Free High On Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips Page B

the time I thought my open sexuality was natural, but in reality it was the drugs. I’m straight.
    Reviews for my performance in Rafferty were good and led to a pilot deal for a show called One Day at a Time. I didn’t even audition. I just met with Norman Lear, whom I knew was the brilliant creator of All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Sanford and Son , and the deal was done. At the time, landing the role of Julie Cooper seemed like just another exciting job to me—I had no idea that it would be on the air for the next nine years and would prove to be the defining role of my career. I came from a family with a father who left houses when he got bored or ran out of dough, a mother who was under the sway of a cruel husband, and a brother who was in and out of trouble. I had a recreational drug habit that was quickly becoming a way of life. For all the chaos in my life, One Day at a Time would prove a point of stability. It would be, in some ways, the closest thing I had to a home.

7

    Originally One Day at a Time was built around me, the little starlet who was getting so much attention. I’d been on the scene for so long, in fact, that when Bonnie Franklin heard that she was going to play my mother on the show, her first reaction was that I was too old to be her daughter. Bonnie’s character—Ann Romano—was supposed to be thirty-five. I was only fifteen— two years younger than my character!—so I definitely wasn’t too old, but it had been three years since I’d shot Graffiti . I had a very public life. I was such a familiar face that she assumed I was much older.
    Shooting the pilot wasn’t momentous for me. It wasn’t a new-enough experience to be nerve-racking or exceptionally exciting, and, as I’ve said, I had no idea how significant the role would be in my life. I don’t remember rehearsing it, shooting it, watching it, or celebrating it.
    Needless to say, my lack of awareness was immaterial. CBS loved the pilot, with one exception. In the pilot my character, Julie Cooper, was an only child. CBS’s major note was that they wanted a sibling for me, so Valerie Bertinelli was cast as my younger sister, Barbara Cooper. Later they’d be patting themselves on the back for that wise and show-saving decision.
    Valerie remembers the first time we met better than I do. She always tells it that we were in an elevator on our way to the rehearsal hall. I don’t remember the setting, but I know that I was a lot taller than she was and different in every way. I remember seeing a cute little kid—we were only six months apart in age, but she seemed like a young child to me. Not only was she five inches shorter than I was, but I wore platforms that made me almost six feet tall. She wore sneakers. I wore tight jeans and leather jackets. She wore headbands; I wore shades. I was so young, but at the time I didn’t feel like a kid, not with my work schedule during the day and the older crowd I ran with at night.
    The encounter may not be burnt on my soul, but I can guarantee that Val greeted me as she always did, with a characteristically sweet and enthusiastic “Hi!” With my seasoned club-kid attitude I probably said something understated, like “Hey. So you’re my sister.” I wasn’t trying to intimidate her, but apparently I did.
    Julie and Barbara were basically the sanitized, Hollywoodized versions of me and Val. Julie was a rebel. In the pilot she wanted to go on a coed camping trip. She hitchhiked, she became a Jesus freak, she talked back to her mother, she ran away, and she … well, she may not have done anything terrible, but she sure talked back to her mother a lot. Julie also dated a man twice her age—in that case life was soon to imitate art. She may not have been rolling joints for her father at the age of ten, clubbing on Sunset Strip, or getting high with seasoned pros, but the part wasn’t exactly a stretch for me.
    The main difference between my character and me was Julie’s attitude.