Hayden Panettiere, formerly a child star, has died at 36. (Martin Rose/Bongarts/Getty)
I enjoyed reading Noel Streatfield’s beloved children’s classic Ballet Shoes recently, with my primary-age daughter. But revisiting the text as an adult, the ending landed less pleasantly than I remembered from my childhood reading.
The story recounts the story of the “Fossil sisters”, three girls adopted by an eccentric British collector who then leaves them in the care of his great-niece and a nanny, with dwindling funds. The three girls begin careers on the stage, while still children, in order to pay the bills. Near the end of the book the most beautiful, Pauline, is offered a Hollywood contract. She accepts it, in order to pay for her sister Petrova, a talented dancer, to train in Europe.
As a child it was a satisfying ending. As an adult, knowing about Harvey Weinstein, it read like Pauline selling herself to fund her sister’s dreams. I wanted to yell at her: the price is too high! Don’t do it!
In real life, though, most children offered up to the god of showbiz are sent by their own parents — a decision as unfathomable as the willingness of ancient Canaanites, according to the Old Testament, to sacrifice their own children to the god Moloch. When so many child stars come to such miserable ends, why do it? But perhaps, again, we might find a clue in other, equally disturbing religious practices attributed to the Canaanites, and condemned in the Hebrew Bible.
The latest child star to be sacrificed to the gods of showbiz is the actor Hayden Panettiere, who was found dead over the weekend aged 36. I loved her as the Cheerleader in Heroes, and found her sympathetic as troubled country star Juliette Barnes in the musical drama-soap Nashville. But according to the memoir she released earlier this year detailing her addiction and mental illness, experience of domestic violence, and grief at losing custody of her daughter, Panettiere’s celebrity came at tremendous cost.
Nor is she anywhere near the first former child celebrity to have grown up deeply troubled. Earlier this year, too, former child actor Daveigh Chase was found dead in Los Angeles, killed by sepsis after a years-long struggle with substance abuse. Drew Barrymore, who had — like Panettiere — acted since infancy, was notorious in the Nineties for wild partying, rehab, a suicide attempt, and a lot of being nude in public and on magazine covers.
A still more notorious just-about-survivor is the singer Britney Spears, whose parents pushed her into acting as a tween and who was just 16 when she sang “Hit Me Baby” in 1998. Spears’ later mental health difficulties were the subject of intense tabloid fascination in the early 2000s, along with those of her fellow child star Lindsay Lohan. But where Lohan eventually withdrew from public life, settling in Dubai, the conservatorship imposed on Spears in 2008 would see her deprived of full adult autonomy while continuing to work. Though unable to control her own finances or even remove her birth control, during her conservatorship Spears released four major albums and completed several world tours.
Still darker, less verified rumors swirl around the children of showbiz. There’s a whole P. Diddy rabbit hole, for example: the rapper and producer has been accused (and acquitted) of sex trafficking, and allegedly held multi-day drug-fueled “freak off” parties which were, according to rumors, sometimes attended by underage celebrities. (After the death of Daveigh Chase, a clip resurfaced of Diddy inviting her, then aged just 12, to “an after-party”. I hope she didn’t go.) Among the rich and famous, it appears, the kind of sexual license now notoriously associated with the Epstein circle was perhaps simply normalized. Hayden Panettiere herself claims to have experienced a kind of celebrity grooming: in her memoir she describes one woman who first befriended her, in her teens, before maneuvering her into situations where she was pressured to have sexual contact with much older celebrity men, including while trapped on a yacht some way out to sea. If true, it seems there’s more than one Ghislaine Maxwell out there.
Who knows what comparable assaults other child stars have endured? And given the risks, and the notoriously high rate of attrition, why would any parent willingly propel their child into this seductive, exploitative, amoral world? Perhaps, again, we can glean some hints from the Old Testament.
In Leviticus 18 and 20, the injunction not to sacrifice your babies to Moloch is, to modern sensibilities, strangely placed. The context is a warning to the Israelites against adopting Canaanite practices described as “detestable customs”. But most of the injunctions specify not religious rituals but practices we’d call “incest”: that is, prohibitions on sexual intimacy with family members or the spouses of family members.
This seems, on first glance, an odd juxtaposition. One interpretation is that all these prohibitions relate to religious practices, which for the ancient Canaanites included sexual rituals. But whatever the truth of that ancient world, it’s still relevant today in the subtle but profound connection it draws between different ways that natural family relationships can become corrupted.
What child sacrifice and incest have in common is a shocking inversion of parental instincts we consider so natural as to be almost universal. Most parents, human or mammal, instinctively seek to protect their young; child sacrifice ghoulishly inverts this, for example in the archaeological remains discovered at ancient Canaanite Carthage. Incest, too, is taboo more or less universally across human cultures, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed. In this context, again, the alleged incestuous Canaanite rites again appear as the detestable practices Leviticus says they are.
I’m obviously not suggesting that children pushed into showbiz are literally sacrificed to Canaanite gods. Nor am I alleging a literally incestuous relationship between these children and their parents. But it’s clear that when a child is placed under pressure to perform as Panettiere was, at auditions, from pre-verbal babyhood onward, the adults making that choice for them are sacrificing important elements of their normal childhood. And there’s a parallel between those two detestable Canaanite practices, in that their modern analogs — sacrificing a child for economic gain, or perhaps status, while blurring the boundaries between parent and child — are profoundly unnatural relative to normal parental instincts. And, where child celebrity is concerned, at least figuratively speaking these forms of profound parental failure often appear together.
In Panettiere’s memoir, the way she describes the relationship she had with her mother makes it appear, to put it mildly, strange and lacking in boundaries. Panettiere outlines first how her mother, herself a small-time screen and stage actress, signed her infant daughter up for a modeling contract at eight months old. By the age of five, Panettiere had a well-established acting career. The mother-daughter relationship itself was plainly always deeply entangled: the kind an old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalyst would have called at least figuratively “incestuous”. Panettiere writes of her own childhood that “Disappointing her was one of my biggest fears”. Her mother seems to have transferred all her acting ambitions seamlessly onto her child, and simply expected Panettiere to comply. As Panettiere puts it: “Her dream had become mine, and mine had become hers.”
The same over-identification and inability to allow a child to grow up and individuate seems to have characterized Jamie Spears’ relationship with his daughter. Back when the conservatorship was imposed, he described her in legal papers as “an adult child in the throes of a mental-health crisis”. In other words: he refused to allow her to grow up, then continued to make a comfortable living off his artificially infantilized child-celebrity daughter.
Spears later described the conservatorship as “abusive”. Her father continued to control every aspect of her life until she finally won a legal battle to end it.
Somewhat more mildly, Barrymore, too, seems to have had a relationship that was first enmeshed. She recounts that, while she was still a minor, her mother took her to parties at the notoriously wild Studio 54, instead of to school: a radical abdication of the duty to keep your daughter safe, in favor of enjoying celebrity access through her. Barrymore later emancipated herself from her own mother at the age of 14.
Similarly, Panettiere describes how, by her late teens, she began to find her mother’s low-cut tops and party behavior uncomfortable, and sought to leave behind the working relationship for a more normal, mother/daughter dynamic: “I just want you to be my mom now.” But her mother didn’t want that. In Panettiere’s account, she just retorted: “You owe me.” Their relationship never recovered. When the memoir was published Panettiere’s mother, Lesley Vogel, dismissed Panettiere’s account, claiming the drama was all “to sell books”. The Independent reported that Vogel declared that it was she, in fact, who had “chosen the no contact route” in relation to her daughter.
Why do some former child stars achieve adult independence, while others struggle? Drew Barrymore still hasn’t fully reconciled with her mother, but she seems comparatively happy, and has hosted a daytime talk show since 2020. Lohan is now married to a Kuwaiti financier, has two young children, and mostly leads a private (presumably extremely comfortable) life in the Emirates. Spears, by contrast, has refused to reconcile with her father since the conservatorship ended, despite reported pressure from other family members. Earlier this year, she checked back into rehab in April following an arrest for driving while intoxicated. Others, such as Panettiere, Daveigh Chase, and many other child stars, are simply no longer with us.
Perhaps Pauline Fossil would have survived Hollywood just fine, avoided all the Ghislaines, and just ended up with a financier husband and large collection of Hermès scarves. Or perhaps not. Who can say from the outside what makes the difference between the children who survive their offering to showbiz Moloch, and the ones who get consumed? Is it the enthusiasm with which a child is sacrificed? The intensity of showbiz-parent enmeshment? The horrors encountered in Moloch’s fiery belly, or indeed on the yachts laden with pervy old rock stars?
Whatever the precise formula that produces the maximum of psychological damage, perhaps the only safe recourse is to listen to Leviticus. That is, rather than trying to find a safe, low-impact way of sacrificing your child to Moloch, just don’t sacrifice your child to Moloch. Alternatively, if you prefer levity to Leviticus, there’s the 1935 message of another Noel — not Streatfield, but Coward — to every sharp-elbowed Theatre Mummy pestering him for auditions:
Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington
Don’t put your daughter on the stage!
You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.
