Kim Fields is 12 years old going on 40. Oh, she may look like a little girl -- she still has more tummy than waist -- but she's the sort of prepubescent who, in referring to her recent appendectomy, says grown-up things like "The doctors were so inefficient I kept asking them if they knew their job". And talking about a commercial she once did, "They shot outside in freezing weather, wouldn't you know, we were in shorts!" Or "When people boss me around, the Taurus in me comes out."
About five years ago, Kim came from Los Angeles from New York with her mother, Laverne Fields, who's also an actress and is known to her friends as Chip. The move was Chip's decision and Kim's good luck.
Chip and Kim were living in Harlem then -- broke. So broke that Chip had to borrow money for the plane tickets. So broke that Chip's acting teacher had to drive mother and daughter to the airport.
"Come back a star," he said, waving goodbye. He meant Chip. But it's Kim who's the star.
Well, Kim -- Tootie in the preachy NBC series about life in an exclusive girls boarding school, "The Facts of Life" -- is not exactly a star ... yet. But she's certainly a glittering twinkle in the program's firmament, precocious, bright, self-assured, a miniature adult. Kim doesn't seem like a little girl at all. Her mother, 29, is more girlish, giggly and bubbly. At Times it appears their roles are reversed. At breakfast one day, when Chip talking excitedly as is her wont, almost tips over her cup, Kim says sternly, "Mommmmmm, you're about to spill your coffee!" Chip looks guilty and rights her cup. She laughs, "Living with Kim is like living in a sitcom." "Yes", quips Kim, "all one-liners."
"I wonder, " her mother says, "when she'll realize I'm her mother."
"We're sisters and friends", Kim responds, "actresses too". They can talk shop as well as talk about what's appropriate behavior for a 12 year old girl with say, boys. Chip still auditions for acting jobs (primarily commercials) and runs a children's repertory theater that puts on three or four plays a year in various communities. Clearly, she is proud of her daughter, and if she feels any of the envy that actresses usually feel at the success of other actresses, she gives not the slightest indication of it. Chip would probably allow herself to be chopped into pieces if it would benefit Kim. Perhaps part of the reason is that Chip was divorced from Kim's father when Kim was a baby, and mother and daughter have lived together ever since (though Kim visits her father and his new family in Indiana periodically).
Kim's first job was on "Sesame Street". "Counting," she says. She was only five years old then. But she learned the acting game long before. Her mother took her to her own acting classes, where Kim studied along with her; when Chip made the rounds of theatrical agencies looking for jobs, she carried Kim with her. "I couldn't afford baby sisters," Chip recalls. Indeed, In California they were still so impoverished "we hitchhiked to auditions." Kim, however, proved just as salable as her mother. She began appearing in commercials. One of her more famous is a syrup commercial wherein, deliberately adorable, she says to the lady on the bottle, "Mrs Butterworth, I LLLoooovvvve you." Kim also played in Roots II (as Alex Haley's daughter) and as Angie in the short lived 1978 series "Baby I'm Back", with Demond Wilson. "I was a smart-aleck daddy's girl," she says. Then in 1979 she tested for Tootie and won the part handily.
"I got the part of Tootie because I'm short," she says. Actually, she was
chosen for the part in spite of her height, which promised to create havoc
with the camera angles. To raise her up a couple of inches, Al Burton,
executive vice president of creative affairs at Facts production company,
T.A.T Communications, put Tootie on roller skates -- and kept her there the
entire first season, until she grew three inches. "Al Burton is only two inches
taller than I am. I call him Ally Poo."
Burton laughs about that, "I'm crazy about Kim," he says. "I knew as soon as she walked in the door we should hire her. She's a bundle of perfect, positive energy, she made the room glow." He does not see her as a particularly adult, or very different from that alarming and unique breed, the child actor. "She's not more mature than other child actors," he says "When I went to see her in the hospital (Kim had an emergency appendectomy last Christmas), I bought her two teddy bears. she hugged them like any other kid. She's just a kid."
Kim was quickly at home with her series character. "She's the Rona Barrett of the school, "She's nosy and she can zing people. Like Tootie, I'm nosy if I'm curious."
Everything about the production and the cast is simply too, too wonderful, according to the fieldses, despite the facts that there are four sensitive, intelligent, teen-age egos competing on the show. Jack Elinson, Facts executive producer, admits he had a moment's pause before he took on the assignment (he had been an executive producer on "One Day At a Time"). "kids are usually a pain," he says.
"We are all friendly on the set," Kim says of her costars. "But I don't see the other girls on hiatus." The Ultimate television child actress, she doesn't say 'vacation' but uses the industry word for the time the series is closed down: hiatus. She and Nancy McKeon (Jo) share a schoolroom, and they are good pals. "She loves to share with people," Nancy says, "and she's not a phony".
Confident, controlled, bored but obedient, Kim says what interests her most is 'life'. Life? "Yes, life in all its aspects". Life may well interest her, but her television tastes have remained fairly juvenile. She cuddies up to watch "Little House on the Prairie." "Diff'rent Strokes" (she has admitted to a crush on Todd Bridges) and "Trapper John M.D." She makes a face when the subject of books come up. "I don't like books much, except for Judy Blume's. I can really get into her; she explains my life a lot. A top-notch student, she has some trouble with fractions but intends to overcome it, she says. "I like Spanish. I'm doing good in it. I took French once". Her nose wrinkles, "All I learned was 'bonjour' and 'je m`appelle Kim'".
Her temper is an equable one -- although she lost it recently, she claims, when her mother denied her permission to go to a roller-skating rink, one of her prime pleasures. "I tore up my dressing room. I threw books. I threw pillows. I emptied my drawers. I tore my name off the door. I said I was sorry later, but I don't know if I meant it or not."
The future presents no difficulties. Kim says, "I want to stay in the business, but it's kinda like a hobby; you need something to fall back on." There is a second of contemplation. "But I want to make a lot of money." Again she hesitates, "I don't know if I want to be a stewardess or a scientist. After college, of course."
Meanwhile, she works happily in "The Facts of Life" and from time to time in her mother's children's repertory theater. "I give her two lines," Chip remarks, "and say it's a cameo appearance. We like to thank Kim for slumming with us."
Since their move to Los Angeles, Kim and Chip have been living in rented homes. They've finally bought a house with a bedroom for Kim to redecorate. Rainbows and clouds will drift across her wallpaper, curtains and bedspread, and she would like to have a rose painted on both sides of her bedroom door.
"I'm into roses," says Kim. I used to like the color blue. But it's so bland it bores me".