Saturday's Child by Robin Morgan Read Free Book Online Page B

they face “has-been” status more often than, for instance, the small musicians. There are the legendary ones who managed the transition to adult stardom—but not without paying the price of shattered lives: Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Cooper, Margaret O’Brien, Roddy McDowall, Natalie Wood. Of course, there’s always the exception to those who became substance abusers, batterers or kleptomaniacs, serial marriers and multiple divorcees, skid-row bums, felons, or suicides: Shirley Temple, perhaps the most famous child star of all time, did not become dysfunctional. She became a right-wing Republican. The choice gives one pause.
    In more recent times, it’s become a frequent headline: the latest young TV star or movie idol sentenced to prison, rehab, or community service for using or dealing hard drugs. Patty Duke survived alcoholism and a disastrous marriage before having to resurrect her acting as an adult because she knew no other skill. Mary McDonough of The Waltons has suffered alcoholism, eating disorders, and nostalgia conventions. Paul Peterson of The Mickey Mouse Club and The Donna Reed Show was driven to drugs by age twenty. Dana Plato, from the sitcom Diff’rent Strokes , died in 1999 of an overdose of painkillers and Valium, after years of drug use and arrests for robbery and parole violations. Her co-star, Gary Coleman, has lived a comparably chaotic life, exacerbated by his being African American and suffering renal disease and stunted growth as a result of immunosuppressants administered during two failed kidney transplants: he sued his family for allegedly misappropriating $18 million of his childhood earnings, has been sued over a punching incident, had to attend court-ordered anger-management classes, and declared bankruptcy in 1999.
    Dr. Lisa Rapport, a clinical psychologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, has done a study of the subject, noting that former child actors endure a drug-and-alcohol-abuse rate three times the general average (that’s not counting those who become codependents and enablers—after a childhood in training on both counts). The study was done for A Minor Consideration, the group Paul Peterson founded in 1990 to counsel young actors and their parents and push for legislation to protect the work lives of such professional children. The group works with the Screen Actors Guild, and has made its most impressive gains in California—where five thousand of the country’s seven thousand child actors work—and where, in 1997, state, industry, and union representatives finally agreed on regulations to raise educational standards for studio teachers, the traditional guardians of minors on the set.
    According to a September 2, 1997, New York Times article, A Minor Consideration has also campaigned about such issues as “children’s working conditions,” the “arrests and drug and alcohol problems of young stars,” overlooked safety precautions—“the killing of two children in a helicopter accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie ”—the recruiting of premature infants to portray newborns, and the vulnerability of “teenagers involved in romantic entanglements with adult stars.”
    The organization also addresses the need for tougher laws governing requirements that some of the money earned by child actors be set aside for their future. Children in entertainment were exempted from national child labor laws in 1938. To this day, state laws are outdated, vary widely, and are unevenly enforced. In my childhood, there was no Coogan Law 5 in New York State, so when I left home I moved to a sixth-floor walk-up apartment and worked as a secretary in a literary agency while my mother bought a co-op on Fifth Avenue and played the stock market. In my day, the sole watchdog agency was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC)—yes, it was related to the