activity. Half terrified. Half hating my own terror. Half wanting to be the kind of person who jumped. Half wanting to climb down and eat some potato salad. That’s right. Four halves. That’s what I’m talking about: a schizophrenic war with myself.
After a good hour and fifteen minutes, I finally jumped off that stupid rock. By then I was so tired of arguing with myself that I was ready to kill myself anyway, so what harm could it possibly do? I did it. I jumped. When I surfaced, there was some biker guy by the edge of the lake clapping for me. He said, “That’s the longest I’ve seen anyone stand up there looking and still jump.” That’s me. I may be scared and conflicted about something, but I go through with it. And for what? Was it fun? Are you kidding me? It was completely anticlimactic. It’s just like sex – too much deliberation kills the mood. It wasn’t even close to fun. All I gained from my jump was the right to tell myself that I hadn’t given up. I’d passed another self-imposed test. Yay me.
You know what they say – you can tell a lot about a person by how they jump off a cliff. Okay, maybe they don’t say that. But it’s not just an isolated afraid-of-heights type of thing. Not for me, anyway. It’s part of my everyday life – that top-of-a-cliff fear, hyper-analysis, internal conflict. That circular contemplation of how I feel, who I am, and who I want to be that keeps me paralyzed on cliff tops for ridiculously long periods of time. I’ve always doubted my abilities and had trouble acknowledging my own success. Take a bet I once made regarding a limousine. If you think I stood on that cliff for a long time…let me tell you, the limo thing went on for years.
It started when I first moved to Los Angeles. I was living in North Hollywood. My next-door neighbor, I’ll call him Ned*, didn’t have a refrigerator and one day he asked to borrow ice and we became friends. (What kind of girl actually believes a guy who knocks on her door to borrow ice? Me, that’s who. Nineteen years old, fresh off the Silicon Valley chipwagon, and plopped into a city where the women were faster than the cars.) Anyway, along the way Ned and I made a deal. It was after I got my first part, playing a dancing, singing, lounge act mermaid on The Love Boat, and the agreement was that whoever of us became a star first had to rent a limousine. Then we’d spend a whole day driving around in our glamorous stretch limo. Doing what? Doing regular errands: going to McDonald’s, picking up the dry cleaning, buying ice (Ned only – he had to keep up the charade). We’d just cruise around doing nothing out of the ordinary, as if renting a limo were just another ho-hum part of our lives. Nothing was further from the truth. I could barely afford the dry cleaning that we would theoretically go to pick up. Growing up, our family car was an orange Chevy Vega with a black stripe down the middle and Neil Sedaka permanently stuck in the eight track. The only limo I’d ever been in was the one my date and his friends rented for my senior prom, and it was white, which (I now know) is absolutely unacceptable in Hollywood. To me, limo equaled private jet equaled swimming pool filled with Dom Perignon – none of which I’d ever seen, ridden in, or dove into. Extravagant beyond what I ever imagined I could experience.
When push came to shove, I wasn’t good for the limo bet. When I had my TV Guide debut for a short stint on a soap opera, Capitol, Ned said, “You made it! You’re in TV Guide. Looks like you owe me a limo ride.” But I shook my head. No way could I accept that I’d been successful at anything. “Not yet. I haven’t made it yet.” In fact, I kept my waitress job at an Italian joint in the Valley and worked there after filming the soap opera all day. Time passed, and eventually I got my first part in a feature movie, The Big Picture. Well, when Ned heard the news, he said, “Okay. This is the big time. You’re in a movie, and it even has the word ‘big’ in the title. Now where’s our limo?” But still I resisted. It became an ongoing joke between us – when I got my second and third movies, when I got cast in Lois & Clark, I always argued, “I’m a small fish in a big movie!” or found some other reason that it didn’t count – why I still hadn’t “made it.” It may sound like I was an ambitious go-getter, never satisfied, always needing to climb to the next rung. But I was actually just full of doubt. I was too worried that it would all disappear overnight, that the acting police would come pounding on my door at 3 A.M. with documents revealing that my only acting education was a six-week summer program at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, demanding my Screen Actors Guild card back and accusing me of fraudulent claims of talent and attempted mugging (the face kind, not the purse-snatching kind). I couldn’t revel in my success – even when it came. Sort of like finally jumping off the cliff into that lake in Sedona. By the time I managed to get there, I was long past enjoying it.
Self-doubt runs deep. I’ve been this way my whole life. It’s hard to pinpoint why. It’s not like your parents sit down and figure out the best way to screw you up and then embark on an organized execution of the plan. Sometimes I wish that life could be more like golf. I know, I know, if there are two things the world doesn’t need any more of it’s types of wine openers and analogies about golf, but bear with me. Unless you take the game super-seriously (you know, the type who throws his club at the duck that quacked during his tee shot), which I don’t, each shot is a brand-new opportunity, totally disconnected from the shot before and the shot after. Each hole is a new chance to perform and succeed and be a great golfer. Golf is zen like that. But that’s not how life works. Small decisions, occasional traumas, incidental inconsistencies – everything adds up in odd, unpredictable, conflicted ways. Each moment is weighed down by its own set of baggage from the past, and we’re messy bundles of self-protection and reaction to our uneven, un-choreographed experiences.
In early high school, when I was taking geometry, I remember showing my math-genius dad a problem I’d solved correctly. I probably hoped he’d be proud that I was learning a little bit of his field. He looked at the paper and said, “You know, there are three other ways to solve that problem.” I said, “I got it right, didn’t I?” I wasn’t really interested in alternate solutions. I’d managed to do it the way the teacher had taught us and that was enough. He handed the paper back to me and said, “You’re a brick.” He didn’t mean it in the jolly old English use of “brick,” as a dependable chap. Nor was he referring to my abs. He went on, “You should be a sponge, but you’re a brick.” He meant that I wasn’t as open-minded or curious as he wanted me to be. I had shown my dad my correctly done math homework, and he in turn found something wrong with me. Getting the right answer wasn’t enough.
He was also the kind of dad who always beat me at chess and ping-pong. I think he just never found the balance of trying to teach me to be good at something, and realizing that since I was a child it was highly unlikely that I’d ever beat him at anything (he’s changed as a grandfather). I wonder if he thought he was building my character by continually reminding me that I wasn’t good enough to win, or if he thought losing shouldn’t matter to me. But it did. As a kid, if you lose enough times you quit trying. You have to be taught the balance between the effort it takes to improve and a realistic view of your capabilities.
My mother, on the other hand, thought everything I did was perfect. She thought constant praise was the way to show love and build selfesteem. But if you’re perfect in your mother’s eyes, imagine how far you fall when you find out you aren’t perfect in the eyes of the world. And no kid is, not even me, though if you look up “goody-goody” in the dictionary, you’ll find my name. So I had one parent teaching me to lose and the other teaching false confidence. Parents can fall into traps like this. If yours were anything like mine, they didn’t mean to be harmful. I learned to be a loser, to manage failure, to expect that even my best efforts wouldn’t fulfill expectations, and that I would never be good enough at anything. Ironically, I became great at having that attitude.
When I was fourteen or fifteen, I auditioned for the San Francisco Ballet. I went with some of the other girls in my dance class. I knew they were all better than I was, and, not surprisingly, I didn’t get in. I still have the rejection letter. Why save it, you might wonder. Was it that important to me? Was I that heartbroken? Not exactly. But the scrapbook I made while in high school had a section titled “Failures,” and that’s where I kept the letter of rejection, along with a few photos of ex-boyfriends. How’s that for being a good loser? I kept a record of my losses the way others might carefully preserve their ribbons and medals.