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A freak accident disfigured Annette Funicello in the mid-1970s. Deep
slashes down her face exposed raw muscles and glands. "Your eye,
Annette!" her husband exclaimed. "Your eye is gone!"
A book review...
I have no eyebrows.
Oh wait, said the doctor, I found some...
A freak accident disfigured Annette Funicello in the mid-1970s. Deep
slashes down her face exposed raw muscles and glands. "Your eye,
Annette!" her husband exclaimed. "Your eye is gone!"
"I need to brush my teeth before we go to the hospital," the former
starlet babbled. "I'm going to be a monster!"
She remembered the horrific moments in a 1994 biography - including
telling her doctor that she had no eyebrows. "I'm not even in shock!"
Annette explained.
"But you are in shock, my dear," the doctor replied. "You are..."
The lacerated mouseketeer required 125 stitches. When her father lifted
the cloth over her face, he looked away in "terror and revulsion." And
then the plastic surgeon took over...
But throughout her life, events fell into a strange pattern - an odd waltz
between darkness and light. While the Mickey Mouse Club grew in
popularity, Annette discovered that "one of my brothers was selling my
phone number." Walt Disney counseled against psychotherapy, saying
[psychotic] shyness was part of her box office appeal. Ripped from
America's heartland, the doted-on daughter of first-generation
Italian-Americans fought a freakish popularity, struggling against the
riptide of an arch-conservative entertainment complex.
Released back into the public school system, Annette was encircled by
swarms of angry teenagers, and their merciless hazing drove her to a
private child-actor diploma mill. Thus began a life-sentence of
protection. She missed her graduation day because she was performing for
Walt Disney. She lived with her parents until the day she married...
In 1962 Annette visited Italy - filming a movie for Walt Disney - and
Italian men pinched her ass. ("I couldn't get too upset..." she wrote
sweetly in 1994, "since that was their custom!") Just once she visited her
grandparents' village - a primal land where people "still killed chickens
in their houses and threw the heads out into the street." And then - back
to Southern California...
On the day of Annette's marriage a crazed overseas soldier threatened to
kill her. "Saint Cyril's Church became a guarded fortress filled with
unobtrusive Disney security people..." she remembers. Annette was wed -
wearing the veil from "Babes in Toyland" - but dark intrigue surrounded
her mysterious honeymoon with Hollywood agent Jack Gilardi. What is known
is the happy newlyweds didn't talk for two days (after "a spat") and that
the bride called her parents, crying. Three weeks later, she was
pregnant...
The trapped icon soldiered on, filming "How to Stuff A Wild Bikini"
(dressing in floppy shirts) - though the real-life Annette has always
hated beaches. ("The sea air made my hair frizzy!") In the 1968 movie
"Head," she unknowingly parodied herself with Frank Zappa and stripper
Carol Doda.
Her father still called her "Dolly". She was tapped to film peanut butter
commercials. Her real-life children were eventually replaced with a new
generation of child actors. Daughter Gina asked if Frankie Avalon was her
daddy - and if so, why was he never home for dinner?
Promoters asked her to strip down naked, down to nothing but her mouse
ears. Would she consider a darker film role - Annette the junkie, Annette
the alcoholic? Time marches on. Annette slips into a porn theatre, wearing
a disguise...
And then, the blackest of nights. "Suddenly the room grew dark..." It
started spinning. Annette heard bells - "loud, crashing bells." She
covered her ears, ran for the bedroom, tripped on a ball her child had
left on the floor... straight for the sharp protruding points of an ornate
dresser.
"Your eye, Annette!" her husband exclaimed. "Your eye is gone!"
"I need to brush my teeth before we go to the hospital," the former
starlet babbled...
For years no one could explain the incident. She discovered a permanent
blind spot in her right eye. She flailed on, returning to a life of
appearing on Love Boat and Fantasy Island. There was a TV pilot that
failed. Frankie Avalon had played a failed club singer, while Annette was
the sad widow whose husband was killed in Vietnam...
The real-world grows darker. Annette summoned her children to her
bedside, and said "You know Daddy and I have not been getting along
lately. So he's going away for a little while..."
"The prospect of growing old by myself became very real."
And one day when son Jason sassed her back, an angry Annette struck him.
"Blood gushed everywhere... 'Please don't hit me again, Mommy'" he cried.
Annette says she'd only meant to slap him across the shoulder, and that in
that exact moment he'd turned his head.
A freak accident at the hair-dresser's causes her hair to fall out in
clumps. That same day a car broad-sided her son. Annette begins hanging
out at the race-track, where she eventually picks up an ex-cop...
In the years to come, "my own body seemed beyond my control." The MRI
scan, the diagnosis - Annette's physical ailments came from multiple
sclerosis. She hides her condition. For five years. From her father.
From everyone. "Living a lie," she remembers, fighting not to betray the
twisted Hollywood simulcrum of a fairy tale princess...
This story ends with a revelation. There are flowers, speeches about Walt
Disney, a bronze star in a sidewalk, and an award from Helen Hayes. But
when Annette looks back over her fifty years in America, she still sees
only a lifetime of believing in sugar-frosting.
The title of her book?
"A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes."
mustard@pigdog.org
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