Melissa Explains It All: Tales from My Abnormally Normal Life Read online

  By the time my brother was born in 1984 (my mom’s fourth child), my siblings and I had found our showbiz grooves—commercials, modeling, voice-overs, soap operas, miniseries, feature films—and thus, began upping our collective finances. And as it worked out, around the same time, Dad started a construction business that began making good money, so our lifestyle got much better. He built an addition to our house, which went from squishing six people into three bedrooms to seven people into four. We only added a second floor and whirlpool tub in my parents’ room, but it felt like a mansion. With more gigs coming in, my parents could also put away some of our earnings for college and weddings for the four girls.

  The income my siblings and I made now helped with fun “extras” like trips, better holiday presents, and other comforts. Suddenly, Santa was a little more generous, and the shrubs outside our house were full of twinkle lights, since we could afford a higher electric bill for a month. We started trading our Poconos time-share for upgraded locations in Breckenridge, Colorado, and Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. If we wanted a new bike, we bought it ourselves. I could also afford to start collecting Franklin Mint Shirley Temple dolls, though I paid in installments. The irony is that now that I have money, I get them free from fans for my birthday.

  One of my proudest moments as a kid happened when I was about eight years old, and I asked my dad to build me a clubhouse in our backyard. I was big on naming and forming clubs at the time, which I blame on my love for Romper Room, The Mickey Mouse Club, and Grease’s Pink Ladies, and I was constantly trying to get neighborhood girls to join. I clearly remember my dad saying, “Sure. If you get three national commercials, I will build you a clubhouse.” Perhaps this was our equivalent of “Get straight As, and I’ll take you to Baskin-Robbins.” I also think Dad was placating me so I’d leave him alone and let him watch his beloved 60 Minutes, but he shouldn’t have doubted the Hart work ethic.

  Two months later, I had shot those three commercials, and though Dad was floored—he thought the challenge would take me a year to complete—the man sure did deliver. In just a few weeks, he built me a towering room on stilts, six feet off the ground, made from cleverly reclaimed goods from our yard. He used our old greenhouse roof, complete with skylights, and turned an upside-down picket fence into the clubhouse’s exterior walls. Though the place could use a remodel and a fireman’s pole, it’s still around and has withstood tough hurricanes and rowdy sleepovers with screaming, giddy girls. It will always be my oasis in the sky.

  * * *

  I know it’s easy to assume that the Harts had a Toddlers & Tiaras situation going on, with parents who got work for their kids to give their own lives purpose and cash flow. But that wasn’t the case. Mom and Dad weren’t like Joe Simpson or Kris Kardashian-Jenner, who’ve been accused of using their kids as a bullet train to success and to making their own situations better. For us, acting was something my siblings and I wanted to do, and Mom made it happen. We were a pretty lively bunch, and acting let us ham it up in front of an audience that gave us more attention than our parents did when we performed dance routines in the living room. What began as entertaining a little girl’s dream became a family business, with the perk that the residuals from one national commercial covered an entire year’s worth of mortgage payments. Okay, so we walked a fine line—but I did score an awesome clubhouse and a kickass, lifelong career from the deal.

  While a lot of “child stars” can become pretty confused or resentful as adults, maybe one of the reasons I turned out so sane is that I wouldn’t consider myself a “child star.” I was a child with a serious hobby that segued into an amazing career—in the same way the kid who loves to swim becomes an Olympic gold medalist, or the child who practices piano every day becomes a Carnegie Hall performer. As Malcolm Gladwell would say, I put in my ten thousand hours. I simply loved to act, and I didn’t care about the rejection, which for me has been key to having such a long career; from a young age, Mom taught me that if I didn’t manage my expectations, and take the good with the bad, life would feel like a real pisser. Between work and auditions, I enjoyed a “normal childhood,” like other kids on Long Island. I played in the sprinklers in our backyard, climbed trees, hunted frogs, and rode my bike to get Italian ices or to a friend’s house to play Battleship.

  While our whole family clearly benefited from the money I earned, showbiz was never all about the cash, or else my childhood would have played out very differently. My family would have moved closer to Manhattan or to L.A. for more frequent auditions, and we’d have spent anything we had left on a high-profile publicist instead of refurnishing the cramped home we’d grown to love. All that pressure would’ve also caused me to obsess over whether casting people liked me, or how upset I’d be if I didn’t get a part or a new toy. This would’ve killed the childlike glee that made me so good at peddling cereal and snacks—and nobody likes to buy Twinkies from a desperate, beaten-down child. The only upside to this fantasy is that I might have dated another child star like Fred Savage, who I always wanted to be my first on-screen kiss. Hey, Fred, if you’re reading this, let’s grab the families and do dinner. It’s on me.

  Chapter 2

  ROOM TO ROMP

  Ask most actors what inspired their love affair with The Business, and they’ll tell you about an amazing film or play that made their hearts skip a beat. Octavia Spencer, for example, has said she was first moved by the inspiring and heartbreaking work of E.T. Gary Oldman remembers belting out the score to A Hard Day’s Night when he was just five years old. And both George Clooney and Viola Davis say that 1976’s Network made a huge impact on their future dreams. When Peter Finch’s character roars, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Viola, for one, says it just blew her mind.

  I also remember the stirring words that moved me to be an actor. They went like this: Romper, bomper, stomper, boo. Tell me, tell me, tell me, do. Magic Mirror, tell me today, did all my friends have fun at play?

  Okay, so it’s not Shakespeare. But to a four-year-old, the final monologue of Romper Room sounded pretty deep. I especially loved how the cheerful host said these words just before looking into the camera, and then listed all the names of the kids that she said she could see through her special magic mirror—“I can see Jane, and Molly, and Billy, and Gina…” Sadly, “Melissa” wasn’t too common a name back then, so she never said mine. But while most of my friends just stared back at their TVs, willing this woman and her mildly creepy bumblebee sidekick to notice them, I knew there were better ways to be recognized. I had my aha moment.

  I need to be on that floor with those kids, I thought. I need to be on TV.

  I told this to my mom, who was always looking for new ways to entertain me—I was her first child of what would eventually be seven, so she had a lot of energy to spare back then. She called her friend, whose daughter had recently been booked for a small part on a soap opera, and asked her for the name of her manager. Just two weeks later, we met the man on New Year’s Eve, and after taking one look at my blond hair and blue eyes, he took the last three hundred dollars my mom had in her savings account to snap some head shots and book my first audition for Splashy, a bathtub toy. Our empty pockets also meant I didn’t get a new dress for my big afternoon, so I wore one from my first day of preschool that made me look like I’d jumped right off the pages of an English picture book: a navy blue smocked dress with small, embroidered red roses. It was perfect.

  The audition was at 1515 Broadway, in the heart of Times Square. This landmark now houses the Viacom headquarters, including Nickelodeon, which would later produce Clarissa Explains It All—but in the early ’80s, it was just a random office building dwarfed by Forty-second Street’s booming porn and prostitute business. Once I got inside, I quickly scanned the waiting room and noticed that all the girls looked like me—blond hair, blue eyes, big smiles.

  Even so, I was booked for the Splashy job. I partly credit my lucky dress, which I’d continue to wear to
most of my auditions until I outgrew it. (It still hangs in my closet, in case I ever have a daughter.) But at this, my very first shoot ever, I had lights, cameras, and what felt like a hundred people staring at … my four-year-old boobies in a bubble bath. I was mortified. In the end, though, it didn’t matter how I looked naked because the client only used shots of my hands in the commercial, and then featured another blond-haired, blue-eyed child’s face and body in the ad. I didn’t even know I had been replaced until Mom recently told me the story. I’ve been telling talk show hosts for years that the little nudie girl in that bubble bath is me, even though I secretly wondered why she didn’t look familiar.

  Splashy was a win for my early career, even if our manager did turn out to be a real swindler. (Rule number one of showbiz: Never give an agent or a manager a dime before booking a gig.) Mom fired him after my fifth audition. She began managing me herself and quickly learned how to promote my all-American looks among the industry’s top agents. I became a pro at acting like a little adult to make my mom and the casting people happy. I was officially a working girl (not in a Pretty Woman kind of way).

  * * *

  When I was just starting out, I worked mostly in commercials, and my parents rarely fussed over my ability to land the jobs over and over again. They never told me I had a special skill or called all the relatives when I booked a gig. So to me, acting was just something I did in my free time, the way other kids play sports or take ice-skating lessons. In fact, I acted, danced, and joined Brownies, though acting always took priority. Sometimes I’d even miss a dance recital, talent show, or graduation to Girl Scouts so I could make it to an audition or shoot a commercial. But I never thought this happened because my parents were positioning me for a bigger career. More like Mom was learning that our business thrived on relationships, and if we skipped meetings or opportunities, our agents, managers, and casting directors would stop sending me out for jobs.

  Commercial auditions were a blast for me, and it helped that they were quick and dirty. My parents didn’t have a fax machine and e-mail hadn’t been invented yet, so agents sent Mom scripts in the mail or read them to her over the phone, and she’d write down my lines. Then she’d recite them to me (I couldn’t read yet) and I’d memorize the part at home, in the car, or in the waiting room of the actual audition. I had the memory of a Bronx Zoo sea lion—I learned my tricks fast and performed them with ease and grace. In the audition room, I’d be in front of two to ten gruff grown-ups, including a casting director, director, producer, and the discerning client. I’d stand on a masking tape X that marked my spot, look right into the camera like the host on Romper Room, and say my lines with enthusiasm and boatloads of charm. Ta-da!

  “Great, thank you, next!” the casting director would shout. On to the next blond kid …

  After my audition, Mom always treated me and whichever sibling came along to a snack, like a blueberry turnover from Au Bon Pain, broccoli pizza in Midtown, or an ice-cream Chipwich to split. (Seriously—we were too thrifty to buy one for each of us.) Once after an audition in Harlem, I wanted KFC, which meant taking a detour home through a sketchy part of town. Mom told us to roll up our windows and lock the doors, and then she freaked out when a group of men began chasing our car down an alley. She swore up and down that they were after us, but as it turns out, we were just on a one-way street and they were trying to tell us to turn around. We couldn’t hear what they were saying because our car was so tightly sealed, but even still, we never trolled for goodies in that neighborhood again.

  After a long day in the city, I’d zone out on the ride home. We spent up to twelve hours a week in transit for my jobs, and once a year I’d hear Mom scream about clocking so much time in the car—usually when she reached her breaking point, often during tax season. Don’t even get her started on how she went into labor in the Midtown Tunnel when she was pregnant with Lizzie. Usually, though, I’d just close my eyes and fantasize that all the ’80s lyrics on the radio were about me. I’m never gonna dance again either, George Michael. I just called to say I love you.

  * * *

  Back on Long Island, elementary school life was significantly less glamorous than I let my peers think. After a few ads ran on TV and in the local papers when I was in fourth grade, and I began to noticeably miss school for auditions and shoots, kids began to ask a lot of questions. Do you ride in a limo? Do you live in a mansion? Do you know ALF?

  I dodged answering most of them, usually by changing the subject or rolling my eyes, since it all sounded so stupid and suck-up-y to me. The truth also wasn’t half as interesting as their perception. My mom drove a white Oldsmobile station wagon with a wood panel down the side. We lived in our cramped ranch at the end of an isolated block and used my dad’s lobster traps as end tables and his old ship’s wheel as the top of our coffee table. It would be a few more years before my girlfriends would care that I knew Joey Lawrence but not a puppet alien.

  I think all this bobbing and weaving is why I liked running into my audition friends in the city—Joey, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Soleil Moon Frye, and Lacey Chabert, to name a few. Since we shared the same acting “hobby” and saw each other a lot, I felt like we had this time-consuming interest in common that I didn’t share with the kids at home. They just got what I did, and I didn’t have to explain it to them. It also helped that I was too young to view my city friends as professional competition, though we were often going for the same roles. (The parents, on the other hand, were in it to win it. Most saw dollar signs from the start.) A lot of times, the means to a job was acting like a kid—like trying to roller-skate for a part on Another World, or riding bikes with Joey Lawrence and Soleil Moon Frye during a Ron Howard audition for Little Shots—so it hardly felt like we were working. We were encouraged to just be ourselves, so if we got booked for doing our best, we thought we deserved it. Years later Soleil told the press a story, while I was sitting next to her, about how she ran into a little girl in the elevator after auditions for the Punky Brewster pilot and was so worried that she didn’t get the part because the child told her mom that she did. After the interview, I confessed to Soleil that the elevator girl might have been me. I never would have said this to be mean, but I did land a lot of jobs because I was such a confident child. That said, we all know who scored Punky, so clearly bravado only goes so far.

  Between the ages of four and twelve years old, I booked more than a hundred commercials, including national spots for Life Savers, Twinkies, Arnold Bread, Tylenol, Barbie (sadly, no freebies here), and the first Chrysler minivan. I also kept busy with regional work. I crammed so many lines into my child-size brain that some of them decided to stick around forever, like the commercial I did for Connecticut Natural Gas: “You can probably tell just by looking at me that I’ve been a homeowner for years! Nice, isn’t it [while gesturing to my giant dollhouse]—Dutch colonial, three bedrooms, very up to date. But believe me, a big responsibility. Especially when it comes to saving energy…”

  I’ll spare you the rest, but suffice it to say that reciting ads took up a lot of my time and gray matter in those early years. In between, I did some TV work, took on modeling jobs for catalogs and ads, acted in feature films, and started to do theater too. I was an aspiring Shirley Temple—that quintessential child actress whose success story I worshiped, and whose signed pictures, movie posters, and porcelain dolls I collected and still have today.

  I accomplished a lot of different stuff at a young age, but commercials could be the most grueling, though not because I learned pages of dialogue or worked eighteen-hour days. One of the most challenging jobs I did was a Barbie pony commercial, because it tested my young discipline and self-control in a big way. Here, two other girls and I were asked to peek over a table at a row of beautiful, shiny plastic horses. Each one had a silky mane and a foot raised, as if it were frozen in mid-canter, but we girls could only look at these toys—no touching allowed.

  Every time the director yelled “Cut!�
�� a prop stylist rushed to the table to brush, style, spray, and essentially play with the horses’ hair, which was torture for me, because I wanted in on the action too. Instead, I had to sit still and do my job on cue. I’d learned about self-discipline early on, when I worked with Bill Cosby in a pudding commercial. Every time a giggly, Jell-O-eating child “misbehaved”—say, mentioned that he had a stomachache or asked to trade his chocolate dessert for vanilla—Bill promptly gave ’em the boot. So from then on, I always respectfully did what I was told while flashing a camera-ready smile, even if it drove me insane.

  Sometimes I could go too far in my eagerness to please. I once shot a Fritos ad that sold the salty corn chips as an incentive for children to clean their plates during meals. For this spot, I had to eat chunky forkfuls of meatloaf, peas, and mashed potatoes—and after every bite, drink from a tall, cold glass of whole milk. For three hours, I did nothing but bite, drink, bite, drink, bite, drink. We did these takes no less than what felt like fifty times, and although the director offered me a spit bucket after I chewed my food, I swallowed it all down instead. I was too embarrassed to spit in front of strangers, and as a result, Mom said this was the only time she’s seen a person literally turn green. As if things weren’t nasty enough, the director then asked me to cram my face with nothing but Fritos—one at a time, in handfuls, throwing them in the air and trying to catch them in my mouth … By the time we wrapped, I’d eaten enough meat and potatoes to sustain an army of lumberjacks, and to this day, I still have an aversion to corn chips. I can’t even smell them without gagging. Good thing Fritos had yet to invent some of the flavors they have now, like Chili Cheese and Chutney. Chutney! I’d have barfed peas for days.

  * * *

  It was during these adventurous and influential years that my parents insisted I was just like all the other kids, that my friends thought I would be the next Elisabeth Shue, and that I saw compelling signs that both impressions were legit and meaningful. I’ll never forget the time that all my worlds seemed to come together in a way that made sense, felt really good, and validated the person I wanted to be when I grew up. And yes, it had to do with a commercial job.