Official Book Club Selection (7 page)

I also stood outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theater for a crowd scene in the horror film Fade to Black, which obviously faded to black upon release. It chaps my ass to this day that no camera got an accidental close-up of the top of my head so some agent could see an aerial shot of my bangs and go, “She’s got the stuff! That’s our new It girl!”

And when I think about the now-famous-in-my-head shot of me as an alien extra reacting to a spaceship landing in that sci-fi gem Battle Beyond the Stars, starring Richard Thomas, it’s pretty amazing I wasn’t singled out for stardom. Movies with aliens became huge after that. You’d think I would have been in a few Star Trek movies by now, or at least on the spin-off series Star Trek: Now Voyager. I could have that title wrong. But again, where was the agent saying, “She’s got the stuff! That’s our new alien It girl!”?

The reality was, as an extra I wanted to absorb anything I could about the television and movie world. I’m surprised I never got fired, because I was always really obnoxious and always bothering the celebrities (sound familiar?), peppering them with questions:

“How did you get started?”

“How do you stay thin?”

“Do you know Stefanie Powers?”

It didn’t help that being an extra is humiliating work at times. You’re treated like cattle, and the second assistant director really keeps you in line. If you take one step out of the holding area you’re put in, you get screamed at in front of everybody, and because they don’t know your name, they’ll just pick on what’s least flattering about you.

“You with the ugly yellow dress!”

“You with the big nose!”

“You with that stupid retarded look on your face!”

It was like high school that way, just brutal. Plus, everyone around you is in the same boat you are, wondering how to get into SAG (Screen Actors Guild). The long-standing catch-22 you always hear is that to get into SAG, you need to be working, but to get work, you need to be in SAG. One day I heard somebody mention something about being “Taft-Hartleyed” into SAG, and I remembered signing something about that when I did that Chicago White Sox commercial. Well, this person explained that Taft-Hartley was an exemption law that means that if you’re an extra in something, but your face is distinguishable, you’re considered a principal, which is one of the requirements for SAG eligibility. Bingo! That Sox commercial—where, if you recall, I dazzled the city’s television viewers with my quasi close-up—was my ticket all this time and I didn’t even know it!

Getting the money to join SAG, though, was another story. At the time it was $1,750, and it wasn’t like we were rolling in it. In order to support myself (while still living at home), I temped (badly), and bused tables at a diner (because I wasn’t even good enough to waitress). I didn’t have any extra money lying around. And it wasn’t like I had an allowance from my parents. But after I convinced them I needed to do this, they paid the whole thing. That’s because my mother the master negotiator—able to scream any utility employee into being reasonable about a bill—worked out a payment plan with SAG. It’s all about the payment plan with her.

In addition to helping me gain access to SAG, my parents were smart enough about fiscal responsibility that they figured out a way for me to go to the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute on a bullshit scholarship by way of a loophole in a company that my dad hadn’t worked for in thirty years. Genius, huh? So for two years I went full-time to Lee Strasberg, which was founded by and named after the acting school giant who helped make the Method—a kind of memory-based acting that drew on what was unique about you to bring life to a role—into one of the leading acting disciplines in America. This guy taught Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino—all my favorite stars—and now his techniques were going to turn me into a serious fucking actress. It was dancing, singing, Method classes, elocution to get rid of my Chicago accent, the whole nine yards.

When I was there, Rebecca DeMornay had just been in the school, and suddenly she was in movie theaters everywhere getting raves for the movie Risky Business. That was mind-blowing to me. I remember I was in a tai chi class at Strasberg with Maria Conchita Alonso. She was serious about the movement exercises. I thought they were dumb. Two seconds later, she’s starring opposite Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson, and I’m in a movie theater watching her going, There’s the girl I made fun of for being dedicated while I was ditching class to eat Cheetos across the street at 7–Eleven with my girlfriends.

We were always naked in class, too. We did these exercises where you’d have to enact your most private moment onstage. You might get somebody popping their zits, but mostly every guy pretended to jerk off, and for girls, it was stripping down and taking a fake shower.

One of my teachers was Sally Kirkland, who had been in The Sting, and would later get an Oscar nomination for a movie called Anna. She was awesome, because not only was she a very good acting teacher, but she would casually tell us about every famous guy she slept with. She talked all the time in class how she had met, you know what I mean by “met,” De Niro, Pacino, all the hot Method guys. But the amazing thing is, she’d get them to come speak at the school! Pacino came in right after he’d made Cruising. Perhaps to apologize to the gay community. Strasberg would come to the Institute, too. We called him Yoda (his looks had a little something to do with it.)

The Institute was located in Hollywood, and because I didn’t have a car, I had to take the bus from our place in Santa Monica, which took forever, and categorically sucked. I would jump on the number four bus bright and early in the morning in my unflattering Danskin spandex outfit, and then stay at Strasberg all day till the last class ended at 11 p.m., then catch the number four at 11:22 p.m. to Santa Monica and 4th, and walk eight blocks home. That bus was a funky cross-section of LA personalities, too. Everybody from trannies to drooling kids to surfer dudes to weird guys hitting on you to the occasional nice person. You got a little bit of everything on the number four. As Denise Richards would say, it’s complicated.

Between dedication to acting classes and the transient nature of Los Angeles, it was hard for me to make and keep friends during this period. I’d be really close to somebody for a year, and then they’d move away. One girl I was friends with got married, became addicted to cocaine, and just seemed to vanish. Another girl in acting classes with me also got married, but she became born again, decided she didn’t like show business, and moved. I was used to a close neighborhood, like back in Oak Park, and the spread-out quality of Los Angeles was a hard lesson in acclimation those first years.

Me in my first crib. Where was MTV?

I was also pretty lost during that period when it came to guys. I had sex for the first time at nineteen. Okay, I know I waited a good long while, but I’ve been making up for lost time ever since. I became pretty promiscuous, and not with a whole lot of winners, because as I’ve always said, my vices are junk food and bad men. I screwed a million really gross, sleazy guys. Is a million a lot? I’m surprised I was never killed. I remember being at Carl’s Jr. at La Brea and Santa Monica in Hollywood late one night, meeting some motorcycle gang member, and just climbing on his bike and leaving with him. I never drank, but I’d go to nightclubs and bars all the time to go dancing, then just go home with a guy and think nothing of it.

One time, a girlfriend and I were in a club—I was probably sporting my mind-blowingly sexy Madonna-inspired crinoline-over-tights look—and she pointed to a pair of guys in the corner. “See those two over there?” she said. “They have matching 280-Zs!” I was like, “No fucking way!”

They were busboys. And we fucked them. That’s how low the bar was. But remember, I never wanted to get married or anything. It’s not like I put a lot of thought into where these magical interludes might go. I wasn’t exactly looking for love.

Here was my problem: My type was pretty much any guy who said “hi” to me. That was my type. It’s important to have a type. “Creepy” was another one of my types. This one guy Roland was so weird that during sex his voice altered—as if he were a fucking alien—and he started talking like a baby in a bizarre high-pitched voice. He’d start screaming shit like, “I just want to fuck my baby! I’m your baby! Will you be my baby? Baby? Baby?” For one thing, he couldn’t decide whether he was the baby or the daddy. Make up your mind, freak. I had to force myself out from under him and flee the apartment undressed, clutching my clothes.

Point of interest: Mr. Baby, or Mr. Daddy, whatever he considered himself, was a donut fryer. I’ll be honest, I’ve probably fucked five donut fryers overall. I love donuts. It’s my happy place. So this was clearly the action-packed sequel to my after-school eating disorder—The Perfect Storm if you will—when having no boundaries about food meets Roland the donut-shop fryer giving you free bear claws at three in the morning. I didn’t wait to get to his apartment, either. I banged him in the back of the donut shop. He waited till he had me in his apartment, though, to unleash his disturbing goo-goo-gah-gah blathering. Not great.

I once told a therapist the following story from my childhood. My older brothers Kenny, who you now know went on to be quite deranged, and Gary thought it would be fun to take turns holding each other outside the upstairs bedroom window upside down by their ankles. It became a tradition, and it happened with my brother John, too. I’m not kidding. We called it being “dangled.” I was always whining, “When am I gonna get dangled? This is ridiculous! Just cause I’m a GIRL I can’t get dangled?”

So one day my brother John says, “I’ll dangle ya.” Yes!

We opened the window, I climbed out, and my brother got me by the ankles. I’ll never forget the feeling of being upside down, bouncing against the stucco wall, and giggling. I was having the best time. He’d say, “I’m gonna drop ya!” and I’d yell, “Don’t!” Over and over, that was how it would go.

Now imagine that you’re walking down a back alley, looking up, and you see a kid holding another kid upside down by the ankles, outside a second-story window. If YouTube had existed back then, my parents probably would have lost custody of us. Well, a neighbor finally caught us. He ran to tell our mother, who then bolted upstairs in her muumuu and screamed, “What the CHRIST are you GAHDAMN kids doing?” John freaked out enough that he let go of one ankle, and I’m just like, “Johnny, cut it out!” But he pulled me up instantly and everything was fine, except for our being punished, of course. Actually, I think John got punished, not me, which is a shame because he was a pretty darned good dangler. I think he had to spend an hour in the garage. Or, as my mom calls it when I asked her about it recently, “Oh, we got after him. We gave him heck.” I feel kinda bad that he got “heck” and all. John, I love you and I forgive you. You’re not a damned good dangler. You’re the best dangler I’ve ever had.

So when I told that little nugget of childhood roughhousing to this therapist, she said, “Well, don’t you think that’s kind of what you do with the men in your life? You let them dangle you out a window and you don’t really know it’s dangerous?”

I’d never made the connection. “So dangling was a bad idea, huh?” I said.

I always thought of it as the equivalent of parents throwing their kids up really high and catching them in their arms. But there was a big difference. It’s not like I was running to Mom and saying, “Will you get John or Gary to dangle me?” So I knew it probably wasn’t right. But that was the problem. I liked being dangled.

Immaturity and low self-esteem also played a part in my less than stellar relationships with men back then. But I wonder if my attitude toward sex and men also had something to do with how career-driven I was. Was I unconsciously choosing guys who I knew would end up being only interested in silly affairs that would never lead to anything permanent because I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my career track? Like my calculated decision never to touch a drop of drink or get mixed up in drugs, I might have intuited that marriage was another impediment, and that a crappy one-nighter wouldn’t deter me from my true love: performing. And since a guy was going to come second, anyway, maybe that led me to men who were clearly never going to be number ones in anybody’s book.

It would take me a while, however, to realize that nice guys were better than bad boys. There I was in a crazy situation with a baby-talking donut fryer, and not ever saying to myself, “Um, maybe things aren’t working out so well for me. Maybe I could find someone better.”

Instead it was, “Okay, back to acting class tomorrow!”

So on the one hand, while I wasn’t too concerned about who I slept with back then, I was pretty consumed with my weight and my continued binge eating. Since childhood, I had developed a rigorous cycle of bingeing and starving, with an erratic schedule of compulsive over-exercising on top of that to really fuck me up. After a bender of a toxic combination of junk foods, I’d feel so shitty the next day that I could barely function: nauseated, unable to fit in pants I’d just worn yesterday, consumed with self-loathing, and unwilling even to look at food until evening. That would then put me on a cycle of having my first meal of the day at 6 p.m., and my last meal at probably 3 a.m. Really healthy, Kath, when you have to get up for your temp job in El Segundo at 7:30 a.m.

I could never barf, by the way, although God knows I desperately wanted to be bulimic. One time I ate a whole pie—not too much pie, cause “too much” implies there’s some left, it was an entire fucking pie—and I went to the bathroom I shared with my parents in our little Santa Monica apartment and tried sticking my finger down my throat like I’d seen drunk girls do after a crazy night at the bar. I had no girlfriends with me to hold my hair back, though. Well, it was just too disgusting. I couldn’t do it. I can honestly say, with complete disappointment, that I have never purged in my life, because I have what I call a barfing disorder. Every time I puke, even when I’m sick with the flu or from food poisoning, I think I’m going to die. Weird, I know. No disrespect to you, Mary Kate. Rock on.