Saturday's Child (6 page)

Child actors usually fare even worse, since cuteness, as much as if not more than thespian skill, tends to be their prime commodity, so they face “has-been” status more often than, for instance, the small musicians. There
are
the legendary ones who managed the transition to adult stardom—but not without paying the price of shattered lives: Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Cooper, Margaret O'Brien, Roddy McDowall, Natalie Wood. Of course, there's always the exception to those who became substance abusers, batterers or kleptomaniacs, serial marriers and multiple divorcees, skid-row bums, felons, or suicides: Shirley Temple, perhaps the most famous child star of all time, did not become dysfunctional. She became a right-wing Republican. The choice gives one pause.

In more recent times, it's become a frequent headline: the latest young TV star or movie idol sentenced to prison, rehab, or community service for using or dealing hard drugs. Patty Duke survived alcoholism and a disastrous marriage before having to resurrect her acting as an adult because she knew no other skill. Mary McDonough of
The Waltons
has suffered alcoholism, eating disorders, and nostalgia conventions. Paul Peterson of
The Mickey Mouse Club
and
The Donna Reed Show
was driven to drugs by age twenty. Dana Plato, from the sitcom
Diff'rent Strokes
, died in 1999 of an overdose of painkillers and Valium, after years of drug use and arrests for robbery and parole violations. Her co-star, Gary Coleman, has lived a comparably chaotic life, exacerbated by his being African American and suffering renal disease and stunted growth as a result of immunosuppressants administered during two failed kidney transplants: he sued his family for allegedly misappropriating $18 million of his childhood earnings, has been sued over a punching incident, had to attend court-ordered anger-management classes, and declared bankruptcy in 1999.

Dr. Lisa Rapport, a clinical psychologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, has done a study of the subject, noting that former child actors endure a drug-and-alcohol-abuse rate three times the general average (that's not counting those who become codependents and enablers—after a childhood in training on both counts). The study was done for A Minor Consideration, the group Paul Peterson founded in 1990 to counsel young actors and their parents and push for legislation to protect the work lives of such professional children. The group works with the Screen Actors Guild, and has made its most impressive gains in California—where five thousand of the country's seven thousand child actors work—and where, in 1997, state, industry, and union representatives finally agreed on regulations to raise educational standards for studio teachers, the traditional guardians of minors on the set.

According to a September 2, 1997,
New York Times
article, A Minor Consideration has also campaigned about such issues as “children's working conditions,” the “arrests and drug and alcohol problems of young stars,” overlooked safety precautions—“the killing of two children in a helicopter accident on the set of
Twilight Zone: The Movie
”—the recruiting of premature infants to portray newborns, and the vulnerability of “teenagers involved in romantic entanglements with adult stars.”

The organization also addresses the need for tougher laws governing requirements that some of the money earned by child actors be set aside for their future. Children in entertainment were exempted from national child labor laws in 1938. To this day, state laws are outdated, vary widely, and are unevenly enforced. In my childhood, there was no Coogan Law
⁵
in New York State, so when I left home I moved to a sixth-floor walk-up apartment and worked as a secretary in a literary agency while my mother bought a co-op on Fifth Avenue and played the stock market. In my day, the sole watchdog agency was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC)—yes, it was related to the one for animals—whose representatives on the set looked you over for any visible bruises (but didn't asked you to undress in case there were hidden ones), then went on their way. In my day, for New York kid actors in television or on Broadway, the
Professional Children's School was thought to be the solution to bothersome education requirements. The PCS was most obliging: it overlooked undone homework and absentee attendance, and bestowed passing grades despite an abysmal scholastic reality. Fortunately for me, my mother and aunts shared an Ashkenazic reverence for education, so they scorned the PCS in favor of a small, serious private school and, when I got older, tutors (and therein lies a tale, about which more later).
⁶

I wish Paul Peterson and his group all the best. They're doing much-needed work. But the experienced political activist in me knows that better legislation, while a crucial component of any battle for progressive social change, doesn't solve oppression. The strands are too varied, the knots too tightly woven to be unraveled quickly or simply—and it takes a long time to saw through them. Whenever habitual denial is threatened, it feels to the denier as if the world were about to explode. Though often unacknowledged, it feels this way to the
powerless
as well as to those who wield power over them. This is true of adults and even more so of children. Thanks to the research of such psychologists as Alice Miller and Jennifer Freyd, we now know a bit more about how deep the influence of early imprint really goes.

Having responsibility but lacking authority is a fatiguing, contradictory kind of power, and the child performer lives a fatiguing, contradictory reality. Seduced into collaborating with one's own commercial salability while ignorant of one's own human value, proud of the talents and skills one has while mortified at the use they're put to, unable to break free of the shame-pride-guilt-responsibility dynamic, an intelligent child develops a sophisticated sense of irony so keen it teeters on the edge of self-disgust.

That's when it's time for the perks and rewards to kick in.

Like the dolls.

¹
Originally published in France as
L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime
(Paris: Librairie Plon, 1960); English edition, Jonathan Cape, 1962; U.S. paperback edition, Vintage Books.

²
The late Simone de Beauvoir summed up this position most succinctly in writing that the Roman Catholic Church “reserves its most uncompromising concern for child welfare to the child in fetal form.”

³
Action for Children
, vol. 1, no. 3. See also Robin Morgan,
The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism
(W. W. Norton, 1989) and
The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism in Four Dimensions
, 2d ed. (W. W. Norton, 1994). In June 1999, the International Labour Organization (ILO) finally adopted a treaty intended to abolish the most hazardous forms of child labor. Under pressure from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, however, the ILO compromised, not prohibiting people under age eighteen from
enlisting
in the military, although the treaty bars “forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.” As trade unions, most human-rights organizations, and such countries as Canada, Denmark, and Norway note, military service
is
hazardous, whether the participant has gone compulsorily or voluntarily. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that more than 300,000 children under age eighteen are serving as regular soldiers, guerrillas, spies, cooks, sexual slaves, and suicide commandos in current conflicts in approximately fifty countries. By trying to raise the recruitment age to eighteen, UNICEF is attempting to change the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which set fifteen as the minimum age for military recruitment at the insistence of the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which wanted to continue recruiting high-school graduates. In January 2000, the United States finally dropped its opposition: the Pentagon retained the right to
recruit
seventeen-year-olds but agreed to keep them out of direct combat until age eighteen.

⁴
Interview in
Komsomolskaya Pravda
, the Moscow newspaper, quoted in the
Daily Telegraph
(London), June 25, 1999.

⁵
Named after the former child star Jackie Coogan, who, after a lucrative movie career, grew up into poverty, then sued his parents for misuse of monies he had never seen.

⁶
Education or the lack of it plays a central role in a child performer's chances of surviving into a sane adulthood. I think it's no coincidence that two child actors whose adult lives seem to be conducted with dignity and purpose have had decent educations: Jodie Foster, who manages to act in, direct, and produce films with quiet integrity; and Sheila Kuehl, formerly of the TV sitcom
Dobie Gillis
, now a member of the California State Assembly (D., Santa Monica), sponsoring progressive legislation for women's, children's, and lesbian/gay rights.

THREE

On Air

Show me my face before I was born
.

—Z
EN KOAN

It's a rare little girl who gets to play with a doll of herself.

There was a Robin Morgan doll. There also was a Dagmar doll, named after the character I played for seven years on TV. The Dagmar doll was a large, cloth-stuffed-with-cotton, floppy, genial creature, attired in 1910-era period clothes, the navy-blue “sailor suit” middy blouse and skirt with long black stockings that constituted Dagmar's costume (wardrobe permitted me variations for festive occasions). Her yarn hair was done up in the braids I'd made famous at the cost of a scalp so tight I had a permanent, mild headache I no longer noticed.

Sent off with Aunt Sally on a ten-city tour to hype the Dagmar doll's sales in department-store toy areas, I cheerfully sat in costume, signing photographs for tongue-tied kids and their gushing mothers, all of us surrounded by eerie, smiling, life-size, stuffed versions of myself.

But the Robin Morgan doll was even spookier. It was manufactured in a limited number, as an elite doll—that strange commercial category known as “a collector's item”—although I was allowed to keep one for promotion purposes. A plaster cast was made of my six-year-old face—a
claustrophobic experience where you breathe through straws placed in your nostrils—and then the cast was re-created in hard rubber. This doll also wore her hair in pigtails, but the wig was from human hair almost identical in color to my own, and she had tiny eyelashes fashioned of fine gold wire. Her fifteen-inch-tall body was also made of hard rubber. Her clothing could be taken off—real buttons and buttonholes, real hooks and eyes on real patent-leather shoes—and she even had a petticoat and underpants that came on and off, showing a smooth sexless body (which I examined the second I was alone with her) with hinged limbs and detailed hands complete with fingers and nails. It's just as well I hadn't yet heard of voodoo, or I might've felt even uneasier gazing at this creature than I already did.

She lost her limbs one by one over time. Finally, a few years ago, burrowing through Scrabble boxes and chess sets gathering dust on a closet shelf, I came across her head—disembodied but smiling brightly, the wire eyelashes only a bit tarnished and bent out of shape. I think I must have saved her (or at least her head) less out of fondness than some inchoate self-preservative impulse that was discomfited at the possibility of such a graven image falling into anyone else's hands.

But then there was the Doll Collection.

The doll collection began well enough, in the for-play category. But it wound up in the good-peg-for-press-interview category. Over a period of years, the doll population grew into the hundreds: wee dolls and dolls the size of a three-year-old child, baby dolls and grown-up dolls, cloth dolls, antiques with porcelain heads, and a subcategory of “exotics” from other countries, the kind you see displayed in tourist shops sporting national dress. The elite line of Madame Alexander dolls found its way into the collection one by one, usually as gifts from agents and producers: the Queen Elizabeth II in her coronation robes, the Prima Ballerina, the Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty, the Little Women set—Meg/Jo/Amy/Beth (Beth arrived cross-eyed, but I wouldn't send her back) and Marmee—and naturally there was the Bride Doll. A doll was dutifully carried for photo shoots and public appearances, making me the object of bilious envy for most other little girls—who didn't know that these dolls were considered too expensive to
play
with. Nor did they know that the one thing I really wanted, a dollhouse, was “out of the question”: it would take up too much
space, and it wasn't portable, meaning it had no function for publicity purposes.

When I grew a little older and an omnipresent doll was less required for my adorability factor, it became more permissible for me to have some fun with the dolls. I dressed them in creations of my own making from scraps of cloth, washcloths, an old chiffon scarf of my mother's. I wrote plays for my miniature repertory company, with multiple heroines (there were no boy dolls back then, no Kens or GI Joes). I rearranged everybody, putting Queen Elizabeth's crown on Beth, switching the Ballerina's toe shoes with Cinderella's glass slippers. I threw them a pajama party—an act of invention on my part, since I'd never been to such a party and none of them had doll pajamas anyway.

Still, only one doll ever claimed my heart. She was a plain Raggedy Ann with shoe-button eyes, a stitched-on grin, and a printed heart that declared
I love you
. She sat on my bed all day and slept in it all night, got packed in suitcases when we traveled for location taping or promotional shots, got frayed, torn, restitched, and lumpy. But, like Faulkner's Delsey, she endured. Of all the characters in the doll collection—donated with fanfare publicity to a children's hospital when I was fifteen—she's the only one I still have. Any average little girl, any
real
little girl, could have had a Raggedy Ann, you see.