Mariette Hartley's home has an "open-door, open-heart" policy.
Husband Patrick Boyriven and children Sean and Justine bring home friends with troubled lives. Together, they provide love, care and in many cases, a safe harbor.It's a lot different from the home of her childhood, where she never felt safe. Although she "had parents I adored, it was kind of wild and crazy and ultimately a death house." Those experiences led her to an abusive first marriage.
Her parents were alcoholics whose lives never quite turned out. Her grandfather was internationally noted psychologist John B. Watson, who believed children should be raised without sentiment or physical affection. As a result, her mother was terrified of touch.
Hartley learned to bottle up emotions. By her teens she was drinking, depressed and supporting her family with acting jobs. Her at-home years were played out against a backdrop of failed suicide attempts - hers, her mother's, her father's. In 1963, her father did kill himself.
Saturday, Sept. 19, Hartley (best know perhaps for Polaroid commercials with actor James Garner) will be the keynote speaker at the Governor's Conference on Families in the Salt Palace from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Dozens of experts will discuss family-related topics ranging from troubled youths to positive parenting.
Hartley's theme is breaking leg
acies. It took her years to learn how "to come to the best part of us and not have the demons rule our lives," she said during a telephone interview. Her list of personal demons is long: "Definitely success. I had a hard time committing to it. In fact, commitment is very hard for me. Sometimes intimacy is tough. Self-esteem. I was listening and heard that Steffie Graf still gets hounded by nerves. I have that problem. Another demon is telling the truth about what's going on in my life; revealing myself without fear that someone will deeply harm me."
Her activism - for those with mental illness, abused children, suicide prevention, runaways, anyone in pain - began with self-revelation. "I was too afraid of my own lack of knowledge and had my own fear that I couldn't affect anybody. I was raised by a woman who I adored, but the subliminal message was I couldn't affect anybody's life. One person can't."
She learned that wasn't true when she portrayed Candy Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, for a TV movie. That gave her direction. She found peace during filming of "Silence of the Heart," where she played the mother of a boy who commits suicide. "I had to go back into my pain. It was one of the toughest things I had ever done. Finally, I could release my dad."
Her children, she said, benefit from her childhood. She learned the importance of being a role model. "We cannot minimize that. A lot of us have been raised by parents who try to skirt the issue." She hopes she gives her children consistency, responsibility, accessibility and emotional sobriety - with a big dose of love and laughter. She spends time with her children and knows the difference between quality and quantity. "My mother was with me all the time and we were about the most diseased couple I know. Almost parasitic. It took me years to pull away from that."
Hartley handles her schedule - parenting, acting and public appearances, "basically one child or one person or one project at a time."
At the end of September she plays a therapist in "Child of Rage," a TV movie about a child who has been brutally molested and becomes homicidal.
She believes a friend's words that "one's deepest wounds, integrated, becomes one's greatest power. It's essential if you want to live a genuine and profound and deep and happy life. It's possible. My life is not exclusive. It's inclusive. And I keep learning."