Pg 18-21
Lisa Whelchel and her "best friend in the whole wide world," Mary Brown, are sitting in Lisa's dressing room in Hollywood's Metromedia studios, reminiscing about their adventures together back home in Fort Worth, Texas, the year they were both 16.
"Oh, were we mischievous!" says Lisa in her soft Texas drawl, with a puckish grin that makes her look like a child who has pilfered a few extra cookies from the kitchen.
"We had our teachers at Liberty Christian Academy just wrapped around our fingers," explains Mary, who had flown up to L.A. to visit for a week. "We'd ask if we could go off campus, then we'd never return. We'd just drive around all day, singing and messing around, hitting the shopping malls and restaurants."
"It was absolutely the best year of my life," 19-year-old Lisa says with nostalgia.
"Absolutely," Mary echoes wistfully.
A voice on the dressing-room intercom interrupts their teen-age reverie by calling Lisa to rehearsal. She bounces up from her chair, dens a prep-school blazer and walks out to the set of the exclusive Eastland School for girls, the stage for NBC's The Facts of Life.
A moment later, Lisa's Texas twang has disappeared, and her now-deepened voice is dripping money and good breeding as she assumes the role of Blair, the vain and snobbish teen-age socialite you might see on Fifth Avenue in New York, or on the Champs Elysees in Paris, but never, never in the shopping malls of Fort Worth.
For the innocent-eyed Texas blonde, the transformation is by now familiar; she has been making it for the last three years. But the shift, which appears so effortless on the set, has not always been so easy for Lisa. The loneliness of growing up 1500 miles from home and family, and the pressures to keep her weight down for her role, have frequently made Fort Worth appear far more attractive than Hollywood.
"I love the Blair character," she confesses, "but there were lots of times these last few years that I flew home to Texas for weekends and almost didn't come back."
Years ago, when she was a stagestruck little girl in Fort Worth, Hollywood had a much different aura for Lisa. Like many who began acting in childhood, she started drama classes, at her parents' suggestion, to overcome her shyness. The cure took, and by age 12, after five years of theatrical musicals at the Casa Manana Playhouse, she felt ready to try something more ambitious.
Learning that Disney was conducting a nationwide search for Mouseketeers for The New Mickey Mouse Club, Lisa wrote to ask when she could audition. The studio sent back a standard form letter expressing regrets that it would not be holding auditions in her area.
But even at 12, Lisa was not easily dissuaded. A born-again Christian since age 10, she saw the Mouseketeer role as the television part most consistent with her own values. So with help from her mother, Jenny French, Lisa bombarded Disney with letters of reference from people she had worked with in Fort Worth. Finally the studio relented. If she wanted to audition that badly, she could fly out to Burbank at her own expense and they'd take a look. By the time Lisa arrived, Disney had already screened more than 6000 children, and all but one of the Mouseketeers had already been chosen. Lisa went through her ventriloquism act, sang and danced a little bit and flew home again. A month later they called to say she had the part.
Lisa's mother accompanied her to Los Angeles and stayed with her off and on the first year of The New Mickey Mouse Club. But with husband Jimmy and a younger son back in Texas, Jenny French felt perpetually torn. When Jenny decided to remain in Fort Worth, Lisa lived with a guardian for a while, then with her grandmother, but her home and heart were still in Texas. "From 12 to 16, I really had no friends out here, she says. "it was just work." Nevertheless, when the show failed in its second year, Lisa was still enthusiastic enough about acting to audition for other parts.
Lisa's talents won her guest roles on several TV situation comedies and parts in two forgettable movies, "The Magician of Lublin" and "The Double McGuffin." They also brought her to the attention of Embassy Television executive vice president Al Burton, who heard her read for a CBS project that was never produced. "She had a way of acting in layers," he recalls, "of conveying two different emotions at the same time--one detestable, and one you loved. If she were going to deliver a nasty line, for example, there was a curve of niceness in the way she did it. So when we were casting for Blair, the snob you loved to hate, she immediately came to mind."
At first there were seven girls on The Facts of Life. Blair was the only one of the three blondes people remembered; eventually she was the one who remained when the number of girls was set at four. "Blair and I really don't have a lot in common," Lisa says. "She's an only child, extremely wealthy, and she can have any guy she wants. In that way I wish I was like Blair." She laughs. "Between 16 and 18, I had about four or five dates. But even though Blair and I are very different, it surprises me how easy it is to play her and how much enjoy it. I guess as Blair I get to voice a lot of things I have to squelch in Lisa. "
There were other sides of Lisa, however, that playing Blair did not allow her to express. In 1979 and 1980, during series hiatus periods and the actors' strike, she got a chance to spend half a year in Fort Worth. "When I went home, I just let go of all of California." she says. "I was able to have a good time and be a kid, do all those things I couldn't in L.A."
"Remember those super hot fudge sundaes at Bennigan's?" Mary asks.
"Do I?" Lisa sighs and rolls her brown eyes.
When the strike was over, Lisa seriously debated returning to L.A. "I really didn't want to go back," she says. "I'd go to L.A. and work for the week, then I'd fly home on weekends. I just couldn't decide."
One of the costs of Lisa's six-month spree of ice-cream sundaes and hooky was a considerable weight gain, a problem both for her and for the show. "They never bother me about my weight," says Mindy Cohn, 16, who plays the chubby but irrepressible Natalie. "but not a week goes by when they don't get on Lisa about her weight. They aren't too tactful or sensitive either. They say: 'We can't write romantic stories about you if you're fat.' Every week someone mentions it."
"What else is new?" Lisa shrugs. "I've had problems with my weight all my life. The studio made it worse. The more they talked about it, the more I rebelled, so the more I ate. Because I was lonely out here, I guess I also ate for comfort."
To Blair, appearances may be everything, but to Lisa, they never have been. "I know I don't pay as much attention to my looks as I should--I wish I did--but to me it's the inside that counts the most."
It is this faith in her own values and her deep religious commitment that have enabled Lisa to cope with the pressures she faces. "There's so much rejection in this business," she says. "Sometimes you feel like you're in a meat market. As long as you produce for them, they love you, but you're always wondering how long they're going to continue liking you. I don't understand how child actors can remain sane or normal without stability somewhere. I get my stability from Christ. I know that He loves me no matter what."
"Jesus Christ is the most important thing in Lisa's life," says her friend in L.A., Pam Cohn, Mindy's 19-year-old sister and stand-in. "She bases everything she does on her religion, but she never preaches or proselytizes." adds her Jewish friend. "Basically she's no different from any other 19-year-old girl." She pauses. "Except maybe for the pranks she likes to play. She has this great ability to turn almost anything into a joke.
Even the problems about her appearance. Although Blair, the world's only pimple-free adolescent, is always supposed to have every hair in place, Lisa has a tendency to let her own darken at the roots sometimes. Since she also has a fondness for practical jokes, like nailing nickels to the floor, she recently had her hair dyed brunette. "When I came to the set, I thought they'd all be scandalized, but everyone on the floor loved it," Lisa says with disappointment.
A few weeks later she showed up for rehearsal dressed as a punk rocker, in orange tights, miniskirt and Devo glasses, with her hair frizzed out and her bangs colored in a rainbow of eye shadows. But once again everyone loved it. "I keep trying," she says with a roguish glint. "You can never tell when it's going to shock them."
Despite her sense of humor about it, those closest to Lisa say the constant pressure about her appearance has been painful. It has been difficult for her mother to observe as well. "It hurts me to see as fine a person as Lisa is inside judged by externals," says Jenny French, "but guess that's part of the business. I'm very proud of my daughter, but I have some regrets. both for myself and for Lisa, that she came to Hollywood so young. She had to make a choice and she did, but I still don't know if it was the right one. If she was talented at 12, she'd be just as talented at 21, and we wouldn't have missed so much of her growing up, and neither would she.
"I know my mother has regrets," Lisa says as she and Mary rush to leave rehearsal for an evening exercise class, "but I don't. For a long time I had mixed feelings about being here, but a few months ago I decided I really wanted to stay and become an adult actress. I bought a condominium, started dating and making new friends. Now I consider L.A. my home."
"I've even stopped rebelling and want to lose weight," she says with determination, turning to Mary for confirmation. "I've really matured, haven't I?" she proclaims in the self-impressed and sophisticated Mice of Blair, but before Mary can reply, she adds in her own Southern drawl: "Do you know where we can get some more of those nickels I used to nail to the floor?"