Is My Bow Too Big? How I Went From Saturday Night Live to the Tea Party (5 page)

“I could do things to you and you could remain a virgin,” he suggested. Then he shuffled into his bedroom and hooked himself up to his oxygen tank. He only had one lung. I felt so embarrassed for him. I went into his room and sat next to him on his bed while he breathed with the aid of his machine. I chatted nonchalantly so he wouldn’t think I was repulsed or anything. Maybe he silently understood that I wouldn’t even have been promiscuous with him if he was a twenty-five-year-old-model-body-builder-soapstar-millionaire (under a full moon)—I was that morally convicted. For a moment, I felt like we were buddies.

I remember thinking,
Well, I never imagined I’d be “loving my neighbor” in Hollywood in a dying celebrity’s bedroom. But maybe this is my mission field.
Fading celebrities need love just as much as anyone. I left a few moments later. He sent me a Christmas gift every year after that until he died. It was always a potted baby Christmas tree.

Being Seen by People with Power

My first attempt was a disaster.

I wanted to be on
Happy Days
because it was the best show on TV, so I called in sick to my American Cancer Society typing job. I felt guilty, but I had goals. What I didn’t have was permission to get on the Paramount Studios lot. Studios have very high security, maybe to keep away fans and stalkers, but I think it’s probably to keep away desperate actors looking for work. At the guard gate, when I gave my name, the guy mistakenly wrote Victoria Tenant (Steve Martin’s ex-wife) on my pass and opened the door. This was an unexpected mini-miracle. I hadn’t quite figured out how to get past the guard gate. I had just decided to tell the truth. I told him I was supposed to meet with Jerry Paris, the director of
Happy Days
. This was not a complete lie. Jerry had given a speech at Auburn University while I was a student; he had told me that my voice was unique and to look him up if I was ever in LA. So I did.

I asked the guard how to find Jerry Paris, and he pointed me toward the commissary. I approached him as he ate lunch and introduced myself. He looked scared, like I was going to shoot him. He screamed at me, “Who-are-you-what-do-you-want?!”

I reminded him about our meeting at Auburn.

He shouted, “My daughter can’t even get work as an actress. What do you want from me?”

His lunch date quieted him and told me where the casting office was. I knocked on the door and “Cappy,” a white-haired guy in a sailor’s cap, opened it without taking his eyes off the TV. The news said President Reagan had just been shot. I was really sad about that, but this was my only day off. Why couldn’t he get assassinated tomorrow? I only had one day to get discovered! I started doing a handstand on a chair in his office to get his attention. He snapped in disgust and looked past my legs. Without taking his eyes off the continual replays of the shooting, he said, “Who sent you over here?”

“Jerry Paris.”

“We aren’t casting anything today.” He moved his cap and scratched his head. “You can watch the cast tape the show if you want. They’re on Stage 6.”

I found Stage 6. I didn’t want to bother anyone, but this was my only day off, so when Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, and the rest of the cast took a break, I ran up to the set and did a handstand on top of one of the tables. It was wobbly but I didn’t fall. I started reciting my poetry.

“The life of a gymnast is really rough,

You can tell a gymnast for her hands are tough

Only a gymnast knows how it feels

To win a meet or bruise your heels

Because your muscles are big, the boys all tease you

You did a full twist, the coach won’t believe you…”

Jerry Paris shouted, “Hey, get off that! What is she doing? Who is… put the camera on her!”

I continued,

“Though it is tough, it is really not rare

To tell a gymnast by the smile she’ll wear.”

I got down off the table and Jerry recognized me. He awkwardly pushed me away, “Look, we’re uh, working here, why don’t you go over to Stage 7 next door and, uh, get a good seat. They’ll be taping
Laverne and Shirley
in a couple minutes.”

I walked over and sat in the empty bleachers alone for an hour while a few grips set up for the show. I was exhausted from humiliating myself. I’d put in enough effort for a day. I had a goal, but I was still human and I had a shred of dignity left. I turned off the ambition faucet. I stared at the set mystified. I could do what they did, but how do you get the five feet from the bleachers to the set? It was a mystery.

One of the actors from the
Laverne and Shirley
show saw me sitting alone. The audience hadn’t been let in yet. He bounced up, heard my story, and invited me to his house for a volleyball party after the taping. Volleyball party? Maybe TV stars really are down-to-earth people. I didn’t even play volleyball, but then again, I was from Nowheresville. Later that night, after resentfully watching Laverne and Shirley frolic about and get thunderous applause and millions of dollars for doing what I could do, I drove my jalopy into the valley and found the TV star’s house. I waded through a crowd of strangers and said hello when I saw him. He gave me a personal tour of his home which ended at his bedroom. I admired the drum-set near the bed. He said, “Ya wanna do it now, or later?” I did a double take. Was he talking about drumming? He didn’t even know my name.

He looked kind of high.

I replied gently, “I’m a Baptist virgin. Weren’t we going to play volleyball?” He looked at me puzzled and walked away. I awkwardly shuffled myself down the hall and out to my car and drove home. Next day, my William Morris TV agent yelled at me on the phone, “What were you doing? How are we supposed to sell you as a serious actress if you’re doing handstands on tables?”

My second attempt at being seen by the people with power was informative. Since I had no car at this point, I walked about ten miles from my typing job at Wilshire and Western to The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard to perform for three minutes on Open Mike Night. It was 1980, and I’d heard that that was where comedians got discovered. I wasn’t a comedian and I didn’t have an act, but I tried to make one up during my long walk. I stopped in a fancy place on La Cienega, Restaurant Row, to get a Diet Coke. They were in the middle of an armed robbery. I was standing at the hostess’ desk and saw some nervous employees whispering, “He has a gun.” People were shuffling about in the dim lighting. I didn’t know which ones were the bad guys and which ones were the good guys. I thought,
If I run, the robber might shoot me, or the restaurant owner might shoot me thinking I was the robber
. So I pretended to be oblivious. With no Diet Coke, but lots of adrenaline, I shuffled back to the sidewalk looking as dumb as I could. And then I started sprinting.

I stood in line at The Comedy Store and received my time slot. 1:30 a.m. Now I wait. For five hours I watched the others. Howie Mandel had a white surgical glove over his head, and he talked in a baby voice. The others cursed a lot. They all looked like they knew what they were doing. I did not.

I was now living in a $100-a-month room in a crumbling Victorian relic squeezed between two ugly 1970’s apartment buildings with chlorine stains on their stucco walls. My neighbors didn’t have telephones. One night the man upstairs beat up the woman downstairs and the landlord needed to call the police, so he banged on my door since I had the only phone. All five downstairs tenants shared the same bathroom. It was 4’ by 4’ and had a long string hanging down from the ceiling to turn on the single light bulb. The old man carried bottles of yellow liquid to the bathroom every morning. I guess he couldn’t hold it. He loved Hitler, and talked about him all the time. The other neighbor had greasy, long hair that hung in his face and gave him bad acne. He played the Rolling Stones all day, every day, real loud. None of these people ever left their rooms.

The lady next to him invited me in to show me scrapbooks of her movie-star days. She wore an old, wrinkled, pink satin nightgown. Prescription pill bottles and junk was everywhere. I felt I could end up like that: flipping through scrapbooks and showing young girls how pretty I
used
to be, while the long ash of my cigarette finally crumbled into my glass of chardonnay.

I glanced around the dark comedy club. The walls were black and only three candles were flickering. I could hardly see the front row. A few cool guys, the real comics, stood in the back whispering to each other, laughing. I was invisible.
What have I got to lose?
I thought.
No one knows me. These are strangers I will never see again. Anonymity is my friend.

I had no “set,” so I did the monologue by Lily Tomlin that I’d memorized in high school. When I left the stage, a scaly figure in the shadows yelled at me (I later found out she was the club owner, Mitzi.), “You never do someone else’s material! Especially if they’re alive!” I did not know that.

A month later, I went back to The Comedy Store, except prepared this time. I recited my original poetry from high school while performing a handstand. I figured no one else could do that, and besides, the athletes would respect my gymnastics, the English majors would appreciate my rhymes, and the drunks would like to see my bloomers.

There were two places to work on your stand-up routine: The Comedy Store and The Improv. The Comedy Store was a clique of dark, cursing, angry, drug-addicted comics, and The Improv was a clique of dark, cursing, angry, drug-addicted
yuppie
comics. So, I found a more comfortable place to indulge my performance fantasies: The Society for the Preservation of the Variety Arts, or the Variety Arts Center (
VAC
). The
VAC
was downtown and full of old, non-hip, non-industry patrons who danced to Art Deco’s 1930 Society Orchestra. I was hired as the cigarette girl. That was my night job
.
In a French Maid costume, I took Polaroids of the patrons for a dollar each. I also sold cigarettes and cashews. I was told to circulate and say, “Cigarettes, cashews, nuts, and butts.” My day job at The American Cancer Society (
ACS
), was teaching people how to quit smoking by eating sunflower seeds, sucking cloves, chewing gum, and attending
ACS
Stop Smoking Meetings. All this attention to cigarettes made me curious, so I’d sneak them at home, trying to get addicted, thinking that this might solve my weight problem and eliminate my need to binge and purge. That was getting old. A secret plan developed: to smoke until my career took off and quit before cancer set in.

My third attempt at being seen by the people with power worked. The talent scout for Johnny Cason saw my little handstand/poetry thing at the
VAC
and put me on
The Tonight Show
. But, it wasn’t so easy. I had just survived a nervous breakdown. Let me explain.

One doesn’t just lightly trip onto
The Tonight Show
stage. While young wannabes are living in Hollywood, ambitiously doing their act night after night in hopes of being discovered, or at least noticed, and having to pay rent and eat, they also have a real life; a life where con-artists live, where friends and romances pop in and out; a life where all the temptations of the universe swirl about your young virginal skin and tease you or trick you away from your original goals and values. I had already shot down a few snakes and sharks. I physically fought off one naked, Quaalude-filled, casting director and rode the city bus two hours home; I’d left a newspaper advertised scam where I was required to pay $700 to be in a movie; I’d fled on my moped from a photographer’s house when he asked me to pose in see-through lingerie for a foreign magazine. I guess my guard was down because at the
VAC
, where I’d found a supportive place to hone my craft, I’d also found Satan, the resident fire-eater. Drinks were free for employees at the
VAC
, just like at the Playboy Mansion, so I started experimenting with alcohol again. Brandy tasted like cough syrup. Vodka tasted like poison. Bailey’s tasted like ice cream. Satan was the bartender. He helped me explore the bottled mysteries. I knew he was promiscuous, so I wasn’t interested in him romantically. One day, Satan (He said he’s going to sue me if I keep calling him that in public, so, let’s just call him the Artist Formerly Known As Satan from now on. A.F.K.A.S. for short.) invited me on a “ride” in his broken-down red convertible. I was bored and lonely so I said okay. He wore a beret! But so did I. I entered his Silverlake hippie pad. Silverlake is a low-rent Bohemian section of LA. The air was thick with smoke. Finches and doves were in cages. There were ferrets, dogs, cats, wind-chimes, and lots of people laughing and playing music. I noticed that a lot of people stopped by frequently for short periods of time and exchanged small packages. After a while I started giggling a lot and I heard someone say, “She has a contact high.” I asked someone what that meant, and was shocked to learn that I might have drugs in my body. I hadn’t given anyone permission to put them in me. I couldn’t tell if I felt funny or not.