Read Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir Online

Authors: Melissa Francis

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Entertainment & Performing Arts

Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (8 page)

BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
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But in this shot, Mom had explained, I would be happily arriving with my still-alive dead parents and meeting Michael.
Jason and I walked over to the wagon to take our marks. He climbed in first, and the AD lifted me in next. Jason took my hand and helped me settle in. He smiled, showing his perfect white teeth. I scootched a little closer. Alone at last.
“Don’t worry. Sit here with me. I have a line but you don’t have to do anything.”
Michael yelled, “Action!” and the scene flew by in one take, no rehearsal necessary. This group didn’t mess around.
 
 
That night, Mom wiped the orange sludge off my face. “You did a great job today. Don’t let Jason muscle you out of the way though. Make sure you keep your face toward the camera.”
“But don’t look at the camera, right?” This was rule number one. The camera wasn’t there. Never ever make eye contact with it.
“No. You can be aware of it without looking at it.” She took the rubber bands out of the ends of my braids and started to undo the plaits. My shoulders sank and I felt tired to my bones. My calves ached, unused to my retro footgear. My back hurt from riding in a hard wooden wagon with no suspension and my scalp just burned.
“Let’s look at the script for tomorrow,” Mom said.
Seriously? I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I followed her to the bed, where she had laid out the script as if it were a bedtime story. “This is the only time we can learn your lines for tomorrow. Even if you don’t say anything you have to know what’s going on around you. Acting isn’t just what you say, it’s what you do and how your eyes react to what’s going on.”
She kept talking, but the last thing I heard her say was something about a big train. Then I was asleep.
 
 
The enormous black steam engine roared toward us, smoke filling the sky and blotting out the sun. I had never seen anything so enormous move. It was magnificent.
In the morning we had filmed a scene where Michael loaded us on the train and said goodbye forever. The covered wagon had gone out of control, fallen down a ridge, and crushed our parents to bits, but Michael’s character, Charles Ingalls, couldn’t afford to adopt us, so instead he shipped us off to an orphanage.
Then as the train left, he felt guilty and changed his mind.
Now the train thundered down the track, with more smoke billowing from it than I’d ever seen come from something that wasn’t on fire. With similar dramatic flair, Michael rode his wagon onto the track in front of the speeding train and pulled the horses to a wrenching stop
The conductor would either stop or crush Michael, his fictional son, Albert, who was along for the ride, and two perfectly good horses, to smithereens.
Both in the story and in real life, it looked like Michael was taking a huge risk.
I was sure the train would stop.
Pretty sure.
The horses were more confident than I was. All day, the wranglers kept swapping out two sets of big burly chestnuts to serve as the horses in Michael’s team. I could tell the difference between all four horses because I’d been riding for as long as I could remember. Still, I was amazed that they assumed the viewers of the show were so gullible or nearsighted that they wouldn’t notice.
All four horses seemed accustomed to Michael’s brand of high drama, and didn’t flinch as a hundred tons of steaming steel barreled toward them. They stood bravely on the track and waited for the engine to grind to a halt.
As the train roared closer, Michael pulled the reins tight and rapped them snuggly around the brake handle. Then he leaped down from the wagon seat and strutted to the middle of the tracks, where he stood boldly watching the train screech and scrape, finally slowing and stopping, leaving only the smallest cushion of air between them.
“I’ve put two children on board. I’m here to take them back!” Michael shouted the line to the conductor who hung his head out of the window. He then ran to the side of the train and boarded.
He did the take once and yelled, “Print!”
Michael was the king of the one-take scene. I was learning quickly that he worked efficiently and wasted nothing. For a man who flew around in his own Learjet, he was tight with a penny, as the modest honey wagons and Super 8 attested. Even I noticed the downgrade a few hours after we’d landed.
Now it was my and Jason’s turn. The camera and lighting team set up inside a passenger car, making the focal point a row of seats in the middle. Extras in similar costumes sat in the other seats.
We rehearsed once. I had no lines. Supposedly, I was still in a state of shock after seeing my parents pulverized.
Jason and I held hands at the doorway of the train car. The assistant director yelled the standard questions that set every scene in motion: “Rolling? Speed? Speed! Marker!”
The next line fell always to Michael: “Action!”
The conductor ushered us down the center aisle and pointed to the seat. We sat down and Jason started his dialogue: “It’s going to be okay, Cassandra. We’ll find a way. I can take care of both us without Ma and Pa. . . .”
After a few more sentences, tears started rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t know why I was crying. The writers hadn’t put that in the script. But everything Jason said made our lives sound so hopeless. Plus I just felt stressed and tired. I was supposed to be mute, but I couldn’t help it. And once the tears started flowing, they turned into a flood.
Fortunately, Jason kept going, even though he had to be wondering why I was crying. Halfway through Jason’s speech, Michael shoved his way past the conductor to our row.
“Listen, how would you two like to come with me?” he said.
“Yes! Oh, yes!” Jason said. I hoped Michael didn’t see my tears, but by now I was sobbing, so there was no way he could miss them. He didn’t seem mad.
“It’s not forever. Just until we find you a more permanent home. You can do chores and help out.”
“What if you don’t find us a home?” Jason asked.
“Well, then you’ll have to go on to the orphanage, but at least it’s hope. It’s something,” Michael said, near tears now himself.
He swept me up into his arms like a western superhero and carried me off the train with Jason on our heels. We got outside the train and he yelled, “Cut! And print!”
Then he laughed loudly and kissed my cheek while squeezing me so tight I thought my head might pop off.
“That was great!” Michael said. “Who told you to do that?”
I didn’t answer but just buried my head in his shoulder, thrilled I wasn’t in trouble.
 
 
Mom took me back to the honey wagon so I could change out of my clothes. She was wearing a purple plaid Ralph Lauren dress with a flowing skirt that made her look like a modern version of the other women on the train. She had curled and teased her short dark hair, but it wilted a bit during the long workday. Her makeup, which had initially been flawless, smeared around her eyes a little after hours of wear.
She sat me on the stiff bench that was supposed to be a couch, and started unlacing my boots. I looked in the mirror and noticed that my yellow eyes matched hers.
“You were perfect today. Did you really cry during the train scene? I couldn’t hear what was going on from outside.” She gripped my calf as she struggled to free my foot from the pitiless boot.
“Yes.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Everything Jason said made me sad. I couldn’t help it.”
“He did all the heavy lifting, and you stole the scene,” she said with a smile.
“Jason’s nice. I like him.”
“Well that’s fine. Just be careful. Don’t let him upstage you.”
I didn’t know what she meant and I was too tired to care.
 
 
When we got back to L.A., we filmed the indoor scenes on Stage 15 of the MGM Studios lot in Culver City, and the exterior scenes on the permanent outdoor set where the fictional town of Walnut Grove had been thriving for the past seven years. In both locations, the cast and crew fell back into their well-worn groove, and I realized that Michael was in fact the center of the universe. He called all the shots, got all the attention, and drove all the action. He was the energy that made the earth rotate.
We pulled up to a chain link fence that seemed to guard absolutely nothing.
“The whole town of Walnut Grove is supposed to be here somewhere. But I don’t see a thing,” Mom said, looking off into the distance.
We had followed a sheet of directions into the low rolling hills of Simi Valley. The crew in Sonora had described the location of the permanent outdoor set as “the middle of nowhere.” It turned out “nowhere” was roughly twenty minutes from our house.
An AD stood at the opening of the fence holding a clipboard in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other. He leaned into the open car window and addressed my mom, who wore a frilly western shirt and dark blue jeans. She was really getting into the frontier theme.
“Who do we have here?” he asked with a smile.
I smiled back. “I’m Missy!”
“You’re the third Missy then actually.”
I had heard this in Sonora. Apparently, almost all the brunette actresses playing Ingalls children were named Melissa, or Missy for short. What an odd coincidence. There was Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson. Melissa Gilbert was the star. She played Laura Ingalls Wilder, the real-life pioneer who had written the
Little House
books, on which the show was based.
I hadn’t read the books, and I’d only seen the show once, after I’d already landed the role. Mom let me stay up late to watch it so I’d understand why we wore bizarre clothes and spoke strangely.
Little House
came on at 8 PM when I usually went to bed, so I was thrilled to stay up late, curled up in one of our family-room chairs with my white Persian cat in my lap.
The show itself was really boring, at least to me, an eight-year-old more used to sitcoms and cartoons. All the characters ran around, literally, in the dirt, and rode in the backs of wagons with dramatic music playing loudly in the background. They endured a lot of heartache over stuff that didn’t seem like a big deal to me. Mom said the story was basically a nightime soap opera, whatever that meant. She showed me a section of the
Los Angeles Times
that reported television ratings, and claimed that more Americans watched
Little House on the Prairie
than almost any other show. I just couldn’t figure out why. But it was starting to sink in that my role was a big deal.
The two other Melissas were both super old. Melissa Gilbert still starred on the show every week as the married schoolteacher, Laura. But in real life, Mom said she was dating someone named Rob Lowe, who was supposedly gorgeous because he had, among other things, pink cheeks. This made absolutely no sense to me. I wondered if he was overheated a lot. She and my aunt buzzed about how handsome he was, and how handsome Michael was, which made even less sense. Whatever.
Melissa Sue Anderson played Mary, the oldest sister in the Ingalls family. Like me she was called Missy. She was very pretty with shiny blonde hair and big blue eyes. Mom explained that Missy “didn’t know what a good thing she had” and quit right before I arrived. From what I’d seen so far, I agreed with Mom. There were so many great places to play on the set and most of the crew were willing to entertain you. Being part of the regular cast was hard work for sure, but the food was good and there was loads of praise when you did a good job. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would quit.
The man with the clipboard opened the gate and directed us to a small group of parked cars. We parked and got out of the white Porsche with the red and blue racing strip that Mom had just bought from Dick Clark. Another person everyone but me seemed to know. All the moms at school had been startled when Mom traded in the brown station wagon for a slightly used Porsche that she had bought from a glorified game show host. But Mom figured we were celebrities now too, so we needed a ride that reflected our shift in status.
A white van idled nearby. We climbed inside and it took us up a path carved into the side of the hill. We drove for about five minutes before we saw a small wooden house on the left with a barn and a corral next to it. With its asymmetrical roof, the house looked more like a big outhouse than a place where people would live. The barn dwarfed the house, but it still looked as if it could be blown down by a good strong wind.
We kept driving past the buildings, and after another five minutes we arrived at a ghost town. An old mill with a big spinning water-wheel was attached to a small bridge that led to the town. All the buildings there were clustered in a circle as if they were huddling together for warmth. At the far end of the circle sat a church or a schoolhouse, I couldn’t tell which. To the right was a long red hotel, and across the circle from that was a big white storefront. There wasn’t a human being in sight.
The van passed through the town and rolled up another small hill, where we found a team of honey wagons and prop trucks. That’s where all the people were hiding. The driver let us out and Mom took my hand, gripping it so hard I thought the bones might crack.
BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
4.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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