Nevertheless, a few days later, there I was, standing onstage describing outfits very similar to the clothes Gidget wore on the show. Since I wasn’t good at cold readings, I didn’t use the script I’d been handed right before stepping on the stage. Instead, I tried to point out what each young model was wearing as she walked out, just as I saw it—which needed no explanation at all. In between, I filled in with snippets from my day on the set, told the audience about the cute boys hired as extras, confided in them about watching all the kids leave together as I stayed to work through the rest of the day. Which in reality, I never noticed… I don’t think. I shared with everyone the amazing loop-de-loop ride I was on, felt comfortable talking to these young women, something I had rarely felt when talking to the girls I’d gone to school with. And the young women in the audience seemed to accept me, like it was a whole room made up of my friend Lynn, whom I was losing sight of as we traveled in different directions. After the fashion show had ended, I lingered onstage, answering questions, genuinely wanting to talk to everyone.
Slowly they started to move out of the audience, climbing onto the stage with me, chatting at first, then asking me to sign things. They’d hand me scraps of paper or programs, and since I hadn’t signed many autographs, I didn’t know what to write to each of them. When they ran out of paper, they wanted me to sign their clothes or even their arms. As more and more came onto the stage, I felt their friendliness turning into a hunger for something I didn’t have, and as their urgency began to overwhelm me, I tried to push away from them. But instead of moving back they crowded around me, frantically pulling at my clothes and hair, like they were playing a game of “Red Rover,” only now the arms were locking me in, not out. As I bent down, covering my face with my hands, I suddenly felt a huge presence pick me up, effortlessly hoisting me over his head and holding me high in the air. “I gotcha, Gidg,” beamed the big man as we waded through the crowd, which now looked more like a flock of evil birds than a group of high school girls. I’ve always thought that perhaps this guardian angel was the school janitor because he wore a uniform, but I’ll never know for sure. After he set me down in a utility closet and flipped on the light, he left.
For a moment, I stood at the door, listening to the commotion outside, then turned a small wastepaper basket upside down and sat, my hands still shaking, feeling deeply alone but oddly thrilled. Never again would I walk down the street or push my cart through the produce aisle without being aware of people when they recognize me—and when they don’t recognize me. Either way, I was no longer a member of the club anymore. The Human Club. I was a celebrity.
8
Get Thee to a Nunnery
WHEN I WALKED onto the set—a classroom containing ten or twelve children of varying ages—everyone stopped dead in their tracks and stared at me. Gidget’s happy-go-lucky clothes were gone, and in their place I wore several layers of ankle-length ecru wool, starting with a long-sleeved dress. Over the dress, with its Peter Pan collar, was placed an apron-like panel called a scapular, the front section loosely belted at the waist, leaving the back to flap in the breeze—layer number two. After my long hair had been bound to my head with countless bobby pins, a nylon sock—which looked as though it had once been attached to a pair of panty hose—was pulled down over the top and anchored in place with long straight hairpins. Covering the whole wad was one of my two hat choices, and since this was an interior scene, I wore the smaller, scarf-like head covering with its shoulder-length veil attached to the back.
The camera had already been set up and the assistant director was in the process of placing the children into positions. There was a rote feeling to it all, probably because the scene had already been filmed the week before and they were planning to do it exactly the same. Only one thing would be different: This time I was playing the lead. The director—whom I’d worked with on several Gidget episodes and adored—put his arm around my shoulder with an easy smile and started to explain the shot. Before he could finish, however, the cameraman—whom I had not worked with before—butted in to introduce himself and at the same time began inspecting my appearance. Moving close, then pulling back, he flatly stated that I needed to cut my eyelashes. They were too long.
Mind you, these were not fake, glued-on eyelashes, but the things that grew out of my lids, for God’s sake, the same as my mother’s and grandmother’s. Trying to make light, I laughingly begged him to please let me keep them, saying that I was proud of them and it would be weird to cut them off! Joining the discussion at that point was the Catholic technical advisor, who took her job very seriously. Luckily, she didn’t remain for many episodes, at least not on the set. After giving my face an impersonal examination—everyone leaning in like they were looking at a painting on the wall—they walked to the edge of the set, then huddled together to discuss the serious situation while the crew waited, watching the unfolding drama. When a few uncomfortable moments had passed, it was announced: My eyelashes could stay. Praise be to God. Everyone quickly moved into their positions as the assistant director yelled an unnecessary “Quiet on the set.” Swack, as the director was called, suggested we run it once—then roll film. I was fine with that, and that’s what we did.
Even with my eyelashes in place, I felt defeated before I said my first line.
When Gidget was canceled after that one blur of a season, I felt only one quick painful stab and then it was gone. I’d never read the reviews, wouldn’t have known where to find the Nielsen ratings even if I’d wanted to know what they were, which I didn’t. I was only slightly aware that the show had been a product at all, bought and sold by an industry that needed to see an immediate profit (or the likelihood of one soon), something they didn’t see from Gidget. Maybe the fact that I had lived in a fogbank so long was keeping me from projecting ahead, forcing me to live one day at a time with very few expectations. I don’t know. But when I walked away from the girl I loved so much, I didn’t feel crushed. Gidget was still with me, was me. And living with her so relentlessly that year had given me things I hadn’t owned before: a tiny sliver of her confidence, her willingness to be optimistic, and her daring ability to look toward the future.
I hadn’t had an agent when I was initially cast as Gidget, so Jocko introduced me to Herb Tobias, who seemed like a nice man, though befuddled by the fact that I’d landed the starring role in a television series without any representation at all. And although Mr. Tobias visited the set during that first year of my career, maybe even asked me to lunch—something I have only a vague memory of—I always felt that he thought of me as an energetic flash in the pan. However, when I was asked to meet on two projects immediately after Gidget’s demise, and when those meetings resulted in two very different offers, Herb started calling with regularity, if only to say hi.
The first offer was for the lead in a play being produced at the Valley Music Theater—a short-lived but well-intentioned theater in the round, located in Tarzana… or was it Woodland Hills? Clearly not Broadway, where the play had first been produced in 1961, and later adapted into a film starring James Stewart and Sandra Dee. Take Her, She’s Mine is the story of a feisty teenage girl and her anxious, loving father, very Gidget -like territory. But this would be a stage production, like going back to the familiar drama department, and the father was to be played by the great Walter Pidgeon. I was thrilled. The other project was a movie entitled The Way West, starring Richard Widmark, Kirk Douglas, and Robert Mitchum, to be shot in Oregon all that summer, now 1966. I was to play a feisty teenage girl with an anxious loving father, which sounds painfully familiar, but this time everyone is stuck on a wagon train heading west and when this daughter finds herself pregnant by a creepy older guy, she jumps off the back of her covered wagon, rolling head over teakettle down the hill. This prompts the sweet redheaded boy—who has always loved her—to leap to her rescue, somehow running down the hill faster than she can bounce. Miraculously, he catches her, then marries her, even though he knows she is damaged goods. I chose to do that one.