Episode 152: Young Breadwinner
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
Before we get into the show I just want to acknowledge that I have been incredibly distracted by the coronavirus. This is a deeply scary and unsettling time for so many of us. I hate being unable to get to my family in England while all this is going on. I know some of you are in a similar position. And it’s really made me think about what I should do with the show right now given pretty much everyone is paying attention to just one story at the moment.
I think I am going to produce a couple of upcoming shows that are related to the current situation because it seems almost weird not to.
But in this episode I am bringing you a totally different story. It’s the story of someone I know, my friend Marie.
I met her through a freelance job more than a decade ago – it was a market research type gig. But as I got to know her I found out she’d originally done the job I had wanted growing up.
“I entered the workforce at the ripe age of 5 years old, and I got into show business.”
I used to envy those child actors so much.
Coming up…someone who started her career when most kids are starting school…and ultimately let it go because climbing this particular ladder didn’t seem worth the sacrifice.
Marie is the youngest of four kids. Her mother, an artist, was a single mom and when Marie was little they were on welfare to get by. She remembers being hungry. That time of the month when the cupboard truly was bare, except for sugar, which she and her sister would spoon into their mouths.
One day when she was five, her mom was reading the newspaper and she saw an ad inviting kids in the area to come and audition in front of a talent agent.
“Each of us tried out, and me, as the smallest, blondest one, I could read, my mom had taught all of us to read quite young – I could take a page of copy, read it over and read it back. And the agent at the table was thrilled with this and signed me up on the spot.”
Not long after signing up with that agent she began going on auditions; then she started to land acting jobs in commercials.
“Commercials for foods, mostly junk food, food and toys. And most of these commercials are aimed at other children. This is the rise of marketing towards children in the 1980s, the great era of advertising to children during the cartoons on the weekends.”
If you grew up in the US you’ll probably remember this line from a famous cereal ad.
“Silly rabbit – Trix is for kids!”
For non-Americans, Trix is a sugary cereal and Marie did the voiceover for that brand starring a cartoon rabbit for four years. She also acted on screen in a bunch of other ads – her first gig was a series of commercials for a laundry detergent.
Her family lived about two hours north of New York City, in the Hudson Valley. As she grew up she spent a lot of time commuting back and forth to the city with her mum, going on auditions and shooting commercials.
As she got older, she started trying out for films and TV as well.
“I remember my first job on a film, I was 9 – I loved the experience, I remember telling people in the cast and crew this is a great job, I much prefer the dramatic job because I don’t have to smile all day. Because the work for the commercials, the publicity, etc. you’re the cute kid, you’re smiling, I remember at the end of one shoot I told my mom, Mom, my smiler muscles hurt.”
AM-T: “Did you always enjoy it…give a sense of…it’s so hard for other people to imagine not being in school every day and just having that boring routine and hanging out with other kids after school, on the weekend. I don’t know how different…maybe you could give a sense of how your life did or did not match that description.
“Right, that’s a great question, I did not have a normal life in that regard because I didn’t go to school, I wasn’t in school because I was busy working. Other young performers my age, they’ll probably describe a similar experience, as your career heats up your school experience goes down because the demands are such, you have to choose as a young person: OK kid, do you want to go to school or be in the business? And me, I chose the business, that’s what I was doing, so no I didn’t go to school, and I didn’t have much of an experience – most of my days were around adults, so I didn’t really grow up with a peer group.”
Her mum home-schooled Marie and her three siblings, but when she was on set…she says there wasn’t that much schooling going on.
Instead, she was earning money. Quite a lot. And she understood right from the get-go that her job was important to everyone in her family.
“Let’s put it this way. We were not in a great situation financially, and I knew from the beginning that this was a fun thing to do but it was also a financial thing to do, and that I was helping my family access a better quality of life and that above all is what made me happy. And any time I went out to read, it wasn’t for me so much…there was the attention on me but it was really about improving our situation and helping my family and hopefully securing a better financial future and career for myself. So I knew all of that from day one.
She could hardly fail to notice. After all…
“I was paid in my name, I was paid checks many thousands of dollars in my name, written to me, I am 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years old, I’d sign the back of my check and walk into the local branch of my bank. ‘Oh, here comes that small child again, with a check for many thousands of dollars, and I would put it into my bank account.’”
She was proud to be helping her family. But it was really more than help – it was everything.
“I was the income earner for our family beginning at age 5 until about age 15.”
And while she brought home the bacon she was also learning a lot. She may not have gone to school but she says she gleaned so much during those years about what it means to be a professional. She says bringing a positive attitude to everything you do was one of her main takeaways. Then there was teamwork. She says there’s this perception that the actor is the star of a production, but she knew she could only do her job thanks to the work of scores of people the audience couldn’t see. They supported her, and she wanted to do her job well to support them. She says knowing the value of a good team is something she’s carried into later life.
And as the years went by, she became more and more aware of what it meant to be female in show business. She was playing adorable blondes; sometimes she’d play the younger version of a famous actress in a flashback scene. It was exciting…but…
“As a working actor, especially as a young person and a female you also understood pretty early what was going to be expected of you relating to your gender, and the race was sort of on to establish your credibility.”
Credibility meaning name recognition, so she could negotiate to get better parts. Ones with more character development, more depth – parts where she wasn’t just standing around looking pretty.
“So to me the pressure was on to try to make a name and get some kind of credibility because then that’s negotiating power. Because from an early age when I was maybe around ten or eleven you start to notice pretty acutely that most of what is expected to you is certain gender roles. And I didn’t like the direction that was going. I remember once I was walking to an audition with my mom, you know, cute blond child maybe put on a little blush or light makeup to make her look extra cute. And it occurrs to me what if I get hit by this bus, on the corner of this NYC street, what if I get hideously disfigured by this bus, my so-called career is over. It just struck me like a ton of bricks how much what I was doing was relating to my physique and looking a certain way. And I thought well then, my whole livelihood is wiped out if something happens to my lovely little face, and I thought, this is really not fair, and then it got me thinking about how stereotyped the roles were that I was reading for.”
She started counting the lines in the scripts she was getting, to see how many lines the female characters had…
“…and consistently guess what, they were always, always much lower than those of the male characters. I was like, I want to be the boy going off having adventures and doing stuff, why am I the piece of furniture, the supporting character?”
The character who needed to be rescued? And as she got into her teens, the world of work got weirder.
“There is a very tricky transition. People in the business will tell you it's very difficult to transition from being a charming child performer to an adult. And that creepy in between place is riddled with pitfalls.”
She says that began for her at age 13…
“I was already reading for roles where you’re either the virgin, or the whore, or you’ve been raped or you’ve been knocked up. It just started to get really graphic really quickly and I just started to get angry because I’m thinking, why am I reading for these roles? Why do I have to deal with this right now?”
She was only 13; until recently she’d been playing innocent kids. She says she didn’t really talk about it with her mum – her mum was not a stage mother who interfered a lot. No one was forcing her to audition for this stuff, and everyone around her was very professional. But privately she still cursed whoever was writing these scenes. Luckily she had a manager who was supportive.
“I did discuss things with her. Without her support I don’t know what I would have done. She did have a good way of diffusing this content with me and checking to see if I was OK. Frankly I was probably less OK than I pretended I was. I thought these are the options I’m presented with, these are the roles I’m being offered, and I just have to suck it up and do it.”
She saw these roles as pitstops on her journey to eventually getting better parts. Or at least she hoped that would be the case. But as the teenage years went by she became increasingly disenchanted with her industry. She was seeing a certain pattern play out with slightly older actresses…
“There was this paradigm you’d have to pass through as a professional actress, you’d kind of flail around in the bottom, you’d get a couple of roles, then you’d have to do a topless scene, you’d do a couple of topless or naked scenes, then hopefully you’d have a name where you could negotiate your way out of the topless or naked scenes. It’s like your get out of jail card. And I couldn’t face that so standard and boring trajectory. It just made me really angry, it was like, why do I have to give you all of this just to get to something more interesting and professional.”
Maybe things would have been different if more people behind the scenes on these productions were women themselves. But that was not the case.
“Sadly my entire time, ten years in the industry reading, I read for one lady director…and that is including commercials, everything. There were some ladies present as producers, executive producers, but not very many. So it was kind of a given there was not much space for women in the creation of these pieces. It’s kind of sad how at the time it seemed like this monolithic, unchangeable thing and it didn’t even occur to me to stay and fight and change because when you’re faced with the monolith you just think well, that’s just how it works, and these are the rules, this is what you have to do to get out of jail, quote unquote, and I just started to get really disgusted with that and that’s a lot of why I stopped and left the industry.”
At 15 years old, she stopped acting. It was a difficult decision. It was the only world she’d ever known. But she started to think about what might come next.
“…since I hadn't been to school, I wanted to start taking control of my destiny because I realized that so much of performing, performance work or being a working actor is waiting for the phone to ring, it's a very passive role. Um, so I thought, well, let me go to school and you know, try to carve out something more to do with my mind than the way that I look because it seems to me that most of my value in this trade is about the way that I look. And I, I just was so tired of that and, and I'm really glad that I made that decision.”
AM-T: “Yeah. When you came out of college, well actually before we talk about that, talk about, because all of our, I've spoken about this on the show before to the extent that our identities are tied up with what we do. And there you were having worked in this industry for about 10 years and you're around 15 when you sort of start to step away. How hard was that just in that your identity was, 'I'm an actor' and also not to mention your identity is the support for your family.”
“Oh, it was horrible. I mean, it was the worst thing I'd ever done in my life. It was horrible because I felt here's this thing that I was made to do, that I was raised to do and suddenly I couldn't do it anymore.”
She missed acting. She missed the work and the people who’d taught her for ten years. She had hoped for a long career in showbusiness. But the costs just seemed too great.
Marie had always been a quick learner and that paid off after she stopped acting. She attended a local community college, then landed a generous scholarship to a prestigious liberal arts college. By this point very little of the money she’d earned during her career was left – about two thousand dollars, and she put that towards her education.
But being plunged into a group of her peers at 18 – it was tough. She got to college, and wondered why everyone else was behaving like children…gathering in groups….leaving some people out…whispering behind eachother’s backs. She’d never been in a school playground, so she had no experience of this stuff…
“I couldn’t relate, didn’t understand it, I couldn’t keep up, I had a hard time making friends, I just didn’t understand the motivations and games and cliques, etc.”
And when she tried out for a play some of her fellow students were putting on…
“I didn’t get a single part. It was kind of astonishing because of the people in the room, the students in the room I was thinking, hmm, wait, who of us here has a page of credentials…so that was confusing and I thought, welcome to the world of peer pressure and all that. Later I got something…and that was very positive. But that was a jarring experience to meet my peer group at that point in life.”
When she graduated with a degree in French Studies – with a specialty in cultural anthropology…she rebelled against her artistic upbringing.
“I got into the information business and I, I liked the idea of, um, using my mind and helping people in an abstract way with information and advisory. So I got into sort of a consulting type job and that was really thrilling for me because it's, again, it, you know, a lot of my work was over the phone or you know, or didn't have to do with the way that you looked in person.”
But it took a while to get used to this more humdrum world…not to feel that every time she met someone new in or outside work she had to win them over…
“Then I realized, oh, I’m not in an audition. These are just people and I'm talking to them and I don't have to be the funniest, most charming, most clever whatever person in the room. I can just be, and I don't have to be the object of attention. Because the dynamic that's set up in an audition is exactly that. There may be one two, 15 people in a room, but they're all focused on you, and it's for you to like, save the day and get the job. But most normal human interactions are not like that. So it took me a while to learn how to calm down the need to impress - talk about insecurity. My God…”
AM-T: “Doing what you’re doing now, do you ever think, I wish I’d stayed in the business, or not?”
“Of course. When you see certain posters of certain people you’re like wow, good for them…that could have been me, yup. I used to look at…in the difficult in between years, l’d be looking through the newspaper and I’d look at the movie ads in the back and each time you look at someone doing well you feel like a failure, and I’m like this isn’t just a phantasm, this is real, it could have been me, and yet what kind of an absurd experience is that to be mad at yourself because you’re not in the new movie coming out.”
Some of her contemporaries – the people who were up for the same parts she was back in the day…they stayed in the industry: actors like Reese Witherspoon, Tara Reid, Claire Danes, Alicia Silverstone and Natalie Portman.
But when the #MeToo movement began, Reese Witherspoon spoke up about a director assaulting her when she was just 16 years old.
When Marie thinks about #MeToo and the man whose actions sparked the whole movement…
“The Weinstein stories were just kind of corroborating what I described to you earlier. And in some ways were validating the experience that I had, meaning, okay. I wasn't just crazy. I didn't just imagine these things, this was actually real and happening. And, you know, I was lucky enough to avoid those sorts of scenarios. So I guess I wasn't surprised because that's the dynamic that I had understood to exist in the industry. So I wasn't surprised and yet the depth of it just made me really sad, and it might seem, it's a little difficult to judge and understand these stories now because well, we kind of wonder, well they didn't have to do that. Why did they do that? But I think it's difficult to, to go back a couple of decades or even a few years and remember just how impenetrable that wall seemed and just how unfair of like, well, if I want to do this job, um, I have to, to, you know, do these certain favors.”
AM-T: “What did you think when the verdict came that he had been convicted on two of the counts, anyway?”
“I'm pleased that justice is being done, at least for some of these women. I am a bit dismayed though, to hear how, I dunno, jaundiced or, you know, now people are angry at this movement and are pushing back and it's getting more complicated. So this is still a lot more work to be done.”
AM-T: “When you look back, is there anything you’d change about your working childhood?”
“Um…if I had to do it again, because again, it’s an industry I loved, it was my home, it’s where I grew up, and where I belonged and I felt raised by those people, and I learned a lot from them. If I were to do things again I probably wouldn’t have approached it so much from being in front of the camera as being behind the camera because that’s where things get interesting. And I didn’t have any role models…I only met one female director in my entire professional career. if I had more female role models I’d have felt it was a bit more possible for me to make a difference on that angle either in writing or producing. Because that’s where things happen. If you look at the flow chart of a production the actor is the last thought in that process, it all flows downhill, and the aggravating thing is you’re only asked to recite these words that someone else wrote, someone else came up with and produced. Behind the camera, In the writing room that’s where you get to create roles, create the kind of tomboys or characters I didn’t see, I didn’t get to read for. So that’s where I think you can effectuate more change…I mean I’m happy to see performers who are able to do better roles, but I think the real power happens in the making of the works, not in the performing of them.”
And things are changing…slowly. Last year women made up 20 percent of people working behind the scenes on the top 100 films in the US – directors, writers, producers, cinematographers – and that’s the highest percentage ever recorded. Those figures come from The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, at San Diego State University.
Thanks to Marie for being my guest on this show. I will post a few photos of Marie in her acting heyday under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time. You can reach me via email at ashley at TheBroadExperience dot com or on the Facebook page or Twitter. It’s always good to hear from you, especially at a time when many of us are isolated. Thanks to all those of you who contributed to that FB discussion of what kinds of shows you wanted during the coronavirus outbreak.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.