Crashed (31 page)

“It really began in season four,” Lissa said. We were sitting in the front seat of her SUV with the doors wide open to admit the fragrance of the roses. “I’m sorry to date everything in terms of the show, but that’s how I remember those years. And, of course, Thistle
was
the show. In more ways than one.”

“I never actually saw her until recently,” I said. “I guess what I saw was filmed in the middle nineties, and it looked like it, except for her.
She
looked like her performance was ninety seconds old.”

“The really good ones don’t date. And the really awful ones don’t, either, they’re just as horrid today as they were fifty years ago. It’s the rest of us who get frozen in a moment, a style, a way of being—in my case, I guess, a woman, what everybody’s idea of a woman was then. The hairstyles don’t help, of course, but that’s not what’s really wrong. What’s really wrong is that tastes change. Nobody eats baked Alaska any more, nobody wants their refrigerator to be avocado green, and no actor overplays on camera, but there was a time when those things were the
ne plus ultra
. And film, of course, unlike avocado-colored refrigerators, never goes away. On the other hand, some things don’t date at all. A simple white refrigerator, a perfect apple pie, great acting. They appeal as much now as they did fifty years ago.”

“Some child actors are instinctively perfect,” she said.
“Thistle was one of those. It’s not so surprising, I guess. Give a boy a towel to tie around his shoulders and he can fly. Give a little girl a doll—I’m aware that my attitudes here are not exactly breaking news—give a little girl a doll and a toy set of cups and saucers, and she’ll have a tea party. But eventually they stop playing, while Thistle could turn it on all day long, ten hours a day, and it went way, way beyond simply believing what she was doing. She was phenomenally inventive. The thing I heard her say most often on the set was, ‘I did it that way before,’ and what
that
meant was that she was about to come up with a completely different approach to presenting, say, shock or surprise or guilt or incomprehension. She’d ask for a minute, and she’d sit on the couch if we were in the living room or on one of the kitchen chairs if we were shooting in there, and she’d close her eyes. Sometimes she’d laugh while her eyes were still closed. Then she’d get up and say, “Okay,” and nail it in one take. And woe betide the director who was new to the show and who didn’t want to give Thistle one of her little timeouts. Everyone in the studio jumped on him.”

“And so they should have.”

“We were the biggest problem, because we laughed. She’d catch us off guard and we’d just stand there, laughing, and the scene would grind to a stop. How she loved it when that happened. You know how much she looked like an elf? At those moments, she looked like the naughtiest elf in the swarm, if that’s what you call a bunch of elves, like she’d just gotten the idea to put the donkey ears on old Bottom.”

“This was in the early days?”

“Yes.” She put both hands on the steering wheel and looked at her wedding ring, which had caught fire in the sun. “Really the first three years. They were magic, in so many ways. The trouble is that
Thistle
thought it was magic, too, and believed to the center of her being that it was. And that left her defenseless. Oh, how can I explain this without it sounding crazy? You
know, lots of creative people feel like someone else is actually doing the work. Some of the best writers I know say that the words come
through
them, from somewhere else, that the characters talk and all the writer does is try to get it down before it fades. It’s not like they’re making things up. It’s like someone is
telling
them the story, and they’re just, I don’t know, taking dictation.”

“I’ve read pieces where writers say things like that.”

“Well, Thistle believed that there actually was
someone named Thistle
, someone talented who lived inside her and did all the good work. Her real name was Edith, did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“After we got to know each other—after we realized we had a hit and we were going to be working together for a while instead of being broken up after three or four months of filming—she told me what had happened. She said that Thistle just appeared, just came out of nowhere, at her first reading for the show. Even told her what her name was, and that was the name Edith gave the casting director. And, look: she got the part. All she had to do was relax and let Thistle do whatever she wanted. So she did, just read the lines the way Thistle wanted them read and added some physical business Thistle thought of. The casting director left the room and came back with the three executive producers, guys who don’t laugh at anything, and asked to see the scene again, and this time Thistle did something completely different, something even better. Even the producers were laughing, but the casting director quieted them down and said, ‘Once more. Differently this time.’ And she got what she asked for, the best one yet. And of course, she got the part. They made an offer that evening.”

“And Thistle—I mean, Edith—didn’t believe she was the one who had done it.”

“She never did. She, Edith I mean, would take the script home and learn the lines, and when she got to the set in the
morning, all she had to do was open up and let Thistle in, and Thistle would move Edith around like a hand puppet.”

A hand puppet
, she’d said to Hacker.

“That’s what she was doing when she sat with her eyes closed. She believed she was opening up to Thistle. And that’s what she did, scene after scene, show after show.”

“What did you think about it?”

She shook her head, a gesture packed with regret. “I didn’t give it the thought it deserved. Like everybody else, I was just happy to be part of the show, happy that Thistle could keep it up, keep the people tuning in, keep the damn ratings up. Keep the money coming in. And, of course, everyone was afraid of screwing up Thistle’s process. Afraid for our own sakes, not hers. We were like an army that was being led from victory to victory by someone who believed he was Napoleon. The cities are falling one after another, all this booty is landing in our laps, and who’s going to go into his tent and tell him he’s really Harold Mednick? Who’s going to tell him he’s suffering a delusion? So we all went along with it, with the Thistle idea, even though we knew perfectly well that she was simply the most talented child—oh, hell, one of the most talented
actresses
—we’d ever worked with. We listened to her talk about Thistle and never said a word.

“I remember telling myself—guess I was actually comforting myself—that the whole thing was just a phase she was going through, like an imaginary friend, and that she’d grow out of it, and realize that the talent was hers, that she was really the one doing all the work.”

“But,” I said.

“But I didn’t
tell
her that, and there was no one else who could, no one who mattered to her. God knows her mother didn’t. I really think the reason Edith made Thistle up in the first place was that her mother had always told her how ordinary she was, how unattractive she was. So if the child was suddenly
capable of all
that
, getting laughs, getting applause, becoming a
star
, there had to be a reason. Thistle was the reason. And then her father died, just as Thistle started slipping away.”

“Slipping away?”

“That’s how she described it. She’d been having harder and harder weeks, weeks when the sitting sessions got longer, and the work wasn’t as fresh. You could see her grabbing for inspiration, thrashing around like someone who’s afraid she’s drowning. And she came up with things, eventually, but not on the same plane. Before, she’d been startling, and now she was just good. She was relying more and more on technique.”

“I saw that,” I said. “In the shows I watched.”

“I think she was just tired. She’d worked nonstop for three years, with all of us riding on her shoulders, but she didn’t think that was the reason. She told me she could feel it. Thistle was leaving. This child was literally growing up on television, doing what she did in front of seventy or eighty million people every day, and she felt like she was failing. She felt the talent, the spark, whatever it was that Thistle represented to her, slipping away. Going out, like a candle. And there she was, under those lights, under all those eyes, surrounded by people whose paychecks depended on her, her father just dead and her mother glaring at her whenever things weren’t perfect, and she was
failing
. We all fail, all actors, we all have bad takes and sometimes whole bad days, but she’d never had a bad minute, and suddenly here they were, one after another after another. And she was just a kid. So what she believed was that she’d never had talent, really, it had all been Thistle, and Thistle was leaving.”

“I heard her say it a couple of times. She said,
That wasn’t me, it was Thistle
.”

“Exactly,” Lissa said. “And it just got worse and worse. Because, of course, who she was, when Thistle was gone, was a failure. She was a phony, someone who was pretending to do things she couldn’t really do, and everyone was beginning to see
that she couldn’t do it. I’ll never in my life, not if I live to be a hundred, forget the morning in season five after the
TV Guide
review came out that panned her. I remember every word of it. It said, ‘The problem with the show is that Thistle Downing seems to have lost what used to be the surest touch in television. Before, she dominated the scripts, but now she’s just trying to live up to them. And the scripts aren’t much to live up to.’ And then the press piled on. The child was twelve or thirteen years old.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Everyone on the set was so
kind
to her that day,” Lissa said. “I think it would have been better if we’d all made jokes about it, or just surrounded her and hugged her, even though I think Californians overestimate the healing power of a hug. But that would have been better than what she got. Everyone was just so,
please sit here Thistle; lovely take, Thistle; that was wonderful, Thistle; let’s do it one more time, Thistle
. It was enough to make you sick. About four o’clock, she disappeared. The call went out for her, we were all in place on the set, and she just wasn’t there. We looked absolutely everywhere for her—I honestly think some of us were afraid she’d done herself harm—but it turned out she’d gone out to the street, gotten into a cab, and just taken off. A week later, she told me she’d come up here, up where her father was.” She fell silent for a moment. “She had nowhere to run, so she ran to a rose bush.”

Lissa Wellman took off the big glasses and touched the sides of her index fingers to her lower eyelids, a blotting motion. She put both hands on the wheel and sat there, chewing on her upper lip, her sunglasses forgotten in her lap, and looked at the featureless weathered redwood wall in front of us as though something were written there. “I could have helped more than I did,” she said. “I always told her I loved her. And she believed me, God help her. She didn’t know how little it meant. Everybody in show business loves everybody else so much, it’s darling this and
darling that, people fall in love and drink together and swear eternal friendship and then the shoot ends and we all lose each other’s phone numbers. I loved Thistle, but it was something like that, sort of talk-show love, not the kind of all-out, no-holds-barred, no-questions-asked, I’ll-love-you-forever-no-matter-what love she needed. Probably still needs. And, of course, no one was giving her
that
except the millions of fans who never got anywhere near her and who were beginning to wonder what was wrong with her anyway. Who were beginning to change the station. Abandoning her by the tens of thousands every week. So the problems started. The tantrums, the lines she didn’t learn because she didn’t believe she could do the scene, the days she was late because she couldn’t sleep at night and then couldn’t get out of bed because she was terrified of failing again.” She sighed. “And the drugs.”

“The drugs could kill her,” I said.

“If they haven’t already. Killed whatever was inside her, I mean. Doing something creative is tough, but it comes from a fragile place. I can name lots of people who killed their talent with less cause than Thistle. I think Hollywood’s continuing fascination with zombies comes from the fact that there are so many of them among us. They look the same, they sound the same, but they’ve been unplugged. The thing that made us want to look at them, listen to them: it’s gone. They’re still here, but they’re just waiting to be embalmed. I’d do anything, I’d give years off my life, to turn the clock back for that girl.”

“She’s still in there,” I said. “She doesn’t believe anything good about herself, but she’s still in there.”

Lissa Wellman put a hand on my wrist. “Listen. In your life, there must have been one horrible, unforgettable, humiliating moment, maybe when you were ten or eleven, at the most sensitive time in your life, there must have been one moment when you wished you could disappear forever.
More
than that, not only wanting to disappear, but wishing you’d never existed at
all. A moment that can still make you cringe, twenty or twenty-five years later.”

“There was,” I said.

“Well, multiply that moment by a million, imagine it happening to you on national television, and make it last for
four years
.” She put the sunglasses back on and looked away from me, toward the life and color of the roses, rooted in people’s dead loved ones. “That’s what happened to Thistle Downing.”