Still Growing: An Autobiography (2 page)

When I arrived at a party, everyone sat up and took notice. The room buzzed with not-so-quiet whispers: “Isn’t that Kirk Cameron?” The adoration was obvious in the body language, facial expressions and eagerness of those around me. All of it baffled me beyond belief. I was in the midst of a phenomenon I felt I had no hand in creating.

I had everything the rest of the world craved—money, fame, fortune, any girl I wanted. I admit, I liked that part. What 16-year-old guy didn’t want girls to melt when he walked in the room? And I certainly
wasn’t complaining when Domino’s Pizza offered me a million bucks to be their ad boy.

If I didn’t have something, it was only because I didn’t want it. I was a devout atheist, livin’ large, hanging out with the beautiful people.

Years later when people asked about that time in my life, I defined it like this: Imagine a world where whatever you want is given to you as quickly as possible. When you walk into a room, all the adults smile at you, talk nicely and say, “What do you want? Okay, I’ll give that to you.”

Everything in your life is carefully placed with the intent to make you happy. If you aren’t happy, no expense is too great in order to fix the situation. As far as you can tell, you are the center of the universe. Everything revolves around you, your schedule, your dreams and wishes. You are more important to adults than other kids are. “Why is that?” your little mind asks. And the only answer you can come up with is that you are
very, very
unique.

That was my childhood, my adolescence, my reality.

The smug 16-year-old climbing out of his white Honda Prelude had no time to muse about what was wrong with that picture. I was Kirk Cameron, and I was on top of the world.

I paced the floor of my dressing room, palms pressed hard against my temples. I was trying to escape the noise inside my head. My stomach churned as if I’d downed some bad orange juice.

Please don’t make me do this
.

I pressed my hands tighter, trying to squeeze out the angst and frustration.

If only
 . . .

To the outside, it would have seemed ironic that a television star envied by millions could be here pacing, distraught and alone in his dressing room.

Confrontation had never been my thing. That’s why I had agents—slick suits who enjoyed negotiating a higher salary, bigger perks, more respect. But this wasn’t something they would do for me. They wouldn’t understand. They
couldn’t
understand. If I had tried to tell them what I was about to do they would have said that I was over-reacting and was going to ruin my career.

“Let it go, Kirk,” they would have insisted. “Do your job. Give ’em that million-dollar smile and don’t blow it. Get to syndication and we’ll
all
be multi-millionaires.”

I was a peace-loving guy by nature. I prided myself on being a devilish clown, laughing his way through life and using that optimistic outlook to lighten the burdens of others. But I couldn’t chuckle my way through this one.

I had to figure out a way to get my point across without offending the producers. I needed to be a man, even though I wasn’t quite one—at
least not legally. I was just a 17-year-old kid who wanted to do the right thing. And I knew that no matter how I tried to camouflage, soften or sweet-talk it, someone would be unhappy, maybe even furious, by what I had to say. I hated the lose-lose place I found myself in. I
hated
it.

I opened my eyes and saw the glow of my over-priced Swatch. (Again, the ’80s.) I didn’t have much time left. I needed to do this or let it go.

I took a deep breath and got a drink of water to strengthen myself for what was ahead. I didn’t want my voice to do that Mike Seaver puberty-crack or my bosses would have a difficult time taking my concerns seriously.

I stood in front of the mirror to practice my speech. No one was here to tell me how to say my lines as my mom did when I was younger. I didn’t have a writer handing me lines to make me witty and resolve everything at the end of 23.5 minutes. I didn’t have a director to tell me the right way to look, the right emotion to portray or the right inflection to get the desired response from my audience.

I ran my fingers through my curly mullet, trying to mess it up so I didn’t look too Hollywood-slick. I gripped the sides of the sink and took a deep breath.
I am an actor. I can do this
, I told myself, loosening my neck by performing a few head rolls.
Kirk, you’ve gotta make a choice. Are you going to do what you think is right or are you gonna compromise?

“I want to do the right thing,” I answered aloud, like an overly earnest character in an after-school special.

But what was the right thing? Letting the show go on, as written? Or stepping in, hoping that I could—in a respectful way—point out how things could be different? It would be a mistake to remind producers what they already knew—that a TV series has an unspoken agreement with its audience to be what it has been from the beginning. A sitcom shouldn’t become a drama. Nobody wants to see a homicide investigation on
Mr. Belvedere
. (On
Murphy Brown
, maybe.) A show about a middle-class suburban family shouldn’t suddenly focus on illegal immigrants and their struggle to cross the border.

My inner voice kept reminding me that I was just a kid, while the producers were authority figures—albeit odd authority figures. As a child actor, I had learned early that I wielded more power than most adults,
yet my parents instilled within me a respect and a desire to submit to authority. My parents never put up with the typical child-star behavior. At the same time, I was taught to speak firmly, as an adult, to these powerful figures who had the ability to turn my life into a Hollywood game. I needed to walk the fine line of standing up for my convictions and respecting authority.

Pacing, I tried to find words to express how I felt about the new direction of
Growing Pains
. It felt as though we were straying from what made our show successful: the fact it was a wholesome family show.

I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hey, guys,” I said to the makeup mirror, trying to muster my most sincere smile. “How ya doin’? How was your weekend?”

The hardest part would be to explain my motives. I knew how others would see it. I knew the quiet uproar it would cause. Tension on the set would thicken. The producers and writers would be irritated. The cast and crew would roll their eyes or glare at me over the stupidity of what I was asking. Maybe some would try to understand, but most wouldn’t.

Most would think I was flaunting my celebrity.

No matter what I said or did, that would be the fallout. No matter how I tried to share my true heart, the assumption in “the business” would be that I was messing with the status quo as a power play.

Power-tripping had never been me. Fame and celebrity didn’t come naturally. I really didn’t like star-struck fans following me with their mouths agape, watching everything I did as if I were a freak. I wanted to be a normal teenage kid with an unusual job. I wanted to be seen for
me
, not given higher status as a human being just because I’d landed a part on a hit show.

I leaned my forehead against the door, wishing I could just let it go so that we could be the happy cast and crew we’d always been. But something had happened to me and I no longer saw life the same way.

In the early years of the show, I had earned a reputation as the prankster who planted stink bombs under the audience seats, greased doorknobs and hid crew members’ cars in bushes. I initiated practical jokes, laughter, ribbing and the sarcastic comments that flew around
stage like the evil monkeys on
The Wizard of Oz
. My fellow cast members affectionately named me “Devil Boy.”

But I had recently become a new man. I had stepped from the house that had fallen from the twister and it had changed my entire world from black-and-white to Technicolor. Once there, no matter what Dorothy or the Wizard said, I realized I couldn’t go back.

“Is it wrong to bring my new convictions to the set?” I asked myself. “Should I keep them wrapped up inside, letting business be business? After all, TV isn’t real. A sitcom is just a
story
. And the stories aren’t real. The characters aren’t real, either.”

Now I sounded like a crazy person, talking to myself in my dressing room.

I knew Mike Seaver wasn’t me and I wasn’t him, but viewers didn’t seem to know the difference. To them, the Seavers existed. If Mike took drugs, kids would assume it was okay to take drugs—all because Mike was cool and someone to follow.

I didn’t want to blow it. That would be my nightmare. I desperately wanted to do the right thing in a no-win situation. I knew people would be unhappy with me. But it was something I had to do . . . and the time was now.

I am so much like my mom. In her book,
A Full House of Growing Pains
, she says, “I was raised to be a good girl. And I
was
a good girl. Unlike some kids, I really
wanted
to be good . . . Like many kids who want to be good, I was influenced in part by my desire-to-please personality, in part by my strict parental upbringing.”
¹

That was me from the earliest I can remember. I wanted to please people and make them happy. If an adult had told me to jump off a cliff I would have replied, “Leading with my left foot or right?”

I formed my choices around what would please others around me. I wanted to be good—but more than that, I wanted to
do the right thing
. Whatever the cost to me or others, I wanted to do what was right. I hated letting people down, hated thinking I’d hurt someone. (Well, excluding my sisters. That was my job and I did it with zeal.)

I wanted to be a fireman, astronaut or doctor when I grew up. Combining all three would have been ideal—a man equally equipped to control an engine fire in the shuttle and to provide medical services to life forms found on Mars, all at zero gravity. My face would be in the encyclopedia under the listing
Astrofirector
.

Sadly, my parents grounded my career aspirations by choosing to live on Earth, in the San Fernando Valley home they reside in to this day. Robert Cameron and Barbara Bausmith met on a Santa Monica beach one Sunday afternoon about a million years ago. Dad was trying to be cool, even though he had a huge safety pin holding up his orange
swim trunks. Mom thought he was funny, playful and cute. That he was seven years older and a math teacher impressed her, though the safety pin wasn’t doing him any favors. The moment she saw him jump into the driver’s seat of a white Mustang convertible with a bunch of guys, she was smitten. It wasn’t until their first date when he picked her up in a Volkswagen Beetle that she discovered he’d bribed his cousin to let him pretend the Mustang was his car. She went out with him anyway, and before the year was up she proposed to him. He accepted and they were off to an interesting start to a relationship that has never ceased to be anything but.

They didn’t waste time having kids. I was born October 12, 1970, and was named for my dad’s hero, Captain Kirk of the
Starship Enterprise
. Mom only agreed because Kirk meant “of the Church.” She decided that was a pretty good legacy to put on a kid—even if she didn’t go to church herself.

Bridgette followed less than a year later. They took a breather before Melissa arrived in 1974, and Candace came 18 months later in 1976.

I wasn’t raised in a Christian home, but it was a moral home. My parents stood on old-fashioned family values, like the difference between right and wrong: You didn’t lie, smoke, do drugs, drink alcohol or have sex outside of marriage.

As a little girl, Mom had a simple faith in God, which began in church and shaped many of her values and decisions. When she married Dad, she presumed they would go to church as a family—but Dad had other ideas. He didn’t want his kids being corralled into any particular religion. He insisted his kids be able to make up their own minds when they were older, so he adamantly refused to let us attend even Sunday school. So Mom kept quiet and prayed in the simple way she knew how.

We were never allowed to play alone. We had to be in when the street lights went on. We could play with our cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and with the Rock family (no relation to the wrestler). The Rocks were our parents’ best friends, and their two boys, Ryan and Andrew, pretty much rounded out our play circle. We had a blast—never a dull moment.

Dad refurbished old juke boxes, one a 1948 Rock-Ola bubbler with neon tubes running around the outside. He glued 45s back-to-back so they’d play only the best songs—never the dull flip sides. We cranked those puppies, singing and dancing to the music of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. My sisters and I were probably the only kids who knew the lyrics to “Eight-Eyed Emily.” The whole family joined in the dancing, though Mom preferred to sit and watch—she was our most enthusiastic audience.