bitter. It's an uphill battle; who can always be young, beautiful, and happy? I think I tried to be the anti-Whitney. Sure, I always tried to look my best, but I think my rebellion focused on the honesty. I'm sure I startled more than one casting director when I'd walk into an audition room, stick out my hand, and say, "Hello, my name is Meredith Baxter. I'm twenty-four and I have two children." This was probably more for me than for them. I wanted to remember who I was. Also I didn't want to start some fantasy about myself that I'd have to live up to the rest of my life.
I was so excited no matter what work Jack found for me. During a lull when I wasn't getting hired for anything, Jack arranged for me to work for director Milton Katselas, who would go on to become a very famous director and popular acting coach in Hollywood. Katselas was in preproduction on the Screen Gems lot for the movie version of the Broadway play Butterflies Are Free, about the relationship between an overly protected young blind man and the pretty, aimless young girl next door who befriends him. Katselas was screen-testing actors for the male lead, and they needed someone to play the flighty airhead neighbor girl opposite the various guys trying out. I got hired for $50 a week to rehearse and test with these actors.
What a terrific gift this turned out to be. I got to work with this amazing director, who had studied acting with Lee Strasberg and apprenticed with Elia Kazan. He'd work for days with a new actor, helping him find his strengths so that he'd be his very best in the screen test. I got to spend downtime alone with Milton, going to lunch or dinner, talking about which actor we favored and why, talking about the importance of listening, discussing how to find what a character wanted. He was equally helpful in guiding me to be as alive and vibrant as possible so as to enhance each young man's performance; I came to understand that good acting is also performing a service. Milton lit a fire under me about acting that until now had been barely smoldering. Yes, I decided, I think this is what I want to do, not just to support my family but to really pursue it as a craft.
I'd been working with Milton for a couple of weeks when for some reason, a different light went on ..."Oh oh oh, I have the part!!" For a couple of days I was so excited. This was great because I'd worked so hard. Then that light blinked out. I'm sure I'd been told, but somehow I never grasped the fact that Goldie Hawn had been cast in the part months before and I was just standing in for her for the screen tests because she didn't do those. I felt so stupid, afraid I'd made a fool of myself in front of Milton by acting so chatty and confident, when I was really just a nobody. I'd gone and lost a part I wasn't even up for. Sigh. But, here's the great thing: About fifteen years later, when I was appearing in the comedy Vanities at the then Westwood Playhouse in Los Angeles, Milton was called in as a secret undercover director to save our show. The show was in deep doo-doo, there was dissension among the three women in the cast, we were all going to walk if they didn't replace the original director, and at the same time the show was in preparation to tape from the stage for HBO, one of the first productions to do this. So the theater managers brought Milton Katselas into the chaos (by that time he was a heavyweight director) as our stealth (for political reasons) savior. He was great and as happy to see me as I, him. He indeed saved our show with grace, gentility, and humor.
For all my disappointment and unfounded surprise at not being cast in Butterflies Are Free, there was a reason for me to have been at Screen Gems. As I was leaving one afternoon, about to get into my car, I was approached by the legendary casting director Renee Valente. She asked me if I'd be interested in reading a script for a new sitcom called Bridget Loves Bernie, about a wealthy Irish Catholic girl who marries a working-class Jewish cabdriver. Was she kidding? Was I interested? Were we doing business in the parking lot?
I never even auditioned for the part of Bridget; they just offered it to me. Now, that had never happened to me before. For years I'd always assumed that I got the part because someone had seen me hanging around Screen Gems for weeks or that someone had seen my screen test footage. But as it turns out, Fred Silverman, then a young vice president of programming at CBS, remembered me from the Doris Day Young Love pilot. I figure he told the Bridget Loves Bernie casting department, "Get me that orange girl!"
Chapter 6
Bridget Loves Bernie.
The media always claimed that Bridget Loves Bernie was inspired by Abie's Irish Rose, Anne Nichols's popular Broadway stage play and radio series about the romance between a wealthy Irish Catholic girl and a working-class Jewish boy. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet could have been credited as well. Bernard Slade, who wrote and produced Bridget, told me that it was his own personal story. The premise of Bridget Loves Bernie involves star-crossed lovers whose parents object to their union. In it, I played Irish Catholic elementary schoolteacher Bridget Theresa Mary Colleen Fitzgerald (daughter of upper-crust, town-house-living New Yorkers Walter and Amy Fitzgerald), who meets and instantly falls for Jewish cabdriver and aspiring playwright Bernie Steinberg (the son of blue-collar, Lower East Side delicatessen owners Sam and Sophie Steinberg). The couple's decision to marry in a civil ceremony happens so quickly that neither family can intervene, but each clan is equally convinced of the unsuitability of its child's choice in mate. Bridget and Bernie, intoxicated with each other, are merely amused by their parents' religious intolerance. Bickering made up the comedy and the conflict, but love won out by the end of every episode.
I met then thirty-two-year-old David Birney, who was cast as Bernie, at the initial table reading. On the first day of work David and I had lunch on the patio in front of the stage on the Screen Gems lot. At the end of the week's shooting, the company flew us to Manhattan for a few days to shoot the exterior street scenes. David and I ate a romantic candlelit French provincial dinner at Le Champignon, and by the end of our time in New York, we were sleeping together.
Having never been to New York before, I had arrived early, with one day to play in the city before starting work. I'd never spent time alone before. I'd lived at home, then with just Bob, then with Bob and two little ones, then just me with the little ones. Now I had one bright, cold spring day all to myself. CBS had put us up at the Essex House, right on Central Park South, and first thing in the morning I ran over to the park. I climbed out onto some large boulders in one of the ponds and watched the ducks. I'd splurged and bought my first camera just for this trip and sat there taking pictures of ducks or of my bare feet on the rocks, which cast long morning shadows into the water. The whole concept
of this huge mass of parkland in the middle of a city was dizzying and incomprehensible to me. As an unworldly twenty-five-year-old, I'd always thought of New York as an endless slab of concrete, yet I sat in a lush oasis with the spectacular skyline barely visible through the treetops. I remember lazing there in the sun, feeling new and very full, very centered, very happy in my life. I had a job. I loved living as a single woman. I loved spending my days playing with my kids and reading. I felt like I was getting stronger; I was self-supporting, starting to feel a little confidence. And then I got involved with David.
I think early on I'd decided that the answer (to success? happiness? driving?) was having a man at the wheel. Jack had always been firmly at the wheel, strong and decisive, which is why I think Whitney chose him. So there was David, a majorly charming guy and very attractive: dark-haired, intense, lithe, and graceful. And he paid attention to me. But I was most attracted to how erudite he seemed to be; he had so much confidence, he had opinions, he'd traveled, he knew things. He listened to Bach and Mozart and quoted passages from Yeats and Shakespeare. Okay, I thought that was a little pompous and if I'd gone to college I probably wouldn't have been so impressed, but at the same time I was dazzled; this was so outside my experience. He had a good education: on a scholarship at Dartmouth he graduated with honors in English literature and then later got his master's in theater arts from UCLA. When he was drafted into the Vietnam War, he had the good fortune to be assigned to the Second U.S. Army Showmobile and spent most of his tour singing and dancing in the Army Special Services variety show; there was no danger on the horizon for him.
Untied Page 9