Family Ties Me Up, Family Ties Me Down

An interview with acting icon Meredith Baxter

By John Esther

Wild, beautiful and dramatic, the life of actor Meredith Baxter reads like a Leo Tolstoy heroine leading her way through a Toni Morrison novel that has been edited and syndicated for tabloid consumption.

Born in South Pasadena, CA, on June 21, 1947 to actor Whitney Blake (Hazel; The Andy Griffith Show) and radio announcer Tom Baxter, Meredith was the youngest child of three and only daughter. After her parents divorced, Meredith's mother married talent agent Jack Fields and Meredith, along with her brothers Richard and Tom, moved to West Hollywood.

At the tender age of 19 Meredith married Robert Lewis and they had two children, Ted and Eva, before divorcing three years later in 1969. A young mother of two, Meredith needed work so she went to Fields (who divorced Blake in 1967). Shortly thereafter Meredith was picking up guest roles on The Doris Day Show, The Partridge Family and Ben before landing a star role on Bridget Loves Bernie, where she met her future husband of 16 years, David Birney. The couple had three children: Kate and the twins, Mollie and Peter.

Meredith continued to work in a little film and a lot of television through the 1970s and 1980s. Along with garnering guest roles on established TV shoes McMillan & Wife, Police Woman and The Love Boat, and starring in Movies of the Week, such as The Night that Panicked America and Kate's Secret, her two most famous roles were Nancy Maitland on Family (1976-1980) and Elyse Keaton on Family Ties (1982-1989).

As Americans watched Meredith every week on their television sets little did most of them know the tumultuous relationships she was battling with Birney and alcohol, both of which she would start leaving in 1989-1990.

Still working throughout the 1990s in television -- including her role as Paula Hensen, a gay mom in the CBS Schoolbreak Special, Other Mothers (1993); and Joyce Wadler a woman suffering from breast cancer in My Breast (1994) -- in 1995 Meredith married made her wedding vows for the third time, this time to screenwriter Michael Blodgett (Turner & Hooch). Meredith was Blodgett's fourth wife.

Not done with difficult challenges in her life, in 1999 Meredith was diagnosed with breast cancer. She divorced Blodgett in 2000.

Surviving cancer, poor-relationship choices and the loss of her mother in 2002 were not Meredith's last dramatic turns. Well into her 50s, Meredith was discovered carousing at lesbian events, prompting her to come out of the closet in December 2009.

Since then Meredith wrote her autobiography, Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame and Floundering. Published last year, the memoir takes an honest look back at her tests and turmoil, misfortune and mistakes.

Still working in television and currently in a relationship with Nancy Locke, a general contractor, LN recently had an in-depth interview with Meredith.

Lesbian News: You grew up in South Pasadena in post-World War II America. How did that shape your outlook during your earlier years?

Meredith Baxter: It didn’t have much impact in my early years. Later when my mother married her agent, Jack Fields and we moved to Hollywood, then I gained a concept of liberal as opposed to no concept of conservative -- basically because my stepfather was very liberal. He worked to help actors and writers who had been blacklisted. He helped get them jobs. He was very much for equal rights. My brothers and I were part of a march on Washington D.C. back in 1963. I was exposed to a lot of open liberal thinking at an early age.

LN: You were the youngest child and only daughter; what was your relationship with your older brothers?

MB: I was the annoying one [Laughs.]. That's usually the case. My brother closest in age to me, Brian, and I were very close growing up. My father had remarried and had four more children, three girls and a boy, so I went from the youngest child to the oldest girl of all these kids – although I didn’t have that much interaction with [my half-siblings].

LN: As the only daughter, what kind of expectations did your parents put on you?

MB: I didn’t have much interaction with my parents so I don’t have an answer to that. I never got any sense that they expected or wanted anything from me. Just could I  please not be around.

LN: What kinds of pressure were there for you to enter show business?

MB: The only reason I went into acting was that I was looking to get out of the first marriage I was in. We'd gotten married so young and I had two children right away. I had no remarkable skills so I went to my stepfather and I asked him if he could send me out on jobs. I never spoke to my mother about it. She never said, "Way to go" or "Don’t do that." There was just no interaction with us.

LN: Did you enjoy acting? Was there a point where you wanted to use it beyond a refuge?

MB: No, it was really a refuge. It pleased me. It helped me feel like I had a place to go. People seemed to like me. I don’t think I was particularly good. I was cute. I was blond, cute and with big breasts. That was what was required at the time and not much more than that. I got on easily with others. I was non-threatening. I was girl-next-door-ish.

LN: Considering your tenuous relationship with your mother, it is remarkable a lot of your best known roles are as a mom. Where did you draw your inspiration?

MB: [Laughs.] I don’t know. Sada Thompson (who played Baxter's mother on Family) recently died May 4, and I admired and respected her so much. People have said to me,
"Oh, what a loss. She must have been the mother you always wanted." I just had a general longing for my mother. I didn’t know how mothering was supposed to be done, never having witnessed it firsthand. I sort of blended into it myself at 19 when I became one -- unsuspecting and unprepared and sort of inflicted myself on my children. I guess I just did what the script indicated. That's how I knew what to do.

LN: Earlier you mentioned the blacklist. There has been some talk about the blacklist again. What kind of experiences or energy do you remember from those times, being around all these people who could not work because of their beliefs?

LN: I was a young teenager at the time, very self-involved. I didn’t really have some sense of it. The only understanding was that my stepfather was helping what I perceived to be the underdog. He was helping people who might have been unfairly persecuted or prosecuted. Somehow their beliefs and the freedom of their beliefs were being question, and that they were really okay, but they were being persecuted.

LN: How about when you landed your role as Debbie Sloan in All the President's Men? In light of the presidential corruption the film covered, were you surprised to see similar events play out in the 1980s and then during this past decade?

MB: [Laughs.] John, I have a sense you were wishing I had been more politically involved or interested than I was.

LN: I ask because I do not know. I do my research and certain things are not covered or discussed about you. Your bios tend to focus on your marriages, divorce and career and there is more to you than just those elements.

MB: Well, at that time, I have to say I was trying to keep my head above water. I wish I could say I was really deeply involved. I certainly championed the rights of African Americans. That was what was on the table and I did it because my parents did it. I can't say it was because of any belief I had come to on my own. My children were liberal because I was. They're all much smarter about it than I was.

LN: Yet on TV you played a liberal mom in Family Ties but your eldest son, Alex (Michael J. Fox), was a staunch conservative.

MB: Right. Although Alex was professing these very conservative points of view, the show was written by very liberal people. There was no hiding the fact that they were poking fun at the conservative position. They were giving space to someone who was a heartfelt conservative, misguided though he may be. But he was misguided. To humor him we patronized him. We accepted him and loved him even though…

LN: And you were playing Michael J. Fox's mother although you were only 14 years older than he in real life.

MB: What's your point? We're from the south [Laughs.]. It's no big deal. It's what they call a "buy." You just buy it. How many shows do they show with these 70-year-old men with 25-year-old women on their arms? All right, it makes him look young and virile.

LN: Having grown up in post-WWII America, what kind of pressures did you feel as a young mother of five who maintained a career?

MB: It was difficult sometimes if I had a steady job. When I was doing Family Ties I knew when I would be off. When I was off I was with those kids all the time. I was trying to be involved with them as much as I could mainly because I was trying to be the anti-Whitney, the not-my-mother. I missed her so desperately in every aspect of my life and I did not want to do that to my kids. For better or worse I was just trying to be different.

LN: During your divorce to David you decided to give up alcohol consumption. Why at that particular point in your life and how did that change your life?

MB: I never "decided." It was the last thing I wanted to do. It was a really low period in my life: my family was being ripped up; I had no friends; I was very isolated; fractious with my children; an ugly custody dispute going on with David; so I thought the only thing I really had was my work and because I was drinking openly on the job that became an issue as well. I was sort of challenged by one of the women who were one of the producers. I was horrified that they thought I was a threat or problem for them. Horrified! I could argue, "Yes, I was drunk through a lot of scenes. What's the problem with that?" This one area of my life I thought was okay was now threatened. I checked out sobriety simply because I wanted to get them off my back. I started to go to meetings and I was horrified where I found myself. I thought these people were real losers; that there was nothing there for me. I was not one of them. I didn’t identify with their stories because I was still a working actress, my life on the outside just looks fine, but then I really identified with the feelings they talked about. My life was shredded. It was absolutely unbearable. I was so lonely, angry and fraught with fear, anxiety and loneliness that the laughter I heard in the rooms compelled me to come back. I drank for a short time while I kept going to meetings. Then I stopped. "Okay, okay, I'll try that." Then my life got better because I stopped drinking. And I stayed. The only thing that made me stay was I was so lonely. I didn’t think I had anywhere else to go. I did not really pick up the tenants of the program. I didn’t really embrace them. It still felt different then. I wasn’t as far gone as everybody else. I thought I was a special case. [Laughs.] Those rooms are filled with people who think he or she is a special case. You know, "If you had my life you'd drink, too." When you get sober you start looking back at your life: looking at the choices you made, the resentments you've carried throughout your life, who you are, how you function and how you were with others. You're supposed to live with all this stuff. Well it took me like 11 years to do it. Until then I was doomed to go back and repeat. I got married, again, because I was looking for love and I married someone who was totally inappropriate. Everything in me said, "Run from this man." Earlier on I even said, "Who is this guy? What a creep." And that's the guy I wound up marrying.

LN: Is there a core or linchpin that keeps you from wanting to start drinking again?

MB: I know that it would take me down. I would lose so much of what I have. My life is so rich today. I wrote Untied yet I would never have been able to write it had I not been a sober woman, had I not spent 20 years in a 12-step program where I learned how people spoke so openly, honestly. If you have not been in a 12-step meeting, John, you don’t know what honesty is. Unguarded, rigorous honesty. It's devastating and it's hysterical and the feel of recognition when you go, "That one is in me, too." I don’t want to give that up; for what, a drink?

LN: At the beginning of the 1990s you were going through a divorce and started your battle against alcoholism and at the end of that decade you were diagnosed with breast cancer. How did that new formidable challenge change you?

MB: Because of the guy I was married to, it didn’t really change me a lot. He was devastated by the fact that he might lose my breasts. I didn’t really pose a factor in that. That was what he liked me for. That was my value to him.

LN: That is something a lot of women fear and experience.

MB: Right. He led me to think I was my breasts. I downplayed all of it. I had two surgeries around that and I downplayed any doctor appointments and anything that happened because it made him crazy and that began to spiral down for him, that whole period, and he sort of lost himself to drugs and we separated.

LN: Well, your initial reaction that he was a creep was rather accurate.

MB: It absolutely was. In the last two marriages I knew everything I needed to know before I went into them. But it's that alcoholic thinking that tells me stories and I make up things. "If I'm with this guy it means I'm valuable. If he loves me, then I'm okay." I was so separate from reality. So that's why when I divorced him in 2000 I threw myself back in the program and really started doing the work and that's when my life started to change.

LN: It also started to change in 2002. I understand that is when you first realized and accepted you were bisexual.

MB: Prior to that I had a relationship with a woman and it never occurred to me – here's how that alcoholic thinking served me – that I might be gay. Not once.

LN: Even when you made the film Other Mothers?

MB: No.

LN: Were there every any other clues along the way? How did you rationalize or deny your gay experiences?

MB: Back in 1993 I really loved this woman. She was such a good person. She had been so loving to me. It didn’t really feel sexual. But it seemed like the next natural expression because I was so crazy about her. I was so grateful to her. Nothing dropped. I was a mystery to myself. I was involved with this woman but I left her to go marry the guy I knew was such a creep. It wasn’t until I was out of the marriage. Then my mother died and my two kids just went off to college. I was no longer in between anybody. I was afraid of my mother. I wanted her. And she died. It was devastating. But it propelled me into doing the kind of work I needed to do to understand myself. And it was around that time a young woman moved into my guesthouse. I knew she was gay. I said, "Sure, you can rent that," and then it was [cooing voice] 'Hello.'" [Laughs.]. We started to spend time together. We would go to 12-step meetings, the movies, walks and stuff.

LN: How did coming out effect your acting abilities?

MB: It's hard to know, I haven't had that many opportunities. My work has pretty much slowed down anyway. Maybe it's an age thing? Maybe it's coincidental? Maybe I'm retired.

LN: Come on, Meredith, you have been working on We Have to Stop Now. You did two episodes for Family Guy and so on.

MB: And I'm doing an animated series called Dan Vs.

LN: How did your children feel about you coming out?

MB: I was such a non-issue to them. [Laughs.] It was a little disappointing. The truth is I hope that parents would embrace their kids coming out the same way my kids embraced me. They just wanted me to be happy. It's a non-event.

LN: Were they surprised?

MB: Somewhat. My oldest daughter was around the house when I was involved with the woman who lived in my guesthouse. She knew that, and I guess she might have told the other kids so that when I said something, they went "Oh, okay." [Laughs.]

LN: Well you came out a lot later than most moms do.

MB: Well, duh.

LN: How did they feel about Untied?

MB: They have been very supportive about the fact that I did it. Some of them have issues about the fact that my writing about my life automatically means I am writing about theirs. That's a lack of privacy. That's an exposure they're not asking for, but they sure got it. One of my daughters said, "I would rather when people met my father they wouldn’t know he was an asshole right away. I would rather they found out incrementally like everybody else." Particularly, when there is abuse in the home, no one talks about it. There's a tacit agreement. "You do not discuss what goes on in this house. What happens in this house stays in this house," which is what he said to us and I'm sure it's what his father said to him. That means someone can come to them and say, "Hey, so I hear there was some smacking around." They don’t want to talk about that, necessarily.

LN: Moving away from the heavy stuff and career. I understand you are a vegetarian. Why?

MB: For no interesting reason. It's almost 30 years I've been a vegetarian. I started because I thought it was a track to weight loss. I thought, "It's all those chops" so I stopped eating that; and I got really fat eating spaghetti and ice cream. So I had to pay attention. My blood type is A+ and A+ people are like natural vegetarians. I just feel good. I feel healthy. I cook it for anyone who wants it. I make it for Nancy. I don’t have a problem with that. I just don’t eat it myself.

LN: When you are not working what are your current passions?

MB: I'm writing. Whether I have another book in me I have no idea, but I am writing and I'm enjoying it a lot. I've been painting for the past 10 years. I started out with figure drawings, sketch drawings and then I moved to water colors. Now I'm doing acrylic abstract, which is wonderfully freeing from someone who is too much in the minutiae drawing. I have no idea what I'm going to paint when I start.

LN: Are there any non-creative endeavors?

MB: I love reading. The nice thing about being a published author is that some places place your reviews. I guess in some way I reinvented myself without knowing that was going to happen. When I wrote that book I learned a lot about myself [Laughs.]. I have something to say about domestic abuse and I love speaking to groups about domestic abuse. There's a lot of PTSD (Post Traumatic System Disorder) attached to abuse. We're in victim mode. If we stay victims we are doomed to go and repeat the same mistakes.