Children of Paradise
In what has to be the most disposable, albeit topical, of ironies, the loneliness and disenfranchisement that set Eddie's emotional gyroscope into play very early seem to be the very qualities that landed him his role in T2. And they have ended up providing him with a story he's willing to applaud: "I had it kind of handed to me--pretty weird. I'm lucky. And if I become big-headed or something, it could backfire on me. I just have to go back to where I was before--and I'm sure I could do it. But right now, it's fun and I want to enjoy it. It can be hard work, and stressful at times. But to me, it's the best job you can get. I wanna act till I die. It's like I won the lottery. It doesn't make me any smarter, bigger or better than anyone else. I'm just a lucky person."
When he was five years old, my son caught the acting bug from his best friend, a veteran of TV commercials. Not willing to bear the weight of a stifled acting career on my conscience, I got my boy (who resembles his mother) an agent easily enough, and began the cattle call schlep. I have a small confession to make here. What kept me going was the pleasing idea of a trust fund for an Ivy League education or, at the very least, a new set of tires. Alas, the bubble burst at an audition for an Oscar Mayer baloney commercial that involved a father/son vignette in which the little boy asks his dad what's in the baloney. When my son saw how easily the actor paired to be his father slipped into character, the alarm of common sense rang in his little ears. Phony fathers are full of baloney. "It was creepy," he told me later. "I think I'll just play professional baseball."
With a show business pedigree, Sara Gilbert has considerably more to fuel her passion to act than my son. Grandfather Harry Crane wrote and created "The Honeymooners"; half sister Melissa was the endearing Half Pint in Michael Landon's "Little House On The Prairie," on which her brother Jonathan also appeared. "My mom had a short-lived career as an actress when she was younger. Now she's a manager--she manages me," says Sara, 17, who looks like an extra from an Oliver Stone film. Sara lives in Encino with her mother. Just now she is busy doodling with a pen. She draws on her jeans, her shoes, her socks. And she continues to draw on everything in sight for the next hour.
"I was just at Cafe Luna on Melrose. They give you crayons to draw while you're waiting for food. Well, I can't draw a thing, but they're gonna put what I drew up in the bathroom," she confides, in a voice that hints at more than a passing acquaintance with attention. The doodling fixation and the droopy, flower child aspect, however, can't hide the savvy that the actress who plays Roseanne's TV daughter "Darlene" possesses. Apologizing without a hint of remorse, Sara sets her own tape recorder next to mine on the table as the interview begins. (The last person who did this to me was that pussycat Jerry Lewis.)
"I've been an actress--I love it--on and off for about 11 years. I think that the main thing is that when you see people around you in the entertainment industry, it becomes a reality, as opposed to others who aren't as exposed to it. If I had not been in a family of actors and other creative people, I would've never thought of it. I would've said, oh, yeah, there's TV."
The fact that Sara's mother manages her career invites speculation that Sara may have received an extra nudge, especially in light of her mother's unremarkable career as an actress, not to mention her half sister's long run on prime time. Sara blithely denies that there's any vicarious living going on here: "From the very beginning my mother said if you ever want to stop doing it, then you don't have to do it anymore. My mom didn't even necessarily want me to do it. She knew ahead of time how long the hours are and all that. It's something that I've always wanted to do and if you were to look back on my life then you'd see times where I stopped acting. It's been my decision all along--start, stop. And anyone who says oh, you're being shoved into this--well, that's just a complete misconception."
And although her acting career has, by her own admission, deprived her of not only her privacy, but the normalities that many of her non-acting friends take for granted, she is philosophical--almost to a fault, were it not commensurate with her overall Earth Day perspective. "I think it's important to ask yourself not 'What could I have changed in the past, but what I can do in the future.'" Still, she admits, "the hardest part for me is typical, I guess. Giving up your privacy. Going out with friends and their having to wait while you sign autographs. But in other ways it's cool because you realize that people do appreciate you. It's nice to make someone feel better by obliging them."
Sara is a good deal less philosophical on other topics, such as the existence of a boyfriend. No flower child babble on this one: "Oh, I don't know..." She rolls her eyes dismissively. "Avoiding personal questions ..." she says ambiguously, dangling a gerund as if she is reciting from a manual on interview do's and don'ts.
We are alone, except for Sara's woefully overweight beagle. "Don't pet the dog!" she cautions. "He doesn't like anybody but me and he bites." Though the dog seems to me to be committed to slothfulness rather than aggression, she turns out to be right; he later gets a second wind and takes a throwaway swipe at my palm. When Sara talks about the inequities younger actors face, I swear I can hear the Catherine of Russia of sitcom TV in her nasal, indictment mode. You don't, after all, spend two years on the set of "Roseanne" without picking up a few pointers. "It's always the case with kid actors--the kids on the show are grouped together, as opposed to being separate actors. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. People are gonna see you as a kid, instead of an actor. And up to a certain point you have to fight it. But, like, you don't want to, like, lose your job by saying I want the same size trailer as so-and-so."
Sara just acted with Drew Barrymore in the feature film Poison Ivy. In one particularly provocative sequence, Drew's character runs her tongue seductively over the lips of Sara's character. The acting, however, wasn't the uncomfortable part for Sara. "The thing that made it really difficult was that I would be in a hospital gown completely naked underneath and, like, it was really late at night with these fake rain machines going," she moans, the Maynard G. Krebs syndrome that, like, afflicts her speech sounding all the more humorous. "I'm, like, freezing, and having to do 10 takes--it was a lot of physical work--a lot of working late--but getting through it was worth it. You're really there for the art, anyway. You're not there for the size of your trailer or the size of your paycheck. If you're very passionate about acting, then it really doesn't matter."
"That's a mature attitude for--"
"--someone that's drawing on her shoe?"
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