Vintage

Melissa Galt is the daughter of Classic Hollywood actress Anne Baxter. Unlike the children of many Hollywood stars, Melissa was purposely kept away from the flashing lights and the media. Her recollections of the Anne Baxter we know are simply as a mother, and a very normal one at that. Celebrity runs in the family. Melissa's great-grandfather is the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose works have become a marvel of design. Melissa's godmother is none other than legendary costume designer Edith Head, who has dressed the cast of classic films like Sunset Boulevard, The Greatest Show on Earth, Sorry, Wrong Number, and one of Anne's most beloved roles, The Ten Commandments. We had the recent pleasure of speaking with Melissa about growing up with a star for a mother and the ups and downs that come with it. You can read the transcription and listen to the audio below. If your browser is not equipped with Flash, you can download it right here.

MP: Today I’m speaking with Melissa Galt, the daughter of classic Hollywood star Anne Baxter. Anne is well-known for her role in 1950's All About Eve, as well as The Ten Commandments and many other classic films. Melissa, thank you so much for your time today. I do appreciate it.

Melissa: Sure!

MP: First and foremost, your mom kept you away from Hollywood lifestyle, so your memories of her are strictly at home. How was she on a daily basis, away from the cameras?

Melissa: Well, she was "Mom". (laughs) It wasn't glamorous; she wasn't a star to us. I don't know what anybody else's mom was like, other than knowing my friends' mothers, but she was pretty ordinary and strict and lots of rules to follow and that sort of thing.

MP: You had to be aware to some extent that your mom wasn't working a typical 9-to-5 job. Did you know at all that she was a movie star?

Melissa: Oh yeah, of course we did. It just didn't mean anything to us because we lived in a very normal, run-of-the-mill middle class home. The last house we lived in in California was a ranch, and we had our own bedrooms after the age of about--I guess it was about third or fourth grade, but prior to that we shared bedrooms. It wasn't grand or anything like that. There was no swimming pool, no butler, no maid, no chauffer. The reason we knew was because occasionally when we would travel people would recognize her, and they would pat us on the head and pinch our cheeks and say "Aren't they cute?" (laughs) We hated that!

MP: Oh, you didn't like that, huh?

Melissa: No. Hated it.

MP: How about your friends and the people you hung out with? Were they aware of who your mother was?

Melissa: I think my friends at that age probably had some inkling, but they thought my mother was really cool, and I just thought she was my mother, so that's kind of normal. There was not any big "Woo woo your mom's a movie star" going on. That didn't happen until I got into high school and college and I limited it in high school as much as I could. I went to high school and no one knew in boarding school because my father took me up. But about two weeks later, I had a roommate walk into the room and she said, "Oh...you're Anne Baxter's daughter." And that kind of sank me for three years. And then in college, you know, I did something similar whereby I didn't tell a lot of people at all, and then graduation Mother came to visit. I basically didn't let her visit during the rest of the time, and she came to visit and they said, "Oh wow! How come you didn't tell us?" I was like, "Well, why would I? What's your mother do?" So, I've always been very grounded about it. It's been something I've fought most of my life.

MP: Now, you have family gatherings, holidays, birthday parties, and everything at home. Was it all family members?

Melissa: Oh yeah. It was family and friends. There was no Hollywood crowd involved at all. I think I've met a total of maybe five significant names. She kept us very, very far out of that, plus, I was born when she was 38, so Mother had already been through her Hollywood phase. She'd gone off to Australia, she'd come back, and Hollywood just said, "I'm sorry. You're done." And so when she got back into it, she didn't get back into it in movies, she got back into it in television, which was a new medium at the time.

MP: Why do you think she kept you away from it?

Melissa: Because I think if you hear a lot about stars' children, you hear a lot of real disasters, you hear suicide stories, you hear drugs, you hear alcohol, you hear addiction. She was smart. She wanted to keep us grounded and normal, and plus Mother was a single working parent, and she was raised in the golden days of Hollywood, not the obscene days of Hollywood like they are now. So she did work for a living and she had to take care of us, so it wasn't that grand multi-million dollar lifestyle.

MP: What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of having a famous parent, even after people did find out who your mother was?

Melissa: I think the advantages are limited. I think that it can, on occasion, open a door here and there. It actually usually doesn't open a door as much as it creates interest so that you might get in someplace. Now that doesn't happen at all because she's been gone for so long. I think that the disadvantages can be pretty significant. She was gone constantly, working. Even when she was home, if she was on location she was gone at 5 in the morning and not back until 10 o'clock at night. We didn't see her all week long. She took one month out of every summer and we would spend that month traveling in Baybar. Baybar was our large blue Cadillac--yes, we named our cars--but, other than that, she was working. She was working and gone a lot, and we had a series of caretakers, so I think that the challenge is it's a single parent situation. We were latchkey kids before that term had even come in Vogue.

MP: And even more so, probably because the people who were watching your mom on-screen maybe knew her better than you did.

Melissa: Well, they didn't know her better; they knew a different side of her. My mother had three very distinct personas: She had "Mom"; she had "Anne Baxter"; and she had "Anne, the Personal Person". And they didn't really mix a lot. I found out a lot of things about her after she passed that I had no inkling of--to do with her as a person. And they were all very complimentary, but it was interesting that I didn't know them beforehand. I guess that just made it easier for her. I know that in growing up, when you try to get your parent's attention, you're usually going, "Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother," well, that didn't work with her. The only way you could get her to turn around was to say "Miss Baxter".

MP: Wow!

Melissa: So, if you understand that we were not the priority--and it's not crying "Woe is me" or anything--my mother sat me down when I was 17 years old and said, "I never should have had children." She said, "I don't think I've been a good mother." And I found out from my aunt a couple of years ago, my aunt said, "Oh she was absolutely right, Melissa." She said, "She had kids because it was the thing to do, because she felt it was time to take an intermission in her life." And so that's why she did it. She probably never should have children. (Laughs) You know, but she did. What do you do?

MP: But your mom is not the only famous person in your family, because your mom's grandfather is the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Was that an important relationship to her?

Melissa: For her, yes. She had a very unique relationship with Great-Grandfather. I am far too young to have ever met him. He passed before I was born, but Mother joked that she used to send him uncut versions of her movies and he would kind of do his own screening and editing job, just for fun.

MP: Well, he puts things together. That's what he does.

Melissa: Yeah, and I think that a lot of what they had in common is that he put things together and he architected buildings and lives, where she architected stories.

MP: Did you ever consider following in your mom's footsteps and becoming an actress?

Melissa: No. Absolutely not. What I saw, and this will sound funny, what I saw...was that it was way too hard! You know, she was gone constantly. She didn't have time to even have a family. She didn't really have time to have a personal life. Why would I want to do that? Of course, I don't really have a whole lot of either one now anyway (laughs), but that's another story.

MP: Well, some people see the fame, and they want the fame.

Melissa: But, you know what? Fame is a real double-edged sword, because you give up your privacy, it sounds cool to be recognized on the street. It is anything BUT.  And, even in my own life, because I've met so many people through classes I've taught at various institutions, through my design practice, I've had people walk up to me and say, "Ohhh, you're Melissa!" And I'm like, "Oh-Oh. I don't know who this person is". You know, and you're caught off guard, and it's uncomfortable. It's really a price to pay, especially if the monetary benefits are--I'm not saying that Mother didn't do well, of course she did. But she was not in the era where she was making a million per picture or two million or five million or, now, ten million. It wasn't like that.

MP: Then again, you never know when it's going to happen. You never know when you're going to go outside and someone is going to approach you.

Melissa: No, you don't, but the thing of it is, it's like if she walked down the street, I still have a vision in my head of my mother incognito, with the big dark glasses and the scarf around her head. That's what she did to prevent it from happening... or the botched attempts that would happen. We were on the Circle Line in New York at one point, going around Manhattan, and they announced that the actress "Ann Bancroft" was aboard. And we're like, "Oh noooo." Because we knew they made a mistake. And then they tried to fix it. Then you had people scrambling to meet "Ann Bancroft", and then redirecting themselves--oh it was hilarious. And that's happened a lot. People have always gotten her mixed up with Ann Bancroft or, once in a while, Ann Margret, which makes no sense, and some people have even thought she was Hazel on The Baxters because her last name was Baxter. (laughs) So, you know, you just kind of roll with it.

MP: Yeah, I guess you have to. Your godmother is Edith Head, a very famous costume designer who began working all the way back in the silent era. Did you have a close relationship with her?

Melissa: Well, as close as could be expected. Aunt Edie was incredibly busy. She was consumed by her passion. She was two different people, because she was Edie the Costume Designer and then she was my Aunt Edie, who was a very different person. I saw her at the studio a couple, three times, and she was always dressed in gray and tailored and formal, but then at home she loved to refer to herself as a Spanish omelet, because she dressed in bright colors and very relaxed tailoring, and laughed heartily and had a wonderful time, and you never would have recognized the two. They were very different people.

MP: It's interesting, though, that she would even dress very formal, considering the kind of gowns and everything that she designed.

Melissa: Yeah, her whole thing was that she wanted to disappear--now this is only visually, mind you, this is not actually when it comes to taking credit, she was brilliant at that, so was Great-Grandfather--but, she wanted the star to be the star. She was about being in the background. And she understood how important that was to her stars. So, by doing that, she actually became a star herself.

MP: Are there any ways in which you feel that you are like your mom?

Melissa: Oh, yeah, I have lots of my mom's characteristics. Lots of them. I can be very dramatic. I can be very melodramatic. (laughs) I love to entertain, absolutely love to entertain. My cooking is extremely creative. I'm probably less restricted to recipes than she might have been, but on the flip side of my sisters, who both follow recipes to a T, particularly my younger one. Obviously I'm an interior designer; I love to design, I love doing homes. Mother was very good at that. I got a lot of that talent from her and design does run in the genes, obviously. And I have an insatiable curiosity about other cultures, other customs, other people, other places. I love that. I love to travel. Mother was very much like that.

MP: What are your best memories of her? Are there any memories that stand out among the rest?

Melissa: Oh...gosh. That's a tough one. We had a very hard time together when I was growing up. There was a period of almost seven years where we barely spoke. And I didn't get past that until 22 years of age and she died two years later. I'm blessed that I got past it, that I started to realize the amazing gift that she had given me, with the travel that she had taken us on tour, pulling us out of school, getting a tutor, all those sorts of things that, at the time, didn't feel good. At the time, all I wanted was to be normal. I wanted Mommy at home in the apron baking cookies, and Daddy going to work nine-to-five. But that wasn't going to happen, so, instead, what I got was an amazing education on how to be independent. And Mother had a wonderful gift for encouraging you in a direction, but allowing you to do it on your own, and that was something really extraordinary. I do remember there was something I was doing with sewing--some sewing project, and she said, "Let's see if you can sell these pillows", and she got this man involved in the whole thing, and the only thing that happened was that he came back and said, "Well, they aren't completely hand-done, so I won't be able to make a go of it. If they were, I could." But she had the connections and the ability to pursue it in a single-minded fashion that was really, really important, and that's a gift. She also was very big at taking care of people, and I think one of the stories that I most remember was one of the guys in the neighborhood, he was a few years younger than I was. A couple of years after she died I was at a friend's house in Connecticut, and he was there, and he said, "Did you know that your mother, every year without fail, sent me a fruitcake because I told her just once that that was my favorite kind of cake?" And I was like wow. He told her just once and she never forgot. Every single year she sent him a fruitcake. Most of us hate [fruitcakes and use them] as doorstops, but he liked it. So, there's not one--oh yeah, actually there is one--it was Christmas, I was in college, both my sisters were home, and we had a family friend with us--and her name is important, because it's just so amazing. Her name is Gusty Hornblower--and I swear to God that that's her true name. It's short for Augusta. She came from a famous family out of Boston--political, I think. And she had disappeared to parts unknown, and my sisters and I had done our usual torturing of ourselves with ‘What do we get Mother for Christmas’? We got our heads together and said, you know what, let's just get her what she's been asking for for the last five years, this is stupid. She wanted a Flexible Flyer. Now, you may not know that, but it is an old-fashioned, metal-runnered wooden sled. And, my mother was 55 at the time. And we're like, "she's got that keen, childlike sense of wonder, let's just go with this. Let's get her the sled." So we got her the sled, we wrapped it all up in paper, and we're standing out on the deck in Connecticut. It's a brilliant night, it's crisp, it's cold, just the barest little snowflakes were coming down. Mother comes to the sliding glass door. The three of us are huddled out on the deck, she opens the door and she's this 5-foot-3 little creature in rabbit fur boots, the lynx jacket down to her knees, and she's this ball of fur. So she comes out, we pull out the sled from behind us, and you know you can't hide a sled in wrapping paper, it's just not going to work. She knew what it was immediately. She was all excited, she's beaming ear-to-ear, she's ripping the paper off, she's grabbing the big red bow, plopping it on her head, so you get the whole furry image with the bow on top, grabs the sled, drags it to the edge of the deck, drops it over the side--it's only about a six-inch drop, jumps on, and goes sailing down the hill. Well, we are beaming. We are just so thrilled. And, at the bottom of the hill, there's an evergreen, and she's coming towards the evergreen and she's coming around it, and she gets to the evergreen, she slides off--no big deal, brushes herself off, and, all of a sudden, from around the other side of the evergreen comes--Santa Claus! Well, we all just lost it. I mean, I'm jumping up and down at 19 years old going "Santa Claus! Santa Claus! Santa Claus!" I suspended completely. Mother trudges up, and the giveaway was when Santa Claus got to the patio and said "Ho Ho Ho!" with a Boston accent. It was that family friend, but it was the most amazing Christmas that we ever had, because we'd given Mother what she had asked us for for years, and we all got back in touch with our 6-year-old, at the same time. It was just phenomenal, because she really did have a very keen, childlike, sense of wonder. She was always willing to go off on an adventure, and that made a huge difference. It's probably one of the reasons I've become a lot more adventuresome in my life than I used to be.

MP: Was there a point in your life that you went back and started watching your mom's films to get a sense of the Anne Baxter everyone else knew?

Melissa: No. And I've only seen her on the big screen twice. I saw her the first time in To Julie Newmar With Love. And I didn't know it was going to happen and I was sitting there with a friend in the movie theater and all of a sudden my mother's face was blasted on the big screen because they used a clip from The Ten Commandments, and I was like, "It's my mother! It's my mother! It's my mother!" My friend looked at me like, "Shut up, shut up, Melissa!" And I was like, "You don't understand, I've never seen her twelve feet high!" And then the last time was--that was a little weird--the last time was this last fall I went out to a Tyrone Power Film Festival on the West Coast, and they ran Razor's Edge, which is the movie she won the Oscar for, and it was the only time I'd seen her in a full-length film, black-and-white, 20 feet high in front of me. And it was very freeing, because I realized that wasn't Mother. I completely separated.

MP: Are there any films of hers that you would want to see on a big screen?

Melissa: Oh, yeah. I would love to see Ten Commandments on a big screen, that would be a blast. I would love to see--my all-time favorite is My Best Friend's Wife, and the premise was that she's sitting there on a plane with her husband and they think they're about to crash, and he starts to confess something, but suddenly the crash is aborted, and so he doesn't finish the confession, so she just guesses her way through the rest of their life, and she plays like five roles within the movie. One is the martyr and she's the scrubwoman in his life, and then there's another where she gets to play the vamp. It's howlingly funny, because she really does get to play like five different roles all within one movie, and it's very fun and very campy, and I really liked that. I've only seen, maybe, ten or twelve of her films, and she did 52.

MP: Do you think that All About Eve should be credited as her breakout role?

Melissa: Probably. I don't like watching it, because she's so bitchy and evil in it. That just really makes me uncomfortable, because every role that my mother plays there's a part of herself, and that's like the really nasty underbelly of Mom (laughs), so I don't like watching that one.

MP: Probably the one that most people remember off the top, too.

Melissa: They do, but actually what I found is that most people know Ten Commandments better, because it's on every single Easter without fail. Now, with Charlton Heston gone, I don't know whether they'll keep that up, but that seems to be the one that most people [remember]. Basically what I do is I go, "Do you remember the one who was in love with Charlton Heston, but had to marry Yul Brynner?" And they're like, "Ummmm, kind of...." And I'm like, "Do you remember 'Moses, Moses, Moses!'"? And they're like, "Yes!" And I go, "That's my mother." So, it doesn't make it easy in that regard.

MP: Your mom wrote a book in the '70s called "Intermission, A True Story", and she does talk about her acting career, but also living in the Australian Outback. And I know you mentioned that a little bit earlier in the interview, do you think that was an important experience for her?

Melissa: Oh it was huge. It was huge. It changed her whole life.

MP: In what way?

Melissa: It changed her life because she left Hollywood. That's why when she left Hollywood, ran off to the wilds of Australia with this exotic, charming, handsome man who I now refer to as the contributor of DNA--it was legal, they were married--but he was never father material and he disappeared by the time I was 6 or 7 years old to gallivant about the globe at his will, and yeah, it changed her life radically. She was married once before and had one daughter prior to that, but having one child didn't really slow her career down much. Having two more sure did and, when she came back, Hollywood at the time--and it still is a bit like this--it doesn't have a lot of roles for older actresses, and she came back at age 41. Well, in those days, that was prehistoric. So, they said, "I'm sorry. You left. You don't get to come back." And, she had to reinvent herself, so she did that with television, and she did that with writing, and she did it with stage, and she reinvented. Mother was very, very gifted at that, and that's something that I picked up from her, because I tend to reinvent. I also get bored quickly, and I think that she had the same issue. It dramatically changed her life.

MP: Did you read that book?

I'd like to offer my sincere appreciation to Melissa Galt for taking the time to do this interview. To find out more about Melissa's book "Celebrate Your Life! The Art of Celebrating Every Day", and to purchase a copy, please visit  her website: www.101waystocelebrate.com.