“And Thistle-I mean, Edith-didn’t believe she was the one who had done it.”
“She never did. She, Edith I mean, would take the script home and learn the lines, and when she got to the set in the morning, all she had to do was open up and let Thistle in, and Thistle would move Edith around like a hand puppet.”
A hand puppet, she’d said to Hacker.
“That’s what she was doing when she sat with her eyes closed. She believed she was opening up to Thistle. And that’s what she did, scene after scene, show after show.”
“What did you think about it?”
She shook her head, a gesture packed with regret. “I didn’t give it the thought it deserved. Like everybody else, I was just happy to be part of the show, happy that Thistle could keep it up, keep the people tuning in, keep the damn ratings up. Keep the money coming in. And, of course, everyone was afraid of screwing up Thistle’s process. Afraid for our own sakes, not hers. We were like an army that was being led from victory to victory by someone who believed he was Napoleon. The cities are falling one after another, all this booty is landing in our laps, and who’s going to go into his tent and tell him he’s really Harold Mednick? Who’s going to tell him he’s suffering a delusion? So we all went along with it, with the Thistle idea, even though we knew perfectly well that she was simply the most talented child-oh, hell, one of the most talented actresses-we’d ever worked with. We listened to her talk about Thistle and never said a word.
“I remember telling myself-guess I was actually comforting myself-that the whole thing was just a phase she was going through, like an imaginary friend, and that she’d grow out of it, and realize that the talent was hers, that she was really the one doing all the work.”
“But,” I said.
“But I didn’t tell her that, and there was no one else who could, no one who mattered to her. God knows her mother didn’t. I really think the reason Edith made Thistle up in the first place was that her mother had always told her how ordinary she was, how unattractive she was. So if the child was suddenly capable of all that, getting laughs, getting applause, becoming a star, there had to be a reason. Thistle was the reason. And then her father died, just as Thistle started slipping away.”
“Slipping away?”
“That’s how she described it. She’d been having harder and harder weeks, weeks when the sitting sessions got longer, and the work wasn’t as fresh. You could see her grabbing for inspiration, thrashing around like someone who’s afraid she’s drowning. And she came up with things, eventually, but not on the same plane. Before, she’d been startling, and now she was just good. She was relying more and more on technique.”
“I saw that,” I said. “In the shows I watched.”
“I think she was just tired. She’d worked nonstop for three years, with all of us riding on her shoulders, but she didn’t think that was the reason. She told me she could feel it. Thistle was leaving. This child was literally growing up on television, doing what she did in front of seventy or eighty million people every day, and she felt like she was failing. She felt the talent, the spark, whatever it was that Thistle represented to her, slipping away. Going out, like a candle. And there she was, under those lights, under all those eyes, surrounded by people whose paychecks depended on her, her father just dead and her mother glaring at her whenever things weren’t perfect, and she was failing. We all fail, all actors, we all have bad takes and sometimes whole bad days, but she’d never had a bad minute, and suddenly here they were, one after another after another. And she was just a kid. So what she believed was that she’d never had talent, really, it had all been Thistle, and Thistle was leaving.”
“I heard her say it a couple of times. She said, That wasn’t me, it was Thistle.”
“Exactly,” Lissa said. “And it just got worse and worse. Because, of course, who she was, when Thistle was gone, was a failure. She was a phony, someone who was pretending to do things she couldn’t really do, and everyone was beginning to see that she couldn’t do it. I’ll never in my life, not if I live to be a hundred, forget the morning in season five after the TV Guide review came out that panned her. I remember every word of it. It said, ‘The problem with the show is that Thistle Downing seems to have lost what used to be the surest touch in television. Before, she dominated the scripts, but now she’s just trying to live up to them. And the scripts aren’t much to live up to.’ And then the press piled on. The child was twelve or thirteen years old.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Everyone on the set was so kind to her that day,” Lissa said. “I think it would have been better if we’d all made jokes about it, or just surrounded her and hugged her, even though I think Californians overestimate the healing power of a hug. But that would have been better than what she got. Everyone was just so, please sit here Thistle; lovely take, Thistle; that was wonderful, Thistle; let’s do it one more time, Thistle. It was enough to make you sick. About four o’clock, she disappeared. The call went out for her, we were all in place on the set, and she just wasn’t there. We looked absolutely everywhere for her-I honestly think some of us were afraid she’d done herself harm-but it turned out she’d gone out to the street, gotten into a cab, and just taken off. A week later, she told me she’d come up here, up where her father was.” She fell silent for a moment. “She had nowhere to run, so she ran to a rose bush.”
Lissa Wellman took off the big glasses and touched the sides of her index fingers to her lower eyelids, a blotting motion. She put both hands on the wheel and sat there, chewing on her upper lip, her sunglasses forgotten in her lap, and looked at the featureless weathered redwood wall in front of us as though something were written there. “I could have helped more than I did,” she said. “I always told her I loved her. And she believed me, God help her. She didn’t know how little it meant. Everybody in show business loves everybody else so much, it’s darling this and darling that, people fall in love and drink together and swear eternal friendship and then the shoot ends and we all lose each other’s phone numbers. I loved Thistle, but it was something like that, sort of talk-show love, not the kind of all-out, no-holds-barred, no-questions-asked, I’ll-love-you-forever-no-matter-what love she needed. Probably still needs. And, of course, no one was giving her that except the millions of fans who never got anywhere near her and who were beginning to wonder what was wrong with her anyway. Who were beginning to change the station. Abandoning her by the tens of thousands every week. So the problems started. The tantrums, the lines she didn’t learn because she didn’t believe she could do the scene, the days she was late because she couldn’t sleep at night and then couldn’t get out of bed because she was terrified of failing again.” She sighed. “And the drugs.”
“The drugs could kill her,” I said.
“If they haven’t already. Killed whatever was inside her, I mean. Doing something creative is tough, but it comes from a fragile place. I can name lots of people who killed their talent with less cause than Thistle. I think Hollywood’s continuing fascination with zombies comes from the fact that there are so many of them among us. They look the same, they sound the same, but they’ve been unplugged. The thing that made us want to look at them, listen to them: it’s gone. They’re still here, but they’re just waiting to be embalmed. I’d do anything, I’d give years off my life, to turn the clock back for that girl.”