Her trip from hedonism to Hollywood is a classic of the fame to fortune, rags to riches genre. But it was all because Michelle Pfeiffer found her sense of purpose and pursued it. When you wander around the Vons supermarkets or any of these giant food emporiums, stuffed like an Aladdin’s Cave with goodies, you can almost sense the daydreams as the staff flick the groceries over the electronic eye, and the goods roll along to the packer who’ll ask you, ‘Paper or plastic?’ giving you a choice of the type of bag for your purchases. Most are young kids helping pay for their education or saving for a car, a holiday or simply little extras.

Pfeiffer’s father had drummed into her the merits of thrift, of saving, of having money in the bank. From her first job at the age of fourteen she had a savings account at the Wells Fargo Bank in Midway City. Now, she was in her late teens, and things were a little different. She wasn’t a youngster saving for extras. She was making a living as a supermarket check-out girl.

When she was at Fountain Valley High all she wanted to do was get out of school. It became, say her friends from those days, something of an obsession, another outbreak of the Pfeiffer all or nothing personality. Fountain Valley gave academic credits for after-school jobs so the willing worker had, along with the groceries, stacked up plenty of them. ‘I liked checking groceries for a while. I liked getting up at 4 a.m., driving on the freeway, and going in and stocking the shelves and laughing with the stock clerks.’

Then, she discovered something that would change her life. She could earn extra English credits by taking the high school’s theatre course. To her theatre teacher Carol Cooney it didn’t seem that Pfeiffer wanted to be America’s next great acting talent.

‘She didn’t try out for any of the major productions. She was more out of class than in it.’

But she had got a B grade. Was that because she was bright? Or was it because she was bright and a natural? Did Carol Cooney get that feeling, the feeling that her pupil would become a big star? Matter-of-factly Ms Cooney says, ‘Absolutely none.’

However, it was Pfeiffer’s first contact with acting -other than playing Gilligan’s Island and always catching The Bad Seed when it played the late show on KNBC TV- and she insists she enjoyed it: ‘I’d always thought that theatre people were really weird. And I got in this class, and I just fell in love with the people. They were funny, witty they were really interesting. It was the first thing that made the work and the commitment effortless. It was the only class that I made an effort to go to.’ And, by her and other accounts, that certainly was saying something. During an interview, American Vogue magazine reported in 1986 that ’she hadn’t read a book in her life until about six years ago.’

With all her extra credits she graduated from Fountain Valley High a year early, fulfilling her aim to get out fast. ‘When she sets her goals in a direction, look out,’ says Dick Pfeiffer of his daughter. She attended Golden West College in Fountain Valley for a year taking psychology classes and missing lots of others. Then, she had her Perry Mason moments doing her court stenographer stint. (‘After a while, whenever anybody spoke, in my mind my fingers would be punching it out even two years after I quit, my mind still did that.’) Then she was back at Vons. Full circle. Going nowhere.

Chapter Five | Biography Index | Chapter Seven

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