Despite her phrasing it as a question, I had no say in the matter. Her tone made it clear I was going whether I wanted to or not, that Ricardo would drive me, and that I shouldn’t even think about stopping at a liquor store along the way.
So here I am, in solitary confinement. My mother swears it’s for my own good, but I know the score. I’m being punished. Because although half of what happened wasn’t my fault, the other half was entirely my doing.
A few weeks ago, an acquaintance who edits celebrity memoirs approached me about writing my own. “Most stars find it very cathartic,” she said.
I told her yes, but only if it I could call it How to Become Tabloid Fodder in Seven Easy Steps. She thought I was joking, and maybe I was, but I still stand by the title. I think people would understand me better if I laid out my life like Ikea instructions.
Step One, of course, is to be the only child of Beloved Lolly Fletcher, Broadway icon, and Gareth Greene, a rather milquetoast producer.
My mother made her Broadway debut at nineteen. She’s been working nonstop ever since. Mostly onstage, but also in movies and television. YouTube is chock-full of her appearances on The Lawrence Welk Show, The Mike Douglas Show, Match Game, several dozen awards shows. She’s petite, barely five feet in heels. Instead of smiling, she twinkles. A full-body sparkle that begins at her Cupid’s bow lips, spreads upward to her hazel eyes, and then radiates outward, into the audience, enveloping them in a hypnotic glow of talent.
And my mother is talented. Make no mistake about that. She was—and still is—an old-school Star. In her prime, Lolly Fletcher could dance, act, and land a joke better than the best of them. And she had a powerhouse singing voice that was somewhat spooky coming from a woman so small.
But here’s a little secret about my mother: Behind the twinkle, inside that tiny frame of hers, is a spine of steel. Growing up poor in a Pennsylvania coal town, Lolly Fletcher decided at an early age that she was going to be famous, and that it was her voice that would make it happen. She worked hard, cleaning studios in exchange for dance lessons, holding three after-school jobs to pay for a voice coach, training for hours. In interviews, my mother claims to never have smoked or drunk alcohol in her life, and I believe it. Nothing was going to get in the way of her success.
And when she did make it big, she worked her ass off to stay there. No missed performances for Lolly Fletcher. The unofficial motto in our household was “Why bother if you’re not going to give it your all?”
My mother still gives it her all every damn day.
Her first two shows were mounted by the Greene Brothers, one of the prime producing duos of the day. Stuart Greene was the in-your-face, larger-than-life publicity man. Gareth Greene was the pale, unflappable bean counter. Both were instantly smitten with young Lolly, and most people thought she would choose the PR guy. Instead, she picked the accountant twenty years her senior.
Many years later, Stuart married a chorus girl and had Marnie.
Three years after that, my parents had me.
I was a late-in-life baby. My mother was forty-one, which always made me suspect my birth was a distraction. Something to keep her busy during a career lull in which she was too old to be playing Eliza Doolittle or Maria von Trapp but still a few years away from Mrs. Lovett and Mama Rose.
But motherhood was less interesting to her than performing. Within six months, she was back to work in a revival of The King and I while I, quite literally, became a Broadway baby. My crib was in her dressing room, and I took my first steps on the stage, practically basking in the glow of the ghost light.
Because of this, my mother assumed I’d follow in her footsteps. In fact, she demanded it. I made my stage debut playing young Cosette when she did Les Misérables for six months in London. I got the part not because I could sing or dance or was even remotely talented but because Lolly Fletcher’s contract stipulated it. I was replaced after two weeks because I kept insisting I was too sick to go on. My mother was furious.
That leads us to Step Two: rebellion.
After the Les Mis fiasco, my level-headed father shielded me from my mother’s star-making schemes. Then he died when I was fourteen and I rebelled, which to a rich kid living in Manhattan meant drugs. And going to the clubs where you took them. And the after parties, where you took more.
I smoked.
I snorted.
I placed candy-colored pills on my tongue and let them dissolve until I could no longer feel the inside of my mouth.
And it worked. For a few blissful hours, I didn’t mind that my father was dead and that my mother cared more about her career than me and that all the people around me were only there because I paid for the drugs and that I had no real friends other than Marnie. But then I’d be jerked back to reality by waking up in a stranger’s apartment I never remembered entering. Or in the back of a cab, dawn peeking through the buildings along the East River. Or in a subway car with a homeless man asleep in the seat across from me and vomit on my too-short skirt.