Baby Libby and Me (Part One)

When I stepped into the shoes of the character Emily Rogers Hunter on Search for Tomorrow, they were still warm from the feet of the actress who had been playing the part a few days earlier. Well, okay, I didn’t actually step into those shoes because she was petite and I have large feet, and the shoes probably weren’t warm because I’m pretty sure fake leather cools quickly. That shoe statement was my attempt at a metaphor for the way I felt. Things had moved really fast. I auditioned, landed the role of Emily and signed the contract in a couple of days. A week later, Iwas in a CBS studio saying lines of dialogue. I hadn’t been watching the show. I didn’t have time to do research on Emily’s backstory. Or her present-day story. When I started playing her, she was embroiled in a love triangle, torn between her long-suffering husband Nick and her dashing lover, an English professor named Cal. A classic soap set-up for the kind of acting that could be very moving or it could go horribly wrong. I had inherited it. Pretty much overnight. And that wasn’t all I’d picked up.

In addition to the metaphorical shoes and the acting challenge, I had acquired Emily’s adorable little daughter — Baby Libby. She came as a total surprise to me. No one had warned me about working with a colleague who was still in diapers. But babies, I soon learned, were a fact of life when acting on the soaps. And Baby Libby was a big crowd-pleaser. She was a photogenic little charmer with a killer smile, and when she was lovingly dressed by the wardrobe department in pink ruffles and hair bows, she was the picture of everything dainty and girly. But beneath her frills, she was not what she seemed. Because Baby Libby was played by the grandson of one of the contract actors on the show. Yes, in the grand tradition of boy actors dating back to the time of Shakespeare, young Steven was playing a girl. And I got to know him well. Very well.

That was because of the way my storyline was structured. When I wasn’t playing scenes with my husband, I did solo monologues. Most of the time I’d be expressing my guilt over the fact that my husband wasn’t the father of my child, but I was passing her off as his. Sometimes I’d pine for Cal, who was the father but didn’t know it. For some reason, he’d never done some very basic math. I delivered these arias in a variety of settings, always seated and always — because someone on the writing staff was a fan of dramatic irony — with my daughter onmy lap. The concept behind these moments was that she would be a heartbreakingly innocent testament to my shame, lust and lie. Let me clarify that. She would be a heartbreakingly innocent little testament who would not move or make a sound and would stay within camera range. That was the concept. The problem was, no one had explained it, or dramatic irony, to say nothing of camera angles, to Stevie. I’m mentioning this because it was a crucial factor in my relationship with him. More about that later.  

I didn’t always handle my end of that relationship well, I’ll admit that. I was young and unsure, and I really wanted to nail my new gig. I’d never been on television and had never trained for camera acting. I was working at what felt like an insane speed, learning endless pages of new material every night and churning out high drama every day. I was already tap-dancing as fast as I could when they told me about my daughter. I didn’t know anything about children. I didn’t have one, and none of my friends did, either. One of them had once borrowed two of her nieces so she could justify going to the circus, but one of the little girls ate too much caramel corn and got sick; after that, outings with Auntie were canceled. But I digress. The point is, I had no idea how to interact with a person of Stevie’s age. And it was my bad luck that he was in the process of rethinking his career. I was told that when he’d started on the show a year earlier, he'd been a docile little sweetie who often slept though his scenes. But lately he’d been rebelling against the restrictions of the gig. He’d been mobile and vocal — although not yet in English — for a while by then, and he saw no point in sitting still when he could be walking around. Or running. And making noise. To put it simply, the kid was getting sick of show business. That happened regularly with the baby actors who populated daytime dramas. And when it did, there was a time-honored solution. The little one would go upstairs for a nap one day and not be seen or heard from again for the next few years. Eventually, when the show needed a new young love story, the kid would reappear magically aged to his or her late teens and ready for romance. That probably should have happened with Babby Libby. But the Searchwriters were having such a good time with the dramatic irony. And there was Stevie’s killer smile. A decision was made somewhere on high that Baby Libby would not being taking that soap opera nap any time soon. And until she did, it would be my job to keep an active toddler inactive and serenely silent. While Iplowed through my lines.  

I can still remember the first show I did with Stevie. When I walked onto the set for the first of the three rehearsals of my two scenes with my daughter, I was informed that Stevie didn’t rehearse. I would be working with his stand-in — a large toy panda — until we actually started taping. I told myself it made sense. It wasn’t like running through the scenes was going to deepen Stevie’s performance. I told myself I didn’t need to rehearse with him. I was a grown-up professional actor and he was a baby. What could he possibly do that I couldn’t handle? I told myself I had this. It was the kind of mindless pep talk you give yourself when turning off your mind is the best way to go. We were taping in Emily and Nick’s bedroom. I sat in a large wingchair, and as the stage manager started the countdown to our first scene, an assistant stage manager raced across the studio carrying Stevie and thrust him at me. I grabbed him, sat him on my knees and pointed his face in the direction of the camera a second before the countdown ended. I mean that literally; Stevie and I had one second to settle in before the red light on the camera went on.

For a moment, I thought everything was going to be okay. Stevie seemed relaxed; I leaned down and nuzzled the curls on top of his little head with my nose — a bit of improv that I hoped was appropriately maternal — and launched into my opening lines. Stevie put up with me, my nuzzling and my monologue for approximately 30seconds. Then he wanted off my lap and started to climb down. Still emoting, I wrapped my arms around him, hoping it would look like a hug on camera. Stevie tried to slide out of my embrace. I held on. He banged his head into my ribcage,causing the kind of pain that leaves you wondering if you’ll ever breathe again. I tried to pull him to my chest. He repeated the ribcage move. I repeated the pulling-him-to-my-chest move. He started screaming. I shouted my lines over his screams. We went on that way until finally, mercifully, the camera light went off and the stage manager called the all-clear.

But there was no rest for the weary — or the bruised. We had another scene to go. I was still clutching Stevie, he was still screaming and trying to get off my lap. Someone rushed onto the set and handed me a box of Zwieback cookies. “Here, he loves these,” my unknown savior whispered and put one in his mouth. It seemed to do the trick. Stevie stopped screaming and started munching. There was silence in the studio. Blessed, beautiful silence. The countdown started, my savior vanished, the red light went on, and holding Stevie with one hand while grasping the Zwieback box in the other, I drew in a deep breath to begin our scene. Stevie beat me to it and started it for us by spitting a mouthful of cookie on me. Do you know what partially chewed Zwieback looks like? If you don’t, trust me when I tell you it isn’t what you want dripping down the front of your dress when you are on national television. But I didn’t have time to think about that; I had words to say. I took another breath and started saying them. At the same time, Stevie, having shot his wad of Zwieback cookie, was trying dig a new one out of the box, which I washolding in front of him. Fearing another screaming session, I got one out and gave it to him. While still acting. Which I thought was a win. It took Stevie less than a minute to chew the second cookie enough to spit it on me. Then he giggled. At that moment — and I’m not proud of this — I was deeply, totally jealous. We were both trapped in a situation we were hating, but he was allowed to spit stuff and laugh about it. If I wanted to keep my job, I had to keep on saying words. Many, many words. I gave him another cookie and powered on.  

But suddenly, for no reason except the fact that babies have the attention spans of gnats, Stevie was tired of his spit-disgusting-cookie-goo-on-your-co-worker game. Now he really wanted to get away from me. He’d been serious about it before, butnow it was war. He threw the cookie in the direction of the camera and tugged at my hands. Not realizing that we were in a Hunger Games movie, I tried my old trick of hugging him. He became a whirlwind of flailing arms and legs. The box of cookies flew out of my hand, and Stevie went into a new kind of vocalizing that topped his previous efforts. We’re talking about red-faced yowling that could compete with a New York City police siren at full decibel level. There was no way I could shout over it. But because I was young and dumb enough to believe that the show must go on, I clung to him for dear life and finished the monologue from hell. From that moment on, Stevie hated me.

Note from the author: This is not the end of “Baby Libby and Me,” it’s the end of “Baby Libby and Me, Part One.” There’s more. But this opus was turning into something the length of War and Peace, so I decided to go for a sequel. I’m told that works well with readers. So hang on for “Baby Libby and Me, Part Two.” It’s coming excitingly soon.

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