The big daughter-seeks-birth-mom TV event that everyone remembers from 1984 is, of course, the miniseries Lace. History has unfairly forgotten My Mother’s Secret Life, and I’ll be pleased if I can get even one person to revisit it. It’s an engaging (and unintentionally funny) telefilm that is perhaps best described as “Loni Anderson’s Charlene moment.” I encourage everyone to get in the mood right now by listening to the song of which I speak.
Now that we’ve taken the hand of a preacher man and made love in the sun, I think we can continue. My Mother’s Secret Life opens with Anderson’s Ellen Blake draped in about 30 lbs of designer clothes and furs. It’s all soon to be removed with artful precision in a demanding john’s penthouse suite. “I’m the buyer here,” he tells her aggressively. “I want to know what I’m buying. You do come at a premium rate.”
As their transaction begins, we join the 1983 Rotary Club Annual Picnic, already in progress, in Potter, Ohio. Tomboyish teenager Tobi Jensen (Amanda Wyss) and her father, Michael (Douglas Dirkson), compete in a three-legged race before heading to the hot dog stand. After palling around with Maggie (Grace Zabriskie), who serves friendly insults with their food, they wander away. Michael complains of indigestion not long before suffering a fatal heart attack.
Once Tobi’s placed with an aunt and uncle, she wastes little time looking through her father’s personal effects. Finding a cash-stuffed envelope from her absentee mom, she hops a bus to San Francisco to solve the mystery of her parentage. (When she asked a tearful Maggie about her missing mother, the response was “Don’t look back, Tobi. You have to make a life for yourself now.”) Face-to-face with Ellen for the first time since she was an infant, she asks, “Do you remember spending some time with a man named Michael Jensen? I’m what you left behind!”
Wyss, who convincingly plays much younger than her actual age (she was 23), is earnest and jittery as Tobi explains why she didn’t write. “I guess I was afraid that you wouldn’t answer me. That you wouldn’t want to see me. I mean, don’t worry or anything, I’m not planning on staying. I know you have your own life to live. And, let’s face it, a 16-year-old girl is kinda hard for anybody to take. Even somebody that loves her, which you don’t. I mean, how could you? You don’t even know me. I just wanted to see you.” Having done so, she’s ready to leave.
Ellen invites her to stick around and have something to eat. She regards her child as if she’s heard of teenagers before but never encountered one, and answers her questions as stiltedly as Anderson recites 90% of her dialogue. “Did you ever think about me?” Tobi enquires. “Yes,” Ellen answers without elaboration. There’s no antenna coming from her head, or brightly colored bulbs blinking above her eyes, but I checked a few times to be sure.
Their reunion is interrupted by a call from one of Ellen’s regulars, businessman Max (Paul Sorvino). “I can’t get enough of you. After three years you’re still an addiction. You put things in my drinks, I know it,” he tells her. She abruptly prepares to leave, instructing Tobi not to answer the phone if it rings. “It’s my business phone, the machine will pick it up.”
Tobi asks what she does for a living and Ellen says “I’m in executive sales.” Her dazzled daughter replies “That sounds kinda neat. It sounds like something I’d like.” Ellen doesn’t need to mask her expression, because Anderson’s immaculately made-up face rarely moves. “Well, you have plenty of time to think about,” she responds before hitting the road.
Max isn’t just a client but a confidante. Despite habitually rebuffing his attempts to form a deeper bond, Ellen values his counsel and tells him about her long-lost daughter. “I don’t want to be a mother,” she confesses. “I don’t even know how to be.” Unfazed, he suggests, “Try being a friend.” Ellen mechanically maintains she doesn’t know how to do that, either.
Tobi, accustomed to closeness with her father, struggles with her mother’s aloofness. Frustrated after trying to open up to an unreceptive Ellen, she erupts: “God, you know, it’s so obvious you don’t want me to stay here. Well, I don’t want to stay here, either. I just wanted to see you. So now I have. Thanks a lot for everything!” When Ellen follows her downstairs, she miserably adds, “I don’t mean anything to you.”
“You’re my daughter!” Ellen replies, sounding like a more feminine Dr. Sbaitso. Tobi mentions her years of neglect. “I don’t know very much about love,” Ellen bleep-bleep-bloops. “I don’t know if I have any to give.” Nevertheless, mother and daughter will give their relationship another try.
“Incidentally… which one of you bitches is my mother?” is the line that made Lace legendary. My Mother’s Secret Life has nothing that explosive, but there are a few “prostitution whore!” moments, minus the table-flipping. Once Tobi realizes what “executive sales” means, she throws it in Ellen’s face during several confrontations. Their first such exchange packed the greatest emotional wallop:
Tobi: Aren’t you even ashamed of what you do?
Ellen: I don’t do things I’m ashamed of.
Tobi: Well, you’re talking like it’s OK for your mother to be a whore!
my mother’s secret life (1984)
As their discussion continues, Tobi asks why Ellen had a baby she didn’t want. “You’re asking a lot of questions,” Ellen replies, expressionless as ever. “You might not like the answers.” In her first real bit of parenting, she goes on to explain: “In this world you adapt or you die. I did what I had to do to survive. And the way you survive is you see the world the way it is, not the way you’d like it to be. Now, you’re 16-years-old, your father is dead, and your mother is a call girl. That’s your world.”
The first two-thirds of the film, in which she and Tobi guardedly get to know each other, are surprisingly polished by the standards of television trash. Anderson’s makeup and extensive wardrobe changes are a lot of fun, and most of the music’s unusually well-suited to the action. Amanda Wyss, who most of us remember from A Nightmare on Elm Street, isn’t given much of a character to explore but makes it through numerous crying jags with her dignity intact.
Things take a wonky turn when Tobi, upset about Ellen’s occupation and the time she devotes to her clients, pulls the ultimate vindictive teenager move. Intercepting a business call, she helps herself to Mom’s wardrobe and shows up for an assignment. It’s a detour that threatens to yank a perfectly nice call girl movie into “Fancy” territory. But screenwriters John Furia and Barry Oringer have a final trick up their sleeves that guides us in a different, more Paul Schrader-esque direction.
I was not expecting a final act that’s a milder variation of Hardcore, with Loni Anderson as a more sordid George C. Scott. That’s sort of what we get, though, when Tobi impulsively reacts to her mother’s arctic chill—and some crushing revelations—by taking off. Ellen, discomfited by Max’s observation that it’s easier for her to manipulate people than to love them or accept their love, responds by pounding the pavement. She searches for her runaway teen on the same streets where she once turned underage tricks. It’s grittier than what came before, but somehow just as schmaltzy as it builds to a harrowing, yet laughable, climax.
Anderson’s performance is memorably mediocre, but she also gives marvelous face. (The script plays up Ellen’s assets with a couple of gross, gratuitous scenes of Tobi starving herself and adopting a Mom-approved exercise regimen to more strongly resemble the stylish hooker.) Her work opposite Sorvino, the rare john with a heart of gold, has slightly more pep than her scenes with other actors. You get a brief glimpse of a different, more serious movie when she tells Max (with a soupçon of emotion!), “You don’t know me. I’m not what you think. I’m not part of this, I don’t belong here. I come from the street, Max. I’m a whore. I just changed my address.”
Programming Note: Mother’s Day Marathon
This review is part of our 2022 Mother’s Day Marathon feature. We’ll add more films throughout the week and you can click here for more information.
Streaming and DVD availability
My Mother’s Secret Life has not been released on DVD. It’s not currently on any streaming platforms, though grainy VHS transfers circulate on YouTube.
Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.
… But wait, there’s more!
Regular readers of the site know that as Burt Reynolds aficionado, I keep a copy of Loni Anderson’s 1995 memoir, My Life in High Heels, handy for reference. The story she shared about My Mother’s Secret Life is horrible.
Three or four days after I arrived in Florida, my agent called about a TV movie. Farrah Fawcett was supposed to do it, but for some reason she had dropped out at the last minute. They were a week from shooting; was I interested? I certainly was.
“My Mother’s Secret Life” was about a high-class call girl whose sixteen-year-old daughter shows up on her doorstep. I always called it “The Hooker Mother Story.” It meant I had to go to San Francisco, where it was being shot, immediately. There would be a break over Thanksgiving; Burt and I planned to be in Los Angeles for the holiday.
During our time apart, Burt called me on the set three times a day. Roses came, with the dear, familiar message: Roses suit you so. I loved being back at work and felt healthier every day, more and more myself. When it came time for the break and my reunion with Burt, I was happier than I’d been in a long time, and eager to see him.
Loni Anderson, my life in high heels
From there she recounts “one terrific night together, tender and romantic.” It takes a frightening turn when Reynolds starts rummaging through her belongings as she showers.
He started shouting at me. Who had I been with? What had I been doing while he was away working?
And then he grabbed me so hard around my upper arms that for two weeks afterward I had angry finger bruises where his hands had been. He shook me, pushed me, and finally slammed me up against the wall.
loni anderson, my life in high heels
They repeat a familiar pattern afterward, with tears and pleas for forgiveness from Reynolds.
He went out and bought me diamonds. For the next two days, we walked on eggshells, then he went back to Florida, and I went back to work. Where it suddenly hit me: I was in the middle of shooting a movie in which I had to wear negligees, lingerie, strapless gowns. My arms were a mess, and my back was scraped from when he had shoved me up against the wall. High-class hookers don’t wear long-sleeved sweatshirts, at least not on television. I had to have body makeup, a lot of it.
loni anderson, my life in high heels
That’s all Anderson wrote about the film. According to IMDb, her role was reportedly also offered to Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd after Fawcett withdrew from the project.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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