Portrait of the artist as a former child star

Part 6 - A little schadenfreude

by Ellen Barry

We feed on their lives like a pack of jackals. They were like our more popular siblings -- always prettier, always more antic, always emerging from adversity with a useful lesson. So our attitude toward them, as with the more poised members of our eighth-grade class, is one of ghoulish delight in midlife decline. Who can deny the horrified twinge we felt when we heard that Anissa Jones (who played the adorable Buffy on Family Affair) died from what was reportedly "the largest combination of drugs" the coroner had ever encountered?

Joal Ryan identifies that paradox -- "the cute kid with bangs, the bad adult in the ski mask" -- as the source of her own inspiration.

"It's hard reconciling the images -- you know, Dana Plato on TV, all happy and looking all cute, and then being turned down for a job as a trash picker and robbing a video store. It's a great dichotomy," says Ryan. "Because she did seem so together on the show. She was good-looking. She was so full of promise."

Occasionally we catch ourselves in an embarrassing episode of former-child-star salaciousness, and flush with shame. At one point, when she was looking for former child stars to cast in her film, Ryan found herself on the phone with Tina Yothers (Jennifer Keaton on Family Ties), who now lives with her grandmother in the San Gabriel valley, and who told Ryan that she didn't like to be thought of as a "former" anything.

"You start to feel guilty," recalls Ryan. "You end the conversation by pretending you . . . just happened to telephone to commiserate about those awful stereotypes that plague child stars." Greg Bulmash, of the WASHED-UPdate, has occasionally called off the hunt when it became clear that a former child star did not want to be found.

Lisa Rapport, a psychology professor at Wayne State University, has studied the long-term effects of child celebrity and says that our fixation with former child stars has a particularly grim focus on failure -- perhaps because "we know in our hearts that placing children in [high-stress situations] is wrong."

For whatever reason, there is something in us that wants to see Cindy Brady turn a trick.

"We are attempting to identify with this person, but it's unclear whether we want to bring ourselves up to their level or bring them down to ours," says Rapport. "We're very rarely interested in the people who just went on with their lives.

"People are often unwilling to let celebrities become normal people," says Rapport. "If you walked into a cable company, and you saw a former child star behind the counter, why would you feel that they had sunk somehow?"

Despite ourselves, we still want to know. Poor Alfalfa (does anyone care that his real name was Carl Switzer?), slain in 1959 in a scuffle over a $50 debt owed him by a former partner in a bear-hunting scheme. Poor Scott Baio (Happy Days, Charles in Charge, Diagnosis Murder, Who's Watching the Kids?, Blansky's Beauties, and the short-lived Baby Talk), now the host of a series of sex-ed videotapes entitled The Facts and the Feelings and the Wonders of Life.

Poor Spanky.

Maybe in some animal part of our brains, these events justify our wise decision to delay our big splash until late middle age. We thank our parents for permitting us to spend our tender years -- what were we doing, anyway? Watching Diff'rent Strokes? And we didn't turn out half-bad, did we? Did we?

Early bloom, early rot, we think, and go on with our lives.

We will, we will stalk you

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.