Meredith Baxter - Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering

I'm glad I didn't wait until my eighties to write a memoir; it would have involved that many more years of memories to excite and excavate, more friends and family to account for and stories and relationships to sort out, satisfy, and encapsulate. I'm thinking that rather than being an early offering, I consider this memoir timely. I am glad to have found all those spotty journal entries I've made over the years, sometimes in notebooks, often scrawled in between drawings in my sketchbooks. Unearthing my life frequently took side roads down Amateur Art Alley.

And where does my gratitude list start? With my lovely partner, Nancy Locke, who always seemed to have faith in my ability to write this despite my fears, wails, and declarations to the contrary. And next, I have to thank Margy Rochlin, who painstakingly questioned and recorded, searched and researched, prodded and pushed me and others for more stories, more details, and more connective tissue. I have great respect, awe, and gratitude for her ability to shape my stories into a cohesive framework upon which I could build.

To my friends and family, mainly my children, Ted Bush, Eva Whitney Abarta, Kate Birney, Ph.D., Peter Birney, and Mollie Birney, I offer my apologies for not being very available these past nine months due to this nonfiction pregnancy. This has been a deeply personal undertaking. Taking responsibility for my life took more thought, introspection, and willingness than anticipated; giving it the self-reflection required seemed to dictate me on me time over social time, and I regret any perceived slights. Please know I hunger for you all.

I have to thank Annie O'Toole and Nancy, who have been seemingly tireless sounding boards for me, reading and rereading, never admitting to tedium. And also to Annie for offering harrowing and hilarious recalls from our sixteen years of working together.

To dear Allan Manings, my stepfather, who let me talk and talk and talk about my thoughts and trepidations about this book. Even while he was gravely ill, he gently urged me onward, and to him I weep my thanks. He gave me many stories about my mother and their lives together and what he knew of her early years. I loved him dearly and I'm deeply saddened he didn't live to see that I took his words to heart and made it through, as he said I would.

I give thanks to my brothers, Richard Baxter and Brian Baxter, who willingly plumbed their memories to offer their experiences of our shared stories ... but so often not the same perspectives. Of course.

And I appreciate Robert Bush for so generously giving of his time, observations, and recollections of the few years we shared, ranging from the tender and hallucinogenic to the rough and combative. Thank you.

I am grateful to Michael Gross for his great recall of our shared history; it helps to have a good friend who's such a colorful raconteur. Thank you to Victoria Thompson, who amazingly, all these years later, had physical evidence of our respective ships having passed in the night. Thank you so much for your contributions. I am indebted to Andrea Baynes, who shared not just the made-for-TV foxhole with me many, many times, but contributed background information, giving context and perspective where I had none.

My thanks must include Alan Iezman who advised me, Dan Strone, CEO, Trident Media Group, who accepted and supported me, Diane Salvatore who said "yes," and Julia Pastore who has guided me ever since. Thanks, Julia, for championing me while keeping the ducks on the path.

Others who made this book possible are: Sarah la Saulle, Ph.D., Martha Sanchez, Leonard Goldberg, the Paley Center for Media (Los Angeles), and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. I feel deep gratitude for the hundreds of people, many of whom I know by first name only, who for over twenty years have shown me unconditional acceptance and honesty; they gave me the lessons for living and urged me to keep coming back.

Meredith Baxter has been an actress for forty years and has five children. She achieved early success in the comedy Bridget Loves Bernie, followed by the acclaimed ABC drama Family and the popular NBC sitcom Family Ties.

She received Emmy nominations for A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story, her part in the series Family, and her role as a lesbian mother in Other Mothers. She has starred in more than fifty movies for television and coexecutive-produced several, including My Breast, Betrayed: The Story of Three Women, Darkness Before Dawn, and The Long Journey Home, as well as her TV series, The Faculty.

She has served on the board of the CLARE Foundation for six years; CLARE is a nonprofit organization that provides recovery services for alcohol and drug addiction.

Baxter makes appearances speaking on breast cancer, domestic violence, alcoholism, and general life experiences. Meredith established the Meredith Baxter Fund for Breast Cancer Research to help support nonprofits in providing free mammograms and follow-up care to women who can't afford them.

She lives in Santa Monica, California, with her partner, Nancy Locke.

(Left to right) My parents, Nancy and Tom Baxter, with Brian, Richard, and me, 1947.

T o know me , you must first know my mother, Nancy Ann Whitney. More than anything else, my mother wanted to be an actress--a famous actress--which in the 1950s was all about being young, sexy, and available. She was all that, and more. She had big blue eyes, alabaster skin, a heart-shaped face, a beautiful figure. She was just a knockout.

But my mother seemed to feel there was an obstacle to her making it in show business in Hollywood. Children. And she had three of them by the time she was twenty-three--my two older brothers, Dick and Brian, and me. The fact that we existed made her seem older than she was. Her solution was to have us call her by her new stage name, Whitney Blake. We were not to call her "Mommy" anymore. We were to call her Whitney. I think she was hoping if we called her that, people might assume she was our aunt or maybe an older sister.

I can remember coming home from first grade, walking through the front door of our little white Craftsman-style house on Indiana Avenue in South Pasadena, and calling out, "Mommy, I'm home!"

No answer. I was confused; her car was out front. I stood very still.

"Mommy, I'm home!"

Still nothing. Then I remembered.

"Whitney?"

"Yes, dear?" her musical voice rang out from the middle bedroom, where she kept a vanity table at which she'd do her makeup.

Although I believe she had no idea about the psychological impact this might have on her children, now that I'm older I realize that Whitney was probably just giving us what she got. Whitney's mother was born Martha Mae Wilkerson--my brothers and I called her Memaw. She was a scrappy, tough, smart, and wily survivor. She wasn't the soft, fuzzy type; she didn't coddle Whitney and she didn't coddle me. Whenever I would complain about my clothes, as girls do, Memaw would tell me in her dry, crackly voice, "When I was little I had a red dress and a blue dress. When I was wearin' the red dress, I washed and ironed the blue dress. When I was wearin' the blue dress, I washed and ironed the red one. I didn't have choices."

Memaw was from Arkansas and married five times over the course of her life. She kept burying husbands (and sometimes I think there should be some exhumations to find out why). Whitney was only six when her real dad, Harry C. Whitney, a Secret Service man who guarded President Woodrow Wilson, died from alcoholism. Memaw's replacement husbands came at such a clip that Whitney never formed much of an attachment to any of them.