Might As Well Laugh About It Now

by Marie Osmond

Although this thought didn’t take away the pain of losing the necklace, it did lessen the anger and blame that had been left in its place. I was never going to get the necklace back, but I could tell that the bad feelings would stick to me forever unless I really let them go.

  I had to let them go.

  I’ve been given and even bought my share of fine jewelry since losing that four-leaf clover. I appreciate it, but I stay away from becoming attached. Diamonds are the hardest natural substance found on the earth and they represent eternal love, but in the realm of eternity, they’re really just stones.

  I will admit, when the occasion arises I still love to parade some loaner platinum on the red carpet, but that’s for the movies and award shows, not for real life. I can’t spend forty thousand dollars on a pair of earrings. Come on! That’s a week’s worth of groceries in my family!

  Scatterbrain

  As a spokeswoman for Go Red for Women, my focus is on bringing awareness to heart health. I was ready for this appearance thanks to a red Sharpie.

  “We’re both scatterbrains.” That was the answer my oldest son, Stephen, gave when asked in what way he was most like me.

  I happened to be standing nearby, autographing an album cover for a fan, and overheard his answer.

  “I’m not a scatterbrain!” I protested, as I wrote a huge “Love, Marie Osmond” on the cover and returned it.

  “You signed right on Donny’s face,” the fan said, in blunt disbelief, and then recovered quickly. “But that’s okay. Thank you very much.”

  I apologized and then, before he walked away, I suggested that he should have Donny sign his autograph over my face so it could be a really bizarre collector item. I thought that was pretty quick thinking on my part.

  Stephen grinned at me, like I had just proven his “scatterbrain” indictment.

  “Stephen, I was distracted momentarily by you and your insult. That’s why I signed in the wrong place,” I said, pointing the really expensive pen I was holding for emphasis.

  “This is really pretty,” I added, twirling the pen to see all angles of the etched silver plating. “Is it mine?”

  “No. You forgot to give that guy his pen back.” Stephen laughed, putting his arm around my shoulder. “By the way, Mom, did you see where I left my jacket?”

  Great faith, kindness, and a sense of musicality are on the short list of attributes that I’d love to say Stephen could have inherited from me. Having spacey neurotransmitters is not one of them. In fact, I’ve never been called a scatterbrain before. Well, if I have, I don’t remember it. I guess one person’s scatterbrained is another person’s busy. That’s what I am. Busy. Busy in the extreme!

  Find me a busy woman who hasn’t had to call AAA more than twice in the same day because she keeps locking her keys in her car. I’m not alone in that, am I? In fact, as proof of the saying that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, an AAA card was the most useful gift I ever gave my three older kids. Every time they use it, they think of me. So I know that’s at least three times a week.

  One day, as Big Dave, the AAA tow-truck driver, finished jimmying my door lock open, he said to me, “I’m going to go get a sandwich and wait for your next call. Can I bring you a roasted turkey on pumpernickel?”

  I told him: “Oh, you’re funny. No, thanks. I’m on my way home. You probably won’t hear from me again until tomorrow.”

  I mean, if I truly fit the label of “scatterbrain,” I would leave things behind after going through airport security, right? I’ve never once been called over the speaker system to come back for my computer bag, my wallet, or my neck pillow. I always have time to gather up my stuff while one of the very nice scanner people retrieves my shoes from the other side of the metal detector, where I left them on the floor near the stack of plastic bins.

  When I was doing Dancing with the Stars I bought each of my kids a cell phone. I told them it was so they could always reach me, even on the set, and also so they would call in every single show to vote for Mommy. Having seven cell phones is very handy around the house, too. I can always ask one of the kids to ring my cell number so I can figure out where I left my phone. Do scatterbrains have that kind of common sense? Though I will admit, if every hotel in which I’ve left behind my phone charger cord for the past ten years all sent them back to me at once, it would fill a UPS truck.

  Scatterbrain? I’m a creative thinker. I’ve had to be. As a spokesperson for the “Go Red for Women” campaign for the American Heart Association, I go on a publicity tour to raise awareness a couple of times a year. I always remember to wear red and pack a variety of red suits, shoes, and slacks. At the last event, we were in New York and running late for a live appearance on the Today show. Once we were in the car, I realized that I had left the earrings that match my red necklace back in the hotel room. It was too late to turn around. I scrambled in my bag and came up with one pair of light blue crystal earrings, which really didn’t go with anything I had on.

  I noticed that one of the talent coordinators riding with me was writing notes with a red Sharpie.

  “Can I borrow your pen for a minute?” I asked her. In a flash, I had colored the crystals on the earrings with the red Sharpie, as the talent coordinator gasped, “That looks great, but didn’t you just ruin your earrings?”

  “A little witch hazel and they’ll be as good as blue,” I said.

  “I take it you’ve done this before,” she said and laughed.

  “A variety of permanent markers should be a part of every woman’s emergency kit,” I advised her. “You can color in a scuff on black shoes, water down the red one a bit to use as a lip stain if you forgot your lipstick, darken a beauty mark with a dark purple or brown, or change the color of almost any kind of jewelry on the spot.”

  I choose to see this not as a scatterbrain moment of forgetting my earrings but as a fantastic opportunity to pass along really helpful emergency tips to another woman.

  If Stephen has borderline forgetfulness that he believes he inherited from me, it’s probably because I have my mother’s DNA. She was a very busy woman, too, with the nine of us kids, our lessons and our laundry, her newsletters to the fans, bookkeeping, managing real estate sales, gardening, helping out at church, and countless other activities in which she was involved. Once in a while something would fall through the cracks . . . or seep out of the trunk of the car.

  One hot summer in the early 1970s we came home to our ranch in Huntsville, Utah, after finishing an extensive tour. We looked forward to having time to be away from the crowds and back to nature, and would often stay put for a whole month, if time allowed.

  About a week into our time off, Wayne announced, “The car in the driveway has a really bad odor coming from it.”

  Jay added, “I think something is leaking from it, too.”

  My father got up from the kitchen table and started to follow my brothers to check out the situation.

  I was helping my mother clear dinner dishes when suddenly her eyes flew open wide.

  “The groceries!” she said. “Oh, no!”

  We dashed out into the driveway, just as Father was opening the trunk. There sat six bags of groceries that had accidentally been left to bake in a 100-plus degree trunk for a couple of days.

  “I forgot, I shopped for food on my way home from the post office,” my mother said, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, looking at the results.

  Four gallons of ice cream had turned into a moldy lake in the bottom of the trunk. The bag of potatoes had sprouted into small trees and some raw chicken legs and thighs were ready to get up and climb out on their own.

  As much as my brothers tried to sanitize the trunk, it always carried the faint odor of rotting food, and no matter where the car was parked, flies seemed to hold their family reunions nearby.

  Perhaps that’s why station wagons are better for busy women. It’s harder to forget that you grocery shopped because there is no trunk. Looking back, I know my mother must have really
been overwhelmed because it was totally unlike her to ever forget that she bought ice cream. We are exactly alike in that way.

  I really am not a scatterbrain. I only need to focus a bit more on the task at hand.

  One evening, my fifth-grader, Brandon, was searching the room where I kept all of our crafting materials, desperate for a piece of poster board for a school project. He had forgotten it was due the next morning. As a mom who deals with minor emergencies all day long, I told him I’d make a quick run to the nearby discount store and be back in a flash.

  When I arrived back home, Brandon met me in the driveway.

  “That was a really long flash. You’ve been gone for two hours.”

  “I know,” I told him. “Big Dave is on vacation, so they sent a different AAA guy. He took a while to get there. Help me carry in the bags.”

  “Bags?” Brandon asked.

  “They were having some great sales.”

  Brandon carried the bags into the house and started to shuffle through my good deals: a twelve-pack of white crew socks, two-for-one ink cartridges for the printer, three cans of mixed nuts, a forty-eight-count box of granola bars, SPF 30 sunblock lotion, and a large plastic tub perfect for storing Christmas decorations.

  After a minute he distracted me from trying to find my ringing cell phone in the bottom of my purse.

  “Mom. Where’s the poster board?”

  Whoops.

  Being a “creative” mom, I spent some time with Brandon recycling brown paper bags into substitute poster board. It was the best way to teach a lifelong, very useful lesson on resourcefulness and, more than that, he and I figured it out together.

  A Poseidon Adventure on the Love Boat

  Calling Captain Stubing to the lido deck!

  There was a lot of beauty and bluster the week I taped The Love Boat in Italy. One extremely strong gust nearly blew me overboard, but I managed to hang on. It wasn’t the weather or even the ocean breeze that almost knocked me off my feet: it was a legendary actress.

  Yes, I really did an episode of The Love Boat. It’s pretty hard to comprehend that I would turn down the role of Sandy opposite John Travolta in the movie Grease, and then later agree to play a sheltered Italian girl on The Love Boat, but it’s true.

  Even now, thirty years later, some people I meet will still bring up my decision, and the fact that Olivia Newton-John achieved such major fame in the role that I turned down. They usually ask me about it with a quizzical look of disbelief, like: “What happened? I thought you didn’t do drugs? Did you have a mental lapse?”

  I’m sure it would have been a lot of fun to work with John Travolta and the talented cast, but I still have no regrets.

  Even though the music was fun and the script was good, the ending of the story seemed to send a strongly mixed message to young girls, one that made me feel uncomfortable: the sweet “good girl” chooses to become a very different person due to peer pressure. As Rizzo sings in the movie, Sandy was “lousy with virginity.” With the “cool” girls rating her moral values as a personal flaw, Sandy vows to change.

  At the end of the movie, she appears as her transformed self in tight black pants, a revealing shirt, sassy high heels, a cigarette in hand, and an attitude of “come and get it.”

  This is the “happy” ending for Sandy—becoming exactly what her peers and boyfriend want her to be. From my perspective, it was not a story of a girl becoming a woman; it was a story of a girl becoming a sex object.

  When the part was offered to me, I was still a teenager. Being in the public eye, I was watched closely by many other young people. Beyond that, however, I had been raised to believe that being a female was a blessing full of unique privilege. I see women as being the cocreators and nurturers of the future, the nucleus of the family. My parents had taught me that having self-respect as a woman could never be replaced by any amount of money, possessions, or popularity. It’s something I want each of my own daughters to know, and something I learned a lot about in 1982 on the set of The Love Boat.

  When I was offered the guest-star role of Maria Rosselli, one of the deciding factors for me was the chance to work with two incredible stage and screen legends: the funny and dear Ernest Borgnine, and the outrageously talented Shelley Winters. In the story line, the two of them were playing my cantankerous grandparents, who were journeying with me to meet my husband-to-be.

  As timing would have it, my life was a bit similar to the character I was playing. I had recently become engaged to my first husband and I was very happy. I was twenty-two years old, looking forward to being a wife and a mother. I had so much enthusiasm about my future that I was like a sugar addict who gets the first piece of birthday cake with the giant rose made of frosting. I was buzzing with excitement.

  My best friend, Patty, was along with me as my traveling companion. When I wasn’t on the set, Patty and I would go out and explore each city where the boat docked. We called it sightseeing. It was more like sighting the best stores and seeing how many we could get to before we had to be back to the ship. Let’s just say the two of us have always done more than our share when it comes to stimulating the retail economy wherever we visit! She’s the only one I know who can power shop at my pace.

  About halfway through the week of filming, we were in Rome, Italy. I found the most beautiful christen ing gown I had ever seen in a small specialty shop. The handmade lace and the embroidered satin were breathtaking. I had to buy the gown to hopefully bless my own baby in someday.

  I took it back to the set with me and was showing it to some of the friends I had made doing the show when Shelley Winters came over to see what everyone was oohing and aahing over.

  Shelley had been on edge with almost everyone equally, both cast and crew, the entire week. Now, for some reason, she flew into a rage over my purchase. I didn’t understand and the crew stood stunned into silence as she ranted on about my “sentimental stupidity,” scoffing at the baby gown. I didn’t even know how to respond. In total embarrassment, I gathered up my shopping bags and went to my room.

  That night, the cast and crew traveled on to Ven ice. I spent the entire trip trying to figure out what on earth I had done that made Shelley Winters so furious. I thought that she had no reason to be so crabby. She had a great career and had won every award available in show business: an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy. In her younger years she was a Hollywood beauty. Now she was a first choice for a lot of high-profile, challenging character roles. It seemed to me that fortune had been generous to Shelley.

  I decided it would be best to just ignore the incident and do whatever it took to get through the filming schedule. She obviously didn’t like me at all.

  The next evening, following a day of filming, there was a knock on my door. I wasn’t expecting anyone, so I was even more surprised when I opened it to see Shelley standing there, cocktail in hand. It seemed, by the way she leaned on the door frame, that it wasn’t her first one of the evening. After I invited her in she asked: “Can I see that baby gown you were showing everyone?”

  I was actually afraid she would try to destroy it, but I handed it to her anyway. She sat down in a chair with the dress in her hands, looking it over closely, not saying a word for the longest time. When she finally looked up, her eyes were full of tears. I didn’t dare speak, until she said, “I have a daughter, you know.”

  I told her that I didn’t know that.

  Then Shelley scoffed, took a long gulp of her drink, and said, “I have so many awards I don’t know what to do with them. I use them for doorstops. I could have had any man in Hollywood that I wanted.”

  She set her glass down hard on the table. I was concerned that she was building up steam again so I kept silent, not wanting to make her more upset.

  “When my daughter was growing up, all I cared about was my career,” she continued. “What would be my next big part? What role would get me further ahead? I guess my daughter felt like she was lost in the shuffle of my career.”

 
; Shelley’s face softened for a moment and her chin quivered. “She hates me, you know.”

  Then she wiped her eyes and picked up her drink again.

  “Here’s to your career,” she toasted me with a forced smile. “If you plan to have kids, which I hope you don’t, but . . . if you do, I hope you’ll remember what I’m telling you right now.”

  She stood to leave, hugged me, and then broke down sobbing in my arms.

  “I would give back every single award I’ve ever won if I could have my daughter’s arms around me right now.”

  She didn’t even wait for me to respond. She picked up her glass and walked out the door, not turning to look back or say good night.

  My heart broke for her.

  When I anticipated working with Shelley, I thought I was going to have the opportunity to learn a lot about acting from a truly talented legend. What she gave me, though, was insight into what it means to be a woman and a mother, and a look into the painful emptiness of a broken relationship between mother and child. It was an extraordinary lesson at a very impressionable time in my life and my desired career.

  I know I would have done a good job playing Sandy. I would probably have had a different career, with more film work or perhaps more hit records. I also know, however, that I would regret having my eleven-year-old daughter watch Mommy in that movie now, especially as she enters that time in her life when she is deciding what it means to be a female, and how to navigate in today’s world all the expectations that may come her way when it comes to dating.

  Every choice we make has an element of consequence. I guess the question in choosing is: Can you live with the results?

  Maybe my guest-star turn on The Love Boat wasn’t a career move that I happily highlight on my résumé, but it did help me dock in the reality that when the peer pressure, the awards, the applause, and even that fairy-tale marriage you think could never fail fades away, it’s only self-respect that will keep you afloat through the storms.