Читать книгу Happy Accidents - Jane Lynch, Jane Lynch - Страница 7

LIKE ANY GOOD, CLOSETED YOUNG LESBIAN OF THE seventies, I developed a raging crush on Ron Howard.

Not a well-known fact, but many young lesbians have gay boyfriends, or crushes so safe they might as well be gay. Happy Days was my favorite TV show, and Ron, who played all-American boy Richie Cunningham, was cute, boyish, and asexual—all Mayberry and apple pie. I thought Anson Williams, who played Potsie, was cute, too, but less so. As I wrote in my scrapbook, he was just “pretty good foxy.”

Ron and Anson came to town in the summer of 1974, just after I turned fourteen, to promote Happy Days. When they were on WGN, the big talk radio station in Chicago, I called in and said, matter-of-factly, “Hi, I’m fourteen and I want to be an actress.” I don’t remember exactly what Ron said, but it was something sensible like “Stay in school, be in plays, and then when you get out of college, if you still want to do it, you should come to Los Angeles.” Then, Anson Williams piped up: “Jane, here’s what you should do,” he said. “Go downtown to the Screen Actors Guild, get a list of agents, and start writing to them.”

My desirability assessments of the stars of TV’s Happy Days.

This was stupid advice to give to a fourteen-year-old girl in Chicago—especially one whose entire acting résumé consisted of a couple of school plays and a sixth-grade talent show where I pretended to play the guitar. But I didn’t know that. I decided Anson was right, so not long afterward, when I was downtown with my parents, I made sure we stopped by the Screen Actors Guild office so I could get a list of talent agents in Chicago. An office assistant made a copy on mimeographed paper for me, and I went home and wrote them all letters. Our family had visited Universal Studios on a vacation to California the previous summer, so I sent a letter off to them as well. I watched the credits of The Brady Bunch, to see who cast the show, and wrote them a note of my availability while I was at it. I think I even sent a school picture.

Needless to say, the talent agents and studio executives did not come knocking. But one afternoon, maybe six months later, I finally did get a reply. It was from the office of Monique James, the head of casting for Universal Studios.

Okay, so it was from Linda, assistant to the casting director, who perhaps was taking this opportunity to feel better about her assistant status by crushing the dream of a young girl in suburban Chicago. And … she spelled my name wrong. And … it was just about the most unencouraging letter she could have possibly sent.

An observant child, or maybe just one who wasn’t completely delusional, would have felt dismissed by this. But I was over the moon—it was on Universal letterhead! Yes, they got my name wrong, but Jamie is such a cute name! I was never a fan of my name anyway. I was so buoyed by the letter that I put it in my scrapbook. Linda Abbott and Monique James might have thought I would never come to Hollywood, but in my mind I was trying to figure out travel plans.

I had known early on, almost out of the chute, that I wanted to be an actress. My first theatrical experience happened at the age of about five, when my parents took me to see a school play one of the neighborhood kids was in. I remember going into the dark theater, and when the lights came up, there was this whole world that came out of nowhere. It was alive and bright and you could see that everyone had makeup on.

We were sitting very close to the stage, and as part of the play, there was a little kid in a cage, playing a bird. I remember thinking, Let the bird out of the cage, let him out! That is how real it was to me. I was transfixed by the whole experience, as if I were watching magic happen right in front of me.

My folks loved to sing and perform themselves, and even more so with an audience. This was post–World War II cocktail culture, and Rodgers and Hammerstein weren’t the only ones exploring the world through song and dance. Our parish church, St. Jude’s, put on a show every year called Port o’ Call, and this was the highlight of my parents’ performing lives. The various schoolrooms at St. Jude’s were transformed into McGinty’s Irish tavern, full of revelers, or a Hawaiian luau with grass-skirted hula dancers, or a risqué German cabaret for which the neighbor ladies donned fishnets, eliciting hoots and howls. The audience would go from room to room, taking in various spectacles from other ports of call. I was there with my parents every night until the final bow was taken. I was absolutely riveted by the frenzied backstage energy of putting on a show. I remember the smells and the sights, the thick pancake makeup, and how they all dropped trou in full view of one another in the tiny cloakroom that served as the dressing room. All the adults were so focused and engaged when they put on these shows. And I was literally beside myself with elation to be among this business called show.

Dad sings “Look to the Rainbow” in the Irish Room, St. Jude’s Port o’ Call show.

But to my parents this was something you did for fun, not for a living. My mom was not on board with my plan to become an actress. As I wrote those letters to agents at our dining room table, she asked, “Who are you writing to?” When I told her, she spoke to me in that flat voice of Midwestern reality.

“Janie, you know, people can’t always do what they want to do,” she said. “And it’s probably not realistic to think you’ll be a Hollywood star.” To her, my saying I wanted to be an actress was a little like saying I wanted to be an elf. “Well, honey,” she’d have said, “you can dress up as one, and you can have fun as one, but you’re not gonna be one.”

I’m sure that to Mom, this was just realistic motherly advice, like telling me to stay out of traffic. She wanted to convince me to dream a little less big, to protect me from heartache—but of course her words just made things worse. Sitting there at the dining room table, I started to cry from the depths of my soul, feeling my life was over before it had begun.

My mother felt terrible. She tried to console me, saying she wanted me to be the best actress I could be, but that I should be careful of aiming too high. Years later, she’d tell me that until that moment, she’d had no idea how dead serious I was about being an actress. But that realization didn’t change her message. She would reluctantly support me in the years ahead, but she still wanted me to have a backup plan, which usually involved learning to type.

About five months after getting the Universal letter, I got a reply to a fan letter I had sent to Vicki Lawrence, a star of The Carol Burnett Show, a program I so loved and wanted to be on that it hurt just thinking about it. She sent me an autographed photo, a soft-focus headshot of her gazing meaningfully into the camera, her hair gently feathered. It came with a form fan letter printed on blue paper, but at the bottom she’d written a note: “Janie, Keep working hard, learning, & be determined & positive!”

Vicki Lawrence wrote me back!

I knew that Vicki had gotten on The Carol Burnett Show because of a fan letter she’d written to Carol. So, of course, I had the fantasy that my letter to Vicki would produce the same result. The fact that it didn’t was of no consequence to me—I’d received a personal note from Vicki Lawrence. And she’d even spelled my name right.

These snippets of encouragement were huge to me—my bubble was now un-burstable. I pasted Vicki’s letter and photo into my scrapbook, along with the Universal letter and my Ron Howard photos, and continued forward.

SPEAKING OF MY SCRAPBOOK, I DUG IT OUT RECENTLY and was delighted to find it was a proud monument to absolute mediocrity.

Included are my report cards (mostly Bs and Cs), in addition to other cherished mementos of averageness:

 An “Award for Achievement” from Vandenberg Elementary School—the award they gave to kids who didn’t win an award.

 A handwritten schedule for my basketball team, the Dirksen Junior High “B” team, showing a final record of three wins and eleven losses.

 Ribbons for third-place finishes in a 1975 swim meet.

I appear to be greatly amused by my own mediocrity, writing silly notes in the margins throughout the scrapbook:

 Beside my basketball numerals, which were awarded to benchwarmers (starting players received letters), I wrote in all caps: “AGAIN! HA HA!”

 Next to a note from my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Gerson, that read “Mr. & Mrs. Lynch, Jane has put forth much more effort recently. She is doing better work and behaving better. I hope this continues,” I scribbled: “It didn’t! HA!”

 Beside the letter from Universal, in which my name had been misspelled, I wrote: “Jamie, Ha ha! I think I’ll keep it.” On the next page, I pasted the envelope the letter had come in, highlighting its return address of the “New Talent” department. I wrote, “New Talent! That’s me!”

There is no Volume #2.

I did not like his singing. I did not write a letter asking when he would sing again.

Of course, not everything in the scrapbook was a monument to mediocrity. There was also a photo postcard from Anson Williams, who kept writing me for some reason, with a handwritten note on the back.

As I recall, when Anson sang he sounded like a Lawrence Welk baritone. Not my cup of tea, so I never did his bidding. (Besides, he was only “pretty good foxy.”)

DURING FRESHMAN YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL, I WAS CAST as The King in a one-act production of The Ugly Duckling (the beginning, incidentally, of a lifelong pattern of being cast in roles originally intended for men). I was thrilled out of my mind—this was what I wanted to do with my life! This was my dream, and now I was officially taking the first step toward fulfilling it.

My name appeared in the school newspaper, The Bagpipe, along with those of the rest of the cast, and by all appearances, I was on my way. But when we started rehearsals, I found myself paralyzed with fear—the fear of blowing it. So … I quit the play and joined the tennis team instead.

I don’t think anyone understood why I had quit. I’m sure I didn’t. I know now it was out of pure terror. I was face-to-face with my destiny and I walked away from it rather than risk failure.

In my scrapbook, I pasted the article about The Ugly Duckling, then right next to it, I pasted another article about the tennis team. Underneath, I wrote this: “Had to drop out of play because of tennis, but mostly because I couldn’t get my character. Darn!” Obviously I had either read something or heard someone talk about the importance of “getting your character,” and I used that to feel better about what I had done. My poor little fourteen-year-old self had no idea how to process this.

But deep down inside, I knew I had killed the thing I most wanted in the world. I couldn’t stand to stay away, though, so I signed up to work on the stage crew. Stage crew—when I could have been in the thing! In the official program for the evening of one-acts, I made little check marks next to all my friends who were in the cast and crew—and I put a little star by my own name. I was putting on a brave face, but inside I was crushed.

My poor little conflicted self!

Making things even worse, I was now officially branded a quitter. In the spring of my freshman year, I tried out for another play, but I didn’t get chosen. One girl who got a part told my sister, Julie, it was because I’d quit The Ugly Duckling. When the same thing happened with Man of La Mancha—I was even passed over for the chorus!—I realized with dread that at age fourteen, my acting career was already over.

One night, as my parents sipped their “first today, badly needed” cocktails, I poured my heart out to them at the kitchen table. I cried as I explained why everything was ruined, and my mom tried to soothe me. “You made one mistake, Janie,” she said. “It doesn’t mean your life is over.”

But I was inconsolable. I started having dreams in which every one I knew had gotten a part in a play, and I was the only one who was left out. All these years later, I still have those dreams. And when I wake up, I hug my Emmy.

MEANWHILE, MY SISTER, JULIE, MADE THE POM-POM Squad. Julie was a big eye-roller, especially with me. She was always bugged by my corny jokes and goofy faces at home, but when I was about to be a freshman in the high school where she was a junior, she was wracked with fear that I would embarrass her. She was skinny and cute and looked like she just walked out of the Sears catalogue. I was clumsy and silly and had a belly. At the breakfast table, she’d say, “Okay! Get all the goofiness out now, before we go to school. Now! Get it out! Get it out! Get it out!”

My sister and I couldn’t have been more different. She went through a neatness phase where, every morning, she’d make the bed—but because I slept later than she did, I was usually still in it.

“Just slide out!” she’d say. “Don’t mess it up!”

I was a slob, so she didn’t want me touching her stuff or wearing her clothes. And she was right—I don’t know if it was the oil in my hands or what, but I had a way of ruining anything I touched. Everyone would get the same paperback math books at the beginning of the year, and somehow, by the end, mine would be completely destroyed—smudged black, dog-eared, bent cover. Everyone else’s was pristine, while mine looked like I’d taken a bath with it.

So my sister, sensibly enough, wouldn’t let me wear her clothes. “Don’t even touch them!” she said. “You’ll ruin them, or stretch them out, or both.” She even went to the trouble of locking her favorite pair of jeans to the hanging rod of our closet, through the belt loop. Which meant I had no choice but to cut them off. When she saw me strutting down the hall wearing them, she shrieked aloud. As I passed her, she mouthed, “I’m going to kill you.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t care one way or another about those jeans. I simply enjoyed tormenting her.

I tormented her in other ways, too. She wanted nothing more than to be able to sing, but the family musicality eluded her. So when I caught her in the downstairs bathroom pouring her heart into a pitchy rendition of “Edelweiss” into a tape recorder, I had to play it for all her friends.

Yet my goofiness and ability to woo with humor worked in Julie’s favor, too. There was a group of “cool girls” that she wanted so badly to hang out with. She was invisible to them. Despite the fact that she was blond and pretty, her shyness could be paralyzing. She wanted me to come to the rescue.

Two members of this cool group of girls were Carol, the good-time party girl, and June, the wholesome sweetheart who reminded me of Julie Andrews. They were both in my second-semester Algebra I class. I had barely passed the first and was hanging on by a thread as the second semester began.

When I told Julie that these girls were in my class, she instructed me on how to win them over for her: get them to laugh at me so they’d ask me to go out with them one weekend. I would then bring Julie with me. I said, “What am I, your clown?” This question didn’t really need an answer.

By the second week, the class was lost for me as far as the algebra was concerned. I obediently became the class clown and a pain in the teacher’s ass. I remember Carol and June doubled over laughing at what I’m sure were my hilarious shenanigans. They invited me to hang out with them one Friday night and I brought Julie with me. We hopped into several cars, cracked open beers, and drove around town. This was a huge group of girls, about fifteen of them. And they were a delightful mix of personalities: some were cheerleaders, some were popular, some not so much, some got straight A’s, some loved to party (my subgroup). What we all had in common was we loved to laugh and hang out. We had our own language and inside jokes. We’d scream from car windows as we drove by the boys hanging out in the St. Jude parking lot, “What’s your gimmick?!” This would just crack us up. I’m still not sure why we found this so funny.

I had started drinking in my freshman year of high school. At first, it was just a little Boone’s Farm or a beer here and there, but by my junior year, I was drinking every night. And now my new friends and I would party hearty on weekends together. We went to football games and Flings (school dances). We’d have keggers at one another’s house. There was no drinking behind my parents’ backs, though: it was all in the open. It was a drinking culture all round in this neck of the woods in the late 1970s. Our house was the place to go for singing and drinking. We’d sit around the kitchen table, and Mom and Dad would tell stories and sing songs from their youth. My favorite was their two-part harmony rendition of “Coney Island,” a peppy 1920s tune. My new friends adored my parents and couldn’t get enough of them.

My parents were creatures of their era—they loved to drink and throw parties. As soon as I was old enough to think of it, I’d sneak downstairs after everyone had gone and take sips out of the leftover drinks. I also liked relighting the cigarette butts that people had left behind, so I could practice smoking. Once, when my dad caught me lighting up outside (I was about twelve, and I had literally picked up a butt out of the gutter in front of our house), I overheard him proudly telling Mom in the kitchen, “She’s out there smokin’ like a pro!”

When my mom would have a few drinks, she might get a bit sloppy and sentimental, and my dad would gently prod her upstairs to bed. But no matter what she drank the night before, she never, ever had a hangover. She’d be up at five in the morning, bright-eyed and ready for the day. So drinking just seemed like a lot of fun. And with this new group of girlfriends, I was starting to do it for real, with the sole aim of getting wasted.

To the manner born.

My friend Peggy Quinn’s house was another fun place to party. Unlike the Lynches, the Quinns were good Irish Catholics who dutifully produced a tribe of redheaded children with saint names. What made their house the best place in the world, as far as I was concerned, was that Mr. Quinn had a keg in the basement. I don’t remember that we were allowed to drink from it, but I was captivated by the idea of it. He had a keg … in his basement.

I remember Big Jim Quinn sipping a glass of his Special Export out on his front porch and me out there with him, shooting the breeze upon a summer’s evening. I guess I felt comfortable enough to tell him the secret I had only ever told my mom, Ron Howard, and Anson Williams: I wanted to be an actress. I think he was the first grown-up who took me seriously. Instead of telling me to learn to type or some other surefire way to make a living, Mr. Quinn said, “You get out there and do that, Jane. And be sure to thank me when you get that Academy Award.”

I flunked that second-semester Algebra I class, by the way, but the class wasn’t a total loss. I had successfully pimped myself out for my sister and got us both into one of the popular cliques. But even in the midst of all the parties and goofing around, I still had that feeling that I was on the fringes of life and not genuinely a part of the world around me. Much of it had to do with my big gay secret and the fantasy life it spawned. I was noticing a different girl every week, but the one I fixated on most was in that same Algebra class, and she was deaf. I imagined romantically rescuing her from her alienated existence and making her feel that her thoughts and dreams were understood. I realize now that I wanted so desperately to be rescued that I projected it all on to her. But to a high school freshman that was irrelevant. I would blissfully slip into daydreaming about sweeping her off her feet whenever the teacher started writing equations.

What I didn’t know was that soon I would meet someone with whom I would feel connected and understood—my own unlikely version of Prince Charming.