You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (7 page)

“Hey, you’re cute.” I put my hand on my hip, just like during rehearsals.

My line still pretty much got lost in the crowd reaction, but at least it didn’t feel too awkward. Clearly, no American actor could have managed it.

With
Night Court
on my résumé, the auditions started to increase. The L.A. freeway system became a familiar blur as we spent hours commuting from one casting office to the other. Mom learned that if you took surface streets, you could, in fact, get from a one o’clock audition at Culver Studios to a 3:30 callback at Disney with just a couple minutes to spare for a quick read-through of my sides. She perfected the intricate dance of traffic calculation and I became an expert at changing in the car while eating In-N-Out French fries without spilling ketchup on my audition clothes.

When we were not stuck in traffic, we were spending long hours in the immigration lawyer’s office, collecting my credits from the newspaper TV listings and any industry magazine articles that mentioned me. We were like crazed scrap-bookers, attempting to justify to the government why I should be allowed to work in the US. It felt kind of like begging, but in a very specific way that involved filling out forms in triplicate. Our forms eventually paid off, resulting in regular visas so that I
could continue working.

But one obvious truth remained—regardless of how many visas I got, I was not an American. A casting director identified the problem: my Canadian accent made me sound like Bob and Doug McKenzie. I said things like chesterfield instead of couch, runners instead of sneakers and I pronounced the word pasta like “passed-a.” The situation was clearly out of control when I asked at a restaurant where the washroom was. After a scary ride in a freight elevator, I ended up in the laundry room, still needing to pee. I just didn’t speak the proper language of Los Angeles.

Conveniently, a whole industry had sprung up around the need to get foreigners to say pah-sta. We went to the Samuel French bookstore and bought a cassette tape called something like
Achieving the Standard American Accent
, which came with a little stapled booklet with phonetic examples written out. I listened to the tapes on my bright yellow Walkman on the way to auditions. I imitated the people on the tapes, all of us sounding ridiculous with our exaggerated, deliberate focus and our unnatural lilt. I spouted nonsensical phrases and stretched my jaw and lips, attempting to make them more American.

It didn’t work. My clipped Canadian talk still seeped through the attempted whitewashing and casting directors continued to complain about it. Mom hired an accent coach who had been recommended by my manager. She and I met twice a week and sat in a small, windowless office, making strange sounds together and trying to get my tongue to hit the roof of my mouth in the correct place. I said my lines and she covered my audition scenes with notes, indicating the proper, generic American pronunciation of words like
project
and
house.
Her eyebrows would raise on the syllable I was supposed to emphasize and she would hold her breath when we got to anything with a
u
sound. She put red squiggly marks over each syllable, creating hieroglyphics that rendered the actual dialogue almost illegible. Her perfect accent oozed slowly and deliberately from her lips as she read my lines as an example, over and
over again. It was all so flawless, so vanilla and inoffensive next to my now obvious annihilation of the word
about
. We would repeat the dialogue onto a tape recorder so that I could listen to the flowing verses at home as I drifted off to sleep.

Slowly, the Canadian-ness melted away and I sounded like all the other nonspecific American kids on the radio commercials. That little piece of me was sufficiently hidden and glossed over. I had been smoothed out and prettied up, made more acceptable for the American screen. My new accent felt like hair dye or bronzer. It was a lie, but it was the sort of lie a person is expected to tell.

After a while, I forgot that it wasn’t always a part of me. The new cadence stuck, since I was surrounded by other actors from Minnesota or Boston who had hired the same accent coach and whose voices had been cloned to bland perfection just like mine. But when I went back to Canada, everyone said I sounded weird and didn’t know that when I asked for a soda I really meant a pop. But that was a sacrifice that needed to be made if I wanted to work in Los Angeles. Hollywood had officially branded me.

Shortly after
Night Court
, I booked another gig. The shoot for
Rambling Rose
felt slow and genteel, embodying the spirit of the South during the 1930s, just like it was supposed to. My role was straightforward and not very demanding. There was a lot of sitting at a dinner table and saying cute things. There was nothing that indicated that this movie would change everything and give me the biggest challenge of my life.

We shot in Wilmington, North Carolina and so began my love affair with filming on location. Getting to go somewhere new for months at a time and immersing myself in an unfamiliar place was intoxicating. It was fun to live out of a suitcase and make my home wherever I landed. It seemed unnecessary to have consistent companions or the comforts of my own bed; the delightful chaos of being on location made up for all that normal kid stuff. This first taste of what would be my life for the next decade proved to be a particularly lovely introduction. The production company had rented a small condo on the beach for my mom and me, with lots of windows and a carpet that always felt slightly damp from the sea air. The apartment was densely populated with cockroaches but I could run across the street and dig my toes into the sand in under a minute.

We filmed at Carolco Studio in Wilmington. North Carolina gave
significant tax incentives to production companies that filmed there and since we also had exterior shots that needed to show the sleepy south of the 1930s, it was a perfect location. On the sound stage next door, another production was taking advantage of the tax perks; they were shooting the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
movie. Our very different films tended to break for lunch around the same time, so we often ate together. The Turtles would remove their heads and sit with us in our original 1930s scratchy wool costumes, while we choked down our soggy sandwiches and wilted salads from the commissary and complained about the slow shooting schedule. Those Turtles were nice guys who increased my knowledge of ninja moves.

I had no clue who Robert Duvall was before working with him.
Lonesome Dove
and
Apocalypse Now
were not on my eleven-year-old movie-watching list. He was very kind, with a laid-back, approachable manner and he asked the cast and crew to call him Bobby. His laugh was deep and heartfelt, and he maintained his character’s Southern drawl even when we weren’t filming.

In between scenes, the other children on the film and I would be sent to “school.” This entailed corralling us into a florescent light drenched office with a few chairs, desks with sticky drawers and walls with peeling paint. It was oppressive on the best of days and it was a stark contrast to go from being a working professional on set, to being a bored 7
^th
grade student with zero interest in memorizing the details of Canada’s parliamentary system. My schoolmates were six-year-old Evan, who played the youngest brother and our two stand-ins, Gelene and Jeffrey, who matched us in size, age and general appearance.

One day, Bobby’s assistant Brad knocked on the door of the schoolroom and popped his head in and addressed the tutor.

“Hey Ruth, Bobby would like to see Lisa.”

My teacher seemed surprised by the intrusion and she protested. She explained that she only had three hours a day, squeezed into fifteen-minute segments between shots, to attempt to get us a decent education.
These were the legal rules of children working, she explained and she had to answer to the union. Brad smiled and nodded, acknowledging her plight. Then he simply repeated, “Bobby would like to see Lisa.” There was no negotiation, no explanation, no apology.

I shrugged at my tutor, barely concealing the smug look slapped across my face and obediently got up from my desk and followed Brad. It wasn’t that I cared so much about being summoned by one of Hollywood’s most revered film stars, I was just doing an internal happy dance at the fact that I got out of school. In the back of my mind I wondered what he wanted. Did he want to run lines? Sometimes actors did that during lighting set ups. But for which scene? Did I know all of them? Was I in trouble for something? Was this what happens when you get fired?

Brad wasn’t answering any questions as he walked me back to the set where we found Bobby. He was sitting in a rocking chair on the fake front porch of the Depression-era house that was built, to scale, on the soundstage. The place could have been torn out of a plantation in the Deep South, but instead of looking out over kudzu-laced weeping willows, the house gazed over the dirty warehouse floor snaked with heavy industrial cables and the ransacked craft services snack table. Bobby was dressed in his costume—he had his straw hat in his hand and was playing with the brim while he waited for me. He smiled when we arrived and gestured for me to sit in the rocking chair next to him.

“Do you need anything else, Bobby?” Brad asked him as he turned to leave.

“Thanks, we’re fine.”

I didn’t sit but instead I hovered and nervously picked at the porch railing, telling Bobby that my tutor was mad and attempted to re-explain the legalities of being a child actor and the three-hours-per-day schooling requirement. Plus, there were my teachers back home who were never happy that I was working, so all my work really needed to be done perfectly. What I left unsaid was that I wasn’t sure which adult I was supposed to obey. There were teachers demanding that school was
the priority and then there was Bobby not taking no for an answer. No matter what I did, someone was going to be disappointed and I would always be failing somehow.

He listened to me patiently and then nodded and said, “Tell your teacher that you are going to learn much more here with me than in those textbooks. Sit down, Baby Doll.” He pointed again to the rocking chair next to him. I sat.

Bobby called for me often after that. He would let me get an hour of school in before sending Brad knocking at the schoolroom door. My tutor gave up trying to fight it. She would respond to the inevitable interference with a deep sigh and would say, “You can go,” just to hang on to the illusion that she still held some control over the schoolroom. Every time I arrived at the porch, Bobby had a new topic that he wanted to discuss. I don’t know why he chose me for these porch chats but I loved how freely and openly we spoke. All I knew was that he made me feel special.

Bobby legitimately wanted to know about my past eleven years of existence. He asked questions and really listened in a way that pre-teens are not accustomed to. He shared details about his life. He taught me how to tango. We talked about acting. He had a deep passion for the craft and I suspected I was assumed to have the same. He wanted to tell me how to keep a good head on my shoulders and teach me how to not get burned out by the film industry. He told me to keep people around me who would always tell me the truth and that I should never believe my reviews, good or bad, because both were likely to be exaggerated.

“And if you forget everything else, just remember this one thing,” he said. “It’s only a movie.”

It sounded like good advice, but it made me laugh anyway. I looked around at the hundreds of people who were reverently clocking eighteen-hour days and pouring their souls into this movie. I thought about our seven-million-dollar budget. Every moment on set always felt like it was Saving-the-World important, with people rushing around in an attempt
to get everything perfect. And yet, here was a Hollywood legend saying it wasn’t that big of a deal. I didn’t get it. So, I laughed.

Filming progressed and the show was filled with fun kid-perks. We filmed near sluggish Southern streams and during my lunch break I would try to count all the painted turtles that dotted the muddy banks. My one day off every week was spent on the beach, eating hush puppies, chasing ghost crabs and playing Frisbee with Bobby’s dog, Gus. We had just a couple weeks of filming left when everything changed.

I was in the dingy school room, seated at my desk and attempting to avoid some bogus busywork that had been passed on to me by teachers back home who were upset that I was not seated in their classroom. They made it clear that they didn’t care for the daunting task of providing several months of work in advance. Some teachers simply refused to grade the assignments I had done on location and covered my report cards with
Not Applicable
. They sent work that had very little relevance to actual subjects, just so that they wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore. Each bogus page they gave me was a little academic mutiny in the form of a photocopied worksheet.

That day of work had already been long. We had several scenes still to film and I was exhausted. I looked at those worksheets and didn’t know how I was going to survive them. It was the end of October, and my mind easily wandered to Halloween. Trick-or-treating was, of course, thrilling, but I had spent so much time dressing up like a kid from the 1930s that the idea of wearing my own clothes seemed novel and attractive. I wondered if anyone would give me candy if I knocked on their door dressed in jeans and Chucks and told them that I was pretending to be a regular non-working child. I wanted to talk to the other kids, maybe find out their Halloween plans, so I pushed my chair back to stand up and the wheels of the chair got caught on the carpet. I flew backwards like I was in a bad slapstick comedy, with arms and legs flying through the air.

Crack. I heard it. It could have been the chair, but it wasn’t. It was my spine. The back of my head smashed in to the wall, my body snapped
forward and there was a sharp burn when my knees collided with my nose. The other kids laughed, I must have looked ridiculous disappearing so suddenly behind my desk. I tried to laugh, too but realized I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t quite tell what hurt. Maybe it was just my pride, maybe my face burning was from embarrassment rather than impact. I gasped as the wind came back into my lungs. I put my hand up to my nose, but there was no blood. It was fine.