This isn't to say that we weren't talking about it. One night we were sitting together in front of the fireplace at my house in Stone Canyon, and David was talking about his work and how he had to make a certain amount of money if we were going to get married. As it happened, my career had moved on pretty steadily since Bridget Loves Bernie ended: I'd starred in two TV movies and done several guest spots.
So I assured him, "I'll ... I'll be working, too."
David sighed, shook his head wearily, and said, "What you make doesn't count. It's what I make." He put no value on any contribution I could make; only what he did was important. He told me that he'd made "promises to himself," meaning, I think, about the amount and quality of work he would do in a lifetime. David pointed out that I'd made no such promises, which I think he interpreted as my having no pride or commitment to my work, which rendered it valueless and superfluous. He had a facility for erasing me with relatively few words. I knew being with him required that I be real small, not take up too much space; well, that was familiar. I didn't like it but because he was smart and spoke with educated confidence and because I was primed to disappear on cue, I acquiesced.
In early 1973, not long after our dispiriting fireside chat, something happened--who knows what the last straw was?--and I walked away from the relationship. I'd just had enough of David's snarky comments, his preening self-importance, being constantly made to feel bad about myself. I had gotten a part in a TV movie that was filming in Palm Springs, and right before I left Los Angeles, I broke up with him. I was so thrilled that I had summoned up the courage to call it quits that I called up David's friend Oliver, who had a many-years-long love-hate relationship with David because David was also verbally abusive to him, and I said, "Oliver, I did it. I DID IT. I'm OUT of there!" He was so happy for me. I felt free. I felt strong and alive and wonderful. I felt like me again. It was short-lived.
I got to Palm Springs, settled into my hotel room, and went to the production office to check on rewrites, get a shooting schedule, pick up my per diem. That night the calls from David started coming. He wasn't angry; he was wooing me back. I'd have none of it. I had made a decision I'd been terrified to make and I didn't want to talk to him. I couldn't be very articulate--even over the phone he still scared me. I just said, "I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this." The calls kept coming and my response never changed. The next day, he showed up at my hotel. What? What? He just drove all the way down here from Los Angeles? For me? I couldn't believe he did that. I couldn't believe I mattered that much to him. I must have been wrong about him. I didn't have any defenses in the face of what I saw as a grand gesture. It was kind of like Whitney coming to get me at Interlochen. He wanted to be with me so much that he was just going to come get me. For the rest of the weekend, he was sweet and solicitous and funny, all of the things that he could be when he felt like it.
I had no birth control with me: I'd been a single girl when I packed for Palm Springs. David and I prowled a nearby pharmacy looking for something familiar but we were leery of someone yelling out, "Hey, there's Bridget and Bernie buying some Emko foam," so we abandoned that pursuit and spent a couple of cozy days together. My fate was sealed. Somehow I'd managed to leave David, reconcile with him, and get pregnant in less time than it takes to make a ninety-minute TV movie.
I don't remember being proposed to, but immediately, as soon as I found out I was going to have a baby, marriage was in the mix. I wasn't thinking about having an abortion, and there was no way I'd have a baby on my own. In a reversal of conventional bride and groom roles, David took over and mapped out every single wedding detail--he chose the date (April 10, 1974), where our church ceremony would be conducted (New York's Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church), and the location of the reception (The Player's Club, right across from Gramercy Park).
The next month, in early April, David and I flew to New York to get ready for the event, staying at David's wonderful, high-ceilinged apartment on West Seventy-seventh Street and West End that he had kept when he moved out to Los Angeles for the series. One day, while David was out taking care of loose ends at the church, I was getting ready to leave for a job interview some blocks away, but I was feeling so low. I was a month pregnant and a week away from my wedding, Teddy and Eva were flying in with the nanny the next day, and I missed them terribly. I started crying. And then I couldn't stop and proceeded to have a mini-breakdown. All the thoughts I'd been fighting not to think, all the feelings I'd been trying to keep pushed down came flooding up and I was sobbing and sobbing so hard, I could hardly stand. I was next to the front door, hands spread on the wall to keep me upright. I knew, right then, I acknowledged to myself that I was making a terrible mistake, that this was going to be a horrible, punitive marriage, but I didn't know what else to do. I didn't think I knew enough to be a good mother on my own and David seemed to agree with me. I thought this was the only thing to do, that it would be a good thing for my children. I knew I'd have no voice in anything and I would probably always feel powerless, empty like I did then. I finally stopped crying and as I dried my eyes and left for my interview, I made the decision to not know what I knew and I told no one. Who was there to tell?
David is Irish, so he decided that the ring he wanted me to wear would be a specially designed claddagh, a charming traditional Irish wedding ring that features two hands holding a heart. Only two or three days before the wedding, David went to his jeweler and was told that my ring wouldn't be ready in time. That evening we were eating at the Irish Pavilion, one of David's favorite restaurants. As our waitress served our food we noticed she was wearing a claddagh ring. We told her our sad story and she told us her happy one. Her boyfriend, Seamus, had given her the ring just a few days earlier. When David offered her $30 for the ring, I remember her worrying that, "Oh, Seamus will be so upset." David was pretty convincing but I think she was won over by the idea of being such a heroine and saving our wedding day. I wore Seamus's ring for the next fifteen years.
While our wedding was to be attended by several of David's New York friends, his mother and one of his three brothers, Joe and Peppy Stern, and his best man, Oliver Clark, I hadn't invited any guests. I had no friends who could afford to fly to New York and I knew no one who lived there; Jack, my ex-stepfather and still my agent, would be in attendance, and Whitney. She was my only family member who'd be present. I asked her to be my maid of honor since there were no other candidates. The day before the wedding she took me to lunch at The Pierre. Afterward we were standing on the street and just as we were about to part, Whitney turned to me and said, "You know, you don't have to do this." I looked at her standing there, looking beautiful in her white St. John suit, concern filling her face. I was aware of the bustling of cabs, the bright sun, and the screech of tires all around us. I had a sense that it was too late for anything, including my mother's advice and changing my mind. Pregnant on the eve of my wedding, I had no better ideas; I was too small; I felt bereft of choices. I told her, "Yes, I do."
Twenty hours later I walked down the aisle in an off-white dress I'd bought for twenty-seven dollars. My hair, still long at the time, was down. I'd planned to wear a small floral wreath in my hair that Whitney brought for me, but David didn't like it. He was always sensitive about his height--he's about five-ten, I'm five-seven. He thought my floral wreath made him look short.
Right before our wedding I was offered a high-visibility role as William Holden's daughter in a big Hollywood disaster movie, The Towering Inferno, and I turned it down because the shooting schedule overlapped with the honeymoon we'd planned. But we didn't go on a honeymoon. Work intervened--for David. He was offered the lead role in a production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Connecticut, and he needed to rehearse.
Being married changed our lives in a myriad of ways. For one thing, David and I bought a big four-bedroom redwood house together on a cul-de-sac in Santa Monica Canyon and for the first time all four
of us lived together as a family. I didn't want our household to be like the one I grew up in: a collection of strangers who lived under the same roof but sequestered by themselves in their own rooms. I wanted to protect my children from the bleak isolation that characterized my childhood and create a place of warm, loving cohesiveness. I didn't want them to live in a house where there was a "Jack" or a "Whitney" or an "Allan." I wanted there to be a "Mommy" and a "Daddy." Period.
I was so determined to make this happen and so fixated on the goal of a happy home, though, that my approach lacked sensitivity. My future child would be calling David "Daddy," and I wanted Teddy and Eva to call David "Daddy," too. That they already had a perfectly serviceable father outside our home was an impediment I paid little attention to--I was forging my family, dammit! I realized later calling David "Daddy" made them feel terribly disloyal to Bob. I remember poor Teddy telling me years afterward that he didn't ever want his father to know that he enjoyed anything in his new home--and that he didn't want David or me to know if he had a good time with Bob. He was desperate to protect feelings on both sides and was often defeated in his attempts. David would ply them with questions about what they did while with Bob and then heap criticism on whatever activity they named, whatever meal they had. I would sometimes participate because I thought it pleased David, backed him up.
In some ways, our new life was a rude awakening for Teddy and Eva, because my ideas about child rearing were less restrictive than David's. Suddenly there were lots of rules regarding how much television they could watch and how to behave at the dinner table. David had never spent much time around children before, but he sure knew what behavior he wanted to see. David and I took the kids to dinner one night at the Sea Lion restaurant in Malibu. Eva ordered a shrimp salad and when it arrived at our table, I thought it might be a problem because it was ridiculously huge and she was about five. She could only eat a little and David was furious. What was confusing was that his anger came so fast and out of nowhere. I remember him threatening her, saying that he was going to pour a bowl of chowder over her head if she didn't clean her plate. Perhaps he was mad that his authority had been flouted ... she didn't eat it all as he'd demanded but didn't eclipsed couldn't. David hadn't spent any time around kids and he wasn't interested in hearing that that there was no way a five-year-old could have eaten such a large portion. The evening ended with Eva crying all the way to the car and David sort of throwing her in the backseat. I didn't intervene. I was afraid of the suddenness and ferocity of his rage. And part of me wondered if maybe he was right; perhaps children were supposed to do exactly what their parents said, that their explanations were just excuses. And I often felt just like one of the children.
Somewhere along the line I decided it was easier to live with whatever rules David laid down than to fight them. Someone had to know what was right. He always seemed sure, so he made the decisions. He wanted his way even when it had nothing to do with him. Take my hyphenated name, Baxter-Birney. For the sake of my career, it would have made more sense for me to continue using my maiden name. I wanted to keep using my own name. However, if David and I were at someone's house or out somewhere and he had to introduce me, he'd pause as if he didn't know my name, then say in a tone dripping with sarcasm, "What am I supposed to call you? Who are you? Who do you want to be?" and then he'd laugh, like look at this idiot woman I'm with, as if wanting to keep my name was a stupid, mindless thing. I expect he felt it was a rejection of him but he never said that; he just humiliated me. After a while it felt like it wasn't worth the harassing and the jokes made at my expense. I told myself it could be a good thing; if it would make David happy, it was a small thing to do. I needed to choose to change it, not because I was bullied. So I went through the legal process of becoming Meredith Baxter-Birney. I showed him the official affidavit as a surprise. He seemed unimpressed, like I was late to the show.
On December 5, 1974, I gave birth to our daughter Kathleen Jeanne Birney, whom we called Kate. I had a saddle block when both Teddy and Eva were born, which requires numbing the mother in all the requisite areas from the waist down. David had done some research and decided he didn't want his child to be born with drugs in her system, so he had me do natural childbirth. No drugs. Which, let me say, is a stupid fucking way to have a child! With so many modern techniques and all the safety measures at hand, I feel there is no reason, short of some man's whim, to forgo the relief drugs offer and endure the horrendous discomfort. Obviously childbirth has been around longer than drugs but it might have died out altogether if it weren't for drugs. That's my feeling.
Now there were five of us. And here's where David did something inspired. In order to pay tribute to our first Christmas together as a family, he went out in mid-December and bought an enormous tree, maybe ten or twelve feet tall (we have very high ceilings in our redwood living room). David wanted it to be a surprise, so he hid the towering evergreen behind the garage so the kids wouldn't see it. I was in the kitchen a few days later, watching Ted playing out in the yard, and I saw Teddy wander behind the garage, where he was sure to see the tree. I told David and that night he made an announcement after dinner. He said, "Kids, I gotta tell you about something"--and I'm paraphrasing this, of course--"whenever a new family comes together, very often Santa Claus will bless that family with their own special, magnificent tree. Now I don't know if it's going to happen to us because it always comes as a surprise. In fact, it might not happen, but I just want you to know that it's kind of exciting that we might get that blessing." As David spun his tale, I remember watching Teddy, and he was beside himself with excitement. He was leaping up and down saying, "It's us! It's us! I saw the tree! It's us!" It was beautiful. It was a brilliant story, and its message--that we were united as a family--was so timely and openhearted.
It was like the letters David would write when any one of the kids would lose a tooth: he'd make up these intricate stories customized for the individual child. They were works of art, really, written in a semicalligraphic style with intricate illustrations in the margins, and David would sign them Almalda the Tooth Fairy. He also wrote equally elaborate Santa letters to the children with ornate designs; they were glorious! He put so much work into them that it ultimately became too unwieldy and the ritual eventually ended. Sometimes, particularly after one of David's inexplicable rages or his punishing one of the kids for an insignificant infraction, I'd try to find some congruity between the rager and the creator of Almalda; I just didn't understand how they could coexist.
In the early part of 1975, just after Kate was born, a small but exciting job opportunity came my way: a small role in Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men, the feature adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about how they broke the Watergate story. One of the peripheral characters, Hugh W. Sloan Jr., was the treasurer of the Committee to Re-elect the President, Richard M. Nixon's 1972 campaign committee, and I was cast as Debbie, his loyal wife, who answers the door when Bernstein and Woodward--played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman--come to interview him. (Stephen Collins played my husband, Sloan.)
Until then, my brief career had been mainly in television, where the tempo was very fast-paced; time was money; on an average TV movie we could shoot eight to ten pages of script a day. So it was unfathomable to me to be working in Washington, D.C., on a feature film that had such a big budget that it might do only two pages a day. There was a lot of sitting around, waiting to work--much more so than in television. I recall people just sitting in clusters playing cards, sleeping, or talking; I mainly sat and read and tried to eavesdrop on Pakula, Redford, and Hoffman discussing and arguing about upcoming scenes.
I was still carrying around some post-Kate baby weight, but Debbie Sloan was supposed to be pregnant, so they just padded me up. I had only two little scenes, but the most operative one was when Woodward and Bernstein come to our door. The camera picks me up coming out of the living room, takes me to a doorway, and then follows me down an entryway to the fron
t door and you see my back as I open the door, revealing the two reporters standing there. Such a simple shot, you say? Ha!
It almost defeated me. They wanted to frame the shot so that when I opened the door the back of my head was in the center, revealing Redford on one side, and Hoffman on the other. That meant the door had to stop on a particular mark so that it formed the right side of the frame. But my back was to the camera, and I couldn't look down to see how far I was supposed to open the door. It's not as if I could just magically figure it all out while the camera was rolling. They were looking for precision and I was a novice and not producing that for them. I was in a panic trying to make it right. I'd already blown it several times before they broke for lunch. So, on the break, I worked by myself on the darkened set, over and over again, walking along the entry to my mark counting the steps and opening the door just so, trying to get a good sense of exactly the right amount of space between my shoulder and the door (honest, hitting your mark is a major part of acting), and by the time we started up again I was pretty confident I had it right. Everyone reassembled on the set, I got in position, they called action, the camera followed me down the hall, I opened the door to perfection, but Oh my God, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are at my door and standing in the wrong places! They had switched positions just to mess with me! They were successful. I blew it again. I felt like I'd be a newcomer forever.
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