Prairie Tale (29 page)

My immediate instinct was to say, “No effing way you’re taking my kid to Texas. Are you out of your mind?” But I held off and asked him to give me time to have a conversation with Dakota and talk to the rest of the family. I sat down with Dakota, and he assured me that he did indeed want to go. I went into my therapist’s office weeping, wanting to know what was wrong with me that my kid wanted to move to Texas.

“It’s not what’s wrong with you,” she said. “It’s what’s wrong with his father that your kid feels he has to go to Texas to take care of him.”

We talked through my options, all of which were going to hurt no matter what I did. Did I want him hating me for the rest of his life because I said no? Or did I want him hating me for a smaller part of his life because I said yes? I knew not to discuss it with my mother, who would have immediately read me the most devastating passages from
Sophie’s Choice
. I talked it over with Bruce, who pointed out Dakota would be back for long weekends, holidays, and the summer, so it was just a different way of dividing up the visitation schedule we had already worked out.

By the time Bo actually moved, I had come to terms with letting Dakota go. I was fine as I took him to the airport and put him on a plane. I got about two miles up the freeway before I fell apart. Agonizingly sad, primal screams came out of me, and I pulled off to the side of the road and just wailed. As far as I was concerned, I was no better than my birth mother. I had just given my kid away.

I was convinced I had made the biggest mistake of my life. It sent me reeling into a depression that I had little time for. A small bright spot was when Bruce and I finally sold his Hidden Hills place and moved into my dream home: my own manor house with majestic views on Mulholland Highway in Calabasas. But then my grandfather’s health took a turn.

Sometime earlier, Papa Harry had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. At eighty-four, he had refused the surgery his doctor had recommended, preferring not to endure the side effects. He made his wishes clear at a family dinner when he said, “When it’s my time, I just want to go. No heroics.”

Papa Harry knew his audience. All the women at the table immediately berated him for even hinting at such a time when he would be nearing his final breaths. You have to fight, they bleated. You can’t ever give up. Blah-blah-blah-blah. Papa Harry shook his head; they didn’t understand. But I saw no problem. I believed any adult who wasn’t responsible for parenting a child had the right to end his life whenever he felt he’d reached the end.

“You call it. I’m there,” I said to him. “Whatever you need, one way or another, it’s up to you.”

He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “That’s why you’re the jewel in the crown, kid.”

I felt like more of a juggler than a jewel. I oversaw work on our new house. Then I gave Bo ninety thousand dollars after he called and said he wanted to give Dakota a better place to live than his apartment but didn’t have the cash for a down payment. I also helped my mother, who was handling my grandfather’s decline in her own way. While my mother tried to feed him tuna noodle casserole, banana pudding, and other fattening foods as if they were the cure for cancer, he had no appetite for anything except spending precious time with his family.

In the midst of all the turmoil, I had to go to Seattle for the movie
Switched at Birth,
but I flew back every weekend to be with my Papa Harry. One time when I had Mike with me, the two of us climbed into bed with him and snuggled up on either side. He would turn to me and kiss my forehead, and then he would turn and stroke Mike’s cheek. He did that over and over again. No words had to be spoken.

After that visit I went back to Seattle to shoot another week. Bruce called me late that Friday afternoon. When I picked up, he asked me if I was at the hotel. I said I wasn’t and he said for me to call him when I got there. I knew what had happened and there was no way I was going to wait. I was shaking uncontrollably and I begged him to tell me. I said, “Papa Harry’s gone, isn’t he?”

“No,” said Bruce.

“Well, what is it?!” I begged.

Bruce told me that a few minutes earlier, my dear fifteen-year-old beagle, Sidney, had been running across the backyard and just fell over. He was gone. My firstborn pup. Sidney Bidney Kidney Bean. The Bean. Mr. Beanly.

I was completely unprepared for that. I was devastated but finished the day’s work, then flew home the next day to see my family and visit Papa Harry.

In his final days, Papa Harry lost the ability to speak and grew frustrated by it. My mother encouraged him to relax; he’d already said everything that needed to be said. Soon thereafter he slipped into a coma. I went back to Seattle for the last week of shooting. About two hours after I arrived, my mom called and said, “He’s gone.”

I stared out the window into the nighttime sky and thought about Papa Harry. He passed true to form, on his own terms, with grace, dignity, and style. His ending was peaceful and serene, an end I wish for everyone.

At work the next morning, I thanked everyone for their concern and condolences and insisted I was fine. I wasn’t. Between scenes, I hid in my trailer and cried. As soon as I was needed on the set, I dried my eyes and put on my game face. I didn’t have to be told the show must go on. That was second nature to me. I could stuff away colds, broken bones, and even the death of my beloved grandfather.

Or so I thought. After two days of setting aside my grief, I was on the set and in fact in midsentence, speaking with my director and costars, when suddenly I started to hyperventilate. Then my hands began to shake and my fingertips tingled. The set medic came running over.

I had just experienced my first anxiety attack. I still get them, but much less frequently. They happen when I stuff away anger or pain.

I wrapped the film and came home the day before Papa Harry’s funeral. Bruce was away on a trip he takes every year with his guy friends, herding cattle in Wyoming. To his credit, he wanted to come home but I told him to stay. So the night before the funeral, my friend Cordelia slept over and then helped me prepare for the service.

My Papa Harry’s service was a remarkable celebration of his life. It was closer to a roast or a variety show than a funeral. Uncle Miltie spoke. So did Uncle Jan (Murray), Sid (Caesar), and one of my favorites, Red Buttons. Garry Marshall told great stories about Papa Harry. Sara and I delivered eulogies on behalf of my mother and my aunt Stephanie.

I sat there with my boys, Sam, Lee, Dakota, and Michael, and grieved with my family for the first time in my life. Dakota carried Papa Harry’s ashes to his place of interment. It was fantastic and sad and healing. It was what grief should be, and it really made me miss my dad.

Later that night, I was reminded of a story about my grandfather and Jerry Lewis, who amused themselves by making crank phone calls back in the sixties. One day they were looking through the newspaper classifieds for people they could prank when they saw an ad that said “Parakeet Found.” They called the number and told the man who answered that they had lost their parakeet and believed he had theirs.

“Is it yellow?” they asked.

“Yes,” the man said.

“With an orange beak?” my grandfather asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s him!” Papa Harry and Jerry Lewis yelled into the phone. “That’s him! You got him!”

“When you say Marvin, does he chirp?” my grandfather asked.

They heard the man talk to the bird. “Marvin! Marvin!” Sure enough, the bird made noises back.

“He chirped when I called him Marvin,” the man reported.

“That’s our bird!” Papa Harry and Jerry Lewis said. “God bless you for finding him.”

“Do you want to come get him?” the man said.

“No, no, no, that’s not necessary,” they explained. “Just take him to the window, point him toward Highland Avenue, and tell him to fly to Orange.”

“Really?” the man asked.

“Yes,” they said. “He has a wonderful sense of direction.”

There was a pause. Then the man got back on the phone.

“Okay, I did it,” he said. “He’s gone.”

And so it was with Papa Harry. As far as I was concerned, he went to the window and flew toward Orange or wherever his next stop was, having made this life much better with his entertaining chirps.

I
continued to suffer anxiety attacks after Papa Harry’s death. They were like emotional earthquakes. Without warning, something would shift inside me and then the ground would shake with a fury that made it seem like life was about to end. They didn’t happen often, but they struck frequently enough to keep me on edge.

I didn’t know what was going on. All kinds of crazy that had built up inside me over the years started to bubble out. My head was full of conversations. I heard discussions from my childhood. I replayed fights I’d had with Bo years earlier. I went over the checklist I had created a few days earlier for the fiftieth birthday party I was planning for Bruce. The chatter never stopped.

I relied on alcohol to get me through the thicket of noise and anxiety. I drank through the making of
A Vision of Murder: The Story of Donielle
in Vancouver. I drank even more in Toronto when I worked on the movie
Sanctuary
. I tried to be strict about my drinking, though. My alcohol consumption did not invade my day before 5:00 p.m. But then it was like troops storming the beaches of Normandy. By the end of a typical night, I would have gone through two bottles of wine myself.

Bruce had no idea how much I consumed. At home, I had my secret system down to a science. I would pour a glass of wine, take a few sips, and as it would get lower in my glass, I would sneak back into the kitchen and fill it to the same level so it looked like I was barely drinking. Sometimes I would hide an open bottle of wine in other rooms so I could refill without going back to the kitchen.

One night our friend Archie was over for dinner. A former marine and Gulf War veteran, Archie had worked as Bruce’s double on
House of Secrets
in New Orleans, and we had stayed close. He was like one of our kids. Neither Bruce nor Archie drank that night, but I had my glass of wine, which I secretly topped off throughout the evening until something happened. It was like a switch flipped; I don’t even remember. From what I have since been told or put together, I put Michael to bed and joined Bruce and Archie in the family room. I sat down on the dog bed in the middle of the floor, began talking to them, and then fell asleep. “Fell asleep”—that was denial talking. I passed out facedown in the dog bed.

Bruce couldn’t wake me up so I could say good-bye when Archie got ready to leave. He made an excuse about me being tired; he may have believed it, too. Then he tried to take me to bed. Apparently I went off on him for waking me up and struggled as he helped me up the stairs. Anger came out of me like steam from a vent on a street, noxious and foul—and I had no clue. To this day, I have no recollection of that night.

I woke up in the guest room. When I opened my eyes, Bruce was sitting on the bed, staring at me. I heard him say my name and I broke into tears.

“I have a problem,” I said.

“Yeah, you do,” said Bruce.

“I have a drinking problem,” I said.

“Yeah, you do,” he said, nodding.

I wiped the tears off my face and sniffled deeply.

“Holy shit,” I said. “What do I do?”

“Get help,” he said.

“I don’t want to go to rehab,” I said. “I can already see the whole thing in the tabloids: Half Pint drinks a half pint per day, blah-blah-blah.”

“Melissa,” he said emphatically, “let’s start at the beginning. You just said you have a drinking problem. Go deal with it.”

I
got into an emergency session with my therapist and told her the deal. My situation was dire. I felt like it was life and death. Certainly, my marriage and ability to mother was on the line. I couldn’t remember putting my kid to bed the night before. I had called my husband terrible names, words that had never come out of my mouth before. I had blacked out.

“A blackout?” I said. “Me?”

It had been awful.

“Look, I have a drinking problem,” I said, talking a hundred miles an hour. “But I don’t want to go to rehab and have this conversation in front of strangers and have to worry about one of them selling it to one of the rags. This is my life. I’ve done enough of it in public.”

We agreed to try rehabbing at home and if it got to be too much, I would check myself in somewhere. I was surprised to learn my therapist was twenty-eight years sober. She said there was a saying in AA that wherever two alcoholics are gathered, there’s a meeting. In fact, Alcoholics Anonymous began in 1935 with just two members, failed stockbroker Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon. They talked, smoked, and drank coffee in Smith’s kitchen, and a worldwide movement grew from there.

“The only way to get sober is with AA,” she said. “How you choose to do it is up to you.”

I stopped drinking that day for almost the last time. To offset my body’s craving for sugar, she had me eat a spoonful of honey every hour till I went to bed starting at 5:00 p.m., the time I normally poured my first drink. I also drank fruit juice. My juice of choice was white cranberry peach. It took me almost two years to get off that stuff! But it kept me from having horrible physical withdrawals. I had a rougher time emotionally. All of a sudden I had to feel everything that I had been trying to avoid. I was insecure. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I feared I wouldn’t be funny anymore. I was irrational, short-tempered, paranoid, and angry, which was new for me. I hadn’t ever been an angry person. I didn’t recognize that part of me. All of it scared me to death.

Whenever you see someone in a movie or on TV going through their first thirty days of sobriety in rehab, they are socially inept, inappropriate, and angry at the world. They chain-smoke and chew gum. I was like that, except I was rehabbing at home under the supervision of my therapist. It was unconventional, but I got through it.

As I got into the second and third month I embraced my newfound clarity as a blessing. I didn’t enjoy all the difficult emotional crap I had to feel, but I took ownership of my life. For the first time ever, I was forced to say out loud if I was unhappy. Or angry. Or cranky. Or craving a drink, so watch out. Or sad. Or if I needed to talk to someone about why my mother didn’t love me enough to keep me. There was no running away.

But as I articulated these issues, I could start working on them. And that was a good thing.

I wasn’t staying sober according to AA’s Big Book. I wasn’t going to meetings. I wasn’t working the steps. I was sober, though, and that’s all that mattered to me. I was present for my kids, present in my marriage, and present in my life. And that was a good thing, too.

In the fall I got elected to the Screen Actors Guild Board of Directors. I was completely naive when I started the position. I had served as an alternate once when Richard Masur had been president, and the meeting had been terribly boring.

Then the commercial strike of 2000 piqued my curiosity. At the time, I was the face (or the head) of Garnier. Say what you will about me, I’ve had good hair my entire life. But that account fell apart during the 2000 strike. I instinctively knew the strike was too long. I also knew that the reputation of SAG within the industry had taken a beating. Something had to be done to restore its image; so when Richard called and asked me to run for the board of the Hollywood division, I agreed.

I was excited when I came in among the top ten vote-getters, which was a win. My first call was to Anna. She had been a past president of SAG. She congratulated me and wished me luck, but I detected a slight edge to her voice. I would find out soon enough why. The first board meeting I attended was a Hollywood division board meeting and it was bloody awful. The strike had just been settled and a seemingly disinterested President Daniels sat at the dais while his vice president gave awards to people who had worked hard during the strike.

The meeting was supposed to run about three hours; it lasted six. Two hours was consumed solely by a discussion concerning one board member whose photo had been left out of the previous year’s “class photo.” There was screaming and yelling. There was even crying as the awards were handed out. I had never witnessed such a colossal waste of time and energy. I ran a very tight ship at home. This was crazy. I couldn’t imagine what the national board meeting would be like.

I attended a dinner at Bill Daniels’s house for new board members who were somewhat unaffiliated. Like the country, SAG was basically divided into two main parties. Bill Daniels and those at his home belonged to the neo-con Performers Alliance, later known as Membership First. They had taken the Guild into the commercial strike.

Before dinner, Kent McCord spoke. I knew he had been on a series I didn’t watch when I was growing up,
Adam-12
. He spoke endlessly, quoting labor history and arcane rules like a walking encyclopedia. Valerie Harper, best known as Rhoda on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, sat next to me. She had the annoying habit of muttering “uh-hum,” “yeah,” and “uh-hum” as she listened to someone talk. Hers was always a second voice in the room. As Kent spoke, she muttered and stared like he was Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt rolled into one. I thought,
Wow, this guy knows a ton of history
. I was impressed with his breadth of knowledge. Then, about twenty minutes into his soliloquy, I realized that nothing he was saying was applicable to the topic at hand. He spoke a good game but it made no sense whatsoever. If you look up the word “blowhard” in the dictionary, you will find a picture of Kent McCord.

By the end of the evening, I knew this was the wrong side of things. All these people were patting themselves on the back for running this great strike, which had crippled California’s economy and ruined the commercial industry, which had partially migrated straight to Canada and never returned. Tremendous monies were lost that would’ve gone toward pension and health plans. How was that a victory?

I called Richard Masur and said I wanted to talk to his friends about this, because it struck me as weird, or wrong.

In April 2001, I attended my first national board meeting. It was in a top-floor conference room at the Sheraton Universal Hotel. There were 106 national board members. At the time, the entire union totaled 98,000 members, nearly 90 percent of whom did not work full-time as actors. New York board members Paul Christie and Paul Reggio, both close allies of Richard’s, instantly embraced me, a move that would help shape my future. Some of the more moderate Hollywood division members as well as those from the Regional Branch Division also welcomed me. They were sane, rational, thoughtful people, who I quickly recognized as beacons of light in a thick fog of crazy.

Before the meeting, I fixed a cup of tea at a buffet in the back of the room. That’s when I spotted Sally Kirkland, another newly elected board member. She was dressed in layers of multicolored Indian robes and had a rhinestone bindi in the middle of her forehead. She had come with an assistant who set up a special antigravity chair for her, and she had a foot-high stack of unwrapped, sliced American cheese on the table in front of her.

Zino Macaluso, who ran the agency relations department, caught me staring at Sally and her cheese.

“Welcome to the board, Ms. Gilbert,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“You look perplexed.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that,” I said, nodding toward Sally.

He laughed. “Just breathe.”

Board meetings were known to be disruptive, what the
Los Angeles Times
later called “as peaceful as a food fight.” A month earlier, the LAPD had been called to break up a fight at a meeting of the finance committee. However, this board meeting was about as exciting as a coma. It went on for two days. Kent McCord droned on endlessly about procedure and statutes, quoting
Robert’s Rules of Order
and points from history that didn’t seem to relate to anything. A timer would go off, Bill Daniels would announce that his time was up, and Kent would keep going. The arguments back and forth in the language of Robert’s rules of parliamentary procedure were like Greek to me. Thank heaven for my friends who translated. I just listened, trying to learn as much as possible.

By the end of the two days, I was cross-eyed. I had no idea what we had accomplished other than passing Global Rule 1, and I still had questions. I was never called on during the discussion, though, because someone was quoting laws from 1976 and some other putz was talking about when he was on
Room 222
.

After the meeting finished, I gathered with Richard and others from the United Screen Actors Nationwide faction at Claudette Sutherland’s home to strategize ways to move forward. A couple hours later, I felt like we had accomplished something; I wondered why it had been so difficult with the larger group. As I walked to my car, Richard intercepted me and said he wanted to talk for a minute. It was a warm spring night, and we stood just beyond the yellow circle cast by the front porch light.

“There’s a presidential election coming up this fall, and we want you to consider running,” he said.

I took a step backward. He may as well have admitted seeing an alien spaceship zoom across the sky. This was the office Charlton Heston, the SAG president from 1965 to 1971, had called “a bitch of a job.”

“Are you crazy?” I said. “I don’t have a clue what happened over the past two days. It was a zoo in there. I can’t be the president of this union.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Just think about it. You’ve got our support if you’re willing to do it.”

B
ruce laughed with me when I told him about Richard’s entreaty. I had driven home thinking that Richard was as loony as the rest of them. We had a really good laugh that they would even ask me. I could run a household. I could direct an After School Special. But what the hell did I know about running a union?

After going to sleep that night still laughing my ass off, I woke up the next morning with an entirely different attitude. I wasn’t even out of bed when I turned to Bruce and said, “Screw it. If James Cagney can be the president of the Screen Actors Guild, I can be the president, too.”