It was 1987, and teen TV star Justine Bateman had just been nominated for her second Emmy playing the ditzy Mallory Keaton on the mega-hit sitcom “Family Ties.” This was before the days when publicists ruled the red carpet; a nominee could just walk into a store and pluck something off the rack for herself, as Bateman recounts in her scathing new book “Fame: The Hijacking of Reality” (Akashic Books), out Tuesday.
“Tight gold dress. Nice. With a little black bolero jacket . . . I don’t think about ‘how this will be seen.’ Not thinking about that, not at all. I go to the Emmys with my brother [“Ozark” and “Arrested Development” actor Jason Bateman]. And pictures are taken. Fine. The usual . . . Next day, the papers, the tabloids, the ‘reputable magazines,’ everybody is losing their f–king minds over this dress . . . Too short, too tight. Skintight. A little outré. An ace bandage. A long girdle. The least amount of fabric covering a nominee. Pretty tame, compared with today’s comments, but the outfit landed me on Mr. Blackwell’s worst-dressed list.”
The actress in the outfit that landed her on the “worst dressed list” at the 1987 Emmys.WireImage
Initially dismayed to find herself there, she was cheered after a look at the best-dressed folks on the list: Frumpy and predictable, she concluded. Who cares?
And yet. It still comes back to haunt her. “S–t, don’t you f–king know it, as I’m looking up some quotes from Mr. Blackwell, something from that 1987 episode to amuse you, and I have to scan another sh–ty comment about me that I hadn’t seen before . . . Here: a painfully stuffed sausage. Was that worth it? Me getting scraped by that rusty metal edge of a sh–ty comment to fish out that sausage quote of Blackwell’s?”
Fame, in “Fame,” is the source of Bateman’s ire, eye-rolling and many an ’80s anecdote. Now 52, the actor, director and producer takes up a rusty metal edge of her own as she recounts her rise to stardom at the age of 16 as one of the leads on a beloved comedy, at a time when there were only a few networks for viewers to choose from. “Family Ties,” which ran from 1982-1989, hit a high with 36.3 million viewers upon its season finale. Looking back on those years, and what she’s done since her time in the spotlight, Bateman digs into the out-of-control nature of being famous, its psychological aftermath and why we all can’t get enough of it.
Bateman, a native of Rye, started her career at the top with her role on the family sitcom, playing the younger sister to Michael J. Fox’s ultra-conservative Alex P. Keaton, when Fox was the hottest thing in TV and film (during the show’s run he made the movies “Back to the Future,” “Teen Wolf,” “The Secret of My Success” and more). “Family Ties” ran alongside other TV classics like “Cheers” and “The Cosby Show” in the golden age of must-see network TV.
By 1986, Bateman had started to tire of the perks of fame. She was not interested in playing the all-American teen the public wanted her to be, as she illustrates when recalling a shoot for Redbook magazine, around the time when she was dating the actor Leif Garrett.
Justine Bateman shot to celebrity with Michael J. Fox on the hit show “Family Ties” in the ’80s.©Paramount Television/Courtesy
“So you sit there, at the photo shoot. Hate the makeup. Conventional, boring, beige, oatmeal, no edge,” she writes. “Oh God, the hair. The hair is turning into a ’do. Conventional, conservative. Spraying the reality of a senator’s wife ‘look’ on you. You are inside, you are inside, alive. Like a buried body, a person who’s been buried alive in this spraying of someone else’s ideal on you, all over you. You are inside and you can’t speak up. SAY SOMETHING. You’re screaming at yourself to say something. Like those dreams where you can’t scream for help. You open your mouth and the sound won’t come . . . But no, I say nothing. I fold into the spraying, I fold into the reality they are making for me, the molding of what I seem to be, appear to be, I guess, to everyone else.”
By the age of 21, she had starred in the feature film “Satisfaction,” which saw her playing the lead singer of an all-female rock band. On a subsequent film, she found out just how ridiculous the conflation of her “Family Ties” character and her real life could be.
“Shooting a film on location in South Carolina. It’s nighttime and we’re out. Me and some of the crew, maybe one of the cast. We want to go into this nightclub. They check IDs. The guy gets to me, checks my ID. Hands it back and shakes his head. ‘No.’ No. I’m not getting in.”
Bateman’s puzzled; does he think she’s giving him a fake? No, he says. “You’re Mallory. Mallory’s not 21.” Bateman is stunned. “Christ. The character, CHARACTER of ‘Mallory’ on Family Ties, was a year younger than me. A FICTITIOUS YEAR YOUNGER THAN ME. So, I am not 21. I am not getting into the club. Boom.”
A couple of years after “Family Ties” ended its run, Bateman was still considered a hot celeb property, appearing in films, hounded by autograph seekers (though mercifully, she says, not bullied on social media as she would have been — and has been — in the current celebrity era). She was approached by a man who claimed to want an autograph for his daughter. “But then a curveball: He tries to flirt with me when I hand the paper back. Me, shift gears, pull back the smile, cut that s–t off . . . The daughter, right? Writing something for the daughter. Then, ‘I read that you don’t wear underwear.’ Yeah. Yeah. Y.E.A.H. I remember that Playboy interview, I said that . . . I remember that interview. Panty lines. Pantyhose under jeans on camera so there’d be no panty lines. That’s what I said. THAT’S WHAT I SAID, YOU F–K.”
Bateman, now married and the mother of two children, drew back. She continued to act, albeit in smaller films and in theater and online series, but she also got a degree in computer science from UCLA. Now a director and producer, she debuted her short film “Five Minutes” at last year’s Toronto Film Festival and is a Net-neutrality activist who testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee in 2008.
Still, not immune to the lure of the Internet, she writes, “I put my name into the Google search bar. Justine Bateman . . . And the auto-complete comes up. The auto-complete says that the top option is, Justine Bateman looks old. Did I? Really? I looked in the mirror. I thought I looked OK . . . I CLICK. That’s right. I CLICK ON THAT SEARCH LIKE A GODDAMN IDIOT. ‘I’ve noticed she’s aging poorly.’ ‘What the hell happened to her?’ And my personal favorite, ‘Justine Bateman looks like Eric Stoltz in the film Mask.’ I look at the picture of me that they hate. The one of me at 43. I like it. I think I look represented. I look like ‘real me’ . . . And here’s where I make a decision that would partially wreck me for a few years. I decide that they are right. Christ, I just made myself cry.”
But, she says, she eventually learned to trust her own vision of herself rather than the one offered by the funhouse mirror that is fame. More to the point, she concludes, “Don’t feel bad if you never ‘get famous.’ Don’t freak out if you have less than 300 Twitter followers.” In the grand scheme of things “it doesn’t f–king matter.”
