Late one night we were standing out in the short driveway in front of a house he was renting in Beverly Glen, talking about the show. Now, I may have grown up around this world, but the truth back then was, I wasn't really invested in it beyond my immediate job; I had no fantasies built up around what it was or what it meant. David, though, had very lofty perceptions, and on this night he was going on and on, gathering steam about what television was, what it wasn't, and what it should be. A perfectly intelligent wish, granted, but what he was saying seemed to me to be so disconnected from the kind of show we were doing that his anger seemed misplaced, even crazy. We were making Bridget Loves Bernie, for crying out loud. It wasn't Masterpiece Theater.
Finally I said, "David! It's just television!"
And he knocked me down. It was so sudden and unexpected, I couldn't tell you which hand hit me, or even how hard. I do recall thinking, "I'd better not get up because he's going to hit me again." I don't think I was hurt much. I just lay there, flat, staring at his shoes. At the time, he always wore Florsheim zippered stack-heeled boots. Tonight he wore the black ones. Will I remember this night when he wears them again? I wondered. I could hear cars whip down the canyon of Beverly Glen. Did they see us? Did they think they were experiencing a Kitty Genovese moment? I considered staying on the ground, pretending I was dead, but that was improbable; I wasn't hit that hard.
I didn't understand. It was just a conversation. But for some reason he felt that I was undercutting his dreams or the work he was trying to do or somehow minimizing him. I wish I could have said to him, "You putz! Why is hitting me your response? Is there only room for your feelings?" But instead, the following morning, I went back to his house and apologized for being insensitive. And he graciously accepted my apology. I figured he'd gone to college, I hadn't; he must be right. His anger reflected a passionate opinion about something, an emotional investment. I didn't seem to have passionate opinions about many things. I think he had no patience with my uninformed opinion and he was just protecting his passions. I'd try to be smarter next time.
I assumed that his volatility had a lot to do with his childhood. Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Cleveland, Ohio, David was the eldest of four boys. His father, Edwin, was an FBI agent. Years later, David would always tell our kids, "What happens in this house, stays in this house," and I think that attitude had a lot to do with growing up with a privacy-obsessed dad.
This was the man that David just revered. I think he wanted to be him. Edwin was smart, had a great mind, wrote interesting letters, but when I met him, later on, I found him to be a cold motherfucker. Ed terrified me. He was a big man, around six feet and broad across the shoulders, and to David, who was very small as a child, he must have seemed even larger. Ed appeared to have more bulk than muscle and he had an air of menace about him that probably served him well in the FBI. David's mother, Jeanne McGee, once told me a story about being sick and how she couldn't come downstairs because she was in so much pain. So when she needed something, she'd have to pound on the floor with her cane, hoping Ed would hear and come upstairs to see what she needed because he never checked on her otherwise. One day, her pounding elicited no response. Finally she had to phone one of David's brothers and say, "Can you call your father and tell him that I need a glass of milk to take my medicine?" A little while later, Jeanne said, Ed wordlessly walked into the room, plunked the milk on the nightstand, and made his exit without so much as a "Can I get you anything else?" or "Are you okay?"
I experienced a lot of Ed in David. Jeanne had a little girl from an earlier marriage, about six years older than David, who suffered immeasurably at Ed's hands. Little Betty Jeanne, as Jeanne told me, wasn't allowed to eat at the table with the boys or use the door as an entrance to the house, just one of the windows, and Jeanne felt powerless in the relationship and had little voice to combat Ed's decisions. Her best solution was, after a few years of this treatment, to send Betty Jeanne away to live with another family. These stories and Ed's behavior often came back to me years later, after David and I were married and had children of our own.
As the television season wound to a close in the spring of 1973, the religious furor around Bridget Loves Bernie continued spinning out of control. Groups were picketing CBS headquarters in Manhattan, and one of our associate producers was carrying a gun because he'd been getting death threats. Two members of the Jewish Defense League showed up on the doorstep of my Stone Canyon house and told my housekeeper that they wanted to talk to me about changing the show. When my housekeeper told them, "She's not here, she's on a plane coming back from New York," they wanted to know what flight I was on so they could meet me at the airport. They never returned, but it didn't make me feel particularly comfortable that they knew where I lived.
Meanwhile, CBS was trying to do some damage control. There was no official second season pickup, but new producers had been hired to provide a less controversial spin if the series continued. There was talk of cutting Bridget and Bernie's families loose and focusing more on the trials of a young married couple adjusting to life as a pair.
Thankfully, I knew nothing of this at the time. I was off on an adventure. As soon as we went on hiatus, I was cast in a stage version of Butterflies Are Free in Addison, Texas, a town about twenty minutes from Dallas. John Spencer, who would go on to play White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry on The West Wing, was the blind mama's boy, and this time, I got to be Jill Tanner, the dingy next-door neighbor, the Goldie Hawn role I longed for just two years earlier. Redemption!
I was thrilled beyond words to have this work. I'd never done a play outside of Hollywood High before and I worked prodigiously to get my lines down before rehearsal started, some weeks down the road. Then I started to come down with something: I was having difficulty swallowing. Eventually I lost my appetite, stopped eating, and began losing weight. I could detect the lump in my throat that was making even swallowing saliva painful. This sucked! I just get my first stage part and I get cancer? I was way too young for this. I consulted an internist, who gave me the requisite liquid barium test (yech!), but he saw no lump or obstruction at all. Afterward, in his questioning me, he asked if I were anxious about anything ... anything at all?
Duh! Hello? A play! Standing in front of hundreds of people--sometimes wearing only a bra and panties--trying not to goof up my lines and look foolish. The doctor's simple question was magical. By day's end, I still had my anxiety, but my throat was back to normal.
I can still recall the lurch in my stomach I felt when a Dallas-based reporter told me that CBS announced that Bridget Loves Bernie wouldn't be coming back in the fall. Whatever reservations I had about the series, I was still really disappointed. The five-year contract that I signed had always brought me a measure of security. In my head, I could calculate out the revenue stream that would support my kids and me until Teddy was nine and Eva was seven. So much for that plan.
CBS did what it could to make it appear as if they were not caving under pressure. Data was released citing the number of complaint letters regarding our show (it turned out to be fewer than two hundred) to the outpouring of letters from viewers who objected to the abortion episodes on Bea Arthur's Maude (more than six thousand). They told newspaper columnists that Bridget Loves Bernie was underperforming, pointing to the drop-off in viewers between All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Whatever. To this day, Bridget Loves Bernie remains the highest-rated show ever to be canceled by a network.
In all fairness, CBS put a real winner in our time slot: M*A*S*H, the TV adaptation of Robert Altman's 1970 darkly funny feature film about Korean War medics, an award-winning series that ran for almost eleven years and still runs in syndication.
I didn't understand why they'd pretend that there was any other reason we went off the air but this: a small but articulate group of detractors didn't like the message of our series and CBS blinked.
Chapter 7
With David on Catalina island, 1971.
; Any actor will tell you that each job feels like it's their last. I hadn't even been an actor that long, but that's how I felt after the series was canceled and Butterflies Are Free closed. Fortunately, I landed a nice role in my first made-for-TV movie, a mystery called The Cat Lady. In it, I played Rena, a salesgirl at a head shop who turns out to be ... the reincarnation of a murderous Egyptian cat-headed priestess. Woooooo. When I first read the script, I politely pointed out that with gender in the title it wasn't hard to figure out which character was transforming into a cat and killing everybody. When I received the next draft, the title had been changed to the more mysterious, asexual Cat Creature.
These days, if people think of made-for-television movies, they might assume they fit into one of three different categories: issue-oriented stories ripped screaming from the headlines, disease-of-the-week tearjerkers, or women-in-peril melodramas. But in the early '70s, sci-fi and horror TV movies were also popular, and they drew notable talent. One reason The Cat Creature worked was that it was directed by the great Curtis Harrington, who was responsible for several classic "Grande Dame Guignol" movies like What's the Matter with Helen? and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, aging-starlet chillers in the manner of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Something I might be cast in today, for example.
Curtis had one foot in mainstream Hollywood and another in experimental and occult films. Because of this he managed to persuade established movie actors to appear in what was essentially a small-screen reworking of Val Lewton's 1942 horror classic, Cat People. The Academy Award-winning actress Gale Sondergaard played one of Rena's first victims. David Hedison, John Carradine, the venerable Stuart Whitman, Kent Smith (who starred in the original Cat People), and Keye Luke (who played Number One Son in the Charlie Chan movies) were also part of the cast. I think the network was looking for a name, but Curtis Harrington fought for and eventually succeeded in convincing the network to cast me as the lead. He also somehow managed to secure the original costume that Elizabeth Taylor wore in Cleopatra for the scene when I turn into the bloodthirsty Egyptian cat-goddess. At the time I was a size 6, but they still had to let the gown out to squeeze me into it because Liz Taylor was a tiny thing! And it weighed about 70,000 pounds because it was embroidered with real gold! Really! I coughed and popped off a few gold bugle beads. I watched the equivalent of my salary disappear through the floorboards.
The entire experience of making The Cat Creature was fun, but one of my most vivid memories of the production happened way off-screen. After Bridget Loves Bernie was axed, David landed a starring role in the feature film adaptation of Alistair MacLean's Caravan to Vaccares, which was filming in the south of France. As soon as I wrapped The Cat Creature, I was going to go join him. But first I had to get a passport, and in between the shooting schedule and taking care of the kids, the only time for running that errand was on my brief lunch break and there was no time to change out of my thick, wavy, shoulder-length red wig and feline-green contact lenses, which is what most cat-goddesses wear. So I went as I was into the U.S. Passport office at the Federal Building in West Los Angeles and presented myself at the counter.
I filled out my questionnaire, handed it to the civil servant in charge of processing my passport, and he looked at the part that read, "Blue eyes, blond hair," looked up at me, looked back at the form, then looked back at me, and finally said, "I'm sorry. Are you this person?" "Why, yes I am," I said adamantly, then marched off to have my photo taken. So not only did I go to Europe with a passport in which I looked totally like someone else, which could never happen today, it was also a particularly unattractive someone else. I might have looked better with a fake nose and eyebrows. Passports have to be renewed only once every ten years, but believe me, as soon as I found the time I renewed it so at least I wouldn't have to explain to any border police what I'd done with the real Meredith Baxter, assuming there was one.
Arles and Les Beaux in the south of France were stunning and amazing. It was hard to take in that there were places that had such coffee and croissants, were so romantically beautiful, and existed just air-hours away yet instead we spend our time in Los Angeles. I loved the food. I hated the bullfight. I felt uncomfortable with David but figured it was just me.
Not long after I returned from France, I started work on another movie of the week, this one about a young woman and man, both adopted in infancy, who are in search of their birth parents. It was originally called My Mother's Eyes, My Father's Smile, but by the time it aired, in March 1974, the name had been changed to The Stranger Who Looks Like Me. Considering my background, the title could have been Are You My Mother? a popular children's book I read to my kids. I probably didn't do myself any favors psychologically when the director, Larry Peerce, told me he was still looking for someone to play my real mother, and I suggested Whitney. Larry, who knew my mother slightly, instantly agreed it would be a brilliant piece of stunt casting.
I'm not sure what was going through my head. It's not as if I ever thought that acting alongside her would be fun. But I might have assumed it would be interesting or powerful to have the woman who basically ignored me throughout my childhood play someone who never really knew her daughter. Maybe I hoped she'd understand how I'd experienced those early years and beg my forgiveness. Maybe I figured that I could handle it because in the three-plus weeks it would take to shoot Stranger, only one long scene would be between me and my mother. Maybe I had an agenda.
I loved working with my colead, Beau Bridges, whose character assisted mine on her quest and at the same time sought out his own natural parents. But the shoot turned out to be draining. The roller-coaster ride began on the first morning, when Larry Peerce, who had directed the critically acclaimed big-screen adaptation of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, announced that we would be improvising our dialogue during key scenes. I hadn't done much ad-libbing since Day in Court, and we remember how well that turned out. In the end, Stranger would contain an exchange where a group of adoptees (my character included) argue angrily for the right to know the details of their personal history--the names of their biological parents and where they lived, as well as the reasons behind their being given up for adoption--while another group defends parents' rights to remain anonymous. It was like a debating team free-for-all. The pro-adoptees and the pro-parents argued from their own position, each actor speaking his or her own unscripted words. The result was mayhem, powerful and tempestuous, and the scene ran for almost five minutes.
As for the time I spent with Whitney on the set in the house where we were filming, it wore me out emotionally. I was spinning inside the whole day we filmed our big scene, the one the entire movie built toward: the moment where my character shows up and asks her real mother, "Why didn't you keep me?" The exchange was so loaded for me, as of course I knew it would be. This scene was the reason I wanted to do the movie. In this scene I could ask the pointed questions I'd always wanted to ask, albeit with not quite the right words, though they would serve. In my mind I'd confronted Whitney repeatedly, but never in reality.
Usually we rehearsed a scene several times but I only wanted to run through the lines. I didn't want to use up the emotional fuel I was stoking. Besides, Larry was going for the ad-libbing thing. Well, I'll give him ad-lib. So I am there, ready to shoot the master, I'm toeing my mark and wired, the camera is favoring me while I face Whitney, whose back is to the camera. She has the first line and when she speaks I am primed to spit out, "Where were you all my liiiiife?" dripping with decades of vitriol, anguish, and loneliness for everyone to see. And then what? What did I expect? Everyone would hate her? They'd throw things at her?
There are delays while the crew adjusts lights, puts a new battery in the camera, and I just stand there ... staying tight, staying ready, looking down, not ready to see Whitney's eyes. By the time Larry finally quiets the set to start shooting, I realize in a panic, I'm dry. I've lost it; my edge, my ammo is gone. I'd been too focused on it, it took too long, and now it's gone. Larry whispers "Action" to Whi
tney, and she doesn't say her lines ... she starts talking about my real brothers! "You saw the pictures on my mantel?" she said. "Dick is there, Brian is there. You're not there. I didn't want you there." Indeed, she'd brought framed photos of Dick and Brian and actually put them on the shelf above the fireplace on the set, where I could see them.
It was just too on the nose for me. I couldn't get out my lines or any words to save my life. Midway through the shot, I was so wound up and in distress that I turned and ran out the front door crying, and apparently Whitney ran out the back.
She'd come intending to pull a stronger performance out of me by capitalizing on my real feelings of abandonment.
Whitney and I eventually calmed ourselves down, came back to the house, and completed the scene. It was everything that was required on the page, but I don't know if it ever approached the heights of brilliant drama I'd imagined when I arrived on the set that morning. And it's probably just as well it didn't. Acting is not therapy. A movie set is not the place to work out familial angst.
Years later now, I wonder that my mother decided she could address my feelings in such a public yet indirect way as she did that day, yet never again. Not that I ever brought it up with her. I never felt I had permission; I was far too afraid of her. But I'm grateful she took that chance. She was helping me, not that I realized it then. This took another twenty years of grief and reflection. I'd come loaded for bear, ready to deliver some snarky "news," make sure she understood I was not acting. But she didn't need to be told. She knew and was playing on those same raw feelings to excite a better, deeper performance from me, for me. For the movie.
Even though Bridget Loves Bernie was over, David and I stayed a high-profile couple in the eyes of the media. Whenever we did press, there was always a sentence or two that included a fairy-tale retelling of how we met, fell in love, and stayed together after our series ended. Typically, the reporter would throw in a question about marriage plans--as in, did we have any? The truth was that we both felt skittish about making our relationship official. David's previous marriage--to a coed he'd met at Dartmouth--was, as I understood it, brief, had ended badly, and left him with unresolved feelings about ever getting married again. He also struggled--and he was always very open about this both to me and in interviews--with whether or not he was ready to commit to raising Teddy and Eva. It wasn't just that they weren't his, I just never got the feeling he was wild about kids, period, although he had said many times that a prerequisite to getting married would be my promise to have another child with him. I was only twenty-six at the time and just getting a career off the ground. I wasn't real confident I wanted a third child. I was on the fence about getting into another marriage anyway. I'd been through too many fathers with Whitney and I didn't want to put Teddy and Eva through the same upheaval.
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