Falling with Wings

by Dianna De La Garza

  We waited and waited to hear directions about our trip to Los Angeles, only to hear the final instructions a little more than an hour before we had to leave for the airport. That’s also when I learned that Disney had only purchased tickets for Demi and me, even though Madison needed to come with us. “Guess we’ll be buying an extra ticket at the counter,” I told Demi. But when we got to the airport, the line to the counter trailed out the door. Five minutes later, we were still standing in the same spot. The cloud of anxiousness hovering above me burst, drenching me with terrifying thoughts. I knew that if Demi missed this opportunity to get to Los Angeles, it would haunt her (and me) forever.

  As the minutes ticked by and our scheduled departure drew closer, I couldn’t take the stress any longer. Reaching into my purse, I pulled out that bottle of Xanax and popped one of the pills into my mouth. A few minutes later, when I finally reached the counter and purchased Madison’s ticket, an airline official magically appeared and told us to follow him. Each step we took was faster than the last. Demi eventually started running, but I couldn’t. Every footstep made me dizzy. When we got whisked to the front of the security line, my legs were so wobbly, I could barely stand. I held on to Demi and tried to ask her to watch Madison, but my words were slurred and garbled.

  The last thing I remember hearing was Demi’s voice. “My mother’s not drunk,” she insisted. “She took some new medicine, and I think that’s what’s wrong.” To this day I don’t remember passing through security or getting on the plane, nor do I remember climbing into a row of empty seats at the back of the plane while Demi and Madison took their seats toward the front. My deep sleep lasted until we landed in LA.

  When I woke up, I was fine. After we got settled at Selena’s loft, I checked in with my doctor, and he suggested that next time I only take half the dose. Thankfully, I wouldn’t need it for a while.

  The audition on the twenty-first floor of the Walt Disney Company in Burbank was a blur. The morning after, as Demi and I sat waiting for the phone to ring in Mandy’s loft, the experience still seemed surreal. Screen testing was as far as it goes in the audition process, and Demi had exceeded everyone’s expectations, so we both felt optimistic. But that didn’t make the waiting any easier. Sometimes we stared at the phone, sometimes at each other. But we didn’t talk. We didn’t eat. We barely breathed. Every thought got sucked into the vortex of what was about to happen. Our inertia bristled with the certainty that finally … after all this time … Disney was going to make Demi a star!

  When the phone rang, I answered, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Dianna,” said Margo, the agent from CESD, “she didn’t get the part.”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it. No way! I thought. She’s just pulling my leg! I know she got the part! So I smiled even broader. In fact, I was so sure that she was kidding, I told her, “No, no, no, Margo! Just tell me now. She got the part, right?”

  But she hadn’t. “I’m so, so sorry,” Margo offered. “I really thought we had a good chance on this one.” Our disappointment was raw and intense. It felt like someone had kicked me in the gut. For Demi, it was more like a knockout punch. She was standing next to me and seemed to know it was bad news from the start. I confirmed her fears when I shook my head no, and she promptly disappeared. Later, I found her in the gym upstairs, running on the treadmill and refusing to talk. But the disappointment in her eyes said it all.

  Not thirty minutes later, Margo called me back. “Judy Taylor at Disney Channel wants to know, can you stay in town for a few more days?” she asked. “They have a couple of other projects they want Demi to read for.”

  After we agreed to stay, Margo promised to fax over some sides for Demi to study. Those sides, we’d learn, were for another Disney Channel Original Movie called Camp Rock. The script, written specifically for a young teenage girl who could sing and act, revolved around a camp for musically gifted teens where Mitchie, the main character, dreams of becoming a rock star. We’d learn the Jonas Brothers would also be in the movie. The other set of sides was for a television series titled Sonny with a Chance, a sitcom that followed the experiences of teenager Sonny Monroe, who becomes the newest cast member of her favorite live comedy TV show.

  Demi read the sides for Sonny with Dallas, who decided a few cans of stew were needed. The scene involved a country girl who ducked her head into a pile of pig slop and then popped up exclaiming, “Umm! That’s good!” The slimy, dark stew would add a bit of dramatic flair, and according to Dallas, would prove that Demi was willing to go all in, 100 percent, to get the role.

  Off we went back to the Walt Disney Company in Burbank to read for both the movie and the TV series, and we took our cans of stew with us. Demi read for Camp Rock first; then she sang for the musical director. She nailed it, or at least it appeared that way as the musical director quickly whisked Demi off to meet a few more people. We thought it was a good sign, but we certainly knew that nothing was guaranteed. Besides, Demi still had to go through the actual audition in a few days.

  After reading for Camp Rock, Demi switched gears and started reading for Sonny with a Chance. When it was time for the pig-slop scene, she politely asked to be excused. Upon her return, the group beamed, “Oh, you have props!”

  “Yeah,” she smiled, placing the bowl of stew in front of her. It made everyone curious. When she got to the right part, she dunked her face into the bowl and popped back up covered in brown slime. To everyone’s delight, she had taken another tidbit of advice from Dallas and wedged a piece of meat in the gap between her front teeth. The room erupted in laughter. We hoped it was enough for her to get the part, but we also knew that Disney had weeks to make their decision.

  Before we left Los Angeles, CESD also scheduled an audition for Just Jordan on Nickelodeon. Afterward, as darkness was descending on the city, we jumped in the car and realized that we hadn’t eaten all day. “Let’s stop at the first convenience store we see,” I suggested. A block later, we hopped out of the car and made a mad dash toward the store, hoping to use the restroom and grab some food. Just as we were about to walk through the front door, Demi stooped over and picked something up off the ground.

  “What is it?” I asked, as she held up a business card.

  “Momma!” she cried, sounding breathless. “It says: ARE YOU READY?”

  We both stopped and looked at each other. Neither of us uttered a sound, but we knew those words like they had been tattooed on our foreheads. Are we getting closer? I asked God. Demi tucked that card into her purse, and we walked inside, savoring the hope stirring inside of us.

  * * *

  Three days after we returned to Texas, I was puttering around in the kitchen while Demi was still sleeping upstairs. When the phone rang, I assumed it was my sister wanting to catch up on how our trip had gone. But it was a conference call from Mitchell and Margo. “Hold on,” I said. “Let me get Demi, and I’ll put you on speaker.”

  Demi, still a bit groggy, took a seat at the kitchen counter and clasped her hands tightly, as though she were praying. “Well,” Margo started, “we have some news for you.”

  Demi, so nervous, could only whisper, “What?”

  Together, Mitchell and Margo gleefully announced, “You’re our new Mitchie for Camp Rock!”

  There was no piercing wallop of joy, no scream of excitement. Demi went from zero to sixty in a heartbeat, and her only reaction was to burst into tears. But her face was radiant. And I was thrilled because my daughter was happy. Without a fear or worry about how it all would play out, we rode that wave of excitement for as long as we could. We knew that our big moment had finally arrived, because Camp Rock was expected to be the next High School Musical. Finally, after all the disappointments and all the sacrifices, Demi was on her way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Did we make mistakes along the way?

  Yes, and they were ours to make and learn from.”

  The year 2007 continued to surprise us. Later
that spring, Demi also got called back to LA to screen test for Sonny with a Chance. When we met with a small group of producers and writers for the show, Demi was awestruck by the posters hanging in their West Hollywood office.

  “Look,” she gasped, “There’s Big Momma’s House and Blue Crush!”

  At that meeting, Sharla Sumpter Bridgett and Brian Robbins, founders of Varsity Pictures, wanted to know what kind of vision Demi had for her future. Not yet fifteen, my wide-eyed daughter didn’t hesitate to answer. “Well,” she giggled, “I want to have my own TV show and be a star like Miley and Selena.” Her innocence and down-to-earth personality charmed them both.

  Soon after she finished filming more episodes for As the Bell Rings, Demi was offered the starring role as Sonny Monroe in Sonny with a Chance, which would air in August. By late September, she needed to be in Canada for the filming of Camp Rock. It seemed that once we signed with Disney, our lives were “Go! Go! Go!” The frantic pace made my anxiety issues return with renewed intensity. One saving grace was that we had a good lawyer who could help us sort through all the contracts we needed to sign.

  The entertainment industry is riddled with people who are willing to take advantage of anyone who has earning potential. Blind trust isn’t a good idea. We didn’t know that; we simply got lucky. Thanks to a friend, we had gotten introduced to Jamie Young, with Ziffren Brittenham LLP, a law firm specializing in entertainment, long before Demi was ever offered a contract. Normally, you can’t just walk in and get an attorney of that caliber without already having an established career, but Jamie decided to roll the dice and take a chance on us. She later told us, “I didn’t sign you because of Demi’s talent per se, but because I really liked the two of you.” Her counsel and advice would save us thousands of dollars, not to mention the numerous headaches and anxiety attacks she prevented by helping me to understand legal jargon.

  But even with Jamie’s help, my nerves were spiraling out of control. Now that the stakes were higher, my fears about Demi getting fired or making a mistake intensified. Nowhere was that more evident than when Demi, Madison, and I flew to Canada in the fall for the filming of Camp Rock. Eddie stayed behind to work at the Ford dealership, and Dallas was out in LA, once again trying to launch her acting career.

  The first few weeks in Canada were pure luxury, as we stayed at The Grand Hotel in downtown Toronto. Every window, marble tile, and brass fixture gleamed and sparkled like jewels. Although I wanted to absorb all that calm beauty, I couldn’t. When I was on set, my nerves were even worse.

  Two scenes early on were shot at a nearby multilevel house. Each morning, I fretted about showing up late. “Get up! Get up!” I hollered to Madison and Demi. “We need to go! Now! Keep moving!” The giant ticking clock inside my brain kept reminding me that tardiness was grounds for being fired. I became obsessive about the smallest of details: When to go to bed? What to wear? How to interact with people? And my mind was constantly awhirl with strange fears about people talking badly about Demi and about making mistakes that would be grounds for dismissal.

  Things got off to a rocky start on day one when all the moms were sitting outside on the lawn of the big house as they filmed the music video inside for the end of the film. It was typical Hollywood, as scenes are rarely filmed in chronological order. The heat that day was unbearable—and so were the bees.

  We’re not talking about a few stragglers, either. Dozens and dozens of bees swarmed around us, sometimes dive-bombing into our faces and at times bouncing off our legs and arms. It was terrifying. When people started getting stung, real panic set in, because I’ve been afraid of bees my whole life. (I actually keep a can of bee and wasp spray in every room of our Texas home—the kind that can shoot twenty feet in the air so you don’t have to get close to kill them.) Staying still, like everyone suggested, just wasn’t possible. I desperately wanted to make a good impression that day, but I kept jumping up and running away. It felt like I was standing inside the gates of hell without an escape route.

  Nothing about that first day resembled the picture in my head of how I thought the experience would unfold. There were no glamorous photo ops, no bursting-with-pride moments. Only sheer torture. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. Was this what we had worked so hard to attain?

  That night as I relived the horror, my hands and body still twitching, I picked up my bottle of Xanax and gulped down another dose. That tiny bottle of solace was quickly becoming indispensable, especially since the next day offered its own setbacks.

  This time, I was on set inside the house with Demi as they prepared to film a scene in the kitchen. It was the part in the movie where Demi, as Mitchie Torres, begs her mom, Connie (played by María Canals Barrera), to go to Camp Rock for the summer. It was a very exciting moment, and I happily struck up a conversation with the hair-and-makeup people as we all stood off to the side waiting for the action to begin. The more I absorbed the reality of the moment—the fact that I was witnessing my daughter making a film, a dream that had seemed so unattainable at times—the more talkative I got.

  “Roll set,” the director yelled, which stopped me in my tracks. I knew from all the commercials my girls had made that once the camera starts rolling, silence was expected. No one ever, ever, interrupts filming because it’s considered very bad etiquette. Almost instantly, I realized that Madison was no longer by my side.

  “Where’s Madison?” I mouthed to everyone around me. Heads turned as everyone started searching. We didn’t have to look long. At the sound of the director’s voice, my blood ran cold.

  “Well, hello, Madison,” he exclaimed. My five-year-old, all eyes and big smile, was delighted to be on camera as she unexpectedly stepped into frame. Although everyone was laughing, I was mortified.

  Oh, my God, this is it! They’re going to fire Demi over my mistake!

  That night I tossed and turned, replaying the whole day in my head. How could I have been so inattentive? Once again, I reached for another Xanax, telling myself that I’d put my bottle of pills away once things calmed down.

  * * *

  Filming eventually moved to Kilcoo Camp in Minden, Ontario. Our accommodations, a small group of cabins surrounded by a delightful paddleboat pond and a pristine golf course, were at Delta Pinestone Resort, about fifteen minutes down the road. It turned out to be a wonderful change of scenery, but it didn’t start out that way. This time it was the check-in experience that left me rattled.

  Usually, I handed the front desk my debit card, and they swiped it to cover a small amount of incidentals, as Disney paid for everything else.

  “That’s $3,500,” the woman said as she handed back my card.

  “What?” I protested. “That can’t be right!” When I explained that I wasn’t paying for the room, she apologized and said, “I’ll make sure you get a credit in a few days.”

  “No,” I insisted, “you need to put that credit through right now,” all the while imagining that our mortgage payment and a slew of other checks were about to bounce. There wasn’t that much extra cash in our account.

  “Sorry,” she said again, “but it takes a few days to sort these things out.”

  Suddenly the room started to spin around me. While my neck got hot, my hands grew sweaty. I knew I needed to reach Eddie to warn him, but we were so isolated that I wasn’t sure my phone would work. That realization made my throat tighten so severely, I felt like I was choking. I have no choice, I decided, running to our cabin to gulp another pill.

  From that moment forward, Xanax became my coping strategy for every terrifying thought and every difficult circumstance that we encountered. And trying to look perfect, act perfect, and be perfect all the time made every day stressful. There was no room for error in my mind—we couldn’t be late, couldn’t make mistakes, couldn’t get into trouble. We were working for Disney, after all, and we had a responsibility to uphold the company’s image. It was just the fuel my brain needed to spiral out of control.

  What I failed
to notice was that Demi’s mental state was just as fragile as mine. Signs, such as her forty-eight-hour binges of not sleeping to write songs and her fluctuating moods, went unaddressed because I brushed them off as normal teenage behavior. I missed so many chances to help her. But I needed help, too.

  Years later, after Demi came out of treatment, I was cleaning our Texas home and found an old book. When I opened the cover to see if it was important, I realized it was Demi’s diary from that very time when she had filmed Camp Rock. The page I opened to told me that my daughter’s struggles were far greater than I knew. Each and every sentence confirmed that she battled many of the same issues that I did. She struggled with anxiety, just like me. She had eating issues, just like me. And she worried about people’s opinions, just like me. One sentence in particular crushed my heart: “Nobody loves a fat rock star. Guess I’ll have to starve myself so people will like me.”

  * * *

  Thankfully, there were lots of sweet moments at Kilcoo Camp to offset the nerve-wracking ones, especially when Eddie and Dallas came to join us for a few weeks. It felt wonderful to have my family together again, even though Dallas, who had been in a car accident right before her arrival, was constantly complaining about her arm hurting. “I’m sure it’s just sore,” I reassured her. “You probably just need to let it heal.” I suggested we take Madison and Frankie (the Jonases’ youngest son) on a hike the next time I wasn’t needed on set.

  On every hike, we got to witness a budding friendship between the two kids. As we explored trails and climbed boulders, Dallas and I also got to see their imaginations go wild. Some days, the pair even pretended to act in their own movies. One afternoon while collecting rocks, the two decided they should sell them back at the camp. But before they set up shop, Frankie directed Madison to “wash the rocks in the creek.” Once their display was ready, people started lining up to buy their wares. Madison, though, quickly grew bored. A few afternoons later when someone asked if they were still selling rocks, Frankie hung his head and sighed, “No, we aren’t because Madison doesn’t care about the business anymore.” Madison, in turn, pouted her lips and whined, “All he does is work, work, work while I stay here and clean the rocks!” Dallas and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. They might have been the two youngest people around, but they acted like an old married couple.